When last we left our dour heroine, she was bemoaning the collapse of several plans.

In yet another example of the principle that if you don’t like the answer to a question, ask someone else, it appears that Eliza will be attending our pre-school’s summer camp program after all in July.

While I didn’t take your advice to the letter, I followed the spirit of it and decided to be nonconfrontational about the problem. Paraphrasing what you all said, the best way to solve the problem is to give the school ownership of the solution.

I called the vice-principal, with whom I had spoken in the past and who had seemed delightful over the phone even though I haven’t met her in person yet. She had mentioned the summer program in my first conversation with the school but was not involved in the yes/no imbroglio.

I laid out the problem to her as, “We LOVE the school and are super-excited to enroll our kid, we think the summer program sounds awesome, but we have received conflicting information from these two sources, can you help me sort out what’s correct?”

It totally worked: The VP explained where the wires had gotten crossed, what we needed to do to get on track, assured me that Eliza was in fact eligible, and long story short, Eliza is being screened next week so she can be enrolled in the summer program. Yippee!

Yesterday morning, we made a visit to the dump to dispose of a bunch of junk, including old furniture pieces that we were unable to sell or give away at last year’s tag sale and had been sitting in our garage, mocking us, ever since.

When we arrived, the empployee on duty told us that we’d have to break up the furniture pieces before they could accept them. I was wondering where I could borrow a sledge hammer when he (rather gleefully, I must say) let us in on the secret to $%^#ing $h!t up GOOD. I am now fully prepared to trash a hotel room, should I become a rock and roll star in my dotage.

Here’s what you do: You pick up the piece of furniture you intend to destroy, angle it so a corner is pointing at the floor, and then bash that corner into the floor as hard as you can. If you like, you may think of your ex-wife’s lawyer, suggested our helpful guide. Et voila, CARNAGE.

Jim and I showed real aptitude for this task, making short work of a brace of nightstands and a half dozen drawers. We are now offering our services for a small fee.

Call me, Mick!

The sort of thing you don’t anticipate your husband saying to you one day:

“Mascara is edible, right?”

She seems none the worse for wear so far…

***

(This is a little bit gross, but it is my REVENGE, and I am happy to pay the therapy bills Eliza will incur as a result.)

Our mattress has been giving us trouble. There are valleys on either side and a hill in the middle, to the extent that nowadays, when we are ensconced in our respective foxholes, Jim and I can barely see each other over the edge anymore. It was time, in other words, for a new mattress.

Since yardwork was out of the question, what with my constant whining and the rain that threatened the entire weekend but did not materialize until today, it seemed like a good weekend project.

We visited a couple of stores, and I should tell you right now, Eliza is a fan of furniture shopping ever since we discovered that one of the stores has a koi pond and a cookie snack bar on the second floor. Shopping for beds was even more awesome in her estimation because there were beds to climb on and several stores her giant stuffed sheep and bear versions of their mascot animals for her to snuggle up to.

Additionally, salespeople were quite intent on ingratiating themselves with Eliza, figuring that she was the key to our wallet.

By the fourth store, Eliza took the lead and when a salesman rolled up, she pointed at him and shouted, “What’s YOUR name?!” He was startled enough to answer, after which she regaled him with an incoherent stream-of-consciousness ramble, and then, when we asked for advice about cat-proofing the box spring, she delivered a delerious monologue about “Our CATS! BARNEY AND MOE!”

Now, 36 hours into our quest, Eliza had the afore-blogged constipation episode, which had her generally being a pill, and it was during a lull in pillness that we rolled up to a store where the employee made car salesmen look retiring by comparison. Pushy, pushy, pushy. He tried to sell us a $4000 mattress, doing the “phone call” to “Chuck” about “special arrangements” to get us to buy the thing, etc. — every trick in the book. Jim and I aren’t the type to walk into a store and drop that kind of cash within 10 minutes ANYWAY, but the sales tactics were really over the top.

To try and let everyone save face, we did that thing where we asked him to write down the deal so we could think on it overnight. To which he responded by continuing to haggle and pressuring us to drop a deposit right then.

We were failing to make our escape when Eliza started carrying on from across the store and when I got with 20 feet of her, I smelled a freshly-delivered poop baby — a large, painful and long-awaited poop baby, hence the crying.

I grabbed her and ducked into the bathroom store and intended to change her, only we’d left the spare diaper in the car. I cleaned her off, stuck her back in her pants diaperless, dumped the smelly poop-diaper in their trash, and rushed out of the store saying something about Eliza being indisposed and needing to take her to the car.

Yes, I am sorry to say, I threw my husband to the wolves; I left him to fend for himself with Pushy McSalesman.

In all fairness, I figured he’d run with the same excuse and follow me out, but he was still engaged in the futile face-saving take-down-the-info maneuver we had implemented pre-poop.

He finally joined us in the car 10 minutes later, admitting that he’d had to give up our contact info and that, furthermore, he hadn’t had the presence of mind to make up fake info*.

We pealed out of the parking lot to the furniture store next door to buy the mattress we actually wanted and have spent the last 24 hours joking nervously about Crazy McSalesman showing up at our house and taking a bat to our cars.

As a final kicker, last night I made vegetables with a sweet-sour glaze, with tofu for me and shrimp and scallops for Jim. Eliza would eat air, I figured.

Well, after crawling onto my chair to shove fistfuls of tofu in her mouth before dinner had even started, Eliza proceeded to eat copiously of the glazed carrots, then eyeballed Jim’s dinner and declared that she needed shrimp. Jim gave her one, skeptically, which she shoved in her gaping maw and chewed with enthusiasm. And then she ate the rest of his shrimp and one scallop.

This evening, she farted repeatedly, loudly and creatively. I don’t know if it was the shrimp, the tofu, or the mascara, but things seem to be moving again.

______

* I can lie like a rug in these situations. Trapped on a train with a bunch of drunken Polish students who wanted my info so they could party with me in Warsaw, I gave them a totally false name, then maneuvered my way out of the train ahead of them. A middle aged German man who’d been in my compartment caught up to me to warn me about being too trusting and was either horrified or impressed, I’m not sure, when I breezily informed him that this was not my name, I had no intention of visiting the hostel mentioned, and in fact might not be in the city in another hour. Some of that, too, was a lie. What — I should’ve trusted him more than the drunken louts?

I suppose I should prepare my acceptance speech for Bad Mother of the Year, but I am having a very hard time being sympathetic about my kid’s constipation episodes, since they are caused by her refusal of any and all substances related to the plant kingdom, especially when we discuss this cause and effect relationship DAILY, and when I take care to offer her those items she says she likes.

ZOMG ENOUGH WITH THIS SPRING NONSENSE!

I am in allergy HELL.

My nose is running, my skin is itching from the INSIDE, and I am actively wondering whether the nutmeg grater or the foot pumicer would feel better on my horrible, horrible eyeballs.

Oh, and this is despite taking Claritin.

Jim suggested I go to an allergist but I explained that I prefer to whine on account of the only prescription allergy medicine I ever took that was effective also gave me heart palpitations and was pulled from the market for, oh, let’s see, FATAL side effects in the heart-type region, and my mom had a bad allergic reaction to those ridiculous allergy shots that were all the rage for a while there (do people still do those?). Both of those freaked me out sufficiently that I find complaining and superior alternative.

So here I sit, trying to figure out if there is a way to temporarily remove my tongue so I can get to the inside of the skin on my chin and SCRATCH IT and oh, the visual, I know, but duuuuuude, it feels even worse.

***

OK, deep breath. Regaining appropriate sense of perspective…. NOW!

***

Right, Fix-It Friday (Oooh, and head over and give Jo advice on assembling a knock-out interview outfit!).

Today’s theme is … Random tips!

1. If you are making a sweet baked item that calls for gobs of oil, you can make the item lower-fat by replacing some or all of the oil with applesauce (NOT the chunky kind). Start by replacing half, just to be safe, your first time around. This works in quick breads, muffins or cakes and keeps them nice and moist.

2. A make-up tip. I mentioned this in Jo’s comments but it bears repeating here, and I learned this from make-up pros: most women who wear make-up make the mistake of thinking they have to match their outfits and apply something different every day. In fact, what works better is to find make-up that flatters your features and coloring and get a “day” version and an “evening” version and just wear those. It’s cheaper because you won’t be buying 5 million shades of everything, and you’ll look better because it’ll be your look and you’ll be very practiced at applying it.

2b. As a corrollary to this, it does pay to get yourself made over by the pros, because they can help you find the colors that really work for you, rather than you just grabbing whatever’s on sale at the supermarket. The stuff is more expensive, but again, since it cuts down on failed experiments and futile purchases, it will save you money in the end.

3. If you are thinking about planting something and you have no clue what will work in your yard and you’re an inexperienced gardener: Hostas. Them things is like the plant version of cockroaches. Cannot kill, propagate copiously.

4. Do not leave Sharpies lying around when you have toddlers. Thank GOD she only used it to draw on her mirror, although the mirror is now less-than-effective as a reflective surface. I was torn about how much of a hard time to give her, though — she doesn’t draw very much, and I am getting tired of being her artist working on commission, and would like to encourage this artistic self-expression business.