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This is ridiculously cute.

No, that’s not a picture of my grandma’s funeral. We didn’t take pictures because that’s not how we roll. Pictures at funerals bug me, but that’s for my therapist and not this blog, I suppose.

I had a good time at my grandmother’s funeral. Well, okay. The funeral itself wasn’t fun, but getting together with family members is fun. The very threat that I could blog anything anyone said to me perhaps kept people in line and everyone was nice to me, even that uncle I can’t stand.

The uncle I really like (We’ll call him UJ) was there, which made things a heck of a lot more tolerable. I got to spend a too-short amount of time hanging out with him where we could just chill and be ourselves and yammer on about the things we yammer on about. Then there was hanging with family time, which was actually pretty nice. I got to talk to a cousin I haven’t seen in years, and I got to hang out with my favorite cousin (We’ll call her AC for AwesomeChick).

After that, AC  and my UJ and AC’s friend and Mr. Ivy and I went and chilled at a restaurant and then hung out in my UJ’s hotel room. This was awesome because the aforementioned favorite uncle and the favorite cousin have never really gotten a chance to get to know each other.

So, it was really cool. Catching up on old friendships, bringing together new friendships. I love it, man. I’ve always been sort of split by “I hate family” and “I love family”, but the real truth is that I love my awesome family members. The rest of them, well, whatever.

See the ring in the middle? When my grandfather was in the Aleutian Islands, he was missing my grandma and didn’t have a ton of money to buy her a gift and send to her. So, he took a quarter into the machine shop and came up with that ring I’m wearing right there in the middle. My grandma, even though she took off her wedding rings when her husband passed away, wore the quarter ring for the rest of her life.

And now it’s mine. Someday, it will belong to my daughter, but for now, it is mine. It’s a great reminder that love doesn’t require fancy gifts or anything more than your time and energy.

I’m very frustrated with my youngest son. He’s 5, he’ll be 6 in October. He still has toileting problems. Sigh. He never wets his pants, but he does poop them with some frequency. All the advice I have read says to not make a big deal of it, so I don’t. I tell him to go clean himself up and I don’t help him with it or anything. But inside, I’m seething. By now, he should be able to control his bowels.

And I know he CAN control them- he never has these accidents at preschool, only at home. I am just so frustrated. Does anyone have any advice?

My grandmother passed away at about 5 AM on Sunday, March 15th. As usual, my uncle and I have the same thought- we remembered back to our school days and “Beware the Ides of March.” He wrote this update to some of our family members and I thought it was so eloquent, I wanted to share:

In seventh grade, we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which has the oft quoted line, “Beware the Ides of March.” Well, I didn’t get that; what the hell are “Ides” and what’s so important about that oft quoted line? Not wanting to look ignorant in school, I went, instead, to an ever reliable source, my mother. Sure enough, she explained about the Ides of March in sufficient detail to satisfy my curiosity.

This is a funny story to write, you may be thinking, but there is a point.

That little episode of my history came to mind in an ironic way when it occurred to me yesterday that my mother, died on the Ides of March, 2009. She was 91. They tell me she kind of faded away over the last 3 weeks, unable to fight off a combination of the MRSA virus, a bladder infection and pneumonia. I understand she didn’t seem to be in pain.

I watched her fading away, dying inch by inch. I still don’t really know which is worse, losing someone suddenly or watching them fade away like this. When I lost my other grandmother, the pain came after her death, and there was a lot of hurt, anger, and I had a hard time understanding why.

With this grandmother, it was completely different. The hurt and anger all came before her death. Why couldn’t we do the humane thing and let her die in a humane manner rather than watch her fade away? Why couldn’t we DO something rather than sit back and let her die? How is it fair that we can put dogs out of their pain and misery, but not people? And everyone in my family was tired, irritated, and sniping at each other when it was really the situation we were all mad at, not each other.

When she died, instead of being sad and hurt and confused, I was happy for her. Happy she’s in a better place. Happy she’s no longer in pain (if she was in any), and happy that she’s back to her old self, but in Heaven. And I was relieved. And maybe a little guilty for feeling so relieved since my life had been hanging on by an interminable thread. Now things can go back to normal, and I’m glad of that, but a bit guilty that I’m feeling so glad about that.

We travel to Indiana at the end of this week to say our goodbyes. And then things can get back to normal. A new normal, one without my grandma in it. But normal as can be.

One of my favorite songs ever.

Things have finally gotten to the point of ridiculous. I’m sick, I have the flu. Nice. One would think that would be the breaking point, but I actually find it very funny. And I’ve noticed that when things get so bad they’re funny, that you’re on the upswing. It’s about time. My grandma is still alive, which isn’t funny at all, but everything else has become a great source of amusement for me. This might mean we’re back to my regular postings of amusing things and general silliness. Nice.

I cannot remember who took this picture. Did you take it? Let me know so I can credit.

Yes, I know it's only the beginning of March and it's not time yet, but I wanted to open up some dialogue about how some people throw around the word "child abuse". The internet is a particularly bad place for the misuse of the label "child abuse" but I've seen it happen in real life as well. People say overfeeding your kid so they're overweight is child abuse. They say taking your kid to a fast food restaurant- even only every once in awhile- is child abuse. People say smoking around kids is child abuse. People say not buying your kid the latest iPod Touch is child abuse…no, wait, that's my own teenager. His view on what's child abuse doesn't count, haha.

But really, I think most of the above examples are not good parenting, but do they equate to child abuse? I hardly think so. I think using the term "child abuse" to describe bad parenting takes away the effectiveness of the term. And it's not like "bad parenting" is so many more keystrokes than "child abuse" that it's just a shorter way to put things. No, it's the typical overreaction that people like to use. This kind of hyperbole is dangerous, however. If we start terming every instance of bad parenting "child abuse" then when real child abuse happens, it doesn't seem as bad.

What do you think? Is the term "child abuse" overused?