two dolla

blogging for LGBT families: our lgbt family

For the past three years, our little gay family has been just as normal as any other family I know. Just like every other family out there, we don’t eat dinner at the kitchen table enough. We get behind on laundry. We go out to dinner once a week. We watch TV. We have a pet or two. The General and I take turns helping The Kid with homework. I drag them to sporting events; they talk about comic books and nerdy cartoon stuff. That’s pretty normal, no?

And just like any other family, gay, straight or otherwise, we want to expand our family. Past The Kid, past the dog and the cat, and add a baby to the mix. Why not, right? I mean, what else do we have going on? And I think when we finally started to seriously consider that option is when I realized that — holy crap, we’re a gay family.

When/if we have a baby, who’s going to accept him/her? Who’s not? Who will make a huge deal out of the fact that our child will have two moms? And who will just be ecstatic because, HEY!, we had a baby! Does the baby have grandparents? Aunts? Uncles? Or do we just raise our baby with family that we choose for him/her? That kinda thing gets trick if you really start thinking about it.

Then, there’s the whole issue of two ladies not being able to make a baby. I gave The General a turkey baster on our 3 month anniversary. It was more of a joke than anything. And besides, I’d stolen the turkey baster from a neighbor when I was moving out of the suburbs and into Minneapolis, so it’s not like I really expected her to use a used turkey baster… but still. It’s not like we can try to get one of us knocked up. And if we did, it would probably have to require entirely too much alcohol and a stranger with a penis. In other words, not really an option.

This is disjointed, I know. I want to post today and I want to post on this topic, but it’s hard to wrap my head around what it’s like to be a gay family. We’re just a family. And probably a whole heck of a lot less dysfunctional than most of the families out there.

It was my idea

I have a feeling I just lost The General to the sexy gaze of DJ Hero. It came in the mail today and someone in this house over the age of 30 that’s not me spent the whole night sitting cross-legged (damn right I wrote Indian-style and then had to delete it!) on the couch mixing Flo Rida and Kanye West on a plastic turnrable. I had it coming, though. Santa brought be NBA Jam for the Wii and The General has been forced to listen to things like BOOMSHAKALAKA for the past five days.

Also another idea of mine involved taking on some freelance transcription work that’s probably way late at this point, which is why I was working on it tonight instead of perfecting my scratching skills on the Wii. I’ve been trying to transcribe 4 hours of a seminar about mindfulness and being centered and finding your inner… zzzzzzzzzz. Wait. What? Yeah, I can’t listen to 10 minutes of it without having to get up and walk around or slap myself in the face repeatedly.

I am full of good ideas, no?

a wholesome christmas tale

It’s post-Christmas lunch, post-unwrapping presents. I’m sleepy and I have to plan for an 8 hour drive the next day. However, I don’t want to give up time with my 6 year old pseudo-niece, since I only see her a few times a year. I’m trying to convince her to read me a book so I can fall asleep in her bed. She’s not having any of this, so she storms out of the bedroom and closes the door. I, assuming she’d be back shortly, covered the my head with the blankets.

There’s a possibility I dozed off for a couple of minutes. I heard the door open again, so I waited a while to plot my surprise attack on an unsuspecting 6 year old. When I decided to pull my head out of the blanket, I noticed it was certainly not a child that was in the room with me. It was someone that had just arrived to our Christmas soiree. And that someone was, in fact, my Sunday school teacher from my younger, more religious days.

I did what everyone else would do in an instance like that. I covered my head backup hoping she didn’t know I was in there and hid. She’s old. It’s likely she has dementia or would have convinced herself that she was just seeing things, right?

home from the holidays

After driving through four hours of fog along I-35 and drinking four Red Bulls since noon today, we’re home safe and sound. Surprisingly, I’m not at all tired. I can’t imagine why.

We spent the last few days in Sedalia with my family. As time goes on, I can’t help but be so proud of where I come from. Not necessarily the Sedalia part of it all, but the people that have known me since the day I was born? I feel so fortunate to call them my family.

And now that things have calmed down in my neck of the woods for the next several months, I’m devoting myself to more writing and more picture taking and more playing NBA Jam for the Wii, because The General ordered for me on Christmas night when she realized nobody else had gotten it for me.

My life, it is all right.

I know I missed a day

And my life hasn’t been the same since.

The house is coming along incredibly well! We were an unpacking machine yesterday. The General dominated the kitchen and the front room (which is a porch, but calling it that seems really weird, because it’s insulated and everything) and I kicked some booty in the den and living room. The DVDs need to be unpacked, but The General is going to have to that, because she needs to alphabetize them. (I’m not kidding!)

My goal tonight it to finish up the den, find some place to store an assload of beanie babies (SHUT UP), and figure out where the rest of these IKEA Lack shelves are going to go.  Hey, maybe I’ll hang the shelves in the den and display all of my beanie babies from 1999. How stylin’ would that be?

UNPACKING IS HARD.

In other news, Riley has hit the jackpot at this house. Not only can he drink out of the toilet, but he can also reach the faucet on the sink. We came home to paw prints on the edge of the sink, which I’m sure means he’s about three days away from figuring out how to turn the knobs and make water come out. And he has so many things to pee on in the backyard, he can’t even stand it.

Life is good in this new humble abode of ours! I’d take some pictures, but I have a feeling my camera is hiding in a box somewhere.

might be normal elsewhere

This is a perfectly normally conversation at our house.

I heard really weird noises from the living room. Knowing that The Kid is the only one in there, I yell from the bedroom, “What are you doing?”

He answers: “Trying to make a duck noise.”

Me: “Okay.”

Because how else would you answer that, you know?

my favorite person in the world

Today would have been my Grandma’s birthday. It still makes me sad to think about not seeing her every time I go to Sedalia, but I have pictures like this that make me remember how awesome our relationship was.

Things I learned from my grandma include:

• Don’t judge people based on anything except what’s inside.
• Always treat people with respect.
• Don’t let people walk all over you.
• Don’t leave the gas pump unattended.
• How to tie a hook when you go fishing.
• How to spot a morel in the woods, even if it’s covered in dead leaves.
• How to tie my shoe.
• The phrase “up shit creek without a paddle”.
• And about a million other little bitty things that I don’t remember until it happens in action.

I wish she could have met Amelia and The Kid and seen who I would become after finally being able to be comfortable with who I am. I wish I could make a quick trip down to Missouri and spend a day fishing on the lake with her. I wish she was still passing along true life crime books to me after she’d read them. I wish she was still sneaking an extra 10 bucks into my Christmas card every year. I wish a lot of that stuff.

Without getting all religious and spiritual, I’m just glad to know that she’s always watching out for me now. No matter what.

Happy Birthday, Grandma.

measuring pupillary distance is easy!

Along with about 2908 other things I did while home in Missouri, my brother measured my pupillary distance. It’s not as hard as it sounds really. It took a ruler and about 15 seconds.Pupillary distance, by the way, isn’t as dirty as one would think. It’s just measuring the distance between the centers of your pupils. I highly recommend asking someone like my brother to do it, who’s the kind of guy that will measure something 563 times just to make sure it’s right.

Several months ago, my little bro started ordering every pair of eyeglasses that would even remotely fit his melon from Zenni Optical. I’m pretty sure he has a around 9 pair, which include some argyle ones and a pair he wears just when he goes to art gallery openings (along with a newsboy cap) that he says makes him look artsy.

This morning, since I woke up a whole two minutes before the alarm went off, I ran across a couple of articles/message boards that talk about how professionals in the optical world are refusing to give out or measure the pupillary distance so people can order glasses online. I guess I get that, since it’s definitely losing money for them. I’m just concerned that it will cause people to be discouraged about being able to order glasses online and they shouldn’t have to deal with that. The internet is all about saving money, right?

And mainly I just like saying pupillary distance. Pupillary.

bieber and his bouncing bangs

After touring what will be The Kid’s school’s new location next year, The General and I dropped him off at home (with a healthy dinner of McDonald’s) and headed out for dinner. We ended up meeting up with Matt and Jenni and helped the finish up with Trivia. It’s good we showed up when we did, because they had to identify 8 pictures of people that had Bieber-esque hair. Who has two thumbs and knew everyone of them? That’d be me. The four of us ended up winning first place and reeled in a whopping $25 grand prize.

Tomorrow’s full of The Kid’s end of the school year picnic and celebrating his birthday with a friend of his. Per his request, he wants to go to Chipotle and then to see Iron Man 2. That’s the kinda birthday party I can stand behind. Saturday is full of 3 Day meetings and Sunday is Hugo’s first adoption day and a couple of hours I have to put into work.

Sometimes, I seriously don’t know where the time goes. At all.

where i gush about a kid

So, today, I realized I’m pretty much in love with a boy. He happens to be turning 13 at the end of this month, but over the last week, I’ve realized that I don’t just love him like he’s my better half’s kid. I love him like he’s my own. I’m not his mom. He already has an absolutely fantastic one of those. I’m not his dad. One, I don’t have the parts to be a dad, but two, he also has a very incredible one of those, too. I’m just his Wendy and I’m cool with that. So very cool with that.
 
We met when he was just a shade under 11 years old. The first time we met was at the dog park. Less than 10 minutes later, he was using his metal detector to search the pockets of my cargo shorts. About a week later, the three of us were at the dog park again. He didn’t want me to leave, so he hid in my car and refused to get out eventually wedging himself on the floorboard between the driver’s seat and the back seat. He was stuck for a good 15 minutes.
 
He was not at all into sports before we met. In the past two years, he’s gotten into basketball and loves going to WNBA games. He waffles between Yao Ming and Shaquille O’Neal has his favorite NBA player. Over the last month or so, we’ve been playing catch with a baseball mitt I got him a while ago. He’s got a heck of an arm!
 
I wasn’t at all into sci-fi and, well, reading before I met him. I’ve read the entire Twilight series (save the last half of the 4th book, because C’MON, IT’S GETTING HORRIBLE) and can tell you things about Dr. Who that I’d never even heard of prior to that. I’m also still very capable of doing middle school math, if you can believe that.
 
Over the past couple of months, this kid has grown from a squeaky little boy to this young man whose voice is dropping and who grows out of jeans every two months. He’s abandoned most of his arguing when he screws up and gotten into the habit of doing his hair every morning. I’m still fighting the Axe Body Spray thing, but that’s a battle that’s probably not going anywhere.
 
Point is, I’m pretty much in love with this kid. He’s as much a part of me as any kid could ever be.