TALKIN' TURKEY WITH MARNEY!

It's that time of year again!  The much maligned Thanksiving Letter by Marney is making its festive away around the social networks. No one knows if Marney actually exists or if the letter is a well-constructed  ode to one of the most passive-aggressive fictional hostesses in history. Either way, it's a thing of a beauty because, though the letter is offensive on so many levels, anyone who has ever hosted a large family holiday can find, somewhere in all the obsessive-compulsive demands for NO MORE ALUMINUM FOIL, a glimmer of truth. In case you missed it, read the Marney Letter Right Here! 

THE GALES OF DINOVEMBER CAME EARLY

When I was a little girl, carrots did not come in bags. Instead, you bought them in bunches with the leafy greens still attached. When my mother would come home from the grocery store, she would cut off those greens and present them to me. I then turned those stalks into fancy ladies in beautiful  gowns dancing  at a ball, or long-haired witches casting spells over a boiling pot. Lest you think we were impoverished and this is some sob story about how I had to "make do" with a potato as my only doll and a burlap sack for a dress, I assure you that was not the case. I had real toys. Plastic ones, in fact!  I also had a vivid imagination and, apparently, a thing for vegetation.

LET ME EAT CAKE!

I remember the day it happened as if were yesterday. I call it "The Day of the Great Explosion." I was a few months shy of my 38th birthday and flying to Florida to attend my sister's wedding. I went through my wardrobe to select the perfect dress for the nuptials, hoping to wear the one I had purchased only six months prior. I slipped into the sleeveless sheath and checked my look in the mirror (apologies to Bruce Springsteen.) My first reaction was, "What in the absolute world??" (Actually, I probably said something a bit more profanity-laced, but we'll stick with polite expletives for the purpose of this blog.) My entire body looked as if it had exploded overnight, leaving me with a pooch of a belly, hips straining at the material of the dress, shoulders too tight for comfort. I let out a cry and raced for the bathroom scale. Ten pound weight gain! But, when? How? No time to think about that.  I was going to have to either lose the ten pounds in 24 hours or move up a dress size. With a broken heart and a sense of defeat, I went shopping. I felt depressed, dejected, unattractive, and suddenly very old. The new dress size I was forced to purchase due to the weight explosion? A size 10.

NESTING: NOT JUST FOR PREGNANT LADIES ANYMORE!

When I was 9 1/2 months pregnant with my son, my next door neighbor caught me outside doing the unthinkable. I was standing on a rickety kitchen chair washing the ceiling of my screened-in porch. She rushed over in a panic, shouting, "What do you think you are doing?!" I calmly replied, "Cleaning." Such is the  mentality of a woman in the "nesting" stage of pregnancy. Nesting is the term given to the time in a pregnancy when an expectant mother, be she cat, squirrel, or human, begins to prepare the physical world outside her body for the new baby. In us human mothers, it often involves a ridiculous amount of washing, scouring, folding, sorting, rewashing, and refolding. Sometimes, as in my case, the compulsion to sanitize every inch of living space is so strong that we do something fool-hardy.  After all, what if my baby took a notion to crawl on the porch ceiling, and I hadn't properly sterilized it ahead of time?