IKE, Confessions, and A Happy Ending

I haven't been reading Julia for all that long, but now I visit her site often. Her compelling writing has completely sucked me in, she has the Minnesota connection, and then there is her kitchen. Sometimes, I visit her site just to look at her kitchen. So spacious. The craftsman style chandelier. The bright, sunlit space. Swoon! The ample storage. The desk. Is that a playroom for the child, right next to and visible from the kitchen? I must go lie down.

Sarah's kitchen is impressive, too. (Although the video of Rob destroying it made my heart stop. Well, the part where he destroys it made my heart stop. The rest of the video made me giggle like an insane bridge troll.) I'm secretly hoping that when I see Sarah's kitchen in person, it won't be quite that fabulous. The double wall ovens. The sensibly laid-out work triangle. The cleanth! Is there a fainting couch nearby?

I would post a photo of our kitchen, but come on. The randomly strewn crap all over, the pantry items that take up counter space because we don't have a damn pantry, the rug that may or may not be a biohazard by now . . . you understand, don't you? Bump manages just fine in our kitchen, but I've developed an unhealthy case of Internet Kitchen Envy.

And I don't even cook. It's sad, really. It's like coveting someone's garage when you don't own a car.

But I do have Elvis. Poor, neglected Elvis. Elvis is the kegerator we bought when Buttmuch and Scrubly lived with us for a summer. I rationalized the purchase by calculating that if we drank two cases of beer a week (which we easily did, especially with four people in the house), Elvis would pay for himself within three years. In the meantime, we would have cold, draft beer goodness in our very own home. Our friend Eric suggested we should hard-plumb lines to every room of the house. He was joking, but if I could have figured out a way to do it, I would have.

Now in this imaginary picture of my kitchen that I'm not posting because, come on, you would probably not even be able to see Elvis. He's currently wedged between our liquor cabinet (a skinny Ikea bookcase that houses dusty bottles and other bar crap) and a pot rack. We would have to do some serious Moving o' Shit to replace the keg in him. The empty keg that has been in him since before I got pregnant.

It's so heartbreaking. Tragic, even. If there were a social services department for kegerators, I'm sure that last paragraph would launch scores of agents running to my house to remove sweet Elvis from my neglectful care. I'm the Britney of kegerator mommies.

But! Lumpyhead is no longer shunning me. I'm not sure if I've died or repented, but he seems to recognize that I exist. Maybe it had to get worse before it got better. You know how they say that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference? When I got home on Tuesday night, I received full and complete indifference. You've heard about the triumphant return home of the go to work parent, when the baby is all smiles and crawls frantically to the door? Yeah, I came home to a baby who looked at me disinterestedly for a moment, then immediately returned to bored fiddling with his toys. Crushing.

But when Bump and Lumpyhead came in for lunch today, the baby actually reached for me. Reached! Smiles and cuddles! Hooray! Who wants a pony? Ponies for everyone!