Last year, I figured out what the hell an Advent calendar is. I’m a little slow on the uptake.

This will be the 11th Christmas I’ve ever celebrated. I still can’t, with any clarity, explain precisely what the role of the Easter bunny is in April, let alone grasp all of these weird little Yuletide nuances. In fact, I am fairly certain that, 11 years ago, Advent calendars did not exist at all, and that you, the Western world at large, are simply trying to fuck with me on as many levels as possible over the holidays.

That’s nice. Pick on the poor white trash cult-member kid every December. Stay classy, Western world.

Thanks to the Lord Almighty Twitter, the whole Advent Calendar thing clicked in my thick head last year and I decided that my children would be Scarred For Life if they did not have them. So I set out to procure for ourselves three lovely Advent calendars, a week into December.

My Christmas tree is full to the brim with little homemade ornaments all made out of clay or popsicle sticks, that all say, “Josh” and “197-something” on them. His mother kept everything, and we hang that everything on our tree every year. I came into this marriage with a dildo my dad gave me for my 18th birthday and one Cheshire Cat ornament that I didn’t even know was an ornament until somewhere around 2002. His mother, thankfully, has been catching me up by buying me, and all of us, a new ornament every single year, and more thankfully not one single instrument of penetration, but it’s not the same as having something old and handmade from your momma when it’s your turn to get drunk and breed in the backseat of a Nissan start a family. I wanted, want, my kids to have something that I lovingly slaved over for months and months, beside, um, their bodies, to pass down to their kids someday. To remember me by when I’m blowing off their family Christmas to drink drinks out of coconut shells on exotic islands with their father, because I’ll be damned if I’m not reclaiming our 20s in our 60′s, dammit. DAMMIT.

And so I turned to the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom in the universe today, Twitter, and not only found out what exactly the fuck an Advent calendar was, but (thanks to my friend pgoodness) how to make one. Myself. All crafty-like and good-motherly-ish.

And that I did. It took me weeks and all of my neighbor’s scrapbooking tools. I cut and measured and color-coordinated and spent more money than I’ll ever tell my husband, and they came together beautifully. And now I have two calenders that are both 98.26% done, and one that isn’t started yet, but everything is cut out and ready to go….

…and these, too.

Because there is a Target right up the street and I am significantly more Fartsy than Artsy at the end of the day. And, apparently, the one and only thing I can start and see through until the very end involves that ill-begotten dildo.

This weekend, I was blessed with a houseguest. And we did almost nothing. It was quite epic. But after the kids were put down for the night, after we’d drank The Donor under the table and he was good and passed out on the couch, we staggered upstairs to my bedroom, turned the lights down low; she in her little, faded wife beater and me in my short-shorts. We laid together in the darkness, doing what any two, youngish, reasonably attractive, identical woman would do when given a dark house, a king sized bed, with red sheets, and a lot of wine….we stayed up awwwl night long.

Talking about cleaning products.

Now, I’m as much a hippie tree-hugging earth momma as the next girl, and since I’m also quite lazy and have three children who like money, I try very hard to stick to organic, bio-degradable, won’t – burn – their – fingers – I – can’t – replace – off cleaning products. I swear by my Bissell steam mop and my jumbo Heinz vinegar bottle, and yes it has to be the jumbo Heinz bottle because I grew up with a girl who was loosely related to the Heinz’s and she had this, well, obsession with underwears. She collected them, like people collect spoons or feet or teddy bears. I, of course, was barely able to afford my brother’s hand me down underwears, and I honestly had no idea their were so many options as far as undergarments went. It was quite an eye-opening friendship. And slightly intimidating. Which may be why it took me until I was 33 and threatened within inches of my life by someone to start wearing chonies at all. Either way, I only buy the Heinz vinegar now.

Of course, sometimes I have to bring my B game to the housekeeping, and that’s when I’ll bust out the Mr Clean with mountain and rain scented Febreeze stuff in it. Because that shit kicks ass. And is probably eating my pipes out from the inside, and may be responsible for melting one of the polar ice caps. I try not to bring my B game too often. When it starts to get dire, out comes the Tide and the hairspray. You can clean anything with a box of powdered Tide and some Big Sexy Hairspray. But when it’s at critical, when my mother in law is coming, it’s A game time.

Enter the lemon fresh Comet with bleach. $0.99. CANADIAN. Nothing in the world cleans anything better than lemon fresh comet with bleach ever. I clean everything with it; my counters, my walls, my floors, all of it. Sometimes right after I clean all of that with the Mr Clean stuff. And maybe the chemical fumes will kill me before I can pull my underwear that I’m now forced to wear down to go pee, but at least I’ll be found dead on a 25 year old tile floor with grout as white at Michael Steele’s heart.

So, I’m making the bed in my room tonight at 8:15 and I’m mumbling to myself about how I shouldn’t have to make it since I’m never the last one out of it.  I’m honestly just feeling guilty because it’s the first time in years days that I’ve made the damn thing, and feeling kind of moronic to be making it three hours before I’m going to get back in it, and kind of annoyed with myself because who really, actually makes their bed anyway?

And then I realize that all the grown-ups make their beds and I just suck.

So I keep making it and I start thinking about Extreme Home Makeover and how they always make the master bedroom into an oasis or a sanctuary or a refuge or some shit.  There’s always a reading area and a big-screen tv and gorgeous drapes and lush rugs and I wonder, do people really spend that much time in their bedrooms that they need all that?  Because if you do, sure, you probably want to make your bed once in a while.  My bedroom is on the 4th floor of my house and the only time I’m in there, I’m unconscious.  I have three children; it’s not like I have time to just go lounge around in my room all day long.   And it’s not as if anyone except my three year old ever walks past my door and peeks in, and if you do find yourself in the doorway to my bedroom there’s a 99% chance you’re up there to kill me and I really don’t care if you have to trip over some laundry and rustle with the sheets in order to chop me into tiny bits with an old, rusty axe.

And before you say, “What about the ol’ winkwink, nudgenudge?” I’ll just say this: In my life, I have these two columns that I like to call Things I Will Do and Things I Won’t Do and I’ll give you three chances to guess which column “It; with the lights on” goes into.  If he’s taking the time to stop, grab the night-vision goggles and check the state of the linens, he’s doing it all wrong.

Now I do like my kids’ beds to be made but the girl only has these two baby blankets so making hers is nothing and the boys have these ginorous loft beds and there are a few activities as equally futile as making ginormous loft beds that I occasional like to engage in, but every time I sit on the floor to converse with the toilet I notice that someone’s dribbled peepee all down the sides of it and then I have to clean it, so I try to stay away from those sorts of things if at all possible.

I wish I were the sort of person who makes her bed everyday, but that would mean I’d have to be the sort of person who walks into her bedroom every day, and that’s just not me.  I also wish I were the sort of person who folds the laundry right after she dries it, or the sort of person that washes the pan right after she cooks in it, and it occurs to me that if I were that sort of person my husband might suddenly become the sort of person who drags his wife into her bedroom randomly throughout the day.

But then the damn bed would never be made.

Do you know what happens when you forget yourself for a second and write a really angry, seething sort of post on your blog?  Do you know what happens when you then re-think that vitriol laden post and re-work it into something deep and introspective?  Do you know what happens when you re-evaluate that post and get yourself stuck in a place where you can no longer find any words to say what should be something as simple as “What the fuck, yo?”

You walk away from the computer, go upstairs, and realize that your children have hidden pumpkins in their bedroom well past their expiration dates, and you also discover, upon picking them up, that one of those pumpkins thought it would be loads of fun to rot from the bottom up, that’s what.

Also titled: How to avoid having to sell your toddler on the black market in four easy steps.