I.Am.Invisible.

Seriously. I am the incredible invisible mom slash super wife. I do not exist. My wit, my wisdom — my excruciatingly insightful parenting advice that I’m so eager to pass on to my offspring — poof! Passes out of my mouth into the air and disappears, like dandelion fluff along with the brilliant ideas I come up with to share with my husband.

Case in point. Well actually two but we'll start with this one. I blogged a few days ago about how A2 decided it was more appealing to chow down on his fruit loops if they came out of the potty chair bowl. Weeeellll, for about a week or so prior to that I told hubby and A1 to go in the bathroom, take A2 with them and take a leak in the bowl so he would know what to do with it. Did they listen? Nope of course not they are guys and they didn't think it up themselves.

At least not yet.

Keep all that in mind. Because here's the build up. During the day A2 and I have our routine worked out to where we are pretty well happy with the goings on. We sleep in, we get up and eat breakfast (sometimes), we watch some Backyardigans, play, clean house, eat again (sometimes), call hubby 10+ times to see what he's doing, and anything else that may come up. I haven't been looking forward to this whole potty training thing so I haven't been in too big of a rush to scuttle A2 off to the potty chair. I silently decided that I'm going to let his daddy field that one. He's a hell of a lot more anxious than I am to get him into underroos.

Anyway, last night I'm strolling through the living room wondering where A2 and his daddy have disappeared to because I couldn't hear them. Turns out they were in the bathroom. With the door locked. I knocked to see what was going on and I heard from the other side, "men's private time go away mom". Well kiss my grits. I kinda chuckled to myself because I knew what was going on in there and could just picture it.

After about five minutes the door flies open, A2 runs out with just his t-shirt on and hubby is rinsing the potty bowl out in the sink with this smug grin on his face. He proceeded to tell me that contact had been made. I asked what happened and he told me that HE, yes, I am trying to enforce the fact that he said HE, decided to show A2 how to use the pot by taking a whiz in it in front of him. Are you freaking kidding me!! This assclown (don't tell him I called him that) is trying to take the credit for MY idea. What am I, not here!! I let him have his moment because A2 came back a couple of seconds later and wanted to do it again. He was actually straining to try to pee in the pot. Yay A2!! I'm so blessed with the most creative husband ever. Who else but him would have come up with an idea like that. ***Grumble, Grumble, Grumble***

Next example and it involves A1. His computer was on the fritz for about a month with the screen being broken and all so he was freaking out. He couldn't get his computer games to load up on the one he had because they required a large amount of space and the game card wasn't compatible for some of the games he plays. Well, we found someone who had an extra computer and was willing to sell it for pretty cheap and it would be perfect for his gaming. He asked me what he should do with his old computer since it has now been fixed and works perfectly otherwise. I told him that he should do his iTunes on the old one because I was going to put my account on there as well and we could share anything we wanted to without having to make CD's. Plus he could surf the net on the old one and store any documents or photos he wants without worrying about space. This would allow him to use the new computer just for gaming. He didn't really like that idea because he didn't want to have to switch back and forth and was thinking about selling the old computer. I told him that if he did that then the likelihood of me or dad using his new computer went up and he'd have to monitor his space usage pretty closely. This conversation went on about two weeks ago. Two (2) weeks ago.

This past weekend he finally got the new computer in his hands. At first it didn't work but luckily hubby is a computer nerd and was able to fix it although it took him several hours. That naturally made him some sort of freaking hero and his ideas for the old computer were sage ass wisdom. I asked A1 a couple of days ago what his dad told him he needed to do and he (meaning Dad) said that it would make more sense to use the old computer to play on the Internet and upload songs to his iPod and just play video games on the new one to alleviate taking up too much space with all his other junk. He then explained to me how that was a good idea because he wanted to load up all the games he could on the new computer. Where in the t-total hell had I heard that before??!!!

I opened my mouth. I wanted to say, “Excuse me???? DAD said????? Are you all INSANE?????? DO YOU EVER LISTEN TO ME AT ALL???? HELLO, HELLO…..DOES ANYBODY PAY ANY ATTENTION TO ME????”

But I didn’t. I just shut my mouth, nodded thoughtfully, as if I was hearing this for the first time, and said, “Sure. That makes sense to me."

GAAAH, I stress therefore I blog. It allows me to grumble about the people who live in my house and complain about how hard it is to be so smart, so insightful, yet... so... ignored….

Now I know what causes normally rational, intelligent people to start walking around, muttering to themselves.

They are married with children.