Frosted Flakes and Cheetos do not a good breakfast make.

I'm just sayin'.

I just gave myself my daily injection of Lovenox (one of the many joys of my pregnancy). Upon pulling the needle out, blood spurted all over my pretty deep-pink powder room. I think I may have punctured the fetus. Thanks to these injections, I don't have a pretty pregnant belly. It's covered in bruises. I do get creative with the injections, though. Because I don't have the balls to inject myself in the thigh, I give myself these shots in the stomach, under the belly button area in a u-shape. I don't have any stretch marks visible from my first pregnancy, but I do have 2 small ones above my belly, the same size, equidistant from my belly button, and at symmetrical angles. Between these badges of courage stretch marks, my belly button and the locations of the bruises, my belly looks like a Chinese man's face. If I get brave I'll post a picture. It's really quite amusing.

My gripe today is with WalMart. I hate WalMart. Loathe and despise it, even. But sometimes, on a rare occasion, I'll need to go there for something that the retail mecca that is Target does not carry. Today was that rare occasion. I need an old-school window shade to prevent anymore early morning sunlight from entering my son's bedroom through the very expensive blackout curtain we already have on the window. Mama's a little tired of his 5 a.m. wakings - I think the boy is part rooster.

Anyway...

WalMart. I'm already annoyed that I have to bundle the kid up to take him out. It's freezing out. It was 60 degrees in Western NY yesterday - today, we're expecting half an inch of ice and highs of 24. Gotta love the Northeast. We get there half an hour after the damn store opens and the parking lot is nearly filled. There's already about a mile gap between the closest possible/handicapped parking spots in the lot and the store's entrance, so it's going to be a 5K trek from wherever we park to the front door. I'm pretty sure my baby boy weighs close to 100 pounds at this point - at least that's what it feels like - and, being 16 months pregnant with sciatic pain running from the left side of my ass down to my cankles, this wasn't going to be a fun walk. What made it better was the sheet of black ice that I apparently parked on. As I walked around the back of the car to get the baby from his car seat, I slipped and, while I didn't fall on the ground, I did "land" face first into the backseat passenger window, inches from my boy...who found my antics terribly amusing and saw fit to laugh at his mama, who was trying very hard not to let the obscenities come flooding out.

We made it into the store without further incident and were greeted - not by the WalMart greeter - but by the smell. Do all WalMart stores smell, or is it just this one? I can't tell if it's the Subway shop that is just inside the store, or the clientele (minus my son and me, of course, despite the fact that I haven't showered since Sunday), but ohhhhh, the smell. I don't even think I can put a finger on what the smell is, not that I'd like to anyway, but I feel obligated to share with you, dear readers, just what I had to breathe in this fine wintry morning whilst pushing my squeaky cart through the aisles. Bacon, mayonnaise, and dirty ass, perhaps? No, not quite it. Oh, and the parking lot filled with cars? Where the hell were all the people driving these cars? They certainly weren't shopping, and God knows they weren't working in the store because every time I grace this store with my presence the lines are longer than my husband's stories about his college days. That's another thing about WalMart - 20 checkouts, only 4 or 5 of which are ever open. EV-ER. Forty dollars later, we made it out alive. The store was, of course, out of stock of the appropriately-sized shades and kitchen-sized garbage cans, something else we desperately need so that my son will stop picking food out of the garbage and eating it, but at least I got some new mascara that promises to plump without clump.

My gram's bathroom, Old Spice, and hard-boiled eggs? That's it!