I just tucked my son into bed.

I am with him all day long, so my husband always reads him the bedtime stories that are part of our goodnight process. I kiss him goodnight and leave the two of them snuggled in bed together for story time.

At the door on the way out, I turn and say, “Have a good night-night, I’ll see you in the morning. Mommy loves Miles!” and as per our ritual, my son replies, “Miles loves Mommy!”

Sometimes Miles adds, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” because he heard it on a cartoon.

(Thank you, Little Bear. Appreciate that. How about you do an episode where you explain to my constantly over-analyzing brain why the parent bears wear clothes and the kid bear runs around naked? That would actually be helpful to me.)

I have never liked the “Don’t let the bedbugs bite” saying, which I’m assuming hearkens back to the days when bedbugs were a very real problem. It seems morbid and makes me itchy. One of those creepy “Ring Around the Rosy” things where the cutesy saying is actually about some archaic and gruesome malady.

So when my son started saying it, I found a way to spin it cute. He has a favorite stuffed toy my mother gave him. It is a rainbow-colored bug that we named Nightbug once he decided he had to have it nearby in order to sleep.

So when he says “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” I reply: “If they do, give ‘em a kiss ‘cause it’s Nightbug!”

This always makes my son giggle. Unfortunately, this makes my husband wince. He is not fond of my attempt to make bugs in our son’s bed into a friendly thing. He is not okay with it at all. Annoyed eye-rolls aplenty at my cheesiness. Sometimes I sneer at him in reply on my way out.

(I also get the eye-rolls when I say “in my elephant” rather than “in my element.”)

(I can’t help it.)

He is also not okay with it when I combine “Knock your self out!” and “Eat your heart out!” into the bizarre and therefore much more entertaining saying: “Knock your heart out!”

He actually gets angry. (So of course I say it even more. You married folks know what I’m talking about.)

Knock your heart out.

A funny band-mate of mine did this by accident one time and it stuck. Years ago. Isn’t it odd how certain things stick with you?

My husband sometimes sarcastically says, “And if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a wonderful Christmas,” in reference to wishing we’d done things differently.

I had an ex who said basically the same thing in a more crass way. He used to say, “And if shit were butter, we’d spread it on bread.” I always remembered that one. I have a soft spot for crass. I hope I’m one of those old ladies who curses a lot.

That said… I also hope that unlike my grandmother on my biological father’s side, I do not curse openly in the presence of children. My son met his great-grandmother (he’s named after her maiden name of Miles) for the first time recently in Phoenix, and I still can’t believe he didn’t learn some lovely new words to share with the nice ladies who teach his church preschool.

She dropped every single curse word you can imagine, save for the F-bomb. And I’m sure if we’d just had more time she would have found a way to work that one in.

My grandma would curse; I’d give my younger sister Sommer who was with us the Official WTF? Look, and then glance nonchalantly at Miles, hoping he hadn’t noticed. I got lucky—he was immersed in his toys every time.

I’m no delicate flower. I’m often the first one seated at the Table of Inappropriateness and will drop a “That’s what SHE said!” whenever humanly possible, but I was really shocked. This woman raised four kids, for goodness sakes. She knows better than to call someone an asshole in front of a three-year-old.

Before I stop babbling, I must recommend a book.

I’m reading the Slash biography (by Slash with Anthony Bozza). It’s pretty good.

If he’s telling the truth, then Axl is a power-tripping control freak with an ego the size of the Sun. I will never support Guns & Roses because Axl owns the name and that’s all it means anymore. Just stupid Axl and his grody new “chubby old guy with cornrows” look. Not the awesome band that made one of my top five ever albums, Appetite for Destruction.

I’ve been in a band with a lead singer/guitar player/psychopath like that. Two drummers in a row “nicknamed” her Hitler. Yeesh. When I got away from her, it was like a black shroud of negativity fell off of me and I could see the sun again. Because of my own experience, I could really relate to the way Slash talks in the book about quitting the band he’s thrown his life and heart into, and watching some egotistical bastard destroy everything he helped create.

The process of acquiring band members and discussions of the relationships between them were also relate-able to me after playing in bands for twelve years. A band is so much like a family. There is a crazy dynamic there that nobody outside of the band will ever see.

The hardest part of getting a band somewhere, once you have a decent musical set to offer the world, is simply trying to keep everyone together and happy.

If one person is off, everybody’s off. Your drummer’s coked up and can’t keep the rhythm, guess what? You ALL sound disjointed and off playing with him/her. Your guitar player just broke up with his girlfriend and is depressed, guess what? You are ALL going through that break-up. Your singer has the flu and can’t sing for shit, and you all sound like shit. You get it.

This factor is both the most irritating and most amazing part of playing in a band. You become one entity with a sound of its own. You change or remove one person and it can become a completely different thing. One of the coolest things about Appetite for Destruction is that it was lightning in a bottle. If you had changed one member of the band, or done one thing differently, there might not be a Slash book to read today. Everyone contributed something unique and absolutely perfect for what they were doing to that record.

That Appetite for Destruction cassette got me through my first year of college. I was barely seventeen, working a closing shift at the KFC at night and getting up at 4 a.m. to work in a donut shop across from campus. I’d run over to my classes from there, go home after classes for a quick nap, start over. On the off-days, I’d drink alcohol and have seventeen-year-old sex with my loser boyfriend. And listen to that damned cassette. I flipped it over and over until I wore it out. The cassette, I mean. Heh.

Okay, that’s enough of that sassy talk.

Hope all is great in your world, my friends.