sweetened*taters

The selfish blogger

2012-01-30T15:12:00.002-06:00

I used to think that blogging was an embarrassing hobby – something that I should hide from others until the very last moment and their opinion of me was already beyond tarnished.

It wasn’t until several years into the process that I started to see genuine usefulness to it. After all, once you wipe away the hipster/hippie vibe and the Google ads running up and down most of them, blogs are really just modern nonfiction essays.

(I’ve been at this blogging thing for a long time, though, so I may be biased.)

Blogging has become a funnel down which I’ve crammed some pretty awful writing and ended up finding my voice, and part of that voice is reflected in the audience it attracts. I must admit that I am far from the fame of some bloggers like Dooce and VodkaMom, though I find a kind of comfort in the relative obscurity of my blogging life. Instead of tens of thousands of readers, I am happy with the several hundred that stop by each day, probably less now that I’m writing less often.

But I’ve always known my writing style is not for everyone.

You might call me a Mommy Blogger, but that’s not very accurate if it causes one to envision a Starbucks-sipping, minivan-driving, PTA-associating egomaniac. No. I drink McDonald’s coffee, drive a gas-guzzling Suburban with a tail light recently attached with blue painter’s tape, and would probably never be invited to join (or stand near) the PTA for fear that I might reference Satan too many times in regards to other people’s small heathens. I’m a skeptic, a mom who wanted a career and got a fleet of small humans to care for instead.

And now I fear that that description might throw me into another kind of category that involves rotting teeth and mall bangs, but I’m neither of those extremes.

Nope, I am just the regular kind of egomaniac… who happens to have children and writes online for the amusement of a few – most of whom are admittedly probably weirdos, but I’m not picky. Even though we often hold a one-sided conversation, I’ve grown quite fond of my weirdos.

It’s the perfect relationship: I get to talk about myself a lot, and they listen.

It might not surprise any, then, that I laugh every time I see this quote from E.B. White, imagining, of course, that he’s speaking not of “essayists” but “bloggers” (“The Essay and the Essayist”):

“The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest… Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”

Every blogger I’ve ever known and loved has kind of been a selfish jackhole in some regards. We’re opinionated and blunt. It should come as no great shock that every brilliant blog post I’ve ever written has been either a scathing review of my life or a greatly over-celebrated moment of it.

It’s those harsh criticisms of blogging that cause me to wonder many times why I started down that self-centered writing path back in November of 2006.

At first, it was probably because I felt invisible. No one knew me. No one understood the hell I was going through with three infant triplets at home and a husband who was nearly non-existent from working long, exhausting hours of his own. At least: no one in my physical world.

So I reached out to the internet.

I wrote even though I was sure no one was interested in what I had to say. Most of my readers were people who wanted to see pictures of triplets. I look back on some of those early posts and cringe at their inauthenticity. Then I must have snapped. I started writing short diatribes about how awful being a stay-at-home parent could be, and I’d find the humor in it all. I stopped posting pictures and used my words to paint my life for the world to see.

I gained a small following of readers, only visible by the hits marked to my page.

And slowly, they began commenting.

I learned their names.

We became a community of sorts, all connected through the words I wrote.

The responses pushed me, made me laugh, angered me...

I found myself writing for therapy, but I started writing things that I thought might make my readers laugh or make them think. Usually, those posts involved bodily functions, and the funny-factor only increased if it involved feces on some vertical surface of my house. I needed to write most of all when I was struggling because I knew that I would have to force myself to laugh in order to write the humor out of my situation. I even went through a phase when I wrote of nothing but the refrigerator contents that ended up on my living room floor that morning, or which kitchen knife the girls had smuggled out of the butcher block that day.

The writing changed my life. It was a journal that spewed out of me, sometimes uncontrollably.

I was amazed that the more brutally forthcoming I was, the more of a connection I made with the readers. It was as if they craved honesty.

I also noticed that my motivation had significantly shifted – it became equally about my own needs to relate to another adult human as it did my desire to create something from which others could glean entertainment and their own therapy.

It wasn’t until very recently that I realized another motivation, as true as the others but clearly not as obvious: I wanted to be remembered for who I was and how I lived my life through those long days. Two weeks ago, my introduction to Michel Montaigne brought this revelation. In “To the Reader,” he wrote about his drives for writing nonfiction essays. The vocab is a bit lofty, but you can get the gist:

“Reader, thou hast here an honest book; ... I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of me… it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections are my natural form…”

In other words: he wanted to leave his family and friends a memory on which to reflect after he’d died.

Like Montaigne, I want all the ugly gore and the beauty of my life here in this world to be remembered, to anyone who may choose to remember me, even as insignificant as I may be in the grand scheme of things. I want my girls to know what kind of woman raised them. I also want others to know that I had good intentions but sometimes failed to live up to my own standards, but it didn’t stop me from trying. And as writing has taught me, the ugly often makes the beauty.

I found solace in the truth. Even my saddest moments and struggles needed to be bared. Our sex life, our fights, our failures as well as our triumphs as parents were fair game. I once wrote about how my uterus built a fence… that one still makes me laugh. More recently, I’ve lost two loved ones to cancer and diabetes, and the pain is almost too much to bear until it is down on paper.

Honesty is often the less glamorous road.

One point E.B. White makes struck me as incredibly timeless, if again, we think of bloggers:

“There is one thing the essayist cannot do, though–he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time.”

There have been more than a few infamous bloggers who have been outed as “fakes” and over-exaggerators, and it’s hard to toe the line of honesty when others have such extravagant stories to tell of travelling to foreign countries or exploitations of their children suffering through horrific illnesses, and I’m trying to find the excitement in artwork being razorbladed into my coffee table with “safety” scissors by a 4-year-old. The temptation to lie is always there.

And then there were the times I had things to say that couldn’t be said.

I felt like a fake if I held back, and there were times I was asked – usually by my husband – to use discretion when speaking about his mother or work-related problems, although never about our personal lives. In those moments that I hit the backspace, I felt like a fraud.

Isn’t nonfiction supposed to be about the truth, if nothing else? Like I always tell my husband, usually after discovering that he had done or said something unsavory and neglected to tell me: Omission is a lie. So what did that make me?

Not that it was always easy to write honestly, knowing that my parents, husband, cousins, sister, neighbors, strangers, teachers all swung through to read on occasion.

My memory isn’t always stunningly accurate, either. It makes a difficult post when I know another person might read my story and think me a liar if I don’t get the details exactly right. I’m probably the harshest critic I have when it comes to writing, and I have – more than once – deleted a post that had too many gaps.

I feel at home in Jocelyn Bartkevicius’s quote (from “The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction”):

“The self – at least my self – is composed of misremembered and unremembered scenes.”

At least I have the blog to help me remember what I may have forgotten since putting the words out into the world wide web.

Thankfully, that is blogging’s last gift. The final reason for being here.

I can travel back in time, back to the days when I thought I couldn’t write the words.

Yet I’m so glad I did.

*This blog was submitted as a creative nonfiction reflection this afternoon for a course I am taking. Yes, it is long. I apologize for causing you to practice your literacy. Love you all!*

We do what we want

2012-01-22T16:05:00.001-06:00

I think Mike fears for his life a little. He’s got that nervous laugh. God help me, but most of all, God help Mike.

We’re having some technical difficulties with our “birth control method,” if you can call it that.

So between that drama (his constant teasing) and Kristin lying in bed between us last night kicking and punching, I didn’t get much sleep.

But I did have my first nightmare in several months.

It mostly involved me having a dance-off with Tina Fey, and she kept scowling at me because all I could bring to the floor were my lame moves from Just Dance 3.

And I looked just about as good as Mike does here (you KNOW he’s getting serious when he throws back a ponytail):

So, Tina, if you’re reading this, I challenge you to a rematch.

Since Mike is on my Shit List already, I have no problem telling you that he accused me this last weekend of blogging all the time. Oh sorry… ALLLLL the time. Like an addict.

If he’s going to accuse me of something, I’m going to at least try to live up to the crime.

It’s time I get back on the bloggin horse.

No Limits, Mike!

Can I get a little grit with those fries?

2012-01-18T16:19:00.002-06:00

A little over 45 minutes ago, I decided that I would break with my tradition of hating McDonald’s food and allow my children to indulge.

Of course, I refuse to buy them Happy Meals. It'd be a cold day in Hell when that happens. Oh, no. I buy them the dollar chicken sandwiches and they split a large fry.

I even got into a fight with Emma in the car that ended with me saying: If you think their milk is so much better than our milk just because it comes in a little plastic cup, then YOU can cough up the $2 for it out of your piggy bank ice cream money.

She shook her head.

Well, I don’t want to spend MY money on it, either.

They were pleased to drive off with our booty, except the wind had other ideas.

As soon as I stepped out of the car, the wind grabbed hold of the grease saturated paper sack and tore it all the way down the side, sending the whole thing to the ground with a thud.

I clutched my precious – my coffee – and swore at the top of my lungs.

Shit chicken bastard!

You’re welcome, neighbors with small children within earshot.

I don’t even know what that means, but it felt good. I scooped the fries back into the bag and yelled to my child to stop crying and get out of the car before so help me…

This has not been a good week for us.

Then again, I can’t stop laughing at the visual I’m sure I supplied everyone as I salvaged the girls’ after school fries from the snow- and ice- and grit-covered driveway.

The Green Box

2012-01-10T10:41:00.001-06:00

Today is my first day back to school, and I’m already dreaming of a margarita.

Instead of getting my Gringo Groove on, I walked around campus during my two-hour break between parking and my first class.

Yes, two hours.

That’s how shitty the parking is here.

I found my way to the bookstore where I dropped $100 on a single textbook plus two mechanical pencils. I’m a baller, yo.

Anyway, here I am, bored out of my gourd for at least another half hour.

I’m slightly anxious that I’m in over my head.

But I’ll make it work because it HAS to. I’m graduating. I’ve already picked out the Brighton grad cap charm that my sister will buy me ~~but I’ll really buy it myself and tell Mike that it was from Stephie shhhhh don’t tell him okay.~~

These are the important things that drive me.

Plus, I need things to take my mind off of this week.

Have I mentioned that my children turn SEVEN tomorrow???

My home has been impossible to maintain and the girls’ room was so horrendous that it even caused guests to scold them, so my solution was to take back our master bedroom and give the girls the TWO extra bedrooms.

They’d decided unanimously that Kristin gets her own room, most possibly because she’s bossy as hell and is anal retentive about her stuff. Plus Emma and Alison want to jump on their beds in peace without being tattled on.

My parents took the girls over this past weekend so I could paint. Mike chose turquoise for our bedroom, and the girls picked purple and brown for the double room and Kristin wants to keep her room yellow (phew!) I ended up giving myself a headache from the fumes and arching my neck upward to paint over the sky-colored mural ceiling that was such a brilliant idea.

I dragged the girls’ bed out of the master bedroom and threw their mattress on the livingroom floor where they’ve been sleeping the last two days, which also might be the reason for Emma’s sudden Stockholm Syndrome over wanting to move permanently in with my parents.

When I got done painting, Mike said, “Wow, that’s a green room. You painted the ceiling? Why did you pick that color?”

“Um… you fucking picked the color! And I painted the ceiling because it WAS blue and I thought you’d like to keep the room dark for sleeping during the day.”

“Well, I was just kidding.”

psssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhttttttttttttttttt

That’s the sound of steam coming out of my ears and eyeballs.

Luckily, we’ve both decided we like it, and that it totally WORKS. Although I now call our bedroom The Green Box. After which Mike tells me how much it’s grown on him.

Because he’s afraid of me and he knows I keep a hammer and a shovel handle under my side of the bed.

I’m trying to get myself pumped up. I have one whole day to get the girls’ room organized, furniture-d, painted, and decorated.

And make a Green Bay Packers cake (per the kids’ request).

Can I take a mulligan this year?

Practical tragic

2012-01-07T01:14:00.001-06:00

I’m not sure I’ve ever properly explained just how much I HATE painting.

My parents took the kids this weekend in order for me to prepare the girls’ birthday presents, which is, excitingly enough:

NEW BEDROOMS.

Ta-da!

(I can feel my sister’s cringes through the keyboard. I’m lame. I don’t care.)

We’re all about the practical gifts around here this year since I just spent an 8-hour day emptying garbage bags FILLED with toys and debris and art projects out of their room and into the trash.

I AM OVER CHILDHOOD. Can’t they get jobs and buy their own damned toys like everyone else?

So here I am, being smart, and telling them that they can have brand new bedrooms, BUT they’re getting nothing else for their birthdays.

And immediately they started plotting.

I want a yellow room with pink.

I want my room to be brown…

…and purple! (Two are sharing a room.)

Then the slow-mo realization set in. OhhhhhnooooooIhavetoPAAAAINT…

Clearly I didn’t think this one through.

I’ve painted about 30 square feet and I’m ready to whittle this paintbrush into a shiv and cut myself like a jailhouse snitch.

Of course, you might think that my incredible knack for insomnia would be helpful, and normally, I would say yes.

BUT.

Emma cried for about six hours straight last night until she and I finally passed out cold on the couch. She had a “scary dream.” I’ve never seen her so hysterical.

No amount of McDonald’s Crackhouse Coffee could wake me up today. I slept at least three solid hours while the kids were in school, and I woke up in a panic since this Apocalyptic Al Gore heatwave has me all freaked out about what time it is. And before you write that off as an exaggeration, it was 60 fucking degrees yesterday. In January. And today was 50. I might have to buy a mower since the grass is turning green in spots.

In other news – and since I’m avoiding painting – Mike is working about seven days straight just because we both agreed that it’s probably best if he’s not around for the home improvement hell that’s going down this weekend. We don’t need two adults high on paint fumes… one of us has to be sane enough to heat supper in the microwave since I’ve given up cooking for Lent. In advance.

I’m nothing if not dedicated.

Speaking of which, I’m heading back into turquoise hell.

Yes, turquoise.

That’s the color Mike wanted for our bedroom. Turquoise and brown.

Apparently the long hair means he’s suddenly got a vagina and can plan interior designs.

Have a cookie!

2012-01-02T14:39:00.001-06:00

My children fail to understand that I’m no short order cook. Lunch today was no exception.

Me: What kind of sandwich would you girls like?

Kristin: No.

Alison: I’ll have pepperoni pizza!

Emma: I would like a bowl of Mini Wheats… with milk.

Me: I said SANDWICH. Forget it. How about a cookie. Cookies all around!

All: YAY!!!

That’s how I’m going to solve all my problems from now on. Cookies.

I made what I thought would be 2 dozen and ended up being 5 dozen peanut butter blossoms to take to the neighbors’ house for New Years, which means that we have way too many left over.

I’ve been using them for everything.

I’m not ready to get out of bed yet.

But we’re HUNGRY.

Help yourselves to some cookies.

YAY!

See how that works? Magic.

And as our friend Tim likes to say: our kids could stand to eat a cheeseburger or two.

Emma’s been so concerned about weight lately and it irritates me. She flicks her skinny little chicken stick of a thigh and says, Look at that! It’s fat!

I finally told her I am the boss and you are NOT fat until I TELL YOU you are fat.

(Now help yourself to a cookie.)

This girl is in the 49th percentile for height and 3rd percentile for weight.

Although that may change if she keeps eating her sudden new favorite lunch menu (aside from cookies): MAYO on wheat.

Ew.

Where has the time about to go?

2011-12-28T06:08:00.001-06:00

I wonder sometimes what the girls will think of me, as a person.

These are the things that pop into my head at nearly 6AM and the sky is still black.

Like: will they heed the warning of my life and study harder in college so they won’t end up in the same predicament? (going to college until the age of 31 just for a BA)?

Or: will they think ‘Mom screwed off for a few years and she ended up okay’?

Because some days, I don’t feel okay. Some days, I feel like I got run over by a truck. And tonight, I think I have the joints of an 80-year-old ex-football player.

This morning, I look around at all the Christmas toys, and I’m thankful that I haven’t had school for a few weeks so I had time to enjoy playing with the girls and watching them turn the livingroom into Hello Kitty legoland. And watching Emma carry around that blasted iPod (read: $20 Best Buy special Sansa) so she can dance in every room and shout: GIRLS! Look at my dance moves!!!

Because good GOD that girl needs some dance lessons.

(But at least it’s good entertainment.)

I call her Elaine, Jr.

It seems like – for the last few months – the girls have had to fight my homework for my attention. I’m sure people think I’m a cold-hearted, self-centered bitch who doesn’t care that they miss me, but it hurts me to constantly have to tell them to occupy themselves elsewhere as I study.

It especially hurts when the girls ask: Do you have homework tonight? and I respond with a NO and get a celebration dance involving jumping and prancing.

Because I know that my school starts up again very soon.

In less than two weeks.

And the girls go back in less than one.

Am I ready for this?

And wasn’t I just complaining that Winter Break was sooooo long that it shouldn’t be called a “break”?

What was wrong with me???

PJs all day, dancing to the Wii, coloring life-sized cutouts, watching Cars 2…

If I had any sense at all, I’d spend the next six days showing the girls that I haven’t forgotten how to be fun.

HULK drink wine!

2011-12-21T10:35:00.001-06:00

Is it really 4 days until Christmas?

Can I get a resounding Fuuuuck?

That’s my favorite word lately. Very festive. I almost care.

Like when I realized that someone had broken into my Suburban last night and ransacked through my receipts only to leave my Kohl’s cash on the seat because it was expired. I would have laughed if they’d taken it.

I forgot to tell Mike until he walked back from his truck and said, Weird… my tools were pulled out from under my seat.

Ha, oh yeah, I forgot to mention that someone tried to rob (or is it burgle?) our vehicles. Oops. I guess it was low on my I give a shit list this week. They can have my quarters and bags of dry cereal if they really want them. Turns out they were only looking for electronics.

It doesn’t even feel like Christmas is in less than a week. There’s no snow on the ground and I’ve been way too stressed about getting my degree audits straightened out that I’ve been forgetting important things like picking up wrapping paper when I’m by myself at the store. Luckily, my kids are extremely gullible.

Girls, why don’t you each pick out wrapping paper and we’ll leave it by the tree for Santa’s elves to pick up.

YAY!!!!

My sister was so mad at me about that one.

I’ve also been drinking significantly more wine and fantasizing about “Going Rogue” on the Registrar’s desk knick knacks if she tells me I’m missing yet another 3 credit hours (for my minor this time… because Social Psychology is listed under Social Science instead of Psychology).

HULK ANGRY! GRAAARRRRHHHHH!!!! HULK SMASH!!!!

And then I laugh hysterically to myself.

That poor woman. And she signs off every email with a smiley face because she can sense – from my increasingly agitated responses – that I’m somewhat emotionally unstable.

Even Mike is wary.

Mike, I love you so much. So so sososo much…. sometimes I just wanna smother the love out of your face with a pillow until you stop kicking.

Which might be why he stayed up until 5 in the morning last night and finished off a family-reunion-sized bottle of red wine and is currently snoring in bed.

I can’t bring myself to do anything this morning since I’m still recovering from our shopping extravaganza yesterday. At 8:30, we dragged our beaten carcasses (kids and all) into the Suburban and Mike cheerily proclaimed:

“On to Target, and then we can go home!”

I’m pretty sure people thought I was drunk when I staggered down the toy aisle from exhaustion. I barely had enough energy to glare at Mike when he turned to me and asked, Do we even need anything from here?

No, fucker. That’s why I groaned when you pulled into the parking lot. And your child with the pink eye-slash-strep is crying and wants to go to bed.

But I’m so glad we found a way to spend $100, and I’m not even sure on what.

Fa la la la la… la la la fuck.

I was so tired that I bought a snow globe last night, even though I swore, after Emma's snow globe leg gash sans-insurance incident that I will never ever recover from emotionally, that we would never let another glass death ornament into our home.

My sister told me this morning: The gifts aren’t the most important thing about Christmas.

She’s right.

It’s how much pain and suffering went into ACQUIRING said Christmas gifts.

And if that’s the case, I am to painful gift-giving what Tiger Woods is to extramarital sex.

There’s enough to go around for everybody.

The end is near

2011-12-09T05:38:00.001-06:00

Next week is Finals Week.

Or more accurately for me: Finals Monday.

But I’m not stressing about it. Nope.

Not when I went to the Federal Courthouse to view proceedings for class and by the time I got there they’d decided to “close” them so I had to twiddle my thumbs (aka: chat with security about his woodworking hobby) for four hours until the next one.

Not even when I had to spend a ~~timesuck~~ lovely evening at the girls’ winter recital last night so I could see my kids sing for 45 seconds.

Or when I nearly OD’d on caffeine yesterday and got the shakes so bad I couldn’t type (and had to pick up a nasty coffee just to stay awake once I started to crash).

OR when I had to wake up at 4AM this morning to work on homework.

Nope… smooth sailing.

BUT…

I have to admit my blood pressure DID rise a few notches after going through Christmas Card Picture Taking Hell.

Really, girls???

All of you parents of many small children know EXACTLY to what I’m referring.

I spent about $200 on card-making supplies, so come hell or high water, you WILL be getting your G. D. Christmas cards this year. There were many tears spilled during the picture process, mine and the kids’. We WILL be sharing that special moment with friends and family.

I can hear my husband cackling at the bags of last year’s cards, signed and sealed, still hanging out in one of our craft bins…

My snowman is tipping over in my front yard like he’s been into the Manischewitz, Mike’s closet is so full of presents that I’ve forgotten what I need to get (or STOP getting…), I’m washing underpants on a daily, as-needed basis, AND my mom was so worried I was starving my husband from neglect this week that she sent home a huge pan full of tuna casserole. Ick.

I’d start the countdown to the end of the semester, but I’ve forgotten what day of the week it is today.

It doesn’t help that the little neighbor boy I watched for a few hours kept referring to Thursday as “Humpday.”

(Which is especially funny since I know the neighbors well enough to know it could be either “hump.”)

It’s kind of like MY children exclaiming that the Happy Meal Auntie Stuffie bought them (with a Puss in Boots toy) “smells like Puss.”

Yikes.

Of course it was a few chuckles later that I intervened. No, no, nonono… it’s NOT “puss.” His name is Puss in Boots. You have to say his whole name.

Sweet Jeebus.

But I’m getting sidetracked now, and I obviously don’t have time for edits.

I guess what I’m saying in this rambling mess is that I’m slightly more scatterbrained than normal, but it will end soon.

Only to be resumed in January.

I can’t wait.

My birthday jersey

2011-12-08T01:27:00.001-06:00

The guy who sits next to me four days a week in Research Torture asked me if I could come visit with Miss Iowa this morning and donate a pint of blood while there. His frat was putting on a blood drive.

But then I remembered I was sick.

And that I’d planned on getting just a tiny bit drunk on margaritas with my sister for my birthday later that afternoon.

So I figured giving blood would be the third strike.

At that point, I’d have been better off lying down mid-interstate and save Mike the car insurance paperwork.

Although he DID say there was a free t-shirt in it for me. I spent at least two minutes fantasizing over all the reasons I could tell Mike on how I got ahold of a fraternity shirt.

But then I was informed that it was a Red Cross shirt, and I decided to postpone until I felt better and/or less like drinking at 2 in the afternoon.

And because we’re all friends, I deserved that alcohol. I’m dealing with an angry uterus, and I’m doing my best to thoroughly piss it off while I can.

On a completely unrelated side note, I woke up this morning just before 1 AM. While leaving through the front door. Where am I going? is not a good question to have to ask yourself when standing with the door wide open and the –100* wind chapping your eyeballs.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever met me (hi.) but I don’t make a big deal about my birthday or getting older.

While shopping with Stephie the other day, she realized my birthday was coming up. I’d forgotten momentarily.

Oh yeah, I guess that’d be on… Wednesday?

If it was ME, you would’ve started telling people four weeks ago already. ‘It’s my birthday in a few weeks… don’t forget!’

So it’s not a huge deal that Mike isn’t a big gift person.

It might stem back to the time we were broke and in college and he bought me $400 worth of presents, including a fancy-shmancy leather laptop carrying case…

…and we didn’t own a laptop.

I thanked him and apologetically asked him to return them, knowing that I was about to seal my gift-receiving fate, possibly for eternity.

I was right, but it only last a decade.

Last night, he was so excited about my birthday that he dragged his gym bag up from the basement and had the girls hand me – with my eyes closed – handfuls of stainless kitchen serving and cooking utensils. He looked like a little kid on Christmas. I think I’m more excited about your presents than YOU are.

And that was saying something. I was purty excited. Hell, my first presents for birthday, anniversary, Christmas, for about a billion years! I was beaming. Plus I’d wanted utensils since last Christmas when I surprised my mom with a set that she desperately needed.

Then came the mixing bowls that I’d looked at a few months ago.

He made me wait for the last present today…

At the risk of sounding crude, I just about shat myself when I saw the jersey. (For those of you who are following along from another country or a part of the United States that doesn’t have ~~teeth~~ televised football, that is a throwback Donald Driver jersey. Um, yeah. My last jersey was Sterling Sharpe. Mid-90s.)

I think Mike should wear his Witten jersey and I’ll wear my Driver jersey and we can recreate the NFC Championship game. I can win it, as long as he doesn’t pull a Slow Motion Trainwreck on me. Those are the worst.

So it was altogether a pretty good day.

I’m trying to enjoy it while I can, especially if I’m only this spoiled once a decade.

*Sigh*

Time to go back to homework. I’ve got a mini visitor coming in the morning and a court case to view while the kids are in school.

I can explain the degree fiasco on another day…

Morbid obsession

2011-11-27T16:36:00.001-06:00

The girls are endlessly entertaining. I wish I could have a 24/7 video camera on them while they “discuss life.”

Mom, when you die, we will live with Daddy.

What happens if Daddy dies?

If Mommy dies…

… and Daddy dies?

Who will feed us supper?

Why are there so many ambulances?

Maybe somebody fell down.

Or maybe someone killed somebody else.

But we don’t kill people.

Because we’re girls.

And we’re little.

And we don’t have knives.

But Daddy has handcuffs and he keeps them next to the bed.

Let’s keep some of these conversations to ourselves, shall we?

Craptastissimo

2011-11-24T07:20:00.001-06:00

This day is not beginning the way I’d hoped.

I’m sick (the first time in MONTHS, which is rare for me).

My CO2 detector went off at 5:30 this morning for 2 minutes then went back to normal.

I’ve been hearing noises in the basement – what I thought was the cat – and then realized the cat’s been sleeping three feet away in the chair.

And my phone turned itself all the way off then back on right in front of me as I sat on the couch.

Twilight Zone music…

It’s less probable that I have a ghost and more probable that I’m hallucinating from acute carbon monoxide poisoning.

Swing low, sweet chariot… comin’ for to carry me home.

I’ve been in the same pair of pajamas since Tuesday evening, and I’ve grown accustomed to them. So much so that I dread getting dressed today, even though I’ve got three brand-spankin’-new pairs of jeans to wear.

I went shopping with Stephie on Tuesday under the auspices that we’d buy stuff for the kids.

I knew I was in trouble when I walked away from Von Maur with bags…. TWICE.

I told Stephie: We need to get the hell outta this store and stay out before I spend more money here. I can’t believe I just spent $85 on clearance jeans.

But you spent what? $30 on two other pairs? So that’s $110 for three pairs of jeans. That’s not bad!

That’s what I’ll tell Mike – $110 for three, nevermind that one cost me only $10.

At least one good thing came out of the shopping spree: I no longer have to wear the jeans with the precariously thin crotchal regions.

We made the horrendous mistake of walking into Justice 4 Girls, Alison’s favorite store due to high ratio of glitter to clothing. (It’s possible that I gave birth to my sister’s child.)

The entire store was 40% off, which brought the clothes back into the “normal price range” of children’s apparel.

Halfway through checkout, we discovered that it was 11:00 AM and we were in need of an alcoholic beverage. We only made it one hour.

I hate shopping, as a general rule.

And now Black Friday is almost here (starting in 17 hours) and my sister has sent me off into the wilderness on my own. Who will I drink with after fighting the masses to get the one Mini Cooper at Target???

Maybe I can hallucinate up a shopping buddy.

This is gonna be ugly.

It’s not even Thanksgiving

2011-11-20T08:42:00.001-06:00

With midterms and lit reviews due in mid-October, I didn’t get a chance to decorate for my favorite holiday – Halloween.

As I saw others taking down pumpkins and spiderwebs, I was thankful that at least I didn’t have to UNdecorate. I thought I was one step ahead on the holidays.

That is, until driving down my street last week. I noticed at least a dozen houses with Christmas trees up already.

Damnit.

Can I pretend to be Jewish this year and avoid the tree thing altogether? I’m not a Scrooge… I’m just realistic that this is REALLY something I don’t have time for.

I’d rather spend my time getting the kids into their new bedrooms and preparing for Christmas presents.

This year is the first year I can buy Christmas gifts for my kids and really cater them to each girl. Which might be why I’m so damned excited I could BURST.

The funny part is, the gifts are so simple, and for the most part, cheap.

Alison was the easiest. The girl raids my mailbox for return envelopes, and she uses them to “send letters” to Grandma and Auntie Stephie.

I made her some stationery using a pink poodle and a scroll text of Alison Claire beneath.

She’s going to get a huge stack of envelopes, stamps, and pre-addressed labels with all sorts of addresses on them so she can put together and mail letters to whomever she’d like, without Mommy’s help.

Yay for independence!

A couple of fluffy feather pens, two boxes of pug puppy glitter cards, and some art supplies later, and her “theme” came together nicely.

Stephie even suggested that we buy personalized stamps with her face on them. Except one sheet is 30-some dollars. Ouch. That girl need a ROLL of stamps.

Kristin is our book worm, so we’re probably going to buy her a comfy reading chair for her room since – after this next week – she’ll have a room to herself. Then we’ll add some reading materials and maybe a journal, and some pretty pretty stuff. I’m looking at making a neat bookshelf for one wall of her room… maybe a bunch of rails that can display books in the open. We’ll see. (I still have about 1000 other projects to do first.)

She loves hats, so I was thinking she could use a hat rack for her room, too.

Emma was more difficult.

She doesn’t really have a niche, except for being strange.

I told her “You’re an odd one” the other day, to which she replied:

“No, I’m an EVEN!”

Case in point.

I asked Mike what he thought her hobbies were, and he said tackling a Daddy.

Hmmm…

But then I remembered how ridiculously stoooopid she gets when we have an impromptu dance party (usually when my phone rings).

We’ve decided to give Emma Mike’s MP3 player since his dad gave him a new one this May. We bought her a cartoonish skeleton speaker-guy, and I can see lots of butt wiggling and giggling in that girl’s future.

Music.

Mail.

Books.

Add to that a bunch of clothes and random crap that we’ll probably pick up at the last minute, like always. Then there’s Mike, who can’t walk into a children’s clothing store without picking out a hat or two to feed Kristin’s habit. He picked out a gray jeweled beret and a page boy cap with glittery threads throughout, so we tried to find comfy t-shirts to match.

It spiraled out of control from there. The headband, the necklace, the clips… that’s just ONE OUTFIT EACH.

While all this seems really lame for Christmas, this is the type of stuff my kids get excited about. It’s because I keep them deprived all year.

My kids were smart enough to go to my parents to ask for the fun stuff.

Emma wants a chalk scooter.

Which I had to look up.

Because I’M lame.

But with the money I’ll be saving, I might finally be able to rid myself of the couch I refer to as The Urinator.

Unless Mike runs out and buys a gun first.

The devolution of a skillset

2011-11-13T10:53:00.001-06:00

My kids are almost 7 and can’t tie their own shoes.

I’m sure it’s 9 parts laziness for me as a parent and 1 part my children's lack of fine motor skills (read: ability to follow instructions).

I don’t know how but group training in Potty Training Hell didn’t scar me enough to dissuade me from attempting a group session of Loop-Swoop-Pull.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

It ended with me saying I don’t care if you ever learn to tie your shoes now go outside and play, you bloody heathens!

Alison returned – injured from a sideways swing collision – and I had regained my composure enough to try again, this time with only one child.

It turns out the YEARS of me chanting “Loop, Swoop, into the Tunnel and PULL” has rubbed off.

Either that, or my suspicions are true that someone at school has tired of tying her shoes for her at recess and took matters into their own hands.

I would like to point out that they taught us how to tie our shoes when I was in Kindergarten back in 1985, something they no longer do with the advent of velcro AND the introduction of Calculus to Kindergarten curriculum.

You know how many velcro strips are in that classroom? I HATE and I LOVE velcro. I love that I don’t have to tie their shoes a thousand times an afternoon, but I hate that those stupid, floppy, dirty strings aren’t there to keep me accountable.

It’s possible that we’ll eventually forget how to tie shoes as a species someday.

Now if someone could teach my kids to ride a bike without training wheels, I’d be eternally grateful. You know, before they invent an affordable hovercraft bicycle that doesn’t require pedaling.

I’m still working with them on what an appropriate amount of toilet paper looks like.

And flushing.

Always the flushing.

They already make self-flushing toilets, so we’re way behind schedule.

Titillating Tuesday: The Comeback

2011-11-08T19:53:00.001-06:00

My mind it working in tidbits lately. It’s Pepsi Crack induced ADHD (yes, back on the Crack from time to time, don’t judge… I need something to keep my heart rate up at 3 in the morning.)

---

Auntie Stephie asked to know what the girls wanted for Christmas. Since we’re in the process of getting rid of 99% of the girls’ toys, I begged the girls to think of presents that AREN’T toys. Maybe something for their rooms. We’re switching them over during Thanksgiving break.

Kristin offered up, “A basket? Like for clothes.”

Me: “A laundry hamper???”

Kristin, excited that I knew what she meant: “YEAH! A laundry hamper for my dirty clothes!”

Stephie’s text said it all.

“O M G”

---

When walking across campus, I try to stump myself with questions as if I was interviewing myself. Yeah, fuck off. I’m weird.

I’m teaching myself to think quickly and respond with thoughtful details.

Today’s random question: What’s the oddest thing you’ve ever done?

And the answer that made me laugh:

Saved a hedgehog using CPR.

Yep. These lips are golden.

I wonder if that would get me a job…

---

Also in my free time, I’m learning sign language. My vocabulary is limited.

So far I can say:

Black cat.

I would like to marry your daughter. May I please have your permission.

Happy Halloween/Holidays/Hanukkah.

Do you like to eat oranges?

The semi driver next to me waved today because he thought I was flirting with him.

Or he really likes oranges.

---

I’ve decided that the girls are going to be my labor force.

In addition to doing spelling tests and reading chapter books together every night, the girls are now assisting me with chores.

Kristin helped me with laundry.

Emma helped me cook.

Alison made herself a sandwich.

That last one might not seem like much of a chore, but that child is insatiably hungry. Teaching her to feed herself will cut out 2 hours of work each day.

Unfortunately, it probably spells doom for our food supply.

---

Happy Tuesday!

Paranoia can be FUN!

2011-10-30T00:25:00.001-05:00

I’ve been paranoid pretty much my whole life.

I watch people. I watch vehicles. It’s a little game I play with the world called: What if someone was out to get me.

(I’m not serious about the out to get me thing. It’s more a game to pass the time. I just store the information in the back of my head for “just in cases.”)

I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but I saw an anonymous man in Sears a couple months ago who later appeared in a missing persons report on the news. I called the cops and described what he was wearing, how he was walking, what he was holding…

I could overanalyze it and say that it’s from reading too many detective novels as a kid, or from Mike working security at Target and busting felons, or from watching the movie Conspiracy Theory too many times… but I think it’s just a control thing.

I like to know what’s happening.

So if you drive through my neighborhood in a tan cargo van after dusk doing 10 mph, then turn down my street and continue to the end only to turn back toward the subdivision exit, I’m probably going to remember your license plate.

C#Y#1.

I don’t know you. I put you on file. It’s nothing, until it’s not.

After all, Halloween is coming up and there are gonna be a lot of little kids roaming around.

If my brain was a computer, I’d have a file filled with oddities and random useless knowledge. Probably stored next to my quotes from Anchorman and all that stuff I learned about diamonds back in the day.

I also remember where Mike’s keys are. 24/7.

And the answer is: yes, on the banister under his hat.

I don’t need hobbies.

Six years

2011-10-26T20:34:00.001-05:00

I had a moment of weakness today.

I’d attempted to set my blog to private. It was the compromise I’d made with myself since I was struggling to hit DELETE BLOG.

And then somewhere around the time I deleted my Twitter account – something I used only sporadically and usually to learn of the latest earthquake – I chickened out. I couldn’t even make it PRIVATE.

Yikes.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been at this so long. I thought it would be easy with the week-(or more)-long hiatus that I’d taken from writing here.

But when I get down to it, I’ve been writing Sweetened Taters since November of 2005. Six years! It took me a while to figure out my “blog voice,” but I feel pretty confident about who I am on here now.

It seems like such a waste to throw that all away.

Maybe I’ll get brave at some point to make this blog private or to delete some posts, but not today.

I’ve got enough going on in my life that I don’t need to take away my therapy. At least for now.

I’m not ready to break up.

The end of nipple blogging?

2011-10-12T14:08:00.001-05:00

My favorite moment of the week came this morning thanks to my six-year-old.

I was dragging the recycling containers out of the garage when Emma laughed: “Mom, it’s not RECYCLE day!”

Like, duh.

I looked down the street, and, sure enough, no garbage cans.

“It’s not Tuesday, is it? Sonofa….”

While I realize this means almost nothing to the people of the Interwebs, it was the moment it dawned on me just how much time and energy and sheer brain power this college degree is draining from me.

Who needs a degree anyway?

You may have wondered why I fell off the face of this blog. I had a Lit Review to write and it turns out I happened to pick a topic that was interesting. That translates to: complicated.

Of course, I didn’t realize this until we were way too far into the process to start over.

While others had their neat little stack of 40 pages of sources, mine came to a grand total of 450 pages and 2 ink cartridges worth of print.

While others talked about homecoming weekend and going on roadtrips, I fantasized about going to bed before 1AM and not spending yet another night falling asleep in a pile of paperwork.

While others handed in five-page reports, I struggled to keep mine under FOURTEEN. Yes, 14. One four. Fourfuckingteen.

Which I wrote yesterday after reading the last of my 20 sources.

I’m sure it’s a literary masterpiece.

But it’s over… at least the majority of it. Unless they tell me to start again which means that I’ll be writing you next from prison.

Another reason the blogs are a little slow is that I’ve been contemplating what kind of career I’d be interested in. I’ve had a lot of car time to think about it, and I want to do something challenging but meaningful. I want to want to work every day, and not just for a paycheck. I thought of that saying: the one about going where there is no path and leaving one of your own? Yeah, that one.

Well, last week, my professor brought up Intelligence. With a capital i. We chatted and he gave me a pamphlet that he’d just happened to get in the mail (because of his previous work with the FBI and Intelligence gathering).

I flipped through, thinking that I was certainly too old (30, gah!) for the FBI, even though it had always interested me.

It was at that moment that I saw it, in the bottom corner of one of the pages. The only quote in the entire booklet:

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

So I laughed and called my hippie sister and told her it must be a sign.

But the funny part is: I’m contemplating it. I’m weighing the challenges and the benefits. I’ve got a meeting with my professor in two weeks to go over my options.

Odds are I’ll still take the GRE or some form of it, perhaps the LSAT. I’ll probably apply for an internship with the FBI in the Summer. Who knows, I may change my mind.

In the meantime, though, I’m contemplating cleaning up my internet history as much as possible.

I don’t want my future boss to be reading about my affinity for nipples or the body hair that plagues me to the extent that I could body double for Freda Kahlo.

Or do I?

to be continued…

The Pumpkin Extravaganza

2011-10-07T07:21:00.002-05:00

I love my sister.

She called me up about two weeks ago and said, Remember that the Pumpkinfest Parade is coming up next weekend? Yeah, can you HELP ME with the float???

And then I laughed maniacally and crawled from beneath my mountain of books and paperwork.

I didn’t want to give too much away on Facebook before the big day since I ended up seeing some of you there (oh, excuse me: chucking candy at your kids’ heads) and wanted the theme to be a surprise.

The parade was Rocking Around the Pumpkin Patch or something like that, and Stephie picked a Gnomeo and Juliet theme since she runs a hoop house.

Did you know that NO ONE sells gnome costumes over size 18mo?

So in my infinite wisdom, I offered to sew them. And told her I’d do it the Thursday before the parade.

Which meant that she’d call me or text me five times a day all the way through Thursday morning, asking if I’d started them yet.

Um, yeah… suuuuure I did.

They turned out cute, I think. Considering.

Here we are, waiting to be judged and getting ready for the parade to start in the staging area.

Alison was really excited to play her drums for everyone. She was especially crushed when I told her the drum solo would have to be much much quieter, or we wouldn’t be able to hear Crocodile Rock and Saturday the 1000 times in a row thanks to Stephie’s iPod’s inability to SHUFFLE.

It all worked out. Steph and I ran/jogged/speedwalked next to the float and emptied bags upon BAGS of sugar-laden treats on the children. You are WELCOME!

I told Stephie I had a bit of a laugh (internally, of course) when a piece of candy pegged a kid who was too impatient to wait for me to throw it. The small pleasures…

We headed back to Jeff’s house where we received the phone call from my parents. They’d been in the crowd on my side – right in front – but I’d apparently been too preoccupied with throwing stuff at kids’ heads and missed them. They told us that Stephie’s float won FIRST PLACE.

Which called for a celebration.

We immediately forgot that Stephie’d spent half her morning in tears, scrambling to finish her papier mache pumpkins while I screwed together the flowers and turned an empty trailer into organized chaos… all in less than 2 hours.

Instead of dwelling on THAT, we decided to get krunk.

We stole Jeff’s neighbor, Jason (red hat), and drove to Stone City for drinks and fried pickles.

And since I’m a beacon of responsibility, I just remembered that Stephie’s half-empty bottle is riding around in my Suburban…

Then it was back to reality.

I was tired and sunburned, and I had loads of papers to write for school.

Thankfully, Mike has been taking over the important parenting duties. Like watching Star Wars together.

It’s Beer-Thirty somewhere

2011-09-28T15:13:00.001-05:00

Does anyone want to share in a couple bottles of moscato tonight? I’m not kidding.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m in the car a lot. It gives me lots of time to think, which might seem like a relaxing task, except that most of my time is spent worrying. Here’s the list I’ve come up with TODAY. I’m worried:

that I’ll forget to pick the kids up on time and the people at school will think I’m just the most wonderful mother EVER
that I have to cook supper and I just don’t wanna
that I’ll overlook a deadline for school like I just did this week when I missed not one but TWO assignments for the same course
that my house is messy because, well… it is
that the people at City Hall are bitching about everything I do voluntarily FOR THEM behind my back and I want to know so I can slap them in the tits
that Mike will yell at me because the bathroom trashcan has become a blossoming mound of Kleenex and I’m too busy to give a shit
that the kids aren’t getting enough attention for their spelling and math homework (although it seems as though they’re doing well enough on their own… acing almost all of the pre-tests)
that I have so much to do that I need my own freakin’ assistant

And I already told everyone, but I’d gotten a flat tire on the interstate a week or two ago and now I’m paranoid that another tire is gonna go kaput.

It’s more likely that my head is gonna blow straight off my neck. If I don’t get some liquid happy in my veins soon, this could get ugly.

I normally wouldn’t turn to alcohol, but I can’t get ahold of any drugs.

Vitamin Dill: Cure-all

2011-09-27T09:23:00.001-05:00

I’ve survived thus far, although I’ve got an exam tomorrow, several hundred pages to read today and an assignment due in about 30 minutes…

which is (clearly) why I’m blogging instead.

It only took five weeks, but my mother’s premonition came true: I’m sick.

And not just my normal sick-in-the-head.

Sick sick.

Sick enough that I plowed through half a box of Kleenex last night and took the day off of school. I figured it wasn’t that big of a loss since I have 30 minutes of class on Tuesdays with 2 hours of commute.

2-1/2 if you count the half hour I spend trying to run people over with my Suburban to get a parking space.

So instead of spending half of my day in the car, I’m spending the day finishing up my homework and medicating. I haven’t decided if a ~~bottle~~ glass of Moscato would disinfect the blood or counteract the decongestant.

Mike brought me home dill pickle chips because (I quote) “You seem to feel better when you eat salt.”

What the hell is wrong with him? (They’re delicious.)

I’d better knock back a bag or two if I’m going to get through the day I have planned. Because I like to keep in true Loren fashion, I’ve somehow overscheduled myself.

(SHOCKING.)

My sister’s business (Bloom Hoop House in Anamosa – go buy some mums, etcetera, etcetera and support the woman lest she have to get a real job again) is going to be in the Anamosa Pumpkin Parade this upcoming weekend.

She’s demanded that our 4 children throw the candy out, dressed as the cutest fucking (CENSORED)s you’ll ever see. Except we couldn’t find any costumes or hats. So guess who’s sewing this week…

Why would she or I think I could whip together four costumes in less than three days? Except for the fact that I’ve done three costumes in a single night for how many Halloweens in a row now?

And since I’m sick-in-the-head, I’m looking forward to it.

I do a lot of thinking while driving, and since I’ve had quite a bit of driving time over the last five weeks, I’ve been able to narrow down a few things I need to do today.

First, I built the base for my workbench last week and finally have the lumber for the top and back, and I REALLY need to get it done and in the garage. Then, because 6-year-olds are either incredibly clueless or entirely diabolical, the girls have been inviting their “best friends” to the Pumpkin Party that I wasn’t even sure we were DOING again this year. So I guess I’m planning THAT.

Then there’s the roast I’m making for supper since I haven’t made a real meal in over a week.

So let’s recap:

Sick. School. Kids. Parade. Garage. Party. Roast.

You can imagine the condition of my HOUSE. It looks like I let the kids go on a week-long parentless rampage. We’re beyond hiring a maid at this point. We’re halfway to Hoarders.

Okay, maybe not THAT bad, but there are only two rooms in our house that are passable as “clean.” And none of them are visible from the front door.

9:20 AM. Time to snuggle up with a box of Kleenex and my chips and get crackin’.

This is why people start smoking meth

2011-09-24T10:11:00.004-05:00

The girls had math homework this weekend.

In a moment of what I thought was lunacy, I brought down Yahtzee and taught the girls how to play, hoping it would help them with counting by unusual numbers like 3s and 4s.

They kicked me out.

And then I rejoiced.

Haaaaa-llelujah!!!

Who knew there would ever come an age when my children could play a board game with no one there to referee and coax each painful trip down a chute or shake of the di?

I’m going to throw this out there right now: I will be dead and gone before Monopoly leaves that toy closet.

Instead of screaming and talk of who's a "cheat," they're having fun and laughing like maniacs every time a di flies off toward the cat. I can't help but laugh a little myself because Moochie's expression looks a little like this with every propelled cube:

So now it seems I should do some homework. I have a pile of ear plugs that Mike rounded up for me and only 475 pages and 20 articles to read by Tuesday.

Can you hear my insane laughter?

We’re gonna be eating a whole lotta microwave dinners this week because until those exams are taken and annotations are written, the only “cooking” I’ll be doing is mixing up some of the Devil’s sugar aka Crystal Lite Energy drinks.

Maybe I can cut out the middle man and snort the powder, straight up, no chaser.

Then again, I’d probably end up with papers written in Sanskrit and not retain a damned word of what I’ve read.

As an added bonus - and what can only be a punishment for saying to Mike I can't believe I haven't been sick all year! - I’m getting sick from a lack of sleep and high stress levels. It should be a very interesting weekend, indeed.

The way things are around here

2011-09-22T10:34:00.001-05:00

Normally, Mike has off for 7 days in a row, once a month. Since we’ve begun this great new idea (designed by Mike, of course) that he gets $50 to blow for every overtime day he works, he’s been frantically signing up for OT. He said he’s “saving up.” For instance, this week, he only had off 3 days instead of 7.

How much you want to bet all that money he plans to “save” will magically disappear.

I only agreed to do this because I can finally prove to him how much he sucks at budgeting. It might be bad for our bank account, but it will be good for our marriage. I can only see one ending to being incessantly asked for money to waste on useless shit and it involves a fork to Mike’s forehead.

I promise to grab a picture of if it ever comes down to that.

I have a fun new answer for everything he wants (or as he would say: needs)…

You can buy it when you save up your own money for it.

~~Jeez O Fuck~~.

His coworkers are amazed that I agreed to it.

Don’t tell Mike, but I have a secret agenda. I’m trying to teach him how to manage money for when I run away to fucking MEXICO.

Ahem.

So, of the three days he had off, he relaxed for two and spent the third one digging out the window well that is so completely ridiculously attached wrong that it was allowing mud and water to fill up the window like a murky backwater aquarium.

Then I opted out of homework and helped him backfill the clay and mud, which reaffirmed my belief that couples should never do home improvement projects together.

Forget the fork, I had a spade shovel.

Anyway, on to happier news!

The girls had picture day yesterday. The night before, I picked out three outfits that were completely unique to each girl. All the while I dug through their clothes, Mike calmly worked on the girls to clean their bed and toys up.

When they didn’t listen, he sent them to bed early. It didn’t go well.

Emma was so mad at him that she cut a chunk of her bangs out. Boy, was I the happy mommy when I found it at breakfast that next morning.

Thankfully, I’m a miracle worker. Or wait, maybe the hairspray was the miracle worker...

I’m praying that the picture people had the wherewithal to leave her bangs alone. I told Mike it’s either going to be unnoticeable, OR I’m gonna be adding some bangs via Paint.

They use those pictures for everything throughout the year: art projects, class pictures, labeling. Those bangs are gonna haunt you, Missy.

Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

The girls: An update

2011-09-18T09:37:00.001-05:00

I’m so proud of my girls. They aren’t perfect, by any means, but they’re so sweet to each other.

Kristin came into the room yesterday, frantic because she couldn’t find Alison anywhere. It was then that she turned and saw Alison sitting in the chair five feet away. Kristin blushed and hid behind me.

I told Alison, See? Your sisters love you very much and worry about you. You need to make sure you’re showing them how much you love them, too.

The girls have pretty much found their roles:

Alison is the Yes Man in that she thinks everything sounds like a good idea. Like when the neighbor kid (whom I’d never met formally but knew of through word-of-mouth) came down to my house and tossed tomatoes onto my driveway and fence after getting yelled at twice. Something that neither my kids nor the other neighbor boy had done all summer long. Alison was right next to him to toss the third tomato against that fence just as I came around the corner. The smile on her face said, Why have we never thought of this before???

That girl has worn out her use of the word SNACK, too. I’ve told the neighbors to ignore her if she asks for food because, odds are, she’ll claim to be wasting away from lack of sustenance at some point. When your neighbors ask: Do you ever feed your child? you know you have a beggar in the making. I’m guessing it’s because all of my snacks suck compared to regular people snacks. Yogurt raisins, dry cereal or fruit. Take your pick.

Alison is also a sweetheart. She loves to snuggle and if she doesn’t get her hug and kiss before bed, she makes sure to hunt me down, no matter how long into bedtime she remembers. I’ve been woken up at 1AM for a hug and kiss. She doesn’t think before she acts, but her emotionally impulsive nature also brings us spontaneous moments like this:

I love that picture. It totally captures the way those girls act when no one else is around.

That’s Kristin on the left with the short hair, Alison in the back with long hair and growing her bangs out, and Emma on the right. Surprisingly, more people are able to tell the kids apart now. I’m thinking the different hair cuts might be the way we roll from here on out.

Anyway… little tiny Kristin is the Tattler. There really is no other way to put it. That girl loves her rules. She gets SO MAD when people don’t behave themselves and can’t resist the urge to tell me who and how and what and where and how it makes her feel (irritated). Unfortunately for her, sometimes her tattling is worse than the original offense.

Kristin is also the child who – with virtually no help from me – has aced every spelling test on the first day of the week so she has taken (and aced) the challenge spelling tests on Fridays. If any of the girls know the answer, Kristin’s always one of them. Mike says that clearly, with her anal-retentiveness and smarts, she got all of my DNA.

And Emma. Emmy. EmmyLou. She’s flat out Weird. I see a side of her that only Mike and perhaps my sister and parents ever see. She makes fart noises in the crook of her arm and adds “poop” to the end of every poem then laughs hysterically. She gets going on a roll and I have to send her to the hallway just so she can take it down a notch on the volume.

Here they are, cheering for Green Bay and screeching TOUCHDOWN until I had to kick them out for bedtime.

Emma is invariably a Daddy’s Girl. They all are, but Emma will check to see if I’m still awake and will sneak off to snuggle with a snoring Mike. Just this past week, I asked her not to sleep in my bed for a few days. The next day, I walked into our bedroom to see Mike, sleeping alone. As I trekked to the end of the bed, I noticed a lump on the floor. A baby lump. Emma had curled up with a decorative pillow and a baby blanket and made camp at the end of the bed.

Technically: NOT in my bed.

I told her to climb in and I went back to the couch.

I’m really having fun with them at this age. We’re allowing them more flexibility and responsibility. They love to help me cook and fold laundry. Emma LOVES vacuuming. All three girls will do anything for a shiny penny (they haven’t figured out that they’re totally getting screwed if we’re talking rate-of-pay).

My favorite question is: If you make your bed, I’ll give you a nickel OR two shiny pennies! They always pick the pennies.

I wonder how long that’ll last…

Let me school you young’uns

2011-09-17T10:33:00.002-05:00

I can’t believe it’s a weekend. Time flies when you spend every waking minute feeding a small child or chugging caffeine to stay awake while reading about validity and correlations. Yawn.

Well, not EVERY waking minute. My neighbor/accomplice reminded me that I’ve been using up my Sunday study time by hanging out with everyone at Sunday Funday. Which has become a nice little treat at the end of a loooong week.

Which reminds me… it’s probably my turn to host. Mike has decided: quesadillas and Mexican food. He’s obsessed with them lately.

I’m always the life of the party – usually I end up reading my textbooks while drinking alcoholic beverages. So never second-guess my ability to rock a lawn chair.

It’s been a hell of a month. Only 13 more weeks to go?

Mike’s not happy with the situation, although he’s coming to terms with it. And he’s been quite a good sport about the growing pile of clean laundry in the livingroom (although he does ask me irritatedly: What’s that aweful smell? quite a bit. I want to answer him: Oh, I’m sorry… I took a shit down the heater vent and forgot to clean it out*)

But mostly he’s just lonely. He wakes up every morning with a child snoring next to him. Or three. Because I’ve been falling asleep on the couch with my nose in my books at midnight and waking up at 4AM to finish typing assignments. Last night was the first time in five days that I slept in my own bed.

I have no idea how these college kids get anything accomplished with all the beer-drinking and the party-having. Either that or I’m doing something terribly wrong here…

As terrible as that all sounds, I’m enjoying myself. It’s been SO LONG since I’ve done anything on my own, and I’m not used to having moments of silence to THINK. What an odd concept. I commute about two hours a day and spend my drive singing or daydreaming when I’m not being run off the road by semis or getting a flat tire while doing 80 on the interstate.

But that was yesterday’s little adventure.

And the time spent hustling across campus between classes is also time spent eavesdropping.

My favorite are these two guys:

I see them every damned day, and I swear to you, the guy on the left has been waxing poetic about 1 plus 1 equals 2 for about two weeks now. By his “friend”s body language, I can only assume he’s wondering how quickly a cyanide pill can end his own suffering.

Please, sweet Jesus, let a tree branch fall on me right now if you love me. At least knock me unconscious so I don’t have to hear this one-man debate again.

At least that’s what I’m guessing he’s thinking. And I’ve had lots of time to think about it.

I also have time to ponder important things like: why do the Israeli guys hover around outside their dorms like they’re selling watches out of their coats? and When did this Dean decide he was opting out of the traditional picture to get his taken at Glamour Shots?

Important things, I tell you.

One day, I’m gonna solve all the mysteries of the universe.

Plus I’ve met a lot of interesting people, sometimes in the strangest of places. I just found out this week that one of my professors had top security clearance in a secret office where they chased down foreign terrorists. And everyone in class suddenly stopped yawning and fidgeting and rolling their eyes.

I also discovered that, yes, ten years IS a huge age gap.

My classmates had never heard of the Digital Underground.

Or PCU.

Or Mark Paul Gosselaar. Gasp, I know!

It’s like some kind of cultural tragedy.

That I have taken on as my personal cause to remedy. Listen up, mother crackers.

First I limp to the side like my legs was broken, shakin’ and twitchin’ kinda like I been smokin…

After watching about ten seconds of that video, the nice, sweet Mormon girl sitting at my table in Research Methods asked: Why the hat? Is he Russian?

I said, No, he's kinda like the Hip Hop George Clinton.

Who's George Clinton?

I have my work cut out for me.

It’s wonderful! It’s marvelous!

2011-09-15T11:17:00.001-05:00

Ah, what gorgeous weather!

Sure it’s a little ~~nipple pinching~~ chilly in the morning, but I wait all year, every year for the time when I can lounge around in a sweatshirt and be “seasonably dressed.” Instead of every other day when people think I have some kind of infectious skin disorder because I’m always in jeans and long sleeves.

(And if there’s any time to wear a sweatshirt, it’s when you’re surrounded by 18-year-old college students 5 days a week. I want to yell: Where was your mother when you woke up and put those pants on this morning?)

I swear I’m not as crotchety as I seem.

Fall is my favorite season. Nothing can bring me down, not even when Mike tries really, really, really hard.

Like when I came home from school and tried to do my homework online, only to find out that my wi-fi wasn’t working properly. I didn’t even go into the computer room because I KNEW. I called Mike at work.

His immediate hysterical laughter was followed by instructions on how to fix what he’d intentionally re-wired.

He does these things just to see what I’d do. (And he does this crap at work, too. He’d set one of the bosses’ monitors so it was displaying everything upside-down. Mike said he could hear my dad laughing in the background as the guy rang Mike up and called him a jackass, rightfully so!)

Mike thinks he’s some kind of comedian prankster.

He believes it’s his DUTY to take the joke to the next level.

For example: I almost never make toast for myself. A few days ago, I decided I’d treat myself to rhubarb-apple jam.

Yes, it’s just as delicious as it sounds. Damned Amish people and their delicious everything.

I noticed that Mike had twisted the twist tie on the bread bag so the twists went all the way to the end. I knew that was a message for me. I’d just asked him a week earlier to throw away the ties and twist and flip the bag shut instead, but he decided THIS was a better route.

I sighed and started untwisting. Then I noticed that – about halfway through – I was actually REtwisting. What the….???

He’d gone through the trouble of changing direction of the twist, just to piss me off.

Mother. fucker.

So I threw the twist tie away, took my two bread slices, and TIEDtheMOTHERFUCKINGBAG SHUT. In a KNOT.

(Of course, I did this before I thought through that I might want more toast.)

Later that night, I heard him laughing in the kitchen and knew he’d found the bag. He tore it open to get the bread out and started into the next loaf.

The following day, I went to make the girls some toast for breakfast.

The twist tie was twisted – once again – all the way to the end.

And Mike made sure to change directions…

TWICE.

But I just laughed. Because it’s Fall and NOTHING (You hear that, Mike?) NOTHING can bring me down.

Instead, I just take pictures of drifters/construction workers with raggedy-ass hair and tell Mike I thought I saw him on my way to school.

The one where I almost commit manslaughter

2011-09-08T10:12:00.002-05:00

I was 16 – just a baby! – when I first attended college. Turns out if your high school runs out of classes for you to take, they pay for your college. Remember THAT, Em? Although I think we avoided class more than we actually went.

God, I was such an asshole back then. Heh. Shut your mouths.

Parking was incredibly difficult to come by (do I sense a recurring theme in my life?) but the Blue Permit parking spaces were always open. So I’d do what every other student did and parked in the Blue Permit areas which I can only assume were for teachers.

Knowing I’d get a ticket.

Except I’d swipe a parking ticket off the car next to me and put it on my windshield, then give it back to that car when I left. Put that little gem of info in your lockbox for a rainy day.

Other fun tidbits: the bars in Iowa City would let underage kids in if they had a college ID. Hey-oh… I bet you can’t guess where WE spent our weekends.

Note to self: my children are NEVER going to college!

Anyway, I was an asshole. Back on topic…

Which might be why I want to run over these snotty little assholes every day who walk in front of my car in the middle of the street in packs like they’re somehow protected from parapalegia by herd mentality. I can run your cracker-ass legs over en masse if necessary.

We teach our kids to NEVER. EVER. EVA. cross the street without looking both ways for cars lest they be smashed flat like the little squirrel pancakes I point out to them every day.

So why does that rule no longer apply on campus?

Now, you can call me PMSy, but yesterday, I let four hoards of people cross at a 4-way stop. And it’s not a steady flow. There are definite breaks where it would make sense to maybe, just maybe let one of the 15 cars waiting go. But I was patient. As were the other 14 cars and a bus, waiting. And waiting…

I picked an opening and started across the intersection. Just as I crept toward the crosswalk, a solitary girl looked up and jerked to a stop with a foot in the road and stepped back.

I stopped.

I waved her across with a smile. What’s one more, right?

As her feet hit the road a second time (and I was IN the intersection), another hoard of kids looks up at me and starts walking in front of the car. I let them pass.

I saw another gap, so I figured I would drive through.

The next clump of people started to walk across without even LOOKING at my car.

I can’t begin to fathom it. The nose of my Suburban – my big fucking white monster of a truck – was parked practically ON their toes. And they didn’t even look up.

Parked IN the intersection.

Needing to get out of the fucking intersection.

And they didn’t even look up.

So I pulled forward.

They chose life and stopped next to the door of my truck, where they scowled at me.

So I did the obviously Christian thing to do, and mouthed FUCK YOU at them.

I’m making friends!

As a bonus, a little old man in a fedora and houndstooth suit handed me a copy of the New Testament on the way across the street to class.

I smiled, told him no thank you and have a nice morning!

Does that mean I’m back to square one with Jesus? Or do I need 20 lashings with a wet noodle? Mike? I need a ruling.

Day of Reckoning

2011-09-03T16:10:00.001-05:00

This morning started out vvvveeerrryyy sloooowly, but I made up for it.

We’re in the middle of a Toy Fire Sale in the kids’ room…

Everything. Must. Go.

The kids aren’t sure what the hell is happening to be exact, not that it matters. I’ve explained to them: If you can’t keep your room cleaned, I’m going to get rid of the toys that make it messy.

Anyone need a huge tote full of Play-Do accessories? How about a Ziploc full of Polly Pockets? Or even a giant kid’s kitchen?

MUST.

GO.

And since I’m so anxious over school during the week (eh, who am I kidding? I’m so stressed that I feel like my heart’s going to explode out my neck…) today’s my only day to purge.

Note to my parents: the kids are NOT allowed to get toys for Christmas for at least TWO YEARS.

Time to go back to supervise the mass toy exodus. I can hear Emma in there deciding which toys are “important” enough to stash in her sock bin.

…

2011-08-31T17:32:00.001-05:00

I don’t remember taking hallucinogenics this morning, but somewhere in my teeny tiny brain, a genius plot started.

I’m applying for a “job” at the Northern Iowan – the newspaper on campus at UNI.

And wouldn’t you know it, I’m applying to become an Opinion Columnist.

Instead of giving them all sorts of reasons why I should get the job, I’m submitting what WAS going to be a hilarious and brilliant post about my parking lot stalking that I’ve been committing. Allegedly.

You’ll have to wait to hear the verdict, as will I, I guess, but until then, I hope to be back a little more often with updates on school, the peter patters and 4-square hippies now that Hazing Week is over.

(Hazing Week is what I call the first week of classes… the professors make you read those hideous first chapters. Here’s what we’re going to teach you this semester. Oh, we won’t teach you any of that NOW, we’re just warning you that that’s what we’re going to teach you. All while wading through the bullshit in the syllabus and class schedule just to figure out what’s due and when. But seriously. I started fantasizing about margaritas on the 3rd day of classes. I may be on the verge of a breakdown.)

*Sigh.*

Time to go round up the kids and get the husband awake after his nap (insert curse words here) so we can go to a SUPER FUN BASEBALL GAME.

At least they serve beer.

I was living some kind of metaphor for life

2011-08-29T21:56:00.001-05:00

A foot was all it took. The tire just missed whatever it was, and at the very last moment, I realized it was a Monarch butterfly.

I hate seeing dead butterflies, but it seems to be the price that is paid to have an interstate moving at 70mph. Even though he was already dead, I would’ve felt worse running him over.

Like adding insult to fatal injury.

I checked my rear view mirror and saw the orange wings tumble, tumble, tumble toward the grassy median.

Suddenly, the wings opened up… it fluttered up through the air and flew back to the fields.

It was alive!

For the next few minutes, I marveled at what had just happened.

Because of a small gesture to respect life, even if it only meant moving 12 inches into the next lane, the world has one more butterfly floating through it.

Amazing. I was positively giddy over it.

Two seconds later, another huge Monarch rammed head-first into the grill of my Suburban.

Splat.

Here comes the vomit!

2011-08-25T01:28:00.001-05:00

I made Mike feel my forehead today before leaving for work. I’m truly not a hoarker, but I think this week was just too much for me.

I’ve been nearly vomitose every day since Monday.

Blech.

In fact, it makes me realize just how desperate I was for any kind of outside interaction when the kids were toddlers… I can’t believe I went back to school when they were 18 months old and did this, NO SWEAT.

Now, I’m sweating. Like the sick sweats.

It might have something to with the stress… OR the sudden increase in caffeine coursing through my veins.

I’m pretty sure I was high today.

Wow, I wish I was kidding.

The first indicator was when I couldn’t stop giggling in class. My professor has an interesting look and looks at the ceiling tiles instead of the class as she lectures.

It took me a while, but this afternoon it dawned on me what she is: she’s the frankencombo of Danny DeVito’s body, Gilda Radner’s hair, Madeline Kahn’s Mrs White voice with Stevie Wonder’s aversion to eye contact.

And no matter how many people I relayed this epiphany to, no one found it as amusing as I did.

That, plus my inability to stop shaking or talking or aimlessly moving from room-to-room made me reevaluate my caffeine-only school diet.

The only bright spot today was that Emma came home in a much better mood from her second day of school than her first.

Everyone had been so excited to go to school during the Meet N Greet. They chattered about who had what animals on their class walls, and what they wanted to tell or show their friends on the first day.

The first day came and went, and on the trip home, only two girls bubbled over with recaps of the momentous occasion.

Emma sat quietly, even when I questioned her.

She wouldn’t look at me in the rear view mirror.

When we got home, Mike rocked her in the rocking chair for a few minutes, then tickled her into a laughing fit.

It was at that point I interrogated her.

She sits next to a little boy who has a profound lack of respect for authority – I knew this going into the year and saw he’s at her table – and he spent the day trying to rip apart her frog backpack and harassing her in between not listening to the teacher. This report is from a 6-year-old, mind you, so this testimony is not intended to be used in a court of law.

But I knew there was something else. I urged her to tell me. She could hardly talk about it.

She’d gotten punched in the cheek on the playground by a girl who was her BFF last year, and she had a small dark bruise forming under her cheekbone.

At first I was pissed off for her.

That same girl had been BFFs previously with a little girl who acted, well, like a little bitch. I’m sorry, it has to be said. She was a “mean girl.” She tormented Emma last year out of jealousy of the blossoming friendship between the other girls. Unfortunately, Emma hasn’t seen her all Summer, and Ball Buster got to spend every day with her at daycare. I wondered how things would pan out once they were all together again, and I feared the worst. It seemed like the worst had happened.

But I stayed calm and found out that they had actually been playing together at the time of the hit. It sounded like an accident, but Emma was upset because it had hurt and didn’t know how to deal with what happened.

Phew.

Today was much different. She came home from school chattering up a storm.

Isn’t school fun?

How did any of us come out of it alive?

If anyone messes with that child anymore this week, I’m going to march into that school and vomit on them, just for fun.

I may as well use this stress to my advantage.

I drank the Jesus juice

2011-08-23T23:44:00.001-05:00

I promised myself that if I finished my homework, cleaned up the dining room and kitchen, then switched out the laundry, I could blog tonight.

After changing the cat litter.

And packing the girls’ backpacks.

Hey, this crap doesn’t finish itself.

So I think we can all pretty much agree that I am way too far in over my fucking noggin’, but that’s pretty much my lifelong mission AND I believe those words were voted by my husband as: Words Most Likely to be Engraved on Loren’s Tombstone.

My first day went well on Tuesday.

Class. Call Mike for a classroom number (and building… that’s important). Buy $5 agenda just to have a map of campus before getting lost again. More Class. Another Class in another building across Campus.

Then came The Lines.

Parking Permits. Who ARE these old people and why do they need permits? Are they teachers? Or just people like me and my sister who are setting the Guinness World Record for most consecutive years of not working and not graduating.

And my favorite: Campus Wi-Fi.

I liked the Wi-Fi crowd so much more because at least I could laugh (quietly. to myself. while I wished my boobs would perk up so I’d get some assistance.) at the mid-30s guy who couldn’t help but smile and ogle all the young hot 18-year-olds in shorts with words printed across the ass.

I’d get a pair for myself, but by law, they’d have to read: WIDE LOAD and be followed by a pilot car with flashing beacons.

I made sure to call Mike immediately afterward to complain about my poor, old aching hips – from the WALKING – and he ignored my whining and opted to inform me: I’m gonna tell everyone I’m banging a college chick.

Yeah, but you need to tell them that this college chick is gonna need a hip replacement in the next decade.

As I headed toward the general vicinity where I was pretty sure my Suburban was parked and most likely receiving a parking fine, I passed what appeared to be a Red Cross stand with a water pitcher.

The girl was kind enough to fill up a little red cup and hand me some brochures – none of which I looked at but figured would be rude to turn away – and I stumbled off to my truck, realizing that this was only Day 1 in the last year before my Edu-geddon. (read: Graduation)

I came home to see Mike, on the floor, in his underpants, watching Angels & Demons.

No WONDER that’s what he thinks I do all day.

I wasn’t feeling the greatest, as I hadn’t been for a few days. I’d been waking up on the verge of vomiting, and for anyone who knows me, I only vomit once a decade and it usually involves Jager. I lounged on the couch, then had a sickening thought.

I wandered off to the bathroom, where I unpacked a tiny little pink and white strip – a gift from Misti a few months earlier during my prior pregnancy freak-out. I looked around for something to, ahem, “hold a sample.” I saw the red cup from campus and thought Eureka!

I put the test strip in and set it on the counter.

That’s when I noticed that the red cup was NOT a Red Cross container… but a Jesus Club Cup.

I laughed.

Then I looked at the strip.

TWO PINK LINES.

That can’t be right. I dipped another one in Jesus’s crunk cup, and it came back with…

TWO PINK LINES.

Excuse me, but at that point, I scream-hollered at Mike to get his “college girl” boinkin’ ass into the bathroom.

We stared at them until we decided it was an error. (Weren’t we just discussing this on Facebook?) The pink line was in the wrong spot and was from the dye pooling there.

I immediately threw that cup away and vowed never to pee on Jesus again.

And that was just the FIRST day of class…

Our marriage: A short

2011-08-21T14:38:00.001-05:00

Mike hit me in the head with a pillow.

Hey!

Just remember, you married this.

I gestured to my body.

Just remember, YOU married THIS.

Touche’.

But at least I work hard…

We burst out laughing.

I must’ve married you for your humor.

Mill-sponsored date night

2011-08-17T05:57:00.001-05:00

Get over here, I wanna get a picture of us.

*click*

Oh wait, that was terrible. Just turrrible*. Let me try that again.

*click*

I blinked, try it again.

You blinked in your own picture???

Shush and get over here.

*click*

I’m really digging that shadow across your face…

Shut it. Hold on a sec.

*click*

Is it still there?

Yep.

*click*

Ohmygod, it delayed. I just took a picture of the cart.

*click*

By the end of it, we were both practically in tears.

I’m not sure if it was because of the complete FAIL on my part in trying to take a picture, or if it was out of relief that we were – for the first time in a long while – doing something FUN without children.

And it was FREE.

Mike’s work is awesome. Have I mentioned that lately???

They are not only treated well, paid well, and given great benefits, but the company loves attaboys. Safety. Holidays. Production bonuses. And on, and on, and on.

And even though I’m generally a liberal, I’d like to point out: this mill that makes linerboard and treats their employees like movie stars? It’s NOT UNION.

Anyway, this particular outing was part of the funds they give the mill and each team for team-building activities. It can be spent however the team members want, usually by renting out a movie theater, going to a pumpkin farm, or doing an Easter Egg hunt.

They also do golf outings.

When Mike mentioned the mill-wide outing, I asked if I could tag along this time.

Mind you, I haven’t been golfing in several YEARS. In fact, I have never golfed using women’s clubs before, so I finally had a chance to test out the clubs I’d bought from Stephie for 25 buckeroos. They still have the Demo sticker taped to the shaft from nearly a decade ago.

Of course, Mike neglected to fill in my name on the sign-up sheet, so I was the only person there whose cart was labeled “Guest.”

Mike claims that he wasn’t sure which of his mistresses he was going to bring. I made sure to change it so people knew who I was…

Mistress #7.

Which became my nickname for the rest of the afternoon.

Your butt’s hungry, honey. Nyom, nyom, nyom.

It was Best Shot, and wouldn’t you know it? We WON.

Thanks to the men who drove the ball, and to moi who sank several back to back to back to back uh-MAY-zing putts on the front 9. One was from around 30 feet away. I was more shocked than THEY were that the putts sank.

Mike is now claiming that Mistress #7 is his golfing mistress.

I told them to thank my father for all the hours we spent at Cup’N’Cone in Merrill as kids. I was like Happy Gilmore with boobs.

Eighteen holes later, we sat in the clubhouse and ate catered food and laughed at the “Longest Putt” winner on the 18th which was a foot from the hole and clearly not the real longest putt, but not a single person dared move the marker. Then they announced the team winners.

Scott and Steve and Mike V and… Mike V’s… guest? Championship Flight.

I was so excited to be on the winning team that I didn’t realize we won MONEY until they handed the prizes out. They were whippin’ those gift cards out like cars on the Oprah show. And YOU get a card! And YOU get a card! You ALL GET A CARD!

We walked away with $100… money ahead on date night.

We continued on later to Wally World and used the gift cards to buy a bunch of crap we didn’t need, like the Godfather trilogy (I’ve never seen it – a wrong Mike’s been dying to right) and Lego Harry Potter for Wii.

So much fun.

So so so much fun.

I’m glad I took those pictures so I can remember that day ten years from now on our next real date.

*That’s my turrrible Charles Barkley impersonation.

Addicted to code

2011-08-16T02:54:00.002-05:00

Remember when I first announced that I would be working on our city’s train wreck of a website because it hadn’t been updated in over 11 years and it irritated the ever-loving crap out of my anal retentive self?

And I had grand aspirations of how it could serve as a great jumping off point in my resume for a communications job?

And even though I’ve never built a real, non-blog website before (let’s face it… Blogger is a godsend) nor taken any kind of computer classes, I figured How hard could it be because I have such an over-inflated sense of ego that I think I can do anything?

And someone – one of you kind, kind readers who happens to build websites for a living – told me sweetly to RUN? RUN far far away?

Remember all that?

I’m thinking maybe I should’a listened.

Here’s where I’m at so far.

I have so much respect for web designers now.

Every bit of data on that page, I either added manually using code, or placed there through a picture I created in Paint. Every godblessedpixel was dropped there by me.

And I’m only about 2/3 finished… with the home page.

Have I mentioned that I want to get this done by the 19th for the Sweet Corn Festival? Pahahaha!!!

Between the divs and the ps and the tds and the buffers or whatever the hell you call the crap-space in between the border and the content... I'm losing my mind. I throw numbers in until it looks right then go back to figure out exactly why it worked. For the record, if anyone at City Hall tells me to change ANYTHING, my head will spontaneously combust.

I’m so incredibly happy that I’ve figured out just that much (like the scroll table? amazing!) that I feel like this has been all worthwhile if I ~~ran screaming~~ walked away now.

But I won’t. Because of that whole OCD, perfectionist thing.

That same “thing” that has made me change the overall design of the site at least a dozen times.

That “thing” that has made Mike scold me at 3AM to put the computer down and step away from the goddamned Microsoft Paint.

One more button before bed, Mikey. Just ONE MORE…

The long week

2011-08-15T01:35:00.001-05:00

A week from today, I will be entering my final year as a college student.

Which is why I was a little stressed to find out that one of my classes had been cancelled due to “low enrollment numbers.” Like TWO. Two people wanted to take Geopolitics. Totally understandable, except that it’s a required course for my degree. Oh, and the fact that I’d spent hours and hours meticulously combing the campus site, looking for five classes to fit together perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle.

Thankfully, I take good notes.

Next to History & Systems of Some Boring Bullshit, I’d written: (same time as Geopol).

Ding ding ding! We have a winner. Who cares that every Tuesday and Thursday is going to be a lunchtime snoozefest? You KNOW it’s a boring class when people drop out of it before it even begins. Lucky for me, two people decided they had more important things to do two days a week like flat iron their knuckles. In other words: there’s still one spot open if anyone is interested.

To add to my excitement, a week from tomorrow, my children will be first graders.

I don’t even get a single day to enjoy freedom from children.

In fact, I need to con someone into watching my children that day.

Dear Auntie Stephie…

I’m so sad that having days to clean and *gasp* watch TV (!) and cook supper by 3PM are over. Now it’ll be all could you please be quiet so Mommy doesn’t blow a grand on this class by failing the test?

Anyway, Mike said to me tonight: I really hope this is your last year. So you can start focusing, on… on….

…Getting a job?

Yeah, getting a JOB.

Is THAT why I’m going to school? Silly me. I thought it was just to have an excuse in order to delay the inevitable employment questions.

Damn it anyway.

Note to self: Doctorate programs.

That should buy me a few more years.

The changing Tide. And Downy.

2011-08-13T00:28:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you’ve gotta learn to just let it go.

Those years of my mother making me sort dirty clothes into piles of whites, darks, brights, heavy darks, jeans, towels, and on, and on… they are engrained in my soul.

Do you know that laundry has been my #1 sore spot for the last seven years?

It was almost guaranteed that – if you showed up at my house between the hours of 7AM and 10PM – I would have at least one if not two small mountains of clean yet not-folded laundry on my livingroom floor.

And then my cat would sleep on it.

So I would hurry and fold it, but occasionally forget to put away something like a stack of towels.

And then my cat would sleep on that.

(Thank god she doesn’t shed much. Just ignore the cat hair mustache after you dry off your face.)

I gave up.

I’m pretty sure I’m disappointing her, what with all the brainwashing and repetition, but she’ll get over it. Just like she got over the disappointment when I told her I was agnostic.

Dear Mom, Agnostic doesn’t mean I’m an Atheist, which I’m pretty sure is what you think and now you’re panicked that I’m going to piss Jesus off. I’m not. Just think of me as Pre-American Idol Clay Aiken: confused and willing to ride the fence.

Back to the laundry.

Now that I sort nothing, and I MEAN nothing, the turnaround time on laundry is ridiculous.

Mike could undress at night and I’ll have his clothes back in his closet by morning. No more waiting for enough white socks to make a load. Which, by the way, is less than our entire stock of socks. We end up going sockless a lot around here…

I’m going to have to start rotating underwear like stock boys rotate produce. I wouldn’t want them to go bad.

And guess what, Mom. Everything comes clean.

Please ignore the one white shirt that is now a denim-y hue.

Whole lotta nothin’

2011-08-12T17:40:00.001-05:00

Children

2011-08-07T22:56:00.001-05:00

Every time I think, I’m gonna post every OTHER day,a ton of stuff happens that makes me have a completely disjointed and rambling entry to this blog.

Here goes a whole lot of mess…

The last few days, Kristin has been begging for two things. The first: that I make “salty chicken” – aka Chicken Adobo – for supper (of course, she didn’t touch it once I made it). The second: short hair.

The girls seem to have a weird understanding, albeit an annoyance, that no one knows who they are. Or I should say: which one they are.

At first, Emma had long hair and the others had short.

Then, they all had long hair but Kristin got her ears pierced.

I sent two girls over to the neighbor’s house a couple days ago and another neighbor referred to one of them as Kristin. I nonchalantly corrected her – Emma – and she protested: But she has her EARS pierced!

Emma had insisted just the week before that she get her ears done, so we took her to Coralville when we visited Mike and Al on RAGBRAI.

The neighbor chucked her water bottle and guffawed at the injustice until she realized that she now knew that the third would always be Alison. (Alison confirmed that she was never, EVER going to get her ears pierced… or at least until she was an adult or “tall like Mommy.”) Crisis averted.

But Kristin has always seemed more conscientious about being different from her sisters, even if she’s never talked about it.

Mike and I have decided she takes after me. Mike thinks so because she’s neurotic. I think so because she’s a genius.

So when I told Alison we should grow her bangs out, Kristin piped in: And I can cut my hair short!

I can feel my mother cringing as I type this.

Yes, we cut her hair tonight. So now we have chin-length-haired Kristin. She looks flippin’ adorable. We had to try on her fedora to make sure it looked just right, and as I was staring at her and smiling at how much her hair makes her look like a wise old soul, I glanced over at Alison.

She had her mouth agape as she thoroughly scratched her stuffed Pigeon’s armpit with a Mr. Potato Head arm.

(That one’s yours, Mike.)

Yesterday was Tax Free Weekend here in Iowa Land.

I’m not sure why, but my neighbor and I decided to trek around town with our four children. I returned a pair of $115 jeans that Mike bought me while on a Chef’s-coat-esque shopping spree and spent the money on a bunch of clearance and sale kids’ clothes, books, and three animal-shaped lunch packs (thanks, China!)

It was fun and absolutely my style of shopping. In. Out. In. Out. In… wait, a minute….

But to get to the high point of the day, we need to rewind.

We started out by taking the kids to McDonald’s. I confessed – while sitting in PlayLand – that it was only the second time I’ve taken the kids to the play area. I’m no germaphobe, but I consider McD’s PlayLand to be the eighth circle of hell.

From time to time, we did the obligatory head count. One. Two. Green shorts must be her son. Pink flower must be Emma. Four.

We chatted about the time I took the kids to a birthday party at The Playstation which is a four-story labyrinth of tubes and dark corners. I ended up losing my child – pretty sure it was Emma – when she got lost and hunkered down into a corner. Even the employees couldn’t find her.

It was just about then that a very large man quietly made his way across the McDonald’s PlayLand to interrupt our conversation: Excuse me, but is SHE one of YOURS? and pointed to the tubes across from us.

As I looked up, I heard the muffled wailing.

Emma had her palms face-out on a huge plastic window, and her face was completely pink and sobbing hysterically.

It took about three minutes to talk her down the fifteen feet from the exit. Go to the window, Emma, honey, listen to me… see that window right here? Go to that. I’ll help you down. Okay, now go to the next window right here… Hi! Okay, stop crying, you’ll be fine if you calm down and go through the purple slide.

The purple slide only amplified her wailing like a giant megaphone as all the parents watched the horrific scene unfold.

I picked the sobbing child off the end of the slide and waited for applause like I’d just freed an infant from a well. (It never came, damnit.)

My neighbor said, I think that’s probably a good point for us to leave. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

When it comes to gardens, the only thing worse than a plague of locusts is a hoard of 6-year-olds.

I went out tonight to pick green beans so the kids would have something to ignore on their plates along with the “salty chicken” they so desperately asked for, and I couldn’t find a single one.

The girls have been picking me clean. Beans and peas. I have to DIG to find any longer than an inch. At least now I’ve got them leaving the babies alone because they WERE eating those, too.

The tomatoes are in full swing, but they’re falling off the bushes before I even get to them.

I told Mike tonight, Next year, I’m not planting any weird crap. None of that eggplant, no swiss chard, WAAAY less cayenne pepper. We’re doing beans and more beans and peas and corn and tomatoes and only the stuff the kids are eating on me.

Even the green peppers haven’t been sacred. Alison picks them as soon as they’re as big as a golf ball. And because I refuse to waste them, I de-seed them and chop the little tiny peppers up in stirfry.

While watching Rio for the eleventh time in the last 24 hours, I set a plate out with the handful of peas I did find – not enough for a meal – and she maliciously ripped the tips off and crunched them until they were gone.

And before you think I’m some kind of health nut, she chased them down with a handful of Mike’s Sterzings chips. (If you’ve never had Sterzings, think potato chips, remove the flavor and dip them in vegetable oil. They’re ~~absolutely revolting and vomit-worthy~~ delicious, I’m sure. If you don’t mind the grease enema.

I’m finishing up a few things this week.

For one, the girls’ bedspread. It was a cheap Bed in a Bag from Target, and the threads finally gave out. The girls would make their bed every day, and the gaping hole grew larger and larger until it had torn a third of the length of the blanket.

I laid it out on the livingroom floor, tamping it flat and making sure the stuffing was correct before cutting 18” off the entire length. (The girls sleep sideways on a queen-sized mattress, so the blanket now fits perfectly at the shortened length.)

I had to go search for pins, but after those were found, it went smoothly and surprisingly quickly.

I held up the finished product with a big smile on my face. I was so happy I’d bitten the bullet and fixed it but ohWAITwhatisTHIS?!? It seemed as though, when I’d left the room, Alison has shoved what appeared to be a Cootie leg in between the layers of fabric, and it was now a permanent fixture inside the bedspread.

After collecting a confession, I excused the girls to a safe spot, far, far away from me while I contemplated how large of a hole was necessary for the extraction.

I decided I didn’t care enough for a pretty fix, so I chopped off a corner, fetched what turned out to be a Mr. Potato Head arm (later used for an armpit scratcher, mentioned above) and sewed the corner inward.

But BOY does that bedspread look nice, now…

The way things are

2011-08-05T14:52:00.001-05:00

I've been so distracted that, this morning, when I got out of the shower, I reached for my towel and instead grabbed about ten squares of toilet paper and wiped my face.

So distracted that I found myself sitting on the end of my bed yesterday, contemplating for ten minutes why my mother buys me dress socks on every holiday, and why it took me so long to figure out she’s sending me a message to wear less athletic socks.

But they’re so comfortable!

I’ve also let the days blow past me without realizing I haven’t posted anything to my blog.

While I don’t need to go into details, it’s been a not-so-fantastic week on the marriage front, and I guess it sucked all the fun out of my soul. I only had enough joking to fulfill my Facebook status quota. Har. Har.

(In case you’re wondering: yes, I love my husband. As with any marriage – as far as I can tell – that can be great and at times unfortunate. We’re going on eight years of marriage this month and thirteen years together next January. Let’s hope we can last a few more without bringing in the rat poison.)

Like I’ve always said, this blog is therapy. And I think people have noticed that I ~~haven’t blogged~~ was having a crappy week because I got no less than four messages on my phone, a status (thanks B!) asking if everything was okay, and my neighbors mowed my lawn twice for me since Monday.

Anyway, I’m back on the horse today. I’ve been at this since 2006… why quit now?

(Don’t answer that.)

I peered into Project Land to see where I left off and decided that all those projects suck the big donkey bologna.

Instead of working on any of THAT mess, I pulled out Mike’s RAGBRAI shirt squares that I started last year and laid them out on the floor to figure out how many more I needed to make a quilt. Eighteen. I’m excited. Then Mike dug out a few more RAGBRAI shirts from storage and it makes – you guessed it – exactly eighteen more squares.

This quilt – a future Father’sDay / Christmas / Hanukkah / NearestHolidayWhenIt’sFinished present – has both of us excited. Or at least he pretends to be, and that’s fine with me, too. He’s such a good sport.

In honor of his good sportsmanlike conduct, I’m making a lovely meal for him when he gets home, just in time so I can bolt out the door, leaving Mike to vacuum out his new-ish truck while I hang out with the neighbor girls and drink wine and whine.

You know I’m feeling better if I’m scheduling time to piss and moan…

RAGBRAI widow: Day 6

2011-07-29T00:32:00.001-05:00

I’m going to have nightmares about crab grass.

Especially after seeing THIS:

We have a 7-foot-wide “dirt patch” in our yard where the garden dirt was sitting for a couple weeks. After the recent combination of rains and drought and tsunami, it quickly turned into a “weed patch.”

And because I hate being that neighbor who mows or weed whacks when the neighborhood is so deathly silent, I sat out there at dusk and pulled out those crabby bitches by hand.

Aren’t I so thoughtful?

Gah. I can’t stop staring at that picture.

So here’s the miscellaneous stuff we’re doing to take our minds off the crab grass:

I’m reading The Help. Great book so far. Very similar to Ya-Ya Sisterhood that Mike loves so much. (I wish I was joking.)

The girls are getting really into helping me around the house. I never thought the day would arrive. But lately, they’ve been begging me to let them cook, clean, pick up the house, and especially: pick vegetables from the garden.

They love that last one so much that I’m constantly yelling at them to leave those poor baby beans on the vine so they can become BIG beans. I have a handful of plucked-too-soon eggplant and about a dozen green tomatoes.

And I’m mixing in some money lessons. I occasionally reward them with coins if they go out of their way to help me. Like tonight: Alison came out and helped me pull weeds then put away the bikes.

So I offered her a quarter or a dime if she could tell me which one was worth more. Bribery and education go hand-in-hand.

I’m being serenaded almost nightly with piano and song. All three of the little farts sit on the bench and plink away. At least lately they’re aiming toward a melody instead of random key spanking.

It’s when they break into their third rendition of Jingle Bells that I pull the plug.

Movies. The girls and I have watched a dozen movies over the last week, almost all of them after 9:30 at night. We watched one-and-a-half of the Night at the Museums.

Six days. I can’t believe it’s been six days already.

Maybe it’s because he works so many nights – leaving us only a few minutes to chat while he gets ready for work – that I’m not terribly lonely yet. I miss him, but we’re still pulling through okay.

And the girls are becoming more independent.

Maybe Mike should stay away until I’ve got the girls tying their own shoes (nope, still haven’t mastered that one) and cooking supper for ME.

A girl can dream.

RAGBRAI widow: Day 5

2011-07-28T13:56:00.002-05:00

How are things at the house?

Good. I’m getting a lot taken care of, although now that I look around, it probably doesn’t appear that way.

I hate that part of the stay-at-home job, the invisible work that you don’t get credit for, only the blame when the bills don’t get paid or the kids’ teeth fall out with cavities.

It sounds like Mike is having a great and miserable time on RAGBRAI, so that’s some consolation.

I told him, I want to hear what a fabulous time you had when you get back. You’d better go on and on about how much fun it was. And take pictures. I want to look at pictures and say, Hey, remember that time you went on that really fun bike ride?

WARNING: I will be incredibly irritated if he pisses and moans about how aweful it was on this vacation we’d planned for and paid for over the last year while I stayed home to tear out the basement floor and fix our house and our yard and his car and go car shopping while dealing with insurance phone calls and paying bills and preparing for college and 1st grade. I’m getting annoyed just thinking about the possibility that he’s not having fun. Where’s my claw hammer…

Anyway, we decided to sell Mike’s car to the insurance company for the full payout. I asked Mike what he’d like to do as far as a new car.

His response: I trust your judgment.

Oh, there are so many possibilities to mess with his head here. Stephie said I should test drive a really pimped out brand new car and leave it on the driveway for when he gets home.

The kids are ready for RAGBRAI to be over.

Last night, they peppered me with questions.

When is Daddy coming home?

Where is he sleeping tonight?

Is it going to be rainy there? Will his tent rain on him?

I miss Daddy so much.

Which is sweet, except when I’m trying to cook supper and Kristin is standing 4 inches behind me, simultaneously playing Madagascar Penguins on her Leapster and asking me to bring her father back and maybe she’d feel better if she could have a piece of candy.

And while we’re on the subject of things no one cares about, the guy who poured our foundations and put on our window wells stopped out yesterday. He rushed out after I told him we’d had our basement flooded, which meant I needed to rush to get into non-pajama clothes. He rang the doorbell as I was throwing on my jeans.

He looked unnervingly like Crocodile Dundee, minus the hat and with the addition of a few decades of sun damage.

He told me that he would no longer warrantee the wells since the frost was what had detached them from the house, but that he could pour us some concrete ones for the bargain basement price of $1500-1800. Because he liked my face.

I turned him down for the moment.

I have the money if I spend less on a car, but I’m thinking the five $4 bottles of exterior aluminum caulk – which I already own – are looking ~~cheaper~~ better than getting stuck buying another grandma-esque car. And I refuse to buy yet another white vehicle. People are probably starting to wonder if we’re a white supremacist family with the white cars and white house and blindingly white wife.

And there’s not enough alcohol in the world to make me believe buying a sweet ride and blaring Big Pimpin’ through corn pone Iowa is a bad idea.

Mike and I will probably try to do the work ourselves with the help of my kinda-sorta-brother-in-childoutofwedlock. Mike used to do concrete construction, among many other jobs of the labored variety, before he got hired on at the mill.

Which brings me to an aside...

I can't stop reading the comments on the local news page. And, more specifically, can't stop getting pissed off at the whiny nature of the commentors.

One mini news blip stated that the garbage men were starting their day promptly at 7AM to "minimize the amount of time spent in the heat." Keep in mind, we've had Heat Advisories nearly every day for two weeks. It's miserable out there.

One woman's response: That they're lazy.

I let my temper flare up. Mike never worked for the garbage crew, but I know many of them would hurry to get their jobs done by noon, not to run off to drink or nap, but to go to a second job.

So I unleashed a little sarcasm on her. It was after a long build-up of frustrations from people who do nothing but piss and moan about civil servants. It wasn't the one comment that set me off, but a long list of comments.

ME: Seriously??? What is WRONG with some of you people. I swear there is never a single story on here without a complaint. I happen to know more than a few people who work for the city and TRUST ME, while you sit and FB from your cushy office job, you would NEVER trade places with the work they do. The days that you're whining about your AC at work, they're out in the 100* weather doing manual labor. But don't break a sweat lifting that pencil...

R: You don't have to like peoples opinion but you do have to respect their opinions if you expect the same in return. I chose my job knowing I would be in a climate controlled environment. I live in Iowa, it makes sense.

C: And just because I chose a job that has to do with that HEAVY pencil I lift and that pays three times as much sounds like a bad career choice. My bad

M: a little bit of gratitude for service workers goes a long way. Just sayin...

ME: I don't have to respect anything, especially blind generalizations by people who seem to have nothing but disdain for every other human being if it gives them 5 minutes of gratification. Cassandra, I don't care how much you make. It doesn't give you a pass to be a brat.

R: I guess I didn't realize it only matters what you have to say. Its just to bad your words are hypocritical. Your tired of the complaining & you called her a brat but all you did was complain & act like a brat.

ME: Renee - I don't "expect" respect for my opinions. I have opinions because it's what I feel is right, not because I care how other people feel about them. And as far as being hypocritical? So be it. Maybe I should join in instead? Dear Little Baby Jesus, I hope ALL the city and county workers and construction workers and all the apparently *less-intelligent* people in our communities who chose to work in non-climate-controlled environments due to life circumstance or genetic predisposition or personal choice or because they must be sinners are able to do their jobs safely and hopefully far, far away from this forum and the opinions of people who feel they are lazy for not disinfecting their trash cans before placing them exactly 12" from the curb. Please, someday, give them brains so they can get real jobs and spend 80% of their day belittling others online. In Facebook, I pray... Amen.

Who says I need therapy?

RAGBRAI widow: Day 4

2011-07-27T11:45:00.001-05:00

And of course, by “Day 4” I mean “yesterday.”

If I remember correctly, I spent most of the day in a mental coma, debating whether to make beef stir fry for supper, or beef stir fry for late supper. I decided not to make beef stir fry at all, but to make it for tonight. I’m glad I took the time to think that decision through. Take notes. There will be a quiz.

Mike called me at some point – still alive, still not bleeding from any part of his body – and I explained to him that, if we take the money for his car instead of buying it back, then sell our Suburban, we’d have about 20,000 to spend on a car and a truck. OR we could just buy a new car and keep the Suburban. Hear my sighs of irritation… SIGH.

He couldn’t decide. He told me: Use your best judgment. Whatever you want to do.

Like I don’t have enough to worry about! It took me 6 hours to decide not to make stir fry, for gods sakes.

So now I’m car shopping. I think I’ll have a car sitting on the driveway when he gets home Saturday afternoon. Might even put a big bow on it. I’ve found quite a few decent ones, one of which is a 2003 Lincoln LS with all the trimmings. Eight years old, but who gives a rat’s ass? With our luck, it’ll be destroyed in six months by a random act of God. Or random act of raccoon.

(And yes, I realize I just told everyone in internet land that my husband is gone until Saturday. It doesn’t worry me as much as it should worry any potential burglars. I sleep next to a claw hammer. And have a full-sized MagLite and sanded down shovel handle under my bed. I kind of fantasize about sinking the teeth of that hammer into the skull of an intruder. So yeah. That. And the fact that my husband can be kind of a chickenshit when he gets really scared – just ask him – so I usually have to go wondering by myself with weapon in hand. Him being gone is actually cutting out the middle man.)

The second half of the rest of my evening was spent at the neighbor’s 5th birthday party.

The girls love Gage’s house. Even though they’re devastated that the wind storm two weeks ago took out his huge swing set, they’ve told me that they still like to visit him.

Let’s hope the girls become irretrievably hideous or Gage becomes less of an adorable little blonde thing over the next decade or I’m going to have to seriously rethink putting up an impenetrable force field between our houses, he is just that cute.

We only had one moment of mini drama when Alison tried to bite a little boy in the skull after he made a sudden turn. Smack! Her tooth is now loose, but it’s one I want gone anyway. In fact, I’ve stopped cutting up their apples in the hopes that they’ll lose teeth before they need to be “extracted.”

Thanks to reading other mothers’ horror stories with piñatas, I knew we needed a boundary. Logs sufficed well enough, except the dad, Cory, almost was decapitated by his own child when he broke the No One Past the Logs rule. And now you know, young man…

CAAAANNNDYYYY!!!!

That should be enough sugar to last us until next Easter. Of course, I told the girls to pick up as many square candies as they could find. I love me some Now N Laters.

After chasing down a neighbor’s dog for 10 minutes and catching him only to find out he’s NOT the neighbor’s dog but actually a stray – yay, me! – I brought the girls home where they sat on the couch watching cartoons and pretending they weren’t exhausted, yawning be damned.

I forced them to go to bed at 10:30 with the promises that they’d get a visitor today. Possibly Untie Stuffie or Grandma.

The girls obliged, but they neglected to inform me that they’d be standing in the doorway of my room at 3:30AM, blankets over their heads. Thankfully, I’m a little slow on the draw with the claw hammer.

Turns out they could sleep in, anyway. Stephie crapped out on us and won’t be coming up to help me build my workbench and clean out the garage.

Then again, do you really want a person like this:

working with power tools?

Advantage: Loren.

We’ll see what we can get done today. If only I can decide what to make for supper…

RAGBRAI widow: Day 2

2011-07-26T14:21:00.002-05:00

I’m starting to miss Mike. Just a little.

Who else would understand my excitement for 30 Rock, pretzels with jalapeno cheese dip, and brightly colored, overpriced sports cars?

I was actually kind of pissed off at him on Day 0. We woke up early, then had an argument about whether or not we should park his crap at my parents’ house while he went back for his dad, versus leaving us at Hardee’s.

I caved in. Hardee’s it was.

Hardee’s at 5 AM is kind of a scary place.

I made the girls eat outside.

I added the second picture simply because this girl is a weirdo.

Yes, Mike. That child is yours. She’s the same one who plays her Leapster while wearing a hooded sweatshirt and one Michael Jackson-esque Hello Kitty glove in the middle of the hottest week of the Summer.

Clearly, I haven’t had much time to think about what Mike’s up to… with the flooded basement and all that comes with it.

On Day 1, my parents offered to come up to help, and while everyone was in such a cheery mood, I told them they may want to wait for the Rainpocalypse to pass.

After they arrived, we spent the first half of the morning emptying the basement of all the hard work we’d put in over the previous Fall.

Then we all decided we were hungry, which meant I bought $60 of beer and a couple bags of snacks at the gas station.

Half in the bag, we managed to put in a new post and mailbox… fairly straight.

The neighbors who’d lost their entire roof two weeks ago came over and offered to help. Mainly I was grateful they let us throw the roof and siding debris into their construction dumpster.

And now thanks to the insurance adjustor taking his sweet time getting around to our house, we have what I believe is our loveliest patch of lawn to date.

Thankfully, my mom gave me her old garden wand. Probably because my lawn and gardens are so incredibly depressing that she just can’t bare the thought that they’re about to die.

My second favorite part of Day 1 (after the liquid lunch, of course) was the phone call from my insurance agent, giving me the heads up that flooding isn’t covered by my plan. I’ve looked into flood insurance (not everyone is “eligible”) programs, and I have no fucking clue if we can get compensation for the hundreds of dollars in wood and supplies that are heading over to the dump.

Well, it might be a close second with the moment I realized I should probably get out of the heat. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t die while hoisting all that roofing crap into the wheelbarrow and pushing it up the street. I started blacking out around the corners of my vision as I walked, but the end never came. I’m pretty sure that’s not how I want to die, so I’m not disappointed, but I will say this: I drank a whole 6-pack yesterday and never peed once. Yay, dehydration!!!

In good news, the basement is almost entirely dried out. Which is saying something, since our “floating floor system” (the black stuff above) REALLY became a floating floor system, rolling waves and all.

As for RAGBRAI Day 2, I have no clue what happened. I pretty much blanked it out.

Oh, besides the fact that the local bank rejected our insurance checks for $2400, leaving me paying for all sorts of cleaning and construction supplies and wondering why my debit card wasn’t going through. Then trying to use my business acct and realizing my daily limit had been exceeded. Thank you, Target card… for buying my groceries. Jeezus frick. You’d think – with a town this size – that MAYBE, just MAYBE, they’d call us and say, Hey, you needed TWO signatures on this check, so that I could come down and claim them and forge Mike’s signature on them instead of mailing them off and delaying the money for another week. Is that too much to ask???

We also discovered a load of hot peppers, beans, pea pods, tomatoes and eggplant are nearly ready for harvest. Alison spent 20 minutes digging out pea pods and crunching them down as fast as she could pick them. I didn’t even know she liked peas.

The only other thing I can remember is that we went to the post office to tell them that they can start delivering our mail again (because apparently having a mailbox wasn’t clue enough for them) and the girls started yelling, KITTENNNNS!!!!

Sure enough. Kittens. A poster on the wall advertised them. FREE. And they look just like Moochie.

I texted Mike: How angry would you be if we had another family member when you got home, then attached the picture.

You suck. How many did you get?

Ye of little faith! I haven’t gotten any… yet. I called and they have seven 3-month-old kittens left.

The girls picked Krissy, Gemma (with a hard G), and Mrs. Cat for potential cat names. They girls apparently don’t see any resemblance to their own names, since I told them No, you CANNOT name the cat after yourself.

We talked to Mike yesterday and it seems as though he’s survived another day. Seriously. Last year, he bit the dust hardcore when his dad’s headlight fell off his bike and Mike nailed it with his tire. His arm is still scarred. I’m waiting to hear the bad news for THIS year.

It’s something like 2 or 3 people die on average each year. The last year that I rode, two guys got struck by lightning and another one died of a heart attack. It’s a really weird feeling to see the bikes slow down and ten minutes later an ambulance squeezes past.

On a completely unrelated note, Lance Armstrong rode today. I wonder if Mike will see him out at the beer tents tonight.

They’re at Boone today, and the only thing I know about that town is that some of the guys from the team 16 years ago hooked up with a bunch of slutty chicks there. I can say that because I’m 30. And I believe I’m now officially allowed to look down on youngsters.

So yay, have fun tonight, Mike! I guess?

If tonight is anything like last night, we’ll stay up until midnight watching Up while the kids share a giant bowl of Corn Pops.

Mother of the Year? You bet. I might have to crack open one of the 8 7 bottles of beer I have from Day 1’s lunch to celebrate.

RAGBRAI widow: Day 1

2011-07-25T13:50:00.001-05:00

Can we pretend that Sunday never happened?

Although we DID get a lot done… new mailbox, all the house debris off my lawn (thanks to the neighbors coming over even then their house is missing the roof!), the water out of the basement (as well as the floor), and my dryer duct shortened so I no longer have to worry about a dryer fire.

Tell that to my two fire extinguishers that now reside in my house, one on each floor.

It’s just that when my parents come over to help, it seems like a good idea until it seems like it’s NOT.

I’ve got pictures and stories and all that crap, but I’m already 3/5 of the way through Day 2 and have a long list of work ahead of me.

It’ll have to wait until this evening…

RAGBRAI widow: Day 0

2011-07-24T01:15:00.001-05:00

Last night, I called The Children’s Place.

Um, hello. I bought about $130 in clothes yesterday, then got a coupon in the mail for 25% off my entire purchase. Do I need to bring all my clothes in for a price adjustment?

Actually, that coupon doesn’t apply to prior purchases.

Okay, but I can just return everything and repurchase it with my coupon, so…

I suppose you could do that.

I will do that.

And I did. At that point, just to spite her and their store’s evil policies. While I got the stink eye from cashier lady, Mike took the girls over to Claire’s. Kristin came back with a huge grin on her face and a card filled with earrings that Mike bought for her with his precious beer money.

(For all you haters out there, that’s just one of the many reasons I love my husband.)

We got a text during errands that we should come over to the neighbors’ for supper. I would like to point out that there is an inverse ratio between how much of a hurry I’m in and how fast Mike walks.

(Is it on purpose? That’s just one of the many reasons that I want to slap my husband.)

A disappointed and seemingly antisocial Mike opted out of supper so he could pack for RAGBRAI.

While the girls and I visited at the neighbors, the power went out. The wind shook the trees. The rain seemed more like a faucet full on. The neighbor’s roof – previously damaged 2 weeks ago but nothing obviously urgent – leaked water into their bathroom ceiling.

During the commotion, I noticed our Suburban pull up in the storm. A soaking wet Jesus stood before us in the light of his flashlight.

Wow, you mean he was coming over to visit since the power took out his ability to wash clothes? Wrong-O.

Loren, I need your help. The basement is flooding… it’s just pouring in through the window.

Go home. Light candles. Threaten the children with their lives if they touch the candles. Go downstairs to assess. See water in the window well. A foot deep. No, more than a foot. Pouring through like a spout. Cram towels in the track. Realize it’s futile.

Cuss like a sailor.

Mike and I ran to the garage where I grabbed two sand pails.

Ignoring the fact that our clothes were as wet as if we’d jumped headfirst into a swimming pool, we knelt in the mud in the blinding rain and bent down to scoop water out of the window well by the bucketful. It was a race. We could hardly keep up with the water pouring into the well.

I could also hardly stop laughing in between Mike’s motherfuckers.

It was all so ridiculous.

We’d just gotten a check from the insurance agent 6 hours earlier for the prior week’s storm damages. And gotten a phone call with an offer to total Mike’s car out 2 hours before that.

And now the basement was becoming a floating lake of OSB. Once the rain finally stopped, we stood back and started laughing like idiots. Luckily it only took 20 minutes for the majority of the water to drain away. The rest of it would have to wait for the removal of our floor, and Mike was slated to leave for 8 days about 5 hours later.

During this same time, my mom and sister were at a Lady Antebellum concert a county away, enjoying a night out. (Dad was supposed to go, but duty called at work. Stephie stepped in to help.)

Isn’t she adorable?

(Happy 53rd birthday, Mom!)

This is what I gather happened:

At some point during the concert, Dad texted Mom that storms were on their way. Probably at the same time that Dad texted me: Are you getting clobbered by the storms yet? I couldn’t answer since I was busy trying to build an ark. Two of every animal, girls. Decide amongst yourselves who gets to swim with the cat.

Mom and Steph hurried to the bathrooms, and while waiting in line, let a woman ahead of them in more desperate need. The lady offered them 3 beer tickets as thanks.

While redeeming those tickets under the beer tent, luck would have it that it started to rain pretty steadily. When it slowed, they ran back to their seats under the awning.

The band played a few more songs, then suddenly played hit after hit after hit and bang bang boom the fireworks went off, well before the concert was scheduled to end.

Just then, the real rain hit.

That same downpour that Mike and I had been fighting minutes earlier.

They ran to Jeff’s diesel truck – their super classy transport for the night – only five blocks away, parked in someone’s yard. When they got there, Mom had 2” of water in her purse and her makeup was streaked. They looked like “drowned rats,” and she told me she finally knows what jeggings feel like.

Yes, my mother is awesome. She knows what jeggings are. Then again, she lived through the first 80s.

Even with 4-wheel drive, they couldn’t get out of the person’s yard. The owner came out, laughing, giving them the “go ahead” hands to gun it. Mud splatter and ruts later, they were freed. Into the bumper to bumper traffic with an hour wait to the highway. That’s when they remembered they were out of diesel.

A bunch of horribly timed turns later in search of a back alley gas station, they got behind a car with hazards flashing. They couldn’t tell why, though, because the rain almost entirely blinded them.

Stephie turned to Mom, Do you feel lucky today?

Mom laughed and said No.

Steph rolled the truck past the car.

I assume at some point the saying: Turn around, don’t drown crossed her mind. Or maybe not.

Even at a crawl, the water sprayed several feet over the truck’s roof. Mom said, It was like riding a JetSki down the street.

Luckily for them, it was a diesel and stayed lit. I can absolutely see my sister being one of “those” people sitting on top of a vehicle roof, waiting to be rescued downstream.

Stephie kept saying, Do you realize how bad it was raining? It was pouring!

I may have had some idea… (see above where we were out in our yard for 30 minutes getting a free shower in our impromptu swimming pool).

After all the crazy antics, Mom was most worried that she had to crawl upstairs in her own home in the buff. She might have drowned, but god forbid, don’t let anyone see her old lady ass crack.

Maybe that’s a bit too harsh a criticism, especially since prancing around my house displaying my old lady ass crack seems to be a hobby of mine.

Then again, I don’t have a cabana boy right next door to worry about. Chris? Matt? RJ? Anyone else? I’m always taking job applications…

Mom says she feels like she’s had terrible luck lately.

I feel like I have a radishbush up my ass!

A what up your ass???

A radishbush.

I don’t get it…

You know – a RABBIT’S FOOT. How people think they’re lucky?

Oh wow, I thought you said radish bush. I was wondering if they bring bad luck or something.

I think we’ve decided that we’re cursed. I also think we’ve decided I need my hearing checked.

And after that crazy evening, we had to be up at 4 AM to take Mike in town for their team RAGBRAI bus. They drove their bikes and gear across the state to the Western edge in preparation of tomorrow, the first official day of a 7-day ride. I hope he got some sleep. I only had about 2 hours and the girls had 4.

I have a feeling this is going to be a long, long week…

To Colleen

2011-07-23T18:21:00.001-05:00

Happy 53rd birthday to my mom.

She deserves way more than a 4-sentenced blog post, but I spent the first 1/2 of the morning being a lousy daughter – forgetting it was her birthday until Dad called and said, By the way, it’s your mom’s birthday today and she’s right next to me, and the second 1/2 being seriously depressed while cutting broken vegetables out of my garden and putting away laundry that I’d hung over kitchen chairs to dry at 1:30 AM because our now-flooded basement decided that our dryer doesn’t need to actually DRY the clothes.

So yeah, after all that, she’s coming up here tomorrow with my dad to help remove the basement floor and dry everything out.

Happy Birthday to the Mother / Grandmother of the Century!

No whammies, no whammies

2011-07-22T11:41:00.003-05:00

“Poverty Causing President,” in case you can’t read the print. The last one said “Mendacity of a Dope.” They’re getting increasingly less funny, especially when most of the people in our state have no idea what mendacity even means. Ahem… (looking it up online…)

mendacity: having the tendency to lie.

See? Now we’re all smarter.

I miss the days of the simple OOPS!. Or No Clue. Or OBummer, Obama bin $pendin’, or SCAM.

The miracle that is: colored duct tape.

That picture has nothing to do with anything I had planned to write, but I didn’t want to forget to post it. Since that seems to be a problem of mine. (See a lack of the post The Missing Week: Part 2 of 2. I might get around to it. When I do, it’ll be called The Missing Post of the Missing Week Part 2 of 2: Part 1 of 1.)

I amuse myself.

As I’m typing, there’s a man on my roof. While I’d like to imagine him shirtless and sweaty from the heat, he’s in a polo and poking at my shingles, taking measurements.

I apologized and promised him that I’m not trying to be a nitpicker, but that I didn’t want to overlook anything since I don’t know what’s covered. Every time I pointed something out, he’d say, I’m not sure that that would be caused by wind, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Um, it wasn’t just a windy day. It was the force of an EF1 tornado for 48 minutes.

So I point to things and tell him how much they cost me… my $8 solar lights – 2 of which no longer work, one broken in half, the other just not working (he’ll “give me the benefit of the doubt") – my bricks that busted in half, my $65 chicken that is now headless…

Why does this remind me of Michele?

I’m whittling away at my $1600 deductible, eight dollars at a time.

My garage door is gonna cost at least that much, so anything else is just gravy.

Have I mentioned that we had siding embedded in my fence? There’s nothing I love more than working on that ~~motherfucking~~ fence.

Send me good insurance mojo… I’m going to need it. Big money, big money! No whammies!!!

It’s gettin' humid in here, so take off all your safety clothes

2011-07-20T17:30:00.002-05:00

It’s that time of year again when I start whining about the weather like an incontinent old ninny-head.

It’s HOT. It’s not only hot, but it’s HUMID.

I took this snapshot on Tuesday night at 10PM. Pee. EMMM. PM. As in nighttime. 100hundredandfucking7. (I went ahead and put a little star in case you don’t know where Iowa is, since probably 1/2 of Americans think we’re near Texas.)

We drove our sweaty asses in town this morning for Emma’s eye appointment. I’d found a tiny brown dot over her iris a couple weeks ago while camping, and since it didn’t hurt and it didn’t LOOK bad, I started Googling. Oh my god CANCER. And MORE Cancer. And scooping out of eyeballs to get rid of Cancer.

I know the popular saying “Google is not your friend,” but does anyone really ever listen to it?

We spoke to the opthalmologist, and as soon as he got the magnifier up to her eye, he laughed and said, Well THAT’S interesting…

Why does the weird shit happen only to US?

He explained that she has rust inside her cornea.

From what, he’s not sure. Probably a piece of metal. But the metal is no longer there. And her eye has healed over “quite nicely.” Nicely enough, in fact, that he doesn’t want to chance damaging her eye with surgery if the rust seems content to stay put.

Now I get to watch her eyeball like a hawk for the next couple years to make sure it doesn’t move or change shape or get irritated.

We met up with my sister at the mall, but not before spending a small fortune at The Children’s Place. (Place your bids, ladies… this stuff will probably be up for garage sale when they grow out of it in half a week.)

Kristin got the Fedora, Emma got the rose petal skirt, and Alison got the sweater dress.

Kristin is now insisting she’s a detective. Because otherwise why would she have such a bitchin’ hat? So watch out.

Stephie lugged me down to Von Maur to try on shoes because she’s tired of looking at my 2-year-old yellow Soffts. I paid a lot of money for these. I plan to wear them down to little black and yellow cracked flaps of cardboard.

Which of course meant that we headed to the kids’ section. Another fortune spent. At least it was clearance this time.

In a moment of wisdom, we decided to drag the girls out of the mall and into the inferno in order to fetch lunch.

Stephie likes to crank the AC, so my car was whining through the parking lot.

It read:

but I’m pretty sure it meant:

We passed a group of brown-glazed men working on the main street through Northeast Cedar Rapids.

Stephie: Look at those poor bastards. (As she fanned her armpits in the air-conditioned breeze.) I could never work in this heat. I would die. LOOK at them – wearing no shirt under a safety vest. That’s what I’d do. I’d wear…

Me: …safety green pasties.

Stephie: With blinkers. And a bright green g-string.

Me: Definitely.

In yet another moment of heat-induced mania, we took the girls to Stuff, Etc. It’s a consignment shop where they make you pay more for regurgitated goods than you pay for it new.

We found a small white wall shelf for my bathroom, but by the time we circled back through the store, it was in someone else’s cart up at the counter. I hesitated and wondered if I could make it to the car before she realized I’d stolen it out of her cart, but I sulked instead behind her with a glass measuring cup I’d found for $3.99.

After standing behind her and being harassed by Stephie for missing out on the shelf for three minutes, I lost all desire to buy anything there. Stephie asked, Do you even really WANT that measuring cup? Can’t you just buy a NEW one??? It looks gross.

I peeked inside at the white residue caking the bottom. They probably made meth with it. Can I put it back?

Here. Let ME do it.

She plopped it – CLUNK – behind the cash register and waved goodbye to our happy little shelf.

Then we got in the car and laughed. Because heat makes us giddy. And everything is funny by this point in the story.

We picked up her spawn at the daycare where she sends her child. It’s more like a sports club-slash-school-slash-field trip facility. I would like to point out that my sister now not only doesn’t have to work a 9-to-5 job, but sends her son to this child’s paradise.

I never want to hear you complain about my years as a stay-at-home mom.

I noticed that they also have infants at this place. I say that because you can see the babies sleeping in the cribs right up against the windows.

It’s just like window shopping for puppies.

We dragged the four kids and our fat, sweaty carcasses to Coldstone Creamery, where they happily announce that under NO circumstances do they accept LivingSocial or Groupon coupons, but please do enjoy your treat. Kinda like a big Fuck You before you even place your order.

By the way, I had no such coupon. But I kinda wish I had, just so I could piss and moan a little more about it.

As we’d come into the parking lot, I’d seen this green taxi. But Stephie~~’s demonic voices~~ wouldn’t allow us to get any closer than this shot through the car window.

GetmyeouttathisgoddamnedheatNOOOOWWWWW.

You don’t argue with that.

Titillating Tuesday

2011-07-19T17:10:00.001-05:00

I finally fetched our mail from the post office today. I figure eight days is long enough.

I opened a utility bill and we had such a large credit that it said “DO NOT PAY” across the bottom and top.

Did we get some kind of credit for losing power for a day? Or did I get all stupid last month and pay it twice? I discount no theory.

I apologized to the post master, saying that with all the storm drama, I’d completely forgotten that we didn’t have a mailbox. And our mailmen don’t particularly love getting out of the car to bring packages up, let alone junk mail due to missing mailboxes.

I sure hope they enjoy the five MILLION pounds of textbooks I ordered this week. Find a place to stuff those sonsofbeeches.

I finally ordered a new garage door this morning.

The pervy old guy – after asking which of my children he could keep (ten seconds into meeting him) because he “love(s) little girls” and I laughed along with him while secretly thinking I bet you do – asked me TWICE if I should wait to order the door in order to consult with my husband, throwing in a “honey” or ten for good measure.

I write the checks around here, Sweet Cheeks.

Then he told me he wished he was married to me. Who doesn’t? Besides the obvious one of my husband, anyway…

I’m almost glad he threw that in there because up until that point, it seemed as though he was putting me in my place. Now I know he’s just an idiot.

Then he showed my girls a picture of his grandson and asked which of my girls would like to marry him.

None. Unless it gets me some kind of family discount.

Speaking of Mike:

He likes to harass the crap out of our kids, sometimes literally. The kids are relatively quiet until the moment he walks in the door. He has them trained to go into superpsychotic monkey mode.

He also likes to pester ME. But he uses the kids as weapons.

Emma has been running around the house over the last week, telling me how wonderful our lives would be if only we had a Sunsetter.

Mom, we need a Sunsetter! And maybe some tables. Wouldn’t that be great???

And yes, you know what a Sunsetter is. It’s an old person awning that they advertise on TV.

He’s got her convinced that we need one, NOT because he wants one, but because he knows she won’t let it go.

Too bad I’ve been working against him.

I’ve got the kids convinced we need a scooter.

Meep Meep.

Doesn’t it scream mid-life crisis?

I think I’m paranoid–about twins

2011-07-18T09:58:00.001-05:00

I went to a baby shower a week ago – the day before The Storm – for a friend whom I haven’t seen in a couple months.

We always have a good time when we get together.

Unfortunately, Mike wasn’t able to make it, otherwise I’m certain he’d have had the Diaper Genie on his arm like a Transformer gun.

Anyway, I got a text a few days ago from the same friend, telling me she has something to show Mike and I and could we come over on Sunday?

I was freaking out.

I told Mike: Do you think she’s having TWINS???

Because every time anyone says “I have something to tell/show you guys,” it’s always twins. We are the go-to people for sharing the twin information.

I convinced Mike that that’s why we were going over to their house.

So last night, Mike and I hung out in their livingroom with friends of theirs and an old coworker of mine, and our friends asked us to have a seat on the couch for a presentation.

I was all Here it comes! The ultrasound pictures!!! TWINS!

Then on the screen came a good-looking guy talking about vacation packages and getting discounted TVs from an online mall, and I was all Wow, they put a lot of time into this. They’re trying to throw us off their scent. I wonder when the ultrasound pictures are gonna pop up on the screen!

Yeah, it never happened. But we did find out about a fabulous way to travel at a discounted rate!

Mike will never let me live it down.

All the way home, he kept giggling, Prestige WorldWide… Boats and Hoes. You have now lost all credibility. You were SO CONVINCED it was twins.

In case you don’t follow the reference from Step Brothers:

In any case, I talked to my parents because I’m all out of money and figured they’d be the only ones in our family doing any traveling this year after we get raped simultaneously by the dentist and insurance adjustor for thousands of dollars.

I was too late. My parents informed me that my SISTER has already signed up and tried to get them on board.

I think Stephie is going for some kind of record for most work-from-home business opportunities. MaryKay. Avon. Silpada. I know there’s more here…

So yeah. I was beat to the punch by my sister.

And I told Mike the only way I’d sign up is if he talked to the guys at work, some of whom call themselves: Redneck Trash with Too Much Cash.

He gave me a meh.

So now the plan is that if anyone is interested in signing up, I’m sending them to my friend. Happy early baby present! They’ll need that extra money for the twins they’re not having.

I guess I’ll never get my boats ‘n’ hoes. I’ll be a boatless, ho-less, loser for the rest of my life.

Weird is genetic

2011-07-14T20:45:00.001-05:00

Spawn: When you hold my hand, don’t pull my arms too hard or they’ll fall off.

Me: Does that happen often?

Spawn: Sometimes. Or sometimes my leg falls off.

Me: I hate when that happens. Sometimes my arms AND my legs fall off, then I roll around on the floor – a legless, armless blob.

Spawn: Because you can’t walk without legs.

Me: Exactly.

---

Munchkin: Are Auntie Stephie and Uncle Jeff married?

Me: What do YOU think?

Munchkin: Yeah.

(They’re not.)

Me: How do you know?

Munchkin: They sounded out the words.

---

Big Al: When I grow up, I’m gonna be a fighter-fighter. And when the bell sounds, I’m going to put my boots on VERY fast and jump in the truck, and I’ll take a water hose to put out the fire.

Little Baby Round Head: When I grow up, I’m gonna be a liVarian.

Big Al: When the librarian’s house is on fire, I will hear the bell. I’m going to put my boots on VERY fast and jump in the truck, and I’ll take a water hose to spray out the fire.

Monkey: When I grow up, I’m gonna be a teacher.

Big Al: When the school gets on fire, I’m gonna tell the kids to get out.

Me: Burn, baby, burn.

---

Shorty: He had a tiny dog. I think it was a Chi-walla.

Mike: Don’t you mean Chihuahua?

Shorty: No, that’s silly.

Me: Oh, that’s right… I’ve heard of that breed. A mix between a Chihuahua and Koala.

---

Child: Something’s wrong with this water. It tastes like hotdog water.

Me: The latest KoolAid flavor. Yummy.

We’ve got El Derecho stuff!

2011-07-12T13:56:00.002-05:00

Har. Har. Har. I crack myself up.

That’s about as clean as the humor gets around here.

Me: In your BUTT.

Mike: In your MOM’S butt.

Mike cracks himself up. He’s constantly making YOUR MOM references.

Which is why he had double the fun when my sister was here yesterday. It was a two-fer. Because we have the SAME MOM. (He had to spell it out for us, apparently.)

Stephie came up to tolerate Mike’s crude sense of humor and obvious butt-crack, coin slot jokes in order to help clean up the neighborhood after our Derecho on Monday morning before the butt-crack of dawn.

There’s no more relaxing way to wake up than at 5AM to Mike throwing his body up out of bed with a LOREN! Get the kids in the basement… NOW, then jolting upright only to hear what seemed like our house being sucked into the World’s Largest WetVac.

Mike – the lookyloo of the lookiest – was right there with us, huddled under the stairs. He didn’t dare go near a window. In fact, I was the one furthest from safety, perched on the edge of our “safe spot,” while Mike asked me from his prime spot: What IS that SOUND??? Can you see anything out the windows? No honor amongst spouses.

Instead of being tucked away, I sat and held on to a board that we’d – only a year earlier – bolted into the concrete floor for just such an occasion. It only ran to the upstairs banister, yet I could feel it shaking and snapping like our house was dancing around it.

Mike and I gave each other a look that said we knew we’d be lucky to have a house to go upstairs to.

Then came the sirens. Although we weren’t sure at first with all the noise of the rain and wind.

And a continuing bangbangbangbangbangbang like a crazed gaggle of woodpeckers which we later figured out was our Radon pipe that ran from below our house out to the top of the roof. Our house was twisting and popping against it.

There was so much rain and debris that we could only see alternating white and black smears out the window, depending how often the lightning flashed.

We sat down there for 45 minutes, thinking the entire time: Is this what it sounds like to be in a tornado? Or will it get louder? Why isn’t our house flying away yet? When should I dive into the corner on top of the kids?

I tried to call my parents but we had no signal.

I tried to get radar but we had no internet.

I tried to get our weather radio signal, but it was splotchy at best.

The winds died down to a dull roar at around 6, and we went up to assess the storm and damage.

I first noticed the neighbors had a flap of shingles missing. Then the girls pointed out that our mailbox was gone. Along with the horrified: How will we ever get our mail?!?

Mike peeked out the girls’ window and laughed.

Um… my bumper is off.

What do you mean?

It’s OFF MY CAR. IN THE STREET. OFF.

Sure enough. Mike’s car got hit by a roof. The new neighbors across the street had lost a chunk of their garage, and Mike’s car and our driveway FOUND it.

(Remember that the next time you complain about hail damage.)

We took a flashlight and found out we were missing part of our fence and had debris from dozens of houses on our lawn. On the way back in the house, I noticed that my hanging basket was also missing the mommy and baby birds that have been our “pets” for the last month or two.

I was devastated.

I’d heard the basket swinging and smacking the porch as we’d headed to the basement, but I was hoping they’d flown off in anticipation of the storm.

The weren’t the only fowl casualties.

The adorable ceramic chicken planter that Stephie had given me for working at her open house was in several pieces on my lawn. I took this then considered sending her a ransom note.

I heard the neighbor yelling for a dog, unusual since he doesn’t OWN a dog. Then I saw why. Only a house away, our other neighbors had lost their entire roof.

I jogged up the street and asked if they needed help, but it turned out a couple firemen had helped them out of the basement already and they were in a neighbor’s house.

We found fun trinkets all morning. This OSB came with a side of 2”x6”x12’ that scooted right up to the house. I am incredibly grateful it didn’t IMPALE anything.

Thanks to starting at 6AM and the help of a random (unknown) neighbor who happened by with his daughters and a wheel barrow, we had all of the shingles, siding, plywood and plastic out of our yard within two hours. We also found his decorative pillow.

I couldn’t figure out how my newly planted tree could snap off at the base then fly over our house but end up pushed underneath our deck. Or how our bricks had thrown themselves OVER our fence and broken in half with just straight line winds and not a tornado, but that’s what the news kept reporting.

I finally understood this morning when they reported that the Derecho had had sustained winds of 110-130 mph. The storm lasted for NINE HOURS in totality. Holy hell.

No wonder.

Mike spent most of the day at the neighbor’s house, and Stephie and I helped a little in between fetching him ice to salvage his groceries and making phone calls to our insurance.

The only positive side to this whole story (other than no people being injured) is that I noticed the mommy dove had come back to her nest. I was so sad for her. There was no way those babies survived.

Then I wondered… and I started searching.

I finally found them, huddled underneath our downspout, 20 feet away.

I scooped the fluffy babies up, one at a time, and plopped them carefully into the nest.

I’ve never seen such a happy bird in my life.

She immediately cleaned them up then sat on their heads.

Another neighbor and I found three of her baby Robins on the ground, but there wasn’t a mother bird in sight. We put them back in the nest and hoped she’d show up.

She finally did this morning.

(I’m an intervener, if you haven’t noticed.)

Watch the price of corn this year. Acres and acres and acres of corn were snapped off at the base, all across Iowa. This crop is TOAST. Even if it stands upright again, once the corn grows and puts weight on it, it’ll blow over in the first wind.

Luckily we like our neighbors, so while yesterday was extremely tiring, we’d spent the day with people we enjoy.

We finished it off with some time at the neighbor’s house, grilling out and discussing insurance deductibles and the Beastie Boys.

At least this happened on a Monday. Tuesday is garbage day, and I'm betting they'll have a few truck fulls.

The Missing Week: Part 1 of 2

2011-07-10T23:44:00.000-05:00

I disappeared for almost a week.

It’s this new magician’s act I’m trying called: Having a Real Life for a Change.

~~So far, it’s given me a lot of reasons to stay home and drink~~.

On with the pictures!

Sunday evening, I spoke to my dad about possibly meeting us for fireworks since Mike would be at work and he would be home alone – my mother was visiting her mom in Wisconsin since she hasn’t been doing well lately.

I thought it would be a nice pick-me-up.

I forced myself to go even though I was tired and lacking in motivation, and Dad forced himself to go even though he was fighting off food poisoning.

I’m glad we made it.

We went early enough to be seated directly across from the display on the Cedar River.

After paying more than our fair share for fried food, we coughed up another five bucks to tip Mr. Lincoln for a quick picture. He’s one of three presidents the girls recognize. (Actually, they only recognize Lincoln and Obama, but they think Benjamin Franklin was a president no matter how much I try to persuade them differently.)

Stars…

… and stripes.

Booms…

wows

… and oohs.

I’ve got more pictures and lots more to chat about in regards to our camping extravaganza this week, but I’ll put that in my next post, part 2.

Changing the world (wide web)

2011-07-05T10:59:00.008-05:00

Some words are magic.

Like project. It makes my husband cringe.

Another is: free.

I'd contacted the local economic developer about our horrid city website. It hasn't been updated since 2000 and half the links no longer work. It has no organization and we have no way to post or retrieve information on local events.

My email went out last week.

It only took a few minutes to get the first response. It was a bit snide. As I read through it, though, I understood why. Our website is so horrible that it's a magnet for "offers of help" from companies and private individuals who'll design a new site for the bargain price of $5,000... because they like our faces.

He thought I was one of the thousands of solicitors and was clearly pissed about having to deal with me.

My next email told him that I am a local resident and would like to revamp our entire site. For free.

Bingo.

I got a phone call a few minutes later.

Free? I can't pass up FREE!

I thought he would promptly forget about me. Surely he had more important things on his plate, especially if the website had sat dormant for 11 years, and the city has change a lot in that time. A third of these houses weren't even HERE 11 years ago.

This morning, I got a cheery phone call from Mr. President of the Economic Development Something-or-other that we're meeting down at City Hall next week to discuss the future of our website. He's excited. I'm excited. This website had better kick ass.

(I've already told Mike that this technically isn't a "project," so he can stop making that face at me.)

My goal is to make an attractive, organized and updated site, then turn around and throw that site on my list of accomplishments when I search out an internship in PoliComm this spring.

At the very least, I'll be one of the first ones to know when stuff is happening around here.

But first? Time to start packing for camping tonight. Yes, START.

The Boston Beer Party

2011-07-04T18:10:00.005-05:00

The decision has been made: we're going downtown for the fireworks. Barring any more injuries from the girls trying to hoist each other through the air. So questionable.

On a funny aside, I did manage to teach a little bit of history today.

The lessons included:

Today is our country's birthday. It is 235 years old.

The founders signed the Declaration of Independence.

They were trying to get out from under the rule of the King (one of them, I have no idea who... Edward? Bartholemew? I lose track. Or maybe it was a Queen?)

One of the fun things they did as an act of defiance was to throw tea - Mommy's favorite drink - overboard in Boston to protest the taxes.

They collectively remembered most of it. And I don't score individually. I'm happy if ANY of them can remember ANYTHING.

I quizzed them and came to the final question: What did the people throw off the boat in Boston?

Alison remembered that it was Mommy's favorite drink, but she did a little improvisation.

Ummm... beer???

Close enough.

Have fun tonight and try not to get any important body parts exploded off!

Embarking on what I hope isn't a sequel

2011-07-04T13:47:00.010-05:00

My children have appointed themselves Holiday Greeters. Every person they meet gets a joyous: Happy Fireworks Day! Except they started shouting that four days ago, and no matter how much I try to explain that it's the Fourth of July, they wake up every morning asking Mom, is it Fireworks Day today???

Imagine their excitement when I sighed and told them that yes, yes it is.

I was hoping to sit down with them and show them maps of the colonies and tell them some of the more exciting points of the birth of our nation, at the very least to explain why we shoot off fireworks, but I'm having a bad case of I don't give a sh*ts today. Not that I don't care about the holiday and such - before anyone starts throwing out crazy labels like "socialist" "democrat elite" or "liberal ingrate," although really, aren't those the same things? - it's just that my energy is sapped from the mere thought of packing up to go camping tomorrow morning for FIVE DAYS.

This is one of those brilliant plans I schemed up when I panicked that we had absolutely no plans for this Summer. And I saw that Mike's only empty long off was coming up this week. And I came up with the brilliant idea of camping up north and going to the Mall of America but then realized that Minnesota had closed all its State Parks due to the budget impasse and holy crap wherethehellarewegonnagocampingnow??? So I freaked out and signed us up for the only remaining campsite in Prairie du Chien. (That's in Wisconsin, for any stalkers who might be taking notes. Let the underwear sniffing commence.)

I'm freaking out because I'm not sure where I'm going to find 18 pairs of clean white socks for the kids, and because I like to add to the pandemonium, Mike is working nights and will be of no use to me.

I don't know if you remember last year's camping trip from hell and did I mention that I packed unpacked and set up the campsite entirely on my own? I get to relive that nonsense. At the very least, let's hope the weather is better this time around... no one wants to see a Part II.

(Is it any surprise that we're bringing TWO TENTS? We've learned our lesson.)

My dad is home alone right now, so I figured I'd drag him out to the fireworks in downtown tonight, but when I called him, he told me he was having some, um... personal health issues possibly involving some moldy cheese he'd eaten.

So now I have to make the decision: Do I brave the crowds with the girls? or do I crush their dreams of seeing fireworks and stay home to search out socks and swimsuits?

It's a tough one.

Happy Fireworks Day!

I am The Punisher

2011-07-02T13:56:00.006-05:00

As you may have figured, I've been busy trying to find my zen place the last couple days.

My kids were grounded for a whole hour. I didn't even tell them, but I said I swear to God in my head at least a dozen times yesterday, vowing to punish them to within an inch of their lives for... well, everything they've ever done.

I was so stressed out that I fell asleep last night at 6:30AM this morning.

Which is kind of funny since I can't say I've been dreading sleep. In fact, I've been having the most obscene sex dreams about ex-boyfriends whom I hardly even dated (and certainly never slept with, if that's what you're thinking). I'm guessing it has something to do with me watching the trainwreck of The Bachelorette and one of the guys looks like him.

When I told Mike, he said: I've been having weird dreams, too. Last night I dreamed that I dropped Kermit the Frog off at some hot young chick's house, and it was a Chris Hansen sting operation. He even brought the Mike's Hard Lemonades.

I think I laughed for a solid five minutes.

So there were some bright spots this week.

Like finding three apples between my two apple trees.

And getting three more sections of fence stained. Huzzah! I think that fulfills my quota for the year.

Yes, it is DARK in these pictures. I stained until the very last possible moment. Until the mosquitoes and spiders had me so creeped out I couldn't take it anymore.

I was determined to get something accomplished. I actually spoke these words aloud to my children: Do not talk to me until I talk to you. Unless you're bleeding. Then you can talk to me. Otherwise, I want 10 MINUTES without interruption.

Forget insects, the real pests are offspring.

They played on the swingset and I heard Emma shout out: I see a shooting star! What should I wish for?

To which I responded: How 'bout a nanny.

Halfway through staining, the girls decided they were going to fly a kite. Only they didn't know how to put it together. And they made sure to "read" the instructions right next to me, talking about how much they love flying kites. Guilt trip, anyone? I guess the Catholic runs deep.

I listened to two minutes of it until I caved in. We had fun for a while.... until Emma decided to stomp on the kite as it swooped low, and Kristin let go of the string to watch it take off over the garage and get caught permanently on the roof. Because no good deed goes unpunished.

It wouldn't have been a big deal, but I pushed through the 100-115° heat index all day, finishing the driveway edging and staining, and the girls were all I'm thirsty and I'm hungry. Every. two. minutes.

And I don't think they're growing taller, and they're NOT growing fatter, so I don't know why they're hungry all the time. Yesterday morning, I made them egg/bacon/cheese sandwiches and decided to fry up the rest of the package of bacon. An entire PACKAGE.

I figured Mike would want some for sandwiches or snacking. No more than 10 minutes later, I heard giggling and the words: bacon napkin. By the time I made it back to the kitchen, it was too late. The girls had run off with the entire plate of bacon and engorged themselves on it.

(I gave my first spankings in months, and I definitely think it was worth it. No one gets more than their share of bacon in this house. NO ONE.)

It was quite gratifying later that day to watch Mike hose down the children with cold water.

Yes, I realize they were having fun, but I can always pretend their screams weren't of delight but of pure terror.

Bacon-stealing baby-squealing terror.

What makes this week EXTRA special is that Mike told the girls NO MORE MOVIES until their room is clean. Newsflash to Mike: Their room has NEVER been cleaned solely by them. I've been cleaning it for the last 6 years. I've just STOPPED cleaning it since school ended. Because I have no will power left.

So this is really a punishment for ME.

I'm playing a new game with the girls to try to derail this out-of-control mess in their room. I call it: Five Minutes and then Nose to the Wall.
I'm betting you can guess the rules.

I tell them which part of their room to clean, and five minutes later when they haven't done a single thing, I have them step out into the hallway and put their hands and noses to the wall for two minutes.

Then I give them another "opportunity" to clean. It usually gets finished the second go-around, and my blood pressure doesn't feel quite as high.

Yesterday, their first task was to empty their room of toys into garbage bags.

POW. The Punisher strikes again.

Is there any question why they keep asking to move in with my parents? The people who give my children grape pop and popcorn after every meal?

And yes, I've already asked and my parents said no.

Part I

2011-07-01T15:09:00.003-05:00

Let's all thank the Lord that I don't own dogs. If I did, my children would be spending the remainder of their week in kennels.

That is all. More to come after I figure out how to duct tape the kids' door shut.

Titillating Tuesday: It's a trap!

2011-06-28T16:15:00.002-05:00

As Mike logged his third consecutive hour carousing the internet last night, looking for guns and chef's coats (which, I might add, he is now claiming he should have followed through on purchasing), I realized a horrible truth: I would soon be fighting him for computer time in order to do my homework.

Oh, the terror!

I devised a system in my head in my typical OCD fashion, mostly involving a stoplight system according to how urgently I needed to kick him off.

He must've been feeling a telepathic twinge in his brain because he immediately asked how much money we had.

Go buy a laptop tomorrow. You need it for school.

Do I need it for school? or did you realize that your computer time would be drastically reduced and you're now panicking?

No matter the reasoning behind his sudden turnaround on buying non-gun things, I'm feeling like this is a trap.

And scheming up my next move.

---

On top of all the computer speculation, I talked Mike into buying some blocks for edging out my gardens. Actually, I didn't do much asking. I hijacked my dad's truck and ran off to Menard's for block, and Mike decided to come along for the ride and criticize my life choices (aka: having too many projects) the entire way.

You see, everywhere I went the past two months, it seems as though I was always coming home with free or nearly free flowers.

Work for Stephie? Free flowers.

Sit at the greenhouse and drink with Stephie? Cheap flowers with a side of free flowers.

And two nights ago, we visited my parents after their return from a long camping trip at the Lake of the Ozarks. A couple hours in, Mom turned to me suddenly, Do you need some flowers? I've got some flowers, but we've got to sneak them out the back of the garage!

She explained that the neighbor had given her some extra irises and Mom didn't realize until later that she already had them in her gardens. And Mom apparently has some kind of bizarro Flower World kind of Affirmative Action going on when it comes to plant percentages.

I hummed the Mission Impossible theme song as Mike, Mom and I tip-toed around the back of her garage, through another neighbor's lawn and bushes, and into the back of our Suburban with a couple boxes of what looks like tall grass.

People probably think we're nutjobs already, so I can only imagine what they thought of us "stealing off" with a box of grass.

Mike pointed out: I think we already grow this stuff in our lawn. I chopped it down with the lawn mower two days ago.

Touche'.

So the moral of this story is that I have a shitload of flowers. I didn't want them to die, which is why I've moved onto this Summer's project #482: Build gardens.

---

When Mike and I got to Menard's, I noticed something amazing! The block was 15c off! (Amazing, right? Well, amazing when you have to buy 400 of them...)

I started thinking...

and thinking...

and thinking...

I'd always wanted to run brick along the edge of our driveway, ever since I saw every single fancy house had it. And no one in our neighborhood did. (I like being different. Can you tell? I bet I'm the only 30-year-old you know with chin acne...)

Anyway, we filled up my dad's truck with mulch and block and headed home.

I immediately regretted not getting more block.

On comes Summer project #483: Edge the driveway.

---

I called Menard's the next day, and - even with my sister rooting against me - they agreed to give me the sale price even though it had expired.

Haha, SUCK IT.

We drove back and filled up with $100 more in block with great aspirations of having a beautiful driveway.

Two days later, we have THIS:

A half-finished garden and a quarter-finished driveway edge.

My favorite moment of the week was when the elderly gentleman drove past me, huffing and puffing and stomping on the shovel. He said, Hittin' rock there? This was the empty lot they used to dump the rock and dirt on during construction.

Seriously??? OHMYGODKILL.

We have every manner of sharp-edged tool on our driveway so we can have various methods of hackage to mix things up. Hammers. Ice-picks. Trowels. Shovels. Post hole diggers.

Summer project #484: Get a foot massage.

---

As I was sweating and no doubt sporting some lovely pimplage on my dirty brow, a lovely young girl from Estonia (Google it) ran up in a pair of short shorts and Russian-esque accent.

She was selling Southwestern books. I told her four times I was NOT interested, but was nice and chatted with her for a minute so I could get a break from kneeling on gravel.

As she ran away, I told Mike, That's your dream job, isn't it? Running from door to door in your short shorts, talking to housewives? I'm thinking you could make a career of it.

He's planning on growing his hair out until Christmas now, so I'm thinking he could pass for a really, really ugly German woman. And before any of you Germans protest, I AM that really hairy, ugly German woman.

---

Happy Tuesday, everyone! It's back to work for me...

I have seen the future... we're gonna burn

2011-06-27T13:57:00.004-05:00

I looked at the radar last night and saw - what appeared to be - the end of the world.

Then I remembered that Michele Bachmann was announcing her bid for the presidency today in Waterloo, Iowa.

Which explains a lot.

Hell, even in her opening prayer in the Legislature, she's convinced the End Times are upon us...

Lord, the day is at hand. We are in the last days.... We know that the times are in Your hands... The blossom on the fig tree is opening, the day is at hand, Lord, when Your return will come nigh. Nothing is more important than bringing more sheep into the fold... Lord, this is all about replacement. You tell us in Your Word to go and make disciples... I thank You, oh God, that You are literally, right now, by faith, You are lighting a fire, a fire of the Gospel, that would sweep this city, that even moreso, that it would sweep Minnesota, and that Minnesota would just become [whispering] a burning incense, a sweet-smelling incense of praise and sacrifice, into Your kingdom.

If there's anything we need more of, it's uber-Christian, loud-mouthed women in politics. When did it become popular or normal to wear your crazy on your sleeve? Remember back in the day when old conservative men would say something racist and we'd all be "They're just senile... bless his heart," but now they've got tits and hair stylists so it's okay to systematically discriminate against people who aren't straight white Christians, not only in personal lives but legally?

I have two words: Go, Mitt!

Anyway.

Steph's Farmer's Market went fairly well this past weekend. I sold one set of jewelry and spent most of my time trying to pronounce kohlrabi. That's a real thing. And people evidently love them.

Steph had so much lettuce, we were giving them away as parting gifts. Oh, you bought 5 tomatoes and some kohlrabi? Here's your free head of lettuce.

The little old ladies liked the jewelry, but weren't as amused (as I was) at my magnets.

It was fun. I added yet another layer to my sunburn, and my children are just now starting to turn chocolate brown. Thank Jeebus they got Mike's skin.

Since everyone's thinking about sunburns and sun protection, I thought I'd post this picture I found from an Australian research group.

It shows the extra skin cancer cases that are projected over the next 50 years due to the increased UV radiation caused by - you guessed it - the depleted ozone. Radiation. The sun isn't just sending heat... it's radiation. You think global warming is a myth? That's fine. Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your complimentary melanoma.

And on a final note:

For people who say that the Japanese nuclear crisis could never happen here? I live in very close proximity to an active nuclear power plant. There very well could be a day the sirens would go off and I would have to throw my kids in the car and never come back to my home. Don't believe me: ask the people in two Nebraska towns how confident they are about their power plants' abilities to avoid a more severe flood in the future.

Mother Nature is more powerful than we are. Just a thought!

(You never heard of a broken windmill forcing a regional low-level emergency... or worse.)

Best laid plans

2011-06-23T15:29:00.002-05:00

I could kill someone, specifically the quality control personnel at Swingset Manufacturers of China.

Just before dusk, I finished dragging the bloody corpse of a swingset into its 2-foot-deep grave. Once reasonably level and stable - me, not the swingset - I climbed on a ladder and plopped each of the chains onto the hinges.

Plink!

Plink, plink!

Plink!

Five down, last one...

ERK!!!

ERRRRRRRKKKKKK....

It refused to drop in. Upon further investigation, the gap is about .5mm too narrow, and no amount of swearing, debating or plier-pulling was going to convince it to be otherwise.

The girls cared not.

They took turns last night, out in the mist, swinging and pushing. Pushing and swinging.

I couldn't get them to stop long enough to fill in the mud holes.

This morning, I threw cereal at them and watched Emma's monkey face as she realized the swingset was REAL. It wasn't just a hallucination after all! All three kids flocked outside where they spent the next hour in the spritzing rain.

MY children. The kids who are so deathly afraid of thunderstorms that I catch them watching the rain approach on the radar channel. They were outside in the RAIN.

It was almost too good to be true. I reached my arm outside to snap this picture:

(Notice the swing to the right not being used? I have the link wedged so fucking hard in there, it's gonna take a sumo wrestler sitting in the swing to pop it out. Nonetheless, I told the girls if they sat in it before I fixed it, they're going to lose swingset privileges. Which should tell you how desperate my kids are for a swingset of their own since they never listen to me.)

Now I have to decide how much I care if they have a play-pirate-ship on the east end. Which is not that much at the present moment. Maybe it's because I'm still pissed off at that link...

Also going well? My gardens.

In the realm of everything you really don't give a donkey's rear about: I have leafy lettuce ready to harvest. I noticed only after one of my very-much-not-a-head-lettuce plants bolted and I was all What the eff is going on with this lettuce that it's bolting, why haven't any of them started to form heads ohmygod I'm a moron.

(Almost that quickly.)

I chopped the sucker down and fed the girls and myself a 10PM salad "snack." This means I have about 18 lettuce plants ready or almost ready for harvest.

Salads, anyone?

I didn't think I'd be QUITE this excited to have my own garden, but as I rinsed the dirt off some head lettuce today, I realized we aren't eating chemicals. We're eating something that I planted and watched grow, leaf by leaf.

It's a weird feeling. I'm really not all that granola-y. I don't typically buy organic (I'm not anti-organic... I'm just too lazy to hunt through the products). I've rinsed off the store food and wondered if I'm rinsing it or scrubbing it hard enough to remove all the shit - sometimes literally shit - and what it's doing to our bodies. Not that I felt I had any real choice in the matter.

Now I do.

And it's making me feel like a gardening superhero.

In fact, I'm channeling some Veronica Corningstone today: Power... Powerrrrr...

We noticed our first Roma and Better Boy tomatoes sprouting fruit last night, and this morning I saw an itty bitty, teeny weeny bell pepper growing.

The excitement in our house is almost palpable.

Because I never know what day it is

2011-06-22T11:49:00.006-05:00

Hey, guess what! Yesterday was Titillating Tuesday. I thought it was Thursday until the neighbor informed me otherwise. Yay for unemployment!

---

I called my sister from the road at about 1:00 yesterday. We're on our way home from Menard's with the swingset materials. I'm hoping we can finish it up tonight and get back to my other projects.

Yeah right, you won't get it done tonight.

Wanna bet?

Sure. But I expect photo evidence.

What do I get if I win?

Sushi.

You're on.

By the way, I - unlike Mike - see nothing unsafe about having 14 feet of lumber running through the center of the Suburban while traveling 75 mph. If anything, we've become one giant ramrod.

Emma: Why does it stink in here now?

It's the cancer-causing chemicals in the wood, honey. Don't worry, though. It's in there so our swingset doesn't dry out or rot. Enjoy the smell!

Mike rolled up (in his now-fixed car... it was supposedly a "burp" in the radiator line) about 7:00. I had the A-frames completely finished and was working on manhandling one of them perpendicular to the top boards. That seems really late, but I spent an hour looking for EITHER ONE of my two measuring tapes. The kids run off with them all the time, which is why you'll hear me hollering at them if I hear How tall is my bike? How long is my shoe?

I did find my kids' Scholastic book marks with built-in rulers, but I refused to mark my project up, 8-inch increments at a time.

It's feast or famine around here for help, and holy crap, last night I was running out of jobs for people.

Mike held the frames upright while I worked. I borrowed a 3/8" drill bit from the neighbors just up the street (two times on the blog in one week, Natalie... you're movin' on up!) because out of my ENTIRE KIT, it was the only one I needed and the only one missing. What kind of crappy operation am I running here???

Then neighbors started converging on the site like it was a fatal car crash.

Another neighbor grabbed his wrenches and pitched in.

Yet another climbed up to try to attach the chains (the frame is sitting 10' off the ground currently).

All trying to finish up before THIS rolled through:

Ominous, yes?

Maybe they could tell how desperate we are for outdoor entertainment for the children.

OR they overheard something about winning free sushi.

OR they overheard me saying that we should forget sinking it 2' in the ground and leave it tall enough in case the adults get drunk and decide to swing. In a literal sense.

After all that work, we still couldn't attach the swings. It didn't stop Alison from being the first child to injure herself on it by running full-out into the frame, hitting her head and her collar bone.

I'm rethinking this whole endeavor...

Anyway, I sent this picture to my sister:

She can't tell that it's not this:

...and instead is a swingless skeleton.

I'm wondering if she wins by technicality because we're missing the clasps to attach the chains?

Todays' task: sinking that sonofabitch 2 feet deep and wrestling it to its final resting place.

One last note: Late this morning, I sat down and futzed around with a few ideas for that extra end piece. The kids love pirates...

I've got a bunch of extra lumber lying around my garage.

I'm going to pick whichever child is annoying me the most and make her test it out. I'll let you know how it goes.

It could be worse

2011-06-21T00:38:00.002-05:00

After the "raccoon incident," which I'm certain Mike will argue is not technically a car accident but more of a furry speedbump, we took our car to the shop.

Specifically Quality Auto in Marion.

This was a week ago Sunday.

We waited. I called. They put me on hold. A lot. They promised to call back. They did... the next day. I waited some more. They had no idea what kind of timeline we were looking at. They didn't know if the car was finished.

They finally put me on hold for the last time this morning to fetch someone who might know anything about Mike's car. It's kind of convenient to be able to drive your car to work, after all.

It's just being washed up now and should be ready at noon.

Fantastic! Phew. Mike picked it up and put me on speakerphone while we chatted about the pizza he'd just collected.

Then he got silent.

A bad silence.

His car had overheated and quit running. He limped it into Target's parking lot, and I threw on some jeans and packed my grubby-looking children into our Suburban. We shopped for groceries and I told Mike: It could be worse. You could've been on the Interstate.

As we left, he checked the coolant and noticed it had dropped considerably.

He put aside his feelings of frustration and drove out of the parking lot, down the block...

and back into the parking lot.

The godforsaken thing had started overheating AGAIN.

I told him: It could be worse. We could've gotten it all the way home before realizing it wasn't fixed right. At least now it's still in town, and maybe I can convince them to reimburse you some gas money for your trouble.

We went home, tired from the stress (and tired from the 4 hours of sleep I'd gotten last night).

I couldn't wait to put all the days' events behind me and deal with it in the morning. I really believe it could've been much worse than paying our $100 deductible for a new bumper, radiator, condenser... etc. It could've been worse.

I readied myself for bed around midnight tonight and noticed....

It just got worse.
Guess who'll be sleeping on the couch in full-out clothes in case a mad dash to the basement with children tucked in a football hold is required in the next one to two hours?
It could be worse.
I could be with my parents in their camper in the midst of storm warnings in Missouri.

The mess

2011-06-20T11:45:00.003-05:00

I'm always in awe when I walk into a person's home and it's organized. Especially when they have children. And when the visit comes unannounced.

I'd like to do a TV show involving me and a camera crew showing up at people's doorsteps with a wad of cash if they'd only show us what their house looks like at its worst. Like Hoarders but not as depressing and where the people would more than gladly pitch their junk if they could only find the time in between wiping asses and unclamping teeth from their ankles.

While my house isn't always messy, there are things about my home that make me cringe.

Usually involving the old standby of our toxic couch - a piece of furniture that has been disinfected with piss more times than a urinal cake, yet we for whatever reason haven't replaced.

(And people wonder why we don't host parties.)

I'd cover it with plastic, but we like to live dangerously. It's been a while since the last fecal contamination, and I figure the half life of shit has to be, what? 10 years? Definitely longer when covered in saran wrap.

Then there's the girls' toilet that I don't bother scrubbing anymore. I squirt the blue Clorox goo in it three times over the course of a day and let the chemicals eat away the disease.

And their bedroom. The place from which the mystery smell eminates, no matter how many times I steam clean the floor. I'm convinced they're hiding dairy products somewhere... the heating vents, perhaps?

Yes, their room - the place that I ask them to clean lest I put their tooth pillows out in the evening (and we all know that the Tooth Fairy bites ankles of naughty children with dirty rooms, and yes, I'm saving for therapy).

And I try, oh I try so hard.

Yesterday was a prime example. The house was gloriously clean for the first hour. Then the kids hit it like a fucking freight train filled with markers and dry cereal hits a cement wall...

Oh, there are things I love about the messes.

Like stickers.

A small, silver heart sticker glitters up at me from the oak kitchen floor. It's a reminder of the times the girls would strip nearly naked and paint and sticker the bejeezus out of giant sheets of paper.

Or Lego creations that I find hidden away, tucked into bookshelves and in the middle of the hallway where one might walk to the bathroom at 3AM in the dark.

They're resourceful in exacting revenge.

So it never dawned on me to investigate into what was holding Emma's newest pumpkin artwork to the hallway wall.

I figured they'd found some tape.

And I was all, Whatever I don't care because it gave me an hour when I didn't have to answer the questions: Are we gonna have a tornado today? and I'm hungry, which isn't really a question but a demand, yet it requires putting immediately down whatever object I'm relieving of day-old pizza sauce with my fingernail in order to fetch food that I'll find encrusted to the floor or furniture the next morning and thus we have the Circle of Life.

Then Emma came up to me, proudly using her Vanna Hands to show me her gallery du jour.

She exclaimed: I licked it to the wall!

Of course you did, honey.

Of course you did.

Date night and the garden exchange

2011-06-19T17:00:00.004-05:00

This past week, the girls and I drove to Stephie's shop to cover it for a few hours while she took Elliott to the doctor. The doc said he's having what are called 'partial seizures.' (He goes in on Thursday for an EEG... hopefully we'll know more very soon.)

My sister has since kissed my arse and bought me flowers and taken my children overnight. I haven't been courted this intensely since... well, never.

In case you're curious, Mike and I spent our Date Night at Zeppelin's where I had the most delicious Beef Foie Gras on top of mushrooms and asparagus with a side of parmesan potatoes. Ohmygodyum.

The food is delicious and the atmosphere is very museum-underground-tavernesque.

Plus when the "boss" took my drink order and got it wrong, he brought me a second beer even though I told them it was fine and I would choke down a Bud Light. Maybe not in those words.

Mike agreed they were trying to get me drunk.

Especially since we'd just come from a graduation party for our neighbor's son and I'd tied a few on.

Which might be why I found this funny on the walk home:

It reads: Get off the phone and drive.

And the car parked behind it:

Scrape!

Maybe it was just funny to me...

Anyway, the rest of our date night was spent at Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, my father-in-law's house to feed his cats, and then to MY parents' house to crash and watch Hall Pass. Funny but not a real feel-good movie if you're living in the world of Everyone I Know Is Getting Divorced This Year.

We're the lamest 30-year-olds EVER.

Just to prove it: I was more excited that my radishes were ready to harvest than I was to have a Date Night.

So excited that I immediately ran some over to the neighbors' house to share in my radishy wealth.

They, in turn, gave me a heaping handful of rhubarb. YUMMY!

I'm thinking we should work out some kind of crop rotation between the three of us neighbors who are gardening and have a garden exchange. We could mix it in with that game night we'd been talking about reviving. I'll see your garlic and raise you a head of lettuce.

We could knock out grocery shopping and Date Night in one shot.

The next phase

2011-06-16T11:55:00.006-05:00

Things around here are pretty fantastic, as always.

My beans and peas and corn and other late-seeded veggies are poking through the ground...

and my main garden is full and growing "fuller" every day.

Holy cabbages.

My shelves are done in the garage, and my gardens are in.

So of course that means it's time to add a new project.

I spent the last two days - hence the lack of blogging - working on my Fall schedule. I'm going to finish my Bachelors Degree in PoliComm and Psych Minor. I only have 32 credit hours left. I can say "only" now because I've decided that I'm graduating this next Spring even if I had FIFTY GAZILLION hours. I'll be the first in my family to get a Bachelors, so this is important to me. Important enough to go back on a Caffeine Only diet if need be.

(For those who are unfamiliar, 12 credit hours is full time. Usually 3-4 classes.)

I'm currently signed up for 16 credit hours for Fall and aiming for 3-6 more as Independent Study.

I can hear your doubts.

I am READY for this part of my life to be over. I enjoy going to school, but I hate hate hate driving 45 minutes each way and HATE juggling my children and housework and schoolwork.

Because I'd prefer not to spend every moment with them cleaning, but they do not cooperate when it comes to limiting their damage. Even when they're not rubbing mud on my walls or plugging my toilets or stashing dairy products under the furniture, they're constantly moving stuff around. Or creating hazards. Every time I open the dishwasher, an alphabet soup of letters clatters to the floor.

They hide my stuff from me.They reorganize and redecorate.

It's a miracle if I can find stuff, let alone put it back where it belongs so I can start to clean.

I call it Square One.

I haven't seen Square One in months.

After getting the house at least in the vicinity of Square One, I reach the phase of my cleaning called: I Stopped Giving a Shart Two Chores Ago.

I shiver at the thought of what my house might look like in August.

In fact, I'm considering asking for slightly more in Student Loans to hire a maid for the duration.

In other late-breaking news, my father-in-law is getting married in two months to a lovely woman he met at the end of last year. Proof that lightning can strike at any time. Mazel tov!

I would like to take this opportunity to tell my sister that he's 60 this year, so it should give her hope that she won't always be a cat lady. Even though she tells me she prefers the cats...

Mike will also have a new 15-year-old step-sister.

Whom I've never met, but I'm sure she's lovely as well.

My new goal? Graduate before my step-sister-in-law-to-be.

---

My sister called me this morning saying she's pretty sure Elliott's been having seizures again. They go in to see his ped (also our girls'... he's a neonatalogist and FANTASTIC) this afternoon. Keep them in your thoughts, if you could.

Titillating Tuesday: Tantrums and lies

2011-06-14T12:22:00.003-05:00

Happy Tuesday!

---

I was having myself a little think this morning...

Remember back to the days when candidates for the presidency were virtual unknowns outside of their constituencies? And we got to learn about their political theories and records over time and debate?

And now you aren't a candidate for public office unless you're a quasi-celebrity?

Goes to show how shallow WE, THE PEOPLE are. For Christssake, the biggest "political development" the last couple months has been Wiener's erection.

Weiner.

Weiner's Weiner.

I need to take my blood pressure. My neck veins are about to POP and my anxiety is only going to grow over the next 17 months.

---

In other news, my kids are great at restaurants.

We sat at Olive Garden yesterday while Mike went on a bike ride around Cedar Rapids. The girls - though freezing to death under the Arctic Ice-Blowing AC unit - sat still and colored quietly. Then they ate their calamari and pasta and thanked the lady next to us when she handed them her mints.

I even took Alison to the bathroom, leaving two alone at the table, then later sent the last two to the bathroom while holding hands.

Can you believe it?

So why, when we get in the car, does all hell break loose?!? Every single time?!?

I've brought the car to a stop in the middle of a road and threatened to pull the offenders out for a very public timeout. That was the only thing that has worked so far, by the way. For whatever reason, they're deathly afraid of having people SEE them misbehaving. Or they're afraid I'll drive off. Not undeservedly.

Hitting.

Kicking.

Leaning. Because making physical contact with a sibling is enough to send everyone into a tizzy.

Singing.

Looking. Because LOOKING at a sibling is enough to send everyone into a tizzy.

Whining about where we're going.

Whining about where we're NOT going.

Crying that they miss Daddy. I miss Daddy, too. If Daddy was there, I'd be giving him the Don't Follow Me Where I'm Headed look and run off into the sunset.

Seeing a squirrel when someone else did NOT see the squirrel.

Sitting in the wrong seat.

Playing with the extra seatbelt.

Telling someone they smell like a Dirty Underpants Face.

I have never heard so many reasons to bring on fighting in my life.

---

I have to get going. Lots to do outside before the rain that I assume is coming.

Not because I've checked the radar, but if patterns hold steady, we should be getting a torrential downpour at some point.

N is for Nuts in your Nostrils

2011-06-13T09:56:00.002-05:00

We have big plans for the day, which of course means this beautiful sun is going to be interrupted in the afternoon by thunderstorms.

Mike wants me to drop him off in Cedar Rapids so he can bike all the way back home. I sure hope he can pedal fast...

I'm hoping the storms break up because I'm building the girls their swingset today.

I'm more excited about it than they are.

Yippee!!!! Mommy's gonna get some time away from you lovely children whom I love so much all I could think about last night was what I'm going to do while you're outside swinging for hours and hours and hours.

So I don't have much time to chit chat.

And if you pray, pray that this storm magically averts my town.

I'll leave you with these visuals of my sister at the crawfish boil yesterday:

Because if you learn anything from MY family, it's that: food with arms must be played with. (My mother can never pass up the opportunity to dance with cornish hens.)

And: if it can fit in your nostril, it should definitely go there.
My children are growing up to think this kind of behavior is normal.

God bless us, every one!

Working in circles

2011-06-12T02:29:00.004-05:00

Did I imagine all of April and May because I thought the rainy portion of this year had passed us by?

For the record, I hate being one of those people who bitch about the crappy weather, but c'mon. THIS:

is the best day we've had all week. Everything else has been Hotter than Satan's Ass Crack - and just as gritty - or Tornado.

But at least our beans and peas are poking their little heads through the dirt!

Okay, I feel better now.

Today, the sun peeked out in the latter half, so I threw the girls outside with threats of me locking them out of the house if they kept letting the cat loose.

(I should note that I also hate being that person who lists all of their daily tasks as a blog post, so let's get that out of the way now so my brain can think.)

Hung the leftover insulation, cut the shelves, put shelves in place, filled more storage bins, cleaned up the garage, and retrieved the cat a half dozen times since the children never ever EVER listen to me. Phew.

This is where I'm at.

You could say it's getting there... slowly. (And can anyone help me with this little problem? The corner spaces aren't 16"OC but more like 9. Is there a trick to putting pre-faced insulation in without doing a hack job on it?)

Mike drove up a bit earlier than expected today and he watched me "at work." He finally stepped in when it looked like I'd lost my sense of direction.

You've been moving around a whole lot the last 15 minutes but haven't done anything. Like, you're REALLY moving around.

I wish I could say that pissed me off and we fought, but I laughed because it was true - I'm literally one of those people who becomes broken when I have too many tasks to complete. I am Spanish Buzz Lightyear. Except I default to going through the motions. Usually that means walking in circles. It's my take from that famous When Harry Met Sally line: Do SOMETHING that resembles ANYTHING!
Anyway, I think my brain is broken after trying to navigate UNI's Course Catalog.

I'm going back to school for what I can only hope is my final year - pray to Jesus and Buddha - this fall.

And if you want the perfect example of what is wrong in bureacracies (and I should mention that I'm a fan of a functional government, not the LACK of one), look at this school's catalog.

On Degree Requirements, courses are listed as such: 100:345. Department:Class#. It works.

But on the Class Schedule, the same class is listed like THIS: COMM PC 5345.

This requires another book to figure out which classes belong to which codes.

Then you have to figure out which single class to take because 95% of the classes this semester are from 10-11AM, MWF. And unless I can clone myself before August, I doubt they'll let me enroll for all of them and only show up once a week.

Total mindf*ck.

Also on my mind:

I'm in total panic that my dryer is going to burst into flames because I'm a paranoid freak whose dryer exhaust hose has started drooping into curly-cues conveniently the same week that I read an article about the danger of dryer lint.

I'm trying to coordinate dropping off Mike's car to get fixed. He nailed a raccoon doing 75 on the interstate and screwed up his radiator and condenser along with his bumper. I have learned that hitting a raccoon is not considered a collision, thus leaving us with only a $100 deductible. I'd dare the insurance company to ask the raccoon if he felt it was a collision...

I feel the summer slowly slipping away from us and we have no camping vacations planned. Yet again.

Where is Alison's damned Leapster so they can stop fighting over them?

My lawn needs to be mowed and I'm wondering if I missed my only rain-free opportunity today when I jerked off with insulation* in the garage instead of baling the hay-grass.

I fed my kids TWO processed meals today. TWO. I'm going to hippie hell.

And on.

It might explain why it's 3AM and I'm still awake, watching The Bachelorette online instead of sleeping.

(By the way, whothefuck does that Bentley guy think he is and why do I totally want to see JP naked?)

So yeah.

Maybe I should go back to pacing my house in circles. At least I looked busy...

*itchy!

People without children, AKA: Politeness*

2011-06-11T10:56:00.006-05:00

Regardless of how this post might be taken by people trying to conceive, this was NOT meant to bash my children or gloss over the fact that I love them and realize every day how lucky we are to have them.

That said...

Every. single. bloody. day I have revelations about the odd predicaments Mike and I get in because we have small people in our house.

Here we go.

People without children:

might wonder Where did that stain come from? on their favorite blouse, carpet, wall... But I never do. I know where it came from.

might actually own a blouse. That still fits. And isn't just a hopeful reminder of how agreeable your boobs used to be.

might plant a garden to eat food. Not me. I plant a garden so I have a place to send my children when they ask Can I have a SNACK? the 1000th time that day.

enroll in college to get an education or get a promotion. I enroll in college so I have an excuse to lock myself away in a quiet room while ~~napping~~ ~~perusing Failbook~~ doing "homework."

never have to wonder: What's getting destroyed in the house right now? as they mow their lawn.

rarely have to keep tabs on where bathrooms are at all times. Unless you're 80. Or have eaten questionable burritos in the last 12 hours.

probably haven't imagined yelling Will everyone just shut the f*** up and pay attention! while playing a board game.

can poop in peace.

don't keep a stockpile of ear plugs, Advil and alcohol as "emergency supplies."

have never turned to your spouse and said: That one's yours.

don't set bowls of dry cereal out the night before and pre-set the TV to the cartoon channel so they can sleep in until 8 on the weekends.

have never told someone that blood is just paint and to nevermind that movie why aren't you playing in your room?

have never analyzed why Caillou doesn't have hair or why Max & Ruby don't have parents.

don't spend 20 minutes before making supper convincing people that they might like eggplant if they'd just TRY it.

rarely find turd submarines in their toilets, and certainly not several times a day.

don't flip out at the sound of water running for more than 20 seconds.

might ask: Who's Sandra Boynton?

think Leapsters and other handheld games are contributing to the demise of society.

never sort their laundry according to which items most likely have fecal residue on them.

have never had a conversation to reassure someone that they're not bleeding to death, and that tampons are just like "toilet paper for mommies" now get out of the bathroom!

don't have to share their popcorn lest someone cries.

can have a phone conversation without locking yourself in a bathroom/bedroom/basement.

can make it through the grocery store without having a dozen conversations with strangers about your plans to have/not have more children and how they feel about the issue. Okay, that one might be just for multiples.

- speaking of sex - will never have that horrifying moment after Nighttime Activities when you open the door to see two silent silhouettes of blanket-covered children, posting guard just outside your door because they're afraid of "funderstorms."

won't giggle the accompanying conversation with your spouse: "I wonder how long they were standing there." "At least they were polite enough to wait."

People without BLOGS have also never had their spouse say after such an incident: Politeness, the topic of today's blog post...

And since he *named the post, I'm taking that as permission.

We're not in freakin' Kansas

2011-06-08T22:33:00.002-05:00

I wonder why my kids are afraid of everything.

See those flags and lines in the yard? They tell me where the utilities are buried. They're so Mommy doesn't get e lec tro cu ted. Okay? So don't move the flags or Mommy will die.

I promise to start a therapy trust fund as soon as possible.

I had had bright bright hopes of going to Menard's to buy lumber and brackets to build the girls a swingset that they most desperately need.

Because if Mommy doesn't get that sonofabitchingodawful thing built to give the kids a reason to go outside, they'll be on me like glue all summer.

Here's Kristin from Tuesday's trip to the Aquatic Center. She spent 40 minutes in the pool and about 15 minutes with Mommy on the loungers before she realized I wasn't going to entertain her.

She's just happy as can be.

So when I discovered that they would end my life if it meant they could play on a swingset - a recent development - I went all HELLS YEAH and started shopping around for a really cool playhouse-slash-slide-slash-swing contraption.

Until I saw the dollar signs. $1800 for some of them at the cheapest.

Eff that stuff.

I'm building them a 3-seater swingset with braun and sweat, and it surely won't cost me any $1800.

Mike told me to "buy a kit," not to build it.

I explained that the kit IS essentially what I'm buying. That the swingset doesn't magically appear on our lawn and set itself. I still have to build it.

All this work in the 90+ degree ACTUAL temps (I say ACTUAL because of the heat advisories with humidity... holy hell. Literally.) should help me lose a few poundage.
At the pool, I noticed that a lot of women were cuties, but most of them were wearing mumus and weird see-through tarps. I figured if they can show off their bulgy parts, I might just have to whip out "the girls" for public display.

She's hard to see, but there's one fine specimen on the far, far left side. And I totally give her props for puttin' herself out there.
I was outside again today in the blazing heat, playing in the garden, when Mike texted me from the golf course:

How you feel about taking the pork chops and kids to Delmar's

Of course I thought bitterly back to our recent Date Night - a once-in-a-~~lifetime~~-year happening - which turned into watching UFC fights at Delmar's house instead of our romantic night at home, but then I remembered that I probably had more fun with Delmar's wife than I would have with my husband passed out asleep on the couch.

Okay, sounds fun!

We ended up at another coworker's house instead, and they hijacked the neighbor's blow up waterslide. The kids had a blast.
Unfortunately, I forgot to change out of my gardening clothes, so I'm sure we all looked like a ragamuffin band once the kids were drenched, Mike was slightly drunk and sunburned, and I looked like a Proactiv "Before" picture.
I have three phone numbers from women who pounced on me at t-ball to get the kids together with them sometime, and several coworkers who I'd love to spend time with their wives, and neighbors and family and bears, oh my! Is this what life is like for people with older children? I want to do everything and nothing all at once.

At least we're starting to get more fun people in our lives. It's hard going from 0 to 3 kids in 60 seconds flat at age 24/23. So this is a nice change... GAINING a few friendships.

One of the couple's children - a 3-year-old boy - kept calling Mike Jesus because of his hair. I told Mike to be on his best behavior lest he scare the child religiously for the rest of his life.

We had fun, and stayed longer than we'd anticipated because the tornado sirens started up. We weren't too worried until we headed for our cars and saw the black, lowering clouds and hail.

Whoops.

That's about the time my sister frantically texted me to give her updates.
I sent her this photo collection.
SE:
NE:

I hope it helped.
We got home at 8-30-kinda-ish and the kids insisted on popcorn. I told them they could have popcorn before bed if they did FOUR math worksheets.
They did eight. Gladly.
These kids love learning software, learning worksheets, learning exercises...
Which makes me wonder... If my three kids can get through eight 1st grade worksheets in less than an hour, why does it take a class of 20 all day long to do just TWO Kindergarten worksheets?
Is it the class size and the lack of one-on-one attention?
Is it the inability to keep kids focused on the task at hand?
Because - going to a Catholic school - as a kid, I was scared that if I didn't do my homework or pay attention, I was going to hell.
I also thought I was going to hell for any one of the following: kissing a girl, being mean to my sister, wearing pants to church, getting the communion wafer stuck to the top of my mouth, not showering in gym class, or thinking about naughty bits. As well as failing to recognize a prepositional phrase.
So maybe we need to lower class sizes after all.
Or let God back in the classroom and scare the shit outta kids again.
I'm thinking some one-on-one attention would work for MY kids, but I'm not above using the latter. Maybe I can convince them Mike really IS Jesus.
Fear worked for the yard flags... I see endless possibilities in its application.

The punishment of the great outdoors

2011-06-08T13:41:00.003-05:00

I'm typing this blog post completely with my phone, simply because my children have hijacked the computer to play Wonder Pets. I apologize in advance for all the auto-corrections. Like when I say anal and my phone chooses the more normal analysis.
We went to the pool yesterday. Just curious for all my parent friends out there: do you find that your kids automatically attract the bullies? Alison wasn't having any.of that shit, but kristin was getting manhandled up the stairs to the water slide. Another mom came over and lit into him, and I thought, 'it's about time you chew your kid's ass for ramming into the other kids as they go down the slide.' Then I realized he WASN'T HER KID. And I was all 'why didn't *I* think of that?'
A lifeguard had several chats with him over the course of 3 minutes, but before he had to yank the kid from his precious slide for hitting kids with his goggles, his sister came over to fetch him.
On a more positive note, our girls had a blast. I'm glad it only cost the five of us $21 to get in because kristin was over the whole water thing after 40 minutes.
I was forcing her to go down slides.
As we left and the pool closed down, she and Emma decided they were having too much fun to leave.
And this is why I drink.
There were so many cute kids running around, I felt like I was in a Gymboree ad. (Regardless of Mr. goggle Ornery Pants on the slide, the majority of the kids were silly, normal, and completely free of the asshole gene.)I would like to note that auto-correct has learned that I use swear words enough not to try and replace them anymore.
I love that my children are Mike's kids. I didn't use an ounce of sunscreen on them and they're slightly tan today. If that had been me as a kid, I would have been red as a monkey's ass.
We've got s heat advisory today but I think we're going to head out for as long as these kids can stand it. I'm bribing them with s gigantic container of sidewalk chalk.
Emma still can't understand why we can't stay inside and do Artsy Craftsy time.
Is it any wonder that I'm.caving in and building them a swingset this week?

Titillating Tuesday: Pool Day!

2011-06-07T04:03:00.002-05:00

In a plot twist which is sure to reveal my lack of mental soundness, I have scheduled, nay insisted that we go to the pool today.

If you happen to be out on the town, look for the only adult to be fully clothed and wearing a Phantom-of-the-Opera-esque mask.

---

This is a special message to my neighbors:

You may have heard some children screaming this evening.

I can explain.

We're having a bit of a communication/separation issue in our home.

The kids feel the need to keep tabs on me - they think I'm going to run away (which tells me my kids are more in-tuned to my mental well being than I thought) - and I'm having a hard time communicating to them that I'm not leaving. Mostly because it's still illegal to leave them alone.

This means they come outside to check on my construction progress every 5 minutes.

Why not just let them go outside and play? you might ask. Great question.

I do. And then they run off to the neighbors' house to beg for snacks out of their pantry. Or they whine to me - as I've got sweat running down every orifice in the World's Least Sexy Way - that they need food, even if they've literally JUST EATEN. Because everything revolves around food.

Then they go in the house. And out of the house. And in. And out. And they run to tell me that so-and-so has let the cat out for the umpteenth time in the last 20 minutes. And I sigh and hunt down our not-outside cat who is just as obsessed with killing birds as the girls are with food.

So I had had a revelation tonight. I told them if they didn't stop letting the cat out, they'd have to go to their room while I worked.

Out I went to the garage. Out came the kids and the cat.

I followed through but told them I was locking their door shut. (Something I can't do, but I held it shut for about 15 seconds.)

Which would explain the screaming.

Alison had the most god aweful noise coming out of her in the moment it took to realize her door wouldn't open. Sobbing. WAILING. It doesn't even describe it. She pulled on the door for about 5 seconds, then through her screams I heard her say, Kuh-h-h-hri-ri-sssstin!!! I *ahhhh* have *ahhhhhh* an idea... and the sound of her blinds raising and her little fists banging on her window.

At that moment, all of the speeches I'd given them of what to do in a fire came crashing down.

Bang on the window.

Keep yelling and banging.

And if you have to get out, take a toy and smash it open.

I opened the door at the 15 second mark and held back my laughter at the thought of my daughter going from zero to insane in less than 2 seconds. I pulled her back from the window and hugged her sad little face.

I have no idea what happened to her, but she hates the idea of being left alone. Nothing happened, it's as if she just realized that people can die and leave forever, so she wants to keep tabs on me.

Desperately.

---

In case you're keeping score, it is 4 AM. (And a-thank-you for noticing.)

I had texted Mike after he left, asking what I would get if I had both the shelves built and the house clean.

His response: Something.

I told him he really knows how to set a low bar.

Regardless, I've decided to find out if he really is bringing something home for me.

Besides the obvious jokes of: a weiner in my ear or all the other things a 13-year-old boy might say. Because I married a husband who is perpetually 13. And likes to pretend his body parts can change size as if they were props on Alice In Wonderland.

I set my alarm for 2:30.

Obviously I just woke up.

Time to get cleaning!

---

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Face-melting fun

2011-06-05T13:07:00.007-05:00

The girls had the final t-ball game this past Saturday.

The opposing team decided that any kids who got "out" would have to leave the field - something that we hadn't done before.

Of course, this meant MY children saw first base and the dugout for most of the game.

After Emma nearly shed a few tears the first time she was escorted from 1st base, the girls still managed to have fun. They had a few good stops on the field and a couple of throws that stayed in the air for a full second.

(Nothing like Alison's 1st base play on Friday when she caught the ball... with her shirt. It went IN the armpit, AROUND her body, and was finally fished OUT the back by a fellow teammate.)

I noticed that the other team ALSO had a full bleacher section and then some. They cheered every player. They cheered every play.

Our team?

Not as much.

Apparently we have the team of parents who wanted to pay the $25 for 5 weekly 1-hour babysitting sessions and couldn't be bothered with cheering for anyone but their own kid.

So I wouldn't be "that annoying mom who cheers for everyone," I stood alone on the edge of the dugout so I could be "that annoying mom who thinks she's a coach."

Let's just say the word fuckers was being rammed into my brain-to-speech filters every few seconds in between cheering Go, Kale! Go, Ben! Go, Stinky Monkey!!! (That last one was for my child, of course.)

Just to see what would happen, I let my girls hit the ball and trot toward first base... to a resounding DEAD SILENCE from the crowd. Fuckers.

The girls loved t-ball so much that they want to move immediately into soccer.

Andamommy'ssphinctersays What???

I'm not ready for another sport. I'm seeing more and more of the benefits of staying home this summer. I'd much rather spend a week camping than an hour in the rain, discovering which kids have natural talent and which parents have way too much "enthusiasm" about their child's participation in sports.

To add to the fun of our thus-far Summer Vacation, my children spent an hour NOT making their bed yesterday, so I filled FIVE GARBAGE BAGS with the toys that littered their floor. JUST the ones on the floor.

They cried and cried, mostly Alison cried, over drumsticks and art projects going in the trash.

I had had enough.

As a bonus to making it through the week of t-ball games and room cleanings, my neighbor invited me with to watch her husband's death metal bands. I think that's what people still call it, but I'm not socially in-tuned enough to be sure.

They promised to melt my face off, which was an added incentive.

(I was sad to discover this morning that I still had my lumpy, swollen face intact.)

(Cami's, on the other hand, started suffering the effects immediately.)

It was a lot of fun and not nearly as loud as I expected.

I told my sister I'm either going to leave the bar GrrrrrANGRY and ready to beat someone's head in or extremely relaxed.

In the end, I felt refreshed and capable of dealing with my children again.

I was also happy to report that I was not the only person in attendance in desperate need of some Spanx and a facial.

And why did that sound dirty?

We listened to Cory's band Pullchain, then a band called Sorvara,

and finally Cory's second band Revive the Fallen.

They do a theme every week.

One week was Nerds.

Last week was Cowboys.

This week? 80s.

While the mullets and bandanas and torn jeans were hawt, the best moment was when Cory realized an extremely intoxicated older woman had drunkenly danced/wandered - once again - onto stage with the band. He began his death metal singing into her face.

Dear Jesus, please never let me be that person. I'll be anyone else, just not that person. Thank you.