Birds II and Birds III

We only thought our bird adventures were finished last month with the discovery (and subsequent removal of) a dead bird from our house-for-sale.

We were wrong.

About a week later, we got a phone call from our realtor, on a Friday evening. I got a little excited. I shouldn't have. She had just finished a showing of our house in which she and the show-ees found three more birds in our house. One was still alive.

So the nice couple helped to shoo the live bird out before resuming their tour. (They may have liked the house, but have a house of their own to sell and have not made us any offers. I'm not sure the presence of dead birds helped speed up the process.)

When my husband went to investigate and clean up (again), he found that the birds devised an alternate means of entry. The first one came in through the bathroom vent and pushed his way through the ceiling vent cover (it was hanging loose and the bathroom facilities had clearly been utilized by an avian visitor).

This time, the bathroom vent cover was intact. But they used the same outside vent entrance (my attempts at covering it had been pecked through and they had used some of the netting for a new nest). Instead of coming down the vent, they came through the side of the duct and into the unfinished side of our basement.

So that was fun. My husband did a much more extensive repair job than my attempt. He had to replace a section of vent tubing, and found a vent cover that should be more bird-proof than window screening. I had tried to buy a vent cover, but I couldn't fit a cover over the opening because of the deck ledger board. He used a Dremmel.

So far, so good. So on Thursday night, we were all in the car and kept hearing a funny chirping sound. When we got home, hubby checked his car, found his spare tire had been installed upside down, righted it, and thought all was good.

The car chirped again the next morning. You guessed it. Another bird. In the car.

You'd think these things would learn by now. We own cats. We barbeque chicken. We have power tools. When we talk about "nest eggs" in our house, we mean the financial type! (Or else scrambled).

Sheesh.

Open House

We had our first open house last weekend and the turnout was...less than spectacular. We had one person come besides our realtor. One.

Granted, the one person was also a realtor, who had a client who was looking for a house in our neighborhood. All we need is one buyer. But still, after all our work lately to make sure the house was as good as it could be, it was disappointing.

I am not a market analyst, though I do have a few theories as to why we had such a low turnout:

1. School starts this week. Most families who want to move either did it last month, or else are waiting until they get in the groove of fall. And our house is most likely to appeal to a family.
2. Debt ceiling and stock market. The various and sundry news outlets have foretold the end of the world as we know it, therefore no one wants to buy a house. Best to wait until after the apocalypse to see which areas of the world are glowing with an eerie green and which are still habitable.
3. We are overpriced. I don't actually believe this one as we are darned close to actually taking a loss on the house at our current price. By "taking a loss" I mean that should our house be destroyed by a tornado today, it would cost more to build another one exactly like it on the same lot than we are asking a buyer to pay for it. But, logic and math have never played a part in the real estate market, and I don't expect it to start now.
4. We are flesh-eating monsters and there is Dark Mark permanently hanging over our roof, a la Voldemort. This is actually my favorite theory lately, as it explains many things (including our issues with flooring contractors). This theory would also conveniently explain why we recently sealed our garage floor (had to cover the fresh patch where we hid all the bodies...), that we own two black cats, and the assortment of dragon decorations...
5. The house has been listed for all of two weeks, and there aren't a lot of people in a position to buy a house, especially one that is probably a move-up house compared to many nearby neighborhoods (and many of those people are probably wringing their hands wondering why no one is coming to their open houses either).
6. Its too soon to tell.

Packing Packing Packing

Closets are scary, scary places. Every time I delve into one that really needs cleaning, I am both horrified and disgusted by what I find in them.

No, this isn't related to my joke about how the new garage floor coating will mask all the bloodstains, or how when we up-sized our fridge, we could fit a whole nother person in it.

We are packrats, but not of the insect-attracting, living-room-composting variety.  We are clean, and the visible parts of our house stay relatively uncluttered.

But oh, the closets.

My husband and I are also both masters at the video game Tetris. That's the one with the different-shaped pieces that drop from the sky and you have to quickly flip them around and scoot them into place at the bottom without leaving any gaps. I bet that we would be pretty darned good at a 3-d version of it also. Because our house is like that. Every square inch of space, every gap, every nook and cranny has been well utilized.

Packing items into fixed-sized boxes for temporary storage and their eventual joyride across town in a semi is very different than Tetris. It is more like eating a restaurant salad. I don't know how they fit so much stuff in those bowls, but no matter how many bites you take, the salad looks as full as ever.

I have to face the fact that we own too many of certain items. Dragons. Crayons. Chip and dip sets. Blenders. Cake pans. Unused glow-in-the-dark bracelets and wands. Dead computer parts. Books on how to write software for the ancestors of those dead computer parts (MS Dos from 1985? VB4? Anyone? Anyone?).

I filled an entire "extra-large" size box with fabric that I never got around to sewing. This is the box to donate. I have about a dresser drawer full of bits that I am keeping for now. We filled three or four large sweater-type storage boxes with college t-shirts. Several more with just sweaters. There are still sweaters in our closet. 

Books. Books. Books. We have purchased and filled 30 book-sized packing boxes from Uhaul. And used a few other smallish boxes. And we haven't packed anything. I own one e-reader, too, which after this will be seeing a lot more action.

The biggest lesson that I'm learning from our moving adventure is that we can't wait eleven years between closet cleanouts. We can't just buy new stuff without getting rid of the old. Even if we have the storage space for the overflow. Because the next house may not be our last house. In another eleven or fifteen or even thirty years, someone will have to clean out our closets again. We don't need to scare them.

Signs from the Universe

Sometimes you just get a Sign from the Universe.

Like when you dream about your unborn child and she introduces herself and informs you of her name (my daughter did that. I hadn't ever considered the name Charlotte before that dream).

Or when the college you liked best, the one that felt like home the minute you stepped onto the campus, the one that then proceeded to decorate itself with the most beautiful and picturesque snowfall just for your visit, and the one that was also the most expensive and farthest out of your financial reach, just happens to send you what amounts to a full scholarship.

Or when there are not one, but two sets of beautiful kittens born under your own front porch in one summer, and the second litter (of only 2 cats, which is the perfect number of adoptees) bears an uncanny resemblance to a pair of cats from your childhood, and one of the two kittens practically begs at the front door to be let inside, and the timing just happens to be pretty darned good for your family to introduce pets.

Apparently, now the Universe is in dire need of a picture album of my family. There have been Signs.

We took the kids to see Santa at the mall on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. For the grand price of $25 we got a couple of snapshots of the kids on Santa's lap, a CD of the same snapshot, and a $20 gift card to Shutterfly. (Did I mention that the Universe might be named Shutterfly for purposes of this post?). $20 is way more than I needed to order a few extra prints of the Santa pose, so I started browsing the photo books. You know, the ones where you upload like 100 pictures and design your own book. They're great. They're beautiful. They give me panic attacks.

I have no idea where my hang-up about pictures and albums (and the insertion of the one into the other) comes from. It's not like I've ever been attacked by a rabid scrapbook or mauled by a glue-dot wielding paper cutter or anything. But when it comes to dealing with photos, I freeze.

I'm getting better. Thanks to the choosing of my own camera (one that didn't have so many buttons and lenses that it requires a college degree to shoot a photo), and to the purchase of my phone (with built-in camera), I now willingly take photos. Without prompting. I even share them (that whole "Share via Facebook" option on the phone goes so fast I don't have time to pass out from the hyperventilating).

Back to Shutterfly and the photo books. I've made one of these before. Last year, after our family trip to Destin over Thanksgiving, I spent hours arranging our photos onto pages and choosing background colors. It turned out really nice, and the kids love the finished book to pieces, and I've been afraid of that website ever since. It's a time suck and something about all of that arranging and sorting just seems so hard. (Yes, I am the same person who is writing my 4th novel-length manuscript that I hope to someday publish, this one being an epic fantasy that will likely clock in somewhere over 100,000 words long. Clearly large tasks don't always freak me out).

So, $20 gift card. I've got to spend it (not doing so violates every instinct against gifting my money to some corporate bottom line). I looked at the site Sunday morning and ended up running from the computer in terror. And then, at the grocery store checkout Sunday night, they printed me out a nice coupon. Was it $2 off my next grocery order? Oh, no. They couldn't be that kind. No, it was a free 8x8 photo book from Shutterfly.

Kiddie Candids

Until recently my kids had one of those "kid-proof" cameras. The kind whose commercials show kids dropping them down the stairs. Yep, I'm pretty sure this one went down the stairs once or five times. And that's not what killed the camera.

I was going through the memory card looking at what all we'd managed to salvaged. Judging by the kids faces, outfits, and haircuts, we had about a year's worth of pictures. In the first photo, Trystan looks to be about two and a half. And he's clearly upset. If I had to guess, I'd say that his sister had just taken the camera out of his hands.

There were tons of unrecognizable blobs among the shots. And some funny ones, like this series of Charlotte clearly attempting a self-portrait. 

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(Last One of the Charlotte Series)

For some reason, this scene was a popular one. This is the corner of our bed (yes, unmade). The same shot was included in several different groups clearly separated by time.

Feet are also a popular subject. These are Trystan's.

On the same day as he took pictures of his feet, he was photographing our deck. This shot is looking down on the patio and our massively overgrown garden. Its not a bad shot, actually.

You might be wondering just how a kid-proof camera does actually die.

There might be more than one effective method. Ours drowned in the bathtub. Overnight apparently.  Yes, a big person got scolded for leaving water in the bathtub overnight. And a couple of kids were scolded for putting the camera in it.

The camera was toast. The batteries leaked. But the memory card was salvageable (after Windows' checkdisk repaired a file).

This last photo is the last one for the old camera.  I have no idea what this last actually is. Could be an extreme close up of a nose. Could be the bottom of the tub. 

I saw a funny quote today

Life is precious; treat it like a jewel.

 

Uh, don’t we use diamonds for drills and saws?  And don’t we chip bits off of jewels and grind them down into just the right shape? And then lock them away in a safe? Is that how I’m supposed to treat life?

 

Funny, I would think that “life” should be treated as though it’s alive. Alive, and in need of nourishment and sunshine, and a storm now and then to clean the dead leaves away and to strengthen us.

 

Twilight

I finally did it. I’d been avoiding it for a year (or more? I’ve lost track). I watched Twilight.

 

Lets’ just say that while I enjoy sci fi/urban fantasy/paranormal romance and also YA (hello, Harry Potter), that I have never gotten into vampires.  Sure, I saw Interview with a Vampire years ago, and it wasn’t bad.  But it never inspired any Bite-Me type fantasies (no matter how sexy the leading actors were…too bad they were bloodsucking dead people). A recent Harlequin Blaze (whose title escapes me) about cowboy vampires didn’t really help matters.  At some point all that scary-evil-biting-erotic(?) stuff just looks silly to me. Still, when so many people are so awe-struck by a book series or film, I figure I should at least see it once.  Know what the hype is about.

 

And maybe, had I read the book first, I might have enjoyed it more. Maybe. I usually get a better feeling for characters when I read them then when I watch them. I may have skimmed the first page or two in a bookstore. But it didn’t draw me in. 

 

After two and a half hours of ten angst and blue-washed shady scenery, I still don’t get it.  The end wasn’t bad.  From about the point that James(?), the evil hunter vampire, showed up on the scene the pace really picked up.  But that was what, 45 minutes, tops?  And I’m still shocked that Bella’s parents didn’t suspect Edward of physically abusing her and try to separate the two (or at least send her to counseling).  Come on, falling down stairs? How does that account for teethmarks on her wrist? I’m still shaking my head over that.

 

So, I saw the movie.  And am still not tempted to pick up the books. Never say never, of course. But I won’t be eating my words any time soon.

 

 

Deep Thoughts Thursday

I don’t usually comment on news unless I have something smart-a$$’ed to say. Today I do.  The post office has been talking for a while about cutting Saturday mail delivery to save money, and there have been hearings in Congress about it.

 

Here’s my thought (that no one important will bother listening to): Why Saturday? Why not cut Wednesday?

 

Does anything good come in the mail on a Wednesday? I bet people will complain less if they have only a one-day break at a time in mail delivery, instead of a long weekend. Some of us may not even notice the missing mail in the middle of the week (don’t know about you, but by Wednesday I’m already tired and looking forward to Friday).

 

Ok, I feel all civic minded now. And tomorrow, back to my reguluarly-(un)-scheduled ramblings on completely unrelated and uniteresting topics. Possibly about paint colors. I actually have a post in mind about paint colors, and where best to use them.

All Wet

The very blonde theme of my weekend so far seems to involve submerging things in water. Things that have no business being submerged.

Friday, I wore a pedometer into the pool. There's a wellness challenge at work at the moment where you count steps with a pedometer all day (plus time spent doing other exercise), and might win a prize at the end. I've been remembering my pedometer everywhere I go, including clipping it to the skirt I wore taking the kids to the pool on Friday. Strike that, I clipped the thing to my swimsuit, not to the skirt. So when the cover-up came off, the pedometer stayed on, and spent its share of time chasing two kids around the pool. And not just the baby pool--Trystan dog paddles nicely with a swim vest on.

The good news: The pedometer was very cheap, already a few years old, and I have another free one to use for the wellness challenge.

The better news: The pedometer might recover.

Saturday night, I took my wedding and engagement ring off while I was putting away meat from a grocery store trip. I put them in my pocket, like I always do. An hour or so later I had changed into pajamas and started a load of laundry. A load that contained the skirt with the pocket with the rings. And brilliant me, I even heard the clanking in the washer and didn't think a thing about it. Until this morning when I went looking for the rings, and found yesterday's clothes in a basket of clean and dry clothes.

The good news: the engagement ring at least has turned up. I found it in the dryer with the sheets from the following load, still hot to the touch. The diamond is loose in its setting, but I'd bent two of the prongs already, so now I really really have to get it fixed (and maybe sized...the silly thing now slips off my finger).

The iffy news: It is entirely possible that my wedding ring is still in the washer (currently running a load of very wet, soapy towels). We have a front-loader and it is unlikely the ring could have escaped--the drain holes are too small. But it is still AWOL.

And I'm wearing my high school class ring because otherwise my finger feels empty. Funny, with how large my wedding and engagement rings were feeling lately, I'd considered buying a cubic zirconia temporary one until we could decide how/if/when to re-size (and possibly re-set) the other two. But I haven't, and I only own two other rings (the one on my finger, and my college class ring that is also too big).

And he cooks too...

A month or so ago, my husband and I preemptively spent part of our tax refund on a new fridge. (yes, our tax withholdings are horrendously out of whack if a brand new fridge claims only part of our tax refund).

 

So far, I love the thing. Love love love it. There wasn’t much wrong with the old one, except for a crotchety disposition when it came to the “auto” defrost, and a general lack of size. And storage space. It did look nice enough and was only about ten years old, with fairly good energy usage. So it took me a really long time (and a sizeable hunk of new-found money) to really commit myself to buying a new one. Don’t laugh too hard at that. Yes, I’d been drooling over larger models for a couple of years, but I’m an obsessive window-shopper.

 

The difference between the old fridge and the new one is about the size of a person. We now have six cubic feet more storage space. For comparison sake, I’d estimate that I’m about five cubic feet (probably less—my ankles aren’t that fat when I’m not pregnant). So you could stuff me and a kid and all of our groceries in the thing. And the energy usage? Almost identical to the smaller model (I mentioned obsessive, yes? I still had the yellow “Energy Guide” tag from the old fridge tucked away in the filing cabinet).

 

This fridge is so big that last night it had two gallons of milk, one of orange juice, one of apple juice, a 6-qt crockpot full of chili fixings (for tonight’s dinner), sodas, leftovers, our massive array of sauces (incuding like 6 kinds of mustard. We’re weird), big containers full of strawberries, grapes, leftover fruit salad, etc. And there was room left. Seriously. I’m not sure the crockpot even fit on a shelf in the old fridge.

 

The downside to all this stainless-steel wonderfulness? Access to the ice cream. The model we bought is a French-door one (which works great in the corner up against the wall that used to impede the old fridge door). And it has a bottom freezer. Which my 3-year old can open all by himself.

 

We have caught Trystan snacking on ice cream bars and popsicles all by himself more than once now. He’s sneaky about it too—just helps himself, throws away his wrapper. One day my husband caught him not just with unauthorized ice cream, but eating it at the computer desk (I think the computer was already terrorized by the little people and their penchant for button pushing…and we just added sugary stickiness to the risks).

 

And the frozen waffles. Oh the waffles. I think I should be less worried about him eating waffles than ice cream, except that he knows how to cook them. In the toaster. He has to take the toaster out of a cabinet and plug it in. And he can totally do that. Last time I heard him banging appliances around in the cupboard, he had the toaster out and was also checking out the metal grids for the waffle iron.

 

The biggest dilemma now?  Whether to punish him for messing with kitchen appliances, or promote him to sous chef.

 

 

 

Traffic Camera Traps

Last night, we made an after dinner trip to the park so Trystan could try out his birthday present, a new scooter (complete with Thomas the Train helmut).  Our driveway and the sidewalk outside our house both have too much slope to be safe for a 3-year old with wheels.  The park closes at sundown, and we stayed until the very last rays were disappearing, since the weather was nice and the kids were laughing.  We probably stayed too long, actually.  There is a gate that could be used to block the entrance to the park, but we did not get locked on the wrong side of it.  We were instead trapped by red light cameras.

 

The park exit is one side of a 4-way stoplight, and we needed to turn left to head towards home.  My husband pulled up into the left turn lane and we patiently waited for the light to go green.  We watched cross traffic drive unimpeded for a couple of minutes (it was spotty at best, not exactly a busy road).  Just when we started to despair of getting a green, I saw that the cross lane was turning red.  It did, and the cars opposite us (who were turning, not entering the park), got a turn light.  We did not.  Then the cross traffic got their green back.  This repeated 4 or 5 more cycles.  We never saw a turn light. If the light had a weight sensor, it should have noticed our car.  Its not like we were crammed onto a lightweight bicycle—it was a mid-size SUV.

 

The cross traffic was light enough, that we could have just made an illegal left turn (at the red light), or even driven straight (through the red light).  But they have a camera at that intersection.  How rude is that?  No left turn arrow (or even a green light to drive forward), and a camera that will tag you if you do it anyway.

 

We ended up backing up and taking a right, then making a u-turn farther up the road. What a pain. And what a poor use of cameras.  And traffic lights and sensors.  Maybe the city did it on purpose to catch loiterers hanging out in the park after dark (don’t send a cop to ask em to go, just ticket them when they try to leave)?  Because my husband and I and our two kids were clearly up to mischief.

 

 

What were they thinking?

Did you see the closing ceremonies last night? 

 

I didn’t watch much of the Olympics.  I’m not a huge sports fan, and the broadcasts overlap way too much with the kids bedtime.  But I caught a few glimpses here and there.  Like last night.  I tuned in for about ten minutes of the closing ceremonies. What on earth were the Canadians thinking?

 

The part I saw started with a man dressed as a Canadian Mounty, singing something that sounded patriotic in front of a chintzy background.  And then on walked women dressed as Mounty hookers.  Spike heel boots, tiny red skirts, jackets unbuttoned to the sternum.  And they ripped the clothes off the singer.  Ok, so it was Michael Bouble (sp?) underneath there, now dressed as a lounge singer in a white dinner jacket.  But tear-away away uniform?  Yikes.  And then it got better.

 

More performers brought in giant blow-up Canadian Mounty dolls. Blow up dolls. After the clothing-removal.

 

And then came the giant inflatable beavers (pun possibly intentional here…). Wow. Just wow.

 

Was my mind just stuck in the gutter, or was this a really poor choice of performance “art”?  Or maybe they intended the joke.  In any case, by the time I clicked away, there were also lumber jacks, an inflatable moose, and women dressed as green worms (or perhaps it was stems) attached to giant maple leafs and hanging from the ceiling, waving their leaves like they were butterflies.  It was not an improvement.

 

I DVR’d the second half of the closing ceremonies (as NBC felt the need to interject Seinfeld into the middle of it).  But now I’m scared to see how they could possibly top the beginning.

 

Sales Pitches Suck

My husband let a vacuum cleaner salesman into our house last night.

 

I’ll give him credit for not realizing that these people were selling vacuums.  Their ploy was to offer a free one-room carpet cleaning, and I assumed (as I think my husband did) that they were selling either maid service or carpet-cleaning services.  I think the agreement was for them to clean our stairs (as our dining room is not in need of it, and the rest of the main level lacks carpet), and I’m not entirely sure whether they did that or not.

 

The whole experience was funny.  They had some kind of bait-and-switch tactic with the sales people, as the first door-knockers were female and it was a male salesman who then moved in for the kill.  A talkative male salesman who was really hard to shut up.  He set up shop in our front room (the dining room with “formal” sitting area) and soon had our oversized coffee table covered in little round filters showing various puffs of dirt that their miraculous vacuum had extracted from our floor.  And of course, he had my husband bring out our current vaccum for comparison.

 

Trystan, my pint-sized vacuum-obsessed engineer, was fascinated by the whole show.  Had the Wonder Pets arrived in their flyboat, he would not have left the scene of the demonstration.  No, we didn’t buy a vacuum.  Are you kidding?  Their so-called list price was over $3,000.  Yes I meant every one of those zeros.  Their so called offer prices (and there were 4 of them, depending on your payment method) were all over $1,000.  That was the funny part.

 

I am not a fan of salespeople.  I like to evaluate purchases by my own criteria—usually some mix of need, aesthetic qualities, functionality, and price.  Having someone talk for an hour straight attempting to push every emotional button while performing sleight-of-hand does not sway me.  It annoys me.

 

Some of my “favorite” sales techniques from last night:

1. The fact that their vacuum could always suck up a tiny bit more fuzz and dirt out of our carpet, even after using our vacuum.  Clearly our vacuum is crap. 

1. Funny, he wasn’t cleaning out and testing our vacuum repeatedly to see if it stopped extracting fuzz at some point.  He just asserted that if his worked then our must have stopped.  Hmmm…did we mention that we’re engineers?
2. Our carpet is nearly 10 years old. And cheap.  And l don’t actually trust our builder to have thoroughly cleaned our subfloor before installing the carpet and pad. I’d be shocked if a vacuum failed to find dirt and lint and carpet fibers and disintegrating pad flakes.

2. If anyone in the house has allergies, you have to buy this vacuum.

3. If our allergies are that severe, we nix the carpet, not the vacuum.  You catch a lot more dander with a mop any day.  And I can lay a lot of laminate for $3000.

3. The only way to buy the super-duper vacuum is when someone knocks on your door and covers your living room with tiny filter circles demonstrating just how many dead skin cells you can shed.

4. Are you telling me that if I call your company and say “I’m willing to part with a few grand” that you won’t have a salesman at my door in minute?
5. If that’s true, then your fancy sucky device is a total, utter rip-off and you know it.

4. All those same-branded vacuums you just found for sale on line are stolen. 

6. Even the ones in your company’s online store?  Weird.

5. You can either buy a Chevy Cobalt  or a Mercedes, your choice

7. Um, for that price I probably could buy a Chevy Cobalt.  Or at least pay a maid for a year to come vacuum my carpets for me.  And seriously, if I’m not the one cleaning out the bag/filter/whatever the heck kind of parts, why would I care?  I don’t intend to eat off of my carpet, and my toes aren’t offended by a little dust.
8. The guy never asked what kind of car I drive.  A 7-year old Honda, not a shiny new Mercedes (or a Chevy for that matter).  I like dependable vehicles with a low total cost of ownership.  I’d probably still be driving my ’98 Honda if it weren’t for a little close encounter on the highway 7 years back.  And our existing vacuum already fills that role (1) its already bought and paid for and 2) there are no bags or filters to buy for it ever).
9. A Mercedes is a status symbol.  I tend to hide my vacuum when company comes over, not go cruising in it.

6. There was some anecdote about having to continually replace broken hammers, and how his father told him to just buy a good one.

10. Yeah, you totally weren’t paying attention to the vacuum we already own.  6? years old.  Going strong.  No bags or filters to buy for it ever.  My hammer’s not broken.                 

 

So, vacuum man, thanks for the show. You kept the kids entertained. Do you sing?  They really like songs.  Next time you come by, I’ll have you demonstrate in the basement.  I bet dead pillbugs would look cool on those little filters of yours.

 

What do you do with a not-so-sick sick toddler?

What do you do with a not-so-sick sick toddler?

Take him to the grocery store. Buy him a donut and a new Thomas the Train book. Play choo-choos, race cars, blocks, puzzles, cooking, magnetos, and watch too much Max and Ruby. Then give him fruit snacks and feel serious mom-guilt about it when he falls asleep thirty minutes later having refused an actual lunch. The donut wasn't much of a factor in the lunch embargo--he had only nibbled some of the icing off a few hours earlier.

This is the hard day of a multi-day illness. The one where the fever is probably gone, but its still within the 24-hour window where you're not supposed to dose them with motrin and send them to daycare (I was sorely tempted...). He's too sick for school, too well to sit still. And too two to be reasonable about simple demands (such as not bouncing on the couch, not climbing on mommy when she attempts to do pushups, and to just pick one of the three identical yogurt cups and move on with life).

I'd actually rather be at work right now than sitting on my couch surfing the web while he sleeps. I can't count on how long of a nap Trystan will take (Yesterday, for his grandma & grandpa, 4 hours. Tuesday for me, 30 minutes). So any task more complicated than laundry isn't feasible. Murphy's law (or is it Scott's Law of Luck? Or just Mom to the Terrible Two's) states that as soon as I become productive or interested in something, he shall arise to terrorize the house. But if I'm a couch potato, I'll have to carry him to the car still snoring when its time to pick his sister up from school.

Ah well, I bought myself a Cosmo at the grocery store this morning (magazines are expensive these days)...haven't read one in years. And now I feel old. Really old. I'm going to start clucking my tongue and shaking my finger at all of the twenty-one year olds who believe any of this crap. Speaking of which, why am I still typing? I'm only halfway through the issue...

3 posts in 1, because I don't feel like splitting it up

Sunday, our grocery store hit a new low (or maybe it’s a new high) in food-sampling. They were handing out samples of Coffee and Cream flavored Kahlua. Mmmm. Lucky for me 1) the samples were very small (maybe a tablespoon of liquor plus crushed ice) and 2) I passed the table on the way in, not the way out. Yes, I bought some (it was quite effective marketing). And its too bad I was shopping by myself or I could have stopped back through for another sample or 3 and let my husband steer the cart…

Trystan has been asking to use the potty more and more. It’s a good thing, except for a few small snafus. 1) He likes to stand up. That’s great, for a boy, except our toilet seats (that have a built-in toddler-sized seat) won’t stay up and he doesn’t care to hold it up while he pees. Nor does he aim. 2) He thinks tinkling all over the seat and/or floor is funny. He’s a boy. And he’s 2.

He also likes to change clothes. Some of it is his newfound expertise with dressing himself. He can do many shirts and pull-on pants all by himself. And shoes (but not yet socks). And he knows how to strip.

Last night, after he had already been dressed in his first pair of jammies (a tad early as a result of peeing all over his jeans, and laughing about it), I found him buck naked at the top of the stairs, holding a pair of Elmo underwear. “No yuckies on Elmo”, he told me. I went ahead and helped him into them (underwear are harder to pull up than sweatpants), and he then donned a different set of jammies (fleece this time, with feet. He did the big zipper all by himself). We made sure he went potty before bed, and verified that he had a waterproof mattress pad on his bed. He made it about 3.5 hours before wetting himself (and getting sent back to clean sheets wearing a third set of jammies plus a pull-up). Still, it’s a start, and he’s the one driving it. If he wants to start wearing “big boys”, I’ll happily send several extra outfits to daycare every day and save myself the cost of buying more pull-ups (though the money’s probably a “wash” compared to the extra water and detergent for the laundry).

Last night’s dinner: Panini with bacon, swiss, and sautéed mushrooms (and salad). Want a lighter version? Don’t butter the bread, and hit the gym first. Works for me. The great part about that dinner was the bacon grease. I turned around and sautéed the onions and mushrooms for today’s crockpot dinner in it. (I never claimed to be cooking low-cholesterol, btw). If I’d had an un-cut pork roast to brown, I would have done that in the drippings also, but I used chops, and figured that if I pre-browned them, they’d be total mush by the time we get home tonight (they might be anyway after 9 hours of slow cooking). Besides, the longer I waited to make those Panini, the less bacon was going to be inside each one…

I might have done a bad thing...

I showed Charlotte how to work the TV remote.

 

She can read, just enough, to do some of the basic functions.  Like choose the “Watch TV” button, and remember that “ch+ and ch-“ change the channel.

Char is sick with the flu, and today is day #2 of laying around the couch watching TV.  My husband is working from home, and I thought I’d spare him the trouble of frequently starting up shows for Char, so he can stay productive. 

 

Maybe it was a bad idea.  My husband is reporting that she refuses to relinquish control of the controller.

 

Oops.

New thing: Scotchguard

I had one of my blonde moments recently, where I realized something kind of obvious. 

 

For years, I’ve gotten annoyed at getting new shoes dirty.  I am wary of fabric shoes because they look awful after the first wearing.  And with kids, I’m always getting food and drinks spilled on my clothes and shoes.  I have a pair of lavender canvas flip flops that got coffee spilled on them on their second wearing, which immediately moved them to the “bum around” pile and out of the “cute shoes” pile.

 

Revelation:  you can buy scotchguard at the grocery store.  This morning I sprayed a pair of beige colored mostly-fabric shoes that I’ve been really careful with all summer.  They already have a spot or two, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll have prevented a few more.

 

Now, I guess there’s no guarantee that it’ll work perfectly.  But its got to be better than splashing through a muddy parking lot and hoping for the best, right?  And I might check out the kids’ shoe collections and see if there are any likely-looking targets for my spray can.

 

 

What do you get when you let a 5-year old pick out the dinner menu?

Hot dogs (no bun, with yellow mustard), grapes, and pumpkin pie.

I want to spend someone else's money for a while...

I spent about two hours on Friday shopping for clothes. Mainly for myself. In the mall. And I've decided two things:

1) I want more money to spend on clothes. Trying to keep total purchases down to, say, well under $100 doesn't go too anymore far when you're in the mall (not that it ever did). As usual, when I have little or no money allocated to spend on clothing, I find bucketloads of things that I'd like.
2) I want a lifestyle that allows me to wear more of those cute clothes that I didn't buy.

No, the self-imposed $100 limit wasn't my only issue with clothes shopping. It never is. I have a love/hate relationship with clothes.

Growing up, as the second kid in a larger family, I didn't get as many new clothes. Until I grew taller (and larger in general) than my older sister, I received many of her hand-me-downs. And by the time that happened, I started being able to earn my own money (through babysitting, and later, a fast-food job), and ended up funding most of my own wardrobe. Alas, I was always the responsible kid, and saved a lot of my money for college expenses instead of blowing it all on the latest fads.

In college I had zero money for clothes. I'm not talking zero money for new clubbing clothes or for designer clothes, I mean zero money for something-relatively-clean-to-wear-to-class. The staples of my wardrobe were free t-shirts, clearance rack flannel shirts, and about 2 pairs of jeans a year. I hated going to any event that called for "dressing nice" because I never had "nice". I barely had "presentable". Yes, in the mid-90's, grunge was in, but I was quite a bit more grungy than was probably fashionable.

At the same time, I have always loved fashion magazines, and fabrics, and learned to sew and do a bit of pattern drafting with the idea of dressing better. It never worked that well because "better" involved better fabrics than I could afford on my shoestring budget, and the freedom to make mistakes. In college, I had no money to waste on "wadders", and these days I have no time.

Anywho, you get the idea. Poor me, yada yada. These day, I have more of a clothing budget, when I choose to spend it on myself. I just have mommy guilt that drives me to buy the kiddos more stuff than I buy myself.

Which brings me back to Friday. I'm still down that 10 pounds that I worked off this summer, and in mostly single-digit sizes for the first time since I can remember (I think I passed right through them in the free-t-shirt days). My closet is full of tops that are a bit too baggy and pants that will fall off of my hips without a belt. The 60-pound rollercoaster ride of pregnancies and breastfeeding didn't help much either (actually from now to my heaviest is closer to 70 pounds).

And suddenly, I can put on an expensive (to me) outfit and like how I look in it. But then I read the care labels and tags, and feel like I have to put things back on the rack for practicality. "Eveningwear" in my lifestyle is sweats or jeans (when your kids use your shoulder as a Kleenex, you don't wear dry-clean-only clothing). And I could dress up a tad more at work. Suits would be out of place as are many skirts and dresses, but I could definitely trend away from jeans more.

But, I have to allow myself to spend more money on clothes. That's a toughie for someone who's a cheapskate, who doesn't believe in credit card debt, and who has way more things on her wish list than just clothes (like kitchen appliances...). Too bad fairy godmothers are hard to come by these day :)

Friday Photo

Believe it or not, his sister didn't put him up to it.