Gold Star

Boo Bug knocked over her milk this morning. Though warned with quotations not to, she was so busy bouncing in her chair and trying to play with Bacon Bit while drinking that she tipped it right on over.

“Oh no, mommy, I spilled!” she cried.

“Oh dear, get a towel,” I advised, grabbing one myself.

“Ok, ok, ok!” she shouted. “You get the high parts, I’ll get the low parts!!”

Muttering “oh dear, oh dear, oh dear what a mess!”, she wiped the milk from her chair and the floor, while I soaked up the lake from the table.

As I was tossing the towels into the laundry, she surveyed the ex-damage with a sharp, critical eye. Then she turned around, grinned up at me, and thrust her tiny thumb skyward.

“OK. Good job, mommy. You’re a gold star mommy today!”

Hot dog. Gold Star Mommy. That’s me. Milk Wiper Upper Extraordinaire.

…does this mean I get to pick a treat out of the basket this afternoon? Cause I’ve got my eye on one of those miniature spiragraphs in there…

Martha I ain’t, but…

I’m going to do this. I have to do this. Meatloaf Cupcakes!

But instead of using food coloring, I’m going to get some more of those purple potatoes . And may I just state for the record that it utterly sucks that our town’s weekly farmer’s market sucks?

Lessee, you want fifteen different kinds of makeup? Maybe a sno-cone or some cotton candy or deep fried Thai food? Then go to our market. But if you’d like, say, oh, I dunno, vegetables? Well, we’ve got onions, bok choy, strawberries and…uh…more onions…and the occasional carrot. And that’s about it.

Feh!

Fortunately, though, there are some thumping good ones within half an hour of my house. So I can still get the best of the best, without too much angst and suffering. All I need to do is find other things I want to do in that neck of the woods so I can justify the cost of the gas.

What I love best about farmer’s markets is that I can get the veggies for the same (or better, even) price as Costco, while the guy who sells them to me gets a much better price for all his hard work. It’s also nice that the food is actually picked when it’s ready, instead of being harvested slightly ahead of time so that it is green enough to survive the journey from field to processing center to distribution center to grocery store.

Why did I do this to myself

Due to comment length restrictions (another way of saying I’m too damned long-winded), I’m going to answer ya here, Mapletree. Question was: I am curious (as one of four children) why you decided to have 4 yourself. And what was the chaos escalation with each new addition?

I wish I had a solid, business-like reason. But I really don’t. In some ways, it’s like trying to say why you prefer green over blue, or chocolate chip to peanut butter. I preferred having four kids to having a lot of other things (like peace and quiet) (or a luxury yacht). Even when I was just a kid myself, I wanted to have a lot of kids. Of course, when I was a kid (to include up to my very early twenties), I wanted the classic Catholic ‘as many as God will bless me with’ lot of kids. Thank God I switched Sprint, with the new rollover minute plan…um…wait…why doesn’t that sound right…?

My husband and I settled on four pretty quickly. Me being the oldest of two, four seemed like a nice big number. My husband being the youngest of seven, four didn’t seem a bit threatening.

Well, actually, it was more of a ‘we’d like at least two and up to four’ agreement. We thought pretty long and hard about each kid before we conceived. Could we handle this new addition emotionally? Physically? Financially? Could we fund two, three, four college funds? Wedding funds? Semesters-abroad-funds? Not to mention preschool, and the possibility that the public school system would get so incredibly bad that we’d end up paying for private schools…what would we do if and in case…?

And after all the thinking and planning and wondering and worrying, each new kid was basically a leap of faith.

I consider my kids to be the greatest gift I have ever been given. There was a while in my life when I thought I wasn’t going to have any kids at all. Payback for a life of crime, so to speak. First of all, I never thought I’d find a man interested in me that wasn’t…uh…let’s see, what’s the term I’m looking for…scary beyond all reason? Yeah, I think that’s it. And let me tell you, it hurt. Going from wanting lots and lots and lots of kids all your life to thinking that it just isn’t ever going to happen? Ouch. So you can imagine how I feel, now that I have all four of my children.

There is not a happier woman in the world. There is nobody more blessed than me. I have everything in the world, and more.

The chaos factor is interesting. You’d think that it would be either a smooth upward trend, or an exponential leap and flatten with each new baby…but it didn’t really work that way. Going from no kids to Eldest was the biggest leap of the Chaos Curve, and it would settle and spike with each new phase. She started toddling and there was this big spike in the curve. AH! The baby! She’s got your soda! AH! AH! AH! Catch her, stop her, grab her…aw, hell! **sigh** OK, you vacuum up the glass, I’ll get her some dry clothes…

It goes up temporarily each time one kid or another hits a new phase. Like when Boo Bug suddenly decided, at three and a little change (and not a bit coincidentally, right around the same time Bacon Bit arrived), to work on her Terrible Two Attitude. Suddenly I’ve got a kid who is arguing with me about Every Damned Thing in her life, from what color shirt she’s going to wear to whether or not she likes apples (you do! I don’t! you DO! I DON’T! You WILL! I WON’T!), and the Chaos Factor takes a big upward tick. But then she decides that overall, it isn’t worth the hassle and it settles back down again…right around the same time Bacon Bit discovers that his feet are made for walkin’, and starts crashing around the house bonking his head on every available surface. I swear, I could bubble-wrap the whole house and he’d still find some way to fall over and bonk his head on something.

As an aside, I’ve observed when visiting other parents’ Dens that whether you have one kid or a dozen, the chaos seems about the same. I mean, the physical logistics are tougher with my four than my friends’ one or two (I’ve got this one, you’ve got that one…who’s got #3 and 4?!), but in terms of mess and noise it seems to be the same whether there’s one or twenty. Weird, huh?

Sometimes it makes me crazy (especially when it involves pain, blood or squabbling…I loathe squabbling), but overall the noise and the mess and the upheaval are part and parcel of the whole ‘mom’ gig. And every day, every mess they make, every shriek and giggle, every accident, every mistake, every inappropriate copping of attitude, takes them one step closer to going out into the world as (hopefully) happy, healthy, well-adjusted grown-ups. Who know that their mother, while admittedly something of a nutcase, loves them hopelessly and thinks they’re pretty damned cool.

I write more about the times when I want to bang my head against the wall than the times when things get schmaltzy. I usually need the therapy more than I do when I’ve spent the day with the Golden Children and am basking in the warmth of their sun-like glow. Besides, it’s hard to write about those times and feelings without sounding like a putz. Seriously. How do you write about the way sometimes you look at your kids when they’re playing some charming little game of their own invention and feel your eyes swelling up with tears because they’re just so damned beautiful, without sounding like you’ve gone not only around the bend, but over the rapids as well, banging your head on the rocks all the way?

Speaking of mess and general noise level… Bacon Bit would like to get up from his nap now, so it’s time for me to quit this, and the girls to quit their ‘art time’. Mess is about to go down as we clean it all up, noise is about to go up, and the Chaos of Snack Time is upon us…

Step on a crack...

I’m not in the mood to roughhouse this morning due to both a rotten night’s sleep and a remarkably sore back. So when Danger Mouse threw herself on the floor in front of me demanding, “Tickle me!” I said no. Not this morning.

“Why not?” she asked, tugging at my arm.

“Because, honey, my back really hurts this morning.”

She dropped my arm like she’d been burned.

“Is it broked?” she asked timidly.

“Broken, not broked,” I laughed. “And no. It’s just sore, and I don’t want to roughhouse today.”

She skulked away. I thought she was just sulking, but then I heard her crying over the baby monitor. So I schlepped upstairs to see what her problem was and found her sitting at the top of the stairs. Before I could a word to her, she wailed out with, “I didn’t mean to!!”

All sorts of horrors were flashing before my eyes. Which would it be? An overflowing toilet? Towels soaking in the bathtub? Crayon on the wall? All the clothes taken out of the closet and their hangers used to form a ‘barrel of monkey’s’ like line?

Well, no. Turns out she, and she alone, is responsible for my sore back.

She was stepping on cracks yesterday. Even though Eldest had told her that if you step on a crack you’ll break your mother’s back, she (and Boo Bug) had been jumping from grout-line to grout-line in the hall as part of their Princesses Avoiding Alligators game.

Not only stepping, but jumping on cracks. No wonder my back is so sore this morning!

I think she’s mostly bought my explanation that her stepping on, around or over grout has nothing to do with the state of my back. I’m pretty sure she understands that my back is likely sore because I insisted on trying to reorganize the closet yesterday by myself, instead of waiting for Daddy to be home to help me with the heavier / higher up bits.

But right now, she is trying to walk up the hall without stepping on any grout…just in case…

OW!!!!!

Ok, so teething is just not fun, pretty much ever. But this is double-plus-not-fun.

Bacon Bit was pulling up on my leg while I was working at the kitchen table.

And then he fell.

Face-first.

Into the table leg.

When I picked him up, he was bleeding like crazy. I mean, it was gushing out of his mouth. AAH! AAH! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

So I applied a little first aid and a lot of cuddling and the bleeding stopped and he settled down to a case of hiccups and whimpering.

Then I took a peek in his little mouth.

Whaddya know. The tooth that was nothing but a white bud this morning is now poking well out of his ripped-up gum. He must have fallen just exactly on top of that tooth, pounding it through his gum like a razor.

Damn, that just had to hurt like hell.

Infant Motrin and frozen biting toy have been given, and sympathy will be extended all day.

And now that the crisis is over, I have just noticed that my t-shirt has a lovely wash of bloody spit all over the left shoulder. Swell. Bets that it won’t come out, even though I’m taking it off right immediately now and putting it into the washer, anyone…?

*sigh* That’s two t-shirts ruined for wearing out of the house in one week – and it’s only Tuesday!!! (Yesterday, it was chocolate – I gave Bacon Bit a chocolate chip cookie, and he stored up a bunch of chocolate in his cheeks or something to urp all over my shoulder, and I didn’t notice it until it had set like steel into the {ahem} WHITE t-shirt.)

I'm just not cut out for this line of work. I'm not. People who are stupid enough, after SEVEN YEARS of experience, to wear a white shirt around children ought to be fired. Also, people who get so emotional over things like bloody mouths and infant pain that they get all damp in the eyeball area are obviously not psychologically well-suited to such work. Not to mention the inability to multitask well enough to simultaneously comfort the baby, cook breakfast for the other two and spell words like "Wishing well", "sport bottle" and "singing" - all of which have been requested by a kid who can't even write the letters yet anyway, so what the HELL is the point?

There! Right there!! A woman who gets mad at a five year old for pretending to write because it's irritating her while she's trying to simultaneously comfort an infant and cook eggs to order? Bad mother! Bad mother!!

Somebody, please: fire me. For the sake of the children.

Hot Diggity-Damn!

OK, this is one of those stock-geek posts. I’m sorry, I know they’re boring to, like, 99.9999% of the other human beings out there. BUT! I have just passed the Profit Point on a batch of trades. Woo-hoo, woo-hoo! {funky chicken dance}

I made a thousand bucks worth of trades three weeks ago, buying small positions in 8 different stocks. I paid $7 apiece in commissions, losing $56 to the broker. And if I wanted to sell out of them, I’d lose yet another $56 in commissions, right? So my $1000 worth of purchases has to go up by $113 before I’m actually ahead by a buck. (Ack.)

Well! As of this morning, I am officially at the point of Starting To Make A Profit. And it only took three weeks, which, on such a wee tiny little investment set, is pretty damned good. As usual, it’s a couple of them doing fabulously while another couple are doing blah (dipping up and down around my purchase price and not committing either way – but that’s OK, I bought them to be a stable base of dividend producers - their contributions will come from quarterly dividends rather than capital gains) and the other four are just sorta…truckin’ along. Surviving a freaky market where missing earnings by a fraction of a cent causes people to scream in panic and rush to sell every last share before the End of the World (hence putting the stock ‘on sale’ for the rest of us, who are less concerned with ‘this quarter’ and more concerned with ‘in fifteen years, when I hope to be retiring’).

Now I just sit back, try not to freak out if they dip back below that level (‘dip’ is OK…it’s ‘tank’ that’s scary), and wait it all out. This batch is, in my humble and probably wrong estimations, undervalued by an average of about 40%, and I expect it to take between 2 and 5 years for them to grow into their value for a total annual return of between 8% and 20%, depending on just how long it really does take.

And, I must take that crayon away from Bacon Bit. Where does he get these things?! I just swept, vacuumed, and mopped this floor not twelve hours ago…!

New Favorite Show

Forget CSI. Forget America’s Next Top Model. Forget How Clean Is Your House.

My new best-favorite show in the world is now Mad Money, on CNBC.

Oh my God. I laughed, I cried, I argued with him (always a fun exercise, shouting at the host of a television show), I asked myself, “What? What was that? Geez! Talk slower, talk slower!!!”

I hereby vote Jim Cramer extremely likely to drop dead of a heart attack mid-show. Good lord. I’m watching the ‘lightening round’ right immediately now, and he has given opinions on about five hundred stocks in less than five minutes. Holy smokes.

He is a much faster mover than yours truly. Well, duh, of course he is. He’s a hedge fund manager. I’m one of those ‘buy in and then sit there for a year or two or five’ types. He’s looking to buy a stock that is right immediately now undervalued and then !BOOM!, the instant it slides up, sell-sell-sell!!

But he did interest me on a couple points. For example, I've been keeping an eye on my 7-Eleven (SE) position lately. They’re trading on a 52-week high right now (and have been for about a week now). I bought in a little over a year ago at $15, it’s now trading at almost $30. When I bought in at $15, I had set a target of $28 a share.

Hmmmm, I said to myself, sipping my second cup of coffee at 6:10 this morning. Methinks perhaps I ought to take some profits on that deal…

And then what does this guy blurt out but “7-Eleven! It’s been good to you, now sell, sell, sell!”

Wow. Weird. Because just about everybody else is still hollering, “Buy! Buy! Buy!!”

Me, I’m meeting him halfway. I’ll be selling some of my position, locking in most of the profits I’ve made. I’m not exiting the position…just scooping the profits off the top. I have no crystal ball, damn the luck; I can’t guess whether this stock will continue to rise or crap out next week due to some bizarre confluence of assorted moons and stars and a new diet that bans the Slurpee sweeping the nation. All I know is, I like their balance sheets, I like their net income, I like their Slurpees, their distribution system rocks the free world and, by the way, I like their gas prices. Our local 7-Eleven has one of the lowest priced pumps around.

Oh thank heaven. (Sorry, couldn’t resist – but then, my van takes up to 28 gallons at a crack, so low(er) gas prices do make me sing…)

Oh no, you DIDN'T

Oh yes, I did.

Lunch in the Den of Chaos. I start combing the cupboards and I’ve got…nothing. I mean, I've got a lot of fixin's, but I've got nothing that's ready to just EAT.

Out of bread for the next three hours.
Just had mac-n-chez yesterday.
Saving the cheese and cracker and fruit plate routine for snack.
Only one can of raviolis, not enough for the five of us.
Leftovers – HA! They didn’t eat them when they were new-overs!
Out of fish sticks. Out of spaghetti-os. I could make spaghetti-spaghetti, I guess…

Hey, I’ve got a few chicken nuggets languishing in the freezer. That’ll work. Not quite enough for the kids, but there’s also a half bag of tator tots.

Hmm, directions say to oven bake or deep fry…saaaaaaaay, I’ve got a brand new deep fryer…

{deep fries chicken nuggets}
{deep fries tator tots}
{assures self that they are Yummy cooked that way}

So I had enough chicken nuggets for the girls, but not for me. I was going to have, like, an apple and maybe a few tator tots and the pathetic half bagel pining away on top of the fridge.

But then, it occurred to me that I had some chili out in the freezer.
And I had tator tots.
And cheddar cheese.
And sour cream.

Sounds like an impromptu casserole to me!!

So I have just put crispy fried tator tots in a bowl, layered chili over them, added a handful of shredded cheddar and a dollop of sour cream, and eaten it for lunch.

By my rough estimation, I have just consumed enough fat and calories for a week's worth of lunches in this one go.

Dinner tonight will be a salad.

Deep fried. With sour cream and cheese on it.

Oh yeah.

Ooooooooh, HELL yeah.

Things that make you blink

I run across things just about daily that make me sit back and go {{blink}}.

Like this comment, snipped from a review of a slow cooker:

“…It also does NOT have that non stick coating which is safe to use if you own a pet bird which was a very important feature for me…”

{blink}

Whoa, first of all – what is she trying to say? That a nonstick coating is safe? Or that the non-nonstick coating is what she’s after? And is it the coating, or owning a pet bird that is the important feature?

So. Confused.

Eventually I figured out that what she meant was that the nonstick coating can kill birds due to the billowing of PTFE from said coating. So, it was non-nonstick that she was after.

So, reconstructing the comment: “It also does not have a nonstick coating, which makes it safer to use if you own a pet bird. This was a very important feature to me.”

Clear now? Good. I’m glad I could help out with that.

And I had to do so, because it called out my Evil Twin. Upon reading this, Evil Twin leaned over my shoulder and whispered in my ear: Of course you wouldn’t want a nonstick coating if you owned a bird – it would be easier for the damned thing to jump out of the pot if it didn’t stick to it!

Bad! Bad Evil Twin! Go back to your cave!! That’s a ten minute time out, Missy!!! And no, I do not want to hear your opinion on the finger-in-the-custard case. Thanks all the same. (Argh, what an ASSHAT! Clarence Stower, you jackass, what IS your major malfunction!?)

Now. Where was I? Oh yeah. New crockpot, Den of Chaos sized.

Wish me luck, I'm headed back out into the Internet...

BUCKLE THEM UP!!!

I ran across an article talking about how parents favor better-looking kids. I’d heard this before, that babies that were “cute”, with rounder heads and Gerber-like little faces, tended to get more and better attention from their parents than those Dumbo-eared, smoosh-nosed, weak-chinned versions.

Ok, so, whatever. I suppose it might be true. I’ve got some pretty good looking and well-behaved kids (at least, usually and in public), and they do seem to attract more positive reactions from people than that ugly little creep throwing bags of Cheetos on the floor screaming, “Buy it for me or I’ll hold my breath ‘til I’m purple!!!”

Blah blah blah, evolution, ensuring that the best thrive and the worst…uh…don’t…but then, my eyeballs stammered across this paragraph, which I am quoting directly from the article:

The differences were striking. The researchers found that 1.2 percent of the homely children were buckled into the shopping cart, compared with 13.3 percent of the prettiest ones. When a man was in charge of shopping, none of the unattractive children were strapped into the carts, while 12.5 percent of the cute children were.

Whaaaaaaaaaa? Sooooooooooo…you’re telling me, that overall fewer than 13 percent of parents are strapping their little monsters into the cart?

I’ve winced a few times when I’ve seen other people’s kids jumping up and down in the basket of a cart. Accidents waiting to happen, and while the fall from a shopping cart might not seem that far from the perspective of a 5-foot-something adult, it’s pretty damned far for a small person to drop.

Think I’m just paranoid? Well, I am, BUT! Every year, around 12,800 kids are taken to hospital emergency rooms for shopping-cart-related injuries. 5700 were head injuries, of which 25% (or 1,425) were considered ‘serious’. It ain’t just me sayin’ that. It’s plastered all over the Internet.

Those falls happen in a flash. Children small enough to be put into the shopping cart in the first place are so incredibly likely to be jumpers, too – ooooh, lookit, a bright-colored package! I wannit!!! – and out they go, without a thought to the fact that it’s four feet to the ground.

C’mon, parents. Yeah, buckling them is a pain, like trying to throw a harness on an octopus. Yeah, they whine about being buckled. Yeah, they’d rather be free to run and roam.

But we’re the parents, and they need us for much more than food, shelter, and Nintendo cartridges. Part of the gig is doing things that are going to be very unpopular. None of my kids particularly likes being buckled into a shopping cart. They also don’t like being made to clean up their rooms, eat vegetables, and behave like civilized creatures instead of Wild Things.

But all four of them are still alive, free of concussions and other broken bones.

I’d like to keep it that way. And I’d like to see yours stay that way, too.

So buckle them. Even if they hate it. Even if you’re a man. Even if they’re so ugly you wish they'd hurry up and get to that phase when they're begging you to pretend you aren't with them.

Keep them close, keep them safe from themselves and others.

Attractive as babies or not, I guarantee they’ll grow up to be beautiful people – if we treat them as the treasures they are.

Rude, rude, RUDE awakenings

First, I woke up at 2:15 this morning because there were small feet kicking the hell out of my lower back and a hard little head burrowing between my shoulder blades. What the…

“Bed. Back to. Go.” I muttered. Nobody moved.
“Hey!” I poked at Eldest. “Time to go back to your bed, honey.”
Nothing.
“Other Honey. Wake up. Get her back to bed now,” I commanded. Yeah yeah, I could have done it myself. But he’s the one who let her in there in the first place, I vote it’s his problem getting her out of there again. Besides, my rotten husband has this magical ability to get up, deal with things, get back in bed and be asleep again in less than ten seconds. Me, if my tootsies hit the floor that’s it. I’m awake. No going back to sleep without chemical assistance for me once I’ve achieved verticality.

So two hours later the alarm goes off and we start the ‘getting the husband out of bed’ process. Alarm goes off, I poke at him, he says, “FiveMoreMinnits…” and I hit the snooze button; we repeat this once; and then I start pushing and shoving and hissing at him that he needs to get up or he’s going to end up in the office until, like, midnight, get going, get going, get going get going get going…

Then, exhausted, I doze while he showers and gets dressed. Usually at this point I schlep downstairs with him, make our coffee while he puts together his lunch and so forth, we chat a few minutes, he leaves, and I get to putter around for an hour or two before the kids start bouncing wildly.

Well, this morning, I didn’t get up for coffee. Himself said, “You want to just stay in bed?” and I said, “Yes. Yes, I do. Have a good day,” and tunneled myself back under my covers like a burrowing owl.

Half an hour later (about 5:30, for those keeping track at home), my door banged open and Boo Bug stood there peering at me.

“Mommy!” comes the urgent whisper.
“{snork, cough} Wha?”
“Mommy! Can I come sleep with you?”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah, OK. C’mere.”
“Mommy!”
“Come here, honey. Don’t wake up your brother.”
“But I wanna sleep with you.”
“Then come here.”
“But mommmmeeeee…I wanna sleep with you.”
“You aren’t going to do that from the door. Come. Here.”
“But mommy!”

About this point, I get mad. I sit up in bed and say, “Boo Bug. Come. Here. Right. Now.”

To which she replied, “But…but mommy…I wanna come in and sleep with you.”

This is typical of Boo Bug being defiant. She doesn’t say ‘no’, she doesn’t directly fight with you, she just ignores and/or deflects you. I got mad. I got really mad. Mostly because I now had one of those headaches you sometimes get when you wake up, doze a little while, wake up, doze a while, wake up, actually get back into real sleep, and then are abruptly jerked back awake again.

“Awright, that’s it. Go back to your bed. You’ve made me very angry, Boo. Go on. Go back to your bed. I’m too mad to have you in here with me now. You should have come when I called you. Go.”

So she wanders off back to her bed. I got up (remember my complaint above about not being able to get back to sleep once I’ve gotten up?) and watched from the door as she got back into her still-dark room and climbed into bed. She lay down and put her fingers into her mouth. I shut the door, got back in bed, and watched my ceiling be completely uninteresting. Sure as death and taxes, now I’m wide awake. Oh well.

I start planning my day, staring up at the monotonous ceiling…a load or two or ten of laundry, change the sheets on the beds, replace the towels, vacuum upstairs, oooooooooh yeah, I’m supposed to be washing the windows throughout the house this week (feh!) and I wonder how much that security laminate I saw featured on ‘It Takes A Thief’ last week would cost because gee, it seems to me that it would be worth having just due to having so many kids bouncing around trying to kill themselves; glass that doesn’t shatter can’t be anything but good, when you stop to think about it…

I had moved on to chuckling about how disappointed a thief would be if he broke in here. No jewelry. No cash. One laptop, that would be good…a little silver, but nothing to write home about… maybe the checkbook…hmm… where did I put that thing last…?

And then I hear: “Ayi! Ya ya ya ya! Goo-GA! GA! Mummah magoo {giggle shriek}!!” {rattle rattle rattle go the crib slats}

Whaaaaaaaaaa? Oh, now come on. That baby is not awake at this hour!! Oh yes he is, though, I can hear him jumping up and down, using his crib mattress as a trampoline (173% boy, my Bacon Bit).

Then suddenly, Boo is back in my room, quivering with glee.

“Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy! Bacon Bit is awake! And he’s looking at me! Because he was lying down, but then I pushed on his eye and he woke up and now he’s looking at me!”

Yes, that’s right. The baby was peacefully sleeping in his room, and Boo went in there (a blatant violation of Den of Chaos Denizen Laws #27,280, thou shalt not go unto rooms which are not thine own AND #37,217, thou shalt not wake up the slumbering infant, lest the wrath of thy mother exceed her ability to remember that thou art likewise her baby and beloved unto her), reached through the slats of his crib, and pushed on his eyeballs like they were ‘on’ buttons to wake him up.

ARGH!!

I just want to check. If I understand the law correctly, it would be illegal for me to, say, duct tape that three year old kid into her bed for the night? Or brick up her door?

Damn. Stupid laws. Always protecting the so-called ‘helpless’.

Where’s the law that protects me, huh?! I was so irked by my rude awakening (again) that I was forced to have two double mochas and a two-serving-sized slice of banana cream pie for breakfast. Forced!! {blatant lie} I was planning to have a half cup of nonfat cottage cheese, an apple and a cup of black decaf coffee {/blatant lie}, but noooooooo. The kids made me pound back two heavily-leaded mochas and a massive slice of banana cream pie. Which is going to contribute to my belly-floppage, which, as we all know, is a leading cause of tummy tuck surgery, which is damned expensive. And where am I going to get the money? From the college funds, of course!! After all, it’s all their fault that I look like this, it’s only fair!

And then people are going to stand around and tsk at me: What a rotten mother! Look at her poor little darlings, not able to go to college because she spent all their money on that tummy tuck!

It just ain’t fair, I tell you, it just ain’t fair…

Jump and Crash

So I updated my portfolio this morning shortly after the market opened - and the damned thing dropped by a thousand bucks!

What the hell...?! How could I have lost a thousand bucks between closing bell yesterday and open this morning? I ain't no day trader, I ain't no penny-stock-holder, I ain't got the kind of portfolio in either size or investments where a thousand bucks comes or goes in a single day!! (More's the pity...)

So I start trying to track down what the hell and, Dear God, one of my investments has tanked. I mean, it tanked! I mean, it dropped in value by almost half! What the...I mean...it's just...I don't...they hit earnings...they just got another juicy business partnership deal...news is good...earnings are good...growth is good...{hyperventilating}

So I'm staring at the chart and suddenly I notice this little triangle up at the top with the word "Splits" next to it.

Oh. Oh yeah. Stock split this morning. Yeah, I knew that, it was announced about forever ago. So, hahahaha, let's see, if I adjust for the split...

There we go, still down compared to last night but only by a hundred bucks. That's the level of waffle I'm used to, the plus-minus a hunnerd bucks waffle. This I can handle.

{whew}

Yet another reason why I am so not cut out for the life of the day trader. I'd need a stockpile of nitrous pills and Alka-Seltzer that would bankrupt me before I even started...

Pittering, Pattering, Screaming and Splattering

So this morning at 5:45, the pitter-pattering of little feet began. So did the shrieking, complaining, cries of ‘I hate you forever!’ and ‘Gimmie it!’ ‘No!’ ‘Mine!’ ‘NO!!’

Some people get birds chirping on the windowsill. Some people get their favorite radio station. Some people get trash trucks (which, while not exactly pleasant, at least are things that do not demand any action from you – unless, of course, you forgot to put out your totes the night before, in which case they require you running out in your unmentionables to drag the damn things to the curb).

Me, I get shrieking, running and the sound of excessive water being run in the bathroom, which means that somebody is filling up a vessel of some kind which will probably end up being poured on somebody else’s bed if I don’t put my butt in gear.

Being a gentle, loving mother who respects their delicate grasp of justice and fairness, I naturally threw open my bedroom door and shouted down the hall: “If you do not stop making that noise this instant, I am going to come down there and take every single one of those princess dolls away!!”

Then I put on my last pair of (sorta) clean jeans, and decided that a few little stains from yesterday weren’t anything to bother with right now – I honestly don’t think that Tyra Banks is going to pop into my life any time soon to criticize my fashion choices.

I brushed my hair and judged that going one more day without a shower isn’t likely to actually kill me, but another week without a visit from my best buddy Ms. Clairol might. It occurs to me that if Tyra were, in fact, to pop into my life, those beautiful doe-like eyes of hers would probably fill with tears of pity for me. Which would undoubtedly piss me off. Maybe I should actually really consider getting my hair cut done an actual hairstylist instead of using a teenager with a summer job at Supercuts and a box of whatever hair dye is on sale at WalMart...

I put on my socks and tennis shoes and determined that while they are getting a little bit on the worn side, they still cover my feet OK and don’t have any actual holes in them (my last pair were five years old and had holes the size of dollar slugs in their soles before I broke down and bought these). I like to call it 'shabby chic' and pretend that I am taking my fashion to the next level. At least, that's what I'd tell Tyra, when she came to invite me to be America's Next Top Model. Although the fact that, due to certain damage to the old figure that I like to blame on the children because it is convenient to do so, I can barely even reach my feet might damage my chances on that front...

In the meantime, I crushed five little dreams:

Can we go to a farm? No, and get out of my bedroom.
Can we go to Disneyland? No, and get out of my bedroom.
Can we go to Chuck-E-Cheese? No. And. Get out of my bedroom.
Can we go to the zoo? Whaddya call this place?! And! Out!
Can we go to grandma’s house?! No. {point silently at the door}

Eldest has told me all about the three chapters of Farmer Boy she read last night. That would be Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. That would be a book considered appropriate for 9-12 year olds.

Excuse me, my daughter is only seven! And may I just state for the record that she has read this over my shoulder, aloud. And she wishes to state that it isn’t hard to read and that books shouldn’t be only for people who are a certain age because…well, because {adorable shrug and self-deprecating giggle here}.

Lord help us. What are we going to do with the child?!

I must go now. I have only had one cup of coffee, and that ain’t enough to keep this creaking old brain clipping along fast enough to pace these kids, not one of which is a bit stupid.

And no. We’re not going to China while Eldest is on break. Even though they speak in Chinese and make tea, which, coincidentally, Eldest is growing quite fond of, especially if she can put the sugar in it herself.

Too. Much. Input.
Too. Little. Coffee.
Must. Go. Brew. More.

While I brew, I will ponder the intricacies of attempting to plan an impromptu trip to China, of all places, wedged in among all the ballet classes, trips to Grandma’s, birthday parties and etcetera already on the calendar for this brief little month she has off school…

He’s a busy kinda guy

Bacon Bit is nine months old now, and he is one busy little fella.

He likes to stand and ‘cruise’, pulling himself along the sofa or a table or your leg whatever else presents itself. He can crawl at about nine miles a second and can get through a door or a gate that has been left open before you even realize he’s noticed it.

He can also climb the stairs all by himself. We didn’t know he could do it until he demonstrated for us on Mother’s Day. “He’s on the stairs!” someone sings out and by golly – so he is. Crawling like a demented lunatic, right up the stairs. (My adored son often looks like a demented lunatic – like right immediately now, for instance: he’s standing up leaning on my rocking chair banging frantically on a broken computer keyboard we’ve relegated to ‘toy’ status. Good Lord. I wonder what he thinks he’s programming into that chair…?)

He then tried to go down the stairs – headfirst, and at a fast crawl. He has no fear. “Hey, I wanna go back down where the party is!” he decides and off he goes! And was very irritated, thank you, by my wild grab for his hips. Yo, babe, yer slowin’ me down here…!

His day is pretty full. It can be hard to schedule things like, say, a diaper change or a snack, because he has got so many things to do.

I mean, he’s got to pull all the videos off the shelf, for Pete’s sake! You think those videos are going to pull themselves down? No sirree! It takes skill, and dedication, and a single-minded devotion to duty to get those videos down on the floor where they belong!

And let us not forget that the floor underneath the table must be cleared of debris left by sisters. There is always at least a crumb of potato chip or perhaps a sliver of turkey or something under there – and it is his duty to collect and eat it.

Then there are TV buttons to be played with, a remote to be chewed upon, and naturally some kind of uck needs to be deposited on Mommy’s left shoulder absolutely as soon as possible.

Yeah, he’s one busy guy, that Bacon Bit. But occasionally, he’s willing to give us the benefit of his full attention for a few minutes.

We were all singing “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” yesterday, and he dropped everything to listen in. And laugh hysterically at the ‘dah nah nah nah nah nah nah’ part. He’d sit there waiting, breathless with anticipation, a tiny smile loitering around his little rosebud lips, as we got through the chorus ‘…there goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt’ and as we started the ‘dah nah nah nah nah nah nah’ he’d fire off a machine-gun laugh: eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!

He goes-goes-goes in three to four hour bursts and then suddenly - !THUMP!. It’s over. He turns from Mr. Affable into this howling, fussing, glaring-eyed little ball of neediness. After hours of struggling and lunging toward the toys when picked up for diapers changes and so forth, suddenly nothing will do but to be held, cradled in mommy’s arms, perhaps fed a bottle, staring up sleepily into my eyes, lazily exploring my face and hair with one questing hand until he drifts off to sleep.

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the transitory nature of his childhood. Nine months old now? Surely not. A matter of weeks, maybe, but nine months?

Impossible.

He’s growing before my eyes. I just know I’m going to blink and a man is going to be before me, tall and strong like his daddy. I’m going to ask myself who that good-lookin’ stranger is, and it’s going to be this little tiny baby who puts his chubby little arms up to me and shrieks with wild delight when I come to lift him out of his crib, smiling at me and leaping into my arms and lunging forward toward the world.

But all grown up now and wondering what’s wrong with Mom now, geeeeeeez, always with the waterworks going…!

And he’s going to be a busy kind of guy. Football practice and dates and meeting up with the guys for some video game time and then there’s the debate club and the future business leaders of America and…

A busy, busy kind of guy.

Hope he’ll be able to find a little time for mommy then, a few minutes in that busy-busy day to talk to me, to let me think I’m still important. A glad-to-see-ya smile wouldn’t suck, either.

Come to think of it…I don’t know that I’ve given my mom one of those for a few years. It’s still inside of me, but it doesn’t come out much.

I wonder if she misses it.
I wonder if she knows it’s still there.
I wonder if I’ll know it’s still inside my kids, when they’re all grown.

I hope so.

But right now there’s a tugging at my leg, and a baby voice is whining. It must be time, time for our pre-nap cuddle. Look at him laugh at me – he knows I’m going to pick him up and hold him close.

While I still can.

Scare of the Day

Yesterday I was doing laundry (again). My three year old is very into “helping” right now (read as, I would have been done sooner, but I had help). She wanted to help me put the clothes into the washer. I said no. I said she could help me unload the dryer when it beeped, but no washer. About a zillion years ago, I saw a news story on our local station where this four year old boy had gone into the laundry room, opened the lid of the washer during a spin cycle, reached in and promptly got his arm torn clean off.

Ugh. For some reason, of all the horrors there are to choose from in terms of ‘stuff kids can do to themselves around the house’ from falling on knives to blowing themselves up with kerosene, this is one that really stuck with me. It’s up there with the ‘running in front of a car’ in terms of making me freak out. You want to see an irrationally pissed off mother? Hang around the parking lot of the school sometime and watch what happens when one of my kids tries to go dashing off the curb toward the van.

(And yes, before anybody says it: I’m paranoid. Especially about my kids.)

So after telling her ‘no’, I sat down in the other room to fold up the dry laundry. I called her a couple times, ‘wanna come help’? “Nooooooo,” her sweet little voice drifted back. “I’m busy.” Her voice was coming from the bathroom, which is right next to the laundry room. Hmmm, busy. Either using la toilet, or making a huge mess. Better keep an ear out either way…

And then, I heard the lid of the washer go ‘CLANG!’

I’m often a bit upset by how much I’ve slowed down over the last few years. I used to be athletic. I used to be a runner, a hiker, a kayaker. I used to be able to put it in gear and move it along – but these days, I tend to kind of waddle and dawdle. I can think of a thousand reasons why it really isn’t all that important to go the stairs right immediately now.

Unless, of course, I have just heard breaking glass, the unmistakable sound of a head hitting a solid object, or…

I got into that laundry room faster than an Olympic hopeful hitting the first hurdle, snatched her off the stool (stolen from the bathroom), and gave her an earful of ire. It was hard to resist shaking the dickens out of her! Ah, the delicious irony: Thank GOD you’re alright! Now, I’m gonna kill you!!!

You think they understand. You don’t expect them to do these things. What did she think she was going to do? Why did she open the damned thing? I might forbid a hundred things a day, from watching cartoons to eating cupcakes for lunch – why choose the thing that could get you maimed or even killed for your supreme moment of defiance?!

I’m saving like crazy for a new, super-ultra-deluxe washer and dryer. They have three times the capacity of my current washer/dryer set, and the washer door actually locks during the cycle. Can’t be opened without pushing specific buttons in a specific order on the machine.

That alone would be worth the fifteen hundred bucks to me right about now.

And now, I'm going to go do the ironing. Hmm, back when I was living with my folks, I seem to remember seeing this story about an infant who crawled over while mom was ironing and pulled on the cord, bringing the iron down on his delicate little skull...

There can be only one conclusion to be drawn from BOTH of these news items.

Laundry is dangerous, and should only be undertaken by professionals in a child-free environment. That's it. I'm taking all of mine OUT from now on...!

(OK, not really - but I think I like the argument!)

The Killer Cards

MOI, I so understand your confusion. It took me a minute, too, when Eldest explained it to me (I stole it from her school). So I thought I’d make a new thread about The Cards.

As melodramatic as it sounds, these stupid little shreds of bright-colored construction paper really did revolutionize our relationships around here. I did a lot more yelling, screaming, and irrational parental moves (accelerating straight from “now, honey-pie-sweety-love” to “GOTOYOURROOMFOREVERYOULITTLE!!!!!!”) before we went to the cards.

Here's what happens. The four cards are stacked, one on top of the other, in order: green, yellow, orange and red. They’re pinned up on the fridge in age/size order (Boo Bug’s cards are first in line AND smallest in size), where you can’t help but see them all day long.

When you sin against society, a card gets pulled. Green goes to yellow, yellow to orange and so forth.

For a long time, we had this deal where they got a quarter AND a treat for being at green. But I just recently (like, this week) began having two separate treat baskets, one for Green Card Holders and one for the Yellow ones. The ‘green’ basket has the more primo-treats: the sheets of stickers, the temporary tattoos, the $$money$$ (quarters) and larger candies (still not full sized bars, but Halloween candy-sized anyway).

If you, say, hit your sister or something, you'll get a card pulled. Then you've got a yellow card showing. You can pick something out of the regular old treat basket, which has stuff like Hershey’s kisses and single stickers. Still cool, but not cooooooooool.

Now, let's say you've already lost your green card and now (duh-nuh-nuh!) you decide that your sister just really needs a good hard whack with a shoe and damn the luck, mom saw you do it. Lost the yellow card and you're on to orange.

NO TREAT (wah!) and an immediate five minutes in "time out" (a.k.a., endless purgatory).

Now. If you're just really determined, you can go on to losing that orange card, which puts you at ‘red’. At that point, Flaming Death (a.k.a., "Go to your room This Very Instant") will descend upon you. You’ve proven yourself to be a danger to society, and will be removed from it for a time period not less than half an hour and probably Until I Call You For Dinner.

That's only happened once to us. It may be due to the fact that I have Mutant Alien Children™, but my kids have responded really, really well to the cards. I’ve actually seen them, just before performing some feat they know is going to get them busted, glance up at their cards to see where they stand.

The two younger ones are more than willing to exchange their green card for, say, jumping from the sofa to the rocking chair or attempting a Cookie Theft. But losing that yellow card and not being allowed a dip into the treat basket at Treat Time? Dear God! The horror!!!!!!

They are wonderful ‘visuals’. You can see at a glance what color card you have. They’re simple enough that my three year old gets it. And I have to say, I love the way it puts a kind of layer between myself and the discipline. Call it a copout, I don’t care. I love that I can point at the fridge at Treat Time and say “who has a green or yellow card?”

I also love the fact that I can stop most of their worst behavior simply by reminding them that, if they persist, they will lose a card. Quietly. Calmly. “If you don’t stop yelling and screaming in the doctor’s office, you will lose a card.” {silence} Aaaaaaaaaah. That’s better. No yelling. No screaming. No threats, no spankings public or private.

Amazing how a child too young to understand that mommy balling her hands into fists and turning bright purple is a bad thing, can yet somehow understand that (green OR yellow) = good, (orange OR red) != good.

Amazing how it keeps me in line, too. I might be tempted to cut a kid some slack, because after all, it isn’t fair that her siblings are getting treats, so maybe I’ll just overlook her horrid behavior this one time…

But not with an orange card glaring out from the fridge. Just like in Real Life, what you’ve done in the past follows after you, hindering or helping you by virtue of the choices you’ve made earlier. Good choices bring certain rewards, bad ones certain punishments.

Unlike Real Life, mommy resets the cards overnight, so that you start each day with a fresh, green card. Monday’s sins have no impact on Tuesday’s virtues.

If only, if only…

Creepy crawly all day long

Don't you just hate it when you feel a tickle on your arm? And then, when you look down, there's a spider on you?

So you go "Shriek!" and brush it off.

And spend the rest of the whole freakin' day thinking there are spiders crawling on you.

{brush brush brush brush brush}

can i have a soda can i have a soda can i have a soda can i have a soda can i

Why do they do it?!

There’s a new habit in the Den of Chaos. It is practiced by all three of my older children, and it is incredibly irritating.

“Can I have some soda mommy? Can I have soda? Soda? Can I have soda? Mommy, can I have soda? Soda-soda-soda-soda-soda! Soda! Please? Can I have some soda?!”

Remember the Simpson’s episode where they build the pool? “Can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad can we have a pool dad”?

That’s about it.

Doesn’t matter what it is. Soda, cookies, macaroni and cheese, apples, going outside, coming inside – doesn’t matter. Whatever they ask for, they ask fifteen times per second.

It’s gotten so bad that when I answer them, it always goes like this: “No AND! Do NOT ask me again!!”

Yesterday, Danger Mouse lost a card* for spitting out her request one more time after the “No AND! Do NOT ask me again!!” gate had crashed down.

They also have begun trying the ‘divide and conquer’ routine. One will wander in and ask, say, for cookie.

“Can I have a cookie?”
“Nope, not before dinner.”
“Puh-leeeeze? Just a little, little, little one?!”
“No AND! Do NOT ask me again!!”
{wanders away}
{four seconds peace}
{enter the next kid in line}
“Mommy, can I have a cookie?”
{lather, rinse, repeat}

Now granted: sometimes you’ve gotta ask a few times before mommy a) remembers you asked in the first place and b) has a free hand to get it for you. (Aside: someday, some elusive day, they will be old enough to get their own whatever – by themselves. Without help. Without angst. Without breaking, spilling, or otherwise wrecking anything. {pause to appreciate Someday})

But it seems that my kids have decided that it is best overall to simply hit mom with a barrage of demands and hope that she gets so confused by all the noise that she gives you cookies for lunch. It could happen.

Wouldn’t hold my breath though, if I were you. I’ll cheerfully admit that I’m pretty easily distracted by any number of things. But cookies, for lunch?

I don’t think so.

Rice Krispy treats now, that’s another story…


*the cards: every day, the kids start out with four cards. Green, yellow, orange and red. You lose cards for rule infractions. At the end of the day if you have a green or yellow card, you can get a treat out of the basket. An orange card is an instant 5 minute time out AND no treat, and a red card means Flaming Death (a.k.a., ‘go to your room and think about it until dinner and/or I call you'). Works better on my kids than anything else I’ve tried, from reasoning to yelling to spanking the dickens out of them.

A Poop Story

Fair warning: this is a POOP story!

I should have known something was up when the potty became a meeting ground.

“I need to go potty!” my five year old declares. Yeah fine good whatever, I’m looking at earnings surprises right now honey just – go. Go potty. Score one for the gipper. Whatever. (As an aside, I can hardly wait until the only person whose digestive processes I need keep tabs on are my own.)

Now, for the record: my five year old has been doin’ the potty thing for two and a half years now. She’s well past the point of requiring my hovering about anxiously in the background to do her business.

But then the three year old wandered in there and a meeting commenced. Discussions of poop, quantity, quality and the making of, ensued (‘do you have to poop?’ ‘why yes, yes I do’ ‘do you gots a lot of poop?’ ‘uh-huh, a-cause of daddy tooked me to McDonalds yesterday and that makes a lot of poop!’), until finally, thoroughly grossed out and wondering if these really were my children, I said to the ref that it was time to get out of there and let the player finish her game, if you know what I mean.

Well, the ref stood right by the door and advised the player to make sure, absolutely sure that she wiped good. Because if you don’t, you get a red butt. {bwa-hahaha, you said butt} (As another aside, I also can hardly wait until the words ‘butt’ and ‘poop’ become embarrassing rather than hysterically funny.)

A few seconds later, there was screaming and carrying on. Sure as poop, poop had happened. So had toilet paper. Lots and lots and lots of toilet paper. The toilet bowl was filled to the point where the only thing keeping the water from pouring over the floor was the surface tension of the lake.

Now, there are few things that gross me out more than a backed up toilet. Seriously. I’d rather deal with any diaper than a backed up toilet. Hence, I am about as far from an expert in the fine art of toilet-un-backing-uping as you can get and still be a user of said devices.

However, taking a quick glance around, I determined that no big, strong, manly-type guys were about to dash to my rescue.

Nope, it was just me, and the plunger. And two screaming little girls who insisted on giving me a running commentary as I sprinted for said plunger, which I vaguely remembered seeing in the garage at some point.

“Mommy! The water’s coming! The water’s coming!!”
“EEEEEEEEW! That’s POOP in it!”
{wild shrieks of laughter because someone said ‘poop’}
“Mommmmmeeeeeeee!” (the cries are getting more urgent as I begin throwing things out of my way, searching for the damned plunger) “MOMMMMEEEE! The water! It’s on the floor! It’s on the floor!!!”
{much cursing is done, sotto-voce because I don’t want to hear these words again from those cute little lips – where is that beep-honkin’ plunger?!}
“AAAAA! Mommy! MOMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
{Oh, there it is, right next to the door I came in here through}

The water (and…other…matter…) is sheeting all over my floor. The floor which, by the way, I had just sanitized this very morning. Why do I bother?! The children are standing in my way, screaming and shrieking. The baby has awoken and begun crying for attention.

I wade into the bathroom and realize I have no idea how to use a plunger. Hmm. Well, OK. It’s a pretty simple concept, right? I mean, it’s just…this part is the pushy-sucky-part, and all I need to do is…hmm…get a good seal on the thing there and then, what? Push? Pull? Yeah. Push-pull. That’s gotta be what you do…

{squish-thok-squish-thok-squish-THOK!!!}

Followed by the most beautiful sound in the world: {fluuuuuuuuussssssssshhhhhhhhh}

Whew.

The water subsided back to where it belongs. After a long, tense moment (honestly, you’d think there was a rattlesnake in there!), I gingerly depressed the handle on the toilet and, with calm efficiency, the water flushed out and refilled again, sparkling and clean.

Double whew.

That’s it for me today, friends. The market closes in eight minutes anyway, and I think it’s about martini time around here.

Thus endeth another day and I, the Reigning Goddess of the Den of Chaos, am going to get an early start on my evening. A very, very, VERY early start. A martini and a double-dark-chocolate-brownie ought to work pretty well on my nerves.

Backed up toilets. {{shudder}}

Anybody want a couple kids? Cheap? Anybody? Anybody?!

Can’t we all just get along?

One of the most valuable things we can teach our children is how to get along with others, how to manage the give and take of relationships, how to get what they want by giving a little in order to get a little.

Also, I am damned sick of refereeing every little thing my middle children do all day long. Take this morning, for instance. It’s only 8:30 in the morning, aaaaaaaaand…

“MOMMY!!” the twin voices shriek from up in their room. {thump thump thump go the little feet down the hallway} I can hear them squabbling as they run: I’m telling, no you’re not!, I am telling! I’m telling first, huh-uh, uh-huh, huh-uh, uh-huh…!

They shove and hurtle their way to my side, invariably waking up their brother – I just spent twenty minutes of my life cuddling and rocking him to sleep, grrrrrrr – to scream their siblings’ sins into my ear.

“SHE HIT ME!”
“DID NOT AND BESIDES SHE TOOK MY DOLLY AND…”
“MOM-EEEEEEEEEEEE! SHE HIT ME AND SHE TOOK MY BOOK AND SHE TOUCHED MY BLANKIE AND…”
“I.DID.NOT! MOMMY!”
“MOMMY!”
“MOMMY!”
“MOMMY!”
“MOMMY!”
“MOMMY!”

Bill Cosby once pointed out that parents aren’t interested in fair – all we want is quiet.

So true, so painfully true.

“All right,” I say, calmly. “Stop. Stop yelling. Everybody quiet. Eyes on me. Danger Mouse. Go upstairs to your room, and stay there. Boo Bug, you may stay down here with me in the playroom. Go quietly, go quickly, go now.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

“But we wanna play together!” Danger Mouse protests.

“Sorry. You can’t. This is the fifth time in twenty minutes that you have been unable to find a way to play nicely with each other. I think you need to be apart for a little while, so you can think about ways that you can work together.”

Also, mommy is going to start banging your adorable little heads together if you keep shrieking and screaming like that, I think to myself, as I kiss them lovingly on their muffin-encrusted heads (why-why-why can’t my children eat without somehow getting their food in their hair? How do they manage it, with me sitting right there with them at the table? It is one of the great mysteries of life…)

Shrieking and wailing, they part company. They promise to love each other forever and that they will miss each other so-so much. Forever!

Oh, ack. Bronte has nothing on my 3 and 5 year olds for angst.

They were thus torn asunder for all of fifteen minutes before Danger Mouse appeared downstairs, clutching a paper towel roll.

“Here, Boo Bug,” she said contritely. “You can have the telescope. Now can she come back upstairs to play, mommy?”

“If you can remember to play nicely.”

“We can remember.”

Hoooookay. And off they run, up the stairs.

So far, so good. It’s been almost an hour, and no shrieks of ‘I’m telling’ have echoed off the stairs yet. I can hear arguments and discussions, but nobody has rushed to tell on anybody else for a while.

I’ve gotten through my email, made two stocks trades, folded a load of laundry and contemplated cleaning the kitchen floor again.

What more could I ask out of a Monday morning?

I'm going to hell

I'm serious. Where the bad people go, there go I. I am evil.

I got a crank call on my cell phone. Some teenage girl was panting and moaning into my ear. Gee, how...special.

I should have just hung up. Or maybe said something “mother-ish” like, “Is that the mouth you kiss your mother with?” or “I know your mother, and when I tell her…”

But oooooooooooooooooooooooooooh no. My sense of humor ran away with me again. Pitching my voice as low and husky as I could, I cooed into the phone: "What're you wearing?"

The panting and moaning stopped abruptly. I could still hear her stunned breathing, so I knew she hadn't just hung up. "What're you wearing?" I asked again, still with the husky voice.

{silence}

"I like thongs myself...what are you, a size 6? 8? What're you wearing?"

Another pause, and then a little squeak of "ohmigawd!" followed by a dead line.

Yeah, I'd say she was maybe fourteen, fifteen - and a Class A1 rookie at the crank call thing.

And I am SO going to hell.

Because I told a lie. I hate thongs. They run up my…well, they run up.

A Banquet Is Spread Before Me

For about as long as I can remember, it has been loitering in my freezer. Hanging out with an insolent sneer across its face, mocking me every time I opened the door.

America’s #1 Frozen Brand, Banquet
Select Menu, no less.
Barbecue Chicken Meal (hmm, can we get an official definition of ‘meal’, please?).
Barbecue Sauce over Grilled Chicken, Mashed Potatoes and Corn.
Microwaveable.
330 calories with damn near nothing of value in them.

When and why I bought it, I know not (although I can pretty well guarantee there was a rock-bottom sale price involved). I know only that it has been in my freezer since approximately 1918 – the same year I bought the tennis shoes I’m wearing today. I have looked at it just about every day since then, grimaced, and chosen something, anything, else for lunch.

“Yeah, that’s right, you just keep lookin’,” it would snipe at me, as I peered between the frozen blocks of ground beef and pork chops. “You ain’t woman enough to eat me! G’on! Pick something you’d like better, like maybe that little dainty portion of tamale casserole, or perhaps a Tupperware of onion soup!”

I’d glare at it, choose something else, and slam the freezer door while it howled with laughter.

But today, I finally did it.

I took it out, nuked it up, and ate it.

Scoff at me will ya, punk?! Well, take that! I’ll even mix your corn and mashed potatoes together, then scoop the barbeque sauce into the whole mess before I chomp them down! Bwa-hahahaha!

{!!BELCH!!}

Pardon. Did I mention I’ve also polished off the last little going-flat bit of a liter of Diet Dr. Pepper with that? Well, I did. In about four seconds and without the benefit of a glass. CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!

Both were equally vile. Semi-flat Diet Dr. Pepper, and a Banquet frozen meal.

Oh, yum.

But now they’re both gone, consumed rather than thrown away, and I can get back to my life. The only thing mocking me in the freezer is a six pound bag of gourmet hotdogs, which like to throw the fact that my Mutant Alien Children will not eat hotdogs.

Bastards. But I’m getting even with them, oooooooh yes, I’m getting even with them.

I’m taking them to my niece’s birthday party this weekend. 30 adults, 15 children (not including my Mutant Aliens), and a red-hot BBQ grill.

They will be eaten.

Oh yes, they will be eaten.

BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can't claim I'm bored...

My plan for the day: Drop off the three older kids at (pre)school, go to the bank, go to physical therapy for my tendonitis-inflicted wrist, goof off until 2:30, then carry on with the picking up, ballet-lessoning and so forth of offspring until the husband eventually returns home.

Instead, I got to drop everybody off, go to the bank, go back to preschool to get Boo Bug, who was ‘very grouchy and complaining that her ear hurts’ and drag her along to physical therapy. She was 100% fine earlier that morning, ate a hearty breakfast, played and frolicked and in no way gave me any indication that she was sick. So I’m chalking it up to a combination of not wanting to go to school in the first place and maybe a headache.

For the first twenty minutes of my session, all was fine. She settled in with a coloring book and crayons and was quietly drawing away. Bacon Bit was fine, chewing on Gerber fruit snacks and ogling back at the nurses. The therapist is going to town on my wrist, doing the stuff that hurts like hell – this is the stuff I consider to be my payment for the part that actually feels good, later.

Then suddenly, the man sitting across the table from Boo diligently using his recently-surgically-repaired fingers to move pegs around a board says, in tones of great uncertainty, “Uh…she’s sorta…throwing up…”

SORTA throwing up? The kid is hurling up three times her own body mass! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!

In all the chaos, I:

♠ Hyper extended my wrist trying to grab paper towels
♠ Made it go ‘crack!’ when I tried to pick her up off the chair in an attempt to get her over a trash can
♠ Topped it all off by toppling over, landing on the sore hand (naturally) and letting out a yelp that is probably still ringing in space

THEN, I had to strip my little girl nekkid right there in front of God and everybody, wrap her up in an adult-sized hospital gown, pick up Bacon Bit and put his sister into his stroller, carrying him with one arm and push the stroller with the other (hmm, which hurts the bad wrist more, holding the baby or pushing a stroller?), maneuver my way through the various doors and around corners, over hill over dale, back to the van, get them all loaded in and buckled down.

Oh, and right in the middle of the crisis, my cell phone starts going off.

So. My wrist hurts more than it did before, I have an extra kid at home (currently running around playing ‘mermaid princess Barbie’ and feeling 110% fine, TYVM), and all my plans for goofing off? Out the window. The closest I might be able to get is if I load up my video game and attempt to thwart the Minions of Darkness for a while.

But at least I can’t claim that I’m bored, right?!

Instinctive respect

Some reactions are purely instinctive. Like if something whooshes over your head, instinct will make you blink and duck – even if you realize within a nanosecond that it isn't going to hit you. Or that it's a Nerf ball or something equally innocuous.

Some reactions are purely physical. If you accidentally set your hand on a cooking surface while it is in use, your hand will jerk away from the heat.

Some reactions are a bit trickier. I've been reading the Torah in my copious free time (ahem), and had last left the volume sitting on the little table beside my computer desk. So I finished my leftover pasta from last night and started to set the bowl down – right on top of the Torah.

You would have thought I had burned myself. I jerked that bowl away from the book just as it was about to touch. The spoon went flying, speckling my wall with pasta sauce (swell, just swell). I almost dropped the bowl.

But what was the first thing I did? Clean up the sauce? Pick up the spoon?

Nope.

I checked to make sure I hadn't gotten sauce on the Torah. With a kind of frantic, “Oh GEEZ!” usually only seen in teenagers who suddenly realize they've got mere moments before mom and/or dad come back through that door and they've got beer cans all over the floor.

It was instinct. It doesn't matter that it isn't a holy writ in my religion – the fact that I know it is god's-almighty-word-holy to some group of people gives it a kind of sanctity. A certain 'handle with care' stamp that I'm afraid Stephen King's works are just never going to get from me.

Of course, being me, I immediately started pondering how nice it would be if we as a species could somehow manage that kind of respect live and in person with each other; to engage and examine each other's religious, political, financial and ecological views without turning into rabid pulpit pounders.

To agree or disagree and go our own ways saying, “Best of luck!” instead of “What a nuckin' Baptist fat head! He's going to burn in hell for all eternity for driving that Hummer and eating brand-name ice cream purchased with the same credit card he used to donate money to the Republican party!! I'm going to start pounding the drums of war until I gather a lynch mob together to go after him..."

But I guess it is asking a little much. After all, it is very difficult for those of us who are always right to put up with the legions of ignorant savages doomed to Doing It All Wrong because they just won't listen to us…

New blog: The Great Washer / Dryer Experiment!

I made the idiotic mistake of asking myself just how much time I spend doing laundry. Fourteen loads a week, each taking about 1-1/2 hours to go from washer through dryer, folding and putting-away, I make that to be 21 hours. Twenty-one hours.

You know, it’s funny how sometimes things will blindside you. When I decided to have four kids, I was braced for things like ‘very noisy house’ and ‘going through a lot of groceries’ and ‘in my van chauffeuring an awful lot’ and ‘having to save diligently for college funds’.

Two things that have really smacked me in terms of grim, unexpected reality: that I will be doing a full load of dishes at least twice per day (and that for us, ‘service for 12’ is precisely half as many as we need), and, that I would spend 21 hours per week, half of a more rational person’s total work week, standing around either folding laundry or waiting for more laundry to fold.

I have decided I need a new washer and dryer. I need the Big Ones, the ones that can handle about three times the capacity of my current washer/dryer set.

They cost $3,000.

Did I mention I’m a stay at home mom with four small children, no income to speak of and a pretty damned tight budget?

But! Undaunted, I forge on!! I’ve started a new blog to track my progress, which may well take years! I’m going to be using every trick I’ve garnered over years of debt and income reduction to squirrel away cash out of my discretionary spending toward these washers and dryers.

However, unlike the times when I’ve done it because it was a matter of eating or not eating, keeping a roof over our heads or using the van as a mobile hotel, or staying just on the other side of the Bankruptcy Line – this promises to be kind of fun.

This time, it’s a game.

C’mon over if you have time. http://iwannanewwasher.blogspot.com

I’ve got $8.57 so far. I'll be at $3,000 in no (geologic) time...

Common Luxury

I once read, in a rather dated cookbook, the suggestion that it was only proper for the cook to eat leftover roast chicken for her own lunch the next day rather than attempt to stretch it further by making casseroles and so forth – a kind of reward for her hard work and dedication.

Last night, I made a roast chicken. Took one lemon and one lime, cut them into quarters and stuffed the bird with them, sprinkled salt and pepper over the top, and roasted carefully until it was precisely done. Not a centimeter on either side of ‘done’, but right smack on the nose.

At the same time, I boiled up some potatoes, mashed them with butter, milk, a little salt, a little pepper and a generous dash of garlic powder. Add a bag of steamed sweet corn, and you’ve got Americana on the hoof. Even my kids, who have apparently decided that everything that comes out of our kitchen is ‘icky’, ate pretty well.

Ordinarily, I’ll take any leftover meat from roasts and freeze it for end-of-month potpies or casseroles. And there wasn’t a whole lot left. Half a breast, the wings, and the back meat – that was about it. It was easy to take the little scraps from the wings, the thighs, the back, the shreds of clinging breast meat…but that one beautiful breast medallion…

So darned toothsome, so delicately juicy and citrus-scented flavorful…it seemed a thousand pities to put it into the freezer, to be lost in Worcestershire-driven sauce.

So this afternoon, I sat down with a Tupperware containing half a chicken breast, a small serving of potatoes and a smaller one of corn. While my kids cheerfully downed PB&J and milk, I enjoyed my leftover luncheon with a little glass of not-at-all-bad white wine, followed up with a homemade cookie and a cup (or two, or possibly three) of strong-brewed French-press coffee.

Luxury is so very relative.

I have had a very luxurious day, thus far.

And you…?

Valuable bits of worthless information

This has just been added to the List of Stuff That Is Mildly Irksome: companies who confirm your order and assure you that it will arrive ‘shortly.’

‘Shortly’? What the heck does that mean? I just gave you eleven bucks to ship something that weighs about four ounces to me, and it will arrive ‘shortly’?

No.

No no no no no no no. No.

I happen to know that the major carriers permit you to instantly let people know exactly when things will arrive. I know this because, as a very small-time Seller of Stuff on eBay, I use said technology. Shoot, even the USPS can do this.

‘Shortly’ my beeeeee-hind, folks. Gimmie a tracking number or something. Because otherwise? I’m gonna call you. Four, five, ten times a day.

You have been warned.

Don’t give me ‘shortly’. Give me something in days. Or preferably hours. I have a short attention sp-

Organizational Bulimia

I have decided that I am the organizational equivalent to a bulimic.

First, I gorge. This is the cycle where stuff piles up. The closets begin to overflow. The ‘junk drawer’ becomes the ‘junk desk’ and eventually the ‘junk desk, cupboards, built-ins, closets and Every Flat Surface In The House’. The laundry is piled up all over the house. The ironing hasn’t been done in three weeks and the husband is wearing “KISS ME – I’M IRISH!” shirts to work (which is silly, because he isn’t even one little drop Irish). The kids haven’t had a bath in a week because there is no soap and no clean towels; and besides, the tub is so dirty that it is arguable whether their bath is cleaning them, or the tub.

Then suddenly, with little or no warning, I purge. In a week (or two) long frenzy, I work ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day or more. Cleaning. Organizing. Tossing trash, filing paperwork, donating worn out clothing. The house is sparkling from roof to garage. The roses get pruned, the lawns get mowed, the children are suddenly dressed before breakfast, from their brushed hair to their neatly cleaned shoes. Bag after bag of outgrown clothing has gone to Goodwill, a hundred bucks worth of books has been sold on half.com and suddenly I can find all my knitting supplies the instant I need them.

It is very, very good. And it stays that way for a month or two, or even three.

Then, one non-recycled newspaper or spot on the bathroom mirror at a time…it begins to grow.

And it grows, and it grows. Knitting needles get left on top of the shelves instead of getting put away in their holders. Balls of yarn get tossed into a pile that quickly begins sliding onto the closet floor. Craft supplies get shoved into drawers until they won’t close anymore, and then are simply dumped onto the floor in front of the chest on the theory that I’ll put them away ‘in a minute’.

First I dismiss: When I get a second, I’ll deal with that.

Then I deny: It’s no big deal, it’ll take me, like, five seconds to snap that room back together.

Then I defend: It isn’t like I’m not doing anything here. I’ve got four little kids to keep amused all day, every day. That’s a lot of supervising. That’s a lot of work, right there. I’ll take out the trash when I get a damned minute – right after I finish reading this article about General Motors’ loss of market share and research the bond market a little bit…

Then, I get mad: Why the HELL is this MY job? Would it kill people to pick up a dish once in a while? And why is it that I’m the only one capable of hauling a trash bag out to the trash can? And while we’re at it, how come I’ve got to clean the damned bathrooms all the time and iron HIS shirts? His legs ain’t broke and I know he’s not stupid, so how come he can’t do his own damned laundry and his own damned shirts and maybe JUST ONCE take out the damned trash?!?!

Then, I sulk for a while: I’m not doing it. Not. Doing. It. I’m not picking up even one (1) more thing in this house. Hell with it. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I’m sick of it. Besides, there’s a new article at Snopes.com…

But then, one morning, it happens. After a week (or two) of having to walk through the house as though it were a minefield, stepping over toys and boxes and whatnot, a bit will suddenly flip. I will literally wake up one morning full of vinegar, jump out of bed and start scrubbing. One room at a time, one task at a time, doggedly, grimly determined, ignoring all else and letting my children watch TV or play video games literally all day for a week – I clean.

And then I vow, solemnly, that I will never let it get that way again. I will never set trash down on the kitchen counter when the trash can is right there, under the sink. I will never decide to give Laundry Day a miss, even if it does happen to fall on a perfect ‘let’s go for a drive’ kind of day. I will do the ironing every Tuesday, so that it only takes about twenty minutes instead of becoming a two hour ordeal. I will not allow my discarded newspapers to pile up in my knitting basket, or permit coffee to pool up on the counter behind the coffee maker. Ever again.

And I won’t.

For a month or two, or three.

But then, one crumpled up envelope of Equal left on the kitchen counter at a time, it begins again.

I’m on the beginning of the downward spiral right immediately now, as I write. And I swear, I am not going to let it get out of hand. I’m going to get all these books that have mysteriously entered the house via some mystic portal (a.k.a., UPS deliveries from Barnes & Noble) out of here, and I’m going to file all those bills and shred all those unsolicited offers of credit and I’m going to clean the coffee off the kitchen counter and put away the laundry and go through the toys currently carpeting the floor upstairs from the bedrooms down the hallway.

But first…I understand there may be some upheaval in the bond market right now due to the high price of oil and the rising interest rates. And the bond market, as we all know, waits for no one – not even a Domestic Goddess who has dust bunnies the size of goats under the bed.

Stupid stupid Glow Worm!

We had just arrived home from the park. Bacon Bit was very, very tired. And like most very, very tired babies – he was fighting sleep with every ounce of his remaining strength.

He wailed while I got his sisters settled with coloring books and art buckets. The brief silence after being picked up was quickly replaced with more wailing as he realized I intended to {gasp} rock him to sleep!

Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes tick slowly past. Gently and slowly, back and forth, crooning and cuddling, until his shell-pink eyelids dimple themselves closed and his death grip begins to slide on my collar.

Rock-rock-rock.

Five more minutes. Eight minutes. Ten minutes – OK. Time to try for the crib…

We ease out of the chair. We glide up the stairs. Tip the baby into his crib. Watch him settle down, with a quick glance around, a sigh, a shrug, and back to sleep. Ah. I have the same feeling I suspect Olympic gymnasts have upon completing a perfect dismount from the parallel bars…

…and then…

……turning to leave……

………I stepped on the garble-fraggled-hazenfefferin’-blister-burbled Glow Worm some {beep honk} relative decided Bacon Bit simply had to have. How the stupid thing got on the floor or why people will insist on buying such things for tiny babies (who are not allowed to cuddle anything in their cribs at night and aren’t afraid of the dark in the first place) is moot right at this moment, because…its cute little face lit up and it began to LA-LA to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. LA LA, LA LA, LA LA LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! It does this loudly.

!pop! goes the little head, straight up, eyes wide open. Whoa, that was a close one! Almost fell asleep there, almost actually took a nap! Whew! Thanks for getting my back there, little wormy dude…OK, now, where were we? Oh yeah. {ahem} WAAAAAAH!!!! I DON’T WANNA GO TO BED! WAH-WAH-WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Aw, {garbled expletive}!! I grabbed up the Glow Worm and stuffed it under my shirt in an attempt to silence the cheerful la-ing – which is exactly what is meant by ‘closing the barn door after the horse is already out’. It is just SO too late. But I try anyway. And then I start trying the ‘well, I’ll just let him cry for a few minutes, maybe he’ll go back to sleep.’ Uh-huh. Hasn’t worked in the last five months, but maybe, magically, he’ll do it this time.

I hate that Glow Worm. I hate it with a mad and abiding passion. I hope that the Glow Worm rots under a thick coating of dust up there on the top shelf in the closet. No, wait, I take that back.

I hope that Glowy is Bacon Bit’s absolute top-favorite toy…right after his teeth start coming in.

BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Signs of Intelligent Life

I love babies, don't get me wrong. But those very early days can be a bit...trying. You know, when they mostly lie around having a rest between squalls and don't give you a whole lot of feedback on things. When you wonder, "Is there anybody HOME in there?" as they stare fixedly up at something only they can see on the ceiling while you're trying to engage them in some brain-stimulating game guaranteed to make your three week old a genius by age two.

But then suddenly, with little warning, they begin doing things like cooing, smiling and laughing, and otherwise reacting to the world. And you think, "Hey, there's hope for this kid yet!"

And then, glory be, they begin to take a very active interest in the world around them. They struggle to move themselves over to objects, instead of lying there like slugs waiting for a servant to bring the object to them. They begin to express emotions in a wider range of ways, from crying to laughing, even the occasional pointing or hand-wave-in-the-general-direction-of.

Bacon Bit has moved into the ‘crawling with a vengeance’ stage now. After being stuck in reverse for a few weeks, he suddenly threw it into drive and is now able to go just about anywhere he’d like in a remarkably rapid fashion.

A point of definite interest in his world is my knitting basket. Each child has had to learn this basic rule of the Den of Chaos: the knitting basket is Off Limits. Now obviously, I don’t expect my eight month old to understand the whole concept of ‘no’ or ‘off limits’ or anything like that. I just move the knitting basket out of his reach when I’m not actively using it, and redirect him whenever he attempts to get at it while I am using it.

So yesterday, he saw me take it down from On High to begin working on my project. He threw it into high gear and bustled over to attempt a reconnoiter of the contents – he is a great lover of paper (good source of fiber, interesting flavor and texture) and string (fun to wave about and chew upon), and he knows I have some of both in there.

“No-no-no,” I said gently, picking him up and setting him back down on the floor some distance away. I handed him a couple toys and reminded him how they worked.

First, he shouted his outrage. I will not be balked!! It didn’t last long, though, and he moved on to idly banging the plastic truck on the floor while mulling things over. He watched me for a moment, then crawled nonchalantly over. He sat up. He looked up at me and gave me a charming little smile as he rested one hand, ever-so-lightly, on the edge of the basket.

I heard what he was saying, loud and clear. “I’m checking to see if the sound ‘no-no-no’ means what I think it means, Mommy. And whether or not maybe I can use charm to get away with it anyway…”

A little later that same day, he was sitting in the middle of the playroom floor chewing on a teething ring and watching me from the corner of his eye. Hmm, I thought. Wonder what he thinks he’s up to…?

Sure enough, he set the ring down and began hightailing it out of the room. Out of the playroom, behind the sofa, and out into the hall. Grumbling, I set down my knitting, heaved out of my chair to go after him…and found him sitting up in the hall, bright-eyed and expectant, waiting for me.

The instant he saw me coming after him, he let out a shrieking giggle of pure glee, flopped back onto all fours, and began crawling away as fast as he possibly could. “Chase me, momma, chase me!!”

When I swooped down on him, he let out another shriek of joy, seized hold of my face in both hands and got me a good one in his baby version of a kiss (open mouth as wide as possible, work up some slobber, then rub vigorously back and forth across any exposed skin on the kissee). He was just so darned pleased with his servant’s ability to figure out the new game!!

He’s showing himself to be a fun-loving young man with a good spark of intelligence, a physically active child with a love of games and a deep affection for Servant #1, a.k.a., Mommy. He is also very persistent – we played the ‘chase me’ game at least six hundred times in the next hour, before he finally tired of it and moved on to demanding food and a nap.

Every day now, he shows me a little bit more of the person he is going to be. I’ve been blessed so far with three older children that I not only love (which just sort of comes along with the Mommy gig) but also like (which can be a bit trickier – some kids are pretty, well, uh, obnoxious and easy to dislike).

And it’s starting to look like we’re going to be four for four. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Now I just need to remember that right after he’s drawn on my tax return with crayon or used Play-Doh to decorate the sofa.

Unfair!

I am SO unfair

Eldest has been indulging in one of the uglier behaviors available to children: she has become something of a bully. She’s turned into quite the petty tyrant, shrieking at her sisters, pitching fits when she doesn’t get her way, telling them “I won’t be your sister anymore!” (like THAT’S a good threat!) or “You’ll never be a princess!”

I’ve been working on this for a couple weeks now. Let’s see. We’ve gone through the ‘that’s not nice’ discussion. We’ve had the ‘go sit on the sofa for a minute and think about it’. We’ve talked about thinking before we speak, and discussed thinking about how we’d feel if these things were said or done to ourselves.

Well, today, I finally blasted right on through ‘discussing’ and ‘time outs’ and everything else and went straight for the jugular.

I have just been Unfair. Watch for Eldest in front of the house with a picket sign, soon.

We have an old laptop that is being used for the kids’ games. I set the kitchen timer for half an hour, and each kid gets one (1) turn per day during ‘quiet time’.

Eldest was twenty minutes into her game when the laptop froze up (a common occurrence – did I mention that it is old?!). Normally what happens next is, I’ll come in, unfreeze the thing, and bump the timer up a couple minutes.

So, right in the middle of the reboot, Danger Mouse says to me, “Mommy, I wish it were my turn soon.”

Before I could say anything (such as, ‘only about ten more minutes, honey’), Eldest whips around, thrusts her tongue out at her little sister and shrieks, “Well, you CAN’T play a game – EVER! It’s my turn FOREVER!! Because it’s MY computer and MY games and I SAID SO, NYAH!!”

Excuse me? EXCUSE me?

I froze, looking at my eldest child in disbelief. She froze, realizing that she was getting the patented Stare of Doom™ from her mother. Danger Mouse froze in mid-wail, realizing that if she didn’t hush up, she was going to miss the show. Even Boo Bug gasped, looking up from her LeapPad.

I sat there with my mouth open, searching for something to say. The first few things that came to mind really weren’t things I’d like to hear repeated, and the next few really weren’t harsh enough. I’m way past ‘discussing’, ‘debating’ or ‘exploring our feelings’ on this deal. Finally, I went with, “OK, that’s it. Out of the chair. Danger Mouse, it’s your turn NOW.”

Nooooooooooooooooooo!! Oh, the angst! The agony! The promises of good behavior! Never again! Wailing, screaming, flinging herself to the floor in excesses of grief. “I’ll never say anything mean again!”

Yeah, right. I’ve heard that one at least twelve times in the last two days. Besides, I haven’t found it to be a good idea to backpedal away from disciplinary measures around the Den of Chaos – if you say you’re going to do something, you’d better do it. Every punishment you threaten and don’t follow through on seems to result in three more punishments you DO need to follow through on to get back to where you were, Respect For Your Authority wise.

So, the timer has been set, Danger Mouse is playing Reader Rabbit, and Eldest has been couched to watch the stupid antics of the stupid Bear in the stupid Big stupid Blue STUPID House. She has also been told, just put to the cherry on the Unfair Sundae, that if she so much as whimpers about it even one more time (or tries to take it out on any of her siblings when she thinks I’m out of earshot), she will also forfeit tomorrow’s game time.

I am unfair. So unfair. She wants to go live at Grandma’s house FOREVER.

I’ve got news for her: my mother, her adored grandmother, cornered the market on ‘unfair’. I could tell you many hours of stories about the unfairness of my life as her eldest child.

Years of this unfairness taught me how to control my temper, so that I didn’t simply backhand my snotty-brat-child (which, believe me, also occurred to me as a potential course of action). It taught me the discipline that enabled me to get through college. I learned not to snark off at the wrong time, thus avoiding getting my face beaten in by irate peers.

And I will continue to be unfair until she, too, has learned; so that, someday, my grandchild can run to me with sobbing tales of how unfair her mommy is…

Sickness Sucks

OK, I know that I’m stating the obvious here. But still, I feel impelled to declare that Being Sick Sucks.

The thing that sucks the most, to me personally, is that I am not able to just lie down and sniffle miserably to myself when I get sick. Because I am (dramatic music here) Mommy.

Yes, that’s right! Cape streaming in the breeze, Wonder Mum must boldly go forth and do her duty, even if she is breathing through less than a quarter of one nostril and has the lung capacity of a flea!

My being sick does not exempt me from such things as creating meals for the Denizens. It also does not cause the laundry to do itself, or the bathrooms to suddenly self-clean. Groceries will not be delivered, and they certainly will not be putting themselves away. Bills must still be paid, even if I’m so muzzy with cold and flu medication that I have to use the calculator to figure out what 2 times 20 equals.

Worst of all, the baby will not decide to simply nap until mommy feels better. No! Quite the contrary! Bacon Bit has in fact developed the same cold I have, and is not only not napping during the day, but spending a considerable portion of the night wailing and crying, too.

He is doing this because he feels like shit. But it feels an awful lot like persecution to me. Especially at 1:15 in the morning, when I’m up for the third time trying to comfort him back to sleep. My husband, usually a lot of help in such times of trouble, also has a cold. For him, being sick imparts the most amazing ability: he can lie in bed saying, “Let the little fart cry himself to sleep! I’m too tired to deal with it!” whereas I’m pretty sure that if I listened to him cry for more than, say, five minutes my spleen would actually implode inside my body.

Hard not to feel as though the entire world hates you at that point. And Bacon Bit was so frustrated with his own shit-feeling-like-ness that he was flailing at me with his little fists, grabbing tiny handfuls of hair and yanking, and kicking and arching his back as if he wanted nothing more to do with me – except, of course, that if I set him down even for an instant, his screaming would intensify until every piece of glass in the house was quaking ominously, ready to shatter.

I looked down at his tiny, six month old self, and I thought, You ungrateful little twerp!

Of course, I can’t stay mad at him. Plagued with empathy, I know just how he feels. His head hurts, his throat hurts, his nose is all plugged up and he doesn’t get the concept of breathing through his mouth very well.

He wants his mommy, but yet mommy just isn’t doing him that much good. I can solve everything else that upsets him, so obviously I just don’t understand his problem. I know! I’ll yell louder, maybe then she’ll do something about this…

The good news is, colds only last for so long. The kid who gave us all this disease is over it, so I figure we’ve got another day, maybe two at the outside, and then the husband, baby and myself should be feeling better.

At which point, I suppose I’ll have no further excuse for not getting the lawns mowed…

Frugality in the New Century

If you tell someone that you are embracing frugality as a lifestyle, they will likely laugh in that way people have when they aren’t entirely sure if you are serious. It seems as though the word has acquired a certain quaint silliness, putting a polite or humorous spin on what would be more commonly called a tightwad or a skinflint or a pathetic waste of a loser who is probably going to bum twenty bucks off you before the end of the evening.

So, just for the record, here is my dictionary’s definition of it.

Frugality: (n) Prudence in avoiding waste.

You know what I like best about that definition? The ‘prudence’ part. Prudence. Prudence means ‘careful management’. So, someone practicing frugality carefully manages what they have in order to minimize waste. It goes far beyond mere money, touching just about every aspect of life.

Practiced correctly, frugality does not make a person into a Scrooge-like miser perched in rags atop a pile of coins. It will, however, produce a person who knows precisely what they really want and who truly savors the things they have.

I can’t tell you how often I meet people who lament about their sheer inability to make major life purchases, like a home. Both of us working full time, and we can barely afford the rent. We just can’t seem to get ahead…

It is usually because they do not practice frugality correctly. Frugality is a lot more than turning shampoo bottles upside down to get that last lather-rinse out. It is about having a clear idea as to the relative value of what you are purchasing.

There’s nothing wrong with owning a Hummer. There’s also nothing wrong with owning a house. Ditto having the new spring wardrobe in time to step out at the annual Ladies Who Lunch Spring Fling. Or having a lusciously funded college fund for your kids, or retiring at age 55 instead of laboring on into your 70s.

Where it goes wrong is if all you ever want out of life is to retire early, but instead you’re driving a Hummer. Or you want nothing more on this earth than to have a roof over your head that actually belongs to you, but then those darned sales kept happening and instead you’ve got a collection of shoes that makes Imelda sigh with envy.

Frugality is all about knowing what you want, and in what order you want it. Which is more important to you, home ownership or driving a new car now? Which is more mortifying, having to tell your kids it’s Scholarship or No School, or having to wear (gasp) The Same Dress Twice In A Season?

Personally, I don’t think there’s any right or wrong. That different people have different values should be pretty obvious to most thinking people at this point; and that nobody has the One True Way should be equally obvious.

The only wrong thing is to never bother to think about it. So take a minute. Your time and your money both are finite – in order to use them wisely, you have to use them with awareness. Be frugal with them. Enjoy them, each coin and each minute, to their fullest and then sit back with full boasting rights to say, “That was worth doing!”