I tell you what: you think, when your kids are little, that when they're bigger, it'll be easier. HAHAHAHA. You look forward to self-sufficiency and assume it will magically appear in exactly the right proportions at the right time. This is because parenting damages your brain. When you're dealing with a child who goes floppy and boneless when it's time to put on their shoes, you imagine that someday they will make good, responsible decisions as a direct result of your calmly reiterating instructions for the tenth time and your remarkable restraint in not strangling them with their own...
This morning I removed the season's first rodent from the pool. It was just as much fun as you might imagine! And that's how I know that summer has well and truly arrived. It's not summer until something drowns. Also, my garden is giving me fits. APPARENTLY I planted a bunch of bum seeds for my beans and cucumbers, and because I am a very slow learner---and also because we have squirrels and feral cats roaming around and sometimes digging in my beds---I replanted with those same seeds several times before admitting that they simply weren't going to grow. Finally I admitted defeat and bought...
There isn't really a good way to "top" graduation, so a smarter family would not try, but we are nothing if not sort of dumb. Chickadee graduated on Saturday and then yesterday she had her wisdom teeth out. INSERT SAD TROMBONE HERE. The bad news is that I was ready for post-anesthesia hilarity---I had been told not to videotape anything, but I made no promises---and I was disappointed. For all of her larger-than-life antics while completely sober (and let us not forget that her last oral surgery was a Party with a capital P), this procedure was anticlimactic. All she wanted to do after was...
I've been whining about our unfinished bathroom for... several weeks, at least, by now. What a mess! What an inconvenience! A first world problem, to be sure, but ugh. So annoying. And I've been trying really, really hard to gain some perspective on this, because it's not that big of a deal. The good news is that today we have a mirror! Not that I haven't ABSOLUTELY LOVED Monkey coming downstairs every day with rumpled hair after his shower---soliloquizing on how maybe no one has noticed, but their bathroom STILL DOESN'T HAVE A MIRROR---to grump his way into my office bathroom and make...
Greetings from Day 17 of our 5-day bathroom remodel. HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA. HAAAAAAA. HA. Ahem. It was the vanity, you see. Not vanity like hubris sort of vanity, but the physical cabinet/counter/sink thingie, and it was backordered, and so we had to wait. I mean, let's pretend that's why, and forget about the tiling and retiling and the third time the tile got done, finally. Because the tile looks great! The floor is lovely! The shower is complete! And we even have a working toilet! Let's ignore the antibacterial soap pump on the edge of the tub because we have no sink. In fact, I'm pretty sure...
Yesterday was rife with complaints about the time change and how Monday is so completely awful and now it's Monday-plus-a-time-change and EVERYTHING IS THE WORST. I was busy bathroom-wrangling, or rather, trying to wrangle what's happening with the bathroom and the contractors and when oh when might we have a working bathroom up there... does anyone know? Plus there was the usual work stuff and getting the kids back to school stuff and some other stuff and I remember thinking, yesterday afternoon, that it was a pretty terrible day and I would be very glad once it was over. But then it got...
We're renovating the upstairs bathroom this week. More accurately, this week I am trying to keep the dogs from going insane while a crew makes a lot of noise and a big mess. So far it doesn't look much like a bathroom, but I have high hopes. Also, it was supposed to be finished by tomorrow. HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA. Um. I am still hoping it might be done next week. Or this year. Something. My usual way of coping with the grossness my offspring proliferate in their bathroom is to... just never go in there. But until that bathroom is done, they have to use the bathroom I use. Let's just say my...
We had some scrambling to get Nerd Night rescheduled, this week, which prompted our friendly neighborhood Dungeon Master to share this with the group: It's possible it made me laugh louder and longer than was strictly necessary, but I admit to nothing. Now, normally my argument against rescheduling or canceling Nerd Night is that MONKEY WILL BE SO DISAPPOINTED, but when the subject of canceling last night or moving it to today came up, this time, like the doting mother I am, I was all YOU CANNOT CANCEL I AM ALREADY MAKING A COMPLICATED CAKE. See, Boston Cream Pie (motto: not actually pie!)...
It's been a long time since I could say this, but: It's been a pretty good year. I would like to lose 10 (20) pounds and I would like Duncan to stop getting ear infections and Licorice's breath to smell less like she just ate a bunch of cat poop (yep, the feral cats in our neighborhood are still around...) and for Otto to have a little less stress in his life and for my kids to start understanding how amazing they really are and also maybe for them to strike the phrase "in a minute" from their vocabularies... but... things are good. These are minor quibbles. To celebrate, I made a million...
