My Chickadee sometimes drives me completely insane. You know how chickadees were named for their call? "Chickadee-dee-dee-dee-deeeeee! Chickadee-dee-dee-dee-deeeeee!" My daughter's nickname evolved because she, too, twitters constantly and loves the sound of her own name (as in, if there's talking going on, it had better be either by her or about her, or she'll set things straight). If I had a nickel for every time I've said "You know, honey... when you don't have anything to say, it's okay to stop talking," I'd be a wealthy woman. Marcey calls her my "prickly pear." Eileen says she's...
I would like to sit down and calculate how many waking hours I've spent trying to get my children to go to sleep. No, I wouldn't. It would probably make me cry. I accept that this is part of the Mama job description, just as part of being a kid is that you don't go down without a fight, whether you need to cry and whine that you are NOT tired or get out of bed eleventy times or simply work on your headstands in bed and then fall crashing out of the bed with the approximate velocity and force of a herd of thundering wildebeasts and then wonder why the following reception is not more...
I fear that Julia--Master (mistress?) of All That is Funkalicious in Graphics--is going to kill me, or at least spend a loooong time guilting me, when she sees that I've removed the cool banner she made for me. I do love that supercool night sky background, and all of the nifty text transformations that Those Of Us With Cheapo Limited Edition Photoshop can only dream about. But this place isn't meant to be about being flashy, and Sundays bring out my desire to simplify in a way that little else does. Feel free to leave long, wistful, deeply yearning comments about how the previous banner was...
Important discovery: I can have oodles of time to myself to blog, pay bills, and do dishes, and still garner Fun Mama points, if I allow the Monkey to cut up his Spiderman coloring book while I do so. He has spent most of the morning cutting out every little spider in there and then running to me to present it... whereupon I shriek a fake little scream of horror, he laughs himself silly (remember, he is easily amused), and then he runs off to find me another one. "Mama, you don't like spiders, do you?" "No, honey, not very much." "Mama, spiders and Barbies freak you out." "Yes, sweetheart,...
For a Monday morning, today was fabulous. I don't know what I did to deserve it or what horrors lay in wait for later today or tomorrow, but I'll take it. Monday morning is Back To School, and Monday morning is often also Battle of the Cranky Tired Ones. If the Monkey (my 4-year-old son) is overtired, he gets up at the crack of dawn ("crack of darn" as he has aptly named it), comes down to my room, and is as unpleasant as possible until I get out of bed and run away to the relative seclusion of the shower. If the Chickadee (my 6-year-old daughter) is overtired, she just doesn't get up. (I...
