I'm a big believer in a little bit of special all the time, rather than a whole lot of special just once in a while. It's just how I am. Not that I'll turn down the occasional grandiose gesture, you understand, but I am not a Special Occasion person. I'm a Little Details person. Usually. Needless to say, every now and then I trip myself up. I get a wild hair---I decide I Must Do Something Special---and nine times out of ten it results in an unmitigated disaster. Give you a kiss every morning? Sure! Do your laundry? Okay! Make your dinner? Absolutely! Plan something extra special? Um, please...
After careful consideration, I have decided that I am not equipped to parent a teenaged girl. This is really a pity, because it leaves me just three short years with my family before I either have to send Chickadee off to a military academy or enter the Witness Protection Program, and I'm not sure I'm even going to be caught up with all of the television shows I have DVRed, by then. Also, who will tell Monkey to put his socks in the hamper? Who will say to Otto, "HUSBAND! Please go outside and MAKE FIRE and bring us back some CHARRED FLESH!"? In case you haven't guessed, my darling daughter...
I was working along, yesterday, quite happily. Mondays are always excellent work days---I've had just enough family togetherness to make those hours after everyone's left the house feel serene and calm and full of possibility. I'm incredibly productive on Mondays. (It falls off during the week. By Friday? I'm useless.) It has become my habit to do several hours of work in the morning before showering. If I'm going to be completely honest, I guess the truth is that I often work until lunchtime, then take a break to eat and shower and, you know, get dressed. Until then, I'm just here on my...
This weekend was an interesting one. Otto was off playing with cars in the woods (at an actual event, not just randomly taking some cars into the woods, because I guess that would be weird) and so the kids and I were on our own. I'll be the first one to tell you that life is INFINITELY more interesting when Otto is around, but the occasional day without him is very familiar and cozy, too. Saturday was a lazy day, and I do mean LAZY. It was gorgeous out and I found myself trying to cajole the kids into a walk. "C'mon! It'll be fun! It's a beautiful day!" But they were having none of that...
So it turns out that when you spend your day catering to a very sick and pitiful child and also trying to work, by the end of the day you feel as though you've been up for a week. And then you review the day to consider what you could possibly write about, and once you rule out everything that has to do with a bucket or Lysol or the indignity of the Hallmark Channel claiming that Little House on the Prairie is on when REALLY it's just another damn episode of The Waltons, there isn't much else on your mind. Um, let's see. Oh! Our dishwasher started behaving strangely. And by "behaving...
I had so many exciting things to tell you about today, like that the Great Scrabble Wars are alive and well (in case you were wondering, HOMEY is acceptable, but HOMEYLIT as the genre that results from rappers writing books is---for some reason---not) and that we've already nearly demolished the leftovers from the Super Bowl party, but I'm afraid that will all have to wait. My folks are getting ready to leave and head back up north this morning, and not a moment too soon. (No, not because we want them gone. For their own safety.) When my alarm went off this morning, I was in that place of...
Today we went on a wild, day-long adventure, which included going panning for gold. As we stood clustered around a trough, each swishing around our pans, Monkey jabbered a mile a minute and Chickadee complained a couple of times that the water was too cold, but in the end, each of us had successfully isolated a few flakes of gold, which was then placed into a vial we could keep. The children were ecstatic. For about ten seconds. We then had to wait a bit before it was our turn to go on a tour of the mine, and for a moment I actually GOT SMART and went and bought the kids a snack to head off...
Over the Christmas break we had planned for our little family to spend a few days with my parents before heading home again. As it turned out, Otto and I ended up going to see my folks without the kids, which was sorely disappointing all around. (It turns out that I am just not very interesting now that there are a couple of pint-sized versions of me who are a lot funnier than I am.) After a bit of cajoling, my dad and stepmom planned a trip down here to visit us. They did so at no small inconvenience, too---yesterday afternoon my father called from a Chili's in the Detroit airport to let me...
I have just a few things I need to take care of today. I have work, cleaning, work, an interview, work, laundry, work, errands, and, OH YEAH, work. So I decided to make soup. You know, because I wasn't busy. There is something primal, to me, about throwing things in a pot and letting them cook all day and turn into something you might actually want to eat. When I first came to Georgia it was approximately 110 degrees every single day, and I found myself looking forward to the winter so that I could start making soup again. I waited. And waited. And the kids were still going to school in...
