A night out like grownups
Last night Otto and I went out on a date. A DATE. LIKE ADULTS. It was very exciting, because I don’t know if you know this, but it is very easy to get caught up in work and kids and life and leaky pools (still leaking!) and strawberries and “there’s nothing on TV… oh WAIT, have you seen that Netflix has this ENTIRE SERIES here??” and forget to do things like this whole mythical “nurture your marriage” deal.
Speaking as someone whose second job has become pulling weeds and harvesting snap peas, I often wish I could just water Otto and pull on… wait. This metaphor is going someplace too inappropriate even for me. NEVERMIND.
The point is that I am still very fond of this here guy who keeps stealing the covers at night, and APPARENTLY we need to do more than watch television together to keep our love healthy, or something. So we went out without children. read more…
The beeping; good lord, the beeping
Something kind of exciting happened here this week, and I wrote about it over at Alpha Mom.
I’ll give you a hint: My teenagers are no longer speaking to each other in person using their mouthparts. Our electronic overlords have taken over! And in a weird way, I guess I’m okay with that. Mostly.
When inappropriate is a family affair
This Monday-on-Tuesday nonsense is kicking my butt, today, but I just had to share a brief glimpse of the lovely family hike we took yesterday while enjoying the holiday:
Monkey: Licorice keeps pulling me ahead.
Me: She is a small dog. You are a medium-sized boy. You should be winning.
Monkey: No, really, she pulls REALLY hard! She keeps dragging me.
Me: Dude, she weighs twelve pounds. Maybe it’s time for you to grow a pair.
Monkey: Of what?
Which prompted this simultaneous response of:
Chickadee: TESTICLES!
Otto: Boobs. Your mother is suggesting you grow boobs.
After the laughter died down, we then had:
Chickadee: You need them so you don’t have erectile dysfunction.
Monkey: What’s erectile dysfunction?
Chickadee: It’s when your erectile doesn’t work.
[She’ll be here all week! Tip your waitress!]
Otto: Sometimes Licorice has reptile dysfunction.
Me: Yeah, it’s when the lizard she’s chasing refuses to get in her mouth.
Otto: Ba dum bum!
Also? That’s what she said.
I’ll be dressing Monkey as the Little Dutch Boy
Bad news: The pool is still leaking.
Good news: The Pool Guy comes to see us EVERY DAY! And he gets to spend a lot of time IN our pool!
Bad news: He doesn’t seem too happy about it, plus Monkey is very bitter that the Pool Guy is the only person who’s actually been swimming in our pool so far.
Good news: There is not, in fact, a hole in the new pool liner. You know, the SECOND new pool liner.
Bad news: What it SEEMS to be is some poor patching work between the steps and the pool concrete, and the Pool Guy keeps “fixing it,” but we are still losing water.
Good news: We’re currently losing water a lot slower than before. Yay? read more…
This is how we do summer
Phil departed the premises last night. It was time. (It was long PAST time, but I’m working pretty hard on this whole “saying yes” thing.) No tears were shed. Any residual sadness has been smoothed over with frozen dairy confection, and our house is once again a blessedly bug-free zone.
By way of partial explanation as to why I ever allowed that in the first place, I offer you a summer manifesto for the big kids, over at Alpha Mom. ‘Tis the season to say yes, to build skills, and to chill out. All at once! I THINK THAT WOULD BE EASIER WITH A FUNCTIONAL POOL, but regardless, we’re working on it. (Hope springs eternal. The pool guy supposedly found the leak, so CROSS YOUR FINGERS.)
So the inmates are running the asylum
Summer vacation, man. Things are crazy already, and it’s only the second day.
I think tomorrow I’ll be able to direct you to a post about my summer philosophy (spoiler: Now with fewer Give A Craps!), but for today all I can tell you is that we ate all the strawberries we picked last week and we had to go pick some more. Also there are more teenagers lurking around here than I remember giving birth to, but I am a little afraid to do a headcount. Everyone seems happy, so it’s okay. Also we have a lot of strawberries.
ALSO my darling daughter has completely lost her mind discovered her nurturing side. You see, yesterday the Bug Guy came to spray, and while he was out spraying on the deck, a GIANT cockroach palmetto bug ran in through the deck door, and Chickadee decided to rescue it. AS YOU KNOW, I was already planning to burn the house down, but the new resident is making that decision even easier.
“He has EPILEPSY!” she declared. It seems he may have gotten sprayed on the way in. It scrambled his brains just a little. [WARNING: Pic after the jump.] read more…
Why am I even surprised?
We knew, not even very far into it, that fixing the pool was yet another Curse Of Casa Mir project, doomed from the start. What could go wrong, would go wrong. Obviously.
Much went wrong. So much went wrong, they had to redo the liner entirely, which meant the first one was taken away and a second one installed last week. EVERYTHING IS FINE NOW, they assured us. LOOK THIS LINER IS PERFECT, NO PROBLEMS, PLEASE DO NOT PUNCH ME IN THE FACE, they said. (The “please do not punch me” part was possibly implied. I never threatened to hit anyone. Not out loud, anyway.) They came while Otto was teaching his summer class and took out the old liner and put the new one in and then scampered out of here as fast as they could, probably because they knew I am a woman on the edge and also Mr. Completely Unflappable was considerably flapped by this entire adventure.
Otto came home; we finished filling up the pool, and then commenced dumping all the chemistry in the world into the water, to the tune of several hundred dollars. (Why do I mention this? The liner itself was a 4-figure job, why split hairs about the cost of the chemistry? BECAUSE I AM BITTER, THAT’S WHY.) When you start from scratch, there’s a bunch of stuff that has to go into the water. The salt for the chlorinating system, plus stabilizers and pH balancers and I don’t even know what. All I know is that we dumped and stirred and then I said to Otto, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we went to turn it on and the filter doesn’t work, after all of this?” read more…
Strawberrypalooza
Some days I have a ton of work to do, deadlines coming out of my ears, and also there is laundry to be done and the kitchen is a mess and the dog needs a bath and my children are needy in various ways, and because I am a professional and also a master of life balance I look around and say, “Screw it. Let’s go pick strawberries.”
So we do.
Insomnia logic
3:01 AM: Huh. I appear to be awake.
3:03 AM: I’m still awake. Do I have to pee? Maybe I have to pee. I think I have to pee. But if I get up, then I’ll never fall asleep again.
3:05 AM: I probably don’t really have to pee. If I just lie here quietly I’m sure I’ll fall back asleep.
3:10 AM: Do I have to pee?
3:15 AM: Does Otto snore this loud all the time and usually I’m asleep, or am I awake because JESUS CHRIST I AM SLEEPING WITH A LAWN MOWER?
3:16 AM: He’s adorable when he’s snoring, though.
3:17 AM: Do I have to pee?
3:18 AM: No, sure, fine, just keep on peacefully sleeping while I stare at the ceiling. THANKS, HONEY. At least one of us is sleeping! read more…
School’s out for summer (or maybe forever)
So in the midst of everything else, we thought it would be a supergreat and totally not at all crazy idea to change Monkey’s schooling YET AGAIN. Because what Aspies love more than anything else is CHANGE! Yes. Except no. And lord knows things have just been SO BORING ’round here.
(The alternate version of this story is that Hippie School—lovingly dubbed thus two years ago when it was still mostly a joke—is undergoing some changes and growing pains, and after careful consideration, we feel the program which has so nurtured him for the past two years is just not going to meet his needs anymore, moving forward. I like the first version better, though.)
Today was Monkey’s last day, and so we swung by the store on the way home to buy some Pokemon cards to ease the sting. Next year we’ll continue homeschooling, and then… well, we have a lot of decisions to make about what he’ll be doing for high school. We’ll see.
In the meantime, if you are one of those I-could-never-homeschool types, I feel you. My latest post over at Alpha Mom is all about how I never could’ve, either, but then I did, and it’s been kind of awesome.