99 Bottles of NyQuil on the Wall...

 Here's my feeble attempt at speed blogging for tonight...

Order of the Arrow camping trip for Grant - no talking, little food, manual labor, pouring rain

Post camp - no talking, little food, NO manual labor, and blistered feet

Field trip to Chattanooga, TN with four charter buses full of 3rd graders. DOT pulls all four buses and holds them for almost two hours for "safety inspections." One bus fails and we end up with three buses jam packed full of hungry and tired kids who'd been on the go for 12 hours! In hindsight, we should have just released all of the kids into the parking lot. I'm sure those officers would have sped up a bit!

A class of kids who love me despite stranding them on a bus without food

The divalicious teenager of the house has decided to go into over drive. Um, NO!

The divalicious toddler is, well... a divalicious toddler.

The last week has been crazy. Despite the lunacy of the whole thing, everyone is still alive and I've dosed out a minimal amount of Benadryl in order to preserve my sanity. When my brain surfaces for air, I'll fill in all of the blanks. But, for now, the Randolph Asylum is running on high alert for potential inmate disturbances and the warden is beginning to find humor in things that really aren't all that funny. Like I said, that's normally my sign to take a deep breath, use those Lamaze techniques that I never used during child birth, and start singing 99 Bottles of NyQuil on the Wall.

Good night, all.

The Future Has Arrived

 

This is the best I've got today. The future has arrived, in case you were waiting on it.

Good night, all.

Getting the Sand Out of the Nooks and Crannies

What a weekend! I'm not quite sure where the time went. As usual, Sunday night becomes a frantic scramble to get things done that I've had all stinking weekend to do! Whew!

With a nearly sleepless night due to my own brain deciding to crank into action about 1:00 a.m. compounded with a snuggly squid lodged underneath my armpit trying to avoid hearing the thunder, I've been in a very dense fog all day. I'm thankful that yesterday's puker did not continue redecorating the bathroom today, though. It must have been something that he ate. However, with the 1:00 a.m. call to order of my brain cells, the squid bed mate, and that anxiety that all moms know regarding the timing of a puking child (will they, won't they?), we did not make it to church this morning. We did tune in via the internet. Annie is always amused when I do this. Although, she was still piled in my bed watching Sofia the First over and over again while I tried to glean something from the sermon. Like I said, "Whew!"

 

We did manage to make some cookies to overcome the ills of the previous night. The kids lovingly call these "poop cookies." I am in continual fear of receiving a note from Annie's school informing me that she has said something extraordinarily colorful at school! I can just see it now! Some well-bred, cultured mom is handing out chocolate cupcakes for her little dumpling's birthday at school and Annie yells out, "Those look like my mom's poop cookies!" I've gotta say that she is the most incriminating nugget out of this three pack.

Those who know me well can tell you that when I start baking (ok, the cookies count as baking even though they are officially "no bake" cookies), I've got something on my mind. Yeah, I do. Just when I think I know everything and I have life figured out - WHAM! I'm beginning to think that I am probably His worst student! Even though I have the instruction book right in front of my face, I continue to fail the tests. I saw a sign the other day that said something like, "When you're in school, the lesson comes before the test but in life, the lesson usually comes after the test." Yeah. I probably need to file that somewhere important. I feel like I've had to revise every single thing that I thought and believed about myself over the last three years. I guess there have been a few boxes that I had shoved back into the corner of my mind and hoped I wouldn't need to open up and overhaul them. Wrong. I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of it tonight but I can tell you that my visions of what relationships should look like have been majorly tainted by the Hallmark Chanel. While I tossed my rose colored glasses quite a few miles back, I still get hung up with some pretty warped expectations. At this point, it's so hard to separate bruises from the past with the discomfort of moving out of my comfort zone. Ok. Enough said. Sometimes, I just wish I had  some sort of external hard drive that could be wiped clean and reprogrammed with the updated software. I guess there's just not much character building to be gained with that scenario, though, or faith building.

So, to top off my already foggy and feeble mind today, Annie started telling me about DNA. Thinking back, I think she was actually saying something about this yesterday but I dismissed the fact that any four year old would know what DNA was. I just thought she was screwing up the ABCs again and I welcomed that from her - something more toddlerish. But, nope! When I unpacked her school bag a couple of hours ago, there was a sheet in her behavior folder that said she'd learned about and built DNA. There were toothpicks, Twizzlers, and gumdrops in the baggie with the info sheet. Well, crap. I guess I better refresh my memory about what DNA is because I've sure forgotten. Oh well. Once again, I'm dumbfounded by the smarts of the third child. I'm rather thankful at this point that there's not a fourth or fifth kid in the mix. They probably would be overthrowing civilization before they ever made it out of Huggies. How do the Duggars do it? That 20th kid has to be sort of like a mini-rocket scientist!

Yeah, I know it's upside down but I don't have the brain cells to figure out how to flip DNA at this point. I'd probably screw up someone's genetic code by trying to flip the dumb things!

 But, the crowning moment of the day was sort of the final straw. Grant looked out my bedroom window and said, "Um, Mom? Did you know that there's a tree that fell?" Nice. I'm thankful that it didn't end up on the house and I guess I'm sort of laughing at the fact that it fell on the shade tent that I'd already used zip ties to repair. Hmmm.... I'm thinking that I'm going to have to have a tent disassembling party and invite folks over to help me tear that thing down and carry it out of here. I think it's worth a couple of steaks on the grill for sure! Takers? Oh well. Like I said, at least it's not on top of the house, in the house, or... I don't know. It's laughable at this point tonight.

So, for tonight, I'm still processing and trying to be open to this whole overhaul but it's sure not easy. Realizing that you're a stupid-head just isn't a fun thing. And, when you've had your head buried in the sand for so many years, it takes quite a while to get the sand out of all of those unknown places! No one ever said that wisdom is free.

 

¹¹ Discretion will protect you and understanding will guard you.¹² Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse, ¹³ who have left the straight paths

to walk in dark ways  Proverbs 2:11-13

 

Good night, all.

No Fly Zone (for Spoons)

Ok, ok, ok. Yeah. I know. I didn't post last night. It doesn't mean that I'm dead (or running from the law). It means that I fell asleep face down in a book and really never knew what hit me!

So, for those of you who seem to hang on my escapades for your own bedtime stories, here you go.

Yesterday, I left school before I could figure out anything pressing that I needed to do. It's nice to leave early but it usually just means that I have more time to sit in the middle school car line - with Annie in tow. She started getting whiny about 10 minutes in to what would be about a 40 minute wait. I let her get out of her car seat and told her to get a book and I'd read to her. Well, she eventually got the book but not before she pushed every single button and even discovered a bag of croutons and started chowing down on them. I don't ever buy that kind of croutons! I don't have a clue where they came from. I'm hoping that it was something mom sent at some point and it just got pushed up under the seat!

She was very amused with the VOLUME control. I just wish she had a simple little knob that would silence her!

So many buttons, so little time!

At one point, the radio station kept mysteriously changing. Who knew that you could do that from the backseat?

Minutes before we needed to start moving forward to pick up the big kids, Annie buckled herself in and threw me the book to read to her. She was NOT happy when I buckled her back in to her little car seat cage!

Quite honestly, I just didn't feel like cooking last night. I really wanted to simply order a pizza and call it quits. But, in an attempt to be a good steward of the resources I have left at the end of the month (the Cheerios and change under the sofa), I made do with throwing together a stir fry. The kids were not impressed with my shortcuts and decided to have a full-blown uprising. As I look back over the whole debacle, I realize that my biggest mistake was throwing out plastic spoons for the kids to shovel the rice into their pie holes. I'm not exactly sure who started it but everyone quickly learned that plastic spoons make great catapults. Grant tried to cross into the illegal territory and started loading his spoon with broccoli which was shut down quickly. Just FYI, if you're starting a food fight and want to cause quick and devastating damage, broccoli is a good choice. It explodes and sends little broccoli shrapnel everywhere when it hits something with enough velocity. Anyway, since I vetoed the official food fight, the kids simply started flipping the spoons at each other. Don't ever underestimate the power of a plastic spoon. They hurt like heck when they smack you in the face!

Grant used his hoodie to shield his eyes. Do you see the cat? She had seen enough and just got out of Dodge!

Annie (yes, she's shirtless - and pantless if you want specifics) couldn't master flipping the spoon so she just started throwing them like javelins.

Dasha gave up and just went back to eating. Sometimes, I think she wonders if all American households operate like ours.

Today, everyone sort of went in different directions. I had a sitter stay with the girls. Grant feels very insulted when I have a sitter over and he does everything in his power to escape. Today, he managed to secure respite at a friend's house. With everyone settled, I headed north to Tellus Science Museum. I normally have a cloud of children around me when I'm there and I don't have time to actually read anything. Today, I actually took time to read some of the descriptions. It was rather amazing! A meal at a real restaurant was a nice ending to the outing. (No. I did not fling the spoons. But, I really had to maintain quite a bit of control when my straw wrapper slid off the straw in perfect formation. It would have been a perfect wrapper to have blown off the end of the straw. Ugh. Manners are sometimes highly overrated).

I don't know how I was coerced to put my head into that thing! Yeah, I do. I was double dog dared! All I could think about was who'd been in there last and might have had cooties!

So, everyone is now back to their start positions minus the one who is holding his head over the toilet and projectile vomiting. (Why bother even trying to hit the target when you are spewing at that velocity)? I'm hoping that something he ate has taken revenge and that this isn't some nasty virus that is going to render this house helpless before daybreak. Maybe I'll spray the kids all down with Lysol after they're asleep. It's probably going to be a very long night.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. Deuteronomy 6:6-7

Good night, all... Clean up on aisle 6 - AGAIN! Ugh.

Quit While You're Ahead

Why does the four year old ask Grandma to dig past the kiddie candy and pull out the dark chocolate?

I need a time out seat with a seat belt. Strong willed doesn't even begin to describe this monkey!

Muffins for Mom with Grandma was a success.
Bribing Annie to get out of bed this morning using stickers was a success.
Grant mowing the yard by himself was a success (all body parts still attached).
Dasha getting her homework done in record time was a success. (I'm not checking for correct answers, though).
My plan to get my school work accomplished and walking out of the building this afternoon without my computer or any papers was a success.

I'm quitting while I'm ahead.

Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.

Proverbs 16:3

Good night, all.

Mini-van Miracles and Momless Muffins

I'm keeping it quick and keeping it real tonight.

It's time for an intervention when it comes to rousing this group of chicken nuggets in the mornings. I'm not above bribery. I'm tired of folks thinking that they don't need to get up until I call them the third time! Tomorrow, I will institute bribery on a mass scale.

When I finally got everyone to their designated starting positions this morning, I heard my phone buzzing on the window ledge in my classroom. I never get a cell signal in the building! I answered the call to have my dad inform me that I needed to leave the van unlocked because he was coming to get it. Um, ok. This is one of those situations where you don't ask Fred what he plans to do with the van. You simply start praying that he isn't going to use duct tape (or PVC pipe) in the activity! So, I did as I was told and unlocked the van and left the key for him - and then completely forgot that he'd taken the van!

As I left the building hours later, a colleague ask me how I was going to get home! Doh! However, the van was tucked neatly into a parking spot at the edge of the lot. I could see the greasy black finger prints all over the sides of the white van so I knew that Fred has intercepted the vehicle at some point. When I opened the door, the floor was littered with parts and pieces that looked like they should have been under the hood and not rolling around on the floor. Ugh. I just kept telling myself that I needed to be grateful for... whatever he had done.

I went and picked up all of the chicken nuggets and then thought I was heading home until Ethel called to tell me that I needed to take a detour back to their house. Nice. She obviously didn't know that I had just endured sitting through car line for 20 minutes with a four year old saying she needed to poop! I admit to asking Annie if she wanted me to put a Pull Up on her. Nope. I didn't even offer to take her to a real bathroom. I had my eyes set on the prize of a quiet afternoon at home with a pile of paperwork to do!

Ok. This is really dragging. I'm getting to the point. Basically, Fred had the garage door open for me when I arrived and he had a few choice words for me. Seems as if I'm not an expert on automotive maintenance and had overlooked what he deemed routine maintenance. I'm 37 years old and I still do NOT like to get into trouble with my daddy! Seems that he spent his entire day trying to undo whatever damage I did. (I'm still not quite sure what I did but, he didn't like it). He had the van in ICU for another two hours! When we finally left, he started to lecture me and then quit. Did he realize that I'm a grown woman with three kids, a house, and a job? Maybe he did. But do I realize that?

Here's my issue... How am I supposed to continue the "leave and cleave" part of adult life when mom and dad seem to have taken me back in as a child? It's so hard to find the boundaries. While I want to snap back at Fred when he declares me incompetent, I don't because I know that my Battleship would be sunk without his help. When Ethel oversteps her boundaries as a grandma, it's hard to say anything because I know that without her help, I'd be in major trouble. Fred and Ethel both end up playing clean-up when I can't make the ends meet with schedules, emotions, and even with basic maintenance. Oh, heck. I'm not going to lie. They make the financial ends meet for the kids' activities constantly! Without their help, our lives would look very different right now. So, I ask again, how am I suppose to find the boundaries of being a single mom when Fred and Ethel are constantly having to sneak around the boundaries to help keep the folks behind the lines in working order? You know what this boils down to? Independence vs. dependence.  I hate having to be dependent on anyone. It has taken me years to realize that but it's one of those things swirling around at my core. For some reason, relying on others equates to failure in my book. Maybe this isn't logical or reasonable but that's just how I'm wired. Maybe I need to work on rewiring those thoughts. Hmmm... On days like this, the battle of me vs. them smells like stank!

Here's the other part of the issue... Tomorrow is Muffins with Mom at Annie's school. I'm not going. I feel guilty taking off more time even if it would only be a couple of hours. So, mom is going in my place. Ugh. This jabs me at a hundred different places tonight. Part of me is scolding myself and telling myself that I should have taken the time off and gone despite feeling like I've missed more days this year than any in the past. Another little meanie-head voice is reminding me what a crappy mom I am and I can't even manage to meet one simply little obligation for Annie's class. Then, the little goody-goody voice tells me that missing the muffins tomorrow will not land us in the therapist's office immediately. It's only a muffin. Sometimes, I just want the voices in my head to shut up and leave me alone!

So, I will go forth and pretend that I know what I'm supposed to do now to keep the van in better working order. And, I'll continue to count my blessings of having mom and dad to pick up the pieces that I simply can't hang on to!

Good night, all.

The 3 Stooges Duke it Out with PVC

Abracadabra... You're a... tree!

New Olympic sport - pole vaulting off a tree

Watch this! If I swing my wand at Dasha, I can smack her feet and make her swing go sideways.

Here we go... I can take out Grandma, Dasha, and the dog with one little swipe of my wand!

Aw, Grandma! You're no fun! I haven't caused any blood shed yet!

Do you remember that post about my confirmation of God's sense of humor? Tonight, I got enough evidence to prove my theory beyond a shadow of a doubt. Think back to that post about Fred constructing Ethel the birdseed catcher using PVC pipe. Well, Ethel insisted that poor Fred dismantle the whole contraption due to the fact that it scored very high on the "You Might Be A Redneck" scale. Poor Fred. I guess he put the now useless PVC pipe back into his doghouse. While he was out there cutting the crown molding (remember that from the same post?) to cover the paint blobs on the ceiling, Annie decided to thieve the pipe and turn it into her own magical wand. At first, she just wanted to whack the trees. Then, she figured out that she could reach the bird feeders and rock them back and forth and make the seed go everywhere. (Mom will probably blame the birds, anyway)! But, the best part of the whole darn thing was when she wanted to swing WITH the pole. I sat on the back porch and just sort of watched the whole Three Stooges episode unfold. At first, Annie just held onto the pipe as mom pushed her back and forth. Then, Annie started swinging the pole like her wand and that's when the show got really good! At first, she was only smacking Dasha and making Dasha spin around in the swing. That was ok entertainment. Then, she realized that she could push off the tree and make her swing go sideways. Ok. The entertainment value increased marginally. The best stunt was when she started swinging the wand back and forth diagonally and found that she could bust grandma in the snout and swipe Dasha's feet out from under her with the same motion. The commotion also made the dog run for cover! I'm going to refrain from asking the obvious question. "Why did stooge one and two continue to stand there and let stooge three smack them with the pole?" Maybe I did ask the question. Who cares. It was too stinking funny. At one point, I saw Fred peep out from his doghouse and laugh. My assumption is that his inner child was saying, "Ha! I'll make you think my creations are borne of redneck genes! I hope the ankle biter impales that PVC into your nose!" Neither one of us tried to save the stooges from each other. It was just about the funniest train wreck I've seen in a while!


OK. So, you can tell my exhaustion level based on how easy it is to amuse me. Tonight, I'm very easily amused.

I'm posting the calamity in order to appease my inner OCD diva who seems to feel the need to post every night. I'm not, however, catering to her need to follow the same format as other nights. Do other people argue with themselves like I do? Oh well.

Good night, all.