Tomorrow, tomorrow...

The tale of Brian's Volcano Cake will have to wait until tomorrow. I don't want all the b'day pictures lumped together with the pictures I dumped off the camera this morning in preparation for the festivities. The b'day pictures need to be downloaded on a different day. I know there is probably a way for me to download them tonight into a separate "album," but it is beyond my capabilities. Do not try to explain it to me; my brain will explode.

So, instead, I will share with you the most exciting news of the day. Today Susie became the very first kid in our family to actually poop in the potty before reaching her 3rd b'day. Yup, she is amazing. Well, actually, I am just amazingly lousy at potty training; but I've made my peace with that. We all went out for ice cream to celebrate her great feat. Which, I do realize, poses a problem the next time she chooses to poop in the potty....

Oh, and we left a message for Larry at work - I got Susie to say into the phone (in her sweet little 2-year-old voice), "Hi, Daddy! I pooped in the potty!" I sure hope Larry doesn't listen to his office voice mail on speakerphone.

How many times can I type some variation of "poop in the potty" in a single post? I'm up to 3 already. No, 4...and I am just getting warmed up.

It was spring-like here today, so spring-like that I even considered putting on my (knee-length) shorts. But I really didn't want to find out whether I could button them or not, so I put off that pleasure for another day. I did finally figure out a simple way to reach my goal weight, though - I increased it. So now, instead of being 7 pounds away from my goal, I am only one pound over. I feel so much skinnier! Larry was not impressed with my new approach to weight loss.

I really wish I could show you those Volcano Cake pictures....

No Kidding

I had to clean the stove today, since I can't even turn it on without setting off the fire alarm; so I thought I would make the task fun by taking before and after pictures. Well, I must be a lousy photographer; despite my best efforts , the after pictures really do not look much better than the before ones. Go figure. Maybe it is my camera's idea of an April Fool's joke.

I hate April Fool's Day. I have never understood what is so funny about making someone else (as in, um, me) feel like an idiot. Not that I resent it or anything, Another Gray Hair; but if you do end up actually pregnant at some point in the future, enjoy that morning sickness, okay? Humph.

I took the younger kids to the library this afternoon; I only had to pay 25 dollars this time to get my account thawed out. If any of you are keeping a running tally of how much money I have paid to that lovely institution this year, please do not share it with me - I don't want to know.

Remember the other dad Larry spent 24 hours with on the Boy Scout camping trip? The one whose son became best friends with David? Turns out Larry learned neither his last name nor where he lives. This incident just may explain why Americans resorted to torture* to get information out of detainees: the interrogators were male and had no idea how to gather information in a normal fashion.

*If you are one of those benighted individuals who doubts whether waterboarding is technically torture, I suggest you go experience it; then come back here and make your report. Make sure to bring pictures so we can see what a great time you are having.
[No one splits legal hairs better than our current Administration, I must say.]


And yes, I did let my toddler poop in her pants while I wrote this post - how did you guess?

This And That, But Not Much

I lost 2 and a half pounds this week. Which means, that I can sit down to the computer to type without having to unsnap my pants. In my mind, that's progress.

My husband has left me for the week, and he forgot to take our resident rodents with him. He's coming back Friday evening so that we can spend a pleasant weekend watching him get over jet lag. Or, rather, the kids can. I'm outta here.

Susie can now say, "I need to poop, please give me a diaper." This amazing ability to articulate her toileting needs makes me suspect that there is no reason why she shouldn't be using the potty. Except she refuses to. She also refuses to stay in her bed all evening. She's on a little power trip that should only last, oh, 16 more years. There's nothing like being the baby of the family.

No funnies here tonight, I guess. Just wanted to say hi, and thank all the people who have been stopping by. Y'all come on back now, you hear? And in the meantime, stop by Derfwad Manor and see what's up over there. Make sure to check out Mrs. G's explanation to her daughter of why PC is better than Mac. I guarantee you haven't thought of it her way before.

Friends Don't Let Friends Knit....

I am caught in a time warp. Because I haven't seen many movies since I started on this child-raising thing 16 years ago (lack of money, lack of time), my points of reference for actors and actresses are, well, a little off. So when Derfwad Manor posted fairly recent pictures of Jessica Lange and Ellen Barkin, I thought she was playing a cruel joke. I remember the fresh-faced Jessica from Tootsie. Ellen, girlfriend, in my heart you're still the young wife in Diner. But here I am looking at pictures of (not very gracefully) aging women. I feel like Rip van Winkle, waking up after 20 years. Ah, the ravages of time.

Giddy with triumph over our potty training success yesterday, I neglected to stick a diaper on Susie when she fell asleep in my bed last night. So, when I went up to go to sleep, I had to strip the baby and the bed (I love doing this at midnight). Susie slept through all of this. The whole episode agitated me a bit, so I went back downstairs to get the pee smell out of my nostrils and edit some more photos. I went to bed at 1 AM. Which explains why I passed out while I was putting Susie to bed (with a diaper) this evening. And missed half of my weekly Knit Night.

Which is all right, because I hate knitting. I invested so much time in one stupid sock, and it persisted in getting bigger and bigger (not in a good way) as I knit it. I kept telling myself that it would still be all right, that it wasn't that outsized; but tonight the scales fell from my eyes (what does that mean, anyway?) when another knitter looked at it and suggested, not unkindly, that maybe I could hang it from the fireplace on Christmas Eve. It's that big. I think you could fit a small laptop in it. Or you could have, but not anymore. Because now it is just a big pile of yarn sitting in the middle of my dining room table. Waiting to be made into a smaller sock. Or maybe a sweater, if I can find a pattern simple enough. Or maybe I should just cut it all up into tiny little bits to punish it for wasting hours of my life.

I take failure sort of personally, I guess.

Time is running out....gotta post or the NaBloPoMo monster will get me.

Toddler Tricks and Money Mayhem

Susie (my 2-year-old) has been on the phone a lot lately. She walks around cradling a plastic banana between her shoulder and her face and saying, "Is your mommy home?" and "Uh-huh. Hmmm. Uh-huh." I've asked her who she's talking to, but she doesn't seem to hear me. Probably because she has a banana in her ear.

Ba-da-bum.

Maybe she was talking to a toilet-training hotline, because yesterday - miracle of miracles - she walked up to me and said those 3 words every mother wants to hear: "Wanna go potty." So I sat her on the toilet, not expecting her to actually use the darn thing, when what to my wondering ear did appear but a tinkling like bells on the harness of 8 tiny reindeer.

Sorry, 'tis the season...I'll try not to let that happen again.

Yes, she actually peed in the potty. I happened to be on the banana, I mean phone, with Larry at the time, so I was shrieking into the receiver, "She did it! Did you hear her tinkling? She did it!" Have I mentioned that he works in a very centrally located cubicle? So now his colleagues think (if they didn't already) that 6 kids may be a little too much for any one woman to take.

Larry and I are trying to pick out a paint color for the living room. I'm thinking we may need to hire a mediator. What with our divergent tastes in home decor and the fact that there are approximately 14 billion different shades of gray available at our local paint store, we'll probably get this place painted, oh, maybe 9 years from now. Or perhaps we won't bother. I mean, we've got lots of different shades of gray smeared all over the living room walls at this point anyway. We could leave it and go for the variegated look. Like multi-colored yarn. I bet I'd be the first knitter to paint her walls to look like her favorite skein. Take that, all you knitting bloggers!

We gave up today and agreed to pay a friendly service technician lots of money to explain to us how our gas fireplaces work. It's galling. Add to that that we brought the second car in for an oil change today and ended up paying the garage almost 500 dollars (that's on top of the 1000 dollars from yesterday), and Christmas is looking less and less merry. I mean, for us. There's a bunch of mechanics who are gonna have a pretty good time, though.

Anna is speaking to me again. I have no idea why.

Larry came home for dinner and then went back to work. Good. I didn't want to see him anyway. Now I can waste the entire evening on the computer and he won't even know. I do still have about 1500 photos to edit. And a photo calendar to put together. I don't know what the heck I did with my time before we went digital. Sleep, maybe?

Sleeping is a good idea. Maybe I'll just go to bed early. (And you know you're middle-aged when that seems like the best way to spend a free evening.) G'night, all!

Singular Accomplishments

Today, while my wonderful next-door neighbor let my 3 youngest kids play in her house, I managed to wipe down the fronts of the kitchen cabinets, one section of the kitchen floor, half the stovetop, and the outside of the kitchen garbage can. Go me! Then I ran up the staircase and danced around with my hands in the air, with the theme of Rocky playing in my head.

Frightening, isn't it?

You know, after 16 years of raising little kids, everything smells like pee. I think my olfactory sense has been permanently damaged. Or it could be that I missed cleaning up after one of Sarah's many accidents. She claims she's scared of the potty. Do you think she'd go for a litter box? I could even teach her to scoop it herself.

Larry and I did our bit to contribute to global warming by leaving the oven on all night. So, if scientists find another hole in the ozone this week, you can blame us. We're responsible for the overpopulation problem too, though I guess you knew that already.

Wait - are those 2 separate issues - the global warming and the ozone thing? Wasn't the ozone problem caused by aerosol cans? Or is it back? I can't keep my environmental catastrophes straight anymore. No wonder I didn't win the Nobel prize last week. Although if they had a prize for Seat-of-the-Pants Parenting, I would definitely be a contender.

I'm just making this up as I go along; feel free to stop me at any time.

The boys' room finally smells normal (I mean, for a boys' bedroom); and I discovered that the disgusting smell in my kitchen (which was bothering me so much I couldn't even write about it) was caused by the rotting bag of potatoes in the cabinet under the sink. I was wondering why no one was dropping by anymore....

I just noticed that my calendar is still on September. I'm living in the past. I've got to go catch up. Talk to you later...

Brady Envy

We had a teachable moment here yesterday morning - I got to instruct my daughter on proper dress (as in, if your entire butt crack shows when you bend over, you need to change your jeans before you go out) and she got to instruct me in just how much she doesn't care about our dress code. I don't remember ever seeing this sort of thing on the Brady Bunch. Which, I'm belatedly realizing, has been my guide to parenting all these years. No wonder I can never get all the housework done - I've been sitting around waiting for Alice to show up.

After Anna changed (loudly), she and Theo went out kayaking, which provided me with a much-needed respite from the teenage death glare (also never seen on the Brady Bunch); I spent my morning productively cleaning up after all of Susie's toilet-training accidents. Oh, and I made David cry by suggesting we work on his book report. Cross that one off my to-do list.....

I lost my head later when I picked up the teenagers from the bus and foolishly asked Anna if she had had fun at the boathouse. I received another death glare for my troubles. A couple of hours later, I woke her up from a nap to take Susie to the swings so that I could escape to the bookstore with David (they were having an educators' reception there). Death glare #3 - I never learn, now do I? But I left anyway. The reception was great - David ate handfuls of M&M's and I feasted on the Brownie Bites. I entered a few drawings, because I love freebies. Anyway, the festivities were interrupted by Anna's calling me to tell me that Susie had once again peed on the floor. Ah! Another teachable moment! I described to Anna the absorptive qualities of dishtowels and recommended that she see for herself how well they would wipe up the puddle (that would be the lab portion of the class). She hung up on me (she had no other option, as the Death Glare cannot be administered over a phone line). She's not going to get a very good grade for comportment this semester, I can tell you.

The stomach-virus fairy is still conducting mop-up operations around here (no pun intended); David "felt funny" last night (we weren't sure what that meant, but we supplied him with a dishpan and got him off the top bunk, just in case) and Anna woke up complaining this morning. I mean, more than usual. So she's downstairs watching Fiddler on the Roof, a nice wholesome movie that may have a pogrom or two, but at least Tevye isn't snorting cocaine out in the barn and none of the daughters' butt cracks are showing. And all the swear words are in Yiddish. I'm sure Carol Brady would approve.

Potty Animal

Summer's back - it went away for a few days and we were teased with sweatshirt weather and beautiful gray skies, but now it is back with a vengeance. That's okay - I like being miserable.

Potty training is going along swimmingly here, as usual (ahem). I decided that waiting far too long to train the other kids had caused all the problems we've had in the potty department; so I confiscated Susie's diapers months ago (before she turned 2). As a result, she pees on the floor and yells, "Towel!" and I run and bring towels to clean it all up. She's trained me pretty well, don't you think?

What I should have done is paper-trained her. And smacked her (gently) on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper every time she messed up. Too bad there is no #7 on the horizon to try that out on.

Christmas is Coming...

It's been a while since my last letter, but not much has happened around here of note. I have decided that perhaps it would be best if I took a little time to clean my oven more often than, say, once every few years. Nothing like a minor grease fire to make me reevaluate my housekeeping methods. The fire was a great learning opportunity, however - the kids got to see how effective baking soda really is on a kitchen conflagration. And I think the flames actually burnt off a lot of the greasy buildup. So it wasn't a total loss.

After faithfully exercising for the past 3 1/2 months at the Y, I've come to the inescapable conclusion that exercise makes me fat. Apparently, I am not the only one to think so. The other day, as I was bending over to wipe out the tub, Rachel happily said, "Mommy, you have a big bottom." That kid used to be cute; I don't know what happened. When I shared my scientific findings on exercise with Larry, he muttered something about the chocolate factor, whatever that means. Hey, is it my fault the Y is dumb enough to have a candy machine in the lobby?

Rachel woke up one morning recently and apparently decided that using the potty was a pretty good idea. I would like to note here that this happened at the exact same age that Anna learned to use the potty, which leads me to think that it really didn't matter what I did as far as toilet-training went. What I need is a set of identical twins to test this theory on.

In case Anna reads this, I would like to state as a disclaimer that of course Anna has always used the potty and would never dream of doing otherwise.

I suppose I should be writing a Christmas-type newsletter right now, sharing the year's highlights and all. Unfortunately, I don't remember a darn thing that happened before the baby was born in May. And since then...well, you've been kept up to date on all the excitement. I'm not truly in the Christmas spirit right now, as we have to drive up to Maine this Wednesday to celebrate with Larry's family. I don't see why we have to do that, as we have a perfectly good tree right here at home. His family's okay, but not worth a 12 hour drive with 6 kids in two vans. Larry, of course, does not share this opinion. If someone would like to steal our van late Tuesday night, I'll give you my keys. Just don't return it until the 26th.

Halloween, Etc.

Well, Halloween passed uneventfully. We had 2 pirates, 1 damsel, a dalmatian, a bat, and a pumpkin this year. Rachel (the dalmatian - and a very cute one, at that) almost backed out at the last minute, as the first trick-or-treater to show up at our door was a 9-year-old Grim Reaper. We had to unmask him in order to persuade Rachel to stop screaming and come out of the hall closet. Larry took all my candy and brought it to his office. When I asked him to bring back some of my chocolate, he said that two really fat women in his office had eaten all of it. I think he's trying to tell me something.

Anna is perennially annoyed at me now. This morning she was annoyed because I asked her to come back down and throw out the potato peels from the potatoes she had just peeled for me. Then she got more annoyed because I told her to change the garbage bag, since she had left the peels mounded so high the lid on the can wouldn't even close. I am so mean. Today is her day to do the dishes, too. I can't wait.

As if having a 12-year-old girl isn't bad enough, I have an 8-year-old boy who suddenly thinks that he shouldn't do anything he doesn't want to. But that's okay. It may be sadistic, but Larry and I will really enjoy, um, persuading David that, yes, he actually does want to do everything we ask of him, even the unreasonable requests such as not screaming at the table and being polite to his parents. In fact, I have reason to believe that shortly he will be downright eager to say "Yes, Ma'am" and "No, Sir" and to stop acting as though everyone closest to him is his worst enemy.

Do I sound fed up or what? I can't believe that kid is stupid enough to mess with me.

Okay, I'll stop. It's raining now, and rapidly turning colder, and we all know what that means. Well, maybe we don't. It means, tonight is the night the mice come in seeking shelter from the elements. We're ready for them this year, though - traps are set, waiting to be deployed. I don't need any extra creatures living in this house at this time, pooping all over the place and making a nuisance of themselves. We have enough of that type already. Meaning, yes, we have made absolutely no progress with Rachel's toileting habits. I think I'll just work on Susie; if she learns, perhaps Rachel will be shamed into it. Who would want to be outdone by a 6-month-old?

You know, reading over this scribble has me thinking that Larry and I really need to get away for a bit. Anyone want to come babysit? It'll be easy - really.

Another Fall Weekend - October 2005

Well, I've bowed to the inevitable -- the only way to teach Rachel to use the potty is to not put those diapers on her. Though maybe that's not correct - after all, can you learn to fly by going skydiving without a parachute? Whatever. Rachel's wearing those undies, so the past two days have been rather wet around here, and I seem to be doing 4 loads of laundry a day rather than the usual 3, and I don't think the nice people working at our local Barnes and Noble really want to see us again, ever. Otherwise, potty training is going just fine.

I think we've finally cleaned up the last of the apples from the apple tree. We sort of neglected the apple situation last week because of all the rain; but today our front porch was smelling strongly of fermenting apples and the bee population seemed to be multiplying, so I did what any responsible adult would do in that situation - I sent the kids out there to clean it all up. Yeah, they cried a little; but in the end, it made them stronger. And now maybe our neighbors will start talking to us again.

Larry worked all weekend (boy, this sounds familiar), so I kept us busy with trips to Michaels' (Rachel and Brian made very fine styrofoam/pipecleaner piggies there) and to the Farmers' Market at Lake Anne (we tried stopping in at one of the stores, too; but Rachel had another, uh, accident there) and then to the commissary to pick up 2 weeks' worth of groceries. That was just Saturday. Theo was away at a boy scout camporee, so Anna was pressed into service as oldest child present. This did not make her happy. She had quite the attitude until she suddenly seemed to sense that I was about to ground her for the rest of her life. Then she became amazingly cooperative. Sunday, I was going to take it easy; but I woke up and realized I still had 6 kids and no husband, so that plan went out the window. We made a double batch of apple crisp (we just can't stop) and walked to the bookstore and the bagel shop and came home and cleaned up the porch. By this time the children realized that if they would just leave me alone, I might not make them work anymore. So I didn't see any of them for a couple of hours. Good thing.

Larry has the day off tomorrow, so I have many exciting plans, such as sleeping as late as 7:30 and maybe even going to Target all by myself. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but I can't help it. An incurable optimist, I am.