Notes to Myself

Things I Used To Worry About When I First Had Kids, But Don't Have The Energy To Care About Anymore:

1. Being fair - life's not fair, and if they can learn that lesson early in life, well, that puts them that much ahead of the game. Besides, it's fun to pretend you like one of them better - it drives them crazy. My kids actually argue among themselves over whom I like best. Which is sort of weird, come to think of it.

2. Anything any "expert" says about childrearing - unless, of course, that particular expert happens to have raised 6 or more children without going insane in the process.

3. What my children think about me - it really doesn't matter, because no matter how wonderful I am to them, they're still going to hate me when they are adolescents.

4. Providing expensive toys that "do" things - my kids prefer empty shoeboxes, cartons of craft sticks, duct tape, and garbage bags, even when presented with spectacular alternatives.

5. Going on fancy vacations (fancy, as in anything over, say, 150 dollars) - kids whine no matter where you take them; but their whining irritates you more if you've plunked down a large wad of dough that should have gone into your retirement fund in order to show them a good time. You do realize, don't you, that you can take them on a fancy tour of the European continent, but what they'll remember fondly are mundane things like the ice machines in the hotel corridors? Hey, we've got ice at home, okay?

Things I Worry About Now:

1. One of my kids growing up to be a psychopathic ax-murderer (and the neighbors shaking their heads and saying, "It must have been the homeschooling.").

2. My children letting their kids watch TV non-stop until their little brains melt, all because they didn't get to watch it when they were young.

3. One of my kids marrying a total loser, but not realizing it until they have 3 kids together and she/he leaves him/her and I end up playing host/babysitter to 3 grandkids and a single parent.

4. Any of my children growing up to be the sort of skank who would ever use this website.

And One Thing I Definitely Have To Live Long Enough For:

1. Anna's having a 13-year-old daughter of her own. 30 years may be a long time to wait for an apology, but it'll be worth it.

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!

Blogrolls and Banality

I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the blogroll over there to the left. It's short, because I don't do that "You blogroll me, I'll blogroll you" stuff. I read other blogs (lots of other blogs - this whole blog thing is slowly taking over my life, but let's not go into that), because I like them or the person writing them; but, in an effort to keep the blogroll useful, I try to keep it short. Today I couldn't resist adding a new member - finslippy. I have no idea what that means, but she is breathtakingly, seemingly effortlessly funny. Enough so that I briefly considered throwing out my keyboard and never attempting to be even mildly amusing again.

But, I came to my senses. Some of us need to be willing to be second-rate. It makes everyone else feel good about themselves.

Anna hates me again (don't you love roller coaster rides?). I mean, it's been over 24 hours since I've done something for her, which is an almost intolerable situation to her befuddled teenage brain. She also hates David. He was standing in her general vicinity today, which annoyed her greatly.

She hated him when he was born, too. I remember holding him in my arms one day and Anna saying, "I hope you drop that baby and break his head." We used to regale her with that funny anecdote from time to time after she turned into a sweet little girl who wouldn't dream of saying anything like that about her little brother. But, nowadays, the story seems just a tad too realistic to be amusing.

Susie spent over an hour screaming this afternoon because she needed a nap and I wouldn't give her one because then she wouldn't go to sleep in the evening and I would start hating my life. Tolerating tantrums is exhausting. But I prefer 2-year-old tantrums to 14-year-old ones.

Truth? You want the truth? I wouldn't be posting today if it weren't that NaBloPoMo made me. Nothing happened today. Larry took the car to the garage, so we couldn't even go out. It ended up costing us a thousand dollars to get it back, so now I can't even afford to go out.

In my attempt to ingest as many carb goodies as possible before I head back to Weight Watchers in January, I baked bread this afternoon and I let David make cookies; that was probably good for another pound or two. My jeans finally arrived from Lands End, but I'm scared to try them on, as they probably won't be quite, um, roomy enough at this point.

I got stuck doing all the dishes tonight. I think we broke a family record by using almost all the pots and pans today. I'm talking 3 cookie sheets, 3 mixing bowls, 6-qt pot, 12-qt pot, 3-qt steamer, square pyrex pan, and the colander. Oh, and 4 loaf pans. The pile in the sink when I came downstairs after the meal was almost breathtaking. You would think that after 16 years I wouldn't find this situation that remarkable, but I guess my youthful capacity for wonder remains undiminished.



Minutiae, folks, that's all you're getting here tonight - the stultifying minutiae of an average suburban mom's life. Scary, isn't it? Maybe the educational powers that be should use this blog in high school sex ed classes as a powerful motivator to use birth control. I can see the poster now: "Do You Want Your Life to Turn Out as Banal as This?" or "Condoms Can Prevent Things Even Scarier Than STD's."

Happiness Is Not A Warm Teenager

I would like to draw everyone's attention to this article in the New York Times, which discusses happiness levels in the general US population. My favorite line therein is "People who live with teenagers are the unhappiest of all."

Thank you. I'd suspected as much, but it feels good to have some official statistics to back me up. Now excuse me while I go take another Valium.

I've sorted out all the Christmas presents I scooped up at Michael's, just to make sure I hadn't made a mistake; but, no, I had just the right number for each kid. I thought I was spending an average of 15 dollars on each kid, but it looks to be closer to 25 dollars a person when all is said and done. Which is way too high, but the hell with it. Call me a spendthrift.

Larry is offering to take me out tonight, which is nice considering I've been spending all his money. Meaning, I had to take Anna to Kohl's again today. She was fairly exuding tolerance, but you could tell she was thinking, "If only I could drive myself, I could dump this stupid old lady."

Of course, if I could manage to get a real job that pays real money, we could afford to hire someone else to do all the stuff I've been doing around here for free, like chauffering a teenage girl with a lousy attitude to the clothing stores. Then again, with a real job, I might have to deal with super-annoying people all day who aren't even related to me, and that might put me over the edge. So I'll stick with being a kept woman for now, thanks.

My boss wants the computer. And I need to go to bed in order to get up on time to go for the walk my fiendish neighbor insists on dragging me on. And I'm too tired to fix that last sentence. Good night!