Tomato Follies

Well, we just finished canning some more tomato sauce here. I got a good deal on a half bushel at the farmers' market and, for some reason, decided it would be a good idea to spend a hot summer day in the kitchen with a steaming canning kettle. I wish I could justify this activity on economic grounds, but I figure it's costing us about 3 dollars a quart to make our own sauce - that is, about twice as much as it would cost me in the store. The peach jam I'm going to make tomorrow (good deal on those, too, wouldn't you know?) is even pricier - it comes out to 2 dollars a pint (that's 4 dollars a quart for you mathematics-phobes out there). I have to fall back on the educational justification - the kids need to learn how people made their food before the advent of supermarkets and year-round fresh produce. And let me tell you, my teenage daughter is really appreciating this lesson. About as much as she appreciates the lessons on how to clean a bathroom.

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.

One of Those Days

One of those days, unfortunately. By 5 o'clock I was reduced to sending the younger ones to their rooms and telling them not to bother me. My Rachel's voice seems particularly high-pitched lately. She and Brian have spent the day bickering with each other in an attempt to drive me right over the edge.

I am bored out of my skull. All jobs have their boring moments, I know; but my particular job seems to have more than its fair share. I need to take up a physically demanding form of exercise - long-distance running, say, or bicycling - to distract my mind from the fact that most of my days are filled with pointless tedium. Eating chocolate does not do the trick anymore. I can't believe that most folks feel that solitary confinement is some sort of punishment. It would seem like heaven to me right now. A nice quiet room, with a pile of books and maybe an exercise bike - that's not asking much right now, is it?

It doesn't help that at Target today (yes, I was there again - what of it?), I noticed an elderly woman sweeping the floors and emptying the trash cans. That will be me, 25 years from now. That's what happens when you are stupid with your finances - we've taken money that should go towards our retirement and are sinking it all into this money pit of a house we bought last spring. It cost us 700 dollars yesterday just to have our new kitchen sink hooked up (yes, for a day or so there, we had everything but the kitchen sink). Seems that the handyman who installed the last sink here was pretty damn creative and glued all sorts of things together, so everything had to be ripped out and replaced. Which took a lot of time. 500 dollars worth of time, to be exact. The hell with college - I'm apprenticing all my kids to plumbers and electricians. Eighty dollars or more an hour doesn't look too bad to me. And then maybe they could support me in my old age so that I wouldn't have to sweep the floors at Target. That is, if they manage to forgive me for locking them in their rooms every afternoon at 5:00.

Regurgitation, revisited

Larry and I managed to sneak away after dinner last night to take a walk at the Town Center and listen to the live music they have there in the summers. We enjoyed our date for almost 10 full minutes before Theo called to inform us that Rachel needed to throw up; we sped home so we wouldn't miss any of the excitement. I don't know what's with that kid. I just know that there is yet another dinner that I won't ever be able to eat again. There's quite a list now - the delicious sausage chowder a friend made us last summer, the great salisbury steak recipe we tried out this past winter, the spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce that we enjoyed last night - just a few of the many dishes that have been ruined for me by the sight of their regurgitated versions. Thanks, kids!

It's difficult to sleep well when the odds are good that your kid is going to throw up again during the night. At half past midnight both Larry and I heard a child cry out for us and leaped out of bed like firemen hearing an alarm bell. Wrong kid, though - psych! - just Susie coming in to share our bed for the rest of the night. Rachel waited another hour - you know, just long enough for Larry and I to get back into a comfortable slumber - to wake us up. Obviously feeling quite chipper, she wanted her comforter back (we had confiscated anything we didn't want to wash the vomit off of) and her stuffed bunny and a few other things. We staggered back to bed, relieved that we weren't cleaning up more vomit, and knew no more until daybreak. This pattern of interrupted sleep (16 years of it, dammit) is getting to me. I believe the sleep deprivation is eating away at my brain cells.

Which may explain why I can no longer figure out how to operate a simple appliance such as my new dishwasher. Reading the manual is too overwhelming, so I just push random buttons until it lights up and starts making those gurgling sounds. But I love my dishwasher. And it only costs us 77 dollars a year to operate! I figured that out all by myself, thank you. You see, the tag said it only cost 22 dollars to operate; but that refers to normal use (defined as 4 loads a week). 4 loads a week! If that's all I had to do, I wouldn't need an automatic dishwasher. So I managed to extrapolate to 14 loads a week. It took me a while. Probably used up my last few remaining brain cells to do it, too.

I Love Automatic Dishwashers

Library, Pool. Pool. Target. Pool. Library, pool. Target.

Things are getting a bit repetitive around here.

The good news is, the new dishwasher is coming today! Glory, hallelujah! I don't know how those big 19th-century farm families managed to wash all their dishes while milking the cows and feeding the horses and making all their own clothes. I feel as though I am already spending half the day just washing and drying dishes. And that's with the kids' help. (Although, maybe it would go faster without all that bickering and whining...)

One wonders how it is possible that I managed yesterday to forget not once but twice to put a diaper on Susie when she fell asleep. The upshot being that I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself soaking in a puddle of pee. Apparently, creeping senility and baby-raising do not mix - a powerful argument to have your kids while you are still young enough to take competent care of them. I sprang out of bed upon discovering my predicament, peeled off my disgustingly wet pajamas, diapered a still-slumbering Susie (a prime example, I believe, of locking the barn after the horse is stolen), piled (absorbent) cotton towels over the wet spot (because, of course, the other set of sheets is still waiting to be washed), and attempted (unsuccessfully) to get back to sleep. So much for my plan of waking all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning and getting a zillion things done.

I would like to note here that Larry managed to sleep through this whole scene.