Putting Santa In His Place

You know, as jaded a parent as I am, I have managed to take the kids to the pool 4 days in a row. That's 4 times I have endured the humiliation intrinsic to wearing my swimsuit in public, just so my girls could have fun.  I would like an award, thank you.

I am still attempting to reconstruct my bedroom closet.  Larry emptied it so he could tear the walls out, and then the handyman put up new walls and painted and installed some rods and organizers and extra shelves and I had a good, oh, 2 hours of looking at the empty closet and envisioning how beautiful it would be, once I put everything in there properly. But then I went out, and Larry - thinking he was helping - took all the bins he had shoved closet stuff into and piled those bins in the closet.  He also took a bunch of boxes and stuffed them onto the high shelves.  I could have wept. Really.

So the other day I took most of the things out AGAIN and have slowly been sorting and deciding where things go.  Now the bedroom is a mess, with half-empty Rubbermaid bins scattered all over the place.  But hey, the closet looks great!  I've decided that we will NO LONGER use it as a catch-all area for items that have no home.  I'll use David's closet for that, if he would just hurry up and go to college already.

No rush, David! Kidding! Ignore those empty suitcases I just piled in your bedroom!

Yup, we have the cookie jar, too.

In other news, I finally managed to get the last bin of holiday items put up in the attic - you know, things like the Santa salt and pepper shakers and the Santa matroshka doll and the Santa towels from the powder room. They've been floating around the upstairs in a laundry basket for months, along with the Santa cocktail napkins from our New Year's party, because we didn't notice them before we put all the official holiday storage bins away last January.

This is normal, right?  I wouldn't know, since I was raised Jewish.  All we had to put away was the electric menorah, which we kept in the upstairs linen closet.  I guess we weren't very festive, actually.

And...that's all I've got today, folks.  Maybe tomorrow I will talk about the injustice that is having to share my birthday with Father's Day, but not today.  Today I will just sit here and revel in my newly Santa-free home.  I think I've earned it.



[Cookie jar image: Cracker Barrel]

Kids Say The Darndest Things, Redux

Happenings this week included the dreaded First Wearing of the Swimsuit, an annual event well-documented in these pages.  This year I ordered a veritable assortment of expensive, over-spandexed swimsuit bottoms to try on with the tankini top I had bought a couple of years ago.  You see, I had been wearing a skirted bottom with it, but I was tired of the way it swished around my legs when I tried to swim.  What's more, that tankini top didn't have nearly enough spandex around the midsection, so I was hoping to find a sort of control-top bottom that would make up for its deficiencies.

I know - SEXY.

So! I was pawing through the selection and rejecting things left and right.  Too loose, too long, too high.  In the end I was left with a pair of control-top bikini bottoms - that is, they extended well up under my top, but the part that showed looked like the bottom of a regular swimsuit.  Finally! I thought.  I can look sporty instead of matronly.  I went into the girls' bedroom to more closely examine the look (they have the only full-length mirror in the house).

Susie was there - Susie, the precocious child who has exhibited a beyond-her-years appreciation of the difficulties inherent in middle-aged-swimsuit-wearing.  I twirled in front of the mirror, sizing myself up, trying to pretend cellulite looked sporty. "Well?" I asked her. "What do you think? Is this okay, or is the skirted thing I wore last year better?"

"Welll," Susie said, carefully. Too carefully.  She pursed her lips and eyed me closely. "Do you mean in a swimming way or in a how-it-looks way?"

Sigh. Say no more. I can take a hint, you know.

Those Darn Seasons, Going Round And Round Again

It's late and I need to go to bed, but I am just here to invite you to look over at that "About Me" paragraph to the right (left? no, right - I had to pick up both my hands and stare at them to figure that out, you know).  Notice anything?

They're all double digits.  All the kids.  Susie had a birthday while I was away, so I didn't get around to changing her age until just now.  When I started this blog, only 2 of the 6 were over age 10.  And David?  Look again - he's turning 18 any minute now.

They all used to be babies, you know.  I spent half an hour in the card aisle at Target this evening, looking for an appropriate card for David; but there was nothing that said, "You used to be the cutest baby and now you're all grown up and I have no idea how that happened.  NO IDEA."

In other news, we picked strawberries and made 2 batches of jam today.  Everything is sticky.  There are still strawberries left. No, I don't know what we are going to do with them. I did have a picture to show you, but it seems Brian inadvertently made his photo editing program the default for downloading pictures on to this computer, and I have no idea how to use it or how to get the photo to show up elsewhere.

On the bright side, he does seem to have developed some rather advanced image editing skills.

Well, there's always tomorrow.  Sometime between the dentist and the cake baking and the gift-wrapping, I'll be back, hopefully with pictures...

I Love My Bed

This looks like how we felt the last 8 miles

On Sunday, my fit friend made me bike the Tour de Cure with her again.  That's 56 miles, people. And we weren't nearly as prepared as last year. Toward the end, she said, "Okay, I can tell I'm looking tired. People keep biking past me and saying, 'Doing great! Keep it up!"  3 miles later, she said, "I must look really bad now. Now they're asking, 'Are you all right?'"

I was barely hanging in there myself.  Another rider pedaled passed me with a radio/speaker on her handlebars, blasting out "Shut Up And Dance." The music might have helped, if I hadn't almost killed myself trying to keep up with her so I could hear it.

But my friend and I managed to ride past the finish line, tall in the saddle and smiling, so I call that a win. And then I went home, showered (because not only was I sweaty, but also I managed to pee on my own pants while trying to hover over the seat of a port-a-potty at one of the rest stops), and (finally) lay flat on my back on my beautiful bed, in my beautiful bedroom, for the first time since I had returned from my girlfriend trip to Maine.

For those of you keeping track, that translates into a full week that I was sleeping on our couch.  I decided to ignore Larry, who was hinting around all evening that I should thank him because he put the furniture back in the bedroom - you know, the same bedroom that he insisted on dismantling against my wishes while I was gone.

People, that would be like my slashing Larry's car tires and then waiting to hear his expression of gratitude after I got them fixed.

Not my bedroom, but that's the color

Oh, and in case you were wondering, that bedroom paint color I essentially had to select at gunpoint? It ended up being chosen (after I did my usual stripe-painting) by our handyman.  Is anyone surprised by that? You shouldn't be.  So now I have a master bedroom painted in Benjamin Moore's Kittery Point Green, even though my original plan had been to cover the walls in Revenge Purple, just to bother my DIY-obsessed spouse.

Whaddaya mean, Revenge Purple isn't a real paint color? It should be.




[Tired cyclist image: Free Coloring Sheets]
[Bedroom image: Photobucket]

Home Alone

I was gone, but now I'm back.  I went away for 10 days with 2 girlfriends, something I have not done in over 23 years. I meant to blog about it the day before we left, but life (and packing) got in the way.

So now I am going to tell you all about it, right? Wrong.  Because first, I have to tell you about my return. I've been back 3 days and have yet to unpack my suitcase.  I have yet to sleep in my own bed (which I was dreaming about the entire ride home, after having spent a week sleeping on soft rental beds and on hard floors). I cannot find any of my clothes, and my house looks as though a hurricane went through it.

It was beautiful, but I'm paying for it now.

You see, back before the trip, when I would mention my plans to anyone, she would invariably say, "Wow, that's great Larry is taking the time off work so you can get away!" And I would agree, yeah, Larry IS a nice guy to do that.

But along about the fifth time this happened, a little thought popped up in the back of my head, a thought that went something like this: Larry is looking awfully cheerful about his week off without me.  I brushed it away, but then - when I made a few suggestions to Larry about fun things he could do with the girls while I was away - I could tell that he wasn't really paying attention.  I started to suspect he had plans he wasn't sharing with me.

Nonsense, I told myself.  He's just distracted.  He's taking off work because he's a nice guy.  He certainly isn't going to use that week I am away to start another crazy DIY project.  That would be insane. Stop thinking that.

I looked like this.

Then, 2 days before the trip, as we were taking a walk, he said, "By the way, while you're away, would you mind..."

And I said, "YES! I DO mind! If you start a question that way, you KNOW the answer!"

"You don't even know what I was going to ask you," he said.

"Yes, I do! You want to rip apart the walls to the master bedroom and its walk-in closet. NO! I don't have TIME to clean out that closet before I leave! STOP TEARING APART MY HOUSE!"

Larry denied nothing, which meant I had guessed right. I swear, I felt as though my head would explode. Larry, apparently, didn't notice.

"I can clean out the closet," he said pseudo-helpfully.

People, this is like having your 4-year-old help you with dinner.  He might get the job done, but it will take way longer and your kitchen will never be the same again.

Larry, attempting to take on the walk-in closet

Desperate, I moved from anger to bargaining. "The laundry room is finally cleaned out.  Why don't you have the handyman build shelves in there this week so it doesn't get trashed again? THAT could get done pretty quick."

"No, I have to get that bedroom wall insulated before summer," said the man formerly known as my beloved. "I can get it all done before you get back.  I promise.  Plus the laundry room."

After briefly considering canceling my trip to put a stop to the madness, I capitulated by cleaning out my third of the closet.  I binned everything up, cleaned out the junk piles in the corners of our bedroom, and left on my road trip, hoping for the best.

So, yeah, here I am, back for 3 days, and it's not finished.  PLUS, when I got home, I had to pick out a paint color for the bedroom, pronto, if I ever wanted to sleep in my lovely Hemnes bed with the extra-firm mattress again.  And we all know how much I LOVE to pick out paint colors.

This luxury was mine, once...

You know how the post-vacation glow can last a week, if you're lucky?  Mine lasted maybe 4 hours, max. I'm feeling a tad ripped off, I am.

So how have you been?  Have I missed anything?






[Angry woman image: imgsoup.com] 
[Guy with tools image: closet clip art]