Purse Pounds

I took the dog to get a bath and nail trim at the veterinarian's office today.  While I was waiting to be checked out I looked over at the dog scale.   I'd weighed my dog many times on that scale and I know it has a good level of accuracy for all dogs.   It was about the same time that I decided my purse was heavy...

...so I put it on the dog scale.   Three point three pounds.  That includes the purse, all my junk and my iPad.   Not bad, I thought.  Then I wondered what the average purse weight was so I checked the internet for more information. 

By this time the technician I was working with was interested as well.  It turns out from one study that the average lady's purse in the United States is 6.27 pounds.  So I'm less than half that weight.  I would be happy to me even lower, but I'm not giving up the iPad.

The Big Boy Update:  Look at the fire pipes.  My son saw some fireworks on television today.  He wasn't sure what they were called, but he gave it his best go as he excitedly said, "look at the fire pipes!"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My friend Maggie.  We had a friend stay with us today, Maggie.  Maggie is one of the students in school with my children.  We had her come over today and visit with us.  She had a good time and my children loved showing her their toys and swing set and introducing her to their dog.

I Turned Down The Volume...

...and I wasn't even in the room.

That's right, my husband has, "set us up the bomb" as the famous poorly-translated saying goes.  We have the best remote control system in our house that I have ever had the privilege of working with. 

First off, the remote controls all our devices.  That's something we've had for a while, as universal remotes have been around for some time.  Secondly, it does so without having to point in any general direction, and that's something that has been a challenge to easily achieve until recently.  You can be in the kitchen, pointing at the oven, and the channel will change or the Netflix movie will start.

And then thirdly, I can control it all from my smart phone or tablet.  And that has proven useful in several situations.  Just recently, the volume of the show that was being watched by the kids at Movie Night was far too loud.   I was in the bed and I was trying to go to sleep.  (It was late, I promise.  Okay, maybe it was early, I don't remember.  Either way, I was tired and I was trying to sleep.) 

So back to the loud movie...I connected to the remote control system via my iPhone, turned down the volume from the comfort of my bed in the next room and no one ever noticed.   I love technology.

The Big Boy Update:  Calm or loud.  My son had an interesting day today.  He was either very calmly watching television, eating or playing on a tablet or he was running around screaming at the top of his lungs and being aggressive.  The combination must have worn him out because he went to bed early.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Carrots.  She has been asking for carrots several times a day for snack of late.   We have not minded.  Tonight at our neighbors, they gave her a full-sized carrot.  She was so excited she brought it home with her. 

Baby Gate

We never used them.  We have several sets of stairs.  I'm not sure if we were more diligent at watching the children, (I doubt it) or just more accepting of their need to explore while not being inclined to throw their bodies off heights.  They made it to walking and now running stages without plummeting down the stairs on their heads so far.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse the other morning before school.  We don't have the television on on school days and I told him he would have to wait for the weekend.  He tried a second, more thoughtful tactic saying, "I want Mickey the Mouse to watch me eat breakfast."  As much as I admired his creativity, the television remained off until the weekend arrived.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Uncle Jonathan brought my children a stuffed animal, wait, no a plush figure of a character from the video game Doom.  My daughter looked at it and responded when Uncle Jonathan presented her with the gun-laden plush figure, "no, he's a bad guy."

The Placebox Effect

Television commercials about medications seem to have twenty-five percent information about the medication and its benefits and seventy-five percent information about possible side-effects and under what conditions you should call your doctor and lots of other legal-types of information because we live in a highly-litigious country.

I am quite grateful that we have medical companies researching and discovering medications that help to make use comfortable and assist our body in healing, but every now and then, one of the commercials makes me laugh. 

I saw a commercial the other day that talked about the benefits of Botox for preventing chronic headaches.  I have a friend who has had Botox injections multiple times for just this purpose and has said it's made a significant difference in her headache frequency.   What made me laugh about the commercial was one of the disclaimers they had to legally give:

 If you suffer from chronic migraines, Botox may be able to help. Botox prevents 9 headache days per month, opposed to a placebo that prevents 7 headaches days. To see if Botox is right for you and to see who should not take it, visit BotoxChronicMigraines.com.

Wait, what?  All I need is a placebo injected into me and I will likely have over two-thirds of the results of the actual medication?  Sign me up for some saline injections in that case.

All skepticism aside, candidates for the injection, (those suffering more than fifteen headache days per month), are suffering and those two extra days I am sure are a relief.   Still, it made me laugh when I saw the commercial report on the placebo comparative statistics.

The Big Boy Update:  I need my Skeletope.    My son deconstructed a paint roller today.  There were several parts, but the one he had the best time playing with was the handle.  He was looking through it off into the distance of the back yard and telling me he had a, "skeletope".  It took me a while to realize he meant a telescope and he'd seen it on one of the kids pirate shows. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The best little cooker.  She likes to help her daddy cook.  For an hour this afternoon she stood right by him (on her stool) and helped him make his meat sauce for a big dinner with guests for tonight.  She engaged him 

The Diaper Cream Disappearance

As the children grow up and become more independent, we get to move away from things we relied on when they were smaller children.   For over three years now we've had a changing pad and all sorts of changing things on the long dresser in our bedroom.  There are wipes, diapers, more recently pull-ups, diaper cream, lotion, a hair brush, hair bows, steroid cream and other things that come and go, depending on the current health situation of our children.

The time has come to start moving on.  Because both my children are in underpants during the day, we don't have much call for diaper cream or salves any more.  They're also large enough to get them dressed on the bed or standing on the floor.  Soon enough, we're going to have our dresser back in our bedroom.

But I'm going to miss some things, so it won't be all at once.  First off, the variety of uses wipes are put to in our house is significant.  The runny and raw nose is much better addressed with a wet cloth than a dry tissue.   And the ointment we still use for things like eczema and dry skin.  Oh, and there's the hair spray for fly away hair and the hair bows and barrettes and now that I think of it, it's a lot easier for me to put on a "night night" outfit on the changing table (even though my children's legs hand well off the end) given my back issues. 

So okay, it's not all going away today...but it's getting closer to the time when it will.

The Big Boy Update:  Color memory.  You can ask him questions about what color something is and he can think back to that item and tell you that, "daddy's car is brown" or, "my motorcycle is blue" or, "my sister's tricycle is red."  How he can do that and not have any interest in telling us what or with whom he did anything at all during school still intrigues me.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Singing along.  My daughter loves to sing.  She knows more songs than I give her credit for.  We have lots of children's music we play in the car and she will jump in and sing along to many of the songs as soon as they start to play.

Fitness Update:  This should be titled, "Backside update" because it's about my complete lack of exercise lately with the break in my sacrum.  The good news is it is much better.  I'm not in that broken bone achy feeling state all the time.  Hopefully next week I'll get back to the gym.  I am sure my trainer is going to laugh at me and all the muscles I've lost.

The Cyto Brush

I had an appointment with my OBGYN today.  I was doing my thing, lying back in the chair, when I saw the doctor pull out this small plastic stick with something on the end that looked a lot like an eyelash curler brush.   After he got whatever sample he needed, I asked him what he just used.

He said, "it's a cyto brush, used for pap smears."  I said, "I was wondering what those were used for, I have some at home."  He looked at me a bit strange so I followed up with, "have you ever heard of The Scrap Exchange?"  That didn't help.  He looked at me more suspiciously, laughed and said, "no, but now I'm curious."

I tried to explain how The Scrap Exchange took donations of all kinds of materials like old records, cloth, paper products, wood, metal tile, as well as medical products (sterile and non-used) and sold them for children and adults to use in up cycling the products into art or crafts or whatever they want to use them for. 

He still wasn't sure so I protested, "they weren't used!"  He laughed again as I explained how great they were for cleaning out straws from reusable water bottles or getting dirt out of a tight spot.  He said, "I never thought of using them for anything else.  I have a Camel Back backpack and I've always had the worst time cleaning out the tubes.  I'm taking some of these home tonight!"

I wonder what my husband will think when he reads this and discovers I've been cleaning out our straws with pap smear sticks though?

The Big Boy Update:  Spiderman.  Blake was coming over to watch the children this afternoon and my son decided it would be helpful if he dressed up as Spiderman for the occasion.  He later decided that being Spiderman wasn't such a good idea as it made it hard for him to go to the bathroom because he couldn't get the costume off himself. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  After I left this evening the following conversation happened between my husband and my daughter:  "Where's mommy?"  "Out."  "I want her to come in."   "She's not here."  "I want her to come here."  "She's at girl's night."  "I want to go to girl's night!"

The Gymnastics Consideration

My son has been going to gymnastics class once per week for about six months.  I should note that my son told me several times that it was, "FIVE months", a time-frame which he has no concept of, but he was emphatic about it, so maybe he's right.

The requirement to be in the class is that the child be three-years-old, and what with me being the rule-follower that I am, I was rather messy when I wrote in his birth month because he was two months shy of his third birthday when he started.

He's done well in class, although he has trouble listening and sometimes he can't focus on the activities at hand because he's too excited or tired or who knows what other reason.  I hear from the instructor that this is common for younger children in their first class.

I'd also been wanting to get my daughter into the class, but at only two-and-a-third, she's nowhere close to the three year requirement.  That didn't stop me from asking the teacher though.  One of the advantages on the coincidence side of things is that one of my daughter's teachers happens to be there in the lobby with me during my son's class.  This is because she nanny's one of the students in our class.  One day about two months after we started taking the class she showed up to bring the daughter to take the class.  Ever since then, it's been a great hour to catch up on my children's education with our teacher while my son gets out excess energy in the gym.

But back to the advantage of that coincidence...when I asked about my daughter having a trial class, our teacher looked over and told our gymnastics instructor that, "I'm her teacher and I can tell you she'll most likely be more focused than her brother in class."  With that recommendation, we had the go ahead to bring my daughter to a trial class today.

On the ride there I built up to my son the importance of helping his sister in class because she was coming for the first time.   Bad idea.  My son's idea of, "help" is mostly of the chasing and tackling sort.  My daughter had no anxiety at all (probably because her brother was there) and was very interested in listening to and following the instructor's directions.

I had to pull my son out of the class and have a discussion with him to get him focused on the teacher and not his sister.  I do think he was very excited to have her in class, but he wasn't showing it in a positive way.   When he went back to the class, things changed.  First, the threat of pulling him out of the remaining class if he didn't listen to the teacher got through and he knew it wasn't an empty threat.  Second, it gave my daughter time to orient on the teacher and not her brother and third, the teacher came up with a plan: he changed the lineup of the children so that my two were separated as far apart in the class as possible.

From that point on, it was great.  I was so impressed with my daughter in how well she listened and how easily she managed the tasks set to her in class.  I was given the go ahead to bring her back on a regular basis.  Tuesday afternoons are now going to be fun for both children.

The Big Boy Update and Tiny Girl Chronicles:  As detailed above, both of my children did well in their first gymnastics class together today after an initially rocky start.  I was proud of both of them for doing so well together in such an exciting and physical time.

The Bottom Commiseration

I had a long evening at a board meeting tonight, followed by a necessary evening shopping trip to the grocery store so that we had the necessary (read requested) foods for the children in the morning.  It was as I was bringing in the groceries that I got a call from my Aunt Martha.

I missed the call because I was laden with grocery bags and I couldn't get to my phone in time, but I decided to call her back, because why was she calling me at nine o'clock at night?   That's when I realized she had fallen and hurt her sacrum/coccyx just about the same time I had and from what my mother had told me, she was also suffering in the backside area.

We had the nicest conversation, exchanging stories about where our injuries were and how they were an impedance to our daily routine.  We also discovered that we both held our chiropractors in the highest regard.   We agreed that our chiropractors had helped to keep us comfortable, without medication, for many years--and that is priceless.

We talked about her children, my cousins, and ended the night wishing each other a speedy recovery.  I'm so glad she called.  She's a great aunt.

The Big Boy Update:  "I want English."  My son woke up requesting, "English".  We don't know what he wanted, but apparently it was something on television. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The piggy pick.  My daughter and son wanted to play with one of their piggy banks given to them as infants.  They figured out how to take the rubber stopper at the bottom off and dump the coins out.  It was when I came upstairs, to a room strewn with coins everywhere, that I realized my daughter thought the thing they were playing with was a, "piggy pick".

The Poo Delivery

When I was in college we did one of those Secret Santa things with the people on our hall.  The gifts weren't suppose to be expensive, just something little for your college dorm friend.  I happened to get one of the people in our suite.  She was very nice, almost too sweet and kind, and tremendously inexperienced in anything remotely city-life.  She was from a small farm and had lived a fairly sheltered life.

That's not to say that the rest of us, at eighteen-years-old were much more experienced in the ways of the world, but I suppose we had a more mischievous side.  So I told the rest of my suite mates that I had her and we concocted a plan.  It was going to be fun.  It was going to be hilarious.  It was also going to be gross.

I got a box of chocolate pudding and added just enough water to it so that I could mold it into a shape--that shape being poo.  We had another suite mate who chewed up a few peanuts and added them to the top to make it look a little more, "realistic" she said.  I got a little box, put some tissue paper in it and put our cute little poo inside.

Then I took it down to the switchboard operator's kiosk.  It was in a central location and we'd all used the house phone from there before to call each other.  I told her I had a Secret Santa gift for one of my hall mates and could she call her in five minutes telling her she had a gift to come and pick up.

And it worked.  The remaining five of us eagerly waited and giggled while she went to get her present.  We figured she would come back mad because she'd opened it already, but no, she waited until she got to the room.  And she was so excited.   I started feeling badly before she even opened the box.

When she opened it she looked in and then she screamed.  And we couldn't contain ourselves, we all started laughing.   Fortunately, she was a good sport and after she realized it wasn't real, she asked us how we did it.   I'm glad we didn't upset her too much.

The Big Boy Update:  He is so loud!  I know he's related to his nephew, because when Kyle was young, he had a very loud voice as well.   Noise is good, but he just likes to have more of it than most--especially indoors.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Underpants.  We have been putting my daughter on the potty since she was seven-months-old.  I even have pictures of her first production.  But getting it to stick has been a long process.  Part of it I know is our fault.  We stick her back in pullups when we're going someplace we don't want to deal with poopy underpants and drippings down the leg and all sorts of unsavory baby potty things.  She's got enough awareness and interest now to want to go to the potty and hold it when she's in underpants.  Not always, but I think we're getting close to chucking the pullups for good.

The College Recipe Cards

When I went to college, I first spent time in dorms, like many college students do.  Then, after half-way through college,  I moved out of the dorm and into my own place.  And that meant I had a kitchen.  And that meant I could cook dinner.

Only, I'd only helped my mother cook dinner before and while I was excellent at frying up some Steak'ums or heating a can of soup, I'd never really cooked a whole meal before.  So my mother decided to help me out. 

She went through her recipe box and selected some recipes that she thought I'd both like and that I would be able to easily make.  When she gave them to me, all written up on nice little note cards, I suddenly decided that I needed a recipe box myself and that I would learn to cook some of those recipes soon enough for my roommate and maybe some of our friends.

Some of those recipes I remember to this day and still make.  Other things were good suggestions, like ideas for side items that would be easy and healthy to serve.  I was reminded of the cards just the other day when I had a sample of something that brought back memories from years ago.   It was a dish of rice, chicken tenders wrapped in dried beef with a can of cream of chicken soup poured on top.   I love that dish.  I'm going to have to make it soon because thinking about it now is only making me hungry.

I hadn't thought about those cards my mother made for me in a long time although I still have them in my recipe folder (down at my desk in my file drawer at this point because I look most things up online).  They were a good way to get a start cooking in your first real home.   Good times.

The Big Boy Update:  The cup and string telephone.  We watched Sesame Street today and they had a cup-and-string telephone on the show.  My mother, who was over helping out with the children, said she'd never made one and had I?  I couldn't remember, I'm sure I had, but no specific memories came to mind so I said, "let's make one now."  It took five minutes and we had a real working string phone.  My son wasn't interested at first, but later he thought it was great fun.  I told my husband, "it's a long string, we can't leave him alone with it or you know what will happen."  That's right, hooking.  We did let him hook it around the kitchen and dining room and we had fun seeing if you could still hear each other around corners and through cabinets (you can't.)

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The excabator nap.  My daughter woke up from her nap this afternoon and suddenly excavators, (or excabators as she calls them) were on her mind.  Big machines have always been her brother's passion.  But for some reason her food, daddy, the dog and anything else seemed to have something to do with excavators today.  Maybe she dreamed about them.

Sacrum

I went to my chiropractor today.  I went yesterday too.  I've been trying to figure out a way to sleep on my back with my broken backside.  I don't sleep much on my sides and I can't sleep on my stomach because my head can't turn much to the left and right with the spinal fusion.  But with the broken bone, I can't sleep on my back without discomfort.  So it's frustrating at night.

The last two days I've woken up, after a lovely night with a rolled towel under the top portion of my butt so that I can sleep on my back, and had a very painful pressure situation on my right hip, high up.  It appears the rolled towel allowed me to sleep on my back some, but caused other problems.  This is so annoying and so me.  My back has a tenuous and narrow range of, "comfortable" and "not painful" and deviations from my trusted routine can cause all manner of issues (read pain) in different spots in my spine.  I hate that it's like that, but it is apparently what I'm stuck with.

So when I went in to the chiropractor I saw one of the doctors I hadn't seen since I fell and broke my backside.  And here's something you need to know about chiropractors...they stick their hands down your pants.   It's true, I'm serious.  They check out your sacrum and see how it's moving and they will just stick their hands a bit down the back of your pants to see  if the joints are moving well and determine what they need to adjust.

When I told him I'd broken my coccyx, he wanted to see where it was painful, especially when I told him I could sit fine, because it was a break higher up.   I almost said, "um, you're going to get to a spot you don't want to get to if you go any deeper into my pants", but I know he was trying to be helpful, and honestly, who really wants to stick their hands down your pants and check out your sweaty butt.   That's when I told him I had a picture of the X-ray on my phone. 

When I showed it to him he said, "oh, you didn't break your coccyx, you broke the bottom part of your sacrum."  And then he told me it was a much better bone to break.   He gave me some tips on how to lie in the bed and things to do and not do and I am very happy I made sure to take a picture of the X-ray on the monitor at the orthopedic clinic the night I broke my rump. 

The Big Boy Update:  The tooth that got lighter.  We have a neighbor who is a pediatric dentist.  I mentioned to her about my son's darkening tooth at a neighborhood girls night a few weeks ago and she gave me good and bad news at the same time.  The bad news is he may have that tooth for another four year.  The good news is that children's teeth defy the rules of adult teeth and that it might just lighten back up.  And so it did!  It's not the color of the other teeth, but it isn't that noticeable either.  Hooray for children's teeth.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "I wanna whistle."  My daughter wants to help me call our dog, Lucy, when we want her to come in from outside.  I whistle, and my daughter knows the sound.  However, she can't whistle.  What she can do is make a tremendously adorable, "woo-hoo" sound with her mouth that mimics the whistle I make when I call her.

The Rescue Truck

Our Uncle Dale brought over some toy vehicles he had from when he was a child some time back.  They were toys you play with outside and were big enough for a small boy and girl to have a lot of fun with them.  There was a dump truck, a grader, a bull dozer, and a tow truck. 

Of all the toys, the tow truck is by far my son's favorite.  Remember his, "hooking" obsession?  Take that and add to it a construction vehicle and then, to make it even better, add not one, but two hooks.  He is in love with this truck.  He calls it his, "Rescue Truck" and would happily spend over an hour just seeing what he can hook up with this truck.

The strings holding the two hooks are quite old, and one of them had broken a few times so I decided to replace the string.  I got what I thought was sturdy string, but it turned out not to be up to my son's level of tugging and towing and pulling and it broke.  It was when it broke that was worrisome. 

And that's mostly because the hooks on the end of the ropes are very nice and just perfect for the truck and absolutely, positively not the piece you'd want to lose.  It was coincidental that my son decided on the day the string broke to take the truck all the way down to the cul-de-sac and play with it in several neighbor's yards.

He came up later and I noticed the string was broken and the hook no where to be found.   So I asked my son if he knew where the hook part was.  He said he did and walked me all the way down to the neighbor's house and showed me how it was hooked onto this piece of their basketball hoop stand.  I was relieved.

But I didn't have better string to fix the tow truck with at the time so I hid the truck from him.  Today, my father brought me several options of more sturdy string and one matched very closely to the original string (which was now quite brown as opposed to the general white it probably started out as).

We got home from dinner and I told him I was going to fix his rescue truck while he rode on his balance bike.  I got it fixed and after it got dark he spent a long time in the garage playing with his truck very happily and very quietly.

The Big Boy Update:  The little Rescue Truck that could.  He will ask his rescue truck to do seven impossibly things a day.  Tonight he hooked it up to their riding car (which is both large and heavy) and was quite hopeful there would be successful towing happening shortly.  It's still sitting there in the dark garage right now, hooked onto the big car, not making any towing headway.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Riding too fast.  She didn't learn from the last time she fell off the tricycle going to fast.  Daddy had her put on her helmet, which was a good thing because she only got a bloody lip.  Will she remember and go more slowly from now on?  We shall see.

You Are My Sunshine

When I was a little girl my mother would sing, "You Are My Sunshine" to me every night when she put me to bed.  I have memories of her singing that song and giving her a goodnight kiss after she tucked me in and made sure my gown was pulled all the way down.  Someday as a mom, I would sing that song to my children, I thought.

And I did, for a while.  I sang it to my daughter when she was very tiny as I carried her up the stairs to go to bed.  I sang it very softly in the hopes that she would fall off to sleep easily when we got to her room.  I sang it to my son some as well, but my husband has put him to bed more and I've put my daughter to bed more, so I mostly sang it to her.

My daughter isn't old enough at two-and-a-not-quite-half to remember me singing it to her when she's older, but she's old enough to have made an association with the song for now.  If I even try to sing the song to her as we go upstairs to bed it's met with a resounding, "nooooo!"  She will wave her hand around and try to get me to stop singing to her because she doesn't want to be tricked into going to sleep.

But times change rapidly with small children.  Of late, she's asked to go up to bed some nights and she happily puts her head on your shoulder as you carry her up the stairs.  I'm going to give the song another try again soon.

The Big Boy Update:  Buzzert.  My son thinks "dessert" is called, "buzzert".  We tried to correct him at dinner tonight but he was confident he had the word right his way.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Helping daddy make dinner.  My daughter helped daddy make pasta tonight.  She was apparently very helpful and descriptive to him throughout the entire process.  Then, she ate her whole bowl of pasta that we told her we were proud she helped make.

The Onyx Ring

I have a friend that went to the same college that I did.  She and I are quite similar in many ways and we've come to be able to trust each other in things that we might not tell other people.  My friend came up with a great way to differentiate between things that are okay to mention to someone else and things that absolutely, positively, must not be shared with anyone else:  "The Onyx Ring". 

It's like putting something in a black hole of secrecy, but the name comes from something we both have in common, a black onyx class ring from our school.  The ring from our college has been the same I believe since the school has been offering class rings to their students.   Your choices are quite limited, being only you ring size and ten versus fourteen karat gold.  Oh, and your name engraving on the inside.  Other than that, all the rings are the same.

But this new phrase, "Onyx Ring" has an effect on me that I didn't realize it would.  It's like a binding contract of silence.  You hear people say, "and don't tell anyone but..." and you hope to remember it, and you definitely don't plan to betray a trust, but we say that all the time and sometimes we mean it with more emphasis than others.

It's been nice having a very specific saying that says, "it's just between the two of us."  It's also been nice having a confidant that is involved in some of the same things as I am.   Also, she's fun.

The Big Boy Update:  Terribly tired.  He still isn't feeling that well.  He went to school but was cranky.  He went to gymnastics, but wasn't enthusiastic.  He slept a long time this afternoon and then wanted to go to bed early.  He's having a hard time getting over this cold just like I am.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "I want to try that again."  If it's fun and my daughter is liking it (say you're flipping her over or showing her how to balance the egg on the spoon, she'll say this phrase over and over again.  Today, daddy almost threw his back out because my daughter wanted to be thrown up in the air repeatedly.

My Favorite Kind of Present

I've been sick and I broke my tailbone and I had a good friend stop by with a get well present that I just loved.  She went to the grocery store and got all kinds of things that she said, "made her happy" and that she hoped would make me feel better too.

There were chocolate chip scones, hummus, rosemary raisin crackers, a bag of those tiny little oranges, a honey ginger hand soap bottle, some trail mix, this chocolate bark with pretzels and several other things that have skipped my mind at this point, two days later. 

By the time dinner had come around, I had tried most of the things she'd brought and my daughter was on her third orange.  I didn't realize my daughter could completely peel them, would throw the peels away, could get the white stuff off the slices, and then break apart and eat the slices.   She was loving them.

She and I also enjoyed the hummus and I ate a lot of the chocolate.  It was so nice to have such a fun present.  It's one of my favorite kinds of presents, because I just like food and different things.  When I travel abroad, I like to go to a grocery store and go up and down the aisles, looking at all the different things they have available.  Usually, my suitcase comes home with multiple things from the grocery store and I enjoy them and think about the trip and the fun I had while I was traveling.

I feel better today, although my tailbone is one large achy broken bone for now.  But, I've figured out how to roll up a towel and sleep on my back for a bit, which is a great relief.

The Big Boy Update:  He hid the remote.  We couldn't find it.  My husband looked all over.  When he asked my son if he knew where it was and my son said, "yes", I yelled across the room, "believe him.  Ask him where it is."  So he did, and my son took him into the guest bedroom, and showed him where he had hidden it, under the pillows, in a spot we wouldn't have found until Uncle Bob came to visit.   Hooray for honest toddlers.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She dressed herself.  She didn't have pants on yesterday and then, suddenly, she had on pants (backwards) and shoes.  My husband and I looked at each other and then realized she had gone upstairs, gotten pants and then found her shoes and put them on.  She was, however, disappointed that she couldn't go outside and play on the swing set in the rain after that. 

Who Wants To Live Forever?

There's a haunting song by Queen titled, "Who Wants to Live Forever" that's been going through my head lately.  When I was a child, I wanted to live forever.   In fact, I planned on living forever.  Why would you want to do anything less? 

Then, time happens and your body gets older.  Things begin to break or break down and you've been around long enough to be able to extrapolate how you feel now and how you will most likely feel eventually and you start to weigh how long is really too long to live. 

I might be feeling differently about things today if the part of my spine in the middle of my back wasn't bothering me and if the area of my spine at my hips wasn't being aggravating and if my broken coccyx wasn't aching so much it was driving me to distraction.  Then, add this sickness on top of it all and the creaking and tiredness that happens every time I try to move up and down and around, and instead of almost being brought to tears, I'd be excited at the prospect of a long long life.

I gave in after several days and took something for the pain.  An hour later I remembered what it was like to not be in so much pain in so many areas.  I felt light-hearted and happy.  But narcotics aren't the solution, they have their own problems long term.  

What we need is something to de-sensitize our nerves and tell them we're okay.  There are plenty of nerve medications (I've been on a lot of them) but they don't do anything without side-effects.   My body isn't that much of a problem I don't think.  It's my nerves.  If they would just let up for a while, I think I wouldn't mind so much my limitations.

The Big Boy Update:  Still sick.  He's hanging in there with his fever.  It was another day of mild activity and on-and-off crankiness for my son.  Tomorrow we hope he'll feel better.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Wadiebug.  She has a ladybug pillow Aunt Kelly, Uncle Eric, Kyle and Nicole gave her for Christmas.  Her love for this pillow grows with each month.  Today she was carrying it around the house, hugging it and sitting it at the table with us for lunch.   Also, she calls it a, "wadiebug".

Fitness Update:  Congratulations to Uncle Jonathan who ran his second marathon today, shaving off a full hour on his time from our November run and coming in at 3:47!  My children and I were cheering him on as he approached the finish line.  We're so proud of him.

The Return of Comfy Pants

It's like one of those horror movies, only not.  Many years ago I got some sleep pants at Abercrombie & Fitch during the holiday season.  I remember them being unreasonably expensive at the time, but they just looked so comfy I couldn't resist.  As soon as I put them on my suspicions were confirmed, they were indeed amazingly comfy.  If only I had more than one pair...

I was traveling for business and by the time I got back and remembered to go back to the store, there were no more in my size.  Oh well, I would have to make do with the one pair.   Then, a month or so later, I wandered by the same store and saw a whole rack of those pants, Christmas trees and all, with a big sale sign on the top.   What?  How did I miss this?

It turns out our store had been send inventory from other stores and they had all these pants they needed to get rid of cheap.  So I stocked up.

I didn't want these amazingly comfortable pants to ever run out, so I wore three pair in rotation.  Over the years different fates befell them and ultimately I stopped wearing my comfy pants.   By that time I had stored the remaining three pair in a box in the attic. 

Some years later I came upon them but for some reason didn't pull a pair out.  Then last week, I found them again and this time, I happily brought down a pair and put it on before bed.   They are just as comfortable today as they were fifteen years ago when I tried on my first pair.  Has it been that long?   Dear me.  If I keep this pace up, these pants are going to outlast me.

The Big Boy Update:  Going in to lunch the other day there was a package of King Condoms (unopened) on the ground.  I pointed them out to my son, who in classic toddler fashion yelled out across the street for everyone to hear, "I don't want King Condoms!"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Green is the new purple.  She has recently become obsessed with the color green.  Well, sort of.  She wants, "the green one", although what she wants may or may not actually be green.  Still, she is liking green a lot these days.

I Was Wrong

I wasn't getting better.  I think I've slept eighteen of the last twenty-four hours.  My husband has been very helpful.  My son had a fever so we kept him home from school today.  My daughter never had a fever, but she got very cranky later in the day and only came around after some Advil.

I was too tired to do anything other than turn on the television, give the children iPads and let them take care of themselves for most of the day.  Definitely not ideal, but I didn't have much choice.

My neighbor brought over her nebulizer and I've used it twice now to help with the congestion in my chest.  I think it's helped a good deal.  Tomorrow, I hope will be a better day.

The Big Boy Update:  Blanket, pillow and pacifier on the couch for him all day.  He didn't have that much of a fever and he didn't feel that bad, but he didn't argue either.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She was happy enough until she fell asleep shortly before dinner.  When she woke up she cried inconsolably for probably forty-five minutes, which is not like her.  After some Advil she was fine again and just went to sleep happily after a bath.

The Sky Sound

We've been having a lot of AccuWeather alerts lately.  I have alerts turned on on my phone, so I get a message with details, not unlike a text message, anytime there's something to note.  In the past month we've had alerts for fire, thunderstorm, tornado, winter storm, and high winds.  There have been alerts for child abduction and lost elderly as well, but those aren't weather specific.

We were in the middle of a long number of hours where high winds might be possible yesterday evening, but my children and family were happily playing in the back year in the remnants of the sun at their water table getting nice and splashed before bath time.

Shortly after we came in it grew dark and just a few minutes later there was the most amazing rain and wind storm I'd ever seem.  My husband, children and I ran out onto our porch to watch it.  My children couldn't appreciate the angle the rain was falling or the sound of the wind or the overall intensity of the storm, but they were excited because we were.

After we put them to bed, I got in bed myself because I'm still not feeling well from this flu/cold I've been working through and as I lay there in bed I was entranced by the sounds being made outside by the weather.  It wasn't raining much, and it wasn't thundering or lightning, but what it was doing was making that "cloud lightning" sound of rumbling thunder.  Only...it didn't stop.  Thunder comes and goes, this was sustained, rising in volume and intensity over more than twenty minutes.  It was beautiful to hear.

I wanted to open a window and listen to it that way, but the amount of wind that was whipping around would have made even the small amount of rain a nuisance in the house. 

I really like weather.

The Big Boy Update:  We were talking with my children about what to do when we got home after lunch.  We decided we would go up to the bonus room and play with the musical instruments together.  We even decided we'd become a band.  When we started talking about band names, my son didn't have much to say until I recommend we could be, "Mimi and the Bops".  At the mention of that he said, "That's not a choice, that's an oatmeal snack!"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My husband found her asleep, on the couch, with her palms face up, iPad on her lap...covered in poo.  Ew.  No devices or leather relaxation pieces were harmed.  Much sanitizer was used in the cleanup process. 

The Nightstand Sickness Calculation

The more ill I am, the less I care about what kind of a mess surrounds me.  In general, I like everything to be in it's place and I dislike disorder.  I put everything up before going to bed so that I can sleep knowing the house is in order and I can start afresh in the morning making new messes (or more commonly, cleaning up new messes of my children).

Those rules change when I'm sick.  Whenever I'm sick enough to stay in bed for long periods of time, my nightstand that is usually cleared of any mess, becomes cluttered in all sorts of sick-related things.  This time there were the sore throat drops, sore throat spray, bottle of Gatorade, thermometer, vial of medication for my broken tailbone, NyQuil, and possibly some other food items I can't remember now.

The floor around the bed has also gone chaotic.  There is the blanket that goes on the bed when I'm shivering and thrown off the bed when I'm sweating.  There are several iterations of clothes that I don't have the energy to put away or put in the hamper, and there may be jackets and shoes and other items that normally don't belong on the floor on the side of the bed.  

One of the first signs that tells me I'm getting better is a reduction in clutter on the nightstand and surrounding area.  As I begin to feel more like my self, the mess starts to bother me and I have to clean it.  As of this afternoon, the nightstand was back to it's clean and clear state.

So, I hope this means I'm close to getting over with this cold-type thing I've had for the last four days.

The Big Boy Update:  "There's no more handlebars."  My children were climbing on a fallen down tree at the park this past weekend.  My son was shimmying up the trunk and pulling himself foward with the limbs.  At a certain point there were no more limbs for him to grab and he exclaimed, "there's no more handlebars."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She found my ring.  I knew it was going to happen sooner or later.  You can't completely house-proof your home from toddlers.  They will find something you don't want them to find, use something in a way you don't want them to use it or do eleventy-twelve other things you never, ever expected your precious little children to do.  I told my husband a while back that I was worried someone would find my engagement ring and decide it looked fun to play with and wander off with it.  Then, in their innocent little toddler-way, stick that ring in some very toddler-logical place and we would never find it again.  They can open drawers, move stools around to get to high locations and they are ingenious at getting to things.  So when my husband said, "look what she just found" and I saw my ring on my daughter's finger, there was a serious conversation with both children about how that was not theirs and they were not invited to ever play with it and would they like a ring of their own?  Two colorful plastic rings later and I hope they don't bother with my ring (now in its new location when I'm not wearing it) in the future.

I Am So Sick...

I mean that.  I'm sick.  Ugh.  It's some sore throat I thought was strep throat but then I developed symptoms of a head and chest cold.  There's been this fever that's had cold sweats with it.   I spent almost the whole day in bed. 

Thanks to my mother and my best husband who helped out all day.  Now it's back to bed for me until morning.  I am tired of being in bed so I'd better be better tomorrow.

The Big Boy Update:  Check out his huge permanent teeth in the x-Ray we had done to make sure his darkening tooth hadn't done any damage. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Cough.  She doesn't seem to have what I have, but it might be early.  She does have a ferocious cough that's bothersome to her.  Hopefully both she and I will be better tomorrow. 

Bong Bong We Have a Gong

My father makes yard art-type of things from various materials.  Usually, those materials are industrial in nature.  My father likes things that are solidly made and his yard art pieces live up to that standard.

I asked him a few years ago if he could make me one of his gongs for my deck.  These gongs aren't to be trifled with; they're made from an air canister that's been sawed off (and I'm guessing you'd need a plasma torch to do that) and then he solders on a trailer hitch knob to the top and then an ring on the top of that to hang it.

Then, he made me a mounting bracket and attached a clapper that I can grab and bang back and forth to make a very nice sounding "bong bong bong" noise.  Why would I need an industrially-built gong on the back of my porch, you might well ask?  One word, "children".

We have woods behind our house and there is a stream and there are children all around our house that my children like to play with.  I know in years to come that that gong is gong to make calling my children in to dinner so much easier.

Thanks, Dad. We love it.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted a "pet-sa-roni drink" for snack.  When further questioned, he told me he either wanted a petsaroni drink or a petsaroni pizza.  Ah, that's what that word is.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   "You gotta be gentle mommy."   My daughter told me this after I accidentally dropped my phone on the floor.  I told her she was absolutely right.  (And I said to myself I'm glad she didn't decide to repeat the word I said out loud when I dropped the phone.)

The Ticking Clock

When my children were very small, during those breastfeeding times, I put a clock in their bedroom on the wall.  I went to Target and got what looked like it would fit in a child's room well.  It was plastic and it was cheap (I think it was only three dollars) but it was all we needed.

That clock had an unforeseen feature--it was loud.  It ticked.  It ticked so loudly that we could hear it over the baby monitor.   This wasn't good, this wasn't what we planned; would it keep the children awake in their cribs?  We took the clock down and put it in the closet and let it tick to itself for a few weeks alone.

Then, I decided that I needed that clock in the bedroom and that the children probably didn't notice the ticking, so I put the clock back.  That's when we realized a regular sound in their bedroom was a good thing.  It was a sound that let us know that the baby monitor was still working.  It was a sound that helped us determine the best volume for the monitors.  And best of all, the children never noticed the ticking.

Recently, my daughter has noticed the tick.  I don't think it bothers her, I think she rather likes it.  She's just interested in what that noise is.

The Big Boy Update:  "Maybe we could use a scooper?"  My son had something black on his cheek yesterday.  I was trying to wipe it off with a cloth and having little luck.  My son wanted to help, so he said, "maybe we could use a scooper" as a suggestion for how to get the smudge off.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  At the park today there was a duck.  My daughter and son were fairly obsessed with this duck.  They were interested in how he ate food off the bottom of the pond, how he quacked, why he wanted to get near them (because he hoped they had food), and how he swam around using his webbed feet.   They could have stayed at the park all day watching that duck.

The Pillow Hunt

I have a crummy neck.  It complains and and gives me grief and I've learned it's better to try and make my neck happy than to ignore it, because ignoring it only makes it complain more loudly later.  One of the things that wouldn't seem important to a normal, happy neck is just the right type of pillow.  Bur for my neck, the wrong pillow can make my night uncomfortable, painful with repercussions into the following day.

I've been on a lazy pillow hunt for some time now because the pillow I had was not thick enough.  The search was passive, because I thought I'd try out the various pillows we have on the other beds so that I could determine what type of pillow I needed.  For several months now I've been pulling different pillows into the bed and giving them a trial run.  I had hoped we already had a pillow that was perfect, but alas, none of them were right.

It was time to take the search into the realm of retail.  I knew I wanted a firm pillow because most of the ones I'd tried in the house weren't thick enough.  Without enough height on the pillow, my arms go numb and the muscles in my shoulders and neck become tight and inflamed.

I remembered in years past having a hard time finding anything other than, "super duper fluffy" pillows, so when I saw a brand that had a "firm" variety I was ready to put it in the cart.  As I was pulling it off the rack, I saw an, "extra firm" version and was certain I had found my new ideal pillow.

I got the pillow home and tried to put the pillow case on it.  Now granted, my sheets are old, but I didn't expect the pillow case to tear, just because the pillow was so big and dense.  I was somehow able to wedge the pillow into a second pillow case and that night, planned on having the best night's sleep I'd had in a long time.

And then I tried to go to sleep...  This pillow was enormous.  It was three feet tall.  It was made out of something solid and unyielding.  This pillow was awful.  I made it until midnight before getting up and getting my old pillow back out.

The next morning I returned the pillow for not the firm, but the "medium" version and have been happy ever since.  It appears I didn't need as firm a pillow as I thought I did.

The Big Boy Update:  My son made a mess on with some cars on the floor in the basement the other day.  My mother told him he had to go downstairs and clean it up before he could do anything else.  He walked down the stairs with her, sat down on the bottom stair and said, "I'm going to watch you clean up the cars."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My son felt ill several days ago.  He wanted to lie down on the sofa and have a blanket over him and do pretty much nothing.  His sister didn't want him to be alone, so she made several trips upstairs to get her pillow, blanket and stuffed animals so she could like near him on the floor.  When I came into the room to see what was happening, she was finishing making up her bed and getting comfortable.

Two Days of Lost

My children are allowed iPad time from time to time.  There is a drawer we put the iPad in when it's not in use.  The drawer is a high one so that my children can't get to it.  Only they're children and they are resourceful, so recently they figured out how to stack stools and get the iPad.

My son got to the iPad a few times recently and I was pondering a new storage location and then, suddenly, the iPad wasn't where it was suppose to be.  It wasn't in the drawer, although my son told me that's where it was (he was incorrect).  He didn't remember putting it anywhere and he said he hadn't used it.  In short, it was lost.

My husband and I weren't thrilled.  We were decidedly unthrilled.  We looked everywhere.  We looked in places we thought there was no reason an iPad should be, but that a small child might have thought it was an interesting place to store an expensive electronic device nonetheless.  We asked both children where they might put an iPad in the hopes of some insight, but we got no useful information back.

We tried the, "find my iPad" feature, but either the iPad's battery was dead or something else had happened to it that was causing it not to report.  We fretted.  We searched.  We found nothing.

It had to be in the master suite somewhere, because that's where we let them use the iPad and that's where they liked to play on it.  I was trying to come to terms with a forever lost iPad when my husband showed up at the door holding the iPad with a wild grin on his face.  I screamed.

It was in our closet, right beside an area we had looked through several times, disguised under a small piece of blue material that deceptively didn't look like it was large enough to hide an iPad.  My son has no recollection of putting it there, but then again, the day we lost it he was ill.  

Lectures on proper iPad usage and management have been given.  I wonder if they listened?

The Big Boy Update:  My son was sitting on the potty for a long time this afternoon.  I went in and asked him if he was ready for me to wipe him.  He pretended he didn't hear me and kept playing with the toys he had brought in.  I told him when he was ready to call me because I had other things to do.  A few minutes later he came into the living room, bent over into the down dog position, putting his butt in the air and said rather loudly, "will somebody wipe me?"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was sitting on our bed, playing on the iPad while I got ready for our dinner out this evening.  I turned on the hair dryer and my daughter looked over to the bathroom, put the iPad down, got off the bed and shut the door to the bathroom.  She couldn't hear her stories. 

Well, That Hurt

I fell rather dramatically late this afternoon onto my bottom.  The reaction I always have when I fall is that of protecting my head and neck.  I've had far too much damage in that region for me to think of anything other than protecting that area above all others.  So when I fell, I saved my head, but wounded my backside.

I yelled for my husband, who came running to me.  He asked if I was okay and I said reports were still coming in from various body parts but that I could tell him I was okay in general.  I told him I needed a minute and I'd give him an update. 

He told me my shoe hit the wall and I noticed an unattractive black streak down the side of the wall from the sole of my shoe.  He left to finish making dinner and I slowly got up and got a cloth to clean the wall, because hey, I don't like a messy house.  And yes, that was a silly thing to do next when I wasn't sure if everything was okay or not, but it helped me focus, scrubbing that wall.

And yes, I hurt myself.  I had landed right on the coccyx portion of my backside and I had heard some sort of crunching sound.  This was 4:45 PM.  I decided I'd better schedule an appointment at the orthopedist's office in the morning so I called to schedule something at 5:03 PM.   Their office closed at five o'clock.  Well, it would have to wait until morning.  I texted my neighbor and told her I was out for the gym in the morning and to not freak out but I hurt my backside.

She immediately calls, asks questions and tells me to go to the doctor.  I said, "I will, but they're closed."  She told me the new office (recently opened) had an urgent care orthopedic clinic open until nine o'clock. 

I grabbed my purse, told my husband I would be back (he knew at this point it wasn't good) and drove the three miles to the new office.  They got me right in, took x-rays and told me congratulations, I'd broken my coccyx.  The prize was weeks of pain and discomfort while it heals. 

The doctor gave me some prescriptions to help with the inflammation and pain and I left the office.  After filling the prescriptions I came home and ate dinner that was still on the stove. 

From fall to doctor's office to diagnosis and filled medications, the entire process took less than three hours.  I am thankful to their office for being open.  I am also thankful to my husband because he never once told me I was clumsy or that I should have been more careful.  He's the best.

Now. to find that doughnut pillow...

The Big Boy Update:  Measuring tape.  My son has a keyring measuring tape.  He hadn't seen it in some time, but he apparently remembered it was in the garage and went to get it to measure something this afternoon.  What he didn't remember was that there was a tape that did the measuring.  I watched him measure several things by stretching out the two-inch key chain part alone.  I asked him if he'd like some help using the measuring tape and when I showed him how it pulled out, he was very happy.  So happy that I think he'd still be measuring things now if it weren't past bedtime.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Mickeys.   Did I mention she has an obsession with the Mickey Mouse stuffed animals we have?  There's a Mickey, a Saint's Mickey, a Mini-Minnie, and a tiny Mickey.  She has been carrying around two a lot of the time and if she could figure out how to hold all four at once, I think she'd have a Disney entourage with her at all times.

The Happy Sad Dinner

We had dinner plans with friends this evening. We were going to take our children over to their house early and play on their trampoline and in their back yard.  About an hour before we were planning on leaving I got a text message from my friend saying, "I have something to tell you, but you have to promise you'll still come over." 

I told her I'd already bought the dessert, so we were in.  She said their cat had taken a turn for the worse and she had to leave to put the cat to sleep shortly after we arrived.   This cat they had gotten the week after their daughter, now thirteen, was born.  So this was a sad day for their family.  It was also the second cat they'd lost in a very short time, the one today going downhill quickly after the last cat he'd known all his life wasn't in the house any more.

But if they wanted us to come, we would come.  I told my husband I didn't know how to act, because it was a sad time, but they wanted us to come over.  So...we came and we acted like we normally would have.

We played on their swing set and jumped on their trampoline.  My son loved the toys in their son's room and my daughter found a barbie car but insisted Barbie wasn't Barbie when my friend's daughter showed her one.

We had dinner and then headed out.  I spoke with my friend briefly about it afterwards and she said that yes, they needed a day with some cheer in it and she was glad we came and had fun with them.

The Big Boy Update:  Tying my shoes under the table.  My son decided to untie my shoes under the table today.  And what does my son like to do with ropes and strings?  That's right, he likes to tie them.  He didn't realize how funny we thought it was as we watched him try and tie all four lace ends together at once.

The Tiny Girl Updates:  "I don't need it."  This is a new phrase my daughter has been using.  At dinner tonight when she was done eating she told us she didn't need it.  When I stuck her painting on the refrigerator after school she got a stool, drug it to the refrigerator and pulled the artwork off saying, "we don't need it."

Fitness Update: Gym again.  I finally made it back. Good times. 

The Den, The Walls and The Naugahyde Coffee Table

I grew up in the seventies.  My parents still live in the house I was raised in.  There was a den in which I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings and kids shows after school.  I watched the original Star Trek and the Dukes of Hazard.  I never missed an episode of The Love Boat or Fantasy Island and I'm fairly certain I kissed more than one boy on the couch in there when I was a teen.

There were decorations befitting the 1970's in that room.  There was a strange piece that my father's friend made with thick layers of paint and various found objects.  I remember looking at the cigarette filters imbedded in the painting and wondering why anyone ever thought that was art. 

There was a coffee table too in the den.  My father and his friend got a large cable spool and put some two-by-four planks on the bottom covered in felt for feet.  They put a lovely orange Naugahyde cover on the top and held it down with heavy-duty staples.  This coffee table was annoying.  It was also useful.  It was annoying because you couldn't get your legs under it or around it or in any way that made drawing or reading or painting comfortable.   But it was there for years and somehow I made do and got lots of things done on it.

I don't know what happened to the coffee table, but it had long outlived it's stylishness by the time my parents got rid of it.  That den was a beautiful wood.  It had hardwood floors and pine walls and pine bookshelves.  It was dark and warm and welcoming.  Today, that color wood and that dark a room isn't in style either.  Recently, my father decided to paint the room a more neutral color. 

I asked him to send me pictures of the room in-progress.  It's the last I'll see of the den I grew up in, the way I remember it, with the brown Levelour blinds and floor to ceiling wood.  But the new den may look even nicer with the spritzing up my father has planned.

I still get to see that strange painting his friend made, because he has it high up on one of the walls in their mountain home.  Even though it's far away, I can still see those cigarette filters, and I still think, "why would someone think that's art?"

The Big Boy Update:  Fever and Tired.  My son was tired all day and had a mild fever.  He was so lethargic he didn't really care if the television was on or not, but he didn't really want to go to sleep either.  His sister went through this a few days ago, so I'm guessing it's a one-day thing.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Clothing opinionated.  She either likes something or she doesn't.  Hello Kitty pink rain boots?  Wonderful!  Warm and fuzzy pink boots?  Dreadful!  We shall see if she has good fashion sense when she gets older.

Have You Noticed...

...there haven't been any "Fitness Update" entries for two weeks.   It's not because I've forgotten, it's because I've been completely lazy.  I haven't run, I haven't been to the gym and I haven't done anything remotely fitness-ish that I could report here.

I'd sort of like to run, but it's so cold.  (Well, except for yesterday, which was an anomaly, but I had kids all day.)  And I could have gone to the gym, only my neighbor who loves to go has been out of town and I haven't been motivated enough to get up in the dark and drive there by myself.    I could have gone to the fitness room, but for some reason, I just haven't felt like doing anything.

I might be worried, but then I look at the date.  We're in the middle of the month otherwise known as, "in like a lion, out like a lamb", which means spring is right around the corner.  And there is nothing like spring for making me want to get outside, get in shape and get some sun on my terribly pale winter skin. 

So for now, I'm going to finish my winter mental hibernation and look forward to spring.

The Big Boy Update:  "I'm the real Spiderman."   My son wanted to put on his Halloween costume the other day.  He was making webs with his hands (and adding in sound effects) and he was in the middle of taking care of some, "bad guys" in our bathroom when he turned to me and told me he was the real Spiderman.  I guess he thought I doubted his authenticity.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "doh doh"  At dinner tonight my daughter looked up at us and started repeating, "doh doh" again and again.  We asked her for clarification, but we got nothing other than more rounds of doh doh.  She stopped for a while but started back in a few minutes.  I don't know that the mystery of the doh doh will ever be solved. 

Hot Now, Cold Tomorrow

Today was a great day.  It was sunny and for March 2nd, unseasonably warm at seventy degrees.  We spent a lot of the day outside.  My husband had several things he was doing, so I packed up the children and took them to a large park near us.  This park is fun because it has a big castle-like, wooden play structure with tunnels, slides and towers.  It looks like fun to me, and I'm an adult.

My mother joined us an hour after we arrived and at that point we decided to, "go on an adventure," as my son called it.  We went down to the pond and saw a turtle.  We were talking about the turtle when my son told us to be quiet because, "I'm singing a song to the turtle."   (By that time the turtle had swum off, but that didn't bother my son one bit.

We walked on the wooden pathway into the woods and then followed dirt paths between trees.  We passed a soccer field and my children were interested in how they played with the ball using only their head and feet--unless you're the goalie, but at that point explanations got more involved than I realized and I suggested we move along.

As we went down a paved part of the path, a woman in an orange jacket on an orange bicycle came pedaling around.  My son said, "could you please move out of the way?"  She and I laughed at his rude and yet polite question as she was moving out of the way anyway.  Then, we were all distracted by the fallen pine tree.

My children wanted to sit on the trunk and my son decided it was a race car (or was it a rocket ship?)  We headed out, picking small flowers out of the grass on the way to the water fountains (which were all our of service).

This afternoon we played outside and I brought down the water table for the occasion.  Water was everywhere, but it was warm outside so no one seemed to mind.   As it got dark, we all went in for dinner and a change into dry clothes.

Shortly before we came inside, I got a weather alert on my phone.   We were out in shorts and the warning was for a "winter advisory" for the next three days.   Apparently tomorrow night it's going to be down to seventeen degrees.

I'm missing spring already.

The Big Boy Update:  He got to the pancakes.  He loves pancakes.  It's his favorite food.  I didn't realize he knew where they were until I came upstairs to hear him holding a crinkling bag under the dining room table.  He had gotten a bag of frozen pancakes out of the freezer and was trying to figure out how to open it.  It's a good thing he doesn't know how to work the microwave yet.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She has been telling us her tummy hurts for two days now.  Today, she proved it with very messy pants three times.  Her fever has abated, but whatever this is is still working through her innards.

What's the Temperature?

I think I've written about this before, but I find my interest in temperature has been growing over time.  Without children, I never cared what the temperature was.  I would put on a jacket or coat or I wouldn't.  If it was really cold, I might bring gloves or select an even heavier coat.  If it's warm, I go the opposite direction with less or lighter clothes.

With children, my interest in what the temperature is now and what the temperature will be in the next five hours has increased dramatically.  Putting the proper amount of clothing on them for the upcoming school day, which involves play time outside unless it's raining, means you have to know what the temperature is now and what it's going to be mid-day. 

I've also never paid attention to the amount of fluctuation the temperature makes during the day.  I know it usually starts cooler, heats up and then cools down later, but by how much in general and how quickly, I never paid much attention to because I was reasonably comfortable and since I can dress myself, changes in temperature were something I could adapt to.  My children haven't learned this yet.

Do we go to the park?  It's thirty-three degrees now so maybe not this morning.  But look, by ten o'clock it will be forty-five degrees.  Okay, park it is.   

We can't leave these decisions up to my children yet.  Only yesterday, my son wanted to go swim in the neighborhood swimming pool.  He said he was, "berry warm" and it would be fine, regardless of how cold I told him the pool would be.  Finally I said, "the pool is closed."

The Big Boy Update:  Gassy.  My son (and daughter too) have had terribly gas lately.  They are little tiny people but the sounds that come out of their bottoms are impressive.  They're eating the same things my husband and I are, aside from snack at school, and we don't have the same issue.  What in the world are they having for snack?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Sick and sleepy.  My daughter fell asleep on our bed this morning about nine o'clock, which was strange.  She was working on the iPad and just fell asleep in the middle.  I couldn't wake her up easily, so we checked her temperature.  She had a reasonably high fever so she's been on fever-reducing medication all day.   She's not been particularly unhappy, just tired.  We'll see if the rest of us catch whatever this is she has. (I say that like there's a chance we won't...of course we will.)