Monday Ramble

It was a quiet weekend here at Casa de Demons.

There was football on tv Sat & Sun.  DH and Mayhem bonded while watching hours of it in the living room. Havoc and I watched random stuff on Discovery in the bedroom. Things about haunted places, underground places, hidden places and a Dirty Jobs episode that must hold the record for most swear words ever.

Havoc amused himself by trying to guess the words.

Idiot?

Stupid?

Wicked?

Nope, kid. Those are all words you can say on TV.

Then there were the explanations about why such and such a person killed themselves & is now haunting the lighthouse. And what’s a prostitute? And what is prohibition & how can I be drinking a beer now if alcohol was made illegal? And why did that guy build a castle in 1890 when castles were built in the middle ages? And what spirits was that lady so afraid of & how were those weird rooms supposed to make them happy?

Makes me long for one of those WWII in Color shows.

I worked on my cross stitch project while all this was going on.

I also created two layouts

Mostly I laid around. I was sore from Body Pump Friday. It was the first Pump class I had been to since early October and only the 3rd time I had been to the gym since the Monday after Thanksgiving.

But!

I actually only had to back up my weights a small bit, leaving off the 2.5lbs for squats & the back track. Everything else was the same weight as last time. So I feel good I have been keeping up my strength training at home in my half assed workout way.

This week I need to clean the pantry out and I need to do it before Thursday. The kids have half days Thursday & Friday. Right now I always open the pantry door with some trepidation. I expect boxes of cereal or bags of goldfish crackers to come tumbling out on me every time I open it. So far it has just been plastic cookie cutters.

Look for a post about it later this week.

Randomness

It’s officially the Christmas season!

I am officially having a hell of a time keeping track of what has & has not been purchased for gifts already. I keep having to go back through my emails & match up non-Amazon orders with Amazon wish lists & remove the items. I think I was a little overzealous on Black Friday with a video deal I found & instead of getting the boys one movie each, I got them 3 each. But I am not sure because there was a cancellation in there somewhere. Everything was UPS delivery to arrive tomorrow so I suppose I will know for sure then.

I *think* I just have to buy the books & board games still & pick out something for our friends’ kids (5 of them). Books are getting tricky what with every changing reading levels, toys are much too varied and changeable to keep up with, games might be better but games are pricy enough that I’m considering one game per family instead of individual kids. There are some interesting looking cooperative play board games, or maybe something for the Wii.

We made good time coming home, until VA.  I95 from Richmond to DC was creeping along Sunday. It got better once off onto secondary roads but we easily lost a couple hours there.

The boys actually slept in Sunday, not waking until 7am. We are usually being served breakfast at the Waffle House by 7am & we knew that by the time we got to one there would be a line waiting to be seated. So for the first time in about 11 years we didn’t go to Waffle House & had the free breakfast provided by the hotel instead.

We had Waffle House for lunch.

It is much colder here than in Florida.

The engine light came on again while we were travelling Sunday. Attempts to jiggle the gas cap didn’t fix it. Today the light didn’t come on. I’m guessing the sensor for the gas cap warning is loose or corrupt or something & it’s giving false readings. I’ll mention it the next time I take the car to get the oil changed so I don’t have to pay extra labor charges.

Hopefully it won’t cause any medical emergencies this time.

I’ve got all my supplies & things chosen for Journal Your Christmas & am looking forward to getting started.

I glanced at my calendar for this week & apparently Saturday is Girls Night Out. I wish I could remember what all & who all was involved in it. Hopefully someone will call me about it.

I also saw that Thursday I am supposed to have a Tupperware party. Probably I should start thinking about refreshments & cleaning the house. Maybe the GNO ladies will be there & I can find out what is going on.

This is my 1000 post on the blog.

The first was July 25, 2005. There is no point in linking it. It says

I bought some new patterns for XS. I got them from Witches Stitches. I don't know why I bought them. I'm almost half way done with my current project but I have been working on it off & on for 3 years. So it isn't like I'll need them any time soon.

This blog started out as a way to keep track of my craft stuff, then I started add parenting stuff & doing daily prompts on a digi scrapping site, then it became more journalish with stuff about the boys and here we are today 5 years 4 months and 999 posts later. I don’t think I ever thought about how long I would blog or things like that when I started. I’ve flirted with trying to make money here but it’s more work than the payout in my opinion & I am not the self promoting type. I have ads, but I get about $8 a year from them so I’m hardly ‘monitzing’ my blog. I write to journal & to entertain & to share things so others can see it’s not just them. My goal was only ever to make some friends & enjoy myself and I think I have done both quite well & look forward to the next 1000 posts.

Thank you for reading me & commenting. I really appreciate it.

Just one small suggestion… please leave your blog URL when you comment if you don’t already. It makes it easier for me to return the visit. Thanks!

randomness

People recovering from bronchitis cannot be expected to compose whole paragraphs, let alone entire blog posts.

So, my scrapbooking sisters! Who has signed up for Shimelle’s new class True Stories, which begins Oct 25? It focuses on journaling & I am hoping to get a bit of a jump start on Journal Your Christmas with it. Since this will be my 4th year of JYC I’m hoping to go with more journaling & less scrapping for it this year.

Mayhem’s handwriting sucks. Pretty much our entire conference with his teacher focused on that. The problem is that most of the time no one can read his homework or his writing assignments so he doesn’t get full credit. But since that is all that is wrong with him he doesn’t get special writing time, so we have to do it at home. The nice part is the teacher thinks she can get some writing workbooks & things from the special assistance teachers & send them home for us.

Havoc is doing fine. They want us to work on his reading comprehension. He and the 3 other accelerated readers are all focusing on that. While they can read 5th grade stuff, they don’t always understand it so we have all these questions we are supposed to ask as part of his reading homework from now on.

I had an appetite for the first time in a week yesterday! Felt good to want to eat something. And to want to cook. Dinner was so haphazard, if it happened at all last week. DH must have brought home food 4 times.

iPhone has this cool new app called Stop Motion I think. You can make stop motion videos with it. It’s 99 cents, totally cool.  Anyone know of a similar thing for the Droid?

I won a Boba Fett Xmas ornament on eBay! Only $9! It’s the one from 1998. I got Leia that year. But I am slowly backfilling the ones I wanted but wasn’t able to buy at the time. I need to decide if I am going to be a first trilogy purist or go with second trilogy as well. I didn’t like the second trilogy that much.  But I like the Clone Wars series.  Decisions, decisions.

Tonight is bunco & we are supposed to come in costume. Probably I could just show up  in my pjs, carrying my meds and a big class of OJ.  Go as a sick person. But probably no one would want to sit near me. So I bought a witch’s hat. I’ll wear that, normal clothes & carry my staff. Probably I have some pentacles around here somewhere I can wear.  I have no energy to get into a full costume.

Back it up

Consider this a PSA that doesn’t come with a tragic tale of photos & data lost.

Though, considering it has actually been since November since I did a back up, it could easily have been a tragic tale.

In my mind I back up my photos to Smug Mug on a near monthly basis. In my mind I burn my digi supplies to DVD as soon as the ‘download’ folder reaches 4GB. In my mind I copy the contents of my My Personal folder to both my EHDs every 3 months.

Lots of happy thoughts in my mind.

Many of them involving Nathan Fillion, sushi and a deserted beach.

But, unfortunately, like Nathan & beach, none of the backing up, copying & burning ever happen in real life quite the way I imagine they do.

See, I have a rather selective & idiosyncratic memory due to a combination of motherhood and insomnia. Mostly I remember things that happened years ago and things that happened hours ago. Anything in between is a mystery. So if I actually remember doing a thing I assume it must have been a recent occurrence, otherwise I wouldn’t remember it. Right?

This is the leading cause of the long expired items in my kitchen. I assume since I remember buying them, it must have been recently & so I don’t look at the date.

My recent discovery of 20 month old Milanos led me to wonder what else in my life I was remembering wrongly. Later that night I read a post in some forum or other about someone’s hard drive crashing & they lost 6 months worth of photos and half the book they were writing.

And I thought “well, at most I’d lose a month of photos since I back up regularly” and thought about the last time I plugged in my EHD to do just that. Because I clearly remember doing such a thing it had to have been recently. Hmmm…wait, that wasn’t last month. It was still cool out then (I have better luck remembering things if I think of what was going on around me instead of the thing itself), so it might have a been a few month after all. Maybe April. Probably I ought to back up the summer’s worth of stuff.

So I went out to Smug Mug to check the last month I uploaded.

I was right, it had been cool out.

It had been November.

So it’s been almost a year without backing up photos & I’d have been fairly devastated to discover that had my hard drive suddenly failed on me.

I had last done a back up of my folders in February and there are currently 7GB of stuff sitting in my download folder waiting to be burned.

Then upon further investigation I discovered there are three months of photos that I have not edited from their raw format. I started shooting in raw in December for more control of editing but Smug Mug does not upload raw format so I edit the best photos of the month save them as jpgs and upload those & delete the raw format versions to save space. I was missing March, June and part of July.

How did I miss March?

Wednesday night I started an upload to Smug Mug for Dec-Feb. I also started a sync between one EHD and my personal folders and realized why I hadn’t done it since Feb. I have random files all over the damn place on two EHDs and this laptop from back when I bought it a year ago and I have no idea what is what. I need to catalog the darn things & then combine them & then I can back them up properly.

Guess what i am going to be doing Labor Day weekend (since Nathan has yet to call me offering sushi and a plane ticket)?

Who would do something like this?

We had a mouse problem recently. This meant putting sticky traps all over the cupboards & taking everything out of the cupboards, washing it or checking it for mouse contamination, washing the cupboards themselves & then putting everything back, but in better sealed containers.

I should know by now that cleaning anything in my kitchen is bound to provide blog fodder & that I ought to go get my camera for ‘before’ photos before I start.

I have no shame. I share my embarrassing bad housekeeping skills with the world willingly because even a bad example is still an example & someone may think to themselves “you know, it has been awhile since I cleaned out my fridge” & be inspired by me.

That’s my story & I am sticking to it.

My mom, right now, is cursing the day she joined Facebook and gained access to my blog feed.

The snack cupboard held no surprises because everything in it is in heavy rotation. It gets emptied & filled regularly & at various points every one of the 4 people in this house will poke around the entire cupboard checking to see if anyone hid the last few Oreos from the rest of us somewhere in the back behind & under the bags of dried fruit.

We never find anything because we are all much more clever than that.

The oil & vinegar cupboard is another story. I’m the only one who gets in it & then because it is up so high I can’t actually see what is there beyond what it is in the front of it. If what I want isn’t visible I have to go get the step ladder & even then, those are tall bottles.

This is all the stuff that I had already removed from the oil & vinegar cupboard when I realized I had blog fodder to document

This is what caused me to go get the camera

   Hey! That white bag looks familiar somehow.

Could it be?

Oh my GOD! it is! Chocolate raspberry Milanos!!! And there are still cookies in the bag!!!

Wait a minute.

I haven’t bought Milanos in forever. When did I buy these?

Sell by 10/05/2008!?!?!

Who forgets about chocolate Milanos in the cupboard for almost 2 years?

Obviously I thought I was being clever hiding them behind & among the vinegars but apparently I was too clever for myself & never found them again.

Then I was left with quite a dilemma... can you eat 2 year old Milanos?  Wasting Milanos is a major sin in my religion. But it’s one I had already committed by leaving them there for 2 years in the first place so I don’t think I am compounding it by not eating them now.

Probably the best thing to do, especially given the mouse issue, is just pitch them. So after some prayer on the matter, which consisted of inhaling deeply over the bag, I did toss them in the trash with the rancid oil and the vinegars I could not recall using in the past year, as long as they had the requisite layer of dust on them. Given my memory & cleaning habits it’s probable the dustless ones that I can’t recall using have actually been used in the past few months.

But it does leave me with another dilemma.

Does vinegar go bad? There are no expiration dates on the bottles & while I know balsamics can be aged for years & years, possibly leaving a half full bottle in my cupboard does not really count as ‘aging’. I have 3 opened bottles of apple cider vinegar. I have no idea why. I have no idea which is the most recent. Do I pitch them all & start over? Can I pour them all into one bottle & get on with life?

Anyone?

Musings about socks

Deep thoughts I am sure…

Yesterday’s photo was under captioned in my opinion, but I didn’t have time to write down everything that I was thinking about in relation to these two socks in the hallway, a mere 5 feet from a welcomingly empty washing machine, only 15 feet from the dirty hamster where they actually belong.

Socks whose owners suddenly couldn’t bear to continue the journey carrying them any farther. It was all too much. Those 3 steps they had to climb were the limit of their endurance, if they even made it up them, since the socks are at the top of the steps and the boys are taller than the 3 steps are high.

Perhaps their bare feet got stuck to the kitchen floor from the juice someone spilled & then wiped up in a half assed manner, keeping them from attempting the steps & all they could manage was to fling the socks in the direction of the laundry and hope for the best.

Maybe the weight of dirty socks is to great for males to carry.

It could be that only a woman is strong enough to lift & carry dirty socks great distances.

I’d think that the problem is dirty clothes blindness which effects people of both sexes, usually in their youth, though many continue to suffer from it all their lives, or it’s related issue – dirty plate blindness, the inability to notice dirty cups & plates in rooms other than the kitchen. But I rarely find dirty clothes anywhere else in the house. Dirty clothes all seem to end up in the hamper – except socks. Sometimes, socks end up near the hamper, but not so near you’d suspect a failed attempt at laundry basketball, unless the socks are so dirty they are bouncing back many feet when they hit the rim. Mostly though socks are everywhere else – the middle of the living room, under the kitchen table, around the beds, in the hall and a small colony in the main bathroom.

Then there is the nature versus nurture debate.

There were no dirty socks randomly scattered around our house when I was growing up. This is not to say there were not piles of clothes, both clean & dirty all over my room or my brother’s room, but the mess stayed in our rooms. I grew up in a home that was always so neat you though House Beautiful would be stopping by for a photo shoot later in the day. Though my room was the exception. Stray socks were NOT ALLOWED in my parents’ house. You can still occasionally find random footies by my bed because I have cold feet & sleep in them then take them off while sleeping because my feet get hot. But no where near the pile of socks on DH’s side of the bed or in the living room or in the bathroom.

I don’t know what the sock situation was in DHs house as a child & my ILs are deceased so I can’t ask them. DH is the youngest of 4 by several years, born to parents  who were old & tired & let him get away with everything. So I’m guessing, with many more important issues like my FILs failing health & MIL working 12 hour days, the sock thing was allowed to slide. I don’t blame them for that. But now I have to deal with it.

DH is 44 and for about 18 of those years has been living with me. I have made miniscule progress on the ‘pick up your dirty socks’ front. Mainly I have settled into a passive aggressive ‘I only wash socks that are in the hamper’ stance & leave the cleanliness of his socks up to him. If he wants clean socks, he knows where the hamper is. There are also far fewer of his socks in the main areas of the house than there were when we moved in here 13 years ago.

But.

There are now two little males whose socks more than make up for the lack of DH’s socks. The little males take their socks off after school on the sofa and mostly leave them there. Or they push them on the ground, or they kick them over into a corner. Then they decide to go outside and put on NEW SOCKS, which an hour later join their compatriots on the floor, or halfway under the sofa. I then stand over the little males and direct them, step by agonizing step, through the challenging process of putting their socks in the hamper.

An hour later there are a half a dozen dirty socks scattered around the living room and NO ONE has worn any socks in that time! Where do they come from?

Sock wormholes?

Sock fairies remedying a perceived lack of socks?

The socks themselves preferring the bathroom floor to the clothes hamper?

I’ve been attempting to train my sons in the ways of socks and clothes hampers for about 3 years now, with no success. I have about 10 or so more years to go & I’m not hopeful. Some progress will probably be made. Hopefully.

But let me just say now to my future DILs, whoever they will be

I’m sorry. I tried. I really did.

so..Connecticut

DH & his team did such an awesome job this summer down at Ft AP Hill that they have job prospects doing the same installation/moderation thing at the NY State Fair and somewhere in Connecticut later this year.

Imagine the joy I feel at the prospect of DH spending days, nay weeks, at a time in upstate NY and in Connecticut.

And I don’t even know where Connecticut is.

Somewhere in the north eastern part of the country.

Nowhere within daily driving distance.

Yes I just admitted my geographical ignorance to the internet at large.

Yes, Americans…bad at geography…stereotypes… etc.

Look, once upon a time I knew where Connecticut was. I still can pick it out on the map if you give me a couple seconds. If you give me a full minute I probably can recall the name of the capitol city.

OK, maybe two minutes and a lifeline.

Sorry.

The parts of my brain that used to hold that state info from 4th grade geography have been taken over by the names of every single Pokemon, where it comes from & what it evolves into. Or possibly all those dinosaur stats & muffin recipes. Or the random Star Wars stuff that has been cluttering my brain & competing with the geography info for space literally since the 4th grade (1976-77).

Only jumbled bits of it remain.

Ask me what state is near Connecticut and I will confidently and correctly answer Rhode Island! Leading you think I know where Connecticut is, but if you then ask me what state is near Rhode Island and is not Connecticut, there will be a long pause and I will say “um…Massachusetts?” and I will be correct, but only by coincidence, not because of prior knowledge.

Ask me to name a state near Iowa and I will say Kansas.

After checking with Google maps it turns out I am only wrong by a small part of Missouri.

Obviously a generality of geography still exists.

I know Sri Lanka is in Asia, but mentally I put it closer to Vietnam than India.

But seriously, when was the last time I needed, really NEEDED, to know where Sri Lanka was, or Iowa?

Basically not ever in the past 15 years

How many plates a Stegosaurs has though? Or the name of the Clone Trooper who works with Obi Wan Kenobi? Or what Admiral Akbar’s native language is? Those I needed to know just this past week alone.

I do now need to know where Connecticut is. And thanks to google maps I now know it is 7-8 hours, give or take, from where I live.

Which is about what I thought it would be, despite not knowing where it was. So I suppose I retain at least some geographic knowledge, subconsciously.

DH will be gone for days at a time if they end up in Connecticut.

I would register my unhappiness about that but I’m not sure if it would matter from a job requirement perspective.

He better be home in November & December.

Talking points

I can’t think of anything that would fill a whole blog post so I am working with bullet points today

• Its freakin hot AGAIN! It had cooled down there for a week or so but it’s back to hovering around 100
• I won a contest at Lizzie Made! I won a spot in shimelle’s Love Your Pictures Love Your Pages class. It ran in July but shimelle keeps all the materials available online for you to work through at your own pace.This’ll by my 4th class with her. I’ve also taken Blogging for Scrapbookers, Learn Something New and of course Journal Your Christmas
• Note to self – if you think you smell green peppers when you pick up carryout pizza – CHECK THE PIZZA. Take 5 seconds, pull over, whatever, open the box & look because discovering that there are SURPRISE! GREEN PEPPERS! on your pizza at home, 20 minutes later is a real bummer. So’s the drive back into town to get the right pizza. Green peppers are a lingering scent in pizza stores, but not THAT lingering. Green peppers & pineapple… I’d’ve kept the pizza but no one would eat that combo
• The new improved insult currently in use in our house is ‘sweaty caveman’ and I must admit I kind of like it. “Stop being a sweaty caveman Mayhem”. “You are SUCH a sweaty caveman”. I may start using it myself. Who is going to be insulted by it? Those guys at Geico?
• You know what is a really liberating milestone? When your kids can buckle & unbuckle themselves at the appropriate times from their car seats. OMG! Life suddenly got ever so much easier when I no longer had to buckle people.
• I’m sending my Kindle back to Amazon tomorrow to exchange for the wifi version. It doesn't ship until Aug 27th though so I have to swing by the library after the UPS store to pick up some things to read until then
• Speaking of things to read. I know I mentioned that I was reading some books in a series & I really didn’t like them. The Hannah Swenson mysteries. Yeah. I’m still reading them. Still don’t like them. But they have cookie recipes in them & every time I read one I end up thinking “I need to make cookies” instead of “well, that really sucked” But they do annoy the daylights out of me.
• Did you know that a home equity line counts as a revolving credit on your credit score? I didn’t. Apparently because we owe $40,000 on it it dings us on our credit score for ‘high revolving debt’ even though we have never ever made a late payment. I thought it fell under ‘mortgage’ but I suppose since we can actually take up to $55,000 out whenever we feel like it, it is sort of like a credit card.
• Much much better interest though.
• Sometimes I really really hate the things I have to know as an adult

Any bullet points going on in your life lately?

Monday Ramblings

 

It’s been 95-108 here during the day. There is not enough money in the world to get me to turn my oven on. I think we have had sandwiches and raw veggies for dinner nearly every night, except when we had taquitos cooked in the microwave.

 

 

The living room is a mess. It’s always a mess. I could sweep 3x a day and there would still be stuff to sweep up. The kids are in and out of it all day long so it hardly seems worth the effort to clean it until they go back to school.

 

 

 

I got a Kindle for my birthday!!!! I bought Tony Bourdain’s latest book, Murder Most Royal by Jean Plaidy and Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent. So far I have read Plaidy & am about a third of the way through Pratchett.

 

 

 

Actually it is a phrase – gnomic utterances. They are saying that are mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise.  I can think of a couple people I can apply this to, we’ll have to see how the week shapes up

 

The last few weeks have been rather disjointed for me, with all the coming & goings that we have had. I’m hoping things settle down now for the next 3 weeks until school starts again & I can get back into my regular routine.

Bad hotel karma

One of the reasons I am no fan of travel is that I have bad hotel karma.

I always end up with the room by the ice & vending machines, or the elevators, or the side entrance from the parking lot, or with a bed that as a huge dip in the middle, or the a/c that sounds like a freight train charging through the room whenever it kicks on, or with the neighbors who watch TV loudly until 3 am, or end up on a fold out couch bed with a mattress that is mere millimeters thick over hard metal bars.

Hotel pillows are terrible, soft, flat things & I hate them. They are too flat to lay on one pillow but piling two of them makes the pillow too high. So I have to travel with my own pillow.

Plus I travel with children who wake at the crack of dawn. When I was a child I traveled with adults who woke at the crack of dawn.

Does no one I am related to by blood understand that humans are meant to stay in bed until at least 7am, 8am preferably?

Oh. And I have insomnia, which makes sleep under the best of conditions a challenge and sleep under any of the above conditions damn near impossible.

Yesterday we checked into the hotel we will be staying in for 4 nights. It is a room by the ice & vending machines, with an a/c unit that sounds as if a freight train is rattling to pieces while emitting a high pitched whine. It is a room on the first floor by the door that opens on the parking lot & people were still coming & going, shouting & honking horns at one another until 2am.

And I left my pillow at home.

But the mattress was decent.

At 7am I went to the front desk & requested a new room, mainly because of the a/c problem. OMG! the noise. It sounded like this for about 8 minutes

WOMP!

WHRLLLLLRRRRRLLLLLRRRR

 

RRRRRLLLLLRRR!!!!!!!

rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle

rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle

RRRRRRRLLLLWWHHWWW!!!!

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle

rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle

RRRRRRRLLLLWWHHWWW!!!!

rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle

rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle rattle

WOMP!!!

Then suddenly there was total silence for about 5 minutes and the humidity began rising then it would start over again.

Supposedly they will be moving our luggage to a new room while we are out today doing our family photos.

Given my hotel karma I somehow doubt this will happen.

 

Adventures with the sewing machine

So.

I promised to make Mayhem a Batman cape, complete with pointy ends, just like Batman. But I can’t sew with the boys around. They are not the problem. They don’t bother me. It’s all the obscene language that accompanies the sewing that is the problem.

Don’t get me wrong…I like sewing.

Really.

I do.

It just doesn’t seem that way because of all the swearing sewing causes. It’s not the sewings fault, its the inadequate props.

Any sewing project always begins the same way – with the ritual opening cursing of whoever the hell took ALL the effing scissors and failed to put them back where they belong. The curse lasts for awhile and encompasses the whole damn house while I go room to room looking for one effing pair of the dozen or so scissors I know damn well are somewhere in this bloody house and wonder aloud why the hell no one has the common effing decency to replace the freaking scissors when they take them.

The ritual opening curse ends when I at last locate some scissors, usually child safety scissors that I can’t use without getting my thumb trapped in the damn handle.

This is followed by much lamentation, bitching & moaning about my missing quilting ruler and rotary cutter. What the hell people? Who is using my rotary cutter? And where in the name of god did my ruler go?

Things go quiet for a bit while measurements are made and fabric is cut. Then some choice words are uttered regarding measurements and cutting and how nothing ever quite comes out like it should.

I am spatially challenged. I cannot look at things and estimate size, by eye, anywhere resembling ‘somewhat close’, let alone accurate. Some people can look at the object you are sewing something for and say “oh, 2 yards of fabric will be fine” and they will be right. I have to measure, and remeasure, and break out the graph paper and draw a sketch to scale and go online and find a pattern helper and then ask DH what he thinks and EVEN THEN I end up either 6 inches short of material or have a yard too much.

Then the pins come out. GOOD GOD THE PINS! And lots of expletives are heard while things are pinned because it’s slipper satin like fabric & the pins don’t stay put once you get them in, assuming you can get them in because either the damn pins are all dull or the fabric is hard as nails. OUCH! God DAMN it! BLOODY HELL! EFFING PINS!

Silence once again descends while the sewing machine itself is contemplated warily. The mind is searched to recall what was wrong with it last time & was that fixed? Were the wrong sized bobbins finally discarded or must every freaking bobbin be tested prior to loading it with thread?

You’d think I’d have bobbins with black & white thread on them but no, my bobbins are a riot of colors – chartreuse, lime green, burnt orange, 3 shades of purple, grey and aqua. So every time I have to wind up a damn bobbin.

Bobbins are easily wound & even threading the machine is such a habit I don’t need to think about it. It’s just one tiny irritating thing in a mess of larger irritating things.

And oh yeah the light bulb is burnt out and has been for almost 2 years now.

Because Singer is such a rare brand of sewing machine the useless Wal Mart doesn’t carry bulbs for it in the sewing department and my forays into other fabric stores are so rare I never remember to buy bulbs and should I manage to remember the bulb I never remember the model number of the stupid sewing machine. I have two bulbs that are the wrong size that I never returned because I have to drive an hour to do so.

Muttered curses then accompany me on a search for a lamp that will somehow fit on the table yet still leave room for the material being sewn. Once this is accomplished the actual sewing is done quickly and quietly.

Until…

Oh look. I sewed the wrong damn sides together! Where the hell is the seam ripper? How about my effing embroidery scissors? WTF people! Can’t you leave me one damn pair of pointy scissors? The opening cursing of the scissors thief/thieves is then repeated until something small & pointy that can cut thread is located.

Fortunately I rejected the idea of French seams because I ALWAYS screw up French seams. I simply cannot visualize how it will come together, despite having sewn them before. So even with the instructions in front of me I sew right sides together instead of wrong sides together. Or vice versa. Whatever. Stupid freaking seams.

Probably I should have used them though because this faux satin is very unravelly.

The pin performance is then repeated with added color because my fingers are sore from last time and my back is started to hurt.

Ergonomics have no place in my sewing room. Tables are too high, chairs too low and I end up hunched over somehow and the lighting sucks so I end up bent at an odd angle trying to see to rip out the black thread stitches on the black poly satin fabric. I can manage about 90 minutes of sewing before my back gives out and I have to go lay down for 20 minutes.

When I was childless, gainfully employed and making quilts I had none of these problems. Scissors stayed put. An hour trip to get a missing bulb or whatever supply might make my life easier was nothing! Neither was the cost. I knew I should have popped for that craft table & chair set up I wanted when I was pregnant with Havoc. That money is long gone now & who knows when I’ll be able to afford such a thing again.

90 minutes was enough to cut the cape out, sew together the two pieces, hem the sides, cut the bottom triangles, pin & sew them on backwards, rip them out and pin them back the right way.

I ought to be able to resew the triangles & then hem them & the bottom tomorrow.

Assuming no one borrows my scissors overnight.

And the thing is…I really do LIKE sewing.

It relaxes me.

Like Little House on the Prairie

but with indoor plumbing and a mini van.

Just call me Ma.

I didn’t intend for it to happen, it just sort of turned out that way.

Yesterday I took the kids off to bible school.  Then I came home to clean. I scrubbed the stove and the oven, then I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the slate tile in the kitchen. Then I rinsed it, then I dried it with rags. ON MY KNEES! Mops don’t work well with natural slate, too many nooks and crannies.

In between scrubbings,I hauled dripping wet laundry (bedsheets) out to the clothes line and wrung the water out with my hands before hanging it up to dry. (Sorry Mrs Ingalls, I’m not scrubbing the laundry too. I wouldn’t have wrung it out but my washer has developed glitch where it stops spinning 3 minutes early & your only options are to rerun the load from the start or wring things out by hand)

I also swept and mopped the wood floors and brushed carpet freshener into the carpets.

Thank you god prairie dresses, corsets and multiple petticoats are out of fashion. I would have died trying to clean my floor in a corset.

And it was 90 degrees by 10:30am.

This took up the whole morning & it was time to go fetch the children home for lunch.

After lunch I started a batch of bread dough rising, made a pie crust and set up a quart of yogurt. Then it was on to doing the family mending,including some curtains I bought for the boys room when I went to IKEA 2months ago that have been hanging in their room with about 9 inches of excess fabric on the ground. This was followed by ironing and then working on sewing Mayhem’s cape.

I bought the chicken for dinner already roasted because you know how I feel about roasting my own chickens. I baked the bread. I did wash and peel the vegetables though someone else grew them - because you have to draw the line somewhere.

After dinner I made sure the young’uns got their book learning in for the day while I washed the dishes (WASHED THE DISHES! BY HAND! GOOD GOD PEOPLE!)

While the children played outside in the setting sunlight, I made the beds with the fresh sheets. The children were then brought in and put in the washing tub and scrubbed up real good for more bible school tomorrow. (wouldn’t want Jesus to think we’re dirty heathens). After everyone was in bed I sat by the (cold) woodstove and did my needlework.

Today I am dropping the kids off at bible school & heading to coffee shop for gourmet beverages and free wifi, play with my cell phone apps and then maybe I’ll lounge around in the afternoon watching DVDs with the kids.

Because I’ve done all the scrubbing I intend to do for weeks to come.

I just needed a few

(This was originally posted in 2008 but it happened to me again Monday so I am reposting it because it was such deja vu for me)

Just a few. All I wanted was to make some breakfast burritos. I needed maybe 6 corn tortillas. Small ones, but knowing how these things go package wise, I accepted I'd probably end up with 12 large ones or 15 small ones & make enchiladas for dinner one night. HA! I was determined to get corn tortillas, not flour. I like corn better, especially for breakfast burritos.

I run into Food Lion & scan the 'international food aisle' for tortillas. They only have taco shells and flour tortillas, so I head back to the refrigerated section. There I find corn tortillas. Except....they only come in bags of 100.

Yeah

100 tortillas, when I need maybe 6.

There are slots for bags of 36 tortillas and bags of 15 large sized tortillas, but the slots are empty. It's 100 tortillas or no tortillas. The boys were very into having breakfast burritos and the boys rarely get excited about food that isn't cheese pizza, so I was feeling pressure about the burritos. I stood there in the refrigerated aisle and tried to come up with things to do with 94 corn tortillas. Enchiladas, of course. Quesedillas. Steak & veggie fajitas.  That's maybe 15 tortillas. Wrappers for BBQ pork sandwiches.  That lasagna thing Alton Brown made, that used a lot of tortillas. I could cut some into triangles & fry or bake them for nachos. We could do breakfast burritos twice in one week. That's maybe 50 tortillas.  I could cut them up and blend them to mush. I'm fairly sure Alton Brown did that, and use them like polenta & serve with ragu. Maybe I could layer them with cheese & top them and call them pizza? I'm sure I stood there a good 5 minutes pondering all the tortilla recipes I have heard of (I'm Irish & German, tortillas are a rarity in my life). Finally I decided I could use at least 70 of them & given the cost, that would be ok.  Then I saw the sign. 

BUY ONE GET ONE FREE! 

Yeah.

200 tortillas, when I need maybe 6. 

I don't know how it is at your Food Lion, but the checkers at ours will not let you leave without your BOGO. Saying "that's ok, really, 100 tortillas is way more than I need anyway" will not stop them from sending someone back to get you your free bag. They don't seem to understand the concept that you might not want the free food to which you are entitled. If you stand there & try to insist that you don't want it, life will grind to a halt while you are stared at by checkers, baggers and fellow customers in blank incomprehensibility.

She doesn't want the BOGO? Why is she buying the item if she doesn't want the BOGO?  How can you not want a BOGO?

I have this problem all the time with soda products. I want a 12pack of Coke & one of Sprite for a cookout we're having, but the deal is buy 2 get 2 free. but I don't want 24 extra cans of soda in my house. I will drink them if they are in my house. I don't not need the calories of 24 extra cans of soda (and I can't stand diet so it's the caloried stuff or nothing). I can't not drink them. I know this about myself. So I just don't buy them. But you can't not get BOGOs. I can usually solve the problem when it is soda or something like chips or cookies.  The store is always collecting goods for the food bank and I just drop my unwanted BOGO soda into the collection box. Corn tortillas are perishable & they don't collect perishable items at the box.

There are now 192 corn tortillas in my fridge. I wonder if the boys would accept them as a substitute for buns on their ham & cheese sandwiches? I suppose I can freeze them?

I need your small corn tortilla recipes please!

This is my religion

The Holy Lunching Friars of Voondon claim that just as lunch is at the centre of a man's temporal day, and man's temporal day can be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should (a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and (b) be held in jolly nice restaurants~Douglas Adams-The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Yesterday was International Towel Day, a celebration of the life & works of Douglas Adams, my very favorite author of all.

I would dearly love to be a Holy Lunching Friar.

In the days before children I almost actually was.

We went out to lunch almost every day at my last work for pay job. Arbys and the Pig Pit don’t really count as ‘jolly nice restaurants’ because one is fast food & the other a pit BBQ place, but they were our only options besides Sheetz (a gas station that makes good sandwiches) and Mc Donalds.

I’ve always said that, apart from the money, it was lunch I missed most as a stay at home mom. The money to go out to lunch. The freedom to go out to lunch. Lunch with people who for the most part did not need me to order their food, remind them to keep their butts on the seat, stop making that noise, eat your food, no we aren’t going for ice cream.

Though the ice cream one always caused temper tantrums among my co-workers.

What can I say? They didn’t eat all their lunch. I’m not stopping for ice cream if you don’t eat the food you asked for.

The adult conversation. Questions of more words than just ‘why?’. The ability to bitch & moan about the job & other co-workers. Or even discuss world events.

The boys don’t understand the situation with Korea (and I don’t really want them to at ages 6 & 7) or the stock market or the fragility of jobs in the area.

Sometimes I manage to have lunch with DH if his work schedule permits and we do go to jolly nice restaurants like the sushi place or for Thai. But he’s been busy and out of the office a lot the past few weeks so no lunch dates for us.

Lunch alone is nice sometimes but I miss lunch with others.

Priceless?

School photos… a rant.

They are not my favorite thing.

The boys’ school has 2 photo sessions every year. One in the fall & one in the spring.

The one in the fall requires payment upfront, before the photo has even been taken.

Who pays for photos that haven’t been taken yet? Still? In this day and age? How does that business model even work anymore?

Frankly given digital technology I expect them to email me my kid’s photo for my approval within minutes of having taken it.

OK, I’ll give them an hour or so to get enough photos for a bulk download and email.

Heck, I’ll give them 2 days to retouch and then email.

And it can be low res and have SAMPLE printed across my kid’s face in watermark fashion to make sure I don’t sneakily print it out myself for nothing.

I would pay for that service. That would be worth the price these companies charge for photos.

There is no reason on God’s earth these days why anyone should find paying for photos sight unseen acceptable.

So I don’t. And I write my my reason why I don’t in large friendly letters across the top of the order form.

“THIS IS BOGUS! NO WAY AM I PAYING FOR PHOTOS WITHOUT SEEING THEM FIRST”

Because I think companies benefit from knowing WHY they are losing a sale.

The spring session lets you see the photos before paying for them. They send home 6 sheets of 2 poses in assorted sizes plus one ‘collage’ sheet.

OMG!

I realize that as a digi scrapper I am biased but GEEZ! It’s 3 photos on one 8x10 page with ‘blended’ edging around them.

Regularly $45!

But if you buy all 6 of the other sheets, it’s only $25. ACK!

The sheets themselves start out at $15 for one, $22 for 2, etc and the whole lot, with collage is $75.

You see what the envelope says?

Priceless? Really? I can get mediocre shots of my kids at home for free.

Granted I don’t have a stunning faux garden backdrop and fake fence like they do.

But still, I have currently several thousand photos of my kids. Many of which are posed and posed better. I have a perfectly good grey fleecy blanket to use as a backdrop should I want that ‘professional portrait look’ and unlike the school photographers I have endless time and only two kids that I can bribe or threaten endlessly so I can take all the shots I need to get a good one.

Don’t you love the look on Mayhem’s face?

And that was the better of the two poses. He looks quite pissed in the other one. And I suppose in it’s own way it is somewhat priceless.

Havoc’s is decent. But I could get an equally decent one from Wal Mart’s photo center and for $22 could have all 6 sheets and several poses.

But not the collage.

Last year I didn’t buy them. I only bought the class photo because that cannot be duplicated and really is priceless in future years. This year the boys were all “Can we get all 6 sheets? How about the collage?”

I love my kids but I’m not paying $150 for mediocre photos. We compromised on 2 sheets each and 8x10 each and one with different sizes on it to give to my parents & brother.

How much do your school photos cost? Are they really worth this amount of money and I am just cheap?

It’s ok, I don’t mind if you say I am cheap. I can be quite cheap about some things.

Randomness

Today’s post is random because I am tired.

I’ve been fighting the unmedicated insomnia fight since Christmas and for awhile there I was winning. After 3 solid years of Lunesta induced sleep I was off the meds and actually sleeping some, most of the time, by mid-Feb. I filled my last Lunesta prescription on Nov 30 and I still have 2 of those pills left.

I would have had 5 but it’s been a hard 10 days.

Sometime in late Feb the balance tipped and insomnia has been winning over half time time. For awhile there it was various aches & pains keeping me awake & Tylenol PM helped but that soon stopped working. Meditating was never more than 50% successful, neither were the various herbal teas I have tried.

Lately I seem to sleep best from 5am until 9am, with a 45 minute period of wakefulness around 6:45 when I get up to get the kids ready for school. So I’ve been getting about 3 non consecutive hours of sleep lately. I’m a bit cranky as a result.

Then the boys started night waking again from nightmares brought on by … something… maybe that thing on Big Foot on the Travel Channel.

I don’t think Big Foot is scary though and the show wasn’t scary.

Sometimes I believe Big Foot exists and sometimes I think it’s just a legend but even then I sort of hope there is a Big Foot creature out there somewhere. I like that science is wrong sometimes & that some creature has managed to hide from humans all this time.

Did you catch the new Doctor Who? Looks promising! I love Doctor Who, have ever since I first saw Tom Baker as the Doctor on PBS back in the 70s.

Now that we have streaming Netflix on the Wii I get to watch old Tom Baker Dr Who episodes on it during the day.

It’s been sci fi heaven around here lately. We’re re-watching the Babylon 5 series currently, just finishing season 2 now.If you have never seen it, you need to. Best sci fi series ever. It was written to have a 5 year story arc and nearly every episode ties into the overall story. There are maybe 2 episodes in 5 years that don’t. There are no one appearance characters, no throw away lines, no unnecessary dialog points. Everything at some point ties into the full story line. The characters are great, the story is epic. Season 1 is a bit slow but season 2 is like riding a plot rocket.

Speaking of story arcs..I just finished the Betrayal of the Blood Lily, which is the latest book in the Pink Carnation series by Lauren Willig. It was a good story, set in India for a change, Interesting characters, starring Penelope who is a friend of Henrietta & Charlotte & appeared in a couple of the recent books in the series. She’s packed off to India with her husband who she was forced to wed after being compromised with him in the previous book. She doesn’t love him, barely even seems to like him actually but tries to make the best of things being her flirtatious outgoing self. She ends up getting involved in some political intrigue involving the English, the French & some of the local rulers, as well as with Capt Alex Reid. It does a very good job of giving the feeling of life in Indian at the time (pre Raj) but I think the flower motif is getting a bit forced at this point.

And there was no Blood Lily. There was a Marigold, a Frangipani, a Moonflower and a Gulmohar (an ornamental tree with red/orange flowers). The book was mostly about the Marigold. And isn’t the Blood Lily African, not Indian? So the title makes no sense at all. Betrayal of the Marigold would be better. Though not as dramatic sounding.

Marigolds are not at all dramatic.

Despite the floral inconsistencies it was a good story & if you have read the others it is worth reading this one too. We learn a bit more about Colin’s strange family as well as hearing Penelope’s story. I enjoy the series but it falls under “library only'”. I’m unlikely to read them enough to justify buying them.

Unlike say, the Stephanie Plum series,which I own all of and recently finished rereading for about the 4th time. DH is reading them for the first time now & I must say it is interesting getting a male viewpoint on the whole Stephanie-Morelli-Ranger thing.

I’m going to go attempt some sleep now. Later this week I’ll have highlights of my yogurt making and some praise for my new toaster oven.

Because that is what my incoherent sleepless life has come to – praising toaster ovens.

Some assembly required

Thursday I bought 2 dressers from IKEA. Each dresser came packed flat in 2 boxes. Friday night we bought a new TV stand and added a new tv to stand on it. The flat box for the TV stand weighed 85lbs. The TV only weighed 55lbs.

I spent 4.5 hours Saturday assembling dressers while DH took Havoc and planted trees with his scout troop.

Mayhem played Wii Lego Indiana Jones the whole time.

Parenting FAIL but it was a success from an uninterrupted assembly standpoint.

First I opened Box 1. 

There were drawers in Box 1

Do you know what is the last thing the instructions have you assemble is? DRAWERS! Do you know where the instructions are packed? Box 2, with all the stuff you need to assemble first.

Why not name Box 2 Box1, since it is the one you need first?

The dresser involves the fun lining up of multiple pegs onto one board

And of course you can never get all the pegs into the holes without having to lift up some of the ones that did make it in so you can line up the ones that didn’t, thereby causing THEM to not line up while the others do. 

5 tries to get the 14 pegs to line up!

The instructions clearly show one unhappy person attempting to assemble the dresser, with a big X on it and another drawing of two happy people attempting to assemble the dresser. Unfortunately only my unhappy self was available if I wanted those dressers assembled this weekend.

Eventually I did get it framed

Having done one, the second was a snap!

Let’s not talk about what the screwdriver and hammer did to my carpels or the big blister on the inside of my thumb from holding the drill, which is just a tad too big for my hand and has a long shaft holding the phillips head screwdriver bit.

So Sunday when the new TV stand needed to be assembled and the new TV mounted, I confined myself to providing the necessary hardware at each step & let DH damage his hands on it.  I also hooked up all the electronics & ran the wiring.

Because that is part of ‘home decor’ and DH doesn’t do ‘decor’

This was our old TV set up.

This is the new TV set up.

I really need to do something about those gold walls….

I luv the new TV.  Friday we received a disc from Netflix that lets us stream movies to the TV through the Wii!  I hate watching movies on my laptop so I have not used the instant viewing option much. We get unlimited instant viewing with our account so I am looking forward to getting to rewatch some of my favorite very old British dramas like Upstairs Downstairs and The Duchess of Duke Street, along with old Doctor Who episodes I haven’t seen in 20 years and Miss Marple & Poirot, as well as Red Dwarf and Monarch of the Glen, without having to wait for movies to be returned & shipped back.

(Pretty much the only thing I watched on PBS, once I outgrew Sesame Street, were, and still are, British tv shows)

I have to enjoy it while I can. Next week is Spring Break for the boys.

New lamps for old

I went to IKEA yesterday with my friend Mel. I wanted to get a dresser for the boys’ bedroom and she was looking for a desk for her daughter’s room. I ended up buying 2 dressers, each with 6 drawers (4 boxes) and she found a desk with attached side shelving units. (2 boxes) I have never appreciated the space in a mini van like I did yesterday.

But of course you can’t just pick up the furniture you want & go. First you have to walk through the marketplace full of stuff to put on or in or next to the furniture you want to buy. Kitchenware, plates, picture frames, bins of assorted sized and materials, garden things, hooks and shelves, pillows and curtains.

And lamps.

Mel wanted to get a Chinese lantern lampshade while we were there and after pondering the various hanging lamps, that were basically a cord with a plug on one end and a light fixture on the other that you hang from a cup hook on your ceiling (no wiring required) I, finally, at long long last, replaced a standing pillar lamp that I have loathed & despised for 14 years but just never found anything to replace it with.

This lamp came to us from a friend, who was moving. He got it from his grandmother who had bought it, along with most of his living room furniture, from some government auction sale. So it is a 4th hand hideous heavy monstrosity of a lamp to begin with. I hated it when he owned it, but DH can’t turn down free furniture.

This photo is from 2005

The huge ugly lampshade fell and cracked that year & was so huge I never found another of appropriate size despite buying the largest lampshades I could find

This photo is from 2007

The detested sofa in this photo is the same as the tan sofa in the 2005 photo, just with a new slipcover, in a last vain attempt to make it less horrible than it was.

We got the sofa at the same time from the same friend who got from the same grandma who bought it at auction. Words cannot describe how much I hated that sofa, though if you were reading this blog in 2006 & 2007 you know that isn’t quite true because I actually devoted many posts to that exact subject.

It was a ‘perfectly good sofa’ meaning yes, you could sit on it without pain & stand up with only minor effort if you were under 60, so I could never convince DH we needed to spend money on a new one. A couple months after this photo was taken my parents sold their home in WV and gave me their reclining sofa set. Which is a perfectly good sofa set, I like it and am delighted to have it, it just clashes horribly with everything else we own.

I am 42 years old and have never had my own sofa. Someday, when the kids are grown I am buying a leather one. I’ve started saving for it now.

The loathed & despised lamp is also a ‘perfectly good lamp’ in it’s way. It does cast light, which is it’s prime function. Can’t argue with that. DH cannot be convinced that buying another stand lamp is necessary, so I have lived with the horrid thing for going on 14 years now.

But NO MORE!  I saw those hanging lamps and knew I was at long last free of the unwanted pillar lamp.

Behold!

A perfectly adequate replacement lamp. $12.99 (and the sofa from my parent’s house)

It’s not stunning. I admit. My joy in it right now come solely because it is not the hated pillar lamp.

BUT! The plain boring white shade is replaceable! In time I can get a crinkle paper shade. Or a bright blue round globe. Or a long skinny green tube. I could even get a sort of paper pie plate with colored beads dangling from it as a shade! Endless possibilities!

Not to mention it’s another excuse to go to IKEA. I hadn’t been in 6 years.

That is way too long between IKEA visits.

Photos of the new dressers will be up sometime next week. I have to assemble them & it’s probably going to take me all day Saturday to do that.

I’m not an auto mechanic but

I’ve been driving for 25 years, many of those years with junk cars over a decade old when I got them, plus a number of years with cars that were no longer new, even though I purchased them that way.

I know a lot about what can go wrong with cars & am fairly good at diagnosing them.

I know the difference in sounds between a car not turning over because the battery is dead and a car not turning over because there is a problem with the fuel pump.

(correctly identifying this in DH’s truck last month as soon as at failed to start)

I know that that horrible grinding noise you hear sporadically while driving is probably caused by your brakes. Either the pads have worn off or there is a problem with the rest of the braking system, probably the rotors.

I know how to repair a problem with the radiator hose with a box cutter & duct tape.

I know the terrible sinking feeling the engine makes as the transmission suddenly goes out on you while you are driving. (having experienced it 3 times!)

I can correctly identify the timing & alternator belts and know what happens when they break while you are driving. (Not in the mini van or the Cruiser, but in any pre-1995 ford or chevy auto)

I know that if the CHECK ENGINE light comes on and stays on, with no accompanying ‘strange noise’ from the engine, that it really means CHECK BANK BALANCE

I not only know how to change a tire, I can do it on the side of the road on rainy night while wearing a dress and heels. Or in my own driveway while DH sleeps off the meds from having 2 teeth pulled. I have AAA now, but short of being in a life threatening position, like on the side of a busy highway & the flat being on the road side, I will probably get impatient waiting for them to show up after 30 minutes and change the tire myself.

I have done so as recently as 2 years ago.

I can change my own oil and transmission fluid (again, not in the mini van. We were given lifetime free scheduled maintenance as an incentive to buy, so I actually have no idea where the oil is added.  Though I do know how to jump start it)

Speaking of jump start it. The jumper cables in my mini van have been with me since 1988.

So I am not a novice when it comes to automobiles.

But there is one thing that has always eluded me about every single one of the cars I have owned except the 1972 Dodge Dart

I cannot for the life of me ever remember how to change the time on the clock. (the Dart had no clock)

I just keep punching combinations of buttons until I get fed up or the time changes. Should the time actually change I tell myself I will write down what I did and put the note in the glove compartment.

There is never a note in the glove compartment 6 months later and once again I just push random combinations of buttons and hope.

Sunday the clocks went forward. But so far, not the one in the mini van.

The need for sleep

Not me, but Mayhem.

I’m not sure what time he is waking up but it’s around 5am most days I think. I can always tell when he has an early morning because by 5pm he’s a bundle of tired just waiting for an excuse to freak the heck out. The littlest thing can trigger it.

Sunday I made pot roast for dinner. He watched me put the meat & the veggies in the crock pot. We talked about potatoes, carrots & turnips & why I was peeling them. He knew what all encompasses the phrase ‘pot roast’, that it is meat & vegetables.

But, when 5:30 rolled around he decided he didn’t want any vegetables, just meat. DH said he had to eat a  bite of carrot and the white veg (no way of knowing if it was turnip or potato) and Mayhem lost his little mind. He screamed and he cried and he had hysterics at the thought of having to eat a bite of carrot and turnip. Both of which he has eaten – in pot roast – as recently as two weeks ago, with no complaints. In between the sobs he says over and over “but what if I hate it?”. Then you swallow, drink some juice and rejoice that it is over. It is one bite. And you like it. But he couldn’t calm down & couldn’t be reasoned with and so was taken to his room and put in bed, where 5 minutes later he was asleep.

Monday was a red eyed hysterical sobbing fit about wanting to go to McDonalds after TKD at 5:45. Even though he had been told before we left for TKD that there would be no McD’s, but mac & cheese instead and he had asked for Spongebob mac & cheese & was perfectly happy with the plan at 4:30.

Tuesday’s melt down was because there was no dessert. There isn’t always a dessert. Desserts are a random reward for good behavior during the day and at mealtimes. Trashing your bedroom & failing to clean it up despite repeated reminders before dinner is not good behavior. Havoc took this setback with his usual sulking & blaming others. Mayhem threw himself on his bench and wailed as though I had thrown all his toys away. Screaming “I not doing my homework now since you are being mean to me!!!!” in between sobs. He spent about a half hour on this fit, screaming, crying, protesting the unfairness of it, accusing me of being mean & not loving him and generally being really really annoying. I ignored most of it , only sending him back to the table whenever his fit carried him out of the room and eventually his homework was completed.

Then he says “I really tired Mama. I am going to bed now.” it was 7:15.

When he sleeps until 6 or 6:30 this behavior rarely happens. I don’t know why they are both suddenly up at all hours. Havoc came in our room at 1am the other night & said Mayhem was keeping him awake & could he sleep with us? DH went back and Mayhem had apparently gotten up, went in the living room, got his DS, took it back to his room and was playing Mario Party. He said he wasn’t tired. We’ve made them stop sharing a bed  to minimize waking one another up. We’ve shut their door so the cats don’t go in and wake them up. Reminded them of the rule that they are not allowed out of bed until 6:00. Talked about ways to go back to sleep if they wake up early.

In two weeks the time changes, which will at least make it 6 when they wake up and not 5, so I am hoping that I only have two more weeks of this.

Mayhem is so sweet and loving and such a snuggly, cuddly little boy, except when he becomes a lack of sleep monster and I feel bad there is nothing I can do to help him with it.

I’ve installed the Disqus commenting system due to recent excessive anonymous spam. It might pop up and ask you to join Disqus. You do not need to do this to comment. You can just complete the name, email, URL fields and comment that way as a guest. It should remember you in the future. I apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any problems please let me know at havocandmayhemATgmailDOTcom.  Thanks