Yesterday

 

Dia de la Madre 2012

Translation: Happy Mother's Day!
love John

No, I'm not pregnant.

My Mother is the most wonderful mom in the world!
She is as pretty as a butterfly and smells like a rose.She weighs 1,024 lbs and is 5 feet tall.
Her favorite food is coconut pie.
In the good old days when Mom was little, she used to play sofball.
I think Mom looks funny when she gets out of the shower.
I know she's really angry when she grades a paper wrong.
I wish Mom would play baseball with me every day.
I wouldn't trade my mother for 20 dimens.
Happy Mother's Day!

Today Sam had his first hot chocolate.

 

Why Bathtubs Can Determine Family Size



From L to R, T to B: worm, drain, crane; dirt clump, T-rex; locomotive, upside-down racecar ... all other brown spots are dirt, fyi.



The closer view.  Please note how much dirt & debris.

What does Kimmy want for Mother's Day?  A new jug of Clorox?  A housekeeper?  A girl?

Ixnay on the Irlgay.  We. Are. Done.

A  housekeeper would be nice, but there's all of that pre-cleaning work that stresses me out.

And we can buy our own Clorox, thank you very much.

How about diamond earrings or just Sleeping In?  And I do NOT mean sleeping in with pitter pat combined with Dadshushing in the background. 

Yes, maybe just straight up sleeping in and some sort of bacon-heavy breakfast would be nice.

Or diamond earrings. 

Whichever is easiest.

Lawn Mowing: It's Serious Bidness

While Sam & I mowed, Brian took these pictures:

We might as well call this Clovermowing.

Sam gets the high part; I take the low.

 

 

There is nothing better than the monotony & row-making mesmerization of mowing grass. 
At one point, I started running on the long straight stretches.

Luckily, I'm not dramatic about it.

It's a BIG hill even if you go sideways.

Recent Grandparent Visits

 

 

Last weekend we had a double header baseball game and a piano recital, so all the grandparents came to visit. These are the only pictures of the weekend, which is really not my fault. Jane was supposed to be the photographer, and she got some great shots, but then after the recital her camera came up missing. This is absolutely unheard of, as her cameras are essentially her 5th and 6th grandchildren. It's a mystery. 

Dear Nnny, thank you for being my grama, I hope you have a happy birthday eney way.

I even went so far as to contact the realtor of the piano teacher's next-door neighbor on the off chance that someone, somehow, had found it and given it to him.  Yes, I know.  I should apply for D-i-L of the Year, but I'm too modest and humble.

At any rate, it was a great visit ... I so wish they were all closer.

Our neighbors have really cute kids with blue eyes and boots.

 

It seems that the children have differing opinions on the task of bringing up the recycle bins.

 

Yes he did ride a scooter to work.

After my last post, I have been feeling a badly about publicly criticizing Brian.  Based on most conversations I have with other women, I feel that he is definitely in the camp of Men Who Actually Do Help Around The House.  (Thanks to my mother-in-law!)

Friday, May 4, 2012, 7:25 a.m.

And his fixation with magazine reading at dinner time can probably be explained by a quick look at evolutionary biology.  Apparently, men have much poorer peripheral vision than women because back in the day, they were hunters, and we were gatherers.  In order to hunt, you must fixate on the prey and block out all distractions.  Women have a better ability to see things all around us because that's the skill one needs to locate nuts and berries.

I'm convinced that this can explain a lot of things around our house and in the home in which I grew up.  Besides the ability to ignore wailing children with head wounds, men also seem not to be able to find things they have lost.  Enter a woman with her carefully-honed-peripheral-vision talent for finding small objects, and the object is found within minutes.

So, you see, Brian, this really isn't about you at all.  It's more of a comment on gender differences in general than a criticism of our home life.  In fact, when you have coffee after work, you're not half bad.  And scootering to work in a tie is just the icing on the cake.

Six Years Ago Today (and an unfinished tirade on the obliviousness of men)

I started this several weeks ago, and didn't finish it.  Now I cannot remember what was the moral of the story, but I'm still going to post it, even unfinished ...

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 Sometimes when I cannot sleep, I find respite in looking through old photographs.  Ironically, they are from a time when I was mostly depressed and lonely and living in a state park (not in a tent, as I used to tell people who gawked). 

I remember this day like it was yesterday.  We had a major plumbing problem (thank you very much Mr. Weeping Cherry Tree), and Brian had rented a small backhoe loader to help alleviate the problem.  (I never really understood what he was doing, but it seemed like one of those times when you just keep your mouth shut.) John-John (2.5 at the time) was beyond fascinated. 

 

 I often wonder how ALL of us parents feel as though we have meandered away the "good years" when they were _____ (fill in the blank -- sweet, chubby, wide-eyed, fascinated by diggers, etc.).  But I know that we all do it.  In fact, sometimes NOW, when I'm rocking Sam or watching movies with him or watching him throw Cheerios into the nether-regions of the dining room, I think about these "good years" and I wonder about the relativism of the word "good" in that scenario.

 Because it can't be just me that finds parenting to be like having an eternally drunk houseguest, right? 

But I digress ... I actually intended to write tonight about Husband. 

Bless. His. Heart.

I swear to goodness that he could sit at the dining room table reading National Geographic while the house burned down.  (I would swear to God, but my mother always told me that it was bad to do that, so I can't do it even now ... although I always wondered why it was bad if one were sincere ...)

For the past few months, this has not been an issue, for Brian coached basketball in the fall and soccer in the early spring and was rarely home before 7 p.m.  But now, for the first time in months, he is home during The Dinner Hours. 

Those of you who keep up with this blog (and my life in general) know how I loathe The Dinner Hours, a time when very little seems to go right in my house & mind.

And so having an extra person here during that time somewhat throws me off.  I'm thrilled to have the help, and annoyed that someone is coming in and taking over my domain.

Tonight was no exception.  I was cooking something fabulous (noodles with pre-made pasta sauce), Sam was running about obsessing about various lost, microscopic toys, John-John was trying to make sense of the spelling patterns of words such as "book, boot, soup, & south"  (go back and read that list again with your thinking cap on), and Brian was reading his new edition of National Geographic.

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This is all I wrote that night.  Sadly, I cannot remember what happened next, but it did not involve a house burning down.  Let this be a lesson to all you Contemplators of Having Children: This is Your Brain on Kids.

OUS,
k

Let's discuss dentists, shall we?

Today was the last exam day of our semester.  This is always a day fraught with either giddy excitement or doomsday dread.  I wore jeans today (with sparkly stuff on the back pockets), in the hopes of tipping the scales toward giddy.

The first thing that happened was that I had a meeting with a student whom I all but called stupid.  Now, I know, I know ... all you goody-goody NON-teachers out there are gasping in horror because you have not fully encountered the full stupidity of humanity.  Bless your hearts.  Here, I'll make you feel better:  She may not be stupid, but she acts stupid (and really: which is worse?).  And don't get me started, but this is why we should not be encouraging EVERYBODY to go to college.  Some people need to lean skilled trades or matriculate through job-training programs so that they can have a steady income in less than a year.  Like the one my hygeinist was telling me about today as she scraped all the enamel from not only my teeth, but also my gums.

I went to the dentist for the sole purpose of having my teeth cleaned and checked.  No x-rays were scheduled, so I was expecting a 30-45 minute appointment.  Why do we humans still try to "expect" things or "plan" or "assume"?  These words should be banned altogether from human thought and language.  They're way worse than slacks.

Hygeinist: "Have you been grinding your teeth?"

Me: "I don't think so, but I used to."  (We have this discussion every six months ...)

H:  "Well, there's lots of evidence of tooth grinding ... your gums are receding, your bottom left eye tooth has now been ground down to a flat surface, and you have broken two ceramic crowns."

Me:  "Um."

H: "I think you need a bite grip.  They're expensive, but it will keep you from ruining your mouth."

(Remember my hope for a day of "giddy excitement" instead of "doomsday dread"?  Add "hope" to the list of ridiculous human words.)

Me: "So, all I need to do is get a tooth grip?"

H: "Bite grip.  You'll need to have one made ... after they replace your crowns, of course, which may be awhile because patients usually like to space those out due to sticker and procedure shock.  You should also reduce your stress.

Me: "Thank you Zen Master. OK."

H: "We'll get you all set up, and don't worry -- I know about the valium."

At this point, I checked out of The Scraping Room and into a Hypnobabies Hypnosis Scenario from one of the pirated CDs that I used to listen to while pregnant with Sam.

Forty-five minutes later, she announces that I need to move to another room to see the doctor.  I do as I'm told, stopping just long enough to call Ms. G the piano teacher and tell her that we're going to be monumentally late.

A few minutes pass.  I'm antsy.  There are drills humming in the background.  I stand up and start looking for reading material.  There is a photo-laden pamphlet about periodontal disease.  I sit back down.

The doctor arrives.  She is sweet as sugar, very clear, and quite liberal with her prescription for valium.  She says that I'm likely going to get TMJ, chronic headaches, gum disease, and braces (again) unless I act NOW to replace my crowns.  She explains the procedure to me.  They will take a wrench and pry out my current crown and then weld another one on top of the metal plate.  (What metal plate?)  All I can hear is drills all around me.  Then she says that her husband is going to be the dentist doing the actual work, not her, because he is faster, and anxious people need fast clinicians.  I think this means she is not confident she is physically strong enough to remove the crown.  I'm also pretty sure she knows I might have a breakdown mid-procedure, and feels she's not emotionally strong enough to deal with that.  Next she helps me out of the chair and whisks me to the front desk where a person named "Edit" (of course I did ... I said, "Like, 'edit' a paper?" to which she quickly retorted, "I'm ARMENIAN, hun.")  printed off an estimate of my charges.

Recently, my husband sold his car on Craigslist.  ONE of my new replacement "teeth" is going to be worth $50 more.  We have dental insurance.

Lessons learned today:
1) sparkly pants pockets don't always tip the balance toward giddy
2) fake teeth are expensive
3) "dentist" starts with "d" just like "doomsday" and "dread"

The End.