Twiddling my thumbs

Sometimes I have the sorriest life. I've been bored, waiting for the people who write my favourite blogs to update. In my quest to forget the slowness in my life, I've forgotten that they have a life. I've had a migraine, the little mobile virus infection units they call kids have been running underfoot, and a whole lot of nothing has been getting done. I want to escape, darn it! Is it too much to ask that they call in sick and spend the day writing witty things to entertain me? I know my 3 year old will entertain me all day long (starting with a box of oatmeal poured out on the carpet, followed with a nightcap of a whole bottle of body lotion on another carpet). So maybe it's not excitement I crave, really, just a little vicarious, out-of-the-normal adventure where I'm not responsible for cleaning up.

Products I wouldn't want to live without

Mr. Clean Magic Erasers
The dark day when I realized I had no life came when I made Perry come and see what these little rectangles of goodness did to the refrigerator door. I had actually left a little before and after sample. To this day, these are almost the first things I reach for when cleaning.

Mrs. H.S. Ball's Chutney
There's chutney, then there's Mrs. Ball's. When Perry came back from South Africa raving about the chutney, I went and bought a bottle of Major Grey's to go with some curry I made. He didn't seem all that thrilled with the chutney. I thought maybe it was the variety and bought several different types and brands, all with the same reaction. Yeah, they were good, but they weren't like what he had in South Africa. I gave up looking. Then, one day, he sends me a link to a website telling me he's found it. Mrs. Ball's. Never heard of it before. Christmas shopping for some German mustard in our Harry's Market, I find it has an international section (with lots of varieties of German mustard) and to my delight it has a South African section. Filled with 3 varieties of Mrs. Ball's chutney. Skeptically, I tried some on a cracker. HOLY COW! Now I can see what he was raving about. To this day, I've probably eaten more of the chutney than he has.

The Blue Bulb Nose Syringe
You know, the ones they give you at the hospital when you've had a baby. Nothing cleans out a baby's nose like those. Ours broke on our second baby and we bought the one that has the wide tip. Totally sucked (or rather, didn't). I found one at Babies R Us and grabbed it.

The Hello Kitty Monster

"Mom, I a monster!". After the ketchup styling he gave himself, do I even dare to look and see the latest Joshua monster. I look. I shouldn't have. His legs are striped with 5 or 6 different colours. Some of the stripes are on his khaki church pants. His palms are a dark purplish magenta. But what really takes the cake is his face. Almost his entire face is either purple or bright pink. Oh. My. Gosh. What has this child done? I grab a wipe and start scrubbing. Not much is coming off. Perry tells me to imagine it's model paint and you're really sick with the flu (he's going to have to start a blog about all of the crazy things he's done in his youth). I go upstairs to clean up the markers and see they're from Michaela's Hello Kitty art set. Clean up the markers and I can only find the top to the stamp pad. I call Joshua upstairs to show me where the stamp pad is. Another thing I shouldn't have done. He goes into Michaela's room, where I'm busy stenciling a garden all over her room. There, on the white picket fence that I had just finished shadowing the night before, are pink and purple rectangles. That won't come off. With anything I try. The good news is that Joshua finally came clean after Perry threw him in the tub and that the stamped portion of the wall was pretty small and easy to paint over. From now on, though, I think I'd better be a little more curious when there's silence coming from a room my children are in. I wouldn't want another monster visit.

One of those days

You know you've stayed up too late and shouldn't have when you wake up to the news radio guy telling you that it is 6:11 and you've set the alarm for 6:00. How I missed all of that talking right next to my ear, I don't know. I'm even single-momming it for the week, so my ears should be alert for anything. The kids decided that they weren't going to understand English for the first part of the morning (as far as I can tell because the first 3 times I told them to be getting dressed it went right over their heads and the 4th time a look of understanding lit upon their faces as I threatened to send them to school in their pajamas). I was brushing my oldest daughter's hair on the way to the bus stop (luckily it's at the end of our driveway). Sent them off to school and sat in the quiet deciding if I wanted to take a shower when the baby woke up. She finally woke up and I had just finished feeding her when the phone rang. Michaela is itching really bad and can I come pick her up from the clinic. There goes the shower. Dress the two youngest and out we go. Pick her up and head over to Kroger to pick up some candy for my oldest to give a friend whose candy he stole (a whole other entry in and of itself), grab lunch, and head home to prepare for Daisy Girl Scouts. I'm co-leader for Michaela's troop. It's a really fun thing, but you throw in our 10 Daisies, 2 Brownie helpers, the sister of one of the Daisies that stays most of the time, my 3 kids, plus the girl next door that I watch after school, and 3 or 4 toddlers from my co-leader's daycare, and it's really easy to go crazy. I felt like I was thrown into The Grinch that Stole Christmas- all the noise, noise, noise. It didn't help that we were doing recycling crafts and some of the girls decided to create maracas out of the stuff that we brought. Home brought a clingy baby who was angry when I put her down to throw some dinner together. For such a little angel baby, she sure can scream. As the night went on, it became clearer and clearer that she was getting sick. I hate those nights. I hate it even more when you're alone to handle those nights of endless crying, where nothing is soothing. Makes for very long and cranky days for me the next day. I will have to say, that before we tried to go to sleep, she was the most talkative baby she's ever been, probably about an hour of nonstop babbling. It was really cute when she was lying beside me on the bed and we were both looking up at the ceiling, to just listen to her talking to me. I would look over at her and she'd look at me and smile. I'm convinced cute is a defense mechanism to make tired moms forget that it's the 10th dirty diaper of the day or to ignore the slobber when their little ones try to give them a kiss.