p.s.

I think it's safe to say that our kitchen tile is finished.

the world according to Owen

"I love floss! It is minty and dental!"

holidays

Wow, so a whole month passed in there somewhere...
I think that by the time the Halloween-candy coma wore off, I realized it was time to start brining the turkey, and now here we are, already listening to piped-in Christmas carols at the grocery store. Whew.

The good news is that I can now dig out my prized album of Christmas music by Boys II Men (thank you, Rachel).

The bad news is that I may soon have to purchase a semi-automatic assault rifle.
No, really. Not making that up.
My husband, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that he wants to shoot elk, and he has decided that what he wants to shoot elk with is an AR-308-975aught3-PDQ-BLAH. I'm completely a girl when it comes to firearms, and I can't tell a Winchester from a Rochester, but I'm pretty sure this particular weapon was not conceived with game hunting in mind. It looks suspiciously like it came off the set of Rambo. Anyway, for reasons I will not discuss on the internet, he cannot purchase said firearm under his own auspices. No, he's not a felon. I wouldn't buy a semi-automatic assault rifle for a felon, even if he was my husband. Jeeze. I do have standards...waaaay down there somewhere...
While those of you who know me are debating whether I might, in fact, have standards, and calling up a laundry list of past actions that would refute the existence of said standards, I will be dusting off the American flag bikini in preparation for Christmas pictures.
I can totally see Russia from here.

full-time

Last year I made a point of not drinking on school nights - too much to do, etc.
This year I made it a point not to drink on school nights...right up until the fourth day of school.

eureka!

"Hey, Mom!"
"Yeah?"
"Can I have a treat?"
"No."
"Grandma is your mom, right?"
"Yep."
"So she's the boss of you. And she says I can have a treat!"

Checkmate.

this keeps happening

This time Ryan was home alone for a whole day.

We have a new front door and several windows waiting to be installed, and our kitchen is in pieces, waiting to be reassembled and tiled.

sink or swim

My phone is struggling with the aftereffects of its dip in the tea....perhaps I spoke too soon about the whole LG testimonial bit. I had a feeling it was too good to be true.

It happened just in time for a visit from one of my very dearest friends on the whole planet, and her delightful significant other, both of whom had lots of questions about parenting, what it's like raising three boys, how we stay sane, how we fulfill our parenting duties and still make time for our marriage (I think I actually managed to respond to that one without laughing)(not sure, though - we'd had some wine by then). In any case, I felt it was a perfect demonstration.

(fuzzy) silver lining

So Ryan just took my nicest black work slacks and washed them with a load of fuzzy white terrycloth dishtowels. You know what that means.




MY HUSBAND DID LAUNDRY!!!!!

from the mouths of babes

"Mama, I dump your phone in the tea!"

And so far it still works. Feeling like I should write a testimonial to LG.

It followed me home

Happily the steamer trunk has found a home, and not in Mom's apartment. We swapped it for a jar of homemade blackberry-cherry preserves, and got the better deal by far.
That whole (short) episode reminded me that when I left Ryan talking to some nice 4-H'ers at the fair this summer, we ended up with a chicken.
There may be some kind of pattern here.

I left Ryan unsupervised for about 45 minutes today, during which time he happened upon a garage sale and came home with a steamer trunk. Like, the old-fashioned pre-suitcase luggage complete with hangers and drawers and spring-loaded latches. All three of my kids could fit in it, and I'm somewhat amazed that it hasn't been attempted yet. Come to think of it, they're kind of off their game today.
The downside is that it has some water damage and some other kinds of damage, and also it's sitting in the middle of our living room because it's huge and we have no place for it...and it also has what I would imagine to be the typical aroma of an ancient, water-damaged steamer trunk.
Ever see the Stinky Chair commercial for VW?

still not fun

My neighbor suggested that I tender my resignation and set up a school in his basement. I actually gave this some thought.
If it weren't for the health insurance thing (and this nagging suspicion that you probably can't run a school out of somebody else's basement), I'd be there already.

if it was meant to be fun

Mostly I love my job, and nearly always I love the kids, even when they might benefit from some duct tape, but the first weeks back are taking some getting used to. Also everyone in the district is insane right now, due to completely new district-wide curriculum, and also due to the fact that their best friend and/or teammate and/or best teacher in their building got fired last spring and also all the class sizes are huge (oh, and we're all taking a pay cut, too).
Yay, back-to-school!

It followed me home

Possibly the most interesting fringe benefit of cafe ownership is the strange offerings that come from customers.

There is the predictable smattering of baked goods and so forth, and the freebie stickers, pens, and t-shirts from other local business owners. There is the extensive collection of Preserved Things in Jars (ketchup, mango chutney, habanero peach jam, lemon ginger marmalade, nondescript unlabeled reddish stuff, pickled green tomatoes). There are the green bean sets in the spring and tomatoes in the fall (because here in the mountains, tomatoes ripen by Labor Day if you're very lucky or very dedicated. This year we have unfortunately been neither).
And then you get into the fashion accessories. That thing up there is a hat (thank you, Darryl, you stylish man).
We have been the recipients of a load of manure (many metaphorical and one actual) and a sack of worms (Vanda, bring more worms! Ours did not survive winter on the porch!). We have a manvine nerve tonic (spellcheck doesn't know what 'manvine' is, and neither do I), a tincture of valerian, a dropper bottle of Yin Chao Junior, and a box of Chinese Fish Poop Tea.

Most recent, and most impressive, was the following accessory.

Apparently someone has a very high opinion of my husband.

my week

One mother-in-law
One mom
Five dogs
A 14-foot moving van
1400 miles
And my first day of full-time employment in six years.

In Which I Reveal Too Much

     I am a crappy housekeeper. This is in no way my mom's fault - she has a lovely home which she dusts regularly, and she passed on the rites of such to me. I just failed miserably at internalizing them, along with things like how to change the oil in my car and how to calculate annual compound interest. My brain, lucky for me, retains like a steel trap wildly useful tidbits like what year Oliver Cromwell died and the words to every song we learned in fourth grade music class.
      We have lived in this house for seven (!) years, and there are parts of it that have not been cleaned since we moved in - under the stove, behind the fridge, that kind of thing. I dust more or less bianually. Most of the time it's the usual clutter of toys and papers and goldfish crackers and socks (I have silently gone on strike against picking up my husband's socks, so there are, as of this writing, eleven of them on the floor. I vacuum around them.)(If you don't think you're that petty, you just haven't been married long enough. But I digress...) I have actually considered posting a series of pictures of my day-to-day messy house just to make other women feel better about themselves, because it's something I have spent a lot of time being insecure about, and something useful might as well come of it.
     All this is to preface that Alec got it into his head today to drag the couch out from the wall, and we discovered that a colony of adolescent male gnomes had been living under it for quite some time, stealing and hoarding all manner of small toys, bits of food, and candy wrappers, and supporting an entire dust bunny ranch. There was even a spot in which something orange and thready was growing in my carpet. That has now been steam-cleaned at great length, but still, I had something growing in my carpet. This is horrifying, and funny, and it leads me to wonder if I have a special talent (what's the opposite of talent?) for this kind of thing, or if some seriously crazy shit is just the inevitable byproduct of a busy household.
      I'm going to contemplate that while I go eradicate the spiders from my laundry pile.

um...

Granted, it was a Match.com commercial, but my TV just informed me that one in five relationships begin online. Is this possible? Is it totally weird?

respectably looney

Ryan agreed that he might be fair game for a blog post.


I can hear what my sisters are thinking all the way from here, but it's his first time, so I feel I should be gentle.
I'll start out with the beehive. Way back last summer he was wistfully bemoaning the fact that I wouldn't consent to a beehive in my backyard (and by that I mean an actual beehive in my actual backyard, no euphemisms). In one of those moments of marital clarity, I shot back that when he quit smoking he could have his damn beehive, and sure enough, January 24 was the quit date and he never looked back. Actually he smoked a cigarette about a month ago, after which I explained to him using very small words what I would do to him and which parts of his anatomy would be involved should that happen again because I am not raising my beautiful children to be smokers so help me, but that is neither here nor there, unless it happens again and the bees have to find a new home. I don't think it will. He loves these bees.
The beehive arrived by mail about a month before the bees, which was fortunate, as it took Ryan about a month to decide where to place the beehive, construct a platform at the proper height, use his smartphone's GPS to make sure the beehive entrance was facing Southeast, and get out the old-fashioned green-bubble level to make sure it was flat (what the hell, Ryan's smart device? You can surf the web but you can't level a beehive? I guess there are limits to what Droid does, after all), and then change his mind about the location and go through the whole procedure in a different spot (atop the chicken coop! On the roof! Three inches to the left of the first location!). This is also how he rearranges furniture, but that is a whole 'nother blog post.
So at last the bees arrived, which was an unbelievable production (I found out later from my sister the bee expert that most people who have bees mail-order them from a bee factory, but ours are wild-caught, organic, free-range mountain bees, snatched out of their pristine home by some lady in Boulder and put in a cardboard box, then passed on to another lady who happened to be driving our way that night, and left on our porch at about midnight, since she passed through later than she planned) and our up-the-street beekeeping neighbors came over first thing in the morning to assist (Inga) and/or videotape and laugh from a safe distance (Nathan). I was in charge of herding the boys out of harm's way (five boys five-and-under including theirs - I don't see anything that could possibly go wrong there)
So Ryan and Inga suited up in bee armor and prepared to transfer the swarm from the box to the hive. The bees were all sort of bunched up on a couple of wooden rails, which should have lifted out of the box and into the hive before the bees even knew anything had changed, but of course the rails were too wide to fit into our hive. Some swearing ensued, the kids and I moved back about ten yards, then the intrepid Inga proceeded to whack the bunched-up bees off of the rail in the general direction of the open hive. Suddenly there were about three thousand disturbed bees humming around in a disturbed-bee-cloud by our back door. The kids and I moved back about half a block. I missed most of what happened next, but there were only a handful of stings and it only took the bees about six hours to find their way into the hive, where they are busily building combs and pollinating local flowering shrubbery (saving the world, really) as we speak.

questionable vegetables

Dude, we totally had weed for dinner!


Not that kind of weed. Lambsquarter. It's all over the yard, and my experience with it so far had been mostly to yank it out from between the green beans, but you can saute it like spinach and it's  pretty tasty. Excellent, actually, considering how much work I put into growing spinach compared to this stuff. I'm sold.

Squelching their creativity

Add to the list of banned games: Juice Volcano.

It's too bad their mama is so narrow-minded.

getting old sucks

Ryan had a moment last night in which he realized that most people on TV are younger than he is. Not a capital-M moment, just an uncomfortable realization.

The capital-M moment came when he found a gray hair somewhere other than on top of his head.

funk it up

Few things say 'funky' like a jar of radish pickles left too long in the back of the fridge.

still other things we learn in kindergarten, but later forget

Going down a three-story carnival slide in a sundress gives you three stories' worth of slideburn on your ass.

the world according to Owen

"Look out, Mom! I'm about to transform into a four-year-old boy with no pants!"

In Which I Discuss My Undergarments

Today I am wearing a billionaire's socks.
Actually, according to Forbes he's not quite a billionaire (a mere 800-plus-millionaire), which is a touchy subject, but nevertheless he's so wealthy that he apparently feels it would be beneath him to wear the same pair of socks twice. This is, by the way, my husband's former employer we're talking about, which is how I came to be in possession of some of his discarded socks, because I have what could be described as RCD, Recycling Compulsive Disorder, and they are Perfectly Good Socks.

other things we learn in kindergarten

 "Mom, what does fuckit mean?"
 "Who says 'fuck it'?"
 "Landon. What does it mean? Is that the f-word?"
 "Alec, that's a very very bad word and you must not ever say it. And I don't think you should be friends with Landon."
"But what does it mean??"
 "It's so bad, I don't even know what it means. But you don't ever say it. If you say that word, everyone will think you're mean and bad, and you will have to go see Mr. Forsberg."
"If it's a bad word, could I say it to bad guys?"
"Maybe so. But only the worst bad guys ever. Only if there were alien bad guys from outer space with laser eyeballs who wanted to eat you. Then you could say fuck it."
"Okay. Thanks, Mom!"

Squelching their creativity

"Mom, let's pretend I'm a Great White shark and Daisy can be the sea lion!"

Add that one to the list of banned games, along with such classics as Butt Tag, Wiener Tag, Chopstick Tag, Spatula Fighting, and Shovel Golf. Too bad their mom is so narrow-minded.

In fairness, Daisy does bear more than a passing resemblance to a sea lion. And the BBC Planet Earth series does have an inspiring (or nightmare-inducing, if you're me) sequence of slow-motion seal-meets-shark sequences.

Motherly Wisdom, Nugget #58

Don't drink the egg dye. I know it looks like juice.

Motherly Wisdom, Nugget #57

We shouldn't say 'foul' about anything that somebody cooked.

the world according to Alec

We walked into the church for my cousin Veronica's wedding on Saturday, and Alec asked, "Mom, why is there a big letter 't' on the wall?"

I am feeling as though I've neglected my children's education.

Charming wedding, however.

questionable meats

We had vertebra tacos for dinner tonight.
I have not fessed up to my husband yet, and this may just be one that I take to my grave.
How, you ask, did we, inhabitants of the most firstest of first-world countries, even manage to find vertebrae in edible form (and 'edible' is fairly relative here, but among the many virtues of Taco Night is to take the inedible and render it somewhat edible, and kid-pleasing, in thirty minutes or less)?
Well, the last two years at the fair, we have purchased a 4-H steer with another couple. Said steer is trundled up the road to the meatlocker in Rifle to be transformed into little frozen paper parcels, each stamped helpfully with some kind of descriptor (chuck roast, t-bone steak, ground beef, etc). We are now down to the very end (which end?) of Dopey, and the last few packages in the deep freeze tend to show a great deal of creative license as to what parts of a cow you might want to consume and how you might want them portioned.
This latest package was coyly labeled "soup bones." Peeling back the paper, I could see plenty of meat, so I threw the entire frozen beef rectangle in the crock-pot before I went to work.  That evening, after I shredded the meat for tacos, it became clear what kind of soup bones I was dealing with, but by that time it was dinnertime and I had no backup plan (except Cheerios).  A good dose of chili powder and some excellent guacamole diminished the creep-out factor, vertebra tacos were served, and Ryan need be none the wiser.
Unless we all get Mad Cow disease.

amazing discoveries

Alec: "Um, Mom? I looked in the box by Dada's side of the bed even though I know I'm not supposed to and then I picked up a flashlight and turned it on, but now it's buzzing and I can't turn it off."

Mom: "..."

Alec: "What kind of flashlight is that anyway?"

Mom: "..."

Alec: "It doesn't light up."

Mom: "....I don't know, honey. Let's make sure to ask Dada when he gets home."

things we learn in kindergarten

You know your child attends a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse school when....

Alec (5) introduces Isaac (2): "This is my baby brother, Isaac. He doesn't speak English."

followers

Wow - my blog is now being followed by dogs. They're Claire's dogs, though, so I'm totally flattered (and a little worried that their literary skills may eclipse mine). Maybe this will inspire Daisy to be my guest columnist.

the world according to Owen

"Mama, today the warm winds are blowing, and the sun and the moon are all in their places!"

Captain Caveman

Isaac, Owen and I were sitting in the Target food court, having a juice box and cracker break, when in flitted this tiny apparition in pink. She was maybe three or a small four, getting a snack on her way to ballet class, and she was in full fairy-princess regalia from the tutu to the shiny slippers. She sidled up to our table, ducked her chin, batted her eyes, and smiled, "hi!"
Isaac (almost 2) hopped down from his chair, eager to make a friend. He stomped over, yelled, "RAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR!!! DINOSAUR!!" and chest-bumped her.
Luckily we have some time to work on his approach before he is ready to date.

exile in boyville, case in point

Stepping into the bathroom to brush my teeth last night, I found the sink full of mud. I do not know why the sink was full of mud, or how long the mud had been there, but, since the drainplug was not in the sink, it's safe to say the pipes are now full of mud, too.

In 7th grade English class, Mrs Lutt taught us that there are four types of literary conflict:
man vs. man
man vs. self
man vs. society
man vs. nature.

I would submit a 5th, man vs. indoor plumbing.

rhapsody in feathers

I love my chickens. I had no idea it would be possible for me to become this fond of livestock, but they are truly, singularly delightful birds. I mean, they eat my garbage and turn it into eggs, which is pretty nifty. They live in an old bathroom vanity (maybe the focus of this should be "I love my neighbors" for tolerating such hillbillies next door to them)(but we all have a good working system of politely putting up with each others' neighborly shortcomings, and assuming that we all chose to live in an HOA-free neighborhood consciously and for good reason)(and, okay, the exception to that is when my husband tried to kill the Jack Russell next door, but that's a story for another post)(and it kind of made me reconsider what I thought I knew about my husband as a person)(if you haven't had moments like that yet, you just haven't been with your significant other long enough - but have no fear, they will come. It's what makes partnered life interesting).
Back to my poultry. They have goofy bird personalities, goofy bird food preferences (Little Chicken and Floyd love old rubbery mac-and-cheese, Red likes cantaloupe guts), and they lay lovely green and pink eggs, not to mention keeping my nieces, nephew, and mother-in-law's yappy lapdog endlessly entertained while visiting. It's good stuff. I'd recommend fowl to anyone, whether or not your mother-in-law has a yappy lapdog in need of diversion (though to this day, if you make clucking noises at Ruby (which I'm qualified to do, having witnessed many years of the Wayne Chicken Show Cluck-off) she will go completely berserk, which then, in turn, entertains my kids. Win-win.)

The world according to Alec

Alec: "Mom, my underpants have been crazy today!"

I have no idea what he meant by this. Clearly his underpants are capable of things mine are not.

the world according to Owen

"Today I want to have hot cocoa, see a rainbow, and fight dragons!"

the cruelest month

     Every year, in February, I start to believe the world is going to end. Fortunately, by now, I have recognized this as a pattern, so I can at least brace myself.
     This year I've decided to go one better.  Since I have what appears to be a midlife crisis already underway, I'm experimenting with letting the Annual February Crisis feed into it. I'm hoping what ensues will be useful momentum and not total disaster.
      "A midlife crisis?" you say, "What can it be? A trendy diet-and-workout routine? A life-changing trip to Tuscany? A tattoo??"
      Even better; I'm getting a Master's Degree. And not just any Master's Degree, an MFA. In creative writing. I was really hoping to do a cross-disciplinary study in which I'd teach Cuban folk music to dolphins, but I ultimately settled on the practical option.
     And, mind you, when I say "getting" an MFA, it's more that I'm "contemplating the possibility of embarking on" or "getting totally bogged down by the obstacles to achieving" or "berating my own insanity at considering."  I have not yet applied to any programs.  I am fairly sure I do not know three people who could write me recommendation letters. I am shuffling through very old notebooks trying to excavate something that resembles a writing sample.
     However, it has moved up from the "daydream" stage to the "semi-possible" stage, which is an improvement.
     I am counting on February to  get me the rest of the way there, to back me into the freezing gray corner, to keep me convinced that the status quo is no longer an option. Wish me luck!

Fun with Hard Hats

     Alec came across a hard hat (which was liberated long ago from a nuclear power plant, but that's a story for another day) and subsequently spent a good twenty minutes whacking himself over the hard-hatted head with increasingly heavy objects to see if it would hurt. When the whacking proved harmless, he took to throwing Ryan's work boots into the air and attempting to stand under them. When it became clear that he was not coordinated enough to pull that off, he settled for running headfirst into the wall.
     If he had hit himself with my recent attempt at homemade cheese, he may have actually done some damage...

Precious Moments

My children have invented a game called "Butt Tag."
I am so proud.