Ostrich

I fell off the blogging wagon at 2:50p on Monday, April 15. I planned on posting about how lovely my weekend was, how I successfully cooked for 15-20 people for a party for a coworker and had an amazing time with work friends that I always forget are my friends, I got a haircut and took the kids to their first time at Disney Quest, got caught in the rain and made it an early quiet time home. I was going to tell you what a joy my kids are right now, how fun our weekends are and how much I look forward to going home to spend time with my family lately. I was going to tell you how that day was my anniversary, and how much I love my husband for all the things we’ve been through in six years of marriage and ten years of togetherness.

And then the bombings happened.

I rarely keep up with news. I read the occasional news website or check out our local free newspaper, but I’m just not good with keeping up to date with news. I really dislike it, truth be told. My husband reads the paper and watches the news channels all day, and if there’s something I really want to know eventually I’ll find out (Today! Trader Joe’s is coming to my town!)

When big things happen, I grasp at the news that I’m not accustomed to seeing, immerse myself in information. I want to know the facts. All the facts, but not someone’s interpretation of the facts. I stare at twitter and news websites, unable to DO anything but watch the news roll in.

Then, two days later, the Texas plant explosion. More dead, wounded, more things I can’t bury my head in the sand about. More watching, more waiting.

By Friday I couldn’t handle anymore, and so I took the weekend off. I spent another full day of Disney (Animal Kingdom AND Hollywood Studios), late night book club, Sunday morning gardening and pool time with my favorite boys. All I CAN tell you right now is that my boys are a joy. They’ve been on the low side of whine central so we all seem to be getting along well. I’ve been setting up the pool and sprinklers in the backyard every night so once S finishes his dern homework (this is our main fight, truthfully) they play in the water and C and I sit outside and talk or catch up on whatever we want to catch up on (me: twitter, him: random downloadable games). I WILL tell you how fun our weekends are and how much I look forward to going home to spend time with my family lately. I WILL tell you how that day was my anniversary, and how much I love my husband for all the things we’ve been through in six years of marriage and ten years of togetherness, good and bad.

We have a drink, I make dinner and we sit on the deck and soak up the beautiful weather and the happy kids and the fact that we’re there.

So here’s my point, in all this. 10 days is what it took me to stop dwelling on things. I will remember, and it hit me harder than I could have expected given my nature of ignoring the bad. I cannot forget. And while I think that the whole “enjoy every moment” is just pure bullshit, one moment here and there. Remember those moments. Remember the splashing and the dirt and even the play guns (I can’t escape the play guns, with no guns they resort to fingers). Remember the first time your five year old goes on Tower of Terror and begs to do it again. Remember them eating ramen by stretching out the noodles as long as their arms to slurp them down. Remember five times in three days at your favorite tea place and cats curled up on your lap. Don’t dwell on all those hard times, so many hard times and so much whining and arguing and timeouts and tantrums, fights with significant others and hard times at work. You don’t need to embrace those times. Just take a minute when things are going really well to acknowledge it, and put it in your memory bank and when terrible things happen in the world, or even to you personally, you have something to grasp onto.

You won’t need to put your head in the sand, although that’s where mine will be.

A few things for Friday

It’s icky outside this morning, and all I want to do is sit here and drink my tea and not worry about anything. That’s not how today is going to go, but it would be nice.

I’ve been drinking tea for the past week or so, because coffee was upsetting my stomach. I do miss coffee but I’m unexpectedly loving my tea in the mornings. I like black teas: breakfast teas, earl grey, orange pekoe. Right now I’ve got my favorite, Numi breakfast blend, with a little honey.

I’m co-hosting a party for a friend on Saturday, and I’m doing all the cooking. It’s at my girlfriend’s house and she’s handling the cake and alcohol and I’m making chicken salad, pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and baked bacon jalapenos. I made the chicken salad last night and cut and cleaned the jalapenos because that was the most labor intensive of the whole ordeal. Tonight before I go to bed I’ll start the pork to cook overnight, and then the rest in the morning!

I’ve posted five times this week. Don’t expect this to be a habit or anything.

Every bullet (before this one) has started with an I. I don’t know why. (perhaps she’ll die. Sorry, random nursery rhyme in there)

My anniversary is Monday, and we’ve made FANCY reservations. I feel bad about this, because we are also going to New Orleans next month pretty much as an anniversary trip too. Should I nix the anniversary dinner? Embrace it? I think I’ll embrace it (there’s a dessert room, people. And a kitchen tour. And what’s billed as the best steak in the city). My inlaws are keeping the kids OVERNIGHT so we don't have to pick them up (they watch the kids on Tuesdays anyhow)

Tonight! Tonight I’m (hopefully, probably, almost definitely) meeting an internet friend for dinner with her husband and her adorable son with the same name as my son. Yay for pocket friends becoming real life friends!

I’m getting a haircut on Sunday, and I’m so overdue. It’s not really that bad except that I do nothing with it except pull it in a ponytail (and my usual request at the hairdresser is “too short for a ponytail”). So it’s definitely time.

I have new Kelly green pants, and I’m wearing them with an aqua undershirt and a black and white stripe shirt. I do hope they match okay. Some days I just feel hopeless.

Easter baskets

Jen wanted to make a list of Easter basket ideas for the future, and since my phone was washed this photo from Instagram is the only picture I have of the boys’ Easter baskets. Which I had to snag as a snip from Instagram because apparently you can’t download your photos back from there like you can Facebook (obviously I’m still in mourning for the contents of my phone).

In Spencer’s basket (age 5)

A new bathing suit and a beach towel (he had been drooling over this Monsters Inc towel at target for a while, reasons unknown).

A peanut butter bunny (since relegated to the freezer for future consumption)

A handful of jelly beans and Cadbury mini eggs

A headlamp (forgot batteries, 2 weeks later still no batteries)

A watch (the boy is OBSESSED with time, and I’m sick of him asking what time it is)

A new Thomas movie

A beyblade-like top

In Henry’s basket (age 2)

A new bathing suit and a beach towel (Cars2).

A peanut butter bunny (since relegated to the freezer for future consumption)

A handful of jelly beans and Cadbury mini eggs

A headlamp (forgot batteries, 2 weeks later still no batteries)

A Jake and the Neverland Pirates seek & find book

A new Thomas movie

A beyblade-like top


Obviously, I tend to give my boys pretty close to the same thing. They are always coveting eachother's things, and unless it's something they can share I would rather get two and not have to listen to the complaining (see: the Innotab. S got it for Christmas and I regret weekly not just getting one for H too, even though I wasn't the one to purchase Spencer's.)

Also, instead of baskets this year (I can never find the baskets) I got these buckets from Target because they were $3 and I thought they would be good multiuse for them afterward. When I was peeling the sticker off the bottom to fill, I realized they were St Patty’s day ice buckets. HAHA

The most recent holiday

So I know I’m more than a week late documenting our lovely Easter holiday, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least through a few photos up here to remember it by. We did the same things we do every year: sunrise service at the zoo park, breakfast out with family, egg hunt and baskets at Grandma’s (and family baskets at home before service) and family dinner at Grandma’s. It was delightful, as usual.

So here are some highlights:

 

(two watches for Easter)

Books I read: March

I've been a little slow on the reading these days. I blame Candy Crush, and primetime television, and really everything else for taking over my mind and leaving me little room for digesting the written word. Except blogs. And twitter. I can digest those.

Grave Mercy - Robin LaFevers This was recommended by Jonna and I loved it. When does the next one come out?

Under the Never Sky - Veronica Rossi recommended by Whitney, also wonderful, also can’t wait to read the next one (my library doesn’t have it yet)

A Girl Named Zippy - Haven Kimmel This was … cute, I guess. I read it for book club and it was a lot of little stories about people in the woman’s hometown. It had a very young feeling, and I had a hard time continuing to read after each chapter. I don’t really know how else to explain it. The book was okay.

Tiny Beautiful Things - Cheryl Strayed The first Dear Sugar letter was sad and the answer well written and thought provoking and I thought I would like this. But there’s a reason that advice columns are written 1-2 letters in the grand scheme of a whole newspaper. A whole book of them was just grating, and several pages of an answer to every single question wherein most of the answer was stories about her … I couldn’t do it. No.

Unbearable Lightness - Portia de Rossi I loved this book, until it got to the epilogue, and then I wanted to, well, do something very bad. The idea that she was “saved” by Ellen and that she is fully recovered and life is peachy – well, I know a lot of people with a lot of problems and I don’t think anyone with a problem (eating, drugs, alcohol, anything) would ever say that they were “fully recovered”. It’s a struggle. Own it.

Pretty Little Liars - Sara Shepard The first part of this book was written so young that I couldn’t get into it. I was also having a reading problem and I can’t say I tried very hard though.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple I thought this was charming, and I never exactly knew where it was going which was refreshing. It was sweet.

Organization of the brain - so not happening

I have this jumbled mess of things that I keep wanting to get down in my blog but I either haven’t had the drive or the inspiration or the time to do it. I’m not sure what my problem has been, but every single time I try it’s all, “bah, later”. And then not later.

So here I am trying to organize my thoughts, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t blogged in so long you aren’t even here anymore and it’s not like the last couple posts were stellar or anything. But This is MY SPACE (right? Isn’t that *they* tell you?) so here I am, throwing it all out there.

We got Disney passes five weekends ago. I can tell you it’s been exactly five weekends because we have gone to Disney EVERY WEEKEND. And now I’m looking through my last few posts and it does appear that I told you this, twice, but I’m typing and I’m not about to backtrack to not tell you again. So Disney. Five weekends. We’ve now hit every park, and Epcot and Hollywood Studios twice. We’ve gotten to the wonderful part of pass ownership where we a) pack all our lunches (I pack, not we) and b) we get there about 11a, and leave by 6p, and eat dinner on the drive back home (90 minutes or so). We’re really having a great time doing this, although every time we pack the kids up to go I wonder if we’re jading them to how magical Disney should be. I went maybe twice when I was growing up. Will they even think it’s special if we’re going so much?

But then as we’re sitting on the tram and Spencer is planning what he wants to do (“we need to get fast passes to Tower of Terror first, mom” (yes, he’s FIVE)) and Henry is grinning like an idiot looking for “the giant hat” and I think, well, at least it’s still special right now.

AND! Since we are in the throes of five-year-old-meltdowns, we can nix a Disney trip specifically because he’s not acting properly and not be out a ton of money and preparation. Not that we’ve done this yet, but we honestly should have done it on Saturday so it’s not out of the realm of possibility for VERY SOON.

Here are some fun pictures:

And then there was Easter, somewhere in the middle there. I should make a separate post for Easter. Are people still posting about Easter? Has my time passed? Screw it, I’m writing an Easter post too. We had a good Easter.

In the midst of all this fun-having, we all got terribly sick. The weekend of Easter Henry had liquid butt (yep, we were at Disney one of the days! Imagine that!) but everything was handle-able. He felt fine otherwise, and we just kept changing him and his pants. But the Monday after Easter Spencer woke up with a fever. I usually discount his whining about not feeling good – just preparing myself for test avoidance when he’s older, but one look at him and I called out to stay home with him. It was a good thing I did too, because an hour in there was VOMIT! VOMIT! EVERYWHERE! He walked from his room, past his own bathroom, into my room where he promptly puked on my computer cord, rug and everything between my bed and the toilet that I got him to. I do not handle puke well, so I’m gagging and trying to open a window while still acting calm for my boy (gag, heave, “it’s okay sweetheart, it’s okay. Get it out” gag, heave, ‘why the hell isn’t this window opening faster’) I was texting C, who was in the office for meetings and he was NOT TEXTING BACK and I was trying to rein in my freak out.

I went for the gold star in parenting and stripped my bed except the sheets and set S up there with a leftover Easter basket  as a puke bucket managed to clean up everything. I ran laundry and washed every sheet and towel and the regular dirty clothes in the house. And then I was felled, around 1pm, by fever and napped the rest of the afternoon. C came home and decided to wash the sheets that we had been laying on all day and washed my phone with it.

For those of you playing at home, here was my week in bullets:

liquid butt Thing 2

fever/vomit Thing 1

fever/weakness me

phone through the wash –no more phone

we missed kindergarten tour and opening baseball game due to MORE VOMIT on Tuesday

extreme drama with family (if you follow on Twitter, you know this but I’m not rehashing)

five year old MELTDOWNS daily

one of the hamsters died ON EASTER and I had to replace him before the boys noticed

But moving on! Yesterday I laid on the back deck and read while the kids played in the sprinkler, and then fed them popcorn and fruit for dinner (after a late lunch, and, well, it pleases everyone) while watching a movie. Laid back evenings ahoy!

And now it’s Monday, and a whole new week of crazy awaits (ps - I did get a new phone).