is it really today?

I can't for the life of me figure out where the school year went.  On one hand, it was the looooongest year for G, since we didn't really love Mrs. Flower.  On the other hand it was a short year for Colleen since we loved her teacher, Mrs. North.  I blog-named her Mrs. North, in honor of Glenda (or Galinda) the good witch.  Here we are, it's day 180, and the kids are home from school for the summer.  I can do math, but I don't really want to calculate how many days of summer break there really are...  I will tell you that by August 20th I'm usually in the boat of "summer break is too long!" and "when does the school year start?"

Probably it was 5 months ago we punished C for lying by taking all her toys out of her room.  She kept being on the verge of getting them back, when we'd catch her in another lie.  So today, she came home with honor roll and I asked her, if she could "do one thing to celebrate having such a good report card, what would it be?"  She asked for all her toys back, and I agreed to it.

Gregory's report card was "ok", but frankly since H and I both wanted to tell Mrs Flower to F'off for the past 4 weeks or so, when he showed his OK report card we just celebrated like it was great and asked him what he wanted to do...  Tomorrow we're going to a theme park.  Which is also fine.

C is upstairs playing in her room with all her new toys.  B is upstairs napping.  G is upstairs, doing something?  Who cares!  The house is quiet for probably the last time this summer vacation.  Seriously, it's 10 weeks of bickering, arguing, "he said/she said", "don't wake B!", "hey, does anyone want to go to the pool?", TV watching on rainy days, craft making, summer camp attending, and traveling up and down the eastern sea board.  Should be fun.  And tiring.

Motherhood rites of passage #187 & #188

#187 Sick Kid on a Trip...

You're not really a mother until you've gone somewhere on a trip with a child, and had that child get sick in the middle of the night.  That itself is an experience.  "Do I call the Pediatrician on call?"  "Even if I call the Ped on call, what is she going to do for me, here, 30 minutes from the nearest pharmacy and 45 minutes away from the nearest hospital."  "And even if she were to call in a prescription, the nearest 24 hour pharmacy is an hour from here."  "I'm an hour from help."  "Crap".  "I'm tired."  "It's 3 am.  Whew, we've made it almost through the night."  "Ok.  It's 3:03.  It's only been 3 minutes?"  "Crap."  "I'm tired."  "IS she ever going to stop coughing?"  "Please God, if you're hearing this right now, just help her stop coughing so I can get to sleep."  (Yea, because seriously, at 3:30 in the morning, when you've had an hour or less of sleep, that's what it's about.)  

It's especially fun if you're camping in a cabin with 24 other people, which brings me to rite of passage #188, Camping with the Scouts....  which is where we were when Colleen suddenly went from "a kid with a cough" to "A KID WITH A COUGH".  So, the good news is that I have a wicked good pediatrician who prescribed some steroids so we could finish out our day at camp (I waited until 8am to call).  The bad news is, it's walking pneumonia.  We've called her summer camp and pushed her back to another week so she can chill out, rest, heal her lungs, etc and so forth.  In the meantime, here's a quick re-cap of "camping with the scouts"....

We ate s'mores (well, they ran out of graham crackers, so I ended up eating plain raw marshmallows, but the kids made Hershey/melted marshmallow sandwiches...), went swimming (the kids went swimming), did crafts (while I was at the pharmacy), climbed a 40 ft rock wall (I actually did that one, and well I might add), did archery (and it turns out I'm pretty good at this too), took a barn tour (saw Sparky), rode on a trail ride and went canoeing (Colleen and I also rocked out this activity).... and then, we packed up and came home.  I know, we missed the camp fire and breakfast, but we still had fun and Colleen got to cough in the privacy of her own home and i had another night of prayerful wakefulness.  Did I mention that I'm so tired I can't move?  

ANYhoo- here are some photos from the weekend!

The "mood to write" is like hunger.  Either you're hungry, or you're not.  You can force yourself to eat, but the food won't taste as good, and it probably won't satisfy you.  

Writing is that way for me.  I have some good ideas floating around in here, but without the hunger to express them, they feel like a waste.  Wasted ideas, like wasted time, are hard to recover once they're gone.  They're difficult to re-think with the same energy, and even then it's hard to know if they're as good.

Currently I have 3 projects going.  One is brilliant, clearly my best idea, but it's emotionally draining to work on, so I really have to be in the right place to noodle with it.  I'm so not there this week.  It's not a trashy smut novel, but instead a book about a woman, a mom, who is lost and looking for passion in her life.  It's not about infidelity, crime, or drugs, so it's probably not interesting enough to publish, but it's real, and funny, and depressing all at the same time.

One is pretty pat, but it's easy to work on, and that's probably why I'm not inspired by it.  Its a dark story that is hard to write about when it's so pretty and sunny outside.  Surely I can't write about a frozen city under a mask of night when the cardinals and finches are flitting about the bird feeder outside the window.

The last project that I'm working on is just aged.  I've fooled around with it for 4 years.  Four years.  I have the whole outline, the entire idea is formed from opening page until the last chapter, but i can't seem to get it out.  There is a plot hang-up that I need to work out *it could use a villain, but other than that, it's a perfectly sound, logical, interesting, sexy story.  It has the most amazing alpha male character ever, who, ironically, looks and acts a lot like SDD with expressive eyes, a sharp wit, thick dark hair and yes, a trim waist and long legs.  Probably one of the reasons I enjoy SDD so much is that I wrote the character before I met him.  But, as much as I want to be done with the story so I can put it away and move on to my next rejection letter, I can't seem to write it.

I'm beginning to think that the rejection letters are the problem.  Like a diet pill for authors, the repeated rejections suppress my need for words.  Except here of course, where I ramble in circles on what seems to be a daily basis.

an old song

Every day in my house is a new verse to an old song that people have been singing aloud since the mid 1940's, and one that mother's have been able to imagine since Abel and Cain created sibling rivalry.  The song, a peppy duet that is performed as a trio in my house, is "Anything You Can Do I can Do Better".

And no, it's not the oldest and middle child who are doing this, it's B fighting her way violently into the conversation or activity between the oldest screaming, "me do it!".  She then jumps into the game, whatever it is, and of course, disrupts everything.  G, being a boy, is happy to take her exuberance and use it to his advantage, making the game just one more level up.  C is just aware enough of the advantage to "playing with her sister for the sake of Mommy's sanity" that she'll play girly things with her, even in the midst of the chaos.

In many ways this type of sibling rivalry is not all bad.  For example, it is very motivating for B when she's attempting to learn a new task, like potty training or eating with a utensil.  At the same time, it's great for G because he gets the opportunity to learn from his older sibling and step into a leadership role as he's teaching his younger sister.  C has the advantage of always assuming the role as the example, and the disadvantage of always hearing me say, "C, set a good example for your sister/brother".

Todays game was get in the sun beam that bathes our Family-room with light and Dance with Your Own Shadow.  C was tapping to some imagined song, and G was behind her, their little, and not so little, shadow feet were actually executing perfect shuffle steps and flaps when B joined them- by running though the game and tagging G with both hands on his belly.  That's when the game became, Touch Dance with Your Shadow.  And then, because he's a boy, it became Tackle Dance with Your Shadow which meant that the shadow was actually a mangled pile of limbs, tangled and wriggling, before finally becoming so rough that the ref (me) had to step in and remind everyone that "This is NOT an indoor game".

Aw- Man.  I'm so boring.  I never thought I'd be a boring mom.  That's probably a song for another day.

g's terrible no good very bad day

I would like to start over please.  I would like to go back to Monday when it was the last day of a busy 3 day weekend and I thought, I'm going to potty train B this week and it's going to be a nice low key week and by Friday or Saturday I'll know if I should keep going w/ the potty training or can it until after August 15th.  (when we get home from our marathon vacation).

If I could go back to Monday and talk to myself I would say, "Hey g, s'up?  So listen, about this whole plan of yours.  This isn't the week to do it.  This week is going to suck.  Why don't you just go ahead and wait until June 1 or some other random date.  Trust me on this one."  But, alas, time travel wasn't on the agenda and I didn't get the heads up.  Instead, this was how my week went.

On Monday after my run, I had had ENOUGH of the odor in my kitchen.  Enough was enough.  H had been under the house multiple times and found nothing, but I knew better than that.  I knew there was something there.  The smell had to be coming from outside.  I know b/c I have completely torn the inside of the kitchen apart.  Yea, I found a rotten board, black, dripping wet, covered with mold & crap.  ...little did i know....

So, I figured that since I would be home all day on Tuesday potty training B, I would call a friend and ask him to come out and give us an opinion.  Yea.  He came in on Tuesday, took a look in the morning, and came out with grim news.  The kind of news you don't really want an experienced contractor of 20 years to admit, but know you have to take what you get sometimes.  He didn't know, he would have to rip some boards down to find out, was that OK?

Um.  I guess it has to be OK, because the smell has to stop.

The friend of ours called in a friend of his, and yesterday, day two of potty training, they came together to look.  And, when they came up from under the house, they had grim news.  There's a water leak, and it seems bad.  This has been going on for a long time.  OK.  So what now?  We think we can fix it, but first we have to brace the deck, cut it away from the house, call in a plumber, get the pipe repaired, blah blah blah.... (I don't know exactly what he said, it was a little over the head)... I can tell you that they looked me right in the eyes and said, It's the waste pipe that's leaking.  The WASTE pipe.  Just think about it for a minute.  Wait a minute, does that mean that waste has been leaking into my walls for weeks, maybe months?  Yes ma'am.

The friend of ours came back today because he wanted to give a fair estimate when they write up the quote, and he thought he could jury rig the leak.  Only guess what?  When he ripped the rest of the boards down, he discovered that the pipe is actually cracked IN HALF.  The waste pipe to the kitchen sink is cracked in half.  This means that we can't use the sink for days except if we absolutely HAVE to (i.e.- someone forgets and turns the water on).... we may as well not have a dishwasher or garbage disposal b/c we can't use them at all... and, in short, we're back in the days where people don't have running water in the kitchen.  

I've been home all week potty training B, while men crawl around under the house and each time they come up for air they deliver more bad news, worse than yesterday's news.  No wonder I have a wicked headache.

Potty Training: Episode IV

Things that potty training is like:  

Star Wars:  Your child gives you some signs that they're ready, so you think you're on episode IV, but after a few hours of going with that, you realize that you're really in Episode I.  That and getting a kid to use the potty is like using the force.

WWII:  Just when you think you're getting one thing under control, something else happens that makes you aware of just how vulnerable the other borders are at any given moment.  And, there's a chance you'll have to drop some major bomb in order for the potty training battle to end in your favor.  Take today for example, when I casually announced that there would be no more TV for the day.  Oh, that screaming you heard?  It was B.

Baseball:  it's boring unless something is actually happening, which isn't that often.  There are definitely 3 strikes per bat, 3 outs per "inning", and right now, at the bottom of the first, things are not going in favor of either of B or the potty training.  The current count is 0 hits, 3 strikeouts, 2 fouls, and 1 error.

trapped inside

A few weeks ago I was running with some ladies who aren't my normal running group.  I was tagging along, if you will, on their 6 mile long run.  They're really fit, fast runners, and I was pleased that they had agreed not to leave me in the dust.  (questions?, go read that running blog post from last summer where I was left behind about 500 feet into the long run, this is them.)

Except, this time, I kept up just fine.  No problems.  8 months of training and I can keep up with them on their runs if they slow down a touch and I push myself a touch.  Sure, they out sprinted me in the end of the run, one of them is part Kenyan, and one of them is actually some type of Gazelle hybrid.  

As I run with them though, I realize that I am definitely Barney Rubble.  The short square side kick that says funny things for the amusement of the audience.  So, let's for a minute assume that these women are a size 2/4 and size small 6.  I say small 6 because we all know the 6's at Express are smaller than the 6's at LOFT.

One of them turns to the other and refers to an article in a magazine.  Unfortunately for me, I haven't read it so I had to struggle to follow along in the conversation, but I caught up.  It was called something along the lines of "the fat girl inside you".... and the topic was that many runners are lean in appearance, but they're not working out their other muscle groups so they're actually "fat" instead of "lean", thus, making them, in effect, fat girls trapped inside skinny bodies.  Both of these women determined that they were, in fact, "fat inside".

After a few steps I chuckled and said, "Pretty much every woman I know has a terrible body image of herself, perhaps we're all fat girls trapped inside of skinny girls.  Except that I am not the fat girl inside the skinny girl, I am the muscled girl inside the fat girl".  If I wasn't covered in a layer of fat, I would be totally buff... fat on the outside and muscled on the inside, that's me.

My tiny running mates protested, that I too was "skinny." (Yea right, so... Barney Rubble, A Gazelle, and a "part Kenyan" all walk into a bar....).  

No, I'm not I explained, I know how I look.  And I think I do.  I squeeze into my cheetah skirt, my thighs are always bulging out of my skirts, my waist is squishy, my Buddha belly is getting really out of control, and I have a strip of fat that lines my inner leg... not just my thigh.  My whole damn leg.  But the Gazelle and Kenyan are very convincing, as are some other people in my life, and I started to wonder.... am I a skinny girl with a fat body image?  Could I be thin and not know it?

...And then I saw the race photo from The Cary town 10K.  If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then this one is worth 1000 lbs.  No seriously, I look like a 250 pound 5'2 inch woman running all out in a cheetah skirt.  It's bad.  Super bad.  After looking at that photo, I will never eat again.  Seriously.  I already broke up with chocolate.  This one is bad enough that I think I need to break up with food all together.  Maybe I should join weight watchers...  Maybe I should join the LEAN program...  Maybe I need to have some self discipline so I can stop paying other people to tell me what I already know....  Maybe I should buy that photo and paste it on the fridge and pantry doors...