Homeschooling

Aaron (doing his spelling): "Mom, what is a four-letter word that begins with Sh?"

Me: "Shit"

Aaron: "Can I really write that down?"

Missing: One Frumpy Dumpy Mom

This morning I woke up earlier than usual. I was able to not only shower, but I dried my hair... with an actual hair dryer. I was able to pick out an outfit to wear... and not the usual jeans and sweatshirt. I was able to put make up on... more than just a wave or seven of mascara. I was able to curl my hair... which took so long that now I know why I stopped and I was even able to brush my teeth before lunch!

My son walked down and saw me in the kitchen making omelets and looking all supermodel-ish and he said to me...

"Who are you pretending to be for Halloween mom?"

Your worst nightmare kid... your worst nightmare~!

Grocery List: Candy, Beer, Candy, and more Beer.

Halloween for my son is so much different than Halloween for my daughters.

The girls always want to be something sweet and fun like a cowgirl, a princess, a ballerina, or an exotic dancer from De Ja' Vu.

My son always wants to be something with blood and guts dripping off of him.

This year Emma is going as a cowgirl/Cinderella. She could not decide which she wanted to be more so we just morphed the two costumes together. Now she looks like the cowboy from the Village People. Hope was going to be a 1920's Flapper Girl, but decided to be a Bears Fan instead. She even went to the orthodontist and had the colors on her braces changed to blue and orange for this costume.

Aaron is going to be an executioner. He has the mask, the black robe (which incidentally was his Priest robe for the All Saint's Day party this past Sunday... talk about an oxymoron!) and he has a big plastic ax to carry around. He always needs an accessory.

I am going to be a drunken housewife. I love Halloween!

Who Pee'd In Your Cheerios? Oh Wait... That Was Me.

My husband somehow ended up in a very bad mood Friday night. This mood may or may not have come about because of something that I may or may not have said/done. I would tell you what I did or did not do but this post is not about me... it is about my foul mooded husband.

Anyway, this bad mood followed my husband around all weekend long, so in turn, everyone in the house had to bow down to him and treat him like a King (a very unfair and unpopular King) in order to survive this bad mood of his.

When I am in a bad mood, no one cares. The kids don't go out of their way to make my mood happier and my husband usually just says "What in the world is wrong with you!" As if me being in a bad mood is somehow ruining his moment and therefore I am very selfish. How dare I.

By Saturday afternoon I let my husband know that I thought he had let this bad mood of his linger long enough and it was time for him to get over it and move on. I even insisted that he give me a kiss. My kisses usually will pop my husband out of his bad mood and put him into a horny one... which is not necessarily what I want, but having a horny husband is much better than having a bad mood husband, unless of course his horniness is rejected and then I run the risk of having a husband in a worse mood than what I started with. Men are such complicated creatures.

When my kisses did not work I knew I was in for a long weekend. A weekend of chores, cooking, watching Army movies, helping hold the hammer or screwdriver and eventually black lace. *Big Sigh*

The kids knew that this foul mood meant that they were in for a weekend full of "Clean your room!" "Rake the leaves!" "Why are you watching TV?" "Who's plate is this on the counter?" and the such...

At one point I walked into the family room and found both Aaron and Hope watching TV. I warned them that their father was on his way into the house and if he saw them sitting around and not doing something "constructive" that they would be in for "it." As the words were still lingering in the air, the door started to open. Aaron and Hope made a mad dash for the kitchen only to collide into each other and fall to the floor. Hope jumped up and went to help Aaron but he yelled "Save yourself! Just GO!" My husband walked into the family room and looked at Aaron and said, "Why are you lounging on the floor? Go chop wood until I tell you to stop!"

Aaron looked to me to help get him out of the situation but all I could think of was the time when I was a kid and we were going on vacation. My dad was always in a bad mood when we were going on vacation. I am not sure if it was the packing of the car or the constant license plate game that set him off, but he was always cranky. On this one vacation, we kids started to complain in the back seat. Things like "she is looking at me!" and "Why do I have to sit on the hump?" were heard. When my dad stopped for gas and got out of the car my mother turned around and said "Listen up! I am doing the best I can to make HIM happy, you, I don't care if you are happy or not!"

Having a husband in a bad mood is much like having a black bear living in your house. You can never tell if they are going to be calm and just sniff your campground, or if they are going to slash open your tent and rip your head off. The only difference between my husband and a black bear is that to get the bear under control you have to tranquilize it and helicopter it 100 miles away, with my husband, you don't need to put him in a helicopter.

Thank God for tranquilizer guns.

Return Of The Punctuation Mark...

Ask any mother out there and she will tell you that one of the main reasons for breastfeeding is completely selfish. Sure it is healthy and stuff for the kid, but for the mother, it keeps a certain punctuation mark at a distance.

I have been happily nursing Mary Claire for that reason. Oh relax... I have been nursing her for the other reasons as well, like that it helps me get back in shape.

My sister will nurse her kids and her punctuation mark stays away indefinitely. If she nurses until the kid is 18 and going off to college, well she would not have a punctuation mark until she dropped that kid off at school and they started their first class.

Me on the other hand, I have been jipped! Robbed! Thwarted! Here I sit a measly 5 months after giving birth to Mary Claire and I am back to correcting grammatical errors!

I have to wonder if it is because of my recent interest in jogging and my recent suppression of carbs in my diet that has caused this unnatural phenomenon to happen to me, a nursing mother.

Back when I was lazy and eating everything in sight, I was punctuation free... now that I am getting my act together, WHAM!

I should look at the bright side, at least I can blame my cursing on PMS again...

Whoever Said "Clothes Make The Man." Did Not Know My Mother...

I have been attempting to do a dreaded chore for about 2 weeks now. I have been sorting through summer clothes and putting them in the Goodwill pile, the garage sale pile and the save-for-hand-me-downs pile. I have also been getting out the winter hand-me-down clothes and sorting them again... and most of them end up in the Goodwill pile as well.


This takes me so long because I have so many stinking kids who live in this house! Seriously, ever since #4 came along and homeschooling started back up I have only been able to accomplish two chores a day. Dishes (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and laundry. The rest of the house is in complete chaos. Now, you may be saying to yourself "But you have time to Blog you lazy woman!" This is true-I do have time to blog, I also have time to drink a beer or two and sing Broadway musical hits, but I don't criticize your daily schedules do I?


My mother never did the clothes sorting thing when I was a kid. She was not very good at laundry either. This may explain the fact that I wore shorts and a Holly Hobby halter top to school one day... in January. One thing my mom was very good at was child labor. She put us to work I tell you, and not the way I put my kids to work by asking them to vacuum or wipe down the bathroom sink with a Lysol wipe, no, my mother believed in severe child labor.

I would wake to a note on the table. Ahhh, the dreaded note! It was a to-do list. The typical list had things like "scrub the toilets," "rake the carpet" (we had shag), "brown the pork chops" "peel the potatoes" "paint the garage" "change the oil in the station wagon."

Every once in a while a representative from the Department of Labor would call our home and my mother would instantly pretend like she was from the Old Country and could not speak English and hang up. She is wanted in 4 states.

The problem with this "clothes sorting" chore that I have is that it requires the help of my children. I need them to try on winter clothes in order to see if they fit or not. Asking my son to try on clothes is like asking him to paint himself pink and to walk through the neighborhood. It takes sooo long because he has to go to the bathroom and lock the door to try things on. While in the bathroom he decided to go to the bathroom, check out his nose hairs, pick lint from between his toes and see how many good arm pit farts he can belt out. He has focus issues.

Asking my oldest daughter to try on clothes is like asking a supermodel to try on clothes. She has to pick out a complete outfit before she will put it on-one that matches and goes with her hair. She has to twirl 10 times in the mirror and try on a pair of shoes with each outfit to see if it all "comes together." she has vanity issues.

Asking the 4 year old to try on clothes is like asking a monkey to try on clothes. It takes 20 minutes just to coral her and then another 20 to convince her to just put on the sweatpants so Mommy can see if they fit,and no, she does not have to wear them today, and yes, they are pretty and any princess in the world would kill for a pair of sweatpants like these! She has princess issues.


I am starting to think that my mother had the right idea. Just leave all of the clothes from winter, summer, spring and fall in the drawers. It worked for me when I was a kid. So what if I had to wear my bathing suit top for a bra on more than one occasion... I turned out OK.

Things My Kids Say...

When I was at Orin Scrivello's office yesterday, I was reading a magazine that had a brilliant idea in it! I do not recall the magazine, as I think it is out of print now considering the people were wearing neon sweatshirts that said "Relax" on them and had their stretch pants stuffed in their socks. It was pretty old...

Anyway, in this magazine it was giving ideas for journals. One was a travel journal (borrrrrring! I don't travel so I don't know what I would journal about. I used to be a world traveler, but now I just go to the grocery store and back.) Another was a design journal that had little swatches of fabric sticking out and little sketches of dresses, furniture and shoes. (This one would not work for me either as my designs consist of Old Navy, Target and Payless.)

But one journal idea was pretty cool. It is a quote journal. When you hear or read a quote that strikes you as mind-blowing, you head on over to your handy dandy notebook and jot down the moment of brilliance.

I have decided to put a spin on this idea and instead of journaling in a notebook with actual paper and a pen (or God-forbid a pencil!) I am going to START ANOTHER BLOG! (I will keep you posted on the kick-off party)

My first quote is from my son...

"How long do you think a person would survive on just a bottle of mustard?"

We are talking earth-shattering quotes here people!

My Endodontist Is In Violation Of The Geneva Convention...

Yesterday I had to go back and finish the second half of my root canal. Yesterday I also came to a grave realization... my Endodontist is a sadist.

As soon as I get in the chair she numbs me up. I had been dreading this all day because she seems to enjoy her job a little too much and one of the shots has to go directly in the roof of my mouth-which if you have never experienced such pain, just lay your hand down casually on the kitchen table and then take your handy dandy nail gun and drive a nail into each finger. That is about what it feels like. Nice.

My friend Lori asked me why I did not request to laughing gas. I had thought of this in the past. When I was a kid I used to get the laughing gas, but as an adult I was never offered such a tantalizing drug. Believe me, if it were offered I would be the first to jump on it, and the 20 minutes in la-la land would be like a vacation for me.

Anyway, I was left to sit in the office by myself until my mouth was good and numb. I only had a August, 1983 issue of National Geographic to keep me occupied. After about 20 minutes I started to wonder if she had forgotten me. My Endodontist is like a fart in the wind, she breezes in and out and spends most of her time in her back office-with the door closed.

As I sat there I started to imagine just what she was doing in that back office. I figured she was A) reading blogs on-line, B) knitting a tooth shaped pillow, or C) rubbing her little hands together and cackling with her sinister laughter as she waited just long enough for my Novocain to wear off so that I would feel every inch of pain that she was about to inflict upon me.

At one point her assistant came in and whispered to me "Are you still numb?" Now, this made my adrenaline shoot through the roof, which in turn freaked me out even more because I could not calm my heartbeat down and I knew the harder my heart was pumping the faster the blood was traveling through my body and distributing the Novocain to other parts of my body than to the tooth where it belonged. I was in a real-life horror flick! I was about to be Drew Barrymore in Scream and be the first to be killed in 5 minutes! Oh the HORROR!

To make matters worse, the woman in the torture chamber next to me was a talker. When my Endodonst finally emerged from her think tank, she went to the woman next to me and I sat and listed to her go from one subject to the next. I heard about her husband who had cancer, a blister on his right foot and a mysterious rash on his lower back. She then talked about her two dogs who are rescue dogs and she just spent $2500 on one of them to get a leg operation because it had a tumor on his little leg. Then she talked about her daughter who was going through a "nasty" divorce from a man who she is glad to be rid of because the dog with the tumor used to be theirs and he did not want to operate, he wanted to just put the poor thing to sleep for $150! Can you believe the cruelty? And then she talked about her neighbor who was going to be checking in on her husband while she was at the dentist and she just knew her neighbor would eat all of the coffee cake she left sitting on the table for her husband.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I don't have to tell you, but I was no longer numb.... or not as numb as I would have liked to have been. I prefer to not feel a drill going into my head at rapid speeds-that is just me though.

FINALLY it was my turn. I was reclined to look like a corpse in a coffin and she went to work. I felt pain-I felt a lot of pain! She explained to me that she could give me another shot to numb me, or I could bully my way through this house of blood and horror and get the heck out of there ASAP!

I chose door number 2 because I did not want to get another shot in the head and wait another 45 minutes for it to wear off so that my Endodontist could satisfy her Quentin Terintino rituals. I am no masochist!

Would it surprise you to know that my Endodontist's name is Bates... Norma Bates? Or maybe you would believe she is Orin Scrivello's daughter?

Deep Thoughts With June Cleaver...

IF MAN EVOLVED FROM MONKEYS AND APES...

WHY DO WE STILL HAVE MONKEYS AND APES?

I Shop At Tramps-R-Us...

I hate everything in my closet.

I have decided to get rid of all things that I hate in my closet... so now I will have to go to Church in a bathing suit.

Since I had Mary Claire 5 months ago, I have not been able to get back to the bulk of my wardrobe. I have gone to places like Target and Kohl's to buy inexpensive clothes to get me through these past months and I can't stand any of it anymore!

I have also come to the realization that before I had Mary Claire I was nice and skinny and I apparently dressed like a tramp because anything I try to put on from my "before Mary" days makes me look like I need to take my place at the corner of 5th and Broad and start saying things like "Do you need a date tonight handsome?"

I just lugged a big box up to my bedroom and I am just going to start pitching crap. That green tank top with the gold sequence-gone, those white Capri pants that require the use of no underwear-out the door, that black top with silver sparkles and no hope of covering the twins-rejected.

When I am done I am going to take all of this to Goodwill, because somewhere out there is a mom in denial who believes she needs a top that says "Blonds Have More Fun" and a pair of jeans that show her butt crack every time she bends over.