Catching up

Busy busy month.

We spent five days in Jackson with my family and had a glorious time. It was nice to see Jeff, after his week in India he was home for about 18 hours then went to North Carolina for a couple of days, was supposed to be back the night before we left for Jackson but his flight was delayed and he got stuck in Cincinnati for the night and ended up getting back to Salt Lake about 2 hours before we left for Jackson. He realized he’s slept in his own bed four nights in the past month.
We hiked a couple of days, and ran the river, and then spent an extra day playing by the pool with the kids. All in all we had a really nice time.

Grandma’s story is that once when she had the grandkids at the pool while Jeff and I were somewhere else, the kids in the kiddie pool, including Thing 2, were pointing out their parents to each other. Thing 2 pointed out my mother to the other kids and said “You see that Old Lady over there? That’s my Grandma!” Mom said she felt rather exposed, she’d never been called that before.

Jeff was in town for part of a week, then left for a conference in Chicago. We celebrated Thing 2’s fourth birthday on Sunday before he left, we had a really nice spaghetti dinner (her choice) and had a pony shaped cake from Sydney, the lady I know who makes the fabulous cakes. The girls and I had a quiet 24th, trying to get ready for her friend birthday party on on Wednesday. We met at the Liberty Park Pool and it was very nice, she just had a couple friends and my cousin Wendy and her three kids were in town. We swam until lunchtime then had watermelon, and I had made a Hello Kitty cake for her the night before which she was quite tickled about. When we were done swimming and eating I popped for some midway rides at the little park next to the pool for all the kids. Since I hadn’t been able to get Dominos to deliver to the pool, I had more cash than I had intended. I think Thing 2 had a good time overall, despite the few moments of being upset that Maxine (her friend) said she liked Thing 1 better than her. Thing 1 and Sophia (Thing 1’s friend) were playing pretty happily together… Thing 2 seems quick to take offense sometimes.

Later I hosted Wendy and her family and Janet and Gary for dinner – this basically doubled my usual contingent for hosting people, what with a birthday party and a dinner party all in one day.

We came up to Logan the next day. Thing 2 had a fit during breakfast because I asked her to take her Little Ponies off the table, then asked her to not throw a fit at the breakfast table. Her options were to eat without a fit, or to go outside with her ponies and her breakfast and have a fit. She took the third option, stumble around the kitchen screaming like a banshee. I got increasingly frustrated at her blocking my attempts to have a quiet breakfast. When she finally did calm down she insisted she was crying because I gave her too much cereal. Sigh.


When we were in Jackson Dad had a sty on his eye he was having trouble with. Apparently Mom told him to put Neosporin on it, that’s what she does with hers. Kristin and I expressed our surprise at that, and told him we heard you should hot pack a sty, slathering it Neosporin sounds counterproductive. I thought it looked better after he’d started hot packing, but he kept up with the Neosporin. Well, after a couple of weeks it wasn’t really getting better, and in fact on some mornings it was quite a bit worse. Finally one morning it was really awful. He says he’d gotten kind of sporadic about putting the hot packs on it because it was time consuming, and then woke up one morning and it was really awful. He finally went to the doctor, who was somewhat alarmed and sent him to an eye doctor because he thought they’d need to lance the infection. The eye doctor asked him what he had been doing to treat it… then told him the problem was he was having an allergic reaction to Neosporin.

I just find this so funny!


I had lunch with Sandra and Jill (old high school friends of mine) and some of their kids today. Jill’s 10 year old daughter Jessa came, and all of Sandra’s kids with her visiting Japanese student who was very sweet and handing out little presents to everyone with surprising frequency. Sandra’s kids didn’t have a very high tolerance for McDonalds and we didn’t stay too long there. It was awfully noisy and cold, too. So we went to Sandra’s house. When we were getting ready to leave, Sandra’s daughter Anna, who is a little older than Thing 2, went sprinting over to the neighbor’s house. Then when we left, Thing 2 completely came unglued because Anna wasn’t there to say goodbye to. I completely intended to stand firm and get her in the car and go, but she finally stopped screaming and sort of asked without crying if she could go say goodbye. I caved and let her go over to the neighbor’s house and say her farewells properly. It really ticks me off that she gets what she wants by having a royal hissy fit. What happens is I get outrageously angry at her for screaming and then give in just so I can get on with life. It still pisses me off to think about it. I feel bad that someday when Thing 1 and Thing 2 are reading this, a lot of my stories now are going to be about Thing 2’s fits. My quiet, compliant little Thing 1 doesn’t cause these kinds of problems that prompt me to vent my frustrations on the computer. Bless her little heart.
Thing 1 is finding herself at loose ends at Grandma’s. She has decided that what she needs to occupy herself is to dye some Easter Eggs. I keep reminding her that it’s not time for easter eggs and I don’t have any dye, but she has come up with a neat new scheme on how she was going to color the eggs and drew many diagrams showing us how she was going to decorate these eggs. She is very persistent about it.