Ignorance is guilt

I am not normally a procrastinator.  I procrastinate, on occasion, but in general my motivation runs along the avoidance of pain and suffering.  I have found that procrastination makes my life frenetic and harried, and actually brings more work.  So I try not to put things off until they are actually on fire.  However, lately things seem different.  I have been procrastinating.  Duties and commitments are sliding.  Look at me ignoring my responsibilities!  I am putting off commitments until the very last possible moment!

Things that have deadlines and should take priority aren't as appealing as the stuff that is farther down on the priority list.  Why is it the higher the priority, the less appealing things are?

I SHOULD be writing the primary program.  This is my fourth one, and I can tell you I am sick and tired of them.  Yessirree, I would just about do anything on earth other than write another Primary Program!  And I am doing just about anything on earth instead...   I've already used up all my clever ideas, I'm tapped out.  Every other ward I know of has already had theirs, and I haven't even started writing ours! Oh, the humanity. And to top it off, we are having it on Halloween, of all days.  I want to throw in a spooky song.  And maybe have the kids wear costumes.  It will be the Best Primary Program Ever!!  The kids always pull it off, but first I have to write it, publish it, distribute it, and we have to practice it.  

I should also be making Quilt Blocks!  Slightly below the Primary program on the Priority list, but still pretty important. I committed to participate in a Christmas Quilt Block exchange, and it is going to be wonderful, but if it's going to happen on October 11th, I have to hold up my end of the deal.  12 quilt blocks finished and pressed in about two weeks.  Should be plenty of time, but... did I mention I haven't actually completed ANY of the quilting projects I started with this group? 

I should also be cleaning my house.  My folks dropped by today, my mom called from the road that they were coming into town and would be at my house soon.  I was at Costco buying, among other things, Nutella (the food of the gods) in bulk.  I could not be interrupted.  

So I didn't have time to even get home and load the breakfast dishes from the sink to the dishwasher.  I can imagine the horrified conversation the folks are having as they pull away from my house, something about depression, therapy, and slovenliness.  
And I should be getting our financial ducks in a row.  I'm the bookkeeper, and I haven't actually reconciled the bank or AM EX account for several months.  I haven't made a travel report (required for tax purposes) since the 2nd quarter.


Did I mention the sprinklers are broken so I turned off the water a month or so ago?  I remember to hand water occasionally, but the whole yard is starting to have the professionally neglected look of a "Bank Owned" property.  (On that one I think I'm giving up.  I think I'll hire someone come in and fix the sprinklers.)

So what is it I'm doing instead of these important things?  Blogging, for one, or rather reading other people's blogs. Also working on the sweater that I started for Thing 1, but Thing 2 is quickly growing out of  - I was so close to finishing it three years ago when I put it down for one reason or another, and finally picked it back up last week. A kid grows a lot in 3 years and I would like to see someone wear it.  While I knit I watch 24, season 6, in which Jack Bauer can cross LA in 7 minutes, catch terrorists single-handed using nothing but... well, his hands, and use his body to shield innocent bystanders from the blast of a nuclear warhead.  Well, almost.  There is so much shark jumping going on it isn't interesting anymore.  Yet I'm addicted to watching through to the end.

I've also been reading.  Nothing amazing, just picking up a book now and again and ignoring everything until I put it down. 


And I've been staying up late at night to do all of these things (or, more correctly, to NOT do the things I should be doing, but to do the other things.)  Speaking of which, it's past time for bed and I haven't had the nightly call with Hubby... so I guess I should prioritize bedtime as #2 (right behind phone call) and then stick to my priorities, at least until tomorrow.

Sharing the love

In church yesterday Thing 2 got frustrated when I whispered I didn't have any coloring books. I have sticker books, puzzle books, paper doll books, and tons of blank paper, but no coloring books. Fine, give me a sticker book and a piece of paper. I handed her a sticker book with photos of various kinds of horses in various poses.

From when she sits down, Thing 1 hardly looks up from her pencil and drawing pad until they say the closing prayer. Fine with me, so long as she's quiet.

Thing 2 peeled two horses out of the sticker book and put them on the blank sheet of paper, facing each other. Then she drew a large pink heart over them, and wrote her name above one horse and Thing 1's above the other. Then she showed it to Thing 1 with a rather ingratiating smile.

Thing 1 smiles back, and they hug.

Thing 2 writes I Love You! over the horses, shows it again to Thing 1, and they hug again. Thing 1 pats Thing 2's back, touches her face (in a hauntingly similar way to the way I pet them sometimes when we're hugging) and they hug again.

Thing 2 is obviously pleased with herself. She is doing everything short of wagging her tail. She asks for another piece of scratch paper and starts another masterpiece. There are two horse stickers on one side, one sort of on top of the other to represent standing side by side, facing the two "side by side" horse stickers on the opposite side of the paper. The stickers are carefully chosen from the pages and pages of horses with great attention to their relative size and features. She writes "Mommy" and "Daddy" over two and her own and Thing 1's names over the other two, and draws a big pink heart between the two pairs, and a line of grass behind them. She shows me and explains how I am the palomino, and Daddy is a sort of muscular black horse behind me. She and Thing 1 are smaller stickers, Thing 1 is a reddish horse, and she is kind of a pale horse. She is so proud, she is giving me her biggest closed-lipped smile. I give her a smile and a side hug. She moves to Thing 1, shows her the new picture and gets another series of hugs. They hold each other at arm's length, gazing at each other, then lean in to hug each other again. All of this is done with almost no words, quietly in the middle of church. The love was so thick around us it was distracting.

The very sweet girl and her husband who usually sit in front of us were this week sitting a couple of rows behind us. After the meeting she approached and asked, "Are they ALWAYS like that?"

No, they're good friends and they get along really well almost all the time, but the love was running pretty fast and loose that day. Thing 2 is usually the instigator, but Thing 1 reflects it, and together they can make a love-fest of major proportions.

Maybe they were listening when I was lecturing them that if they're lucky and they don't screw it up along the way, sisters are the best friends in the world.

Happy Campers

We are not particularly big campers. Hubby's idea of roughing it involves having to call to the front desk for an iron. (I admit to a slight exaggeration for illustrative purposes.) My father, bless his heart, took my family camping quite a bit when we were youngsters and I have backpacked and horsepacked enough to know that car camping is not really roughing it. But I'm getting lazy and soft in my old age and my daily comfort requirements are greater. What I will tolerate as roughing it is getting correspondingly less and less primitive. There is a broad range of comfort levels with a mobile home on one end (and I recognize there is a whole subset of levels there) and rolling out a blanket on the ground on the other. The differences along the scale between the two seems to be mostly a differentiation of camping equipment.

Getting the equipment for comfortable camping gets to be a substantial commitment of finances and storage space. My father accumulated a basement collection of tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, and various and sundry other items necessary to the outdoor explorer. As his own comfort needs climb higher and camping becomes less appealing he has started to purge his camping equipment and find homes for it with me and my sister. So I do have access to some decent camping equipment without the expenditure. But this equipment requires gathering, checking, remembering, and loading in the car. That's before we even pull out of the garage. That's before we even start unloading and setting up, and long before we start breaking down, loading, and driving home so we can then unload and wash and put away. On my childhood camping trips my mom and mostly my dad did the bulk of the work. Since Hubby is out of town and is working right up until the moment he climbs in the car to drive, I'll be doing all the prep work that both my parents used to do. My ideas of what are preferable leisure activities are climbing farther and farther away from the pit toilet. That luxury condo Hubby mentioned looks better and better... But the girls get so freaking excited about the whole woodsy thing. Combine this with the annual church group camp-out on Friday and there is just no avoiding some sort of outdoor experience.

About four years ago when my kids got old enough to find the idea of camping romantic and they stopped having so much baby related equipment required for an overnight stay, I gave in and started trying to fulfill their fantasy of waking up in the woods. An easy platform to do this is the church camp-out. So much is arranged for you. The activities committee finds the spot and provides the fees for the campground, they only stay one night which eliminates the question of staying on longer, and there are a bunch of well equipped veteran campers on hand who can usually loan you whatever you forget. So they are making it easy, but it's still no picnic. As I have bemoaned to my mother how much of a pain in the neck the preparations are she has exuberantly expressed her respect and admiration for the herculean effort I go to to get the girls in the woods, because she certainly wouldn't have done it without the driving force of my father. It's nice to have my own cheering section, even if she's on the other side of the phone and not actually helping me load the car.

The first year the girls and I went on the church camp-out Hubby wasn't coming in until late that night so the girls and I (actually just I) set up camp by myself. That year we borrowed one of my dad's old (and wonderful) Spring Bar tents and his old (and inadequate) sleeping bags with the flannel deer on the inside. Hubby came up the following morning to join us for breakfast and to listen to the girls tell how cold they were all night and how fun it was when we all three ended up in one big sleeping bag together.

Hubby was in town and camped with us the next year, the year I didn't borrow my father's heavy but reliable Spring Bar tent but bought a nifty easy-to-put-up nylon tent for us instead, and bought new sleeping bags for everyone. The sleeping bags were great, but the tent was a complete disaster. The zippers on our new tent popped open or wouldn't budge at all, and climbing across our battery-inflated air mattress to get through what should have been the back window of the tent (because the door was sealed shut) popped the mattress and Hubby and I slept on the ground that night. We returned the tent the next day.

The next year we didn't stay over night, just went up for dinner and then slept in our own beds. Which brings us to this year, when I thought we might be able to get away with the much less strenuous dinner-only option, but eventually just couldn't deny the excitement of the girls. We found someone to stay with the dog and didn't have any other excuses not to go, so we again borrowed one of Papa's old Spring Bar tents (my sister and I rotate storage for some of the bigger items) and we camped over. Hubby was in town, and though he didn't really have time to devote to a night in the hills, he went anyway to be with his girls.

All in all it was a good trip. We got out of town late because Hubby was working up until I practically backed the car out of the driveway without him. So we were one of the last of the group to get there, and certainly the last to set up their tent. My father's Spring Bar is wonderful, he has several smaller sizes but we borrowed the 5 man, which I can stand up in with nearly a foot of headroom. By the time we set up our tent, before we even blew up the mattresses and unpacked the sleeping bags, it was nearly full dark. We went through the dinner line just one step ahead of the clean up crew, and I went back and finished setting up the rest during the campfire songs.

Not many people camped this year, most just came up for dinner, so breakfast the next morning was pretty quiet. In fact had I known it was going to be as quiet and unplanned as it was I would have brought a gallon of milk and a box of cereal or something. The breakfast provided was a rather gourmet affair of hot chocolate and boiled crawdads in butter or cocktail sauce. Thing 1 was horrified and wouldn't come near them, but Thing 2 found them a delicacy and gobbled them up as fast as anyone would peel them for her. When we came down from the canyon we stopped at IHOP because only Thing 2 had eaten enough to consider herself fully breakfasted, and then we came home where I set about unloading the car, and Hubby went to work and ended up having to pull a nearly all-nighter in order to get ready for his flight this morning.





The girls really enjoyed it. I come home dirty and tired; no matter how comfortable the air mattress and warm the sleeping bag, there is a certain amount of tossing and turning and waking and shifting and waking and listening to the woods and making sure the girls are covered and waking up trying to ignore my bladder and finally getting up to shiver to the latrines and blundering back into the tent and getting Hubby to roll over because if one of us rolls over in the double sleeping bag, the other has to too. It's absolutely exhausting. I apologize for my major whine rant.

This Friday the girls have the day off of school. Hubby went to great lengths to rearrange a client so he could be here and we can do something together. What do the girls want to do? Go camping.

November 2001

This just didn't make sense - I lost a whole year of baby missives! Then I found it - on the next page. Doh! Now they're out of order!

Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2001 8:05 PM
Subject: Are you tired of my photos yet?

More photos!
We went to my folks' for Thanksgiving - it was good to
get away and relax the way you usually can't in your
own house because there's always too much to do.
Hubby took a break from all the night before
Thanksgiving preparations with Thing 1.


We returned home to a big snowstorm, Hubby had to go out and shovel.

Baby and I went out to watch.


I seem to take lots of pictures of Thing 1 sleeping.



So. To show this next picture I must confess that way into my adult life I continued to put stuffed animals on my bed. Hubby was very tolerant of this, but it's not really His Sanctuary when there's dolls and widdle wabbits on his bed. We compromised and he got equal representation in the form of the Wild Things Monster. I would come into the room to find the doll, rabbit, and monster in very suggestive poses. Setting up little vignettes became the best part of making the bed. In one of the tamer poses, Hubby added another character to the bed regulars.


- One of these things is not like the others...

September 2003

One of my favorite pictures in the world is the one with Thing 1 and the tomatoes. One of my regrets is I don't still have the digital source, so I can't blow it up to poster size.

Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 10:03 AM
Subject: babyphotos


Hello!

I've not been keeping up with my photos... And I'm
not sure which ones I've sent and which I haven't.

Here are the latest.

One of the things we got for Thing 2 was a baby gym.
Thing 1 seems to think it's neat too. She wiggles under
it sometimes to hang out.


Thing 1 also helped me in the garden recently. I
thought she was playing in the sandbox and nearly
stepped on her when she quietly came up behind me in
the garden. She started saying "Helper!" and was soon
helping me pull weeds. Then she saw me examining the
tomatoes, and before I knew it she helped me pick some.
Unfortunately she doesn't distinguish between red and
green tomatoes, calling them all apples and happily
picking them.

My grandmother turned 96 on Thursday, and Thing 1
and 2 and I went to visit her. This is the three of
them on the couch. Thing 2 got her middle name from
my grandmother's mother.

(My grandmother died about 3 years later. She was a lovely lady. She didn't always get her wig on straight, but she'd suggest we go down to the lobby sometimes for our visits instead of just staying in her room. She was so happy to show off her great-grandbabies to the other residents of the facility where she was. We always attracted quite a crowd.)

Hope everyone is doing well!

August 2003

Here's a babe-e-mail from when Thing 2 was born.

Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2003 10:28 AM
Subject: Announcing!

Hello!

I am WAY behind in my baby pictures! The month of
July has been really busy.
First some of Hubby's relatives were in town for a
couple of days and we had a really nice time with
them. I have photos, but that will have to wait.
Then, we had my family's reunion for a week, this is
the once every three years event. Again those photos
will have to wait.
Because
The next week after the relatives all left, we had a
baby!

Thing 2 was born at 3:33 pm. She
weighed in at a respectable 7.3 and was 19 1/2 inches
long. We had a really hard time with the name, just
like we did with Thing 1.
First me and Thing 2...

Then Papa and Thing 2.

Thing 2 is a little blondie, and is a great sleeper
(except for that 11 pm to 1 am stretch of fussiness I
haven't worked out yet) and is gaining weight like a
little trooper, after an initial bout of jaundice.
This was taken in the hospital, a matter of hours after she was born.

As you can see in the last photo, this new baby business
has taken Thing 1 completely by surprise. She is not
quite sure how to deal with this new little thing.
She tries to give her toys, but the baby pointedly
ignores them.

We'll probably be sending out a few snail mail
announcements and more pictures, but I wanted to send
out some announcement sooner rather than later.

June 2003

Here's a babe-e-mail from June of 2003:

Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2003 9:06 PM
Subject: summer pics


Hello!

I hope everyone is having a good summer!

We're keeping very busy, and thought I'd throw out a
few more baby pictures. Or should I say Toddler
pictures.

Thing 1 is really into cleaning right now. She has to
help me all the time, with everything, though of
course it's usually at a significant cost to how she's
dressed. Gardening can be really messy... I digress.
The first picture is of Thing 1 helping my mom clean the
cushions for their patio furniture.


The next picture is Thing 1 swiffering the kitchen
floor. I've started just leaving one of the cloth
things on the swiffer mop between times I use it,
because it frustrates Thing 1 when she pulls out the swiffer and the rubber of the bare pad sticks to the
floor. In this picture, it is unfortunate that you
don't have the audio of Thing 1 grunting as she pushes
the swiffer into the corner.

One afternoon last week I took
Thing 1 to the zoo. For Thing 1, none of the animals;
the elephants, monkeys, zebra, giraffe, none of them
can hold a candle to the ducks. We spent a good 45
minutes at the duck pond, until I ran out of change
for duck food. What you can't see is behind her
sunglasses she is crying for another quarter for the
machine.


I'm sorry if I'm overdoing it...

But I thought these were kind of cute.

We set up Thing 1's wading pool but she hadn't played in
it very long before she decided she'd rather sit on a
chair and dabble her feet in, like Hubby and I were
doing.


So these are a couple of pictures of Thing 1 lounging at
the pool... doing her best to be cool and grown up.
Only she's too short to get her feet in unless she
puts her tush right on the edge of the chair. Which
meant I had to keep one foot behind her chair to catch
her because she was somewhat off balance and kept
tipping over backward.

Also, For anyone I haven't told already... that large
inert figure in the denim dress next to Thing 1 is me,
7 and a half months pregnant. We're expecting baby
#2, another girl, the first of August.
Anyway, that's it...

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer weather!

Back to the begining

I've seen Princess Bride too many times. I keep hearing Fezzig saying "You go back to the beginning..."

Anyway.

Nine years ago I started keeping a journal on my computer of my daughters. Everything went into the journal, first smiles, first words, first steps... and second smiles, words, and steps. That journal had it all. I am much faster at typing so their baby books lay blank, for the most part, and I carefully recorded everything in the computer journal.

Then about six years later we were robbed. Of everything that was stolen the biggest loss was my laptop, and what it contained. The journal, as well as all my digital pictures of my daughters, were gone. I felt like six years of our lives disappeared. I restarted my journal, and maybe a year, year-and-a-half ago I started uploading my journal into this blog. I went back and added a few pictures. My first entry is a little depressed, and longer than I want to include here. But you just feel free to go read it.

Concurrently with the journal I had been sending out baby emails to keep my old friends and co-workers up to date when I quit work to have the 1st baby and dropped off the face of the planet. I was limited to the three photos with each missive that yahoo would let me upload at that time, though as yahoo expanded I was able to upload more. I included a few photos of the girls and a brief explanation of each picture. Several friends had suggested that instead of laboriously copying each baby missive into multiple emails, since yahoo limited the number of people I could send a blanket email to, I should start blogging. "Oh no, too scary, too much work." But after the laptop was stolen and I started blogging anyway, I stopped the baby emails. I've notified the old babymail list that I'm blogging now instead of peppering their inboxes with missives, but where I used to get a bunch of happy emails back "The girls are gorgeous!" mostly I get the response back "I can't read your blog because I'm on Facebook and that's all I have time for!" So I don't think anyone knows what's going on with my kids anymore. But that's a whine for another day.

Luckily for me a dear friend had saved many of the old baby missives I'd sent out and she sent them back to me. I recently started copying them one by one into this blog, (here's the first one) and I figured seeing them will help me remember some of what was stolen. One day it will all be safe on line, and even if my computer gets stolen again, my girls will be able to read what their childhood was like. I blog to express my own joy and frustration, but mostly I try to blog for my kids, this is my new journal for them. Though it's awfully nice to feel a little connection with other adults, too. There are days when the only other voices over 10 years old that I hear are from other people's blogs.

This post is written in to play along with SITS and their Back to Blogging event. Apparently they have sponsors that a good little girl would mention, specifically Standards of Excellence,Westar, and Florida Builder Appliances, but that is just way too much referencing for me. Now I'm exhausted and I still haven't made dinner tonight.

Thing 1 is 9

Because of her birthday I had to write a quick bit about Thing 1 for church. Some of these went straight from Hubby's lips onto my keyboard.

Thing 1’s favorite color is lime green.
She loves dragons, and drawing, and drawing dragons.
She eats math for breakfast.
If she’s reading a good book or something interesting on the computer, she won’t hear a thing you say.
Thing 1 is NOT pink and frilly. She doesn’t like poofy dresses. In fact, if there is somewhere she is supposed to go that she’s supposed to dress up for, she would rather stay home.
Thing 1 likes raspberries, the kind you eat, not the kind you blow.
Thing 1 loves milk, and Kelso, but not together.
Thing 1 loves cheese pizza, apricots, german pancakes, and hamburgers, but not together.
Thing 1 likes playing on her DS, and on the computer, sometimes together.
She hates clothes that are scratchy or have pokey tags.
Thing 1 makes up her own games if there’s not something around she wants to play. But she does like playing games, especially Sleeping Queens, and Clue.
Her favorite vacation is just about anywhere she’s been, but London, the beach, and all the Disney parks are the first thing she mentions.
Thing 1 loves watching movies with her family, especially at home where you can hit “Pause” and then go get a treat.
Thing 1 loves her family. She is very very close with her sister, and they are great playmates.
Thing 1 is sweet, sincere, and a lot of fun. She has a darling giggle, and a glowing personality.
She is now nine years old.

We had her birthday party as brunch because breakfast is far and away her favorite meal. And even though having cake after breakfast is a little weird, everyone moved right from breakfast to dessert without complaint.
I had forgotten to get the pinata. Even though there were only going to be a couple kids, Thing 1 reminded me that morning that she needed a pinata. I had intended on getting one since Thing 2 had one two months ago for her birthday (we just happened to have one sitting around, long story) but I forgot. Thing 1 is the quiet one who would not say anything, she'd just be a little bit sadder on this day of her celebration, and I wouldn't find out how truly wounded she was and how unfair it is and how she grew up thinking that we like Thing 2 better until after four or five years of therapy. I was out anyway picking up the cake, so I swung by the party store and picked up a pinata.

The pinata was a black dragon, very fitting.


I have never had a pinata that required less than a full on assault with sharp kitchen implements to breach its interior. Those kids could flail on that thing for hours, unblindfolded and without anyone pulling on the string, using a real baseball bat (none of these little wimpy sticks) and the contents would still be safely tucked away in their impenetrable cardboard fortress. This one was no different. After the kids were getting tired, no one cared whose turn it was anymore, and the adults had lost interest and broken off into their various conversations, Hubby attacked the pinata with a pair of scissors. The kids whacked at it some more, and finally a few pieces came out. Eventually Hubby decided he'd loosen it up for them. He took aim and swung a grand-slam home run that would have made Babe Ruth proud, disintegrated the pinata and spread pulverized candy across our back yard. Hubby was stunned, but we got the danged thing open.

Hubby gave Thing 1 a few hitting tips before she gave up and he took over.


My brother kindly risked lighting his hat on fire, using it as a wind block while we kept the candles burning long enough to sing.

It was a very nice day.

In the Doghouse

I've been wondering if I should do anything for the dog's first birthday. Evidently the answer was "no" because it passed over a month ago, and we didn't do anything. But I've been thinking about how much he's grown up since we got him.

He's been so good, I've been writing a post in my head singing his praises. There was the time he was sitting RIGHT BELOW a plate full of link sausages, and he didn't even look up and smell it. He walked right by it half a dozen times, never even looked up. And the paper towel they were draining on was hanging off the counter! (I was so floored I took a photo!) And there are all those times he just walks out onto the porch to greet people who come over, and then comes right into the house with them. Without me even having to call him into the house. He is rock solid housetrained, he's friendly to everyone, person or beast. And for the longest time he wasn't hardly shedding at all. The list of good qualities just goes on and on.

Look at him ignoring those sausages!

Well, it turns out he does shed, I guess he was just fiercely clinging to his puppy coat or something. And he does get things off the table - he chewed up the cute little hand carved wooden spoon that goes in the wooden sugar bowl I brought back from Germany 15 years ago. He stole it off the table when I was out. And then yesterday he ripped out two strands of the drip sprinkling system in the back yard. I hadn't even left him out there very long, dang it! Hubby recently gave me a brief sprinkler tutorial and then turned the sprinkler maintenance responsibility over to me. This is a responsibility he is very happy to unload and I am loathe to accept. I found one blown sprinkler head in the front yard a couple of weeks ago and have been hand watering to cover the dry spot rather than fix the small geyser the broken sprinkler head creates. I had hoped the rest of the system would limp through the fall season and then we could turn it off and I could ignore it until next spring. But NO! The dog has brought the harsh reality of sprinkler responsibility in the form of little black tubes and uprooted petunias on the patio.

And then, the last straw, today he ran away. I had to run an errand in the neighborhood, and I just walked over since it was so close. The dog watched me go out the front door, and stood and watched me walk away, but somewhere down the line he grasped in his little brain that I wasn't just going out and right back in like I often do, I was ACTUALLY LEAVING ON FOOT and NOT TAKING HIM WITH ME. I could hear him barking. It is my theory that he got mad at me for leaving him behind and decided if I could go for a little solo walk then he could too. When I came back 45 minutes later he BOLTED out the front door and galloped into the next door neighbor's front yard. I went out on the porch and called him. He stood staring at me. I started to go into our house, as sort of a threat. This usually works. But not this time. He just stood there watching. I went back out to the porch and down to the front yard and called him. I started walking toward him with the intent of dragging him back by some of that fur. He saw me coming and RAN AWAY! He trotted down to the sidewalk and off up the street. I was flabbergasted! Verging on furious! He has only done this once before, and that time I dragged him home by the scruff of his neck muttering at him... obviously that didn't impress upon him the dire consequences of incurring my wrath, because here he ran off again!
I marched back in the house and got his collar and leash - I don't put a collar on him all the time because it cuts off all the fur around his neck and I like him looking big and fluffy. I followed him up the street. He was already most of the way to the end of the block, 5 or 6 houses away, by the time I got out to the sidewalk. He crossed a moderately busy neighborhood intersection (thankfully no cars around) and stopped to sniff a woman walking by. He sat on the sidewalk and watched me cross the street, and didn't run when I walked up to him and put his collar on him.

Of course I can't yell at him, because I don't want him to flee my wrath should he ever run off again. And he trotted along happily with me back to our house, it wasn't like he was dragging on the leash, he was happy to go with me.

It will be a long time before I let him darken my doorway without a leash clamped firmly around his neck. I keep thinking about his big furry butt trotting away from me, out into that street... I sure as shooting would have zapped him with the shock collar, if only I had one.

By the way I'm NOT buying a shock collar for the two times a year he misbehaves. But I do daydream about cranking the control up to 11 and zapping his furry ass.

First Full Week of School

Hubby is in Brazil, which means I had to call in a favor to find babysitting for Back to School Night last night. The father of one of Thing 1's friends babysat his two and my two while the other mom and I got to hear about the new school lunch program, the upcoming schedule change, and the first of many fundraisers before we went to talk to the teachers, and listen to them outline their program for the year. I'm just glad I didn't have to pay a sitter for that.

Thing 1 and 2 have been holding hands while they walk in and out of the school. Not always, but often enough for several other parents to notice and comment to me how sweet it is. So today I got out their new shirts from Orlando. We didn't go to the Universal Studios Park, but we went to the Universal Airport Shop.



They were holding hands again, walking with their heads together as they came up the stairs. They were planning their afternoon; Fridays there isn't usually homework, and Club Penguin has a new Fair or something starting today. They have been looking forward to this for a while. Several parents "Aaahhhh"ed at me. They were awfully cute. I made them pose.

We have no big Labor Day plans as Hubby doesn't get back until tomorrow afternoon. All the good camping spots will be taken... not that that matters to us, as he's not really a camper. I don't know what, if anything, will happen this weekend. He's been too busy to put in any ideas. Mine usually run on the cheap side, like "Go to my parents' house and let them babysit while we have a REAL DATE! Maybe a Double Date with my sister and bro-in-law." I'm just a bundle of fun.