My life as a ticking bomb...

I am too tense.

I was on the phone with my folks, cleaning up the house so I could vacuum before the kids make so much of a mess I can no longer vacuum.
Suddenly they appear before me with a set of scrapbook paper doll things I must have got from Current a while back. Time to hang up the phone. I REALLY don’t want to do this paper doll thing, I want to vacuum and then start the laundry, and then get the kids dressed because I have to take them to the store and buy stuff to make for the cooking group tonight.
But that’s not going to happen. Suddenly we are going to have a scrapbook paperdoll making party. Did I say the girls are still in their pajamas? It’s 11:30…
My idea was that they could decorate a page and put a photo on it. So I’m trying to control what paper doll things get punched out, and find some photos to put on the pages, and about this time all HELL broke loose. Paper doll parts were being punched out with gay abandon whenever my back was turned, the photos that I laboriously found on the camera were printing in 45 inch format instead of 4 x 6, Thing 2 came in and wanted to play Nemo on the computer while I was trying to control the damage from the photo and the paper doll thing, and suddenly the printer is printing off a back log of pictures that Thing 2 apparently queued up last time she played Putt Putt. They can send dozens of pictures to the printer and we've talked about this before. I got upset and made both girls cry... and had to do an overly dramatic worshipful “I’m SO SORRY” thing to get them to calm down.
Trying to contain my tension, we finished the paper doll scrapbook page with NO PHOTOS, just the little paper dolls. Thing 1’s really does look darling, but she’s currently drawing all over the back of it right now. I just need to go rescue it before she starts coloring on the paper dolled part on the front…
Thing 2 is standing next to me begging to play on the computer. Just a minute honey…
She says “I want to play Putt Putt..”
I say “I know, honey,”
She roars “I’m not FINISHED!” and starts howling at jumping up and down crying. She had wanted to say "Putt Putt... Saves the Zoo" or "Putt Putt... Travels Through Time" or something, but I didn't realize this and interrupted her. This is a common problem… it takes her about ten minutes to formulate a sentence, usually it’s the same one she’s been chanting at me for the past ten minutes… but while she’s saying it this time, I have to sit quietly and not do anything but listen or she’ll get absolutely pissed off and yell at me, which happens about ten times every hour.

I feel about ready to pop sometimes…

Living up to a legend

We had a marvelous Christmas…

There are a couple of things I’ve been wanting to write since then… including one I wrote down and emailed myself that I may have to put in here later.
But right now…
I was playing Wii with Thing 1, and Thing 2 was on the computer playing putt-putt or something. Then I hear her going to the bathroom, which usually means she’s going to call me to come wipe her. But she doesn’t. Thing 2 comes in and announces proudly something about she only used a little paper, and she didn’t leave it on the floor. What does that mean? I do not know. She comes in and sits down to play with us. Sure honey, I hand her the contoller, and I go to do something (and find out what she means about the bathroom). She has pulled the toilet paper in a long streamer across the toilet, out the door, through the hall, and into the office.
I call her to find out what’s going on. When she come in she gets kind of vague. I ask her to help roll it back on the roll, since it’s all one big strip, and when she’s doing that I ask her again what happened, why she rolled out all that toilet paper. She starts talking about the time Thing 1 was a baby - crawling - and unrolled the toilet paper while I was in the shower, and when I got out of the shower and found toilet paper all over the bathroom and how I thought it was funny (and took a picture). We had been looking in one of our photo books and saw a picture of the bathroom after Baby Thing 1 had shredded a ton of toilet paper and spread it all over the bathroom.

She wanted to be just like Thing 1, I guess.

While I sleep in...

This is the sight that greets me nealy every weekend morning. I sleep in, and hubby comes downstairs and lays on the couch and snuggles the girls. They lay on him in various puppy pile positions. They all watch cartoons together.


When I get up with the girls and let hubby sleep in, I putter around the house, clean things up, start breakfast.

The girls MUCH prefer daddy to get up with them.

If you can't do it right...

Thing 1 has a perfectionist streak that scares me. She’ll be drawing a picture, or ask you to draw a picture, and if it doesn’t turn out perfect she flies into a rage and scribbles violently all over the paper. She was asking me to help her write I love you to a friend and got her “u” upside down. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. But she flew into a rage and wadded up the paper and started to sob. A few minutes earlier she came to me to ask me to draw a gingerbread man for her. I made a large head, arms, and legs, and when I went to join the lines at the top of his head where I had started, I kind of missed. So it looked like he had a beanie on or something. She flipped out and grabbed the marker and scribbled all over it telling me how terrible it was. When I tried to explain that she just needs to calm down and say “That’s good, let’s try it another way” she runs away crying.
Sigh.

The Christmas tree has become a compromise on more levels than I intended. Based on Thing 2’s dismay that there were no colors on the tree, I went out and bought some colored globe lights that I thought were pretty cool. Not just those little twinkling lights, some globes that were probably 1 ½ inches across. Then I plugged them in. And they flash. Sigh. Not what I was looking for. And they were expensive, too. 13 bucks for a string of 12. So I didn’t put them on the tree. I dragged the girls to Modern Display to see what they had. Of course, at one time they had what I was looking for, for 17 bucks a strand of 15 lights, so they were similarly priced. But they are all out of those by now. All they had was one color strings, no multicolor. Come to think of it… I wonder if they had 3 strings of red… That might have worked. But I had a hard time dividing my attention between two little girls running around the store so excited about everything, and the salespeople who were either standing in my way while they were helping someone else, or hovering over me and the girls worried they were going to break something.
So we bought some minor things, came home, and put the flashers on the tree. The kids seem happy with it, I think it looks sort of overwhelming. But it’s not about me anymore, not for a while, anyway. It’s about those kids.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

We set up the Christmas tree last Sunday. The girls helped for the first time ever, and the experience was quite amusing.
Thing 1 was so excited to help me get the tree out of the garage attic, she was dancing around underneath me while I carried it down the ladder. We brought it in and put it together and they both were so excited. I plugged it in and Thing 2 said, “I don’t like it.” I asked why not and she said “Because it doesn’t have any color.”
Admittedly the lights are not very big, and they’re all white so she does have a point. Maybe when I take it down I should take off the white lights, and I should go buy some colored lights for it. I saw a home decorating show where they had big colorful bulbs on their tree and I thought it looked great… I just wonder how much I’d have to pay for them.

Then we pulled out the ornaments. Thing 1 and 2 had so much fun helping put them on. Their strategy for ornament placement was… somewhat limited. “Put them right in front of you.” After a while of this, almost every ornament I gave them was on about four branches, of course all about the same height on the tree, right by where I was opening up the boxes. Several branches had five or six ornaments on each twig, with a half a dozen nearby ornaments so close they were bumping into each other. I suggested that Thing 1 move the balls apart, so they weren’t all so clumped up and she said, “But Mommy, they’re Friends!”

Thing 2’s expression was fantastic, each time I pulled out a new ornament her jaw would drop and she would gush over the new ornament. I tried to wait until she’d hung one before I gave her another, but seeing as how she was only putting them on those four branches and was having trouble finding space for new ones, she’d often turn around with the previous ornament still in her hand.
Then Thing 1 found the hook bag, and decided since we have so many empty hooks it was up to her to make new ornaments for them. She came in and raided my sticker drawer and started making paper faces, with a combination of stickers and her own drawings. She cut the faces out and then brought to me to pierce with an ornament hook, and she’d place them on the tree.
They both really enjoyed the whole process. Of course after they went to bed I spent quite a bit of time re-arranging all the ornaments.




The next day I put out all the rest of the Christmas decorations, the nativities and snowmen and stuff. Thing 1 and 2 hung out in the living room, sort of helping and sort of entertaining themselves. Thing 2 found the Robert Sabuda books and started reading them, to my dismay. They’re rather delicate and she seems compelled to touch all the moving parts. As I tried to do what I was doing, yet keep an eye on her, I kept reminding her to not touch the paper. Finally she looked up at me quite annoyed and said, “Do I have to go somewhere else to read it?” Remember she’s THREE and talks with a funny little three year old voice. I had to leave the room so she wouldn’t see me laughing.

Dinner out

Taking the girls out to dinner is a crap-shoot. We do it fairly frequently because neither Hubby nor I are very enthusiastic about cooking dinner most of the time…
We went out last night, to Old Spaghetti Factory, and they did great. Tonight we tried a new place, Cowboy Grub, and Hubby and I spent the whole meal telling them as sternly yet nicely as we could to:
1. Stop disturbing other diners
2. pipe down
3. sit up, or sit down (depending on where they were at that moment)
4. eat their dinner
5. come out from under the table
6. take a bite
7. stop whining about honey on their hands and wipe them off
8. hold still
9. start at # 1 and repeat for the next hour.

It was a rather frustrating experience, to say the least. They can go from being fantastic to frustrating as fast as I can blink an eye.

Good and bad

We have our good days and our bad. Last night was one of the bad ones. I had been dancing with the girls instead of getting ready for Jeff to arrive with dinner, and when he did I was in the middle of fixing one of their light-up necklaces that had broken. The girls launched into each other because we’d gotten Thing 1 something from Wendy’s and Thing 2 something from the Mexican restaurant we got our own food from, and naturally, Thing 2 wanted Thing 1’s nuggets, toy, and all-around exciting dinner instead of her own anonymous white Styrofoam container. I didn’t step in to help, hoping to hurry and fix the necklace before the glue dried, and left Jeff to deal with cooling food, starving stomachs, and Thing 2 marching over to steal Thing 1’s food, and Thing 1 coming unglued… it was not pretty. I should have helped but….

Other than that, they’ve been pretty good.

Our wall is finally getting fixed. I need to paint, but once that’s done, it will just be an unpleasant memory behind us.

I’m trying to think of what’s happened in the last month since I wrote… the only thing that immediately comes to mind is the other day we were all out playing… Thing 1 was playing, Thing 1 was napping, and it was getting dark. The neighbors were out, Wytie, Ellie, and Charlie, who is a couple of years older. I was the only adult, as Ellie and Charlie’s folks rarely come out, and Wytie’s Grandma was inside on the phone with her daughter having a somewhat heated conversation. Charlie doesn’t usually play well with the littler kids. He starts teasing them and picking on them, usually he focuses on his sister… I didn’t quite know how to handle it. But it kept escalating until all three of the little ones were running away from Evil Charlie, and Ellie in particular had a light sweatshirt she was swinging around to use to whip at him. I wasn’t too worried, she kept missing him, but I did finally tell her to stop because I was worried about the zipper hitting someone. She insisted it wasn’t a problem. Right when I was wondering if I step in and take it away or not, Charlie collapsed for the others to come and pounce on him or whatever. Thing 1 got there first. She was kneeling next to Charlie when Ellie arrived, swinging. Sure enough, the jacket whipped around and the zipper caught Thing 1 in the forehead above her eye. She hesitated for a minute, then started to cry and of course I was halfway to her before she figured out she was upset.
It raised a welt the size of a pea under her skin and broke it open a little, it was bleeding a drop. I snapped to Ellie that this is why we don’t swing coats around, the zippers can hurt someone. She insisted that it was all right. I said “Yeah? Then why is she bleeding? Everyone go home, the fun’s over tonight!!” Then I picked up the sobbing Thing 1 and carried her into our house, and everyone else went home. No one ever said another word to Thing 1 about it, Ellie never apologized anyway. The next evening when they were out together, Ellie wouldn’t meet my eye and I never really got an opportunity to suggest she apologize to Thing 1. But I am happy there are other kids Thing 1 can play with.

Speaking of which, Thing 1 has made a new friend. We'll call her Sophia Blue and she’s in Thing 1’s class at school. We kind of have an arrangement to swap kids on Wednesday. One week Thing goes to play at Sophia’s, and the next week Sophia comes home with us after school to play. The problem with this is I don’t have enough car seats to get all three girls home, so on our “Sophia days” I walk over and get them from school. I often take a route home that is a little off the beaten path to avoid traffic as the girls seem to wander around a bit. A couple of weeks ago as we were walking home we came to an area where there were a whole lot of fallen leaves that no one had raked up, and Thing 1 and Sophia were in nearly knee deep leaves, crunching along. Thing 1 encouraged Sophia to walk with her and listen to the leaves crunch so they could experience “the joy of discovery.” She said it quite sincerely, with her arms outstretched to embrace the day. It was incredibly charming.

Mom and Dad are coming up today to hear Thing 1 say a line in the Primary program in Sacrament meeting. She says “Helaman teaches me about faith.” It’s hardly worth Grandma and Papa coming down, but I did mention it to them and they said they want to support Thing 1, and they want to support our church attendance. So I should be cleaning up the house, even though I’m suspecting we’ll go to the Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner.

I’ve already got a good jump on the girls’ Christmas. In fact, all I’m really looking for now is stocking stuffers. If I find something amazing between now and then, of course we might have to accommodate it. I’m still working on everyone else. And of course I’ve got Kristin’s and Mom’s birthdays to contend with…