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…

Bad Rabbit

Thing 2 has invented a new friend. It’s a little simple homemade rabbit puppet she fell in love with at Mom’s but smuggled out of their house and now he rears his head here, on occasion. She insisted it went to bed with her the other night, and then it kind of took over. It was like she was channeling a surly, talkative, furry little character on her hand. Like that impressionist guy used to do when he painted up his fist and it said “saright” a lot. It often spoke in a kind of deep voice, and instead of calling me and Jeff “Mommy and Daddy” it called us “Stacy and Jeff.” And insisted on being called Rabbit, and that we say good night to it as well. Both Thing 1 and 2 had trouble going to sleep that night, and after I’d been up and down the stairs a couple of times, Jeff took over, and went upstairs and alternately rocked them both. I had threatened Rabbit that if he wasn’t quiet he’d have to go outside to sleep, but apparently my threats weren’t enough. When Jeff was rocking Thing 1, he reported that Rabbit piped up with quite a monologue about how he’d come to visit, and when Jeff asked him to take care of Thing 2 and help her go to sleep, Rabbit explained he had to get back to his family and sleep in his own bed. When Jeff suggested that Rabbit go now back to his own family, Rabbit was kind of stumped. But not stumped into silence, apparently. Jeff said Rabbit would go in and out of his deeper voice. It all sounded pretty hysterical to me and I’m kind of sorry I missed it.

Shopping

The girls and I went to the store after I picked them up from school yesterday. I had ordered a little bodum teapot to be sent in from another store and wanted to pick it, and some other things up from a kitchen store. The girls were pretty good but with all sorts of glass dishes, pots, cups, and all sorts of stuff around I was pretty nervous, hovering around them while trying to get my stuff done. I must be quite a nag saying “look with your eyes, not with your hands!” all the time and trying to get them to come along with me. Of course what they want to look at and what I want to look at are not the same things. Finally as I was getting ready to check out Thing 2 was really involved with some ceramic pumpkins and skeletons on display and when I said “Thing 2, be careful!” and she said loudly “But mommy! I want to look with my hands!” There were a couple of little ladies at the counter who cracked up and talked about it until they left. They kept telling me how cute she is and how they like to look with their hands too.

On the way from that store to the next one, Thing 1 started telling me about horses. How a girl horse finds a boy horse that she really loves and the two of them get married. Then they make a little baby horse that is smaller than the mommy and daddy horse. I don’t know where this fascination with marriage and babies came from. Right now they’re in the other room and Thing 1 is singing a song about getting married and growing a baby in her heart.

Catching up

I should be in bed. Why is it that I always start writing when I should be in bed?

Thing 2 has been growing like a weed – neither one of them look like toddlers any more. I have two little girls. Thing 2 has been insisting she is a big girl, especially when we use “You’re not big enough” as an excuse for her to not do things she’s clearly not big enough to do, like playing pinball machines or stuff like that. She when she means “already” she says “airy,” when she goes to bed she can call ten times to have me marching up and down those stairs to help her clean her ears, band-aid her imagined wounds, listen to stories of her bad dreams (honey, I was just here two minutes ago, you couldn’t possibly have fallen asleep and had a dream since I was here last!), go potty, etc. etc. etc.




Thing 1 is my darling big girl, she put on three puppet shows for me today and is just so funny and cute… her skinny little body bouncing around.


Their childhood is slipping away and I feel like I’m not paying enough attention. I want to remember every moment, instead of trying to get them involved in something else so I can take a nap, or get something else done.

I did some work for my old company, Allen Communications, for the past couple of months. It was pretty hard trying to get anything done during what little time I had. Luckily I only needed to put in a couple hours a week at first, and then when the project got tight, my folks were in town babysitting Scott and Karma’s girls while they were in China. So a couple of days it worked for me to pick Thing 1 and Thing 2 up from school, drive them up to my brother’s house, then come back into town to work. I was able to fly to St. Louis overnight for a one day session with Boeing, the client, which I wouldn’t have been able to do either. Also helpful was the fact that Jeff has been in town since August 1st instead of traveling, while he’s been working on his book.

Right now, however, he is in San Francisco at a Microsoft conference. And I should have been in bed an hour and a half ago.

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to bed I go.

Moab

We took the girls to Goblin Valley and Little Wild Horse, and had a great time. We stayed in Green River, and went to Canyonlands, and hung out in Moab.

I got tons of wonderful pictures, too many to put up here, but here's a few.




We took the girls to Goblin Valley and Little Wild Horse, and had a great time. We stayed in Green River, and spent a couple days hiking and hanging around Moab.

I got tons of wonderful pictures, too many to put up here, but here's a few.

Sigh

It’s been too long since I wrote.
I’ve been working just a little over the last couple of weeks, and it seems to have sucked up all of my free time.

Right now Thing 1 is giving me detailed instructions on how I'm supposed to assemble the book she's making. She just lit into me a little bit ago because I did something apparently horribly wrong in its construction. You'd have thought I started removing her limb with a spoon for the reaction I got.

Oh. And now she just found a series of pictures she printed out from one of her computer programs that she had taped together to form a story... they've been on our wall for about two months and the other day I pulled them down while she wasn’t looking – the only way I can clean our walls, and put them in the recycle bag. She just found them. And now I'm in deep doo-doo again.

So many ways I disappoint her. Sigh.

And of course I'm ignoring her while she rants and I'm typing. It's better than paddling her behind, I guess. Maybe.

Maybe not.

Okay, she's not that bad....

And most of the time she's overwhelmingly sweet.

Okay. I just got chastised again because she's going to the bathroom and this irritated little voice hollers at me from the other room saying "Mommy! I'm waiting for you to wipe me!"

Oh really? Is that how you ask me to wipe your little ass? Aside from the fact that you're old enough to do it yourself, didn't your mother ever teach you if you want someone to do something for you, you should ask them nicely first? Certainly before you cuss them out for not doing it?

Well???

So I hear this noise... the noise of a little hand bopping out the toilet paper... the sound of the toilet paper roll vibrating against the holder as yards and yards of toilet paper are unrolled into a pile on the floor.

She'll show me what happens if I don't go wipe her butt when she yells at me that I haven’t come in to wipe her butt...
Sigh.
So I go in and say "Is that how much you need? Here, let me help you..." I grab the toilet paper hanging off and give it a yank...

Guess who gets to roll all that toilet paper back on the roll?

Who exactly is the mature one in this relationship?

Sigh.

Some days being a stay-at-home mom really sucks.


Thing 2 was saying something in the car the other day. She was yelling at me that something was wrong with her magna-doodle, but I can’t remember what she was saying was wrong with it. It wasn’t “applicable” or “permeated,” or “appropriate” or something like that, that made no sense. Porous? Possible? Probable. No, I can’t remember. While I hated her yelling at me it was pretty funny that she insisted her problem involved this weird state of being that made no sense at all.

Thing 1 turns 5

Birthday party at Grandma's. Hubby brought the cake up from Salt Lake, after flying in that morning. Scheduling parties with him is awful... once I get everyone else in the family's schedules combined with his, we've waited weeks before we can have one of the girl's parties.
But this was fun. We had a pinata, and painted a sheet of dinosaurs with squirtguns full of colored water, almost like a friend party.