One Clean Earwig

I love blogging because even the most mundane of tasks takes on a special allure ....

I was mopping my ever more disgusting, dried peaches and cheerios, tons of dirt from the backyard, fallout from breakfast, high-traffic light tile kitchen floor. I was only able to do a speed sweep before the baby tried sampling used food items from my debris pile. I scooped up the pile and the baby putting one in the trash and the other in his Johnny Jump Up sling shot hanging in the nearby door way, respectively.

Since I never seem to have the side of the sink clean that I need for mop water, I fill a metal tub with soap and water from the spray nozzle (my pre-teen's favorite method of getting a drink lately). As I mop, the baby cries. He folds himself in half ignoring the tray that surrounds him for safety purposes and bangs his head into the door jamb. I console him while kneeling and scraping dried food. He seems to calm for a minute as I do a choreographed dance routine with a kitchen towel drying the wet spots so as to not have any more head injuries when my toddler comes down. I mop, he cries. I would stop but the floor is so bad that even the ants think it unsanitary.

An unfortunate earwig should have been as discerning. He ended up under my mop strands on a whirlwind visit of tile and grout that left him clean but deceased. At least he didn't start crying too.

Do you know why God made babies so cute? It is for days like these when they haven't left your side since midnight, wake you up at 5:00 A.M. and then they cry. My little man is the sweetest most beautiful baby in existence (since my other four are no longer babies), and I will enjoy staring at his precious mug as we curl up for a survival nap later today.

At least the floor is cleaner and I don't have to worry about that earwig sneaking up on me.

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Small Potatoes

I sit around at work and at home in good old Idaho and realize that I am small potatoes. I work in retail and make money for corporate America, but precious little for my hard work. I sit on my talents and I squander my dreams. I have great aspirations and great ideas. I fear failure and hope for success. So what is the solution? It lies within the problem. If I am small potatoes, then maybe I should just start small. Do minute things towards lofty goals. Inventions are formed on ideas, successes on baby steps and achievements on attempts.The more that I share my aspirations, the more likely that I will be to pursue them.

"Pomme de terre," that is French for apple of the earth. A vegetable that matures beneath the dirt, soaking in the sun's rays and absorbing its leaves' nutrients, to come forth at a given time in its adult state to help enrich the world. I've always liked potatoes. Now, I know why. I am one. Deep man, deep.

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Unpolished Proposal

I have had multiple conversations with my son Shawn about husbands and wives. He thought that boys were wives and girls were husbands, so I have been working with him to get that sorted out. He had one of those conversations with his Grammy where he said to her, "You are a Wife." True enough. Then he says, "I am a husband." So his Grandma says to him, "If you are a husband, where is your wife?" That question took a moment of contemplation. Then he looked at his Grammy and told her, "You'll do!"

I sincerely hope that he gains finesse and presentation skills before he proposes for real, because that technique is not likely to work.

"I don't wanna be at church."

In June of 2010, we traveled 10 hours to Northern California to go to a baby blessing. I never finished this post, and it is a good one, so I am publishing it now.

My sister is 28 years old. She and her husband have been married for five years and they just barely gave me a nephew to spoil. So, of course, I had to make the journey and pay homage to the amazing genetic cuteness that emerged after over forty five hours of childbirth. About a week before our trip, my fifteen year old porcelain crown fell out of my mouth! Almost $600 later, we decided that it would be best to take our more economical car and not our gas guzzling, needs extensive maintenance van. So, my husband stayed with Ben and was a domestic house God during my absence. I would love for him to be a stay-at-home Dad, he makes it all look so easy. I will summarize the torturous trip. We bought a DVD player in Winnemucca for sanity and child preservation purposes. My son Shawn can escape almost any restraint in cars and grocery carts. After the ten hours to our borrowed beds and another hour to my sister's church building, I heard the baby blessing from the foyer while my son J.B. loudly decreed, "I don't want to be at church!" He said it at least three times as we were leaving the chapel. Then we got razzed out on the grass trying to take photos. "I don't want to take pictures, I don't want to take pictures..." Really people! Jokes aren't as funny when they are about you! Okay, it was very funny, the next day. We went back to my sister's house where people kept saying "I don't want watermelon" or I don't want chicken," etc., etc. Just to make fun. What a crazy life I lead.

Broken Toe

Oops! I broke my toe. At least I didn't break it doing something sissy.

I was transporting a dead car battery for my Mom to go get a replacement. I put it behind the passenger seat in the van, close to the side door. It shifted while I was driving my son to preschool. I made a mental note to be careful when I opened the door, just in case. My mental notepad is not a very reliable document! When I arrived at preschool we were late, so I yanked the door open and a large heavy object flew out. The corner of it made direct contact with my index toe and then crashed to the sidewalk. If it wasn't a dead battery before the catapult from a caravan, it was afterwards. It urinated out a little acid from it's trauma. I fell to the grass without any leakage of my own personal fluids, but there was an influx of colorful vocabulary into my cerebral cortex, or wherever.

My four year old opened his door and says "What are you doing Mommy?" Here I was luxuriating on soft green grass on a beautiful sunny day and even though I told him I was hurt, I looked okay to him. So, he trotted on in to school. That's toddler concern for ya! I hobbled his backpack to the door where I received a little concern from the two Moms busy preparing for eight rowdy kids and then I hobbled back to my van.

The good news is that the battery was replaced for free. I didn't mention the plunge to the concrete. Sometimes less information is more. It was two years into a three year warranty, so there wasn't an issue.

To summarize my day, it was pretty awful. My kids weren't helpful, My Mom was over for a while canning peaches, but still hobbles from a knee injury and was having serious issues with it. My Husband was at school from 4:00 p.m. to almost 10:00 p.m. My 13 year old was a walking attitude primarily concerned for himself and terrorizing his siblings before being sent to bed by 8:45p.m. without a backwards glance. He helped about 10% as much as he normally does.

My Little Pony Binder House

I go in crafty phases. I obsess about one craft or another for a while. I get all of the supplies, start a hundred variations and eventually peter out and don't do it again for months. My current obsession is making Barbie Binder Houses. I have started 10-15 and I have completely finished only a handful, because each one is a labor of love. I entered my Lego, Tinkerbell #1 and Asian binders in the count fair and got two 2nd place ribbons and like $3 bucks prize money. Eat your heart out! I spent it all in one place. The little girl that I gave the Tinkerbell binder to won't let her little sister play with her binder unsupervised because it is "award winning." Yes, I do have a binder for the little sister in the works! So, these are some pictures of the My Little Pony binder that I made for a family friend's four year old daughter for her plastic horsies to call home.

This is the finished inside of the binder with a little bed for the ponies. I cut out of one of the flowers from the curtain fabric and sewed it onto a little mauve watermarked pillow to help everything coordinate. It's all in the details. The feet on the bed are little floral porcelain knobs.

This is the inside of the binder without the bed blocking the view. I think the pillows totally match the wall art. I am not sure where I found the pony art, but I will add a link to their work if I can find it again.
I claim "fan art" protection rights.

This is the outside walls of the binder. The original idea for these ingenious binder buildings is from southerncomfort.com. I just jazz them up with couture curtains and fab furniture.

Trapper Keeper

So I don't use my children's real names because the internet is a scary place sometimes, but I still have to share a few brags with the world. I took some awesome (modestly speaking) photos of Trapper at the historic building that I mentioned in my last post. I have to share them because we make really cute people at our house, but they are so wiggly that it is hard to catch them on film. Ah hah! This time I have proof!