Weasel Of Doom

By the time I get home from work, the kids have usually worked off all the “what crazy thing should we do now” energy, and are mostly content to sit and watch cartoons on Netflix (incidentally, after catching them watching “The Cleveland Show,” parental controls have been turned on). So, most of my “you can’t make this shit up” stories are relayed to me by BelovedSpouse. Here’s one from a few days ago.

MiddleOne and YoungestOne headed upstairs to play. A little while later, BelovedSpouse went to see what was going on. He caught MiddleOne and YoungestOne on the top bunk bed, playing “Flying Stuffed Animals” game. The game involves leaning out over the rails, putting a toy on the fan blade, and then spinning the fan. Voila, instant flying stuffed animals. We are still amazed we did not also have “instant children screaming because they just fell off the top of the bunk bed, head first.”

Much to their disappointment, they are no longer allowed to play the “flying animals” game.

Halloween trick-or-treating was on Monday night in our neck of the woods. BelovedSpouse had class, so UncleMel was drafted into accompanying little pests around the neighborhood, while I handed out candy.

Apparently, MiddleOne decided that he needed to pee about half-way through. Resourceful UncleMel located some semi-private bushes for him, but MiddleOne would have nothing to do with it: “You can only do that in Russia, UncleMel, you can’t do that here!” he said.

And here you have it. Russia, where the world is your bathroom :)

A week ago, we got an email from OldestOne’s teachers, letting us know that his 1st grade class received a (traveling) trophy for being appropriately quiet in the cafeteria – the (much coveted, I presume) Silver Spoon.

That evening, I asked OldestOne if they won the Silver Spoon. “It wasn’t silver, it was gold,” he replied, and after some more thought, “And it wasn’t a spoon. It was a SPORK!”

I was highly amused (and slightly drunk, which probably contributed to the levels of amusement).

Today a subject of my church affiliation came up in conversation with a member of a different department. (We were talking about daycare, and how expensive it is. She asked if the church we go to have a school attached to it. I admitted that we currently don’t go to church, and that I feel it is wrong to join a church just to take advantage of the (virtually) free daycare.) The guys in my department all know about my currently unchurched state, but it is not something that is widely known outside of my circle of work friends. For those of you who know where I work, I am sure you can understand why.

I will not lie about my church attendance (or lack thereof) if asked about it. Still, I wonder if my honesty will come back to bite me in the butt, as just about everything else I do does.

And on this appropriately gloomy note, NaBloPoMo is over.

I called my OBGYN’s office today, trying to see if I can schedule an appointment. This time, the receptionist was more forthcoming with details. My doctor has cancer, and the prognosis is not good. He is on medical leave until the end of the year, going through chemo. They will know after that if he is coming back or not.

This man delivered my three children into the world, treated me with respect and kindness, made me feel good about myself when I was down. He is not even 50 years old. It seems so unfair that I might never see him alive again. For some reason, the news hit me harder than finding out about the cancer diagnosis of Bill’s two cousins.

I am planning on driving to his office sometime this week, to drop off a card. I hope I will find the right words to say.

Just signed up OldestOne and MiddleOne for Snow Plow Sam I classes at the Pettit on Sunday nights (January 9 to February 13). We’ll see if they like it. I am (as usual) not holding my breath, but I think it will be good for them to get out of the house on weekends.

It’s only 6 classes, so I am pretty sure we will all survive the experience.

The children are in rare form these days. In case of fire, please save them in this order: YoungestOne, OldestOne, and if there is time, MiddleOne. Though if YoungestOne doesn’t knock it off soon, OldestOne is going to move to the top of the list.

I used to like long weekends. Now I dread them.

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Husband is asking the boys who their favorite Star Wars character is.

OldestOne: “Luke Skywalker!”

MiddleOne: “Darth Vader!”

We are so doomed.

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Thanksgiving recap:

We are hosting. There are going to be 6 adults and 4 children, total. People are planning to arrive at 1:30 pm.

Wednesday night I feel horrible, and crawl into bed at 7:30 am. The house is thoroughly trashed, but I am too sick to care.

Thursday morning. Bill is supposed to take the kids to his Mom’s, so I can clean in peace. They don’t leave until 10 am. The house is even more trashed than it was on Wednesday night.

11:30 am. The dishwasher is running, and the kitchen counters are clean. I have two diaper boxes of various junk for my efforts.

12:00 pm. Bill calls to let me know his aunt will be running late. Good thing, since by that time only half of the great room is cleaned up.

1:30 pm. I have started washing the kitchen floor. Glad the arrival time has been pushed back!

2:30 pm. Declare house clean. Start peeling potatoes.

3 pm. Company arrives.

The company was good, turkey was good, the stuffing was good, my mashed potatoes were declared a success, and kids returned the house back to its trashed state by next morning.

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Tuesday night did not go as planned. Mel became the latest victim of the plague Xavier has been spreading, so it was just me and the kids. Oh, and my bottle of 24% proof brandy cordial. I was taking a sip here and there while kid-wrangling, and once they were all in bed, I finished my glass, poured another, and decided to bake some cookies. Apparently being slightly inebriated makes me think I can bake. Considering that prior to Tuesday night I have made only two kinds of desserts (apple crisp in the slow cooker OR apple crisp in the oven), you can see that alcohol gave me delusions of competence.

For my first foray into baking, I chose Oatmeal Chocolate Cookies from Baking Bites. Because, you know, a recipe from the oatmeal container is not good enough for us baking goddesses. No, I needed to bake BEST OATMEAL COOKIES EVAR! Cue the ominous music.

Step 1. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and the sugars until mixture is light in color. Hmmm? How do I cream the butter? It sounds vaguely sexual and naughty. Some frantic googling later, it appears a mixer is involved. Except we don’t own one. More frantic googling later, eHow.com has a solution.

Step 1a. Beat the butter with a wooden spoon… Like how? Just whack it with the flat part? It is not impressed. I end up stabbing butter with the edge of a spoon. Stab stabbity stab. Take another sip of cordial. Stab butter some more. Declare it beaten into submission.

Step 1b. …use the bottom of a fork’s tines to gently mash [butter and sugars] together… Gently? It’s butter and sugar, not Waterford crystal. What’s going to happen? Screw gentle. Mash mash mash. Drink some more cordial. Declare it mashed, though since I can’t judge volumes I have no idea if the mix had doubled in volume or not.

Step 2. Beat in the eggs one at a time. This is where I realize that we have jumbo eggs, and the recipe calls for large. Is jumbo bigger than large, or smaller? Decide not to bother googling, since I am not about to divide raw eggs into fractions.

The rest of the process goes OK. By the time the oats and chocolate chips are stirred in, I can barely move the wooden spoon. Who’d have thought cookie dough is so dense?

Step Whatever. Drop 1-inch balls of dough onto the cookie sheet. How do you make a one-inch ball of dough, anyway? I try the ice cream scooper. We have the wrong kind, and the dough clings to it like a lover. Switching to spoon. Anticipating severely deformed cookies.

11 minutes later, the first batch of cookies is out. They have a death grip on the parchment paper, and refuse to let go. I drink more cordial and scrape them off with a metal scraper. This is when Bill comes home from work, and I inform him that baking while drunk-ish was probably a dumb idea.

Surprisingly, the cookies turn out edible. I make a few more batches before the alcohol catches up with me, and I am too tired to stay awake. The remainder of the dough survives three nights in the freezer, and my experiment is officially over as of Friday morning, when I bake the rest of the cookies.

Today was our parent-teacher meeting at OldestOne’s school. I am always slightly terrified of the meetings (“What if the teachers hate my kid? What if the teachers hate me? What if my kid is an unholy terror? What if I say something stupid? What if Husband says something stupid? What if everything is going horribly wrong?” – you get the idea), and far, they have always went well. Still, I continue to freak out, because deep down I am sure that the day I have no fears about meeting my kids teachers will be the day when the midden hits the windmill (thank you, Terry Pratchett, for this lovely turn of phrase).

OldestOne has been blessed with lovely teachers; this years’ crop is no exception. They are nice, caring, and seem genuinely invested in helping OldestOne achieve his highest potential. They also don’t seem to think that Husband and I are too weird, which we appreciate.

The meeting went well. OldestOne is making good progress in his academic and social skills; he functions best one-on-one or in a small group; we need to work more on getting him to use appropriate tone of voice (he likes to get loud), and on listening and following directions. We also saw the daily schedule in pictures thingie that they use to help OldestOne navigate his day; I am seriously thinking of adapting it for home use with all three kids.

The best part of these meetings are the stories the teachers tell about OldestOne. The winner, from his Special Ed teacher: OldestOne was not listening and following directions, so she was giving him a spiel about it (not for the first time). OldestOne, not in the mood for a lecture, waived his hands in front of her face and intoned, “You are getting sleepy! You are getting sleepy!”

The runner up: Seeing that OldestOne added arms and legs to the different shapes he had to draw.

Yup, it’s haircut time for the menfolk!

Armed with my trusty Wahl trimmer with attachments #4 (for the boys) and #6 (for the Husband), I have commenced the shearing.

There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm, but once candy was mentioned as potential reward, MiddleOne and OldestOne started to fight who’ll get to sit on the chair of torture first.

I opted for MiddleOne. He has such fine thin hair, I am not even sure why we bother trying to cut it. Still, he did his best to sit still, and was done in five minutes or so.

OldestOne was next. He has the best hair in our family – thick and fast growing, and it is always noticeable when he gets a cut. Unfortunately, sitting still is not his strong point, but after ten or so minutes, he too was done.

YoungestOne has not been having a good day so far (he boycotted the new coat; was cool to me, cried at every opportunity and made more opportunities to cry), and a haircut was the last straw. He wept through it all, eventually ending up with a mouth full of hair. We felt bad, but the raspberry noises he made trying to clean his tongue very too funny.

After YoungestOne took his injured dignity away, it was Husband’s turn. I am sure he is freaking out inside every time I attack him with a trimmer, but he was a good example to the boys and manfully kept still and silent.

Now if only someone would give me a haircut…

This morning, Sergey walked into our bedroom and announced, “Look, shirt pants!” He put his legs into the sleeves of his shirt, making the aforementioned shirt into pants. We were amused.

We ended up splitting kid care this weekend. On Saturday, Bill took care of the kids in the morning, and then I took them to gymnastics while he went to work. At gymnastics, I have managed to acquire extra kids, since we bring bionicles and legos with us, and other mothers gladly let their kids play with mine while they (mothers) relax. I don’t mind (because it keeps my kids entertained, too), but I do find it funny. Our gymnastics have wi-fi, so I could catch up on emails and socializing (yay Facebook for iPod app). Then my friend Rachel got there with her boys, and we got to hang out a bit. After gymnastics, I called my parents on Skype, and they watched the kids being goofy. Mel came over around 4:30, enabling me to do a quick run to the library and a surgical strike to Pick’n'Save for apples and ice cream. I went to the mega-Pick’n'Save, and it’s huge! Took me a while to find my two items ;) Bill got home with the pizza, I made apple crisp, Bill gave the kids a bath, and that was that. We watched an episode of Vampire Diaries, and I was in bed by midnight. Oh, and I managed to do dishes and laundry, too, and take down Halloween window clings upstairs.

Today Bill watched the kids while I had the day to myself. I slept in (as much as one can while being interrupted by screaming children, but still), had lunch and did more dishes, then put Xavier to bed and went to work. My mother-in-law, who was supposed to come over around noon, did not show up until 2:30, and apparently left without putting the kids to bed (which was the plan). I am not surprised, but I am annoyed at how unreliable she is.

I started feeling sick an hour or so after I got to work, so instead of being productive I cleaned up my office. *sigh* Time to go home and go to bed (or possibly throw up). The fun, it never ends.

Today at gymnastics, the boys got pieces of paper with the next class they should take. MiddleIOne moved up a level. OldestOne is staying where he was. I wonder how the new schedule will work out. And I can’t figure out what class MiddleOne will be in, because I have accidentally washed that piece of paper. Somebody please shoot me now.

[updated half an hour later] After checking my jeans pockets and finding absolutely nothing, I had an epiphany and remembered that I used MiddleOne’s class placement piece of paper as a bookmark, in order to not lose it. So now I know that he will be in Tiny Tot, and OldestOne will be in Beginner I. If anybody sees my brain wandering around looking lost, please return it to me. I promise to be nicer to it this time around :-)

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I have been so jealous of other people lately. I know I should be focusing on all the good things I have, but instead all I can see is what I lack.

• I am jealous that my cousin’s daughter is bilingual (even though I have not put an effort to teach my kids Russian)
• I am jealous that my friends’ kids can read, and mine cannot (even though I haven’t made an effort to teach them)
• I am jealous that other people have fulfilling jobs (even though I have not looked for a new job, or tried to improve the one I have)
• I am jealous that other people are on top of things (even though I opt to waste my time on web surfing and reading books)

I don’t think I like myself very much.