Public Service Announcement #1

Attention all humans that have decided to procreate and/or are responsible for caring for small humans. See this thing?
Probably not a good idea to place your very small human in it and then SIT IT ON A TABLE AND WALK AWAY! Also probably not a good idea to place your very small human in it, then put the whole contraption on the kitchen counter while you cook or otherwise prepare food. (Saw that gem on someone's myspace. A person I was not too friendly with in college.) My big human would argue that it is natural selection. But it starts to interfer with my life when I am trying to enjoy my lunch and I can't because I am trying to watch someone else's very small human because her grownup seems to be incapable of making good decisions. Oh and her brilliant mother then spent the next ten minutes meticulously wiping off a soft book with clorox wipes since the very small human had tossed it on the floor while unsupervised sitting on top of a restaurant table. Because a few germs from the floor are definately worse than A CONCUSSION!

O.K. I'm done.

Enough already!

We need it, I know but geez, it's been raining and/or cloudy all week long! I can't take it anymore! My whole being just wants to be snuggled into my bed with my warm rice sock and a good book. We need to see the sun soon because at this rate, I will get nothing accomplished this weekend!

Spam, Junkmail and Prizes, Oh My!

So I have a new obsession. Oh first let me say, yes, I missed Simple Sundays this week. Sorry about that. I had a busy busy busy weekend. It was full of fun stuff and some not so fun stuff and I will write about it soon. O.K. back to my new obsession. I have discovered that you can do searches for contests. And now I enter them. Daily. Well at least the ones that will let you enter daily. I know that soon my spam filter will be clogged, my mailbox will be perpetually overflowing with junkmail and probably my phone will be ringing off the hook with 800 numbers but...but...there is the possibility of winning stuff. And given my perpetual good luck, I'm bound to win something! So I can put up with those minor annoyances. Now I just have to remember to register every day for the different contests. At this point, if I win the different contests I have entered so far, I will have a LOT of money, multiple trips to Disney World, a trip to Europe and I think a year's supply of M&Ms. Not too shabby, eh?

I will leave you with a visual image from this past weekend. Six women, ages ranging from 9-50, doing a Soul Train dance line to "We Are Family" and two of those women were me and the ex-wife. It was a good party.

It's officially started

Santa bought her first christmas present today. I went in to Target to buy a birthday present for a little boy who is turning 6(I think) and my smaller boy human is attending his party. I wandered over to the Playmobil isle and I found this on sale.

Santa is so bringing that for the smaller girl human so into my basket it went. Which means I have officially started my christmas shopping before Halloween. Oh geez.

She turns my unintelligable thoughts into things that make sense

This is why I am loving "Eat, Pray, Love". So far, I have come across so many bits in the book where it feels as though she has crawled inside my head listened to my inner dialogue and then wrote about it. Here's a great example:

"I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted."

This thought or idea is why when I find the need or desire to go to church, I go to mass. I was raised Adventist and I am sure on some level, it breaks my mother's heart that I no longer consider myself an adventist and that when I attend church it is in the presence of the anti-christ.(see that part's a joke because my whole life I was taught that the pope is the anti-christ and catholics are evil and I have discovered that they are some of the nicest people I have ever met.) There is something so soothing and calming about the ritual of mass. I love the fact that with a few minor exceptions, no matter where I go to mass, it is basically the same thing every time. The priest says the same thing to us and we say the same thing back to him. Sometimes there are bells or incense or no kneelers or jam bands singing "Alleluia" but the priest always says the same thing. It gives me peace. And that is why I will convert eventually one day. They don't make it easy. It's pretty time consuming and I haven't been able to devote that much time yet. I started it a couple of years ago and I made it almost half-way through. But then I started a new job and my work schedule conflicted with one of the weekly night meetings. So I had to stop. But I will finish one day soon.

But back to the book. I can't stop gushing about it. Oh and I love it so much that I am reading it extra slow so that I can savor it.

I've been looking for days for this

There was a moment in last week's episode of The Office that I absolutely loved and I have been searching all over the internet to find someone that had it quoted. I found it this morning. And now I will share.

Ryan: Yeah. I created a website. Look, at the end of the day, apples to apples flying at 30,000 feet. This is a paper company and I don't want us to get lost in the weeds or into a beauty contest. Convergence. Viral marketing. We're going guerrilla. We're takin' it to the streets while keeping an eye on the street. Wall Street. I don't want to reinvent the wheel here. In other words, it is what it is. Buyin' paper just became fun.

Love it!

Simple Sundays 10/14/07

My simple pleasure this week is the weather cooling off, finally. It now feels like fall outside. I love to go out in the morning and feel the nip in the air. This morning, I woke up early and noticed that it was a little chilly in the house. We haven't turned the heat on yet. But I like it to be chilly when I am sleeping so I snuggled back under my comforter and fell back to sleep. Lovely! The weather turning cool also makes me want to drink apple cider and eat pumpkin muffins. Now I just need to wait for the leaves to start turning colors and then it will be perfect!

I think I made it

I'm still alive...all the small humans that went are accounted for...I've had a hot shower so that helps my body hurt less...we didn't completely freeze last night sleeping in a cabin with no heat...breakfast, which I was in charge of, went well and everyone was full...my older small girl human had a blast...they didn't turn on us in the middle of the night...I think it was a success!

It's about time

My wonderful big human gave me a beautiful watch for my birthday. It was lovely. However, I have freakishly small child-size wrists so the watch didn't really fit. I needed to have links taken out. It needed to go back to the store where it was purchased to have the links taken out. Unfortunately, there is only one person at that store that takes out the links for watches. So we played hide-n-seek for a couple of weeks until yesterday when I was able to pin her down and she had to take out 6 links from the watch. She suggested 3 links at first and I thought maybe 4 but 6? Good grief. But now my beautiful watch fits me perfectly and looks amazing when paired with my bracelet. As my husband said so eloquently last night "You're all blinged out now!" I will post a picture soon of both my watch and my bracelet.

In other news, I took today and tomorrow off from work because I volunteered to accompany 80 4th graders on an overnight camp trip. It's not really camping because there will be cabins but there are no showers and that is going to be a huge hardship for me. My first task doesn't start until this afternoon but it is my normal volunteer day to go to the K-1 classroom of my small boy human and help with language arts. So I decided to go to my favorite cafe and enjoy a latte and a pumpkin muffin since there is a nice cool nip in the air which means it has finally decided to be Fall here. Also, I need to build up my courage because this afternoon, tonight and tomorrow are going to be quite a whirlwind. I am sure we will have fun but I am dreading tonight when it will be me, 2 other moms and approximately 40 girls. They may turn on us. And they are just about the same size as me now. I'm a little nervous! Pray for me!

We played hairdresser. And a little bit of fashion show and european model.

Simple Sundays 10/7/07

My simple pleasure this week has been having my small humans home this weekend. Sometimes it feels like the pause button is hit in our lives when we take them to their mom's house and we don't get unpaused until they walk back in the door on Friday evenings. It is wonderful to be woken up in the early morning hours by a small body climbing in the bed and snuggling down between me and my big human. It is delicious to be able to introduce them to the wonders of dancing in our living room to the Jackson Five singing "ABC". It is fabulous to spend hours at the pet store playing with kittens and ferrets and guinea pigs. It is delightful to be with them.

Evil Plot

I needed to go to the grocery store last night but I also wanted to spend time with my big human. So I asked him to go along with me. Normally I do the grocery shopping by myself and the main reason for that is because my OCD/ADD tendencies require me to grocery shop at only certain grocery stores and I have to travel the same path every time I go there. My big human likes to wander in the grocery store and if I did that, it would take me 2+ hours to shop because I would get so distracted and I would end up buying nothing that we need and everything we don't need. So it's best if I go alone. But I made him go with me last night. And it was worse than taking the small humans with me. We left the grocery store with a few things in our bags that would not have been there if he had not come along and when I complained about the cherry poptarts, lime green playing cards and a bottle of Lipton Iced Green Tea with Citrus flavor, he responded with "Good. So next time I can stay home like I wanted to." He's such a brat.

Do you spell "parrot" with one "t" or two?

Today is one of those days that pushes me closer to the realization that I need to be a SAHSM. For those of you not in the know, that would be a Stay-At-Home-StepMom. I came to my office for about two hours this morning and then I left for three hours to go to the elementary school and spend an hour helping my smallest boy human's K-1 class with their language arts work. I also stayed to have lunch with him and it's a 30 minute drive each way so that's why I was out for three hours. Then I came back to the office for about two hours and then left again to go back to the elementary school for teacher conference with my smallest girl human's 3rd grade teacher. Then it was back to the office where I still am now. My big human better start bringing in the cash cause the girls are already asking me why I am not volunteering in their classrooms too. I need more hours in my day/week.

So while I was helping with language arts work, I had one of those moments where I second guess my intelligence because I have the distinct understanding that what is about to come out of my mouth will affect a small human in front of me. I was asked to proofread two sentences that this small girl had written in her composition book. She intended to write the word "parrot". And for a brief moment when she looked up at me with her sweet small face and said "how do you spell parrot?", my only thought was "oh crap, how do you spell parrot?". I pulled it together though and said with confidence, p-a-r-r-o-t, although inside I was having an arguement with myself as to whether that was correct. And when she stood up and marched over to her teacher after she was done to have her sign off on the paper, I watched intently hoping that I wouldn't hear "Take it back to Mrs. T********* so that she can help you spell parrot."

Oh and yes, they call me Mrs. T*********. It's very cute. And yes there are that many letters in my last name. It's a bit of a spelling beast.

My favoritest bit so far

Here's a snippet that I love the best so far in Eat, Pray, Love.

"Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby-I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to-I just don't care."

Amen, sister.

A little belated

The candle-lighting process...there were a lot of them so it took awhile.

It appears that he's finally done. Wooooooo...am I really turning 29? How did my mom find that many candles in her house?

My mother's idea of cutting the sweetness. Serve the chocolate cake that is covered in homemade chocolate buttercream frosting with TRIPLE CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM.

Probably my favorite birthday card but shsssshhhh...don't tell the other ones. My smallest boy human worked very very hard coloring this card in and he was very proud of it.

So that's it. Belated images from one of my three birthday celebrations. Yeah I had three. I have managed over the years to create a birthday week rather than just one day. We celebrated two Sundays ago at my mom's house with all the small humans. Then my big human and I went out on my actual birthday with some friends. That didn't end well as I seemed to have stumbled into some bad chicken wings and ended up with food poisoning. Then we celebrated at my mom's house again this time with a brunch with my sister and her husband and also my pretend little sisters. I don't have any pictures from those two celebrations.

My next goal is to implement a birthday month.