Serves Me Right

Audrey strikes again.

The shiny reflective stuff in the lower part of the picture is the bath water Audrey threw out of the tub. I was letting the kids kill some time this afternoon with a bubble bath while I was doing some light reading online about 2 season finales I saw this week ("Heroes" and "Lost" for anyone who cares). I kept hearing thumps from the bathroom, but it sounded like they were just throwing the little rubber duckies out of the tub. I know, not something to ignore, but I did. I finally got up from my post in the dining room at the laptop when I heard a splashing against the bathroom door. As I rounded the corner to the hall, I saw bubbley water in the hallway coming out from under the bathroom door.

Great.

I opened the door and saw between 1/4 - 1/2 inch of water on the bathroom floor. It was deeper behind the toilet and beside the tub. I took a picture, banished both children to their rooms, sopped up the water, and gathered up all the soaked towels and rug to take to the laundry room. The picture also shows the children telling me who made the mess.

Serves me right. I should have been cleaning or something and not sitting on my backside reading other people's opinions about some stupid (albeit entertaining) TV shows.

Violently Violet

not much purple here - but I like the pic.

And The Winner Of April vs. Her Hair Hair Is....

I know that 2 of you have been looking forward to the conclusion of my day and my latest hair color experiment.

Mom and Eck, this brief post is for you!

I am happy to announce that I am mostly brunette with chunks of purple. On purpose. Not magenta purple, but honest-to-goodness purple. Think Canyon High School, TCU, K State. THAT purple. And I am stoked!

Alas, the lighting is too bad right now (9:44 pm) for a decent picture, so we will all have to wait until tomorrow and daylight for a good shot of the Fabulous Technicolor Mummy Chick. Caleb has his kindergarten graduation program tomorrow morning, so Steve and I will be out with the camera and I'll have him get a shot or two of me in between taking snaps of our soon-to-be first grader.

Watch this space for the Grape Ape!

Tuesday

So my Audrey-free day yesterday was surprisingly productive. She stayed (rather nicely, I will add) in her room all day and I was able to get my room de-cluttered, cleaned, vacuumed, and rearranged. Now I need to tackle my bathroom and closet. The bathroom shouldn't take that long - our vanity is teeny tiny and there's only so much clutter that will fit on the counter.

I'm itching to get some color added to my hair. Watch this space for it.

I watched the season finale of "Heroes" last night. I don't know how I feel about it. I liked when Niki totally kicked Sylar's behind, but then Peter called her off. I would have like to have seen more of Niki and her now-integrated super-strength. Maybe next fall. I also liked Peter's flashback/visit to the past. I like him much better than Nathan. Even at the end of the show, I still liked Peter better than Nathan. If anything, the end of the show makes me dislike Nathan even more, but I know that's opposite of what the writers probably were trying to invoke in the viewers. Oh well. Maybe the finale of "Lost" will be a bigger payoff.

Off to clean my room now. I'm wearing my new "old" cowboy hat I bought last week. When I find hats that fit my ginormous head, I snatch them up and enjoy them immensely. I think wearing a hat will make my cleaning task go that much faster. It has to, otherwise I just look stupid wearing a hat while I'm cleaning.

Banished

Audrey has been sent to her room for the day. She lost all 9 tickets as we were loading up the Sequoia to take Caleb to school. So I get an almost-child-free day (does Julie truly count?) until we pick up Caleb at 3.

Audrey can come out of her room for potty breaks and meals. Julie and Caleb can play with her in her room if she wants, but she can't go to their rooms. She just kept making "I'm very mad at you" growling and screaming sounds at me, then kept interrupting me. Ticket, ticket, ticket.

So what do I have planned for the day? Laundry. And I need to finish putting the living room back together. We finished the painting Saturday and got the furniture moved back where it all belongs that night, but stuff like the curtains and pictures on the walls need to be put back up. I'm actually thinking about moving some of the pictures to a different wall, so maybe only the curtains will go back up today. And the stuff off the mantle. Then I need to clean my room. That's my next big summer project. My room and closet. Yikes. After I get it all nice in there, I think I'll paint that room too. How fun would that be? Do you think Steve would like a pink room? :) I think that, black, and brown are probably the 3 colors that are off-limits. But you never know.

Speaking of Steve, he left about an hour ago with a friend of ours from church (Debra) to drive to a funeral in Clovis. His sister's father-in-law passed away last week and this friend from church is the niece of Steve's sister's father-in-law. Make sense? Steve's brother-in-law is Debra's cousin. Small world. The funeral is at 2 today, so they're going to drive the 4 hours there and then back again in one day. Makes for a long day, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

I'm going to go now and balance the checkbook before I get started on other stuff. Actually I just heard the dryer stop. I suppose I should go fold that load of laundry quickly, shift the wet stuff over to the dryer and start a new load. I'm waaaaay behind on laundry. I probably have 5-6 loads I still need to do (not counting the load I folded already, the load I'm about to fold, and the wet load to be dried). We can really go through the clothes.

Because I Am So Cheap...

...I dug in the trash today to retrieve an almost-empty can of wall primer in order to cover up some paint samples I did yesterday on the living room walls. I didn't want to have to buy a whole new $15 can of primer for a handful of little spots, so I dumped out the kitchen trash into a bigger trash sack, got the bucket of primer out, scraped off day-old Malt-O-Meal dregs, and used the last bits of primer up. It was exactly the right amount. Teaches me to throw away stuff.

I've decided not to go blue in any form on the living room walls. Steve talked me into just using our "Wall Street" white, with the logic that we could always go back later and add color. Sounds reasonable. So this afternoon after Jules wakes up and eats lunch, I'm going to pop down to Metzger's (the hardware store) and get some paint. They sell the same brand of paint as Lowe's (Valspar), so I'm hoping the color I found at Lowe's yesterday will also be at Metzger's.

We watched the movie "Eragon" last night. The book was much better. I actually told Steve during the movie that I knew that at the same point in the book, I was on tenterhooks, but that the movie fell flat. I don't often say that about movies, my standards are so low. But this one had the potential to be a good one (they had a good enough story to begin with, anyway), yet it was unable to stir any emotion in me besides boredom.

We now have "Serenity" to watch, all you fans of "Firefly." Maybe we'll watch it tonight post-children-bedtime and pre-CSI season finale. Or maybe we won't watch the clock and just watch the move at any old time. Now that we have a DVR to record our shows automatically, I have found that I am a lot more laid back about my TV-viewing-scheduled-evenings. I hardly watch anything in real time anymore, since it's so much more convenient to skip the ads in a recording. And Caleb loves having stuff recorded. The only stuff we've kept on the recorder are: "Avatar: The Last Airbender," "Lost," "Heroes," and the 2 "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movies that were on ABC Family a couple of weeks ago. We only have 33 hours left of our 100 hour capacity, and I'm about to record a ton of "Heroes" episodes we missed while in England last fall. They are having a marathon on the Sci-Fi channel on Saturday. There are a handful of episodes they won't be showing - I'm wondering if I can catch these on NBC.com. Like episodes #8 and 13. I have no idea what they were about, but I have to be complete in watching a show. As they say in England, I have to "do the thing right."

Gonna run now and be productive.

My New Project

I am about to undertake painting the living room. I have to prime the 2 paneling walls first, but then I'm going to paint all 4 walls "Nude" by Behr. It's a gray-ish white color - the same as my kitchen cabinets. I'm also toying with the idea of using some blues in the living room, too. "Mood Indigo" to be precise. So I think here in a little while (after the girls eat their mac & cheese) we're going to run down to Lowe's to return something and get some paint. Actually, I might have to wait until Caleb is out of school so I can have enough time since I have to go to Espanola.

It's raining now. If it keeps up I will go PICK UP Caleb, not walk. He'll be disappointed because he rode his bike to school again today.

Winner of Best Mother's Day Card 2007

Drawn by Steve, colored and labeled by Caleb, taken from "Froggy's Baby Sister" book. In the book the baby's name is Pollywogalina.

Six Years Ago Today...

Oh yes - it's Caleb's 6th birthday.

The morning started out when a newly-six-year-old came into our bedroom at 5:40 a.m. and crawled into bed with us, startling us awake with his cold toes. Typical.

We quickly progressed to birthday cards (he was *very* excited by the dollar, Grammy) and then to the present from Steve and me. See below for specifics.

It's a Hot Wheels bike: blue with electric yellow flames. I think it looks uber-cool. He does, too. Steve popped down to the gas station with it to air up the tires while Caleb was eating breakfast, then I loaded the girls in the stroller, strapped Caleb's helmet on him, and RAN to school behind him. I should have worn sneakers, not sandals. I'll know better for this afternoon. We also got him a bike lock and he locked up his bike and helmet when he got to school.
He also got some cool rocks from Tia and Uncle Aaron. He's looking forward to trying the "popcorn rock" but I told him we weren't doing it today because you have to use vinegar. Vinegar stinks. I'll do it after his party.

I'm signing off now to do some almost-but-not-quite-last-minute cleaning up around the house. Plus I need some coffee.

Colorful Things Julie Has Eaten This Week

Spaghetti-os. She loved them enough to try to lick the bowl, hence the stuff on her eyebrow.


Blue crayon. She thinks it's lip balm. I caught her with an orange one this morning trying to smear it around like chapstick or something.

How Do You Spell DORK?

A-P-R-I-L

Yes, I am a dork. After I made the last post, the rain stopped. So I grabbed both girls, put them in the stroller, and we were off! The sun came out, it was getting warmer, so I thought we would make a stop at the Post Office and the grocery store.



So we walked to the Post Office (no rain), mailed 5 letters (no rain), then walked to the grocery store across the street (still no rain). We were in the store about 15 minutes where we placed an order for Caleb's b-day cake. Aside: he chose a Spiderman cake for his Ninja Turtle party. Huh? Anyway, we got 2 Sprites, a Diet Coke and a pack of Oreo snacks for the kids before we left.



We left the store to find it sprinkling a bit. No big deal. I had brought rain jackets/windbreakers for me and the big kids and the rain cover for one of our other strollers to somehow rig to use over Audrey and Julie in the new stroller. So I got us all sorted and decided that we were going to walk about 2 blocks to the library and stop there for a while to get out of the sprinkling rain. We got past the grocery store and I heard what I thought was just hard and fast rain on the metal roof of the building across the street from us. It's actually a complex of storage units and it's set pretty far back from the street, so it took a couple of minutes to figure out that it wasn't rain but HAIL making that noise.



We ran for it! The next place away from the grocery store was a little shopping center that has covered walkways and that was our goal. Poor Caleb - his hood blew back and he got nailed by several pieces of hail on his little shaved head. No hood or hair to cushion the blow. He cried a few genuine tears over that. But his Oreos quickly made all well. We stayed at this place for a little while until the hail passed and the heavy rain accompanying it also passed, then we trucked it over to the library in a light sprinkle.



We stayed at the library for about an hour and the 2 big kids both got books - Audrey checked out 3 "Olivia" books (Olivia is a little pig who is like Audrey in every way except her species) and Caleb got 4 superhero books (2 Superman, 1 Teen Titans, and 1 X-Men for those of you who care). Julie just wandered around saying, "Book! Book!" but thankfully not pulling any off the shelves. She *did* find the chunky toddler books and had fun with a Barney book that had a non-working microphone attached to it. She kept holding it up to her ear saying, "Hi! Hi!"



As we were heading to check our books out, a friend of mine saw us with the stroller and asked if we were afoot. When I said, "Yes" with an of-course-I'm-a-dork look on my face, she offered to give us a ride. So we loaded into her SUV - Caleb in a regular seat, Audrey in a booster, stroller (not folded up because I don't know how yet) in the back and Julie and I sitting shotgun. She drove slowly the 2 blocks home and deposited us at the homestead.



We are all a little chilly and damp around the edges but we're home.



And I got to use my new stroller.

The stroller from the side. It's red like "Ruby the Red Fairy" - Audrey's favorite audio book. Today she got mad at me because I said "Wuby the Wed Faiwy" in imitation of her (to Mom on the phone) and she yelled: "It's not 'Wuby the Wed Faiwy' it's 'Wuby the Wed Faiwy'!" We had a nice laugh about that one, but not where Audrey could hear.

Stroller from the adult pusher's point of view.

Typical

Just got the new stroller (yay!) and put it together (no sweat) and am all ready to start the walk to Caleb's school and the post office when...

it starts raining.

GRRRRR! I finally get this stroller after 2 1/2 weeks of waiting for it to arrive and I can't use it. I mean, how often does it rain in White Rock on May afternoons? I am *so* bummed. I drove Audrey around the living room, but somehow that didn't satisfy my need to cruise.

Thursday

I'm listening to Harry Potter. It's almost the end of the 6th book and Dumbledore is gone. Still a powerful moment, even though I've read and/or heard the book several times.

I took some pictures on Sunday during dinner and some were too funny to not share. I set the camera to take 3 pictures at a time, so the shots were taken in rapid succession.


The white stuff on Julie's hands is sour cream. She loves it as much as the other 2 kids do.

I'm getting ready for Caleb's birthday party next week. We're doing a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle" theme. He took invitations to his buddies at church last night and at school today. We're doing a pizza party. Should be fun.

Caleb also gets to be the letter "Z" in the program at his Kindergarten graduation the last week of school. Should be fun. He has some lines to memorize this weekend in preparation.

So I'm irritated - I bought a fancy-schmancy stroller 2 weeks ago and it's STILL NOT HERE. Grrr. I wish I had discovered this stroller 6 years ago. It looks awesome - it can be a single stroller or a double stroller. It can also hold an infant carseat when in single or double mode. Might have saved us lots of hassle over the years. Here's a picture:

Lots of moms had it in England. When you first see it as a double, you do a double-take because you think the second kid has been stashed in the storage basket underneath. Also, they sell a cocoon-type thing you zip your newborn into when they're lying down. I'm hoping to get this soon. Nothing like spending a chunk of change on something then having to wait and wait and wait for it. *sigh*

So if you're expecting a baby, it might be worth your while to ask for this from well-wishers who want to buy a big-ticket item. Or at least you can e-mail us to see if it's worth your while after we've had it for a while and road-tested it. Hint hint.

One last sad thing: Mom's faithful (although at times grouchy) daschund passed away on Tuesday. Her name was Trudy and she was a truly unique little dog. When she was 1 or 1 1/2, she was out late one night (we lived in the country) and we were looking for her. Mom kept calling for her and finally her the tags on her collar jingling as she was making her way home. As well as we could piece together, she had been chased and attacked by one or more coyotes but had escaped and had taken refuge in an irrigation pipe on the ground. We think a coyote got her by the neck because her voice was gone for a long time and she always had a hoarse bark after she got her voice back.

Mom said she always wanted to get a weenie dog and name her Trudy. Judy is my mom's name, so "Judy and Trudy" was always a cute little rhyme to me. We also called her Trudles (Trudy, not Mom). Before she couldn't jump up into Mom's chair anymore, she would sit on Mom's right side in her recliner. Right side, right Mom? Anyway, she was a fierce, tough, funny little dog. Caleb used to call her "The No-no Doggie" because he wasn't allowed near her. She really didn't like him, but she couldn't have cared any less about Audrey. We think that Caleb had the unenviable position of being the first small-type-person interloper at Mom & Dad's. After Caleb invaded, we don't think she cared about any other small-type interlopers.

When Trudy was a little puppy, she and Bob the Cat (who was just a kitten then) were best friends. I have never seen a dog and a cat play as much as those 2 did. They would chase and wrassle and have all sorts of fun. It was usually hilarious to watch. Mom also told me that one Spring Break when my aunt and 2-year-old cousin Kelly came to visit, Kelly and Trudy (still a relative puppy at this point) would hide under the steps in our living room. Our staircase only had the flat parts of the steps and not the up-and-down parts. Are those called the risers - the up-and-down parts? Anyway, Kelly and Trudy would wedge themselves into the little area underneath the bottom 3 steps beside the landing. Mom was afraid Trudy would hurt Kelly and Aunt Martha was afraid Kelly would squish Trudy. Both lived.

So Trudy was seventeen when she died. That's old for a dog and REALLY old for a daschund.

Rest in peace, Trudles.