I Buy Books

I would buy more, but my husband insists that we have money for silly stuff like food and gas and house payments. Sheesh.

Right now, I've got a shopping cart full to the brim at Amazon.com with kids books. These are really my weak spot. I love full color illustrations -- some of the most brilliant artists are those working in children's lit. And I am a sucker for science-y sorts of books, the kinds of books where you learn a little something in the midst of all the great pictures. Books like Emperor's Egg, and One Night in the Coral Sea, and Actual Size, and Amazing Sharks. My goodness, I could go on and on about cool kids books.

I think I will.

Over in the Ocean, One Tiny Turtle (I'm on an ocean kick), Big Blue Whale, Sea Otter Inlet, Three Little Rigs, Sweet Dream Pie, The Great Gracie Chase, Rain, Rain, Rain Forest, One Nighttime Sea, the list is almost endless. So many wonderful books, it makes my head spin.

My children each have a bookshelf and all three shelf units are overflowing with books. I almost never refuse a request to buy a book -- Scholastic Book Orders is making a mint off our family. We have them in piles next to our beds, great tottering towers of books that we can't bear to put away or that we're meaning to get to as soon as we finish some other book that's grabbed our attention for the moment.

They are a huge source of clutter and they're a storage problem; if we weren't readers, the house would be a lot emptier, but then we would be a lot emptier, too. I love that my children feel they must own books. They like the library, but they love Barnes and Noble.

What would I take to a desert island? Ooooooo. Certainly I couldn't live without Pride and Prejudice and my other Jane Austens (Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion); likewise my Margaret of Ashbury novels A Vision of Light and The Search for the Green Lion. Then there's Harry Potter. And Narnia. And all my Georgette Heyer books. And The Little White Horse and Linnets and Valerians. Brother Cadfael too, I think. Wives and Daughters might have to go in there as well. Those are the ones I read over and over again; they're like stepping into other worlds, grown familiar and beloved from long experience.

New stuff I love: Gregor the Overlander, City of Ember, Holes (not really new but so dang good) The Goose Girl and Enna Burning. My nephew tells me the Alex Rider books are good, so I am adding them to my list of books to try. My 10 year old niece Elea recommended The Unicorn Chronicles and I liked it almost against my will. I mean really...Unicorns? I had flashbacks to a lot of bad decor from the early 80s, but it was actually a good read. More than that; a very good read. The first three Princess Diaries books cracked me up -- what a shame that the cigarrette-smoking, Sidecar-drinking, tatooed eyeliner Grandmere became Julie Andrews in the movie. Another great literary character left in the dust.

I love good young adult lit.

I have whittled my Amazon order down to about $70. Tim said, why don't you take that money and buy clothes? And he's right, I certainly need the clothes, especially since Maggie came along and blew my figure to smithereens. But books are just better than clothes. Hands down. I'll buy clothes next month.

Glow in the Dark Fish

What a great lesson today. We did bioluminescent fish in the deep ocean and the kids really enjoyed it. Grant worked on the letter L and Abby Kate worked on -ight words (sight, fight, etc.). They painted their own lanternfish with glow in the dark paint and then spent ages in the bathroom with the light off making them "swim" in the mirror. I served a dinner everyone likes, managed to get the kitchen mopped (gotta love moppin' monday!) and am in general feeling like I should resubmit my nomination for mother of the year. This could be my year...you never know.
No doubt it will all fall to pieces tomorrow, but I am revelling in success right now.

Revel, revel, revel!

Blah Blah Blah Blah Blog

Taking a break from lessons today. I am so tired, thanks to the dogs who get up at 5 a.m. that I can't make my brain focus. I know just what we're doing for our next lesson, but I think it will have to wait until Monday (we're going on a playdate tomorrow -- the best kind; one for the kids and Mommy).

I've now taken my older two to Target and Kohls a total of 3 times and ALL THREE TIMES THEY WERE GOOD. And yes, that merits a lot of caps. It's eerie; maybe they've been body snatched. Of course, Maggie screamed her way through Kohls, so nothing's perfect. You would think by the 3rd kid I would remember to pack some snack food for her, but apparently the brain damage they've inflicted on me is too extensive for that kind of recall.

On the upside, I've started planning Maggie's first birthday party. I am giving myself what I hope is plenty of lead time -- 22 days. I know that seems like a lot, but I also know how long it takes me to actually accomplish things, especially things that involve shopping (party ware, balloons) and cooking (cake). Also I am a huge procrastinator and I have learned that if I give myself a lot of time to do something, I can afford to put it off once or twice and still be okay.

Maggie is, right now, in her crib NOT sleeping. She is, instead, squeaking, chirping, and screaming at a pitch only dogs can hear. She should have been asleep 40 minutes ago, so I'm not sure what happened to sabotage her nap. Maybe the lack of loud and boisterous noise in the house right now is throwing her off.

Abby Kate and Grant are on the sidewalk in front of the house playing school field trip. They're on some sort of nature walk that involves them picking leaves and flowers off of everything they can reach. Lovely.

And I am going to post this and lie down for 15 minutes. That, of course, will be the signal for the other two to come in and a) ask for a snack, and b) tell me they're bored. Cheers.

Guardian Angels Abound

Right now Grant and Abby Kate are playing "Hospital" in which each of them suffers a series of ever more gruesome injuries that some doctor at the hospital is going to have to fix. Listening to them, you get a real sense of their sophistication -- Abby Kate just said she's going to need an emergency appendectomy, while Grant responded by saying "I got my head SLICED!!"

They are confined to the house this morning for getting into a container of DEET bug wipes and rubbing them all over themselves. Honestly, if they live through childhood without serious neurological injury, it will be a miracle. The fact that the bug wipes were within their reach I blame entirely on Tim.

Of course, keeping them in the house is also a bit of a punishment for Mom. Since Dad's the real culprit here, it would be more appropriate to send them to work with their daddy for the morning. That would teach him not to leave the wipes out.

Take A Deep Breath...

Today, this funny thought crawled across my brain: my life breaks down into chunks by decade. There's the decade in which I was born. Then the decade of elementary school. Then the decade of high school and college. Then the decade of career and marriage. And Now I'm in the decade of having kids (and I will have spent dang near the whole first decade of the new millennium paying for and changing diapers).

I arrived at this blinding insight (which, like so much that goes on in my head is of no interest to anyone but me) because we are going to look at some houses today and one house in particular has piqued our interest and it is the only house that had no pictures of the interior posted on line. So now I am further piqued: what will it look like inside? I'm betting it's a nightmare of wallpaper. It was built in the '80s, the decade of mauve carpet and wallpaper, so that's my best guess. The house we live in now was built in the '70s, the decade of mustard yellow appliances and avocado walls, but we bought it from some people who bought it in the '80s and immediately covered all the avocado with wallpaper. I spent 2 years stripping wallpaper. I know, deep down, that I can't do it again. That was some serious work without kids running around. This house would have to be kick-butt wonderful for me to even consider trying to do it with kids underfoot. And how wonderful can it be if it's covered with wallpaper?

It is a big house -- it would more than double our living space -- and it's in our price range, and it's in a nice neighborhood, so there must be something reeeeeaaaaallllllly wrong with it. Maybe they have a meth lab in the kitchen? Not sure. Honestly, if it was a choice between a meth lab and wallpaper, I think I'd take the meth lab. It would be easier to get those nice Haz-Mat people out in their little white suits to clean that up than it would be to rent a steamer and spend years scraping off sodden strips of flowered paper.

So, we go look. I am not holding out much hope, mainly because moving represents change and I am NOT GOOD WITH CHANGE. Not even a little bit. I have to keep telling myself, it's just looking. Looking is not buying. Looking is just looking. NOT BUYING.

Love Me, Love My House

I am having a very blue day. I can't seem to get on top of it and the least little thing just sends me into a tailspin. After the massive tidy we did this weekend to be ready for Grant's birthday party,the house has reverted to its natural, landfillesqe state. This is creating a tremendous amount of stress for me: though why I should complain about a lego-induced ankle sprain every time I walk through the living room is completely beyond the comprehension of the little perpetrators.
I feel trapped in this house, and the fact that the house is too small, and has been too small for some time now, is not making the claustrophobic feeling any better. Maggie woke us at 5:55 this morning -- that, thanks to one of my parents' dogs, who is staying with us for 10 days while they're on vacation. Barking at a quarter to 6 does tend to wake sleeping babies. It also wakes sleeping husbands, who then threaten to strangle said dog if it wakes him on any subsequent mornings. It is going to be a long 10 days. As if that weren't enough, my sister called and asked if we'd keep their hamster while they go on vacation for 10 days. Honestly, I could just see the veins bulging on Tim's forehead at the mere suggestion. Fortunately, she found someone else after I told her that I couldn't guarantee the hamster's safety (heck, I couldn't even guarantee I'd remember to feed it).
Now I am left feeling like I just can't get it all together. I can't seem to get on top of the house for more than a few hours and although it isn't an extension of my identity, it sure feels like one. So this is me: shabby, cramped, messy, frankly grimy in spots, perpetually disorganized and badly in need of repair/renovation.
Somewhere along the line I have lost something, some essential, critical part of myself. Somehow I've lost myself in the morass of laundry, mopping, dusting, bathroom-scrubbing and cooking.

A Breakfast of Doritos

I hate PMS. I have had almost no appetite today except for an odd assortment of totally unhealthy stuff: Doritos, rye chips, chocolate-dipped macaroons, etc.

Not a speck of healthy food has passed my lips today yet, unless you count the milk I put in my coffee this morning.

Worse than that, I have walked around all day feeling like my head is going to explode. I have zero patience with the kids, and even less with all the household minutiae that demands my consant attention. And, true to form, I have taken on one of those futile organizing tasks that make me feel like the hamster on the wheel...all week I've been trying to clean off the part of the kitchen counter where everybody dumps their stuff and I still can't see the actual countertop. In fact, you can't tell I've done anything at all, even though I have physically cleared it THREE TIMES since Saturday.

The learning experiment continues. It has been less enchanting for me this week. I enjoy the lessons, enjoy that the kids want to do it, but it's frankly difficult to do the prep and the research necessary to do it right. I am having a heck of a time getting anything else done during the day and I am having to spend nearly 2 hours designing activities, researching, printing, etc. to be ready for the following day.

A cleaning lady would be a tremendous help right now.