When shopping unexpectedly does not suck

A good portion of today was spent in the car.

First up was M's post-op ear check.  Tubes look good.

Home for a couple hours and then my psychiatrist visit in the early afternoon.  Refills--check.

Then to the bank to cash the first check I have ever earned from my writing (from a recent article in a local mag).  Fifty bucks ain't much, but it feels good to know I earned it with my mad writing skillz.

Next up was ToysRUs to purchase one more little toy for M.  I have 2 toys each for N and G (one from Santa and one from Mommy/Daddy), but M only had 1 toy.  As far as I'm concerned M only needs 1 toy (oh hell, he needs nothing, and neither do the other two, but whatever).  Still I keep worrying that N will say, "But Santa brought me and G a toy and you and Daddy got us each a toy but M only got one toy.  How come?

I had a gift card to blow (from the bed rails fiasco after I threatened to go postal on BabiesRUs and they gave me back 50% of the cost of the rails for my trouble), which felt like free money even though technically it wasn't.

Anyway, I bumbled around the store looking for something small, around $15 for M.  I found a Shake & Go Thomas the Train and carried that around for awhile.  Then I found an Elmo Driving Wheel noisemaker toy that I carried around for a bit.  But then I started checking out the wooden bead mazes.  There is a big cube one at the clinic that M always plays with....and I was reluctant to get yet another car or noisemaker for the house (because dangit the 3-year-old walking noisemaker we have is plenty.)

I happened to see one that had the Wonder Pets on it.  It was taller than the others and looked like more fun, so I took it to the scanner to check the price, thinking it would fall in the under $20 range.

Imagine my shock when it scanned for........

$3.00

Hot damn!  I'll take it.

And with all my extra money on the gift card I bought a Cat in the Hat card game (since after M goes to bed we play board or card games) and The Polar Express dvd.

The only thing better than finding something extraordinarily cheap at a store is finding paper money in the middle of a parking lot.

Reason #46,970 my husband gets aggravated with me....

I am getting ever closer to having the office closet uber-organized and the office put back together (or as put back together as it will be until I consign stuff in the Spring/Summer gigantic children's consignment sales in my area).

Today I continued sorting and tossing.  Up on the top shelf of the closet were two components to D's old stereo system that we used when we married.....13 years ago.  We had long since sold the speakers on craigslist.com and recycled the cd player (because it no longer worked).  One of these components was a.....I don't even know what it was.  And the other was a tape deck.

So I asked D what they were and what purpose they served.  He said I could recycle the no-identity component but maybe we should keep the tape deck one, to which I replied, "To listen to the tapes that we no longer own?"  To which he replied something muttered and on the order of, "I'm not gonna argue with you.  Here," and handed me the tape deck.

Now my comment about not owning tapes anymore was not screamed, hissed or said while beating him in the head with a stick.  It was merely a comment that it doesn't make any sense to keep a tape deck if we have no tapes to listen to.  But to D this is argumentative.

Anyway, I did save his bag of Dungeons & Dragons books and "notes" or whatever they were that I found in a briefcase because I suspect this has some sentimental value to him.  And I saved my journals, although I tossed most of my childhood scrapbooks because they contained pictures of people whom I no longer keep in contact with as well as about 345 pictures of Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran.

I am not heartless.  I haven't tossed his U2 books or shirts (although I would like to have my mom make him a blanket out of them rather than just have them take up space in his closet).  I don't throw away his childhood pictures.  I kept his baby shoes.

But then I remember that my husband loves his Xbox and iPhone almost as much as he loves me....and possibly even more because his they don't throw out all that is made of fibreglass, phenolic resin, copper, tin and carbon or the cardboard in which these items come.

Things I realized from watching "Up In the Air"

1. Vera Farmiga is a gorgeous lady.  (Much more so than Anna Kendrick.)

2. I may be middle-aged because of the fact that I find Vera Farmiga so much more attractive...she looks like a woman, while Anna Kendrick looks like a little girl.

3. This might be kinda depressing to me.

4. Equally depressing is that since having my third child and nursing for 39 of the last 81 months (that would be 48% of the past almost 7 years), my breasts look like they belong in a National Geographic magazine.

5. In combination with going through all of my mementos from high school, watching this film made me feel quite past my prime.

6. Despite this feeling, I am glad my backpack is quite jam-packed with kids, family and friends.

So different

It amazes me that my children are all so different from each other.  I know this is a definite "DUH" statement, but maybe because they are siblings or because I carried them all within me, I sorta continue to expect that they will be more alike than what they are.

Part of the reason I wanted to have a 3rd child was to see what nature would throw at us.....we had 2 tow-headed, blue-eyed South-paws.  I was curious to see if we'd get another.  So far, with dark-hair and grey-eyes, M is proving to be the exception to the rule.  Handedness remains to be seen.

M's teeth are just like N's baby teeth, with the big gap in the middle.  G has the funky double tooth in front and there is virtually no space between his teeth.

N slept through the night starting at 4 weeks.  G at 14 months.  M......this remains to be seen as well.  Though his sleep has improved much since his tubes and cutting all 4 molars, he is still waking up at least 1 time a night to nurse.  Which is another difference.

M is the "tugging at my shirt" kind of baby.  He says, "Ursssss," as he's trying to get at my breasts.  Neither N nor G ever did this.  He nurses a good 4-5 times a day and protests loudly if I am ready for him to be done before he is ready to be done with a nursing session.

Both N and G crawled "normally," on all fours, while M does the side-winder crawl, with his right leg flat in front of him, his left leg up as he scoots on his bottom wherever he wants to go.

N was a great eater who would try anything put in front of her.  At 18 months of age, she would eat 3 bananas a day.  One night I remember she wanted cherries and black olives to eat.  G was a fairly good eater until he turned 2, at which point he decided that vegetables are the same thing as poison.  M is a picky, picky eater who refuses anything vegetable-like, whole milk and juice.

By 13 months of age, N and G would bring me books and sit on my lap to be read to.  M likes to look at his books and babble read to himself, but he has yet to ask me to read to him.

My friend G wrote a blog once about how having one's first child was like being dropped from an airplane into a big city after having lived in a tent in the desert your entire life (or something along those lines--she said it much better than me so read here).  It is a huge job to learn how to survive in a city.  Having one's second child you think, "Hey, I know my way around this city.  I'll do fine."  But the 2nd child is like being airdropped into an entirely different city.  You are familiar with subways....but not how this particular subway works.  You know that cities have government buildings and churches and malls, but this particular city has different hours of operation.  Having one's third child....or 4th or 10th or whatever......well, it's yet another city you get to visit and discover.

It's a good thing I love to explore new places.

Profound....something

In my attempt to restore order to my basement office closet (which has resulted in me turning the office itself into a giant dumping ground), I decided to go through a humongous plastic container of memorabilia.  High school yearbooks, scrapbooks, pictures, awards, videos and god-only-knows what else has been calling this home for many years.

Clearly I was born to scrapbook because I had at least six from 1987-1991, plus another one from 1993.  Fortunately time (and OCD) have made me better able to pare down the items I keep.  As a teenager I kept everything.  Every note.  Every card.  Every concert ticket.  Every sticker.  And that, over the course of 4 years of high school, is a lot of shit.

But as I was going through this stuff, reading cards and setting aside photos with which to embarrass classmates at next year's 20-year reunion, I became overwhelmed with how little all of this means.  These things---notes, deflated balloons, retreat letters, ticket stubs, stickers, mentions in newspapers---that some 20+ years ago I thought were worth remembering, I did not remember.  And now they don't matter one iota.

That made me feel sad.  And old.  And finite.  And minute.
I felt like crying because it was the first time I have ever felt like an adult with a definite timeline to my life.  A full-fledged grown-up.  A mom to 3 kids, one of whom is already closer to age 7 than age 6.  And before too very long she will be in high school.  Because each school year passes in a blink....just as they did for me when I was a child.

It made me feel so appreciative of the moments I have with my children in all their sweet littleness.  It made me see just how old my parents are growing.  It made me feel all muddled inside.

There is something to be said for feeling to your core that you know what really matters.

Why I love CSAs

This summer my neighbor and I shared a staple in a CSA (community-supported agriculture) program.  Every week she would get a delivery of veggies, and every week we would divide the spoils.

Over the course of 20 weeks, we shared green beans, spring mix, green onions, watermelon, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, various herbs and peppers, and a loaf of fresh-made bread.

There were a number of great things about participating in a CSA.  Aside from helping local farmers, it gave me a reason to visit with my neighbor one day a week.

Some people, I'm sure, might sign on and then never actually eat the produce, but I HATE to waste money, so whatever I received, I used.  I made many, many loaves of zucchini bread, which I have sitting in my freezer for the winter.  I sliced banana peppers into our salads.  I made shepherd's pie on a few occasions when I only had enough green beans to use as part of a casserole.

Since the produce was cooked, it was also eaten, which means I have been consuming oodles and caboodles of veggies since May.

These past 4-5 weeks or so, I have been participating in another CSA through my husband's workplace. This one is a bigger operation, which means I have gotten some seasonal fruits as well.  I have made crockpot applesauce a couple of times.  I have made cushaw bread and pumpkin pie.  Last week I made a superfantabulous butternut squash casserole that simply rocked my world.  When N was off of school on Monday for teacher workshops, she and I took the kernels off a popcorn pone and made "real" popcorn.

Tonight I am making Greek cabbage rolls.  I have cooked a bunch of red potatoes to make potato salad using my MIL's recipe.  I just steamed some greens which I will eat with a really good teriyaki sauce I purchased recently.   


I generally don't like to cook, but it has been fun to find new recipes.  I have been wanting to make sweet beet cookies to see if the kids will eat them, and today we are getting a bundle of beets.  I never thought I would be excited to know I'll be getting beets.

Under any other circumstances, I think this would render me completely lame.  But by helping local farmers, I think it makes me uber-cool!

Airing my dirty laundry

We do not store anything in our attic.  I simply refuse to have enough stuff/junk/clutter that we need to mess with that part of the house.

In our basement, we have an office/bedroom with a sizable closet where I keep all of our holiday decorations (Christmas, Easter, Autumn/Halloween).  This is also where we keep all of my wrapping paraphernalia, our financial paperwork, D's comic book collection (which I made him purge a couple of years back so that it is now 3 boxes full instead of 10), and empty or mostly empty cardboard boxes.

D is a box hoarder.  If I wasn't in the picture, D would purchase an item and keep the box forever.  I do not have a problem keeping the box for the duration of its warranty.  But once the warranty is past, get that cardboard the eff out of my space.  In the 13 years that we've been married, we've finally come up with a system of sorts.

Once a year, I go through all the boxes and throw shit out.  D answers basic questions like, "What the hell is this box for?" and "How long have you had this particular item?"  I don't ask him to help any more than this (usually) because he overthinks.  He would think stuff like, "Well what if one day in the future I need this tiny little wire for god only knows what function?  And if I throw it away, then what will I do?????"  And this drives me bonkers.  So I do it myself.

This year I am really having at it.  Tossing pay-stubs from the jobs D and I worked at when we met (in 1995) and from even earlier.  Donating items that my aunt made me in ceramics when I was a kid that have been sitting in a box for years.  Recycling virtually all of my teaching files and check registers dating back to 2000.

In the past 2 days I have broken down probably 50 cardboard boxes.  So many that I had to call my neighbor and ask if she had space in her recycling bin for some of my cardboard.  And there is still more cardboard sitting in the office needing to be put out.

 This is what the office looks like right now.  A god-forsaken mess.  

These are the items still under warranty.  But they now all have the purchase dates written on the boxes so next year I can quickly scan them and chuck 'em.  

This is the box of instruction manuals, brochures, warranties, etc from various items in our house.  I haven't even touched this.  I need to toss paperwork for items we no longer own.  And organize the papers into "Appliances," "Technology," and other categories.  

This is the pile of cardboard/paper that needs to be recycled.  It is only a molehill now.  

Yesterday it looked like Mt. Kilimanjaro.  

This is the obsolete electronic stuff that will soon be taken to the local technology recycling dump rather than the regular landfill.    

This is the bin of papers to be shredded.   

This is the box to donate.  I still have to go through DHS videos, although D told me I have to save the original Star Wars movies.  I can deal with that. 

 I haven't decided whether to try to sell the LPs on craigslist or just donate them.  

These are the gift bags I organized today.  There is a hangar for solid-colors, birthday bags, baby bags, Christmas bags, and then a miscellaneous holiday/pattern bag hangar.  

This is the shelf with the tissue paper, a bin for bows/ribbons, a bin for smaller pieces of wrapping paper, and a bin for labels.  

This is the bin of need-to-keep paperwork.  

This is the pile of teaching materials that will find it's way into the recycling bin tomorrow.  

And this is the box I don't dare touch.  It is full of wires and wires and more wires.  Connectors and cords and god only knows what else.  It keeps growing every year, but the only thing I know to do with it is to hang myself from the chandelier because it is such a pile of junk.

Seriously, who needs this many cords?

Apparently us.