My mildly-OCD six-year-old has been poring over her bank contents this afternoon, and just ran into the room SOME VERY EXCITING NEWS! Â
“Hey Mama, Mama, guess what?! This penny right here is the OLDEST penny I have… guess when it was made? 1996!  And you can EVEN STILL READ THE WRITING ON IT!â€Â   Â
uh, yeah, thanks kid.Â
3 comments February 26th, 2008
Ok, so *right* after I say I’m not a salt and pepper shaker person, I see yet another set that I’m totally in love with. But before we go on, let me just say once again (despite the mounting evidence), I am not this person. Really.
Right, then.
Part of me is in love with the Dedo Seasoning Sticks set. I think it’s a great idea with a fabulous execution — we’ve all seen S&P sets, but never any that looked like this. The other part of me, however, is a bit worried. Mostly about my little boy. And his extreme drumming tendencies. Because I’m guessing to a two year old’s eyes this looks like “WOO HOO, DRUM STICKS! LOTS OF DRUM STICKS! AND LOOK! THEY SPRINKLE STUFF! ALL OVER THE HOUSE!”
So chalk yet another beautiful thing up to “love it, but maybe later.”
oh, Le sigh…
1 comment February 20th, 2008
Ok, not only do I love the retro photos on these “I’m Saving Up for…” banks, but look at them! They’re shaped like the old Band-Aid boxes! One of THE main building blocks of my youth craftmania.
They’re all pretty funny, but the Therapy one is my favorite. I’m afraid I’ll need three, please.
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3 comments February 7th, 2008
I needed to go to the store yesterday so  I asked the four year old what kind of “regular week cereal” she’d like for breakfast. “Regular Week Cereal,” as opposed to “Saturday Cereal,” the difference being that I can only stand to be around three hopped-up children one morning a week and not seven.Â
She had a particular cereal in mind but she couldn’t remember the name. She described it for me several times, ending up with “it’s like those grapey things, but smaller and like sticks — little sticks that are brown and smaller than Grape Nuts.” I think and think and think and finally it comes to me. My child wants me to buy her All-Bran.Â
Oh, did I say that she’s four? I meant 84. Gives new meaning to “regular week cereal” though, doesn’t it?
Add comment January 24th, 2008
you know, my license to parent. Or they should. Because Friday is Movie Night here and, instead of going to rent a movie, the girls picked one on tv. On Disney Channel. Bleh.
Everyone was settling in but when we went to turn it on, it started an hour later than we had originally thought. Luckily, there was another movie just starting and I told them, “You guys watch this one and if you like it, we’ll keep it on. If not, we’ll switch over when yours starts.” Ok, crisis averted.
So the stand-in movie was Ghostbusters. GHOSTBUSTERS! They’ll have to love Ghostbusters, right?! They’ll never want to go back and watch that other sappy Disney inaneness, right?! Wrong. So we switch it to Disney. But we continued to switch back and forth during the commercial breaks. And we were coming up near the end of Ghostbusters where the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man appears and they wanted to switch back to their movie.
What?! “But this is where the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is!” I scream.
“What’s that?” they say.
“A marshmallow man. A GIGANTIC MARSHMALLOW MAN. And he’s about to be BLOWN UP!”
Their response? Eh. “Turn it back to Disney!”
What? WOT?! My children picked freakin’ High School Musical 2 over Ghostbusters?! Oh, no… oh, my heart!
And so, rather than argue and listen to shrieky little girls for the next 15 minutes, I switched it back to HSM2 (see that? “HSM2″ Bleh. I’m ashamed to know the Disney parlance). I fully expected super stealth ninjas to drop from the ceiling on ropes and bundle me away, you know to save the children. Because obviously somewhere I screwed up. Very, very badly.
3 comments January 20th, 2008
Wanna know (TWEE) what the most (WEEEEEEE) irritating sound in the  (TWEEEE) world is? Can  you (FWEEE) guess? come on, give it one (TWEEE) good (TUHWEE) shot (TWEETWEETWEEEE)…  ok, it’s the sound of a child who has *just* learned how to whistle by blowing across a bottle (WHEEWEEWEEEE).
Now, in the olden days (hee, I’m old enough and uncool enough to say “olden days”), this most likely would’ve been done with a glass Coke bottle. Or, for the drunkard families out there, a glass beer bottle. Whatever the liquid, the container would’ve been glass, giving you that nice, low glassbottlesound (whooooooo). Â
As it is, she learned on one of those disgusting blue syrup drink bottles, made of impossibly thin, melty plastic with an even more impossibly small hole. Which makes the most impossibly god-awful shriek (TWEEEEETWEETWEEEEETWEEWEEE) you’ve ever heard. Â Â
Fan(FWEEEEEE)tastic.
2 comments January 15th, 2008
My children just drank root beer that’s been sitting in the fridge, opened, ummmmm, let’s be nice and say about a week ago. Â Â Oooohh weird, really? It gave me a full-body cringe too!Â
Add comment January 10th, 2008
So I may or may not have mentioned something about my middle child’s love of water towers. It started when she had just turned two — we’re driving along peacefully and all of a sudden she screams, “WAH-TUH TOWAHHHHH!” Luckily, we have only two in town. But it was kind of a nice diversion, looking for water towers on trips, so we fed it.
We drove to Texas that year and, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the Kansas Turnpike, but there is only like one place to stop per every million miles. And, seeing as that one place is stuck in the middle of, ummm, Kansas, it has to have it’s own WATER TOWER! One that you can run up to and stand by and get your picture taken with and try to look up to the top until you almost fall over.
It was funny, this obsession, but I thought she’d eventually outgrow it. You know, despite the fact that we constantly remind her that she loves them. This is how people get known for something. They say they like something once and then their crazy family latches on and inundates them with this thing until they either snap and tell them they hate said thing or all of those old crazy relatives die, finally leaving them mercifully alone.
So, the point is, as a mother it is my duty to drive my kids crazy so I may just have to break down and buy her this water tank bank. Because, you know, it’s there. And it’s weird.
2 comments January 3rd, 2008
So there are three houses with first graders on our block and Santa brought Wiis to two of those houses. Want to guess which house is Wii-less?Santa did, briefly, think about bringing a Wii. And then Santa thought, “Those kids are 6, 4 and 2 — why in the world would they need a Wii?!”
So are you feeling guilty now, Santa, feeling like you’ve doomed those children to be second-rate gamers for the rest of their lives? Nope, not so much. Santa knows that they have plenty of time ahead to be glued to a screen (see: me). Santa also knows that although their father would’ve surely enjoyed Wii-ing with his kids, that he also has a bit of a game obsession and that he’d be Wii,Wii,Wii-ing late into the night. Every night. And so we remain Wii-less.  For now. Â
***Â
(oh man, you have NO idea how many times I mis-typed “Satan” during this post. Enough that I’m starting to feel the need to call in Max Von Sydow. What’s my New Year’s resolution? Exorcise!)
6 comments January 2nd, 2008
When my four year old writes the two year old’s name it looks like “Gut.”Â
Perhaps I should tell everyone she knows German and we’ll pass it off as “good”…Â
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Add comment December 19th, 2007
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