We interrupt this program

Hmm.  Seems I've gone and filled up the startup disk on our computer.  Scott says I upload too many photos or some kind of silliness like that.  Back as soon as he figures out what to do with me... and our Mac.

Conversations with O: One-sided

June 2011

Owen has the counterintuitive habit of moving faster when he's tired, and that goes for his mouth too.  By the time we waited to have dinner with Daddy (our busy season hero), got some quality playtime in with said hero, and nearly forgot to take a bath, it was over an hour past his bedtime the other night.  That meant I was in for a doozie of a bedtime monologue.  I've done my best to remember exactly what he said, but keep in mind I was laughing really hard at the time so I might have paraphrased here a little.  And even though you see question marks, don't assume he actually paused to let me answer him.

Mommy?  Are you old?

I mean are you as old as old people?

Are astronauts old?

I mean are all the astronauts in the whole world old?

What if an old astronaut went to the moon but he forgot to 

tie up his walker to the spaceship and it floated away?

How would he walk?

You know, we hop on one foot on Earth, but astronauts hop on two feet on the moon.

Would the old astronaut hop on two feet even without his walker?

You know... if all you had was just one leg you'd have to hop everywhere.

And then your hair would get in your face all the time.

Do monkeys get haircuts?

Then & Now

July 15, 2009

5 minutes ago

Baking

I fell down the rabbit hole of a new (to me) blog this weekend.  It's amazing how quickly influenced I can be by people I don't even know.  Definitely should be a lesson for me about carefully choosing the kind of media in which I choose to marinate.  Luckily this particular blogger has some wonderful ideas about family and living simply.  But she's also got me wanting to do crazy stuff like buy a farm, knit all of Owen's clothes and make my own soap... from the rendered fat of the pigs that live on my imaginary farm, of course.

Instead, I opted for another radical (again, to me) activity:  baking.

First a Dutch Baby.  (Practice for when my chickens leave me with a windfall of eggs.)

Then some Applesauce Banana Bread. 

Maybe today I'll channel my inner hippie and forego wearing deodorant and make-up.  Who wants to join me?

Cough, cough

I caught a cold from one of my students and promptly gave it to Owen.  Turnabout is fair play, right?  At least I didn't give him a stomach virus.  We had a long night of Robo-tripping me trying soothe nose-bleeding him.  Is it terrible that I get a little excited knowing that he gets his childhood nosebleed tendencies from me since he is otherwise a Scott clone?

Morning has found us feeling better, but I think we'll take it easy today.  Off to drink my tea and build a LEGO sailboat.  

Let's all have a restorative weekend!

Speaking of pirates...

>>>------>

I didn't get any valentines put in the mail this year, so please consider this your special message from Owen.  He loves you!

* Template from here.

* Sewn patches by Mimi.  Thank you!

*Awesome signature on back by Owen S. (not to be confused with the other Owen in his class, Owen K.)

Mothers' Tea

Just like he practiced, Owen:

1. Escorted me to my seat and pulled out my chair for me.
2. Served me punch.
3. Performed Skinnamarink with the rest of his class and pointed at me during all the I Love You parts.

Oh, well.  They say that percentage ain't bad, right?

These were dangling from the ceiling all over the room.  When I asked Owen which one was me, he gestured back over his shoulder without a glance and said, You're the one over there with the funny looking head.

B & A: Garage, Part II

It is grossly shallow and self-indulgent of me to make you look at pictures of how I cleaned out my garage.  But at least I know it, right?  Or does the fact that I know it and do it anyway make it that much more grievous?  Well regardless, thank you, because my self-imposed blogging deadline was just what I needed to finish up this project that I started 3 months ago.  Befores are on the left, afters on the right.

Not exactly Pin worthy.  Is it wrong that I kept imagining how much better it would look with all of Owen's toys spray painted white?  

See?  Shallow.  

But back to my garage.

I mostly used storage we already had, even though I did get these new stripey bins - some from The Container Store and some from Hobby Lobby.  And since we constantly have piles of things to donate out there, I made a little station under our newly hung bicycles.  Scott the accountant makes me keep an itemized list of everything we donate, and it's much easier to make the list as I go rather than all at once, hence the clipboard.

So that's it.  The garage is officially the cleanest, most organized room in our house.  Seriously.  I'm sitting here at the desk in our kitchen watching Greta nap on top of our cozy, warm external hard drive.  It is entirely possible that I could find more hair on our computer than on Don Draper's chest.  And from here I can also see the place on the wall where I ran out of primer a year-and-a-half ago and just stopped painting.  Clearly more of these shame-myself-into-working-on-stuff-because-I-have-to-blog-about-it posts are in order.

Owen is hosting me at his school today for a Mother's Tea.  He practiced for it at school yesterday and is soooo excited.  I bet I cry.  Back with pictures tomorrow!

O Versus the Volcano

We started with the small one he got in his Christmas stocking.  He'd seen a photo of a volcano with sulfur burning blue in it, so we did round two blue.

Then it was time to build the big guy from this kit he also got for Christmas.  There are no photos of the construction process because he refused to help.  Too messy, he said.

Once it dried for a few days, it was time to have a good buddy over to set up dinosaurs, create a few violent eruptions, and drive all prehistoric reptiles into extinction.

I'm off to finish organizing the garage.  I have to report back to you tomorrow with pictures, even if you don't care (wink).

Dear Humans

                                Dear Humans and other members of the Rebel Alliance,

                                You thought Darth Vader's dark side was rough?

                                Sincerely,

                                Greta

Makin' Dough

This month it was Owen's turn to make playdough for his class, so we cooked up some on Wednesday night.  I don't know if it's because Valentine's Day is this month or if they finally resigned themselves to the fact that there is no such thing as red playdough, but Owen was assigned the color pink.

I was warned to make it in three separate batches to keep the consistency right, but I made no effort at all to keep the shade of pink itself consistent since (1) I was lazy and (2) I thought a marbled look might be fun.  However, on the way home from school yesterday, I asked Owen if they all got to play with his playdough, and he said they did but was quick to add that the playdough his friends have brought before looked no-mull and he didn't understand why we couldn't have made normal looking playdough too.  Oops.

Nerdy Acquisition

We're having curl-up-by-the-fire-and-read-a-book kind of weather today, so I thought this would be a good time to share pics of one of the two card catalogs we recently found.  It has a matching unit on the other side of the dining entry, but as is sometimes the case with twins, nature smiled on one and frowned on the other.  No worries, a few repairs and the other will be fit for her close-up soon too.

I've looked for a card catalog for several years (I think I was subliminally affected by the one in Sheldon and Leonard's apartment on Big Bang Theory).  I even checked with schools and local libraries, but I was told more than once that librarians take obsolete card catalogs home like stray pets.  The ones I found online and in antique stores could get up near a thousand dollars, so I was really excited to find these two for way less than one usually costs.

These things are a compulsive organizer's dream.  Scott called home around lunchtime on the first day I had them to see if I'd labeled all the drawers already.  I'd done half, bidding farewell to our kitchen junk drawer in the process.  The furniture touch up paint, ticky tack and push pins (all 3 of them) each have their own designated drawers now.  You say batty.  I say Utopia.

3 little asides:

• The ceramic figure on the top of the top wall box is a hand-sculpted, armless & handless lady I found on the side of the road in Malawi when one of our vans had broken down for the 8th time.  I call her my African Venus de Milo.
• I bought the aloe vera plant because it made me think of my Papa.  In his opinion, every wound was treatable by one of three things: aloe vera, mercurochrome (monkey blood) or calamine lotion.
• Is it time to redo the dining room walls/let the wallpaper go?  I'm thinking plain white.