Random Wednesday

... where I don't at all chronicle the start of school, my birthday or the new tattoo. I'm capricious like that.

Reading on American secularism is making me want to shout from the rooftops, "No, it's MY America I want back."

I'm trying to pack lunches and plan meals better. Bill is my guinea pig and I just don't know if I have it in me to become a bento box mom. But I could start packing more creative tupperwares of food that might help keep us all healthy and wealthy a bit longer. 

I'm researching house painters and fighting a losing battle with ROUSes in the kitchen. One jumped from the top of a cabinet last night, igniting a murderous rage in me. So I set mousetraps before bed... and ended up catching a 3 year old this morning. I feel completely undone by the mouse infestation.

No one in the house has managed an uninterrupted 6 hours of sleep in memory. Weeks. Maybe months. This has become the new normal, such that when folks ask if we are sleeping better, I say a grateful yes and I mean it. If they assume that means we get full nights of sleep and are well-rested and clearheaded...I can only laugh. I've ceased having that expectation. Increasingly, I'm convinced that a full night of sleep is a luxury only a teeny tiny sliver of the population of the planet is rewarded with. The rest of us deal with night terrors, snoring, midnight feedings, random insomnia, sirens, alarms going off, smoke alarm batteries failing, bedwetting, night shifts, insurgent attacks, natural disasters, ... really, who on the planet gets to sleep soundly, safely, quietly all night long? It's a tiny minority of the 8+ billion on the planet. So I'm not sure why I expect to be among them.

Listening to an interview with the directer of OPM sent me exploring on USAJOBS which somehow ended me up on an aupair website. Daydreams ensued. An office. A desk. A task and a sense of accomplishment. Friendly co-workers. Coffee run at 10 am. Thoughtful conversations. A paycheck. The memories I have of working full-time have become as inaccurate as memories we have of idyllic childhoods. I've edited out everything that would make a good episode of The Office and just kept the sparkly unicorns and magic rainbows. 

Stay-at-home life has been.... ooky.

• WeeC is both teething and has a headcold. Snotty baby snores are particularly discordant interpreted through a baby monitor.
• WeeE has been on a tea party binge and that's meant a lot of spills and wet kitchen towels.
• WeeC is a menace to anything near her height and will pull up on anything at all. Recently that meant she tried to pull up on a can of sesame oil, tipped it over and open in one remarkably graceful move and spilling a half gallon of pungent oil all over herself and the carpet. A very nice carpet that is now wet and woolly smelling in the rain because we didn't manage to get it clean before the monsoons.
• I've been processing tomato seconds, which is a big sloppy job, especially when the self-same crawling menace found the bin and crawled in up to her elbows, mashing soft tomato guts as she went.
• I've also been giving our old dog subcutaneous fluids here at home. I was glad to learn how to do this, until the day I was doing it alone and ended up having to clean up saline and blood. 

No harm done, but it made the day "interesting" in that way that does not make for good chatter with the other parents at the school. Although I'm not sure why, since I have to imagine they have weeks like this too. When small things (letting WeeE open the curtains) go awry (having the curtain rod fall off and scare the child) over and over and over. It's sort of a shame that we all put on such good faces while picking up our kids because I think I'd enjoy the belly-laugh of hearing how asinine and slapstick someone else's day was. 

Comments

[Polly]

I'm sorry about the ROUSes. Do you want to borrow our cat, Plato? He loves them...he's spending a great deal of time in the backyard right now because field mice have once again decided to set up house in the shed. I wish he could just catch roaches....

BTW-Elizabeth has the headcold, too and is currently in snot-factory mode. Hope WeeE isn't next.

[Auntie M]

I remember how my brother had to put a moritorium on socks in the house after his 3yo son slipped and almost knocked his front teeth out. That's why Nephew has gray front teeth and always wears those expensive skidless socks. And then, there's a few weeks ago when Hubby put the dogs in the crates and came to meet me for a night of gaming. When we cam back 6 hours later, Caesar had gotten his teeth stick in the metal grate door and pooped himself in fear and thrashed the crate out into the middle of the kitchen and drooled a sea of bloody drool all over the floor. He's had diarrhea ever since. ::Sigh:: Now I know why his old crate has those rusty spots, he apparently chews on his bars. Ah well, back to my unicorns and magic rainbows....and trolls and goblins.