Stoopid Skool!

On the day that our new president was sworn in, I was smacked in the face with a reminder that the effects of the old regime would be biting us in the ass for a long time. Boy came home with a permission slip. It was asking me to allow my son to participate in an abstinence-only program at school.
Now I know for a fact that the only type of sex education my son has had was the puberty talk my husband and I gave him, the scientific talk that I gave him and the book we had to accompany it. The school hasn't even given him the whole sperm fertilizing the egg stuff.
So the fact that the school was going to be feeding him some right-wing propaganda about "saving their special gift until marriage in a fun sports-themed program." just mad me want to hurl. I got better sex education in my Catholic school and they told me circumcision didn't matter because it just fell off the first time the baby boy peed!
I think I'd rather them not say anything at all then feed him this crap, but of course I gave him permission to go, because nothing is worse than be singled out as the person that can't go to sex ed (however pathetic it may be) because your parents won't let you.

I Love You!

I've recently been warping my daughter. When she leaves a light on in a room she no longer uses, I ask, "Girl, don't you love the polar bears?" She will then drop whatever she's doing, snap off the light and say, "Yes, mommy, I love them a lot."
I'm horribly mean.
So back in October when the preschoolers in my daughter's small-town, right-wing, Catholic preschool started telling my daughter that our new president kills babies or whatever the crap of the moment was that their parents were spewing, I set her straight on the baby thing and informed her that we were voting for Obama because he loves polar bears.
I don't have proof of that obviously. I've never seen him wearing an "I Heart Polar Bears" t-shirt, but he is pro-saving the environment.
My daughter doesn't see the environment as a whole. She loves cute, fuzzy polar bears, and knows that they are dying out because that's what her big brother told her. So in our house, recycling, energy conservation, what have you is all a dedicated effort to save the polar bears for our princess.
So today I turned off Dora and made my preschooler watch President Obama being sworn in, and when it was over she turned to me and said, "It sure is nice to have a president that loves polar bears like me."
And I whole-heartedly agreed.

Fun With Tilt Shift

So I am blaming CaptainDumbass at Us and Them for my new addiction: Tilt Shift Maker. I spent a good hour making things look tiny. These are pictures from my Flickr account and my mom's. Here are some of the greatest hits:

Mr. Giles last year

My parents' camper when I was little

A picnic table in a reserve near my house

My sister's house

My mom took this in Vilnius, Lithuania

Another of my mom's Lithuania pictures

Yum!

As a New Year's treat Mr. Hobbitfeet made one of my favorite dinners, med.-rare steaks with cauliflower, potatoes, and garlic bread. Mr. H. and I were eating it with left over cheapy champagne and Girl had leftover Welch's sparkly grape juice. Probably not the right drinks for steak but yummy none the less.
Still no Boy though he's made the transfer from his biological father's family to my sister's which makes me feel like he may at some point be back under my roof. Now I just need to wait for my mom to bring him home on Saturday.
I can't wait, mostly because I hate not having him around all the time, but also it would be really nice to not have to be Girl's only playmate. Also, Mr. H. forgot about the lack of a person and got three big steaks instead of two, Girl and I only managed one between the two of us leaving a large steak for Mr. H.'s lunch tomorrow. . .maybe he did that on purpose.

At any rate, I had a much better New Year's Day than I had a New Year's eve. Despite the number of Barbies, or games of Pretty, Pretty Princess and Guess Who that I played.

Happy 2009!

I am one of those weird people who hate New Year's Eve. Just so you know, I hate the 4th of July too. I must have something against holidays with fireworks. Anyhow, for my super fun New Year's Eve this year I watched too much Battlestar Galactica on my laptop while Girl watched Hannah Montana on the tv. Then at 8 p.m. Mr. Hobbitfeet, Girl, and I put on stupid hats and celebrated 5 year old New Year. We drank Welch's Sparkling Grape Juice in champagne flutes, blew store bought party horns, and banged on pots with wooden spoons. Then Mr. H. and I sang Auld Lang Syne while Girl looked at us like we were nuts. Boy has been at his other Grandma's since the day after Christmas.
Then we put Girl to bed and Mr. H. followed about an hour and a half later. I then watched more Battlestar Galactica until midnight when I woke up Mr. H. and made him kiss me.

Whoo hooo! Do I know how to party or what!?

Bucket Hats, Blue-Nosed Reindeer, and Things That Aren't Meant to be Kept

Several years ago, my son's other grandma gave me a Christmas scrapbook. Having nothing better to do with such a gift, I started sticking all the Christmas cards I received, some funny Christmas artwork that my kids did and Santa pictures in it.
This ends up being something that cracks my family up year after year. You see, most people expect that Christmas cards will be tossed out, or maybe they don't know they do it, but people tend to have similarities in their Christmas cards year after year.
Like I have three of the exact same blue-nosed reindeer cards, two of which came frome the same person on different years. We also have evidence that Mr. Hobbitfeet's good friend loves bucket hats. Four out of Five of his Christmas cards feature several different pictures of his two girls in different bucket hats, and if you go back to the year they sent us a card before they had kids, you'll see him in a bucket hat.
Of course you get your other similarites like who always sends picture cards and who always sends newletters, who always sends pictures of their kids with Santa and who does whole family shots. The scrapbook also helps you remember who absolutely needs to get a Christmas card and who you should write little notes to.
But what I like the most is that you get to see the progression of your loved ones families. First you see the couple cards from the year they got married, then one little baby that keeps growing and becomes two, then maybe two and a pregnancy announcement and then three and so on.

Winter Doldrums

There is nothing I hate more than cold weather. If I didn't enjoy my family or if my favorite seasons weren't Spring and Fall (respectively) I would move to a warmer climate where I could always have my windows open and spend every minute of my life outside. Maybe I'd live in a yurt.
Ha! I have a hard time sleeping when camping so a yurt would most likely be out of the question especially since there wouldn't be a place for all my books or my computer and since Boy has been terrified (since age 5) that a legless boy scout will come after him if he camps, a yurt would be down right impossible.
To end the monotony of another day indoors (there aren't many activities in my town), Girl and I decided to make homemade play dough. I pulled out the container of nearly a billion cookie cutters that I received for Christmas one year and Girl and I sat down to some fun. Boy spurned the activity until he learned that I wasn't going to let him use my cookie cutters on his Silly Putty.
We ended up having so much fun that even Mr. Hobbitfeet pulled himself away from Fantasy Football to join us. Boy kept making people with too large heads that he called dough babies. None of them could stand with out help and their bodies almost always collapsed under the weight of their massive noggins but he never gave up.
Girl spent all of her time taking things other people had made and then "remade them" which basically involved smashing everything until it looked like a pancake version of whatever it was supposed to be.
In the end we called it a day because Girl wouldn't stop eating the dough even though it was so salty and Boy started making dough balls (that I'm sure were about to be thrown) but we killed a good two hours which got us to lunch which got us t nap time which got us to the open at 1 p.m. library. Freezing cold Sundays are all about making it through until Monday.
As Douglas Adams says in Life, the Universe and Everything:

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

Ans so we played with home made play dough.

Um. . .Okaaay.

Today I was looking at my stats, and found a VERY unusual search and for some reason, I am the top result:

a cow is coming in front of a tree looks to the tree and than he says to the tree in my hole live i was never a stupid tree

Really?

Loving Christmas, Hating Santa!

Girl loves Santa and Christmas. I know that most people feel that way, but Girl has gone nuts. I confess that it's my fault. When we were in Colorado Springs this year we went to a Kiddie amusement park at the base of Pike's Peak. See, Mr. Hobbitfeet had dropped Girl on her face the night before and we subjected her to the Ranger talks on the various poo found on the peak as we steadily went up and up on the "most boring" mountain in the world.
So even though it was our anniversary and we wanted a fancy dinner, we spent our dinner money on the amusment park called the North Pole.
She loved it and got to see Santa in early June. Strike one.
We let her start watching Christmas movies in October. Strike two.
And finally I sent her a letter from Santa. Strike three.

Now she hates us because she wants to go live with Santa and can not understand why we can't "just let [her] go live where [she] wants to live! Oy! She's only 5!

So now, even though I love Christmas, I really hate Santa right now and can not remember why I wanted my daughter to believe in him. It seems very counterproductive that I spend my entire year being a mom and making her eat her veggies and go to bed on time, and the credit for the one really awesome thing I do all year goes to some stupid fat man.
I don't even want to share the credit with Mr. H. I'm th one that wrote that letter that she is carrying in her back pocket.
I'm the one that painstakingly picked out the world's best scooter that is currently hiding in my garage waiting for Christmas morning and my daughter is like, "Bitch I hate living with you and all your stupid vegetables and bedtimes! I want to live at the North Pole!" (Obviously she didn't say that, it was just implied).
I never had this problem with Boy. He believed but he wasn't insane.

Nutcrackin'

I've given up a lot since we moved to Central Illinois from Chicago. Don't get me wrong, we've gained a lot too: Mr. Hobbitfeet found a career, graduated from college, and we were able to buy a house, but there are things we really miss about Chicago. The chief of which is culture.
To make up for this I decided to take my family to see a production of The Nutcracker at the University of Illinois, which is still quite a drive, but what's an hour here or there?
Because it was at a college, the cast was really young, and though it was a lovely production there were definitely things about the professional production that I missed. My biggest disappointment came in the second act when instead of real Russian dancing, several pairs of young children did regular couples' ballet.
Since neither Mr. Hobbitfeet, nor the kids had seen The Nutcracker so they were quite content. Boy wished there were more clarinets, but otherwise he was happy. Maybe next year we'll have to just make a Chicago trip and see it there.

When Christmas Cards Go Bad

I spent almost an hour last night trying to get the picture taken for our Christmas card. It did not go well. I couldn't get a single picture where both kids looked nice. Eventually my kids got annoyed and wouldn't even smile for the camera. These were the best of the bunch, and that's just pathetic.

Nothing Smaller Than Your Elbow

When I was a baby, pre-talking but able to move on my own, I stuck a pebble up my nose. My mom never let me forget it. She kept it for years up until she moved out of the house I grew up in when I was in my early twenties. She told everybody about it too. My friends, boyfriends, whoever she could and then she'd show it to them. Tell them about how I couldn't talk but kept yelling at the doctors and nurses, about how they almost had to slice open my "poor little nose", about how a sympathetic nurse made a last ditch effort and got it out.
It used to mortify me when she'd tell it too. That is until I learned how to ask, "Well I was one, how come someone wasn't watching me?" Then she'd stop picking on me and blame my dad.

Well, as of today, I have something to hold over my daughter's head for the next twenty years. Today I was reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone to my five year old daughter, and after she told me she was going to do a magic trick, I looked up from the book to find she had stuffed one of the beads from her jewelery making kit into her ear. I think she was going to make it appear from her ear like that quarter trick. She kind of missed the point.
Anyhow, she was trying to get it out for a few seconds before I realized what had happened, and it got pushed pretty far into her ear.
I freaked out and kept yelling at her not to touch anything. It was really up there and I was afraid to try anything and risk popping something. Of course it was noon and her Dr. was at lunch. The emergency room said I'd have an hour wait there anyhow so I should just hang out until her Dr. came back (It's at this point that I would like to point out that I live in a small town of around 20,000 people, and while the hospital does serve the next town over as well, they aren't much larger and I doubt I would have had to wait an hour unless it was just that the ER was on their lunch break).
At any rate, since I had to wait any how, I decided to give one thing a try. I took the straw from Girl's cup and stuck it near her ear canal and sucked. It didn't move the bead a lot, but it pulled it down enough that I could grab it with a tweezers without putting the tweezers into her ear canal.

And once again the day (and hundreds of dollars in medical expenses) is saved thanks to Super-mommy.

By the way, learning from my feelings about that stupid rock, I took a picture of the bead and then cleaned it off and put it back with her jewelery kit.


Notice the bead is a Y for Why would you stick this in your ear.

Just To Let You Know I'm Alive

I would like to pretend that I haven't been posting because I live a wonderfully fantastic life and I've been out living it; however, I don't. I just decided not to bore people with my current, wake up, get my kids off to school, clean my house, clean my mother's house, come home, take my kids to their activities, make dinner, eat dinner, watch T.V. until bedtime lifestyle.
It's a glamorous life I know.
I've become a hermit and not even an interesting one. I think I would rather be the kind of hermit that hops out from behind bushes and says something random before hitting people on the head with a stick. That would be great.
But mostly I just don't talk to people.
I did have a rather lengthy conversation with my husband the other day about why I don't think movies like Porky's or American Pie are funny which basically involved me picking on him for not dating in high school. Well, mostly him thinking I was picking on him for not dating in high school. I wasn't.
Can you tell I haven't been talking to people lately.

Conversations With My Husband

Me: (Singing crappy Barbie jingle that has been stuck in my head all day)

Mr. Hobbitfeet: I don't even know what to say to that.

Me: I remember that song because I totally wanted that Barbie Dream Kitchen and didn't get it. I think my mom felt that Barbie furniture was unnecessary and that we should just make do with whatever was lying around.

Mr. H.: (Making legs out of his fingers) Weeeee! I'm a Barbie look at meeee!

Me: Idiot! We had Barbies just not a lot of furniture.

Mr. H.: Well, why not make the Barbies up too?

Me: I practically did, my sisters didn't let me play. . .

Mr. H.: Yeah and you got the bald ones I know!

Me: Don't forget naked!

Mr. H.: Yeah naked. Poor baby. I was the youngest of seven, if I didn't eat my food in 3.5 seconds flat, I didn't eat!

Me: Uh-huh sure! Also, sometimes their feet would be chewed off.

Mr. H.: Geez that sounds like something from a chemo ward.

Me: What!? Cancer patients have feet!

Mr. H.: Not if they have foot cancer!

Me: I'm not sure I've heard of foot cancer.

Mr. H.: Only Barbies get it.

Me: This conversation is stupid.

Mr. H.: Hey! Guess what?

Me: What?

Mr. H.: "We girls can do everything with Barbie!"

Me: (sigh) "We girls can do ANYTHING. RIGHT, Barbie?"

Mr. H.: Whatever. I'm sure Girl will correct me on it again tomorrow.

Me: It's from the 80's. . .

Mr. H.: I don't care!

Things to Do When Your Kids are in Bed

I just watched all of the Drunk History episodes that they have on Funny or Die and loved them. My favorite is the one with the drunk, female historian because of the way that the actors do every hiccup. Check them out.

"They'll let any A**hole be a Father"

I try very hard to not be a judgemental mom. I'd be the first to say I fail at that on a regular basis, but I try. I've recently had an experience, however, that made me want to get up and yell at someone about their horrible parenting. I didn't, because I knew nothing would come of it but a headache and drama so I didn't, but I was close.
See, lately I've been spending a lot of time at the YMCA while Boy is at swim team practice. It's real nice cause Mr. Hobbitfeet takes Girl home with him and I can just read a book and chat with the other parents for nearly two hours.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays the Y has swim lessons after swim team practice. It can sometimes get very crowded and rowdy in the waiting area on those days. Last Tuesday I was lost in my book. A little brother was waiting the whole time with his mom and I occasionally let him borrow toy cars from my purse. It kept him quiet and helped this mom.
About a half hour before practice ended a kid came in with his dad and got ready for swim lessons. Again, I was in my book so I wasn't noticing a whole lot. That is until this kid started going nuts.
He was running around, chatting with anyone who would listen, bullying the little brother, screaming, yelling, and jumping. I looked around hoping his Dad would come and put a stop to it. Another swim team mom said, "I think he left!" The mom with the little brother tried to engage him in conversation, found out he was 6 among other things. He wouldn't settle and we all went in to mom mode. I doled out cars and made garages out of paper cups. Little Brother's mom tried to get the staff involved but it was clear that 20 minutes before his class, this boy's dad had dropped him off at the Y wearing nothing but swim trunks. Then he pooped his pants.
Finally we got the staff to listen to us. The director got him a new suit out of the lost and found. His swim teacher searched the Y for the dad (who had, in fact, left) and we got him settled to playing with Little Brother and the cars. Finally practice was over, the boy went in for his lessons and I packed up my cars (grateful once again that I have so much crap in my purse). Why the Y opted to take care of things rather then check their records and call his parents was beyond me, but they chose to wait until the Dad picked him up before talking with him.
Too bad the story doesn't end there.
Today the spazzy little kid was back, still a half hour early, still wearing nothing but trunks, but his dad stuck around, at least physically. He ignored the kid the whole time, letting him run around just as much as he did on Tuesday. His dad just played his DS. I am not surprised. It's just that these are the cases when I wish people had to get licenses to have kids.

Halloween

I hope everyone had a nice Halloween. Mine was okay. After a discussion with Boy we agreed he would Trick-or-Treat with us for one last year. We did bring his buddy with us, which kind-of didn't work out as his friend was slightly whiny and because of him we only went out for about an hour and a half of our town's trick-or-treat hours. We usually go for at least another half hour but Boy's friend complained about everything including thinking that he had flat-feet and had maybe inherited his mother's Plantar Fasciitis.

Oh, well! We have plenty of candy and Girl only complained about going in early a little bit. The Dr. Horrible costume turned out pretty nice and the weather was the nicest Halloween weather I had ever experienced.

Here I Sit Broken Hearted!

A week or so when I started this horrible project of making a Dr. Horrible Lab coat for Boy's halloween costume, he peeked into the room and informed me that next year he would be to old for trick-or-treating. I was sad, but I still got to dress him like a little Dr. Horrible so I was dealing (mostly).
Tonight he came in and asked if he could go trick-or-treating with his friend on Friday. I said yes, but when he left I cried like a big baby. I'm taking this harder than when he stopped believing in Santa Claus. What's wrong with me?