Another reason why kids are awesome
Posted: March 23, 2011 Filed under: family, parenting | Tags: cleaning Leave a commentThe Princess called me upstairs this morning to see something in her bathroom.
“Ta-da!” she said proudly, waving her hand like a game show hostess to indicate the sink.
The room smelled like some kind of cleaner, so I wondered how she might have gotten her hands on that. I peeked over the rim of her sink, and the hardened disks of yesterday’s toothpaste were still there, so I asked “What?”
Frustrated, she said that she had cleaned the handles and faucet, which were gleaming.
“What did you clean it with?” I asked.
She had scrubbed it with her toothbrush.
Okay, then.
Two sides to every story
Posted: March 21, 2011 Filed under: family, parenting | Tags: kids' fighting, sibling rivalry Leave a commentYesterday, I overheard the boys yelling at each other outside, which is a pet peeve of mine because I don’t want our new neighbors to think we have a lot of dirty laundry that we tend to air outside, so I called them over. Immediately, they both started talking at me, so I told them to go upstairs to their rooms and write their own versions of the story. I pledged to read them and render a judgement. Here’s what I got:
Edison (delivered six minutes after the assignment was given):
Here is my order of events. NOT Clooney’s, MINE.
1) Clooney hits the hula hoop farther onto the basketball hoop with the baseball bat, when I tell him to just throw the basketball to get it down.
2) He says, “I’ll get it down!” just after I get the hoola hoop closer to me, and of course he uses the bat and pushes it right back to its original position.
3) I finally pull the hoop down, with great effort, and start yelling at Clooney for ruining EVERYTHING.
4) I say that he lies all the time and I tell him that he even lied when he was 4, because he pushed The Princess over and then said she just fell. I remember like an elephant.
5) He asks when he cried, and if I remember that well, and he used February for me to tell him. I say, “The 17th.” And he says, “NO! The 2nd, the 14th, and the 30th!” But there is no 30th of February, and that is my PROOF that Clooney is a liar.
And then I got Clooney’s (reluctantly, somberly, 20 minutes later):
Mom, if you ask me, Edison always starts it.
Classic.
A stick by any other name…
Posted: March 14, 2011 Filed under: family | Tags: stick in the mud Leave a commentAnother stick fell into our yard, landing in a horizontal position, stuck in the mud.
“Look, Mom,” Clooney said, pointing to the stick as we were walking home from the busstop, “I call it the Stick of Wisdom.”
I laughed and asked why he called it that.
The answer: “Because I didn’t want to call it the Stick of Love.”
Chasing colors in the night
Posted: March 8, 2011 Filed under: family | Tags: family bed Leave a commentThe Princess has a habit of climbing into our bed when we are most vulnerable, too out of it to refuse or carry her back to her own. She forges her way up from the foot, bounding between us and then proceeds to elbow us to the outer edges of the mattress. She is not a sound or still sleeper, thrashing back and forth, pulling at the covers which generally prevents us from having any kind of proper sleep whatsoever.
And then last night, she spoke, somewhere around 4:30 a.m. loudly, so that I was jolted from the shoreline of my own slumber, “MOM,” she barked, “Do blue and red make green?”
“Wha??” I was pulling at the cottony sinews of my brain, “No,” I answered, too tired to respond that they made purple.
A moment passed and I started to drift back, before she called out, “ORANGE?”
“No,” I said, now fully awake. I propped up on an elbow to look at her, and she was totally out, back to snoring.
John Stamos is hilarious
Posted: March 1, 2011 Filed under: Celebrities, television | Tags: Charlie Sheen, John Stamos, Two and A Half Men Leave a commentAs I am sure you have heard, Charlie Sheen has been going rogue of late, acting like a spoiled brat and general cautionary tale. CBS has halted production of Two and A Half Men, which if you ask me, they should have done ten years ago when the “half man” hit puberty and the writers ran out 
of ideas. For some reason, this show has done well, I guess, and Charlie Sheen believes that he is keeping CBS afloat. (Crazy, I know.)
Things have gotten ugly in the last few days, with Sheen stating on GMA that he has a “violent hatred” of the head honchos at CBS, who he believes should appologize to him “publicly, while licking my feet.” Insanity.
I don’t even want to get into the culture of celebrity and how clowns like Sheen believe they are some kind of god, when they are really just spoiled brats who think the world owes them something, that’s another story entirely.
The story I want to tell is about John Stamos. Apparently, on Saturday, CBS CEO Les Moonves told E! News that CBS was in talks with Stamos about creating a new character who would take Sheen’s place on Two and A Half Men. Stamos, however, has since tweeted that is not the case: “Contrary to rumors, I am not replacing Charlie Sheen,” he wrote, “However Martin Sheen has asked me to be his son.”
CBS should get Stamos. He’s much funnier than anybody they have working on Men now.
Watching Red Carpet Arrivals with My Five-Year-Old Daughter
Posted: February 28, 2011 Filed under: Celebrities, family, movies | Tags: Amy Adams, dresses, fashion, Hailee Steinfeld, Jennifer Hudson, Oscars 2011, Red Carpet Leave a comment
She considers herself a fashion diva, and I have no place to argue, though Manfrengensen often accuses her of ripping off Cindi Lauper’s sense of style. I thought it would be fun to watch the Oscar Red Carpet show with her, though we disagreed on a few things.
I loved Hailee Steinfeld’s Marchesa Oscar dress, thinking it was totally age-appropriate, and just stunning. The Princess, however, was not impressed. She didn’t hate it, but she wasn’t wild about it either.
She likes things a bit more frilly or sparkly. She thought Amy Adams’s dress was the bomb. I had to admit that Adams looked stunning in her sparkling purple (also big with The Princess) LWren Scott.
She was 
also no fan of Cate Blanchett’s Givenchy dress, which I thought was interesting.
But the dress she hated the most was Jennifer Hudson’s Versache number (never mind that the dress was the darling of most other Red Carpet fashion critics).
“Too orange?” I asked.
“No,” she said, looking up again from the iPod game she was playing to take another look, “too booby.”
Let’s hope that kind of fashion sense stays with her, at least through her teen years.
Anyway, not long after Hudson’s arrival The Princess lost interest, and we switched back to our regularly-scheduled programming. Spongebob was wearing his trademark brown shorts, white shirt and tie, and he was working that look like no one else can.
Life with a disorganized genius
Posted: February 28, 2011 Filed under: family | Tags: children, disorganization, smart kids Leave a commentEdison is the smartest person I know. He always has been. Before he was two, he could point out that the moon was crescent-shaped, and today, he 
can do math and logic problems that make me feel like Patrick Star, relatively speaking. But he’s not perfect. In fact, he is the most disorganized person I know.
It drives Manfrengensen and me crazy. Every project is left until the very last minute; he can never find anything. He’s more of a big-picture guy, and the details, well, they are just not that important to him. The toothpaste cap is always off; socks are left where removed; Wii remotes and other items are always being sought in frustration. He tends to begin things with grand plans, and often leaves them abandoned where he has begun them, which is frequently the kitchen table.
I came in this morning from dropping Clooney at his bus stop. Edison’s bus had already passed to go to the top of the road before coming back to get him. Edison was in a panic because he couldn’t find his shoes. He had checked the basement, the family room, the living room, the hall closet and his own room to no avail. I suggested that they might be in Clooney’s room since Edison had just worn them yesterday and the boys went up there after church. He went up and still couldn’t find them.
“Did you look in your closet?” I asked.
No.
But after looking there, he still didn’t find them or his Vans, which often serve as alternates in cases like these, which are frequent.
So, I said, knowing that his bus was on approach, “Are there any other shoes up there you can use?” There might be some shoes from last year, or even the ones he wore for Christmas. It wouldn’t matter (at least to me) if they were too small, he needed to go.
“Oh, wait,” he said. “There they are.” In the closet.
The last place he looks is always the place things are supposed to be. So he put on his shoes, I kissed him goodbye, and he flew out the door. I love my mad, mad genius.
More decluttering and a little help from the wind
Posted: February 26, 2011 Filed under: Day-to-Day, family | Tags: decluttering, weather 1 CommentMade some progress in the decluttering project this week. I went through my bathroom and bedside table and got rid of the following:
15) bottle of great-smelling body lotion that had only a little bit left in the bottom rendering it impossible to extract. It’s been a fixture in the bathroom for about two years.
16) A man-sized Guess watch I haven’t worn during the 21st Century
17) another ladies watch I can say the same about
18) another sunglasses clip
19) over-the-ear ear bud headphones (hate those)
20 and 21) two small photo frames, never used
22) Victorian replica brooch (never-worn) I’d been saving for some sentimental reason, but I can no longer recall the sentiment.
23) old night light that looks like a lamp shade that The Princess never really took to
24) small wooden jewelery box that I haven’t used in years
Also, during a walk through the garage, I happened to notice these two things:
25) unopened Bob the Builder computer CD-ROM game
26) a little car book/craft that Clooney never used
This week brought a lot of wind to my neighborhood. We recently moved from the city to the ‘burbs and the increased number of trees is a little frightening in times like these. One morning, I found this in our yard:
Manfrengensen says it reminds him of something from Braveheart. When we removed it, the hole was more than an inch deep. Lucky it didn’t land on someone’s head, or come through a window, huh?
One would think by now I’d recognize quickly the taste of my own foot
Posted: February 21, 2011 Filed under: awkward moments, Day-to-Day, family, friends, parenting | Tags: bidet, decluttering, fabric softener 1 CommentThe other day a friend invited me to meet with her group for coffee. The conversation was animated, mostly mom stuff, comparing notes on housekeeping, parenting and shopping. One particularly interesting part was on the dangers of fabric softener, which I have since stopped using.
Anyway, I finished a side conversation with the lady on my left, and caught some of what the girl on the right was saying. I heard, “I don’t think I could live without bathroom wipes. They’ve changed my life.”
So, I interjected, “Yeah, I think without them, I’d need to install a bidet.”
She kind of paused, and nodded politely, but then turned to the woman to her right and clarified…They’d actually been talking about bathroom cleaner.
The moment reminded me of another about 15 years ago, when I was laughing over lunch with some girls I was working with then. One of the girls had recently gotten a UTI, and so we were talking about ways to avoid them, like going before and after and such, and we were laughing, getting a little bawdy in the lunch room there, and then one of the girls, who was obviously a bit more experienced than we were shared (with a wide smile on her face) that “you can’t be putting it one place and then the other, either.” And the whole room went silent. Sharing is always a good thing…to a certain point, at least.
On Another Note:
The decluttering continues. Have gotten rid of:
10 and 11) two trashbags full of toy garage parts that were never going back together to form actual toys
12) non-germ-free vaporizer
13) one pair of clip-on sunglasses that fit spectacles I haven’t worn for five years
14) stack of old papers from the back of the counter in the kitchen.
1,997 items to go.
The best movie review of recent times
Posted: February 5, 2011 Filed under: family, movies, reviews | Tags: Unstoppable Leave a commentIt’s by my brother, and btw, SPOILER ALERT.
He said he was a little disappointed, then shrugged and added that the title was “false advertising.”
egghead23's world 