Bad House Karma

Ok, this is just wrong. So far while Jim has been gone, and more specifically in the last 4 days, more things have gone wrong with this house than usually occur in 4 months.

Remember the dryer? That was the start.

Then the back porch light burned out.

The front porch light followed shortly thereafter.

The kitchen sink faucet is leaking - this is a recurring issue.

The sink is now leaking under the cabinet, too.

The icemaker got jammed - I fixed that easily enough.

The icemaker remained jammed, even after my fabulous fixing.

The phone in the basement (where I spend a lot of time with the girls) wasn't working.

And then, the regular maintenance things are piling up, just making the whole situation seem slightly insurmountable:

The grass needs to be cut
the gardens have a lot of weeds
the trimming needs to be done before we lose sight of the gardens
the kiddie pool needs to be put away
the toilets (all 4 of them) need to be cleaned
the house (all 4 levels) needs to be vacuumed
the garbage needs to be taken up
the laundry needs to be done (whoops, then there's the dryer issue)
grocery shopping needs to be done
bills need to be paid

And I have a killer headache. So far, things are running about par for the course. I'm going to bed now.

Contrariness and Burning Dryers

A random conversation with a contrary Emma:

Emma: How do my eyebrows stay on?

Me: They are hair that grows through your skin, just like the hair on your head. They do not need anything to stay on.

Emma: NO! NO! They have white things underneath them like glue that no one eats and that is how they stay on.

Me: Oh!

Emma: Is the sun going down now?

Me: Yes (it was 8:30 in the evening and we were driving home).

Emma: NO! NO! It is coming up - it is morning time.

Me: Well, actually it is night time and the sun is going down.

Emma: Why aren't we going to a car wash? We have to go to a car wash! The car is saying, "I need a car wash, hurry up and go to a car wash". Mama! THE CAR IS DIRTY!

Me: It is late and I am not going to a car wash. They may be closed at this hour. Why don't you sit back and take a little rest until we get home?

Emma: NO! NO! It is morning, LIKE I TOLD YOU! I cannot take a little rest when it is morning - the sun will get in my eyes and wake me up.

The random conversation, with every opposition possible, continued until we got home at 9:00. The measure of how tired Emma is relies on a scale of contradiction. The more Emma contradicts things, the more tired she is. If we are in the car and she starts complaining that we should be driving the car in a different direction, she is just on the verge of exploding with discomfort or falling asleep. Tonight was no exception.

I've uploaded additional photos of the Rain Mum incident, so if you'd like to see them click here. Good pictures were hard to get, but they are worth their weight in gold. And I really enjoyed getting some comments on the post, since I seem to have dropped off on the average number of comments lately.

Not too much else to tell. Jim is traveling and I am making due. The dryer, as I mentioned, has stopped working and emits some faint burning smell which should concern me. I'm going to ask a neighbor to have a look at it. The wretched thing is only 4 years old. In our last house we had a refurbished Laundromat washer and dryer (that had the coin system disconnected ) and that thing was still working when we left after having used it 8 years. That was about 5 years longer than the predicted lifespan. Somewhere in my mind I am annoyed and concerned about this one, but mostly I'm wondering how much it might cost to get it fixed and what I am going to do with all of the kid's clothes in the meantime.

That's about all that is newsworthy and otherwise.

Dancing in the Streets

My Mom is staying for a few days while Jim is in South America. We were all getting a little cabin fever, I suppose, when the rains came this afternoon. The girls were having a blast in the alley behind the garage, when my Mom jumped in on the action. Too bad she is going back home tomorrow. As an aside, my dryer stopped working while I was trying to recover their clothes from this little foray. Irony!

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Dinner w/ Mum and Papa

The Birthday Fairy

Happy Birthday to my baby, Mary Leona! I can't believe she has reached this milestone and yet seems to be so much older somehow. This morning, we all snuck into her room and woke her up (gently, since she is easily startled, and scaring the bejeesus out of a kid isn't the nicest way to wake her up on her birthday) and sang "Happy Birthday" to her. We had to sing it in Spanish, since Emma wanted to sing a "new" Birthday song, so Mary was a little confused for a stanza or two. She was also a little loopy since I had given her Benadryl in the middle of the night to help her runny nose and watery, itchy eyes. So for the first time through the song, she sat up and wobbled a bit, staring at us and shaking with the effort to understand why her family had waken her up with some sort of singing ritual and they were all speaking another language. In retrospect, maybe we should have done that a little differently. anyhow, once we sang in English and she realized what was going on, she got really excited. Then we let her open her presents from the family, which was difficult, since Emma wanted to "help" her so badly. And the gift that Emma had picked out for her was one the Emma, of course, wanted to play with. so fighting ensued a little earlier on this momentous occasion then any other day. Jim left for work and then fighting over the new toys escalated and finally crested the climax of Mommy Anger Point when Emma cut her hair. That was about 10 AM. I know it seems like a big jump, and the sequence even makes me think of an angry toddler, standing in defiance with scissors in one hand and a hank of hair in the other, saying, "Give me the toy or I SWEAR I'll cut it!!!". That is not what happened at all, although it is a funny image.

Today, Mary decided that she was a Big Girl. That's great, affirmations all around. Except that Big Girls do not wear diapers, and therefore, neither does Mary. I would normally ignore the pleadings, except that Mary has shown an amazing interest in using the toilet. For over a week now she has consistently had a BM success at a time that she asks to "go to the potty". So, I thought we might be able to roll with this and got out some training pants - the cotton ones with plastic outsides, to keep all the nasty stuff inside. That meant that when Mary announced it was time, there was no recourse but to drop everything and go into the bathroom - sitting and waiting for things to work like they should. Meanwhile, Emma, who was frustrated with the idea that it was a day centered around someone else, disappeared into the depths of the house and became quiet. After Mary had finished up her (successful) trip to the potty, Emma reappeared and I asked her what she was doing while I was helping Mary. Riding the rocking horse, she told me. That was a happy relief. And cutting her hair, she added, because it was driving her crazy. Sure enough, a telltale wisp of liberated hair was hanging below the rest of her hair. I followed the trail of hair snips upstairs to my bedroom, where the "childproof" doorhandle had been expertly beaten into submission with a single, well placed blow from a determined toddler. More hair, this path leading right to the bathroom, where a pile of lovely light brown hair lay in the middle of the carpet.


Then Mary had a couple of friends over for cupcakes and she continued to wear the princess dress up skirt she had opened that morning, because she insisted she was a "Birthday Princess" (who is a big girl and does not wear diapers), and the rest of the morning went off without unusual incident, except for the torturous screaming that occurred when I insisted on a diaper for nap time. But that's a normal thing with two toddlers in the house. And don't forget the Birthday Fairy that showed up this morning:

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HippoMary says hello!

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Stopping to talk to a worm.

Back at it

Emma is upstairs screaming her heart out and Mary is sleeping. I'm not sure how well Mary is sleeping, in light of the circumstances, but both of them need a good, hard sleep and some sort of reset button. It's just after 1 PM. About 5 hours ago I was ready for nap time, as Mary had been up since 6:30. Not just awake, mind you, but SCREAMING. About what? Who knows? She spent most of the morning screaming or squealing or making some form of loud, piercing noises meant to wake up her sister and anger me all in one fell swoop. Once everyone was officially awake and calmed down, Zoe came over and we did some crafts. We painted a forest (we are all learning the letter "F") and made flowers out of cupcake papers to glue on the forest floor:

(Mrs. Bailey, Mary, Zoe, and Emma)
We are going to continue with "F", since it is such "fertile" ground! We are going to look for animals we would find in a forest and stick them on the wall as well. I also want to make GIANT flowers, a la Lydia, as I think it would be fun. Just so you get an idea what Mary is like today, you might really enjoy this picture of her:

It's pretty self explanatory. Emma has stopped screaming now (she was upset about nap time) and I think I can sit down for a quiet lunch. After a morning like this, it's popcorn comfort food time and a cold can of Pepsi. I think I'm making shrimp scampi for dinner, since we had pizza night last night instead of today like we usually do. I haven't started the mountain of laundry yet, but I am satisfied that I've made it this far.

Celebrating independence Day

Happy July 4th! Should I say, instead, "Happy Celebration of Separation"? Huh. When you think of it that way, it's like having a big party every year on the day you moved out to be an adult. So we went to the parade, arriving just as the fire engines turned past the corner we went to. The fire engines are the whole reason we dragged the girls to the parade. Closely behind were the congressmen and their faithful constituents, tossing candy into the crowd. This was a good enough reason for the girls to stay. We watched that parade until the end of the suckers and the snack cups full of Kix that I brought. 25 minutes. Then the kids were done. So was Jim, since he was so hot and sweaty from the heavy, humid, air and the blazing sun beating down on us like nobody's business. He only got 4 hours of sleep last night, but I think he would have been crabby just from the heat. Then we headed to the mall to let the girls run around while we basked in the airconditioning. That was fabulous. Ate lunch at the Coney, came home for naps, took the girls to the park, got pizza for dinner, yadda yadda yadda. Pretty much a non-stress, average day at the homestead. Tomorrow should be characterized by towering laundry and frantic cleaning to catch up to the regular pace of things. And I may have to cook something again. Blah.

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Dinner @ Ikea