kids Archives | Page 8 of 8
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Friday, September 19, 2003
3:00 a.m., can't sleep
This won't be a long entry; I remember with shame how I used to plague my friends by writing letters to them when I couldn't sleep which were so boring they could have been used as a form of torture. So I won't duplicate that here if I can help it. :)
I hate 2:30 a.m. That's always the hour when I wake up and have to pee and can't find a comfortable position to go back to sleep afterward; then C will wake from a bad dream or fall out of bed or both, and she'll want a drink of water along with a comforting. Tonight, to add to the general mood, LT came tottering out of his room and into the bathroom just as I was again trying to get back to sleep after tending to C. Now, he is NOT a night time person; he doesn't wake well and usually sleeps all night, although in his sleep, he generally looks like he's had a wrestling match with his blankets before beating them into submission. Anyway, his 2:30 wake-up call this morning was a bloody nose. He gets these with some frequency but they're never severe. So after I tended to him and got him back to bed, I decided to give up for the time being on going to sleep, and I turned on the computer. [g] The accursed 2:30 was redeemed -- the first thing I saw in my email was a notify-list notification from a friend of mine, and I read her journal to discover that she is expecting baby #2. Great news! And to add to it, another mutual friend of ours had left a comment with the URL to her journal; I haven't been in regular contact with this person and I've missed her, and I got to read all about her wedding last month which was another treat.
Now if only I had some chocolate. As I was trying to go to sleep, I calculated my calories yesterday and unless I'm mistaken, I was about 100 calories under my minimum yesterday. I'd love to be making up for that now with part of a Dairy Milk bar. mmm. Somehow a nice practical glass of nonfat milk doesn't have the same effect...
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Thursday, September 18, 2003
my driver's license speaks the truth
Well, when I weighed myself this morning the scale said 175 (actually the needle was hovering juuust to the left of the 175 mark, can't let those two ounces or so go unrecognized ;-). That's a net loss of 19 pounds in about 8 weeks. This is a banner day because now, for the first time since I was in high school, my driver's license is not lying about my weight. I last renewed it in December of 1998, and I weighed more than 175 at the time but I did NOT want to put down my true weight, no sirree. Hopefully before long my license will be lying again; this is well-timed since I have to renew it in three months.
The odd thing about having lost is that I don't feel like I lost, I feel like I just gained back all 19 pounds I've lost so far (cripes, what a nightmare!). I'm wearing jeans that were tight when I started this whole thing, and they're loose when I stand up, but sitting down, well, maybe they're not exactly tight, but they don't feel loose. I'm sure that Bloat Week is altering my perception a bit. I was never so aware of the in-between times of my menstrual cycle before. I've never been prone to the over-emotional aspects of PMS -- maybe one day right beforehand where I get crabby more easily than ordinarily, but none of the sobby b!+¢hy cross-made-of-fingers-backing-away stuff that men like to joke about (I was a really pleasant pregnant person too). And before I lost weight, I never noticed the physical aspects either, but I am noticing them now. Yuck.
LT is having what I jokingly refer to as a Ritalin day. He's a very active, wired little boy, and I'm sure if he were in a public school environment he'd be bringing home a lot of teacher notes about getting him checked for ATD. Fortunately, in our homeschool, we can lovingly harness his energy, refocus him, and of course send him outside to run back and forth around the yard for a while to get rid of some of the excess energy before going on with schoolwork (when he's older he'll split wood). We are about to reach that point. He's practically vibrating. We could power our small town with his little dynamo of a body, I think, if we could just figure out how. And he hasn't even had any caffeine today.
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Thursday, September 11, 2003
Ducky and Tinkertoys and an ouchy
This afternoon was a big financial day for us. We "borrowed" from T's retirement to pay off a lot of various debts we'd had sitting around. We are paying much less interest, and the interest we're paying is to ourselves, and unless my T's boss doesn't know what he's talking about, this makes our credit report look better because the retirement account loan doesn't show up on it. Who knows. It can't make it look any worse, at any rate. Now we will accomplish a few things we've been needing to do (like get new glasses for me, and fix T's truck), and by Christmas we'll be socking away a substantial amount into a savings account to pay loan origination fees etc. when we buy a house next spring or summer. We've had debt to one degree or another for the entire nine and a half years we've been married. We've been working hard to pay it down for the past five years, and it feels good to finish it off.
I still managed to have a pretty stressful afternoon sorting out all the paperwork and details involved. I wanted nothing more than just to lay in bed and vege all evening but families, you know, darnit, they need to be FED, can you believe that? They all stand around like baby birds with their beaks wide open, cheeping, looking so pitiful and helpless. So I made dinner, and then I went for a long hard fast walk. I actually had an aerobic heart rate for at least 25 continuous minutes of this 45-minute walk, and I wasn't shuffling along for the other 20 either, it just wasn't uphill all the way like the second part. I am all gleeful thinking about my body going, "calories! calories! where ARE you, calories?" and finally resorting to burning up some nasty old fat cells that have been sitting around in my thighs since before my first pregnancy. ha! gotcha! However, I'm not as thrilled about how sore my legs will be tomorrow. Oh well, it's a good trade-off. :)
Speaking of baby birds (well, I was, up there ^ ), I must show you what my daughter made out of Tinkertoys today. I must preface this by explaining that since around the beginning of our engagement ten years ago, T has called me "Ducky" and variations thereon. This explains, by the way, the fuzzy duckling in the layout, in addition to the fact that it's just plain adorable). Don't ask me why the heck he thought of that one (I have always said that it was because I had a short little haircut at the time and my unruly hair wanted to flip up in the back like a little duck tail, but he says it wasn't that). We were just out for a walk, holding hands and being all cute and lovey-dovey, and he blurted it out: "Duck-y!" in this cute little voice. Nobody who knows my husband only, say, at work, or at the VFW, would believe that he can be this silly. But he is. This led to my being called Ducky, and Coin (pronounced "Kwaa" with that nasaly French n at the end; it's what the French claim ducks say), and Quacky, and every other duck-related name you can think of, and some you can't. It never wore off and consequently my children have been exposed to this for years and probably think that everyone's mom is named after poultry. Anyway. Today my daughter made me a ducky out of Tinkertoys. Generally her Tinkertoy creations to date have been the kind of thing where you believe it's what it is supposed to be, only because she says it's what it's supposed to be. This is her first really recognizable item. Here it is:
 Is that not the cutest? Can't you hear it quacking? |
I think we'll see if we can make it last all year and enter it in the fair next year. LT has also made some really neat creations, like his interlocking angled gear drive:
 I've no idea what is up with the green lines on the picture. My snappy unit is very old but why it should choose to freak out in the space of about five minutes between the last picture and this one is anyone's guess. At any rate, if you turn the crank on the horizontal wheel, its spines interlock with the vertical one and cause it to spin. He hasn't figured out a use for it yet -- just give him time. :) |
OK, I was just going to talk about how happy I am that the weather is beginning to cool down enough that the cooler is too cold at night, but as I stood up to turn it off, I stepped on a toy train that was lurking in the shadows and tore the bottom of my foot. Um, OUCH. There are a few things that make me wish I could just let loose with a string of profanity, and injuring the bottom of my foot is one of them. OUCH. Good thing I had just taken a shower, and it was after my walk. I asked LT to bring me the bandaids (after I told him as calmly as I could, which wasn't very calmly, what I thought of his train), and C hovered over me -- "Is it a bleed? Oh, let me see. Oh dear. Oh honey. Just hold still, honey." -- as I was doctoring myself. That is why I don't let loose with the string of profanity -- because the very next time my little 3-year-old mimic damaged herself, she'd do the very same thing. She has an amazing memory capacity for speech, and gets the inflections the same and everything. It's cute (and a little amazing) when it's whole scenes from Bambi or Monsters Inc. Wouldn't be so cute if it was the aforementioned string of profanity. :-/
While I wait for T to get finished working on his buddy's truck and get his shower, I'm going to work on ivillage's book list, another idea I'm stealing from Jenn and Emily. And I'm going to moan quietly about the pain in my foot, too. OUCH.
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Tuesday, September 09, 2003
SpaceCamp
My kids are watching SpaceCamp. (note: from reading my diary you'd conclude that my children watch videos non stop since they seem to always be watching one while I type. Really, though, it's not like that -- it's just that the only times I can sit and relax and write up an entry are when they're settled quietly, and one way to do that is with a video). Until they borrowed this movie from my grandmother a few months ago (they have since returned it and re-borrowed it, by the way, must clarify lest you think I let them keep borrowed movies for years ;-), I hadn't seen it since I think 1986, on New Year's Eve. I must confess that I was totally convinced that "Daedalus" as portrayed in the movie was a real actual space station. When we watched it as a family, I told T that a boy in junior high had done a History Day project about Daedalus, but that he'd spelled the name wrong. T very diplomatically said that he was 99.9% sure, having been a space buff since grade school (which was longer ago than my grade school, let's just say that), that Daedalus was invented solely for that movie. I was not as diplomatic; I insisted, I'm afraid, that it had to be a real thing since Richard had done his project about it. Whoops. I did a lot of research online, and finally found out for sure on an astronomy newsgroup that T was right and I was wrong. I do not remember what the stakes were of our silly little bet on that topic, but I was utterly demoralized and felt like a buffoon. Not as much of a buffoon as Richard, though. He got a lot more than the spelling of the name wrong. What I have to wonder is where the heck he did any research for that project. Granted, it was eighth grade, but we had to have at least some sources.
Not, by the way, that I can claim much superiority in the area of History Day projects. I was in seventh grade that year, and my school friend and I decided to work together on a project. She would do the art, and she was really into drawing with perspective at the time, and wanted to do some kind of interior of a cathedral or something for the background art for our project. The only problem was that the topic of the project had to have something to do with "frontiers". So how to incorporate a cathedral with that? Simple, you title your display "Frontiers In Christianity." ACK. We did a good job -- we wrote a lot about the changes in religious culture from Biblical times to the present, and typed up blurbs of text and put them on little scrolls which we glued to the background. And of course the cathedral interior looked just great. :) But what a stupid idiotic name for a project. I'm surprised we didn't overhear the judges laughing about it. Maybe they were still in shock from "Deadelos."
C's doctor appointment went fine, by the way. The doctor says that the pigment loss on the side of her neck isn't anything to worry about, and that it's really common (which went along with the research I'd done online). She was more puzzled by the discoloration above her mouth, and finally concluded that it looked most like a bruise of some kind, like she was sucking a glass down over her mouth, but if it's still there next week I'm to bring her back in. C loves going to the doctor. She's been asking me at least once an hour to check the white spot on her neck, in a very serious little 3-year-old voice. She likes taking medicine too, little booger. She gets that from her dad, who used to try to drink Triaminic recreationally when he was a little boy. I, on the other hand, will generally suffer with a headache for hours before I finally give in to T's cajoling and take two aspirin. I tell him it's my anti-addictive personality -- unlike some people, I don't need to seek chemical solutions to my problems, physical or otherwise. ;-)
I was just getting a good laugh reading California's voter guide for the special election in October. Here's a quote from Larry Flynt's blurb: "California is the most progressive state in the union and I'm sure its citizens would welcome having a smut peddler who cares as their Governor." That's really funny, except that it's also true. This election is making South Florida look like a think tank in comparison. Dave Barry had a really great column about this a few weeks ago.
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kid stuff
I'm taking C to the pediatrician today. She has some odd skin discolorations, one on her face, and one on her neck. Her neck has a pale splotch, and her upper lip has a brownish area where it looks like her blood vessels have come to the surface. Not like a bruise, and not like a rash. I've looked online and there are a couple things that it looks like it could be, and neither are a hazard, but I would like to take her to the doctor to get it checked just to be sure. Of course with our sucky insurance (one definite drawback of living in a rural area is that all the good HMOs pulled out of our county, which was not profitable enough for them once they started chasing the doctors away by lowering and lowering their contracted rates, and left us with a bunch of cruddy and expensive PPOs and FFSs) this will cost way more than we're used to paying for healthcare. Man, I miss the good old golden days of Pacificare. sigh. Before, we would have a $10 copay for the office visit and that was it. Now we have $20 for the office visit and about five different bills ranging from $20 to $40, for copayments for lab stuff and who knows what all. And half the bills get contested and we have to fight tooth and nail to get them paid by the insurance at all. T broke his ankle last Thanksgiving and it has been totally depressing, calculating the difference between what we paid and what we would have paid under the insurance we had for the first eight years of our marriage. But I'll stop whining now. Must remind myself that even with all the hassles I like it better than I would some socialized 40%-of-your-income providing-insurance-for-everyone-whether-they-can-afford-it-on-their-own-or-not nationalized health care system. To each his own, right? [grin]
Anyway. School went OK today. LT is writing a play. He wants to put on a puppet show, put up signs, charge admission, that kind of thing. What the heck am I supposed to DO about this kind of stuff? He wants to do it all on his own and he's convinced it will be something that people would pay to see. But his materials are paper bags and crayons, and he's only seven years old. I hate having to give him these painful little lessons in reality, but I have to figure out a way to break it to him eventually. sigh. Maybe I'll offer a compromise -- I'll help him make the puppets with some of that construction foam stuff, he can write the story all on his own, and we'll invite friends, family, and neighbors to come and watch. Admission can be free but he could sell lemonade and brownies, or something. (taking a cue from movie theaters, who actually pretty much only profit from the concession stands :).
Well, I just received a call from the neighbor ladies, who want me to get their mail before we leave for the doctor's office. This has just shortened our get-ready time to almost nothing, so I have to get a move on.
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Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Grapes for sale
LT has set up a "grape stand" on our porch. We have some grapevines that just kind of grow wild among some lilac bushes and a flowering quince bush alongside our driveway. He has picked several bunches of grapes, washed them, and is selling them for a penny apiece (that's a penny per grape, not a penny a bunch). He also has ice water, at a dollar a glass. So of course T and I have patronized his business. It is so sweet and funny to see him set up these little ventures. Last fall he gathered two paper lunch sacks full of really big acorns when we were cutting wood. He didn't quite know what he would do with them when he got them, but soon after getting home, I went out on the front porch to find him assiduously painting a sign -- "ACORNS 98¢". He set the sign by our driveway, and sat back down in his chair on the porch with his bags of acorns and a cash box. I asked him if the price was per bag, and he was shocked that I would think so -- no, it was per acorn! I managed to talk him into making it 5 for that price, and bought 5 acorns. We had some friends over and they also bought 5 acorns apiece. That was going to be the end of his sale except that T figured out that he could use some PVC from an old laundry hamper of mine, and hook it up to his compressor's air hose, and we could launch acorns from it. My dad found out about this and bought many, many acorns to launch. This was the beginning of LT's entrepreneurial streak -- he began making plans for machines to make him money. First was an acorn-shelling machine which used two spinning gears to break the shells, and a fan to blow the shells away from the nuts; then a can squisher machine which would have filled our living room (he informed us that we had better ask our landlord's permission before he built it in the backyard since it might be too big to move when we move out of this house). We had a lot of discussions about supply and demand and the free market economy and how nobody would pay to use a machine to shell acorns since nobody has a use for acorns in our modern world. And people would rather squish their own cans than pay someone else to do so. Imagine our surprise when a few months later we were in an "ag museum" near here and saw a couple of Rube Goldberg contraptions which someone had made, one to squish cans, and one which used two gears to crack walnuts! At any rate, undaunted by the logical failure of his first two ideas, he continued coming up with more and more plans, and more and more money-making schemes. He has contented himself for the past six months or so with being the one to handle our recycling, and getting the money for that, but now that I've paid a $1.05 for a glass of ice water and a small handful of seedy grapes, I wonder if he's going to start coming up with more hare-brained seven-year-old ideas. :)
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Thursday, August 28, 2003
What They Never Tell You
C has just made a picture of a ducky for me. She is 3 which means that while the picture is adorable, I certainly needed her to tell me it was a ducky, know what I mean? Of course once she's named it I can see its legs and feet and body and head and bill. Nobody told me being a mom would be this much fun. I mean, I knew it would be nice having a baby, and I knew it would be nice having little children who grew up into big people, but all the little details like ducky pictures and stuck-on kisses and favorite storybooks requested over and over -- they more than make up for all the little stresses.
As you can tell I am back to my chipper self. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that I am ANOTHER POUND DOWN (woo hoo!), I leave to you to decide. I really don't think it is. I think it is a relief from all these agitating hormones that have been bouncing around inside me for a week, making me feel easily stressed and frustrated and bored and sleepy and mindless.
I am supposed to be going to the valley and going shopping, but I put that off until tomorrow. I did get lesson plans worked up for next week, as well as a lot of long-range school year plans done. However, I did not clean the school room. You see, all summer it's been the play room, and right now LT has the floor covered in army men, all set up and waiting for T to have time to have a battle with him. This weekend is going to be crazy-busy, but I think I can pencil in about three hours on Sunday evening to clean that room -- so they'd better have the battle done by then.
Another aspect of motherhood nobody tells you about, right? Scheduling your housekeeping around your son's militaristic tendencies (gee, wonder where he got THOSE).
I spent most of this morning chauffeuring around my neighbors. They are two little old ladies who were finally convinced by their chiropractor (funny how people who see chiropractors with regularity frequently come to see them as God-figures who are all-knowing, isn't it?) to give up driving. This is a good thing since neither of them sees or hears very well. They have lived together for years; they used to run a children's Christian camp in the mountains near here but when they retired from that and sold it, they bought the house next to ours to spend their quieter years. One is very deaf but moves around OK; the other hears slightly better but takes literally ten minutes to walk thirty yards. Or rather, to shuffle thirty yards. So understandably, taking them anywhere is an exercise in patience, as well as an adventure. Small errands turn into two- or three-hour affairs. It's VERY good for the kids to be around them; they enjoy each other, and the kids are learning patience and respect for a generation that will soon be gone. I love old people; I love talking with them. They have seen so much. I mean, I feel all mature when I meet a college student whom I knew as a newborn; these ladies were already old before I was born. They lived through times I've only read about in historical articles and school history texts. So it is definitely worth the time and effort of helping them, just to listen to them talk.
Another website I've been meaning to post about in here is BookCrossing so I'm doing it before I forget. It's a really neat concept, and the website does a better job of explaining it than I can, but basically, you "release" books in public places and then the person who finds them will ideally go online (thanks to a bookmark or bookplate or whatever that you leave in the book, with instructions), post their thoughts about the book, and then "release" it again somewhere else. So far, I have released three books which were never posted about again. :(. But I shall keep trying.
I finished reading Silas Marner and now I'm buried in Pride and Prejudice again. I LOVE THIS BOOK. This means, according to some diehard Jane Austen fans (of which I actually consider myself one) that I am not as mature a fan as someone who has Emma or Persuasion or even maybe Mansfield Park for a favorite. Too darn bad, this is a wonderful story, delightfully told. Not that the others aren't. But I suppose they're deeper, while P&P is "just" romantic. Sigh. Perfectly romantic, if you ask me. [flutter flutter]
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Thursday, August 21, 2003
Dinner out etc.
We went out to dinner tonight at my favorite local restaurant. I was relatively well-behaved but not totally uptight either. (in other words, I ate a couple of zucchini stick appetizers which I'm sure threw me WAY over my calorie quota for the meal all by themselves, I got a salad but not the additional soup I usually get, I gave my totally scrumptious roll (this place is famous for its rolls) to the kids, and I did what all the "weight loss tips" articles always suggest: I divided my dinner in half and brought half of it home for lunch tomorrow. So now I essentially get to have my favorite restaurant food two days in a row. :)
Poor LT. He and C had a late lunch; they ate around 2:30. He had two deep-fried burritos. Then he ate a snack consisting of probably six or eight quarter-round slices of watermelon about 4:00. Then we went to the restaurant at 6; right away he got a glass of rich chocolate milk with whipped cream on top, and he ate some of the zucchini appetizer and half my roll. Then his food came and he kind of dabbled with it, meanwhile drinking about a cup and a half of chocolate milk. Just as I was asking the waitress to package up my extra portion, he said his tummy hurt, asked me to pray for his tummy, then said, "Pray fast... I gotta...." We skipped praying and he ran into the men's room (thankfully we were right near it) with Daddy on his heels. Apparently everything from lunch onward made a reappearance, poor boy. There is something about my kids (and me) and chocolate milk. C has it BAD -- if she has chocolate milk or a chocolate shake or any sweet dairy drink (say from Starbucks) in the car, she WILL throw up. If she eats too much at a meal and then drinks chocolate milk, or vice versa, up it comes. Now me, I just get a bit of an upset tummy if I have too much; LT has thrown up once before (years ago, I think he was maybe 4) after eating a large meal and topping it off with chocolate milk. This was at Hometown Buffet, and he had fully overdone it on the all-you-can-eat macaroni and cheese. That time we were NOT next to the bathroom and we did NOT make it on time (we also did NOT go back to that particular location for a long time). For about a year he referred to HB not by its proper name but as "the restaurant where I frew up." Anyway. This was only the second time it caused any problem for him, but when I really thought about all he'd eaten in the space of about 4 hours (remember, the kid's only 7), I was not surprised. He was fine almost immediately, for which we are really glad. With C losing it yesterday morning, and then that tonight, I was beginning to think they had a virus or an intestinal infection or something.
I have learned today never to say that I've never gotten a copy of a rampant virus. My online friends are all abuzz about how many copies they were getting in ten minutes and I was rather smug. Well, my regular ISP has good virus protection, but I have an address for my sole web design client and at about five this evening the virus messages just started rolling in. I wasn't stupid enough to open any of them; I even turned off the preview pane just to be sure. But that address has probably received 20 or 30 copies of it in five hours. I am getting royally tired of it, to tell the truth.
Well, I am off to bed. T and the kids watched Star Wars Episode 1 this evening while I worked on my dad's birthday present (his birthday is today, the party is Saturday). I'm reading him a book on tape. Probably a flagrant copyright violation, but he likes to be read to and this way his darling daughter and delightful grandchildren are the voices he's hearing tell the story. :) (Well, grandCHILD; LT reads; C talks on the tapes but can't read yet). He gets a tape set for every birthday, Father's Day, and Christmas; so far I've done about six for him. Anyway. Thanks to reading for an hour and twenty minutes straight tonight, I have a nearly unquenchable thirst and my throat is scratchy. It's also surprisingly tiring doing all the voices. :) I have to be heading off early in the day tomorrow for the valley so I should get going before I fall asleep sitting up.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2003
I have earned a moment's repose...
Music: Loreena McKennitt, "The Lady of Shalott"
Mood: better than it was!
I have just finished catching up on dishes and sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor and now I have actually earned the right to sit here and type guilt-free. :) I made a pretty good dinner tonight, only 650 calories a plate: chicken breasts grilled on the barbecue with Pappy's and barbecue sauce, a caesar salad, and mashed potatoes with gravy (I cheated and used a gravy packet; with no drippings it's just so much nicer that way). The highest calorie contributor was the mashed potatoes. Even so, I ate 650 calories and I actually feel full. Like, I should have even stopped a few bites sooner. Is this what it's like for normal people? I had always thought I was the normal one, being basically an appetite on legs. I always thought people who ate small portions were either torturing themselves or putting on an act. But maybe there's hope for me to change my habits on a lifelong basis.
I was so darn crabby this afternoon. It was a combination of several factors: the literal pain in my neck, the lack of sleep last night, and my wonderfully bouncy exuberant children who really need to learn how to behave in the grocery store. They can be behaving totally normally in the car and then we go in the store and they're running and bouncing and hopping and yelling and picking each other up. Every time we go there I have to ride herd on them really hard. T says they do not do this with him. I think (and he agrees) that going to the store with Mommy is a bore, but going with Daddy is a treat because it's so rare. They haven't gotten spankings in quite a while, both being old enough to understand having privileges removed instead. But maybe a firm swat where it will do the most good would serve better than telling them, "you guys are going to be sorry when you get home and you want to do X"; perhaps home is just too far away for their hyperactive little brains to worry about.
No swimming tonight on account of my shoulder. I am trying to muster up the energy for a walk; I know I'd love it once I was doing it but I just can't bear the thought of it right now. I am enjoying being sedentary too darn much. Maybe if I get a good night's sleep tonight I'll go out first thing in the morning while T gets ready for work. Morning is even better than evening for walking. Besides, I did just burn 150 calories mopping. ;-) I think I'll settle for a nice game of computer Scrabble instead. By the way, if anyone has Scrabble 2.0 (that's the one they were giving away in cereal boxes for a while recently) and would like to help me figure out how to play a game together, I'm, er, game! :) Drop me a note and we'll set it up.
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