Feel the Noise

Today is going to be one of THOSE days.  The kids woke up fighting.  The dogs woke up whining and I think I woke up with this headache.  No wait, I did not have this headache before the kids got up.  And of course we have things to do, places to go and people to see, so locking myself in my bedroom is probably not an option. 

I saw the best cartoon the other day, it showed this furry little monster with huge eyeballs.  The caption read, "I put redbull in my coffee pot this morning instead of water.  Now I can SEE noises!"  An accurate description of how this morning feels I must say.

Therefore I will resort to my stress-reliever of choice, my imagination.  Perhaps if I imagine places that are more noisy and chaotic than my home, I will feel better about being trapped stuck here. Here is a top 10 list:

10. New York City.
 9.  A NASCAR race.
 8.  The tarmac of O'Hare International Airport.
 7.  Bike week in Daytona.
 6.  A professional football game.
 5.  A Southern Baptist revival camp.
 4.  A California freeway at rush hour.
 3.  The state fair on "Kids Get In Free Day"
 2.  Mardi Gras.

And of course, lets not forget.....
1.  All you can eat crab legs at Hooters on a Friday night.

Yup, I feel a little better.  Peace out my friends :)

A Modern Day Love Affair

Don't be confused darlings, that is a picture of my brand-spanking new dishwasher.  As many of you know I have been living a harder simpler life since we moved into this house, which includes washing dishes by hand (not by choice) and in the last 6 months or so hanging all my clothes on a clotheslines in the basement (because the dryer died)......don't cry for me, it's character-building (or so my dad likes to say). 

At any rate, due to my husband's recent job switch and massive amounts of overtime, we can finally afford to start heading back into the 21st century.  This last weekend we went to Lowe's where I thoroughly harrassed the nice salesman and finally picked out a new dishwasher.  It was in and running in no time and I happily encouraged my friends to eat as much as they wanted and use ALL my dishes if they liked, since I no longer had to stand in front of the sink and wash them one by one!

Now I often find myself gazing lovingly at my dishwasher, speaking sweet nothings to it while I load dirty dishes in it and when no one is looking I even stroke the clean white button panel.......but I digress.  

I know how anxious you are to hear about the arrival of my sweet little washer and dryer next month, so I will dutifully keep you posted :)

Love,
Jules

The Old Switcheroo

I love change.  Lots of it, all the time.  I tend to change my hair color every few months, my vehicle every few years and my underwear every day.  My mom says I'm a bit of a gypsy.  I love new places, faces and spaces baby!  Unfortunately I am now married and a mother.....and not everyone likes change as much as I do.  So I get by with little changes here and there, things like paint or pictures, so on and so forth.  One of my most favorite changes has always been rearranging furniture.  You can have a whole new room in 10 minutes!  Again, pretty sure I'm the only one in my family that feels this way as everyone else rolls their eyes and groans when I say, "Let's just change it up a bit in here shall we?" 

My latest project has been moving Noah to the top floor and moving my office from the cleaning closet to Noah's old room.  In order to move Noah upstairs, I had to move his brothers over into the other room.  This has been AWESOME.  I've gotten to paint like a crazy woman, move lots of furniture and make a bazillion trips up and down the stairs (good for the glutes and hammies!)  Sadly, my husband does not share my enthusiasm and for those of you who know my husband, this is not surprising. 

On Sunday I asked for his assistance in moving furniture from the basement to the 2nd floor.  He trudged down the stairs as slowly as possible while I jumped around like the squirrel in Over The Hedge (who acts like he's on crack and speed simultaneously).  Dustin patiently asked, "Haven't we already moved these several times?"  To which I replied, "Nope, you're hallucinating.  We've only moved the corner desk from the old house to this house, right into this spot, and the white desk from upstairs to its current location."  I could see him mentally treading water as he searched for another tactic to avoid this chore.  As I'm sure you've surmised, he didn't find one and the furniture is now in its next temporary location. 

I often think that the desire to keep things the way they are is just around the corner and someday I'll be content to just sit back and enjoy the changing of the seasons, changing the radio station and changing my daily calendar page.  Bwahahahahaha (hysterical evil laugh).  As IF!!

Blink and You Miss It

Blink and you miss it is a phrase often associated with things like really tiny towns, lightening and the amount of time a $100 bill stays in my wallet.  It would also be aptly used to describe this summer in Alaska.  We've had maybe a week of sunshine.  While my mother is down in Montana bitching about the heat, I'm up here bitching about the rain.  The grass is always greener........in Alaska. 

A few posts ago I told you about Greta and her amazing digging ability, which has been directed in a full-on offensive at my flower beds.  Throughout all the digging I was still able to hold on to hope that the annuals I put in containers this year would flourish.  Too bad they're drowning.  The cucumbers in my garden only made it through the first week after transplant before they declared there would be no pickles this year, yellowed up and died.  I stood over them and said, "You are the weakest link!"  Hardy vegetables my ass. 

I've always believed that it's best to try and find the bright side in everything as much as possible, but I'm really struggling with this one.  We had 139" of snow this last winter (almost 12' for those of you who are also math challenged).  I figured God had "blessed" us with as much precipitation as one area could ask for.  Boy, when I'm wrong I'm really wrong (refer to first husband for another classic example of this theory in action). 

Oh well, I suppose acting like a big old cry-baby-pee-pants won't make the rain stop.  Perhaps I should start designing umbrellas.  Do you suppose anybody would want one that says "Noah built his ark and all I got was this dumb umbrella."?

I Paint with Food

When we moved into our current house we knew the entire inside would require a fresh coat of paint.  Of course this job falls to me as I am "The Homemaker Extraordinaire."  As if.  At any rate, regardless of my skills, it's my project.  Let me just say, I have always had a fear of putting colors together.  I first noted my inability to do this well when I started dressing myself 30 years ago.  The other children usually looked pretty well put together.  I looked like a hot mess in horizontal stripes and paisley with hair that usually hadn't been combed.  This lack of color coordination was again confirmed in middle and high school when we were required to take art.  I nailed black and white, failed color collage.  Now, here I am faced with the challenge of a color scheme for an entire home.  And I am determined not to fail. 

Here's what I have learned about myself in the interim since age 4.  I like color!  I like BOLD colors, jewel tones, rich warm colors that make you want to sink into them.  I also like food.  Why is this relevant you ask? Because they name paint colors after foods!!!  I know right?? I was as excited as you are.  This changes everything!  I KNOW food.  I am good at food. 

So I headed to Lowe's and started picking through the paint chips, focusing on the colors I was drawn to.  For the stairs I found sugarcane, a very smooth but warm white.  Moving into the kitchen I found pomegranate red and crumb cookie, another soft white.  I am on a roll!! 

I am a little nervous about the living room and have held off picking those colors yet because they have to coordinate well with the kitchen, since one flows into the other.  I'm leaning towards a coffee color, coffee with lots of cream......maybe if I take my morning cup into Lowe's they could match it for me.....

Stranded

When I hear the term stranded I picture someone stuck out in the middle of nowhere, car broke down, in a desperate state of mind.  Well, I too have been stranded recently.......but not because my car broke down. 

I think most people have to pee first thing when they get up in the morning right?  Well, I do anyway.  And this morning was just like every other.  Only when I went to grab for the T.P, there was NONE!!  My head whipped over to the shelf where I store the backup rolls and there was NONE!!  For me this causes a sensation similar to the feeling of the pilot saying "Put on your oxygen mask and put your head between your knees ladies and gentlemen, it's going to be a bumpy landing." 

I quickly racked my brain because I knew that I had known we were getting low.  I definitely remembered adding it to the grocery list and I also remembered grabbing it off the shelf when I bought groceries last night.  So where was it now?  Still in the truck?  No, we brought all the groceries in.  Did I get distracted by the cute cart boy who took my cart in the parking lot and forget to grab it off the bottom of the cart?  No, well, yes I was distracted but I'm sure the cart was empty when I handed it over.  Conclusion, the checker had failed to put it back in the cart after she scanned it.  I scrolled through my options for punishment of this offense including mooning her, wrapping her car in toilet paper and going through her line with every single package of toilet paper off the shelf, but none of these seemed to fit the crime so I decided I would just take my receipt back to the store and get my toilet paper. 

Now it was game time and a decision had to be made.  Shower curtain or the waddle of shame over to the Kleenex box.  Damn that woman for forcing me into this position!!  Literally!!  Don't worry mom, I voted out the shower curtain and instead made like a penguin.  And really, if I had that much shame, would I have blogged about it?  Nope.  No shame in my game folks. 

An Only Child

God blessed me with 3 children, although blessed often feels like too strong of a word.  However, each summer Austin and Connor return to Montana for 2 months to visit their dad.....leaving Noah an only child. 

I know what you're thinking, "but caring for just one must be easier."  You're wrong.  It most definitely is not.

An only child has ONLY his mother to distract him, entertain him, fight with him and play with him. 

Most days Noah and I follow a pretty relaxed routine that includes me working, him catching up on Dora the Explorer, some yard work, housework and a little TV in the evening.  Other days there is no relaxation to be found. 



For example, some days go like this:
1.  Noah finds it funny to put his underwear and pants on incorrectly, usually when we're trying to get ready to go somewhere.  This entails putting both feet into the same hole and hopping around yelling, "MY PANTS ARE ON BACKWARDS!!"

2.  Puts "only a little bit" i.e. huge glob of toothpaste on his toothbrush and then proceeds to smear it on the counter, the floor, his shirt and the sink.  I'm usually pretty unsure any made it into his mouth.

3.  Tries to recreate the tsunami of 2011 in my bathtub.  Pretty sure that doesn't need any more explanation.

4.   Lays on the dog, jumps over the dog, jumps onto the dog, uses the dog as a launching pad, steals the dog's toy......and then cannot understand why the dog snapped at him which hurts his feelings and causes him to cry.

5.  Last but not least, hijacks a king-size bed by pretending to be a barnacle and attaching himself firmly to my person at which point he begins to generate enough heat that causes me to think spontaneous combustion will be the cause of our house burning down.

Laugh it up everybody.  Someday I'm going to come to your house and recreate these incidents and see how funny YOU think it is!! :)