Three Hour Naps, Three Jello Snacks and Three Things I Didn’t Need to Know

Posted on March 7, 2011 | 3 comments

Good morning everyone!  I hope each of you had a good weekend.  We did.

This picture has nothing to do with anything else I am writing about today; I just like it.  It is from a trip to Gatlinburg in 2008.

  • Three Hour Naps

Even though we had a lot we wanted to get done this weekend, we still found time for naps on Saturday and Sunday.  Usually I end up taking about an hour and a half to two hours, and then I’m up, but for the first time in a while I took three hour naps both days.  Mark slept even longer.  Even Kayla (reportedly – with Kayla doing the reporting) slept two hours on Sunday.  At least we should be caught up on our rest!  Kayla used the time when we were napping and she wasn’t to paint pictures with watercolors for Mark and I.  Since I have the prerogatives of a proud parent, here is a photograph of her pictures:

For anyone in need of interpretative guidance, the top picture on the left is of the woods, with a stream running through it, the top center picture is of a golf green,  and the top right picture is a picture of the house, with our red brick as best as she could render with the water colors at her disposal, and the rose bushes in front.  If you look closely, there is a door and a door bell, but I am not sure my photograph is good enough for you to see that.  The bottom row is pretty self explanatory!  On top of painting these pictures, she managed to keep both No-No and Bad Dog quiet in her bedroom under their alter-egos of Mandy and Darwin (although one of the two if not both reverted to form since something  plastic and bright pink was rended to shreds; however, it doesn’t seem to have been anything important).

Kayla and Darwin This Morning

Kayla and Darwin This Morning

  • Three Jello Snacks

When we come home from school every day, Kayla and I have the same discussion – whether or not she is going to “get some snack.”    Most of the time it depends on how long it will take to fix supper and when the three of us will be able to sit down and eat it together.  If it looks like we are going to be eating a little later, I will let her have something. 

On Friday, Kayla asked if she could have a little cup of orange jello.  I told her yes, and didn’t think anything more about it.  To both Mark’s and my surprise at supper, she didn’t want to eat much.  We do not force her to clear her plate, but a certain threshold of food consumption is required before she can have dessert.   That threshold had not been reached, but she decided to stop eating anyhow.  I was a little concerned about this, since she normally eats very well, but right before she left the table, she looked at me with a mischievous grin and announced that she had had three orange jello cups.  She must have been operating on the principle that it is better to beg pardon then ask permission, but she wasn’t really begging for pardon either!

  • Three Things I Didn’t Need to Know

Over the course of my adult life, I have compiled a list of things that I learned that I didn’t really need to know.  These include tidbits of information like “if you leave the oven on at 350 degrees overnight, you  will NOT burn the house down,” a dog can eat a tube of neosporin ointment and not get sick,” and “Indian Hawthorn may be poisonous, but Darwin and Mandy chew on it all the time and are all right.”  I added three things to that list this weekend.

1)    Blue eyeshadow will rinse easily out of a tub.  And lest you accuse her unnecessarily, it was not Kayla’s fault that the blue eyeshadow ended up in the tub, but mine.  I got trigger happy in putting up my makeup containers, and picked up the big case in which I carry all my blush and eyeshadow to put it up without realizing that it wasn’t latched.  Voila, the blue eyeshadow in the bathtub.  Several other items slipped out also.  I leave it to your imagination as to whether I said at the moment everything spilled, “Verily, verily, I hath spilt my make-up case” or something stronger!

2)   If you leave a wooden clothespin on the vent of the toaster oven for two days, it will not ignite. 

  3) And the last thing I learned this weekend needs little explanation – If you are looking for your glasses while you are wearing them, it takes a while to find them!   

No one took me up on explaining “lie” v. “lay” on Friday.  If anyone can explain a quick way to tell the difference, along the lines of “your prinicipal is your pal”, please leave a comment.  An explanation as to whether the “.” comes before and after the parentheses would be welcome, too.  Otherwise, I will have to look the answers up myself! Have a great Monday everyone!

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Cleaning, Petting the Dogs, The Longest Walk Revisited, Braces and Grammar

Posted on March 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Isn’t it great to know that we have made it to another Friday?  Although we have nothing spectacular planned for this weekend, it’s nice –

excuse me while I go retrieve a handkerchief from Bad Dog, who just saw me looking at her and has decided to lie on the handkerchief and pretend that it’s not really there –

 to know that a chance to sleep in and have some additional family time is right around the corner! 

  • Cleaning

Our first activity of the weekend, however, will occur tonight when Miss Kayla gets to clean her bedroom and bathroom once we arrive home.  I don’t think she’s too happy with that itinerary, but it is necessary! 

  • Petting the Dogs

I got the chance last night to sit down with each of the dogs and pet them for a couple of minutes.  Darwin started it, really; I was going over to him to get him to stand up and go out for the last time before we went to bed, and he looked up at me from his dog bed, which is on one side of our fireplace in the den and his tail started wagging furiously.  Darwin’s dog bed is about two sizes too small for him – we have tried buying bigger beds, but he refuses to have anything to do with them – and it constantly amazes us that he can even fit in there!  So, when he started wagging his tail, rather than make him get up right away, I sat down by him and loved on him for a minute.  While I was doing that, Mandy looked up from the dog bed she was using on the other side of the fireplace with kind of a grumpy “Are you really going to wake me up now?” look, so I went over to her to pet her, too.  Petting Mandy is always a sweet experience; for all her foibles in the chewing and counter departments, she is a very loving dog and has the softest hair I have ever felt on a dog.  In my opinion, it is as soft as an angora cat’s hair would be, but less fluffy and infinitely less likely to send me into a sneezing fit!   Having petted the other two dogs, it just wouldn’t do, of course, to leave Tyra out, so I went over to her (she was on the couch, guarding “her man”, ie., Mark, from all comers except me) and stroked her for a while, too.  I got several tail thumps from her for that one.  It just was a sweet moment. 

  • The Longest Walk, Revisited

I was getting ready for bed last night, when my eyes fell upon the pair of shoes I had worn yesterday sitting by my bureau.  I thought about what I wrote yesterday, and decided it couldn’t be too hard to take them to the closet, so I went ahead and picked them up and carried them through the closet door – at which time I pitched them on the floor two inches from the shoe rack where they still remain, along with most of my other shoes.  Oh well, Rome wasn’t built in a day and two inches beats a whole room as a distance to conquer!

  • Kayla’s Braces

I was on the phone with my mom last night, and had just finished telling her that Kayla’s braces weren’t hurting her anymore, when screams started to erupt from her bathroom – the kind of screams that let you know that something is wrong.  I raced in there, got off the phone with my mom, and then got to play the “Stop screaming long enough to tell me what’s wrong” game – any mother will tell you that if you’re not frazzled when you first hear the screams, you will be by the time you finish playing twenty questions in between the screams.  I usually don’t make it to question 9 before my eyes start flashing and smoke starts coming out of my ears, because it is so frustrating to need to help and not be given any information about how to do so.  It turned out that a wire in the back of her mouth had poked into a very tender place in her cheek and stuck there.  It wasn’t in very deep, and we got it pulled out fairly quickly but there was quite some excitement for a minute or two!  After Mark got home, he insisted that Kayla put some wax on that wire, and put on the Canker-X medicine the doctor gave her, and that helped, too. 

  • Grammar

I have tried to use English correctly in these posts, but”lie” and “lay” defeat me – I have a 50/50 shot at it, but usually get it wrong.  So, if anyone knows, did Mandy “lay” on the handkerchief, or did she “lie” on the handkerchief, and is there a good way to remember the difference? 

Have a great weekend everyone and I will talk to you on Monday!

Nancy

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Earth Fare, The Longest Walk, General Von Bissing and the Birds

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 2 comments

Yesterday’s dog paw prints having faded into a nice light glaze all over our dark wooden floor, it is time to move on to other topics of conversation, although, for the record, No-no and Bad Dog kept up quite a trail of things for me to rescue yesterday, also!

  • Earth Fare

This weekend, Mark and I had the chance to go into an Earth Fare supermarket for the first time.  Earth Fare labels itself as “the Healthy Supermarket.”  The label “organic” is pretty much standard throughout the store.  It had a large selection of teas – I got a tin of berry green tea for Christmas, so I have been trying some different teas from time to time – I can brew one cup of tea, add 1 teaspoon of real suger and have a small treat for the cost of 1/3 point on the Weightwatchers system.  Its produce section, which was all organic fruits and vegetables, looked really good too.  We bought a few of them, some dry roasted cashews (the store sold them in bulk containers and you scooped out what you wanted), a fresh-baked loaf of sour dough bread and some wheat crackers.  The finishing touch, though, was the discovery at the check-out counter that the store sells what I consider to be the very best apple juice in the world – Martinelli’s Gold Medal 100% apple juice.  Kayla agrees with me.  Mark and I bought 16 bottles on Sunday; we are now down to only 4.  If you ever come across this apple juice, you really need to try it! 

  • The Longest Walk

I walked into Kayla’s bedroom the other day, to note the pairs of shoes scattered throughout the floor rather than sitting in the closet, and started to wonder irritably why it seemed so hard for her to walk the two feet from where the shoes were to the closet to put them in there – until I walked into my bedroom and noticed the three pairs of shoes I had sitting on the floor in our bedroom by my bureau drawer rather than in my closet.  The longest walk for both of us appears to be the path from the bedroom to the closet door.  I really should do better, since No-no and Bad Dog have been known to snatch shoes to chew when no handkerchiefs, socks or other items of clothing are available.   Other long walks for me appear to be the walk from the kitchen counter to the trash can with the empty diet coke can, and the walk from wherever the clothes were folded to the place where they are supposed to reside normally. 

Have you ever lost the TV remote and spent thirty minutes looking for it rather than walk the three feet over to the TV to turn it on?  I did that the other day.  I used to think it was just an amusing peculiarity of human nature but during this latest TV remote search I realized it has now become a necessity.  About 15 minutes into the search I walked over to the TV to turn it on manually, only to discover that, while I could turn it on and off manually, I was completely unable to do anything else without the remote.  There wasn’t even a channel switch!  That added a new urgency to the search for the remote, which was ultimately discovered underneath a couch cushion. 

  • General Baron Von Bissing and the Birds

General Baron Von Bissing was the German (well, really Prussian) military governor of occupied Belgium during World War I.  As such, he was responsible for ordering the executions of dozens if not hundreds of individuals, and the deportation of thousands of Belgians to Germany to work in forced labor situations.  (I am researching his life as best I can, in my copious free time, in connection with a book I would like to write.)  I was looking through the newspaper archives of the New York Times last night (they go back to 1851, and articles from 1851 to 1922 are in the public domain, ie., they are free) and came across a one paragraph article about a peculiar order of the general’s.  In the middle of the occupation, General Von Bissing issued an order stating that the “artifical blinding” of song birds was forbidden in Belgium as a “cruelty” that would not be tolerated.  Now, it’s not that I disagree with the sentiment, but for that practice to bother a military governor who acted as he did with respect to people just seems odd.  I also wondered why anyone would want to deliberately make a song bird blind and why that was a big enough problem in the middle of the war to require an edict of its very own. 

Well, that’s enough for now.  I need to complete a “discission” (Kayla tried to say “discussion” and managed to blend the words “discussion” and “decision” instead) with Kayla about the necessity to get her hair and teeth brushed quickly at this point.

Have a great day everyone!  

Have a great day everyone!

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Odds and Ends

Posted on March 2, 2011 | 1 comment

Good morning everyone!  It’s hard to believe we have arrived at Wednesday already! 

  • Kayla deprived of her morning fire 

Yesterday morning was another one of those days when I had a very hard time chivvying Kayla out of hibernation and into the cold, cruel world for another day.  Once I got her awake, she came be-bopping into the den to get dressed in front of the fireplace – only to find out that access was blocked because we had put some clothes up there from ironing.  Let’s just say her reaction was not positive; tears and drama were both involved.  When she said she was cold, I pointed out, yet again, that if she would go ahead and get dressed, she would start to warm up.  She wasn’t too thrilled with the logic of that statement!

  • No-No and Bad Dog Strike Again

Once I got Kayla shipped off to school with Mark, I then had the opportunity to start to get ready for work myself, in between retrieving items from No-No (Darwin) and Bad Dog (Mandy).  Darwin is “No-no” because when you tell him “No” about something he at least thinks about listening to you.   Mandy is “Bad Dog” because she really doesn’t care what you think about her activities.  (That laid back basset hound temperament strikes again!)  Yesterday morning’s festivities included rescuing two of Mark’s handkerchiefs, a pair of my hose, and Tyra’s dog bed from our bedroom from the miscreant pair.  Then, just for grins and giggles, the pair gave me the opportunity to rescue one of the two handkerchiefs for a second time last night.  (I also just had to rescue a dish towel from Darwin a second ago.)  We really are putting these things up; Darwin is just tall enough to reach whatever Mandy tells him to get.  The amazing thing is that no socks have been involved in the past 24 hours; I would guess that’s because Mandy has not yet seen a pair suitable for sharing!

  • Floor Decorations

It rained hard on Monday, which has left the back yard still pretty wet and muddy.  We have beautiful dark wood floors in the main part of our house, so we now have the added pleasure of random paw prints scattered on the floor throughout the den.  The most definite, and largest, paw prints are Darwin’s, and the second best prints are made by Mandy.  It adds a certain air of individuality to the floor!  That air will be lost once I am sure that the yard is dry enough to keep any attempts at wiping up the paw prints from being an exercise in futility. 

  • Sunday Night Eating Out

I have mentioned before that Kayla’s imagination is amazing to me.  We ate out Sunday night, and I got some grilled shrimp on a wooden skewer.  Because Kayla got baked potato soup, she was finished well before either Mark or I, so she picked up my skewer and started pretending like it was a pointer that she could use to show pictures of a house to us.  She started out by offering us a four bedroom house with two kitchens and a bonus room for $50.00.  By the time she finished, she was offering us a four bedroom house with two kitchens and five bonus rooms fully furnished (the fifth bonus room was for the dogs and came complete with 18 pairs of socks for Mandy to chew) with a large backyard (location of said house to be determined later) for $0.00.  We told her she drove a hard bargain, but that the last offer was too good to refuse! 

Have a great day everyone!

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The Accidental Haircut, Rain, Bananas and Light Bulbs

Posted on March 1, 2011 | 2 comments

  • Mark’s New Look

As mentioned yesterday, Mark also has a new look, quite by accident.  Right before bedtime Sunday night, he decided to trim his hair just a little bit over his ears.  Unfortunately, at the same time, Darwin popped onto the bathroom sink with his paws to see what was going on, and bumped Mark’s elbow just enough to cause the clippers to take a free swipe at about a quarter size spot on the front side of his head, completely shaving off all of the hair on that one spot.  Mark then made the mistake of asking for my help.  In spite of my best efforts (please note that there is a reason God steered me away from a career in cosmetology), by the time I had spent ten minutes on it, it looked like we were headed for a complete hair shave.  The three dogs, who have been shaved with clippers of their own before, all sat in front of the bathroom door looking greatly concerned.  Right before we hit the point where all of the hair on his head would have had to be shaved off, Mark remembered that we had some additional razor guards.  He went and found them, and then was able to blend the hair that was left on the top of his head into the part that was shaved so that he now has what looks like a very close crew cut on the top of the head.  The three dogs finally left their post in front of the bathroom door when the clippers stopped making noise, with a sigh of relief as they realized that the clipping was going to stop with Mark.

  • Rain and Bananas

Rain and bananas are two topics that tend not to go together – unless you have an Australian Shepherd mix named Tyra.  She has two idiosyncracies.  The first is her attitude towards water in general, and rain in particular. 

Tyra does not do water.  Period. Sincerely.  The first day we got Tyra from the humane society, back in 2004, we put her in the spare bathtub to give her a bath, and apparently managed to traumatize her for life.  To this day, she refuses to come into the bathroom if someone is in the bathtub, or within reach of a bathtub full of water.  This general attitude towards water is folded into a more specific attitude toward rain.  Tyra does not like to go outside when it rains – unless a human is willing to put on a raincoat and walk out there with her.  In our old city, I managed to walk her through Hurricane Dennis by doing just that.  I was the only person dumb enough to walk outside at the time, but the dog was desperate, and I was fond of the carpet.  We’re not sure how she does it, but even when we have the dogs outside and an unexpected gully washer comes up, though the other two dogs will be soaked to the skin, Tyra remains bone dry.  We have wondered if she makes the other two sit on top of her or something!

Last night, a front moved through, and right about the time we got home, the bottom fell out, which meant I had to force Tyra out in the rain, which brings us to the other idiosyncracy, bananas.  She moped a little bit all evening, until Mark decided to have a couple of bananas for dessert.  Tyra loves bananas.  You can have her on the other end of the house, with three doors shut between her and the kitchen, and the minute someone picks up a banana, she just knows and begins begging her way to the spot where the bananas are.  She has a little tap dance she does once she knows the bananas are on their way.  So, today, her forced sojourn into the rain this evening was assuaged just a little bit by the banana she got to have.  (Mark gave her one all to herself, since the other two dogs happened to be outside at the time.)  She then sat on the couch for another thirty minutes thumping her tail and looking at Mark in hopes that other bananas would be forthcoming.

  • Light Bulbs

We have very interesting light bulbs in the den of our house.  They are spotlight bulbs, and for whatever reason, they tend to go out at least in pairs, if not in triplets, about every three months.  We finally got tired of it, and bought a large supply of light bulbs that are supposed to last for at least two years.  We replaced the last one today.  (The time before when it went out with two others, Mark was able to tighten it and get it to come back on, while the other two were really dead.)  If any of them go out before 2013, I am going to be very disappointed!

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New Looks!

Posted on February 28, 2011 | 3 comments

Good morning everyone!  It is hard to believe that it is Monday already!  Our household, emboldened by the new looks of spring blooming forth across our state, spent the weekend in obtaining new looks themselves!

  • Kayla’s Braces
  • The most important new look, of course, was Kayla’s braces.  The people at Allen Orthodontics on Friday were just super with her, as they always are, and she has been a trooper about her mouth and the soreness that comes along with the first few days of braces.  Sunday we stopped for a minute, and she let me take two pictures of her with her braces. 

Because she said the sun hurt her eyes, we took a second picture, too.

  • Mom’s New Look
  • Then it was my turn.  I spent Saturday morning getting my hair colored, so Kayla wanted to take pictures of me with my new hair color on Sunday. 

Front:

Back:

Side:

Front Again:

  • The Escape’s New Look
  • We also had a trailer hitch put on the Escape on Saturday, so that we would have a way to pull a light trailer that could carry Mark’s scooter back and forth to the Suzuki place for servicing.

  • Spring!
  • While the most important new look in our house was Kayla’s braces, the most spectacular new looks are with the trees and flowers around us as spring approaches.  Here are some pictures of them:

A tulip tree in full bloom:

Close Up of the Tulip Tree:

  • Daffodils

Here are some daffodils that have grown wild on a hillside:

And here is a close-up of another group of daffodils that have just started a new clump across the street from the ones on the hill.  In a few years, they will have the ground covered!

The last new look in our household was Mark’s.  He originally intended to rest on his laurels with the truck, but a small “oopsie” by him, followed by a bigger “oopsie” by me led to an entirely new look for him also.  But that post will have to wait for another day!  So, COMING SOON:  The Accidental Haircut!

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Weightwatchers as Kayla sees it

Posted on February 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

Thursday night is not as busy for us as Wednesday night, but it still is busy, since Thursday night is when I go to Weightwatchers.  The meeting is at 6, so I have just enough time to get Kayla from day care and arrive at the meeting just a little early so I can get weighed in.  Kayla attends the  meetings with me out of necessity, and I am very proud of how well behaved she is during them.  In fact, she has been quite a hit with the group, and the leader will ask her to help hand out items and do other little things which make her feel included.  Her favorite part is when she gets to weigh in (for free).  She listens to the leader too; the suggestion a couple of weeks ago was to compare your level of hunger to traffic lights – green means you’re hungry, yellow means you’re getting close to satisfied, and red means you’re way too full.  About a week later, we were eating dinner, and out of the blue, Kayla looked up at me and said, “Mom, I’m at yellow.”  

Last night, Kayla had been playing outside at day care when I picked her up, and her first, second (and next 100) comments involved the fact that she was thirsty and wanted a drink.  I had nothing in the car with me, and not being gifted with the ability to manufacture something out of nothing, I told her when we got to the meeting place, she could get a drink at a water fountain.  Unfortunately, we didn’t see a water fountain anywhere on our way in, either.   So she spent the entire meeting whispering to me “I’m thirsty.”  When we got outside after the meeting, she looked at me and said, again, “I’m thirsty.”  I stopped, looked at her in amazement and said, “You’re thirsty?  I never would have guessed!  What on earth would have made me think that you were thirsty?”  She looked at me and said, “Daaadddyy!” in the tone of voice she uses when she knows she is being teased and wants you to stop.  I pointed out that I was Mama, not Daddy, since I was the one with dark hair and brown eyes, not light hair and blue eyes, and that it probably was time for her to be able to tell the difference between us.  She started to laugh and then she said, “It’s just that I love both of you  so much that I have a hard time telling you apart!” and then she gave me that  little grin that says she is seeing how I will take it.  I looked at her and said, “I don’t believe that, but I give you credit for quick thinking!” and she laughed again as we drove home.

She has been very disappointed that there are no free samples of anything given out at the meetings that we have attended so far – at Weightwatchers’ meeting, there are boxes of different snack bars and other items on the weigh-in table that you can buy if you want, and she has just been certain that somewhere along the line free samples will be forthcoming.  Yesterday was her magic day – we got to try some cracker/chips that were 3 points for 30 that the leader had found at the store.  They were pretty good.  The only problem was that they were seasoned with sea salt and the sea salt obviously did not help with the thirst. 

Today is “B-day” in our household – the day that Kayla’s braces get put on.  Mark is going to take her this afternoon to the appointment.  She is already very nervous about it.  Please say a little prayer for her.

Have a great Friday everyone!

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This and That

Posted on February 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

  1. I forced a very sleepy little girl out of hibernation this morning and into the cold, cruel world of getting ready for school, and she did NOT like it!  Her latest fad is to get up, grab her clothes, turn on the fireplace in the den and huddle in front of it while she gets dressed.  (No, it is not that cold in my house – well, sometimes it is, but not right now.)  It looks quite pitiful and Dickensy – I keep waiting for her to bring me her empty cereal bowl, look at me with mournful eyes and say in a tiny voice, “Please, ma’am, can I have some more?” 
  2. Wednesday is our busiest day, because Kayla has dance after school, which finishes up at 5:50, and then I have to feed her, get her home to change into her sneakers and then be at the church by 6:15.  We usually are home by about 7:45 p.m.  Unfortunately, homework does not regulate itself according to our schedule so on Wednesday nights when she has homework, I am trying to cram her head full of (usually) math in 15 minutes and still get her to bed on time.  It can be quite a drama filled experience.  Last night when we entered the car, I asked if she had homework, and Kayla said yes.  Once we were on the way to the church, she announced that she didn’t have homework after all; the teacher had decided to keep them from pulling the homework page out of their book after all.  The dilemma:  Should I double check the homework file to investigate the mysterious disappearing homework, or just take the statement at face value and hope for the best?  I’ll let you decide what I did…..
  3. Isn’t it nice to see families doing things together?  Last night the three of us participated in a joint parking project.  I was driving and trying to swing into the garage without hitting the other car.  I got advice from both Mark and Kayla (Mark:  Cut it as hard as you can to the left; Kayla:  You’re okay on my side!)  Of course they were sitting on the same side, so the instructions were a little conflicting, but I decided to go with the more experienced driver :).  Regardless of whose advice was better,  since everyone participated, it qualified as a group project.  Everyone was still speaking to everyone else when we finished, too!
  4. I have now seen about five tulip trees in full bloom.  They are so beautiful!  I really hope we don’t have a killing frost this year.  The Bradford pear trees buds are starting to get full, but they’re not ready to bloom yet.  It would be too early for them, anyhow.  I still haven’t seen any yellow bells, which is sort of odd for this time of year here.  If anyone has seen some, I sure would like to know about it! 

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Mrs. J. and the Lemonade

Posted on February 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Yesterday evening, before Mark go home, our neighbor, Mrs. J., came over for a minute to return some space heaters we had lent her when her heater went on the fritz.  Well, the visit wasn’t entirely spontaneous; Kayla had seen her otuside on her front yard with her new puppy and had begged me for permission to go down to say hello, so I let her go.  Mrs. J. is a favorite of ours, with her sweet, kind nature and we all love to visit with her.  Kayla came back to the house with one of the heaters, and with Mrs. J holding the other, so I invited her into the house and we visited for a little while.  Kayla, apparently having learned from watching Mark and me, understood that the first rule of hospitality was to offer someone something to drink, so she asked Mrs. J if she wanted anything, and Mrs. J said, “No, thank you.”  Kayla decided that that was not good enough, so she entered teh kitchen, and after various noises had floated forth from the kitchen, Kayla emerged with a glass of pink lemonade, complete with straw in place, for Mrs. J.  Being the sweet woman that she is, Mrs. J. had no other choice then to accept it from Kayla.

Knowing that there had been no pink lemonade “ready-made” in the house, I gently asked Kayla about the pink lemonade’s sudden appearance.  She told me cheerfully that she had opened the pink lemonade koolaid packet, poured the whole (2 quart packet) into the (12 oz.) glass, added water and ice and stirred.  I asked her if she had added sugar to the mix, and just as Mrs. J. took the first sip, both she and Kayla answered “No” at the same time. 

I told Kayla it was a nice idea, but asked why she hadn’t used the lemonade that was already made up in the refrigerator.  She told me she couldn’t find it.  I couldn’t help it; I asked her “You mean you missed that big pitcher sitting there beside the milk?”  There was silence for just a second, and then she she said shortly, “Oh.”  Resilient as ever, she re-entered the kitchen, and re-emerged quickly with three fresh glasses of the already made-up yellow lemonade, again with straws in place, showing that her heart was in the right place, she just needed a little help with execution!

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Spring and the Call that all Working Mothers Groan At

Posted on February 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Spring is definitely starting to make an appearance in this part of Alabama.  This morning I saw my first blooming daffodils (they always seem to just pop up overnight) and my first tulip trees starting to bloom.  I haven’t seen any yellow bells (fuchsia to those more horticulturally minded) but if the daffodils are blooming they can’t be too far behind!  Even if the cold weather returns, I am going to enjoy these first signs of spring for as long as I can.

Today I got the phone call that makes every working mother groan.  It never comes on a day when I have nothing to do, when it is convenient for me to deal with, or when no projects are pending.  No, this phone call always chooses to come usually 1) right after I have taken a day off; 2) when lots of stuff is going on at work, and 3) when a project is due.  You guessed it – the school called to tell me that Kayla wasn’t feeling well.  The nurse let me talk to Kayla, which always brings forth the most pitiful little voice on the voice saying, “Hi Mama!”  which makes you feel like the meanest mom in the world if you dare to tell her she has to stick it out for the whole day. 

She had a very bad headache that had lasted all day, and the school can’t go ahead and give her any Tylenol because it violates school policy.  She hasn’t gone to the nurse nearly as much as she did last year, so I broke the “no fever/no stay” rule in hopes that I could get the sinus problem taken care of today so that we’re not dealing with these headaches for the next 8 weeks.  She was a little surprised to find out that coming home sick when Mom still has to work has all kinds of unpleasant little rules like “you must lay down in your room with the light off until 3 p.m.”, “no, you don’t get to watch the rest of Beezus and Ramona when you come home sick,” and “no, girls do not get to call their friends when they come home sick.”  She has taken most of the rules with very good grace, though, and we even survived working through her homework on “deckimals” today!  I will be working “second shift” tonight, but at least she is feeling better!

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Posted in Just stuff..., When things don't go as expected

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