because someday soon he won't let me post these stories...

Monkey is upstairs on the potty.

Me: How you doin' up there, Monkey?

Monkey: DON'T SAY THAT.

Me: What should I say?

Monkey: SAY, 'HOW ARE YOU DOING UP THERE?'

Me: How are you doing up there?

Monkey: DON'T SAY THAT!

Me: What should I say?

Monkey: SAY, 'HOW ARE YOU DOOOOOING UP THERE?'

Me: How are you doooooing up there?

Monkey: DON'T SAY THAT!

Me: Well, what should I say???

Monkey: SAY, 'HOW ARE YOU DOOOOOING UP THERE, BUTTHEAD?'

Me: I'm not going to call you a butthead.

Monkey: FINE. THEN JUST GET UP HERE AND WIPE MY BUTT INSTEAD.

kids are disgusting

I mean, really.

Lameness

GAH. Only reason I'm posting this? Because my kiddo erupted like Mt. Vesuvius last night (five times) and forced me to concoct a sub plan at 11:30 p.m. in between dashes up the stairs to try to catch some of the mess in a plastic mixing bowl lined with a dish towel and then the alternating dashes down to the basement to shuffle our bedding, towels, and several sets of clothing from washer to dryer and then back upstairs to the bed, ready to take the next round. Then back downstairs with the new load of ick. Rinse and repeat. Until 2 AM.

So when I started this blog, my goal was to get writing again. I had finished my first novel, spent a couple months querying it to agents (with no positive responses, frustrating because the rejections aren't even based on someone reading the novel!) and then got sucked into the bog of motherhood and teacherdom and, well, real life. So mired was I that I didn't write a single thing other than stuff for work. Maybe an email or two, I'll admit. Oh, and okay, fine, maybe a post or a thousand on a certain natural family living forum. But writing on a regular basis--something that has been a part of me since I was in elementary school--had virtually disappeared from my life since having children.

This blog was my resolve to keep a journal, something I had tried eight thousand times since Jabber was born, with very sporadic results. I decided to write once a week about my kids and their shenanigans, my thoughts on being a parent in this crazy world, my process of becoming a writer/remaining a writer/succeeding as a writer, random bits of creative writing that I hoped might trickle out of me, and maintain some kind of regularity to the whole thing. All last spring and summer I had the most terrific routine, too. I had a gym membership, and I would go work out after the boys went to bed (David included, since he works suuuuuuper early in the morning and goes to bed, ideally, right around the time that Jabber and Monkey do), and while I jogged around the track or slogged along on the elliptical machine, I would think of things to write about. Then I came home and made them happen.

At the end of summer, my gym membership ran out. There was no money for a renewal, sadly, since we are all tightening our belts (haha, yeah, try loosening the drawstring on my sweatpants now!) and stuff since apparently the economoy is awful and times are tough. (This, so far, is not any different from my life before the economic crisis, but whatever. I have lost exactly zero dollars on the stock market. :P Still, it is nice that David and I are still both employed...knock on wood.) Oh, dear, I digress.

Since school started, I've been terrible about this blog, even though I'm doing a nice job at writing itself. The kids...what could I write about them? I feel like I barely see them, to be honest.

The holidays themselves are always sort of an invitation for my soul to freak out. We start with "Deer Camp," the three weekends in November that we all go to the in-laws' so David can hunt. We have a great time, although I think my children have just about worn out their welcome after two weekends. They are certainly energetic, to say the least. That's three weekends in a row that I don't get laundry done, groceries shopped, toys picked up, whatever needs to be done. Then we have Thanksgiving, a family get-together the weekend after that, and wow! That brings us to the boys' birthdays. Wow, it's so nice to have their birthdays only one day away from each other. And just two weeks from Christmas!

*Elissa dies of overwhelmedness*

I've done my complaining about all of this...to anyone who will listen, honestly. But I haven't really come to terms with exactly how lame of a person I really feel at the moment. My mom, trying to reassure me over the telephone, said something like, "Well, you know, you need to let things slide. Who cares if the house doesn't get dusted today."

Uh, Mom? I don't think it's been dusted since 2005. That's the least of my worries.

There are so many things I should be getting done at any given time; I get lost in all the little details. I should be doing a craft project with my children to make little gifts so that they can give something nice to everyone in the family. Instead, I can't even manage to find time to give Jabber a haircut and search through the winter gear in the basement to find Monkey some boots before there's actually snow on the ground. I should be baking cookies with them, writing out greeting cards, shopping for Santa, and I dunno...buying a turkey for Thanksgiving, since I am pretty sure we somehow agreed to having the in-laws over here for Turkey Day? I can't even manage to get the checkbook balanced or buy toothpaste for the baby or change all my clocks over from daylight savings time.

So I'm lame. And my blog is lame. And my house is messy. And my bedroom smells like sick baby. And I haven't said even a little hello to any of my friends in over a month. (Hello, friends! I really do love you, honest!) And...I complain too much. I promise, the next entry will be either witty or endearing or, at the very least, mildly interesting. :)

Head Lice

Ha! Made you itch! You could stop reading right now, and you'd still be itchy. Yep, right there behind your left ear. NO! It's at the nape of your neck!

Sigh. Picked up the Monkey from daycare this morning, after Jabberwock and I had met Dad and Little Sister for waterpark playtime, and I was met with the news that one of the lovely children who attends the daycare has head lice. So, instantly my head is acrawl with phantom parasites. ICK! I checked both kids' heads very carefully. I examined every follicle. Monkey does have about eighteen billion bug bites on his head, but they are very clearly mosquito bites, not head lice bites. So why am I still all itchy?

I've never had lice, and I hope with all of my being that I never do. When I was a kid, we went to the nurse at school, who poked through our hair with little plastic straws and then made this little sound in the back of her throat and sent us along, either to the left or to the right. Nobody knew which line was good news and which was bad, which line led back to spelling tests and music class and which one led to phone calls home and the cry of "cooties" every time you came around until somebody else did something humiliating and earned your spot of ridicule.

I just hope we all end up in the right line this time around (or the left...whichever is lice-free!), and that you never hear another word from me on this subject. I bet you do, too.

Seriously, did you just feel something crawling?

Yuck, yuck

Lost power for quite a bit of our evening here due to strong winds, rain, and other storm-type stuff. So I went back to the gym (third night in a row...go, me!) so that I could do something other than sit in the dark. This is pretty mundane, but it's past 11:00 and I'm racing the lightning here to meet my goal of blogging "almost daily." Is it better to write like crap than never to have written at all? Probably not.

Well, honestly, I could post some cute-ass pictures of my kids, but some weird thing keeps happening to the photos. They turn sideways no matter what they look like in my photo program or how I save them or which way I rotate them. I have truly spent FAR too much time trying to figure it out, with my husband sort of glaring at me as he chases the boys out of the kitchen with a spatula and trips over thirteen or fourteen toys in the process.

Here's an example. This was on the one day we actually had summer, which sounds like I'm complaining but honestly, here's my little secret: I hate being hot. I hate glaring, hot, relentless sun (though I do appreciate a little partly sunny with a gentle refreshing breeze, maybe 70 or 75 degrees?) that chases me into the shade or a big, stupid-looking floppy hat and some SPF 50. Heat and the nasty humidity that go along with it make me lazy and sweaty, with frizzy hair and blotchy freckles, and they also make me contemplate baring my blinding arms and legs in skimpy clothing that sticks to my body and forms a moist, slightly smelly tent of trapped heat.

What was I doing? Oh, yeah, posting a messed up photo of my little Jabberwock.

See? Wouldn't it be a lot nicer as a horizontal? Like it is when I look at it everywhere else in the world???

Anyway.

So this morning I was changing Monkey's diaper. It was the hard-earned product of some pretty considerable work in the far corner of the bedroom, back behind the toybox. When I opened that sucker up, I was impressed, and said something like, "Wow, Monkey! That was a pretty full diaper!" (Actually, I probably said something more like, "Ooh, Monkey, lookie this ginormous poopie diapie!" 'cause I'm a geek like that.)

Jabberwock came sprinting over to take a look. Apparently being a geek is hereditary. "Wow, Monkey! It's a poop-a-potamus!" Ha! A Poop-a-potamus! I can certainly see this becoming a very unfortunate family phrase. I've already demonstrated that my boys are obsessed with potty humor. So I can just hear it now.

"Mom, check out my Poop-a-potamus!"

"Wow, Dad! Way to Poop-a-potamus!"

"Shut up, you Poop-a-potamus-head!"

(Did I mention I teach middle school? There's my maturity level.)

Just why?

Quickie post 'cause I'm supposed to be working, but seriously people, why does my son drink bathwater (by slurping it out of the soapy washcloth, no less), gnaw holes in the kitchen garbage bag, and eat handfuls of mud from the sandbox but turn up his nose at anything we are offering for dinner?

Monkey only eats really gross stuff!

The Toilet Mystery

Not much time tonight to write, but I had a couple of silly things happen this morning while getting ready for work, and I thought perhaps I'd start an occasional series here--things I never anticipated about motherhood. Nothing so profound, you understand, just the strange and goofy things that I didn't know would ever be a part of my life, like the fact that any time I open one of the doors on my minivan, I leave a small sprinkling of stale Cheerios behind. For the birds, I tell Jabberwock. Or like the fact that I'm driving a minivan, for that matter.

So this morning when I got out of bed I really had to use the bathroom. Monkey was nursing like some kind of addict all night, including straight through about three snoozes, and by the time he was ready to back off and let me have my boobs back, I had to pee like crazy. So I run into the bathroom, only to find that the toilet is...full. This was not yellow, nor was it mellow. I was puzzled and irritated by this uncharacteristic act of my husband, and I impatiently pulled down the handle to flush, only to find that nothing was going down, but more water was pouring in. The level of the contents of my toilet was rising alarmingly! Simultaneously gagging, wiggling, and panicking, I reached behind the toilet for the plunger, and soon the problem was solved. Not even a single splash. It wasn't until I had relieved myself and was scrubbing the skin off of my hands that I remembered the sound of Monkey playing in the bathroom last night as I was getting Jabber ready for bed. Sounds like the lid of the toilet slamming. And I wonder...what exactly did he flush? When will I discover its absence? What are the odds that it has now passed safely through the plumbing, never to bother us again? The Toilet Mystery--one thing I did not anticipate about motherhood.