organized chaos

“If I didn’t have a brain,

my head would be flat”

–Jackelope

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This is the last day to enter the giveaway! For all you blokes hem-hawing around on entering, there’s still time! But not much. Sometime around midnight central time, I’m taking your comment numbers over to the random picker and the powers that be will choose a winner. And if you’re just finding out about this today, just leave a comment and we’ll call it good.

My mother in law lives in South Texas and she’s a peach. She sends us packages full of goodies like beef jerkey and paper plates and batteries. Man, do I need the batteries. She’s a little off center, so of course she fits right in around here when she comes to visit.

But talking to her on the phone can be a drag, albeit an entertaining drag, at times. It’s very hard to explain to other people why that is, so one day, right after I hung up with her, I recorded our conversation for all posterity. My Man warned me that no one else would find this amusing. I disagreed, but in the back of my mind wondered whether anyone else would find it amusing. You be the judge.

Oh yeah, and when you read her words, you have to imagine a mexican accent, since she’s you know, Hispanic and all.

Her: ?Que’ Paso, Caaaarrie? Caaarrie, I told you I have to get my molar pulled out? It broke. I don’t have any left!

Me: Uh-huh

Her: Now I’ll have to chew. Like the beaver. You know, chewing in the front.

Me: Hmmm.

Her: I like to chew.

Me: When you get here we could put all your food in the blender.

Her: No! I like to taste my food.

Me: You can still taste mashed food.

Her: I like to chew it. Like a cow. It will just be tasteless. Like a pudding.

Me: *loud burp from an extra long drink of Pepsi Jazz*

Her: Caaaaarrie! Everything ok?

Me: sorry.

Her: I’ll just have to eat in the corner of restaurants from now on. And chew like cows, you know. Back in the corner. Maybe I have two stomachs also.

Me: *imagines her with two stomachs and starts painting my nails with new polish*

Her: I already eat so slow. I’m the last one to finish. Charles gets a Whataburger and finishes in two minutes. Half an hour later, I’m still eating.

Me: Hmm…

Her: Charlie eats fast too. What’s the hurry?

Me: Everyone’s starving I guess.

Her: I’m hungry too. I just like to taste my food. Chewing and chewing like a cow.

Me: Well, I need to go now.

Her: Tell the kids to call me later.

Me: k, bye

Her: blah blah blah with the wrapping up of the conversation for the next five minutes

Me: k, bye

Me: k, bye

Me: yeah, yeah, k, bye

Her: bye, Caaaarrie!

BTW, Looking for this?

When the gremlins make their transition into Adult Gremlinhood, they have made a few things very clear to me and My Man. They just aren’t happy with the state of several areas of their lives these days and never fail to lodge their complaints to whoever will listen.

When they grow up:

• they all plan on living in the house we moved from two years ago. Not together mind you, they have fought with each other on a weekly basis for the last two years, over which one of them is going to move back there first. They’re all very nostalgic in the most impractical way. Our house now is WAY better than our previous one which I’ve shown you up there.

• they plan on eating unlimited chocolate. Ever since the dentist declared all three of the older gremlin’s mouths to be Cavity Central, I’ve been a witch and banned candy from our house. The only problem? Their Father, the Chocoholic. It’s not the woman of the house, the usual suspect; I’m more of a nacho sort of girl. So after dinner, My Man, being kind-hearted as he is, whips out his Hershey bar, because his body might actually go into shock if he doesn’t chase his dinner down with cacao bean. And the gremlins go into full Gremlin Mode with their rights being wronged and all that. And they declare that adulthood must hold a chocolate free-for-all.

• they will also drink all the pop, soda, fizzy, Coke, whatever you call it in your part of the earth, that they can possibly ingest. I’m very mean. I make them drink water.

• they will eat Fritos every day. My Man has a special shelf in the pantry for his lunch supplies. Being on a very low income, we have to guard his Precious Foods, so that they will last the week. Gremlins are notorious for pillaging other people’s food, but so far this method has worked. And it has caused one more thing to go on their lists of “When They Grow Up…”

So, while other children are planning their future vocations and what kind of spouse they might like, mine are plotting about the foods they will finally have unlimited access to. Can you see the pattern of food obsession? I’m sure the list could go on and on. I’m only writing all these down because someday I plan on using it for blackmail.

Just don’t tell them.

As I sit here a mere 4 hours from when I laid my head on the pillow last night to sleep, I realized that the best I could do was to leave you with a few thoughts from the gremlins. They are so thoughtful that way.

First from Jackelope:

Don’t forget that when you visit the Great Lakes, there is a new addition. Lake Oreo. But don’t ask Jackelope how to get there, directions aren’t his thing. He’s only good with remembering facts.

Second from Socrates:

Only bad guys go on joy rides.

And The Cuteness chimed in this morning as well:

If you want to see your mother first thing in the morning, instead of that big gangly kid called a brother, who usually takes you downstairs and then gets your mother, you only need to detach one tab of your poopy diaper, by wiggling profusely, so that a couple pieces fall out onto the sheet. You will have to smear a little on your feet.

Yes, it’s necessary.

Don’t worry, your mother will be totally grossed out, but any attention is good attention when you’re the fourth born.

And now that you’ve tucked those kernels of wisdom down deep in your smoking jackets, I leave you with a thought of my own.

When the blessed time of the year comes when it is cool enough to start that favorite ritual of many, the opening and closing of the windows all day long, just remember:

There might be very large spiders adorning the insides of the screens. About half a bottle of hot shot insect killer will do. Until the eight legged fiend is white with it. Don’t stop spraying until you see the white.

Have a nice Friday.

Have you seen that Ice Cream in a Bag recipe? I got one in my email and I saw one on another blog. I don’t usually do these types of things.

A. I don’t have what I need to do it.

B. I don’t have the cold hard cash to get what I need to do it.

C. I have an eccentric breed of gremlins.

Allow me to demonstrate with some caught-in-the-act photography.

I actually had a little cash, so we high tailed it to Walmart for the few ingredients it takes to make ice cream in a bag. The trip in and out was quick. I don’t mess around with shopping. I hate it. I hate it so much that I forgot the ice.

I tried to bribe Socrates the almost 10 yr old to go back in and get the ice, but he wouldn’t have it. “Not at Walmart!”

“Ok. How about the gas station?” Apparently that was worth $1.

By the time we made it home, we were burnin’ up from the Kansas heat, but we proceeded with the madness of novelty snack experiments.

‘A happy start!’ you might be tempted to think. There’s my girl with all the stuff you need, and a printed off recipe, and some empty bags. You can’t make novelty snacks without total disorganization all around.

Then they started the ice cream shake exercise. Because if you have no idea what this snack is all about, the short version is you put ice and rock salt in a big bag and the ice cream stuff in a little bag, seal them both up and shake for 5 minutes. Jackelope looks skeptical that this will work.

At first he thought you put the half & half right in there with the ice and rock salt and he was really skeptical then. But I was too busy dropping every blessed piece of ice on the floor and trying really hard not to say naughty words to take a picture.

After exactly 47 seconds of shaking her bag, Zoe looked like this:

And then the whining commenced.

“How much longer?” “Is is done YET?” “Can’t you shake it for me?”

I lost track of time, whining throws me into a worm hole usually. So when I got back from wherever the worm hole took me, I told them to stop shaking and open their bags. It wasn’t Blue Bell, but they liked it.

I had made a bag for myself, and I took my turn to shake. Man, was I going to show those gremlins how to REALLY shake that bag and make some KILLER ice cream.

About 47 seconds into the shake fest, my hands were so cold, I wondered if that worm hole had taken me to the North Pole. I gained some perspective on the gremlin’s plight.

But I shook it for the required five minutes. With vigor.

And I opened my bag and found soup.

And that’s why I don’t do fun things.

The other day, I was laying in my bed with one of my arms up, hand behind the head style.  You know, just chillin’ and all.  So Jackelope came and laid his big ol’ head on me.  A second later, he said:

“I can feel your heart beating all the way to your armpit.”

Ah. What every mother longs to hear.

It was that kind of a night. An I-wish-I-could-pry-my-eyes-open-since-I’m-kinda-at-work-and-should-be-alert kind of night. The kind where supposedly someone can say just the wrong thing and SNAP goes my mouth.

Two guys and a girl walk up to my register around 1 am. They look chipper. The one guy looks especially pleased. He looks at my name tag. No biggie.

Pleased Guy: Hey! Were you in that one movie?

Me, aka Friendly Cashier: No. I’ve never been in any movie. (unless you count Gremlins, the movie that is my life)

Pleased Guy points to my name tag: Well I saw your name there.

I look down at it since I kind of forgot it for a second.

Pleased Guy: Yeah, you know that movie with your name!

Me: You mean the one with the blood all over the girl by Stephen King?

Pleased Guy and his chipper friends all nod in astute agreement and laugh.

Me: No. I was not in that movie. I guess it doesn’t matter that there are at least 5 million ‘Carrie’s’ on the face of this earth, but you just happen to think that qualifies me to be in that movie. Nice.

They pay and leave. Not laughing or looking pleased.

But I was.

Commando Demando, a.k.a Zoe, (she’s not so demanding lately), has a thing for naming her dolls.  Not only does she name them, they all belong to family groups and have ages and detailed histories.  Like if they’ve been to jail and how they feel about that documentary Zoe’s dad made her watch the other night.

Occasionally, Zoe will ask me what I think about something or other.  What color do I think is the best for such and such?  What should she draw? What movie should she watch? Should she listen to Beethoven or Mozart tonight? I’m serious.  And usually she HATES my choice.  I don’t really know why she keeps asking me for my opinion.

Zoe has some interesting name choices for her dolls. Dol Dol was an early choice for a boy baby doll that finally bit the dust and lost both legs.  So we buried him, then we dug him up.  Then I finally threw him in the dump.  I’m mean.  What can I say.

There have been many weird names, and many very normal names also.  So today she bought herself a new doll at Walgreens with her newly earned cash and on the way home asked me, yet again, what she should name her.

I reminded her that she would not like any of my choices.  She didn’t care.  So I took a few stabs.

“Mimzy?”

“WHAT???!!!?? That’s so stupid!”

“You asked,” I said.

“What else?” She’s such a sucker.

“Calliope?”

silence

“Penelope?”

nothing

“Violet”

nada

“Margaret?”

crickets chirping

She said, “I like Angel. Your names are too weird.”

I said, “Aren’t you the one that named that one doll December??”

She sighed.  “That’s because she’s a glass doll and that’s what it says on her body!”

Of course.  Now it ALL makes sense.

This is the look I get when I try really hard to do what she asks.

So I took the gremlins out to a friend’s pool finally, cause they’ve been begging non-stop.  We actually went two days in a row because really with The Cuteness and all, we can only stay anywhere about an hour and a half since he refuses to sleep anywhere but his own soft cushy drool-stained bed.  It must be the smell that draws him into dreamland so faithfully.

So there we were, floating and splashing and trying to squeeze in as much sweet blessed relaxation before The Cuteness decided his stroller was NOT the place to be.  Socrates was fending off death’s grip by jumping off the diving board and dog paddling to the edge causing my heart to skip a beat every so often.

Commando Demando was sitting atop her giganto black inner tube like the queen that she is.

And Jackelope was still on the stairs inside his baby size yellow tube jumping up and down, screaming in total water-conquering glee.

Now before I tell you what he was saying, let me preface by telling you that Jackelope has darn near drowned at least two times.  Once in my sister’s ornamental pond when he was three, and once a couple years ago in my other friend’s pool.  He hated baths for a long time after that.

So there he was with his big ol’ almost 6 year old body, stuffed into a baby floaty, and he had progressed off the bottom stair that descends into the pool. He hung onto the concrete side and yelled, “I’M DEALING WITH IT!  MOM! MOM! MOM! I’M DEALING WITH IT!!”

It took me a minute to process, since I’m usually thinking about nachos or how I’m going to make 5 gallons of gas last for another week. But when I asked him, “What did you just say?”, I realized I had heard him right.

I’m dealing with it.

And it makes since that he would say that of all things, since he’s probably heard me tell him a bajillion times to “just deal with it.” 

It seems that I write alot about my brain.  I’ll admit, it is a source of fascination for me.  My blog stats has a nifty little tool to see search terms that people have looked up, then found my blog. 

Things like clogs, shower hair catchers, ammonia and bleach, bossy women I’m sick of them.  I’m serious.  These are real.  It’s almost like they were destined to find my blog.  And of course I’ve had many people stop by after searching for pictures of the brain and symptoms of a mini stroke.  I often wonder what a shock these people get when they are probably looking for some serious info and find this instead.

So I was blogging earlier and sometimes it is so hard for me to string a few words together.  Especially when gremlins are bent on tormenting me with repeated questions that I’ve already said no about over and over.

Jackelope came up to me one of these times and instead of a repeated question, he asked this:

Jackelope: Is your brain spinning right now?

Me: *after the shock subsided* Why yes, Jackelope, my brain is in fact spinning right now.

Yesterday I found a hot tip for bickering children over at Living on A Dime.  It was called The Jar of Doom.  I love that name.  The idea is that you get a jar, fill it up with slips of paper that have chores written on them, and when you have a whining gremlin who obviously doesn’t have enough to do other than whine, bicker, complain of boredom, or the like, you break out the Jar of Doom.

I didn’t have any more jars, since they are all employed for our new snail and june bug pets, so I found an oversized black coffee mug and baptized it as my own Jar Cup of Doom.

I thought of little five minute chores, wrote them down, folded the slips of paper, and explained the new concept to the gremlins.  Not entirely new; they’ll be the first to tell you that if they complain of being bored, I can usually find some obscure chore for them to do.

Later, when My Man got home, Jackelope was whining about something, because that’s the way he rolls with it, and I got out the Cup of Doom. My Man was extremely interested and we told Jackelope to pick a slip. 

But before he could make it over to the Cup, the two older gremlins hopped over and picked slips, too.  I said, “If you read that slip, you have to do what it says.  There will be no reading, then putting it back.”

I thought they were just curious to see what I had written. Nope.  They wanted to do some chores.  My question is, Why did they wait till blasted 8 pm?  I’ve had chores all day they could’ve done.  Good grief!

Jackelope was not too happy with his job(s).  He got a couple since he doesn’t know how to stop whining.  But Commando Demando kept coming back for more, and I actually had to take the Cup of Doom away from her.  Or there wouldn’t be any chores left for the next day!

Later, she was in my bed waiting for her turn to read with dad and she said, “I’m going to be naughty all day tomorrow.”

I just looked at her, waiting for it.

She continued, “Because I love to clean.  And I want to clean all day.”

ok then.

originally posted march 24, 2006

I’ve never claimed to know what goes on inside my 6 yr old daughter’s head.  In fact, I suspect her mind works much like mine, to the nth degree, so it would indeed be a potentially scary journey in there.  Good scary, not creepy scary.

Case in point: Today is our co-op field trip to the skating rink here in town.  We’ve all been looking forward to it. All of us.  While I’m doing the dishes, I say to the gremlins, “Go look at the numbers on your shoes, so you’ll know what size skates you’ll need.

Socrates actually goes and does something the first time he’s asked.

I say, “Ok everybody, remember your numbers.” Because I am a loser that cannot remember her own gremlin’s shoe sizes.

Socrates says, “We have to go buy skates?”

I say, “No, we rent them.  You know, just for today.”

Jackelope says, jumping up and down,”Yay! We get to buy skates.  Mine will have four wheels.” *shows me four fingers for emphasis* “Mom. Mom. Mom.”

I look down at him finally.

“Four wheels, Mom. Four.”

I say, “Ok. I get you.  They will have four wheels.”

A stray thought runs through my head and I haphazardly voice it.

“You know, the skates aren’t that pretty.  They’re all the same.  Probably brown or something.”

Commando Demando says, “What??!!”

I stop doing dishes and look at her. “Yeah.  It’s not like you’re going to keep them.  They’re all the same.”

Commando Demando mumbles, “But I wanted blue or something.”

I say, for the third time, “Well, sorry.  They’re all the same.”

Jackelope starts showing me his best skating moves on the kitchen floor, without skates, of course.

Commando Demando says, “Is Jackelope going to skate? He doesn’t even know how.”

I say, “Neither do you or Socrates.  You’ll have to be careful.  The floor in there can be dangerous.”

Commando Demando says, “What do you mean ‘a floor’?”

I say, “The floor where we all skate.  It’s a big hard floor.”

Commando Demando says,  getting madder by the second, “We’re not skating on a big sidewalk?”

I say, “No way! It’s a big hard floor where everyone skates around in a circle with cool lights and music going.”

She yells, “THAT’S THE STUPIDEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD.”

I have a hilarious mental picture of all the co-op kids and their moms skating up and down a gi-normus sidewalk to funky seventies music.

I say, “Well, I guess you can just sit and watch the rest of us skate.”

Then she storms out of the house.

Make me wonder what she expects other things to be like. 

You go ahead and sing the rest of that song while I relay yet another thing I heard around here.

Commando Demando looked forlornly out the front window at the gray stormy sky and sighed.

Commando Demando: Well, I guess I can’t clean my room today.

Me: (surprised she even brought the subject up on her own) Why?

Commando Demando: Because I only clean my room when it’s sunny.

I think I’ll use that when My Man comes home and there’s no dinner made.

The other night, I heard this:

Socrates: I really want to buy Spiderman 3 for my ps 2.

My Man: Man, you need to get Frogger or Pac Man or something cool like that.

Jackelope: I LOVE Pac man. He’s my favorite.

Socrates: You don’t even know what Pac Man is.

Jackelope: YES, I DO.

My Man: What does Pac Man look like, Jackelope?

Jackelope: *thinks with lips scrunched up*

Jackelope: Well.  He has some frog parts.  And they race.

Socrates: No, that’s Mrs. Pac Man.

Just reporting it as I hear it, folks.

If you heard some of the things my gremlins say here at home, you might be concerned.

The other night Jackelope was reading/looking at one of his favorite books about a monkey named Pippo by Helen Oxenbury . Great little books about a little boy and his stuffed monkey and his mum and dad. I’m pretty sure it takes place in England.

So in a British accent, behind the cover of the book, Jackelope says, “Pippo’s dad is going to die.”

I don’t think I’ll comment on that.

Then this morning Commando Demando came out of the kitchen and made a comment about my Robin Hood brand flour. They sell this at Walmart. It’s a giganto size bag for those with enough Swedish blood to make one feel that they need to spend their whole day making breads and fattening cinammon rolls.

She joked, “That flour must be made out of Robin Hood.”

Yep, she knows about flour being the product of something ground up. So naturally she assumed it was the leader of the merry men. Good times.

Friday, April 6, 2007

Ridiculous Questions

Thursday, April 5, 2007

It’s morning

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Oldest Child Syndrome