Bullets of Sweat

• It's hot. And it is going to get hotter.
• We spent three hours at the pool today. We all looked like prunes by the end of the afternoon.
• The kids have quite a tan going. Despite the fact that I liberally apply 50+ sunblock multiple times a day.
• I am sporting a nice burn on one patch of my back because apparently C is not quite as good a sunblock spreader as he claimed. Ouch.
• Speaking of sunburns, remind me once school starts that I am long overdue for a trip to the dermatologist's...
• And speaking of skin, A's hives are still coming and going. My latest theory is cleaning products, so I'm on the hunt for natural cleaning solutions.
  
• Or, I could just not clean. Now THAT is a tempting solution. No hives AND no scrubbing toilets. Almost a win win except for the fact that it would get gross around here in mere seconds.
• I have managed to keep the house picked up all week though...
• Wait, it's only Tuesday? Never mind. Not quite as impressive an accomplishment.
• How are we going to spend the rest of the hot, hot week? I mean, besides alternating between turning the AC on because it is just.too.hot. and then turning it off because of a panic over what the electric bill will look like at the end of the month...
• Perhaps we will head to the mall for a walk and let the air conditioning bill be on them...
  

The big questions in life

If one has to drive 20 minutes to get to a green dry cleaners, is one really making an environmentally conscious choice? Opinions are seriously desired here....

See Chichi Run

It will amuse those who know me to find out that I, Chichimama have taken up running. Not marathon style running like some I know, but plod along on the treadmill or around the neighborhood at a whopping 5.5 miles an hour for 20 minutes style running. After you get off the floor and stop snickering, you might ask with a rather quizzical look on your face, "WHAT on earth possessed YOU, one of the LEAST athletic people we know, to RUN?" Let me tell you, I'm as perplexed as you.

I've been fairly religious over the past year about getting some form of exercise in at least three days a week, and over the last three or four months it has been closer to five or six days a week. First I walked, then I walked hills. Then I walked hills faster. It got to the point that no matter how I walked, I wasn't feeling like I had exercised. And that made me, well, grumpy. Apparently I have gotten addicted to exercising. (Yep, keep on laughing. Get it out of your system...)

So one day as I was walking along as fast as my short little legs could go, I thought "I bet running would be easier than trying to walk this fast." So I tried it. And I could run! Not far, not long, not fast, but I ran a good ten minutes before my inner thighs called for mercy. I finally felt like I had exercised again. Ever since then, I have been trying to run a little bit longer every other day. Today I got up to 25 minutes. I KNOW! ME! Running for 25 minutes! I didn't even do that in high school when I was on the field hockey team!

This afternoon I even found myself looking for a 5 or 10K to train for, but apparently I have pretty much missed race season in my neck of the woods, and I'm not SO crazy to do one that I'm going to shlep any further than the next town over to complete said race. But still, just the fact that I was considering such a thing makes my head hurt.

One of these days I might even lose the rest of this baby weight I've been lugging around for three years now. Maybe.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time there was a blogger named Chichimama. This blogger was not a great blogger, but she did manage to write, every once in a blue moon. Then this blogger got lazy, or perhaps a bit depressed, or maybe a bit anxious, or perhaps, just perhaps, a little paranoid about her ability to write and her propensity to whine. And so, slowly, Chichimama the blogger stopped writing.

But Chichimama missed writing. And she missed having a record of her life (even if it was a bit whiny at times). So one day, while her fairy godmother was at the grocery store (a girl can dream, can't she?), Chichimama decided that she would try very, very hard to write, at least every other day. And she wouldn't beat herself up if the writing wasn't perfect, or if it tended to sound a bit whiny. Totally unrelated, she also decided that her husband might be right, and life with the air conditioner actually on was nice, once in a blue moon.

The End.

Overheard in the kitchen

Chichimama and M hover over the fruit fly trap, created courtesy of the pixies over at Phantom's.

M: "Wait! One's headed in! In you go little fly, in you go. YES!"

M pauses, and looks up.

M: "Our life has gotten really, really sad if the highpoint of our week is watching fruit flies die."

Chichimama: "I dunno, LOOK at all the flies in there! This is awesome!"

M: "What have we become???"

(And yes, Phantom, this is why someone was trolling through your archives looking for info on fruit flies yesterday...).

Overheard from the bedroom

C: "MOM!!!! I heard a funny noise! Twice!!!!"

Chichimama: "What did it sound like?"

C: "A pterodactyl!"

Chichimama: "Huh. Are the dinosaurs still living?"

C: "Well, no..."

Chichimama: "Then I bet it was just a bird in the tree outside your window."

C: "THAT is a BORING explanation!"

Chichimama: "So sorry, but it is STILL bedtime."

C: "Humph."

And I'm done

My husband is a good, good man. See the comments for details...

Capital L Loser

I didn't go at midnight to get my Harry Potter book. The thought never even crossed my mind. The nice Fedex man (or UPS man) will deliver it to me today sometime. But now that everyone has their books and is reading them, I feel rather left out. So I am haunting the front hall in hopes that the book arrives before I have to take C to a birthday party. Fat chance, I know. So don't mind me, I'll be very late to your commenting parties. And I now have to put myself in media isolation until I finish it....

Hives, Hives and More Hives

A's hives are back. Gah. I am just blogging about it because the blog has actually served as a pretty good record for the doctor as to when it happens. She seems to be coming down with a cold, lending to the hives when sick theory, but then M left a plate with a peanut butter covered napkin out on his desk yesterday that A discovered before I did, making things a bit murkier.

We have also been around kids eating peanut butter sandwiches all week. I am not one to tell other parents what to do or not do, but the other day I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking if the child who eats everything really had to have a peanut butter sandwich while sitting right next to A. And when I quietly move her to another seat, the parent in question got miffed about the whole thing.

I can't wait until the child turns four and we can do the tests for nuts. And while we are at it, I might have them test C for tree nuts while we are in there as I realized today that he has never had one because of our avoidance of such things with A.

When Discipline Fails

Chichimama: "That's IT! No TV and no computer for the rest of the day!"

C: "THANK YOU Mommy! I didn't want to watch TV today anyway! I wanted to play construction!"

Later in the day:

Chichimama: "That's IT! I'm turning on the timer and if the construction site isn't cleaned up by the time it goes off, there will be no extra books at bedtime!"

C: "THANK YOU Mommy! I'm really tired and I didn't want an extra book tonight anyway!"

Chichimama: (under her breath) "I give up. I really, really do."

What is it about a crisis...

that makes one want to clean? Or, perhaps, it is just me. But regardless, my father-in-law is back in the hospital with a heart attack after having a cancer surgery last week. And as I made the round of phone calls to family and friends, I scrubbed the bathrooms, swept and mopped the kitchen floor, dusted the bedroom lamps, and scrubbed the cabinets. Even though the cleaning service comes tomorrow.

The kids are upset, both because Grampy is back in the hospital (which they can only vaguely understand) and because we were supposed to have a beach day tomorrow and I had to warn them that we may not be able to go. But for them, the promise of a trip to the ice cream store and a sprinkler-fest in the back yard seemed to make things all better. M is in limbo as we are currently still unclear how serious the heart attack was, and what is going to be done about it. Me? I'm eyeing the fridge and wondering what might be growing in there.

What Harry Potter Character are you?

As seen at Ginger's...

What Harry Potter Character are You? Hermione Granger You are a smart and intelligent person. You use your smarts to help out friends. You can be emotional at times but you always seem to be in the mood to help someone out. Click Here to Take This Quiz

Quizzes and Personality Tests

When Bribery Fails

We've been having sleep issues here at Chez J-E. I know, shocker, isn't it? Neither C nor A likes to go to sleep before the sun, and yet they also insist on waking up WITH the sun. Leading to very. tired. children. Controlling their wake up times has never worked well for us, so in an attempt to get them to sleep, or at least stay quietly in their rooms at bedtime, I resorted to bribery. If they stayed in bed for five nights, A got a (very cheap) princess watch and C got a new maze book. If, after the initial toy was given, they had a "bad" night, they new toy went away for a day. The first night C went happily to bed dreaming of hours of mazes, and A screamed her head off because she wanted the watch NOW, not five days from now.

Tonight, C appeared in the family room about 20 minutes after I tucked him in sobbing "I don't want the new maze book. I want things the way they used to be. I like getting out of bed and coming to see you better than I like mazes." What could I do except shrug and admit defeat? And thus ends my experiment with bribery. Clearly, not the technique for us.

Is it wrong...

Is it wrong of me to be doing a happy dance because it is raining and I don't have to shlep C to baseball today? He is distraught, weeping at any given second, but A and I are doing a little (quiet) celebrating of our own.

It should be nice and, well, warm, tomorrow instead of god-awful hot, so we will hopefully be able to get through the stack of errands I have been putting off because it was too hot to walk about and I couldn't bring myself to drive from parking lot to parking lot to accomplish them.

Bullets of Catch Up

• Hello! How are you? I'm, well, yeah. Happy Friday Saturday!
  
• We had a lovely meetup with Kate over the 4th, she is as friendly and wonderful as she sounds on her blog, and A is now obsessed with with her new friend Miss M. And C is very curious as to how I had a friend with kids that he had never met before. How DOES one explain a blogger meetup to children you are trying to teach about stranger danger???
  
• My children were, for once, fairly well behaved for the meetup. Kate is probably cringing thinking "And THAT is what she calls well behaved????" But really! By my standards they were! Despite the fact that C took every last morsel of their bag of pretzels in his not so small paws when me, the unprepared parent, arrived sans snacks. And then he dumped them all back into the bag when I yelled at him. I would say something encouraging here about the state of his health, but I don't want to jinx myself.
  
• In my defense, we spent part of the week on my in-laws boat, so I did not have my usual complement of kid snacks hanging out in the garage to be grabbed on the way out the door.
• But still, I never would have remembered to bring snacks because I was so focused on remembering to bring the directions. I'm just that kind of parent. Sigh.
• I did remember to bring one sippy cup though. But, of course, only one. Double sigh.
  
• About the 4th, we kept the kids up until 9:30 for the fireworks that were actually canceled. Yeah. Still paying the price on that one. Maybe they'll catch up on the sleep by the middle of next week. Maybe.
• I'm 1/4 of the way through the bottom of the Einstein jacket! If I can figure out how to work iPhoto, I might even post a pic of the big square of gray knitting. Because it is just. that. exciting.
• I still love my new Mac, although I'm finding myself muddling through rather than learning all the cool shortcuts there are. And iPhoto is not my friend right now. Although I am sure it is all about me and my preconceived notions...
  
• Which about sums up my life. I muddle through. And my preconceived notions always seem to get in the way.
  
• Did I mention my whole house is decorated in streamers because the kids decided to throw themselves a "HEY! It's a special day party!"? And then I made the mistake of serving them chocolate ice cream in the playroom. The rug will never, ever, be the same.
• Is it September yet? That's what I thought. Gah.
  
• Oh, and speaking of September, I still have no idea when my son is going to kindergarten.
• Or, apparently, where. We have been redistricted twice in the last four months, and according to neighborhood rumors, we may in fact be redistricted yet again. Which would explain why everyone else in town has gotten their kindergarten notifications and we are still swinging in the breeze.
• Private, full-day kindergarten is quite honestly sounding like a pretty good deal right now, price tag and all.
• If the AC, dryer, stove, pipes, and electricity hadn't all broken in the last week, I might even be calling around out of curiosity. But, alas, it appears that I will be putting many other people's children through school.
• I just LOVE homeownership.
• The silver lining? At least we only own one home for things to go wrong in these days...
  

I always knew I was a family blog...

Ah, the fun things one finds online at 2am in the morning. I just love insomnia...

And the quotes keep on coming

A: "Am I a little girl?"

Chichimama: "Yes, you are a little girl."

A: "But sometimes I am a big girl."

Chichimama: "Yes, sometimes you are a big girl, it kind of depends on the circumstances."

A: "Ah (nodding sagely). I am a mixed up girl."

Chichimama falls off her chair laughing.

Even Imaginary Friends need a Vacation

A is moping around dejectedly.

Chichimama: "A, what is wrong?"

A: "I don't have an imaginary friend."

Chichimama: "I'm confused, you had one yesterday."

A: "Well, she is gone now."

Chichimama: "Where did she go?"

A: "On vacation."

C: "I think it is her day off."

A: "NO! She is on VACATION! She went to New York!"

Chichimama: "Well, maybe you could make a new imaginary friend. Then you would have two."

A: "Nah, she's coming back tomorrow."

Chichimama: "Oh, OK. Well, I guess you should play with C then."

C: "Nope, it's MY day off."

Overheard from the Playroom

C: "A, I don't WANT to play Caribou any more. Go play with your imaginary friend."

A: "But she doesn't PLAY it the right way!"

C: "Well, she's YOUR imaginary friend, it is YOUR job to teach her."

A: (Big dramatic sigh) "But I want to be an astronaut, not a teacher!"