Marco..... POLO!

When you live in a tiny apartment playing hide and seek requires more work than it maybe ought to. Ashley is up for the challenge. She has three, sometimes four, spots she hides in so it's generally not a problem that she plays hide and seek all. the. time. When there's time for it Aiden and I will pretend to search the entire 300 square feet (or something) of apartment looking everywhere she could possibly be except behind the rocking chair.

Because clearly, she'd hide in the cat box before she'd hide behind the rocking chair.


Sometimes she gets so excited she's willing to overlook the part where we make eye contact with her. Other times she forgives our "seeking" being confined to the parts of the house which can be seen from sitting on the couch.


When we play hide and seek at Gramma Miff's house, she's the best. She refuses to hide with Annie because Annie only wants to hide with people who will talk to her while they wait to be found (and she doesn't know why she's always found FIRST!). Ashley takes her hiding seriously.


While I have mentioned that Annie is picking up on snarkiness in the past, today I learned that we need to put in some more work on the "playing along" front.

I was trying to find Ashley so I could dry her hair and get us all out the door. Since there was no pressing reason we needed to leave sooner than later I decided to look for her. She was harder to find than usual due to the giggling that kept coming from under the computer desk.

I roped Annie into looking for her by over exaggerating my request and winking about 100 times as I pleaded "help me find Ash, okay?". This was a lot of winking. She winked back about 10 times and giggled. "okay"

While I checked the cat box, the bathtub, the closet, the oven, and the dryer, Annie marched down the hall, gave a triumphant yelp, and then carried on a conversation with the missing child until I came down the hall.

Winking at her again (I must have looked like I was having some sort of seizure) I asked if she knew where Ashley was. She winked back a bunch, covered her mouth with both hands and nodded. Then she fully extended her left arm and pointed under the desk. "she's right there!"

I asked again, winking all along and now pointing to the wink and shaking my head, "Do you know where Ashley is?"

She again winked back, giggled, shook her head back at me and pointed for all she was worth.

She kind of looked like she was expecting a bounty or a finders' fee.

After 2 or 3 more rounds of asking she finally understood.

"OOOOOHHHH!!! No, I don't know".

I got the camera out to capture Annie's head hunting venture but obviously I had forgotten the inability of Annie's neck to hold her head upright within the vicinity of a camera once it's turned on. (I could offer proof but you'll have to take my word for it).
Note the hiding Ashley who still doesn't know she's been found.

What Mess?

"I can't WIIIIPE!!"

"why not?"

"The TOILET PAper is not on the Rooolllllllll!!!"

Well, duh.

Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice

My girls must have been mixed with a dash of leftover Alex while in the womb. A snail or snake in this one, a leftover snip of puppy dog tail in that one. Otherwise, yesterday would not have been like this: (this is only a snippet, no pun intended, the whole day was similar-ish)

Aiden went off to dutifully and lovingly stay awake in my class and take notes for me so I would not be more behind than I have to be. He told the girls, I'm sure, to be good for Mom and let her get some rest.

They got half of it right. The other half was discovered when I wandered out to get some Saltines. (I could lie and say it was to check on them but I am sick and I am self-centered whilst sick, I guess, so it totally wasn't. I kind of forgot they were here, honestly).

For Christmas Annie got a gigantic floor mat coloring/cut-n-paste/watercolor activity book starring BARBIE. It has crayons and glue and markers and paints and brushes all attached to the side.

The first time I wandered out (to actually check on them) they were coloring the book. Right on. Keep it clean so Aiden doesn't freak out when he gets home.

The next time I wandered out I was blindsided by the vision of pink tinted water pouring out of a sparkly yellow Scooby Doo cup across the table, onto two chairs, then *plip plip plipping* onto the floor. And two little girls looking shocked as all hell. I don't know if the shock was from how I looked, that I was up, that they were caught, or that it had happened.

I told them to grab a towel but Annie went running for the paper towels and pulled off the very last one. THEN SHE SHRUGGED.

I made her go grab an actual towel from the laundry pile (3 feet away). She thought her job was over then but she was WRONG.

I started cleaning it up and then I had to ask: What is the mashed up paper product in this mess?

Ashley apparently thought adding napkins to the Scooby cup while Annie painted would be something to do.

Her big punishment was to change clothes from the Barbie pink tinged water covered clothes she and Annie had spent all morning putting together (so they'd match). Annie got to help clean and had to watch her crap get thrown away.

And I got to learn a new way to yell at my kids while having the flu and a diminished lung capacity. Whispered lectures are not as gratifying and still induce coughing fits.

Last Day

Alex's Jump Rope For Heart donations can be made up until noon tomorrow. Then he starts the actual jumping.

Please, if you think you can donate at all, do it now before you forget.

A HUGE thank you to those lovely folks who did donate already.

And remember you can send a check written out to the American Heart Association to us and we'll get it to the right place, just send it NOW. **

Thanks!

**Update: Apparently I am dumb. If you want to send less than $25 via check you can but please call me and let me know so I can front the money and then you can send a check written to me. The goods are due at noon today or they don't count. Or something.

Uh, nevermind

You can disregard the last post. At least the part about how the attendance policy sucks so bad. Aiden got home and had me check the syllabus. Turns out I CAN miss class and not be docked on it because I have a doctor's note.

Doc. Tor's. Note.

Beautiful syllables.

In case you can't tell, my fever's back. Bad.

I'm going to go crawl in a hole and wait for the kind face of the grim reaper now.

And because he's so nice

I feel like poop. I feel like white crusted until it sat in the yard all winter and slightly melted into the spring thaw poop.

But I cannot miss class.

My doctor at the urgent care place said not to go for a couple of days minimum. Then he wrote me a note for the entire week.

There is one class I CAN'T miss and others I just shouldn't. So Aiden is going to class for me today. Right now, he's navigating the labyrinth of Todd Hall to find the right room and take notes for me.

How great is that?

And, as a special treat to my speech teacher, I will be in class this afternoon. I will sit front and center and I will cough all my flu-y flu like germs at you with the hopes of infecting you.

Thanks for making the attendance policy so freakin' flexible. It's really your own fault. I mean, I don't want to sit in the back and cough all over EVERYONE so I'll sit up front to minimize the damage.

And I love LOVE love that another guy from that class was in urgent care yesterday, too. He had a cough and "cold". Just because I hate the dumb teacher so much (and not because I don't like him because I don't care about him either way) I hope he has the flu, too.

Maybe we can be coughing buddies and cover each other's lapse in coughing whilst we try to catch our breath and/or suck our inside out lung back into our chest cavity.

WEEEeeeeee!!!!!!!!

I AM going to whine

I wasn't going to. I was going to suck it up, put on my big girl panties, and be a man.

I guess all of those things do not go together as well as one might hope.

Regardless, after the negative rapid strep test a week and a half ago my throat/sinus area have been on an every-other-day pattern. One day I felt pretty good and thought I'd shaken whatever it was. The next, I so totally knew I hadn't.

Sunday morning at 4:30 am things got more ugly than they've been in a long time. I woke up coughing (a lot), threw up, had a fever, and felt awful. I think I sucked it up fairly well by not getting out of bed, moving only so far as to roll over and back (which was taxing!), and taking a bath.*

The bath did not make things better, now I had all the aches and pains AND wet hair. My skin hurts, my hair hurts, EVERYthing hurts.

Long story short (and I've lost my attention span), I went to the urgent care clinic this afternoon. The choices of what is wrong with me were:


1. a viral issue


2. the flu. Not the flu but THE FLU


3. something bacterial



If it was number 1, I was on my own. Number 2 can be helped by some pills that will take about 1 day off of the normal 7 day span. Number 3 means antibiotics (!!!!!).

The best test? Shoving this thing up my nose into my sinus cavity to get a sample and test the sample for the flu. Well, that's what the doctor said. What it felt like was having my frontal lobe pulled out of my nostril by a Qtip with a scrubby end.


10 minutes later he came back and informed me I have the flu. Hopefully we got it in the first 48 hours so the pills can actually help. He gave me a note for missing class (which I don't think I can do anyway) a couple of prescriptions, and a kind look.

I kept asking him if he could make my hair stop hurting or make the sweating go away. He kept saying "no". I told him I was up for getting an epidural between C1 and C2 so I would ONLY feel my hair but he said something about how flopping around wouldn't help me get better from the flu. I think he doesn't know. He said the guy would come give me my epidural in 15 minutes. But the test was only 10 minutes so I guess I missed him. I should have double checked the home visit policy for the anesthesiologists at the hospital before leaving.


***Things in my family can always be fixed by taking a bath. Mom broke her arm when she was a kid and Grandma's answer was "take a bath, you'll feel better". (she did get it fixed later that day) Mom would say it to us and then tell the story about how that was Grandma's answer to things. Nevertheless, I take a bath to see if I'll feel better, to this day.

For Once The Cats Messed Up Right

About a week ago the ancient camera that I have had since I was pregnant with Ashley was left on the end of our counter. Y'know that part you want to call a "bar" but that is really just the end of the wall only half a wall high. Things get set there all the time. The napkin holder lives there, the cell phones get charged there, etc. The camera got left there.

Our cats, who have no manners, climb on everything while we are asleep. That is when they are not trying to use their heads as battering rams to get in our door or meowing incessantly. During their travels that night they knocked the camera to the floor. I saw it the next morning but just picked it up without checking to see if it still works.

Aiden tried to use it later on and found that the zoom function is now another way to click the shutter. This means our out dated camera was as state of the art as Grandma's Kodak.

SOooooo... A trip to Wal-Mart was in order. I got a new camera. It was about $200 cheaper than the dead one (at the time of purchase), has about double the zoom, a WAY bigger screen, better resolution, more pixels, and it's awesome. The only thing it cannot do is shoot in black and white which, as Aiden pointed out, I can fix in photo shop. I'm so excited, I want something fun to happen so I can get the camera out and break it in.

This camera is the wrong model but looks almost identical to the right model. In case you care, we got teh Olympus FE-330 with 8 megapixel and 5x optical zoom. (For those of you who are not Shaila and haven't researched the crap out of cameras, most affordable digital cameras max the optical zoom at 3x). AND the digital zoom is not useless because the megapixels are so much better. Awesome.

Our Son Alex Would Like Your Help

Did you know Jump Rope For Heart has been around for 30 years? I am jumping rope and raising money to help the American Heart Association fight heart disease and stroke in Jump Rope For Heart. Can you please help me by making a donation that will help save lives?

My stepdad, Aiden, has done a lot of fundraising in the past and is helping me. He said one of the things he liked about the AHA is that they only use 7% of their budget for operating costs. I'm not totally sure what that means, but he explained to me that it means more money goes to research and the people who need it.

If you want to donate you can go to my donation page. The American Heart Association's online fundraising website has a minimum donation amount of $25.00. If you want to donate less, that's totally ok. You can just send the check right to me and I'll make sure the American Heart Association gets it. Just ask and we'll get you the correct address.

Thanks for your support and helping me save lives!

Support research, education, and community programs leading the fight against America's No. 1 killer, cardiovascular disease by donating to American Heart Association's Jump Rope For Heart.
Please let me know if you have any questions.

UPDATES: AKA PEOPLE WHO ROCK THE JUMP (brought to you by Holly as Aiden is too cool to type like this):

Traci Donated $40!!!

Gramma B Donated $200! WOW!!!

Aftan Donated $25!

In a world of 19 year olds, I feel OLD

I know that 29 is not that old. I know 30 is a death sentence. I do.

The problem is the 10,000 students I go to school with. They DON'T know these things.

I am in this speech class, for example, and we had to give a speech about "a nature event". So I talked about how we had a bazillion trees in our backyard when I was little. And how Dad built us a suspension bridge between two of those trees (as part).

(Okay, speech is going well, but there's confusion here... WHY would Dad build this? Right.)

"My dad built this for us after we went and saw-"

That's when it hit me. Hard.

"I was old enough to see the Indiana Jones movies in the theatres. The first time they were released."



Up to this point the class had been helpfully avoiding eye contact (I think we find it's easier on the person up front). All of the sudden there was a lot of pairs of eyes staring me down, amusement shining in them all.




So yes, I'm not as old as a lot of people. A LOT. The whole baby boomer generation comes to mind. But age is kind of a framework thing and I am stretching the frame of age around WSU. Not single handedly but definitely helping. Or making it worse. something.



Also how I know? Ashley's teacher said something about MacGyver the other day and I called her on whether she was actually old enough to know what she was referencing. (This was NOT because I walk around drawing attention to myself but because she slightly mocked the kids for not getting the reference)

Then the assistant teacher and I talked about Mr. Belvidere (?), Punky Brewster, Benson, and Webster. Just as I was solidifying my resolve to make a call to AARP, she mentioned some other "awesome" show I'd never heard of.

Her framework is about 17 years wider than mine.