Charming

So Chad had a great weekend with Ryan and DJ. I managed to finally rouse him by slamming the door into his head about a dozen times. He thought that my wifely love for him would prevent me from posting this photo, he thought wrong. Thanks to DJ who encouraged me to take this photo.

Milestone

I am not bragging, I am simply stating that my child reached a milestone on Thursday. She read a word with no help from me in a manner that makes me suspect that she has been holding out on me. Now i hope that I am not the only parent who suspects that our children are actually much more capable than we realize and they are keeping it under wraps because they are annoyed that their parents, once aware of unspecified talents, will treat them like trained monkeys.

We were in the library and there was a gas can sitting by the fish tanks. She asked why there was gas in the library. I replied that it was not gas, but what was in the can was written on the side and she could read the word to figure it out. I urged her to sound it out. She flashed the annoyed look that she always gives me, claimed that it was too hard and asked me to read it to her. I refused and walked away. Watching out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look at the can, sound out the first half of the word, turn and say, "Mommy it's just water."

Here is where I must shamefully admit that I burst out into tears practically hug tackled her while simultaneously dialing her father to tell him that Olivia read her first word. I say shamefully because deep down I know that my child can't really read, she got half the word, took one look at the fish tank and assumed that the "wa" in question was probably water.

I am going to take it as a milestone though because if reading is anything like walking, crawling, talking, or any other milestone she has accomplished thus far she is going to bust out reading whole books like three months from now confirming what I already knew all along. She is no trained monkey.

Accounts payable

Today is one of those days that being a stay at home is your downfall. We all have those days where you would just prefer to stay in bed, but most of us have to get out of bed to go to work. Not me, not today. Olivia is at school so I could lay here all morning, and I have been. just surfing the web completely enabled by wireless internet and the laptop. Yet I know that my house is completely trashed from a weekend of fun houseguests, that i have a very tight and specific spreadsheet of things that need to be accomplished today, for God's sakes I have to eat and bathe.

Yet no one would know if I did none of these things. Sometimes being accountable only to yourself is a dangerous thing.

Au Revoir 171

Chad's childhood friend Ryan arrives today, and by childhood I mean these two have been friends since they were eight. I had no idea that these kind of friendships existed until I met Chad, I thought that they only existed in movies. I digress. The reason that we have to say au revoir to my hard-earned 171 pounds is that Ryan's partner DJ wants a boat load of crap for Christmas. When asked what he wanted for Christmas this year he replied that they wanted nothing-except me to cook their favorite foods when they came to visit.

Here is the favorite food list as it was e-mailed to me:

- macaroni and cheese
- boneless and skinless fried chicken breasts
- meatloaf
- mashed potatoes
- green bean cassarole
- home made pie (whatever your specialty is, if there
is one
- beef stew
- chicken and dumplings
- spaghetti

Since he gave me this list e-mails have come through requesting banana bread, brownies, cornbread and everything be wrapped in bacon.

I ask you, how do two boys born and raised in the land of abundant produce and healthy living learn to eat like this? They claim that they never would move here, that may change once they are here and realize that everyone in the Midwest eats like this. Unless, of course, they are trying to be 170 pounds!!!

Snowbound

So you know that scene in The Shining where they have been snow bound for awhile and he starts typing "All work and no play. . ." I never took that too seriously because I live in a cold weather place and have never experienced that level of psychosis-until today.

Today I got up, shoveled another five inches of snow, and got my daughter ready for school. i laughed, amused at her bundled up waddle out to the car. I was sad that I didn't have a video camera for when she stepped out into the driveway, one eye on her father gently encouraging her to get in the car, one on the ginormous snow bank next to the garage. In an instant I saw her resolve cave and knowing full well she should be getting in the car, she flung herself with abandon onto that snowbank rolling around like a pig in mud. We tried hard to mad, but we can't, after all the poor kid can't even move her arms. Let her go. I ate breakfast, watched the weather which informed me that we will be getting at least another six inches of snow before the week's up, so back out to shovel every last inch before more snow comes. That's when it all turned.

I am not sure if anyone who has never shoveled snow can understand the psychotic rage that occurs when you shovel for long periods of time in temperatures hovering in the teens. The wind is blowing snow you have already shoveled back onto the driveway, half the snow has already turned to ice so you are using a combination of your boots and your shovel to try and dislodge it and all your neighbors are watching this scenario from their front windows. They are waving to you because they are nice Midwestern folk, and that's when the rage bubbles over to an irrational combination of kicking, swearing, crying and stripping down to your sweater because suddenly, even though it is 16 degrees outside you are blazing hot.

So you go in, call your husband, sobbing, tell him you hate the winter and that you are moving in with your aunt in Florida and that you still have to go to the grocery store and can he please come home so that you can take a nap because, after all, you are exhausted. He responds with a calm and even, "Okay, honey, take a breath we are going to get through this." Like you have just been hit by a tsunami or something. After all, he takes this call about twice every winter for the past six years, he's prepared for the psychosis of being snow bound.

Crafting With Special Needs

Why I cannot do any kind of craft has alluded me my whole life. I am creative, detail oriented, meticulous and patient, so why scrapbooking or paper crafts, pottery, embroidery or any of the thousands of things I have tried in my life never turn out well I have never understood until last week. I was loading my aunt's dishwasher when I realized that I realy sucked at it. I have always sucked at loading my own dishwasher (and my mother's), but I thought it was because they were old models ill suited to my modern dish sizes. No, I just suck at loading the dishwasher, and and all the brain teaser puzzles and understanding anything my father in law tries to explain to me about, well anything really. I have no spatial reasoning, and apparently no auditory memory.

I found this shocking that an art history major with a minor in interior design has no spatial reasoning. I didn't suck at either of those things. Yet, I could not put together the advent calendar above. It was not terribly complicated, if I had a series of pictures demonstrating how it went together i would have been fine. Heck, you could have just flashed a series of photos in front of me really fast and asked me what was in them, I'd rock that. Alas, I had a written description so I ended up begging my poor, more spatially gifted husband to help me. Then I still ended up putting on the roof backwards.

So to Martha Stewart Crafts, I implore you, please address the special needs of visual learners and throw a few more photos in those instructions. Don't continue to embarass me in front of my child. She is already really pissed that her advent calendar doesn't contain candy like in the photo on the box.

A weekend in pictures

Here we are enjoying all the season has to offer. We had crazy Midwest weather this weekend which caused Chad's firm holiday party to be cancelled (not so sad) and allowed us to have lots of time in the snow. I voted to make the picture below the Christmas card photo, but I was overruled. Also pictured is this year's Christmas tree.