Kids

Labor Day, Red Jalapenos, and Kicking Summer to the Curb

gmanWe had a quiet, yet very fun holiday weekend. My husband set up the waterslide on Saturday, and let the neighborhood kids run wild while I canned the last crop of jalapenos.

Jelly

I had inadvertently let the most recent crop of jalapenos turn red on the bush, which was a first for me. However, I wasn’t going to let them go to waste even if I was worried about how they would perform. The resulting jelly turned out fine, and seemed maybe slightly spicier than the original version. I read conflicting opinions on the internet as to whether jalapenos are more or less spicy as they mature, so I’d say you just have to try it yourself to decide. If you do want to test a red jalapeno for spiciness, I’d suggest a recipe with a small amount of jalapeno to compare, and not some bold experiment like bacon-wrapped red jalapeno poppers. Better safe than tongue-burned. Unless you’re a weirdo, and are into that kind of thing.

Sunday was fill of fun times with family (and good food), while Monday was grilling with the neighbors followed by a quiet afternoon of movie-watching with the kids.

Bean

It was the symbolic end of summer, and I am so very past ready for cool weather and the fun traditions of fall. I just hope the weather takes a turn for the better soon, because this burning heat sure sucks all of the fun out of September. Summer, you’ve overstayed your welcome, and it’s time for you to go now.

My husband stays I have to wait a couple more weeks before breaking out the fall decorations. We’ll see who wins that one, won’t we?

Holiday Hangover

After weeks of shopping, knitting, sewing, cooking, entertaining, cleaning, our first Christmas in the new house was a success. Here are some of the highlights:

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As I have been known to do, I picked out a Christmas tree with zero foresight or appreciation for spatial reasoning. That’s my 10 year old for scale. And that’s the tree that ate my entire dining room. It only took two vehicles and four neighbors to get said tree into my house and upright.

hat

I made a bunch of gifts, including the above hat that I finished on Christmas night. Note to self–start knitted gifts before November to avoid frantic knitting on Christmas night.

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scarf

The final tally of homemade gifts: 2 hats, 2 scarves, 3 pairs of mittens, 6 dishcloths, 3 t-shirt quilts, and 6 bottles of vanilla extract. Not too shabby.

Then, we have just a small fraction of why you will find me living in the gym for the next year:

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Yeah…my jeans may just suffocate me due to Christmas week feasting. If the tenderloin, shrimp, and bourbon meatballs weren’t enough, we also had a giant turducken, about 100 turducken paninis, cookies, cakes, sangria, margaritas and more. In spite of all the busy chaos, we still had fun:

bella IMG_3941 IMG_3935 cycle car bear

Now, I need to sleep for a week, diet for 100 years, and dig my laundry room out from under the pile that has swallowed it.

Battling the Post-Christmas Crash—Or What Happens When a Manic Woman With OCD is Suddenly Project-Less

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For the past several weeks, I’ve either been knitting, sewing, or shopping like a maniac. I frantically finished teacher gifts, only to cast on for the final hat I’ve yet to complete. While we are scaling Christmas down this year (in theory anyway), I still found myself more stressed and pressed for time than I had expected. With only two days left, I’ll be cooking, cleaning, and knitting on than infernal hat with the delusional hope that I can finish it all in time.

In the craziness that pervades the Christmas bonanza, I also start thinking ahead to after Christmas. We all have plenty of Christmas traditions, but inevitably still experience that post-holiday crash. The kids are bummed that it’s over, and my project-oriented, OCD subconscious feels cast adrift with no direction or purpose. To remedy this ennui, and help alleviate the kid’s stir-crazy antics, we try to incorporate a few post-Christmas traditions so that they still have something to look forward to once their gift-a-plooza ends. Here are just a few of the small things we do:

  • New Year’s Eve fireworks—This is Louisiana, after all, and it’s our God-given right to blow crap up in the name of celebration. For $20 bucks, we can get the kids enough firepower to annoy our neighbors and keep them occupied for hours.
  • New Year’s Day Meal—This last-gasp feast includes all of those foods that superstition tells us will bring good luck and fortune in the new year. Diets are for January 2nd.
  • The Feast of the Epiphany King Cake—As the official start of the Mardi Gras season,  Epiphany is a great excuse for the first King Cake of the year. If I have time, I make it, but if not, every store around here will have one.
  • New puzzle—Now that our dining room is empty of Christmas decorations, and we don’t anticipate formal entertaining for a while to come, we get a new puzzle to work on throughout the month.
  • Selfish knitting/crafting—Now that I’ve spent months on gifts for others, I’ll cast on for that sweater I’ve been eye-balling in a Harry Potter knitting magazine. I’m a nerd like that.

So, while the next two days will probably still be full of frantic holiday prep, taking time to plan for some type of small, post-Christmas something may help ease the sting that comes from knowing that we all have to get back to the real world next week.

For now, I’m going to make a cocktail. After all, that real world ain’t coming until next week, and I think that I deserve it for the kids’ bathroom I’m about to clean.

Things You Shouldn’t Ask a Stay-At-Home Mom

Throughout my many years as a stay-at-home mom, I’ve been on the receiving end of those oh-so-annoying questions that normally well-mannered people feel compelled to ask.

The most common and probably least offensive: “What are you going to do when all of your kids are in school?”

In my mind, I think: Well, let’s see…shower uninterrupted, not be embarrassed by my screaming toddler at the grocery store, have more than one room of my house clean AT THE SAME TIME, and if I’m feeling really crazy, I may just finish my first to-do list in over a decade.

Most people think that school-aged children means the end of the need for a stay-at-home mom. I kind of did too…that is, until I was a working mom, and I soon learned that between sick days, school holidays, school events, and summer vacation, my kids were not in school as much as I thought they would be. Also, the older the Heathens get, the more activities and schedules I juggle. Let’s not forget the hour and a half a day I spend carpooling, and the sentient laundry pile that stealthily reproduces when no one is watching.

But, I did knit a baby blanket for my neighbor during carpool, so that’s something:

So, the long answer is that, no, I won’t be living the life of leisure whenever Bean starts school. I’ll continue to keep this zoo running, maybe just a little better than before. However, since most inquirers don’t want my dissertation on why a return to full-time work is not practical for our family, I simply answer:

“Eat bonbons and watch Oprah.”

That’s probably what they are thinking anyway.

From those with significantly less manners, I get the next stay-at-home mom staple question: “What do you do all day?”

If they ask that, I already know what they are thinking:

Eat bonbons and watch Oprah.

I could list all of the chores, meal planning, couponing, bill paying, budgeting, errand running, carpooling, and minutia to account for my days but it’s all of those time and soul-sucking things that really eat up the hours. For example, “fold laundry” turns into fold laundry, then refold the laundry that the toddler got into and threw everywhere like confetti. Those perfectly mopped floors will need sweeping again before the afternoon is out. How about the time spent putting on then taking off the dress up costume over and over and over?

Or that hour I spent on hold with the phone company? Or all of those half-finished chores that were halted so I could chase said toddler before she throws another toy in the toilet? While the reward for this hamster wheel is getting to be here for my kids, it’s hard to measure tangible accomplishments when the room I cleaned this morning will look like a toy tornado ripped through it by the time my husband gets home.

What I do all day is awesome, essential, important, and makes our house a home. However, it’s also frustrating, isolating, often invisible, and lonely.

So, instead of letting those lame stay-at-home mom questions irk me, I think I’ll start coming up with the most ridiculous answers I can.

“What do you do all day?”

I teach Bean the fine art of combat so she’ll be ready for the imminent zombie apocalypse. The better question is, what do YOU do all day?

Ahhh, School. Long Time, No See. You’re Looking Positively Awesome.

The oldest Heathens are back in school (woo hoo!), and we are still adjusting to early wake-ups and the time-sucking waste otherwise known as the carpool line. However, the fact that the boys are engaged in something other than 12 straight hours of arguing with each other is oh-so-wonderful for a summer-weary mom. I’m glad to see the last of the not-so-fun summer, but I have to admit, we did have some fun times.

So yeah, we did have some good times, and it’s always nice to remind yourself to count your blessings and focus on the positive. For example, carpool gives me time to read because Bean is restrained in her car seat, and therefore unable to terrorize local villagers.

See? How’s that for positive?

 

The Final Countdown!

It’s our last week of summer, and while the Heathens are in mourning, I’m trying not to let my abject glee become a little too obvious. Meanwhile, I’ve been knitting (including this cute dishtowel), unpacking books, avoiding the scale, eating too much, and generally trying to keep the peace among three kids who clearly don’t have enough to do. While I’m not looking forward to carpool lines and school projects, I think a break from the endless cries of, “He’s touching meeeeeee!” will be a welcome change. I completed the hell that is otherwise known as school supply shopping, so now I begin the process of acclimating my children back onto a reasonable sleep schedule. I still need to plan for some fun activities to ease the sting of this final week, but overall, I am ready to put this summer behind us. While it wasn’t as bad as last summer, it still kind of sucked big time.

Yep, that’s about how I feel right now.

Are Your Kids Climbing the Walls? Holiday Inspiration May Keep Them Occupied

We’ve officially hit the point in the summer when my kids descend into endless bickering and I’m missing school like my skinny jeans. We’ve also hit the point when the heat keeps them inside most of the day, so burning off energy through play isn’t happening. It’s definitely time to break out the big guns.

Last year, during the Worst Summer Ever, my husband was gone for nearly a month. Keeping the Heathens entertained during all the calamity was a challenge, so I came up with “Holidays in Summer.” Basically, on each weekend, we would have a mini-holiday celebration (Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas). The idea was to give the kids something to look forward to and help plan. These celebrations included a special meal, a craft or activity, and holiday-appropriate movies. These scaled-down events ended up being a blast and the highlight of our summer. I also loved them because it gave me a chance to have small holiday experiences that did not involve the stress of hosting large gatherings. We have continued the tradition this year, and here’s how it’s going:

For the Halloween weekend, we made a pumpkin-shaped cake and got a bunch of snacks. For our craft, we made masks out of paper plates, paint, glitter, and popsicle sticks. Then, we watched scary movies and played with the glow necklaces I picked up for a buck. My husband was skeptical at first (especially when I broke out the glitter) but later admitted it was really fun.

For the Thanksgiving weekend, we made lovely Pilgrim hats (Ha-Ha!), and I cooked an extremely scaled-down version of the meal. We watched Charlie Brown and generally acted like sloths. The key to this one was to get the kids to help with the food, and we even used all of the Thanksgiving placemats and paraphernalia I have squirreled away.

We had to postpone the Christmas weekend due to a death in the family, but the plan is to decorate cookies, feast on appetizer-type stuff, have a small gift exchange (we drew names), and watch all our favorite movies.

So, if you feel like you may be one-less kid lest school start soon, try having a mini-Holiday. From the planning and shopping to the execution, they have something to focus on, even if it is brief and fleeting. If all else fails, put those boogers to work and sweat the whining right out of them.

G-Man is 12!

G-Man is 12 today. How in the hell did that happen?!? Just yesterday, Demon-Baby was terrorizing us to the point of me begging for a priest and some holy water. Today, I have a (are you f-ing kidding me?!) pre-teen who is just shy of high school and whose feet are bigger than mine.

I’m going to hide now and pretend he’s still 5.

 

MacGyver Meets the Tasmanian Devil

So, Granny and I were talking the other day, and I commented that I can’t wait to move so that I will actually be able to corral Bean with baby gates. As it stands now, the layout of our house and the extra wide doorways in the main living areas make it impossible to keep the littlest Heathen contained. I basically spend my days running laps around the house, starting and stopping projects so that I can chase the booger down or fish her out of the toilet.

Granny laughed manically at this statement, and was basically like, “Have you met your daughter? She’d scale a baby gate in less than two seconds, rip it down and build something out of it.”

Does this look like a kid that can be corralled?

Yep, I think not. If only she would use her powers for good…