Spencer and I celebrated our 11th anniversary with a trip down memory lane. We visited old haunts and enjoyed an entire weekend of fun from our dating days. The actual date of our anniversary was spent at Cedar Point and included lunch at the Weenee Hut (Be sure to use a condiment!).
11 Years and counting
…one mess at a time.
So far today, we have used 5 dish towels on the floor:
That doesn’t even include the dry messes:
I think I need a nap.
I love Lorelai’s “accent” even though I occasionally have trouble figuring out what she means. She speaks very well for her age, but sometimes what she says doesn’t come across because you would never expect a 2-year-old to know that word. Today’s lunch is a perfect example.
She’s eating already because she brought a can of veggie soup to me at 10 and asked for soup. I was saying no (repeatedly), until she said please. We’ve been working on that word so it resulted in lunch at 10:30 in the morning. I thought she wanted to watch the new Chinese show on Nick Jr. called Kai-Lan while she ate because while I was getting her soup ready she kept shouting “Tie-yan! Tie-yan!” Our kids have all had a strange T pronunciation for the K sounds so it sounded just like Kai-Lan to me.
Then I opened the fridge to grab a drink and she pulled out the salad dressing. The Italian salad dressing. She is now having soup and salad and thrilled to no end.
That is how you start a phone call to report an accident in which no one is injured. You do not sob into the phone telling the girls’ mother that you were in an accident and you’re so, so sorry.
On Saturday night, my sister took my 2 oldest girls to see the Hannah Montana movie in a city an hour away from my hometown where we were staying. I receive the above mentioned phone call around 8pm. I was saying goodbye to my brother and his wife after dinner, buckling my youngest into her carseat when she called. My brother says my knees buckled and I nearly went down. I jumped in the car and raced off, apparently leaving my sister-in-law in the dust as she tried to jump in my car to go with me.
My brother called and told me to take the little one to my parents house, which I finally agreed to do against my better judgment. I just wanted to get there, 5 minutes ago. I dropped her off and raced off again, in tears.
As I approached the scene and realized it had traffic stopped on the wrong side of the highway, I started to shake. I went around the traffic and stopped in front of the officers. When I saw the car on its side, I threw up in my mouth. The sheriff helped me out of the car (at which point my knees buckled again), all the while assuring me that the girls were fine and it looked much worse than it was.
The girls were, in fact, unharmed but I’m pretty sure it looked about as bad as it was. My sis fell asleep at the wheel and went off the road. The car hit the median, flipped end over end, landed on its roof and slid a block down the highway in the wrong direction with my babies hanging upside down inside!
Their injuries include a matching scratch on their neck from the seatbelt, a bruise on Stacia’s arm where she landed after she unbuckled, and a bruise on Brenia’s knee from tripping on the highway after she climbed out of the car. My sister has a nasty bruise on her hip from the seatbelt and a bump on the head from a flying object in her passenger seat.
I’m sure there is some sort of irony in the seatbelt Miley neglected to wear in her movie saving the lives of the girls who were on their way home from watching it. It’s just lost on me right now.
We passed around a fantastically fun stomach bug this week. I spent Wednesday cleaning up vomit and Thursday laying on the couch myself so I’m about 5 days behind now! Tonight I am taking one of my Girl Scout troops ice skating. Sunday I’m ice skating with my Daisy troop. By Monday I’ll be one giant bruise. It should be fun anyway, but not so helpful in getting caught up.
I started this post with the intention of blogging out my to-do list to give me some accountability. However, I’ve come a long way recently in organizing, cleaning and maintaining a few areas of my life. It just might kill my motivation to look at a long list of things I still haven’t done. Instead, I’m going to focus on a Ta-Da list of things I have actually completed already this year!
My kids crack me up on a regular basis. There is something about Brenia, especially, that just makes me laugh all day long. It’s probably a good thing since when she isn’t making me laugh she’s likely doing something to piss me off.
We are having trouble getting her diet figured out. We saw massive behavioral improvements when we went gluten free. This fall, we pinpointed the red dye issue. Even Brenia started to see the correlation. Now when she takes candy she isn’t supposed to have, she leaves the red ones behind!
I actually think she has some sort of problem with processed sugar. She’s not diabetic or anything—it’s more behavioral than medical. She honestly gets out of control when she has had any sugar. I don’t mean hyper. I mean it’s like a switch is flipped on her attitude. She gets mean, angry and lashes out over nothing.
When we skip the sugar, she is a sweetheart. If I could afford all organics, we’d definitely go with that for the entire household. It’s not sugar that is the problem because she can handle cane juice or organic sugars. It is the processing involved in so much packaged crap.
In between sugary, meltdown treats I give you this:
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people come through the exit of a fast food restaurant and then slide into the drive-thru lane like they didn’t just cut in front of you. Today I went to Wendy’s for the first time in quite awhile. Now I remember why—it’s not really faster!
Brenia yelled, “That’s an exit stupid-head!” so I should probably be more careful about how I react. It reminded me of the time I ran into another driving pet peeve when Stacia was 3. I was behind some idiot at a light. We end up going to the same store and my dear, sweet daughter yells across the parking lot, “Green means go, moron!”
Luckily, in both situations, the other party didn’t actually hear my children’s road rage.
I’m still swimming upstream, but in the interest of full disclosure I’ll work on getting this up-to-date.
