Memorial Day weekend

I spent two and a half hours yesterday going through kids clothes and sorting out what we're going to keep, what we're going to give to St. Vinnie's, and what we're going to store, either until fall (if the girls still fit into them) or until Julia grows. She's such a little peanut; she still fits into some 18-month clothes (a little short on the legs but they still pretty much fit) even though she'll be 3 at the end of July.

Nothing like Allie, who wore her 0-3 month clothes for about 2 weeks before moving on to larger sizes. Nonetheless, I dug through the stored accumulation of Allie's old clothing and Julia now has a huge summer wardrobe and St. Vinnie's is getting five bags of baby clothes, blankets, and potty-training pants that we never used because once both of our children decided they were potty-training, they were trained.

I found out that we have an immense supply of old diapers, pull-ups and so on. Included in this is an entire unopened pack of size 4 diapers left over from almost 4 years ago that we never used for Allie. And Julia never got beyond a size 3 diaper before she decided she wasn't wearing diapers any more. I'm thinking we'll give them to the local food pantry, who like to have personal and baby items on hand as well as food.

I am so glad, in retrospect, that we had two girls. We went shopping earlier in the month for a complete new summer wardrobe for Allie since she's grown out of the stuff she wore last year. I can't imagine doing that for two kids if we'd had a boy. We don't have any friends who had their kids at the right time for us to get hand-me-downs.

Greg just came out of the shower and he's singing a song with the lyrics, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm me, don't you like what you see," as he wiggles his butt.

This is my life!

I'm stuffed, is it Thanksgiving?

We had a lovely, quiet, food-filled Mother's Day in the Lee household today. My husband made wonderful french toast, ham, and home fries for me this morning (on a tray in bed, thank you very much).

I was so full that I didn't even eat lunch.

Then for dinner tonight, Greg worked for several hours on a truly kick-ass french onion soup. I went to the grocery store with Allie this afternoon and bought a rather slender piece of guyere cheese from Switzerland for $7.53.

Wouldn't you think that Wisconsin, dairy capital of the U.S., would have a dairy making guyere somewhere? Well, if there is, our local grocery store doesn't carry it. I don't know, is there a guyere thing like there's a parmesiana reggiano thing? Limited dairies?

Regardless, we ate big bowls of soup topped with Italian bread and freshly shredded guyere and it was amazing. Dave, you have competition in the soup category! And Greg says he has a new favorite cheese.

Mmmmmm. Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there!

The green, green grass of home

Who invented lawns, I wonder. I mean, what's the point of having a lawn and having to mow it and mow it and mow it again. Every three days or so, realistically. That's a lot of work.

Just so you can have green stuff around your house during the summer. Hmm. That's assuming, of course, that you're willing to water it in August, when it would naturally go dormant if people didn't putz with it.

Greg cut our grass tonight (yes, I do it too) and because it's been raining a lot lately, the grass had actually already gone to seed.

It's like a lush, needy carpet. Anyone for ground cover and prairie grasses instead? I could go for burning it off once per year instead!

Zeeba neighba

My favorite comic strip of all time is probably Calvin and Hobbes, but the creator stopped drawing it a few years ago and it'll probably never be back.

When I was in high school and college, my favorite comic strip was Garfield. They're still drawing that, but it's just not that funny anymore. Or my taste has grown up, who knows.

My favorite current comic strip is Get Fuzzy. Next is probably Pearls Before Swine, but only when they do strips with these idiotic crocodiles that live next door to a main character, a zebra.

They're always plotting to eat the zebra, but they're really, really stupid. And funny. And they talk like the title above.

You can check it out by following the link off our main page for My Shameful Secret. Enjoy!

Awful children and Willy Wonka

One of those fix-your-family, super-nanny shows was recruiting families for future shows in our area this week. The newspaper reported on where they'd be available for interviews and said that part of the application process was to answer the question, "What's the worst thing your kids have done in the last week?"

Okay, I know I'm completely tempting fate here (and Greg would tell me frantically not to say it because he's pretty superstitious), but I can't think of anything that awful that my kids do. I know, give them time. They're only 6 and 2 3/4, so the major fights are obviously still in our future, but I've spent a little bit of time watching those shows and there are plenty of families with kids that age that are having a terrible time of it.

Kids who scream everything they say and kids who hit while obviously trying to hurt and kids who are god awful in public and kids that are so obviously out of control that you wonder what happened. Were the parents completely out to lunch the first few years or is there some weird kind of genetic mutation out there? You know, exactly the kind of families who got their comeuppance in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

The worst things my kids have done in the last week, let me see: Not sharing things (that's a biggie), pushing each other (but not pushing each other down or anything), hitting mommy (that earns a timeout but a 2-yr-old obviously doesn't do much physical damage), yelling at each other, complaining about being bored (that would be the 6-yr-old), chewing with their mouths open, wanting to wear pajamas all day, and not eating dinner.

The best things my kids have done in the last week: hugging each other, sharing sometimes, giggling together, not using bad words even though they hear Daddy say them, putting up with having their faces washed and sunscreen put on, being excited just for going outside, saying please, thank you, and excuse me, changing clothes without complaint, playing together nicely in the bathtub, helping each other, going to bed without complaint even though it's still light outside, sleeping peacefully through the night, being potty-trained, being nice to the cat, eating fruit instead of asking for candy all the time, doing well in school and at daycare, and sleeping on the weekend at least until 7 a.m.

I love my kids. No super nannies needed right now, thank you.

Peter Pan is sad!

I pulled out my work laptop tonight to review some work stuff and now I'm just blogging while sitting with my feet up in the living room. My husband would use this opportunity to proclaim the superiority of wireless networks . . .

"Forrest Gump" is on TBS and I'm half watching it. I don't know why, I've seen it a bunch of times, plus we own the movie and I could go downstairs and get the tape and I wouldn't have to put up with commercials.

Right now, Jenny is teaching Forrest how to dance.

I'm definitely not watching to the end. I always, always cry when Jenny dies, or at least I tear up.

I'm a sucker for sad moments in movies. The king of all examples of that, however, is from back when I was pregnant with Allie. Greg and I were in the living room and he was flipping through the channels. He decided to pause on a retelling of "Peter Pan."

We literally watched it for about a minute and a half, and they showed a montage of Peter coming to the window of Wendy's room to visit her over the years, each time with Peter the same and Wendy growing older.

And I started to cry. Greg looked over in astonishment at my brimming eyes and said, "What!?"

And all I could blubber back was, "Wendy got old!"

Hormones, I swear!

Car Counting

We visited the in-laws in Illinois this past weekend, for the first time in a disgustingly long while. It was a very nice visit, though too short. Greg and Dave opened the pool, and by the next time we visit, the girls will be able to go swimming.

It was a lot of work, and all I did was watch. When we left in the morning to visit Greg's Grandma Gertie, the cover was still on and it was covered with incredibly nasty green, slimy water. By midafternoon, the lovely blue water of the pool beneath was visible, with just an occasional dead baby mole or shrew or something floating here or there. And worms, lots of dead worms.

Really, it looked lovely! You just had to pretend not to see the floaters (or the stuff on the bottom) and think about how wonderful it will be to slip into it in another month or so. After it's dosed with lots and lots of chemicals. Nice, cleaning, purifying chemicals. I like chemicals. At least in this context, I do.

The girls had a wonderful time on the visit, except for the nine hours or so strapped in their carseats to get there and back. While we were driving back on Sunday afternoon, we played games that I played with my sisters on car rides as a kid. One involves everyone picking a color of car and then seeing who gets to 20 cars of that color first.

It was a lot easier 30 years ago on a two-lane highway. Allie liked it, but she had to rely on me and Greg to tell her what some of the car colors were across the interstate. Fortunately, central and north central Illinois is flatter than a pancake and boring as hell to drive, so I didn't endanger us all too much.

I'm glad we weren't playing "Punch Bug."

Castles and ships and trucks

It was warm today. Really warm. Sunny, breezy, and about 85 degrees at the end of the afternoon. Completely unseasonable for mid-April, but fun. Kind of like a visit from summer for the day--see you soon, ta tah.

We went out to eat dinner in a neighboring town and then to their enormous park and big playground for kids. You know the type--all wood chips and wooden walkways and ramps for kids in wheelchairs. There's the aforementioned castles, a ship, several trucks, a spaceship, a barn, loads of swings, a sandbox with a digger machine, rubber mat bridges to jump on, towers galore, a creaky wooden bridge, a bunch of slides, parallel bars and rings--you get the picture.

The girls had a glorious time. Greg stayed in the car (reading his favorite, an Onion newspaper) and I chased Julia hither and yon for almost an hour while Allie ran wild.

It's funny how different the girls are. It's not like I expected them to turn out the same person, but I think we're basically raising them the same and yet Julia is so different.

She's 33 months old and she's already just as brave, if not braver, than her 6 year old sister. Julia is not afraid of the dark and she will walk up a dark staircase and walk through our darkened bedroom looking for me in the master bathroom. Allie still has to turn on all the lights to get something from upstairs in the evening, if you can get her to go at all.

Julia never met a playground slide she wasn't willing to try immediately (sometimes at her peril). Tonight, she flew down one slide before I could get to the bottom to catch her and she fell off the end onto one leg and her butt, at least a 20 or so inch drop. I got there in time to help her brush off her muddy butt and check her leg, then she was off.

If Allie had taken the same fall even last year, there probably would have been tears and much subsequent fear on every other slide that it might happen again. On the other hand, Julia is at that terrified-of-bugs stage, and Allie thinks they're cool, as long as they're not actually on her.

I wonder if this all means that Julia will turn out to be some kind of sports fiend while Allie will get excellent grades and be part of the chess club. Isn't it wonderful to wonder?

Umm, still trying to think of something clever

The Lee family traveled this weekend to the frozen north. Not really, but we did see, pardon my french, a shitload of snow on the way.

I am not happy about seeing snow at this juncture of the year. There are crocuses blooming in our neighbor's yard and my tulips are about to send up buds, so snow is now supposed to be a thing of the past, except for maybe some very occasional flakes floating picturesquely and then immediately melting as they hit the ground.

At my parents' house (our destination), there was no snow, but the wind was biting cold and yet another reminder of why it's nice to live even a little south of them (where it's warmer!).

We had a lovely early Easter weekend, relaxing for all those involved, since one of my sisters had a recent health scare that turned out well this past Wednesday. We shared a stack of recent portraits of the girls, taken at a great place at the mall a little while back. New pictures all around!

And tomorrow it's back to the salt mines. Easter, however, is still on it's way (hippity, hoppity). There's a bunch of bunny poop in our yard, so the Easter Bunny should be able to find his way back. No more candy for the girls, however. Auntie Pam had her second annual, amazing, Easter egg hunt and they each have a pile of chocolate as big as they are.

We're taking donations now for future dental care.

Now I have to think of clever titles

We had a very quiet weekend. Very quiet, which means we stayed home for the entire time.

We had a better excuse than usual, too. Our usual excuse is that we're being lazy. Our excuse this weekend was that Allie has been sick. She's had a low-grade fever for four days now. Never higher than 101.

No real other symptoms--maybe a little stuffy nose, that's it. And this dang persistent fever.

She's been a good sport. She's eating normally and sleeping a little more than usual. Allie gave up afternoon naps last summer, but until today, she'd napped for at least an hour each of the last three days.

She hasn't complained too much about being bored, and Julia hasn't gotten it. I think, if Julia was going to, that she'd have it by now.

Do you think it's a spring fever?

Titles! I Have Titles!

My husband, Greg is the most wonderful man on the face of the planet. The fact that he is sexy, remarkably powerful (both physically and intellectually), talented and often well groomed should be enough to set him apart from most other men. But there's more. So much more that I swoon at the mere thought of the man.

I'm dizzy just writing about him.

I am truly a fortunate woman.

When I was in college, I wrote a paper for Ethics class on the ethical dilemma I faced in trying to decide whether to discard a plant I loved that had scales. I think that's what the disease is called--little brown hard half shell kind of things clinging to the leaves.

I wrote about how I'd had the plant for years and had tried to medicate the plant without success, and how the disease was getting worse. But I couldn't bear to throw the thing out and was it fair to keep a plant around, knowing it was going to die a horrible death by having these things suck out all of it's juices instead of just dying for lack of water or something if I threw it in a dumpster.

I think I got an A.

I'm always like that with plants. I torture my plants by not watering them for weeks, literally weeks. They do OK regardless, and when certain sentinel plants droop excessively, I water them all and they come back, repeatedly.

Most of my plants, if not all of them, need to be repotted. I've got golden pothos-philodendrem thingys with big stretches of vine that are dead and therefore should be cut out and restarted.

I need a live-in horticulturist. Madison is a pretty educated town--I bet I can find someone with a horticulture doctorate (is there such a thing?) who's driving a cab and looking for a second job, helping out horrible houseplant people. I'll sign right up.

I love James Bond movies. Even the bad ones. Even the ones with Roger Moore, which Greg can't bear to watch because he says Roger Moore doesn't act, he just smirks his way through films.

American Movie Classics has been running another of their periodic Bond series this weekend, so I've seen at least parts of about six or seven different Bond movies. They range from ones in which Bond still wore a hat everywhere to the awful one where Bond fights the voodoo-Tarot influenced African American bad guys in Louisiana.

That one made me cringe because it featured a caricature of a Southern sheriff who called everyone, "boy." Such a product of their times, these films were.

That chase scene through the long-changed downtown streets of Las Vegas in "Diamonds are Forever." The time when Bond "died" after being shot in a Murphy bed, only to be buried "at sea" in the harbor in 15 feet of water, so divers could pick him up and take him to a submarine for his next mission. And who could forget the car in "The Spy Who Loved Me" that turned into a submarine and then back into a car as it drove out of the ocean.

What's not to love in these movies?

And yes, I also worked for three hours on Saturday and got plenty of fresh air and playtime with my daughters and watched my husband spend hours on the computers. When is spring coming???

When we ride in the car, Allie is usually talking to herself, telling stories to entertain herself while Greg and I are talking about grown-up stuff. Julia is usually pretty quiet, unless we all decide to sing songs.

Then the girls take turns entertaining us, with Allie singing her ABCs or Mary Had a Little Lamb or We Are Santa's Elves (from her All School Sing in December, mustn't call it a Christmas Concert). Julia always, always, sings Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, and only Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

The rotation takes place, Mommy or Daddy throwing in a song occasionally and everyone applauding between each number, with Julia always, always singing Twinkle Twinkle.

Until tonight, at home.

My parents are visiting and my mom was trying to get the girls to sing a song together. That never works. Julia hates it when Allie sings with her, so she'll stop singing immediately and yell at her, "No, I sing!" And Julia won't chime in on Allie's songs.

Somehow, Mom convinced Julia that singing together was an OK idea. The girls sang Twinkle Twinkle together and did a wonderful job. We all applauded and Mom asked what they wanted to sing next.

Allie spoke up and said ABCs, then started singing. And, lo and behold, Julia sang her ABCs along with Allie, not missing a letter. I've never heard her do that before. I didn't know she even knew the song.

It was cool. Ah, the power of grandparents.

Julia has a new game. She sits on the potty chair, which she's been doing a lot but completely successfully lately, and she reads a book.

Her favorite book is "Everybody Poops," which actually belongs to her daddy, for reasons I won't go into. Great book.

She likes to have company, so she'll often insist I sit on the rug at her feet.

This weekend, she finished her book and kept one hand inside the pages. With a sly grin, she said, "Mommy, where's my hand?" Actually, it came out more like "where my han," but that's just cute, so we don't correct her.

I played along and told her, "I don't know, Julia, where did it go?"

She got a huge smile on her face and said, "Here it is," as she revealed her missing hand (once thought lost forever but now miraculously found).

I smiled the first time, then started laughing when she did it another six times.

Greg thinks I'm weird when I laugh at this stuff. I don't care.

Another one of her favorites is to take her booster seat off her dining room chair. She puts in on the floor and stands on the seat, about four inches off the ground.

Then she calls your name until you look at her. She says, "Are you ready?" and then she STEPS OFF THE SEAT AND WAITS FOR THE APPLAUSE.

I never fail to give it, so needless to say, she does it over and over again.

I was almost sorry last Friday night when she started hopping off the seat, which is actually pretty good. I miss the old ways, and my little baby. She's a big girl, and getting bigger every day.

Julia has been wearing big girl panties fulltime for 9 days now and she hasn't had another accident since the first day. This is a big deal. Last night, she protested about having to wear a pull-up to bed so she went completely big-girl with pajamas for the first time. And there was success! No accidents.

The only problem with this system is that when she wakes up in the morning, she doesn't play quietly for a little while any more. Instead, she immediately start yelling, "Mommy, I gotta go potty. Mommy, I gotta go potty." Needless to say, you don't dally in bed.

But why do they always have to call for Mommy?

Allie called for me twice in the middle of Friday night. "Mommy!" "Mommy!" She had bad dreams. Last weekend, she threw up in the middle of Saturday night. Frantic calls of "Mommy!"

All right, I shouldn't complain. I'm the one who wanted children and this is part of the package. I'll sleep all night through and late on weekend mornings when they go to college.

We forgot that today was the day for Allie's third kindergarten field trip. An exciting excursion to the Madison City Bus Garage!

Yes, you read that right. She went to the Madison Metro Bus Garage, I guess to look at busses (buses, how do you spell the plural of bus anyway?).

She said she liked it, except that it was dirty and she got her pants dirty. Allie is nothing if not a girly girl.

I don't know how they could keep things clean though. We got about an inch of snow this morning that later melted and made dirty, slushy sprays out of every vehicle's tires.

Meanwhile, Julia has spent the last two days at daycare wearing big girl panties, not pull-ups. This afternoon, she had her first accident when she pooped, but she hasn't peed in her big girl pants yet.

She's only 31 months. It seems early to me to try this considering that we potty-trained Allie at 33 months, but she seems ready. Onward to the end of diapers!!!

My mom urged me to write about something that happened to my brother-in-law this weekend, so here goes . . .

My family's suite at the hotel this weekend was three rooms. Two rooms on either side, each with a bathroom and two queen beds. One room in the middle with a full kitchen, dining area, breakfast bar, fireplace, balcony, sleeper sofa--and then beyond double doors, a kingsize bed and a bathroom.

My immediate family (me, Greg and the girls) was in one of the side rooms and my parents were in the other side room. My sister Pam and her boyfriend had the area with the king bed and my sister Claudette and her husband, Mike, had the sleeper sofa area.

My parents went to bed early Friday night and so did the Lee family. My sisters and their men went to a couple of the hotel bars and then came back to their room. Pam and her boyfriend, Jeff, went to bed, and Claudette also crashed.

Mike wasn't sleepy yet, so he had a few drinks and then fell asleep, still wearing his jeans, either in the chair or on the sleeper sofa. He woke up about 1:30 a.m., needing to pee.

He didn't want to turn a light on and wake Pam and Jeff, so he walked quietly through the double doors, past their bed, and towards the bathroom. He must have still been asleep though, because instead of going left into the bathroom, he went out the door into the hotel hallway. The door locked behind him and there he was, barefoot and wearing just jeans, at 1:30 a.m., in the hallway.

He could have just knocked on the door, but he didn't want to wake anyone and he still had to pee, badly. He wandered around the hotel looking for a bathroom and he got lost.

He wandered around some more and then found his way eventually to the main lobby. Even though he didn't have any I.D. on him (and in any case, the hotel rooms weren't in his name), he convinced the hotel clerks that they should give him another key to our rooms.

Mike says he remembered all three room numbers, but I still think it's amazing they gave him a keycard. I guess they figured--1:45 at night, only wearing jeans when it's 10 degrees outside, barefoot--it's gotta be a true story.

So he found his way back up to the fourth floor, let himself in, and went quietly back to bed. We all had no idea, until the next morning, that he had had such an adventure.

Now, if my husband wants to explain how he completely ripped out the crotch of one of his pairs of jeans-----

My feet hurt. And not in the oh-I-walked--a-little-more-than-usual-in-the-last-couple-of-days way, but in the ow-I-think-I-have-a-bunch-of-microcuts-on-the-bottom-of-my-feet way.

You spend the better part of two days walking around barefoot in an indoor water park with hundreds and hundreds of other people. You stand for a total of a couple of hours in lines on always-wet staircases where other people stood just moments before and you hope that foot disease transmittal rates are low. Because you know no one is disinfecting those stairs at night.

That's the kind of thing I think about, not about cryptosporidium, like my husband. The women's locker room at Kalahari was always packed, with every locker taken and the floor wet and kinda slimy always and bits of old bandaids and pieces of waterlogged food and paper slowly disintegrating along the walls (you hope).

I did not ever intend to walk through the locker room without shoes on, but unfortunately, right before we started to leave, Allie suddenly had to pee and the other bathrooms (that are a little less used) were a good block away. So we walked in the locker room without shoes at the busiest time of the day. Ick.

This was right after my family watched the efforts of about six or seven people to disinfect the kiddie pool after four floaters were found (and I don't mean air-filled floatie toys).

It was a fun trip overall and we'll definitely go there again despite the germies because it's a good time, but it's good to be home.

There was music playing. Julia had on a pink princess dress and she was dancing around the living room.

Allie started to get up, saying, "I want to dance too."

And Julia hollered at the top of her little lungs, "No! You sit on butt!"

Such a wonderful sibling relationship.