What's goin' on

Nothing much, how 'bout you?

I took the girls to their Halloween dance last Friday--ah, the overwhelming joys of a grade school dance. The first 1/2 hour was horrible, the next 1/4 hour was tolerable, the next 1 hour was much better, and the last 1/4 hour was horrible.

After 10 minutes, I offered the girls a bribe of each their own fullsize candy bar if we could leave. Allie said yes, Julia said no, so we stayed.

In other news, yesterday it snowed. Yes, by god, it snowed. Big chunky flakes that melted when they hit the ground.

Thank goodness it only lasted about four minutes. Our snowblower is still in the shop and besides, it's October!

BTW, Happy Birthday to my sister, Claudette!

Not too full

Today is the 12th anniversary of the day that Greg and I married. Last night, I arranged for one of our exceedingly rare babysitter visits and we went out to dinner to commemorate and celebrate and all that.

We ate at a relatively new restaurant in Madison called Samba. It's one of those Brazilian meat restaurants. The kind where there's an amazing salad bar and then you turn over a disk (or in this case, hourglass type of thing) from red to green and men with large skewers of meat keep coming to your table and slicing off pieces and chunks for you until you turn your hourglass back to red. They had 8 different meats on the menu last night.

Barbecued chicken, flank steak, duck, lamb, tenderloin, sirloin steak, and so on. Greg and I joked during our meal that we should bring Dan and Kerry to try it if they come and visit again (bad joke, sorry Kerry--she's a vegetarian and I imagine that anyone who wasn't a dedicated meat eater would have been literally sickened by the skewers of meat walking around). But if you're a carnivore--mmmm, it was really good. And then they had these little rolls that tasted like Yorkshire puddings--it was quite an event, actually.

So 12 years ago today at this time (11:15 a.m.), I was at the beauty salon with my bridesmaids, getting our hair done.

At 12:15 or so, I was arriving at the church to get dressed for photos. A friend got sub sandwiches and no one ate them.

At 2:00? 3:00? (oh my god, I can't remember what time!) we got married.

At 5:00, we arrived at our reception and had a little popcorn from the popcorn machine. This was hours before my Uncle Jim, who had been doing a wonderful job helping us out by running the popcorn machine, got a little distracted by the amount of beer he'd drunk and forgot a bunch of popcorn and it smoked up the hall a little--not too bad.

At midnight, our feet sore from all the dancing we had done, we left the hall and discovered that our "friends" (I use the term lightly, at this point) had filled the interior of our car with those little circles you get when you 3-hole punch paper and the exterior of our car with written congratulations. We didn't have time to clean the interior before we left on our honeymoon, so we still had those little circles blowing around more than a week later. And more than six months later, I was still finding them when I vacuumed out my car.

It was a wonderful day and so many wonderful things have happened since. I love you, Gregory. Happy Anniversary!

Campfire songs

Last night, me and the girls went downtown to the senior center for a campfire sing-along. The logs were made of cardboard columns, wrapped with brown paper and decorated with squiggly lines. The fire was shapes cut out of orange and red paper, propped into the "logs." It was about 55 degrees outside, but I guess Allie's school didn't want to risk frostbite or something. So the sing-along was inside on the carpeted floor.

The music teacher, the principal, and a friend of the teacher had instruments and the 40 or so assembled kids and 30 or so assembled parents sang folk songs that the kids have been learning recently in class. I guess that's a good reason for being inside, so that people could read the song lyrics.

We weren't very good, but Allie liked it and Julia liked that they had cookies afterward. Gosh, it's only two months until the December All-School Sing--I guess I'll just have to bear the wait.

A nice offer

We had guests this weekend, so we ran through a few pantry items and we hadn't yet had time to hit the grocery store to restock.

Allie: Mommy, we've been out of napkins for a few days now. Should I bring some home from school in my lunchbox?

She's studying up to be a petty thief in her spare time, I suppose. I declined the offer. Allie shouldn't consider stealing from her school until she's in college and she takes off with dormitory linens, right Greg?

Raspberry picking

Raspberry picking this weekend was not as much fun as I remember it being when I was a kid. This weekend, it seemed that the berries were either well past ripe, not yet ripe, or non-existent. It was to the point that I stopped eating as I picked because I wasn't really getting enough raspberries to chew on and besides, if we didn't all start collecting them, we were never going to be able to fill our little berry container.

When I was a kid, my sisters and our neighborhood friends and I would go to the wild raspberry patch adjacent to "our" city park. We'd have to wear sweatshirts even in warm weather, and we'd pull up the hood and cinch it tight around our faces--because we were, no doubt about it, going to get eaten alive by mosquitoes as we picked.

Nonetheless, we girded our loins and braved the bugs because there were a lot of beautiful, ripe, delicious raspberries to be had. Mmmmm. Raspberries that were picked 20 minutes ago, smashed slightly and with a little sugar, over vanilla ice cream. Now that was good.

Allie's latest nightmare

I walked into your bedroom and there were millions of fans on high and I walked in your bathroom and saw Hello Kitty and she had killed Julia and she was covered in blood.


Amateur psychologists, feel free - - -

I'm not sure how to title this

Greg was picked up by some co-workers today for a seminar they are all attending. Me and the girls stood at the dining room window, as usual, and waved goodbye. Two men that the girls don't normally see waved back in a puzzled but friendly way from the front seat of the car.

Allie: Who was that in the car picking up Daddy?

Me: I don't know for sure, but it looked like one of them was Daddy's boss.

Allie: Oh, I know him. He has a face with interesting hollows and stuff. Like his face is sucked in.

Me: Hmmm, OK.

Allie: I wonder what it would be like to have hollows in your face like that.

Julia: I wonder what it would be like to be a boy.

Allie: Well, for one thing, you would have a lot more stuff in your privates.

Redo done

This week I painted our master bathroom. Instead of being a creamy white that the builder selected (with chipped areas on the exposed corner), it's now a light greenish grayish color called Boulder. I like it.

In the spirit of renovation, Greg and I decided to put up a new shower rod. It's one of those rods with an arc so that when you have a shower in the tub, you can keep the shower curtain from getting familiar with your private parts. I love it. It tends to feel a little too spacious, actually, after the years of close quarters, but I'll be happy to get used to it.

And since it's been 5 days now, my body parts don't ache anymore from the weird positioning required to paint a bathroom. On my knees, reaching behind a toilet in a confined area--not my favorite way to paint. Standing on a ladder with my neck arched in a weird angle--not my favorite position. But it was worth it.

Now we're thinking of tackling the living room and kitchen. Be still, my heart.

Anticipation

This morning, on the way to school, the girls started talking about Halloween. They're already looking forward to Halloween, in the way I imagine a heroin addict looks forward to his or her next fix. They weren't excited about their costumes or the adventure of Trick-or-Treating. Oh, no. They were focused on the CANDY!

OH MY GOD, THE CANDY . . . they said. They talked about chocolate and lollipops and SpongeBob marshmallow treats in the kind of tones that most people reserve for something they're drooling over. I didn't look back to see if any napkins were required. Then Allie spoke the words that brought the conversation to a place of horror.

"I hope we don't get any apples."

NO! NO! THE INHUMANITY!

Not that the girls have ever gotten an apple while Trick-or-Treating. That would be a pretty unlikely treat in these cautious days. And their tone of dread ignored the fact that Allie loves apples and in fact she had one for breakfast today.

I'll admit it. I loved the days when the girls would go Trick-or-Treating and then Greg and me (mostly me) got all of their chocolate treats because all they cared about was the fruity and chewy stuff. Now, Allie actually likes chocolate. Fortunately, I still have the power to forbid her to keep her candy in her room. That means after 8:15 or so--fair dibs!

Snackin'

If your cats had the opportunity to get at some food other than their own, they'd take it, right? Like dogs, cats are pretty omnivorous. Cats chew on plants, bits of leftover breakfast cereal, tuna packages, carpeting (don't ask, but Rabies should have gotten drop kicked for that one).

So if your cat had the opportunity to get at a plateful of dinner that one of your kids (Julia) didn't finish, and that plate contained mushroom pork chops, au gratin potatoes, and broccoli, you wouldn't be surprised to see a piece of pork chop on the floor, would you?

Nope. It was broccoli.

Weird cats. Sneaky too. I was about four feet away with my back turned.

September's over

It was cold this morning. I mean really cold, for September. We were completely spoiled by the warm weather last week but now I do believe that it's autumn. The girls are in corduroys and long sleeved shirts again.

Time to put away their summer sleeveless dresses? Say it isn't so!

On the way home from the library

Allie: Mom, there's a fly stuck to my window.

Me: Open your window and shoo him out.

Allie: No, he's on the outside.

Me: OK, whatever.

Allie: He's hanging on. Why doesn't he go away?

Me: (not listening) Mmmm.

Julia: Maybe he's concentrating on pooping!

Dinnertime

Today is Sunday. I've been cooking a lot lately (since I have little else to do, or so Greg says) and so Greg hasn't had a chance lately to be creative in the kitchen, which is something he very much enjoys. It's just a shame that he lives with the three of us, because we are hopelessly pedestrian in our tastes in food. Nonetheless, he perseveres (sometimes) and today, he decided to make us an absolutely enormous pot of spaghetti, homemade tomato sauce, and meatballs. He wrote about it here. The tomato sauce was wonderful and Greg made both of his daughters take exactly one meatball on their plates to try.

Allie is pretty brave about trying new food and she tasted the meatball and ate the whole thing with most of her spaghetti. I cleaned my plate of all of the spaghetti, light sauce, and meatballs that I took. And then there was Julia. Julia has a bad habit of saying that her stomach hurts when she doesn't want to eat any more of her dinner (or any of it at all). We've been trying to work on this habit with her somewhat, so tonight she took another tack.

We insisted that she try one small piece off of her one small meatball. She ate it and didn't say it was yucky or any other comments about it's taste. She clearly didn't want to have to eat anything else on her plate however, so she tried something new. She reminded me that I made her a really big lunch for school on Friday, then said she was full from that.

Allie didn't understand why I was laughing.

Not so Great America

Back in the year of our nation's bicentennial, my family traveled several hours to a new and exciting attraction, the area's first amusement park, Marriott's Great America. To a kid who had never seen anything for rides and shows except the local carnival and a school field trip to a play, this was heady stuff. It was amazing. Everything was shiny and new and red, white and blue. We rode every ride possible in one day, despite the long lines. After all, adult admission had cost $6.95, so my parents wanted to make sure we got our money's worth. I still remember that we got red, white and blue frisbees to take home.

After that, I visited Great America occasionally, maybe two or three more times. Then, back in 1985 or so, I made my last excursion to Great America. I was with my college boyfriend and he compared every ride to King's Island Amusement Park in Ohio, which was the park he'd enjoyed in childhood. I had never been to Great America without my parents before, so we had a wonderful time, despite some budgetary restrictions. And then I didn't go back to Great America for 23 years.

I'm not really sure why. In the meantime, I visited Epcot in Florida for the first time (and then again), but amusement parks kind of took a back seat entertainment-wise. And then enough time passed that I had kids of my own. So my family visited all of the Orlando parks earlier this year and I finally made it to DisneyWorld for the first time. And that was shiny and sparkling and looking like new, very impressive, truly.

Then we had an opportunity to go to Great America. The girls were out of this world excited. After all, they know we're not going back to Disney anytime soon. We walked into the park and immediately headed for the double decker carousel that's the symbol of the park. All four of us climbed to the top level and Julia selected a beautiful white horse with a very elaborate mane and tail for her ride. I lifted her on and then took a step back and I noticed something disconcerting. The side of her horse, right where a little girl might pretend to stroke her steed's neck, was smeary with what looked like black grease.

I looked around a little more and felt nothing but dismay. The ride itself wasn't clean. And the railings definitely needed paint. And it was obvious that no one had swept bits of greenery off the indoor-outdoor carpet in a very long time (it's an outdoor carousel). I know, I know. I shouldn't expect this park to rise to Disney standards. Disney leads the world in that kind of thing. And it's the very end of the season for Great America. They'll be closed for the winter in another month and I'm sure they'll take the time to make everything shiny and sparkly before they reopen next summer. But it was definitely a let down. And it was like that everywhere, everywhere in the park.

The girls didn't notice. And the rides themselves were wonderful. There were still some things in exactly the same locations as I remembered, but there were lots of new things too. Greg got to fly on the Superman coaster, which he repeatedly said was all he cared about. The food was pretty gross, and about as expensive as you'd expect. The weather was wonderful and because it was a closed event, the lines were wonderfully short. And overall, we had a great, fabulous time.

But will we be back? I think overall I'd rather save my pennies for Disney.

Cats and kids

This morning, I walked the kids to the bus stop for a ride to school. This is Allie's fourth year and she's never ridden the bus to school, ever. She has always gotten a ride from one of her parents. But eventually, I'll get a job. And it probably won't be in town like I had before. So the girls will probably have to ride the bus to school, or I would be dropping them off at school too early. Thus the test run.

Allie, not unexpectedly, thought she was going to throw up. She actually did throw up from nerves on the first day of school, so I took her feelings today in stride. The school hasn't called me requesting another set of clothes, so I'm assuming she made it OK. If things went well, I'm going to have the girls ride the bus tomorrow also and then I'll go back to driving them until I can no longer do that.

When I got home, there were pieces of chalk on the kitchen floor and a cat on top of the kitchen counter. Last night, one of the cats ate most of Julia's only piece of chalk. Stomach ache, I guess. I picked up the pieces and put them on the counter when I saw them and now Simon the cat had obviously been at them again. Our cats are so bold about getting on the counter after we've gone that I've, at least three times, come back into the house to grab something immediately after stepping out the door and caught a cat on the counter.

I yelled at Simon and he jumped down. I picked up the chalk again, threw more pieces in the garbage, and put the last little piece that was left inside Julia's chalkboard box. Then I turned back and I had two cats on the kitchen counter!

That's when I noticed that Allie's bug cage was on the counter, with the large fuzzy yellow caterpillar inside that she caught and made a home for last evening. Oh! I get it now. Damn cats. Get off the counter!

It figures

We had our hottest day of the entire year so far on Tuesday. It got to about 91 degrees or so, so of course we used the air conditioning, hopefully for the last time this year. At about 8 p.m., I thought, gosh, I'm overheated.

I looked at the thermostat and the air was running, so I disregarded my feeling (no, I'm too young for hot flashes). About an hour later, I thought, gosh, I'm overheated.

Crap. The air conditioning was supposedly running but there wasn't any cool air coming out. Greg braved the vicious mosquitoes around the back of the house and tried some things, but no go. It was still about 82 degrees outside, so we had an uncomfortable night.

The next morning, a cold front had come through and it was only 72 degrees outside. Regardless, I called the air conditioning repairman. He said we were smart--always nice to hear. He said people whose air conditioning fails at the end of the season often wait until spring warms up to call for service, and then they have 100 or so service calls ahead of them.

Gregory, it was a dual capacitor, not a flux capacitor. $140 and we're good to go. No DeLoreans in sight.

School and essay questions

Allie went back to school today to start third grade. Julia starts kindergarten on Thursday, which I am frankly not at all ready for. And I'm the one doing an exam. I've decided to apply for a job with the State of Wisconsin and it requires a civil service exam of essay questions. It's only 3 questions, but each question has about 15 subsections, so I've been working on it all day.

Allie was so excited about school this morning that she threw up as we got in the car. Julia held her nose and complained while I bustled around getting Allie napkins and then emptying her "puke bucket" (as we so delicately call it--her carsickness bucket). She was fine in about two minutes--just nerves on an almost empty stomach.

I get to meet her bus in about 1/2 hour so I can hear all about her first day. How can it be September already!

Julia's dream

This morning Julia told me:

"Mommy, I had the greatest dream last night. I dreamed that I was sleeping with Allie in her bed and Ava's kitty was outside the window but her feet weren't touching anything. And then I saw that a big dragon was holding her. Then (Barbie) Mariposa came and she hit the dragon and it went away and Ava's kitty was OK. That was the coolest dream ever."

Request

"Mommy, can you please leave so we can play with the princess set?"

A request from Julia this morning upon arriving at daycare. The girls wave goodbye to me and they wanted to get it over with.

So not worth it

Greg and I went to the movies with the girls this weekend. Julia very much enjoys being contrary, so when Allie said she wanted to see the Star Wars clone movie, Julia immediately insisted she was not going to that and that she wanted to see Fly Me to the Moon. Julia's been taking this contrary tendency to the extreme lately, especially in regards to food choices. She never, ever wants the same thing for lunch that Allie does.

This is healthy assertion of her independence, right? Damn irritating healthy independence, but there you go.

So we went to the theater and Greg took Allie to the Star Wars movie while Julia and me went to the Fly movie, which was shown on an Imax screen in 3-D. Did I mention that it was $35.00 for the four of us? Yep, $22.50 just for me and Julia. And both movies sucked. Well, at least ours looked good. And Greg said Allie seemed entranced.

But overall? I think we should have gone to the (free) zoo again.