Tag Archives: Throw Back Thursday

Throw Back Thursday Post, Because I’m Tired and My Old Writing is Still Funny. So, here.

Posted in Blogging, Faith, family, Fathers, Food, Kids speak crazy, Latent Nuttiness, Marriage, Uncategorized, Writing by

Written last summer, August 2016.

Oh, those were some good times. 🙂

19Aug2016

There is no “Oh no we’re not” in ‘Team’

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Linking up with my happy place: Five Minute Friday.

Today’s theme:

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Well… of course it is.

Ok, here’s the story:

I still haven’t posted my kids’ back to school pictures yet. This is kind of against nature and I am very sorry. Every mom knows that is it the LAW that those pictures get posted on the facebooks, pronto, and here I am, still just trying to make sure they’re fed and in clean underwear before they head out the door.

So, last night was Walking Night. It’s this Thing that the labrador-retriever husband came up with to help us Stay in Shape and Be a Family, all at the same time. We are a Team, after all. We go out and walk together. Or, rather, the boys shoot off on their bikes, like little nutball savages, while the husband and I, who mainly operate like ships in the night, walk and talk.

It’s better to be ships in the day, I guess.

Sometimes we even hold hands. Like ships in love.

Anyhow. LAST night I also wanted to Take it Up a Notch, by adding devotionals to the whole thing. I like to Take it Up a Notch whenever possible because my life is not chaotic or jam-packed enough and this whole Notch business seems to fulfill some basic need in me to be basically Perfect.

Ok, I’m just gonna stop with the capitals thing now. It’s Annoying, isn’t it?

So. I had my devotional all ready. And it went like this:

Both boys were instructed to take a tube of toothpaste and squeeze it out, which they did with some glee. The Blonde informed me right away, however, that this was a terrible waste of money. I just love him. He is so like his momma.

Then, I said, in my church lady voice:

“So, boys, now I want you to put the toothpaste back IN the tube.”

I then made the very overused, this whole toothpaste gag has been so done before thing, analogy that once your words are out there you can’t put them back. It’s not actually a BAD analogy by any means. I had figured that since we were starting up school again and that they might, well, hear stuff and say stuff because school is basically the Child Thunderdome where they learn interesting concepts like “fart train” and such, that this whole toothpaste thing would be memorable and important.

Oh, and it was. It was really, really memorable, y’all.

It started when Red, who was playing with his toothpaste like it was fingerpaint, decided to paint his brother’s face with the gooey stuff. I laughed. Brother laughed. It was all good clean minty fun, right? Learning moment. It was a learning moment! And then Blonde followed suit with some of his gooey stuff, and that’s when the screaming started.

You see, gentle reader, toothpaste is MINTY.

Minty + eyeballs = screaming.

Let me provide you with a short re-enactment:

Red: OH NOOO MY EYES MY EYESSSSS THE PAIN THE PAINNNN!!

Blonde: NOOOO MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MY EYEBALLS ARE ON FIRRREEEEEEEE!

Red: I AM DYING! AS WE SPEAK RIGHT HERE  JUST GONNA DIE. FROM DEVOTIONALS!

Blonde: MOTHER I WILL NEVER DO DEVOTIONALS AGAIN! BAD! BAD!

Both: AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I WILL NEVER DO DEVOTIONALS AGAIN!

 

And that was my first try at family devotionals.

Toothpaste: 1

Devotionals: 0

 

We will try again. We will fight the good fight. We’re like the military. We never leave anyone behind.

Also, we flipping MINTY FRESH.

We are minty team, and as I have explained, numerous times to both boys: We are all stuck with each other, I’m sorry, but you can’t just go live with another family.

But next time devotionals will involve four pounds of M and M’s, soft music, and maybe the Care Bears.

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B is for Brevity. For the love of Pete. And Pete’s mommy. Move Pete’s point along.

Posted in ABC's of Life, Blogging, Faith, family, Kids speak crazy, Latent Nuttiness, Marriage, Mothers, Uncategorized by

Throw Back Thursday! Waaaaayyyy back. My SECOND blog post. Second. Enjoy the cuteness.

Momsieblog

Screen Shot 2013-08-29 at 1.43.35 PM It is the soul of wit. And stuff.

Scene:  Momsie is muttering to herself and attempting to fold laundry, scrape up burnt oatmeal, and load  a backpack for the blond one’s preschool.  As the viewer notes:  Momsie is frazzled because she is attempting The Multitask.   Last time she tried it she injured herself.   It is a tricky maneuver that takes power and precision.   It’s a Mary Lou Retton* kind of thing.  If Mary Lou was a brain surgeon.  On crack. Massive skills, yo.**

Sooooo.  We have Momsie who is desperately trying to fill in an emergency contact form with something besides an orange marker (not really a mark of sophistication, the orange washable), while thinking it might be good to put on a bra before she takes the boys to preschool.  She is considering that if she just kind of crosses her arms and sort of……

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TBT: I Got Your Polar Vortex Right Here

Posted in alcoholism, Blogging, Faith, family, Fathers, Kids speak crazy, Latent Nuttiness, Marriage, Mothers, movies, romance, Uncategorized by
     My husband and I, currently, are playing that delicate game called:
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I Won’t Turn on the AC Yet, but You Can, If You Want, But That Proves That I Am Tougher Than You. (Marriage, right?)

Anyhow, as both of us were laying in bad last night, slowly willing the attic fan to bring in a whisper of cool night air, but never admitting defeat, I remembered a lovely event that occurred in our town in July 2014: The Polar Vortex! Duh, duh DUH!!!
So here’s a Throw Back Thursday* for you:

I Got Your Polar Vortex Right Here

This is the polar vortex. Is it just me, or does it seem to be giving us a saucy gesture? Maybe it's just me.

Is it just me, or does it look like Mr. Polar Vortex is giving us a saucy gesture? Maybe it’s just me.

It’s 6 pm. I am trying to make dinner, keep the cat out of my laundry (laundry is his enemy, and he must vanquish it), and head up the Toddler Peace Summit Summer 2014.  I quit the Summit after 5 minutes.  I’m not smart enough.  I started pretending that I was from Chechnya and needed a translator and nobody could find one.  That was kinda fun.

Hubs will be coming home from work soon.  He will be thrilled to be home, let me tell you.  It’s because it’s so peaceful here.  So… calm.  I’ll be greeting him with a big red-lipsticked smoocharooni, a martini, and a lovely pot roast.

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Hi dear. Make one wrong comment about the empty saucepan and I will strangle you with my apron. And this wallpaper is driving me crazy.

 

 

 

Well.  Nix the martini.  Sometimes I hand him a glass of water.  It even has ice in it.

And really, not so peaceful here.  Wanna know why? Because Toddler Peace Summit 2014 has taken to the streets.  There’s loud protesting and currently the toddlers have taken the cat hostage and they are all working on their Manifesto.

 

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All of this makes Momsie rather… tense.  The toddlers, being toddlers, have absolutely no clue what “tense” is.  That’s their job.  In fact, I think it’s part of their Cluelessness Manifesto.  Momsie is tense = WE MUST AMP UP THE TODDLERNESS!!!!

And because of this ampage, a terrible, terrible thing happened.  I burnt my biscuits.  My precious, my preshus lovely fluffy little biscuits.  So ready to be smooshed with butter and honey, now huddled on the baking pan like sad hockey pucks.

And I. Had. HAD ENOUGH.

It is precisely at this time that the husband comes sauntering in.  You guessed it.  He is toast. Just like the biscuits.

Transcript of Following Conversation:

Me: ANGER AND RESENTMENT-LADEN SILENCE

Hubs:  Hi!  How are you?

Me: ANGER AND RESENTMENT-LADEN SILENCE.

Hubs: Hey boys! (Boys start freaking out because evidently Daddy walking in the house is like Moses just dropped by to say “Heeeey.”)

Me:   I’m fine.  (Holy cow.  Cue scary music here.)

Hubs: Wow.  Ok.  Really?  Your face is all twitchy. Why are you sitting on the floor turning that light on and off?  Wait, isn’t this a scene from Fatal Attraction?  Can I eat my dinner first?

Me: I burnt the biscuits.

Hubs:  Ohhhhh?  (He then tilts his head to the side just like a Labrador Retriever.)

Me:  I burnt. Them.

Hubs:  Why?

 

Let’s take a bit of a break here.

Really, he is in engineer, so asking “Why?” is not his fault.  It’s not.  That’s part of his job.  Or so he tells me.  I kind of think he must just trot around at work yapping, “Why, WHY?” at everyone within reach.  I wish he would just get it out of his system at work so he would NOT utter it at home. Really, he should know better by now.  When one has dealt with the toddler mosh pit of my day, when one burns the absolute best part of dinner (the rest of dinner was beige and warm, that’s it),

YOU DON’T EVER, EVER ASK, “WHY?”

Here’s what you say instead:

Hubs:  Oh my dear.  Clearly you need a break.  Here’s five thousand dollars.

So it just kept going, this conversation.  If the hubs knew what was best, he woulda hightailed it upstairs to free the cat and find some chocolate. But no.

Hubs:  Are you mad at me?  You’re mad, aren’t you.  Why are you mad at me?

Me:  No.  I’m not mad.  I’m just tired.  (‘Tired” is code for = so mad.  So, so mad.)

Hubs:  Because really, this is a teachable moment!

Me: Ok. Now I’m actually mad at you.

 

I think it’s best to stop here, to remind all you newly married folks,  that conversations like this really do happen when you’ve been married for a while.  For reals.  I do remember once at our premarital counseling (where hubs and the pastor talked BASEBALL for the majority of the time) that we did all come up with at least one tenet about How to Stay Married for a Really Long Time:

We should communicate a lot.

I KNOW, right?  Pretty brilliant.  I am pretty sure no one ever thought of this idea about marriage before.  I should write a book.

At any rate, the rest of the evening was a bit chilly, but by tooth brushing time I had stopped quoting lines from Fatal Attraction.  After all, when you’re married to an engineer, it is likely your darling husband takes literally everything, um, literally.  Thus, “I’m not going to be IGNORED, Dan!” carries little weight when your hubs’ name isn’t actually Dan.

 

 

 

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*Throw Back Thursday: This is code for “I don’t have brainage for new material today. Recycling is good!”

Throw Back Thursday, Netflix StreamTeam, and The Dude

Posted in Blogging, Book, family, Mothers, Streamteam NetflixKids by

IMG_3816It is a very tough life to be a cat around our house.

The above is Steve. AKA  The Dude.* Also, his rapper name is Big Fat Furry, if you wanted to know.

He has various jobs around the home. Things like:

1. Excessive lolling.

2. Eating. A lot.

3. More lolling.

4. Flopping down right in your path in the kitchen while are trying to cook, so you trip over his expansive furry tummy and end up excessively apologizing to HIM for being in YOUR way.

5. Wedging his fat arse into boxes too small for that furry action.

6. Doing stuff like this:

IMG_3792That’s a gift bag. And some ugly linoleum. But, he stayed in there forever. I think he thought he was, um, camouflaged. Poor dear.

Actually, he does kinda match the floor, doesn’t he? So, he’s brilliant!

Anyhow. We love Steve. We also love the other cat we own, a little female furry ball of neuroses we call Bob, but she refused to take a picture for this post. “It’s not in my contract,” she told me, as she slunk off.

It’s ok, Steve was more than happy to pose. Diva.

Steve the cat seems to have a lot of similarities to another favorite cat in our family: Screenshot 2015-06-24 08.23.39When I was a kid, my sister and I LOVED Garfield. I had Garfield posters.I think I had a Garfield Trapper Keeper. I also had Garfield shoe laces. It was all very very important to be All Garfield, All The Time.

And now I get to share Garfield’s biting sarcasm and love of lasagna with my kids.

Only drawback: I now have had lasagna as a request for dinner on numerous occasions, and no amount of spaghetti will do it. Do you know how complicated lasagna is? It’s got layers, y’all. The only layered food I can really master is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And even that gets tricky. Peanut butter first? Or jelly?

Anyhow.

Garfield and Friends is available on Netflix and we love him so. We love his disdain and his love of sleeping. (I REALLY appreciate his love of sleeping now because, sleep is so awesome. And children take it away. So I live vicariously now through an orange cartoon cat.)

We also love Odie, who reminds me of a similarly goofy creature in our house:

IMG_3833Thank you Netflix.

And thank you, Stouffer’s, for making frozen lasagna. You both have saved the day!

As a Netflix Streamteam blogger, Netflix asks me to watch their fabulousness and them chatter about it. It's a great gig.

As a Netflix Streamteam blogger, Netflix asks me to watch their fabulousness and them chatter about it. It’s a great gig.

* If you didn’t catch it, The Dude is a reference to The Big Lebowski. This wonderfulness is also available on Netflix. But, the lawyer would like me to add that it is NOT for children’s viewing. There is a bunch of sarcasm and lolling about in it, though, so  Steve would like it. I would just have to cover his furry ears during the saucy language.

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Kitty earmuffs. Of course.

Throw Back Thursday: “Y is for “Yes, Jesus Yubs Me”

Posted in ABC's of Life, Blogging, Faith, family, Kids speak crazy, Latent Nuttiness, Marriage, Mothers, Uncategorized, Writing by

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The other day I was practicing some drills in Mom Surveillance.  This means puttering about in the room next to my sons as I eavesdrop on their conversations.  I do this to monitor if they are normal, not weird, children.  I have a chart:

 

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I also have night vision goggles and I know how to use them.

 

As I pretended to clean the cat box, I overheard this:

Red:  Dis is MY train, stop takin’ it!

Blonde: Red, dats MY train, it was a birthday present and it is VERY SPECIAL TO ME.  (Blonde often claims about 90% of the toys in this house, broken or not, are birthday presents and thus, VERY SPECIAL.  This is a fat load of horse poop, because he barely gets anything for his birthday.)*

Red: (unfazed) Thata is not da truth.  This twain is MINE.  Grandpa gave it to me.

This riveting back and forth session sucked about four minutes out of my life, and since I aim for brevity let’s pick up here:

WHACK!

(Dramatic pause…)

WaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA!!! MOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!

Yep. Somebody got whacked.  Not in the Italian mobster fashion, thank goodness, but in the toddler smiting fashion.

So…  you know the drill…  we all go to the timeout area, we talk about why.. blah blah blah, somebody says sorry… blah blah… the enthusiasm for the whole thing about equals when I pretend to clean the cat box.

The boys are left to timeout to “think about what they’ve done” (which means = I am going to walk away before I lose it, and they’re stuck there, so blessed containment).

After a bit, I hear it:

Blonde:  RED, OBEY your parents because it PWEASES DA LORD.**

I froze in my tracks.  A tough thing to do because I was actually trying to hustle the litter box refuse out the door (no more pretending).

My son, my sweet, darling, adorable son had just quoted scripture to his brother.

Warm fuzzies, ya’ll. Somewhere a bell rang, an angel got his wings, St. Peter high-fived Paul, and Jesus said, “Ch-CHING! Momsie!  Your children are so spiritual!  And I should know!!!!“

 

The end!

 

What. WHAT?  (The Lawyer, aka, Mr. Pain in the Tuckus, is here.)

Well, I KNOW it’s not really the end of the story but I don’t want to bore them-

But-

Well-

Why?

Can’t I just?

Really?

Don’t pull that whole “journalistic integrity” thing on ME.  That’s only for people covering the war, or something.

FINE.

 

Ok. Sigh.  Here’s the rest of the story:

 

There is the possibility that while in timeout, the Party of the First Party kept leaning slightly towards the Second Smaller Part of the Party (or something like that; I’m not so good at this legal speak stuff).  This “leaning,” I guess, qualified as a crime against humanity and resulted, thusly, in what I term Extreme Whining, which made the Third Party lose her cool and bellow at the top of her lungs at Both Parties:

“GOD GIVES JOY TO THOSE WHO GIVE PEACE!*** SO GIVE PEACE! RIGHT NOW, OR YOU’LL BE SORRY!!!!”

Yep.  Nothing like shooting scripture AT your children, lobbing it like a big, fat, cannon ball of God’s Biblical Truth. BLAMMO.

 

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So later that day:

Red and Blonde are in the play room.  Momsie is skulking about as well. As always.  This time, she’s pretending to clean the bathtub.

Red:  Here’s da bible!  Dis is our bible, wite?

Blonde: Yep.

Momsie starts to glow with pride.  They’re gonna talk about the bible!  Jesus moment!!!  I feel like a bird watcher who just spotted a SapBellied SapClucker or something.

And then:

Blonde: Wait…  no… that’s MY bible.  It was a birthday present and IT’S REALLY SPECIAL TO ME!

Red:  No!!  It’s MINE!

(Dramatic pause…)

 

Yes, you know the rest.

One of my kids hit the other one.  With the bible.

And lo, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as the result.  From the kids too.

 

* Don’t email me.  The kid gets loot galore from his grandparents.  Generally all the toys that kids really love that drive the parents crazy.  Payback and karma and all that.

** Cowassianss 3:20.  It’s a good ‘un.  Bible is full of ’em, by the way.

*** Rogers 12:20 – This one makes a lot more sense if you don’t screech it.  At anyone.

 

 

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