Writing News
This week I completed the final polish of THE COUSINS EXTRODANAIR vs. PRINCESS GUARGANTUAN AND THE MALEVELANT MUDSLINGING DINOSAUR TRUCK OF DOOM! Now I await the illustrations from my lovely sister-in-law. Although I know she is sewing 10 zillion things for Christmas presents, including a quilt, and has three rampaging offspring just like us. Then I wrote our Christmas letter. You know, the missive that is often included with the beauteous photo card of you and your family squinting into the sun and attempting to portray the most cheerful, attractive, and patient version of yourself for posterity. And finally, I was asked to say a couple words about a friend of mine for her birthday at the next MOPS meeting and I thought that the obvious solution was to write a Shakespearean sonnet extrapolating upon her most glorious traits. Well I got eight lines into it and realized after I had to force out a rhyme by using the word “midwife” that perhaps things were getting a bit silly and I should stop trying to impress one and all with my questionable skills and simply concentrate on my friends wonderfulness in common English. That I was able to do and I now have a few nice paragraphs that sum up all that I admire about her without any rhyming. Oh well.
Breaking News
No more Holidays this week and so our family went back to normalness. Which for me meant doing pre-school with my 5 and 3 year olds while my 1 year old is in the backpack on my (you guessed it, back). In many ways I love doing school. My boys are so smart and excited and fun. But then there are the moments when they fling their limp little bodies down upon the table and exclaim that fatigue has overwhelmed them and they absolutely cannot continue without the risk of cardiac arrest or a seizure or an onset of malaria or in the very least the loss of some regularly used limb. And so I have officially dug to the bottom of my Mommy trick bag and come up with this. Bribery. If sweet boy #1 finishes his page in the allotted time he earns, dum dum dum dum, four yogurt balls! For those of you in the dark ages, yogurt balls are a type of small fruit snack thinly coated in yogurt sauce and therefore proclaimed to be healthy. I choose to turn a blind eye to the questionable nature of this claim because they are small and make marvelous potty treats. And if sweet boy #2 obeys and does all that I ask he also receives the afore mentioned bribe. Is this a new parenting low? Perhaps, but dagnabit it works and that is all that counts at this point!
Harrowing/Heartwarming
Parent Moment of the Week
Several interesting moments this week. We hung our stockings, which of course resulted in a slew of requests to put things into them. The most interesting one was when sweet boy #1 excitedly whispered in my ear that he wanted to put soy ice cream into sweet boy #2s stocking. I informed him that it would most likely melt, but he was unfazed and patiently explained that he would put it in a baggy first. Of course, how foolish of me to consider that he would propose un-baggied soy ice cream as a stocking stuffer. Then sweet boy #2 was frolicking about in delighted glee over our newly erected Christmas tree and knocked it completely over spilling about a gallon of H2O onto the floor (our stand holds an abnormally large amount of water) and detaching 8 Christmas balls. And finally sweet boy #1 was taking quite a long time to use the bathroom and so I investigated. I found him washing my toothbrush in the sink with soap. I asked if he had already washed his hands. His answer was: “But look, I’m washing your toothbrush!” That toothbrush in now in the dishwasher, again.
