My Lost Moment of Zen

There comes a time in every stay-at-home mom's day where the stars align, the dishwasher and washing machine softly hum their tune in harmony, and the whining grows silent.  That's right...I'm talking about NAP TIME.  The solace that nap time brings is unrivaled by anything else.  No matter how cute your children are, how much light they bring to your life, lights out time is something we look forward to, and sometimes long for, on a daily basis.

So, when said nap time is rudely interrupted, or, far worse, boycotted by a loud toddler who talks more than you do, it's earth shattering - to say the least.  How on earth am I supposed to think clearly while checking Facebook, email, and posting to my blog with the sound of a 2 year old's heels banging on the floor reverberating in my middle ear?  She's sick, I'm sick, and we both need to nap; she needs to nap so she doesn't whine all afternoon, and I need to nap so I don't lose my mind when any little mishap occurs before Daddy comes home from work/hunting/butchering deer.  Seriously...I'm not ready for her to totally give up her afternoon nap, but I think I'm alone in this fight.

So, as I try to finish up this blog post and work on the family photo calendar, I'll try to make the best of the soundtrack that my lovely daughter is providing on this gorgeous afternoon.  (See...I'm thinking positive.  For now.) 

We are Under Attack

"Don't look now, but there are gigantic vultures on your roof.  Don't let the kids out to play by themselves."

That post on my Facebook wall, or something to that effect, started my day.  Lordy, Lordy!  After dealing with the dead deer a mere 48 hours ago, I'm just not ready for this kind of natural experience.  After loitering on my roof for who knows how long, they descended upon some decaying creature in the creek bed in front of my house.  Secretly, I am, at this point, hoping it's that darn cat we've exiled.  Sadly, I see said cat on the back deck and my hopes are dashed.

Now, I had no idea the turkey buzzards were on the roof to begin with.  Normally I have bat-like hearing.  Apparently, my ears failed me this morning, for I didn't hear their claws on the roof or any sort of noise they may have made.  Can you imagine what my neighbors must have thought?  I'll tell you...they think we're crazy.  It's not good to be the talk of the neighborhood, especially when that discussion is caused by a scene out of the Hitchcock movie "Birds."  Seeing giant, black birds swooping in front of my windows, my curiosity got the best of me, and I looked out the window.  Wrong move.  That's when I finally saw the 10 turkey buzzards waddling around my front yard.  I've never seen such large birds!  They could eat my kids for sure!  Unable to peel my eyes off the fiasco, I observed the activities of the buzzards; they swooped into the ditch and back into the trees with a wingspan I can't even begin to estimate except to say that it was WIIIIDE.  Thank goodness for whatever it was that spooked them that finally got them out of my yard...at least for now.

So, after dealing with the deer the other night and now these nasty, giant birds this morning, I'm about to change my name, cover my house with a giant tarp, and not come out until Spring.

It was THAT kind of day

To fully comprehend the end of this little story, you must, first and foremost, know that I do NOT like nature. (See previous post...Not a Nature Girl.)  During a fun trip with friends to Smith Mountain Lake, a tiny black snake slithered into the kitchen while I was in there getting beverages for everyone, and I pointed at it screaming, "Nature, Nature" at the top of my lungs while simultaneously jumping on the nearest chair.  (I did not spill a single drop of adult beverage though!)  Before my husband and I got married, I ate venison one time and about puked.  I've never seen a dead animal up close and was just fine with that.  Do you get how much I dislike nature?  OK.  Now I can continue.

The day started like every other...get up before the girls, shower, make breakfast and lunch, etc.  Then, it went right down the drain.

-both girls cried or whined during the entire ride to preschool (20 minutes)
-drove 10 minutes out of my way to patron a new, snazzy grocery store only to find I'd left my wallet at home.   This also means no Starbucks, which I'd been craving all morning.  Now I've got a decision to make...get wallet and go grocery shopping at the nasty local store, or postpone that activity in favor of my daily hour-long walk.  Ugh.  I get cranky when I don't exercise.
-decide to go home to get wallet and get groceries
-ketchup falls out of cart and top breaks.  Deli counter employee sees the whole thing, so I can't stealthily switch out defective ketchup with a new one.
-ONE checkout line open for the whole store...baby starts crying her liver out b/c now she's an hour past bottle time
-get home, open tailgate, bag with ketchup falls out onto concrete below...buh-bye ketchup.
-go pick up oldest at preschool and get her very first bad report - hitting and pushing her school buddies.  ARGH!  Discussion with teacher lasts too long, get home for naptime very late.
-pull into driveway, after listening to baby crying and toddler whining (yet again) and get a call from a friend who would like to stop by on her way to an appt.  SURE!
-late naptime results in NO NAP for either girl...subsequent weeping and gnashing of teeth ensues...decide to go for that hour long walk...with iPod to drown out the noise.
-while taking double stroller out of car, I break both thumb nails below the quick...blood everywhere, now sporting twin Dora bandaids.
-while putting the oldest down for bed, husband finally comes home from hunting with blood all over his pants.  "Do you want me to rock her to give you a break?"  Me: "Not in those pants.  Go change and you can take over."  Husband: "I need you to help me with something, so I can't change my pants yet."  CRAP.  All I wanted to do after this hellacious day was take a nice, long, hot shower and drink a beer while watching something mind numbing on TV.  Apparently my husband has other plans for me...think back to my dislike of all things nature-related.

I come downstairs from finally getting the toddler in her bed, and I immediately wish I had just stayed upstairs.  My husband trudges into the garage dragging a deer by the antlers, creating a blood trail I've seen only on TV shows with CSI or SVU in the title.  He cuts part of its leg and puts a rope thought the hole.  Then he says to me, "I need you to help me hang him."  Um-excuse me?  "Just hold the rope tight when I lift him up."  Meanwhile, I can't stop staring at its face...it's staring back at me and its tongue is sticking out of the side of its mouth.  Like passing by a car accident, I just can't look away!  Well, this "quick" event took almost an hour: the deer was too heavy for the hook in the garage and the hook broke, and it took us 30 minutes of creating more blood trails all over the driveway and yard trying to figure out where to hang the dead guy before finally deciding on our pergola in the backyard.  So, instead of ending my "awesome" day with a relaxing shower and a beer, I ended up bloody and even more irritated.  On the plus side,  my helpfulness won me brownie points with my husband and all his huntin' buddies.

Not a Nature Girl

I like to consider my home a bug free zone.  We pay an extermination company loads of money to help make this a reality.  When I say my home is bug free, I would also like for that to be a blanket statement that covers the outside of my home and the grass where my kids and I play as well.  Just because I'd like it to be so doesn't always mean it is so.  The trees and other areas of the yard are fair game as far as I'm concerned.

Apparently, the stink bugs and cicadas did not receive the memo.  They are going out of their way to get into my home (as I write this) or onto my front porch or window screens.  The things are ugly from the top side...the underbelly is far worse!  Chills creepy-crawl from my ears to my toenails when I encounter such eery looking creatures.  Thanks to their presence, I haven't set foot on my front porch after dusk in weeks.  (Spiders account for all the other warm nights I've imprisoned myself in my home.)

My husband is trying to turn me into an outdoorsy girl...sitting on the deck at night to enjoy a glass of wine and the latest Daily Show or Colbert Report on Hulu; enjoying the back and forth motion of our hammock swing while staring at the back of our shrinking house.  I spend most of the time looking for bugs out of the corner of my eye - always ready to spring out of my seat and into the safety of my home should a 6 or 8 legged creature decide that tonight's the night to climb Mount Lee.  Sometimes hubby sits on the front porch, smoking a cigar and watching something he's downloaded on the computer, just to taunt me.  He knows that I refuse to go to bed without kissing him goodnight, so he lures me out there on purpose.  Nice try, but the few seconds I spend out there, surrounded by the sights and sounds of nature, are a few seconds too many!

Heaven help me when my girls grow up and, like most children I know, decide they want to spend the night in a tent in the backyard...with Mommy.    

The Great Dishwasher Debate

In the land of Passive-Aggressiva, AKA my house, there's yet another silent war being waged.  This particular skirmish involves the dishwasher and whether to pre-rinse the dishes or not prior to inserting them into their proper spot in the machine.  I'm a rinser, hubby is not...hence the debate.

Until this past week, I've let him go about his non-rinsing ways and not said too many words about it.  However, during a particularly whiney morning in our household, I was unloading the dishwasher and reached the end of my tether.  When the girls are screaming or whining, two of the cats are fighting and creating a tornado of cat hair, the third cat is puking somewhere in the house, and the phone is ringing, the LAST thing I need to do is re-wash a dish; or lose a fingernail trying to scratch off the food that is now hermetically sealed to the dish.  I agree with hubby on this one important point..."A dishwasher is supposed to wash the dishes, therefore I shouldn't have to rinse them off first."  YES, that is so true!  Items should not have to be rinsed before putting them into a dishwasher.  Commercials for detergent and washers all hail that very remark!- Life would be easy if I could simply turn on the dishwasher full of dirty, sticky, messy dishes and it actually got rid of all the food on the plates, like a good little dishwasher is supposed to do.  Ours, which we inherited when we bought our house, does not perform its washing duties appropriately, and when hubby leaves food on his dishes/cooking items when putting them in the dishwasher, I inevitably have to re-wash said items before putting them back in the cabinet.  Who has time for that!?!?

So, after a day of being a mommy and an entertainer and a short order cook and a housekeeper/maid and a soother and a translator and a dish re-washer, I decided to approach hubby in that walking-on-egg-shells manner that's required of such an endeavor.  Kindly, I mentioned that once again, the dishwasher did not fully clean the dishes and it added a bit of stress to my hectic day.  I continued with a plea for his help in making my day peachy keen by simply running his plates/utensils under running water for a fleeting moment prior to putting them into the dishwasher.  *Notice I did not place blame.  I said nothing about his rinsing negligence that created the problem in the first place.*  His response: "I'll see what I can do."  And the war wages on...and on and on.

Warning:

:Exposure to Introverts or Rude People Can Cause Enhanced Exercise Experiences

First full day at the OBX and the girls were up earlier than the sun.  What did I do with my early, EARLY Sunday morning?  Like all people who like to appear healthy and fit, I went for a brisk walk on the beach.  On my walk, which was boring b/c I didn't have earbuds with which to listen to my iPod, I decided to do an experiment.  Being in the true South (if you knew my hubby you'd know why I had to put the word "true" in there), I figured most people would be friendly.  However, knowing that most people there were transplants for the week, I guessed I would be hard pressed to find friendly, Southern folk.  So began my quest.

As I wiggled my hips down the beach I mostly stared into the glistening ocean, thinking that I should have applied sunblock or at least worn a hat.  I was coming up with blog topics, singing songs in my head, and having fake conversations with people in my mind.  That is, until I'd pass a fellow exerciser.  No matter where they were looking or what they were looking like, I waved and piped, "Good mornin'!"  With my signature big smile and Richmond accent, I hoped people would oblige me and return my salutations.  I made sure to just smile and wave to people with earbuds.  Even still, they couldn't contort their faces to return the smile.  Sadly, out of the 31 people I greeted, a mere 3 returned my sentiments.  Maybe they were too shy to say hi back?  Perhaps some cussed me out once I passed for being so chipper in the morning.  I appeared to be enjoying my exercise...maybe they weren't enjoying theirs?  Maybe they were so thrown by someone acknowledging their presence that they were stunned into silence?  To those 3 people who pleasantly responded...I thank you.  Although, you didn't do much to change my opinion of society in general and the direction in which it's heading. 

Since the walk away from the beach house proved fruitless in terms of making new friends, I decided to try the running thing on the way home.  I hadn't run since 2005 or 2006 when I was training for a half marathon I got peer pressured into doing.  I'm slow, I look like a fool, my thighs rub together at the top, my shorts look like they're being eaten by said upper thighs, I turn bright red and appear to be close to passing out even though I'm not,  and I get blisters the size of dollar bills on my flattened arches no matter how top-of-the-line my running shoes are.  All of that aside, I went for it.  At first I thought someone had poured Jell-O into my butt, stomach and boobs.  Holy Wiggle Jiggle, Batman!  I felt like I was being pulled to the core of the Earth with each step.  Knowing that my jiggly-bits would settle in a while, I kept going.  Ugh.  Why did I start this?  What was I thinking?  I had to be at least 2 miles from home.  OK - maybe a mile and a half.  Either way, it might as well have been light-years.  I couldn't even see our beach house from where I was, and anything resembling it was blurred by the morning haze.  Being competitive by nature, giving up and walking was NOT an option at this point.  I quickly thought of any song to sing to myself.  "I'm bringing home a baby bumble bee..."  Nope!  Sad that the first song that came to mind was a children's song...work hazard I guess.  Then I remembered all the summer songs I'd recently downloaded onto my iPod, so I sang those to myself instead.  Once I got close enough to the house to see it I started running a bit faster.  I didn't want my family members to see me running at the pace of a speed walker.  Forgetting that, unlike the car's side view mirror, things are FARTHER than they appear on the beach.  Remember...competitive nature here!  So, I kept up that faster pace for the rest of the distance to the house.  I got to the "finish line" I drew in the sand and vowed never to do that again...until Tuesday.

Hallmark: Take Note!

While searching for a Valentine's Day card for a boyfriend about 5-6 years ago, my inner monologue had a malfunction. I said, in a loud teacher voice, "Where's the 'I Don't Love You Anymore and I'm Breaking Up With You Tomorrow' section?" Apparently I hadn't noticed the nice man standing next to me, nor the 14 other people in the store. We were all last minute card shoppers. Normally I wouldn't be caught dead in ANY store the day of a "major" holiday, but this was a def-con 5 emergency. I hadn't gotten a single thing for my boyfriend for V-Day. As you can probably tell, I was NOT feeling the love anymore and didn't even want to spend $5 for a stupid card that didn't convey my true feelings anyway. What a waste...of my time AND money! Anyway, my plans to break his drunken heart needed to be kept secret (from him at least, since the whole store now knew about it), as I didn't want to forever ruin his Valentine's Days from here to Kingdom Come.
Let's be honest. Unless you're a complete jerk devoid of ANY remorse or empathy, you just don't break up with someone on Valentine's Day proper. If you're just a pseudo-jerk, maybe you do it the day before...save yourself some money and the hassle of trying to find a V-Day present that doesn't convey "lifetime commitment." I am neither jerk nor pseudo-jerk, so I prepare to make nice on the actual holiday and give a card that doesn't even hint at the devastating heartbreak that is going to befall my sweetie within 24 hours.
OK-back to the story. So, there I am, searching for a generic "Happy Valentine's Day" card...maybe one that's even blank on the inside. I find said card, pay for it, and my friend and I head to our favorite bar for an apre-shopping cocktail. After the liquid courage had time to permeate my bones, I headed home to sign the darn card, and patiently wait for him to return from work. (My friend headed home for what I'm sure was a romance-filled evening with her hubby-to-be.) I open the door and am hit with the smell of my boyfriend's go-to dinner cooking in the kitchen. He had not only gotten off work early, he had also cooked dinner AND gotten me flowers and a proper Valentine's Day present. Oh yeah, and a card. Crap. Well, it gives me yet more confidence that I'm about to make the right choice, as even for Valentine's Day we aren't on the same page. I couldn't even eat the dinner he'd prepared, but I loved the sparkly sweater.
Fast-forward to the next day. I come home from my favorite watering hole to find boyfriend on the sofa...tipsy as usual. Given last night's lack of escapades, he'd figured out my plans for today and ended up breaking up with me first! ARGH! Guess I could have saved that card money after all.

The Dish Towel Incident

Although I want you to think it is, my life is far from perfect. Any perfection my friends or family perceive is all an illusion. Seriously. Mere minutes before guests arrive I'm dusting and de-cluttering at a fever pitch. No need for blush when I've got the pink cheeks that only a mad dash clean up can provide. My children leave the house with pressed clothes and not a hair out of place (now that said hair is long enough for proper use of barrets). My husband and I are all smiles and appropriate kissy kissy in public. Once the garage door hits the concrete it's sometimes a different story. The stress of his job, my job (24/7 SAHM thank you very much), lack of sleep, lack of dates, lack of regular good-good (heard that on TV the other night and decided to go with it) and overall displeasure with the fact that our house seems to be shrinking all create a murky fog that creeps into our house and never seems to dissipate.
Said fog is the reason for the dish towel incident...rather how my forgetting to do something ballooned up to being what I now refer to as an "incident."
Really, it's a question of which one is more sanitary. Which one would give rise to an easier kitchen tidy-up at the end of the day? Dish towel or paper towel? We have both in our kitchen, but they do NOT hold equal ground in the eyes of those who dwell in my house. So how did a simple slip of the mind become such a traumatic event that I'm still even thinking about it months later?!?!?
At first, there were 2 dish towels. They both hung on the oven handle. No problem. All's quiet on the western front...until my oldest decided the towels looked like super fun playthings! She pulled both towels down into a cat hair tumbleweed, and proceeded to drag them, a la Linus, all over the dusty floors. Into the wash they went! Mommy brain reared its ugly head and clean, cat hair-free towels were not immediately placed in the designated area. Do the math...now there are NO dish towels in plain sight. Keep in mind that there are, however, paper towels right next to the sink, and a plethora of dish towels in the hutch, which takes up prime real estate in our small kitchen.
Enter hubby. Hubby comes into the kitchen - hubby needs a towel - hubby refuses to use paper towels - hubby over-reacts (a mere opinion) to lack of dish towels. His logical response: take ALL dish towels out of the hutch and place them in various and sundry spots all over the kitchen. I mean, towels are hanging from the top cabinets, the bottom cabinets, the drawers, the faucet, the stove knobs, the hooks on the island and even on the door of the fridge. It looked like Williams-Sonoma threw up dish towels all over my kitchen. Ugh. All I could think about was not the error in not replacing the towels with mongoose-like speed, but that this was going to take a while to clean up. Oh yeah, and how ridiculous a war strategy this was.
Strategizing is a way of life around here, and hubby had made his move. I carefully considered my options...act like a child or act like a grown up. Since the first had been taken this time, I went with the second. So, with utmost outward maturity and a string of slanderous phrases invading my inner monologue, I neatly folded up all but 3 of the towels and put them back in the hutch. Send home the troops, the war is over! Well, at least the skirmish over the darn dish towels.