Thirty seconds ago I was standing in the darkness of the front hall closet, in my pajamas and donning a blue flower patterned child’s bicycle helmet, holding a box of Cap’n Crunch.

“Do you see him, mom? Do you see him?”

Yeah, there’s a glow-in-the-dark pirate guy named Jean Lafoote who is hidden somewhere on the back of the cereal box. But he can only be spotted when you are standing in the darkness of a closet in your pajamas.

(The bike helmet was just for fun.)

No, I won’t ”tag” anyone. But if you would like to participate, copy and paste into the comment section. Here are 50 things about me, whether you wanted to know or not:

1.What time did you get up this morning? 9:00 (I know, so bad.)
2. How do you like your steak? Med. well
3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? Knocked Up
4. What is your favorite TV show? Seinfeld reruns
5. What did you have for breakfast? Diet Coke
6. What is your middle name? Louise
7. What is your favorite cuisine? Crab & pumpkin pie
8. What foods do you dislike? Sour krout, capers, ginger
9. What are your favorite chips? Sun Chips
10. What is your favorite CD at the moment? Karma by Delerium is in the CD player in my car right now
11. Who is your favorite singer? Sting
12. What is your favorite song? Too many to list
13. What characteristics do you despise? Manipulators & negativity
14. What are your favorite clothes? Jeans and t-shirt
15.If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? Anywhere with peace and quiet, ocean and sunshine
16. Favorite brand of clothing? Lucky
17. Where would you want to retire? See #15
18. Favorite time of day? Cuddling with the kids at bedtime
19. Where were you born? Pennsylvania
20. What is your favorite sport to watch? Competitive dance/cheerleading
21. Who do you think will not send this back? N/A
22. Person you expect to send it back first? N/A
23. Pepsi or Coke? Diet Coke
24. Beavers or ducks? Ducks… I was chased by a beaver once. Seriously.
25. Are you a morning person or a night owl? Night
26. Pedicure or manicure? Pedi!
27. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share? My sister started her blog
28. What did you want to be when you were little? A dancer/singer/movie star
29. Your best childhood memory? Spending time at Uncle Phil’s house
30. Piercing? Two in each ear, half closed in the belly
31. Ever been to Africa ? No
32. Ever been toilet papering? Heck yea
33. Been in a car accident? Several
34. Favorite day of the week? Friday
35. Favorite restaurant? Noodles
36. Favorite Flower? Gerber daisies
37. Favorite ice cream? Haagen Dazs – Chocolate peanut butter
38. Favorite fast food restaurant? Fazoli’s
39. How many times did you fail your driver’s test? None
40. From whom did you get your last email? Me. I emailed myself a picture from Jon’s laptop.
41. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card? Buckle (or Pier 1)
42. Bedtime? Midnight or 1
43. Who are you most curious about their responses to this? n/a
44. Last person you went out to dinner with? Jon tonight, sort of
45. What are you listening to right now? Law and Order: Criminal Intent
46. What is your favorite color? green
47. How many tattoos do you have? None, but I tried to brand myself once (don’t ask)
48. How many are you sending this email to? N/A
49. Favorite magazine? Reader’s Digest and blogs

50. What time did you finish this email? 12:59 am

Remember how yesterday I was going on and on about how wonderfully well behaved my children are… so responsible, so kind to each other, blah blah blah. Well, yesterday it was true. Their Children’s Miracle Music thing is awesome. They get everything done in the mornings. But once the Miracle Music CD is over, I am once again on my own to raise my children with some sort of manners and civility. And I suck at it.

I beseech thee, oh lady who invented Children’s Miracle Music… please develop something for children to listen to while running errands. Like, “Children’s Miracle Music for the Grocery Store”. Or, “Children’s Miracle Music for Not Acting Like Crazy Chimp Babies While in Public”. Because today I really needed a miracle, I really did. And there was no miraculous music anywhere. I tried humming something, but it was very un-miraculous and really just made my children hit each other more and squeal at a higher frequency (dogs in the parking lot were going nuts).

There I was, standing in the health food store, looking at a bottle of something called “Calm and Focus Serum for Children”. Seriously, I was. Maybe it was a sign. But I hear this loud, obnoxious squealing. I assume it’s a cranky toddler. Then I hear an adult “shush”ing the squealing child. Then I hear my son’s voice saying “Zoe, stop squealing like a maniac.” Fantastic. The obnoxious child is my child. And she is not a toddler, she is 5 ½ and very well knows better. And she is being disciplined by a health food store worker because this child’s mother is nowhere to be found… she is probably off somewhere in the store looking for kid-calming serum or something.

So I drag my kids to the check out, without the serum, because it is $26 and I really believe my children are past the point of homeopathic help. While in the check out line, the kids roll on the ground, alternating between tickling each other and pulling each other’s hair. I yank them up off of the ground and give them slew of empty threats. Jachin then goes over to a tray of organic cheese curl samples and breaths all over each every sample, while Zoe proceeds to pull out 25 sticks of various smelling incense. I got to sort and replace each of those sticks while apologizing for the germs on the cheese curls. The health food store people didn’t care. They didn’t want my apologies or my incense sorting… they simply wanted me to take my satanic spawns and leave their store… and oh yeah it would be great if I never came back.

Please, Miracle Music lady. You may be my last hope.

Or maybe I should plop down the 26 bucks on the calming serum and hope for the best.

*sigh* Dude, who am I kidding? There’s not enough lavender and chamomile on the planet…

No, no, not the misspelled disco group from the 70’s.

It’s another contest!

I know, I’m really quite obnoxious and insatiable with the contests. But who can resist a limerick? Who??? Not me.

The task is to write a limerick describing your blog.

Here’s mine:

There once was a girl with perspective

Who pondered the offbeat collective.

Not a “mom blog”, per se,

At the end of the day

Witty prose is the leading objective.

I’m tellin’ ya, I bet you can’t write just one. Limericks—much like heroin or pumpkin cookies—are highly addictive.

Try it—go nuts!

Wouldn’t you love to be me:

I got my sleepy rear out of bed at 7:45 this morning. By this point my children had already: gotten up and made their beds, gotten dressed, helped each other straighten their rooms, made themselves cereal and then rinsed their dishes in the sink, and brushed their hair and teeth.

All of this by the time I got up.

Are my children possessed? Nope. I found one of the most awesome things a mom can buy. Seriously, I know I’m going to sound like a commercial… but holy crap, this works.  I found something called Children’s Miracle Music. I can’t sing it’s praises enough. It’s a “system” that comes with two CD’s (one for morning and one for bedtime) and a dry erase board with a chart. When my kids wake up in the morning, they start the CD themselves. It guides them through their morning “points”. They get a point for making their bed, a point for getting dressed, ect. They race the music on the Cd’s, for instance: “Point number one is make your bed. You have two short songs.” When they are all finished, they record their points on the dry erase board. Once they reach 100 points, they get whatever “prize” they’ve written. (My kids generally write something like : “Go get ice cream with Dad”)

I’m telling you, everyone with kids should get this. It’s $30 and I gladly would have paid double. Each dry erase board accomodates up to eight kids. In my opinion, kids as young as three or four would be able to do this with a little parental assistance, eventually working up to doing everything themselves. My five year old can do the entire thing on her own, and my eight year old–who is at the stage where he thinks that most things are “dumb”–thinks the Cd’s are cool. It’s really quite amazing. The only draw back I have seen is that my kids eventually get a little sick of the same songs each day. But according to the site, there is new music coming out soon.

Buy this!

I found this contest a few months back and entered just a little too late! (Like seriously, about 15 minutes after the deadline.) But I made the deadline this time, entering my funny-but-sadly-true Sugar Wagon Fling post. The lady running this contest (and the blog it’s on) is a professional storyteller and a funny writer. Check it out.

Wow. We need an internet filter.

The other day I went online to look up the phone number for the local pool to double check the location of the kids’ swimming lessons.  So I typed in dexonline.com and waited for the little Dex guy to pop up and ask what number I wanted.

 Not until the nano-second that I hit the Enter button did I see what my twitchy fingers had actually typed in: sexonline.com

Look away, Jachin! Look away!

I slammed the laptop lid and vowed to install filtering software.

This past weekend was the Orem Summerfest, granting us 48 hours of unbridled, community sponsored superfun.

Saturday morning Jon got up extra early for the 5k race that began at the Orem public library. The kids and I went over and, after searching high and low for a parking spot, stood shivering a little while we cheered him on. This was Jon’s first race and he did well, setting his first PR (personal record).

After the race, we went over to the park pavilion for the Rotary Club pancake breakfast, a breakfast that has become an annual tradition for our family. Zoe didn’t even make it out of the pancake line before dropping her plate—pancake side down—on the cement. It just wouldn’t be breakfast if I didn’t have to wipe ketchup, syrup, or both, off of the floor…err, ground. Several minutes after we sat down to eat, Zoe stood up and began dancing around, holding herself and crossing her legs as she hopped in spastic circles. I gave her a questioning look and I pointed to a row of Port-a-Potties. She froze and gave me a look like I had just asked her to sit on a bear trap to go to the bathroom. At this point she assured me that she could hold it—all day if she needed to—until we got home. I dragged her, kicking and screaming, to the Port-a-Potty. The rest of that story has been expunged from both of our memories. But I vaguely remember a lot of crying and screaming and something about someone being afraid they would fall into the big stinky potty hole and come tumbling out the other side somewhere in the middle of China…covered in poop.

We left the breakfast to take Jachin to his coach pitch game, where he literally SAT in the outfield and completely covered his face with my glove (yes, my glove because he couldn’t find his own glove). Occasionally he would totally fling himself backwards into the grass, making “clover angels” with his arms and legs, all the while wearing my glove like a hockey mask. I imagined that this is what that chainsaw wielding “Jason” fellow must have looked like when he played coach pitch. Jon and I stood along the side of the field, yelling at Jachin to stand up and at least pay some attention or we would just leave, to which he yelled that he could see out of the holes in the stitching and so he was paying attention. So neener-neener, take that, mom and dad… holes in the stitching. Meanwhile, I’m listening to another set of parents who are sitting near us and they are talking about how their kid can’t hit, and then they say something about how at least their kid’s actually standing up in the outfield. I sent them a stern shut up, punks with my mind. Ahhh, the joys of being the parent of the most disinterested kid on the team.

After the game (which, some-old-how, my son’s team won), we headed back to the festival for—insert drum roll here—the Carnival Rides! Woo hoo! Jon bought about $40 worth of tickets, which meant that each of our 2 kids could pick about 3 rides each. Jon mentally tallied how much the carnival ride people were making and swore under his breath and said he was quitting computers and becoming a carnie. I said good luck with that. Jachin wanted to know about the spaceship looking ride that spins so fast you stick to the wall. I made the mistake of telling him that you can climb the walls and lie sideways while it spins… so of course he jumped in line for that one. Crap. I had to get on with him in case he freaked out. We climbed the rickety stairs and walked inside the spaceship and stood against the wall. It was 20 degrees hotter inside and it smelled like vomit of carnivals-past. Poor little Jachin. I watched all of the blood drain from his face as we spun around and around. All of the other kids were climbing sideways and little Jachin was just trying not to hurl. I said, “Jachin, look at me, buddy. If you yell ‘woo hoooooo’ it makes your stomach feel better.” Which is totally true. So he did. He woo hoo-ed his little heart out. And after what felt like an hour, we slowed down. He climbed out and told my husband about how awesome the spaceship ride is.

Jachin and I needed food. Fast. So the kids got $4 sandwiches from the make-shift Hogi Yogi stand. And no, $4 didn’t include chips or a drink. And Zoe was mad because she had to pick off the pickles…with her own fingers…and now her fingers smelled like yucky pickles. I told her at least her fingers didn’t smell like the spaceship ride. Then I sat under a tree and listened to some classical guitar players while Jon and the kids walked over to watch the Apache helicopter land. I was a hundred yards away from the landing site, and still had dirt fly into my eye. The helicopter kind of killed the “mellow” I had going on from the guitars.

The festival ended with fireworks. We sat in the Jiffy Lube parking lot and watched the fireworks explode over the library. It was great. I love the festival spirit—when almost everyone is kind to almost everyone else.

And the kids fell asleep in record time last night… Zoe didn’t even make it out of her clothes. Kids asleep in under five minutes? Now that’s something worth almost barfing for.

I normally save any movie opinions for the movie page, but this deserves a post on the front page; if for no other reason than to stand as a FIRM WARNING.

Tonight I drove up to Salt Lake to meet my BFF Diana for her birthday dinner/movie. We had decided on Waitress, because it got such great reviews and because we have some adoration for Nathan Fillion. When we got there, we realized that the movie times Diana had picked up off of the internet were incorrect (damn you, Yahoo Movies!!) so we had to pick something else. We had both been wanting to see Knocked Up—a movie which also got some great reviews. So we bought tickets and got some nastilicious* nachos and sat down and waited to be made to laugh.

This was one funny movie, people. Funny. But WOW were there parts that were hard to watch. This movie should be marketed along side the Ortho Evra patch as a highly effective form of birth control. This movie takes a very honest look at everything pregnancy. Specifically, pregnancy sex… lots of pregnancy sex, and the honest dialog that every pregnant couple has had during pregnancy sex. Dialog which is both funny and excruciating to watch because you’re thinking hey, we had that conversation. and did we look that pathetic during that conversation? And then you realize, yes, you totally looked that pathetic during the pregnancy sex conversation, only you are probably not as hot as Katherine Heigl, which just adds insult to injury.

Now, next I will bring us to the birth scene. A birth scene where you will get multiple Discovery Channel-esque shots of the baby crowning. If you do not know what “crowning baby” means, YOU ARE NOT READY TO SEE IT! If you do know what “crowning baby” means, then you already know that you do not want to see it. Either way, shield your eyes, people. For the love… shield your eyes.

Another difficult part to watch was the whole Paul Rudd / Leslie Mann relationship. (The sister and her husband.) I was able to draw too many parallels to mine own relationship with my own husband. I’m watching thinking: Hey, we’ve been married almost 10 years. Hey, we have two kids. Hey, I’m just now edging past “prime”. Hey, I bitch at Jon like that… holy crap, that’s us! And that’s sad, because, bless them, they give such an honest performance of an imperfect, decade married, couple in love. (The only difference is that my husband has never flipped out and driven to Vegas for a lap dance and Cirque du Soleil on ‘shrooms with his stoner soon-to-be brother in law. I supposed I should thank heaven for that.) Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann were great in this.  

Again I say, go, but be ye warned.

*nastilicious = nasty + delicious (as in movie nachos)

Just last week I did a post that went on and on about all of the fabulous things there are to do in our town. In the weeks preceding summer vacation I scoured all around, buying up tickets and passes to activities and events in order to make sure that my children weren’t sitting around bored for the next three months. My poor kids weren’t going to have to sit around watching Spongebob reruns all day, neither would they have to succumb to hours of playing Wow Wow Wubbzy games on Nick Jr.com. My children were going to swimming and camps and dance lessons and all kinds of awesome, socializing type stuff.

Why, then, was this the scene in our house this morning:

Me: Come on guys, get your swim suits on and get in the car!(The exclamation point is only showing that I am calling to them while they are downstairs in the computer room. I don’t actually yell at my kids… much.)

Jachin: Hang on, we’re doing a really funny thing on LineRider.

Me:  But we have to go now! Do you want to be late?

Jachin: I don’t care.

Paige (my little sister whom I’ve also bought lessons for): Yeah, we don’t care.

Me:  Well I care! Now get in the car! (Now the exclamation points are there because I’m a little ticked off.)

So we went to swimming lessons, and they had fun. Then we came back home and they immediately got back on the computer. An hour after that, I was trying to get them into the car, again, so that we could go to the kid matinee over at the Scera park.

Me: Come on guys, get in the car!

Jachin: No!

Paige: Forget it!

Me: What is your deal? Don’t get sassy or we won’t go the movie!

Them: Okay! Great! Come see what we did on LineRider.

Then it hits me: they are happy to sit and do absolutely nothing, rotting their brains, their skin turning pastier by the second. They want to sit in a slackish, vegetative state in front of either the TV or the computer. I told Jachin tonight that he has baseball practice in the morning and he almost cried because he would rather sit in front of the TV and watch Dragon Tails than go play baseball. What is wrong with my children?

I used to play outside when I was a kid! I used to pretend things…with my imagination!  I would actually play…with toys. And we would ride our bikes all over town. I remember the one summer my friend and I turned the woods across the street into a “National Park” and we charged the other neighbor kids money to come across the street and behold the natural beauty that we were preserving. We caught salamanders in the creek and showcased them in a special endangered species display. Salamanders are not endangered, and we had to return the neighbor kids’ money, but it was fun! I ask you again, what is wrong with my children? With all children? The next neighbor kid who walks into my house on a perfectly beautiful day and says, “Jachin’s mom, can we play Xbox?” I’m tossing his butt out for the rest of the summer.

My kids are going to get tans this summer. They are going to swim. And play baseball. And have a dance recital. And have Star Wars light saber battles in the backyard with the rebar leftover from construction (not safe, but fun!).

They are going to have FUN, dammit! Even if it makes them freakin’ miserable.