The kids wore their costumes to school today. Jachin, however, also packed a pair of regular clothes, in case his plastic stormtrooper costume got too hot. And indeed, he came home this afternoon in plain clothes. When the time came to get redressed for trick or treating tonight, he didn’t want to do it.

“Mom, that costume is too hot!”

“Really? Because it will be cold tonight. Were you really that hot at school today?”

“Yes! You know when dad goes running and he gets a big sweat spot between his boobs…?”

*doing my darndest not to laugh* “Umm, on his chest, yes. Daddy doesn’t really have boobs.”

“…well, when I took off my costume, I had a sweat spot like that on my shirt… only mine was HUGE.”

How could I argue about the sweat spot between the boobs? Tonight he went out in his stormtrooper helmet… and a lightweight cotton shirt and jeans. (Cotton breathes.)

Ok, I remember reading the Stephen King short story, The Mist, when I was 12 or 13. Scary. As. Crap. (And we all know how scary crap can be, when it wants to be…) A “mist” —  like a thick, bright fog — rolls up on a town, driving a group of people into a large grocery store. They are trapped inside, waiting for the mist to subside. Watching from the floor-to-ceiling windows that span the entire front of the store, they see that the mist isn’t subsiding. They tie a rope to the waist of a willing man and send him out into the mist to find help; the rope will allow him to find his way back. He walks out the glass doors and quickly disappears into the thick mist. Soon after, the rope pulls tight, there are loud screams from the mist, and the rope breaks. There is something IN the mist. Insanity ensues. Scary stuff, man.

I just saw this ad on TV today for the first time.

Will the movie be lame? Almost assuredly… the book never mentioned a “government project” or some such nonsense.  And of course, the horrific images your mind conjures are always scarier than the best CGI. But I can honestly say I never thought they’d try to make this one, and I’m kinda interested to see what it’s like.

If nothing else, go read the story (in The Skeleton Crew) for Halloween. C-r-e-e-p-y!!

This morning at 9am I was going about my business of shuttling kids to different schools. First I drive Zoe across town to her school for kindergarten, then I drive Jachin back across town the other way to his school. At one of the 5 stoplights along the way back, I came to a stalled car. The light was red, but I could tell that the car was going nowhere because there was a teenage boy standing behind the car, preparing to push it while the mom, a teenage daughter, and another young daughter sat inside. After a nano-second of thinking “it’s a small car, he can probably push it himself”, I pulled off to the side, put on the hazard lights, and told Jachin to wait in the car. I got out of my car and started pushing right as the light turned green. We got the car off to the side of the road, and I asked the kid if they had a cell phone to call for a ride. He said they didn’t. At that point, the mom got out of the car and thanked me. I told her that I would run back to the car to get my cell phone for them to call someone. She said they had no one to call, but that usually, if they waited a little while, it would start back up. I wasn’t sure what to do… I felt a little weird leaving them all sitting there along side the road, holding their backpacks, waiting for their car to start. I asked if I could do anything for them. The mom said, “Well, are you going that way?”, pointing south. I said yes. She told me that her two teenagers were in a program at UVSC to finish up their associates degrees before graduation (from high school). She said that it was very important that they get there on time. She asked if I’d drive them. I said sure. I still felt weird leaving the lady and little girl sitting there along the road, but I took the other two with me.

When we walked back around the corner to my idling car, Jachin was sitting in the front seat, the hazards flashing on and off intermittently, the windshield wipers going, and the headlights now on. A few more minutes and he may have taken himself to school. I motioned for him to get in the backseat. The teenage girl opened the door to get in the front seat. I had to move my old purse (still sitting there because I haven’t quite finished moving over all of the important stuff to my new purse), a hoodie, some school papers, a water bottle, some candy wrappers, and some swimming goggles. The teenage boy, who had to ride in the back with Jachin, had a tougher time. The backseat contains two booster seats for the kids, with the ”middle” seat being open. And when I say it’s open, I mean the middle seat is the trashcan for the backseat. He had to sit in the empty booster. A 16 year old butt in a booster seat that a five year old usually sits in. Before actually being able to enter the car, he took his foot and shoved a clean spot on the floor for his feet to rest. Crap in the back: three sweaters, empty chip bags, half of a cookie, another pair of swimming goggles, more papers, two pairs of shoes, and empty juice boxes. 

I was humiliated.

I apologized repeatedly to the teenagers I had “rescued” and then forced to ride in my mobile trash can. 

I drove quickly, telling them about the time my car broke down while I was pregnant with Jachin. It was right at a stoplight at the exit to a movie theater. Everyone honked and flicked me off and screeched their tires going around me, and no one would stop to help a pregnant chick.

They were impressed and saddened by my story, and I think my plan of diverting their attention from all of the trash in my car was working. Oh, but the story came to an end and we weren’t to the college yet. The girl’s gaze wandered back down to the remains of my old purse; receipts, wrappers, old tissues, a few odd pieces of gum…

I offered her some of the gum.

She politely declined. 

I dropped them off and wished them luck. The boy accidentally kicked a juice box out of the car, and it clanked to the pavement. He picked it up, not sure what to do with it, and threw it back in.

Note to self: clean. your. friggin. car.

There are few albums that hit the nail right on the head. Most albums have one or two singles that are awesome and the rest of the tracks stink. Sometimes an album will have mostly great stuff, except for the few crappy tracks you skip through each time. But then occasionally — and I mean, oh, so rarely – an album will come along that is absolutely perfect, where every track goes smoothly into the next the whole way through. There is undeniable bliss of being able to play an entire CD from start to finish. These “perfect” albums are few and far between, and my list is short. But my list is as follows:

Maroon 5’s It Won’t Be Soon Before Long (my current fave)

Maroon 5’s Songs for Jane (yeah, I guess that would make them my favorite band, if I really had a favorite band…)

Def Leppard’s Hysteria

John Mayer’s Room for Squares

and perhaps my favorite: Jars of Clay by Jars of Clay

Sound off! I’m sure some of you will think that all of these suck. For me, though, these are dang perfect.

What is your perfect CD??

I was very sad to see that Katee Sackhoff (from the new Bionic Woman, and “Starbuck” from Battlestar Galactica), my current wanna-be-like-this-star person didn’t show up. Also, I was a little sad to see that the celebrity I have been told most times that I look like: Drew Barrymore, did not show up on the radar at all. But I guess I’ll take Fergie… whatever. And at least Shaq didn’t make an appearance.

Thanks to Bad Mom and Mama Milton for posting up this cute thing first.

So today I got one of those Fw:fw:fw: READ THIS!!! emails that everyone sends to everyone in their email address books, clogging servers and inboxes on every continent. It was from my aunt (Hi, Joan), who usually does not send me this kind of stuff unless it’s something either really cute (ie- containing pictures of kittens in cute poses like lying stretched out, yawning in a hammock) or else something seemingly important. I opened it and read it, hoping that my virus scan would do it’s job well.

The email pertained to the new movie coming out this Christmas season called “The Golden Compass”, based on the first novel in a trilogy called “His Dark Materials” by Phillip Pullman. Pullman is called by some the “Anti-CS Lewis” in that he is a proud Atheist, hates CS Lewis, and writes children’s fantasy novels… which are kind of anti-Narnia in context. From what I have read up on thus far (though I want to make clear that I have NOT read the trilogy, so I do not know specifically or firsthand what is in it), the trilogy starts out pretty tame and watered down (with the first book being kind of borderline and not overtly anti-Christian). However, by the end of the trilogy it becomes brash and in-your-face,  the third book ending with the child characters killing off the “God” character in order to do whatever they want. The child characters main struggle is with a dark secret society/church called the Magisterium (supposedly representing Christianity). Another character (an ex-nun) describes Christianity as “a very powerful and convincing mistake”. Now, I want to stress again that I have not read these books. However, finding these claims to be a little unsettling (I was planning to take my son to see this movie, not knowing much about it), I decided to do a little Google search on this Phillip Pullman guy.

The following is cut and pasted directly from his personal blog (www.phillip-pullman.com) in the “about the writing” section.

His Dark Materials seems to be against organised religion. Do you believe in God?

I don’t know whether there’s a God or not. Nobody does, no matter what they say. I think it’s perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don’t know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away.

Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it’s because he’s ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they’re responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I’d want nothing to do with them.

Were you encouraged to be creative?

No, I was ignored. When anyone took any notice it was to point out what a twit I was, and laugh at me. This was the best possible preparation for the life of a novelist. If you have grown-ups fussing over you and encouraging you and taking an interest, you begin to think you’re important, and furthermore that you need and deserve their attention. After a while you become incapable of working without someone else motivating you. You’re much better off supplying your own energy, and writing in spite of the fact that no-one’s interested, and even learning to put up with other people’s contempt and ridicule. What do they know, anyway?

************************************* 

Ummmm… this guy is a children’s writer?!? And an award-winning one, no less. Even if he is not attempting to write with overtly anti-Christian themes, it would seem to me an impossible thing for a person with such bleak, there-is-no-god-and-if-there-was-he’d-hate-you-anyway views to be able to write something positive and brilliant for children.

Has anyone read these books personally? I would love to hear more about it. But in the meantime, it’s coming off of our “Holiday Must See” movie list.

My mom’s husband, Jeff, and my youngest sister, Paige, throw an all-out Freak Fest (get it?) every year for Halloween. This year they invited MANY more people than usual because they recently moved to a bigger house with a much bigger yard. So Paige went nuts and invited everyone and their mother to the party. It was nuts… and fun.

Here is a sweet pic of me and my mom. Don’t you love how my freaky purple hat is shoving her head out of the picture? She literally has to shove her neck back and to the side to avoid many feathers in the eye. Poor mom… her diva daughter Bogarting all the pictures with her huge witch hat.

How many more pictures will you have to endure with me wearing a freakin purple hat? Well, there are four more days until to Halloween, so roughly… I don’t know, 16? Just a guess.

Here are my children. Zoe, after taking part in the Mini cheer camp a few weeks ago, makes good on her promise to be a cheerleader this year. Jachin, who couldn’t really decide what to be this year, was a stormtrooper again. The costume cost $60 last year, so I felt zero guilt about recycling it for another year. In fact, Zoe may be a stormtrooper next year. All questions about why Jachin has taped a pencil to the side of his helmet may be directed to Jachin… as I’m really not sure why. I believe it may be some sort of jerry-rigged com-system… or something… or just a pencil in case someone at the party needed a pencil.

Here is the sweet — and very spooky — inflatable house that Jeff purchased just for the evening. What kid would not want to have this in their yard?? A few of the children sat inside of this house for an hour or two and listened to the spooky sounds and watched the creepy light show that went on inside. It was really cool.

As with every party, there was of course one child who ran full-speed into the side of the house and crawled under the walls of the house and uprooted all of the anchors from the ground, trying to destoy the house and make everyone else cry. I took this child aside and stabbed him the eye with the pencil that I borrowed from Jachin’s helmet. (not really… but I totally thought about it…)

And I even got a moment to hug my sweetie. Awwww….

He dressed up like a guy in a Yankees hat. Actually, he also taped a leaf on some fishing line to the bill of his hat and blew on it (making him a “leaf blower”… get it?), but he decided that was lame and removed the leaf before actually entering the party. But it made the ride to the party fun, as he had to keep blowing the leaf to the side to see the lanes of the freeway… the kids were screaming… it was great fun.

As always, more pics up on flickr.

Oh, what fun! I’m talking, really fun!

Witchapalooza will now be an annual tradition. Only maybe we can try to go in the evening next year, because we found out that people don’t really dress up so much during the day (that was okay… just more stares for us). It’s cute to have little girls come up to you and ask if you are really a witch (and the adults ask “are you in the show?”). To the little girls I replied, “No, I’m just a mommy, but this is the only chance I will have to wear this cool hat… so I wore it.”

Viva the witches in all of us!

More pics on flickr.

I’ve been dying to sit down and write this and tell all (6) of you readers about what’s been going on. And now I have a 2 1/2 hour block of quiet to do it.

Last Friday I called Jon at work and posed the question: “What do you think about me sending Jachin back to school?” Because — as you may remember me ranting on numerous occasions –  I’ve been losing my mind homeschooling. So what brought me to the point of thinking about public school again, when just a few short months ago I thought state-run education was of the devil? A number of things, my friends.

I’ve gotten haggard. My husband said so… followed by a quick back-peddling remark about how it was just a bad joke and he didn’t mean it. But dude, if you know me and have seen me, well, he meant it. My kids have told me how I don’t look great. And kids don’t know how to tell bad jokes; if they say something, it’s because that’s exactly what is going through their mind at that exact second. “Wow, mom, you look bad today”, when said by a child means “Wow, mom, you seriously look bad today”. Just three short months ago, I never would have thought of going half of the day without a shower and make-up. And although make-up probably shouldn’t be a huge issue, most women can attest that it is. And when you are struggling through the day and on the verge of tears with frustration for your dear child, and then you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror in sweats, sporting bad, crazy hair, a hideous complexion, and no make-up, that single thought of: “Wow, I look just as haggard and horrible as I feel” is just the kick you need when you’re down to put you over the “verge of tears” and into a full on cry-fest. And while crying about looking hideous, I would no doubt begin to feel some maternal guilt because maybe loving moms shouldn’t care about that kind of stuff. I mean come on, my goal here was to  make my son brilliant and well-adjusted and I’m crying because my chin is broken out and I have huge bags under my eyes and my gnarly toes haven’t seen a pedicure since the night Heidi told me she was pregnant… and she’s almost 8 months along. Yes, they probably should be trivial things, but somehow they are not. They are things vital to a woman’s psyche. It seems ridiculous and petty, but if my toes are cute and my heels have been exfoliated recently, or if I know that my hair is looking dang hot, the world is a much brighter place. That is the cold, honest, ridiculous truth. Call me petty and spank me with a wet noodle.

Also, my house has been falling apart. Everything is disorganized. I have tried so very hard since I got married and had kids to fight against my very nature of loving to be carefree and unorganized. And I’m finally to the point where… holy crap, I can not stand the clutter. It makes me feel disoriented and unfocused. For the life of me, I can not write when I feel that way. Clutter is a creativity squasher, I am sure of that. And clutter perpetuates that feeling of walking into a room and looking around at disorganized piles of mail and homework and school papers and unpaid bills and thinking “Wow, I really need to go through that mail, and make sure Zoe hands in all of that back homework, and draw some smiley faces on Jachin’s history project and hang it somewhere prominent, and pay the bills before they start shutting off stuff… and what the hell did I walk into this room for??” And then I will inevitably walk out of that room empty handed and (even more)mentally frazzled. And poor Jon, who has always been a neat freak, keeps quiet and suffers silently and occasionally throws out some of that “important” (hello, Crate and Barrel catalogs used to be my friend) unsorted mail when I am not looking. Bless him.

I have responsibilities at church in which I feel like I am lagging far behind. I skip meetings, forget phone calls, put off lessons until 10pm the night before (and by the way, a room of 40 children can tell when you’ve made a lame, last minute effort to put together a crappy lesson… they lose interest in record speed). We had the Primary Sacrament Meeting Program last week (if you aren’t LDS, you won’t know what this is, but it’s kind of a big deal and requires months of planning and practice with 60 kids and teachers), and it somehow went off without a hitch. Even the parts I did. Somehow. God helped with that one.

So after all of these things had been happening for a few months – after months of juggling too many balls and somehow managing to keep them all up, but the juggling sure as hell didn’t look good — I finally called Jon at work with the question: “What do you think about school?” I had called other moms and inquired about different teachers at the public elementary school. I got the low down on who is cool, who is pleasantly strict, and who is a crotchety old hag who doesn’t even like children and needs to retire. I called the school and inquired about the schedule and learned that Jachin could start in the 9:15am time slot (as opposed to last year’s 8:00am time slot that kept him grouchy and sleep deprived for a year). And he would be in the pleasantly strict teacher’s class. So Jon and I talked on the phone. He told me that he was fine either way. Homeschool had been my project, my baby that I had contemplated and hashed over for several years before finally getting up the nerve to try it. I would be the one living with the decision. Would I feel like I had failed? Probably at least a little. My attempts to take my grand ideas and ideals and align them with reality just hadn’t happened. Jachin wasn’t four years (or even one year) ahead in his work. He would not be ready for medical school by 15 at the rate we were going. In my crazy attempts to get him interested in classic literature (sure, we read the watered down versions of Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, but is he any smarter or more enlightened?), he still picks his Bionicle chapter books to read when it comes to quiet reading time. He takes piano lessons, but he has yet to write a genius composition (he is, however, still trying to pick out the Super Mario Brother’s theme song on the ivories). It would be one thing if all of my haggard disorganization was yielding amazing fruit… but it wasn’t. He is smart, but doesn’t possess a weird, brooding genius. He is just 8. And for him, his mom had turned into a unkempt woman who hounded him to stay on task all day long, and he missed his friends. He missed eating lunch with his friends. He missed hanging out in PE where, sure he probably wasn’t learning anything fantastic, but he got to be with boys who “got” him and loved hearing his endless stories about Lego StarWars. When Jon and I finished talking through all of this he said, “Ok, so it’s a no brainer. Just put him back in.” So I filled out a paper and handed it into the school on Friday afternoon.

On Monday, Jachin and I had one more fun day together. We went to the Dinosaur Museum with my grandma. We had one last leisurely day of going somewhere fun and encountering absolutely no crowds because everyone is in school (I honestly will miss that). We laughed, we ate dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets and hotdogs called “dino-dogs”. We meandered around the gift shop and dug in the sand, uncovering dinosaur skeletons. It was a good day.

Tuesday morning I walked Jachin through the front doors of the school. He told me that he was a little nervous and squeezed my hand. My heart felt a tiny twinge of sadness that our few months of mom and Jachin time were coming to a close. As we walked down the hall a line of kids passed. “Hey, Jachin!” his one friend called. “What? Jachin?” another kid said. “Hey look, it’s Jachin!” Kids were waving all excitedly and Jachin waved back and flashed a big smile, his two little silver caps gleamed in the florescent lighting of the hallway (his silver caps are yet another way I have failed him horribly as a mom, by not being the floss-Nazi that I should be… but that’s for another post). Make no mistake, he felt like a rockstar walking down the hall having kids calling to him and waving. He walked into his classroom to more kids recognizing him and calling his name. He ran in to meet them and didn’t look back at me. And that’s exactly how it should have been.

I came home and felt a little sad. Time. I had quiet time all to myself for the first time since school let out in May. And how did I start out my time alone? By wondering if I had failed. I got in the shower and stood there washing my hair and — oh my gosh — there wasn’t a kid standing outside of my shower, pressing a math sheet up against the glass shower door, asking me to check his math problems while suds ran into my stinging eyes.  There was no kid standing outside the shower door holding the phone out to me because kids don’t know that it IS possible to let a phone ring and not answer it when your mom is showering. I had a peaceful shower with no interruptions and no one calling me by my “mom” name. Any guilt I had at that point completely melted away. Because I was showering in quiet.

I think I may, indeed, be coming back to life. And my son and I are both happier. Sometimes it’s kind of funny how things work out. So here I sit typing in the quiet, getting ready to take another quiet shower. Today I may even sing.

Why, when something nasty happens in the middle of the night, does it always occur during the 3 o’clock hour? If you go to bed at roughly midnight, and get up around 7 (which is pretty much the standard here), then 3:30 literally is the middle of the night.

Zoe barfed in the middle of the night last night. Yeah, it seriously was at 3:30. I was startled awake by my child’s pitiful voice calling “mommmy???” all worried and strange because she can’t understand why there is hot, yucky vomit all over her bed. The poor sweetie. So I carried her to the bathroom and stripped off the yucky jammies, and washed her down and brushed her teeth, and all the while she was sobbing, “I’m sorry, I ruined my beautiful sheets!” But daddy was already on the case, stripping her bed and washing the sheets and satin covers. They are not ruined. Only temporarily yucky. We put her on our floor with her sleeping bag and gave her a fresh trash can.

Of course I kept her home from school today. She’s been lying around, watching cartoons, but otherwise she’s feeling fine. She had some noodle soup and an apple. She’s played with her ponies. But I took this sick day as the perfect opportunity to have a “scrubby” day. You know, one of those days when you kind of don’t really get dressed (until about 15 minutes before your husband gets home, so he isn’t scared of your hideous appearance), and you spend the day being scrubby. Doing laundry, cleaning the kids’ rooms to be nice (and leaving a kind note on their freshly-made beds), watching a movie with your daughter, writing blog posts, scrubbing sinks. That kind of boring stuff. And on scrubby days you just kind of hope no one knocks on your door all day.

But alas, I got a door knock. It was a lady from church. She was all dressed up with lovely make-up, and I opened the door looking like a minion of the undead… without a bra. She asked me if I was okay. I said that I was fine and then blamed my abrasive appearance on the fact that I was home with a sick little girl. I recalled the last 9 tragic hours. She was throwing up last night. She has a terrible stomach flu. Last night was horrible. She can’t keep anything down. And then when I have just finished describing the horrible, sick state that my daughter is in, Zoe comes skipping down the hallway, curls bouncing, saying “Mommy, mommy, I’m hungry!” I said, “Go lie down, sweetie. You are sick.” She smiles really big. “No, mom, I’m fine. Can I have some Poprocks?”

Jeez, kid. Can you not play along for FIVE FREAKIN MINUTES? If there was ever a time to puke in front of a neighbor, this is it!