My life has been so much insanity these past few days. It’s been so crazy, even the crazy people would say it’s nuts. So, in keeping with the theme, I shall relate the events of today backwards. I was never a fan of proper chronology, anyway.
Last off, my children are finally asleep. It’s 12:20 AM.
Before that, we had a long bout of screaming and crying (performed, at high decibel, by O2). She was ridiculously tired – probably overtired- and proceeded to morph, eerily Jekyll-and-Hyde-like, back and forth between the Sweetest Girl On The Planet and the Bride of Chucky.
No, really. Here is a sample of our conversation:
Me: speaking softly, gently, with my head on a fluffy pillow: Sweetie, you need to rest. Your body needs rest.
O2: sitting upright on the bed, snivelling and snorting between sobs: I n-n-n-no n-n-n-eed *snort* rest.
Me again with the soothing voice: Yes, you need rest. Your toes need to rest, your arms need to rest, your head needs to rest…
O2 relaxing slightly, leans her head against mine
Me: …your fingers need to rest, your eyeballs need to rest, your hands need to rest…
O2 relaxes a little more, lies down next to me
Me: …your legs need to rest. That’s it, bunny. Shhh… rest…
A tender mother-child moment occurs, but only for a brief instant. O2 stiffens, then bursts into fresh tears.
O2: Y-y-y-y-y-ou sobsobsob f-f-f-orgot sobsobsob th-th-th-e ELBOWS!!!
Before all this, I gave my heathen urchins a bath. They were quite muddy. More on that earlier.
Prior to the bath, I made homemade deodorant. I blatantly copied Angry Chicken’s recipe, without remorse. Well, I didn’t have any ylang ylang, however the hell you pronounce that. So I substituted tea tree oil. And I didn’t use orange; I used lavender oil, instead. So maybe it wasn’t a blatant copy. Maybe it was a half-assed copy. I tend to do that. But I’m wearing the deodorant now, and I like the way it smells. It reminds me of the Tone bar soap my grandmother used to have in her bathroom, only more New Agey.
Unfortunately, I should have done this before my previous activity, which found me busy lugging all manner of heavy items off the front lawn. These items mostly came from my mother’s house. Actually, it’s no longer my mother’s house. She moved out this morning. At this moment, she is somewhere in South Carolina, on her way back to Florida. Anyway, she gave me more things than I could possibly ever need or want. I’m grateful, but this means an awful lot of scratching our heads, trying to figure out where to put everything. And it also meant I was sweaty and smelly from moving heavy lawn furniture and kid toys all about.
So before I was hot, sweaty, and sticky from moving things off my front lawn, I was hot and sweaty from bringing in the groceries. Yes, I managed to do the shopping today, and I went by myself, which is actually very pleasant because it meant I could shop without interruption. When I shop alone, I can stop and read things, without other merchandise mysteriously finding its way into the shopping cart while I’m distracted. It means, if I want to dash into a store to look at something and then dash out again, I can do so, without it taking longer to buckle and unbuckle everyone from their carseats than the dash itself. It means I don’t have to constantly check that both children are visible, proximate, and not about to cause irreparable harm to themselves or some object that does not belong to us. I feel much less obtrusive when shopping alone. I prefer being incognito. One of the things I bought was half-pint jars to hold my homemade deodorant. I also bought pickles and Murphy’s Oil soap, among other things.
I went to the store via my in-law’s farm, which is where my nephew, J2-Today, had his birthday party. It was a nice affair, as these affairs go. We picnicked under a huge tent- a Big Top, if you will – and celebrated in style. The sun was out for most of the party, which was nice. Unfortunately, the sun was not out for the sixteen hours prior to the party, which meant that the ground was full of muck and mud and puddles and sloshy spots. And there were ten children present. Nine of them were mobile. Eight of them did not have casts on their arms. So we gave them squirt guns and filled a little pool up with water, so they could fill up their own guns and not need a grownup to constantly help with the filling up of squirtguns (which gets very tedious when you’re the grownup filling up all the squirtguns while trying to enjoy a party and trying to stay reasonably dry). We figured that they were going to get wet no matter what we did; the best we could do would be to minimize the mud quotient. Letting them hose themselves off with squirtguns seemed obvious. We were reasonably successful.
Before this, I left my mother’s house with the last of her unwanted worldly possessions hastily thrown into the bed of our pickup truck. We walked through her empty house and made sure the last soap dish, the last extension cord, the last coffee cup, the last trivial anything, was all picked up and put in a box and packed away. We got all the copies of her housekey together and put them on a ring in one of the kitchen drawers. The realtor even came and took away her Sold sign. And then that was that. It was kind of sad; I mean, this wasn’t a house I ever lived in, but we did make some very nice memories there, and it is hard admitting that my mom has totally and completely moved away. Even though she wasn’t here in Ohio very much, her house was still here. And it’s only a half- mile up the road, so I went by it nearly every day. Now it belongs to some other person. It’s no longer “Nana’s Ohio House”, as the girls call it. As S4 astutely noted today,
“Now Nana has ZERO Ohio Houses.”
Spot-on, kid.
And to start it all off, I got up at 8AM. On a Sunday. 8AM! That’s like the middle of the night for me. (Not really, but I’m trying to make it sound horrible.) Feel some pity, would you? Because this is just NOT how we do Sunday morning in our house. I missed out on the family breakfast-in-bed, where I bring a tray of toasts and fruit and other breakfasty-type foods into the bedroom (where we NEVER EVER EVER eat, except on super special Sunday mornings) and I read the paper while DH watches the news shows, and the kids read, and we all snack and lounge and laze about. And while you may be saying to yourself, “Huh! This sounds like ANY given day in MotherMe’s household,” you would be wrong, because we only take the paper on Sundays. The rest of the time, I watch the news shows, too.
So, that’s today. Most of it. The important stuff. I have pictures to post, but I’m too tired to post them, so maybe tomorrow you can see some plants getting down and dirty in the garden. There was some hot action in the pumpkin patch this weekend; and I suspect that there was a little light S&M happening on the cucumber trellis.
Later, I’ll catch you up on the search engine terms that the preceeding nifty paragraph managed to snag.
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