Sweet Nautiness

Normally, my kids go to bed around 7 pm. Truth be told, it's because I am a light weight. 6:30 rolls around and I am about to loose my ever living mind. So, since the Captain was a baby, our kids have gone to bed at 7. You know, on nights that we don't have t-ball or one of the other thousand things we have going on.

Anyways, they went to bed late last night, and then the little ones didn't take a nap today, so when Brandon announced that he'd be playing tennis for the afternoon, I decided that I would put every one to bed at 6:30.

My plan was simple. I would bribe them with Sponge Bob. Unfortunately, I was to worn out to realize that what I was planning was all backwards. I made three shiny little faces promise that they would go strait to bed, and stay in bed, if I let them watch Sponge Bob. It was the perfect plan. Lots of snuggling, early bedtime, a relaxing evening. Right?

Wrong.

Because apparently, mommy is a sucker. The night quickly spiraled into a string of, "mommy, I just wanted to let you know my tummy hurts really bad." And of course, "There was this thing that happened at school today..." Because what mother punishes little boys for sneaking downstairs to tell about tummy aches and school happenings? My boys are so good at seeking out and exploiting my weak spots.

At 8 pm, I told them that I would cancel movie night if I saw one of their sweet faces again. 10 minutes later, I heard a bumping and thumping overhead, so I made a stealthy but silent run up the stairs to spy on them.

What did I see?

Three little boys, naked as jay-birds prancing like unicorns around their bedroom. Their little sister, who is always the first to sleep, is watching and clapping! She barely has enough room to sit in her crib, it is so full of blankets and pillows and stuffed animals that her brothers have thrown in.

The boys are separated, Lilly is rescued, and 5 minutes later Brandon walks through the front door.

"So did you have a relaxing night?" He asks, while Lilly is clapping for her daddy and blowing kisses at him.

"The Naked Leprechauns doing their Prancing Pony interpretative dance was a little weird, but other than that, it was a nice night." I reply.

I'm smiling on the inside too, the sweet taste of chocolate is still on my tongue, it's medicinal effects soothing my nerves. It was a good move; chocolate melts in a much more soothing way than the ice cream.

Changing Minds

Oh the difference two years makes!

Today I asked my boys (7, 5, and almost 3) what they wanted to be when they grew up and why. Here are their answers, verbatim:

The Captain: "I want to be a police man." (His current aspiration is to be a hall monitor next year. He'd be great at it. He loves telling everyone the rules.) "Because I could catch bad guys and drive around in a car all day. I'd leave at 7 in the morning and come back at 7 in the night, because that is when my kids will go to bed."

"Wont you want to play with you kids before they go to bed?" I ask.

"Ya, maybe for a little while, but then they would HAVE to go to bed at 8."

The Adventurer: "I want to be a judge when I grow up."

"Really?" I ask. (He'd be a great judge, but I didn't know that he even knew what a judge was.) "Why?"

"Because I have a really good mind and I'm good at remembering stuff. And I really like my name, and people could say it a lot."

The Entertainer: "I want to be a policeman and a judge too!" (Of course he does. His original blog name was the Parrot. I think I changed it prematurely.)

"No," says the Adventurer. "Maybe you could be the President. Do you want to be the President?"

"Yes. I want to be the President of Florida Mommy."

There is a lull in the conversation as we eat our sandwiches.

And then the Entertainer pipes up again. "Actually, I want to be a dog from outer space and wear a helmet on my head. Can I be that Mommy?"

"Sure buddy. You would be a good outer space dog when you grow up."

He smiles, confident with the good choice he's made.

Lilly just smiles, and slams some more applesauce. Based on how much fun she has chewing on my shoes, she is either aspiring to be a footwear designer or a dog, like the Entertainer...

Dark Secrets Exposed!

Last night my husband had to stage an intervention. You see, it all began about a month ago, when I started watching "the biggest looser."

I know it isn't something that thin people are supposed to watch, but it quickly became my guilty pleasure, and I would secretly sneak into the office to watch episodes on line while my kids were sleeping.

It's interesting how quickly one guilty pleasure can lead to another. I was folding laundry and watching the finally when Helen walked out onto stage, weighing what I did when I graduated high school, and was playing sports and swimming 6 days a week. WHAT?!?! How the heck did that happen! The lady lost more than half her self over the course of the show! I was proud for her. But deep inside, I was depressed to know that despite a lot of Cardio DVD's later, a lady who was more than double my size, can now kick my butt in any arena.

There. I typed it out loud. I'm sad a woman I will probably never meet could destroy me in any physical challenge. I guess I'm just competive like that.

And that's when I pulled out the ice cream. I was half way through the box of "Chocolate-Chunk-Marshmallow" when my husband walked into the kitchen.

"What on earth would make you eat ALL of that?!?!" He exclaimed. "What are you doing?!? Stop!" (He's a good husband. Those are unsteady bridges for a man to cross, when he comes between a woman and her half-gallon of icecream.)

"I'm only eating the melty parts." I justified. Besides, I was saving myself work by only having to wash a spoon, and we all know that it is really hard to scrape the last melty parts out of a bowl. It is wasteful to rinse it down the drain.

The truth is, I normally do my icecream eating in privacy- only when the kids are in bed and he's not home. The fact that I displayed my secret obsession so openly when he was there to witness it does prove that I have a problem.

Sigh.

I will have to throw my depression into something else. Maybe cookies. Maybe strait up chocolate. I haven't decided yet. But I am leaning towords chocolate, because it is easier to hide, and no one can smell it baking, so I won't have to share. Ya. Chocolate. It has anti-oxidents. It will be a much healthier alternative to icecream.

Oh and by the way, Good Job Hellen. What you did is beyond remarkable. AND I'm pretty confident that I could beat you in an ice cream eating contest. You know, if you're up to the challenge and all.

Jail Ponderings

Not to long ago, I heard a news report that a higher and higher percentage of women in jail are mothers. At first, I was shocked. How could a mother do something so awful that it landed her in jail?!? And then I started to think about it...

In jail, you don't have to do any laundry.

In jail, you never have to cook for picky eaters. In fact, your food is prepared for you, and you get to eat it while it is still hot!

In jail you get to sleep through the night. There are no babies, bad dreams, or random vomiting incidents to wake you up.

In jail you can watch an entire television episode uninterrupted.

In jail you can read a book. Not an 8 page kids book, no there is time to read a REAL book.

In jail you can take a shower every day.

In jail you can close the half door when you go to the bathroom.

In fact the more I thought about it, the more fun jail began to sound. So when I got pulled over by those crazy cops last week, there was a thought that flashed through my mind for a split second: if I just kept driving, and I led the police on a low-speed chase, I wonder if I could get sent to jail for a long weekend...?

My mom could pick up the kids, I could tell Brandon not to post bond until Monday, I could ask the judge to prolong my sentence a little.

And that is when I came up with a great idea: Voluntary Jail.

The add campaign could be that Gieco voice-over guy: "Feeling a little frazzled? Need some time off from being a mom? Come stay at jail for the weekend. Enjoy three days of hot meals, no laundry, peeing in semi-privacy... all at the state's expense."

I bet it would diminish mothers in jail for real crimes by 82%, because my secret suspicion is that they just need a break.

Friends

I was reminded yesterday just how refreshing old friends (ehm, long-term) friends are. It is so easy to hole up and get busy and overwhelmed, but having good friends who can see through the front we put on- they are priceless. Each one shapes us, encourages us, and keeps us from becoming 2-dimensional. May your life be full of beautiful friendships.

The Other Me

On my old blog, I notified you all that I'd been chosen to be on Germany's Next Top Model. The picutures are in!

Imagine my surprise to find that they look nothing like me!

But the girl-on-the-other-side-of-the-world-with-my-exact-same-name sure wears it well! I wonder if she'd be willing to share her fitness plan with me?

Go Hannah, I'm routing for you!

Back-Seat Ponderings

The Adventurer (5) says to me, "Hey mom, I know the Presidents name!"

"What is it?"

"Barak Obama!"

"Good job, buddy. You're right!" I say.

Silence.

"Mommy, when I'm the president, will my name be 'Adventurer Obama'?" (Ok, except he used his real name, not his blogger code name.)

Maybe one day he will be president... "The Adventurer For President: 2048!"

The Price of Raising a Genius

So, post could be called "when you know your youth has expired," or "How I got a $300 ticket for going 6 mph UNDER the speed limit" (it was entrapment I tell you!) But instead, I've kept the original title that I just happened to be brainstorming WHEN I got pulled over.

You see, it all started at 7:20 am. The four kids and I hopped into the van and headed off for school. Since we moved, our commute is now 30 minutes instead of 10. We dropped the Captain off at about 8, ran a fast errand, then dropped the Adventurer off at 9. I got back into the van, only to find that it was dead, and spent the next 45 minutes begging someone to give me a jump. Why do these things happen when Brandon is out of town?!?!

We got home at 10:00, played for two hours, and then left to pick up the Adventurer, who gets out of school at 12:30, exactly 2 hours before the Captain.

We went to the Library. We went to the grocery store. We got to the Captain's school early and waited.

Now why do I bother to tell a long story about my new 5.5 hours of commuting?

For the very simple reason that the Entertainer, my two-year-old who looks like a 4 year-old, and has a gigantic vocabulary and equally large cranium, is still very much two. There had been 5 hours of questions: "Mommy, what are those buttons on the stearing wheal?" "They are for the cruise control." "No, but what do they say?" And I go through the list: Accelerate, Resume, Cancel, On, Off, Cruice, Reset, some 40 million times over the course of 5 hours in the car that day. Over and over.

So while I was at the store, before we got the Captain, I grabbed a soda, so that I could make it home.

We got the Captain, climbed back into the van, loathing the fact that we had to be ready for a baseball game in two hours, with 4 cranky, sick kids.

I took the slowest, most direct path home, setting my stinking cruise control at 29 mph, in a 35, let the bubbly taste of sugar and caffeine sooth away the headache, tuned out more steering wheel questions, back-seat-quibbling, and the sound of a SCREAMING baby who had past her limit of car time somewhere around hour 4- and let the bubbly taste of sugar and caffeine carry me away to my happy place. Where I began to make a mental note to blog about the fact that my two-year-old, who will surely turn out to be a genius, had just cost me a nearly calorie-perfect day.

And then, that's when OUT OF NO WHERE, a cop stepped into the road, his stinking radar gun pointed RIGHT AT ME!

Apparently I driving responsibly in a school zone, for some IMAGINARY school that I don't even know if it really exists. Sure enough, there was a crossing guard hiding in the bushes, waiting to help the IMAGINARY school children across the road.

Stupid revenue-generating government programs. I can just imagine that conversation. "The state is in a budget short-fall, because we can't figure out how to count. What should we do to raise money?" "Ooo! Ooo! ME! I Know! We should set up imaginary school zones, have a bunch of cops hiding in a parking lot, and bust people who AREN'T REALLY SPEEDING! It'll be awesome!"

Sure, paying absorbant speeding fines will re-boot the economy. Ug.

Though I do have to say that I was really proud of Lilly. She continued screaming bloody murder when I was pulled over, and the entire time the guy was writing me the ticket. In the end, he decided that I was only going 9 mph over the IMAGINARY school speed limit, wich cut my ticket in half.

I hope he told his wife when he got home, and she made him sleep on the couch. Eeesh. I hope he hasn't been able to sleep all week, just thinking about the poor, haggared mother he wrote a giant ticket for, while he was trying to catch IMAGINARY speeders.

Though there is a part two to this... but that will have to wait, because I've only compleated 4.45 of my mandatory driving hours today, and the Captian might be a little offened if I don't show.

Hot Stuff

The Adventurer tells me on the way home from school today, "Mom, the mean girls were REALLY nice to me today."

"Oh buddy, I'm so glad!"

"Ya, they must think I'm handsome." He smiles and shrugs.

He's right- he is pretty handsome, and it is amazing how mean girls are suddenly nice, when they notice a handsome boy.

Maybe women are more shallow than we like to think we are...

Homework

The Captains Homework: Use your spelling words in a sentence. All was going well until we got to the word, "bottom."

His sentence was, "My bottom stinks."

"Hmm," I say between giggles, "Maybe you shouldn't write that."

"How about, 'I can touch my bottom?'"

"No, don't write about your bottom."

"How about, 'I can touch your bottom."

"Never mind." I say. "You can write about your stinky bottom. That's not to bad."