the family of five, all home again.

the boy is home, tan, happy, and in the bathtub.

abba bought a "new" vehicle (1988 chevy blazer) today, and we even got to have lunch with Grandma before we left "the big city."

all is well!

mornings are for the birds.

sometimes my husband works late. very late.

last night, he didn't come to bed till 5am. he snored like a chainsaw. he hasn't been doing that much lately and i'm not used to it anymore. i asked him to get up and put on a nosestrip. it didn't help. after half an hour i gave up, took my pillow and went to sleep on the couch. it was lousy, but i managed to fall asleep, unlike in my bed. razi woke me at 7:50, which was 20 minutes later than i'd intended to wake. i'd been having a dream that razi had completely destroyed the bathroom, water everywhere, huge, ugly, decorative stickers (that spouse and i had intended to do something completely different with) all over every wall... i was glad to see the real razi.

i stumbled upstairs and was seriously (and probably unreasonably) annoyed at my spouse. it did not help that he thought i'd simply woken up early and gone downstairs to be awake, the jerk! stumbled through my morning. razi started to complain of a headache but said he wouldn't take medicine. he pretty much never does, so i didn't expect him to agree to it. i just said if he was well enough to go without motrin he was well enough to go to school. but his father insisted on trying to get razi to swallow a pill. that went ever so well. not.

some vomit and a new pair of pants later (and why did i have to grab the pants out of the laundry? i was sure he had plenty of clean laundry in his dresser! how many pairs of pants does the little blighter wear in a day?) his father finally gave up on getting razi to swallow a pill.

oddly enough, i didn't get the girls to school late. that never happens.

Apple Juice and Devious Plans.

Conversation I had with my spouse recently:

Me: “So. Your devious plan worked perfectly.”
Spouse: “Uh…” Blank look. “Devious plan?”
Me: “Yeah, you know. The one where you left the large open cup of apple juice perched at the edge of the shelf, where it would fall at the slightest provocation. Then, when it did fall, I’d be forced to clean the inside of the refrigerator. That devious plan.”
Spouse: “I’m so sorry. I was actually trying to prevent Lilah from knocking that cup over. I was trying to prevent a mess! What happened?”
Me: “Lilah wanted a hot dog.”

preparing for school

this morning the kids saw a pile of backpacks that their father had set aside to check out. i have decided that two are going to charity but one will now be zora's new school pack. they got all excited about how they will start back to school soon, so this has become backpack morning.

lilah was wearing the old "Dora the Explorer" backpack i bought for her brother when he turned three (over four years ago. it's holding up well.) razi had me fill his brand new pack full of the school supplies i bought for him and zora has been stuffing her new pack with so many books and toys that she probably won't be able to carry it.

razi is still wearing his new pack on his back. he doesn't start school for two days. i wonder when he will decide to take it off. ;)

ahh, i was wrong. she CAN carry it. on the other hand, she's unbalanced!

This morning my son jumped on my husband's side of the bed, pretended to sleep, and then pretended to snore. Then he jumped up and told me proudly: "Snoring is important for grown-ups!"
"Well... not exactly...."
"Only for boy grown-ups!"

my new chest

a very, very long time ago, a lovely woman i knew was moving out of her house to enter one of those nicer assisted living placed for older folks. Evelyn packed up everything she wanted, then her kids and grandkids cleaned out everything they wanted, and then she asked me if i wanted anything.

Evelyn gave me a freezer. an 8.3 cubic foot chest freezer. it is probably the most generous gift anyone other than my parents have ever given me.

yesterday i went into the garage to pull out some frozen bread, and found... mostly defrosted bread. uh-oh. the outlet still worked, that was easy to tell, because plugged in right above it was a little light-up plug, to let me know that the small appliance it was attached to was done charging.

so i called my husband at work, and he offered to try to fix it, but really, that wasn't realistic. the thing could have easily been twenty or thirty years old. we have no idea how old it is, but it was free and it worked perfectly for us for five years or so, and it was clearly done working now.

plus it had two or three hundred dollars worth of food in it.

so, spouse came home, emptied out his minivan, went to lowe's and bought a $268 8.9 cubic foot chest freezer. when it was cold inside, we emptied the old one and filled up the new one.

the stuff at the bottom of the old one was still frozen solid.

i love having a chest freezer. i hope this one lasts till i don't have kids in the house anymore. at least.

what does godzilla have to do with bedtime, again?

part of the standard bedtime routine around here is a "special extra story" that used to actually be special and extra. ;)

the two older kids start every day with an assumption of three storybooks at bedtime, plus the special extra story (which razi used to earn by reading a book to ME, but that sort of evaporated when his little sister who couldn't read at all got into the act).

one book is for staying clean and dry all day, which should be a given since zora is almost five now, but sometimes she gets lazy. argh.

the other two books are for cleaning up the two downstairs rooms in a timely manner at clean-up time. if they finish in under half an hour, they get both. if not, fifteen minute intervals come to take away the other two books and then the special extra story.

last night zora lost everything. then she had to lose something else even beyond the special extra story, so she lost the priviledge of drinking soda next shabbat. she was devastated. good. maybe she'll learn that screaming fits are not the best way to deal with disappointments.

razi, though, still got the special extra story. now, my spouse is a genius for making these things up on the fly, with prompts the children give him right before. our cats, hello kitty and godzilla are regular stars. but last night it was apparently my turn, so i told a story of godzilla rising from a laboratory at the local university and destroying the town we live in. of course, my spouse - genius that he is - saved the day with the judicious placement of a sleeping-pill-laced lean cuisine on top of a freight car.

everyone knows that godzilla's favorite snack is a train. ;)

yes, it was a goofy story, but razi seemed to like it.

may i interest you in a fine whine?

last night my spouse got home, took one look at me, and asked me if i wanted to go out alone for an hour to myself. i must have looked pretty bad.

of course, i really appreciated my spouse's generosity, but my neighbor/friend becky couldn't go out, so that was a bummer, and becky suggested TJ Maxx, and that turned out to be horribly depressing. because there i learned that i am a chestless wonder who can't afford decent shoes and whose taste in dresses is so far off the beaten path of normal that it might as well be martian. plus the only cute tshirts are in junior's sizes and would look ridiculous on me, so i am just broken.

then i ended up at the supermarket, which is where every mother of three wants to spend her last half hour of totally free-n-clear / guilt-free / alone / whatever-i-want-to-do time.

then this morning lilah had the most massive tantrum when it was time to leave her sister at preschool. of course, i realized after 5 or 6 minutes of her screaming on the floor that i, mother-of-the-year, forgot to FEED her, so no wonder the poor thing was a total wreck. sigh.

then when i got her home i was sitting here in between bouts of cleaning the front room for her always-late speech therapist (today: 36 minutes late and counting) and she brought me a copy of the cat in the hat and said, clear as you could want: "cat a hat" !!!!!! so i wanted to read it to her immediately. of course, she brought me a copy in hebrew. blasted spouse and his charming, useless ideas about learning hebrew with children's books. i tried to interest her in a different story but she asked for TV instead and i caved.

driveways, garages and minivans

my driveway is really steep. we've lived here almost 4 years and i always park on the driveway because my spouse always has the garage full of computer junk. we already had to pay to have the minivan's emergency brake redone once and the other week i realized that it had suddenly gotten really loose again. so i started parking on the street - which is a pain - and my spouse started cleaning out the garage. this took a few weeks of intermittent effort. he's been working late nights at the shop and could really only clean the garage on weekends. i was getting very impatient to park in the garage.

today we finished cleaning out the garage. woot! so i pull my minivan in, and keep pulling, and get in as far as i possibly can without bashing into the deep freezer or the stairs, and lo and behold, the back end is still under the door. yes, my minivan is too big for my garage. argh! aaaand, it's back to parking on the street.

an odd discovery

i was heating water for tea this evening, and my hubby suddenly said "what is that? it smells like dope." as it turns out, a bit of leftover green bean burning itself to carbonized nothingness under the electric burner will reek just like pot smoke. how ... odd.

Cats.

So we haven't had good luck with animals. Had to return a few cats to the pound, back before we had children. Got a dog who seemed great but that was her "pound personality" and Loki, too, ended up going back to the pound after the second child was born. Loki couldn't handle the competion.

Anyway, it has been obvious for a long time that the children wanted an animal in the house. So hubby made a proclamation. Not till the baby turned three. (September 2007). Well, that held for months. Then suddenly, three or four months ago, hubby decided that having an adult cat would be good for our oldest now. I wasn't opposed. But he didn't want a pound cat. He was adamant. We'd had terrible luck with all the pound cats we'd ever adopted (I couldn't argue with that). Pounds are dirty, you don't know anything about the animal... he was immovable.

So, I figured that gave us two options. Purebred, or getting a nice cat off a good friend who was willing (or eager) to give it up. No friends were in that situation, so I started doing research on purebred cats. A friend who actually owns a purebred cat gave me a web address for breeders, and I emailed a ton of them. This is a story all by itself, so I'll just say I settled on a breeder of Tonkinese cats who lives about 3 hours away from me - practically in Kentucky. Negotiating took weeks, but eventually we drove all the way down there and hubby picked a cat.

I would have been more involved, but I have to admit, I was overwhelmed. The house was gross, there were cats all over, they all looked really similar and I couldn't keep them organized in my mind, and lots of them were much older or younger than what we were interested in. Hubby ended up telling me that I could choose a different one if I wanted, and then took the kids outside, away from all the wet food, poop filled litter boxes and suspicious looking pools of goop on the floor. Blech.

So, I figured the one hubby wanted because she didn't pull away when he went to let her sniff his hand and get a scritch was a good choice, and I bought her. I tried to carry her home on my lap but after a while she really wanted to explore the car and I thought that could turn dangerous, so I put her in the carrier. So she spent over two hours in the carrier and an hour of that listening to the youngest kid scream. Turns out the baby doesn't like long car rides. Ugh. Anyway, maybe it was the awful drive that inspired Sozo (named after a coffee shop we passed on the way home - it is apparently Greek for "to heal, to cure, to prevent destruction") to crawl under the furniture and not come out for days and days and days.

The kids were miserable. We'd gone through this horrid experience to get a cat, and the cat seemed to hate them. They wanted to PET the pet. I was upset for them. And I wanted to pet her, too!

So hubby and I waited about a day, and still no love from the little beast. So we wondered, is she lonely? She's spent her entire life in a house filled with dozens of kittens and cats and one little old lady. Maybe she needs a friend? So, entirely spur of the moment, we call PetSmart, find out they have cats and close in one hour, I rush the older ones into coats and we rush to the pet store and I try to pick a cat that likes us.

So I get there, and I find the cats, and they have two adults labeled "good with children" and "good with other cats". One really likes the kids, and she's spayed and pretty and friendly and, oh, look at that, she's a pound cat. PetSmart doesn't really sell cats. They take cats from an animal shelter south of here, and put them up for adoption. This was a pound cat. But the place was spotless, and this cat seemed friendly, and we'd essentially promised the children, and it wasn't my rule. So I adopted her. On the way home I kindly gave her a name we'd considered for Sozo that hubby had rejected. Her name is Tiamat. You send me out to fetch the beast, I get to name the beast.

Anyway, we get her home, and she is (or close enough) the perfect cat. She was friendly with all three children from the moment she came out of the carrier, she puts up with all sorts of nonsense from them, hasn't scratched or bitten a child yet, doesn't hide under furniture, is extremely friendly and patient with family and friends alike, is pretty, is spayed... and she loathes Sozo. Wants to shred Sozo into little bloody bits, actually. I am now covered with scratches because I've had to rescue Sozo from Tiamat multiple times. Tiamat has even attacked Sozo while Sozo was resting in my lap!

Oy.

So we've set a deadline. If Sozo and Tiamat can't get over their differences by April 18, we ask the "cat lady" to come get Sozo and take her back to the cattery. I don't really want to give her up. She's so sweet and pretty and teeny (she is fully grown and weighs about 5 pounds!) and she loves to sit on my lap for hours at a time. I've become very fond of her. But I can't in good conscience keep a cat who is terrified of the other cat and ends up spending most of her life hiding as a result. That would be mean and selfish. And we certainly aren't getting rid of the one whom the children adore and who adores them. I'll blog again when this situation is resolved.

Oh, and having a cat has been very good for our oldest.

parenthood is sleepy

the other night my spouse and i both fell asleep while putting the kids to bed. my spouse fell asleep in our son's bed, and i fell asleep between the girls. we both woke separately in the middle of the night and wondered why the other hadn't woken us up! there goes watching a movie together.