Kid Quote of the Day

Amanda:  Mommy, will you go to the bathroom with me?

Me:  Amanda, I'm so proud of the fact that you can go to the bathroom all by yourself now and you don't need me to go with you.

Amanda:  I don't need you, my pee needs you.  My pee is saying that it needs you.

Me:  I can't hear your pee talking to me.

Amanda:  I can, and it really needs you to be there.

Procrastination

I'm not sure why I wait until the last minute to pack for every single vacation I go on.  Usually Charlie and I start around 10 or 11p the night before we are supposed to leave and are trying to get everything into the suitcases before we go to bed.  It's just a bad idea because then the next morning we're tired but the kids are all hyped up because we're about to go on a trip.  A very bad mix.  Yet I sit here and write instead of packing.

I sort of have most of it done.  I still need to get the suitcases out of the crawl space in the basement, but I picked out all of the girls' clothes on Sunday while they were taking a bath (don't worry, I kept checking on them and could hear them the entire time) and did mine the next morning.  Andy picked out his own today and probably did a better job than I did because now that I think of it I didn't grab any socks for myself or the girls.

The hard part is Charlie.  Usually he packs for himself but he and Andy got home really late on Sunday night and then he had to leave early on Monday for Las Vegas.  He barely had time to pack for Vegas and definitely did not have time (or any clean clothes since he took them all on his trip to L.A.) to pack for our Spring Break trip.  Oh wait, he picked out his underwear.  Good thing because that's always so hard for me (can you sense my sarcasm here?).  Anyway, I'm not upset with Charlie at all, I'm just slightly worried that I won't pack well for him.  The good thing is that there are stores everywhere so if he hates it all he can buy new things.  Honey, if I pack your pig shirt will you wear it?

So, yeah, waiting until the last minute.  I'm not sure why I can't motivate myself to move any faster in this endeavor.  It's not like I don't want to go, because I do.  I just don't want to pack.  Maybe I don't want to pack because I don't want to forget anything.  Who knows.  Now I'm just rambling.

I'm surprised I don't have everything ready and by the door.  I took the kids to the movies today and was commiserating with another mom in the bathroom about how much we hate the two week spring break and what are we going to do with our kids the whole time.  She mentioned that she had just recovered from Christmas break and now here we were already.  I got a little exciting thinking I was totally breaking up the time by going on an awesome trip.  Too bad the kids were coming with me, lol, but I know we're going to have an amazing time.

So yeah, off to pack.  I probably won't write while we're gone, so think happy, sunny thoughts and I'll tell you about it when we get back.

I Need A Vacation

My brother used to say that the main problem with having three kids was that you could never get them to agree to anything.  It was actually his selling point as to why you should not have a third child.  You can usually get one of the kids to be pretty gung ho about whatever activity you are planning on undertaking, you can convince a second kid that it's going to be fun, but that third kid is no way in hell going to do that.  Most of the time that theory is completely correct, but sometimes all it takes is two.

This weekend Charlie took Andy to L.A. for a belated birthday trip, so it was just the girls and me (Mom, I wanted so badly to write "me and the girls" just now, but all I could picture was you shaking your head and wondering where you went wrong in instilling good grammar in me - you're always in my head).  This was similar to but nothing like last weekend where both girls were under the weather and all they wanted to do way lie on me all weekend.  It's amazing how Charlie is the fun one and they are all about him except when they don't feel well and want to smother me with their hot, feverish bodies and cough into my face.  Anyway, I have learned a fantastic lesson from Charlie which is just because one of us goes out of town doesn't mean the rest of us have to suffer.  Meaning, whenever I go out of town he does all this fun stuff with the kids so he doesn't have to sit at home and do nothing with them (which is torture in itself) so this weekend I decided to do the same.

Spring break started on Friday (because two weeks isn't enough, they have to add one more day to the beginning) so Sarah was off from school.  I dropped her at Amanda's school, which we often do when Sarah has the day off and Amanda doesn't, and got in 9 miles on the treadmill at the gym.  Believe me, this was key to wearing me out and giving me more patience for the weekend.  After school we went home for lunch and then went to the movies.  I really wanted to take the girls to "Muppets: Most Wanted", but Sarah wanted to see "The Lego Movie" because I had taken just Andy a few weeks ago and then after looking at the trailers she decided on "Mr. Peabody and Sherman", which was awesome.  We didn't consult Amanda because all she really cared about was whether or not she was going to get candy, but she was a little confused and about an hour into the movie asked me where the Legos were.

Yesterday we hung out for a few hours in the morning and then went to Amanda's speech therapy make-up session since I completely forgot to take her on Tuesday for no good reason whatsoever, then we headed to the mall for lunch and some shopping.  It wasn't until we got there and I couldn't find anywhere to park and once we got inside it looked like the same amount of people that are at the mall on Black Friday that I remembered why I never go to the mall on the weekends.  Way too many people.  That's the joy of being someone who doesn't work, you can go places when nobody else has time to go there.  But I did go to the mall with two crazy, hyper little girls for several hours and we survived.  They got Build-a-Bears which Amanda paid for with her own money and Sarah cashed in a sticker chart and that made the whole trip tolerable for them.  I got a new dress that looks AMAZING on me (even if I don't really have anywhere to wear it) so all in all it was a win-win for everybody.

Today we got out of the house a little early before swimming and made a stop at Wal-Mart because I had to buy some color run remover for a shirt that was molested in the wash by another shirt.  Not pretty.  I absolutely hate going to Wal-Mart, especially with the girls.  That place is so packed with stuff everywhere that it is over-stimulating for them and they have to touch and look at everything.  There is no such thing as a 5-minute trip to Wal-Mart.  On top of that they convinced me to buy a lot of candy that we don't need but will be helpful on our flight to San Diego on Wednesday which I will be taking alone with the kids because Charlie will be in Las Vegas on business and is meeting us there.  The only positive thing that came out of the Wal-Mart trip is I got our cascarones (hollow eggs filled with confetti) for Easter.  I will give props to Wal-Mart for always having cascarones at Easter time.

After swimming we hit Home Depot for some light bulbs because not a day goes by where we don't have at least one can light burn out in our house.  We're pretty sure there is some weird electrical wiring problem in our house that makes it hate can lights.  I offered the girls hot dogs for lunch on the way out and it was the easiest and cheapest thing we did the entire weekend.  Plus, I didn't have to feed them when we got home.  We topped the weekend off with a viewing of "Frozen", which I bought on Tuesday and was waiting for the perfect two hour time period to pop that sucker in and sit quietly on the couch.  Done.  Now I will have to listen to it in the car for the next few months on end, but I'm good with that.

So overall, not a horrible weekend, just a lot of negotiating to get everybody on board.  I miss Charlie and look forward to seeing him tonight before he leaves for Las Vegas tomorrow, yes tomorrow, and even more look forward to our Spring Break trip on Wednesday.  I cannot believe it's already Spring Break, this year has gone by so fast.  Not really the first part of the school year, but definitely since they have gone back in January.  I'm already stressing about getting the kids scheduled for everything this summer and getting all our travel plans in order and trying to figure out how I'm going to get to the gym and not gain 10 pounds back with all of our "vacations".  But for now I just need to get us through the next two weeks.  California, here we come!

Kid Quote of the Day

"I don't have any green clothes to wear so I am going to go to Michigan where they don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day!"

-Amanda, yesterday morning, starting off our day with drama as usual

Kid Quote of the Day

Amanda:  I love you!

Me:  I love you too, baby!

Amanda:  Mommy, I was talking to my Cheese-Its.  But I love you too.

The ED Factor

I've been wanting to write this blog post for months, but for some reason kept putting it off.  It was one of those things that I wanted to share because it was funny, but also because she isn't going to do this forever and I wanted to capture it in writing before she grew out of it and stopped doing it and I completely forgot and wiped from my brain that it ever happened.  There are so many things that Andy did when he was little that I swore I would never forget because they were so amazing and now I can't remember half of them.  The longer I waited to post, the more I kept telling myself it was too late to write, but then the other day I noticed she was still doing it so now was the time.

Amanda has this strange habit of putting ED at the end of a lot of words.  Sometimes they belong there, many times they don't.  It's kind of like a foreigner who is trying to read English, except she is not a foreigner and she has no idea how to read (nor has any desire to because she thinks that I am perfectly willing to read to her for the rest of her life).  The biggest example I can give you is when she says "eat-ED" instead of "ate".  That one is almost understandable because she just doesn't understand how to say ate.  Except I have corrected her numerous times and it is always "I eat-ED it".

There are tons of them.  I wrote them all down at one point and had many examples except I got a new phone this week and right after I reset it to factory settings I remembered I forgot to transfer that list out of my old phone.  Instead of "put" she said "put-ED".  Where did you put your shoes?  I put-ED them on the stairs.  Instead of "sat" she says "sat-ED".  Where did you sit?  I sat-ED at the table.

Although completely wrong, it is cute.  It helps remind me that she is still little and adorable and not always the evil four-yr-old that drives me crazy on a daily basis (I have yet to write my "I Hate 4" post).  In the next year or so she won't be doing it anymore (hopefully) and then she'll start sounding like a big kid and it will be harder and harder to call her my baby.  Which, as of late, I am totally okay with.

For now I just might rewrite that deleted list.

Kid Quote of the Day

Andy:  Wouldn't it be funny if Chuck Norris was a Mouseketool (from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse)?

Sarah:  Who's Chuck Norris?

Andy:  You don't know who Chuck Norris is?

Sarah:  No.

Andy:  He's just an awesome actor.

Quitters and Knitters

A few weeks ago my friend, Renee, came into town with her family for a long weekend.  We thought it would be fun to take the kids skiing while they were here.  It has been a record year for snow and the slopes are amazing and we hadn't even taken the kids out this year.  The girls I understand, but not even Andy who got a free ski pass this year just for being in the 5th grade.  So, I signed all three kids up for ski lessons and we went to a small, but nice, mountain just north of Boulder.

Let me first start by saying that Charlie took Andy skiing, well really Andy snowboards, at least 3-4 times last year.  Andy is not thrilled by snowboarding, but we keep making him go back.  His problem is that he doesn't like to do anything that he's not good at, and he won't even really give it a try.  It drives us bonkers, and is the reason that the kids still doesn't 100% know how to ride a bike at 11 years old.  You could say that we are making him learn because it's something that we would have loved to have learned when we were his age and we are living vicariously through him.  Or we are making him learn because we know for a fact when he gets older he is going to be so mad at us if we don't make him learn.  Either way I think we end up looking bad.  Andy really doesn't like to go, but we don't care and we make him go anyway.  The girls, on the other hand, have never gone and keep saying that they want to go, so it was really time to give them a chance.

So, here's how it went down.  We put all three kids in lessons around 9a.  They were all-day lessons so we weren't supposed to pick them up until 3p.  In the meantime, Renee and our other friend, Marilyn, and I went to the lodge and Marilyn taught us how to knit, at which by the way I am terrible.  I think I have major knitters block.  Maybe that's how Andy feels about snowboarding.  Anyway, right after lunch, around 1p I got a call asking me to come pick up Amanda because she refused to ski anymore.  I went and got her and she said she didn't like it because they wouldn't give her poles and nobody would hold her hand and the hill was scary.  First of all, they don't give any of the kids poles until they are so incredibly old.  Poles only add to the confusion and slow you down.  Second, why would anybody hold her hand while skiing?  Third, the hill was the tamest barely a hill you have ever seen.  Weak.

I took her to the lodge to hang out with the rest of us and refused to give her candy because quitters don't get candy.  Seriously, what kind of a lesson would that be if I gave her candy while she waited for everybody else to finish?  As soon as I quit, even if the day isn't over, I get candy.  I don't think so.  Meanwhile, Charlie went to pick Andy up after lunch and pulled him out of his lesson so that they could ski and snowboard together.  Since Andy wasn't excited about the lesson we thought that would be a good compromise and make him a little happier.  Except he fell and didn't want to snowboard anymore so around 2p Charlie called me to go get Andy so Charlie could ski a little bit more.  Now I had two kids in the lodge with me wanting snacks.  Never.

Guess who stayed in her entire lesson and even though it was hard wants to go back for more?  That's right, Sarah.  If you had asked me at the beginning of the day who would have been the first to quit, I probably would have guessed her.  But she was a total trooper and stuck it out and spent the entire day out there.  She still has a long way to go, but she did not give up.  I am so proud of her.  And so annoyed with the other two.

I know Charlie has been chomping at the bit to ski and Sarah wants to go back out so they are going again this weekend.  We are making Andy go again as well, even though at one point he said he would rather stay here and help me remove wallpaper from the bathroom wall than go snowboarding.  Mark my words someday that kid will thank us for all the stuff we refused to let him quit.  Either that or he will be in therapy trying to get over the fact that we forced him into all these activities that he didn't want to do.  And because he doesn't know how to ride a bicycle.