What Have I Done?????!!!

As a mother, I feel it is my duty to raise my daughters with the knowledge that they are beautiful daughters of God and they should act as such. My husband has lovingly resisted the manly urge to teach his children the art of "pull my finger," "the scratch and adjust," "you should see what I left in the toilet, no really, come see it," and belching the ABC's. I am far from a girly girl, but thought that I could teach my daughters how to behave like ladies.
This last week as Nick was out of town for work, I found that my daughters are as disgusting as they can be.
Katlyn came home laughing at how grossed out the boys at her table were when she farted during the math test. When I asked why she couldn't do her stinky business at another time when not so many were around, she got very serious and said, "My tummy was hurting, and you said never to do anything to hurt myself." Even as I tried to explain that her behavior, while not bad, was not pleasant for those in smelling range she just laughed and went back to doing her homework. I gave up trying to convince her of the benefits of ladylike behavior and I went back to doing dishes.
Kara, who would never fart around anyone if she could help it, is fascinated with poo. how someone could hate gas, but love poo I have no idea. She has taken to leaving the toilet unflushed just so she can share her hobby with everyone else in the house.
Valentina, while young and innocent, almost always has her hand in her diaper. Granted she has eczema on the inside of her leg, just inside the diaper line, but it never looks good to see a little girl walking around with her hand down her pants.
Eva thankfully has no bad habits yet, but I am sure they will come...
What I do wonder is where I went wrong? I have tried to be a good example to my girls, Nick has not taught them anything objectionable, and manners are a must in our home. The only benefit is that when these girls are teenagers these habits may repulse boys and I won't have to worry about them. Though Nick warns me that boys like girls who fart and burp and do all manner of disgusting things. ....there is no way to win.

Reposting of Thats For Girls

Having been raised in a family of 6 boys and 3 girls, plus two stressed out parents, I have found that I have a very unique outlook on what is healthy interaction among siblings. My husband on the other hand has only 2 sisters, one younger and one older. He spends most of his day wondering why our girls fight so much with each other and every time they make a stupid decision he is convinced they will turn out to be pregnant teen druggies. I keep trying to tell him our girls are just stupid kids not pre-pubescent hoodlums, but his fears always seem to get the best of him in the end.

The other day, i was very sick and while hubby was out working i was trying to keep the tornadoes i call children from destroying our house. As dinner approached i began cleaning the kitchen so we could have pans and plates for our dinner, and asked the girls to watch the 1 year old. Everything seemed to be going well as i was cleaning, and i heard no fighting as I began cooking, so i assumed that everything was relatively OK. Well I hear the sink in the bathroom turn on and just as i was about to go see what the girls were doing in the bathroom, Hubby comes in the front door. I guess my first mistake was being comfortable with the hours of silence from 3 smart, but stupid kids, the second was asking hubby to check and see what the girls were doing so i could finish making dinner.

His cry of “What the heck happened in here?,” told me that I was going to see how much destruction could be accomplished in silence. I reluctantly dragged my self down the hall to the bathroom door to see the one year old sitting fully clothed in the running sink and covered head to toe in dark burgundy lipstick, the 7 year old was using conditioner to style the 5 year olds hair and the five year old was applying liquid eyeliner to her arms to give herself “tattoos.”

When the girls finally processed the question that had burst from their father’s lips the 5 year old replied, “What? makeup is for girls, not for Dads. you don’t need it.” The bizarre jump in kid logic was too much for their father and he walked out complaining that his girls were going to be in jail before they were 16, because they have no respect for the property of others. i on the other hand did not help the situation as I started the girls in the process of cleaning up, when I said “Yes makeup is for girls, and cleaning is for children. Now get busy.”

To be fair they did an ok job of cleaning themselves, but the 1 year old still has a pink tinge to her skin except in her armpits and back where she couldn’t get the lipstick on herself. notice i didn’t say clean diaper area. When i took off her diaper i found she had managed to get a chunk of lipstick in there too and smear it around. The girls are now grounded from makeup and their daddy is terrified that his wild girls will rebel any day now. to which I say “rebelling is for girls…”

Reposting of The Joys Of Pregnancy

I have had an extended break from this blog due to an unexpected pregnancy that has made me wonder why Adam couldn’t have been the first to eat from the tree so Men could bear children, or at least it could have been painless for us.

I am now in my sixteenth week and though I can feel the baby move, this is my fourth pregnancy, and the only magic in pregnancy for me now is the enormous amounts of puke that comes out even when I only had three bites of food.

I do love to brag though that I am part of the less than one percent of women who actually lose weight by being pregnant. It isn’t that I don’t eat or anything like that. Its the huge amount of calories I burn while simultaneously puking, holding my one year old’s head out of the way, using the other hand and opposite leg to hold my two older children apart from each other as they try to rip out the other’s eyes, and tell my husband where is the masking tape that he urgently needs at 8 in the morning. Then because I can never hold the one year old’s head out of the way long enough I have to do laps around the house chasing her so I can wash her off and anywhere she has dripped as well. This routine has been known to occur up to four times a day. In fact it works so well I have wondered about making a workout video to sell.

Thankfully this will be our last pregnancy. I am getting sterilized ASAP after this baby is born. I am not sure what procedure I will go through, but since we don’t have insurance I have called a few Vets and found out I can get spayed for $45.

Reposting Of Shut UP And Feel Good About Yourself Already!

Why is it so hard to make sure your kids have a good self esteem? No matter what I say or do, my kids love to insert negative comments about themselves in conversation.
yesterday, My five year old started crying because she “was too dumb to do anything right.” i asked why she felt that way and she said she kept getting in trouble fo doing stupid things. My answer of “well, stop doing stupid things and you won’t be stupid,” didn’t seem to help her. Then I tried the caring mother tactic and said “Honey, you are not stupid, you just sometimes make choices that get you in trouble or hurt.” The most amazing part was her very intelligent, but self defeating reply of “but doesn’t that make me dumb, when I do thing to hurt myself?”
Not wanting to answer yes,I quickly changed the subject to school and asked if she was looking forward to kindergarten. God has no pity on parents though and her older sister walked in and said “She can’t go to kindergarten, she is too dumb cause she still sucks her thumb.”
This started a bunch of name calling and crying which I stopped with a phrase that proves my kids aren’t too stupid: “The next girl that calls someone a name gets their lips tied to their ears!!!

Reposting of How Hard Is It To Look In A Drawer?

First off I want to say, I love my husband. He is an amazing man who forgives all the crap I put him through on a daily basis. He works hard to support our family and is a wonderful father. I also want to mention how much I love my beautiful children. They try so hard to be good kids. I say this to soften the blow when I say “How hard can it be to look in a drawer and see what is inside it?”

Every time I fold laundry and hand it of to my kids or my husband, there seems to be only two possible actions for them. Either they shove everything into whatever drawer they come to first or they throw the clothes on the bed or floor. Then I inevitably hear the next day. “I can’t find any underwear,” or “Why is there a sandwich in my shirt drawer?”

Now, in the case of my children, I understand that their mental capacity is not yet great enough to use logic like: underwear in underwear drawer or unfinished sandwhich in the trash. But my beloved and extremely intellegent husband always replies with the response “I don’t know where anything goes.” When I ask him why he doesn’t try looking in the drawers, he gets this terrified look on his face like he had once found something worse than an old sandwich in his drawers. I don’t know how to combat that.

So for now I just keep asking them to put away the folded clothes and to my hubbies credit, if it is his clothes he does a great job, but we no longer try to move outside his comfort zone. My children on the other hand will often come back into my room 5 minutes later holding the folded clothes and proudly say “Here’s my dirty clothes mom. They were on the floor.”

Reposting of Heavenly Father Are You Really There, And Do You Hear And Answer Every Child's Prayer?

So I have decided my dear sweet 5 year old will forever be the reservoir of hilarious statements. While praying over the family breakfast her closing line was “Bless us that we wont say we will kill each other in case we really decide to do it. Amen.”

The night before I had stood in their room shaking with anger and said “sometimes I want to wring your neck!” because my sweet little angels thought it would be “neat” to put 6 full glasses of water on our bed and see if the could jump on the bed without knocking them over. Then to cover the mess they took clothes and laid them over the wet spots so we wouldn’t see.

They of course tried to blame each other for the idea, which only ticked me off more. This came after a day where every two seconds the girls were in my face asking for something, and not listening when i said no. My six year old also dropped the bomb at one point that she was planning on getting pregnant in high school just like the girl on secret life of the american teenager. I tried to reason with her about waiting till she was older and married before having babies but she gave me the “you are so old and out of touch” look, and ignored everything i was saying.

Reposting of Honesty Hurts

So this morning I got up earlier than usual in order to make sure the kids don’t wake my husband since he has had no sleep the past couple days. I would like to say I did this out of the goodness of my heart, but it was really just to avoid the grouchy beast he can be when he doesn’t get any rest. Anyway, I made the girls breakfast and sat to watch a cartoon with them while nursing the baby, and a hungry, hungry hippo commercial came on. My sweet and lovely five year old, turns to me in the middle of the commercial and says “they show the hippos butt every time they say hippo.” My six year old chimes in and says “Yeah, they have fat butts.” to which my five year old says “Their butts shake because they are Fat. Just like your butt shakes because you are fat,” while smiling sweetly at me. As if that weren’t bad enough the two girls then start discussing which diet or exercise infomercial I should order from in order to lose weight. They finally decided I should get the “leg magic” along with the Alli pills and some Proactive Solution because “you have lots of zits mommy and zits are ugly.”

Now in my own defense I am a size 10, and my skin is not perfect, but I can’t think of the last time I had issues with acne. Yes, I used to be about 15-20 pounds lighter, but I am not as fat as my kids say I am. So as punishment for hurting my feelings, I made them go and clean their room. To which they responded “I hate you. You are mean!” and I replied “Good,” while examining myself in the mirror trying to convince myself I really don’t look that bad.

Reposting of 48 Hour Notice

So yesterday while my husband was outside replacing a battery cable on our beautiful '73 Malibu, Questar Gas shows up and hands him a 48 hour notice to pay before they shut off our gas. I am not very good at paying bills on time. We get a notice at least once every two months for some bill or another. My hubby brings the notice into the house as I am yelling at my two oldest "Please pick up your shoes, walk with them in your hands down the hall, into your room and place them on the floor of the closet with the rest of your shoes." I had to use those exact words because 5 minutes earlier when I asked them to put their shoes away they picked them up and chucked them towards the hallway. When my hubby handed me the notice, the girl took advantage of my momentary lapse of attention and dropped the shoes in the hall and ran to the garage to sneak into the backyard. Now to give them credit I didn't notice the shoes were left in the hall until I was walking down it a few minutes later carrying a giant stack of clean laundry. Yes I stepped barefoot on the really hard and pointy heel of a dress shoe. It hurt and I am glad to say I did not dismember any of my children even though the desire was strong. It helps though that the girls heard my cry of anger and pain and promptly hid around the side of the house where I couldn't find them.

Back to the bill. I decided in my infinite, procrastinating wisdom to wait till today to pay the gas bill. Well here it is 12:30 in the afternoon and I just now got out of the shower. I have been up since 7 am trying to clean. I say trying because for every thing I picked up and put away, two new things magically appeared in its place. I think my kids have supernatural powers to drive me insane. As I was cleaning I found a bag of corn chips shoved down the side of the couch, spilling the contents everywhere. It took me 10 minutes with our industrial strength Rainbow vacuum to finally clean all the crumbs out of the couch and floor underneath. Then as I was walking back out of the living room I noticed chips were spilled across the coffee table, the rocking chair and some were on the curtains higher than my girls can reach so they must have been throwing the chips at the ceiling at some point.

Then after making scrambled eggs for the girls for breakfast and nursing the baby, my 5 year old says to me "Mom, this house is messy. I don't like messy. You should clean today."

And as I look back at the kitchen table and see she had smeared her eggs all over the table and dropped some onto the floor, I decided I need a break and took my shower. This should have been a relaxing time, but my children don't think privacy applies to mothers. Every two seconds they burst into the bathroom throwing open the curtain and yelling at the top of their lungs "Mom, sissy did...." or "The baby wants you, can you take her in the shower?" I have learned that no matter what I answer the girls will do whatever they want anyway. I told the girls to stop bickering and clean their room, they fought more and made messes. I told them the baby couldn't get in the shower, but they could give her to their dad or just leave her in the bathroom where I could watch her, but before I could even finish that statement they had stripped the baby down and shoved her in the shower with me. So now I am avoiding cleaning up the girls messes made while I was in the shower and since the bill pay center is open until 7pm tonight I have decided to put off paying the bill for just a little longer.

Lets hope I have gas tomorrow.

Breaking News

The next week will feature entries from my last forgotten BLOG. This saves me from having to write something every day for at least the next week, but also lets me laugh again at my wonderful family.

Metamucil is brutal

As previously mentioned, my family often require a little help in the regularity area. I often give a half dose of metamucil to my girls if their plumbing isn't running as freely as is necessary. I keep the metamucil on the top shelf of our cupboard and usually have to use a chair myself to get it down. While I had often discussed the unpleasant result of having too much, it apparently didn't sink in as well as I hoped.

My children are often thirsty and I make sure their cups are within easy reach so that the 6 and 7 year olds can fill up at the sink anytime they want. This can cause a few problems though as those same girls will often get into juice or milk, but not finish the drink. When i see a full cup and the children are over at a friends or playing outside i will drink the milk or juice so it isn't wasted.

I found three cups of juice yesterday and quickly downed them all. the first two were the fruit punch from the fridge, but the last was juice mixed with metamucil. It had so much metamucil that I thought I was drinking jello. I don't know how the girls got into the fiber, but when i looked for it, it was on its shelf. While I prefer not to be ambushed with fiber supplements, i figured it couldn't do me any harm.

I am writing now with bowels that would do a colonoscopy proud. While I would not suggest such an awkward and uncomfortable "cleanse" to anyone else, it has spurred my efforts to get back into shape and I actually exercised today.

So I guess I should make this a public thank you to my dear sweet girls:
Thank you girls, you have helped me get rid of all the crap stopping me from exercising like i should.

Behold My Creative Genius!!!

My gorgeous, sexy and wonderful husband downloaded some writing software for me. I have always wanted to write a novel and have many ideas that are spread throughout 20 some notebooks (my favorite being the epic battle between F.A.G. and G.O.O.D.). My husband therefore figured I would love to have a central area in which to collect my ideas and not have to worry about artistic Kara using them as her canvas.
I have sat down 4 times to try and put all my notes into the program but every time I try, one of my cute kids destroys something or maims a sister. Well I am stating here for the world to see: I will finish a book in the next 2 years or at least one of my girls will end up in boarding school until I can finish the book.

Blogging is hard

I have tried blogging in the past and i quickly become overwhelmed trying to maintain regularity in how often I post. Makes sense though... Everyone in our lovely house has to eat activia to maintain any sort of "regularity" in our lives. I also find that amusing and entertaining thing don't happen regularly. And I have never been the type to say, "Nothing entertaining has happened today, maybe I should do something crafty and write a post on my creative genius." So on those days of monotony I will share my opinion of others' creative genius and write book or movie reviews or something.
The crux of this post is that my life is boring and if that was all i wrote about I wouldn't have many repeat readers.... other than my mom.

Welcome to insanity!!!!!

While watching TV, folding laundry, nursing Eva and helping my daughter Kara finish her homework before kindergarten, a story was aired on blogging. I felt inspired to let my voice be heard, so three weeks later here I am starting this blog.
Most of the blogs covered seem to be perfect mothers giving advice and anecdotes about perfectly baking cookies for the bake sale whilst, and at the same time, cleaning their 6000sq.ft. home, creatively scrap booking their entire extended families photos and picking up their honor roll children from private schools without letting those children feel overly privileged or spoiled. Let me tell you i will have no stories like those, in fact if the impossible happened and i was able to afford/buy a 6000 sq. ft. house my advice and anecdotes would be about the maid grumbling over me making huge messes as I tried to make cookies for a bake sale, and managing to burn the pre-made frozen dough stashed for the last 2 years in the back of my not very clean freezer. In fact now that I remember the existence of the dough i should probably find an ice pick(jackhammer) to free it from the layer of frost in the dark nether regions of my freezer.
Back to the topic on hand.... what this blog is supposed to be about. I am going to steal the Seinfeld idea. This blog is about nothing so therefore I can write about everything. If I give advice or recipes or share an amazing experience I hope you take from it truth that no matter how hectic and far from perfect my life may be, it brings me joy and I hope you will get a smile or two as well.
By the way, I am trying to sell my husbands old strength shoes.... any takers?