Tagged?

Since Tami knows I read her blog, I'm doing this for her :)

ONE. What was I doing ten years ago?
Well, I was about 5 months pregnant with my oldest child, fascinated at the sensation of feeling the baby move inside me, but wearing my husband’s jeans to avoid having to wear maternity clothes. I was teaching a 300-level college course about Matrices in Statistics, made more challenging by the fact that one of my students was blind. At the same time I was also desperately trying to finish my Masters Thesis, and my husband had just been accepted to his PhD program.

TWO. Five things on my to-do list:
* Put my house back together now that SIL’s wedding is over.
* Fix the flat tire on the jogging stroller.
* Take my two oldest boys to buy new shoes.
* (Laundry, dishes, bathrooms, grocery shopping, clean garage…)
* Buy paint for our stupid front door and our stupid window trim because our stupid HOA says they are the wrong color even though we haven’t changed the stupid colors since we moved in to the stupid house two years ago. Oh, and pay them $25 for “permission” to make the changes they are requiring us to make.

THREE. What snacks do I enjoy?
Everything. Unfortunately.
Things I love and can’t have right now because of braces: nuts, Doritos, carrot sticks, caramel, raisins and Craisins, Skittles, Jelly beans, Starbursts, those minty Christmas nougats, spice drops, that wonderful trail mix at Trader Joes (cashews, dried cranberries, white chocolate chips, almonds, white raisins…)

FOUR. What would I do if I were suddenly a billionaire?
Move to a place where it doesn’t cost a billion dollars just to live there.
Buy a piano. Pay 100 million dollars tithing. Try to figure out how to avoid the even bigger tax bill.

FIVE. Three bad habits
I pick at my fingernail polish if it is even a little bit chipped. I don’t know why. Obviously picking at it only makes it look worse, but I can’t stop myself!

I am horrible at getting my kids to bed on time. This is partly because I am a sucker for when my kids ask me intellectual questions. I might have said it was bedtime 20 minutes ago, and then they ask me a math question or start talking about the “main problem” or the “important message” of the book they are reading, and I’m hopelessly involved talking to them.

The dentist says I am supposed to “help” my kids brush and floss their teeth – all of them, every day – to make sure they do a good job. Most of the time I just let them do it themselves. This is mainly due to the fact that when I help them it takes forever to brush and floss all of them, and then I still have to do my own!

SIX. Six places I've lived
Utah
Arizona
Iowa
Texas
New York
Maryland

SEVEN. Five Jobs I've had
Raspberry picker
Math tutor
“Office Assistant” for our city offices (answered phones, processed water bills, etc.)
Youth Counselor for summer recreation program for kids/teens
Statistics Lecturer, TA, and Research Consultant

EIGHT. Five things people don't know about me
* I’ve never been in a hair salon for a cut or style or color or anything.
* One time I had dinner with Oprah Winfrey and Dolly Parton at the same time – at the bottom of the Hoover Dam wearing hard hats.
* I don’t really like chocolate that much. I don’t mind it, but it is definitely not my first choice.
* Calling people on the telephone is terrifying for me. Even my friends.
* I would rather do almost anything than choose paint colors for my livingroom.
* Oh, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have forwarded emails or "tagged" people. So if you are reading this, don't worry. You're not tagged. Unless of course you want to be. Then you can consider yourself officially tagged.

Lost in Translation

I have to tell about this funny thing I saw yesterday.

For reasons too bizarre to explain, I was making a box of some kind of Turkish dessert. This was somewhat of an adventure since the original instructions were in Turkish, and the English translation was not great.

(Not as much of an adventure as the next day when I was making a different pre-packaged foreign dessert that had no translation. Thank goodness for pictures and some good guessing -- oh, and an online translator that got one word right -- saucepan. The rest of the words were translated as things like "text from the Koran," which I was pretty sure had nothing to do with the recipe.)

Anyway, as I was reading the box and looking for any English that might help me figure out what I was supposed to do, I found the following:

"Keep in cool and dry place. Keep away from the bad smelling area."

The bad smelling area?

I laughed for awhile. Because you know, I was really considering putting this package of food right next to my diaper pail.

Confessions of a Bad (or Batter) Mom

So the last couple of weeks here have made for a February to remember. It started on the 12th when my daughter got the fever to match all fevers. As I dabbed her forehead and held her aching, sweaty body, and touched her flushed cheeks, I honestly wished that I could be sick instead of her. She was just so miserable.

And then I got it. And my husband got it. And two of my other three kids got it. (Actually I am amazed that my one son NEVER got it, the whole time all of us were sick. I actually wonder if all the nose-picking and non-hand-washing has somehow benefited his immune system. Is that possible?) Anyway, for the next few days (including Valentines Day) we were all suffering from what I guess was the flu. I'm still coughing and I think I injured my rib cage from coughing so hard! LAME!

Anyway, confession #1 is that I never took any of them to the doctor. I actually never even considered taking them to the doctor because I was fairly certain it was not bacterial. I'm not sure at what point I would have taken them to the doctor. Maybe I have had too many experiences going to the doctor where they take a look and say. Sorry. It's viral. Go home and give them lots of fluids. Oh, and thanks for the $20 copay -- from each kid.

I was realizing that it has been AGES since I have taken my kids to the doctor when they were sick. Because it's almost always a cold, or a stomach thing that I know is going around (and can usually tell you where they got it from.) Anyway, I'm horrible.

Also, I have made three cakes in the past two weeks. I don't even really like cake. But related to it is my second confession.

Confession #2: I sometimes eat cookie dough and cake batter, even though it has raw eggs in it, and even though I am totally insistent that my kids don't touch the stuff. So I guess I am some kind of hypocrite. I sit there telling them that they shouldn't eat this stuff 'cause it has raw eggs, and then I wait until they're out of the kitchen and scrape the bowl myself. Horrible, eh? The thing is, I have never gotten sick from it. And I know I'm gambling every time I do it, but it tastes so good, I just can't resist! Aaah. Guilt.

Ithaca Winter

Yesterday it was about 30 degrees here, with wind gusts of up to 30 mph. To put it bluntly, it was cold. As I was walking my freezing kids to school I started telling them about how cold it was when we lived in Ithaca. I talked about how my eyeballs would get cold. I described how the school had a rule that, in addition to coats, all the kids had to bring snow pants, hats, and gloves every day because it was so cold, and because they went outside for recess even when it was cold. "There was even one year when we had so much snow that I didn't see our grass from November until March."

My oldest then told how he remembered one day when there was an "ice mountain taller than mom" through which they dug a tunnel with the help of their preschool teachers. They also went "sledding" down it (just on their snow pants.)

Skip to this morning.

It was even colder outside. Not as much wind, but colder. I decided to be a little more attentive in bundling at least the younger kids. My 4-yr-old, donning her own snow pants, hat, gloves, scarf, and knee-length coat, asked my 6-yr-old if he wanted to wear some snow pants.

He was emphatic in his response:

"No! I do not want snow pants! We are NOT in Ithaca! And did you know that Ithaca means WINTER in Spanish?"

(Did I mention that he likes to make up words in gibberish and "pretend" it is French or Spanish)

I think I laughed for about 5 minutes.

Bad BYU Mom???

Sometimes you think you have taught your kids, and then you realize that somewhere along the line you must have overlooked something. The following are real conversations I have had with my 9-yr-old son in the past month. (I hesitate to post these because of how bad it makes me look.)

First, at the beginning of December, he came home with a spelling list from school. I asked him to tell me what words were on it, and he started reading from the list. After awhile, he paused and said, "I'm not sure how to pronounce this one, but it's spelled C-O-U-G-A-R." I yelped.

(The funniest part about this was that it was literally *days* after we had driven home, elated about BYU's win over Utah, and we assigned each person in our car to shout B - Y - U - COUGARS, and his assignment was COUGARS.)

Then, this past weekend after their last-second win over UCLA, we were all shouting in utter joy and amazement, when he came over, wearing his BYU blue football jersey and "Cougars" cap, and whispered in my ear, "Mom, are we the yellow team or the blue team?"

Maybe it's time to cough up the money and pay for cable.

Growth Spurt?

Today my 4-yr-old girl, who usually eats next to nothing, had the following for lunch:

2 Tuna sandwiches
1 Peanut butter sandwich
1 grilled cheese sandwich
a bunch of baby carrots
some oyster crackers
some raisins
2 glasses of milk
a glass of water

I nearly went into shock.

And Tonight's Forecast:

So last night was a really hard night, with my baby crying and us trying to put him back to sleep, and him crying some more, and him finally coming to our bed, where he flopped and arched backwards over my head, and flopped some more and tried to get comfortable, and flopped some more on top of me, and then on top of my husband, and finally fell asleep.

In the midst of the delirium that comes when most of me is trying to sleep and about 3% of me is awake trying to take care of a flopping baby, I had the following thought:

It's too bad you can't measure crying the way you measure snow; and I wish we could get baby forecasts the way you get weather forecasts -- something like, "and tomorrow night will have partly peaceful evening followed by scattered storms, and a chance of 3-6 inches of crying and flopping."

OK, really, I have no idea what I was thinking other than this distant memory of wishing that somebody could tell me ahead of time when I am going to have horrible nights!