Redneck Too-tor-yul

Now, I b'lieve I promised y'all some foe-toe-bloggery. Guess now's a good-a time uz inny to give y'all a too-tor-yul on th'care an' maintenance of a ring stacker whatsit.

First off... y'all gotta take iss business perty serious-like, no jackin' round. You screw the pooch on iss baby, ain't NO stackin' goan be happenin', and that jiss ain't FUN.

Getcher self a grip on th' whatsit. Now some folks think y'all kin be jiss grabbin' atcher toys all willy-nilly in a one hander grip. M'self I don't recommend it. Naw. Y'all gonna wanna give this step some real consideration.

Jiss one thangs fer sure... Not. Like. Iss.
Take a good look y'all, this is what's known in th' business as "bass-ack-ward." Ain't nuthin' goan stack on a tumped over bit o' crazy like iss bad-boy here, and on top uh that? The yaller stick part come half unscrewed from the base of the whatsit, ever time ya grip it like iss.

Don't do it.

Now, if ya'll have loosened up yer yaller stick part from the base, jiss grab that sucker like iss and give 'er a righty-tighty. Don't be stingy with the torque now. I'll wait while ya git 'er done.

Once ya git that yaller stick all snug as a bug, ya shift yer grip and shaZAM! Y'all are good to go!

An at's whatcha call ring stack ready! This yere's my fav-rit grip, the two handed straight-up-n-down! And yer ready to stack.

An' that's what ya call a redneck too-tor-yul.
Yee-haw!

LaLa Goes To Kindy-garten

So wow, yeah... LaLa is at her first day (half day?) of Kindergarten right now. I dropped her off at school and then took Henry and Pearl in the double stroller for a walk. Finally.

It is so liberating to just have the two. I can just walk. And here I am, posting on the old bloggy; Pearl is downstairs getting reacquainted with Diego, and Henry is visiting the Sandman. And I am glad for these small mercies, but today they just underscore how low my standards have sunk. How little I expect from myself or for myself outside of the realm of motherhood and wifery.

A few of my favorite bloggers have posted recently and I find that I cannot even comment on their posts because everything I have to say is self-pity slop. And envy; envy when I know better than to compare my reality with the teeny slice of reality that I see of another's life.

I also recently read this really stupid feminist rant about an equally stupid anti-feminist article and the parts of it that stuck out to me (other than the fact that both sets of folks were giving us all a good view of their posteriors) was a bit about how babies give their mommies a sort of narcotic high. Oxytocin I believe was what the more scientific-minded called it. While I am as google-headed as the next mommy over my fat friar of a Henry-boy... I think I am getting gypped in the contact high department.

Have you seen Phoebe in Wonderland? It's a beautiful movie, thoughtful and well done, and well acted... there is a part though, that resonated in me so much that it hurt. The mom and the father are talking while raking leaves, and the mom character is explaining that she is angry that she isn't writing, and how she is afraid that when she is 70 that she will be going on endlessly about her children because she won't have anything else, because she won't have done anything important. And then she is mad because sometimes she isn't scared of that at all, because her children make her live.

Only my children don't make me live. I don't think so anyway.

I find myself with this carrot of "in six years" dangling in front of my mental nose... like some holy grail of motherhood. This "when they are all in school" fantasy that I will be able to do creative things again. That I will be able to write then. I tell myself that I cannot write now because I am so tired and distracted... that perhaps if I had the energy of a younger mother I could do it.

Sorry LaLa... don't mean to steal your thunder. I am so very proud of you, and you are so ready for this time in your life.

Just that some days I wish that I was ready for this time in my life.

Photobloggery?

Naw... this jist filler til the REAL photobloggin' starts. Purely infer-mational.

First off... TLC 9:00 PM on Sunday August 30th, for the "Your Kid Ate What?" thingy. Again, while I must be fair in stating that the story of what happened with the Pearl-girl really was pretty convoluted... what you will see has couple of facts glaringly wrong, so wrong in fact, that they (the production company) cannot even change them KNOWING that they are wrong. As in the footage is shot and cobbled together and they can't really tweak anything they have to fit the truth. Apparently they make heavy use of actors doing dramatizations of what happened. I can only surmise that the people who wrote the script, never got within five feet of my blog, any of the endless footage that I sent, OR the hours of taped interview of both Dadguy and myself re-hashing the details ad nauseum.

Whatever.

We never had an ambulance come to our house.

And not that it matters (though obviously it matters to me)... you will never hear the phrase "Thank God" out of my mouth. As in, "everything turned out OK, thank God!" I am not saying there is anything wrong with saying it, only I am super, super careful about how I use the name of Deity. Is a personal choice that I have made, fueled by the many years that I was very care-LESS about what I said or how, and I just want to make that clear. Kinda like in the Book of Mormon how there was that batch of Lamanites who, when they were converted to Christianity and realized that murder was so wrong they buried their weapons of war and vowed never to take them up again... and then they didn't. Not even to defend their own lives, to the point of kneeling before those who would slay them and offering their lives, and then being slaughtered until not even their enemies could stomach it any longer. Like they went super extreme the other way. So yeah, it's kind of like that only not as dedicated, or meaningful or cool or anything.

Anyway, it's just this thing I have... and they have the gal who plays me say it at one point, and I would never say that.

I know, I know... get over it already woman!

Look at my beautiful Bird on her first day of second grade!

She is LOVING the Potter.
(I edited out her RL name that she had originally put into this drawing)

Grandpa sent the girls a book on How To Draw Baby Animals... this is LaLa's baby bunny. These kids! They KILL me!

This is pure Pearl... and if I know her, this bug is named either "Twilight" or "Sara-tee."

*Edited to add: I just asked Pearl what the human bugs name was, she floored me by replying "Eee-ook." There is a new name in town.

The Bag

Walking home from the school playground this evening, Birdie and LaLa have ridden their two-wheelers on ahead and are waiting for us on the front lawn. I am pushing Henry and Pearl in the double stroller as Pearl and I chat companionably about the things we see. Pearl does a sharp intake of breath and turns around in the stroller to look me in the eye and says, "Mama! Today is the day that the earth worms DIE!"

"They die?"
"Yes, they die and then they go up to worm heaven!"
"Worm heaven, huh? Is that a beautiful place for worms to go?"
"Yes. But the bad-guy worms... they go in the bag."

Seriously though, check this out




and then look over here.

Stuff

With four kids, one of them a baby, ya own a lot of stuff.

Correction: We own a lot of stuff.

There are clothes, and toys, sparkly stickers, and dishes, and food of all the various sorts that all the various and bizarre eaters eat in this house. And then since we are LDS, there is also the food storage and 72 hour emergency kits. There are DVD's, bandaids, computers, tools, magazines and books. Artwork, pencils, rubber bands, papers, mail, bills, ribbons, documents, bedding, toiletries, cleaners, laundry, boxes, furniture...

THINGS.

And the incomprehensible little people of this house moving these things, all of these things all of the time, around in inexplicable patterns and for no knowable reasons. Things that it would never occur to my adult brain to do or to move or to use to play a rousing game of Power Puff Petshop Potter Menace.

It is this aspect, the stuff-management part of my job description; this aspect of being a mother of four children that is sitting on my brain and making my chutzpah scream "uncle!" Today I took LaLa and Pearl to the local department store sale to choose a new backpack each. Later this evening after enjoying being in the audience of our own "pajama/backpack fashion show," complete with catwalk soundtrack and much swishing and posing by three little girls, I gathered together the three backpacks in one place and looked around my front room for a good place to put them. These packs will, after all, be in play nearly every day this up coming school year. But they are pretty darn big, the backpacks... and I already have valuable space taken up by the coat rack and the shoe basket that will also be getting lots of action come cold weather and (gulp) the snow. Plus the paperwork; the blizzards of papers and art projects and flashcards and memos that I can count on from a second grader, a kindergartner and a pre-schooler, these storms of paperstuffs that are soon to grace this home.

Then it dawned on me... in three short years (and the years are getting shorter and shorter lemme TELL you!) I will have four backpacks to shuffle. Holy permission slips Batman, I am feeling dizzy.

S'cuze me a minute...