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Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Archives for September 2007

Sometimes It’s Better Not to Lay Down the Smack

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I came back from a late church meeting last night a couple of hours after Laylee and Magoo should have been sleeping in their beds. I closed the door behind me and turned around to see Laylee at the top of the stairs grinning down at me in the last pair of footy jammas she owns, the fuzzy pink ones I can’t bear to part with yet, the ones that are 2 sizes too small.

My first thought was consistency. We’ve been really inconsistent this summer with bedtimes, snacks gone wild, discipline, and pretty much every aspect of parenting and family life. This week we’ve been really focusing on getting back into routines and teaching our kids that because we love them, we give them limits and now we’re finally gonna get back to actually holding them accountable to those limits.

So my first instinct when I saw her up out of bed was to say, “What do you think you’re doing? Bed. Now.” But I just couldn’t do it. Looking at her sweet face beaming down at me, I thought, “She just wants to greet me. How does she want me to respond? How would I want my mom to respond? What will she remember about me when she’s grown and gone?”

I let my face break into a very sincere grin and exclaimed, “Oh LAYLEE! I’m so glad you’re still awake! I’m so happy I get to see you before I go to bed.” I rushed up the stairs and gathered her in my arms and could feel her face squishing joyfully against my shoulder.

“Why don’t you head back to bed sweet pea?”

“Mom,” she whispered in my ear, “I’m making a copy of my Jesus book for Ellie. I’m working so hard and writing and drawing and do you wanna see it?”

I looked at the black pen on her freshly bathed face and hands and considered for a second. Again, my instinct was consistency. “She should already be asleep and she’s up coloring in her room. We have to get up really early for church and she’s covered in pen and if I go look at her picture, I’m encouraging her to disobey her dad and stay up late when she should be sleeping.”

Again I looked at her face, so eager to please, so excited about her project, not at all calculating or manipulative (Trust me. I know what those faces look like too.) and I told her to run quick and get her picture to show me.

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She’s just beginning to really enjoy writing letters and she has latched on to this little tiny book and wanted to copy it for her friend. I was overcome with cuteness and sent her off to sleep. A few minutes later I walked by her room and saw her hunched under the nightlight, carefully transcribing. I remembered late night games and books read with flashlights under the covers and I smiled and left her to her fun.

The products of last night’s adventure were a snuggly and happy preschooler today who was patient with me when I did tell her she couldn’t do certain things, and this little book that’s sure to be a family treasure. Looking at the outrageously happy faces on the pictures she drew last night, I realized that love is the most important thing I need to be consistent about with my kids.

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Chicco Stroller Giveaway

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strollerChicco is giving away strollers like they’re going out of style. I’m all for giving things away and for helping make strollers go out of style so I’m pleased to promote the contest going on at Chicco where one stroller will be given away each day in September (4 more chances to win!). I’m also excited to announce that one Daring Young Mom reader will win a stroller as well (that makes 5 chances to win!).

To win at the Chicco site, you have to answer a couple of easy questions. To win at Daring Young Mom, you need to do a bit more work but the winner will be chosen from a much smaller group. It’s a really cool stroller that retails for about $150.

Here’s what you need to do:

Convince me that you NEED this stroller more than my other readers. You can do this through photos of your current nasty dirty stroller, poetry, song or interpretive dance. Dan and I will judge all entries in a completely biased and unfair way, choosing whichever one we happen to like the best. I will be accepting entries through this Sunday, September 30th at noon PST. Send me an email with your plea and someone will be getting a free primo stroller. I’ll announce the winner Sunday night!

(Oh, and if you like The Office and you like free stuff, go check out Eve’s giveaway. You have to hurry. The contest ends in a few hours when the season premiere airs.)

The Contest is Closed. I’ll let you know as soon as we have a winner!

Click to Read My Product Review Policy

Works for me Wednesday Night

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wfmwheaderI’m late but hope this still counts. Shannon has been doing Works for Me Wednesday for ages. I think it’s a fabulous idea but I never quite get my stuff together on the actual Wednesday so then I feel silly posting something that works for me on a day that the alliteration wouldn’t work as well.

Then Wednesday comes around and nothing seems to be working for me so I don’t post anything. Now I have read and loved Shannon since long before she became the mighty force of internet rock-stardom that she is today and it tickles me pink to present my very first WFMW 3 minutes before midnight Pacific Standard Time.

It works for me to have diapers, hand sanitizer and fruity cheerios on hand when I need them. If you don’t think you could ever NEED fruity cheerios, then I think you should check your kids to see if they’re cyborgs or hippies or something.

wfmw-basketI usually keep the essentials in my giant diaper bag of an excuse for a purse, but every once in a while we’re out on the town and I notice I forgot to remember to restock my bag. Never you fear because I have everything I need right at my fingertips in a little plastic basket beside the driver’s seat.

Today I was driving around and Magoo said, “Here you go mama!” and gleefully tried to hand me a rather ominous booger. I pulled a piece of toilet paper from the basket, snagged the goob and disposed of it in my very own suspended garbage receptacle, an item that also works for me quite nicely.

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Dan was the first to install one of these in the car and I find it simply ingenious. Instructions for installation are as follows:

1. Make a grocery list.
2. Gather up the children and rubber lizards from your house, put them in the car and drive to the store.
3. Unpack the kids, force them to hold your hand across the street and take them into the store.
4. Jam their writhing wriggling legs into a shopping cart and strap them in.
5. Buy milk, at least three things from your shopping list, Diet Dr. Pepper and cookies.
6. Just say no to 3 types of high fructose insanity in the checkout line while reading about all the celebrities who may or may not be pregnant.
7. Pull the money out of your shirt and pay for groceries.
8. Head for home.
9. Let your kids pull all but one bag of groceries along the cobblestone driveway until the bags shred and the food spills all over the place.
10. Remember to put the milk in the fridge within 4-6 hours of arriving home.
11. Smell it each time you drink it until you imagine it’s probably rotten and then throw it out, even though it just smells like milk.
12. Take the one grocery bag you saved from certain death back out to the car.
13. Thread the handles over the arm rests of the front captains’ chairs.
14. Fill it with debris, wrappers, boogers and polly pocket shoes.
15. Repeat.

These things work for me. And it’s Wednesday.

I Just Stepped on a Slug in My Bare Feet

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Last night I got 3.5 hours of sleep. Everything seems worse than it probably really is. I wonder if I get more sleep tonight, will the slug guts be automatically cleansed from my foot?

Here are some reasons my day ate rocks because I only had 3.5 hours of sleep last night:

1. I decided to try potty-training Magoo today. We’re still at the stage where I ask him hundreds of times whether his McQueen pants are wet or dry, he says dry, we high-five, then he looks down perplexedly at the puddle gathering around his feet. Where did all that yellow water come from? Hrm…

2. My right hip is sort of frozen so it hurts to unload the dishwasher. My physical therapist says it’s good if the pain is localized, rather than shooting up my spine and down my leg so I guess this is a good thing and should not be on my list of reasons why my day ate rocks because I only had 3.5 hours of sleep last night.

3. I JUST MESSED UP MY LIST OF REASONS my day ate rocks because I only had 3.5 hours of sleep last night and now I have to start over:

1. I got a call from my 7-month-pregnant friend this afternoon. I was still groggy from a nap that made me feel worse than I had beforehand. She was waiting for me because I was supposed to meet her at another friend’s house. The other friend was not there to meet her. I was not there to meet her. Her car had a flat tire so she had walked her pregnant belly to our meeting spot so she wouldn’t let us down. Neither of us were there to meet her because… um… I feel like a piece of unreliable cheese.

2. The trash bag ripped open and rancid peach juice spilled everywhere.

3. Dan’s working a bazillion hours of overtime this week. I like Dan.

4. I think I owe email to about 50 people.

5. I just found out that the main character in my book club book received a prophecy that she would die by falling off a tall cliff and now she’s living at the top of a tall cliff.

6. My blue flannel pajama pants with the little white clouds all over them are dirty and so are all my other clothes.

7. Yarn and houseplants were on sale today at Fred Meyer. Hencely and thus, my entire grocery budget for the week is shot and I believe it’s only Tuesday.

8. Does your house ever get so covered in junk that you feel silly calling it messy because it’s such a ridiculous understatement but you don’t know that you’ll ever have the time or the desire in the foreseeable future to shovel it clean? Mine does.

9. My writing feels less not incoherent than usual.

10. Did I mention I stepped on a slug with my bare feet?

LITTLE BABIES!!!

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My time with Erin and her little babies is drawing to a close. There are signs in abundance that it’s almost time for us to go home for the last time this summer and get back to our normal routines. This afternoon Magoo painted their glass patio door with spinach dip. Laylee bit Magoo’s hand while they were “trying to get to sleep” and told me she did it “just to be mean.” They’re both acting really strangely and I’m starting to think that the world’s most portable kids do not want to be ported all over the face of the earth ANY MORE.

On a more positive note, I fell asleep this afternoon holding both of these in my arms!

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I Done Been Shaped

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I headed to the nail salon on my way out of town for a pre-BlogHer manicure. It’s like the pre-prom manicure. For one day a year it’s nice to pay $20 to your Korean fairy godmother and pretend that you are a dainty specimen of femininity who always has perfectly painted pink fingernails and has never heard of a cuticle.

I personally find the trimming of the cuticle very perplexing. Why has that portion of skin been determined to be unacceptable? No one goes around trimming off the spare wrinkly skin from their elbow pit every time it grows back. We just assume that if the skin’s there, it’s supposed to be.

Every time I go in for a manicure once a year I notice various “waxing” services on the price list. I begin feeling sad about my eyebrows. They are one part of my personal grooming that seem like they should be easy to take care of but I am terrified to start plucking or allow someone else to do it.

Since it was the day before I would speak at a conference and meet hundreds of new people, it seemed like a good time to make a drastic life and beauty change. Without looking up, I mumbled to my esthetician that I’d like to get my eyebrows “done.”

“Get them done” like it was something I did every day or every 28 years.

“Sure,” she said as she skillfully applied white paint to the tips of my nails.

I started to have second thoughts. What if they did something crazy? What if I ended up looking semi-permanently deranged, angry or quizzical? I looked up at the girl who had just helped me lose 3 lbs of excess cuticle and was about to transform the whole look of my face. She had no eyebrows.

Okay. That’s an exaggeration. She had a line of hairs above each eye, outlined with a single stroke of brown liner which was thicker than the actual brow.

I started to panic.

“Um… so I just want a little off my eyebrows. Nothing drastic. I’ve never done this before and I’m really nervous. I’d rather take off too little than too much. Let’s just go easy.”

“Are you saying that because of the way my eyebrows look?”

Awkward silence.

“Because I don’t like my eyebrows either. I’ve never had eyebrows. They just grew in like this.”

And I was quiet. And she shaped me and plucked me and they actually looked quite lovely for a few days.

At first I kept up with the lawn maintenance, tweezers in hand each night, quickly snagging up any little guy that tried to make his way back into the fold. But I’ve let it go too long and now I’m afraid, afraid I’ll pull the wrong one and end up lopsided or with the apparent derangement of which I spoke previously.

I remember Amalah once talking about how eyebrows were the one thing you needed to keep up because if you had nice eyebrows but no makeup you look like you’re running late but if you have crazy overgrown brows, you look like you just don’t care.

So for about 4 weeks of my entire life, I looked like I cared and now I’m wondering if I care enough to continue to look like I do…

The Perfect Storm

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peaches-024I over-schedule. I want to do everything and be everything when I grow up. I want to grow my own food and bake bread and make my home a haven of educational bliss, moral perfection and impeccable scrabble playing. I want to have it all. So I plan and I scheme and carefully stagger all kinds of activities and then spend my life flying from one thing to the next until the kids beg for mercy in the form of flopping like a dead fish on the floor of the grocery store and alternately laughing and bawling for CANDY FWEEZE!!!!

peaches-016Every once in a while the elements of my life combine in just the right way to create a perfect storm of domestic insanity. The latest in this series of “WHAT THE SUGAR IS MY PROBLEM?” moments came last Thursday and nobody’s heard a lot from me since.

Thursday is bread making day. I do not plant the wheat but I do buy it in impossibly large white buckets, let it sit in my garage for years, peaches-013finally learn how to use my wheat grinder, grind it, and make my own bread. It saves money. It tastes scrumptious thanks to Sarah’s recipe. It makes me feel cool when I say, “I make my own bread,” because bread preference comes up so often in conversation.

At this point I make 4 loaves of bread each week, giving one away so that “I make my own bread” can come up in casual conversation and keep the other three so “PEANUT BUTTER SAMMMMMMITCH FWEEZE!!!” will be able to get the response it so richly deserves. All day Thursday, I’m working on the bread.

peaches-011Well, a woman from church was ordering a bunch of peaches direct from a grower and asked if anyone wanted to buy some at a discount. Eve convinced me that canning peaches would be the Best Thing Ever so I put in my order and we waited. TA-DA! The peaches arrived on Wednesday, with about one day of life left on them before they would need to be canned immediately.

peaches-025“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll be home all day making bread anyway. I can throw some peaches in that canner thingy while the bread’s rising. It will be perfect. I even have a book that will teach me how. Oh, and I’m also hosting a Mary Kay extravaganza for Stephanie that night so I can work on the hors d’oeuvres and desserts while the peaches are boiling.”

peaches-003The book was obviously written for someone who is literate and likes to read for hours and hours in ecstatic anticipation while they watch their glorious fruit ripen, not someone who wants a quick how-to she can read while stirring the cheesecake batter as the bread kneads in the Kitchen-Aid. I tried to skim-read and pump Stephanie and Heather for information as I scraped the skin off the peaches and tried to remember what dad-gum-awful peach chores I did with my mom when I was a kid and she asked me to “do this please” and “do that please” as she created blue ribbon peaches fit for the fair.

peaches-008My peaches would not win any prizes at the fair. They are brownish and sort of hairy and Laylee has sworn never to eat them. I made the last batch into peach “sauce” by taking out my aggression and smashing any peaches that were left in my kitchen to a pulp and throwing them in jars. It’s actually quite lovely.

peaches-018The bread which I decided to take a risk on and make 100% whole wheat looked good but tasted nasty. The cheesecake took a tumble. The goat cheese frittata triangles were cold by the time we ate them and my stove looks like I covered it with corn syrup and then fire-blasted it with a blowtorch. My makeup, however, looked ultimate and I got a big enough discount to feel justified buying $50 worth of skin care products I probably didn’t need but would certainly enjoy.

peaches-030I continued to can peaches all day the next day with Eve, went to a couple of doctor’s appointments, cleared junk out of several rooms in my house for the neighborhood garage sale I’d organized for the next day and hopped back and forth on my feet trying to rest them one at a time. Our 5 kids ran crazy like a pack of ravenous attention-starved wolves. My floors became so sticky I couldn’t hop on them anymore.

peaches-033At about 9pm on Friday night we had finished all the peaches but I hadn’t hung a single sign or priced a single piece of cheap junk for the garage sale the following morning. I had no change to hand to prospective buyers who planned to hand me a $50 bill in exchange for my used toothbrush and $49.87 in change. I had not an ounce of brainpower or bodily energy left so I called off the garage sale.

My neighbor had recently told me she was worried about me. Every time she talks to me I have a new project in the works, a new hobby or responsibility. Every time she looks out her window I’m either leaving, running in the door or stopping home for 30 seconds to change clothes or pick something up on my way to the next thing. She said something that really struck me, “If your life is crammed full of so many things, you won’t have time to enjoy any of them, even if they’re all things you really love doing.”

In the end, I’d rather eat WonderBread and peaches from Costco if I’m gonna drive myself nuts in my need to say, “I MAKE MY OWN DANG STINKIN’ WHEAT BREAD!!!”

She was right. So I stayed home all day Saturday with no garage sale, slept in late, had some special time with Dan and the kids, didn’t work, didn’t clean, hired a babysitter and went on a date. It was fabulous and I felt so renewed. We had friends over for dinner Sunday and then Monday morning I headed down to Boise with the kids to “help” my friend who’s just given birth to twin boys. She already has a 2 and a 4-year-old boy. I love being with her and her totally sweet kids. I just hope I can be more help than trouble.

I thought there was a lot of truth in Jessica’s post the other day, when she talked about how sometimes things run more smoothly without all the help, regardless of how helpful you think it is.

I’m here for a week and I’m helping around the house while taking a mini-vacation and bringing baby hunger to all new levels. Dan is holding down the fort in Washington, working a bazillion hours from home and at the office. Hopefully I’ll be fresher and more Daring when I get back, with an all new minty taste.

Do you need anything from Wal Mart? They have plenty of those here… and cheap produce… and babies.