Kathryn

The three wonderful ladies at MommyBloggers have gotten together to send a fellow breeding cyber pontificator to BlogHer this summer.

I’m shocked and more than way excited to be the one they chose to send. I’m guessing in the end they picked the applicant who could benefit most from meeting all the amazing women there and basking in their wise bloggishness. I am seriously so grateful and so nervous. Chris has graciously offered to take me in off the street so we can be hotel roomies. Now all I have left to take care of is airfare…

Any takers? If you have airmiles or Benjamins you’d like to donate to send me from Seattle to San Jose, you can expect to receive your very own Daring-Young-Hand-Crafted Disney princess dress or other costume of your choice in time for Halloween this year. Here are some samples of my work:

What? You don’t usually spend $250 on Halloween costumes for your kids? I weep for them.

I also weep for Alicia who will be paying dearly for the unflattering pictures she posted of me on her blog today. I have PhotoShop and I’m not afraid to use it. As I repeatedly tell Laylee, there will be consequences… and they will happen on approximately Wednesday. Tomorrow I’m gonna be asking for moving tips.

Magoo took his first unassisted steps while I was out of town and Laylee greeted me this morning by telling me that she had goobies in her eyes last night. It’s okay because she took them out of her eyes and fed them to the monsters. Hmm…okay. Welcome home to me. The trip was great (details to follow) but I sure missed these crazy kids… and Dan, don’t get me started. That man is sweetness personified.

Karli and I are off on our crazy adventure to meet the ladies.

She wore a cheese hat following our cheese tour in Washington.

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We were checked out by teenaged boys in low-rise jeans and “wife-beaters”* who apparently thought knew we were hot.

A woman in Albertsons called Karli and I “girls,” setting us up for a weekend of giddy glee.

We ate lunch in a dark restaurant when the power went out in Oregon.

Our gas was pumped by others.

We sang the entire Les Miserables soundrack at the top of our lungs.

We met up with the coolest girls around!

Dinner was raucous in a corner booth in DOWN TOWN BOISE. WOOT!

Wild dancing has occurred.

Our hotel rooms are in the middle of a massive group of prom celebrators.

The talking, the gabbing, the hugging, the interrupting, the LOVE! More to come.

The big group gets together tomorrow. Yippee.

P.S. WE GOT THE HOUSE. Cross your fingers that the inspector finds anything wrong if it is wrong. And cross your fingers that there’s nothing wrong.

*Beth says they’re called “K-Feds” now.

Today has been like a mini parenting seminar unfolding of its own volition in my very home. We started the day out by going to look one more time at “the property.” We wanna-be land-holders like to call it that. After a thorough inspection by Dan (don’t worry, we’ll be using a professional inspector too), we decided to make an offer.

Now the waiting… which turns into gabbing on the phone and then magically into lots and lots and lots of work. We’re waiting right now to hear back from the seller who we’re told will be giving a counter-offer.

I feel far less stressed than I should be. Perhaps I’m channeling all of my nervous energy onto Laylee because she has gone absolutely nutso freakazoid insane today. She started by scattering the little blue shoe covers throughout the aforementioned “property,” spilling water all over the floor and then traipsing around the “property,” using the velvet beaded throw as a cape.

Honestly, I could not fault her for that one. It was a cape just waiting to be worn. Throughout the day she repeatedly abused Magoo, scraping his head with her toothbrush, writing on his head with a pointy piece of sidewalk chalk, hitting him over the head with a baby stroller…I could go on and on. She is not normally like this and I do not normally use the word “head” that many times in one sentence.

Whenever I’d stop her from what she was doing, she’d defend herself by saying, “He’s not crying yet.” Ooooohhh….he’s not crying yet? Is that the new criteria for acceptable behavior in our family?

It’s okay to wipe boogers on Mommy’s clean pants, flood the bathroom, scratch the new paint off the walls and scatter every piece of clean silverware we own throughout the house because Mommy’s not crying yet? I see. If Laylee were queen…

Actually, Laylee has become enamored with the wicked queen on Snow White. She loves her laugh, her apples, her magic powers and her fancy box with the heart in it. Laylee promises that if I give her magic powers and a fancy box, she will never use the box to kill people. I feel comforted by that. Maybe I will let her become queen someday.

When Dan got home, I pulled him aside and discretely told him all the crazy things she’d been up to, asking him to take over because I was DONE. He simply asked me, “So, what did you do about all that?”

Um…some time in her room…disapproving glances…said “no” weakly…kept talking on the phone. Yeah, I pretty much did nothing.

Dan calmly went to Laylee, sternly talked to her about her behavior and walked her around giving her instructions on how to clean things up… and it worked and they ended up cuddling on the couch reading stories with her happier than she’d been all day in my house of chaos.

Moral: Children need limits and are happier with them in place. I was freaking her out because I was letting her rule the roost and she didn’t know what had happened to her mommy. I normally don’t let her poke me with pointy red chopsticks. But sometimes on the day you’re trying to buy a house, it’s easy to turn into a slacker mom. And then they make you pay, and I ain’t talkin’ about the realtors. Luckily I have a husband who reminds me that you don’t have to be an evil villain to keep your kids in line and happy.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
~Them, those one people~

I think that is one the dumbest phrases in the English language. Of course you do. If that pharse were true, Dan never would have married me. It’s not that I made a bad impression on him. I just didn’t make one at all. We knew each other for several moths before he remembered my name.

When he finally did, he asked me out every day until we got married. It was very sweet, really. There have been many times when I have misjudged someone the first time I’ve met them and found out later that they were actually very nice, regardless of how pretty or talented they were.

This weekend, many of us will be making first impressions with babes we’ve been chatting with online for months. I know first impressions can be overcome with time, but time…she ain’t what we’ve got this weekend. One dinner. That’s it. I make an impression over salad and then I only have until the last bite of pasta and exchange of marvelous wit to leave a lasting impression on my internet idols.

My suggestions for myself for this specific occasion are:
-Don’t tell anyone, “Wow, your picture online is really really flattering! I hardly recognize you.”
-Don’t spill food, spew on anyone, or horkle soda out your nose when laughing at some funny thing Karen says.
-Say at least one sentence that does not involve computers or small people.
-Stop talking.

Please share your words of wisdom on how to make a good first impression or at least not come across as a total goober in front of new acquaintances. This does not have to be specific to meeting people you know from the internet. You may not be “that kind” of person. I’d also be happy to hear about ways you’ve completely embarrassed yourself when meeting someone for the first time. Those are always fun… in retrospect.

P.S. The house hunting is progressing. I even think we’ve found a winner. Keep your fingers, toes and nostrils crossed for us.

I got the dates wrong, even though I totally know them. The Idaho dinner is on SATURDAY night. I will be on the road Friday if you’d like to join my in a truckstop corndog somewhere in Oregon.*

*Disclaimer – you will not be allowed to pump your own gas and you’ll have to drive 60mph.

Sorry I’ve been a blogging deadbeat for a few days. Interest rates are rising, house prices show no sign of stopping their insane rise in the Seattle area and we’re feeling an itch to move from our condo to a single-family home before the price gap get’s too wide to ever cross. Having learned from Jeana, the intercontinental traveler, to “mind the gap” last week, I decided to take her advice.

It’s been enlightening so far and yes, mostly in a depressing sort of way. There are thousands of Microsoft employees, and young retired millionaire former employees, who are helping drive up house prices. Our condo has shot up 50% in value in the last 2 years and other houses in the area are doing the same.

The problem is – everyone who likes their spouse wants to live close to the city to avoid a long commute so houses in decent school districts, close to the office are too rich for our blood. We’re talking $500k for a 2000sqft, 30-year-old home with very little yard.

Before we started looking, I told myself 3 things:
1. In order to move up, we have to move down.
2. I am spoiled in our luxury condo and should be prepared to move into a “fixer-upper” that I won’t be able to fix up for the next 10 years due to the staggering new mortgage payment.
3. I am totally fine with this.

Now, number three is where I start to come unhinged. I am in fact not okay paying $450K for a small dark split-level with almost no back yard that needs a ton of renovation. I will say that the home I’m referring to had a lovely patio with a great view of the potbellied neighbor guy sitting in an old lawn chair, wearing a wife-beater and smoking while the thousands of dogs across the street yapped their heads off.

Dan said that half of you are probably potbellied middle-aged sweaty male smokers, wearing wife-beaters and posing as mommy bloggers so I should be careful what I say. Sorry if I offended anyone.

The most disturbing thing about the house was actually the hearse parked on the street two houses down because they had too many beat-up cars in the driveway.

In many of the neighborhoods we visited, people didn’t park their old cars or hearses on the street. The lawn was just fine. What is the deal with parking multiple old junkers on you front lawn? Why, I ask you, WHY?

Saturday started with all 4 of us suffering from a yucky cold, getting a cavity filled and being told by a friend that the schools in the areas we were planning on looking were “scary.” We then looked at the homes with the “scary” schools and hearse-driving, yappy-dog-owning, hoopty-collecting neighbors, started getting used to it and thinking it might be okay, but decided just to take a peek at a neighborhood WAY out, so far out that I would likely never see Dan again, so far out that we actually fell in love with a couple of homes in our price range and realized that we were not at all satisfied with the things we’d seen closer in. Then by the time we drove all the way back to our condo, we realized that we were not okay with a commute that long.

So, we’re back where we started.

AARRRG! But it’s fun…right?

FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT — Several of us are meeting together for dinner this coming SATURDAY night in Boise, ID. If you plan on attending, please email me and I will send you the information. The deadline for getting our final numbers to the restaurant is Wednesday so if you’re bringing someone, please let me know that too. I’m really excited. There will be some wonderful bloggers there. I hope you’ll be one of them.

Oh, and Happy Mother’s Day.

Oh, and I am so TICKED that the West Wing is over. The 10 other remaining viewers and I should get together for a bawl fest sometime.

Oh, and does anyone want to buy a really sweet 2-year-old condo across the street from a Bambi forest and backing onto a duck pond with actual bulrushes? Moses could be in there! …or a frog or something.

When I read about Piglet being blown away, I wonder what gauge weapon will be used and who will be wielding it. Eyeore seems the most unstable mentally, although Rabbit has shown himself capable of physical aggression in the past. Kanga is right out, but Roo wants so badly to fit in. Who’s to say that he’s not planning the job, maybe earn him some respect from the whole gang? They all made nice at the end of The Heffalump Movie but I think that book

is pretty solid evidence of the rising tide of violence in their little world. Christo-Robinizzle is too high up in the food chain to take anyone out himself. He’d undoubtedly use one of his henchmen. I don’t think it would be too hard to convince T-I-double-Guh-ER to “bounce” little pink, if you knowahmsayin’. After that whole forgery of documents and posing as a member of his long lost Tigger posse, in The Tigger Movie, our boy is not exactly right with Mr. T. At least the Pooh’s got his back… for now.

Got any theories, yo?

I remember a while back Angela’s daughter was freaking her out a wee bit by telling her morbid things about her future. The past few days Laylee has been telling me what we should do when our house falls down. Has anyone told her that Seattle is expecting a major earthquake any day now or do we just read too much about the three little pork chops? I promise our house is not made of straw.

However, Laylee is fairly certain that it will be falling down soon. When it does, we are to evacuate immediately and go live at Grammy’s house until our house gets put back up again.

Then today she told me that tomorrow we are all going to die. Um, thanks for the warning. I asked her if tomorrow was the day the house was gonna fall down. She said “no”. We’re just gonna die. So if I don’t post…

Now I will share with you something else that’s been disturbing me into hysterical laughter:

So Piglet’s gonna get blown away, huh? What kind of hood is this Hundred Acre Wood?

How do you get your kids to work FOR you, not against you? Last night we gave Laylee her first allowance so we could teach her about saving money and paying tithing. She was pretty much stoked that 5 of the shiny monies (dimes) went into her pink pig’s belly.

I’m not sure if she understands the tithing thing but she did keep saying that her savings box was for college. We gave her several options for the use of her 40 large, but she insisted that her savings were for college. Nice. At this rate, she will have her bachelor’s in approximately… never.

When I explained what allowance was, I told her that she would also be expected to do more “responsibilities” around the house. She was very excited about this plan. Responsibilities = big-girlness. Big-girlness = eating as many peeps as you can fit in your mouth because you’re tall enough to reach the cupboard of coma-inducing refined sugar products.

Currently she helps me set the table, clear her place, “make the bed” (cackle), and “dust.” Not bad for a three year old, but I still don’t think she’s earning her keep.

When we were young, my mom made chores fun by having us “play vacuum cleaner” (Dealers were exempt.). Yes, she trained us all to be dealers. We also tried various chore charts. These were more fun when we were younger and not as able – To Deal. (Isn’t that the name of a Mandy Moore flick?)

Some were not so much fun, such as the “15 minute blitz.” This involved my mom running around like crazy, talking really fast and peppily urging us on like a cheerleader as we tried to make it look like our limbs were moving quickly to clean the house, while making sure that we were cleaning less than our siblings. I HATED the 15 minute blitz with all of my soul. I am SO using it on my kids. I will also be singing the “Good Morning To You” song as I flip on their light and sing tales of orange juice and “get out of bed you lazy bum.” They will LOVE it.

How do you get your sweet little freeloaders to start earning* their 25 cents per week, not to mention all the food and toilet paper they consume? (Yes, I do mean eating toilet paper. Another day, another story about my kids finding ways to be absolutely disgusting at lightning speed. If I’d just been two seconds faster, I could have stopped it. Two seconds slower and I wouldn’t have had to witness it. But hey, I dip my Oreos. I guess TP ain’t the only thing that tastes better when wet.)

*I don’t think chores should be directly linked to allowance. I’d love your opinions on that issue too.

Laylee’s speech seems to be regressing this weekend. She’s picked up this really annoying version of baby talk that sounds more like a 23-year-old imitating a baby for a Saturday Night Live sketch or an idiot Munchkin that was too mentally slow to be allowed to welcome Dorothy to Munchkin Land in song.

I’m not sure if she thinks linguistically-deficient-demented munchkins are cute or if she just hopes this new way of speaking will scare us into giving her what she wants. It is rather scary. I had trouble explaining to her what “annoying means but I do think she caught my stop-talking-like-that drift. She told me that she wasn’t doing it. It was actually her little yellow clip talking. Also scary.

Language is important.

I found that my doctor took me much more seriously this week when I used words like “concerned”, “acute”, and “localized”, rather than my previous visit where I said things more along the lines of “freaked out”, “it kills”, and “seems weird to me.”

I remember leaving the previous visit feeling invalidated and disappointed that she hadn’t taken my concerns seriously. I was ticked, dude.

This time around tests were done, recommendations were made and I have to say, BTW, it still kills, but I have a follow-up scheduled.

So, the moral of this post is, you get more from people when you speak their language. My doctor’s language of choice is not freaked-out-new-moma-ese. My language of choice is not developmentally-delayed-munchkin-ish. And I know the yellow clip is not culpable.