I am sitting and listening to my daughter read Hop on Pop out loud; the first book she has ever read by herself. It’s the very same first book that I ever read, too. I’m sappy. I’m crying.
I’m getting the Christmas spirit. Look out. I even have a fruitcake recipe, just waiting for me to use it.
Not much of note happening lately. Except for my in-laws’ attic catching on fire last night, which was definitely ungood. The girls brought home some grippe from hell from preschool and I got sicker than anyone. We went to see The Incredibles this afternoon, and it was really most excellent. It’s like Atlas Shrugged for Tots. I finally got to play with my new rifle, which I won at Gunstock. The trigger was too stiff to bumpfire it though.
Does anyone even read this still, my poor neglected blog?
My kids have rediscovered their Hello Kitty CD player. I let them have the Free to Be You and Me CDs, and handed over my version of The Beatles One. Jo knows about 50% of the words and makes the rest up. “She’s a big weasel. She took me half the way there. She was a day tripper, Sunday driver yeah.”
Weasel. Hm.
Caroline keeps peeing so much her pullups leak and make a puddle on the floor. Last night we had to have a showdown with Jo about her sleeping habits; she wants someone to sit in the room with her until she goes to sleep. Hub was in there for an hour and a half the other night and she never went to sleep, so we now have a timer for 30 minutes. Caroline took crayons and Tinkertoys and ran up and down the halls with her arms outstretched and redecorated our cabinets. Someone flushed something down the toilet tonight and it overflowed at bedtime. Hub keeps using bad language in front of the kids and making me mad. Today I got so upset that I took the little armrest cover thingie off my chair and threw it across the room. The girls looked at me in stunned silence for about 60 full seconds, then Caroline quietly spoke: “I’ll get that for you, Mommy.”
I even got out a jigsaw puzzle to work on for occupational therapy. Guess what? “What can I do, Mommy? She’s taking my pieces. I want those pieces back! Give ’em back! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
On the plus side, Jo’s started calling me “Mama” out of the blue and I think it sounds really old-fashioned and sweet.
The kids were upstairs playing earlier tonight. I’m accustomed to all manner of thuds when they’re up there and tonight was no exception. ka-WHUMP. There were no immediate cries of distress so I ignored it. About 5 minutes later, my 4 year old comes into the kitchen. She’s pale, shaking, voice quivering. “I’m sorry, Mommy!”
“What happened?”
“The dresser fell on me.”
She was trying to get herself a pair of shorts and pulled her chest of drawers over on herself. She said she tried to be strong and put it back upright but she was just too little. If it weren’t for the toy box next to it, we might have had a pancake for a daughter tonight.
The whole “tried to be strong” thing got to me. Cripes. She’s just so very little.
I was sitting in the living room when Jo said, “Look Mommy, another spider.”
Crap.
I turn around and the mighty hunter cats have what appears to be a huge brown recluse cornered by the kitchen. Max kept playing with it and I trusted him to keep it busy while I went on a mad dash for an Agent of Spider Death. We didn’t have any bug spray, so I spritzed it good with some stainless steel cleaner. If I’d smashed it, identification would have been hard to do, so it was a last resort.
I put it in a jar and got a flashlight to look closely at it. It was all drawn up for a while so I couldn’t see the eyes. Eventually it relaxed (died?) and I could see. Instead of a real fiddle and the eye pattern of the brown recluse which is three pairs of two eyes in a crescent shaped pattern, this guy just had one cluster of eyes right in the middle. That makes it a Southern House Spider, non-poisonous and fairly common.
Still doesn’t change the fact there was an honest-to-goshen brown recluse in the bathtub with my girls the other night. But thinking that I had mutant huge recluses who just waltz around my living room had me pretty fricking depressed.
Our 4 year old recently started preschool and therefore has been getting sick weekly. This time she brought home a cough and cold which has the whole family sick. Yesterday evening we finally got the girls both non-feverish at the same time so I popped them in the bathtub. They like lots of bubbles. After washing them off, I let them play in the tub for a good 20 minutes, during which time the bubbles went away. When I went to pull the plug, I saw a dark shadowy thing floating around the tub. On closer inspection it looked like some thread. On even closer inspection it looked arachnid. I grabbed one of their bath toys and scooped it out. Guess what?
There was a freaking BROWN RECLUSE in the bathtub with my children!!!
Hub and I spent the next hour or so trying very hard not to freak out in front of the kids. We did a lot of big fake smiles and speaking in code. “Hey, is that one of those things?” “Maybe.” “Gee, wonder from where he might have originated.” “We need to check those.” (surreptitiously pointing at children, wondering if someone got bit)
Then later, “Mommy, do ‘piders bite?”
“Well sweetie, yes they do, that’s why,” and I pull out the old Eddie Eagle line, “when you see one you should just leave it alone and come tell Mommy or Daddy.”
“Why did that ‘pider get in our bath?”
“He just wanted a drink of water!” (accompanied with the falsest grin you ever did see)
Where did that little &*#^@^ come from? The possibilities are disheartening. The tub overflow? The ceiling? One of the bath toys?
