Month: April 2006

I’m Bored When They Talk

Tonight, I thought with sudden clarity: I cannot stand pretentious people who are impressed by their own intelligence. They start to talk and I have to force my eyes not to roll up with a snap like old-fashioned window shades. I click onto a blog and find a bunch of big words strung together without any sense of rhythm or style or talent and I wonder why I keep that blog on my Bloglines list. I turn the channel and a talking head is talk-talk-talking and I just can’t listen for more than a second before I fondle my remote control with desperation.

Perhaps my attention span is permanently broken by the incessant interruptions of my daily life. Maybe it’s just me and my mommy brain which has shrunk to fit into this 2000 square foot house with its odd little backyard. I might be have lost my ability to understand politics and theological matters to a satisfactory degree. And I don’t care.

At any rate, all the super-big-name political and religious bloggers bore me silly. (And I’m sure it’s mutual.)

How to Make Egg Rolls At Home

Here’s a link which tells you how to make homemade egg rolls. I use the wrappers located in the produce section of the grocery store and vary the fillings, though I usually use some sort of sausage and shredded cabbage. (Some of you had asked for my recipe, but I usually just wing it, sort of combining the recipe on the back of the package with stuff I have on hand.)

And here is a blog which made me laugh today . . . and which also gave me some great ideas!

Spring Break: Day Two

My husband rocks. He took my boys out for lunch, then to the church for three hours today. “A three hour tour, a three hour tour.” (Sorry. I suddenly started singing the Gilligan’s Island theme song.) The youth pastor at church has video games and a pool table set up, so my boys love to play there, but rarely do.

So, this afternoon, all the little ones were sleeping (except my daughter, but she was upstairs watching t.v. having a “quiet time”) and I savored the silence. And later, to make up for my calmness, I lost my mind entirely and decided to make stir-fried rice and eggrolls from scratch while watching four little ones. My big boys were all outside waving swords and sticks around with the neighbor boys. The little ones were playing in the family room, stealing toys from one another and squealing at each other.

And then I looked out the window and saw branches falling from giant trees across the way. I squinted and looked closer and saw lumberjacks (can I call them lumberjacks?) perched way up the trunk of the trees, chainsawing branches off one by one as they climbed higher. I hollered for all the kids to come and see. The lumberjacks (arborists?) climbed the tree with spiked boots and ropes and when they got within ten feet of the top, they lopped the whole top off and we watched as it seemed to float down. Then they moved eight or ten feet down and lopped off another section, until they reached the ground again.

I’d never seen a giant tree removed before, so I was fascinated and, I admit, a bit distracted from my cooking extravaganza. And the kids were fussy and crabby and my daughter was bossy and then my trying-to-help-son barely burned his finger on the stove and I felt terrible, but HONESTLY, I don’t want help I JUST . . . WANT . . . TO . . . COOK . . . IN . . . PEACE . . . AND . . . QUIET!!!

A-hem.

Anyway, cooking dinner before all the kids go home is always an exercise in juggling and not just ordinary three-ball juggling. No. It’s like juggling flaming swords with baby chicks perched on the handles. Very delicate and someone is likely to get hurt. Or yelled at.

But the eggrolls were delicious.

A Puzzling Question for the Day

When two adults are asleep at 3:11 a.m. and one of the adults wakes up and hears a child crying, why does said adult wake up the other blissfully snoring slumbering adult and say, “Hey, I hear crying?” causing the second adult to also wake up and therefore, become responsible for tending to child?

I’m just asking.

Spring Break: Day One

Today is the first day of Spring Break. And yet, I am not posting from a cruise ship. Alas, I’ve never even been on a cruise ship.

If I were on a cruise ship, I would tell you about the fabulous pools, the magnificent meals, the scintillating conversations with strangers. If I were on a cruise ship, I’d definitely have hot-pink painted toenails and a tan. If I were on a cruise ship, I’d be well-rested and my Oprah magazine would be tattered and wrinkled from being splashed poolside.

But I’m not. My magazine is unblemished. My skin is glow-in-the-dark white. My toenails are hidden in white fuzzy socks. My conversations include discussions about snack foods (“I want an apple with no skin,”) and taking turns on the computer (“That’s not fair! It’s my turn! Wah-wah-wah!”) I do have a pool in my backyard but it’s actually a sandbox full of collected rainwater. The meals around here depend on my creativity and crockpot.

I could be well-rested if I had any sense and went to bed eight hours before I had to wake up. If I went to bed early, though, I’d sacrifice the nighttime silence and that is a price too high to pay. I may be sleepy tomorrow, but at least I will be sane. (One can hope.)

America’s Next Top Model Cuts With Scissors

My daughter wore her pajamas to church this morning. Saturday night, she’d mentioned that she intended to wear them, the Carter’s footie-jammies with horizontal lavender and baby blue stripes, but I didn’t really believe her. (Actual pajamas not pictured, but boy, what an outfit that is, huh?) She’d also picked out a yellow and blue dress with gauzy ruffles around the hem.

But this morning, when she woke at 8:35 a.m. (which in her uninformed brain was only 7:35 a.m., but now it’s Daylight Savings Time, SURPRISE!), she told me she would wear her pajamas. And I said, “Okay.” We had to leave by 8:45 a.m. . . . well, really, we should have been at church at 8:45 a.m., but let’s not quibble over details. I tucked her dress, tights, shoes and sweater into my bag, just in case.

I taught Sunday School to three preschoolers and then my daughter and I headed upstairs to claim our rightful position in the second pew on the left side, right behind my boys who, judging from the greasiness of their pre-teen heads of hair, failed to use shampoo again last night during their showers. A lady behind me noted my daughter’s unusual attire and said, “You’re a more relaxed mom than I was!” and in the pause between that and her next statement, I wondered if I should take offense, but then she said, “Good for you!” I said, “Well, I figured, what does it matter, really?” As I said to my husband tonight, if you can’t wear your pajamas to church when you are three years old, when can you?

We lasted through all the stuff that happens before the sermon begins, then headed to the fellowship hall where we could see Daddy preaching on closed-circuit television while also running around in circles (her, not me). My daughter is seemingly ravenous on Sunday mornings . . . but the truth is, she knows that the kitchen holds loot, desirable loot like cookies and brownies and sometimes, cake. This morning, she feasted on Hostess “donettes,” those small chocolate covered ones. She also brought a cookie to our table, a snickerdoodlish cookie.

The cookie sat. I sat. My daughter sat. Then my daughter, wanting to shake things up and shake things out, asked if she could put pepper on the cookie.

“No,” I said.
She asked again.
“No.”
She said, “But I want to put pepper on the cookie.”
“I said NO!”
She asked again.
I enunciated very carefully, “Look . . . at . . . me. I . . . said . . . NO.”
She added a little whine to her request and asked again.
“Listen to me. The answer is NO!” I used my most stern voice, the one just short of screaming my head off, because after all, I was wearing pantyhose, sitting in the fellowship hall at church.

She paused, smiled sweetly and said, “I love your dress.”

* * *

(These tiny cut-out pictures are her handiwork. They are the actual size . . . my daughter is good with scissors. I’m thinking she’ll either be a hair stylist, a surgeon or, maybe she’ll operate first, then style her patient’s hair.)

* * *
A Note to Clarify:
She had rejected the cookie already. She merely wanted to make a huge pepper and salt mess on the table, using the cookie as an excuse. I did not want to clean up a big mess, so I told her no. I have no objection to peppering cookies under other circumstances. (What? I personally do not pepper my cookies.)