Monday, November 30, 2009

How I Spent My Thanksgiving Vacation...

Remember this Mother Goose rhyme?

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace;
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go;
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for its living;
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

Mike and I really loved it after Maggie was born because she's a Sunday's child, and I had to admit that I was a bit stupidly anxious when I went into labor with Kate on a Tuesday that she'd end up a Wednesday's child: full of woe. Over the weekend we somehow got to talking about it and started looking up our birth days. Very strangely, almost all of us were Thursdays except for Amy (Monday), Maggie, and Kate! We also decided to interpret "has far to go" as meaning that we all have lots of adventures ahead of us instead of that our lives are one long slog! Luckily, we never did uncover any Wednesday's children.

Anyway, curious? What day are you? Anybody full of woe?
http://www.progenealogists.com/dayborn.htm

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Hello, My Name Is... Hallah Lujah

Ok, my friends and relatives who are in the market for baby names, someday will be, or are just curiously appalled by these sorts of things, here is the best baby name resource I've ever run across. If only I'd known about this site before we had the girls. I guess we could change Kate's name to K-8.

The Utah Baby Namer
http://wesclark.com/ubn/

Why name your kid Augustus when you can name him Helamans Warrior?

Monday, November 23, 2009

Come On, Get Happy!

Don't you wish sometimes that you could go back to a time when a couple of pairs of your sister's soft fleece pj pants could bring you such joy?









Saturday, November 14, 2009

Maggie Sez...

Two in one day (before naptime even)! Here's another for the vault:

Me: Kate's a little Sugarbooger! Are you my little Sugarbooger, too?

Maggie: I'm a booger digger.

Maggie Sings...

(this morning at the breakfast table while we talked about going to the grocery store)

...Mommy and Daddy and Maggie and Kate/are going to the shopping/and they won't get in trouble.

Mike suggested, "are going to go shopping/and it's gonna be GREAT!"

but Maggie then switched it up to, "are going to the shopping/and are not gonna be nakey (naked)!"

I guess being clothed is how we are not going to get into trouble??

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

All I Want Is What I Have Coming to Me

Today I tried to write a top ten list of things I love about my house, just as a counterpoint to my whiny rant from the other day. I didn't end up posting my list because I decided it sounded awful and consumerist (I love my huge dryer, I love my fancy dishwasher). The only item that didn't sound like Lucy's letter to Santa in Charlie Brown's Christmas was "#1: I love that the screaming sound upstairs is just my daughters playing and not my idiot neighbors fighting." And while this gem doesn't come off as hideously materialistic, it does reek of misanthropy. I'm turning into a horrible person.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Pass the Ibuprofen, Please

So, what's up with your house?

My house? I don't know. It's turquoise. We live there. I'm trying to forget how much we owe on it and how much work needs to be done. What do you mean what's up with it?

Wasn't this blog supposed to also be about buying a fixer-upper starter home with yard work and decor and being Suzy Homemaker and all that? Not just goofy stuff your kids say? What's up with your house?

To quote the great Liz Lemon... Blerg.

Owning your own home isn't nearly as much fun as people try to make it out to be. I'm going to come right out here and say, "Hey, people, what's the attraction?!" I think people rave about home ownership because Misery Loves Company. And this is coming from the person in our family who has selfishly avoided doing any of the yard work. I also haven't drained the boiler, sawed through the kitchen cabinets, or installed any cat doors. Mike's done all that. (Although, in my defense, I did Murphy's Oil Soap all the hardwood floors, scrub the grime out of the fridge/freezer and off of all the cabinets, and do most of the unpacking. I'm not exactly sitting around eating bon bons and watching Oprah, OK?!) But still, it's kind of a bummer spending your Saturday watching the kids AGAIN so your husband can trim the hedges - after you spent the whole week scrubbing toilets and mopping floors! What day can we set aside for lying on the couch, eating bon bons, and watching Oprah???

So anyway, we moved in, did a lot of fixer-upper-ing, plateaued in terms of how much crafty homeowner projects we could stand - I think I remember myself saying, "I don't even give a CRAP about (fill in the blank) anymore" several (hundred) times - and then we've kind of been letting things lie around undone for a while. But we're kind of anal retentive type people, and those undone things started to mess with our minds after that while, particularly that blue painters tape all around the perimeters of the upstairs bedrooms and landing - most particularly in the girls' bedrooms, especially since Kate is now mobile. That blue tape was really starting to irritate. So this past weekend, Mike took a day off work and we dropped the girls off at Camp Gram and Grandpa in New Hampshire and we painted that dadblasted, frickafrackin', craptastic, primed-but-never-actually-painted wood trim in the girls' bedrooms and part of the landing. Two days and that was all we were able to complete because it takes so infernally long to paint trim and our eyes were going blind from the super white Polar Bear paint.

Disclaimer: OK, so we also did some shopping (LL Bean! Borders! Yippee!) and went out to dinner TWICE - two nights in a row, which is probably a record for us since we NEVER eat out anymore. And for one of those dinners we even went out with some of our FRIENDS (I know, it's true, we really do still have some friends, seriously.) and didn't come home until 10:30! PM! No joke. And we did sleep in both days - until 9:00! And then we ate donuts for breakfast without anything nutritious to go with them. It was wild.

So we didn't exactly just work ourselves down to the bloody nubbins or anything. (What was I complaining about? Oh, yeah...) Still, seems like you should be able to get through more than just the trim in 2.25 rooms in a whole weekend, but sadly, no. And that cabinet in the upstairs hall that needs to be mounted to the wall because it's tall and narrow and tippy still isn't secured and therefore cannot be filled with all the junk in the cardboard box in the corner of our bedroom. And let's not even talk about the grody carpet in the basement that we talked about ripping out. But... there's always next weekend. There will always be next weekend. And there will always be more projects hanging around just waiting to fill up next weekend so that the only bums warming our couch are tiny and wearing a Sesame Street diaper and Dora the Explorer underpants. Blerg.

Monday, November 2, 2009

If It Quacks Like a Duck, It's a Maggie

Here are some Halloween pics. As usual, there are a ton on Snapfish.

Playing in Mike's freshly raked pile of leaves in the afternoon. Maggie liked to lie buried almost up to her chin and make bouquets of leaves, but Kate was more comfortable on the edges of the pile where she could move around more freely.


Another pile in the front yard.


Trick or Treating - we only hit a few houses on our block. There weren't a lot of people giving out candy, but it was plenty for Maggie's first time out. She did beautifully, ringing the doorbells, saying Trick or Treat, and thanking the people. She's an expert now!


Kate chewed up half the candy bars in their wrappers! We had to clean out the drooly ones every time our doorbell rang. We did let her have her first Dum Dum lollipop.


Maggie organizes her loot - of course.