Coincidence, I Hope So!

I'm rather freaked out that a day or two after the only time I mentioned Michael Jackson on my blog, he died.

Maybe I'd better re-think mentioning my favorite Rod Stewart song since he doesn't look so good these days either.

(It's Baby Jane. I'm really not THAT superstitious.)

Black and/or White

No, this post is not about the Michael Jackson song, "Black or White", though it is my favorite song of his. And, since this is the only post where it would make any sort of sense to mention that, there you have it.

Now, on to the real subject:

The older I get, the more I really, really do believe that life rarely is just black or white. There are SO many shades of gray.

I was thinking this the other day when I was reading the book, The Memory Keeper's Daughter. One person in the book made a choice with the best of intentions, but it had disastrous results. What everyone else doesn't know (and the reader does) is why he makes the choice he does. It goes back to something from his childhood that adversely affected him, so his choice makes perfect sense (sort of) to the reader. At least we understand why he made it, even though most people would probably not make the same choice. (I'm sure this is probably hard to follow. Maybe you should just read the book. Then we can discuss it online, kind of like an online Book Club. Really, I'd love to talk to someone else about this. There is one thing from the book that is just driving me crazy and I'd love to get someone else's opinion about it.)

Anyway, along the same lines, today I made the comment while driving that I was going to try and drive no more than five miles over the speed limit from now on. (The police have been out in full force lately, probably trying to drum up some extra revenue for our little county.)

Morgan called me on it and said, "Why don't you just drive the speed limit, isn't that what you're supposed to do?"

I resisted the urge to tell her that I'd be happy to go the speed limit if the rest of the family wasn't always making me "almost" late (which to me is two minutes early, instead of ten). What I did say, and maybe I shouldn't have, is that five miles over would be pretty good for me since I tend to go 10-12 over at any given time (except in residential areas where little kids might be).

I've also been paying more attention lately to other peoples' marriages. It seems like we are having an epidemic of neighbors and friends (and relatives) who are struggling because they are just not compatible with their spouses. Most of these husbands and wives are good people, just not ideal matches for each other.

So really, what's the problem, or the solution? Did they get married too young? Were they in too big of a hurry? Did they really get to know each other before they got engaged? Were they only looking at superficial qualities? (When my husband is giving advice, he likes to say "They'll all look the same in 30 years, so you want to look at qualities other than looks when you are picking a wife." I keep wondering how much offense I should take at this statement.)

I guess the problems are as varied as the people themselves.

Again, gray areas.

So I've been sitting here thinking, is life less black and white because I'm getting older and understand more that nothing is as cut and dried as it seems, or did life really used to be more black and white, but just getting more complicated?

Did life change, or did I?

Austin's "Aha" Moment

Tonight as I was handing Austin his plate of dinner and an apple that I had just cut up for him, he made the astute observation:

"Mom, it looks like you're my servant, but you're not."

I stopped and gave him "the look". (If you're a mom, you know what "the look" is. I try to use it sparingly so it will get the desired effect, when necessary.)

"You're not, you're not! I said, you're not!" he exclaimed.

That lead to a little discussion on how he was big enough to do better at taking his own dishes to the sink or dishwasher, etc.

We'll see if he's old enough to have a guilty conscience that I can use to my advantage.

Somehow, I doubt it.

Landon

Today is our son, Landon's, birthday. He would be 13 today, but he died of a heart defect when he was a baby.

You'd think time would help, and it does maybe a little, but the sadness of losing him is as fresh some days as if it were yesterday. Last year was particularly hard. His birthday was on a Sunday and he would have turned 12. I could barely stand to look at those cute little Deacons passing the Sacrament.

One thing that does help me is the belief we have that someday we will have him back again to raise. Because we have been sealed together in our temple, we know that our family can be together forever.

(I just need to keep working hard every day to make sure we like each other enough to WANT to be together forever.)

Happy Birthday Landon.

I love you and I miss you so much.

I'm Back

We are now back from a LONG road trip.

It will be a LONG time before we do that again!

I'll fill in the details once my selective memory kicks in and/or I get a good night's sleep, whichever comes first.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Today I cracked the whip and the girls and I worked really hard to get the house cleaned up. I had a couple of little incentives to keep them motivated.

One of these was a little package of chocolates that had been sitting on Hal's dresser since Mother's Day. This is what the women got for a little gift from our ward. They also gave Hal one of the extra bags of chocolate later in the Bishop's office. Since he's not fond of chocolate, I was pretty sure he knew I'd end up being the one to eat them.

What he didn't know (or maybe he did) was that I had actually helped myself to another package (or possibly two) of the extra chocolates. They were being stored on top of his dresser until he took them over to the Relief Society president to distribute to some of the sisters in the ward that didn't make it to church that day. I had forgotten about the leftover chocolates until today when I was dusting off his dresser.

To my disappointment, there was only one chocolate left. Someone - and I have a pretty good idea who it was, and it wasn't Hal - had opened the package and eaten one of MY chocolates! How dare they do such a thing!

I marched downstairs to express my indignation.

Morgan took the news in stride saying, "I thought you said they weren't that good anyway."

"Well, the first batch had flavors that weren't my favorite." I said. (One was maple flavored and I'm not very fond of maple. Of course I did eat it anyway. I couldn't let a perfectly good chocolate go to waste just because I didn't love the flavor.)

"What do you mean, FIRST batch?", she asked. "I thought you only had one batch?"

"Well, I might have swiped some more." I sheepishly answered.

"SWIPED!" Austin chimed in, "Does that mean you STOLE them?"

Oh great, I thought. Nice example I am. And especially after all the talks we've had about not taking things that don't belong to us. I knew I needed to say something to make sure he knew stealing is not a good thing to do.

"Well," I said carefully, "It made me feel really bad on the inside."

Austin looked at me for a while with a puzzled look on his face. Then he finally said, "But did it make you feel pretty happy on the outside?"


(While typing this I remembered that there was still that last chocolate left on Hal's dresser. So I went upstairs and, with great anticipation, I took a little taste and - wouldn't you know it....maple flavored. So see, I really did get punished after all.)

"The" Haircut (Self-Inflicted)

I've been sitting on this story for while now, hoping I'd run across the photo to illustrate it. I'm actually wondering if my husband may have destroyed the evidence.

Anyway, it's too good of a story to keep under wraps, especially since it involves someone else's stupidity (oh, maybe to be politically correct I should say "poor judgment") and not my own.

First a little background info:

My husband doesn't like to go anywhere to get haircuts. He usually just hacks into his hair himself, which isn't usually too big of a problem. His hair is very wavy and pretty forgiving. The main complaint I have is when he cuts the back himself. It just never looks good and I don't want people thinking that I made him look like that. I tell him not to cut it without me, but sometimes he just doesn't want to wait if I'm not available, so he cuts it all himself anyway, even the back.

One summer, quite a few years ago, his sister volunteered to cut his hair while he was at his parents' house. (I wasn't there or I would have protested.) She cuts his dad's hair, so she is experienced and should have done a good job. When he came home though, I was not pleased. She had used clippers and just basically shaved his head. She had nearly shaved him bald. Bald is not a good look if you're skinny and don't possess a big head. It was not a good look on him.

Anyway, now here's the story:

One day in December in the late 90s, my husband started to cut his hair. He is always trying to get the sides as short as possible because his hair grows kind of "up" and "out" and not down, like most peoples' hair. I had recently bought some clippers to help get the back and sides even and make things easier. For some reason Hal thought the guard, even on the shortest setting, was leaving too much hair so he removed it.

"You need to use the guard." I told him.

"I'll be careful." he said.

I can't remember how much time we actually debated back and forth, but I do distinctly remember the muffled "Oops." he uttered a few minutes later, from behind the bathroom door.

I raced in to see how serious the damage was.

It was pretty bad, a totally bald patch of skin about 1" by 2 1/2" right on the side of his head. Not good. Especially since his hair is very dark brown and the skin on his head is not as tan as the skin on his face.

The next thing I knew, he was aiming the clippers at the other side of his head.

"No, don't do it!", I protested, "You'll do it on the other side."

"No I won't, I'm just trying to even the two sides up a little bit."

Sure enough, an even bigger bald spot on the other side.

This was during the time he worked at a bank as a loan officer and wore suits to work every day. He ended up wearing a baseball hat to work anyway. I wonder what the boss thought.

Here are two very funny circumstances that came about from this haircut situation:

Nate Webb was a customer at the bank and also sort of a friend of Hal's. Nate was at the bank one of the days Hal was wearing a hat.

Nate playfully hit at the brim of the hat, lifting it up a little bit and kept saying, "What's with the hat?"

Hal kept telling him to knock it off, and had to get rather serious about it. Nate called Hal the next day and apologized.

He must have had a peek at what was under the hat because he also said, "I'm sorry. I didn't know you were going through chemotherapy." (I still laugh when I think about this.)

Hal was also asked to narrate the Christmas Choir program in Sacrament meeting. He said yes, but when he hung up the phone, he remembered the bald spots. You can't exactly wear a baseball hat to church, and especially for the Christmas Choir program. That would not go over well.

He thought about calling the lady back and saying he couldn't do it, but what he ended up doing was taking a SHARPIE (yes, you read right, a Sharpie) and coloring in the bald spots on his head. His hair is not black, but it was close enough. From the pulpit you couldn't really tell.

Fortunately Hal has gotten a little better at cutting his hair over the years.

That, and I have a REALLY good hiding place for the clippers.

Update

My kids are sick.

Two of them have diarrhea. (Gee, I wonder where THAT came from!)

Do you think it's true that no good deed goes unpunished?

Part 2, Read Last Post First.

Ok, so I need to update what happened after I closed the last post. The extra kids were getting really wild, so Hal decided to make a little campfire. I'm not sure if he thought through having the kids around fire and our pointy hot dog sticks.

Anyway, it kept the kids busy for a while. One of them fell and hit her lip so Hal held her for a while and then she fell asleep for about an hour. Unfortunately, she was the easiest of the kids to watch.

The other kids seemed to be entertained by the campfire.

That is until it began to rain. (If you're thinking that we have the worst luck, read on. One thing I've learned in my life is that things can ALWAYS get worse. And they did.)

We stayed outside for a while while it sprinkled lightly and then the boy had to go to the bathroom "Right NOW!" So I ran with him as fast as I could. And he seemed to make it in time. Whew!

I kept checking on him and he seemed fine so I went back outside where it was now raining quite heavily, to get the other kids inside.

When I got back in the house, not more than two minutes later, the boy was yelling. "I had an accident. I got poop in my pants."

Can I just state here, without being too graphic, that that is the understatement of the year. Yes, technically, it was in his pants. And on the floor, and all over the toilet - inside and out, and on the bathmat. It was one of those accidents where you just don't know where to start cleaning AND I still had a five-year-old kid, that I barely knew, dancing around naked with it all over his backside.

Can I also just say here that it's true, no matter how awful it is to clean up a mess like that of your own kid's, it really is a heck of a lot worse cleaning up someone else's kid's poop. (Let me also state here, for the record, that "poop" is a word that I couldn't even say out loud until I was potty training my third kid. - And yes, there is a story that goes along with that but it is almost as bad as this one. Now the word "poop" is practically part of my everyday vocabulary. A part that I'm not particularly proud of.)

Ok, so after cleaning up the mess and filling the washer with the dirty pants, bathmat, and other causalities of the bathroom (basically anything else in the room that could be washed, except the shower curtain), we got the kid put in his back-up outfit, which was his swimsuit. It had stopped raining, so the kids all played outside again. I had my girls stay outside to supervise.

I went back to the bathroom one more time to make sure I got everything as clean as possible. It was then that I noticed the interesting yellow pattern on my white shower curtain. And it was still dripping. The kid was pretty thorough. I wasn't thrilled about washing the shower curtain again since I had just washed it last week (the neighbor kid has bad aim). Let me just tell you right now that a white shower curtain and bath mat are NOT a good idea. (Ironically I bought them thinking that way I would know when they were dirty so I could keep them clean. That was BEFORE I had potty trained a little boy or had his "potty trained" little friends over.)

After starting the next load in the washing machine I went back outside to supervise the kids. About an hour later the boy got a funny look on his face and said, "I have to go poop again!", so again we ran to the bathroom.

And again he had the shooting diarrhea. I found out this time why it went all over like it did. The kid was literally standing on the toilet seat on his feet and then crouched down like an Aborigone. I told him to sit down but he didn't want to because he said the toilet seat was too cold. I put some strips of toilet paper all around the seat, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but when he was done I found them on the floor half soaked with urine. (Sometimes I say "pee" now, but I still don't like that word either.)

One unfortunate thing I also forgot to do when I cleaned the bathroom the first time was put away the bathroom cleaner. It was still sitting out on the counter, within reach of the toilet. Now it was being used as a weapon against me. The kid kept squirting everything with it, the mirror, the walls, but mostly me. Bathroom cleaner does not taste good, in case you were wondering. Next time I'll try not to yell when I'm un-arming a naked five-year-old with a fully loaded can of bathroom cleaner. I'll use the Ninja tactic and sneak up on him silently. (Oh boy, did I really say "next time"? There better not be a next time. I don't think I could survive it!)

So now the kid's swimsuit was also dirty. I had to get him a pair of Austin's pajamas to wear, which didn't make either one of them very happy. But we didn't have a choice, now did we?

Hal now had a pretty good excuse to call his friend and see how soon they would be back. It had now been five hours, about the time they said they'd be back. When he talked to them they were just barely leaving Salt Lake, so we had about another hour and a half. My girls both groaned out loud when they heard the news. That's when I started getting punchy. No sleep for a week and cleaning up someone else's kids' diarrhea will do that to you.

We got all the little kids rounded up in the basement, with the sick kid sitting in a sleeping bag in case of any other accidents.

After the parents finally came and got the kids I had to laugh when I walked into the house. Morgan was wearing her sombrero and playing the song "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang.

It was then about 9:00 and we decided to run get some cheap pizzas to eat for a snack, because I was not feeling like cooking anything and I was hungry. I made Hal walk in to get them because I really hadn't even combed my hair or put on any make-up all day because I kept waiting to get into the shower and didn't even get five minutes to do more than brush my teeth because people kept showing up at our house. I was still actually wearing the same loungy clothes that I'd crashed in the night before, that's how bad it was. I asked the kids for a hat or something to wear, and Morgan graciously offered me her sombrero.

My favorite part of the day was when we were all waiting in the car for Hal to come back with the pizza, and I told the kids that Hal's friend had put in his will that we would get to raise their kids if anything happened to him and his wife. Ally thought it was true and she made this sound, sort of like a sick cow. I let her believe it for a few minutes. Maybe now she'll appreciate the family she has. Actually, I think we ALL appreciate our little family more now that the ordeal is over. Austin didn't fare too well either because those kids played pretty rough and he's not used to that. I think he cried more this afternoon than he has the whole last month.

When we got home we were ready for the pizza. Somehow we always buy one pepperoni and one cheese pizza, though most of us eat cheese better. Ally, our main pepperoni eater looked at the cheese pizza and said in a sad voice, "Oh, it looks really good."

I told her she could have cheese and I'd eat pepperoni, which I usually won't touch with a ten foot pole. I didn't really care at that moment, I just wanted to eat. She seemed so grateful it was funny. Then Hal started to bless the food and I couldn't help it. I tried to hold back a little snicker. Then all heck broke loose as the girls both started laughing too. Hal finished the prayer and gave us all a disgusted look.

Now I'm off to take whatever kind of sleeping pill I can hopefully find in the medicine drawer. I've got to get some sleep tonight!

Rats! I just realized that nobody has bathed yet today, we were so busy, so now we will all have to take showers in the morning and try to be ready before 9:00. That means we will have to get up early. I almost wouldn't worry about being late, the way I feel, but Hal is speaking tomorrow. There's always something.

I hate 9:00 church, but not as much as I hate babysitting other peoples' kids. Maybe a good night's sleep will sweeten up my attitude.

Or not.

Will Work for Sleep (Part 1)

I need sleep. I really need some sleep.

I haven't slept well for four nights in a row now and it's starting to affect me terribly. (This post will probably be full of punctuation errors and misspelled words. I don't care. I'm too tired to wonder if I misspelled the word misspelled. Usually this would be a big deal to me. Today, not so much.)

I can't really remember why I couldn't sleep the first night. (The memory - or at least what's left of it - is the first thing to go when I'm tired. My short term memory is shot. Morgan said I have asked her the same question at least three times in the last hour. I'd tell you what it was, but for the life of me, I can't remember.)

The next night I was up a lot of the night with a really terrible sore throat and an earache. I've only had one other sore throat that came close to it. I was sure I would need to call a doctor the next day, but luckily, I didn't need to. I just had a nice raspy voice for a few hours.

That day I wasn't going to have to go anywhere, which is rare, so I was happy to just lounge in my pajamas for quite a while. I finally got dressed before the girls got home from school. Then Morgan came home and told me she could just get a ride that night if I couldn't come.

"To what?" I asked.

"My last orchestra concert."

So I jumped into the shower and got dressed. And it was a nice concert, truly it was. At least I think it was. I really can't remember anything very specific about it. But I did get it on video, so I can watch it again when I'm feeling better.

Anyway, that night I stayed up late to watch something on t.v. I was really tired and kept dozing off. I stayed awake just long enough to see what I wanted to see and then I couldn't fall back asleep! I was up until well after 1:00.

So, last night (Friday) was going to be the night to catch up. I could sleep in on Saturday, which was a bonus, so I was ready.

Unfortunately my insomnia jag has coincided with a "normal" weekend for us.

"Normal" means nothing goes as planned.

First of all, my nephew, Justin, wanted to come stay over with us. This really wasn't a problem at all. His parents are wrapping up a two week cruise down the Panama Canal. Justin has stayed with Grandma Fronk most of those two weeks and I think they were getting a little tired of each other.

Last night at around 9:00 (I can't remember why it was so late) we started the movie, Bolt. It looked cute, but after about 45 minutes, I just couldn't stay awake. I got the kids as settled as I could and made sure Justin had all he needed and then I went to bed.

I fell asleep pretty immediately, and then Austin started coughing at around 11:30. I got up to get him a drink. And then he started coughing again at about 1:30. I got up to get him some cough medicine. Then he got in my bed about an hour later. Then I woke up another hour or so later because his blanket was in my face and it did not smell good.

Honestly, on a good night I don't do well sleeping in short spurts. In fact, I think this is one way they used to torture P.O.W.s, by waking them up every time they would fall asleep so you don't get any REM sleep. Not good. Especially not good after three other nights of no sleep.

The night was finally over, so I dragged my carcass out of bed, so I could start fixing breakfast for the kids and cleaning up the house a bit. Justin was going to go home at about 1:00, so I was just going to wait until then and take a LONG nap.

I couldn't find Hal, but then he finally came in all covered in dirt. The neighbor's water pipe had broken in the night, so he was across the street, helping them fix it. He needed to run into town to get a part. He finally came home just as Justin was leaving with his sisters.

I said something about taking a nap and Hal got a funny look on his face. Then he told me that his friend, the one with the four "rambunctious" little kids, had called. They were going to a wedding in Salt Lake and their babysitter had fallen through at the last minute. They needed help, so Hal told them we'd take their kids for the five hours (or longer) so they could go to the wedding.

Ouch.

So, it is now about one hour into the five.

I'm sleep deprived, Hal is looking pretty worn out and our kids aren't doing much better. We've already hidden most of the heavy, breakable and/or pointy objects.

On the upside, the kids we are watching are having a great time. They've been running around - inside and out, hitting each other, fighting, throwing things, etc. They've dumped out all of Austin's little toys in his bedroom, the ones that I lovingly sorted into bins last week. And they've already eaten most of our food.

One hour down, four to go.

Did I mention, they've only been here one hour?

Sometimes I forget things when I'm tired.