Mommathon

Colm decided to “help” me make brownies yesterday by spilling some of the chocolate chips all over the floor. This a pic of Colm and our dog scavenging them off the floor. Now, I know Colm shouldn’t be eating off the floor and the dog shouldn’t be eating chocolate, but I had to take this picture. It was like they were competing, it was a race, to see who could eat the most chocolate.

This is such a good movie. Sean and I watched it tonight after we put the kids to bed. Sean and I have watched quite a few movies lately and this was, by far, the best. HIGHLY recommended.

There are many different types of learning. Garner recognized seven different types of intelligences: spacial, linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, spacial, mathematical-logical and kinesthetic. You probably know what type(s) you and your children are. I started thinking about this yesterday when I was working with Colm doing his It’s A Match game. This was only the second time he had worked with it so I was kind of sitting with him walking him through how to do it when I realized that he was doing it perfectly right, but not at all the way I would do it. He had tackled the problem in an entirely different way that I would have. We want back and forth for a while until I realized what was happening. I was trying to help him when I realized I wasn’t helping him at all, but was keeping him from doing it his own way. By the way, if you have a two-three year old, you need to get one of these toys. They are great for teaching problem solving skills and Colm loves it because it is self-checking. He pulls down on the tray when he is done and if the colors match up then he knows he has done it right.

I know of two people who have had their credit card numbers stolen from the same local restaurant in the past year. If I know two people who this has happened to, then you know there are more AND when they were trying to figure out what happened one of the first things the bank asked them was if they had eaten at this restaurant. That tells you right there that there has been a pattern. One particular person had used their debit card to pay and their entire checking account was cleared out to the tune of about $3,000. Yikes! I am not going to mention the name of the restaurant here so I can’t be sued for slander or libel or whichever one it is, but if you e-mail me I will tell you which one it is.

I dropped the boys off at The Little Gym this week for a few hours and I managed to get a TON done. Sean has been crazy busy at work over the past few weeks which means I have had A LOT of quality time with the children, but very little time to get anything done. So, in the three hours they were gone, I went to two different Hallmark stores looking for something I didn’t end up finding at either one, I made two trips to our storage unit to get stuff out, I went to the scrapbooking store, Sonic, the drycleaners and the post office. I would have never been able to get all of that done with them. The post office alone would have sent us all over the edge. There was a long line and there is just way too much stuff for a curious three-year old to get into at the post office. Same goes for the scrapbooking store and Hallmark, too, now that I think about it.

Another memoir. This one was recommended to me by my friend Christie. Very good book. Sad. Tragic. I also have to remind myself while I am reading a memoir that this is someone’s life. These things really happened. I was warned to get the tissues ready and I used them, too.

I saw a report on the news the other night that brought back the night our house burned down. These poor people on the news had to sit and watch their house burn down because it was so cold outside the firemen couldn’t get the fire hydrants open and when they did, the line cracked because it was frozen. We were in a similar situation the night our house burned down. It was cold and it was dark and it was late and the fire hydrant was frozen shut. I had just gotten home from working at Minsky’s. It was a weekend, so it was at least 11 or so when I got home. I was downstairs in the basement getting ready to go to bed when someone came and BANGED on our door. I ran upstairs and someone said our house was on fire. My parents, who always take care of everything and I knew who would take care of this, started rushing around. I went back downstairs because my parents always took care of everything and never let harm come our way. Somehow I realized that this was the real deal and that my parents couldn’t make this one go away. When my mom and I walked out the front door there was a line of fire going up our living room wall. A nice woman down the street gave me some socks to wear since I had left in such a rush and we spent the night at the Holiday Inn. The next day, when we went back to survey the damage, we were reunited with our cat who had miraculously survived my crawling in the dryer. Everything on the first floor was a big piece of ice. I don’t remember there being an upstairs. I think there might have been a shell of the upstairs left, but I don’t think we could go up there. My bedroom was a mess. Since it was in the basement all of the water that got sprayed in the fire ended up in my bedroom. My textbooks were floating around in the mess and pretty much everything that had been on the floor was destroyed. The thing I will never forget is the smell. It stayed with us and on our things for quite a while. You hear stories on the news of fires ending much more tragically. We were so lucky.

Now that we have moved we have a different trash and recycling company. That means we have a new list of rules and regs that we have to follow about things we can and can’t recycle. I like it. We can recycle so much more here and I find us recycling about twice as much as we were previously. The thing that really bothers me though is that we can’t recycle glass here. I understand why. Glass is heavy which means it costs a lot to transport, but it causes me great pain to just throw it away. I don’t know what to do. I can’t have a bunch of glass piled all over until I can find a place to recycle it, but I hate throwing it away. What to do.

We have clearly been watching too much Arthur. Sean and I were discussing whether Buster’s parents were married. I said that they were and that he is a pilot and is gone all the time flying. Sean said that he remembered an episode where Buster had to leave for the summer to go stay with his dad. Yeah, I remember that one, too. Grown-up adult married people shouldn’t be discussing Arthur. We should be discussing world politics, the upcoming election year, caucuses, assassinations, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Nope, we like to focus on the light stuff-Arthur. 🙂

Liam made his first and hopefully last winter visit to Children’s Mercy last night. Croup. Man, it is so scary. It always seems to be the same every time he gets it. He is fine one moment and a half hour later he is gasping for breath. We went out to dinner, came home, took a bath, practiced violin (he was fine the whole time). Then Liam and Colm played on the computer with Sean for a while. He started coughing while they were on the computer, by the time they were done he could barely make it up the stairs. I gave him some asthma meds thinking that was the problem. When those didn’t work I knew things were going to get way worse before they got better. I am glad we went. They had to give him the big drugs…but they worked. We got home a little after one. I’m tired.