Author: Doris

I’m back on the knitting bandwagon. I’ve finished 3 projects since the beginning of February and in order to fit this habit into my day, I’ve dropped my other habit of reading books for pleasure. I’m trying to combine the two by checking out these weird recorded books from the library called Playaways and listening to them while I knit. They have a preloaded book on them and so you just provide your own earphones and hit PLAY! Since I don’t use an iPod, I thought this would be a good way to read and knit at the same time. Unfortunately, I think that hearing is my least sensitive way of gathering information. I am very good at not listening to anything. Just ask Jeremy. This afternoon, I fell asleep “listening” to Prep, the person who was reading is sooo soothing. I don’t know if this knit/reading thing is going to work out too well.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that with knitting, the more money I spend on the yarn, the better the final project turns out to be. It’s crazy, if you want to buy beautiful yarn to knit an adult sized sweater, you could easily spend $200 or more. So now, I’m going to buy nice yarn and keep the projects small so I don’t need to use too much of it. For example, this is sized for a one-year old. Now I just have to find a one-year old who wants to wear it. This yarn was given to me by a mom of one of Vince’s pals, she runs Three Irish Girls!

I’m very grumpy this morning. Along with the time change, we have just managed to survive Vince’s 8th year-old birthday extravaganza yesterday – which was loud and raucous and made me glad that I don’t have 12 children (Dodecatuplets?). We hosted a bunch of boys in the house for 2.5 hours, there was some crying, wrestling, TV watching, pizza eating, dancing and a lot of yelling. The photos are all crap, but there isn’t much photo time when you are trying to keep the kids under control and to not destroy the house.

On Thursday, I went to visit Edda at her school. I had no real reason to visit her school except that I always want to know about her day and since she can’t really tell me how her day was, I just want to go and be part of it.

I don’t go shopping for Edda’s clothes, which is just as well because I have no taste. It’s all Jeremy, my mom, Jeremy’s mom and Donald picking out her clothes and then Eliana rockin’ with the dressing choices. Here’s Edda showing off this season’s turquoise and skinny jeans and sparkles.

So yesterday, I went into the office, planning on staying a little late to have fried fish and knit with my pals, when Jeremy calls me and asks if I have a minute to talk…

Jeremy was working from home yesterday and at about 4:30 in the afternoon he’s on a conference call. Eliana’s downstairs taking care of Edda. Vince, as usual, is running back and forth between the neighbor’s house and playing with kids outside and inside.

As Jeremy’s talking on the phone, he notices from the 2nd story window that there appears to be a small fire in the backyard. He doesn’t see anyone around it and it’s near the huge pile of leaves and bushes and brambles that we have in the backyard so he goes downstairs (while still on the call) and grabs the kitchen fire extinguisher and heads out to the backyard. As he’s headed out, he can see that it really is a fire, tells the guy on the call that he’s gotta go and heads out to put out the fire.

When he gets there, he finds Vince and a few pals, kind of huddled around under a bush and yeah, trying manage their little fire. The fire they decided to build to make some s’mores! Right next to a pile of leaves, because, hey what burns better than some dried leaves!!! They basically had taken matches from the kitchen and headed outside to start the fire (oh, they also had a half full bag of mini marshmallows). Jeremy estimated that the charred ground was about 12-18 inches in diameter. We were very lucky that Jeremy just happened to look out the window when he did, otherwise, I shudder to think what would have happened if the fire had spread more than it did.

Vince was grounded today and got a stern talking to about fire safety. And we have to find a better hiding place for the matches. And we need to get a new fire extinguisher because the old one now is totally used up.

It is noted that when I tell this story to pals, all the boys or parents of boys all say, oh yeah, I remember when I or my kids did that. Actually, Jeremy was laughing a little when he called me at work because he clearly remembers almost setting their living room on fire when he was Vince’s age. And all the girls and parents of only girls were like, oh that’s funny, that never happened at our house… Ha! This has been a crazy week already, throw in a little (or big) fire drama and now I’m basically completely toasted.

Busy week! But it’s been so beautiful outside, I hardly can complain.

Green things coming up out of the ground:

I’m still trying to knit, I have a few flesh and blood knitting friends and we actually are going to sit around and knit together. It’s more fun to knit when you have a (few) knitting friends.

And I bought a half-dead orchid at Lowe’s for just five dollars. I’m hoping it blooms someday.

It’s Vince’s eighth birthday today. We had a low-key celebration today, mainly bacon for breakfast and a Coke for dinner, an oh yeah, Legos out the wa-zooo. Do we know how to party or what? We had a family celebration last weekend and a friends celebration schedule this coming weekend, so don’t fret that he only got bacon and a Coke. The friends celebration is making me a little nervous as it’s at the house and we have zero activities planned except for the pizza, cake and armored-tank pinata (don’t ask).

There is such a huge emotional build up towards the actual birthday DAY for Vince that today, there was so much extra DRAMA. At some point today, Vince was in the kitchen wailing, “It’s my birthday today, why is everybody treating me so badly?!” ARGHHHHHH!!!!

Vince also had the pleasure of going to the dentist today, he loves the dentist so much, he considered it a special birthday treat. The hygienist told me gently that I should not allow my son to have Kool-aid for breakfast (which he did along with the bacon and had the tell-tale red mustache, I was totally busted at the dentist.)

Often, in our travels around the world (or neighborhood), there are events or trips that we go on where they advertise “free childcare!” – it ranges from PTA meetings to the Disney cruise. It’s pretty much impossible to take advantage of these pre-arranged child care options for Edda as it’s hard to just drop her off with someone who hasn’t met Edda before and also has 8-10 other kids to look after.

Jeremy and I went to a potluck at church on Saturday night, and of course, there was free childcare. I asked to put Edda on the list, I haven’t done this before and normally I would ask Eliana to watch Edda at home on Saturday night, but it was Eliana’s birthday and also the church is always, always telling me that they can handle Edda (which I know they want to be able to do).. Anyhoo, we show up and there are like 40 kids packed with very little intersitial space between them and a few adult babysitters who seemed already overwhelmed (only 25 kids had signed up for the child care). I don’t want to be like, OMG, they totally weren’t prepared for Edda, because everyone was very nice about it all and they were already SO MANY KIDS.

So we took Edda with us to dinner and Edda had a nice time. Edda is pretty low maintenance these days at dinner, she’ll eat and watch TV and be pretty easy to manage until it creeps close to 8:30ish when she’s ready for bed. Vince, of course, had a great time elbow deep with the other kiddos.

On Friday afternoon, Edda fell asleep at 4:30pm and was down for the night. Pretty unusual for her, but I’m sure it was her body resting after the bout of whatever was upsetting her stomach.

I came home after a fabulous day at work only to find that our little Edamame is sick! Poor thing, puking until her stomach was empty and running a little bit of a fever. She missed dinner, hung out in a sleeping bag on the doggie bed on the floor. Slept with her last night just to make sure she wouldn’t gag on her own puke.

This morning, Edda and I are watching Curious George and Finding Nemo together. I have some knitting and the internets. I’m good. Edda’s good too, working on keeping some Sprite in her tummy and a dose of Motrin down. Eliana should be back this afternoon so I can go back to work, she’s off trying to get a MD drivers license and is dealing with that especially infuriating bureaucracy that is the DMV.

Both of the kid’s schools have “spirit week” this week. It’s been PJ day, wacky hair day, dress like your parent day, wacky sock day and wacky hat day ALL WEEK. It’s hard enough to keep the kids clean and dressed each day, but throw something wacky into it and I get all flummoxed. Although I’m usually only responsible for remembering that it is spirit week and not to confuse the days – god forbid you send Edda in PJs on wacky sock day. Since I’m usually already working on patents when the kids are getting dressed, Eliana and Jeremy are responsible for the execution of the wacky plan.

It’s been kind of a roller coaster ride at both of our jobs this week. Everyday we come home and tell each other of the WACKY things happening at work. I have to go into the office tomorrow, maybe I should wear some wacky socks under my plain old work pants.