Posts Tagged: Makes Me CRAZY

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction — No Comments
11
May 12

When I head down the aisle, vacuum cleaners leap to their demise.

Bad things happen when I have a lot going on.

My sister aced Queen Bee Multitasker.

I’m taking Remedial Homemaking for the tenth time.

 

*  *  *

All I wanted was some iced tea.

Running around this morning with a deadline today, an appointment in an hour, a trashed house (usually happens re deadline), I filled up the kettle and placed it on the burner.

I raced to get more clothes into the washer, returned a few emails, headed back into the kitchen and

HOLY MELTING PLASTIC.

It was the smell that hit me first.

WARNING: The following image might be too graphic for small children and Martha Stewart.

Well, and any executive with Bissell.

UGH.

How do these things happen? We average a new vacuum cleaner every six months.

They are usually killed by a stray Lego, inhaling enough black dog and cat hair to knit an afghan or vacuuming up the dirt from an overturned 10 gallon planter.

This tops everything.

How could I be so careless? I washed out the cups yesterday and must have absentmindedly set them on the stove top. I turned on the same burner I do every time and….

Now I’m going to have to stop all I’m doing and buy a new vacuum when this one is two months old.

But this is a story of redemption.

Or of how my left brain grew two sizes today.

It came to me out of the blue. The motor still works. I just have to buy two new parts.

I didn’t panic.

I solved a domestic problem.

I got online and found the Bissell replacements.

Here’s the best part. I googled a coupon and got 10 percent off and free shipping. 

That never happens in my pay-full-price-because-you-are-a-creative-wreck world.

See.

And the best part is that the new parts are due to arrive May 22.

No need to try and vacuum for a week and a half. (So if any of you stop over, consider yourself warned.)

What about you? What major appliance have you killed lately?

Children — 5 Comments
4
May 12

Shoeless Joe. How do these things happen?

Tonight we went to eat Mexican.

This doesn’t happen often because my husband is not a fan.

Which is a good thing.

Because I really love it.

So I don’t get the chance to overindulge very often.

We get to the restaurant and put our name in.  I see my friend Karen who asks, “Jamie, why are you taking a picture of the floor?”

Here’s why.

How do we not notice our child is barefoot?

Well, he made it to the booth.

And we actually made it through the meal.

After a filling platter of tacos what do you want to squeeze down your esophagus into your tight belly?

Ice cream.

Yes, Shoeless Joe made it to the ice cream parlor.

And after getting home and putting on a pair of socks and tennis shoes, he got into bed.

Do you have a shoeless joe in your house?

Children — 11 Comments
2
May 12

I wanted drama. So I lied.

I lied.

I just wanted to feel more important and most importantly, wanted Bitsy Beckham (name changed for the Facebook age) to think I was important.

It’s time again for MamaKat’s writing workshop and I’m choosing Number Two: Tell about a time an adult caught you doing something wrong.

image credit

*   *   *

I was five and Bitsy was seven. Our house were separated by a chain link fence.

Bitsy would play, play, play with me ~ until it was time for her older school friends to come over. I stared at them dancing around her backyard at a Brownie meeting thinking if I looked pitiful enough surely they would ask me over.

Nada. No invite ever came.

Bitsy only played with me when it was convenient.

I had enough.

I wanted Bitsy to invite me to Brownies d*mnit!

So I thought up a lie and I thought it up quick.

I was going into the hospital on Friday to have my tonsils extracted — or so I told Bitsy. As the week went on, the story grew and grew.

But Brownies came and went that week and I was still on the other side of the fence. Curses.

*   *   *

A rainy Thursday night.

I lay in bed saying prayers with my Mama when there was a knock on the front door.

Very odd.

“Tracy, could you come out here?” my mother’s voice echoed down the hall. (I went by Tracy back then but that is a whole notha’ story.)

I tiptoed down the dark hall, turned the corner and saw Mr. Beckham, Bitsy’s nice-looking, terribly kind father, clad in a all-weather coat, dripping wet.

His arms bursting with presents.

“You don’t look like a little girl who is having her tonsils out in the morning,” was all he said.

ARGHHHHHHH!

The most humiliating moment of my life and it happened at age five.

What about you? Has a tale ever come back to bite you BAD?

 

Mama’s Losin’ It

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction — 8 Comments
26
Apr 12

Solitary Confinement…please.

Quiet.

Linking up with Mamakat’s Writing prompt this week, I chose number 3:

List the top 10 things you miss about being alone.

 

10.  The warmth and security of a snug straightjacket.

 

9.   Not spending two hours of my day cleaning the house from the marauding hordes who spent the night here.

 

8.  Sleep.

 

7.  No dog to walk, no tortoise to pick weeds for, no fish’s water to de-chlorinate and no cat trying to trip me as I stumble towards the kitchen every morning.

 

6.  The color purple. Okay that has nothing to do with being alone — but I love the color purple.

 

5.  Cooking for one. (And making things I like to eat that no one would touch.)

 

4. Taking a shower for longer than three minutes and shaving more than once every two weeks. Though it’s rather a novelty at parties to talk about my braided leg hair.

 

3.  Sleep.

 

2.  A clean car. Well, maybe my car wouldn’t be clean — but at least it wouldn’t be wrapped in orange HAZARDOUS WASTE tape.

 

1.  No background noise of TV, computer games, fighting, interruptions to referee the fighting and my brain humming with constant static.

 

And it would be BORING.

Not to say I couldn’t recharge with a few days of alone time, but from one who battled infertility and persevered through two domestic adoptions….

I thank God for their bodies and all their ENERGY, mess, noise, itty bits of paper everywhere and the Indian Burial Mound of tangerine peels that was discovered petrifying  behind the couch yesterday.

Yes, thank God I’m not alone.

But that’s not to say I’ve forgot how on the occasional weekend.

What about you? What is most pleasing about having solitary time.

 

Mama’s Losin’ It

Children / the looney-bin — 5 Comments
11
Apr 12

I respectfully disagree iPhone Lady. A smoothie is food.

“Everyone knows a smoothie is in the food group.”

Silence.

“Are you suggesting it’s a type of water?”

*   *   *

 

After sending the children off to school, I tried to call my husband.

Putting the phone on speaker (as is my custom) — I noticed that it was very, very quiet.

Examining the itty speakers on the phone, a pink gooey substance clung on their bitty woofers.

Dear Mother of pearl, the smoothie.

With only 5 minutes till departure for Morgan County Primary, I made an error of epic portions — I handed my eight year old my phone to play a game.

I had fixed him a fruit smoothie for breakfast.

My phone had ended up in his smoothie. I knew it.

Everything seemed okay, till I plugged in a charger.

The smoothie immersed phone wouldn’t recognize the charger. After cramming every charger in the house into it’s backside — NOTHING charged my phone.

Have you ever been so mad you spit tears?

Late this afternoon, I had the above mentioned conversation with the iPhone Lady on the Apple hotline.

“What is wrong with your phone?”

“It won’t charge. Something is stuck in the port and I can’t clean it out.”

“Something is stuck in there?”

“Well, no. My son stuck it in a food sort of thing and I think there is residue in the port.”

“What?”

That’s when I got ‘Ma’amed” by the iPhone Lady and told I was screwed.

Any advice on how to talk to iPhone people?

And John if you read this blog post,

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

This is a total fabrication. What will I dream up next?

 

 

 

She told me that no one would talk with me for a service related question unless I paid $69 some odd dollars for protection not including water damage.

 

I was thoroughly confused at

 

 

Children — 4 Comments
9
Apr 12

Road Trip Rules. What’s your Top Ten?

Road trips.

That’s what this week’s Monday Listcle is all about. “A list about ten things ROAD.”

So here goes.

10.  Kill.

 

9.   How I never fly anywhere any more.

8.   That said I do a lot of driving — with children. Tip number one.

Limit potty breaks to designated rest areas. Only leave interstate for gas and food.

The one thing that supersedes this is Mommy can leave the interstate anytime for coffee.

I do try to “hold it” with the kids till the next rest area. My sister could teeter in a bottle parked at rest area if her young kids were asleep and she didn’t want to wake them.

 

7. Let sleeping children SLEEP.

Never ever, wake a sleeping child on a road trip. EVER. Not even when you get to the hotel. Sleep in the car with them.

 

 

6.  Talk radio.

Most probably a sign I’m aging. Music used to be enough to keep me alive and kicking. Now if I’m really sleepy or bored — I listen to people talk. The Oprah network on Sirrus has saved me.

 

5.  Take children’s shoes off before they get in and hide them…

Nothing turns me into a bull staring at a red cape than getting to a rest area,

having a bladder set on BURST and a child unable to find a shoe to shuffle with me to bathroom.

 

4.  Drive somewhere with your husband.

Without the children, we eat when we want. Yell with abandon at the Garmin lady when she keeps insisting we make a legal U Turn. And arrive at our destination still happy that we decided to leave home in the first place.

 

3.  Order onion rings at drive-thrus.

No comfort food that your crazed-travelling-with-children self eats on a road trip has any calories. In fact, it enlarges your breasts and shrinks your rear.

 

2.  Sometimes mommy needs Silence.

No Disney channel, no movies, all games must be on mute. No fighting. No talking.

No unnecessary breathing.

 

1.  And most importantly, buy gas in Georgia and wine in Florida.

You’re taxed on the converse in each state.

 

What about you? Any road trip rules?

 

Children — No Comments
7
Apr 12

Take it up with the Bunny.

 

At some point in the day, all of my children have asked if I got them anything for tomorrow.

To which I replied, “Who me? What do I look like — the Easter Bunny?”

Okay. I may have a few stray whiskers — increasing at an alarming rate each year — but when my children start giving me a list, I insist they talk to the hand.

Not my job man.

Now, excuse while I google licensed electricians, no better make that licensed electrolysis artisans open for walk-ins 6 p.m. the Saturday before Easter.

What about you? Are you the Easter Bunny fill-in?

Alligators / Children — 2 Comments
27
Mar 12

Born free. Small amphibians fight for their right to be green.

Kids.

Kids want critters in the house. As a child, I chose the common toad as my critter of choice to stuff in a jar.

More frog teeter trickled across my palm as a 8 year old than as an adult with three infants combined.

My eight year old son brought back a boatload of anoles (your common outdoor lizard) with us from Florida on Spring Break.

They went straight in the tank with our tortoise and turned brown as pine bark — because that’s what they lived on. Well, coconut bark. They existed on that and water for we hadn’t managed to catch any crickets in two weeks.

Today before school my son said, “I’m going to let my people go.”

Not really, but it was rather biblical. Freeing the captives from the desert into a land flowing with crickets.

So today after school, we set out to free five anoles.

The Beast — or one of them.

I couldn’t do it. It freaked me out. They bite. Now they might have been so weakened they couldn’t bite a mini-marshmallow or they could have been really cranky and crank out a nasty flesh wound.

What to do?

What would Ross Allen do? What would the Crocodile Hunter have done?

What would the Swamp People do? (Oh yeah, they’d just pull out a pistol. I hate that show and every male in my house LOVES it.)

I channeled my inner reptile wrangler and grabbed a…

 

Yes, it might look like a common athletic sock but in reality it’s a high tech tool of the anole wrangler.

 

 

Anole Whisperers around here? Heck no.

We take care of business.

They all are roaming free as we speak. And turning green.

 

Well, once they make it off the driveway.

What was your critter of choice?

Children — 4 Comments
25
Mar 12

Greeting Cards. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall.

"Wal*Mart after church.
With the children.
"No." "No." And "No."
I said "No" to objects for ourselves. We were to buy
birthday presents and cards.
In the card aisle my daughter hands me one.
"This is you..."




 


Okay. Maybe that is me on certain mornings.


Then she showed me this one.


I held my breath.


 








"This is not you."


Thank God she said that.


I can take the "you're mean" the "you're not a cool mom."


But the old lady on the greeting card?


That would have hurt.

				

				
				

			


				
		

				Uncategorized —   3 Comments

			    22
Mar 12 
				
Unpack your suitcase young lady.


				

					
Hotels.


Linking up with MamaKat — I chose prompt number 5: What was the occasion? Write about the last time you stayed in a hotel.


Hmm. Let’s see. About a month ago, we travelled to Disney World to run a 5K as a family.


Unpacking…in hotels.




Do you or do you not?


I was never an unpacker. My suitcase from Spring Break is still on my bedroom floor. When did we get home? Dear goodness, it hasn’t been a week yet, has it?


But lately, when I get to a place, if we are staying a couple of nights, I unpack and arrange our clothes in the stiff, unnatural furnishings of a hotel.


This is a sign that even the most unstructured of humans CRAVES order.


I have gotten so that I hate clothes all jumbled up after they have been pilfered through in a suitcase by husband, children or me.


If ever there is a LAND of QUICK CHANGES, it’s Disney.


Run in, run out to the pool.


Run in, run out to eat (where’s my jacket.)


Wake up at 4…where are my running clothes? Where is that flipp’n race bib?


Chaos in a chaotic place.


I have discovered that I like the little things…like finding clean shorts. And finding clean underwear. Clean, dry socks.


Maybe occasionally a bra?


Runners are forever looking for socks at the last minute race morning. What a pain to be rifling around in a tub of a suitcase for a clean pair of rolled socks.


I feel so grown-up.


Unpacking and storing our clothes in hotels did that to me.


Wow.


Do you unpack or no?


 


 


Mama’s Losin’ It
 

				

				
				

			


		
		

			
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