Thinks By Me

I have to say that I don't believe I have ever met a single person who had a February 29th birthday. What's the chance of that when my brother and I share a birthday (2 years apart) and my sister's is 10 days before ours (2 years later)?! I just couldn't pass up the chance to post something today, since I won't be posting again on this date for another four years. Frankly, it's downright weird to think that I could still be blogging in another four years.

Perhaps in honor of Starbucks closing for some special barista training today, Dunkin' Donuts is practically giving their small lattes away for .99 cents! Or perhaps it's in sympathy for all the northeastern parents who, after triumphing through a week of winter break from school, will more than likely greet their wee ones with an early release from school today due to a winter storm that is fast approaching. It's from 1:00 pm to 10:00 pm today only, which corresponds nicely with the 5:30 p.m. closing of Starbucks for three hours of emergency training on how to spiff up their processes. Or something or other. So find your closest location, haul it over to get any variety of a small latte and sip in oblivion while your kids hoot & holler about an extra hour to track in snow and ice all over your floors! You won't even mind the mess.

On Little Chic's snowmobiling trip with Dad. Even the deer like a little affection.

Brainy Boy is taking part in his first real grown-up act of supporting a mission cause tomorrow night. He, along with his youth group, are taking part in the 30-hour famine . It's a youth event sponsored by World Vision for the cause of world hunger. The idea is that the kids get sponsors to donate money to help feed hungry children across the world, and learn a lesson in compassion at the same time. The kids, in conjunction with a night of fun activities, will be fasting for a whole 30 hours!! Brainy Boy is just barely old enough to take part (you should be 12, and he will be in about 10 weeks) but he seems to really be looking forward to it. I'd like to think he's excited about the prospect of seeing what it's like to truly be hungry, but I suspect that playing paintball again as part of the activities of the night, is generating most of the enthusiasm. If you are inclined to support this event tomorrow night, drop me a line, and I'll tell you how to give a t...

In return for the many nights of sneaking under Little Chic's covers for a warm cuddle, DogSpot decided to pay back the favor and allow Little Chic a prime spot on her doggie cot in front of the fireplace.

Denise sent me this Scattergories game. It's harder than it looks, believe me. If you wanna play along, use the 1st letter of your own name to answer each of the questions. They have to be real places, names, and things...and no cheating by using your name for the boy/girl name question, either. SCATTERGORIES - THE LETTER J What is your name? Jennifer 4 letter word: just Vehicle: Jalopy City: Jerusalem Boys name: Jackson Girls name: Julia Movie: James & The Giant Peach Occupation: Journalist Something you wear: Jeans Food: Jambalaya Something found in a kitchen: Juicer Something found in a bathroom: Jacuzzi tub Reason for being late: John (truly, my biggest reason being late) Cartoon character: Johnny Bravo Something you shout: "Just Say No!" Animal: Jack rabbit Body Part: Jugular vein PS-(Who Loves Google?!)

Brainy Boy has been agonizing at the mailbox every day when the coveted paintball gun that Muh Main Man won on Ebay last weekend did not arrive. Each and every day. We have exchanged numerous emails with Mr. Seller who assured us the paintball gun was on its way. Mysteriously today, we got a Paypal refund for the amount of the purchase price with a vague explanation about shipping problems. Nice. Explain that to Brainy Boy who schemed all week about gloating in front of his boy buddies during the paintball game tomorrow. Thus the discussion about pride and destruction and the haughty spirit before crashing and burning...or falling as Proverbs puts it. Mean Mom was going to make him wait until his birthday to rectify the issue, good and proper as was the original plan. BUT as always Muh Main Man and his instant gratification tendencies came to the rescue. He again bid and won. This time a better gun for less money. And that always makes me happy. Hopefully this time all will go...

I have a goal during this upcoming week of Winter Break from school. I've been intending to repaint the kids bathroom for a while now. I have no idea what those Short People do when they're in there, but the walls certainly look lived on. And then some. I've been putting off the paint job because....well, that's just what I do. But also because that bathroom is the one room in my house where I have a wall border. I'm not a huge wallpaper fan, but I experimented with a wall border in there a few years ago and I've dreaded getting it down. But surprisingly, some peeling and spraying of warm water and scraping with a plastic scraper got the job done. Who knew those little brown plastic scrapers that come with your Pampered Chef stoneware work for more than getting food off pizza stones? Of course, I have yet to actually pick out the paint but the new shower curtain is sitting on the counter and my nifty Tomboy Tools paintbrushes are rarin' to go, so I...

Luckily I'm married to a guy who gets the whole love language deal and he's well tuned into the fact that acts of service really fill my love tank. To earn brownie points so that he could buy a new snowmobile demonstrate his undying love for me, he has been doing all sorts of favors for me this week--odds and ends that generally would stay undone and cause me to be accused of nagging at some juncture--he has just been knocking them out right and left. He's even taken on a few of my own procrastinated chores. Just because. Without me asking. So although today was the official "day of luv" as they say, I've just been celebrating all week because I won the jackpot in the husband department. It seems that we have successfully passed the idea and excitement about treating your "special one" special on this day to only one of our offspring. Little Chic got right into the spirit of carefully selecting her Valentines for each of her friends, sig...

Brainy Boy, along with several buddies, engaged in a big-boy activity for a birthday party on Saturday afternoon. The game of the day was paintball at an indoor facility - and you have never seen anybody so excited. I could barely keep Muh Main Man from crashing the party. It turned out that they had as many dads as they did boys celebrating the birth of one very happy kid. Supposedly dads were there for supervision, but based on the battle scars Brainy Boy revealed, it seems the big boys were as intent on winning the game as were the little boys. He proudly showed off all 11 of the welts that were the result of the vicious battle. He is begging to go back again and has plans for two more times already. It took a mere 12 hours after the game for us to claim one very cool paintball gun for our own, compliments of EBay. We ended the day on a less aggressive note with our last annual mother/son bowling event hosted by our school. Since Brainy Boy is heading to middle school next y...

For any of you who #1-do your own taxes and, #2 are State Farm customers, you can file electronically via Turbo Tax absolutely free! Go to statefarm.com and register with your policy number and the Turbo Tax link will be on the page. We tested it out for you last night, and successfully filed state and federal with no problems. And it was free, Dude. It was free.

The Super Bowl was a thrill to us as it was to many. We watched, just the four of us, with split allegiance among us. Frankly, I didn't have a favorite, so I waited for Muh Main Man to claim his team before I claimed the opposite....to keep it interesting, ya know? As smart gals will do, I picked the winner, and was able to gloat with Brainy Boy at the upset. Little Chic and DogSpot watched as long as they could, but finally settled for a report as we hauled her out from under the snack table at the end of the game. She took the news well (she was on dad's side). Today was the first day at school after a week of sickness for the Short People. They fared pretty well and it seems their teachers took pity on them. They don't appear to have an overwhelming amount of work to make up. It helps that I picked up assignments a few days and they worked through some of them over the weekend. Hopefully we're good to go for the rest of the winter on the healthy front.

Since the kiddos have been sick all week, and I am fortunate enough to stay home with them instead of packing them off to a babysitter while I work, we've done all sorts of things we don't usually do. I've watched countless episodes of the Colbert Report with Brainy Boy. He gets so tickled at the satire, but occasionally we do have to switch the channel if it gets inappropriate. I spent almost one day laying on the bed, keeping Little Chic company while we watched rented movies. She really loved that. We stayed in our jammies more than one day this week, although it did drive me nuts after a while and I had to get a shower and get dressed. The kids just switched from an old pair of jammies to a fresh pair after their showers. It was nice to have a week to dote on them since we were pretty much housebound. There were no distractions of having to keep a schedule or rush around to our various activities. And Muh Main Man did let me escape several nights to do errands whil...

....really, it is. Seriously. I've spent an uninterrupted week at home with my little darlings. Who's mentioning that they've been sick? And pitifully sick at that. I have to say that in my 11 years experience as a mom, I have never seen them quite this sick for this long. I've made an unofficial "mom diagnosis" of the flu. And an expert I should be in this topic since I have been a medical transcriptionist for the past 11 years and I participated in a flu study - for two years running. So go with me on this one. Got it? It started with Muh Main Man, as we've so faithfully reminded him throughout the week. The Short People got sick almost on cue Sunday afternoon/evening. It started with an extremely sore throat and some stomach queasiness. It progressed to aching and lethargy which prompted our visit to the doctor Tuesday morning. She suspected strep was on the way, although the rapid test was negative. She gave an antibiotic which has done no...

We can't ignore the truth any longer...it is clear that Muh Main Man has indeed bequeathed the most miserable of germs to our offspring. Little Chic and Brainy Boy were both feeling a little punk by Sunday night and stayed home from school to keep us company on Monday. You can imagine what a little party that was ;) By last night, Little Chic was running 103 degrees warm and barking like the resident seal. Lucky for us, Muh Main Man totes his rescue supplies where ever he goes and breathing treatments are a regular necessity on the rescue squad...so fixed her right up. Brainy Boy fared a bit better with just a very sore throat and incessant coughing. A visit to the doctor this morning confirmed....they are sick. Who knew? Five prescriptions later from antibiotics to cough medicines to steroids and hopefully they'll be on the mend. Because believe me - I've got about one more good day in me of entertaining sickies. Any more than that and I'm headed for the loony ...

We've been descended upon by the winter germfest and Muh Main Man has had some type of Mongolian Barfing Lung disease. Or something like that. Of course, he took a hit for the home team and suffered through a day trip of snowmobiling up north on Wednesday, but he came home to spend two days in bed hacking up a lung. He went to the doctor who said he has "atypical respiratory infection." Whatever that is, he got an antibiotic for it and has finally started feeling better today. Just in time to pass it on over to Little Chic, I fear. We all are trying to stay away from him, but his endless days at home are making him feel all cuddly and appreciative of the TLC we've offered, so we haven't been too successful on that front. I think I'm going to have to send him back to work tomorrow to infect the ranks at Lockheed and air out our abode. We'll keep you posted and if I suddenly start blogging more regularly, you'll know that I'm down for the count...

I got home from my kickboxing class this morning and found this note that I hadn't noticed in the morning bustle of getting the kids ready for school. I was looking high and low for my grocery list that had been on the fridge. It was missing and I spied this laying on the counter---on the back was my grocery list. Apparently Brainy Boy did not appreciate Muh Main Man's disturbance at 5am this morning as he was leaving for a snowmobiling trip. At some point he got up and wrote this note to his dad. In case you can't read the bleary-eyed hen scratching that Brainy Boy penned it says, "You may be hungry and/or whatever but please take into consideration that there is a boy down the hall with many hard objects that gets very angry when awoken by lights."

Saturday night marked the fifth Snowflake Father/Daughter Dance that Little Chic has gone to with Muh Main Man. As always, the dress has been planned since before Christmas and the entire afternoon was a flurry of getting flowers, doing hair and asking if it was time to go every five minutes for four hours prior to the start of the ball. This year was no disappointment and even an hours-long line at Red Lobster for dinner after the dance couldn't dampen their spirits. They opted for Friendly's with the big ice cream sundaes instead. Next year will be a little sad because it will be Little Chic's last year at her school where the dance is held. We won't mention the social dances that follow the year after ;( While the the fleet of feet were doing their thing, Brainy Boy and I did ours by spending the evening at our favorite haunt, Barnes & Noble. We scored a latte', a piece of cheesecake and a Dilbert book we surprisingly didn't already own.

.....since I haven't been feeling nearly as motherly toward ya'll faithful readers to let you know each and every mundane detail of my life in real-time fashion.... I am busy and more ambitious than ever, taking full advantage of the fact that I am no longer fully consumed with procrastinating my transcription ;) A few of the blog topics that have been waiting in the wings, and are now completely out of date (but you seriously need to know them) are... 1) I got my Christmas decorations down and put in away in a completely respectable amount of time. That is quite an accomplishment for me. While I was doing that, I snapped a picture of my favorite set of ornaments on the left--the expectant parent bears we got when we were pregnant with Eric. The other shot is the sad realization that Little Chic has a lot more personal ornaments than Brainy Boy has. Not quite sure how that happened since I get each of them one every year, but...I'll be hitting the clearance sales to d...

Friends, I am here! Really, I am. But this new schedule has just turned me into some type of scary superwoman. For this week at least. I have been getting up, getting the Short People out the door, exercising, organizing, laundering, errand going, working my 2 hours and school and going at it again once I get home. I don't know what's happened to me. I'm scaring myself. And my family. They tiptoe up to the garbage dumpster every day when they get home to inspect just who has been the victim of my early spring cleaning. Who knew that eliminating my transcription (which I spent much more time procrastinating than actually doing, by the way) would cause such an uproar in personality. I'm sure it will be short-lived as soon as the routine settles in, but I'm taking full advantage of the unnatural pep for the time being. The only disadvantage to the habit upheaval has been that I've entirely eliminated blogging from my routine for the last week. I gotta ge...