Bear with me. Trying to get caught up - be back soon!

Learning How to Cook

(don't know where  the idea for this post came from, maybe from Debbie at In His Pasture, her post about the biscuits brought this to mind...)

Imagine if you will about 26 years ago, a young wife and mother, in her first home.  She and her young husband have scrimped and saved and done without, and finally put a down payment on a tiny but new home.  She is so proud of her little house. It's small, but new, and she got to pick out the colors, the carpet, the flooring, the wallpaper and paint. They bought it at just the right stage. It's a pretty little house - 3 little bedrooms, 2 little bathrooms, a little kitchen, a little living room, and a little utility room.  She has a new washer and dryer, a new queen size mattress set and she even found some garage sale bunk beds for her little son's room.  She is expecting baby #2.  She's planted some flowers and some tiny shrubs in the front flower bed, and her husband has put together a little swingset in the back yard and a little sandbox for their little boy to play in.

For their Christmas present that year, the young wife's in-laws have bought them a new-fangled contraption for the kitchen - a microwave oven!  She is so proud!  They've been on the market for a little while, but she knew nothing about them.  She was so excited to begin using her microwave because she knew now she was a thoroughly modern housewife. 

She planned a wonderful dinner one evening for her husband who worked hard all day.  He came in about 5:30 and sat down to watch the news on their little TV set and hold their little boy in his lap.  The young wife was so content in her little kitchen and feeling all Susie-homemaker-ish and everything was perfect in her world.  She needed some boiled eggs for what she was preparing for dinner and she thought to herself, 'well, it would be so much faster and more efficient if I give my new microwave a try and boil my eggs in it!'

So, she placed a couple of eggs in a little dish in the microwave and set the timer.  Then she went back to work on her meal preparation smiling to herself.

BAM!!!!!

She practically jumped out of her skin and screamed like she'd been shot!  Her husband came running into the little kitchen yelling, "what happened????"  There she was holding her hands over her little ears with a horrified look on her face.  There was fragments of EGG all over her, all over the little floor, all over the little walls, all over the ceiling, all inside the microwave!!!

She burst into tears!  The egg explosion had blown the door open to the microwave and had blown the eggs to kingdom come and back again!  What a mess!  Their little boy stood there looking dumbfounded.  Then, her dear sweet little husband took her shoulders in his hands and guided her out of the kitchen.  She sobbed into his neck, and he put his arms around her trying to keep from laughing.  "It's NOT funny!" she said between her sniveling and snubbing.  "I know, honey, it's not," he smiled. "Don't worry about it. I'll clean it up."  And he did!

I found pieces of egg in places that I never knew it went when we got ready to move to another house 5 years later....

Perspective for the Holiday Season

If you haven't already been there, you must go to Southern Inspiration and read Suzanne's post on November 12. It's about putting everything in perspective for the season, and not only that, but for every day of our lives.  It's a Gift that you can give yourself.  I get SO overwhelmed at Christmas feeling like that everything's left up to me.  I have way too many things on my list to do.  I plan all sorts of neato things I'd like to accomplish for decor & food and parties and family gatherings.  And while they're all wonderful ideas, I wind up getting myself over-extended and worn out, and sometimes it's almost impossible to enjoy the season and I get frustrated with myself & everybody else cuz they're not helping.  I feel like I let myself and everybody else down because I'm not Martha Stewart and everything's not just perfect.  Suzanne really put into words what I feel each year, AND what we need to do to keep ourselves from getting frazzled and disappointed.  We should keep this mindset ALL YEAR LONG!

I don't want to dread Christmas and the holidays, and I find myself feeling that way nearly every year.  I'm going to try to take her words to heart and pare down if need be. I want to enjoy the holidays, my family and loved ones, and if things are not decorated like the pages in a magazine, so what?  Being together and spending time with the ones you love are the most important things besides celebrating the birth of Christ. Won't you all join me in my endeavor?

photo courtesy - http://www.yowzers.com/thanksmp.jpg

Non-Twitter Twitter

Just went and got my annual mammogram this morning. y.e.a.  I think there ought to be something equally as mortifying and painful for the guys. . . . . . . .  it's just not fair. . . . . . . .

Be sure to go get your mammograms friends.

Laundry Gone WILD!

Sorry this picture isn't very good.  I was just over at April's of Coal Creek Farm empathising with her about her laundry problems and thinking about the fact that my kids didn't and still don't like doing laundry either.  I quit doing their laundry many years ago, so they do their own or they go dirty, skid-marks, wrinkles and all.

Which brought to mind the beginning of them doing their own laundry. I hope April will read this and maybe it will help her get her kids motivated. At least maybe she'll get a good laugh out of it.

Let's go back to when my two youngest, Josh and Hayley, were in middle school, say maybe 7th and 9th grade. Josh was the older of the two.  Ok, Hayley was 12 or 13 and  Josh was15 or so.  Certainly old enough to be learning how to do laundry. 

Soooo, my kids were home from school one day, I guess it was maybe a holiday or summer, and they were driving me stark-raving crazy fussing and fighting and yelling and screaming at each other and hollering for me to referee. You know how that goes. I had had it up to my eyeballs.  I decided to give them some chores to do not only as punishment but also because I needed help.  They were like everybody elses' kids and liked to lay on the couch and watch TV and be waited on hand and foot.  But not today!

I started doling out the chores amidst the whining and complaining from both of them and the "pore pitiful me" expressions and accusations of whose fault everything was.  There were at least 4-5 laundry baskets full of clothes and towels to be washed.  I explained (in a loud exasperated tone of voice) how to seperate and do the washing.  Then, smart-mouth Josh said,

"I'm NOT doing  laundry." 

"What????  Why not???"  I ask.

"BECAUSE THAT'S YOUR JOB." he replied. And I could see that Hayley concurred, and was glad that Josh  had relayed that sentiment to me and she didn't have to.

Deadly silence. Steam beginning to spew out of my ears. Face turning red.  In a carefully contained voice, I whispered, "not.  any.  more." I  quickly gathered up all the quarters out of my change bowl, grabbed the Gain and Bounce sheets, ordered them both to go put all the laundry baskets in my Suburban, told them to GIT IN THE CAR, drove them up to the laundromat (only a mile away in town), and dropped them off. I handed Hayley my cell phone and said "call. me. when. you're. all. done."

I peeled out of the parking lot, very smug, with them standing there in front of the laundromat looking dumbfounded like "what just happened?" and "I can't believe she's actually doing this!"  I drove home actually laughing out loud in the car! If anybody'd seen me driving down the road laughing and bouncing around in the car, they'd have thought I was nuts!  Boy I thought I was MOM OF THE YEAR!  I had made such a wonderful wise timely decision on how a parent should deal with this behaviour that I felt ready to write a #1 best selling child-rearing book that would rival that of James Dobson!!!  Man, I was on a roll!!!!!! (applause here)

Now, I'll interrupt this enthralling story to tell you to hold on to something while I finish. You won't believe it.

I'd been home for say 15-20 minutes. I'd even called my husband to tell him what an intuitive thing I'd done with his children.  He beamed over the phone and told me what a good wife and mother was I.  We laughed together over this little joke.  The phone rings.

"Hello", I say.

Hayley's yelling at the top of her lungs, "MOM, COME QUICK!  THE LAUNDROMAT IS FLOODING, AND THERE'S WATER EVERYWHERE, AND THE MEXICAN LADIES ARE SCREAMING AND GETTING ALL THEIR CLOTHES OUT OF THE DRYERS CUZ THEY'RE AFRAID THEY ARE GOING TO GET ELECTROCUTED!!!  MOM WHAT DO WE DO?????"

Oh my gosh.  What have they done now?  I drop everything and jump back in the car and race back up to the laundromat.  Sure enough, the little Mexican ladies are scattering with their babies and laundry and yelling and fussing in Spanish about those 2 kids in the washateria.  There is water running out the front door and into the parking lot.

"What happened? What did ya'll do?" I tip-toed in the door and they were both standing there in the water looking guilty and wringing their hands.

"I don't know, mom," Hayley said, near tears. "I started the machine and put the soap and quarters in like you showed me. Then the washer stopped (probably mid-cycle I thought) and I thought maybe it was through or needed some more money and so I started it again and then something happened and now there's water everywhere."

I shut off the washer, and saw on the bulletin board an emergency phone #. I called and talked to the owner and told him what happened. He arrived about 10 minutes later, madder'n a wet hen at the mess on his old lineolum floor.  The entire floor of the washateria was standing in water.  He shooed us out after we got all the laundry, including the dripping wet clothes already in the washer.  We loaded it all up and went home.  I'm still not sure if indeed the washer overflowed due to my kids, or a hose broke or something. I'll let them think it was them...

Wow - talk about backfiring.  Here I was thinking I'm super-mom and in reality this whole experience has turned into a disastrous fiasco.  Josh and Hayley were secretly pleased they didn't have to do laundry at the washateria and tried not to laugh on the way home. I could hear sniggering coming from the backseat.  I did not want to hear a peep from anyone and they knew it.  I called Tony and told him what happened later and he and I had a good laugh in private.  I can surely laugh about it now. 

But my kids are still doing their own laundry.