Superman

When I left for choir practice tonight, the remains of dinner were still on the table, and Audrey and Aislinn were just coming in from playing outside.

When I came back less than an hour later, the table was cleared and ALL THREE KIDS were in bed. (OK, Arwyn was in her carseat in the living room, but she was asleep. That counts.)

I can't even deal when I'm alone and have only two to put to bed...any two. I have no idea what he did to get all three of them to sleep in less than an hour. Drugged them, I guess.

Revulsion

My middle daughter is already showing signs of being different from her older sister in a very big way: there are many things that gross her out. Yes, already, at age two. I don't know where she learned this, because there are things that disgust her that disgusts no one else here.

I don't really like bugs, especially crawly ones, but they don't gross me out. Aislinn, however, will point from her booster seat in the kitchen at a fly on the *outside* of the patio door, and say "YEEEEEUUUUWWWW!!!! Yew, yew, yew!!!" (It must have the "yuh" on the beginning, too.) Any small wet drops on the kitchen table are "yew!" Even if they are water. A single drop of milk on the floor (dripped by her, no less), though I tell her I will get it in a minute, must be pointed at with an accusing finger and pronounced "yeeeeuwww!"

Just now, she was looking outside the front door; Leo was picking up sticks in the yard in preparation for mowing, and I heard her yell, "Yew, mouse!" Wondering what rodent would show it's face in a front yard around here, I went to look. What I found was a red-fur-covered toy mouse, somehow escaped from the clutches of our indoor cats. It was indeed "yew"; it was covered in dirt and bits of crumbled leaves, and the hair was STIFF. Ick.

I brought it in, and she demanded to see it, overcome by curiosity at this disgusting object. I let her see it briefly, then said I was going to throw it away. "No!" she said.

"You want it?" I asked.

"Yew, no!" she yelled.

"Do you want to throw it away?

"Yes. NO! Umm..."

She held her hand out, but recoiled every time I tried to put it in her hand. Finally, I showed her how to use her thumb and forefinger to hold it by a bit of fur that was coming off. This way, she marched over to the trash and disposed of the offending varmint.

Maybe she'll throw out the hair on my bathroom floor for me?

Funny is good. Fat is bad.

We're going a little stream of consciousness tonight, mainly because I'm watching Lost while typing this. Of course, it's just a rerun of last week's; I couldn't possibly blog and watch a new one at the same time.

Or could I? We'll see...

Why is it that just when I decide to write a new blog post, Arwyn decides to knock the paci out of her mouth, thereby waking herself up, and commencing to scream? Oh, here comes Leo. Thank you, thank you. But she's still screaming, and it's making me anxious.

Having been on antidepressants (and is it telling that I just now mistyped "depressants"?) on and off for the last six years or so, I've noticed that it's true what I heard about one of the more bummer side effects: not only do I not feel mad or sad all the time, I also do not generally feel extremely happy or excited or amused. I do laugh, I do smile, but it's all kind of muted a bit. Today, however, I cracked up laughing SEVERAL times, much to my surprise when I think about it. Dooce always cracks me up, but today was particularly snort-worthy (as in, I snorted my ice cream out my nose because I laughed so hard). I know I laughed at something that I can't remember, but what I remember laughing hardest at (but quietly, trying not to wake up the baby) was Pearl the Landlord. (Thank you Susie for leading me there.)

Wondering if this means my dosage needs adjusted?

End of the 9:00 episode of Lost. Lots of surprises lately. Is Juliet a spy, or is she just pretending...a double agent? And what the heck is up with Locke?? He was my favorite, and now he's one of "them".

New episode starting. Gotta cut out.

Ha. I can keep doing this.

Can I just say how HOT Daniel Dae Kim is? Obviously, I apparently have a thing for Asian men :)

Also, Sawyer continues to grow on me. Sometimes like a fungus, but generally not. Especially since Jack is acting like such a fool about Juliet, I'm tending to root more for Sawyer where Kate is concerned.

Is this a soap opera or WHAT?

Commercial.

Unrelated...I'm getting really concerned about my weight. I lost 20 pounds right at once after Arwyn was born, an absolute record for me. But not a thing after that. Nothing, nada, zilch. In the last three months, I've hovered within a couple of pounds on either side of...well, I'm not going to say, because a certain ex of mine sometimes reads here, and I'm a bit vain that way. I'm still going to Curves, but I seem to have just hit a plateau. I'm afraid my metabolism has changed, and I'm not sure how to reset it. If exercise isn't doing it, I don't know what will.

I might actually have to (gulp) stop eating ice cream. Or (gulp again) going to Starbucks and drinking venti white mochas and eating chocolate cream cheese muffins.

It could be breastfeeding is keeping me from losing. But it never happened like this with my other two, and I think it's only supposed to be 5 or 10 pounds. Ok, yes, 10 pounds would take me back to where I was when I got pregnant. But geez...I'm a crazy breastfeeding mama, the kind that nurses walking, talking three-year-olds. I don't want to wait three years to START losing any more.

What's most infuriating is that my old clothes don't fit. I have one pair of post-pregnancy jeans that I keep around just for this purpose, but usually by now I'm out of them. My "medium" button-up shirts are all too tight, but when I try on "large" at the store, they are all too big. ARRGHHH...

What the bloody heck is Penny's backpack doing up in a tree on the island, eh?? Tell me that, now, will you brother?

Sorry, just getting in touch with my inner Desmond.

This post is really getting a little too weird (maybe I SHOULD check my meds???). I'm off now for real.

(Another) Cedar Campus blast from the past

Jur (and maybe Cloudscome?), this is for you.

So in retrieving my laptop, I've been getting things back in order, downloading iTunes again, putting all my CDs back on the computer (most of which still had not been saved to my iPod at the crash). Tonight I decided to download a few tunes I've been meaning to get. Near the top of my list was Night Rider's Lament. I was planning to get the Garth Brooks version, simply because it's the only one I'm familiar with that has actually been recorded. Or so I thought.

I first heard this song at Cedar Campus, the InterVarsity camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan I attended several times, and lived at an entire summer in college. The camp's recreation director, the "King of Fun", Marty Feldhake, used to sing it for us once or twice every summer. It's a song about a cowboy who reads a letter from an old friend who can't understand why his friend would work so hard for so little pay. He says:

Why do you ride for your money?
Tell me why do you rope for short pay?
You ain't a-gettin' nowhere, and you're losing your share
You must have gone crazy out there

But the cowboy knows:

They've never seen the Northern Lights
They've never seen a hawk on the wing
They've never spent spring at the Great Divide
And they've never heard old camp cookies sing.

Marty used to dedicate this song to all of us college student on the camp crew, because we worked long, hard hours (I used to get up at 6:30 to start work in the kitchen, and though generally I did get a good break in the afternoon, I was usually not done for the day until 7:00 p.m. or later) for only $20 a week.

We did it for all different reasons. Some of us were going to be attending the month-long camp in July there anyway, and this was the only way we could earn any money the rest of the summer (who else would hire us for a month before and a few weeks after?). Most of us were just doing it because we loved the place (I've said it before, it's heaven on earth), and we loved the Lord, and wanted to serve Him in some way. And heck yeah, did we ever see Northern Lights up there!

Anyway, tonight I was looking to download Garth's version. Oddly enough, iTunes didn't seem to have it. But about 3/4 of the way down the page, I saw a name I recognized: Marty Feldhake.
Couldn't be. I blinked, looked again. Yes, it was. I went up to the search bar and typed in his name. Apparently old Marty has made a CD of music, most of it his own, but including a couple I remember him singing at Cedar. Including Night Rider's Lament.

Marty's not working at Cedar Campus anymore. Last I heard, I think he was helping start an IV chapter at a small college campus in Michigan. But I was so tickled that he's got his own CD, and that now, any time I want, I can hear what was, for me, a validation of why I "wasted" an entire summer out in the boonies of northern Michigan.

Postscript re: the Tooth Fairy and missing tooth

When the Tooth Fairy decided to risk it and leave Audrey some money last night, she found a crayoned note under the pillow. It said:

Dear Tooth Fairy, I can not find my tooth that I lost. your friend, Audrey

The TF was, of course, touched and left an extra quarter in interest since she had been late the night before. TF left her own note that read:

Dear Audrey, that's OK...you can just take the money this time, and leave me the tooth when you find it. Love, the Tooth Fairy

This way, it's no big deal if we still find the tooth laying around! The jig is not yet up.

I'm still alive, or: I HAVE MY LAPTOP BACK!!!

Took long enough, didn't it? Blame it on my husband, who, in taking it to the UPS store to ship it to be repaired, decided he didn't want to pay $30 for their packing materials and would go home to look for the original box, could not find said original box, and procrastinated for the next two and a half months until he FINALLY got back to the UPS store, resigned to paying $30 for their packing materials, ONLY to find that he didn't have to pay for packing after all (we're still not sure why, or why he was first told he did have to).

Worse, they had to completely reformat the hard drive, which means I lost everything, all my files, some music, my downloads, my preferences, and, what I feared losing the most, two whole seasons of Lost, worth $70. I hadn't even watched the last third of Season Two (though I did finally get it from the library). Now I have to decide, having watched all the episodes already, should I download them all again? Common sense says no, fan-sense says yes. Fan-sense will probably win out, though I probably won't do them all at once.

I've had lots of posts floating around in my head for the last several weeks, and the one that keeps coming back is the one you're getting: Wonder Pets (also check out Wikipedia's page). And no, it's not a rant. This is the cutest thing I have seen since...forever. If you have not experienced the cuteness that is Wonder Pets, imagine this: a guinea pig (Linny), a turtle (Tuck), and a duckling (Ming-Ming) who live in a preschool by day, but are superheroes when all the students are gone. Their catchphrase is "teamwork!", and their game is rescuing baby animals that get themselves in all kinds of predicaments. The characters are adorable, created by something called "photo-puppetry animation", which, according to the Nick Jr., means photos of real animals are manipulated to produce their actions.

Each character has its own unique quirks. Linny the Guinea Pig is the leader, the "smart" one. Ming-Ming is daring, and sometimes forgets about teamwork, occasionally getting herself into trouble in the process (one time SHE was the baby animal getting rescued). Tuck is a little harder for me to pigeon-hole yet, but he generally seems to be the "cute" one, and also the one reminding Ming-Ming about teamwork.

My favorite part of this show, though, is the music. Set to sort of opera-type music (sung by young voices, remember, so it's not screeching sopranos), it always starts out the same: the tin-can phone rings, and Linny starts singing:

(Linny:) The phone, the phone is ringing.

(Ming-Ming:) The phone, we'll be right there!

(Tuck:) The phone, the phone is ringing!

(Linny:) There's an animal in trouble...

(Ming-Ming:) There's an animal in trouble!

(Tuck:) There's an animal in trouble, somewhere.

It makes me want to find a ring-tone for it! Think of it, my little cell phone singing, "The phone, the phone is ringing..."

My other favorite part is the two times in each show that Ming-Ming (can you tell yet she's my favorite character?) says, in her little lispy voice, "This is SEWRious!"

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In other news, Arwyn is now three months old and is trying to pull herself upright when sitting in the swing or carseat. AND the kid very nearly can sleep through the night. (There are babies that do that??) Aislinn is speaking sentences, sometimes complete with subject and predicate and no words missing. And Audrey just lost her third tooth, a top one, and is talking in her own very cute lisp now. Darn Tooth Fairy forgot to come last night (that's what happens when I'm not the one to put her to bed!), and now, tonight, THE TOOTH CANNOT BE FOUND. Audrey is already in bed and I've got to find the envelope with the tooth in it so the Tooth Fairy can leave the money. She could just leave the money and worry about the tooth later, but IF the tooth/envelope is found lying around by the tooth's former owner, the jig is up. Could be cheaper for the Tooth Fairy, but she's not ready for the jig to be up yet.

I'm glad to be back in the land of the living internet.