Please reserve my room at the funny farm now

 Our children didn't inherit their father's willingness to eat most foods. Our eldest prefers foods to not touch each other, which I think was inherited from my father. Our middle child lives on peanut butter and jelly, tacos, apples, wheat thins, cheese, and baked goods. Probably in that order. 

Our youngest, age eleven and two-thirds, is afraid of vegetables. Or something. 

I know this, but it's really not my fault that some spaghetti sauces contain actual chunks of tomatoes and/or onions. I thought I was a step ahead of the game today when I provided a tiny bowl alongside his actual bowl of elbow macaroni, ground beef, mozzarella cheese, "shakey cheese" and spaghetti sauce.

"Here's a bowl for you to put your tomatoes in."

"How many will there be?"

"I have no idea. The other option is you could eat them but-"

"GAAAAAAAHHHHHH!"

"-as you think it would kill you..."

Then, a few minutes later as he laments getting sauce on his fingers:

"You could use your fork instead of your fingers. Are you afraid they will contaminate your fork?"

"Whaddaya mean 'I'm afraid'?! IT WILL!" 

I can just envision all of my grandparents shaking their heads. I don't know what I ever did to deserve These People...

Go read the other butt post first. I’ll wait.

 Like I said, the Weather after the unfortunate plumbing incident was right back to Winter. While we were actually dealing with the mess it started off in the 50s and began slowly dropping. The rain had even held off. We got the electric eel returned along with all of its accessories (accoutrements? things? parts? Is that why they're just called "Auto Parts" stores- because nobody knows what else to call all that Stuff?), then it started to get nasty out again.

                                               

                                                

This one was taken on my iPhone with a black & white filter to showcase the ice. It didn't look the same in real life colors.

                                       

But Friday, out in the sunshine, man, it was a breathtaking sparkly walk. Dada kept reminding me to walk because I kept stopping in awe to take pictures!

While I don't love snow or ice, I sure do love glazed trees.

I'm sure these photo collections have nothing to do with my phone being full and not backing up. As Thing One says all the time, "I'm sure it's fine." 

More funny faces

The kids are, without fail, absolutely delighted when they open a brand new ice cream and it's "a butt one" so they were gleeful last night when I pried the lid off of this one.   

I rarely take a good selfie, so here's a funny one for y'all to laugh at. Happy hump day.

The block of cheese looks like he's drawling, "whoaaaa, duuuuude. What happened to you?"

My peeking cheese =D

Y’all are gonna think all i blog about is butts…

 You know how when a toilet flushes oddly you make a mental note of it whether or not you follow up on it. I should have followed up on it. This happened, right into our basement:

Disgusterous, as they say in Roald Dahl's The BFG.

                            Then this also happened: 

                     

My mother texted that we were “literally getting crap as the forecast”- see how prescient she is? Yes, Mom, but not in the way you were imagining…

Thankfully, God is so good that the Weather even held off until we were hosing all the segments off before we returned the rented auger thingie (can you tell I possess zero mechanical knowledge and vocabulary? This should have been obvious based on my previous post about removing the mower deck from the tractor). Liam was completely delighted that it was called an electric eel, haha!

                                      

PSA for today: always, always clean the hair out of your drain when you’re done bathing or showering. Granted, we also found Easter grass (which we don't even use) and small roots, but it looked like the main culprit was hair. 

Now we just gotta figure out the leaking into the basement part. We *think* it was only backwash from the overloaded drain but as there's no good way to check, we're not 100% sure. Someone needs to invent an endoscope for drains that people can rent!

Happy ending. Everything has been draining and flushing fine. We're making an appointment to have our septic tank drained just in case. Another PSA is your friendly reminder to not flush anything that doesn't come out of you yourself and TP. That's it. Flushable wipes aren't. Not when it comes to a septic system. Tampons also, sorry ladies, are a no-go. Thankfully our children are all old enough to be well past the "let's see if this fits down the toilet" stage as documented by Bill Cosby, to which my brother and I used to laugh ourselves silly.

All's well that ends well. Ha. Ha. Ha. 

A clean butt story, I promise

Maybe I watch too much NCIS, for I may be turning into Ducky who has a story for everything. "This poor robe reminds me..."

I mentioned to Liam this morning that he's had this robe for about a year, and that I'm pretty sure it was intact in the pictures here on the blog from last March 9 when he and Damon were having a picnic on the deck. I lamented the sad, sorry state of his robe today, telling him that his bony butt ruined it.

"Ha, Bony Behind- Bane of Clothes. Sounds like a SkyRim boss," is what he quips to me. I'd been teasing him lately, calling him Wind in His Hair like in Dances With Wolves, but I think I prefer Bony Behind- Bane of Clothes...

The story I thought of was from my third summer working at camp, so we're talking 1996. We had some wonderful summer staff from the Czech Republic, one of whom was named Henry. We had a fairly large staff that year- I'm guessing around thirty; we had a lot of those plastic inboxes stacked up inside the dining hall so we could leave each other maintenance requests, encouraging notes, candies, what have you. The staff lounge was in the basement of the dining hall so that a rotating handful of counselors could do morning devotions with the campers upstairs while the rest of us met downstairs for a staff meeting.

We're (mostly) all downstairs, waiting for any stragglers, when we hear a crash from upstairs. Several minutes later, Henry comes in sheepishly and laments, "I had a small accident with the mailboxes."

Bless his heart, he'd knocked some over and was trying, with his English as a second language, to read enough of the notes which spilled out to kingdom come to return them to their proper re-righted mailboxes, guessing where the candies went, and so forth. Poor, sweet guy was so contrite but the confession was so adorable in his accent that we've used that as a code phrase for small disasters ever since. (Henry, wherever you are now, I wish I could give you a huge squeeze and let you know how much we miss and love you! Sorry for throwing you under the bus.)

Hence, Liam has had a small accident with his robe.

It was no match for Bony Behind- Bane of Clothes. 

 

A dose of color

 

Am I the only one accosted during downward dog?

 Here's a snippet of my mornings. This is affectionately known as The Sitting Room. It nestles between the attic and our bedroom and bathroom. The brown door is a pocket door that slides into the wall. The sitting room and our bathroom have baseboard heaters, so we keep that door shut during the colder months for hopefully more efficient heating purposes.

The big red chair was brought up for my mastectomy recovery. I wouldn't have been able to sleep comfortably in bed with the surgery drains and all that so I slept in the chair for awhile. I voted to move it back downstairs but someone that I live with decided he liked it up there and so it has stayed. It is a nice napping spot, I have to say.

I was excited when Dada found the table and desk chair at an estate sale because I'd wanted somewhere to scrapbook since I have All The Things and needed a space to be able to lay it all out and think it through that the kids and/or dogs wouldn't mess with. That entire chest of drawers holds scrapbooking materials I inherited from my mother in law. Alas, making the time still is an issue. How much scrapbooking have I done? Exactly none, and that includes finishing the scrapbooking Bible study that I began before Damon was born. How old is Damon, you're wondering? He will be twelve in June. Twelve.

The bins, boxes, and bags are of various Christmas Stuff and even autumn stuff that is patiently waiting to make it back into the attic proper. It's just so cold in there that I hate to open that white door until it's a bit warmer, hence the traffic jam. Nana's Porch People, as I think of them, have been hanging out in a rocking chair in front of a tiny Christmas tree at the top of our stairs for months because they were damp when I brought them in and didn't want to stuff them in the attic before they'd dried out completely. Then they looked so chummy sitting together by the tree that I just left them there. However, this week they made it into The Sitting Room and now their cornstalk feet are encroaching on my yoga space.

You were wondering when I'd get back to the "morning" part; I didn't forget. I do 15 minutes of yoga the vast majority of mornings. I spread out my purple mat and follow along to the daily yoga videos on YouTube on my phone by SaraBethYoga. But today I noticed that wispy, tickly feet were touching me in the middle of my forward fold. It's a little distracting in an already tiny room that has been accumulating way too much Stuff. It's predicted to be 54 degrees tomorrow so I suppose I'll have to suck it up and do an attic run, putting bins and boxes and Nana's Porch People and my fun Christmas card mosaic away for the year. Well, okay, maybe I'll leave the mosaic because I like smiling at my friends.

So now you probably have a hilarious mental image of me in my pajamas doing Tree Pose, fending off Nana's Porch People, hiding out in my Sitting Room where there is less and less room to physically sit. I promise I'll clean, but I thought it was funny and thought maybe you would, too. Never any judgement coming from me about the state of anybody's house. Our big Christmas tree is still up!

And seriously, how does anybody do yoga in front of other people? I don't know if it's because I do it pre-breakfast and pre-coffee, but I am so gurgly and gassy and creaky and cracky that I sound like a box of Rice Krispies. AND I can't tell you how many times I've almost tipped over into the chair or how often I grab the wall. How many years do these people have to do this before they can do it confidently in front of other people? I'll stay in my Sitting Room, thank you very much. 

Into the belly…

 I made the mistake of asking Dada what his plans were for today. He didn’t have any, and now is perusing the auction and estate sale sites which means there will most likely be More Stuff entering our territory soon.

He’s gushing about a set of swords. I’m not kidding. “Look how cool those are. They look like they need new handles. That’d be a cool project.”

I staaaaaaaare at him. He finally feels it and tries to redirect my gaze to the image of the swords on his phone. “Here. You’re supposed to be looking here. Not at me, over here.”

“It does look like a cool project. Where are you going to put them before you start working on them and where are they going to go after you finish them and what about in the meantime?”

“They’ll go into the bellies of my enemies…”

I tackle and tickle, “this belly?! This belly? Right here!?”

“Ack, ack! No! Not that belly! I don’t like this game.”

The storm arrives

 Y'know that storm that caused mass chaos last week? Our version involved snow more than ice, thank goodness. Still not fun to dig out the driveway, deck, sidewalk to the front porch, and the forlorn fire hydrant. Poor little guy was almost completely buried!

Can you see the rainbow windsock blowing horizontally? 

From "Into the Woods", when Red Riding Hood nervously laments, "Mother told me to never stray from the path" and the baker exclaims, "the path has strayed from you!"

You can't tell because my arms aren't long enough to get all of me in the shot, but I'm knee deep or more in the snow from the road and the drifts. Our mailbox has been knocked off and for all the stomping around that I did, I still can't find it!

Dunes cresting.

That bird looks perturbed. He's some kind of heron and I'm so thankful he held still long enough for me to snap a picture of him pursuing his frozen fish dinner, haha! 

The north facing window in the boys' room.

Pirate cloud

 Last week Dada was in Colorado for work and Thing 1 went with to meet a bestie. For whatever reason the pictures I'd like to add of those meetings aren't loading, so use your imagination. They had a wonderful time and squeaked out of Colorado and back to Ohio not only before the storm hit, but just as the rain started turning to snow.

In preparation for the coming storm which was supposed to dump snow ranging from 8 to 20 inches according to folks on Twitter and various weather predictions, Dada recommended putting the tractor in the garage, facing out, ready to go.

Small problem(s). One, I've never driven the tractor. There are already three People Who I Live With who know how to do that, so I haven't felt the need to learn. Two, the mower deck was still attached and that clearly wouldn't be necessary. Three, I am not what I call "a farm girl" meaning my backing up skills aren't nearly what they would be if I was used to backing up a trailer filled with hay bales on a regular basis. I just don't. I don't even back into the garage in my own vehicle. 

Dada says over the phone, "the directions should be there." Yes, printed directions. My favorite. The light is failing and I have the boys bringing in wood while I attempt to figure out all the vocabulary I need to know in order to remove the mower deck. 

"These directions read like stereo instructions." -Beetlejuice  

If you saw a horrendous black cloud over our general area, that wasn't the Weather, not yet. That was my disposition and pirate-y talk and tears of rage as I tried to get the mower deck off. After more phone calls, poor Dada gave up on my mechanical skills and phoned a friend. Thank heavens for friends! Especially ones who Can Do Stuff.

Said friend came over, cheerful and competent, lamented the inadequacy of the printed directions (to which I felt incredibly gratified), declared a certain piece which I hadn't been able to budge "stuck" and proceeded to unstick it. He then trundled around and backed it into the garage for me. 

I paid him in cake.