There’s a celebrity across the street putting up porch railings.  Perhaps a close relative? Cousin?

At least we know who Joaquin stole his new look from.

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Friday, February 20, 2009 – Last Friday

9:30-11:30am - Time Warner is scheduled to hook up the cable and internet.

1:26pm – Time Warner arrives.  Or the pothead in the creepy blue van that Time Warner has contracted the job out to arrives.  His laptop has the Southpark Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo for a screen saver, I shit you not.  Emblazoned on his screen are several turds in Santa hats with “Happy Holidays from Time Warner” written amongst them.   Is it February?  But really, the fact that Christmas was two months ago mattered significantly less than the dancing turds on the screen.

1:38pm - My sister inlaw announces that they need to head out (they had come by with the ultrasound pictures).  Caleb leans against his auntie looking up at her and wrinkles his brow.  “You have stuff up your nose.” I hide my face in shame.  “Well what is it?!” she begs the answer.  “Buuuggers!”  He’s mine, he’s all mine, wouldn’t pay the gypsies to take em.

3:52pm – Phone rings, it’s dad.  He’s calling for permission to rain check on helping with the move.  My mom informed him he should help.  But I know that we have plenty of help and he needs to go home (away from his apartment where he lives during the week).  He needs the mental and physical separation from the extreme stresses of his job.  Permission granted.  He asks what I’m doing.  I’m throwing stuff in boxes like it is going out of style.  I know there is a 24 foot truck inbound.  Caleb is…well…keeping himself entertained.  Okay, okay, you got me, I’m taking pictures instead of throwing stuff in boxes like I should be doing.

Here’s one of those sentences you never knew you’d say before you were a parent:  “Caleb you got stickers on the dryer when you were crawling in.  Please get them off.  And get out, I need to put the clothes in there!”  Yes I was still scrambling to do laundry in the ‘eleventh hour.’  I was determined we would move with all clean laundry in case I didn’t recover my washer and dryer for a week.  Scott squashed my determination by putting an immediate halt to the laundry campaign and loading the washer and dryer on the truck first.  And yes, it was nearly a week before that campaign resumed.

5:17pm – Everybody in the car, we’re going to Dominos.  No, wait, that was lunch Saturday.  Hardee’s!  Nope, breakfast Saturday.  McDonald’s, we’re going to McDonald’s.  Mom of the year, right here. *points to self*  One child covered in stickers wearing gigantic bear slippers in carseat, one Bat-a-raffe (giraffe dressed like a bat) in child’s lap.  I am digging through my purse for something when a little voice pipes up from the backseat.  “Mommy?  Where’s Charley’s penis?”  Thinking.  Thinking.  Ummmm. Stall tactics.  I forgot something in the house.  That’s it.  I forgot something.  I look up as Scott is opening the driver’s side door.  “Ask your dad!” I exclaim and slam the door to retrieve something from inside while congratulating myself on passing off that question.  Also, I may or may not have been laughing hysterically.

5:19pm – Back in the car.  “What’d ya say to that one?”  “I told him it was between his legs!  Where else would it be?”  OKAY.

5:26pm - She’s taking pictures in the drive through.  Why did she have to go back in to get her camera?  Why, why, why?  One day, when your son or daughter asks you the location of his/her lovey’s manhood sweetie, you’ll understand.

I’m embarrassing him already, he’s only three.  Hey buddy, I’m not the one wearing stickers and bear slippers with the bat-a-raffe

The people behind us probably think I’m nuts.  Oh well, we’re moving.  Who cares?

Don’t worry, the night got less and less funny as it went on.  Reality set in.  I’m a pack rat.  And a procrastinator.  Not a good combination.  We stayed up late loading 75% of the house into the truck.  The only pieces of furniture left were the beds when we got in them that night.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

8:37am - Hardee’s new country potatoes suck.  What were they thinking replacing hashbrowns with those???  I don’t want hacked up steak fry tidbits at 8:37am!  That’s all.

1:15pm – Caleb hugs and kisses the baby.  My heart explodes into a million pieces. Read more here.

2:52pm – BJ helped us move.  He needs to be on his way home by 3:15pm at the absolute latest, as he is playing the piano for a wedding at 5:00pm.  His car as at our old house.  Crap.  20 minutes away.  Crap, crap, crap.  Realize that we need to hightail it.

3:13pm – BJ tucks and rolls when we get to his car.

8:29pm - Caleb passes out with his little knee in the air (foot flat on the bed) he is so exhausted.

8:39pm - We are too tired to even hook up the computer ( the first time we’ve ever moved without hooking up the computer and TV on the same day).  Grab the laptop and cram the ethernet cable in the side.  Check email to reduce internet withdrawal jitters.  I was in the dark for 31 hours.  Scott made it 39.  So it’s only fair that he get first dibs.  I’m impatient anyhow.  Oh great internet, how I missed thee.

8:53pm - Lights out.  Scott slept on the couch, I slept on a mattress (no boxspring) in the floor in Caleb’s room.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

6:47am - Rise from the dead.  Or actually Caleb did.  Despite the early hour, I actually feel well rested and slept amazingly well on the floor.  Are you bored yet?  I’ll skip ahead.

Monday, February 23, 2009

10:16am - Trying to return to a sense of normalcy.  AKA we have no groceries, so instead of unpacking, we’ve taken a trip to “Law-mart,” as Caleb calls it, for provisions.

11:24am - We decided to pretend it is a vacation and wandered around the store for an hour.  Checking out now.  I’m digging through my wallet when I hear giggling.  Both the kid and the cashier.  From the corner of my eye, I see neon green Buzz Lightyear tighty whiteys waving through the air.  “Put your underwear back in my purse,” I hiss.  More giggling.  Another one of those sentences I never knew I’d say.  Cashier raises eyebrows.  I avoid eye contact.

11:31am - Take shopping cart to cart return while on the phone with Scott.  Walk slowly past and come almost in arm’s reach of a little bird perched on the carts before he flits away.  Tell Scott about it as I’m getting in the car.  Caleb asks, “Did he crap on you?”  Sigh. I’ve taught him well, haven’t I?  “No Caleb, he didn’t poop on me.”

12:59pm - I fell upside down in a box with my feet waving in the air while trying to write this diary and decided it was time to give it up.  Nah, just kidding, I hadja going though didn’t I?  It would have been funny.  I would have laughed.  No honestly, the times are approximate, I actually only made a few notes here and there on a text document.  It actually looks like a strange code that could only be deciphered by a mommy blogger.

PS. I think I found my wit.

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My mom sent me this absolutely hysterical email the other day.  I think I actually cried I laughed so hard.

A Harley

A bass boat

A grill

Horseshoes

A lawnmower

The weather station

A pet carrier

Hands down the most hilarious gingerbread house ever.

Wedding Reception

Guest bedrooms

A palm pilot

Powerball winner

Above mentioned winner on vacation

Yacht

A little rain never spoils a good day for fishin’

You where this shirt in your engagement picture…”If I throw a stick, will you leave?”

Wedding cake

Doghouse

A pickup car truck

This hunter is obviously a conversationalist.  He could have just had the deer’s head mounted, but that is so wasteful.  Why not make a doorbell?

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If you stick around long enough, I’ll teach ya how we do everything down here in Nascar country.

    …It ended up bein the Clampetts go to Maui!
    Cuz you get my family together and there is an empty K-mart somewhere!
    They showed up at the airport they were usin coolers and grocery bags for luggage
    The sky cap was like “which ones yours? the Samsonite?”
    They were like, “no we got the igloo with the duct tape on it and the 5 piggly wiggly bags right there!”…     -Jeff Foxworthy

So we’re moving.  You already know that.  Scott walked by when I was editing these pictures and said “Sure, sure.  Make fun of the rednecks.”  Nah, seriously we’re not rednecks.  I’ll show you more proof on that subject next post.  But moving is always cheaper in the south.  Seriously.  Proven fact.  Know why?  Because there’s a 95% chance most of your family lives within 20 miles of you.  And a 99% chance that most of them have trucks, trailers, and brute strength.  So when Scott’s boss offered up a truck to move our storage building contents?  Well we jumped right on it.  There’s no better price tag than “Free!”

Take a very old…

…very rusty…


truck

Drive it home…

Just don’t count on it cranking right back up.

As an added bonus, it is a dump truck, so we were able to just back up the the porch and dump everything out!  Okay okay, so we didn’t really do that.  But it would have been cool if we did!  And I definitely would have taken pictures and video.

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Make it stop.  This kid refuses to nap.  He will do anything but nap.  I had him in the bed for over three hours today and he never did just give it up and catch a snooze.  And he needs one so badly.  Right before bed, everything falls apart.  He turns into nightmare child, hitting and kicking and screaming.  Completely out of character.  Most nights I’m able to just take a deep breath and just let him scream (all while feeling like I want to rip my hair out).  Last night he had a meltdown because he couldn’t see the lines on the toilet paper to tear it evenly.  Tonight it was the process of getting undressed that sent him into a screaming wall pounding rage.  I just hate dealing with it because I know it could be avoided I guess.  He hasn’t napped in several days.  I’m now experiencing what it is like to have a kid who falls asleep in 15 minutes though (that’s new to me).  The night before last was a new moon, so he kept me up pretty much all night.  Then would not take a nap the next day.

We’ve been house hunting hard.  Things are all up in the air right now.  It is all exhausting me.  Meanwhile, our current house is falling apart.  The ceiling is leaking, and not far from falling in.  Every time it rains, we have to blockade off the area with Caleb’s  Cranium Fort stuff.  Nice huh?  Then there’s the kitchen sink.  It also leaks.  I took a shower yesterday morning, then got Caleb a bath about an hour later.  Several hours after that, I started a load of laundry.  No harm right?  Yeah, not until I was crawling behind Caleb’s train chasing it with a police car and he called out “River Mommy!  A river!”  I look in front of us and sure enough, there is a river flowing out of the cabinet below the sink halfway across the kitchen already.  I saw the laundry soap residue in the sink.  So I headed to the laundry closet.  It has overflowed the drain and there is another gallon or two of water under the washer.  Super.  Oops, gotta pee.  Haha, not done yet.  Yep, both toilets overflowed and the tub is full of brown water and toilet paper.  AWESOME!!  Did I mention that this already has already happened in the eight short months that we’ve lived here?  Tree roots are growing into the pipe and they stop it completely up every six months.  I was told by the last plumber that he had been here several times for the same problem.  They have yet to just run a new drain line further from the huge tree.  Understand why we’re moving again?  Good.

And I almost forgot.  Conveniently, our dog slipped his collar over his head and took off at some point last night.  The shelter finally picked him up mid afternoon about five miles away.  $100 we didn’t have.  Here ya go.  Can I wash dog bowls or something?  Seriously the last thing we needed right now.  So he’s back home from his grand adventure, complete with a microchip installed (required, so that next time they can just call you to come pay your fines and get your dog back).

Anyway, I’m off to clean up the mayhem that has taken place during the last two days of plumbing nightmare.  Like I said, sleep is for the weak, no matter how exhausted you are, there’s always more to do.  Ahhhhh!  *runs away screaming waving arms in the air*

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Pre-reading quiz: What makes this post different from anything I’ve ever posted, and has a specific functionality in this post?

I was standing here by the computer tonight looking at something Scott was doing.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Caleb shoot down the hall to the bathroom.  I actually thought to myself how nice it is once kids gain that big step of independence.  You don’t even have to take them to the bathroom, they can pretty much get it done themselves other than a few buttons and zippers here and there.

All of a sudden a wail pierced the silence.  I headed down the hall and in the ten or so steps it took me to reach the bathroom, Caleb was screaming and tears were streaming.  I thought surely he had slammed his finger or some other…ahem…extremity in the toilet seat.  But I hadn’t heard a thing.  I kept asking what was wrong and he could even speak.  He just pointed at the toilet and continued wailing like a banshee with his pants around his ankles.  Scott was on my heels to see what all the commotion was about.  He kept asking what was wrong as well.  We could get no words from the bright red tear stained face.

About that time, I stepped back a bit for a better look in the toilet…the right angle if you will.  You know, to see back in the bowels.  That’s when I saw it.  A silver bumper frowning at me.  License plate number Oscar-Foxtrot-Papa-8-5-7.  The 53 emblazoned upside down on the white paint with red and blue racing stripes fading into the deep, dark porcelain abyss.  I let out a huff as I pulled up my sleeve.  Yes that’s right folks, I plunged my arm over wrist deep down into the yellow water for retrieval.  You want me to make you some sandwiches?

Scott hadn’t been able to see what was wrong until my hand emerged with the little love bug.  Who obviously I must love dearly.  Almost as much as my own little love bug who accidentally dropped Herbie down there.  Scott scooted by me in our painfully small bathroom to comfort the still-wailing child.  I began running hot water over Herbie and my hand.  At that point, I started to lose it.  It is just cruel to laugh at a three year old who is obviously upset beyond words, so I turned my head and hid my face as I stifled my laughter.  Within thirty seconds or so, his face had returned to a pale shade and I lost it.  Mine turned bright red and tears welled up in my eyes as I laughed hysterically.  By that time, Caleb found the humor in the situation also after a little reassurance that Herbie was okay, had not been flushed and would not have to be thrown away (like the paci that landed in the toilet this summer).

PS I honestly would have taken a picture had he not been so upset.  You probably can’t decide whether to say “Aaaw man!” or “Thank God!”

Answer to the quiz: I never use capital letters in the title with the exception of “I.”  They were used in this post in combination with the phonetic alphabet to write Herbie in the john.

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Merry Christmas

Love,
The Cats

Warning, this picture will un-blur on mouse-over. I’m giving you an option not to see the carnage!  It isn’t horrible per say.  Mainly becaue I didn’t include the head in the picture.  It was….up on the porch…on the doormat of course.


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What would Rachel do?

I was pulling a huge old tarp into our storage building.  It has been sitting in the grass for a while, in the spirit of not killing any more grass, I dragged it in there.  No way I was folding it, for all the creatures living underneath.  So as I was trying to shove it into a corner, I see a snake that was drug in with the tarp.  A baby snake.  Probably all of three inches long, and could have been confused with an earthworm had he not been squiggling in a snake pattern quickly trying to get away.  He went under a stroller that is in there.  When I moved the stroller he was coiled up.

So what did I do?

a.) picked it up and tossed it out of the building

b.) left him where he was to make a home in our storage building so that I could find a 10 foot snake next time I entered

c.) brought him inside for a pet

d.) jumped up in the seat of the lawn mower, then balanced one foot on the lawn mower tire and the other on a table and used a rake to gently encourage him to make his way out of the building with intermittent shrieks.  Only to poke at him with a stick a few minutes later.

You tell me.

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I’ve spent much of the last week feeling guilty for not writing on top of everything else.  I came down with some ailment yesterday.  Caleb is having a hard day because I know he senses all the stress in me.  We have basically lost our only source of income at the worst possible time of the year, with the holidays around the corner.  And the worst possible time, due to the state of the economy right now.  It isn’t in stone yet, but not far from it.  I honestly kind of think they are trying to make Scott quit.  Which I suppose is the thanks he gets for carrying his boss’s business by himself 2+ years out of the last three.  Cheers.  I’ll drink to that.

I suppose I’m just excusing myself for a couple days trying to get my thoughts in order and get well.  I’m by no means gone, and reachable by email…just need a few days to figure out where Christmas is going to come from….or our rent.

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Just in case you needed to know, I’ve taken six thousand two hundred and thirteen photos.  Since the beginning of April.  This year.  That’s all.

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