Into the Cap!

Medium Fry came home from school today, almost quivering in excitement.  Even from across the street, I could see that she held a special find in her hand.

My fine feathered friend.

Holy snot, that's a big feather.  That sucker must be 15" long.  At least.  I often see hawks and vultures circling around out here, but I've yet to get a picture of any of these raptors.  Not one good enough to satisfy me, anyway.

I am not sure what bird left that feather behind in the school yard for Medium to find, but I am sure it's a big ol' sucker.

We've found feathers before, but never ones like this.

Pretty cool.

In Which Mommy and Daddy are Mean and Evil

There are things taped to the walls all over one end of my kitchen.

They stretch down the hall towards the den and up the stairs towards the main level of the house.

Most of them are words on 3"x5" cards.  Some of them are the twins' "heart words," the ones they should be able to read, spell, and write by the end of kindergarten.  A few are the twins' shapes/words that they need to recognize.  The majority of the rest are Large Fry's spelling word lists.  There's a piece of paper with our address and phone number on it.

And there's a small piece of paper, ripped from a to-do list tablet, with the words "Today's Chores" written on it in Hubby's hand.

The chores rotate, based on what needs to be done, and they're all age-appropriate: Empty the dishwasher.  Pick up trash from the floor.  Gather trash from the small trash cans around the house.  Clean your room.  Pick up the toy room.  Feed the kitties.  Bring down your dirty laundry.

Nothing too earth-shattering, and usually just one or two a day, with Sundays off.

Today, there are three: pick up trash, gather trash from trash cans, and clean up the toy room.  Tomorrow is trash day, so the first two are self-explanatory.  The toy room is a disaster and one of the cats expressed its displeasure with the state and peed on some play clothes.  Those got pitched in a hurry last night, and I cleaned up the mess that was left from that and put out some more moth balls (the cats hate them and won't pee near them; you're welcome for that new fact).  Plus, the kids had completely annexed one of my laundry baskets and loaded it with toys.  There are five people in this house.  I need all my laundry baskets!  (Medium had no clue what I was talking about when I told them to empty out my laundry basket.  "I don't see one!" she said.  That big green thing, honey.  It's for clothes.  "Ohhhhh.")

Last Wednesday, when my folks were here, one of the Fries took it upon herself to show the chores list to Gramma and explain it's stuff that they have to do...and how evil and mean their parents are for making them do chores.

Wrooooooooong person to complain to!

Gramma launched into conversation.  How she made Mommy and Daddy S and Auntie JS all do chores.  How, when we were older, if our rooms were left messy when we went away for summer camp, she would clean them to her standards, bag up everything that wasn't put away, and we'd have to ransom the bags back for a price...and how we could only ransom one bag at a time (and not one of our choosing), and couldn't get another until we'd put away the stuff in the first bag.  And how Auntie JS managed to lose her church shoes to those bags...and each shoe was in a different bag, and she'd had to wear sneakers with her dress one Sunday (I think it cost her $6-7 to get her shoes back, at $1 a bag).

"Do you know why Mommy and Daddy are having you do chores?" Gramma asked.

Large Fry came up with an explanation—we have had this conversation—and it was close to what I said.  I had explained that they needed to know how to do these things; when they're adults, they'll have to, 'cause Mommy isn't coming over to clean their houses when they're grownups.  And they won't know how unless we teach them, and the best way to learn in this case is by doing.

Gramma went on to regale the Fries with the types of jobs we had to do as we got older.

I think they got the picture that we're not asking them to do too much.

When I told Hubby how they had cried to Gramma about their chores, he just laughed, and said the same thing I did here: wrong person to complain to!

Incidentally, two of the three chores are done.  The Fries are grumpily in the toy room, pretending to clean.

Twice I've been tattled to.

About par for the course here.

TSME Day 4: Recap

Monday:

• Rain.  Pain.  (They usually go together for me.)
• Second-grade math homework: brutal (for both me AND Large Fry).
• Small Fry willingly took a nap after school.  Unusual.
• Lots of tears and missing of Daddy/Hubby.  Most of them were mine.

Tuesday:

• More rain.
• Lots of whining about not being able to play outside in the cool, damp, and wet.
• I slip on the kitchen floor (which is out to get me...really), fall, and am in such pain that I really hope I haven't broken anything.  "Mommy, are you okay?" I hear, times 3.  No.  I'm hurting and nearly crying.  Breaking bones while Hubby is at Summit is not something I wanted to become a tradition (I broke my right pinky toe last year).  And last year, my misadventure was on the day Hubby returned...not three days before.  Tuesday, you should be better to me!  (Nothing broken.  Still a bit sore in places, though.)
• Medium's rather shattering revelation about why she thinks XSIL joined the Army.
• Bro calls and I don't even hear him leave a message on the machine.  (We suspect the sudden increase in his calls—usually, he gets the machine because we're nowhere near our house phone—has to do with the decided lack of child support in the last six weeks, despite employment since February.  He's not paying, so clearly, the next best thing is phone calls.  He must not have yet received the same paperwork from Domestic Relations that I received last Saturday.)
• We have the very exciting chicken cacciatore in the crockpot recipe that I finally decided to cook.  Two-thirds of a hit among the kids.
• I keep giggling to myself and wanting to rename the chicken cacciatore as Revolutionary Chicken, but I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't get the joke.
• Dad texts to see if he can come out on Wednesday.

Wednesday:

• I make a fast run to Walmart on the first uncloudy day of the week (I'm in desperate need of a wrist brace), between dropping the kids off at school and having to be back at the school an hour later for a Child Support Team meeting.  (Large Fry is continuing to struggle in school, and we're trying to see if we can show cause for learning disability testing, which is coming up iffy because Large is showing improvement...just inconsistently.  Innyhoo, the CST was formed to explore our options.)  This is a follow-up meeting, and we determine we're going to do a full reevaluation on her speech issues.  We all strongly suspect there's more going on there, and her last full eval was four and a half years ago.
• Still achy, still have a headache, so it's home to nap after the meeting, and a quick series of texts around noon with Dad.  Gramma got jealous when she heard he'd be coming out here and I'd invited him to stay for dinner, so his departure got delayed until Gramma got home from Wednesday stamping and could come too.
• What to do for dinner...erm...hey, I have chicken tenderloins.  I have taco seasoning.  I have lots of pepper strips in the freezer.  Chicken fajitas, in the crockpot!  I get that started and make a list of the things I'll need from the store in order to complete dinner: sour cream, tortillas, that sort of thing.
• Off to the church office—Hubby's paycheck is in, and we can usually get away with depositing it on Wednesday even though it won't really hit the account until the check goes live on Thursday.  Gabbed with Wanda, the ministerial assistant, for far too long (but it was so much fun), which put me behind schedule.
• Walmart again.  Dinner supplies.  Lady in line in front of me writes a check and has old home week with the cashier.  Argh.  I get home right at 3:30 and hobble to the corner to wave at the kids and tell 'em to come on down (we started this after my surgery, so that I wouldn't have to walk so far—I tired so easily—and we've kept it up).
• Homework.
• Mom and Dad arrive.  Mom has brought more stuff for the Flat Stanley scrapbook she made, and we discuss the CST meeting from this morning.  As a retired 1st-grade teacher, and one who was very good at diagnosing learning disabilities in children,  Mom wants to know all about this stuff.  And not just because it's her granddaughter.
• Dinner.  Medium and Large both have two fajitas before I can get through one myself.
• Much begging for ice cream.  We trundle off to Rita's, which had gotten ixnayed after Large Fry's spring school concert, since it was so cold.  However, there are many tears when the Fries discover that Doc McStuffins is over by the time we get home, and they have to go right to bed.  Tears abound.
• At quarter to ten, Large comes downstairs to tell me that the stinkbug crawling out in the hallway upstairs is keeping her awake...in her bedroom.  I go up and dispatch said stinkbug to Davy Jones' locker, tuck Large back in, and go back downstairs.

Today:

• Quash hopes and smiles and happiness at breakfast by announcing that, no, Daddy does not come back today.
• Decide that eating ice cream for breakfast is not a bad idea at all when I'm feeling like this, and so I do just that after the Fries get to school.
• Pick up kids from school.  Homework.  Medium apparently had a run-in with her nemesis, He-Man Woman-Hater King (who has since been moved to a different table away from Medium,

  

  Large's map.

  and told to stay away from her), and she misses Daddy, and this caused issues with homework.
• We went Scottish for dinner tonight, and I took the kids to McDonald's.  Large was supposed to have ribbon dance tonight, so I figured I would take her there, see if the twins could stay, and scoot out to the grocery store yet again (out of milk this time).  Get to the church...no ribbon dance.  Okay, everybody to the store.
• Get home in time to once again miss Doc McStuffins and I allow them to watch Little Einsteins before bed.
• Large tells me that she's drawn me a map so that I know how to get to the airport tomorrow to pick up Daddy.  She proudly shows me the map she drew, complete with parking lot, on the Etch-a-Sketch.
• Large suddenly wants to do bedtime prayers with the twins.  Oooookay.  So we do.
• And now she won't sleep in her own bed.  Because there's a house centipede under part of her bed frame.  It scooted under there to hide this morning when she went to get something out of her dresser.  Naturally, it's still there now.  I'm sure it's not, but I go downstairs to get the dustbuster (handy for catching house centipedes, which move faster than I can squish) and a flashlight.  I do not find the house centipede.  However, I do find two empty bags of semi-sweet chocolate chips, one empty carton that held a dozen Cadbury Creme mini-eggs, a wrapper from a small Hershey's chocolate bunny (leftover from what went in the kids' baskets for Easter, and hidden up in the

  

  Stash remnants.

  pantry for Hubby and I to have) and a whole bunch of Dove strawberry-chocolate candy wrappers.  We have a rule about candy in our house: you don't get to have any without Mommy and/or Daddy's permission.  And sneaking candy gets you in trouble.  (In fact, all three Fries had snuck candy right before Easter and lost the ability to have any Easter candy for a whole week.  They had to sit there and look at their full baskets and not be able to have any goodies.)  I collect all of the evidence, tuck Large in, and warn her that I'm going to have to talk with Daddy about this, because she's in a LOT of trouble. Thank goodness he comes home tomorrow...  Why, yes, I am counting hours.  T-minus 20 hours right about now.
  

Um...yeah.

Last night, Medium Fry was kinda helping me get things set up for dinner.  As I was working, she was talking about how she didn't like homework sometimes.

Quelle surprise.

 "Would I have homework in college?"

As previously stipulated here, Medium's subject changes are not entirely unexpected.

I chuckled.  "Oh, yes, honey.  You'll have homework in college."

"Then what will I do aftewr college?"

"Probably get a job, based on what you studied."

"Owr join the Awrmy."

Oy.  I should not have been surprised, but I was, since XSIL is so infrequently discussed.  But I knew immediately that this was the person who Medium was thinking of.

"Well, just because you don't get a job doesn't mean you have to join the Army."

My middle child should come with laser sights on her conversations, I'm telling you.

"Why did Mommy XSIL join the Awrmy?"

Gulp.

"I don't know, honey."  Not entirely true, but not entirely false either...I know why she said she joined, and I know why I suspect she joined, and those two things do not match up.

"I know!"

She does?  Um, we don't talk about why XSIL joined for obvious reasons.

"Because she wanted to get away fwrom us!"

Yeah.

We've never said that around ANY of the kids, again, for obvious reasons.  We really try not to bad-mouth the bios around the kids.  Really try.  We save our venting for our friends.  After the kids are asleep, or when they're not around.

Why is it these things always crop up when Daddy is gone?

You don't need any further proof that Medium is one smart cookie, do you?

Going Quackers: TSME, Day Two

Small Fry came unglued tonight at bedtime, because she missed Daddy so much.  She started crying as I helped her finish brushing her teeth, and continued to cry throughout most of the bedtime tuck-in routine.  I hugged her and rubbed her back as she cried and I prayed and kicked out monsters.  And giants.  And wombats, dragons, and snakes.

Oh, it was heartbreaking.

I'm glad they all love their daddy so much, but I hate how much that deep love hurts when Daddy has to go away.  And there's nothing I can do to make it better.

After I sang their goodnight song, Medium popped up and handed me her duckie.  "Mommy, I don't want this duckie.  He needs a bath.  Can you take him and wash him?"

"Sure."  I took Duckie.  "I'll get you another one."

"I don't want another Duckie."

Good heavens, is she feverish?  "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I want to try sleeping without him."

"Okay," I said skeptically.  "Goodnight."

Well, every time Medium has tried to sleep without Duckie, I've ended up getting her a new one anyway.  When she was smaller, it was easier to keep their location hidden, but she now knows that I keep her ducks in a bureau cupboard in my bedroom.  I figured I would get one and leave it on the phone stand built into the end of the hallway by the twins' room, so she could get it if she wanted.

I had stuffed the desperately-in-need-of-a-bath Duckie in my pocket and closed the door.  And I remembered that Small had said around dinnertime that she had no more clean pants.  I was pulling jeans out of the twins' hamper when I heard Medium call me again.

"What, honey?"

"Could you come back hewre for a minute?"

I opened the door.

Medium was sitting up in bed, her pillow tossed to the side.  "I don't need another duckie 'cause I have fouwr."  Her little hands held up four duckies all squooshed together in a death grip.

I blinked.

"So you went into my room and got them all?"

Medium nodded.

"Can you pick one, and let me put the others away?  I don't want to lose them."

Medium shook her head.

"You don't need more than one, honey.  Pick one."

The tears starting to fill her eyes told me that she did need more than one.  "Can you pick two?"

Medium shook her head, the tears threatening to spill over.  She sniffled.  "I just want fouwr."

My poor girl.  Daddy's not here, and he's her best buddy, and Duckies are a poor substitute for Daddy.  I caved like a cheap suitcase.  "Okay.  You can have four tonight.  Tomorrow, can you pick one, and I'll put the others away?"

She nodded, and then tucked all four ducks safely under her pillow.

I collected Large Fry's jeans and tucked her in, and thought how sweet and cute it was that she wanted all her ducks except the filthy one, and I couldn't blame her on that count.  I'd seen that Duckie's wingtips in her nose and ears multiple times in the last few days.

The Single Mommy Experiment Rides Again

Hubby's en route to Florida tonight for his annual youth workers' summit.

Actually, at the moment he's stuck in Charlotte, where it's raining.  And apparently, the heaters they use for dehumidifying equipment on the planes are important.  And by important, I mean that they pulled the plane off the runway, deplaned all the passengers, and directed them to a new gate.  His anticipated 10:15 flight into Orlando now isn't scheduled to leave until 11:59...which is about ten minutes after he should have landed, had his flight been on time.

Isn't he lucky?

The paper chain
Hubby made, to help
count the days until
Daddy gets home.

Innyhoo, the Fries and I took him to the airport.  We went up to the observation deck and the Fries were delighted with watching a plane take off.  They were even more delighted that there was a McDonald's in the airport.  Medium Fry wanted to know if we were going to go on the elescator again.  We ate dinner together...and as soon as all of us girls took a potty break before heading home, the screws started loosening.

Everybody was okay during the first round of hugs.

Not so much the second, in which the twins came unglued.  Small Fry cried the whole way back to the van.  Medium Fry joined her as I started the engine.  I had to call Hubby before I even left the parking space in the garage.

Thank goodness for the set of CDs we got years ago that are different classical compilations.  Gentle Classics into the CD player, and in another fifteen minutes, at least the kids weren't crying anymore.  (Large Fry's "I'm sad in my heart, but I'm not crying" stoicism didn't help calm the twins.)  They all fell asleep on the drive home.

I sent them up to get ready for bed.  My mom called while I was waiting for them to finish getting ready.  In the twenty minutes between getting home and me getting upstairs to tuck them in, Large Fry had fallen asleep in her bed, glasses still on, lights blazing in her room...which I didn't discover until after I tucked in the twins.  (She woke in a panic when I took her glasses off, and I told her it was okay and to go back to sleep; I don't think she heard me sing or turn on her radio.)

Before I tucked the twins in, Medium wanted to know if Daddy had sent the pictures of the plane at the gate and himself in the plane that he'd promised.  I pulled up the photos Hubby had sent by text, and they smiled.

I went through their usual bedtime routine.  After I kicked out all the monsters, giants, wombats, dragons, and snakes, and Medium had sent the fwiendly fings to Gramma and Poppa's, I asked if we needed to send a few friendly things to Daddy's motel room.  Medium nodded, thumb already back in her mouth.

Then we needed to send some to Auntie Sis in Romania...and Great-Aunt Dee and Great-Uncle R, too, since it's very cool that they have a great aunt.

It's gonna be a long week.

I self-medicated with a couple of ice cream sandwiches.

Is it just me, or are those things about half the size they were when I was a kid?

Outside Just Now

The twin Fries are playing out back.  It's a gorgeous day here, so I'm sitting inside, with the door open, listening to them.

They've been racing.

Small: Medium, can you say, "On your mark, get set, go!"?

Medium: On your mark, get set, go, undewrweawr!

Yeah, I thought I'd heard wrong, too.

Until...

Medium: On your mark, get set, go, undewrweawr!