Reader. Writer. Thinker. Homeschooler. Insomniac.
Really, ask yourself…what could be worse than stinky water. I didn’t think it could get any worse than what my husband has been cheerfully describing as “POOP-WATER SHOWERS” ever since we moved into this little country house. But I was wrong. It can get worse. It really can. You want to know what’s worse than POOPY-SMELLING WATER?
NO WATER AT ALL!
Time to call the landlord.
especially when you’ve just spent two unsuccessful hours trying to convert and upload audio files to the kids’ FP3 players.
Dear Easter Bunny,
I’ve got your kid brother, Reggie, here buried in my back yard. If you ever want to see him again, you’ll leave a year’s supply of chocolate bunnies at my house tonight. And I’m not talking about the el-cheapo hollow chocolate bunnies you’ve been getting away with these past few years. I want some good old fashioned SOLID milk-chocolate chocolate bunnies, and I want them TONIGHT. Do not contact Bugs Bunny, Roger Rabbit, or the authorities; they can’t help you, and they certainly can’t help Reggie. I’ve got 16 acres of farmland back here, and Reggie ain’t that big. They’ll never find him. Never.
I am not bluffing. I am a nearly-40 homeschooling mom living with a 3-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a husband who turns every single sentence he utters into a thrash/80′s-glam-band heavy metal song. Remember what I said: 365 solid chocolate bunnies, or Reggie goes on the grill.
Looking forward to your visit. We’ll leave out some nice organic carrots.
Best regards,
RegularMom
PS: The girls said to remind you not to forget the PURPLE PEEPS.
Oh, gee….Look what Grandma sent the girls for Easter. Two sets of this:
It’s the gift that keeps on giving: guaranteed to please the girls and drive me crazy!
I love my mother-in-law, really I do, even in spite of the fact that she accidentally let it slip out last year that if I were to die of lung cancer, it wouldn’t be too tragic because then THE GIRLS WOULD BE ALL HERS!
I know, I know, she didn’t really mean it THAT way.
And she’s certainly never tried to kill me….But then she sends us stuff like this, and I start to wonder if maybe she isn’t implementing some sort of ancient secret torture method she discovered while travelling in Tibet, and this is just one little part of her diabolical plan to render me insane and have me institutionalized and thus get her hands on my kids because even though she says to my face that she thinks I’m a good mother, I am clearly not doing nearly as good a job as she would. I am, after all, HOMESCHOOLING. And homeschooling leads to all sorts of problems, the first of which is, of course, a messy house and a floor that you cannot eat off of because there’s dirt on it. GASP!!!!
But, I digress.
I used to think that there could be nothing smaller than Polly Pocket stuff. But I was wrong. There’s this stuff. Two sets of it. My Easter weekend plans are now solid: I will spend the weekend helping the girls dress these microscopic dolls and hunting under furniture for stray miniscule shoes.
To give you an idea of what I’m up against:
There are now about a dozen pairs of these little shoes scattered on the floor. And my 6-year-old just came up to me and asked if the plastic will melt if left near a lightbulb. When I said YES, she gasped in horror and dashed away to her bedroom. GREAT.
Did you notice up in that first photo that one of the blue shoes is already missing? I’m screwed.
Here’s a closeup of the bunnies:
Is it just me, or do those little bunny-smiles look more like SINISTER, EVIL GRINS? The kind that say: Heh, heh, heh! Now I’ve got you, my pretty!!! And your little blue shoe, too!
Happy Easter, everyone.
6-year old: “I’m gonna be the first space traveller to ever make it to Jupiter!”
Dad: “Really? Well, you’d better get going. It’s gonna take you a long time.”
6-year-old: Gives Dad a blank look.
Dad: “Just kidding….Can I go with you?”
6-year-old (gently, as if she realizes that her father is aging and easily crushed): “I said I was going to be the first.”
at lunchtime, you call out to your children who are playing in the other room: “Hey you guys! How do you want your sandwiches cut?!” and instead of answering something simple like “squares” or “triangles”, they yell back:
“THE GREAT PYRAMID, PLEASE!!!”
And then you take a picture of it to put in your blog, and after you upload it, you stare at it for a while and realize that if you cut the two smaller triangles one more time each, you’d have even more lesser pyramids to place around the large triangle that represents the Great Pyramid which would create a much better scale and thus render the whole thing Much More Realistic.
I still haven’t figured out how to make the grapes into the Sphinx, but I haven’t entirely given up on it yet.
I’m not sure what to say about the dinosaurs, but it’s kinda fun having them there, dontcha think?
Arts & Letters Daily has a link to an article entitled “Switched On Book: Is the Sony Reader the Library of the Future?” by David Skinner that I find intriguing and a bit depressing, to tell the truth. Briefly, it’s a review of the new electronic book reader that Sony’s come up with, and now that Sony’s done it, others will follow, and pretty soon, maybe when my grandchildren start reading, paper books will be nearly obsolete.
I find this to be disturbing, and bordering on sacreligious.
Imagine it: to never hold an actual book in your hand again. To never browse through shelves or tables of books, to never flip open the cover and read the jacket to see if you’re willing to risk something new.
On this really cool homeschooling message board I go to a lot we recently reminisced about LPs. About actual vinyl records and about how it was to float into music stores on Saturday afternoons and flip through un-shrinkwrapped albums stored in square boxes (or dusty milk crates, if the store was second-hand, and there was nothing FINER than second-hand record stores!) and find some obscure gem. Now we download our music instantly. And there’s good in that, don’t get me wrong. But we lose a little bit too.
I’m sitting here trying to imagine that happening with books, and it makes me a little bit nauseous.
Of course, the technology is years away from being good enough to actually replace books forever. There are all sorts of glitches that need working out, not to mention that they cost something like $350. That’s like paying $350 to simply walk through the door of a Barnes & Noble to see what they’ve got. Uh…no thanks.
But I’ve already begun my own little journey into purely electronic reading. I get all my news via electronic services. I don’t take the local paper anymore, nor do I subscribe to any magazines. Right now, this is mostly a cost issue. I’m at a point financially where I can’t afford subscriptions. But I also have frequently told myself and others that I’m glad to not have the mess and clutter of newspapers and such to pick up along with all the toys and clothes and junk that accumulates in this little house. (I’m convinced, by the way, that the stuffed animals are BREEDING in here! There’s no other possible explanation for the vast numbers of stuffed animals I’m having to deal with.) I’ve also told myself that I just don’t have time to read the paper anymore. And truthfully, right now, I don’t.
But now I’m remembering those Sunday mornings back in my grade school days, before cable television. When my mom would drive us out to pick up the paper and maybe some doughnuts. We’d always get the local paper, and the New York Times for my mom. Always, the Sunday Times. My sister and I preferred the local papers because of the funnies. The funnies were in color on Sundays, and we’d fight over who got the first page — the one with Peanuts at the top — first. We’d spread the funnies out all over the livingroom floor and just stretch out on top of them. We’d pour over the Sunday papers for a good part of the day, well past lunch time. And I just don’t remember the papers ever being a clutter problem.
As soon as I can afford it, I’m gonna subscribe to the paper. How in the world could I deny this to my own daughters?
As for the Sony Reader…I hope it takes EONS to catch on. I will continue to take my books the old fashioned way: dogeared and dusty, with little crumbs of whatever I’ve been eating crushed into the binding, and stacked high — as high as it takes.
Doing my part to show the world that the home- schooling community is more than just a bunch of crazy fundamentalists. There's plain old regular crazy people who homeschool, too. Like me.
Email me:
regular_mom at yahoo dot com
