Stumbling Towards Perfect

Have you ever lived in a house that is in a constant state of remodeling? The sounds of cutting wood until 10 o'clock at night, even though you've been trying to get the kids to bed for hours. Having to wear shoes when you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night because you don't want to step on an errant nail. Drywall dust everywhere. You sit happy, breathing deeply and decompressing for a few weeks until 'lo and behold, another project begins. More pounding and cutting, more nails and slivers, more dishes in the bathroom linen closet because your kitchen is currently destroyed. More drywall dust. I'm thinking parenting is like that. A constant state of improvements and fixes and adjustments and learning how to make coffee in the bathroom sink. A constant dusting the drifting through the air until it decides to settle. Then you see it, take a deep breath and do what needs to get done... clean it up. It's frustrating and annoying and exhaus...

I've been super busy making sure Big V installs the toilet (which he has), reading a ton of books (which I have) and fighting cancer through my just 99 cents  blog. [ HUGE shout out to everyone who has donated already! For some reason it's not letting me update names/amounts...but I will prevail! I promise!] Because I believe that if everyone donated just 99 cents we'd have a shit ton of money that could actually make a difference.   Really. Think about it. I have 654 friends on Facebook. If they all donated just 99 cents, we'd have $647.46 to donate to cancer research. About 805,000 attended Milwaukee's Summerfest this year. If all of them had donated just 99 cents, we'd have $796,950 to donate to cancer research. The population of the fictional town of Twin Peaks was 5,120... if they'd all donate just 99 cents, we'd have $5,068.80 to donate. Of course, if we went off the "typo" on the sign in the series that read Population 51,201, we...

Last night, at 8 o'clock pm, as I was attempting to get the toddler to sleep, Big V decided to rip out the toilet in our only functioning bathroom. Because 5 years ago I had walked out of that same bathroom and, after sitting on that same toilet, announced that it was wobbly and probably would need to be re-set. Of course, I had mentioned the wobbliness, the rocking, the fact our toilet could perform a complete 180-degree swivel and how there was no longer any trace of the caulk that once sealed the base of the toilet at the floor which meant I was now getting a puddle dripped on to my washing machine in the basement below every single time one of the kids took a bath and created their oh so fun tidal wave storms, perhaps once or twice, or roughly 8,762 times throughout the past 5 years. But he picked 8pm on a Thursday. Armed with the knowledge that all local hardware stores were closed for the evening and there was a 99.3% chance he wouldn't have all the pa...

This morning, at the only store open on my way to work, the normally crabby Check Out Clerk again, robotically scanned my items: much needed case of Coke (for the caffiene), much needed bag of PopChips (for the crunch), and much need small bag of M&M's (for the PMSing beast getting ready to rage inside my body). Except this time, instead of heavily sighing before she rattled off the total in sales, she changed things up. Today, as I was rummaging through my purse for my debit card (mostly as an excuse to avoid eye contact) she said to me " You are just the cutest pregnant girl I've ever seen !" And I looked around to see who she was talking to because I. am. not. pregnant. And she went on, " Just look at that cute little baby belly! You know, I've always hated girls like you - that look so cute pregnant. You an't even tell you're pregnant from the back. Me, well, I ballooned up so big no one could tell if the baby was coming out of my belly or...

Last night, Big V and I went to a concert. A real grown-up concert at the World's Largest Music Festival called Summerfest  in Milwaukee, WI. I actually thought we'd be the youngest ones there - but we weren't! (We were close to being the youngest ones there, of course. But we weren't.) It was a lot of fun to yell out " we weren't even born yet !" when Mr. Diamond would introduce a song he wrote/performed back in 1960-something. Anyway, since The Jazz Singer's in high demand we could only afford the bleacher seats. Bleacher seats (1) have no back, and (2) have no defined sides so Big V was all  don't get all weird if you accidently touch someone. And I was all what are you even talking about? It's not going to be that bad...  That's Big V's funky assailant knee on the right. It tried to kill him.   ... but, my god, it was . It was VERY bad. It's accepted ettiquette to put your knees on either side of the person sitti...

I came home last night and found Big V re-enacting his favorite Silence of the Lambs scene in our garage. It was making me nervous seeing him so close to the edge of our Body Dungeon, or cistern, if you want to be politically correct about it. Then he told me that he had already been inside the pit because there was a hole in the middle of the pit floor and he wanted to see how deep it really was. Because the pit itself is pretty deep, but the hole in its dirt floor might possibly go all the way to the center of the earth which would totally explain the amount of earwigs, iron and nickel, and the lack of Chinese at our house. Because the antipodal point of my house is somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean between South Africa and Australia and I don't think there's a lot of Chinese floating around that area of the ocean waiting to be sucked into Wisconsin through a hole. I always thought if I dug a hole I could dig all the to China. Apparently only if I l...

My grandmother, Johanna, is 94 years old. She'll be 95 in January. My grandfather, Henry, passed away about 14 or 15 years ago. He was the bomb-diggity of all Grandpa's. Trust me on this. Together, Henry and Johanna have 129 descendants. At least that's how many I've found to date. The oldest one is 73 years old. The youngest, not yet three months. Two are no longer with us: my Uncle Ron, and my cousin Cathy's son, David. It's interesting to note (at least to me) that all six of my Uncle Ron's children have names that begin with R. I also think it's interesting that all 8 female descendants of my Uncle Lester have names that end in "y." This is my grandmother when she turned 90 checking out this AWESOME family tree my cousins Kelly & Tracy made. Kelly is also a teacher. I think that's obvious from the tree. My grandma is also the bomb-diggity of all grandmothers. Trust me on this. I actually didn't used to think so...