Four Hours at Chuck E. Cheese’s. 2/366

You guys. I am not even making this up. I made sure to check in on Facebook when we got there and when we left, so ya know I ain’t lyin’ to ya. WE SPENT FOUR HOURS AT CHUCK E. CHEESE’S. And do you know, in that entire time, the real live Chuck E. only came out ONCE? What about all those signs saying he makes an appearance every hour on the :30? Bullshit. It’s all lies. We were there so long, an employee actually did a double take as we were leaving, and said, “You guys are STILL HERE? Wow, you’ve got stamina.”

Chuck E. Cheese's

Paul dispensed tokens to each child four at a time, so they couldn’t do too much damage too quickly, or lose their entire fortune in the sky tubes. The kids ran around, insane, like you do at Chuck E. Cheese, only reappearing at our table when they needed more tokens. Paul and I had a lovely time, eating salad and hot wings, and planning out our whole year. Over many hours, we discussed what home improvements we want to do this winter, whether or not Extreme Couponing pays off (hint: he’s obsessed), and the logistics of driving to California in July with all seven of us in one vehicle. We made plans. We had deep conversations. We’re used to blocking out the sounds of screaming children, after all, so it was almost like we were having a little date! While we were there, Mallory schooled Paul on proper cup stacking techniques. Did you know they do cup stacking in gym class nowadays? True story.

Anyway, Mallory showed Paul how to do it, and he did pretty well.

But you might find this video more entertaining – Paul and me trying to figure out the zoom on my iPhone. We sound like those old grandparents trying to use their webcam!

I can’t believe how often I say this.

My kids have a real problem lately, and I’m sure your kids are suffering from the same issue – they can’t seem to find their listening ears. Today is the 3rd full day of summer break (Tuesday was a half day) and it feels like all I’ve done is bitch at my kids. It’s weird how as soon as they collect themselves into a group, they all lose their damned minds. I know it’s not just them – I’ve noticed it with my teenager, as well. Get her around her friends, and all of a sudden, I’m getting a call from her in detention. Anyway. My little ones are tearing this place up, and making mommy crrrrrazy. Tonight, I had to laugh, because I couldn’t believe just how often I was saying the same things, over and over again. Here’s a short list.

The Top 10 Things I’ve Said to My Children This Week.

10. The couch is not a trampoline!
9. I don’t care if she hit you first, you don’t put your hands on other people.
8. Who forgot to flush?
7. You don’t need to get a clean cup every time you want a drink.
6. I’m RIGHT HERE! You don’t need to yell for me to hear you.
5. Dirty clothes go in the hamper.
4. Bandaids are for owies that are bleeding.
3. Well, that’s what happens to you when you run around all crazy in the house/play on the stairs/leave your cookie on the table.
2. You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.

and, weirdly, the #1 thing I’ve said to my kids…

1. Why are you naked??

I think they’ve been watching too much of Gibby on iCarly. They think every occasion is an opportunity to take their clothes off!

P.S. God, I’m such a MOM. Somebody needs to swoop in and get me to a patio bar with giant margaritas, stat.

Why My Blog is Boring.

I have nothing to write about. Here’s why.

  1. My husband doesn’t like me sharing our bidness.
  2. I’ve been burned about 2,437 times because something I wrote here was misconstrued or taken ridiculously out of context.
  3. It freaks me out knowing that people spend hours going through my archives, after landing here from searches for “kids in the bathtub.”
  4. After writing here for ten years, most of you pretty much know exactly who and what I’m writing about, even if I try to be vague or use catchy nicknames. Booooo.
  5. I used to be able to count on one hand the number of folks I know in real life who read my blog. That number has increased exponentially since I friended half my neighborhood on Facebook.
  6. There’s just not that much to say about sitting on my ass at home with four little kids. Guess what: we made pizza! We went to the park! We went to Tokyo Joes! We got out the Play-Doh! We painted our toenails! We tipped over every piece of furniture in the living room searching for lost quarters! We snuck into sissie’s room and ate her Easter candy and Silly String’d her Alice in Wonderland poster! We colored with Sharpies on the coffee table! We drove Mommy to drink! Yay! Lather, rinse, repeat.
  7. You’re probably well aware that it snows in Colorado during the springtime, and that the weather patterns here are a little bit on the ridiculous side. I’ve drilled that into you, right? Yes? Okay, we’re good. Did I mention it’s snowing today? No? But you could have guessed that, based on the fact that it’s April and I’ve updated my blog? Okay.
  8. I think I’ve exhausted the topic of INSANE TEENAGERS. This feels like a horse I’ve beaten to death over and over. It’s like a zombie horse now. A zombie horse wearing skinny jeans, rolling its eyes at me, with a sparkly purple bow in its mane.
  9. My kids have been off track from school and home with me for a week and a half now, and we still have WEEKS yet to go. They’re sucking up my brain cells with their Miley Cyrus songs and unending Spongebob episodes and endless bickering. I understand what the Grinch was going through, when he bitched about the noise, noise, noise, NOISE! They were once my muses, but now they’re siphoning away all my inspiration.

Interesting content scheduled to return soon. I hope.

Oh, shut UP already!

I went to the dentist on Friday. (Eeek! Friday the 13th! What a day for a dentist appointment, huh?) While I was off getting my teeth cleaned and polished and x-rayed and all of that, Paul took the little girls to lunch at Hooters with some of his buddies. I’m actually bummed I didn’t get to join them. Lunch at Hooters sounds a lot better than a cleaning!

While I was at the dentist’s office, reclining in the chair with my mouth open, I realized something I never much noticed before. Hygienists always talk your ear off while you’re not in a position to say anything back to them. Why do they do that? I was annoyed a little bit already because as soon as I told her I had 2 sets of twins, she brought up “Octo Mom” – the gal who just gave birth to octuplets, after she already had six at home. Aside: this is something that happens all the time. Whenever someone we meet finds out we have multiple multiples, they almost always make a comment about either Jon & Kate Plus Eight or some evil twins they saw once on Supernanny. It’s happened so many times, I’ve come to expect it. And since the news first broke of this batshit crazy woman and her litter of children, people keep reporting to me the latest information, like it affects me in some way. Whatever!

ANYWAY. This hygienist was going on and on about Octo Mom and related to me that she and a friend had an argument about the situation, because her friend apparently thinks rationally and said that Octo Mom was a nut. Hygienist got on her soapbox to friend, saying that this is AMERICA, and we can do whatever we want in America, and if she wants to have two dozen children, it’s her God-given right as an American, and nobody should tell her what to do. After all, she said, her grandmother had fifteen children and nobody told HER anything about it. She didn’t mention whether her grandmother had them all at once via fertility treatments, but I imagine that was not the case. This has been, so far, the most inane notion I’ve heard about Octo Mom: that we should support her choice because WE’RE ALL AMERICANS. And all I could do was roll my eyes until I almost hurt myself.

Besides crazy hygienist lady, my appointment went well. No cavities! Yay!

Unplugged.

It’s feeling weird, really. Over the past ten years, I’ve been at various times a full time college student, a full time employee, a full time mommy (toddler twins and newborn twins? Yeah, that’s pretty damned “full time”) and now, finally, I should be at a place where I can get more done. I should be able to find plenty of time to write. I should be able to do more freelance stuff. But instead, I find myself nearly disconnected from the ‘net. Even during those early, crazy days of having babies at home, I still got online to talk to my mommy friends. But not now! I can’t manage to catch my own ass, and when I find myself with some free time, I don’t want to be online. I want to be outside in the sunshine, listening to my kids bicker with one another. I want to lie on the living room floor while they drive cars up over my head and under my knees.

I’ve got so much on my mind lately that I can’t seem to get anything DONE, though. I have a to-do list a mile long, and I’m walking around in a daze. The house is a pit. The kids are wearing crazy mismatched clothes. I keep getting distracted by stuff, so I have a thousand half-finished projects all over the place. And I’m seriously getting to the point where I want to throw a lit match at my laundry room. Even if I ever manage to get all this laundry done, I’ll NEVER get it put away.

I think a lot of this is because the kids are off track from school. Do you have any idea how hard it is just to take a freakin’ SHOWER with all the kids home? Unless I lock them in the bathroom with me, they’ll be outside walking across the back fence while I’m conditioning. It’s nutty. I’m not sure which is the biggest challenge, having a child with autism or having four children who are very close in age. In both situations, the kids feed off the bad behavior and do things as a group that they would NEVER do individually.

Another week. Then I can find a new excuse for why I can’t get anything done.

Just trying to catch my own ass, here.

Everything always happens at once. Ever notice that? Our lives are very all-or-nothing. We’re bored as shit, sitting around the house, plagued by cabin fever, dying for something to do. Or, we’re scrambling to find a babysitter because both of us have things going on we can’t get out of, and somebody needs to drop off Kayley across town here and pick her up later there, and the kids have appointments, and something breaks and needs to be repaired right fucking now, and the van has a dead battery, and someone set fire to the drapes. Okay, that last thing was made up. But I think you get the idea.

Currently, we’re in the Ridiculously Overscheduled phase. I’m done with the twin club sale, THANK GOD. I still need to reprice a bunch of stuff that didn’t sell before I drag it all back down to the basement, though, because I know I won’t have time to do it come March. I have a bunch of doctor’s appointments, the kids have appointments for physicals, Kayley’s got play practice (that is, until she shoots herself in the foot by being a slacker with her grades, and I ground her from being in the play), she’s in a babysitter course that runs for two days, Paul’s going to classes 16 hours a week all month to prepare for the PE exam, and we think we have a renter for the townhouse, but we need to process his paperwork and handle all of that nonsense.

I’m rebelling against doing stuff online, because…I have no idea why. I think I just need some measure of control in my life that is tangible and which I can show to other people, like, WOW. LOOK AT MY CLEAN FUCKING KITCHEN. IS IT NOT AMAZING. Rather than, WOW. LOOK AT ALL MY BLOG COMMENTS! Seriously, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret here. My house is FAIRLY clean. It could always look better. But I thought I’d magically be able to do EVERYTHING if I stepped away from the internet for a moment. I’m finding, though, that that just isn’t the case. Apparently, I STILL get behind on the laundry, even if I’m not updating Twitter every time I add the fabric softener.

Still, I’m trying. I’m feeling well. Usually, phases like this overwhelm the shit out of me, and I often end up spiraling into depression. I’m trying to nip that in the bud, because it’s just getting OLD. I’ve discovered that if I evict GUILT from my brain, depression moves out along with it. And I feel far less guilty about being behind on the laundry and having toys all over the floor when I know in my heart that I really have worked at it throughout the day, and that I haven’t pissed away the day on MySpace.

After my post yesterday, (and the lack of comments, ahem) I worried a little that people might think I was just giving bloggersville the finger. Not the case. You know I can’t quit you. I just wanted to let you know where my head is with all of it, though. I think it’s all going to be okay.

I’m SUPERneglectfulMOM!

This has been a quick week. Monday, I had my twin club meeting. Wednesday, I went to a doctor’s appointment and then met my husband for lunch, and on Wednesday night, the two of us had an appointment across town at 8. (Who sets up appointments at EIGHT pm? Seriously?) Last night, I was feeling really bad – I always think I’m about to die of a heart attack for a little while, and then realize it’s my gallbladder acting up. So I went to bed early and made Paul and Kayley put the little ones down at bedtime. And tonight, I’m going to a Mile High Mamas event. And of course, last weekend, we had Taylor’s birthday party, Will’s inauguration as the president of the Denver Board of Realtors, and the Poison concert. And last week, I had a board meeting for my twin club, too.

In other words, I’ve been gone a whole fucking lot, and my kids are REALLY noticing. These little ones really know how to twist that knife, too, and I feel awful about it. When we left the other night, Lexi shouted at us, “You NEVER stay with us! You always LEAVE us!” I actually cried a little as we turned the corner. And I’m seriously debating whether or not to go to this thing tonight. I’ve been looking forward to it for awhile, and I’m dragging my sister along with me, but still – the guilt is consuming me! My poor children, forced to hang out with Nana and Kayley, watching cartoons and eating ice cream all day.

My MIL left yesterday, so my babysitter is officially gone. For some reason it seems like we do NOTHING for weeks and weeks, and then everything hits at once, and we have a whole lot of stuff going on over a period of a few days. This has been the case many times in the past, and I always end up feeling massive mommy guilt about it. This has been the longest period ever, though, where I’ve completely ignored my children. It’s killing me.

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