rockstar:

G's has a rash.

asymmetric periflexural exanthem of childhood: The initial clinical finding is a unilateral erythematous macular and papular eruption, often beginning in or around the axilla. Over the following 1 to 3 weeks, centrifugal spread involves the upper and lower extremities. Approximately 70% of APEC cases have involvement of the contralateral trunk. Despite the progression to the contralateral side, the eruption remains asymmetric throughout its course. Additional findings include lymphadenopathy and pruritus in 70% and 65% of cases, respectively. In contrast to other exanthems, APEC rarely involves the face. A study by Coustou reported that 60% of cases had a preceding prodrome including rhinitis, pharyngitis, otitis, and fever. Although the precise cause of APEC is not known, it has features consistent with a viral exanthem. A viral source is supported by a springtime and pediatric predominance with spontaneous resolution. In addition, 1 adult case of APEC has been attributed to an acute Parvo B19 infection. However, consistent serologic evidence supporting a viral cause is lacking,and no human transmissions have been documented except for reports of 2 familial cases. Some have proposed that this could be a childhood form of pityriasis rosea possibly caused by human herpes virus 7.

translation:
g has a viral rash on the right side of his body, it will grow for 3 weeks and last for about 2 months. It itches and there is no treatment. fun.

two people I'd like to meet:

1. the person who thought polly pocket dolls was a good idea.
2. the person (who clearly didn't have children at the time) decided to put candy and snacks under/next to every checkout counter at 24" high.

Those two folks....I hope they've both since had a set of sextuplets.

e: "Pew," that was a close one!

All night party. Our house. Be there.

2:12 am:
e: daddy! daddy!?
c: ry-ella wants you, will you please go see what she wants?
r: wha?.....yeah....what?
c: ella wants you
r: zzzzzzzzzzz
-mama goes to get ella, brings her to our bed-

2:23 am-the entire house shakes:
e: mom! what was that?
c: I have no idea, maybe an earthquake. (thinking to myself that perhaps the neighbor's house, which I've suspected as a meth-lab, blew up) Please go back to sleep, mama is tired.

2:30 am:
e: mom, I'm board of sleeping. I need to get up and do something else, like watch TV.
c: no. try sleeping, it's not even close to morning yet.
e: why can't I watch TV?
c: there are no kid shows on in the middle of the night as children are supposed to be sleeping

5:50 am:
e: MOM! WAKE UP, look outside-it's morning!!
c: no, not really, it's just got lighter earlier today. go back to sleep.

6:42 am:
g: mama? mama? MAMA!!!!

Good Morning World, for the 5th time today....can't wait for naptime.

on change:

"If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies."
— Anonymous

babycenter.com height predictor:

Your girl will likely be 5 ft. 7 in. at age 18.
Your boy will likely be 6 ft. 4 in. at age 18. (whoa, dude....)

This prediction is a "best guess" but it's still just that -- a guess. Based on the formula we used there is a 50 percent chance that your child's full-grown height will be within 0.7 inches (above or below) of this prediction, and a 90 percent chance that it will be within 1.7 inches.

What they left out was the part that goes "Your child will most likely be taller than you by the first grade..."

this just in, courtesy of CNN:

"Funnel clouds were also spotted in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota, and northern Texas."

....hmmmmm.......are cloudy skies expected from spokane to tokyo as well?

flying time:

May 23, 2006, 11:25 am:

May 23, 2008:
Happy 2nd Birthday Buddy!

R told me I looked like Tanya Harding today.
I don't think that's really a compliment, sorry honey.

best buds:

go shorty-it's yo' birthday...

Ella is FIVE!!

SuperTarget. $13.99. What could be better?

"Mom, let's make it four cupcakes-kay?"

Rockin' out to Girls just wanna have fun.
(with brand-new dress on that she wore for 48 hours straight...
it has since "disappeared" to the laundry basket)

sit down.

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp,
but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

on favoritism:

If you're starting to notice that there aren't ever any photo postings of E, it's not because I prefer one child over the other (well, sometime I do) no, it's because E won't let me take her picture. G on the other hand, thinks cameras are swell....there's always a kodak moment with him. On the flip side, he doesn't bust out thinks like "Do you suppose the friends [the neighbor kids] realize how late it is?" (in regard to it being bed time) or "Mom, I really think you should get to know Brynna's Mom so that she can come to my birthday party." (I once told her she could only invite friends whos parents I knew)...really, I love them both equally, though sometime I do wish G would talk and E would stop talking.

note, have your boys first.

...otherwise they end up wearing flower wellies with camo sweatshirts.
Poor kid, let's hope he's comfortable with his feminine side.

Precious one:

Boys:

Since it was a hotel, I let him ruin the entire roll.
Wasteful, yes, but quite entertaining.

oh no, taking after mama!

e: mom, I'm wearing my butterfly flip-flops today.
m: no, honey, you can't wear flip-flops to school-it's the rule.
e: well, that's okay, I'll just break the rule.
m: (thinking: oh lord, that's what I would have said)
no ella, rules are in place to be followed, please change your shoes.
e: oh, alright-I'll wear my purple crocs instead.

All aboard.....school!

e: mom, do you know what "you farted" means?
m: no, do you?
e: yeah, it means the same as "tooted"
m: where did you learn that? at school?
e: yeah, I think so.

I still remember in 4th grade the "are you gay?" question....you weren't sure if you should answer yes or no as you had no idea what gay meant....I'm guessing that's right around the corner. so much to look forward to...

Economy?

Previous fuel record of $62.43 broken.
New record fill-up of $65.52 on 5/10/08.

Plagiarism:

This next excerpt is stolen. First, taken from my sweet-mama-friend-Allisun's blog and then stolen from it's original author at mommytrackd.com. I will say that outright as to avoid being sued (we don't have any money anyway, it'd be a total waste of court time).

I did not write it, but could have. This is my life:

"...The problem, primarily, is with the piles. Well, ‘problem’ is kind of an understatement; my husband and I have practically sought couples therapy over the piles. He doesn’t seem to understand why the piles exist in the first place (when you bring something inside, just put it away where it belongs), and he certainly doesn’t understand why they keep multiplying and spreading across the kitchen countertops like a fungus. I’ve tried explaining to him that it’s not my fault. I have very few things in the piles. A few loose phone numbers here and there, scribbled onto scraps of paper while balancing a screaming toddler on my hip, some bills, maybe a magazine or two. I’ll take responsibility for half of a pile, tops. It’s my kids who are to blame for the other forty three of them.

Now granted, I will admit that I created the kid piles, but if the stuff wasn’t in piles it would just be spread out all over the floor, so actually, the piles are a form of organization, albeit a primitive one. Some of the piles are legit: things that I just haven’t gotten around to filing or putting away, like the handprints that my son brought home from his Grandma & Me class, the piece of paper with my daughter’s height and weight on it from her four year old checkup (which was in May), or the toys that migrated north from the playroom to the den. But, as I have explained to my husband, the majority of these kid piles should not even qualify as real piles at all, because in reality, they’re comprised not of real things that I am waiting to file, or put away, but rather, of things that I am waiting to throw out, just as soon as a sufficient amount of time has passed so that my children won’t notice. Another rainbow flower picture drawn by daughter. A birthday party goody bag filled with plastic, age-inappropriate choking hazards for my two year old. A handful of business cards that my daughter swiped from my nail salon. None of these things will ever have a permanent home anywhere in my house, and so therefore I can’t just put them away, as my husband likes to suggest in his I-am-a-husband-and-therefore-have-no-freakin-clue-what
-it-is-to-actually-deal-with-a-four-year-old-whose-eighty-seventh-
rainbow-flower-picture-this-week-has-been-tossed-in-the-recycle-
trashcan-by-her-mother way of his. I’m perpetually stacking and restacking these doomed piles, and I do toss them out, eventually. It’s just that every time I manage to clear a bunch of them, ten more appear in their place. They’re like cockroaches. Or Gremlins.

But the lack of organization in my kitchen, really, is just another metaphor for how my life has morphed into a flimsy, gaseous cloud of barely manageable chaos. I used to stare at fashion magazines with disgust – “That is so unrealistic,” I would complain about the airbrushing. “Nobody’s skin looks like that.” Now, I throw home décor magazines across the room in frustration. “Oh, please!” I find myself screaming at the sight of spotless, pile-less counter tops. “Nobody’s kitchen counter looks like that!”...."

this morning:

e: mom, I just really love being five.

big butts

e: hey mom, "LA face with an Oakland booty!"

note to self: remove booty songs from ipod

E to F Record:

2007 Honda Odyssey fill-up, 4/30/08: $62.43

smart mama

e: mom, how do you know everything?
m: I don't know, I always wondered how my mommy knew everything too.
Maybe it's something that just happens when you become a mom.
e: yeah, and five-year-olds know everything. When I'm five, I'll know everything too.

Move over Ariel:

Mama has a new favorite movie: Disney's Enchanted
Great family movie and fulfills the following mama criteria:
1. crush on patrick dempsey
2. classic disney princess tale
3. lots of singing
4. crush on patrick dempsey

girl's night out!

After all the keggers, frat parties and mornings hurled over the toilet...we grew up. We've given birth, drive mini-vans and read books with only three words per page. Through all that, one thing holds true: you can take the mama out of the party, but you can't take the party out of the mama:

left to right: allisun, julie, betty, jaime, mama, kelly, beth

Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author:

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.

What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout.

One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.

I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too.

Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When- Mom-Did" Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?". (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

on ghosts & monsters & television programming:

e: I don't want to sleep in my room because there are ghosts and monsters
m: no, we don't have ghosts and monsters at our house because we have dogs, they scare all ghosts and monsters away
e: oh
e: well, what if we didn't have dogs?
m: we'd buy ghost and monster repellent and spray it around the house
e: oh
e: well, I still don't want to sleep in my room
e: I'll make a deal with you, I'll sleep in my room on the nights that the show with the eight kids is on (jon & kate + 8, only on monday nights)
m: that's really not a deal, because that's only one night a week and we hardly ever watch it anyway
--
m leaves to take a bath, returns in 20 minutes to find e asleep in mama's bed.
mama fails again, oh well.
(Thinking of getting jon & kate + 8 dvd's...they could be on everynight! but yes, that would mean we would need a dvd player....but for a night w/o knees in my kidneys, it might be worth it)

mama's boys: