Wordless Wednesday on Tuesday with Words

I thought this would be a good photo for Veteran's Day. And of course, I photoshopped it a bit to make it look like Owl and I existed during WWII.

As an aside, I'm going to find whatever filter that photographer used that made Owl and I look so young and beautiful and attach it as a hat so that everyone always has to look at me through that filter!

Evil Gnomes

I spent last week, when Piglet and Tigger were out of school, doing a deep clean of the house. Fall cleaning, if you will. In order to actually get rid of things, I need the children to leave. I asked Tigger to take her brothers to the park while I cleaned their room.

Tigger: Do I have to? Can't I just take them outside?

Me: If you stay with them.

Tigger: Okay.

15 minutes later she was back inside playing Icy Tower.

20 minutes later, Pooh Bear came running up the stairs.

Pooh: Mommy, I have some so funny bad news. (He says this every time he wants to tell me something, not because he was laughing at his brother's pain. Although that wouldn't surprise me.)

Me: What is it?

Pooh: Piglet is bleeding.

After we cleaned him up. Note the nasty scratches on his nose, cheek and forehead. He looked worse the next day. But at least he's a happy injured person.

Apparently, Piglet had a fight with the garden gnome. I'm not sure who won.

The face of evil!

Or You Could Say, "I'd like a sandwich, please"

I have two boys who are set in their ways. One insists that I pack the exact same lunch for him every day of his life. When I have suggested anything other than a ham and cheese sandwich, yogurt, chocolate milk, an apple and a package of Scooby snacks, he nearly has a nervous breakdown. God help me if I suggest that he BUY LUNCH from the school cafeteria. He would just as soon die right there.

My other one comes home for lunch. He also insists on the same thing every day. Pooh Bear wants a Nutella and peanut butter sandwich, every day of his life. For those unfamiliar with Nutella it's chocolate spread, like peanut butter, but it's chocolate. So I feed my son a peanut butter and chocolate sandwich for lunch. I suppose I could skip a step and just feed him Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, but those are hard to come by here.

Some days he will request this for breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. (I don't give in, you don't need to report me to CPS).

But one day, he said he wanted something different. So I left him to decide. We have MANY other kinds of food. He sat in the kitchen for 20 minutes trying to decide what else he may want.

Finally he said, "Cheetah tost".

I said, "Um, what?"

"Heetah tost."

I should mention that Pooh Bear was effectively deaf from the time he was 18 months old until he was 3 years, so sometimes his speech is a bit off.

"Pooh, I don't know what you're asking for. Can you show me?"

"Heetah tost!" And he points to the bread.

A few moments of me staring at him in confused silence.

"You want a sandwich?"

"Yes. Heetah tost."

"Oh, Chyba tost! Tak, tak. Rozumiem!"

He'd been speaking to me in Polish all along. The curses of a bilingual school.

Now We Are Six

This is a series to prepare you, my loyal readers, for the inevitable day when I change my blog address and "put myself out there".

I know, I do conversations a lot, but we have weird ass conversations in my house.

Tigger and I were discussing who of each of A.A. Milne's characters each one of our family members is and that lead me to new nicknames for when I change my blog address.

Me: I'm Rabbit. I'm always obsessed that everyone is ruining everything and I want everything to look nice. I'm not terribly social. And I have a lot of babies.























Dylan: He's Dylan. You never heard me say otherwise. Ignore that picture to the left. Can I have my new lens now?



















14 year old : She's Tigger. She's bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!



5 year old: He's Piglet. He's a bit nervous and anxious. And he stutters.















4 year old: He's Pooh. Hum-de-dum. Time for Honey. Yeah, that's Toby all over.











2 year old: He is Stewie from Family Guy. He's totally Stewie.

So now you know, and you'll see that everyone's names will change from now on. If anyone happens to miss this post, they'll just think I'm crazy. Which is okay too.

Wordless Wednesday - Who's Afraid of Ghosts?

These photos were taken at Powsin Cemetery on November 1, 2008.

Blood On My Hands

We did it. We all did it. We made the unanimous decision to put E.D. to sleep.

She had been ill, kidney disease. She had developed incontinence (not that she was ever truly continent), had lost her voice, most of her teeth, and basically her will to live. We would find her at the end of the day, lying on our bed, not moving and barely making a squeak when she would see someone.

So, we decided that it would be better to let her rest than continue to live like this.

But it's hard. So hard.

I agreed. I voted. I spoke for what I believed in. And I did believe in it.

But I didn't want to be the one to pull the trigger. So I stayed home, ostensibly to dig the grave and take care of the little kids who couldn't go to see the execution, but really it was just me hiding out because I didn't want to watch it. I wussed out.

We'd had her for 15 years. Before Pamela, before we were even married. She came from an abusive household and we adopted her, but she was never quite right. She suffered from anxiety. Which helped her to fit right in here.

But now she's gone.

We'll always love you, E.D.

Hobos (with fingers)

This post is inspired by a conversation I had with my father the other day.



Dad - "My homeless guy won't leave. I told him that after the hurricane I wasn't turning the power back on. I thought that would inspire him to go, but he's still there."



Me - "Well, that's a very interesting story you've got there old man. If I were you I would blog about it."



Dad laughs.



Me - "I WILL blog about it!"



Until earlier this year, my dad "lived" in the house that I grew up in. When I say "lived" I mean that he still kept his furniture and everything at that house, but he spent most nights and days in my sister's house. My sister and her husband moved into a new neighborhood near (1 mile or 1.6 kilometers) my dad and my sister enlisted my dad's help in babysitting my nephew while she and her husband worked. So my dad, being the person that he is, sort of "moved in" with them. Since then, and that's a story for another post, my dad purchased yet another home and moved to the next street over from my sister.



Somehow, and I am not totally clear on the whole story, my dad invited a homeless man to live in my childhood home. My childhood home had no running water (it had running water when I lived there, I didn't grow up THAT hippie). But since this guy had been homeless, I suppose running water wasn't his biggest priority.



At one point my dad said to me "I think my homeless guy has some sort of mental disorder." I said, "Gee Daddy, you think?" Then he proceeds to explain the symptoms to me because in my dad's mind being in your senior year of college for a degree in psychology makes you an expert on mental disorders (for all you psych majors out there, laugh along with me...I took exactly ONE course in abnormal psychology - which BTW was a psych elective).



This is probably a good time to mention that my dad also has a mental disorder. He has compulsive hoarding disorder. So my childhood home is packed full of stuff. Seriously. You have absolutely no idea how bad this is.



But that's okay, 'cause there's a homeless guy living amongst the clutter. He probably feels at home. Which is actually quite punny.