Rollin’ down the highway

Montgomery, Alabama
Warner Robins, Georgia
Fayetteville, North Carolina

We’re movin’ on up, north that is, and should make it to DC tomorrow. Tonight we’re staying at a homotel…Let me explain. We’ve got a door entrance from the parking lot and a door entrance from the hallway. So it’s a hotel and a motel combined. Get it? or are the miles and miles going to my head? Whatever. We got free drinks at the bar tonight and are getting free breakfast tomorrow so I’m giving this homotel a thumbs up!

Today we dropped the girls off at the Atlanta Airport. Their “Bop” flew in to meet us and fly them out to Colorado. They’ll be spending one week out there while we’re searching for houses. A bitter-sweet moment, dropping them off at the airport. On one hand, it was hard to let them go so far away without us. On the other hand, one whole week and driving hundreds of miles with peace and quiet, without fights and without crying fits. See the dilemma?

Their Grandma Dee helped paved the way for us earlier this week. She took the girls so we could pack out of our Alabama house in peace, and the girls had such a good time there. It’s going to be hard for them to come back home to boring old mom and dad who never do anything fun with them. They’ve already gone hiking, jumping on bouncy castles, gotten manis and pedis, gone strawberry picking, and I’m sure I’m missing something. They’ll do other great things this week as well, so we’re going to have to step it up to prevent mutiny. Maybe we’ll have a fighting chance since we’ll be in DC.

The cats have actually been very good during all of this driving and transition. I don’t even have a good story to tell about them. Kinda boring, but actually, I’d rather have that than spastic cats who end up bouncing all over the truck peeing on things.

Updates? Maybe

I realize it’s been over a week since I’ve written. Yikes! I have several ideas but can’t seem to find the time to write them down. We’ve moved from Alabama and are in transition. We’re in Georgia for a couple of days and then will head up to DC.

This move, so far, has been 180 degrees different from the last move. Remember that one? If not, read this (the pictures will drop your jaw). So far the movers have been professional, nice and customer oriented. It has made the transition much less stressful.

The main thing that has been giving me the most stress is not having a house to move into. I feel better now, since we’ll be up there in a couple of days to house hunt, but for the past month I have been so stressed. I shouldn’t be worried because we will not be homeless. It’s the control part for me, not being able to control which neighborhood we get a house in. I’m wanting a specific neighborhood and I’m having issues with the idea of not being able to live there. However, God may have something else planned for us, so while I’m praying to live in this specific neighborhood I’m also praying for peace about wherever we may end up.

We’ll be on the road in several days and I hope to take that time to write more down here. Right now we’re having fun with family and friends and moving and traveling. Hope all is well with all of you!

She’s addicted

We’re pretty strict about how much tv we let our girls watch. For a while the rule has been one movie a day, and for the longest time they rarely asked for that. The tv is rarely on and I don’t think Reagan knew cartoons were on tv until recently. A month or two ago though somehow things went to pot (is that a saying a good Christian girl should use? I don’t know).

Right before our school ended, I must have been stressed or something, something about a move and not knowing exactly where we were moving, for some ungodly reason, I turned on the tv to give Ashlyn something to do instead of…um, how shall I say this, delaying and prolonging our educational adventure. She was mesmerized.

Before I knew it she was asking for the tv to be turned on all the time and then movies were being thrown into the mix. “One movie a day!” The girls could chant that. They probably do in their sleep. For a while I could delay the gratification and put off the movie and tv watching until after Reagan was done with school, or until after whatever I could make up and fathom had been completed.

Now though, we’re at the point where the desire is just too strong. The pull of the electric glow, the electrons rushing from the screen mummifying little brains, the high-pitched voices and cute little songs, the animals that talk and humans that do miraculous things (not to mention buses that can do that too); all of that has done its collective job to get my daughter addicted to movies.

As soon as she wakes up she’s begging. When I walk into her room to get her out of the crib I don’t here “good morning Mommy! I love you so much and missed you overnight. I slept so well and am ready to start my day with a healthy breakfast and a good dose of exercise.” Oh wait, that’s what I would hear in my dreams. I don’t even here “good morning” or “get me out of this stinking prison called a crib”.  The first words out of her mouth are “can we watch a moooveeee?!” with the hugest, most excited grin, and then she lists about three or four of her current favorites that have been in rotation so much in the past week that they’re on auto play in my own brain.

Used to, when she’d wake up, she would demand breakfast before I could even get to her crib. The girl was hungry and nothing needed to get in the way of her bolting to the fridge to get her yogurt. Now she has to be reminded that food indeed needs to be consumed after a long night’s sleep.

She not only asks to watch a movie as soon as she wakes up. Throughout the day I’m forced to hear the same question over and over again. “Can we watch a movie?” “I want to watch Mariposa.” “Let’s watch Felicity.” It doesn’t matter when the viewing occurs during the day. All her brain knows is that it loves those electrons and it needs them constantly. Get this, even during the playing of a movie she’ll ask to watch a different one.

This would be funny if I didn’t have to listen to the question day after day, hour after hour after….hour. I’ve formulated a plan though. I think this move is the perfect time to break the addiction. I’m contemplating letting the movies “get lost” during the move if she’s still showing signs of attachment after the girls come back from their trip to Colorado. Cold turkey. We can mitigate the withdrawal symptoms by taking her to see the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, and who knows, the metro ride will probably be entertainment enough.

Right now it’s just so hard to not allow the movie when I need to be busy cleaning and planning and organizing and can I just get forty-five minutes to assemble one complete thought? I am happy to report that the tv watching along with the movie viewing has been eliminated. For a while the girls were watching a movie and then requesting PBS Kids. Bad mother that I am, and not realizing how habit forming it is, and really needing to complete that thought (just one is all I’m asking for), I had acquiesced. Now they no longer ask for the PBS Kids. But for the next several days I have resigned myself to hearing “can we watch a mooovveeee?” every five minutes.

Flintstones vitamins stain carpet (just so you know)

Breakfasts at this house are not complete unless there are Flintstones vitamins. I know you remember them from your childhood. Or were you deprived? And Dino was my favorite. He was probably everybody’s favorite. (He’s Reagan’s favorite and I feel some kind of special bond between us since we share the same favorite Flintstones vitamin character…) Orange Dinos, they could have filled the whole bottle with just orange Dinos. I still love those things and often think about popping a couple of those instead of my grody horse-pill of a multi-vitamin.

Ashlyn on the other hand is jealous that Mommy gets to gag down three vitamins the size of her thumb and is always asking to try them. She gets one half of a “dino”, as she calls them, right now. She tries to say “vitamin” too, it’s hilarious. This morning she found her opportunity. Fortunately I had taken my multivitamin already–the one that contains enough iron to kill a small child apparently, as it says so on the side of the bottle. The two that were left were my Super B-Complex (happy pill that lifts my mood and lowers my cholesterol, supposedly), and my fish oil (all sorts of good side effects).

I left the table for what was supposed to be a second. Did you know a mother is not allowed to sit down to a hot meal while her children are still living under her roof? It says so in A Christmas Story. I was off doing something when Ashlyn brought me one of my vitamins. I kindly asked her to take that back to the table, I’d get it in a minute. Not really thinking about her desire to down these marbles, and not really knowing how she’d do it anyway, I wasn’t worried and thought she’d actually obey me. She does obey us. Sometimes. Usually when it involves throwing something away because then she can practice throwing other things away as well. A mug. A CD.

I went back into the kitchen where she met me kind of hacking and smacking her lips. I smelled her breath and could detect a faint B-Complex smell to it, and there was a brown, chalk-like substance in her mouth. Dang it! I swept her mouth clean and then Du took over getting her mouth rinsed out while I called Poison Control. They do not know us automatically, thankfully.

Du went back to the playroom to pass time with the girls while I was still reading off ingredients of the Super B vitamin to the nurse. All of a sudden I hear commotion coming from the play room. I hear a big groan. I hear Reagan tearing away from the room crying. I hear, “she threw up!” Dang it! I still wasn’t panicking though because the nurse on the other end of the line wasn’t panicking. In fact she told me to brush Ashlyn’s teeth and give her milk. After all was said and done, the vomiting actually helped the situation. It tasted horrible and irritated her stomach so her stomach said, “no thanks”.

What was unfortunate about the incident, other than the whole Poison Control and injesting adult vitamins thing, was that her red Flintstones vitamin came up with her breakfast onto the carpet. Stupid red dye that’s probably made in China and gives us more illness than the vitamin is supposed to prevent…did I say that out loud?

Du said that while they were in the playroom waiting to find out the prognosis Ashlyn was playing just as happily as she could. All of the sudden she puked and then went back to playing, just as happily as she could. I forgot that children aren’t born with the knowledge of what it feels like right before vomiting is going to occur. And hey, she felt better afterwards so why wouldn’t she go back to playing? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because of a slimy, red vomit spot that smelled fishy…literally. It’s not like the girls make liquid messes often , of any kind, and then just leave the liquid where it lay. I would have thought she’d kind of wonder why things came out of her mouth like that instead of going in…

P.S. A Little Green Machine, or whatever they’re called, works wonders at cleaning up red Flintstones dye from the carpet.

Asking too much

We are a set of the crueler parents out there. We make our kids say please and thank you. We make them use ma’am and sir (which gets mixed reactions, especially in the north). We make Reagan do chores. Oh. my. gosh.

You would think we’ve asked her to calculate the value of ∏ out to the 32nd place. Hardly. She has morning chores and evening chores. They are written down on a chart in her room and she marks them off each day. These chores do not change on a daily basis. These chores are neither physically or mentally demanding. But somehow these chores either do not get done or it takes for freaking ever to do them.

You may remember that I’ve written before about our issues with time management and the lack of ability to stay focused for lengthy amounts of time. Now we’re dealing with laziness. I walked by Reagan’s room tonight and she had fallen asleep reading…on top of her comforter. I told Du and he said, “oh yeah…she told me earlier that she was going to start sleeping on top of her covers so she didn’t have to make her bed in the morning.” Wha?! That is some professional laziness right there. I can only imagine what would happen if left to her own devices.

Wait. Maybe I shouldn’t poopoo this idea too quickly. If she doesn’t have to make her bed in the morning then that’s one less thing to take way too long to do. Chores might actually get done thirty minutes faster…hmm…