Mouse Update

Last week we met Fuzzy McSmally McCheezy . Everyone keeps asking, "How's the mouse?" so a brief update is in order.

When PHD came home to meet the mouse that night, it was agreed that Fuzzy should be released into the wild where he would live a happy mouse existence away from my house.  I also was worried about what would happen to the child's psyche when the mouse met his inevitable demise.  So, Boy 2 fed Fuzzy some grated cheese to sustain him on his journey and took him to the park.  Our conversation upon his return went like this:

Me:  Did you let him go?

Boy 2:  Yup.  I think he was half dead anyway.

Me (surprised): Oh!  Why do you think that?

Boy 2 (annoyed with Fuzzy):  Well when he got off the merry-go-around he layed on his back for a while then just ran into the bushes.

Poor Dizzy Fuzzy...

And that's why I am an excellent wife

For some stupid reason, possibly a combination of a solid marketing strategy and slight peer pressure, I signed up for a bootcamp twice a week.  (Screw you Groupon.  No, wait I didn't mean it Groupon, I am displacing my anger.  I actually love you.) So, for the month of August, on Tuesday and Thursday nights I drag my sorry butt to bootcamp at 7 pm. On the nights that I can't think up a good enough excuse to skip out. Because I don't like to vomit, I usually eat dinner when I return from bootcamp. 

On Tuesday I cooked a beautiful chicken dinner in the crockpot.  It took every ounce of my willpower to leave the house for bootcamp that night.  As the skinny little troll of an instructor (who is young enough to be my daughter, also not helpful) devised various forms of abuse for an hour, I thought about that chicken waiting for me. I also thought a lot about how stupid bootcamp is. Mostly about chicken, though.

I return from bootcamp mouth watering, looking forward to that chicken like no meal ever before. I arrive to a big mess in the kitchen, nothing new, and open the lid of the crockpot.  No chicken.  Some spicy tomatoes, but no chicken.  That can't be right.  Look again.  Stir it around.  Still no chicken.  They ate all the chicken and didn't leave me any...At least they put the lid back on to keep the empty crockpot warm...In frustration I scream "OH MY GOD!".  PHD assumes the kids have done something so says, "What?", giving away his location.  I charge down to the office and say, "The chicken is all gone."  He says, "Oh, you didn't get any?"  "No.  I.  Did.  Not..."  He starts laughing.  Laughing.  I, being an excellent wife, didn't call him an asshat.  I also didn't stab him in the eye with a fork but that was only because all the forks were dirty from them eating all my chicken.  And, I can't stab someone in the eye with a dirty fork. That would be unsanitary.  Still, the point is, I didn't call him an asshat.  Good job Me.

I just looked up Asshat in Wikipedia. The definition has gone missing. Probably a defensive move on the part of a husband somewhere. (You can't call me that, it's not even a word.) It used to be defined on Wikipedia as "a slightly trendier and less severe variation of asshole, graphically describing someone who has his “head up his own ass” (i.e., not knowing what’s going on): one is wearing one’s ass for a hat."  I can remember this no-longer-existing/pretend definition of asshat but I can't remember my own cell phone number about 93% of the time.  Good job Me. 

What's Mom freaking out about?

I will tell you what I am freaking out about:  

I didn't think they were ready for that diving board until they were 18, they didn't agree.

I can so fly. (Pic by Carlene, famous food blogger)



This was while my mom was babysitting - she taught them how to hammer caps, you know, the ones that are filled with GUNPOWDER.  C'mon, Grandma, work with me here!




Monkey Bars - 1, Boy 2 - 0, but it's not over...

And today's excitement:

Look Mom, I caught a mouse!

I literally shrieked.  Not like when people say, "I literally had a heart attack" when they mean "I figuratively had a heart attack."  I literally shrieked.  How terrific - I have my own mouser, without the bother of a litter box. He couldn't fathom why I wasn't allowing his new friend in the front door. What I didn't mention was that I had actually locked both of them out until I could figure out how to sanitize the kid.  Our own weird little hostage situation.  Childhood memories being made right there on the front step.  I finally came up with a foolproof plan.  I gave Boy 1 a bucket with a lid for our new friend (christened Fuzzy McSmally McCheezy in case you were curious) and then let Boy 2 in the house.  I made him agree to hold his hands together like he was praying and march slowly to the bathroom.  That way all the invisible rodent bacteria would be trapped between his little hands until he got to the bathroom sink where I made him scrub long enough to give him OCD. I told you - foolproof. And really scientific.

That's how you survive these children folks.  Science works.

KISS the Sister Wife

PHD said, "I made a collage in my office.  Well, it's only 3 pictures, not really a collage.  You should go look."  I played it cool, freaking out on the inside.  The last time he hung something on the office wall it was a framed poster of KISS.  For those of you under 40, here is what members of the band KISS looked like:

Framed.  I thought he was joking so I hung a picture of the cast of Twilight over it to prove I got the joke and I could do one funnier.  Only he was serious.  He really likes KISS.  I haven't seen the Twilight poster or the KISS masterpiece since.  Now any wall hanging by PHD concerns me.  So what I did find wasn't so bad:

Not so bad, if you like to see yourself in three 8 1/2 x 11 photos. I don't really. Especially three photos that I had previously rejected as too hideous for even a teeny facebook profile picture.

I told him, "You don't need to stalk me, I live with you."  He said, "I liked those pictures and now I can pretend you are triplets...or, Sister Wives!!"  He kept looking at me as though he wanted me to freak out.  I don't want to be triplets but Sister Wives I can get into...We could divide up all the jobs I don't like, I could leave the house by myself on those days that the kids hate me and I would always have someone to talk to. Someone who wouldn't wait until I finish a sentence and say, "I don't think I was listening to one word of that", then laugh like (s)he just told the best joke ever. 

I should probably check Kijiji. Is that where you get a sister wife?  Kijiji may or may not provide the best quality of sister wives.   Probably a sister wife that looks like this:

  

Note: A whole week ago, I had a(n) (is it a or an? I think it's an. maybe not. H is confusing.) hysterically funny ending planned for this post.  It tied together all the pieces of this post, related to the title and was so surprising that you would have spit your milk on your keyboard. If you were drinking milk.  Only PHD started reading it over my shoulder as I was typing and then I couldn't remember my ending.  The ending that was hysterically funny.  Gone. I waited a whole week and it hasn't come back.  PHD actually erased all the creative thoughts in my head by reading my unfinished post over my shoulder. Jerk. 

Instead, here is a funny sentence from Tina Fey's book "Bossypants":

"This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury."

This sentence is very useful because in addition to being funny, it can be applied to this post, this blog and 90% of the things that come out of my mouth.  Thanks Tina.

Dog Down

This is our cute, anxious, not terribly brilliant dog:

This is our pool, covered:

Early one morning the dog got confused and went into the covered pool.  Turns out he can swim, up and down, and up and down between the edge of the pool cover and the side of the pool until PHD rescues him.  Could have been at least 15 minutes of laps for poor dopey dog.

Now the dog is even scared of this:

He wanted to go back outside but because the tarp was on the floor in front of the door, and it looked like the pool cover, he just stood beside it shaking, thinking, "What if I step on this and it turns into water?"  I am just guessing, of course, he could have just been thinking, "Shaking feels good."  He is a dog, after all, who knows what the hell they are thinking most of the time.

And now PHD is turning into an anxious dog dad.  "Is the dog outside?  Where's the dog?  Did you let him out?"  So every few hours to alieviate boredom (my own) I yell, "Where's the dog?  I haven't seen him for a while. Is he swimming again?"  PHD starts to shake. And run from the living room to the back door. Up and down the house. Up and down. 

There you have it.  Scientific evidence that dogs and owners do start to look alike. Well, act alike, anyway.  And it's not really scientific but close enough.

Now where did that go?

Yesterday the boys were wrestling on the bed in the spare room, the room also known as the snoritarium.  Boy 1 fell and hit his shoulder on the fireplace insert we are using as a night table.  Long boring story about how we came to be using a fireplace as a night table.  Short version - me mad at PHD.  I get new fireplace in living room.  Anyway, I hear a worried, "Mooom" out of Boy 2, which is unusual. The worried part, not the "Mooom" part.  I hear /ignore "Mom" about 7,000 times a day.  I go into the room to see Boy 1 yelling, the top half of his body flopped over the edge of the bed, his hair mashing a chewed up piece of Bubble Yum into the carpet.  It took a while to figure out that hitting his shoulder on the corner of the fireplace was what caused the mayhem. Once I convinced him that he wasn't dying, I left and Boy 2 took over as the medical expert. Boy 1 would twist around to try to look at the injury, pulling the injured right shoulder blade forward, and sticking out the other shoulder blade. Naturally Boy 2 determined, "His shoulder's half disappeared!!"  More panic ensues until PHD says, "Bend your right arm."  Shoulder pops back out. Whew, the shoulder was just hiding, not "disappeared".

It seems we won't have any doctors in our family...