A Fantastic Day, No Really!

So, remember how Wednesday started out pretty rotten for me. Not much later, when I went to make the kids lunch, I found Nic and Ainsley in the lazy suzan cupboard. Ainsley on the bottom turn table and Nic on the top one buck naked and eating peanut butter right out of the jar. It was one of those days that I was feeling like mom on Malcolm in the Middle. I grabbed both kids and ripped them out of the cupboard they both got screamed at and I made them sit on the couch quietly while I made lunch. After lunch I took Chloe to the bus stop and came back home and started a load of laundry. Things were finally starting to quiet down when I got a call from Lori. It was Wednesday, I had forgotten. I watch her younger girls on Wednesdays during Sierra's gymnastics class. I got a little stressed at the call. Not that I hate watching her girls or anything, it was just one of those days where things were starting to pile up.

I decided to do my project a day project while the extra kids were here. Trying to get two yucky things out of the way at the same time, the project though just happened to be cleaning up dog poo. Nate had been over on Saturday and I saw him land his foot in one of Malcolms land mines. So, in the name of Nate, poo pick up was my project of the day. Two full grocery sacks later and the poo was finally removed, I even cleaned up a dead bird carcass in the process. I came in and cleaned up then went to get my purse so when Lori got back she could watch the kids while I took her car to go shopping. Of course my purse was at work with Kenny and not here where I needed it. The shopping plan went downt the drain.

The extra kids left and Chloe got off the bus and went to her friends house. I was pretty much done with the day at that point, I messaged Kenny to see if we could skip gymnastics that night and just stay home and relax. He didn't respond on GTalk.

He did however call me back shortly and reminded me that it was wing night. I figured that everyone else would've been busy so I pretty much thought that wing night was cancelled. He said his mom was comming over to be with the kids and asked if I still wanted to just stay home. He came and took Chloe to gymnastics, I went and got ready for wing night, showered and put on some nice clothes and of course sat down to check my email and blog which of course was the same as it was when I checked it 30 minutes earlier. Kenny got back and I looked up to a beautifull vase of flowers. It suprised me, a lot, I even cried a bit. We hardly ever do anything extra special for valentines day. Here was a vase of pretty flowers and a beautifull sappy card. I couldn't help but get all choked up, then I didn't have anything for him. I just had to tell him that, "my gift to you is that I didn't by you a corny plush thing and have it delivered to you at work!"

He took me out to a movie, the last movie I've been too was V for Vendetta. I chose Night at the Museum, which I have to say is a great movie and something the whole family would enjoy. It's my type of movie, I love laughing. And then we went to Azteca for dinner. It was our anniversary restauraunt at one time, but we've not been there in a long, long time. It was tasty but I noticed $2-$3 more expensive than other similar restaurants. I had enough left over from my super burrito for lunch yesterday.

On the way home he told me that he had ordered me something but it didn't arrive yet. I was suprised on Thursday when he brought me home a new cell phone, not only new but my very first cell phone. I have finally joined all you in the rat race and own my own cell phone now! We're going to get rid of the VOIP service and move over to full time cell phones now.

So really, it was a Fantastic Day, No Really!

Happy Valentines Day

I was dreaming quite nicely this morning during a semi sleep state between 8:00 and 8:30. (I was having a Battlestar Galatica dream about Starbuck being the 'actual' first born between a Cylon and a Human. It's a bunch of crap, but my subconscious was coming up with a pretty entertaining dream none the less.)

Kenny peers his head in the room,"You're gonna need to punish the boy."
Groggily I look up,"What?"
"The boy" he said, "You're going to need to punish him. The block of cheese is out on the floor next to the container of jam which is all over the carpet."
"Great..."I immediately settled back into sleepy state and shut my eyes.

(This is the time of day where I'm semi-awake but usually convincing myself that I can get a little more sleep. A little more sleep for me is 30 to 60 minutes.)

I hear his voice again, he hasn't left yet,"I'd do it but he's hiding from me."
I slept a second or two, it felt more like a few minutes. Then I remember Kenny was there and I muster up an apathetic sounding, "Okay."

Can you tell, I'm not really 'with it' in the morning.

Kenny left the doorway, being sure to shut the door so Malcolm didn't get into the delicacies which await at the bottom of the stairs.

It wasn't more than a minute later I hear a 'SMACK' followed by a low cry. Ah ha! The boy was caught! Slowly, small stomps made their way up the stair and after fiddling with the door knob for a few seconds a little boy was standing in my room next to my bed.

I try to scowl at Nic, which isn't that easy considering I'm groggy and he's pretty cute. "Did you get in trouble?"
He stares back in silence with big eyes and a slightly quivering bottom lip.
I get up on my arms this time, "Did you get into the kitchen and put food on the floor?"
His expression didn't change, but this time he was able to nod slightly.
The little lecture begins,"You are NOT supposed to be in the kitchen without Mommy or Daddy. You are in big trouble for getting into the food."
His pouty lip gets a little bigger and he nods.
"Do you have something you need to say to me?" I ask.
Out of an almost closed mouthed, pouty face comes his little boy, whisper voice, "I'm sorry Mommy."

As Nic was leaving my room he could hear that his sisters had woken up and were playing in one of the adjacent bedrooms.
He looked at me with a huge grin on his face, "I hear... MY Friends!"


After a quick shower I finally came downstairs to the sight of, yes, a block of cheese with huge bites taken out of it and a small bucket of jelly, open and spilled on the carpet. Next to that was a completed jelly sandwich. Nic must of just finished putting it together when Ken came downstairs. There wasn't even a bite out of it yet. I cleaned up the mess and then went to my station at the LAN bar for my internet fix.

I've only been interrupted once since starting this post. I had to go upstairs to help Chloe get dressed. Malcolm followed me up and as I was going through Chloe's drawers Chloe voice sounds out with alarm,"OH NO MALCOLM IS POOPING!"
Sure enough I turn and look and he's doing the puppy squat right next to me laying out some nice, warm dookies. I immediately scold him, feeling a bit guilty for not seeing the signs earlier. Quickly, I clean up his poo and tell Chloe very simply to find some jeans and get dressed herself. I took Malcolm out to finish his business since he was obviously forced to pinch it off prematurely. And here I am back at the computer hoping that the warm, fuzzy feeling I get from being here will wash over the crappy morning I've been having.

Anyway, I hope you all have a Very Happy Valentines Day!

Lots of Changes

Been making lots of changes to my Blogger stuff. It's probably because of the guilt from starting a myspace page. I re-did the camp fire website complete with a new title bar. And as you can see here Everything Erin got a polish too. It's not perfect or anything, but I got to play with some new design tools as well as really get in to the new Blogger and their widgets they have set up to let people edit the pages themselves.


Kenny installed a program called Inkscape, a nifty little open source vector graphics editor. After sketching a self portrait of me on paper and scanning it in, I used Inkscape to edit the sketch and made the cute image of me you see in the left corner of the page. I also wrote the title and scanned it in and edited it with InkScape as well. I'm far from an artist, but InkScape worked it's magic and made my image look pretty good. It took about 5 hours from sketching to saving. Not too shabby for my first time using the software.

I've not done much with the new Blogger editing widgets. But today I changed to one of the new skins and opened my eyes to some of the new features blogger has to offer. Wow, blogger certainly has a way of making customizing blogs simple for those that don't know how to decipher the mysterious CSS behind the scenes. Now, with a simple interface, changing text, text color, images, image placement, layout placement, etc . . . is just a button click away from a change. And for those of us who need to see the HTML blogger has allowed us even more capability to edit it directly.

Anyway that's what I've been working on this weekend. Maybe I'll do more illustrating later :)