Ethan at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space museum, looking at the “space toys” exhibit.

1 – big footed bunny (from Hillary Lang‘s Put Together pattern) finished up christmas eve for Jocelyn.
2 – Ethan colored in and cut out this angel at school, then one morning a few days ago, took the original, traced it, colored it in, cut it out all by himself (actually, before James and I were even up out of bed) — so that his sister would have one. how sweet is that!
3 – Jocelyn playing on the new Leapster L-Max (a dora game)
4 – Ethan playing with his new CAT excavator, with daddy looking on
5 – Christmas stockings – re-hung after all the hullabaloo
6 – general christmasness all over the living room floor

Well, Christmas day is almost over, and aside for a little bumpiness Christmas eve, it’s been very enjoyable. Everyone is thrilled with their presents. The hit for Jocelyn was the Woody and Jessie duo – upscaled even the major present, a wooden dollhouse with furniture & people. For Ethan, he really has played with everything, but the big two, excavator and firetruck, are definite hits. I am pleased that the wooden blocks and acorns that Santa put in the stockings were met with glee and not indifference (and acorns were handy for scooping and dumping) along with the watercolors and fancy edge scissors.

I haven’t really had the Christmas spirit the last few days. You know, that feeling of wonder and warm fuzzies. I really love the warm fuzzy christmas feeling, so I tried to get it back, but I guess being royally bitchy chases it away for good.. Cynicism and childlike wonder just don’t mix, especially if you throw in a really sore throat and hacking cough.

But then Christmas morning comes, and watching these kids’ little faces light up with excitement, hearing them shout, “SANTA ATE ALL THE COOKIES! AND DRANK THE MILK,” watching them be so kind to each other, “Thank you for the present, Mommy/Daddy/Jocelyn/Ethan!” and the warm cinnamon roll aroma floating throughout the house – I didn’t need any childlike wonder, because there was plenty of it to go around.

Ethan, as I tucked him in tonight: “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Jocelyn as I tucked her in tonight: “Jessie doesn’t want to sleep in her hat, mommy.”

Merry Christmas!

I’m out of the funk. Too bad. I could have joined George Clinton!

Mailed about $5 worth of stuff today overnight that cost many many times that. But what’s the fun of christmas presents not arriving on christmas? NONE AT ALL! So oh well.

Jocelyn turned up a 103.9 fever yesterday at school. James went and fetched her and took her to the doctor who confirmed my fear, strep. I’m glad we got it diagnosed quickly. I’m home with her today, and no fever, so that is nice. We’ve been wrapping presents, watching movies, baking cookies, watching movies, packing boxes to ship, watching movies, and also, some watching movies. I figure she’s sick! So it’s ok! We’ve gone through Cinderella, Toy Story 2 (hello! JESSIE!! The sequel is the obvious choice here!) and now we’re on Totoro. We haven’t seen Totoro in such a long time and I just ADORE it. Little girls being girls, and wonderful fantastical myth creatures. I 3> Totoro. I have an idea now to make a little black soot sprite softie. It would be super easy, flat with pokies and white, round eyes.

Our house is quite the wreck, and I know that James will come home with disappointment in his eyes that I didn’t manage to tidy ANYTHING up, so I’m going to go have a go at that now.

I WISH OH I WISH I had taken some pictures of the wooden clothespin doll cuteness I sent to my nieces Clara and Avery, but I could not find the camera. Woe is me. I’ll be making more for Jocelyn (and myself) so pictures are still in the crazymokes future.

I am feeling OK, my toes are cold, and I have realized that probably some of the funk? Reason #4, if you will? Was the messy messy house. So I really need to tackle that to fill in the hole, so to speak, rather than fall back in it.

I’m off to sort piles of magazines and mail.. wish me luck.

– amy sings, “let’s go walking you with me!!”

.. and I don’t know why.

#1 I’d like to blame the drugs I’ve been taking (muscle relaxer for a majorly knotted up back, stayed home tuesday because of the inability to move my head). However, the side effects listed include dizziness and nausea, but nothing about being bitchy and wanting to run away from home to a tropical island while crying “WOE IS ME!” The drugs, I think are not the problem, but the fucked up back probably is. Today it feels better.

#2 I’d like to blame the fact that I decided way too late to make some little things for my family members and need to ship them soon in order for them to get there and am too stressed out about it. This is probably it.

#3 But what I AM blaming is my husband, who is just pissing me off for no reason and I want to throw things at him. I keep thinking of all the reasons why this is ALL HIS FAULT and when the list starts with “needs to clip his fingernails more often” and ends with “should be able to read my mind” even I can tell, in my deranged state, that I am messed up. In the head. As in, KOO-KOO!

I know that the reasons are probably parts #1 and #2 and none of part #3 (maybe a smidge of part #3), but that doesn’t help me stop with the #3 and the need to throw things.

I feel like crying and throwing things. Big lumpy things. Cross your fingers for me, and give James your sympathies for having to live with a crazy woman.

This year we almost didn’t make it to the Santa Train. Tickets sell out SO FAST, and the place that had tickets was only open from 9-5. I’m at WORK from 9-5. So yeah, I didn’t get tickets, but THEN! Craigslist to the rescue! Did you know that you can put in a search on craigslist, and then subscribe to those search results’ rss feed? GENIUS I TELL YOU! So, late last Friday, I popped open Google reader to see a woman in centreville selling 4 tickets. I quickly emailed her and begged. Beggging in email entails the use of many exclamation points, but not too many, because you don’t want to come off as crazy. I also tried to use PLEASE in a variety of ways. In fact, I’ll dig up the email I sent:

Oh lord, I would LOVE to have these!! Please oh pleasity please please!

Please let me be the lucky buyer!

PLEASE!!

So desperate sounding yes, but also a touch of cuteness with the pleasity please please, don’t you think? Well, whatever, it doesn’t matter what you think because I GOT THEM WAHOO! I didn’t dare utter a word to the kids until after I had the tickets in my hot little hands, because you never know with craigslist buying/selling, but I did get them, and they were so tickled. And I must admit, so were James and I.

So enough with the jibber jabber, fool. On to the photos!

Waiting for the train to arrive.

Jocelyn looks like a big poofy pink marshmellow.

I have taken pains in teaching my children how to make faces when someone points a camera at them.

Look! Look! The train is finally coming to get us!

Yay! We finally get to get on board! And sit for another 10 minutes before we actually get to move!

But then we DID move! And excitement ensued!

I don’t think Ethan will ever not love being on a train.

This isn’t the santa train for nothing — Santa made an appearance. Ethan was excited. He exhibited his excitement by hiding and grinning a lot.

Jocelyn sat on my lap and hardly took her eyes off him once.

That look that could be constipation is actually lots of smiling and shyness and just utter cuteness!

Santa asked her what she wanted, and for a second I thought she didn’t have an answer, but then she grinned and said, “Woody. And Jessie. Dolls.” and then looked constipated some more.

We waved goodbye, Ethan pronounced the rest of the trip “Boring,” and soon we arrived back at the station and headed home.

Santa train 2007 – big success.

… if i like, wrote things on a regular basis? Things that were not just the progress of the mold growing in my shower (a topic i have considered, so consider yourself lucky) but funny and cute and kid filled and craft filled and funny-amy-thoughts filled?

Yeah, I thought that’d be nice too!

Unfortunately, *I’M* the one running this blog so there’ll be none of that HERE, mister! and missy!

I was looking through the archives and it struck me that hey, I did used to be funny! And even kind of prolific! And you know what else? I took pictures of stuff! And of kids! And then I’d post those pictures here! HULLY GEE! I think that the 2006 Amy was more bloggy* than the 2007 Amy, but we’ll see how the 2008 Amy does.

Let’s see if the 2007 Amy can pull some blogginess out of her ass already even though 2008 Amy is just hovering right over there around the corner waiting to take over.

*bloggy: the turning of something mundane into interesting blog reading.

THE MOLD

HA! You thought you were saved, weren’t you? Yeah, me too, but this is about all I’ve got. HOW in the world does that mold get UNDER the caulk? Around the shower door the caulk isn’t actually white caulk (like it is in the corners) but CLEAR, and so as I’m showering, I can look right through this clear caulk and see this dots of black mold. Black mold is much scarier than just the orange normal shower grout mildew, which you can just scrub right off with James’ and old toothbrush. Black under-the-clear-caulk mold can’t be reached. So how in the world did it get there? But what is even scarier is the WHITE caulk in the corners? It’s turning a kind of dull gray. Which makes me thing that the black mold has infiltrated over there too, and not just in dot-form, but in “LET’S GET IN THERE, MOVE MOVE MOVE!” kind of form. The sad thing is when this house was built and they tell you, “write down all the issues you find and we’ll come fix it after 30 days, I WROTE DOWN MANY ISSUES ABOUT OUR SHOWER. I have this belief that someday, I will be an expert tile-layer, and in my efforts to make that dream a reality, I’ve watched many a tile-laying show in the DIY and HG networks. I examined the grout and saw pin holes. I looked at the wall and thought it looked like it was curving (and if the wallboard that the tile is on is curving, doesn’t this mean that proper cement backerboard wasn’t used? They didn’t just lay tile over drywall, did they? And if so, does that mean one day my shower is going to just fall apart?) I saw globs in the caulk, and I thought the shower leaked out onto the floor a little bit and I WROTE ALL THESE THINGS DOWN.

But they brushed me off. They said, there’s no curve, and they said, pinholes are fine, and they said, your shower isn’t leaking.

So now, 3 years later, the builder long gone (ie: no longer available for me to give lists to and for them to scoff at me and not fix things) there are black spots under my clear caulk and my white caulk is going gray. And the wall still looks all curvey to me. OH, and the leak? The molding just outside the shower in my bathroom has mold growing behind it from the leak.

*sniff*

So now I think, ‘I’m going to have to redo that caulking,’ which I can do (not as well as I do in my dreams, though of course) and have done (ditto) but I have this fear. This fear of stripping away the gray caulk and finding grossness beyond my wildest dreams. Grossness that I fear has crept behind the tiles themselves and that once I strip that caulk away I will then have to hire someone to come in and re-tile my entire shower, and they will shake their heads and state in a southern drawl, “these walls are all curvey, they didn’t use the proper backerboard! sorry miss, we’re in for a bit more than we estimated..” And since I wouldn’t want to pay all that money just to put in the same boring 4″ white tiles that the builder used, I would have to pick beautiful new tiles and do the bath surround as well and of course the floors and then we would simply have to paint as well and the sinks could use updating and suddenly I’d be digging into the home equity loan for a new bathroom and we would still be paying it off three years later when the white caulk in my shower corners would start getting suspiciously gray…

Do you see my dilemma here? Obviously, I need to just leave it alone. If I do recaulk, I’ll be instituting a “dry off the shower with your towel before you exit” rule.

Was that bloggy enough you think? I even have some pictures for tomorrow. Hold your breath.

ps – james has a final today. everyone go wish him luck!

new banner 🙂

Jocelyn was playing with a little princess figure in the bath tonight.

“what’s her name?” I asked.

“Jananda!” she replied.

I think this is the first time that the name wasn’t someone we know, a princess character, or some inanimate object in the room.

Pretty good name!