Katherine has been a big helper in our butterfly garden

but today...oh my....it started with her watering the plants. She was doing really well, so I left her alone for a few minutes and arrived back to find her kneeling in the mud. (fig. 1) I decided, hey, she's already messy...how bad can it get? She started making mud pies. She was having a merry old time baking up treats when I left my normally clean-freak child alone with the mud. (fig.2) I'm sure the veteran parents are all laughing at me now, knowing what happens next. Yes, fig. 3 is the swamp thing. Oh no, wait, that's my darling little baby covered in dirt. What am I going to do with her.

Twisted Sisters

It is love bug season here in Florida. Lauren is terrified of them to the point of shrieking during a visit to our local nursery in search of plants to fill our butterfly garden. Unfortunately, it's a season of swarms and she's going to have to learn to live with them. I can't possibly come to her rescue each and every time. Enter Katherine. Today, I filled up the kiddie pool on the patio so they could stay in my line of sight while I planted our new flowers. In the time it took me to come into and out of the porch a couple of times, a few dozen love bugs breached the entrance to our patio. This greatly disturbed Lauren. Big sister (ok, I actually typed "bug sister" lol) came to her rescue by catching the bugs that Lauren pointed out. She then put them in the kiddie pool and with some teamwork, the girls managed to drown a bunch of the little buggers without ever touching them. Then Katherine fished them out with the end of a jump-rope and walked each one into the house to it's final resting place in our trash can.

It's fun watching the two of them work things out without adult intervention. Lauren is not so scared of the love bugs when Katherine is there watching her back.

The Flying Wrights

We are in Philly. We arrived here last night at about midnight. The flight was good, the car rental was awful and the hotel is fine. We slept in, ate breakfast and are currently waiting for our forgotten bags to arrive so we can go to the city to see the sites. Yep...we forgot to pull the two purple backpacks, full of the kids stuff, from the baggage carrier. The hotel is only 10 miles away from the airport but since we had to drive on 7 interstates to get here, we decided to suck it up and pay the Southwest people to bring the bags to us.

Once the bags arrive, we will get the girls dressed, go pick up Henry (Woody's dad) and head into the city for a tour of Independence hall and the liberty bell. We will probably hit a few more spots downtown (If I recall from my last visit, when I was 13, all that stuff is in one small area) then head to Liz's (Woody's cousin) house for dinner.

I found a great nickname for Lauren. I do believe it's now my official term of enderement for her. Lew Lew. When I was writing their initials on their bags, I realized that her's spells LEW. LOVE IT. She is TOTALLY a lulu. LOL

I'll probably post some pictures and stories about today later.

Tooling along

We have been really busy the last week or so. I've taken on two extra projects for work and we are preparing for Woody's mothers visit. Myrna will be here for 5 days and when she leaves, my mom is coming down for two days. Then we leave for our Philly/New Jersey/Niagara Falls trip. Man, that's a ton of stuff! On top of that, Katherine's dance recital is Saturday and her dress rehearsal is today. She's very excited to be a yellow canary in the show.

Speaking of Katherine, she coughed up that nasty tonsilith thing over three days. That was gross and it gave me the willies. It was also huge. It came out in 4 large parts. <>

Lauren has had a rough sleeping patch and w e finally realized that she has her two bottom molars coming in. I think they finally poked through because she slept ok last night. Her GI visit went well. Ok, that was a lie. Her GI visit was an exercise in patience for me. Katherine was tired and wired and I was having a really hard time concentrating on what the doctor was telling me. My distraction level was understandable since she was going through my purse and pulling out tampons and random other items and asking me questions about them. Finally, the doctor asked her to come sit with him and be quiet until he was finished talking. I was so embarrassed. Anyway, she is really constipated and he has her on a mineral oil/miralax/fiber regimen that will hopefully get her unclogged.

I'm no longer a Chuck E. Cheese virgin

At 36 years of age, I've finally done it. I've gone to Chuck E. Cheese. That beacon of insanity in the already tilt-a-whirl life of a parent.

Today, the girls and I headed to the library for the first time in almost a year. The "shush" lesson that we went over a buh-zillion times in the car, was quickly forgotten when Lauren realized the amazing echoing sound that books make when you fling them onto the floor. The bigger the book, the bigger the bang. Her pleasure was made painfully obvious by her squeals of delight that only she can make. Part dolphin, part maniacal chainsaw wielding clown. It was funny and I actually smiled until I saw the librarian looking at me down her bespectacled nose. Then I was just trying to hide my smile while shushing her. I'm such a rebel. HA!

After that we were headed to the dollar store to spend the girl's earnings from the previous weeks magnets. Lauren earned 6 dollars and K got 5.75 (one more nap and she'd have had it). They were pretty excited. I got it in my head that we should make a big deal of it and go to new dollar store. Granted, I've not been to a ton of dollar stores but the one near us absolutely REEKS of cheap perfume/air freshener/incense....They could be hiding corpses in the back and no one would ever know. The odor nauseates me and the flamboyantly gay (not that there's anything wrong with that ROFL) owner is sometimes kind of a jerk to customers so I'd rather not frequent his establishment if I don't need too. So I GPS'd (is that a word yet? If not it will be soon) it but the new dollar store wasn't where Mrs. Garmen said it would be. I asked the girls if they wanted to go somewhere to eat and McDonalds popped up first. They know I hate McDonalds so I think they just do it to bother me. That's the kind of mood I was in today anyway.

Then Katherine says "Let's go to Chuck E. Cheese". I froze and ceased scanning the road and cars around me for car jackers. "How do you know about Chuck E. Cheese Katherine?" I asked. You see, I don't recall the exact moment it happened but I've had a little bit of fear about Chuck E. Cheese since at least my high school days. It probably started as a jealously thing "why didn't they have arcades for kids when I was a kid? MAN NO FAIR!" Then it turned into a "hundreds of screaming kids in a sealed building with bad food, flashing lights, ball pits and robotronics? No thank you. Not even if there is beer". Once I had kids of my own, I pictured myself as the mother of the valedictorian and all the other mom's asking how I did it and I'd say "I saved her from Chuck E. Cheese. Never let her go. She never even knew it existed.". They'd all nod knowingly while (while admiring my superb mothering skills) silently blaming the rat for their own children's short comings and the fact that they now have no money left for the college fund because the Rat has it all. Muahahahhahaa

Ahem...that was weird. I'm tired, that's all I'm going to say about that previous paragraph.

Television. That's how she knows about Chuck E. Cheese. You can't erase the commercials from the shows even if they are on DVR. The point of letting them watch shows is so that I can get stuff done. Totally defeats the purpose if I'm sitting there fast forwarding through the commercials right? I guess CEC has ads on her new favorite show about dinosaurs. Great. Time to find a new favorite show...preferably one on PBS. No wait, they have McDonalds commercials. ARGH!

Back to CEC. It wasn't that bad. OK, yes, the food was horrid (how you can mess up fried potatoes is beyond me), the knowledge of what must be in the carpet and on all of the buttons and knobs on the games had me a little wigged out, and the place had a rat as a mascot. That was all bad but the kids were so excited over the oddest things. You mean I put these money looking things in this little slot, push a couple of buttons and tickets spit out at me? Magical! They didn't even know that they could turn in the tickets for stuff yet. Katherine was in love with the robots. She wants to get some for the house. 4 of our very own 8 foot robo-tronic creatures in our very own house. Gee, that sounds wonderful....if you are 4. If you are mom you are thinking that 4 year olds are very strange creatures indeed. Very, very strange.

So Chuck, if you are out there reading this blog. We will be back. The delight in my children's eyes will bring me back. Never ever ever ever ever on a weekend though. Ever. I mean it. When there are only your kids to drive you nuts, no biggie. When there are a hundred? I'll pass.

You Tube is kind of creepy

Some freak-o commented on our most watched video (tickle toes) that "mom has nice feet". It's just the angle buddy, they really aren't that nice. LOL

Anyway, Lauren really wants to start sleeping with Katherine but their personalities are not working well in that regard. We gave it another shot tonight and the results are on our youtube site. I'm still cracking up.

I'll give you three choices about where I went this week.
A) A spa
B) A really great party
C) The pediatrician

ding ding ding! I heard a winning answer. C is correct! Can you believe that?

Yeah, Lauren started with the constipation thing again and it caused her to bleed a lot. I kind of freaked out (let's just say the Internet isn't always a good thing) and took her in. The doc gave her an enema, I'll spare you the details, and she felt much better after awhile. We have an appointment with a pediatric gastroenterologist on May 8th to find out why she keeps getting so clogged up.

I received the results of my stress test and they showed a lot of stress. Hahahahaha! No, I'm fine. The ticker is still ticking efficiently.

We are going to start a zero tolerance policy for hitting around the house. Lauren started it but now Katherine is ending it. It's not pretty. I'm torn between letting them work it out on their own and just separating them all day. I'm afraid if we don't put a halt to it soon, it may become much worse. Hitting is bad. I don't like it at all and I don't want to live around it. It disturbs my peace....what little of that I have.

Today is our version of Opposite day.

Remember in elementary school when you used to have Opposite day? Wasn't that on Wednesdays? I have no doubt that today is Wednesday.

Yesterday was wonderful. I got the house cleaned, played with the girls, no major messes or fights, we took a walk after dinner...it was all good...except for the undercooked chicken. That was pretty nasty.

Today has been a nightmare. The girls were both awake a lot last night which meant that I was awake a lot last night. I'd guess I had about 5 hours of sleep at best. The day started off with a bang when Lauren pooped. I practically threw a party for the pooper. She's not constipated. Hooray! Yeah, guess what? She's pooped about 15 more times today. That's all well and good except that a) I'm running low on pull ups and wipes and b) she can now undress herself. Once she came to me with a handful of poop and naked buns and later Katherine came in to tell me that Lauren had pulled off her pull up and pooped on the playroom floor. Oh man! Then Lauren spilled a cup of milk all over the kitchen. When I say all over the kitchen I do mean ALL OVER THE KITCHEN". She pulled it off of the counter and the plastic cup bounced around spraying milk everywhere. So, I cleaned that up after the poop. At this point I decided, I need a nap. But neither kid would go for a nap. I gave them some goldfish and turned on Cars in an attempt to catch some z's on the couch. Within minutes, Lauren tossed the entire thing of goldfish on the floor. We cleaned that up. Lauren's getting to be quite the vaccumer.

Katherine has been really good today. She ate well, she's been a good listener, she's being pretty patient with Lauren etc. I thought I'd surprise her and ask her friend to come over for a play date. Sophia came over for about an hour and a half and they played llamas (Sophia was the zookeeper), and princesses. Sophia's dad just called though. Sophia started saying she didn't feel good when he brought her home. She has strep throat. Holy moly. Unbelievable. I wonder if I can get into the Guinness book of world records for number of pediatricians appointments in a month. I think we are at 5 right now. Keep your fingers crossed for us that we don't all catch strep. I hate strep. Hate it.