Car vs car

Yesterday I took our little Audi to the glass shop to get the windshield replaced. At some point it got a crack that just kept expanding, so it was definitely time. Plus, we have decided to sell it. We bought it when I went back to work so we would have 2 vehicles to transport the kids in since I worked a lot of crazy hours, and my husband's work van doesn't accept passengers. Since then, I not only have quit work, but my husband bought yet another car, so we really really don't need this many vehicles. Sadly, it is my sweet little ride that is going to go, not the most recent addition to parking lot that is my driveway. Basically because of the two, the Audi will garner us the most money. Which means that it looks like I am stuck with the worlds ugliest car parked in front of my house. Sorry Mike, but come on, it's soooo true. We're talking about a 1975 Cadillac Sedan de Ville that's about 5 million feet long (really) and smells like someone died in it. Even with the 25 little tree air fresheners that I bought it for Christmas. Speaking of which, I really tried to give it a chance at Christmas, figured I was being too hard on it, so I not only bought it air fresheners, but also some nice fuzzy dice to hang from the mirror, and a sweet hula girl to jiggle on the dash. And then when we were going to my inlaws house for Christmas dinner, I sucked it up and accepted a ride in the Beast for the very first time. My husband was so proud, pulling up in front of his parents place, with all his extended family looking on from the living room window. It was a great moment, right up until the engine suddenly revved up really high, and a huge cloud of smoke came billowing out from underneath it, and we all evacuated in a hurry, coughing and laughing all the way to the front door. Well, all of us except Mike of course. Sorry big guy! Now I just always think of Uncle Buck's car every time I look at it. Which is every day, since it is parked blocking one of the main entrances to our house. There used to be a nice rhododendron, an azalea, and a maple tree among other living things planted in that spot - but yes, he paved paradise and put up a parking lot.....but I realize that some battles just aren't meant to be won. By me at least. Because for now, it is my husbands pride and joy, and really, I tell myself, there are worse things for him to be obsessed with. Besides, I get a sick sort of pleasure from it myself, just in the making fun of it. It must satisfy some inner need I have to pick on something, even it's just a big old butt ugly car that smells like a corpse with dirty socks on. Just as long as I don't have to ride in it - by now it must know I hate it, and I start to imagine that it will turn all Christine on me, and it will try to trick me into going for a ride, and that will be it, I will never be seen or heard from again, just another one of it's many victims....hence that evil smell!
So for now I will be patient, and hope that eventually something else will come along to replace the Beast in my husband's heart.  And only accept rides from my minivan.

daycare - what do you think?

How much are your kids worth to you? Can you put a monetary value on them? I'm sure the vast majority of parents would be horrified at my question and reply with a resounding NO, and go on to say that their children are priceless, etc etc. So what's my point? Submit a quote for daycare to many of these same parents and watch them flip out at the cost.
I myself have been on both sides of that fence. I have worked in licensed daycare facilities, provided daycare in my home to other people's children, and have been a working mother taking my own children to a daycare. Having seen daycare in action from both points of view, I fully realize how important it is to have your children in a daycare environment that both you and your children are happy with. And sometimes that means paying a little more, or driving a little further, or whatever.
Consider this. Most dog owners at some time or another take their dogs to a kennel, say when they go on vacation. The average kennel charges anywhere from $20 to $30 on average per night for your dogs stay, plus you often have to provide your dog's food. The average daycare charges about the same per day for each child. Does that seem right? Daycare providers have sole care of your child, are completely responsible for their welfare. I guess kennel operators also have the same accountability for your dog, but really, is it comparable? We're talking about your CHILDREN.
Daycare providers in general do not get the respect that they deserve for the extremely important service that they provide for our society. Perhaps that is because nearly all daycare is provided by women, and it reflects the way society seems to still view the homemaker/mother/care provider role as secondary, or not as important. Basically, I guess what I'm saying is that daycare is not VALUED in the way that I believe it should be.
I am talking in generalities here, I do know plenty of folks who treat their daycare providers with respect, and are obviously grateful for the service they provide, and how well many of them do provide it.

What do you think?

what's it worth?

We are lucky enough to have a good sized room in our basement that the kids use as a playroom. Actually what seems to happen is that the playroom spills over into the rest of the rooms in the basement, because the girls apparently regard the entire bottom floor as their zone. I wouldn't really have any problem with that, except that they never clean up after themselves. Slowly but surely (and sometimes not so slowly) the entire basement is transformed into a something resembling a home that has just barely survived some natural disaster like an earthquake or a tornado. Now I know that although I'm not down there actually making the mess, I still have to share the blame for it with my girls. Number one - I don't remember to enforce a clean up at the end of the day/play period a lot of the time. Number two - I encourage my kids to just go and play without my participation being necessary. Isn't that the whole point of having a big basement for the kids to play in? So play they do, and play hard. They are very into making stuff out of something else, so there is always a lot of cutting, gluing, painting, colouring etc going on, as well as a lot of fort building which necessitates dismantling all of the furniture and draping of sheets and blankets. And I think that's great. Except for that moment when I venture down at the end of the day to make sure the door is locked or get something from the freezer, and I enter the wreckage of that days activities. Because I know that I have let it go too far, and now when I ask them to clean up, they will take one look at what they've done, and be totally overwhelmed by the task at hand, and much wailing and protesting and dividing up of who actually messed up what will ensue.
So. I spent the weekend telling them to clean up, or there would be no play dates for any of them for a month. I thought that would be pretty good incentive to get them moving, as they love having friends over and vice versa. No dice. By Sunday, I threw in a monetary bribe, offering a dollar to anyone who cleaned up, providing the whole area was cleaned, not just what that particular person deemed "their" share of the mess. They lollygagged around all weekend, procrastinating until Monday rolled around and the mess had only deepened. I couldn't believe they wouldn't even do it for the money. So after school Monday I announced that until the basement was cleaned up, there would be no play dates for a month, no allowance of any kind, and no TV for a full week, which would include all of the coming weekend. Talk about pulling out the big guns.I went upstairs and let them work that one out. I don't think my kids watch a huge amount of TV, some in the evening sometimes, but usually very little during the week. But apparently that was the deal breaker. After a just a few minutes of frantic discussion, up they came to let me know they were ready to clean. I handed out garbage bags and helped them break the job up into separate tasks - one person in charge of toys, one for books, one for craft items and so on, and then I set up my ipod on the portable stereo for them and cranked it up and left them to it. And they cleaned. By the end of the evening it was done, and although it needs some tweaking, it looks about a million times better. Now I have to keep up my end and be the daily clean up enforcer so we don't have to go through this all again next week....

The Corrections

So I just finished reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. One of those darkly humorous books about what would appear to be a run of the mill midwest family on the outside, but then goes into lovely gorey details of how totally not run of the mill each family member is, and of course the family as a whole. The kind of book that makes me go, ahhh, I am not so weird after all, and geez, my family is doing okay. Except that at the same time, I kind of had the feeling that we are all just one wrong turn away from actually being the family in the story, or dangerously close neighbors anyway. Yikes.

the new dishwasher is here! the new dishwasher is here!

Yeah, I feel like Steve Martin in "The Jerk" when he realizes the new phone books have arrived, I am THAT jazzed. After a month of doing without, my new dishwasher will be arriving sometime tomorrow. When the old one died and my husband ordered the new one, I tried to be totally cool when he revealed that it was not available for a month. I thought, oh come on, my mother didn't grow up with a dishwasher, and my grandmother certainly didn't, and they managed, I will not be a modern woman and whine about doing a few dishes.

After a month of doing dishes after every meal for a family of five, all I can say is OH MY GOD I MISS MY DISHWASHER!!!!!! If for nothing else but the way you can hide the dirty dishes away, instead of having them pile up on the counter by the sink, by the oven, by the coffee maker, basically everywhere, because we like to cook, and a family of five plus a big meal equals one hell of a lot of dirty dishes. For a month I have been running after the kids "Hey you! What do you think you're doing?? Didn't you just have a drink of water a little while ago?? Use the same cup please!!!!" I purred with pleasure when my husband pulled out a stack of paper plates on Friday night to go with the pizza we had ordered....I am so pathetically easy to please. When the phone rang this morning and the delivery man asked if they could come tomorrow, I practically screamed YES YES YES! and did a happy dance right there in the kitchen, once again confirming to my kids that I am more than a little nuts. So okay, sorry Granny, I AM a modern woman, god help me, but seriously, if my Granny or any of those housewives had been given the chance to own a dishwasher, they would totally have jumped all over it. Unless they were COMPLETELY mental, and then sorry but I just have no sympathy for that.

So WOOHOO to tomorrow, and the arrival of my new favorite large appliance. Well, kitchen appliance anyway. I don't even want to get started on what my mental condition would be if my washer/dryer were to croak on me. Although at least there are such things as laundromats, so I wouldn't be forced to go down to the river and hand wash my undies with rocks or anything. Ha.

Canine karma

Keep calm and carry on. A great mantra to repeat and live by, right? Massively challenging for a big mouth, temper losing control freak like me however. But I continue to struggle to meet this challenge, hoping that the day will come that I will achieve both inner and outer serenity and all who know me will be able to say, wow, she is just so soothing to be around. Okay, okay, I can hear you all saying, hey Lis, maybe don't set your goals too high, right? Baby steps, baby steps. So after blowing my top at my brother and sister in law this weekend, I am out to redeem myself, if only to myself, and challenge myself to keep it all together when things don't quite go my way.

Fantastic opportunity to put myself to the test arrives Tuesday when what should be a straightforward trip to the vet with my golden retriever goes awry. To say my dog is a big baby is a massive understatement. Basically he is a 100 pound cowering whimpering lap dog. He has this amazing super power of being able to shed virtually all of his hair at once, onto me when he starts to have a panic attack. Which he does upon arrival at the vet's office. I speak in soothing tones, comforting him, telling him (and myself) that it's just a quick visit and we'll be on our way home soon. Dr. Natasha (yes, she has a heavy Russian accent for real!) gets things underway, and it's all going quite well, when a tech suddenly enters the room and tells Dr. N. that she is needed right away. Dr. N apologizes and explains that she has to go deal with an "emergency guinea pig situation", but she'll be right back. Hmm. So Xander (that's my dog) and I wait for several minutes, and finally Dr. N. returns, but moments later the tech is back exclaiming that the guinea pig is in distress, and Dr N grabs a teeny tiny stethoscope and rushes off again. This time we wait even longer, and I can feel my old friend big ugly impatient red temper tantrum starting to stir. I mean, come on, someone could at least let us know what's going on, or send us home, or something. But I take a breath, and wave him off, no easy feat as I am working hard to keep Xander's panic attack from turning into a full blown heart attack, oh my god, that's all my vet needs. At some point another tech brings him some water, and offers me a coffee, leading me to believe the vet is not coming back any time soon. But I tell myself - and Xander - that it's fine, we have no where else we have to be right away, and imagine the trauma room scene playing out nearby. Do they have teeny tiny little paddles fired up, is someone yelling "clear!" while a tearful family looks on from behind the team of medics? Pay it forward, I tell myself, be a thoughtful patient person, because I would expect the same priority treatment if my pet was in dire straits. I strove to communicate this to my dog, and felt him start to calm down - easily done as at this point he was actually lying on top of me, as much of himself as he could get into my lap anyway, so I could get a pretty good read on how fast his heart was beating etc.

Anyway, eventually the vet came back, pronounced my dog to be in great health, finished our check up without further disruption and we headed to the desk to pay the bill, feeling really good about how we had both managed to keep it together over the past hour. And then it happened - a true moment of cosmic karma payback, a tangible reward for our most excellent behaviour. As the receptionist handed me the bill, she smiled and told me that as a thank you for our patience they were throwing in a FREE fecal test for Xander. Woohoo! I smiled right back and said "right on!" Can you imagine my excitement?  I could hardly wait to rush out and gather that sample to bring in.  My healthy dog and I headed home proudly with our fecal sample gathering kit glowing like the trophy that it is.

But seriously, while it may not seem like much of a reward for maintaining my cool, I'll take what I can get. Count your blessings and all that.  Because in the end, I never did find out what happened to that guinea pig....

cleaning house

So.....it's been awhile. Remember that cold etc that I had last fall? Well, it turned out to be pneumonia and a  sinus infection, and the combo of the two laid me out for pretty much the rest of the year.

Nuff said. It's January, and I am more or less back in action - being super sick was fabulous for weight loss, although I admit to getting carried away and ate most of it back over the holidays, oh well.

Another thing being super sick did for me was what it seems to do for many folks - made me appreciate my good health when it started to return. I want to hang on to that feeling. I want to take better care of myself, without living in fear of becoming unwell again. I want to live more in the now, and still protect myself for the future.

How exactly do I do this? Well, in New Year's resolution fashion, I have set out a plan to clear away anything in my life and my home that isn't working. I'm talking anything from relationships to hairdryers. If  it's busted, it's outa here. If I can fix it with a minimum of energy and/or cost expended, then okay, it can stay. But otherwise, it will be purged from my world. It's about cleansing my life, and myself. Reducing the wear and tear on my existence, clearing the path of my journey, whatever. Too many apps running wears out the battery, so to speak. Or something like that.

And hopefully while I am cleaning out the closets, I will manage to clean out my mind and my soul a little too. See myself more clearly once the clutter of life up till now is sorted out and put to rest. If organizing your home can make it run more efficiently, enable you to find what you want, and  allow you to have space for the things you enjoy, then I'm hoping the same principle can be applied to my life, for my self.

I will keep you posted!