Better call Paranormal State, stat!

Hoooo boy am I going to have fun with this one, on SO many different levels.

As much as he likes to insist otherwise, Jeff thinks evil and unexplainable things lurk around every corner. When we bought this house he and a friend found some weird pentagram based candle sticks in the ceiling of our basement. After quickly stuffing them back up there and boarding it up he told me that if anything "off" happened then we were outta here.

Nothing happened.

I could go on, the examples are endless. But I would get off track and I really want to tell you what we discovered yesterday.

Nicky has an imaginary friend! Let me introduce you to Max.

As far as we can tell, Max is a "nice boy" who "runs super fast" and likes to smell stinky poo's. That's all we really know about him so far, that and the fact that the very idea of an imaginary friend has Jeff's imagination going into o-v-e-r-d-r-i-v-e.

He wants to research our house to see if there was ever a little boy called Max who lived here and died. Because a ghost is OBVIOUSLY the natural answer to our son having an overactive imagination.

Oh wait. Maybe he got that from his dad? It's a stretch, I know.

Imaginary friends are bred into his genes. I had one, his dad probably had 50, my sister had a couple. No biggie, as long as Max doesn't start flushing toys down the toilet, pouring a 4 litre jug of milk on the floor, or causing general destruction.

Seriously, my children are hurricanes enough as it is without added interference.

But. BUT. This is going to be highly entertaining just for the Jeff value alone. He's already so skeeved out by the thought that our house is haunted by a ghost that I anticipate endless hours of hilarity. I like to exploit his weaknesses and I can't leave this one alone.

Thank you Nicholas, for being such an awesome kid!

Cringe!

Right now I'm listening to one of the defining albums of my youth.

Live Through This-Hole

I wanted to be Courtney Love SO BAD when I was 16. We had a "band" in high school (in which all 4 of us played the guitar...) and I had visions of myself onstage in a ratted out baby doll with one foot perched on my speaker, screaming into the mic.

One day my best friend and I sang a song for her uncle and asked him which of our voices sounded the most like Love's voice. Way to put him on the spot huh? He told me my voice was too nice. I vowed that day to chainsmoke until I had that same rasp. Duh, alcoholic and heroin addiction? Anyway.

I had a teaser the other day about finding my diary from 15+ years ago. As embarrassing as it is, and it's TRULY EMBARRASSING, I'm feeling a tad nostalgic. So I'm going to post an excerpt. I had to dig for one that didn't make me want to hit myself in the head too hard. I was such a....teenager.

Kids today think they're emo. They gots nothing on a 16 year old from the 90's. For example:

June 11, 1995

Dear Diary,
I'm trying to be calm and cool but I'm SOOO HAPPY (even as a
teenager I wrote in all caps)!!!
Kay, Steve & Alana broke up. I guess it was a while ago, but that's
beside the point. Do you think I'm obsessed? Ya? Oh well. I can remember when I
thought I was over Steve-hah! I just like him so much. I wonder what kind of
kisser he is. I think I could make a relationship with him better than that
bitch Alana. On Friday I did 10 gravol tabs and tripped so bad. God, it was
freaky. I don't know if I'm ever gonna do that again. I hear that Steve does
prescription drugs. I don't know about that guy. Oh well, he can't influence me.
Right? I have a feeling (and it better happen) that he's gonna talk to me this
week. I'll tell you when he does.

Luv Chan

June 12, 1995

Dear Diary,
I'm in a really bitchy mood right now, and I don't know why. So I'm
trying to keep to myself as much as possible. My dear sweet old parents aren't
getting the drift that I like being in my room. "Come outside". Fuck that!
Maybe I'll write more later. FUCK

Lovely hey? Ahhhh to be 16 again. And for the record, Steve never did notice me and yes, I WAS obsessed with him all through high school. I wrote a song about how much I hated Alana. I defaced her picture in my yearbook.

Enjoy!

Motherhood is a thankless job.

I gave Liam the benefit of the doubt and let him pack his own duffel bag for a 7 day snowboarding trip:

-6 pairs of jeans.
-1 pair of sweats.
-3 pajama pants.
-4 short sleeved shirt (for the MOUNTAINS!!)
-3 pairs of underwear.
-1 pair of socks.

Oh ya, and 6 X-Box games.

....

Um. Toothbrush and toothpaste? Enough socks and underwear? Maybe a long sleeve shirt or two, and at LEAST one sweater?

Looks like some 11 year olds still need their mommies. Not that there will be even a whisper of appreciation when he gets home.

Shenanigans.

I will be the first one to admit that my younger two children are hooligans. I try to deny it and prefer to pretend that other people think they're as cute as we do. In my more lucid moments the reality up and hits me upside the head. They're quite monster-ish.

Case in point, and this illustrates my point so precisely that it makes me want to weep;

Josh was hungry, it wasn't quite lunchtime yet so I set a bowl of cottage cheese on the table for him to eat. I tried to make him sit in his chair so I could strap him in but he was being so damn whiney that I decided to let him sit (stand) on the bench to eat it.

Jeff and I were chatting about stuff. The grocery list I think. I was keeping an eye on Josh but he's a wily one and knows that if he's good then my attention wanders and he has a small window of time where he can create mayhem.

Sure enough a couple minutes pass and then Nicky comes into the kitchen. "Oh my Gawd, my sock is messy".

Jeff takes a quick look and wonders out loud how he got cottage cheese, of all things, on his sock.

SHIT. Yup Josh isn't at the table. I run for paper towels and a wet cloth to clean up whatever disaster has occurred in the living room. Jeff runs to the living room to assess the damage.

The scene: a bowlful of cottage cheese dumped in the corner of the couch with a nice pile dripping down the back of the couch into a puddle at the bottom of one of the wicker baskets that hold toys. They like to turn the baskets on their side and shove them up to the couch so they can climb up and over the couch. Ya.

Josh is happily smooshing the mess around on the floor and Nicky is yelling "bad boy Josh, oh my Gawd you're so messy", while helping smoosh the cottage cheese around.

Kids-1/parents-0.

To all the people to whom we've subjected our children, we apologize. We know they're unruly, but it's cute. Right?

Damage control.

I broke down the other day and signed up for Weight Watchers again. It irks me to have to do it because I know what I can and can not be eating. What's high in calories and blah blah blah.

Me: I really want some halloween candy.

My Conscience: you know, you've been eating quite a bit of that stuff in the past few weeks.

Me: It tastes so good. I hardly ever indulge in chocolate.

My Conscience: but instead of 10 snack size chocolates, how about just 2?

Me: shut up. I'm PMSing.

My Conscience: for 2 weeks huh? Whatever you say.

Me: nom nom nom.

If you didn't guess, that's an example of my internal dialogue. It gotten a little out of hand. And while I realise a 6 pound weight gain over the course of 14 days can't just be attributed to smarties and coffee crisps, it was the catalyst.

I need a visual reminder of where I'm standing on a daily basis. An easy, user-friendly program. So as much as it killed me to spend $85 for 3 months just to reinforce something I already know, it had to be done.

So we're back on the bandwagon at 137 pounds as of this past Monday.

However, I have a coffee addiction. Specifically a coffee creamer addiction. So I decided to not count my creamer in my points. I am breaking the rules. I'm such a rebel.

Neener neener.

By no means are my kids good sleepers. Wait, that's not entirely true. Liam is a good sleeper. Then again he's 11 and doesn't need me to hold his hand anymore. So as much as he counts, he doesn't count in this instance.

No, the needy toddlers are not good sleepers. In a 24 hour period I can count on only a solid 3 hours of not having at least one of them hanging off some part of my body. That would be between when they're put to bed for the night and when Josh wakes up for the first time.

And then the second time. And the third time. And oh wait, lets thrown in just one more, fun times!

I digress.

Time change does weird things to kids and none of those weird things are good. Most of them have to do with sleeping patterns getting jacked up and crankiness and much hair pulling of parents. Or so I hear.

For 11 years I've dreaded time change because of the potential for disaster. All of my kids have naturally put themselves on pretty strict schedules, so a whole hour of change? Lord, there's just no way they should be able to deal with that easily.

Except mine do, with a minimum of fuss. It's not like they didn't have meltdowns or get really tired. They did, but it's so par for the course here that I barely noticed it.

Do you want to hit me for escaping time change relatively unscathed? That's okay, I want to hit you for having good sleepers.

Unless you don't have good sleepers and STILL got shafted by time change. In that case you have my permission to call me a smug bitch.

Watch, since I dared open my mouth about my good fortune I will never have a decent time change experience again. Karma's like that.

Sometimes the coffee just can't brew fast enough.

I was expecting a difficult night of sleeping last night. Indeed, if any parent doesn't expect some sort of fall-out from Halloween then they're just naive.

My sleepless night didn't come from toddlers hopped up on sugar though. I know, it shocked me too.

We headed to bed around midnight, as we usually do. I thought my luck had already run out with getting all the kids in to their beds at respectable times without too many tantrums or pouty faces about candy, and was expecting Josh to wake up within the next 30 seconds. So I didn't go to sleep right away and decided to read until he woke up.

45 minutes later he was still sleeping so I decided that I would just go to sleep too. That's when the snoring started. It wasn't too awful at first, just enough to keep me from actually falling all the way asleep.

Along came 1:30. A couple things happened at this point; Josh woke up and I grabbed him and brought him into our bed. And the snoring escalated.

I started out small. A couple kicks to his shins to get him to shut the hell up. Each kick interrupted the snoring for only about 5 seconds, so I moved on to the gentle shoulder shake. No more success there.

Okay, we'll try the combination shoulder shake/whisper to roll over. Keep in mind that I have a restless toddler attached to my boob so I'm trying to not make more noise than necessary. But still no success.

By this point I'm getting pissy. Josh would be almost fully asleep and then a particularily loud choking/gurgling/snort would wake him up. Is it just me, or is snoring the most disgusting and annoying sound another person can make? It makes my skin crawl.

I stopped holding back. A couple shoves to the chest, a few jabs to the side and nothing. Finally a loud command to roll over paired with me physically helping him do so, and he was facing the other way. This usually makes the snoring stop at least long enough for me to fall sleep but not this time. And there was no waking up the man either, he was dead to the world.

So at 2:15 am, after getting pretty much no sleep yet, I finally gave in and moved to the couch. With the baby. Who is a wiggler. Needless to say, the amount of sleep I got on that couch was not signifigantly more than I would have gotten in bed with my snoring husband, but at least he's still alive today.