Here’s a happy song Paul found:

Handheld, by Momus

It’s a person singing a love song to his favorite handheld device, and then the handheld device sings back to him. The funny thing is that I can get genuinely choked up over this song. Well, it isn’t funny or surprising to my family, as they have also seen me get genuinely choked up over a child’s project on the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.

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One of the irritating short people who lives in our house took a plastic ice pack and, while it was thawed and pliable, wove it in and out of the middle bars of a freezer shelf.

I went several months thinking that probably one day we’d defrost the freezer and we could get it out THEN, and then yesterday I couldn’t stand it anymore and I used a knife and a hammer. There are shards of this stuff scattered, though I got as many as I could because I see the packet says DO NOT INGEST and DO NOT GET INTO EYES and OMG PLEASE DON’T EVEN LOOK AT IT.

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You know how some bags of Starbucks coffee say that you can exchange the empty bag for a coffee at Starbucks? Do the Starbuckses located within Target stores take those? I could just ask them, I suppose, but I hate asking questions like that. Sometimes the person I ask seems like their goal is to explain at length why it is outrageous of me to expect a positive answer to the question I asked so extremely deferentially and non-expectantly, and so then I end up saying over and over, “Yes, no, I get it….No, I just wondered…No, I completely understand…No, of course you couldn’t…Really, you SHOULDN’T, it would be WRONG to…no, I see. Okay. Okay. Okay. YES, okay! Okay, I think I hear my mother calling me.”

So I thought I’d just ask you.

I accidentally bought Rob a pair of skinny pants. Ha ha ha, he looked so funny! And he’s mostly clueless about what he wears, he just takes the top pair of pants and the top t-shirt from his drawer, so he didn’t even notice that he was wearing nearly-skin-tight stretch corduroys all day. With loafers and athletic socks and a polo shirt, I am not even kidding you. Paul and I were exchanging snort-suppressed glances all day. I put the pants in the donation bag as soon as I saw them come through the laundry. Luckily they were on clearance—and besides, the day of snorting was totally worth the price.

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Do you remember me telling you about the girl my boyfriend cheated on me with in high school? She’s the one I felt some pity for because when we ran into each other last summer she was wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirt, and I’ve seen her a number of times since then and she is NEVER wearing such things, she is ALWAYS wearing cute clothes (not ANNOYINGLY cute, just basic cute—like, cute capris and a pretty cami with an unbuttoned casual-but-fitted shirt over it), so I felt sorry for her because it was probably Desperation Laundry Status at her house and she borrowed a shirt from her oldest child or from her High School Memories box or something, and then THAT’S the day she runs into the girl whose boyfriend she messed around with. Embarrassing.

ANYWAY, her daughter is in William’s class this year. As I discovered when I went to Parent Night last night. Oh, HI.

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I was thinking about how many gift cards I was going to want to buy at Christmastime this year, with all five kids in school. Well, really FOUR kids, because Rob is in middle school, and once a child has half a dozen teachers I don’t do holiday teacher gifts anymore. So it’s six teachers total: one for William, one each for Elizabeth and Edward plus a teaching assistant shared between their two classrooms, and two for Henry. Plus two bus drivers. Plus we have an excellent mail carrier and I like to give her a gift card too.

That’s nine gift cards. Which made me feel like ditching the whole thing, until I realized it’s about twelve weeks until Christmas and I usually go to Target once a week. If I add a gift card to my cart each time I go, the cost will be more evenly spread out, and I’ll be less likely to get overwhelmed by it. Plus, I won’t hold up the line by getting my giant heap of small-amount gift cards charged up. I’m glad to have thought of a solution, because it IS something I WANT to do.

One problem I noticed today: they don’t have the holiday-themed gift cards out yet. But they did have a pretty butterfly one, which sounds like it would look spring-like but I don’t think it does, and so I chose that.

See? It’s not holiday, but I don’t think it looks ANTI-holiday. If I squint, it looks like two Christmas ornaments! Or a bikini top. Festive!

Have I ever steered you wrong with book/movie recommendations? If so, never mind. But if NOT, then may I suggest Can’t Get a Date? (Is this ONLY available on Netflix? Surely not! And yet. And that’s the disc I watched, with six episodes. So if you don’t have Netflix, NEVER MIND AGAIN.)

Here is what it is: it’s a show about people who are totally and perfectly charming people, and yet can’t get a date because they are accidentally representing their awesome selves as non-awesome. There are six of them, and I would date ANY ONE OF THEM except that they are all gay and so none of them would have a flip’s interest in me. Okay, and also Mandy is too crazy for me and Robert is too uptight but WHATEVER, what I mean is that every single one of them made me feel like why CAN’T they get a date when they are SO AWESOME?? Including Mandy and Robert, because MY taste in laid-back guys has NOTHING to do with other people’s intrinsic dateability.

And the real star of the show is the voice-over narrator guy, who asks the hard/funny questions and gets the hard/funny answers and also can I date HIM? because he would probably be my first choice, despite being (1) faceless and (2) kind of unflinching, hard-truth-wise and (3) maybe also gay? it’s hard to tell.

Anyway. I laughed. I cried. I had another drink and stayed up way past bedtime for pretty much the first intentional time since having children (i.e., staying up because someone is barfing doesn’t count). So you might like it too.

We have a virus going through our house. Henry got it first: he was kind of tired and dazed and quiet, which should have tipped me off but I was just grateful, and then he got a fever of 103, and he said his throat hurt so I thought “Oh please not strep, please not strep”—and then the next day he was fine. No fever. No sore throat. No quietness.

I wondered at first if maybe the fever killed it off before it took root? or something? We go by what our pediatrician says, which is basically “Fever is good! Make friends with it! Invite it to come over and play! Unless it gets Unspecified Too High, at which point you should panic and freak out and we’ll reproach you for not panicking earlier!” (Note: they do not reproach us, except in my head when I am fretting.) The pediatrician’s nurse said she draws the line at 102: before 102, let the fever do its work; at 102 and above, medicate if the child is uncomfortable, or let it go if not. My own line is “Try to medicate before they start fever-barfing.” (This is a difficult line to find.)

Anyway, I would have been patting fever on the back in a congratulatory manner, except then Rob and Elizabeth got 103 degree fevers and sore throats, and Rob’s was 1/10th of a degree from being 104, and they were red-faced and miserable and didn’t want to watch television, and both of them fell asleep on chairs in the living room. And they both felt better the next day—and that’s when William and Edward got 103-degree fevers and sore throats. And Paul came home from work early with a 103-degree fever and a sore throat, and THAT’S when I got a little alarmed, because kids get fevers all the time but adults often don’t. So I googled it, and all I could find were reassurances that adult fevers under 101 were nothing to be concerned about, except of course if it’s the first sign of cancer, so don’t be ridiculous! Okay, thanks! I’ll come back when I’m wondering about an adult fever under 101!

Today EVERYONE IS HOME. Paul is home from work. None of the kids are going to school: two of them are probably well enough, but I didn’t want to be like “Oh, hi, I’m calling in THREE of my children with high fevers and sore throats, but here are the other two for you okay bye see you after school!” The good news is that everyone’s pretty much fine today: even the sicker kids’ fevers are down to “just a little warm,” throats are no longer sore, or else sore but not getting worse. Requests for juice, water, applesauce, toast—those continue. It’s the kind of sick where everyone is kind of enjoying being sick. Except me, the only one not sick and so HANDMAIDEN TO ALL.

This morning I escaped to the grocery store. We were running low on toast and apple juice and MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES. I took my sweet time. I walked down every single aisle. I also got a cup of coffee, which I’ve never done before because I don’t get how it’s supposed to work: it’s a non-lidded styrofoam cup, and I don’t know how to walk around with that while pushing a cart. Today I was willing to sacrifice the time it would take to play out that experiment. And it turns out I’m right: you kind of just have to stand there drinking it. I did manage to walk around, but I was pushing the cart with one hand and my waist, and there were a couple of times that clarified why I so often see coffee spilled all over the plastic seat and handle.

I came home reluctantly, with milk and eggs and juice and applesauce and bread and apple cider doughnuts and Kit-Kats and wine.

I am a little disappointed, because as soon as Miss Grace wrote this:

I realized what I had on my hands here was a perfect excuse for a giveaway. So this morning I went rushing back to Target—and there were no more owl quilts. Nor were there any of the turtle quilts I’d dithered over and decided not to get and then changed my mind about when Stimey mentioned them.

So then on the way home (it was not really on the way) I went to a SECOND Target, and that Target had a few owl quilts and one turtle quilt, but still at full price. I even carried them all over to the price checker just to be sure.

So. Perfect chance for a giveway, thwarted. Plus, there was no other good clearance. I came home with a box of laundry detergent.

I also bought Elizabeth a pair of leggings because she has to wear pants twice a week for gym class and she haaaaaaaaaaates pants and her jeans don’t fit her comfortably, so we’ll try these. They’re the kind that are kind of like sweatpants except a banded waist and bootcut ankles instead of elastic-cinched. But I’m pre-agitated because according to the school dress code, which I had to sign a paper saying I’d read and agreed to follow, “lounge pants and pajamas” are against school policy. And I ASSUME this policy is in place to prevent 8th grade girls from wearing low-slung pajama pants to school and NOT to prevent 1st grade girls from wearing non-jeans pants to gym class, and I further assume that NO ONE is going to (1) care or (2) call me out on this—but I don’t really KNOW these things, do I, not ANY of them, so I’m mildly fretterpated and imagining conversations with the principal.

Also, Henry was sick over the weekend: his fever got up to 103.1, which is where even I start raising my eyebrows a little and wondering what the heck. And then…nothing really happened. His fever went down, and he didn’t develop any other symptoms. But then today Rob has a fever, and just now William said he was so sleepy and did I think he should have a nap before dinner. So. Sick house time. I shouldn’t be surprised: we have children in FOUR different school buildings now. We are going to get EVERYTHING.

And I chaperoned a field trip last week, and now I want to send a bunch of photos to the preschool because someone did that one year when I DIDN’T chaperon [this spelling bugs me too, I assure you, but spell-check and the dictionary both tell me it’s the primary spelling even though “chaperone” looks better AND makes more sense] and I LOVED getting a couple of pictures of my kid on a field trip. But Snapfish is having an upload problem, and I emailed them about it and they say it’s a known problem and they’re working on it—but it’s been several weeks and I am getting impatient and fretful.

And also I recently watched a movie and read a book, and both were sub-par. So as you can see, I have a hard life.

I’ve had my eye on a quilt at Target for ages.

This quilt.
(photo from Target.com)

Today I saw clearance stickers dotted all over that department, but I didn’t get all excited because I hadn’t seen clearance stickers there before. (That is, it was likely to be a 15% or 30% clearance, and Elizabeth already HAS a quilt so I wouldn’t be able to justify it until 75% off and might as well not even get excited by the first sighting of clearance stickers.)

But then I saw some guy with four quilts in his cart, and that’s an unusual thing to see, so I did a really fast sidle into the aisle: zoooooooop! And the owl quilt WAS 75% off. So I yoinked one into the cart (I resisted the urge to get caught up in the moment and take two or three) and it came home with me. It is adorable. I love it. There are hedgehogs and squirrels and owls and mushrooms and rainbow-striped trees, and the whole thing reminds me of something I might have had on my 1970s childhood bed. (What I actually had on my 1970s childhood bed was a white bedspread covered with little tiny white balls forming boring white patterns. I didn’t like it. Which means in another 25 years I’ll be scouring antique stores for one.)

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We needed a bath mat for the downstairs bathroom, a bathroom that is mostly used by the boys. The bath mat goes in the small space between the shower and the toilet. I went with a color that could have been named Pee Yellow. It seemed practical.

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I dreamed the other night that ONE OF YOU was singing a duet with Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry was sitting fully-dressed in a bathtub for his part, and YOU were singing your part in an adjacent room, also fully-dressed and looking very pretty standing in a sunbeam. I woke up thinking you would LOVE this story, but then I forgot about it until hours later when I was driving along and suddenly remembered it. But I couldn’t remember any more WHICH OF YOU it was singing with Seinfeld, and that seems like a CRUCIAL ELEMENT of delighting you with this story.

Let’s say that I ordered a replacement lovey for Elizabeth on eBay, and that now I vividly understand why sellers are so quick to say so when they are a smoke-free household. Let’s further say that this is a LARGE stuffed animal (so that I’m not sure Febreze would get down deep enough) and not machine washable. What would we say I should do in this situation? Right now I have it sitting outside in the sun.

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We give the same annual donation to St. Jude’s no matter what, but I always time it so I send a check right after they send us a notepad and a sheet of address labels, because I use those things and want to encourage them to continue that method of trying to get money out of me. I never send them a check right after they send me a sad photo with a sad story, because that makes me go “ACK ACK ACK” and try to put those things in the recycling immediately so I don’t accidentally see/read anything, and I DON’T want to encourage them to continue THAT method of trying to get money from me.

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Upon further testing and reflection, the coffee-mug cupboard is not the right place for the stash of sweets. First thing in the morning, I open the cupboard to get a mug and it’s “HI, REMEMBER US?? THINK OF US ALL DAY LONG, HOW ‘BOUT!”

After reading this post (“I think we, as a society, have taken the ideas of ‘fate’ and ‘taking the time to find that special someone’ too far. And by ‘too far’ I mean ‘nearly to the end of my childbearing years'”), I thought again about something I’ve thought of before, which is HOW DO PEOPLE MEET PEOPLE AFTER THEY’RE NO LONGER IN SCHOOL?

I didn’t realize it at the time, especially with all the adults telling me to LIVE MY LIFE and ENJOY MY YOUTH and NOT SETTLE DOWN TOO SOON and NOT TRY TO GROW UP TOO FAST—but school is pretty much the only time of life when a person is surrounded by a pool of many single people of one’s own approximate age. THE ONLY TIME. After that, it’s workplaces, where people of varying degrees of age, intelligence, ability, and marriedness gather in varying degrees of randomness (i.e., if you work at Twooters, your coworkers will be of a more homogeneous type than if you work in a large office building).

I hedged my bets by finding TWO husbands in school. But what if instead of making a study of getting married, you used school as a time to distinguish yourself academically? What then? WHAT OH WHAT THEN?

Here is the information I am trying to elicit from you: where/how did you meet your significant other, especially if it was not in school? (But also if it WAS in school, because I don’t know about you but I hate to be left out of answering such questions. And besides, the number who met someone outside of school means nothing if we don’t have the number who met in school.)

It doesn’t even have to be Your One & Only: if you met someone and had what you’d consider a solid relationship with that person, anything where the two of you felt like you were making a go of it (even if that relationship eventually wrecked), where/how did you meet that person? You can list several/many people, if applicable. _I_ would, if YOU were writing this post: I’d say I met three different Serious Relationships, and all three were in school. Then I would probably add that, since then, I’d met mayyyyyybe one eligible guy in one of my many jobs but he was married, plus one available guy I would have been interested in dating because he was super cute/nice, but he had a child and a volatile relationship with his ex-wife and was 10 years older than me and wouldn’t have been a good match anyway.

As a side note, were you trying/hoping to meet someone at the time, or no? I know it’s classic to say things like “As soon as I decided I would be happy being single, THAT’S WHEN IT HAPPENED”—but for an outsider it’s a little hard to tell if that decision was genuine or if it was a FAKE-OUT, a RUSE to trick the fates after hearing many other people claim to have met significant others that way. And/or if it’s a retroactive delusion, like when Rob says “Oh, great: on the ONE DAY I can sleep in, I wake up early,” when actually he is just really bad at scientific observation and statistical record-keeping.

Paul went to the library and the thrift shop yesterday, and came back with proof of his love:

Interesting/pretty china, and a book about sociopaths.
Yeah baby.

I am really living the good life right now. The older four kids got on the bus and then I took Henry to preschool, where I got into the teachers’ good graces by signing up to drive for a field trip BECAUSE I HAVE ENOUGH TIME NOW THAT I DON’T MIND DOING IT. Then I went to the library, BY MYSELF, but it wasn’t open yet, so I drove to McDonald’s and got a LARGE coffee and a sausage McMuffin, which I ate (without sharing) in the library parking lot listening to the radio and not having to entertain anyone. By the time I was done, the library was open, and I browsed in a leisurely, meandering way, not feeling like I needed to grab WHATEVER and get out of there before children started running/yelling. On the way home I stopped at Subway and got a foot-long turkey sub to share with Henry when he’s out of preschool, because of the five children he’s the only one who’ll eat pretty much anything I eat. Then I came inside and a nice cat jumped on my lap, and I’m sitting here listening to her purring and the clock ticking, thinking, “OMG DOES THIS MEAN I’M GOING TO HAVE TO GET A JOB NOW??”

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Speaking of the cat, look at this silly girl:

I’ve never had a cat do that before. She curled her tail around her body, then leaned down until her forehead was resting on the puff of her tail, and then went to sleep.

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Every morning I make a full pot of coffee in my 4-cup coffee pot. I drink one mug in the morning, and in the afternoon I pour the rest over ice and have iced coffee. For MONTHS now I’ve been struggling with the problem of how to get flavored creamer into the iced coffee, because powdered creamer only dissolves in hot liquid.

The simplest and best solution is to use liquid creamer, but I don’t use it fast enough so I always waste most of the bottle—and also, I like to have several choices of flavors. So I’ve been microwaving a small (1/4th cup?) amount of the coffee in that morning’s old mug, and then adding powdered creamer to THAT, and then pouring that over the ice with the rest of it. That works really well, but it’s a bit of a fuss.

Hershey’s syrup and Nestle Quik both stir in nicely to cold liquids, but that’s only chocolate flavor, no creaminess. This was okay when I could add a slosh of whole milk, but nobody at our house drinks whole milk anymore. (It does still work well if, for example, I get a coffee at a drive-through and don’t finish it and put it in the fridge for later, because that already has some creamer in it and then I just add the chocolate.)

It was only today that I realized I could stir powdered creamer into the entire pot of hot coffee.