Every morning I get out the kids’ vitamins. All five kids take a daily multivitamin, and Rob also takes a calcium supplement because he doesn’t drink milk. I’d already streamlined the process somewhat by using the same bottle for anyone who takes the same dose: for example, Elizabeth and Edward both use Elizabeth’s prescription until it runs out, and then they both use Edward’s. Rob and William do the same. Henry is the only one who doesn’t share.

So that’s…four little bottles every morning, which is not exactly the sort of chore that RUINS MY LIFE, but it’s a minor hassle and I have found a pleasing improvement to the situation: I use one of those weekly pill reminder boxes. Last night I put in each compartment two square vitamins (E and E’s), two round vitamins (R and W’s), and a calcium supplement (R’s). This morning I opened the M compartment, tipped the pile into my hand, and went around the table handing them out. Henry’s doesn’t fit into this system yet because his is a liquid, but soon he’ll take a chewable and fit right in with the rest of the crowd.

Not only is this a little quicker, it solves the fuss over who gets which color vitamin: they get whatever is in the box, and I made everyone’s the same color for each day: four orange vitamins for today, four pink ones for tomorrow, etc.

That reminds me, though, of something we started doing early on to reduce the color-choice fuss. When Rob was a toddler, he wanted to CHOOSE, but that led to problems with (1) running out of one color before the other colors, and (2) long agonizing decisions while I stood there holding out my hand with the vitamins in it. So what I started doing was dumping out a little pile of vitamins into my hand, and giving him the one there was the most of. If I had 4 purples, 2 oranges, and 1 pink, he got a purple. If I had the same number of two different colors, I’d dump out a couple more vitamins, or put back a few. This method encourages the colors to come out even, too, which is pleasing to those of us who are firstborn and mathy.

The first giveaway has ended! The winner of the first giveaway for a Whimsical Walney shirt is Chaya, who left the January 27, 2:13 a.m. comment. Chaya, email me at swistle at gmail dot com and I’ll connect you to Whimsical Walney.

Dr. Maureen is showing her pay-it-forward loot and starting a new contest, and because I am SO DIM, I forgot to post about this until the DAY the contest ends, but Maureen is merciful and says she’ll accept comments even after the deadline. Well, not FOREVER. But within reason. And I REALLY suggest you enter, because one of the things in the prize package is going to be a Small Secret that we will be using soon to play a game! And that’s all I’ll say for now.

This is one of those “All the coffee in the world couldn’t…” mornings. But I’m an optimist, so I’m trying the coffee anyway.

I’ve started getting up BEFORE Paul so that I can have some hot water. Upside: hot water! And not having to rush through my shower because Paul used 35 minutes of our shared 40 minutes of getting-ready time! Downside: getting up at five o’clock in the morning, and having my early rising wake the children Every Single Time, so that by eight o’clock I have already logged THREE HOURS of Cherishing Every Moment. Well, 2 hours and 45 minutes, since Paul is technically in charge of the children while I’m getting ready.

It’s unpleasant, and I haven’t adjusted yet to losing the 45 minutes of sleep, but I know, I know, some of you would consider five o’clock SLEEPING IN, and also it’s worth it to avoid starting every day trying to figure out whether my husband doesn’t love me or if he’s just an inconsiderate jerk.

I’m still eating baked oatmeal nearly every morning, and this has led to a canned pineapple kick at our house: the recipe only calls for a little bit, so I was having the kids help me finish off the can before it went bad, and now they’re eating canned pineapple as part of their food rotation. And by the way, not to embarrass anyone, but a Certain Baby has had Certain Issues very much assisted by the addition of pineapple to his diet.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the pineapple. Canned pineapple is packed in unsweetened pineapple juice, and do you know I was POURING IT DOWN THE SINK? I just wasn’t THINKING about it. I’m used to canned fruit being packed in syrup, I guess, and I’m used to draining cans of tuna, legumes, etc. But pineapple juice is YUMMY and made of JUICE! And I have a Certain Baby who is supposed to drink more juice! And also I will note that SOME people enjoy the taste of pineapple juice mixed with vodka after a long day. And stores SELL pineapple juice! For money! But you get about 6 ounces of it FREE in a can of pineapple! This has been a very exciting discovery.

This morning I performed my Wifely Duty, and you can just stop that snickering right now because what you are thinking of is not even in the marriage vows, or at least not the ones I vowed. What I vowed is to continue to be Paul’s wife in sickness as well as in health, so when he woke up making babyish groany “I have a perfectly ordinary headcold but I’m acting more like it’s the end stages of terminal cancer” sounds, I brought him Dayquil and water in bed instead of buying him a one-way ticket for Bucking Fabyville. I rewarded my devotion with a slice of cake in a size known as “Have a little CAKE, why don’t you.”

Today is our third CPSIA giveaway. (Here’s the first and the second.) Charming Maeve is going to give away THREE prizes, one baby shirt of the winner’s choice (I THINK my favorite is “One state, two state, red state, blue state,” but it’s a tough call) to each of THREE (U.S.) winners, so that TRIPLES your chance of winning. To enter, leave a comment on this post by Monday, February 2, 2009, 4:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific time, and I’ll choose (THREE) random winners.

For all of us who DON’T win, Charming Maeve is offering free U.S. shipping on all tees, including women’s tees (also available in my favorite one state two state version). She warns that she has to manually update inventory, and she’ll try to keep up but it’s possible there will be Disappointments if the orders come in quickly. And once CPSIA takes affect on February 10th, she won’t be able to sell the baby shirts anymore, so move fast.

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There is still room in the schedule for a few more giveways, so if you’re an artist/crafter affected by CPSIA or wanting to show support for those affected by CPSIA, email me at swistle at gmail dot com and let me know what you’d like to give away. Don’t be intimidated by the awesomeness of the prizes so far. The prize can be tiny. I’ll handle the giveaway here, and then let you know who to mail the cool swag to.

Oh, good morning!! I am drinking my coffee kind of strong today!! I can’t find my eyelids!!

Today is our second CPSIA giveaway. Yesterday I was trying to figure out a scheme for winning this one myself, because it is by Amy Quarry. Do you remember the package I won from her back in September? ZOMG, as I believe I said at the time. She sent a dress and warmies (leggings made from sweaters) for Elizabeth, both of which are TEH CUTEST, and she sent a bunch of other things (hair thingies! wall thingies! key thingies! thingies to keep thingies in!) that made me marvel afresh at people who are artistic: How do they DO that? How do they know exactly what will look perfect with what? It baffles and impresses me.

Amy isn’t directly affected by the new CPSIA thing (because she’s Canadian, not because she’s an outlaw), but she says she thinks it’s crazy and wants to offer her support. The prize will be a surprise package customized for the winner, but you can check out Amy’s style at her main place, and at her Etsy shop. She’s one of the artists at goodEGG, and you can read her blog, which is about her funny sweetie little girl as well as about projects.

So! Leave a comment on this post by Sunday, February 1st, at 4:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific time. Because I am SO VERY ETHICAL (well, and because Amy would recognize my mailing address), I’ll choose a random winner rather than creating a fake identity and winning the contest myself.

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There is still plenty of room for other giveways, so if you’re an artist/crafter affected by CPSIA or wanting to show support for those affected by CPSIA, email me at swistle at gmail dot com and let me know what you’d like to give away. Don’t be intimidated by the awesomeness of the prizes so far. The prize can be tiny. I’ll handle the giveaway here, and then let you know who to mail the cool swag to.

Perhaps you have heard of this thing where the United States, in an admirable effort to lower the bad stuff like POISONOUS LEAD in children’s products, is passing legislation that, unfortunately, is also going to make it difficult or impossible for some of the art/craft people to stay in business. The painful thing about this is that often the artists/crafters hand-make BECAUSE safe products are important to them, and hand-making is their way of ensuring that.

I’ll tell you right up front that I know VERY LITTLE about this. I have to have “CPSIA” written on a piece of scrap paper next to me or I can’t remember the letters, and I don’t know what the letters stand for….okay, fine, that’s too embarrassing, I’ll look it up. It’s Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

As I understand the situation, the CPSIA thing didn’t set out to hurt artists and crafters; it’s more that it didn’t set out to protect them, either, and so the new regulations, intended for large businesses, also affect, for example, a person with a hobby room who makes baby blankets out of carefully-purchased organic cotton, and a person with a workshop who makes baby toys out of carefully-purchased dangerous-chemical-free wood and paint. Do I have that basically right? Is that about the gist of it?

Okay! So, do you remember the Whimsical Walney t-shirt giveaway we did last June? Well, she can’t stay in business because of this CPSIA thing, so all her stuff is 50% off until February 9th when she’s shutting down. You can visit her at Whimsical Walney to see all her cute Use Your Words and Flags of the World kid shirts.

But also. To, uh, commemorate the CPSIA issue, we’re going to be doing a series of giveaways. If you’re a business affected by CPSIA and you’re getting rid of inventory (um, I hope it’s clear I mean inventory NOT saturated with lead or whatevs, but rather inventory that is nice and safe but can’t be sold unless you pay for an expensive test to prove it), or if you’re an artist/crafter NOT affected by the new act but wanting to show support for those artists/crafters who ARE affected, email me at swistle at gmail dot com and let me know what you’d like to give away. I’ll do a giveaway every day or two until popping slows to 2-3 seconds between pops I run out of things to give away, or until we get to February 9th, which is the last day non-CPSIA-tested things can be sold.

Whimsical Walney is first up: leave a comment on this post by Friday, January 30th at 4:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific time, and I’ll use a random number generator to choose a winner. The prize is one Whimsical Walney shirt, your choice of any still in stock.

My dad I figured out my camera, so now I have a photo of the Medium Ash Brown hair!

Tilted-down face makes 95% reduction in under-chinnage, but 50% increase in forehead size

Oh, wait, I was supposed to be showing you the 50% increase in Morose:

Next topic. We need to talk about something, and it has to do with what to do with your EYEBROWS if you dye your hair darker.

The haircolor box says NOT to use the haircolor on your eyebrows or you WILL GO BLIND. But let’s say you were all, “What does it matter if I can see, if all I can see is that my eyebrows don’t match my hair?,” and so you played it dangerous and put the stuff on your eyebrows. But it didn’t even WORK! So you RISKED BLINDNESS for NOTHING!

In that case, I’ll tell you what you SHOULDN’T do. DON’T buy a box of Just For Men Mustache and Beard Color. I thought you said you WEREN’T blinded the first time! Can’t you see that it’s for MEN and MUSTACHES and BEARDS? It is not for girl eyebrows! Just because it talks about how perfect it is for coarse, resistant facial hair doesn’t mean it’s for YOUR coarse, resistant facial hair, or that eyebrows are coarse and resistant and facial! Don’t be stupid!

Besides, it’s still hair dye, and just like other hair dye, it can cause PERMANENT BLINDNESS if you get it in your eyes. So it is CLEARLY marked that you should NOT use it for your eyebrows! So don’t!

You might as well not even read further unless you’re a MAN intending to use this product AS INTENDED.

Okay, guys, you know how girl haircolor kits have to be mixed all at once and then you can’t use the stuff after an hour or it’ll explode or whatevs? The beard and mustache kit is different. It has two little tubes, and you can mix exactly the amount you want on the little tray.

Lipstick for scale. MAN lipstick.

The whole process takes 10-15 minutes, so if I were a man I’d do this about 15 minutes before I’d normally get into the shower, and I’d already be wearing a bathrobe so I wouldn’t have to pull a pajama top over my head with this stuff on my beard/mustache.

The instructions say not to use the little tubes to mix any more potion after 3 months, but the reason is “to ensure highest level of quality.” That’s insufficiently persuasive. Maybe if it were “because after 3 months this stuff will chaw its way through the plastic tubes and melt a hole in your linen closet shelves”—but it isn’t, is it, it’s just about highest possible levels of quality, which, pfff. And let’s say I knew someone who was using it on, uh, a small mustache—yeah, not eyebrows but a mustache, a slightly-graying mustache exactly the size of two eyebrows, and that she he said she’d he’d been using the same box for nearly two years. Also, just as a total non sequitur, my mother is not blind in EITHER eye. Nor am I.

It comes with a wee little brush, which is just perfect for using on your eyebrows tiny eyebrow-shaped mustache. Maybe you want to put your non-brush-holding hand protectively over your eye. No reason.

ONLY do this to a MUSTACHE. Not an eyebrow! Eyebrow shown only for illustrative purposes, with eye-safe conditioner instead of hair dye, just so you can see what the brush would be like if I HAD a mustache, which I don’t.

You (the man) would wait 5 minutes. This is a good opportunity to manfully clean the little tray and brush and put them back in the box for the next time your mustache is looking too gray or too blond or whatever.

Don’t worry if when you next look in the mirror the extra potion has made the skin around your mustaches look kind of weird.

But next time you might want to keep the potion more IN THE LINES, just because nobody needs facial fuzz to be darker.

After 5 minutes, you (you’re still a man) can get into the shower and rinse. You should be VERY CAREFUL not to get let the rinse water SLOSH UP into your eyes. Maybe you should squeeze your eyes very tightly shut. You should use a mild shampoo to wash your mustaches, and it’s a good idea to have that shampoo bottle where you can find it while groping around with your eyes tightly squeezed shut, because seriously, don’t open your eyes while rinsing or shampooing or re-rinsing the dyed parts. Just in case the water sloshes UP. Be really careful, men.

Just For Men is sold at Target for $6-7. Or maybe it isn’t, how would I know? I’m not a man, nor do I have a beard or mustache, nor do I want to be PERMANENTLY BLIND. My mother, who similarly has no reason to know where such a thing might be sold, says that if she were just guessing, she might guess that Walgreens also had a selection. But she adds that she really wouldn’t know.

I have so many really great emails from friends, sitting there in my inbox like little jewels, waiting for me to….I guess I wouldn’t be answering a jewel. Well, so that’s perfect then! I’m too distracted to focus on them, because Paul left for work angry this morning, and even though he wasn’t angry at ME, it was still a poor way to start the day.

I was already a little crabby with him because he once again hogged the hot water, and I don’t know how he can continue doing that even after I’ve explained that the way I see it, he’s weighing out the hot water in his hands, saying, “I will divide this between my sweetheart and me, and I will do it in the way I think is most fair”—and then he takes 85% of it for himself, so what does that mean about how he feels about me?

And so I was doing some nice careful breathing (through my SHIVERS), and also reminding myself that Paul is not someone who Thinks Symbolically, and even when I point out the symbolism to him he doesn’t see it that way, so I need to not always take it so personally, because it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me, it just means he’s an oblivious fathead.

But because he also hogged the available showering TIME (AS PER USUAL), I got out of the shower kind of late—so he was already a teeny bit late for work when he went out to his car, realized he’d forgotten something, and then realized he’d locked himself out and couldn’t ring the doorbell because he’d wake the couple of children who were not yet awake, and didn’t have his key because it was already in the ignition of the car, way down the driveway.

His knock was kind of irritable, and when I opened the door for him he made an irritable remark about the stupidness of our whole door-locking system, and I just let that go because I’m familiar with those kinds of feelings and know it doesn’t do any good to have someone telling you reasonably that maybe you’re just a little crabby about something else and perhaps we don’t need to go rushing out to buy a new door this very morning.

(Although perhaps we WILL need to buy a new door if someone keeps SHUTTING it so IRRITABLY. I’m just saying.)

Well, and then he got back out to his car and realized he’d forgotten something else, and a swear word was launched into the fresh morning air, and I had to do some fast thinking. When people around me get angry, I catch it like I’m a lightning rod. And then it has to be redirected at something, and I’d prefer that not be the case when it’s just me and the kids in the house, because then a cat is going to get shoved with a foot or a tray of cookies is going to get eaten. Or TWO trays.

You know how worry can morph rapidly into anger? Like when someone is late and you’re picturing them in a car crash and imagining how you’d probably have to be sedated when the doctor came out of the operating room with the bad news, and then they waltz in all perky and “Oh, am I late?,” and you think maybe you should be sedated NOW lest there be bad news SOON? I wondered if that might work in the opposite direction too, so I tried to change my budding anger into worry. “He’s crabby, and he’s late, and now he’ll be a little bit later, and so he probably won’t drive safely,” I told myself. “He could easily Never Come Home.” Not quite enough. “This could be The Last Time You See His Face.” Better. “Later, you’ll remember every moment of this morning. This LAST morning.” There!

Meanwhile he was stomping through the house to get the thing he forgot, and then stomping past again and shutting the door too hard behind him, and I tried harder to picture him in a hospital bed all hooked up to tubes and machines. Then he REVVED out of the driveway and I added some pitiful bruises to his unconscious face. And put out a stick of butter to soften for cookies.

Today was an eventful day. I debuted my new hair color, which I would like to show to you but I can’t figure out how to get my new camera hooked up to my computer. I mean, I CAN figure out how to hook it up, and I HAVE hooked it up, but my new camera and my computer do not seem to be hitting it off, and no actual hooking up is occurring.

So I have a camera CHOCK FULL of photos where I’m tilting my head in various ways trying to find the angle that will make my jawline appear Sharp and Tight rather than Plump and Pillowy, but I can’t show any of them to you yet. You will just have to take my word for it that Medium Ash Brown was a significantly better choice for my complexion than Tempted Peach. Medium Ash Brown more closely resembles my natural No Particular Color (my mother calls it Wheat; my mother-in-law calls it Dishwater), while being a significant enough change that it was fun and interesting—thus satisfying the intended wallowing goal (specifically, wallowing goal 2A).

Furthermore, the darker shade has increased Morose Appearance by, say, 50%. It is much easier to look pale and sad with darker hair. Even Paul noticed: tonight we were both working in the kitchen, and I reached a waiting point in the cooking process and sat down on a stepstool for a moment to contemplate the weight of woe, and he said, “Could you sit morosely over here instead? I need to use the counter.”

I also went to Target in search of Parker’s shoes for Elizabeth, and TOTALLY SCORED, finding about ten pairs of shoes (assorted styles/sizes, including two pairs of The Parker) at 75% off.

AND I chose a winner for the Daily Grommet giveaway. The amusing thing is that the random number generator first chose SarahO, whose comment was: “Okay, I’m not actually entering the contest. But, I just wanted to to say that I bought the CARES travel harness when my daughter was 2. Can I just say that it is the BEST thing ever?? I love it!” So…I made it choose again, and it chose Nikki Page, which was an excellent choice because Nikki’s comment started with: “Okay, I really could use the CARES Airline seat for an upcoming trip so I’ll jump.” Email me, Nikki, and I’ll connect you to the goods!

AND I started a tally of frame votes, and we’ll have to wait and see if I finish that tally or if I just make up numbers to support the frame choices I like best. Also, isn’t it weird to have the site a different color? It’s been the same shade of blue since the very first entry, and now suddenly it’s….cream? What the hay? Or is it “What the hey?” You know, I’ve never written that out before.

Today Wendy is right: it’s impossible to choose a frame if the site background color is not the same as the wall color. So I’ve taken down the Tiffany Swistle Blue temporarily, replacing it with the cream color of our walls.