Nothing special...which makes it special

I took these photos a couple of months ago.  It wasn't a birthday.  It wasn't a holiday.  It wasn't an original location or first-day-of-anything or last-day-of-something or even a Saturday.

It was just an ordinary day.  Evening I think, since Cooper (at six years old) is always lobbying to sleep in the top bunk.  I didn't even crop or edit these pictures; I kind of didn't know what to do with them.

But now I know: I'm taking more pictures like them.  They're a reminder that I need to take more photos of the ordinary times.  The special occasions...of course I have a lot of shots of those.  The day-to-day stuff?  Not so much...not since they've gotten a little older and in school.  Seems like school and all its activities have crowded out the routine but special time I used to have so much of with the boys.  At least this time of year...

So here's to more of the ordinary.  And Cooper getting to the top bunk someday.

If an apology falls on deaf ears, do you still have to apologize?

So yesterday morning when I got the boys up I thought I'd try apologizing for acting the way I did the night before.  I wanted to tell them it's hard to have a lot of patience all the time and that at the end of the day that patience gets thinner and thinner and when I have to do tasks I really dislike it puts me in a rotten mood and I took it out on them but also Cooper you shouldn't have hit your brother but I shouldn't have reacted like that and I'm soooo sorry.

Yes, I really wanted to say all that, but I knew they would just stare at me and probably at the end of my diatribe they would just say "okay."

So I decided to take an easier, less dramatic route.  I waited until they were a few bites into their breakfast and then I said "sorry I was such a crab last night.  You get double goodnight kisses tonight."

Chewing their waffles, they looked up at me and Cooper says "okay."  I don't think Carson looked up.

Seriously, are apologies to my kids more for me than for them?  Do they really care?

I did feel better having said it to them, and maybe in ten years they'll remember their mom wasn't too good to tell them I'm sorry.

But just in case they never remember that, I showed up at the school to have lunch with them.  Maybe they'll never understand why I was there on that day, but for whatever reason they make a big deal about it when I surprise them at lunchtime.  And that's just fine with me...

One of those nights...

Who knows why I'm choosing such a crappy night to turn to you, neglected blog readers (if there's any of you still out there).  But tonight, for whatever reason, I feel compelled...

It was a busy night here: we got home from soccer and eating dinner out at 7:15.  Not insanely late but still late, considering the boys' bedtime is 8:00 on a school night and I am a major scrooge about varying from it even a little.

So when we walked in the door I realized...and nearly turned back around and walked out...that I'd forgotten to get clean sheets on all our beds.  The boys' BUNKBEDS were already stripped of their bedding or I'd have put off this horrible task yet another day.  So I started my barking at them to begin their bath while I tackled the beds.

And our bed was jacked up, too.  For some reason there was gigantic hole in the bottom sheet where my feet go.  Maybe I desperately need a pedicure or something, but with each passing night the hole ripped further and further until it got about two feet (no pun intended) wide.

So every bed in our house needed changing, on a school night with baths still ahead of us at 7:30 p.m.

That's a lot of not-needed detail just to say that wrestling with it all just put me in a foul mood.  Bunkbeds have their place in life, I suppose, but OH MY.  Changing the sheets on those things ranks right up there with dental work.

And since the clock was ticking toward bedtime I got to parent (i.e., yell) from afar to the boys to hurry up with their baths and teeth-brushing.  That's fun.

Dwayne was in the house, in case you're wondering.  And he did show up in their bedroom to help.  But he's just not as, shall we say, enthusiastic about keeping bedtime on time as I am.  I tell him all the time if he was the one who had to drag them awake every morning, he'd make sure they got to bed on time.

So finally the task of clean sheets was done and the boys were momentarily alone in their room, and I hear a "whap!"

The sound of Cooper's hand hitting some part of Carson.

So given the mood I was in and the late hour and whatever else had been piling up in my mind...I totally went off on him and yelled until the chandelier rattled (okay, if we had a chandelier it would have rattled).  I made him apologize to Carson and then put them both in bed without saying goodnight or prayers or reading a story or even giving a kiss.

I went in the living room, got the remote, and for one hour I polluted my mind with Kim Kardashian's wedding special.

See, you'd feel like crap, too.

I think Dwayne went in to the boys and tried to smooth things over for me, but I didn't get a chance to ask him because he, too, went straight to bed.  Asleep.

So looks like, at this moment, I've hurt the feelings of everyone in this house.

Right now I really just want to go wake everyone up and tell them I'm sorry.  But I know all these men, and I believe they all like their sleep more than hearing me grovel.

I suppose I've done the crime; tomorrow I'll have to do the time.  I don't really know what I can do to make it up to everyone.  Frankly, I think the boys will forget about it pretty quickly and move on.  Probably the more I say about it, the more they'll just be like "okay, Mom.  Can we have fruit snacks in our lunch?"

Tonight, though, I think some prayers for patience are in order...

Wow.

I used to love it out here.  Just writing whatever...whenever.  Now Whatever and Whenever have completely stopped.

I have my reasons.  Maybe I started meeting too many of my readers face to face.  That's weird.  See, I like to think no one's reading and I can just write whatever...whenever.  But now and then I get an audible comment and I want to escape somewhere and shut the door.  Still trying to figure that one out...

But it turns out some people missed reading my little (and I do mean little) blog.  Not many, but some. 

Maybe I'll just start up this ol' rickety thing again.

Hmmm...

How I'm living without Facebook

It's been since Ash Wednesday that I gave up Facebook for Lent.  If you aren't sure why we Catholics bother to find something to "give up" during these days preceding Easter, check here for a thorough explanation.  Me?  I find it strengthening to challenge myself to abstain from something in my life that I feel is bringing me down...that seems to suck the time from my day (or brain cells from my head) with really nothing to offer me in return.

(The Lenten season is made up of the 40 days before Easter. I've read and heard a few places that Sundays during this time are not considered part of Lent, and therefore you're not required to abstain from whatever you're giving up on these days.  I finally looked it up and found this explanation, which is very convincing.)

Why was Facebook my target this year?  I found I was spending a couple of hours a day reading things like "nice day today...I think I'll take a walk" and "is it Monday already?"  I don't think these types of inane comments would normally bother me, but seeing them every day was mind-numbing.  Once I realized my friends' and family were having an okay day or their kids were super cute the day before, I would wander off to someone's photo albums and waste some more time viewing, ultimately, photos I'd already seen.

Then there was Bejeweled Blitz.  It's an Facebook video game where...oh, suffice it to say it was not time well spent.  In addition to a couple of hours on Facebook reading statuses and viewing photos and whatnot, I'd skip over to BB where I could play one-minute games for 40 minutes or more.  And this would happen three or four times a day.


So in an effort to use my time more wisely I gave it all up.  For several days I went cold turkey: didn't even log on to Facebook one time.

Then I started sneaking out there every once in a while.  I do have some family members I like to keep up with...and my sister got married for heaven's sake.  I had to view photos!

I can tell you, however, it's nothing like it was before.  I scroll down once, maybe twice, to see if there's anything I've missed.  Then I'm done!  There's no aimless wandering!  Once or twice I've cringed at a status here or there, and then I know it's time to shut it down.  And I do it with ease instead of trying to find something worthwhile.  And recently when tornado weather passed through the area, I watched TV with glee and thought about the five or six or twenty media-types I follow, and how they'd be saying the same ol' thing over and over and over.  (Could be a clue I need to de-friend some folks...)

I like Facebook, I really do.  But tempering my use of it these last few weeks has been good for my soul.  I've learned I can say no to myself once in a while.  I'll probably start updating my status a little after Easter, but it feels like the end of getting up from my computer wondering why I wasted so much time there.

Since I gave up Facebook for Lent...

I'm sharing this with my true friends...at least the ones who appreciate (or severely do not) pop music.

Why do all those pop songs sound the same?

NCAA tournament comes to Tulsa...

  ...and so do dancin' fans.  Or at least those who think they can.

Wow

We already got 14 inches of snow...is this really necessary?

Testing mobile blogger app

Just downloaded Blogger for android.  Apparently I can now blog from my phone.  Woo-hoo!  For me at least.

The boys are busy scanning 40-year-old slides into computer files for their grandpa.  I have no idea how to do it so I guess I can go take a nap.

Blizzard: Day Three

That's right: I haven't updated my blog in a month and now I'm jumping into the fray in the middle, not even at the beginning, of Tulsa's big 'ol blizzard of 2011.  It's Day Three of the mayhem, and even though the snow has stopped falling it's really worse than the first day, you know, the one when we got all the snow and wind...it wasn't as bad for the road and temps situation as the last two have been.

Man, I'm boring.

But trudging onward...

Dwayne managed to get his truck out of the confines of the driveway yesterday and go to work, but I think he was one of about three people who made it.  And he was not happy about it.  For you motherly types out there, I did try to discourage him from going in but he was on a mission so I loaded him up with a big quilt and some rations in a paper bag, some coffee, and a Gatorade in case he sweat (huh?).  He worked almost the whole day and crept home while talking to me on his headset thing and informing me of two drivers who passed him and how he "waved" to them.  Thankfully he's made it driving about town without incident.  Or accident.

The boys and I...we're surviving.  The first day it was all fun and games and snow ice cream, now I'm just trying to keep them from hurting each other.  I made them little tickets to redeem for playing video games, each of them worth 30 minutes.  Give or take an hour.  So far it's keeping everyone happy.

Oh, and in preparation for the storm, we stopped at their school's library on Monday and loaded up on books, about a dozen or so.  Unfortunately, Carson only had about ten books left to go on his 100-books reading log and he managed to knock those out before the snow even stopped falling.  That little piece of paper on the refrigerator was such a motivator for him to read every day that I'm thinking of printing off another one for him to do before the end of the year.

As for Cooper, he didn't have a reading log but that little dude is reading his share nonetheless.  He can poke his way through Green Eggs and Ham and a couple of others.  He informed me last night that he would read to me any time I wanted him to...

Oh, and yes, we've been outside.  The first trip I stayed indoors in my flannel while Dwayne ventured out with the boys.  The drifts...they swallowed them up!  Carson came in and told me he had so much fun making lots of "trespasses" all over the yard.

I'll pause while you think about that one.

I did take snow photos but they are still on my camera with most of December's.  I'm so behind on photos...

To add to our drama...wait...there's no drama here.  I wish there was, actually.  But to add to whatever we have going on here, there's a leak in our roof that is drip-drip-dripping water into a pan in our living room.  This happened during the Christmas Eve Blizzard last year and the roofer guy assured us that was a freak storm and it would never happen again.  Thanks, roofer guy...

That's all I got.  Stay warm.