Category Archives: Random

Monday Musings, which is really an alliterrific way to say “Monday Randoms.” And alliterrific is totally a word, at least in my book and I am a professional “word” person so I know what I’m talking about. [Here’s a funny, marginally related story (or marginally funny, related story, whatevs). Whenever there is something going on with the kids – healthwise or physical injury-wise – Simon will say, in response to my opinion about what we should do, “That’s right, you took a semester of premed in college… you do know what you are talking about.”  It’s a long-running joke for us that, all typed out, sounds rather punkish of him, but it’s not and every time we laugh because we have no more new material after nearly 8 years of marriage (not true… the new material part, not the 8 years; we have almost made it out of the 7-year itch year, whatever that means). Sorry, long parenthetical sidebar is now done.] I made a pretty graphic for Monday Musings but then I thought it was pretentious and dumb and decided not to upload it but now I really want to anyway because I have told you about it. So here it is… and it in no way locks me into doing a random list every Monday or not doing a random list any other day of the week… non-committal is how I roll (can’t you just imagine what a joy I am to be married to given this entire paragraph?).

So… where was I? Oh yes, a random list of stuff for Monday… Happy Monday to you! Hope yours is going well!

• Simon and I got to go out on Friday night, which I’m not sure has happened in over three years… Yes, we have fairly regular date nights but since February 2010, he has worked pretty much every Friday night (unless we were on vacation) so we usually go out on Saturday or Sunday evenings. Going out on a Friday night was a special treat and pretty much the best way I can imagine kicking off a weekend.
• The Friday night date made the rest of the weekend seem like a full weekend… we could sleep in the next morning (well, let’s be honest, I could sleep in because Simon woke up early and the boys were up at the b-u-t-t crack of dawn) and enjoy family togetherness without feeling like we needed to escape for some grown up conversation.
• While I did document this on Instagram, the boys played together most of Saturday WITHOUT fighting with each other. I really don’t know how this happened or if it will happen again anytime soon (they were fairly good on Sunday too… knock on the biggest piece of wood ever), but it was lovely and what I always hoped for in having two boys/children.
• And to top off an already pretty great weekend, after we got home from church/shopping/lunch on Sunday, Simon told me not to take my coat off and to just leave with a book and go have coffee somewhere and maybe pick up some milk while I was out. (I think he might read my blog.) It was lovely. It was more than lovely, it was glorious. I love my family, but I also love to decompress and spend time in silence (or, relative silence).
• I read at Panera and eavesdropped in on a conversation between too college-aged people, a guy and a girl, who were perhaps on a date – they had mixed body language and the boy was a total tool. So much of a tool that I jotted down the following: “Why has this guy never learned that talking about how awesome you are never impresses a girl?” Unless of course you are George Clooney, or Bradley Cooper (which, BTW, Simon says I can totally have a pass for if ever he should call… he is still considering who his pass will be, I insisted that whoever it is, that along with be gorgeous, she also needed to have a sparkling personality like my own so I would know he wasn’t just into her for her looks as I have long loved Bradley Cooper since his days on Alias) but if you are one of those actors, you don’t need to talk about how awesome you are because the ladies will already know. This guy had no business discussing his awesomeness because it included: being picked as the high school marching band major when most of the people in the band had no clue who he was, reading all the time as a younger person (including first reading the Lord of the Rings books in 4th grade) and reading so much because he was so smart in school that he often finished assignments in 3 minutes when his classmates took 30 minutes (I’m guessing this was an exaggeration, but he could, indeed, be brilliant) and in the middle of lunch, he burped and never excused himself.
• I realize that I just made fun of someone who is significantly younger than me and in a mean spirited way, for that I am sorry, but if that person ever reads my blog and knows it is he who I am talking about, I would gladly talk to him about improving his approach with the ladies. Though I gathered he has enough confidence in himself to not be bothered by my commentary. For the record, I am not a dating expert, but I was a geeky, popularish girl in high school and I knew enough to not flaunt the fact that I was the yearbook co-editor as a means of attracting someone to me once I got to college. Also, for the record, I didn’t date a whole lot in college… but that is neither here nor there. And now I’m done with that subject, to recap, bragging about how proficient you were at reading as a youth and burping while out with a member of the opposite sex is not advised if you would like to move things into the romantic category.
• Today is my two year blogging anniversary, happy anniversary to me!
• My first week of revisiting healthy living was a HUGE success! Here’s hoping I can keep up with it and stay motivated. Not sure why I suddenly have discipline and self control (though as I type this, I am thinking how much I would love a slice of french bread with butter on it.) But I did have a small handful of jelly beans on Saturday and immediately regretted it, they did not make me feel good.
• I still miss sugar but I miss boatloads of carbs way more.
• Jack learned to spell a word recently: b-u-t-t spells butt, he told me and pointed to his rear end. Awesome.
• One night last week, Liam’s nightly reading book was over very quickly which made me realize it was missing a significant chunk out of the middle of the book. He had missed a couple words so I marked him as “Just Right” (he has to read a book until he is marked “Fluent” on it and then he can get a new one) and noted that the book was missing pages in the middle. The next night the same book came home so we marked it as “Fluent” when he finished it and sent it back – is that cheating? I mean, I did my part, right?
• I did talk to Jack’s teacher about what was said to him about his hand and apparently there is one child (who Jack had named in particular) who often says surprisingly mean things to his other classmates so it did not surprise the teacher that this had happened (sadly). How do you make a kid be nice when they are four? I don’t know. We will keep loving our guy and working with him to know what to say in those situations and as he grows up, hopefully he’ll be able to discern the people who are worth his time.
• I so love the Golden Globes – it really is my version of sports. I was commenting on people’s outfits all night and Simon would murmur nothingness back to me and I said to him, “Now you know how I feel when you talk to me while you are watching sports. I know you don’t care but I am talking anyway.” True enough.
• I hope 2013 is filled with dozens of weekends like the one I just had… it will be very good indeed is that is the case.
• I also hope I am not putting too many expectations on 2013, but I feel like it has the potential for great things, or at least big changes. Here’s hoping (and praying) that what we want, does indeed become what we have – though God will see us through, either way.
• I just went back and reread that list and my goodness, aren’t I just Little Mary Sunshine? I assure you that there is enough unpleasant to balance out all that sickening good. I did manage to remove all the skin from one of my toes while walking around downtown in my cute date shoes. And Liam might have an ear infection (only his second ever and he might have a future as a man cold haver, given the drama he is putting on).

• I got a new phone over the weekend – another Droid (an HTC One X if you must know) and I’m a happy girl. The screen resolution is greatly improved, the camera is hugely better, it doesn’t randomly stop working AND it has a SWYPE keyboard which I have missed since I got my last phone (which did not). Strangely, the very first time someone called me, it wouldn’t pick up and just kept ringing and ringing, which was disconcerting but since then it has been 100% perfect. Added bonus: I got to keep my old phone which will still work on a WiFi network and so we have yet another piece of technology with which to distract our children with at restaurants and on car trips.
• Last night I took the boys to Chili’s for dinner by myself because they had a special where you get two free kids meals for each adult entree purchased. For $9 we all ate what we wanted to (even picky Jack was pleased with fries, chicken fingers and a milk), you can’t beat that. You also can’t beat the fact that Jack ate happily and quietly while watching an episode of the Backyardigans while Liam and I talked about his day (judge away but I had already spent 3 hours with just Jack, hanging out, playing and talking about his day, which went like this [according to him]: I ate bweckfast, I pwayed bad guys, I watched a show while daddy took a shower, I ate snacks, I wead some books and I pwayed some more with my guys).
• I was listening to Jack play with his guys the other day and had to smile when I heard him create the following conversation between two toys:
  Toy A: Ayudame! [help me in Spanish]
  Toy B: Okay, I’ll help you!
  Toy A: Great… Skadoosh (a word he picked up from Kung Fu Panda commercials on Disney – a channel I wish DID NOT show commercials. Dear Disney – I will forever push Nick Jr. on my kids because of the lack of commercials)
  Toy B: Let’s go… see you later, alligator!
• Two houses across the street from each other in our neighborhood had their Christmas lights up and turned on last weekend. I was going to post some outrage to this happening and then I remembered that we left our inside Christmas decorations up until mid-February last year. Touché. Carry on early Christmas celebrators, carry on. [Note: We also still have one strand of Christmas lights up on the mantle, because they are pretty (well, because they are pretty and I cannot be bothered to take them down).]
• We had conferences for Liam on Monday… he is doing as expected. The learning behavior he is having the hardest time with is “Demonstrating stamina in large group settings” (the wording for that cracks me up a bit) but it means he can’t sit still when they are in a big group and after a few minutes will move to sit by someone else are fidget a lot. No shocker there but I am glad to know this is normal behavior and not worrisome to the teacher. We were very excited to learn he is ahead of the curve for reading (I’m going to take credit for that since I encourage him to read song titles on the radio display in our minivan [I am KIDDING, people]) and I’m going to brag for just a minute because I am so proud of him: by the end of the year she would want the kids to be reading level 16 books for the daily take-home reading and he is already on level 14 books. And by January his teacher would like students to know 130-159 sight words and he is already at 163! The best is the look on his face when he reads a word correctly or finishes a book and gets all the words right. I’m so glad he loves reading!
• And that’s all there is time for today…
• But wait… this weekend is my GWA – CANNOT WAIT! I love my boys but this mommy needs a little girl time!

• I voted today. I have not always voted because I have not always cared. But today I voted. Because I believe that if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain about the outcome, whichever way you vote. And I like to complain. It’s a special gift.
• Though there are two bathroom stalls in our office building’s women’s restroom, people post-training from the gym, regularly change in the main part of the bathroom (i.e., not in on of the UNoccupied  stalls). Why? Do they want to be seen naked by the general public who may be entering the restroom or walking by as the door opens? Myself, I prefer to change where there is no risk of someone seeing me, but perhaps I am a prude or too modest.
• I like to imagine I can do fancy calligraphy and then I try it and it looks like the attempts of a third-grader (no offense, third graders).
• Some people I may or may not be married to always beat me at Words with Friends, this makes me determined to trounce them sometime.
• Ceelo had a jheri-curled wig on last night’s episode of The Voice. Every time he talked to one of the performers, they would inadvertently touch their own hair and can you blame them? I think he does things like that to see if anyone will ever call him out. They do not. [Also, Google jheri curl and be entertained by the images that come up, they are fierce.]
• I watched the CMAs last week. I suppose I will take live performance music almost any way I can get it (though I refuse to watch other performance shows outside of The Voice). I do not get the draw of Hunter Hayes, Luke Bryan or Little Big Town (who sing a song called Pontoon which I feel like is a metaphor for something but I cannot get past the song title). I do still love Blake Shelton, Keith Urban, The Band Perry and Zac Brown Band – judge away.
• We were listening to a song on XM radio on Sunday and the name of the guest artist that was featured with Lifehouse was cut off so you could only read “Na..” and I said to Simon, “Who is that British singer whose name starts with Na? She was on Chelsea Lately that one time.” Simon was no help to me and just laughed that I thought he would know (in retrospect, I was barking up the wrong tree, but Stef would have been able to tell me, I think). SoundHound told me it was Natasha Bedingfield and the song is Between the Raindrops.
• I am kind of loving the show Nashville. So many familiar faces. One of the former Lucky characters from General Hospital, the wonderful Connie Britton, that guy who used to be on Who’s Line… (sorry guy, don’t know your name), and the love-to-hate-her Hayden Panettiere who is awesomely unlikeable.
• We have nothing planned for this coming weekend except small group and I am so excited! We’ve had a lot of plans and it’s nice to be unscheduled.
• Thanksgiving is in TWO weekends (ruh oh); GWA (Girl’s Weekend Away) is next weekend (happiest of happy days). And then it is holiday madness. I am woefully unprepared.
• As I posted on Facebook, Jack ate a frozen waffle for breakfast this morning. Which expands the list of things he will eat for breakfast (outside of cinnamon rolls and donuts, which, let’s face it, aren’t that much worse than frozen waffles but we do not regularly have them – also, Jack will not eat homemade cinnamon rolls, only those we have purchased at a restaurant or store – WHAT IN THE WORLD) to THREE things. Toast (with Vegamite or butter/cinnamon sugar), Fruit Loops and frozen waffles. I don’t think he is a picky eater because of texture issues, I think he is just that stubborn about food.
• A year ago I went away for the weekend with my friend Tracey; ironically (or perhaps just coincidentally) we went to the same northern Michigan city where the fam and I went last weekend… this makes me laugh; apparently I am starting a new tradition of going to Boyne the first weekend in November every year, it’s a tradition I wouldn’t mind.