It's nice to be warm when it's cold outside.

There's a big storm expected here today, so I ducked out with the girls to pick up some groceries. I was planning on shopping today anyway, so I just made sure we went before it started snowing.

It's a snow day again, but the teen is over at a friend's house, so it's just me and the girls home right now. It's rather peaceful and cozy with the snow falling outside and everything nice and warm inside. I'm ignoring the housework in favor of sitting here feeling relaxed for a while.

The teen and his friend are hoping he gets snowed in at the friend's house. While I really don't think that's going to happen, I understand the attraction. I would have loved something like that when I was a kid. I still wouldn't mind getting snowed in at a hotel, on vacation, say, except for the fact that I would have to come up with a way to pay the credit card bill at the end of the month!

My sister's husband is home. Hooray! I'm so glad he's home safely, though not nearly as glad as she is, I'm sure. Now it's just waiting for my brother to get home. Hopefully all will go well with him, too.

Snow Day

I can't believe it's been this long since I've posted. I turned around and all of a sudden the week was gone.

Oh, but it's been crazy. The teen got two snow days, which meant having him sitting around the living room, sighing his boredom and misery whenever he wasn't on the computer. It's amazing how much space he can take up when he's feeling sorry for himself.

The husband was home, too, although he was usually napping. Or sitting on the couch watching television. Or on the computer, doing what he calls mental gymnastics, which as far as I can tell involves making lots of tables and graphs.

Why is it everyone else's time off means so much extra work for me? I don't think I've sat down for more than a few minutes at a time for days now. At least I'll only have the teen home tomorrow. I'll take the girls out in the snow, get them good and tired, and maybe they'll both take naps. I could lie on my bed and read awhile. That would be nice.

Or I could just lock myself in the bathroom and ignore the girls' attempts to break in.

Yeah, that sounds like a plan.

"A message, a message, a very important message ..."

There has a been a change in our household over the last few months. Dora and Blue are still dearly loved, and Dora is still much in demand for clothing, toys and bedding. But there is a new gang on the block, and they're beating out Dora and Blue pretty easily.

The Backyardigans is this, in my opinion, odd little show about a group of kids who have amazing imaginary adventures. They sing, they dance, the whole thing is as carefully choreographed as a Broadway musical. The preschooler loves it though. She's seen every episode a dozen times at least and still gets excited when it's time for the show to start.

At the same time as the preschooler has falled in love with the "backyards," as she calls them, she has entered the imaginary friend stage. Which means she now has not just one, but five imaginary friends, which makes snack time a little complicated. Not to mention car rides. We just don't have that many free seatbelts. Trust her to do this in her own unique way.

(By the way, what's with the opossum that shows up between Nick Jr. shows? I have news for them. 'Possums aren't golden and they don't have cute little fuzzballs on the ends of their tails. They are nasty, mean, filthy scavengers, with naked tails and way too many teeth. This is a good picture of an opossum. So is this. Note that neither looks anything like this little orange guy.)

Good Hair Day

I finally (after being here how many months?) found a hair stylist I like! She said herself that she's the best in town and I have to say I agree. Not too expensive either, which was a relief, since it means I can keep going back to her.

Which I will do, because for the first time in months I like my hair! I feel so pretty and confident.

There's just nothing like a bad haircut to make you feel horrible, is there? I learned that when I was 12, with my first perm.

Up to then my hair was uncut, because of my father's fondness for having his little girl in pigtails. Which means it was probably Mom who decided I needed a more adult style, although it's hard to imagine her crossing Dad at all back then.

However it happened I wound up at a salon, describing to the stylist what I wanted my hair to look like. The newest style is what I wanted, the one all the other girls in junior high were wearing. Since we didn't have TV I'd never heard of Farah Fawcett or feathering, though, which led to the miscommunication. I was trying to describe fluffy feathering around my face and use the word "curl." So the stylist (and looking back she must have been rather young herself to have made this mistake) gave me curls - tight poodle curls all over my head.

I went home and sobbed. Mom talked about washing the perm out before it set. Dad blew up and insisted we call the salon and complain.

Mom and I didn't want to. (We'd been taught very well to simply accept bad things and not invite disaster by complaining about them.) Finally, Dad talked Mom into calling. She returned with the announcement that they had apologized and were fixing it for free the next day.

I was terrified to return, embarrassed to see my stylist and afraid of how she'd react. And sure enough, she was there. She looked like she'd been crying too, though, and gave me a stilted apology, part "I'm sorry," part "How could you get me in trouble like this?" I tried to avoid looking at her as I mumbled an apology for being so stupid as to let her give me a bad style.

Then my new stylist came up, and everything got better very quickly. This woman was a mother of teenagers, and told me she understood exactly how I wanted to look. She waved scissors around my head, dumped gunk over my hair, and kept me laughing as she talked with me. When she was done, I was beautiful.

This time I went home laughing, shaking my hair around as I adjusted to the loss of the weight I'd been carrying on my head. My parents were astonished at the change in their morose pre-teen. It was actually a few days before I went back to being depressed, angry and hormonal.

My dad spent the rest of my teen years trying to talk me into getting my hair set weekly. (I refused because I thought that was much too old lady.)

Yeah, there's nothing like a good style to make you feel good.

Finally! More teeth!

Back last July the baby got a whole bunch of teeth all at once. She wound up with 2 on the bottom and 4 on top. And that was it. She has not sprouted even one little tiny tooth since then. And since she started getting teeth late anyway, I've been feeling a little worried.

Last night I slipped a finger into her mouth to check for foreign objects and found a tooth! It must have popped up Wednesday. I checked around in there and found three more teeth, ready to break through any day now.

Of course, having started off the whole tooth thing in her own way, she is continuing it in anything other than the typical fashion. Usually the next teeth to come in would be the ones next to the ones she already has. Not this little girl. No, she's getting in the four teeth that are on the other side of the ones that should be coming in.

In other words (if you care) she's skipping her canines and going straight to her molars (on the top.) On the bottom she's skipping her lateral incisor and sprouting her canines.

So, naturally, I'm having to fight off worries that her teeth will now come in crooked and getting them straight will take years and cost untold thousands. As if I didn't have enough to worry about. Hey, why borrow trouble when I can make my own?

Diane, it's for you!

We've been getting calls for this mysterious Diane X since not long after we moved in here. At first I thought it was a telemarketing thing, some new technique to keep the person on the other end of the line (me) from hanging up immediately. Sound like a real person, not a telemarketer! Catch them off-guard! Maybe they'll spend money before they realize what's happening!

I dealt with it the way I always dealt with telemarketers back then. Cut them off as soon as you realize what the call is by saying, "Please put this number on your do-not-call-back list." Then hang up. But it didn't cut down on the number of calls, which was perplexing, because it had always worked before.

Then the national Do-Not-Call list kicked in and we were still getting calls. I was annoyed, thinking this was some attempt to evade the law by pretending to be a wrong number or something. "What, you mean that person doesn't live here? Well, sorry about that. Hey, while we have you on the phone ..."

I kept hanging up, usually before the telemarketer could get more than a couple of words into their first sentence. Until one night the woman on the other end of the line managed to shout into the receiver, "This is NOT a sales call!" (She must have tried to call our number before.)

I stopped my hand on its way down and brought the phone up to my ear again. "Oh? Well, what do want then?"

"Is Diane X there?"

"I'm sorry, there's no-one by that name here."

"Well, is this xxx-xxx-xxxx?"

You know how it went, I'm sure. Yes, this is that number, yes, I'm sure she does not live here, no, I don't know anyone by that name. Goodbye.

After hanging the phone up I thought back, and realized I'd been hearing that name quite a bit. Maybe those weren't telemarketing calls I was getting?

I started paying attention to the calls instead of immediately hanging up. Sure enough, almost all of them were for Diane. They were calling about her application for a mortgage on her vacation home, to check on her credit card application, to offer her a great deal on this and that.

Hmm, I thought, this is fishy. This woman must be running a scam. I bet Diane isn't even her real name. And I started letting the callers know that we got a lot of calls for her. I left it to them to draw their own conclusions.

It finally started to taper off a few months ago. We got our last phone call just before Christmas. I went into my spiel about her not living here and we don't know who she is, when the caller interrupted me. This was her cousin, he told me.

What? Diane was a real person? With a real family?

Sure enough, he said, and there'd been a death in the family. I'd probably be hearing from a lot of her family pretty quick as they tried to contact her and let her know.

They never did. I guess he passed the word around that this wasn't her number. I don't know why the other phone calls stopped. Though I'm grateful they did.

Which should be the end of it, except ...

We've been getting phone calls lately for Rich X. These people aren't offering loans. I think they're trying to collect. They don't sound as cheerful and bubbly as the people calling Diane sounded. These callers are grim, with voices that practically spit granite chips into my ear. They ask me repeatedly if I'm sure Rich doesn't live there, if I'm sure I don't have any idea of his identity.

I don't like the idea of dealing with other people's bill collectors. I'd rather have other people's sales calls.

Diane, where are you when I need you?

The wedding is off!

Woohoo! My sister is not getting married!

I know, you didn't even know she was engaged. Well, she's been unengaged for a couple of weeks now, and I only just found out. Which makes us kind of even, right? Right?

This is my youngest sister, the bipolar one, who was dating the guy who didn't believe in the field of psychology or in taking meds for anything psychological. He wound up proposing, she wound up accepting.

Which is when she started falling apart.

My sister is still very young and has lots of dreams about the things she wants to do in her life. She wants to travel, get an education (she just started college this semester,) get a career started, you know the thing. All the stuff young people dream about when they are first on their own and beginning to see the possibilities life has for them. And she's excited about all that, as she should be.

She loves this guy, but she realizes that getting married right now is going to mean giving up most of her dreams. Especially since he's about 5 years older than her, I think. Older enough that he's in a different stage of his life, one where he wants to settle down, start a family, establish roots.

I talked with her about a month before the break-up. She asked me if I'd had bridal jitters before I got married and if they included things like throwing up at the thought of getting married.

Um, no. I can honestly say I never once threw up at the thought of marrying the husband. Was I nervous? Yes. I was also excited, though, and my desire to be with him was much stronger than my fear over the risk involved in making that kind of commitment.

In my opinion, if a bride-to-be is that upset, she's not listening to the part of herself that's saying something is wrong.

I didn't tell her that in so many words. I tried hard to respect that she is an adult now, not my baby sister. Which meant I let her talk, asked a few questions that I thought might get her thinking about things she wasn't thinking about, and gave her a carefully phrased opinion that I thought she might be feeling rushed into this.

I think she made the right decision. He's a nice guy. Everyone in the family loves him, including (of course) my sister. But. As I pointed out in my previous post, I don't think love is a good enough reason to get married. There are many people we can love in our lives; not all of them are good matches for a lifelong companion.

She wants to follow her dreams so much that I really think if she were to get married right now she would wind up a bitter and frustrated woman. I don't want to see that happen to her.

Marrying young is not automatically a bad idea, but it is a bad idea for her. I'm glad she found the courage to take a chance on her future. I don't ever want her to have to look back and resent her husband and children over the dreams she gave up for them.

Taking a Second Chance

I hung up on the only man I thought I'd ever love and sat silent for a moment before the sobs started. Engaged? How could he be engaged to someone else? He was engaged to me!

D. was my best friend. When we first met each other it was like seeing an old friend whom you haven't seen in years. We both had that feeling of recognition. Over time, that friendship grew into love. This, I was convinced, was my soul mate. We were fated to be together.

Which made his infidelity after we were engaged all the more devastating. And not just having sex with other women, which happened. But the way he'd flirt with other women, in front of me, then blame me for getting upset. He'd never acted this way when we were just friends. Why do this, of all times, now?

When I finally sorted through my confusion I was left with only one thing. I couldn't trust him. I loved him with all my heart. I always would. I would never love another man, in fact, I was sure of that. But I couldn't marry someone I couldn't trust and he had to understand that.

So we postponed the wedding date while he went away for awhile to think things over. I urged him to go into counseling, and he promised he'd think about it. He asked for space and I agreed to give it to him.

Now this. I'd decided to surprise him with a call, only to have him tell me to never again contact him. He was engaged, to a girl he'd gotten pregnant. And that was that.

It took me five years to get over him. For five years I went on with my life, convinced I'd never love another man, never marry, never have a family. I didn't want those things unless I could have them with D., and that just wasn't going to happen.

And then one day I woke up, and I wanted to try again.

I hated myself for it. How could I be feeling this longing for love, for a relationship, for marriage? Was I crazy? Hadn't I been hurt enough? No way was I going through that again. Besides, what could I get out of marriage that I couldn't get any other way? No. I wasn't doing that to myself. Five years of grieving was enough for one life. No other man was going to have a chance to do that to me.

But I couldn't make that little thread of longing go away. It stayed and it grew. It grew until it was so large that I couldn't help but do something about it.

Hope is a terrible thing when you don't want it.

When I met the husband we both took things gradually. We fell in love with each other very quickly, but neither of us was inclined to trust that feeling. Love was no reason to get married, we agreed. It was, instead, a reason to see if we thought we could make a marriage work.

We took a year to make that decision. In the end, he proposed to me using words we had used often during that year.

"Wouldn't it be nice," he said casually, as we sat on the couch watching a movie, "if we got married?"

"Yes, it would," I said. We'd talked this over many times before after all. We both agreed that we really hoped we would be able to decide we could get married.

There was a long pause before he spoke again, and this time he seemed to carefully shape each word in his mouth before he released it. "That was a proposal."

I sat up quickly, from where I'd been leaning against him. I stared for a moment, then burst out with a "YES!" I decided to say it a few more times, just in case I hadn't been emphatic enough. "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!" I threw my arms around him as I chanted the word and he laughed as he hugged me back.

Not the most romantic proposal in the world, no, but it suited us.

We were married three months later, in a small ceremony that also suited us. Right up to the last moment I was examining myself to make sure that this was the right thing, that I wasn't rushing into another terrible mistake.

And the little voice inside me that wouldn't let me live alone the rest of my life said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes."

To read other Blogging for Books #8 entries check out the the comments at Zero Boss.

In honor of Valentine's Day ...

You Are A Realistic Romantic

You are more romantic than 70% of the population. It's easy for you to get swept away by romance... But you've done a pretty good job keeping perspective. You're still taken in by love poems and sunsets You just don't fall for every dreamy pick up line!

Are You Romantic or Realistic?

I guess they needed money to fund their retirements?

Have you seen the ad for a major department store where 99 Red Balloons is playing in the background as pink balloons float up while a string of women open their Valentine's Day presents?

The first time I saw it I burst out laughing. I couldn't believe the ad agency picked that song, out of everything they might have picked. Haven't they ever listened to the whole song? Follow the links above if you aren't familiar with it. Then come back and tell me what you think.

A anti-war, anti-nuke protest song, now being used to urge Americans to participate in rampant consumerism. I'm speechless.

A definite low in my relationship with the teen.

The teen spat on me last night.

The husband and I had a showdown with him yesterday about doing his homework. Basically, we explained that if he kept on refusing to do anything in his classes he would find himself doing nothing in any other part of his life, either. He would go to school and come home, and that would be it. No TV, no computer, no friends, no music, no phone, no games, nothing.

The husband also made it clear that he and I are united and that if I tell the teen to do something it is the same as if the husband had told him to do it.

We spent over an hour on this. It didn't start out well, because the teen spat on me almost immediately. It quickly went down hill with him swearing and threatening and generally being as nasty as he could think to be. The husband and I wound up standing practically nose to nose with the teen, shoulder to shoulder, jumping in for one another whenever the teen would start to take advantage of a chink in someone's armor.

He'd make a great lawyer. His debating skills make it a little difficult to get through to him, though.

He spat at me to make the point that I am not allowed to be in his life. He didn't like that I was involved in this, or the fact that our unity made it almost impossible for him to manipulate either of us.

We were moderately successful, though. Today he came home from school, showed us his completed schoolwork, then threw it across the room. He's sulking downstairs now, feeling vastly mistreated by life, no doubt.

His egocentricity right now is truly breath-taking. He actually had the nerve, after spitting on me, to ask that I do a load of laundry for him.

Let me get this straight. As he sees it, I can't ask him any questions about his life, can't assign him any chores, can't ask him to help out, can't make any demands on him whatsoever. I am expected to just do his laundry, cook his meals, give him money, drive him places, and buy him things.

Yeah, right.

27 months until he graduates from high school. I sure hope he grows up a little before then.

Heck, I hope he graduates.

Contributing to the obesity of America, one chip at a time.

Whilst exploring around the corners of the internet last night I ran across this.

Oh, my oh my. I can't quite wrap my mind around this one. I mean, seriously. This is a 20 gallon garbage can. I don't care how prettily you decorate it, it's still a 20 gallon garbage can. People aren't going to walk into your living room and think, "Oh, what a nice piece of décor." They're going to walk in and think, "Oh, look, she has a 20 gallon garbage can in here. Painted."

Then, if they're the sort of people who are polite, even in their own minds, they will think, "How unique." If they are like the rest of us, however, they will think, "Why does the room stink of potato chips and pretzels?"

And then they will never, ever, believe you again when you say you are dieting.

"He's getting away!"

Friday afternoon I watched the son of a pregnant friend while she went to a doctor appointment. It was fun watching him. He's a sweet boy, very well-behaved, and the girls just loved him. They all had so much fun playing.

They had so much fun, in fact, that when his mom came back to pick him up the preschooler got very upset. As they went out the door to their car she was crying, begging him to come back and play.

In desperation she finally turned to me to save the day. "Mommy, he's getting away!"

I told her father later that she's going to be a real terror when she starts dating if she's already thinking like that!

A Small Mystery

Once a month I get together with some other women from church for a book club. Last night was our meeting, so the husband put the preschooler to bed for me while I went off to engage in wild partying. (We had sundaes and talked about the book, whether or not our pregnant member, who was having contractions all evening, might be giving birth that night, and decided what book we were going to read for next month. Oh, and toilet training. Wild women.)

The point of all this is that I did not put the preschooler to bed (ie: do a sweep of her blankets for toys and contraband,) nor was I there to monitor that she stayed in bed.

Which means I wasn't particularly surprised when I got her up this morning to find her clutching a couple of bottles of food coloring. Let me amend that. I was surprised to find her clutching food coloring. I was not surprised to find something odd with her. She's rather fond of taking everything she loves with her when she goes to bed and she loves everything she sees, it seems. Everything's a toy.

Her bedding and her body were liberally spattered in glorious technicolor. Green, red, blue, only yellow was left out. I guess she didn't roll over on that bottle in the night.

What I want to know is how she got the box of food coloring. I thought I had it up out of reach. But then, nothing has really been out of reach since she started climbing. When we have our own house again I swear I'm going to put locks on everything!

She'll probably just figure out a way around them, though.

Off to do several loads of laundry ...

Not quite what she expected.

Just caught the baby with the pepper shaker. She stuck the top in her mouth before I could stop her.

Oh, my, what an unhappy baby.

A lull in the hostilities.

After an exceptionally nasty weekend, in which no-one (and especially me) could do anything right, the teen walked in the door after school Monday, threw his bookbag to the floor and slammed the door hard enough to shake the house.

I had the girls in the tub. The preschooler had gotten into the syrup and her hair was basically a helmet from all the sugary goo encrusted in it. The baby had been eating blueberry yogurt and had painted her hair an interesting shade of purple. Complete immersion seemed the only possible solution.

So, when I heard the door and the books I felt grateful I wasn't out there. The baby was ready to get out, but I waited until I heard him gallop down the stairs to the basement, then slam that door, before I came out with her. I left the preschooler alone in there, something I don't usually do, but since she's even more of a lightning rod to him than I am I wanted her out of reach.

As I finished re-diapering the baby, the teen came back upstairs. I picked her up and headed back to the master bathroom where the preschooler was noisily splashing water onto the linoleum around the clothes hamper.

And then he shocked me. He smiled.

It was an apologetic smile, an embarrassed smile. "I'm sorry," he said, and held out his hand.

Of course, I forgave him, instantly. It's funny how you can just brush away so much from someone you love, as soon as they say they're sorry. And it was genuine. I really think so. I don't think he was trying to put anything over one me. He really felt sorry. And that made everything all right again.

I shook his hand, smiled back, and told him it was obvious he'd had a bad day.

We exchanged a few more comments, but the heart of it was right there. Apology, forgiveness.

He was a real sweetie the rest of the evening, and today, too. Pleasant, thoughtful, kind - he even hugged the preschooler.

I don't know what's happened, and I'm not looking forward to the inevitable time when he reverts, but I am kind of hoping that maybe this means he's starting to grow out of this stage. Maybe we'll start to see more of this kind of agreeable behavior.