Tuesday Morning Haze

Meant to blog both yesterday and Saturday (so much for Learning Notes, sob) but got caught up in a vortex of cleaning and birthday partying and general catching up. Some fair idiot, assumably me, made dentist appointments for three children for 8:50 on Monday morning. And Alouicius had to go too because be knocked his fake tooth out in some kind of altercation with his sister late Thursday night after the office closed for the whole weekend.

“Tell her it was because I fell down” he kept insisting anxiously.

“What does it matter? It just matters that you have to get back in there.” Maybe he was worried the dentist would think he had eaten an apple or something.

Have I said how much I love our dentist? It's everybody's favorite place to go. Apparently I've come, in my adult life, to live in a totally alternate universe where the dentist is friendly but the weather is from Sheol. Everything is backwards.

So anyway, Baby Eglantine, whose birthday it was, was excited about the special birthday treat of going to the dentist, and had a super fun time. I stayed home, though, and baked a cake and made so much bread that I broke my mixer. I've got to figure out how to shove some part back on. And I vacuumed the house and ran around in a frenzy of cleaning, having not bothered to lift a finger in that direction for ever so long. And Elphine faced down her room.

And then, when the dentist contingent arrived back I left Matt to recover and slowly and carefully drove all the children through the snow to McDonalds for a healthy and fun birthday lunch, because I'm that sort of mother, all about a party and a good time, especially at McDonalds, just ask anyone. We beat our way through the snow to get inside and found we were the only people there. And so everyone came out to look at us. And then an extremely makeup covered woman with enormous hair, wielding a broom took her courage in her hands and asked that original and clever question, “are they all yours?” I nodded, and dug through my purse for my life savings, smiling my big fake smile. Her eye brows shot up and then she threw back her head and laughed a loud long laugh before retreating into the hamburger and french fry cavern from whence she came. It's probably the best response I've ever had. Much preferable and more true to reality than “ya sure do got yer hands full” which is the usual response upon seeing one with so many children. Then we went to Aldi where we are no longer an oddity.

So, Eglantine has arrived at four.

She is a real pickle but we're basically glad we had her. She is a pretty affectionate, cheerful child. Her greatest love is sugar, and her favorite thing to do is draw one face on a piece of paper, fling it to the ground, take up another paper, draw a face, fling it down, and so on until an entire ream of paper has been got through. She is pretty bossy of all her older siblings but at least she doesn't bite them any more, so that's nice.

So, onwards and upwards into the week. I rather tragically expect that blogging may be light to non existent over the next three or four days. I have the usual pile of work, but I would like to also do a couple of backed up household organizational tasks–like putting together a new bureau and filling it with a lot of clothes–that have been weighing on my mind for the last two or three years. Why now? Why do that now? When I've waited all these years? Well, I'm probably only going to have one lenten discipline, if it can be called that. I'm going to try to take a day off, once every week of lent, and that means making it easier for the children to do a few more tasks, like putting away Their Own Wretched Snow Clothes And Boots And Mittens and Everything. It's possible that trying to take a day off is a vain and futile excersise. Who can even do such a thing. But I would sort of like to try. It may be that I could be more focused and productive on all the other days if I manage to sit down and read a book for part of one day. Even writing it out makes me feel the great foolishness of such an endeavor. I am not allowed to even complete a sentence when speaking to another human being. Reading a line from a book will be like Sisyphus having his guts eaten out by that bird or whoever it was. I'm probably mixing my myths all together.

Have a lovely day!