Well, here I am 3 days after I said I wouldn't be writing anymore, so I must have something important to say. Brace yourselves: Firemen are hot. Never really got into them before--I mean, I understood all the hype, but it just wasn't my thing. But today, when I was grocery shopping in the produce section of Wal-mart, about 10 firemen came breezing through the door, at the same time, shoulder-to-shoulder, in their little navy blue day-clothes, and, I swear to God, they were walking in slow-motion.

 

Really. Slow-motion. It was like I was seeing firemen for the first time. And who knew that even po-dunk firemen could look so good? I think I even saw their hair blowing in the wind...of the store.

 

I don't know when it was that I stopped doing what I was doing (fighting with Merrick and trying to pick out a decent eggplant), and I don't know exactly how long I stood there blatantly staring at the firemen with my mouth wide open, but I do know that I only snapped out of it when one of them laughed and waved at me.

 

Frick. My face turned red, I finished my shopping and I got the hell on outta there.

 

And why is it, at times when you really, really, need to or want to look good, (like say, your car broke down on the highway, or you run into your ex at the bank, or Hugh-Jackman-as-Wolverine knocks on your door and says he needs to use your shower) WHY do you always look like shit? I had on my most mommiest pair of jeans, my oldest pair of flip-flops, a bra that wasn't doing its job, my hair was a  wreck, my eyeliner was smudged in the not-sexy, football kind of way, and to top it all off, I had a bat in the cave. It's not that I was going to take home a fireman, but if I had to look like an idiot with an eggplant, at least I could have looked like a pretty one. It would've made me feel better.

 

Hmm. Now I'll have get all dolled up and see if Caleb will help me re-enact the grocery store scene. Except that I forgot to get the eggplant.

 

Oooooor maybe we could just play "Wolverine knocks on my door and needs to use my shower."

 

Firemen are hot.

 

Well, we've survived Mia's 5th birthday, the first week of school, and Mia's 5th birthday party--in which all of 3 other people's children showed up for, and believe me when I say 3 turned out to be more than enough.

 

Cheyenne so far is loving the 8th grade; I hesitate to say that she's worn an actual tiara to school everyday and she can't stop talking about this short little boy she's got a crush on. Mia got an aquarium for her birthday and that's proven to be loads of fun. Already we've had issues with filters and bubbles and cloudy water and sagging furniture (we put the damn thing on the dresser in her room). But the fish are kind of cool, and Mia was over the moon about them, so whatever the hassle is that comes along with having an aquarium--it's worth it. Merrick has gotten increasingly acrobatic over the past couple weeks...and destructive, and demanding. He's picked up a delightful case of insomnia, so anything that I used to try to get done during naptime is out, and Mia's been sleeping in our bed so that Merrick's blood-curling cries don't keep her up all night.

 

Caleb is working his ass off. He wakes up at 6:30 a.m. and logs straight onto his work computer, and he keeps at it until 10:00 at night, if not later, stopping only to eat (if he remembers to) or play with the kids for a little bit before they go to bed. It's freaking bananas.

 

It's been busy around here, but if you've kept up with my page over the past almost 4 years, you know that busy is normal. I'm tired of blogging. I'm tired of a lot of things, mainly because I'm...tired. I'm going to keep this site so that my family and friends can look at pictures, but as far as the writing goes, it's just not going to happen much, unless #1. I'm not ready to fall asleep. #2. I've got loads of time on my hands and #3. I've got important news to spread, a hilarious joke to tell, or something Nobel-Peace-Prize to say. That is all.

I've officially ruined--nay, KILLED--the giraffe painting I've been working on for the past 3 years. In a fit of false inspiration, I hastily added what I thought was a fat little ring-master down in the corner of the picture. Turns out, the ringmaster was nothing more than a dowdily-dressed, very 2-dimensional, evil leprechaun that just stares blankly into nowhere. The giraffe? Looks fantastic. It's the best thing I've ever painted. But the leprechaun has made me hate the painting so much that I threw the whole thing away--didn't even take a good-bye picture of the final product. Yes. It's that bad.

 

So anyway, I've decided that my best work comes when I'm just goofing off. No more trying so hard. If I have to worry about a painting, then it's all wrong to begin with. With this in mind, I painted some lovely ink-and-beer elephants yesterday:

 

 

A fly actually crawled across the ink of the left elephant's eye and trailed him some eyelashes; the little dragonflies in the picture look like terds with wings. Other than that, I like it. This painting should actually be called "Just Don't Let Him Eat Any of It", because that's what I said about 50 times over the course of an hour while my kids were doing this:

 

 

At first I thought, maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea, but then I thought, "Nah, just go with it." And they were so cute, giggling and painting and stepping in ink and making footprints all over the garage.

 

 

But then Mia had to go to the bathroom, and on the way there she got black and purple handprints all over the doors and walls, and then Merrick, who absolutely needed a bath, went out of his way to touch as many surfaces as he could as I carried him at arms' length to the tub...just touching. For the hell of it. He had paint in his hair, in his diaper...and I don't even want to tell you how much scrubbing was involved in getting the ink off his little baby skin.

 

 

He's a mess lately, that kid. There's nothing he can't reach, nothing he won't spill, or eat, or throw, and just when I think an area is hazard-free, he proves me wrong. I literally go, all day, from one mess to another. The cleaning is a never-ending process. I start sweating at 7:30 in the morning just running after him. I never believed it before when people told me, but there. Is. Definitely. A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LITTLE BOYS AND LITTLE GIRLS. Oy.

 

Mia is more than ready to go back to school, even though it means a whole 8 hours away from Mommy and Yo Gabba Gabba. I'll miss her--really, I will--but I am getting a little bit tired of playing "Tigers in Love" (with her Schleich plastic animals) and "Birds Laying Eggs" (In which we sit uncomfortably on a bushel of balls. And that's it.) and "Pet Store". In every game, Mia tells me exactly what to say and do, and there's hell to pay if I deviate in anyway from the routine. So, yeah, it's time for school to start already.

 

Cheyenne has been happily fluting away at band camp the past 2 weeks. Every day they wear weird hats (Day one for Cheyenne? Mia's Dora the Explorer hat. Day two? Mia's tall, blue, shiny, pointy princess hat. Need I say more?) and matching bandanas and they say weird things like "Chicken-fighting Random Screaming Brownie Robot Barbie." Band kids are an odd bunch. That's all I have to say about that. That's really all I can say.

 

I've gotten back into my running since that vacation back in June. It wasn't easy, but now I'm taking good advice and trying to get in at least 30 solid minutes of actual running at least 4 times a week. The only noticable difference I've seen is not in my size or my weight, but how much less winded I'm getting at key points of my route. The abandoned golf course in our neighborhood has been ideal; those hills that used to kick my butt are more bearable now, and I can get up and down them without cussing and coughing and crying...I've toyed with the idea of doing a 5K sometime in the fall, but I'm not gutsy enough to sign up for one by myself.

 

I'm at a kind of stand-still with the etsy site until Caleb's company sends him a working scanner. I've got art; I'm just not sure how to go about reproducing it. But I'll figure it out. I'm using this in-between time to paint, so that I have plenty of work on-hand to sell. I've always got the name signs to fall back on, too.

 

That is all.