Check under the couch cushions, I’m going shopping!

Do you have a Coinstar machine at your local grocery store? You take in your bucket ‘o coins and get paper money in exchange. Trouble is, there’s a service fee for getting cash. BUT, if you choose a gift card or an e-certificate, there is no service charge. So you can go in with coins and come out with a gift card for Starbucks or an e-certificate for iTunes. Pretty sweet deal.

With our new bedroom remodel, I wanted to get rid of the money bear. It’s a 18 inch high plastic bear that once upon a very long time ago held 3 pounds of Animal Crackers (how long ago? college). I’ve thrown my extra coins in there every so often, usually when I couldn’t zip my wallet closed. It was about 1/3 full and I was sick of trying to fill it. So today I took it to the nearest Coinstar and dumped it all in. Went for an Eddie Bauer e-certificate; I’m in desperate need of a pair of jeans without holes in the knees. I thought, hey, if I got $20 towards a pair of jeans I’d be happy. Jeans are on sale at the online store, with shipping it shouldn’t be too bad.

Right.

Guess, just guess, how much the money bear coughed up for me.

One hundred and thirty bucks.

In random, didn’t even miss ’em coins.

So, this evening, I’m sitting down and perusing a catalog and placing a nice order. Some jeans, a couple of tops. With sales and good planning, I’ll be looking sharp this summer.

Now, if only losing weight was this easy…

WFMW: Painting behind a toilet

I’ve had several comments wondering how to paint behind a toilet. I’m assuming you mean “How to paint behind a toilet without cursing like a drunken sailor,” so I’ll give you the tip the way-cool gal at Home Depot shared with us.

You need a paint-stirrer stick and one of these:

It’s a refill pad for a paint edger. Very flat. Tape the refill pad to the flat paint stir-stick. Lotsa tape. Go nuts. Dip into your paint tray and voila! You have a super-duper thin/flat paint brush so you can paint behind the toilet. Now, a couple of things I learned. No points off for neatness; it’s behind the crapper, so basically if you’re covering the unpainted spots, you’re golden. Anyone getting that close down there to check out your paint job is unhinged, and do you really value their opinion anyway? And the other thing I learned: you’re going to be trying to see sideways to see how well you’re covering. Don’t lean your head into wet paint unless you’re going for the punk look. I gotta tell ya, the dark sagey green highlights I was sporting for awhile there was hot.

How did Michaelangelo paint that damned ceiling?

When Tom and I got married nearly eleven years ago, one of our “unofficial” vows was that we’d never hang wallpaper together. Still haven’t. Flirted with it putting a space shuttle border up in A’s room three years ago, but we agreed that wallpaper would never happen.

Painting is another story. When we bought our first place, a second floor condo, we spent an entire summer painting it. This was back in the dark ages, when we were both teachers. We thought that was tough. Ha.

Now we have kids. Not just any kids, but curious, excitable, love to be in the center of everything, kids. Wait…that’s redundant. And painting has taken on a whole new excitement.

Will A try to “help” to the point of creating more work for us?

Will J sit in the hallway and play or come grab me and get covered in paint? (Or find the only screwdriver small enough to stick into the only electrical plug uncovered? True, he really did it, can’t believe we’re not planning a funeral today).

Will I get completely and totally high off the paint fumes while painting the inside of the bathroom closet and will I really give a damn?

We’ve been painting our bedroom and bathroom this weekend. What, don’t you use your holiday weekend every year to paint or otherwise work on the house? Cheaper than driving anywhere this year. But our house is torn apart; stuff in A’s room (so he has to shack up with J, which makes for no one sleeping), stuff in Tom’s office, stuff in the living room downstairs, and general chaos. Now, to give you an idea of how nutso it has been around here, I started writing this post on Saturday afternoon and it is now late Tuesday evening.

But I learned a few things from this year’s paint job.

Painting is very Zen. There is no rushing a good paint job. You rush it, you have the results of your impatience staring you in the face for years. So you just concentrate on the slow movement of the brush, on making a straight line on the trim, on not passing out from breathing in the paint fumes while painting the bottom of the bathroom closet.

Prince is the best rocker to paint by. Michael Jackson is the worst.

The woman at Home Depot who gave us the tip on how to get a straight line on knockdown walls (and, by the way, whoever the jackass was who came up with this cheap-ass wall texture should be made to paint straight lines by hand for all eternity) and how to paint behind the toilet deserves a medal. We’ve never had such perfect walls.

I’m so glad we’re done. Now I’m catching up on life: laundry, bills, emails, other home improvements. And sleep, glorious sleep.

Thursday Thirteen: Fun with Rhubarb

I’m on this rhubarb kick lately, no idea why. Oh, wait, I know why. Roger the Wonder Shrub (aka the Rhubarb Plant Hell-Bent on World Domination) has had three days of rain and now will have a warm and sunny weekend. He will now begin Growth Spurt (cue ominous music). Worse than a two year old with a brand-new wardrobe, Roger the Wonder Shrub will grow and grow this weekend, mocking last weekend’s jelly-making fest. So much for trying to keep ahead of the harvest. Sigh… So, today, with much humor, I bring you: Thirteen Things you can do with rhubarb (please take with a grain of salt…or a cup of sugar)

1. Re-enact scenes from The Pirates of the Caribbean, using the stalks as swords.

2. Build a Barbie Dream House (log cabin style). The leaves can be used as the roof of the backyard cabana.

3. Play hide and seek in the rhubarb patch.

4. Scare off burglars by threatening to stash rhubarb in the bag ‘o loot.

5. Sew the leaves together to make a sun shade for the back porch. Warning: the leaves are extremely toxic. Do not eat them, do not bring them into the house, do not taunt them.

6. Pull apart the fibrous strands and weave a new doormat.

7. Diet aid: take a big ole’ honkin’ bite of uncooked rhubarb. I guarantee your appetite will be greatly diminished.

8. Hold neighbors hostage (for chocolate chip cookies) with the threat of rhubarb jelly, crisps, and breads.

9. Make rhubarb ice, and use it for snowball fights.

10. Play floor hockey: rhubarb stalks as hockey sticks, the accompanying strawberries as the puck. Alternate puck: old rhubarb scones.

11. Javelin!

12. Attach a short stalk of rhubarb to a bicycle wheel for a charming clicking sound as you ride.

13. And please share your favorite rhubarb stories, recipes!!!, and uses for the happy little stalk. Or it’s gonna be a realll long summer around here. ; )

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I got that look again

It’s hard to describe, but oh so easy to recognize. It’s a tight smile, the eyes slightly glazed and fixed on a point across the room. And silence from the person with the look, maybe a soft “mmm…”

It’s the look I get if and when the subject comes up about having a gifted kid.

It’s the look of “aren’t you full of yourself, thinking you have a gifted kid. Gee, how easy your life must be” and/or “Christ, another mom who thinks her child walks on water.”

Right.

It’s not easy, and I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that my kid can’t walk on water. He’s tried. Didn’t work. Simply got wet.

I went to the groundbreaking ceremony for the new school last night. It had to be moved indoors because of heavy rain that turned the building site into 4 inches of mud and standing water (and made the trucks halt work at 1 pm thankyouGOD!). A friend (who also has a gifted son) and I were talking to another friend about the new school and how excited/encouraged we were that the new principal has extensive experience with gifted education, and the possibility that there would be a gifted program at the school.

And then came “the look.”

I will NOT hide the fact that my child is a different learner. I also don’t flaunt that my child is a different learner. It just is who he is, and anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with him recognizes that. Gifted does NOT mean “super-smart,” or “mom is pushing the kid,” or “mom is living vicariously through her child.” It means that the child learns differently, whether that be quickly, or needing to learn something in depth (and I mean in depth to the point of driving the parent nuts). Gifted also has its quirks, and it’s these quirks that drive me to the edge of the abyss. I could go on forever about these quirks, but I don’t have that kind of time.

It’s especially frustrating when the gifted child has obvious deficits, in A’s case, ADHD and some sensory issues. You just want to scream at the skies, “You’re so smart, WHY CAN’T YOU DO THIS?” He just can’t, physically can’t. Can’t pay attention to something that doesn’t grab his attention, unless he’s on his meds. Can’t do it, any more than a diabetic can go without insulin. Can’t fall asleep, because he can’t turn his mind off at night. Can’t not ask questions, because he has this need to know.

At times, I wish he were more average. I’ve spent my life as a B+/A- kind of person; slightly above average, but not so far above that it draws attention. A is not like that, and it’s tough for me. Especially when “the look” comes into play. I’m not pushing, he’s pulling. I envy moms who have neurotypical (NT) kids; they think they have a hard time with their kids and they just don’t know. J doesn’t give us the fits that A does, but I have a gut feeling that he’ll surprise us when he gets older.

And then…I’m glad A is the way he is, and I don’t want him any other way. I wouldn’t know what to do with him if he suddenly changed. For now, I have a handle (slightly broken) on how to deal with him, how to teach him, how to guide him. And if he suddenly changed, I’d be lost. I envy moms of NT kids, but I also wish they could know the joys of having such a challenging kid. A kid who is so excited when he learns something new, like how solar power works. A kid who would rather do puzzles than play video games…most of the time. A kid who asks questions, very in-depth questions, at the age of 2 1/2 about the nature of the universe and makes you go to the internet to find the answers. No joke, when A was that age, I thought I was going to have to get a PhD in astrophysics to tell him bedtime stories.

Just, please, moms and dads out there. Don’t think parents of gifted kids have it easy. We don’t. Yeah, our kids are smart, but that comes with a price, a price you can’t explain unless you’re living it. I know a woman, a woman I truly don’t like (and they are few and far between) who has a daughter similar to A. We were out to dinner with a bunch of others last fall and, being seated across from one another, were talking about the challenges of raising gifted kids. We knew what the other was talking about, and no one else around us understood. We just raised our wineglasses in a toast to ourselves.

So, please, be careful with “the look.” No one realizes they do it, and you can’t prevent it. Just remember: we’re not pushing, they’re pulling.

Where did I get this kid?

“A, gimme a butterfly kiss.”

{butterfly kiss on my cheek}

“Mom, how do butterflies kiss each other?”

“I don’t know, A, what do you think?”

“I think they use their proboscis.”

I need a vacation from my weekend

Every so often we have a weekend where we are more exhausted at the end than necessary. It doesn’t happen very often, just often enough that Tom and I look at each other with joint expressions of “WTF?” and “Is it time for the boys to go to bed yet?” and “whimper…” This has been such a weekend.

Not a bad few days, by any means, just busy and exhausting.

Like planets that finally align, this weekend had 1)us both in town, 2)warm, sunny weather, and 3)nothing on the calendar. Yesterday was yard work day. The day that Tom finally mowed the lawn with his new electric/cordless mower. Finding one to replace the electric/cordless that died mid-mow 2 weeks ago has been a quest for him. He also planted the vegetable garden, started the sprinkler system, and discovered that when the nursery came out this past week to replace the tree that didn’t make it through the hellish winter, they sliced through a drip line. And that was one hell of a run-on sentence. But I digress. While he was doing the outside stuff, I was inside, playing out the life of a 1940s housewife. I was entertaining guests, working with the exterminator, and (God help me) making rhubarb jelly.

Yes, my friends, I made a sextuple batch of rhubarb jelly yesterday (that’s 6 batches, for those who don’t want to reach for the dictionary. How many containers, do you ask? I stopped counting at 20). And today when it was cool, I went to put it all in the freezer in the garage. What did I discover there? Three containers of rhubarb jelly from last fall. And apple butter. And peach preserves. And roasted tomato sauce. And spaghetti sauce. And the pork and beef we got from the processor. And frozen pizzas. It looked like Little House on the Prairie had a one-night stand with Costco.

I wasn’t very keen on making rhubarb jelly when the temperatures were in the 80s; that’s a bit warm for standing over homemade napalm…uh, boiling sugar. But Roger the Wonder Shrub (aka the rhubarb plant hell-bent on world domination) is having a growth spurt and if I didn’t do something with the (ahem) 42 cups of chopped rhubarb in the freezer, we were going to have a problem.

A went to a birthday party today. I should have skipped running to Target to get the twins’ gifts and instead just given them jelly.

We hosted Balloonfiesta this morning at the unholy hour of 6 am. Why? Because that’s when the balloons go up. My five favorite ladies and their families trek up to my house and we watch 60+ balloons launch from behind my house while we eat, drink, and be merry.

Two of them went home with jelly. The others hid.

I saw my neighbor outside this afternoon. She got jelly. (And she just stopped by with oatmeal-three kinds of chocolate chips cookies. Mmmmm…)

If you come by my house and try to sell me meat off a truck, you’re gonna get jelly. You’ve been warned.

And our final bit of home improvements for the weekend (after two trips to Home Depot and one to the liquor store), is to do something about the crushed gravel patio we have. The crushed gravel patio has a summer home on my kitchen floor. Apparently it doesn’t much care for the outdoors and migrates in on the boys’ shoes. I hate the crushed gravel patio, it angers me and my sweeper. So today…sigh…today we nailed down fake green grass outdoor carpet in an attempt to keep the crushed gravel patio in its place. It’s a lovely shade of holy crap that’s green!, but I’m sure with the summer wind dust will temper the color.

And now, while Tom finishes that up, and A plays and J naps (as we all should be doing because of the early morning), I will go and complete my weekend of 1940s housewife and begin supper.

What’s for supper?

Rhubarb jelly.

AHA!

Ok, I’ve figured out how to put slideshows and video on this blog. Happy happy. Now you all can appreciate the joy of a construction site in your backyard. Be sure your volume is up…waaaayy up. That’ll give you the full effect. And certainly catch both “Before” and “After.” 🙂

Before

After