Month: April 2005

SuperMom

Usually on Fridays, Jerry’s dad and his wife keep the girls in the morning while I run errands and do whatever. This week, I was planning on cleaning the midlevel of our house and getting ready for my scrapbooking workshop, but Wednesday night I received the news that they would be unavailable this week and next. WHAAAAT?! I have to actually CLEAN my HOUSE while the GIRLS are HERE?!??! Like NORMAL mothers do!?

Once I got over the initial shock, I decided to meet this challenge head on.

I’m so proud of myself, too — my kitchen is pretty clean, I vacuumed, mopped, and I’m almost all the way set up for my guests tonight. And it wasn’t that hard, especially since the vacuum doesn’t terrify Alice the way it terrified Helen (a year ago, I got her to use her little push-popper and vacuum with me, so now she uses that to conquer her fears every time — EVERY TIME — I vacuum). Alice crawls around and keeps an eye on it, but it’s clear she thinks it’s pretty neat… She doesn’t try to get away from it or anything.

Who knew? I CAN do this!!! Yay for MEEEEEE!

Alice is a Goat

Currently, Alice is trying to figure out how to get her diaper off so that she can chew on it.

We’re not sure how she does it, but Alice seems to generate paper to chew on, because we’re always fishing it out of her mouth.

This morning, she was holding one of Helen’s shoes, and she decided to stand up. So she stood up — in the middle of the floor. Then she dropped the shoe, so she crouched down to get it. And stood up again.

Oh. No.

Pooh Bear

Today, as I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my evening since Jerry would be out with the guys he works with, my mother reminded me that tonight was the dress rehearsal for Winnie the Pooh. I like taking Helen to dress rehearsals because her commentary doesn’t bother anyone (really), and I’m not pissing off paying patrons if she decides to be Two right in the middle of everything. Mom volunteered to watch Alice so I could take Helen. YES!

So, abandoning all hope of housecleaning (which is kind of futile during Oak Tree Seed Dumping Season anyway — I can vacuum my heart out and the dogs will still track in all kinds of crap on their foot-long flowing magnetic hair), I deposited a full Alice at my parents’ house and took Helen to the play.

She was SO excited. She couldn’t even eat dinner, she was so spazzed about getting to see Pooh. I think she’s going to wake up starving in the morning, poor thing. I think she had 1-1/2 tortellinis and a Ritz cracker. I couldn’t get her to eat any more.

She started getting things together to give to Pooh. I don’t know if this was to be an offering or what, but she left it in the middle of the floor in the foyer. I did manage to give her a bath, which is a great way to pass the time for Helen — baths easily take 30 minutes or more, and it kept her from continuously asking me when we were going to see Pooh.

When I was gathering up Alice and the diaper bag and Helen and HER diaper bag to take one child to Mom and then go to the theatre, Helen said, “No, Mommy. Not Alice. Just Mommy and Helen go see Pooh.” And there she was, with her heart on her sleeve. Such a sweetie.

I explained that we had to drop Alice off at Grama’s, but it would just be Mommy and Helen going to the play. She sat in my lap the whole time. She let me take a picture of her with Pooh. It was a lovely evening for both of us. And she’ll get to go back with Grama and see the play again on Sunday.

What a sweet little girl.

Adaptable

Alice thinks the power cord going to my laptop is fascinating. Thus, she gets this little twinkle in her eye when she realizes that she’s got a clear shot to it and can violently rip it out of the back of the computer.

Too many incidences of this, and the laptop was having difficulty getting power. I found that if I pinched the cord over to the right side and then wedged the box part of the adapter to hold it in place, I’d have power. But this morning, that didn’t even work.

DESPERATION!

After picking Helen up from playschool and depositing our income tax refunds into the bank, the girls and I headed out to CompUSA. I bought a Kensington 70W Universal AC adapter. It looks like this:
photo of adapter
And I came home and plugged it in.

AH, GLORIOUS POWER!

Whew! Lucky lucky… I was conserving power this morning (I shut it down as soon as I noticed that I couldn’t manipulate the original power cord into giving me any power), since if the power cord was NOT the problem I was going to have to transfer everything over to one of the other computers and ship my laptop back to Dell for repairs. Which could take a MONTH.

A MONTH!?

So. All hail the gods of electricity!

[I also got suckered into the warranty where if, for any reason, the adapter doesn’t work in the next year, I can go in and they’ll replace it, no questions. “Even if the cause of the break is my child ripping it out of the back of the computer repeatedly?” Yep. “Sign me UP!”…]