Logan came by after school yesterday, and he and Lily pulled out the little pool.

There was too much action in the little pool for Damian. He found a quieter place to play with water.

I have vicodin that I take for my headaches; I call it my Miracle Drug.  When I feel a headache coming on, I drink a cup of tea and take a vicodin and *poof!* the headache disappears.

However, vicodin, for me, also acts as a mood elevator and an energy pill.  I was telling Carla that I am a cleaning machine after the vicodin and the cup of tea.  Carla said that she noticed how clean my house was when she dropped Clara off Tuesday.  And then her house looked even worse by comparison when she walked into her own home.  “I should try vicodin and cup of tea to clean my house,” she said.

I said, “That’s playing with fire though.  Vicodin has a synthetic narcotic in it.  It’s like saying ‘I’ll just use coke to get the energy I need to clean my house.'”

And she said, “Yeah but… my house would be clean.”

I started laughing… because it’s true!  Cleaning the house is a monumental task and it’s a miserable job.  When weighing the two, a coke addiction doesn’t seem so bad. 😉

Lily, Damian and I watched Clara yesterday. Lily fed her and rocked her to sleep for me.

Lily and Clara
20 May 2008

Lily and Clara
20 May 2008

The kids love to dance to Moby’s Extreme Ways (Bourne’s Ultimatum).  When I put it on, Damian will drop whatever he is doing and run into the living room to dance around with his sister.  I use this to my advantage.  With proper planning, I can now use the bathroom for 4 minutes and 22 seconds all by myself.  As any mother of preschool children will tell you, this is a luxury.

We all know that I have a thing for bald men, but it’s Moby’s ability to entertain my children that gets me excited. 😉

Shelrie, Lani, and Damian
10 April 2008

My mom arrives tomorrow, and the house is not yet clean.  I place responsibility for the messy house directly at the feet of the two devoted minions of Chaos who follow behind me and undo all my work.

While working against Chaos and its two little minions who live in my house this past week, I realized that we have a cultural lie that, for some reason, we all support and even nurture:  the idea that we can raise children, decorate our house like the homes on HGTV, and keep the house spotless while making home-cooked meals every night.  No one wants to be that person who says, “You know what, my house actually looks like a tip right now and I am unable to keep it clean.”  What a loser.

My house is only 1300 square feet (small by today’s standards, normal by 1970’s standards), and I cannot keep up with the housework.  How do housewives with 2500 sq ft houses do it?  Really.  How do they do it?

So I’ve decided to be that person.  Maybe people will think “What a loser” or maybe people will think, “Finally!  Someone came forth and told the truth!” but here it is:

My house very often is one ginormous mess and I cannot keep up with the housework and I don’t make nutritious home-cooked meals every night.  So take away my June Cleaver badge — I hated trying to vacuum in heels and a meticulously-ironed dress anyway.

This weekend, Matt finished making the sandbox for the children.
While building the sandbox, Matt had a two-foot-tall foreman watching
over him to make sure he built to code.

Pregnancy leaves one with many souvenirs: varicose veins, stretch marks, spontaneous incontinence while sneezing or coughing, and permanently rearranged internal organs.

There is another little quirky thing that pregnancy transforms into a lasting condition: emotional weepiness.  While pregnant, sentimental commercials can make you cry.  And though the emotional weepiness is not as acute afterwards, you are left with a permanent PMS-style sensitivity to sentimentality.

For example, just recently I watched The Wedding Singer again and cried at the very end when Robbie was singing “I want to grow old with you” on the plane to Julia.  “Sure,” you remark, “I can see crying at the climactic, intentionally overly-sentimental scene of an adult romantic comedy.  I cried.”

Well, I see your Wedding Singer and raise you High School Musical.  I just watched High School Musical again, and got all choked up and weepy during the climactic scene when Troy and Gabriella race to the call-back audition and sing together.  Matt was in here and I knew it was silly to cry at a teen movie, so I was walking around, pretending to clear the table from lunch, trying to get the lump out of my throat.

I, like so many other people, assumed Tammy Faye Bakker was being theatrical with all her crying.  But now, after giving birth to two children like Tammy Faye, I believe she was simply misunderstood.

I know what you’ve been thinking.  “Hey, Angel, it’s fine and everything reading your rant against Objectivism and how it translates into a piss-poor attitude towards your fellow man in the real world, but where are the Easter piccies?  I really only come to your blog to look at the cute pictures, and I read the rants just to be polite.” 😉

Well, a bit late, but here they are:

Lily, Damian and Daddy doing a little DIY in the back garden.
Matt was repairing the playhouse for the children.

Lily and Damian playing.

Logan covering Damian with a cascarones egg.

More cascarones fun.

Lily joining in the cascarones fun.

Damian covered in confetti.

Lily covered in confetti.

Lily and Clara.

The women have a picnic on the lawn…

…while the men continue with their outdoor DIY.

Logan playing on the newly-repaired playhouse.

Carla gets her hair done. 🙂

The Easter picnic continues…

… as does the Easter DIY.

Steve had hidden the Easter eggs for the Easter egg hunt for the kids.
There were colored boiled eggs, plastic eggs with candy, and cascarones eggs.
As soon as Steve hid the eggs, Lani found two hard-boiled eggs and ate them.
Here she is eating a blue-colored hard-boiled egg.

Men at work.

Lily hunting Easter eggs. (Do you see all the leaves in her hair?
To a three-year-old, there is no difference between brightly-colored
paper confetti and old dry leaves. After pouring confetti in her hair,
she proceeded to pour leaves all over herself.)

Damian and Daddy find a couple of Easter eggs.

The Easter egg hunt continues.

Carla and Clara supervise the Easter egg hunt.

Uncle Ben and Lily check out the playhouse.

More confetti Lily.

Carla and Clara snuggle.

And then Carla and Clara play.

The kids giving the playhouse a test-run.

Super Logan.

Steve and Matt continue the DIY around all the children.

Phew! That was a lot of photos! But I was a bit trigger-happy on Easter. 🙂 I hope everyone had a good Easter.

Lily in her newest Disney princess dress.
22 March 2008

Kids are wonderfully transparent.  By the time we are adults, we have learned to hide or disguise our emotions.  And all of our hidden emotions cook inside of us and eventually bubble up, sometimes in unpleasant ways.

But not children.  Angry, sad, happy, scared… it’s all right there in your lap.  It makes it much easier to work with them.

And sometimes, like in the picture above, their transparent emotions will make you smile and smile.  Lily had been asking for the Geselle dress for awhile, but I told her that we would wait until it went to the sale rack.  Well, I soon realized that it would not make it to the sale rack.  In fact, by the time I agreed to buy it for her (it was still at full price, but the dresses were not staying on the shelves), there were none left locally and we had to drive to the Disney store at the San Marcos outlet mall (an hour drive) as it was the only store that still had a dress in her size.

But when she put it on…  and Matt photographed her beautifully happy expression when she wore her dress… it was definitely worth the trip.  She felt so special.  I do not have a single dress that makes me feel that special, that encourages the expression that she has.  And, sadly, if I did have a dress that made me feel like that, I would probably feel embarrassed and hide the emotion.

In many ways, we would do well to emulate children.

Ps. That dress was $50, not counting the money spent on fuel to get it.  When Matt watched her happily float around the house in her new dress which is the bridal dress from Enchanted, Matt said, “I’ve just had a vision of my future.  She is going to want a really expensive wedding.” 😉

Daddy and the kids on the swing.
15 March 2008

I’ve read many books on productivity and organization.  It is one of my favorite nonfiction genres.  But I have never been able to follow a system — any system — successfully.  The other day, as I was trying to feed both Damian and Lily while cleaning the house and doing the laundry, it dawned on me why I have failed so miserably:

Productivity books are written by professional men for professional men.

The productivity guru sequesters himself in his home office for nine hours while his wife is left cooking, cleaning, paying the bills, doing the laundry, grocery shopping, and caring for the children (notice that I did not even mention any hobbies that she may be trying to pursue for herself).  “But, honey,” he says as she desperately asks for help, “my work brings in the money and puts the food on the table.”  And off he goes into his office, away from his hectic family, to publish his solution to the world’s productivity problems.

Yeah.  Whatever.

I’m waiting for the book written by the housewife.  Not only does a housewife have too many things to do in too little time, but the priorities are constantly shifting – I mean, truly constantly in flux like water on paper.  And a housewife has a very difficult time following a set schedule because children are variables which cannot be quantified.

Short of getting up at 4am (which is what I did this morning), I cannot find the time for anything but housework and childcare.  And even the housework falls behind.  (Childcare is the primary duty, so it never falls behind; it takes precedence over everything.)

Maybe someday I will discover an industrial-strength productivity system — one that even a housewife can use.  I’ve been searching, but I have not been successful yet.  But as always, I have hope. 🙂

Damian laughing at the world.
06 March 2008

I turn 40-years-old in less than four months.  I’m just not ready to be 40-years-old yet.  It’s not that I mind getting older.  As everyone says, you actually find peace with yourself and the world as you get older.  It’s just… well, there are clothes that I haven’t worn yet; shoes that I haven’t tried yet; experimentation that is waiting for me.  Sure, I might be a mom, but I’m not ready to be matronly yet.

I had heard “40 is the new 30,” and I have decided that will be the theme for my birthday, and may well be the theme for the next decade of my life.  It’s all in the mind anyway, isn’t it?  And I’m just not ready to be matronly.  I’m sure one day I’ll be ready for that stage of my life… just not yet. 😉

Lily with (from left to right) Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, Aurora, Jasmine (again),
Belle, and Snow White. Mattel’s marketing department is a bunch of 4-year-olds
playing with construction paper and crayons compared to Disney’s princess
marketing onslaught. I have bought a Barbie doll (The Angel of Peace Barbie
for my desk), but Lily has no idea who Barbie is.
06 March 2008

I’m ready to podcast… in fact, I’ve been ready to podcast for awhile.  But I can’t seem to find the time.  The cleaning, the cooking, the children, paying the bills, the laundry, the shopping… my time disappears into the daily routine of household chores.

Have you ever heard folks say that they don’t like to work from home — that they prefer to go to an office — because when they work from home they feel like they are never off from work?  They find that they constantly work.

Well, what is a housewife to do then?  The house is our work.  How does a housewife delineate work-time from play-time when the two are so intimately entertwined with one another?

I’m complaining again.  Sorry.  I’ve just been wanting to play with my websites for the past week and have not because of household chores.  So here it comes out on the blog. 🙂

Lani and the children playing in the back garden…
playing in the dirt to be exact. When they came in,
there was dirt in their hair, dirt all over their clothes,
and dirt in their diapers.
04 March 2008

We bought a silver Toyota RAV4 Limited with V6 engine and the third row seating.  And I love it!  Like a vegetarian who craves bacon, I dreamed of a Toyota Prius or Hybrid Honda Civic or experimental electric/ethanol hybrid with high-speed Wi-Fi connection…. until I test-drove the RAV4.  Then I ate the bacon.  And it was good.

The RAV4, being a small SUV, gets decent gas mileage, about the same as my Mazda Protege actually.  Sure, not the greenest car in the world, but I don’t feel like I’ve completely gone over to the dark side. 

Here she is.  She doesn’t have a name yet.

05 March 2008