First of all

To my Mom and Dad:

Please don't use anything you read here as cause for concern. I told you the van is now permanently parked in the drive way until it's fixed. Larry says he'll fix it but he's actually making progress on the bathroom and I don't want him to derail that. I'm driving the truck. It's fine. Quite safe, actually that anything that might hit me will bounce off. Larry has flags he put on the little trailer and I'll put them on the front of it if I need to park in a tight space. You seem to forget it was the only thing I had to drive for 4 months waiting for the van to make it here from VA. I'll survive just fine. In fact it was our sole vehicle our month in FL, too. Given the choice between keeping it or the van, I'd pick the truck everyday. Really we're fine.

Secondly:

I realized what the purpose of the blog is. It was a revelation of sorts.
I thought I'd start it to keep the grandparents up to date on what was going on here, but really it's more just a reflection of life here. And one the grandparents should not read. The antidote to all the 'everything is gum drops and lollipops' blogs which make me nauseous with how lovely and perfect their lives are. This blog is about life.

And it's not all gumdrops and lollipops.Candy really isn't our friend here. In fact most gum here ends up on the bottom of shoes and today, on the bottom of our dog's paw. I have no idea how that happened nor do I have the solution for it.  So.. it's just real life. A little of 'what the kids have done lately' and a little of 'I haven't spoken to an adult in 76 hours and I'll just write to myself online'  there's been less of that with Larry's new and improved hours, so it goes to follow that the blogging has been less.

But fear not.. he will be playing MASH in the desert shortly and I will be here again. Talking to myself and giving others a real picture of life. The one others read and no longer feel like the most inadequate parent because they didn't make the perfect fondant cake for their child's well planned birthday with 40 people in attendance which I made all the food for it myself...  the ones who have laundry piled on the couch and kids with long and dirty fingernails when the 5th nail scrubber and nail clipper go missing.. the ones who show up late for swimming lessons every time. The ones who have a struggle to get library books all returned on time. Those are the ones I keep the company with. Even if they're all just the different sides of myself.

Well since there isn't any internal arguing this am

I guess I can write on something else.
Car trouble.
I think others can relate.

Anyway... our minivan has given us over 5 years of service. And if you combine it with it's twin we owned before we traded it in for the same van... we've had essentially the same van for 7 years. If you ever want to hear that story, I can dig that one out...

And it has alot of memories, it was functional transportation, and it is paid for which is good for the budget. However.. I've never been filled with 'oh I love my minivan' about it. In fact I've never loved it. I've always had a fantasy about 'when this dies, I'm going to get..(fill in the blank)' however now that that fantasy is closer (the minivan dying part) I'm suddenly not so fast to go buy one.

Why? oh, because our Dave-Ramsey inspired 'new car fund' has about $400 in it and $400 won't get you the registration and fees for a new-to-us car.

So.. here we are. I'm afraid to take it to the shop to get an estimate. Partly because of what I think they'll tell me but largely because when I drive it I start praying hard to get home safely.

(ok mom, this is the part where I assure you it's now permanently parked in the driveway until something changes)

So.. it's been giving me alot of warning signs. About 2 months ago Larry was driving us home from church and he stepped on the gas and it went  'bluuuuugggghhhh' and rather than accelerating nearly stalled out. Like it was out of gas but with 1/2 a tank.

So.. I drove the truck for a week after that incident but after getting myself stuck somewhere that I was praying hard 'Jesus please guide me out of here without running over a compact car or two' I went back to driving the van. First for the really short trips around town then for the ones about 20 minutes away.. and it was behaving fine. well.. except for lack of Air conditioning, but that was fixed last year and for $1000 I can buy a whole lot of cold drinks for us. And well.. it's not like we live in Texas or somewhere you need Air conditioning....

So.. this week I was driving the kids to their end-of school standardized testing and when I hit the breaks the van felt like I was running over a grumble strip. Minus the grumble strip on the road.
And in my panic, I did the math and realized I was closer to their school than home so we went slow, tried not to hit the breaks and when I did hit them gently.. no grumble strip.

OK... so... that was last week and things were going ok. Mostly. And I didn't really go anywhere. Larry thought it might be my CV joint. We know the shocks are bad and the transmission has been shifting really hard but still shifting (cept for that one time and we'd forgiven it for that..) and without $3000 in our car repair fund or enough in the new car fund I was going to limp this van along a big longer..

This week I had to do the library run, a milk run and a few other errands. And while I've been going between the van and truck, yesterday I "had" to take the van. Because I was going to the library on a farmer's market day which means.. parking trouble. And my parking the truck takes about 500 backing up and straightening out IF I haven't already taken out someone's bumper with the side of the truck in the process.  I realize it's because space is at a premium here, ther's a pesky smog problem and most people should be driving Prius's. However.. if you do the math, I can fit 3 prius's and their cargo in my truck, so I can get 1/3 their gas mileage and come out ahead. so I win. Wish they's see it that way....

Anyway.. because I need a turning radius of 1/2 a football field to get straight into a parking space on the first 3 trys and because the parking radius is perfect for a Prius or Civic at the parking garage at the library I took the van, which I can park on the first try. Usually.

And all was going well until I went to brake and I started looking wildly around for the jet that MUST be landing on my roof. Or at the very least the HUGE semi bearing down on my rear. Nothing. A Mercedes behind me and no jet overhead. humph. not good sign. not a good sign at all.

Pull into Lowes put the windows down and hear a 'grind-grind-grind-grind' with each wheel revolution. Which vaguely reminds me of the time my civic had cv joint issues or brake issues. I don't remember which it was. Perhaps both. It was a bad year for my civic that year.

Debate taking the bus home and leaving the van in the Lowe's parking lot with a 'please steal me' sign taped to the window.

Go into Lowes, return something Larry had bough that had been sitting in the van for the better part of 2 months waiting for me to remember to return it and debate the bus vs drive back roads home decision.

And it got home with that jet just waiting for me to brake to turn my roof into a miniature air craft carrier landing strip. Pulled it into the driveway and emptied it out. of everything.
Took 2 hours to empty it, scrub it, shampoo the rugs and take pictures for craigslist.

And tell Larry about the Jet plane that night.
He tells me 'oh, that's the rear brakes, I should be able to fix that this weekend'

So the van is given a stay of execution for now. But the ad is written. I can add "need to tow away" should the brake repair turn into a nightmare.

And in the mean time I think I need those training wheel flags- tape them to the 4 corners of the truck so I can get a feel for where the ends are and not run anything else over.

Anything else? oh. you noticed that?

Last year when the AC was broken and we had an unusual hot spell I was driving the truck. And decided I needed to go to Old Navy. No, not that I needed to go, but we were driving by and the kids needed something.... and there was a big one-day sale

Anyway.. one day sale+southern ca= few open parking spaces.

So rather than park 1 mile away I tried to get into a parking spot and scraped the Toyota next to me. She didn't come out so I had to leave her a note. I was sweating that for 2 weeks when she finally called me and told me 'it wasn't a big deal to her, but thank you for being honest' phew. I'm sure the next time the next someone won't be so forgiving about it.  So now I park miles away if possible. And when there aren't 2 spaces open next to each other in a parking lot I sweat lots and lots of bullets.

NOW I get blogging!

Ah. I had it so wrong up until now! I watched Julie and Julia and NOW I get it- you're supposed to try to write to real people who will really read it about something consistent. You're not supposed to be writing to your imaginary psychiatrist or scrap book.. or yourself..

Well, self.. if you're going to really blog you better start over.And come up with a theme

yeah, but we have history here and you know how much I resist change

But some changes are good
but some are really bad

Some people make money on blogs

But then it's a JOB. And you have enough going on in your life- did you forget the kids, the diaper thing and soon to deploy husband?

It'll give me something to do.

Some days I think you need to see a pshrink

You mean talking to myself online doesn't count for therapy? And is THAT how you spell shrink?
It is when you're talking about a psychiatrist pshrink.


I think I'm going to put a paypal "donate here" button for your therapy. 
MY therapy?! Dear left brain, it is YOU who has the problem.




Great. Even my brain bickers. No wonder where the kids get it from.

OK. Going to make them sit next to each other until they figure out how to get along. My brain that is. The kids are happily piled on the couch watching a show on dinosaurs. 

Whoa 2 days in a row

It's not even that I have anything to say, but this came up when I was aiming for something else in my browser history and here I am. You know a whole day of wasted time starts with just one click of the mouse.

Anyway the sun has come back out and paradise has returned to normal. i will miss this weather when we move pretty much anywhere else.

Today is day 2 of Joey walking around with a tooth hanging on by a fraction of a root. It's been hanging and yesterday it was bleeding, but today it just hangs. He's refusing to eat, let us pull it out for him and been wiggling it since dinnertime yesterday. I used to think the thought of tying a string to a tooth and shutting a door was inhumane. NOW I get it and think that'd be the most humane way to end this nonsense. He wiggles it, but he's not really WIGGLING it, more a ever-so-slight movement which he clings to it for dear life with both hands.

We took S + J to the dentist last week. I realize I hadn't been good about getting their routine care done, so called up and got all 4 of them apointments. And the Dental assistant there was explaining to me how Sonia's older which is why she used the adult flouride on her teeth.
Of course I had to bite my tongue about saying the obvious "uh, they're twins which makes them the same age"  Sonia still has a good 1 1/2 inches in height on him and has lost 7 teeth to Joey's 4, so I guess by looking at them she made some assumptions.

Other than that.. my recent quest has been to eliminate any urine smell from the house. Because after renting 'cat pee house' nothing gets my skin ablaze like the smell of urine on carpet. Especially our brand new carpet.

And I have 2 culprits. JM who has kept me in potty training purgatory for months now has had more than his share of accidents and the dog who I suspect was responsible for alot of it.

So.. I had (that would be past tense) that blacklight flashlight that came with the magic potion that was supposed to eliminate it from the last house. While the goo did nothing, the light worked well. And since we've moved I couldn't find it. I took every closet apart, offered a monetary and/or candy reward... nothing. I'd resorted to the crawl-on-the-ground-and-sniff method which was a. gross and b. ineffective so I went to home depot and decided to go buy another one.

I couldn't find it so I went to the 'head trainer' and asked her. She looks at me weird as I explained they used to sell a box with a blacklight flash light and urine remover and wondered if she could find it for me. She says 'well, I've been here 2 year and we've never sold something like that' and I still insitst, yes, it was less than 2 years ago and yes, it came from here. So she asked over their walkie talkies if anyone knows of what I was talking about. And a guy in paint does. I think he watched alot of CSI or Macguver. Maybe both. He brings me to elecrical to get the light bulb, then to lights to get the light fixture and when he's done I have the best. dang. urine stain finder in the world. It's not battery operated, but it worked really well.

And the "nature's miracle" stuff really did make the stuff disappear as you spayed it on the stain on brown rugs. Not so great on blue rugs.

But the smell is gone. And that makes me happy.

And the dog is one accident away from finding a new home.
And JM, well... I wonder if there's much hope for that boy.


EDITED TO ADD:
the tooth is out.
It fell out when he and JM were wrestling about an inflatable beach ball and who it belonged to.
Yes. that happens alot. Not the tooth part. The wrestling part. Someone tells me that's normal for boys. If it's not someone needs to let me know.

It's a Misty Monday Morning

And they call it "rain" here in Southern CA.
Anywhere else it doesn't even count as a drizzle.
Here,  it's rain.

And the people here all complain that it's raining.

Sheesh. I had 4 status messages from my 4 local "friends" on facebook all complaining about why it's raining .

The answer to your question my dear friends is.....

YOU NEED WATER

to drink, to bathe to cook
And if you want to have a green lawn or garden, you need it for that as well.
When you have however many millions of people living in the desert or semi-desert, it's nice for it to rain once in a while.

It's earth science and ecology/our environment basics. Perhaps you weren't homeschooled, so you didn't learn this. 

Anyway life has moved beyond our coffee grind incident and I didn't need to administer CPR or call 911 when I told Larry how much our airline tickets were. So we've all made it to another week.

And as normal for us, if there was something fun that was free or super cheap, we'd be there.

This weekend it was the "Oceanside Military Appreciation Day." Because it's nice to be "appreciated" even if it's for 6 hours. I expected it to be crowded beyond belief. It wasn't. I think the rest of the military families were either
a. afraid to leave base
b. feel 'appreciated' enough on a normal basis to be suspect of any 'appreciation' day
c. didn't know about it
d. couldn't find it

Promised to be free barbeque lunch, kids carnival and rides and a static display of military machines- the amphibious stuff, some guns (the big ones you tow behind vehicles), and jeeps. And live muic. All of which has become the "military carnival" standard for all

And parking at the beach can be challenging on a normal day, so I fully expected to not be able to find parking. so we decided to take mass transit (aka the sprinter). We COULD have taken the bus from the strip mall next to our neighborhood (which is easy walking distance) and then transferred to the train, but frankly, I wasn't up for THAT much 'green living' and took our van to the transit station. And it would have added a good 45 minutes to the trip and that particular bus comes hourly and I know we'd miss it by 5 minutes and be stuck waiting for the next 55 minutes to get it again.

Anyway.. we took the Sprinter, which of course was fun and excited for the kids. And fun and exciting for the kids means they get loud. Very loud. Announcing every train crossing, palm tree and rock they see. I'm sure the others on the train were thrilled to death to have us on there. Even after our little pep talk about grownups without kids don't like to hear kids on buses or planes announce everything they see.. it was no no avail. It actually made it worse because about 7 minutes before we reached our final destination, Sonia got the concept and for everytime one of the other 3 exclaimed what they saw, Sonia would say "GUYS! SHHH! NOT SO LOUD! at least 2x as loud as the other 3.

Anyway.. the kids had a good time. I'm glad not too many people came out because the lines weren't horrible. There was no line for the lunch and I had no fewer than 3 "princesses" offer to help me though the line. They had the "miss Oceanside" and 4 other "miss-somethings" there from Oceanside. Kayla called them princesses because they were wearing crowns.

And I bought a smaller camera memory card so I can pop it in the computer and share pictures. apparently my computer thought 16 mb was overkill. 2 mb downloaded 8 times is fine.
Top picture has Sonia at the bottom of the slide and JM at the top right. Bottom has JM on the slide. Sure I could have loaded 1 of all the kids, but they all look the same essentially. You have my word they all went down more than I can count.

Not that you can tell, but those are the military displays on the beach. (we're on the pier)

This is before it got moving. I thought they'd be afraid. They had a blast and went twice. They'd have gone more but it had the longest line and there's only so much dizzying spinning you can try to photograph and watch.

That's the live entertainment. The guy from Karaoke night at the VFW (guessing, I have no first hand information on the VFW)

On the way there. You can kinda see Joey. He's behind the stroller. He was clinging to the sidewalk furthest from  the tracks in case he was going to fall. His brother, on the other hand had no fear and was nominated as 'most likely to fall on the train tracks' by his peers.

Define: Emergency

I realize the kids and I have different definitions of "emergency"

It came to me as an epiphany as I was sitting on hold trying to decern if the sound coming out of the speaker was just the advertisements from the hold pattern/voice mail system or if it was an actual person picking up the line..

And the kids see the phone there and suddenly.. EVERYTHING is an emergency that needs immediate attention

-"MOM! JONMICHAEL put a marble in my piano!"
-"MOM!!! He hit me!"
-"MOOOM Kayla won't get out of my room!"
-"MOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!"
-"MOM! JONMICHAEL won't get out of my room!!"
-"Mom, can I have some milk?"
-"Mom, is it snack time?"
-"MOM! Joey's in the refridgerator!"
{CRYING}
{Screaching aka fake crying}

Mind you most of that is being said yelled at the same time and drowns out most thought in most adults. Much less the ability to hear.

What they didn't mention was that while I was on the phone...

Jon Michael took a stool to the counter, got up there, got the 5 lbs tub of coffee, put it on the ground and took the scooper and started scooping it onto the floor.

No.. THAT they forgot to mention.

There was an aroma of fresh coffee that met me as I re-entered the house..

Backing up to clarify:  Oh, yes.. I went outside.

Because I couldn't hear the person on the phone.
I was out there long enough to discover that the kids and/or military airfares were not actually cheaper than the web airfares, so.. maybe 2 minutes?

You should see what the do when the 4 of them work together and they have more than 2 minutes of indirect supervision. Like when on the phone for a week waiting for the good folks at the IRS.

IF ONLY they could harness that power to do something helpful.. like laundry.

Happy Seis de Mayo

It's a rarely noticed holiday. Probably celebrated only in the inner most recesses of my mind.

Anyway.. since I haven't been much to blog lately, I think I'll use the occasion to catch up.

We went to the elementary school to enroll the kids yesterday. Well.. didn't actually enroll them, but went and got the paper work to do so. It's starting to sink in that life is going to be different next year. Very different. And I can hardly believe S+J are going to be in 2nd grade. Sheesh. I remember 2nd grade- at least some of it- and they're going to be that old?! 
(I remember mostly that my parents put my teacher up on a blind date with my uncle. Made for a memorable year. Then years later I become an acquaintance with her younger sister- a nurse at the hospital.. you know- typical small town stuff)

Other than that... it's been a season of getting life in order. Getting rid of excess stuff, making a budget, trying to plan for the future- you know the boring adult stuff in life?   Planning if we want to send the kids to college and pay for it, how much we need to save monthly to do that.. ( Warning: do not click the "compute" button if you're faint at heart)

And I daydream about the prototype diaper I'm going to come up with that will send my kids to college, pay off our house and make our retirement a possibility. Or pretty much any prototype anything. Larry still is working on "the secret project" which still has hope for some financial gain, but the hope is not what it used to be. oh well. such is life. Guess we'll have to work and save like normal people.

Other than the little things in life the major ones remain the same - Larry's eventual deployment, my plans to visit but not move home while he's gone, the living in Sunny Southern CA, the trying to raise kids who are well adjusted, smart, well mannered, kind, and love the Lord... (somehow this is harder than we anticipated).

And with that thought, it's off to work on this day being productive

Hurray! It's May!!

Which means we made it through the marathon month of family visiting. Not that I'm complaining, mind you- I like family visiting. I think more family members should visit more often. But it keeps things a bit more, ahem, active than when it's just me and/or us and the kids.

I'll upload pictures later, but we went to Old Town(twice), went on a harbor cruise, the pier, the desert, Sonic, Pat and Oscars (twice), drove to San Diego several times and well.. I forget what else.

Had 2 yard sales- one here, one at church and unloaded a ton (well, perhaps not a literal ton but a figurative ton) of stuff. Mother in Law helped get the yard sale stuff ready for yard sale #1 which was at our house when they were here. I'll say she did have her finger on the pulse of what "spanish" people like. And I was vindicated that our 2 large rocking stuffed animals which Larry though wouldn't sell in a million years had people fighting over them.

But.. a helpful hint if selling here: Learn to haggle in pennies in spanish.
Silly me. I know my numbers up to say 20 well and after that it blends in my mind. So not only was I being offered 50 or 30 cents for items clearly marked with $2 labels, I couldn't understand what they were offering.
Another helpful hint: people shoplift. At yard sales. What the heck?! And it wasn't the young kids. It was the older ones (like grandparent age) I saw doing it. Perhaps the younger ones were just better at it without getting caught.  Sneaky.
Anyway- I've had enough yard sale joy for a long long time. Perhaps forever. I'll shop at yard sales, but have one...  I'll have to wait until Mommy-Amnesia erases today from my brain.

It won't be long. My memory is pretty well shot.