Multiple Choice

Your 9 year old, honor student son brings home a certificate for a "free" month of karate lessons, including uniform, do you . . .

a) throw certificate in the trash as a mere marketing ploy - you couldn't afford to keep it up after the free month anyway.
b) sign said son up immediately, even though it is a marketing ploy and you can't afford to keep him in it after the free month, but it will reward him for the good grades (again) and give him the opportunity to try something he's always wanted to try, explaining to said son that it is only going to be for the free month, feeling no guilt whatsoever.
c) sign said son up immediately, even though it is a marketing ploy and you can't afford to keep him in it after the free month, but it will reward him for the good grades (again) and give him the opportunity to try something he's always wanted to try, explaining to said son that it is only going to be for the free month, while feeling guilty 1)that you've bilked the karate studio for a free month (even though it was their idea) 2)that said son will be pulled from something he loves even though he understood from the beginning that it was only for one month.

This is where someone with a loyal readership would say discuss, give your comments. But my readership is spotty at best (thanks though to Sarah, Ali, Tracey and any other twin moms that pop by), I'll just tell you . . .

I choose c. But the really sad thing is that he's pretty good at this. But alas, finances do not currently allow for outside recreation of this magnitude.

So is it truly better to have karated and lost than to never have karated at all?

Discuss.

Emerging From the Fever Fog

After two days of crabbies and two nights of sleeping on the couch with P, which means she gets to sleep and I try to sleep while worrying that her fever isn't coming down, hoping she'll be well enough to get the tubes put in her ears so that this can be our last horrendous ear infection, praying I'll be able to stay awake enough to get through the next day, hoping The Husband remembers to give the big kids their medicine in the morning because there is no way I'll be able to get them off to school, we have emeged from the fever fog.

P slept in her bed and I slept in mine (I'd almost forgotten how good that feels). Unfortunately, this has taught me that just because the kids have tubes in doesn't mean we can't get ear infections. Exhibit A - the bottle of pink stuff in my fridge for J, who had tubes put in 3 weeks ago, and developed a fever the day after P, quickly followed by green stuff seeping from his ears. This is what the drops the ENT gave us are for, but even though M and E had tubes put in 2 years ago, I have never seen this much stuff seep out of ears. M and E never had an infection after tubes.

I suppose I was niave. Now I know better.

So Says the Man

I promise this will not turn into a Survivor or Reality Show blog. But last nights Survivor really has me steamed.

The women completely rolled over last night. "Younger man" tells the tribe "one of you two are going, even though detoxing Shane begged to be voted off" and the women took it like gospel.

Hello women -- you had the numbers, you could have voted off anyone you wanted to. You didn't need to make a permanent alliance - just get together for one vote to let the men know you weren't going to be pushed around.

If you couldn't at least figure that much out, then you don't deserve to be there.

Enough said.

Miracle at the DMV

Although our DMV is now called the DDS (isn't that a dentist?) which apparently stands for Department of Driver Services and they wear sunny yellow polo's and khakis rather than the dreadful blue not-quite-police-uniform I remember from my last visit, which was about 5 years ago, since they now have an online renewal and address change system, which works great if your address is in the postal database, but if it's not then the DDS can't verify it as a real address and you have to go in anyway, which didn't really matter at this point since my license is lost somewhere in this house (as is my bank card, don't tell The Husband) so I had to go in anyway, after finding the required two forms of ID and a bill with my new address on it (the very reason I put the water bill in my name), of which they only asked for one form of ID and then took my word for the new address (so why didn't the online system work), but I did get a new picture since the old one was 10 years old and I updated my weight so it's only 40 lbs off (don't go there) and this time they wanted my fingerprint (not sure how I feel about that) and I decided again not to be an organ donor (I know, I know, selfish me) and re-registered to vote with the new address and I don't have to renew it for 10 years (here's hoping I don't loose it again, I have a terrible time keeping track of it, which I suppose wouldn't be a problem if I'd just leave it in my wallet and get over trying to get by without a purse)!

Oh and the miracle -- the whole thing took less than 10 minutes.

Humuhumunukunukuapuaa

And if you know what that is, you're probably Hawaiian.

Anyhow--

Stumbled across this article a couple weeks ago (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11069864/) about Hawaii's state fish (or lack thereof) and I actually remember the original vote that happened in 1985ish. No, I didn't live in Hawaii, but my boyfriend (yes, I had a boyfriend in the 5th grade, more on that another time), who was born in Hawaii brought the fish vote for a kind of "show and tell". Our class voted, (for the record we liked the Humuhumunukunukuapuaa) and Matt (the boyfriend) sent a letter to a Hawaiian paper including our results. Cool, yeah?

But who knew the Humuhumunukunukuapuaa had been ousted from it's throne as state fish? Apparently no one. The Humuhumunukunukuapuaa is still my pick, if only because it's an incredibly fun word to say. Kind of like 555,555 in German.

Gotta Have Shoes

Today is an historic day for our family, particularly for P. Today I purchased P's first pair of real shoes. Yes, she managed to make it to 13 months without owning shoes. I've have purchased shoes for her before, but never with the real intent of putting them on her. What's the point if her perfect baby feet aren't going to touch the nasty ground? It's just a hassle, one more thing for me to remember. But now that she's walking (okay she's been walking for 4 months, so I'm a little behind), and trying to wear everyone else's shoes and whining and screaming whenever we walk by shoes in the store, I figured it was time to get serious and buy the girl a pair of shoes suitable for walking in stores and out of doors.

The problem with shoes for P has been that she curls her toes up whenever you try to put shoes on her, making it very hard to determine if we had a good fit. Today, however, she uncurled her toes and then ran all over the store breaking in her new shoes (and shopping while she was at it. The girl can pull clothes off a rack faster than any baby I've seen.)

I know you wondering how I could have not purchased shoes for her for 13 months. All I can say is that J was 18 months plus before he wore shoes. But that was because I refused to spend $40 for an extra wide shoe and he didn't want to walk anyway. He still prefers to be carried.

Save Me From Stuff

This last weekend something happened that I had really lost hope would ever happen. The Husband helped me clean out the garage! Not only did he help, but it was his idea in the first place.

Because of the size of our garage and the shape of the driveway it is nearly impossible to park the van in the garage. I can easily get in at an angle but that precludes ever parking a second car in there. In October we spent most of a Saturday bringing everything over from our storage unit. But we didn't go through any of the stuff; we just stacked it haphazardly in the garage with a narrow walkway down the center. And there it sat for months. Occasionally E would see something out there and beg to bring it in the house (E doesn't forget about anything) but that was the extent of it.

Until I mentioned that I still couldn't find a book of negatives and it was keeping me from completing a reprint order for a very patient mother-of-the-groom. That spurred The Husband to action and we did find the negatives.

But we also found a lot of stuff. Box after box labeled "Japanese Things" from The Husband's mission there 14ish years ago. He has more stuff from those two years of his life than either of us has from our entire childhoods and he has a very difficult time letting go of any of it.

I, on the other hand, have been very good about letting go of meaningless pieces of my past. Painted wooden hearts from church camp, buttons from junior high, party favors from elementary school class parties -- all gone. Plaques from junior high and high school proclaiming that I took 3rd place in a math competition or was an alternate for Governor's Honor two years in a row or that I was a Master Scriptorian have found their way to the trash (after having been photographed of course) to free up space in my garage as well as my life.

The most important lesson I've learned from this weekend of purging - don't go through this stuff while the kids are around (especially E). They kept taking stuff out of the throw-away pile and begging to keep it. I think they get that from their dad.