It’s been a while since I’ve cobbled together a lumpy pillow that roughly looks like a stuffed animal. I used to do it all the time. In fact, when I was little, many of my daydreams centered around the day that I would finally own my own sewing machine and then I could make anything I wanted. I envisioned a whole world out of stuffed material. There would be trees made of green calico and brown felt bears with black pleather noses… I would make a whole forrest of animals!

Then I grew up and realized that sewing is hard and it takes entirely too much time. However, I did buy a sewing machine when I got old enough and I’ve made the odd lumpy pillow over the years.

So when Bug came to me dressed in a brown flowered skirt and the only brown t-shirt she could find (that happened to have pieces of cake on it) and explained that she was a forrest girl and all she needed to complete her pretend world was a pet owl that she couldn’t find one anywhere in her vast (and I mean vast) collection of stuffed animals, I hesitated. It was true. She has every animal under the sun I think but she does not have an owl. Octopus, check. Ferret, check. Owl: no dice.

At first I rolled my eyes at her and told her to just imagine one or to find some other forrest animal to play with. I’m sure the Forrest Girl would be friends with all the animals. As she ran off, slightly distressed, to look one more time inside her hedgehog for some sad sorry owl substitute, I gazed over at my new clean work table and my stack of folders representing all the jobs I’ve got going on right now and sighed heavily. Then I decided that I would much rather make a stuffed owl than attend to my many deadlines. Blast it. Life is short. I should make an owl, I thought.

I hauled out my banker’s box full of odd bits of fabric and called Bug over to help me pick something owlish. She was beside herself excited of course. The prospect of making an owl, from fabric with mommy’s sewing machine! She hadn’t even thought of that. This was probably a bit foolish on my part because now she’s going to be thinking I can make anything she sets her heart on at the drop of a hat.

I’m sure I’ll soon cure her of that.

Anyway, she picked some red velvet for the body, some orange raw silk for feet and a beak and we found some buttons for eyes. I was going to use that brown corduroy for wings but like all my sewing projects, it got simplified in the end. I’m not that amazing at sewing.

I did, however, have a fantastic idea for the feet. What if I sewed the raw silk around some pipe cleaners so they could bend like real talons?!! I didn’t sew tiny claw tubes and then turn them inside out or anything. That would be madness. No, I just sewed seams around the pipe cleaners, cut off the excess and let the raw edges fray. The owl would have floppy-feathered* feet like real owls do.

It actually worked really well.

With Bug hovering at my side, I sewed up the owl body, snipped the edges, turned him inside out and let Bug stuff him. I stuck the bendy feet inside the body where the stuffing hole was and sewed him closed with a kiss and prayer.

And that is how Owly (or Velvie, as Bug calls him) became the floppy-feathered owl that hangs upside down from branches. So his bendy feet aren’t strong enough to hold up his own stuffed-with-fluff weight. That’s okay. He’s still cute. (Maybe I should try that trick with a bat next time.)

And she loves him.

I’m not really sharing this story so you can say, Oh, wow you’re such a great seamstress! (snort.) or Oh, Brenda, you’re such a great mom. Because I’m not. I like to put pictures up that make me look like I’m doing a half-way decent job but really, I’m just like every other mom on the planet nagging and yelling and failing everyday at motherhood. I should share the humiliating jacket story that happened the other day. Ugh. It was terrible.

Okay I’ll just share a little bit: I thought I’d teach Bug a lesson about not getting ready fast enough in the morning by making her wear an ugly jacket to school. It wasn’t even an ugly jacket but she hates it with a white hot passion which drives me crazy because I think it’s a perfectly nice jacket and it’s cozy and warm. I can’t stand seeing her shivering in the cold on the playground when she has a perfectly good jacket to wear but she’s too vain to put it on. It’s big, I’ll give her that and I guess the kids don’t like wearing things baggy these days or something but sheesh! The battles we have over that stupid jacket some mornings make me want to wave a white flag and tear up my mom card.

So she made me mad one morning like she often does by not getting dressed and not getting her shoes on and just generally goofing off and being a normal six-year-old. I lost my temper and said, That’s IT! You’re wearing the ugly jacket and you are going to learn a lesson. You’re going to learn to get ready quickly because you never know what punishments might await you around the corner if you don’t take Mommy’s nagging seriously, rant, rant, rant.

As you probably predicted by knowing Bug from past posts I’ve written about her, she didn’t get over it. There were tears all the way to school. How could I make her look so hideous, she cried. All the kids weren’t going to like her. It was a tragedy. Weeping and gnashing of teeth…So sad, so terrible…

I was tough about this lesson all the way to school. I would not let her win. But when we got to school and I looked down at this little two-foot person standing next to me in the giant purple coat that she hates so much with tears streaming down her cheeks silently; I was a mess. How could I do this to her? She was going to be humiliated all day and what would she learn from it? That her mom is mean and has no taste in coats? At the same time how could I let her niggle out of this punishment without teaching her that crying and throwing fits works like magic? It’s the eternal parental predicament I find myself in. You just want to make them happy but you don’t want them to grow up like spoiled brats either.

So we sat on the wall outside of her school like we often do when we are a little bit early and soaked up the sun. She’d stopped crying and had finally accepted her fate. I was just tired and wanted to hold her close to me because I feel that way when I drop her off at school. I feel like I’m missing something when she’s gone from me and it makes me sad all day until I get to pick her up. I like to hug her and squeeze her and blow kisses and do all the mushy embarrassing things that mom’s do when they’re dropping off kindergarteners. I know she won’t let me do it much longer so I treasure it.

And as we sat there in the bright winter sun, I felt a little warm. It wasn’t that cold actually. It was warm enough to take our jackets off really. So I took her jacket off and stuffed it in her backpack just in time for her to run to the gate as the bell rang. Did she learn the lesson that I wanted to teach her? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. All I know is that this parenthood gig kicks me in the butt on a regular basis.

That and pipe cleaners make pretty good beak bones.

*floppy-feathered is what Bug says when she can’t pull her tights all the way up and the loose feet where her feet should be flop around when she walks.

We’ve been struggling with homework lately. To be honest, I think homework has been a challenge from the start which is silly because it’s kindergarten! How hard can it be, right? Hah. Kindergarten schmindergarten. I think these three-inch packets of busywork they send home as “homework” are a trick to see if parents are paying attention, that’s what they are. If you don’t help your children do the homework correctly then it must mean you don’t love them! The homework police are watching! Fail! Fail! Fail!

For example: that black rectangular smudge on this thrice-copied xerox that someone hand-me-downed from the eighties is a van, right? V is for van? Or maybe it’s a sink. Is there an S on there? Hmm…let me squint and read the miniscule directions along the side of this really crappy worksheet copy…oh, the directions got cut off. We’re just supposed to know what to do because we’re grown-ups and kindergarten homework is for five-year-olds. Surely 39-year-olds can handle simple letter-recognition exercises? I have a degree in English dadgumit!

So my inability to comprehend kindergarten homework directions coupled with my five-year-old’s highly-effective homework resistance efforts have moved the actual homework completion process to a fairly volatile situation. Meaning, the morning that homework is due has turned into full-on bootcamp craziness, complete with me yelling my head off and the five-year-old running off to her room in tears. And this is just kindergarten!! Whatever are we going to do when she gets to word problems and science projects and book reports?!!!

My feelings exactly.

I don’t know.

We’ve tried everything. We’ve tried sitting down and doing little bits daily. She pokes at it. Spends probably 45 minutes procrastinating and picking all the berries off my centerpiece and gets 1/32nd of it done. We’ve tried me sitting next to her coaching her kindly. That lasts about 45 minutes and then my face melts off and I retreat to go text or something on my phone. We’ve tried comedy hour with me making jokes about every little thing. Haha! Isn’t the number seven so funny the way it slants to the left so that all the little children can slide down it and go to the front of the line! HA HA HA HAA HO HO HO HEE HEE HEE!!! She loves that method. We spend hours laughing our heads off and get about nothing done. And then when I don’t make jokes she thinks I’m the meanest mom in the whole wide world.

I’m such a cruel mom! I’m NOT funny AND I make her do stuff. Like pick up her dirty laundry and brush her teeth. It’s so unfair!! Why does she have do EVERYTHING!!!

Does anybody else out there struggle with kindergarten homework?

Do you have any tips for me? Anything has got to be better than how we’re doing it.

I remember when Bug was really really little and she’d show some sign of being willful or naughty, I’d smile. I had this terrible superstitious fear, deep down, that she was too perfect and that meant she was like an angel and would probably be taken from me. Isn’t that how the stories always go?

I don’t know why I felt like that. Maybe it’s rooted in the time my Guess Jeans that I loved so much got stolen out of my locker during gym. I know the value of a child and jeans are not really the same but I always feel this way about things that I love so much. Sometimes I don’t even want to put my laptop in my car because I’m afraid that I’ll get in a wreck and I’ll lose Bug, my laptop and my car all in one fell swoop. It’s ridiculous to be me inside my loopy brain.

Sometimes when I look at Bug and find myself getting lost in her big beautiful eyes, her blonde cascading hair and her perfectly little bouncing crazy body, it’s too much for me. How did I ever get so lucky to have her? I don’t deserve her! I expected so much less and God gave me so much.

But then the other foot falls and I realize God knew exactly what he was doing. He gave me the most stubborn, evil, drama-queen, devil-child who will eternally exasperate me beyond words. She might look sweet but try forcing her to eat a bite of perfectly delicious strawberry yogurt (that she picked out at the grocery store herself!) and it will turn into an hour-long, snotty, crying, freight train of emotions that can only be saved from complete and utter bloody ruin by eating a bowl of hot buttered noodles in the tub.

I’m so tired. How will I ever make it to her teens?

The other day I was making Bug her usual Peanut Butter and Nutella sandwich. (Yes, I know Nutella has four tablespoons of sugar in one spoonful. Gah!) Bug was sitting on the counter next to me, watching and chattering on as she is wont to do.

Everything was going along fine until I got to the cutting part. I cut the sandwich in half and then was about to cut it in half again to make four small triangles when she burst out crying, saying that I wasn’t doing it right. She didn’t want four little triangles. She wanted BIG triangles like her cousin Rapunzel makes.

Sheesh! Kids are so demanding. As if sandwich shapes makes them taste different.

What could I do? One half was already cut? I did what any mother would do. I pretended the big triangle was the mommy sandwich and the two little triangles were the baby sandwiches and made them talk to each other as they waddled on their corners along my paper towel work-space onto her plate.

She thought that was grand…until I told her to eat them

Then there were tears.

“I can’t eat them! I don’t want to eat the Mommy and Baby sandwiches!!!” Waaaah waaaah wahhhh waaaaaah!!! Tears, tears, tears. “Make me another sandwich so I can just look at these sandwiches!”

I tried and tried to tell her the sandwiches wanted to go to the party in her tummy but nothing really worked. She was a crying snotty mess—the usual hungry-needing-a-nap-growth-spurt routine of late. I know a lot of parents would just say suck it up or go hungry and I probably should have. But I finally worked it out for her by drawing a sketch of a mommy sandwich and some baby sandwiches that she could keep and that consoled her. Now we have a sketch of sandwiches permanently living in our house.

Lesson of the day: Never anthropomorphize your kid’s food.

A while back I was having a terrible no-good horrible bad day. I’ve had a few of those lately. I broke our beloved French Press and then on top of that I somehow knocked Bug’s divided melamine pink piggy plate off the dish rack and onto the floor and then a big heavy Fiestaware cup fell on top of it and cracked it.

You’d think I’d at least get a baby out of this clumsiness but no, I’m not pregnant. I just like to stack my dishes a mile high on my drying rack because I refuse to dry a dish by hand with a towel. I was so mad at myself. I wanted to whip myself with that dish towel a thousand times. But I didn’t. I vented to internet instead.

We don’t have a lot of plastic kid plates in our house. I think they clutter up my cupboards and I don’t have that much room to spare. We had the pink piggy one, a Christmas one and a super-long alligator one that pretty much stays in the back of the cupboard because I never serve Bug enough food to fill it up. I don’t know about most kids but my kid thinks every section needs to have food in it.

Anyway, I was devastated when it broke. I really liked this plate. Unlike all the other kid plates I’ve seen around, this one had really cute illustrations (to me). I’m picky about those things because I don’t know, I just can be. It also was pretty faded in a good way because we use it every single day. I sort of like that, that we use the same plate over and over. It’s like our way of not being the uber-consumer. We buy a few things and USE them. Or something or other. Maybe Bug comes by her crazy quirks naturally.

Guess what? Somebody on the internet had a piggy plate exactly like ours! And they weren’t really using it! AND they offered to mail me theirs!!! I love the internet. Thank you for making my terrible no-good horrible bad day not so very terrible after all.

I have this strange kid who doesn’t like me to throw anything out ever. Maybe I’ve traumatized her with my over-eager purging that I love to do from time to time. I guess it’s normal that kids her age get attached to things as silly as old leftover food, gum wrappers or maybe the box that her Christmas baby doll came in.

The box that the doll came in was printed to look like a baby bed. I’ll give her that. It had a nice hard pillow and a crib sidewall along the back side. But it also had a ripped off mark where the price tag used to be and an ugly starburst that said something like “Grow with Me” with photos of all the other dolls I could buy her as she gets older (which I’m not going to do). Anyway, the box was ugly. I had to get rid of it.

I am such a mean mom.

I know she’s probably the smart one wanting to use a box over and over and cutting down on her carbon footprint or something but I just can’t have yucky over-designed boxes cluttering up her room. There’s enough clutter in there as it is. So I threw it away in the middle of the night and I’ve never heard the end of it since. There were tears.

Until I promised to make her a cardboard cradle that is.

I’ve been perking on this cardboard cradle idea for a while but have been busy with other things so I never got around to it. It’s still a box and it was taken from the recycle bin in the alley behind the photographer’s shop near our house so I’m sort of redeeming myself on the wastefulness factor. I’m just being creative about it.

Also I just like a challenge.

It’s not a masterpiece and I would be much happier if it was made out of wood (hint hint Uncle Shawn) but it’s cute and so much better than that nasty box her babydoll came in.

It’s light so she can carry it. I’m sure it won’t last forever (which may or may not be a good thing for me and my purging ways) but it works. All it needs is a small pillow and a little blanket. Though now that I’ve got her using an old pillow from her crib set and the bag that her flannel sheets came in as a makeshift blanket, she’ll probably get attached to those and never let me near the cradle with anything new or matching. Kids! Are they all like this or is it just her?

Instructions for hacks like me after the break.

I actually just glued everything together with normal Elmer’s white glue. I was completely surprised that it held and is relatively strong. Of course if she decides to sit on it, it will crumble but so far it’s holding up to vigorous rocking just fine. When I glued it, I held the pieces together with giant binder clips and then left it alone while we had lunch. That might have been the trick.

If you can call a trip to an independent fabric store and a walk downtown an adventure. I totally call it an adventure. Just think of the photos I could take!

After being holed up in the house all day yesterday, supposedly sewing on my grand quilt project (FAIL FAIL), I think we are due for some fresh outside air. At least Bug is due for some. Poor kid, she’s getting pretty sick of tv and us ignoring her.

Yesterday Bug took a nap early and woke up about 3pm with nothing particularly special planned by me to keep her busy. (Did I just write a sentence backwards? I do that all the time. But I can’t re-order it for the life of me so I guess it will just have to stay that way.) So you know what that means. It’s not time to cook dinner yet, we have no business to take care of (i.e., errands, grocery-shopping, etc.) and it’s a bit chilly for the park or the beach so it must be CRAFT TIME! Break it down!

Except 3 o’clock is a bit late to be starting on a craft project in the wintertime. Winter days are so short! Man! It seems like summer lasted forever and we were sweating constantly and now FINALLY it’s winter and we can do stuff and there’s next-to-no daylight time to get anything done. Short days are cramping my style. Moan, complain, bitch, whine…

Halfway in we were already losing daylight and getting paint on our coat sleeves because it was chilly and for some stupid reason we do not have painting coats. And there is no way I’m moving a painting craft indoors no matter how polluted my carpet already is. I have some standards.

We worked fast and furious and unfortunately it showed. Good thing I’m not a perfectionist!

It’s good not to be a perfectionist when you have a constant helper like I do. Sometimes I have to go to my zen happy place so I don’t lose it when she paints something the wrong way and mucks up my grand vision. She is so patient with me though.

I do lose it sometimes. I mean, I don’t yell or anything terrible but I get a bit irritated and sharp with her when she paints the house color on top of where I just painted the roof color. So when she says something like, “Mommy, you make me afraid I’m going to paint it wrong,” it just slaps me in the face because why am I doing this craft anyway? Aren’t these activities for her? There should be no fear in crafting.

I have a long way to go in the patience department. I’m just glad God gave me a such patient kid. She’s way more patient with me than I am with her.

In the end her every-which-way strokes did not really mess anything up. It was me hurrying that messed it up. I tried to add some shading to the snowy slopes and used a dark color instead of a light color which is completely backwards to what it would be in real life. I had a vision of painting some round shady hills like this painting (that I love so much) but with snow instead of meadows but I rushed through it and was sloppy.

You guys don’t really need to know all this behind the scenes stuff…it was a fun project and who cares where my expectations were right?

We added some “snow” and that made everything better. I’m so glad I stocked up on the industrial-size bottle of glitter. It’s totally been worth whatever I paid for it.

I like this photo Bug took of me lugging my giant craft box up the stairs. She put a nice big fingerprint on the lens (which is why I have a waterproof/kidproof camera) which worked as a nice softening filter. You should try it sometime. I feel like I’m back in the seventies instead of just some dork wearing a hat that is not all that flattering.

So that’s that. A craft and a lesson (for me, hah!). Now what am I going to do with this awful thing? Anybody want me to mail it to you? I’m kidding. Sort of. I’m keeping the kid.

I guess we didn’t think Halloween was scary enough this year so we had to top it off with a trip to the ER during the height of H1N1 hysteria. What? you say. Yes, it was some Halloween. But don’t worry, we are all okay. We just had a lot of sickness going around.

First, I got food poisoning a few weeks ago. That lasted a day or so but I snapped back like a valiant warrior. Then we went to visit my mom a week later and my brother, my niece, my dad and Bug all caught some sort of horrible stomach virus. They mostly staggered their sicknesses so there was always somebody to take care of somebody else.

I was secretly hoping that my food poisoning was the same virus so I could be immune to the puking. I mean, really, TWO bouts of puking in the same month? That would be ridiculous. But then two days later, when I was visiting Bethany, my lunch suddenly revolted on me and I spent the night sick. I’m getting to be a pro at this vomiting gig. Too bad I’m not getting a baby out of the deal.

Thankfully, the virus going around is only the 24-hour variety. By Halloween day I was able to limp my way through pumpkin carving. I did have a bunch of fun activities planned for the kids but there was no way I could pull those off.

Bethany and her mom saved Halloween for me. While I napped and moped about, they watched Bug and put together a festive lunch. It smelled really good but unfortunately I wasn’t feeling up to eating it.

By the time 4 o’ clock rolled around, I felt well enough to go trick-or-treating with the kids. I was worried about spreading my germs so I washed my hands a zillion times and I made sure I didn’t touch anybody other than my own kid.

We decided to do mall trick-or-treating this year. It’s not my favorite kind of trick-or-treating but considering I wasn’t feeling 100% it was fine. It was fun to see all the other kids in their costumes but it was also a little crowded. Bug and Annalie didn’t mind a bit.

What happened to the Ninja costume? Well…at the last minute Bug decided she wanted to be something “sweet.” She’s been doing that to me a lot lately. I’ll pick out an outfit for her that is all green and she’ll declare she wants to wear all pink and she wants to wear red shoes with sparkles and Hello Kitty socks. I can’t win.

I had the witch costume on hand of course because up until last week she had wanted to be a green witch. I brought it with us to Bethany’s because I had a feeling it might be warm on Halloween and I know my kid is not going to wear a full head-covering mask if it’s hot. She’s a cute ninja but without the mask she’s just a cute kid wearing all black. So witch costume it was. We’ll save the ninja costume for dress-up parties I guess.

Trick-or-treating was fun. Bethany has a lot more photos because I was still feeling like a cement truck had run over me. She hasn’t uploaded them yet but when she does, I’ll link them here. Bethany has a lot more photos and a great post about the whole night here if you want to see more.

Then we went home and the kids had fun running around in Bethany’s front yard and occasionally calling out for trick-or-treaters that didn’t really come. I wasn’t really paying attention but I think Bug ate about five pieces of her candy. At least that is how many I unwrapped for her. It’s more than she usually has but I wasn’t really worried about it. It was Halloween after all—the one night you can indulge on candy. They also had popcorn and carrots and broccoli as sort of a snacky dinner since they had had a big late lunch.

Around eight Bug and I decided to call it a night. And that is when things went suddenly wrong. First Bug said she had a tummy ache. I figured she just ate too much candy and she’d get over it. But after about a half an hour her tummy ache turned into screaming and holding her stomach in pain.

I thought it might be gas pains so I instructed her to turn from side to side so the air could work itself out but she couldn’t even do that. I tried to hold her to comfort her but she wouldn’t even let me touch her. Her stomach was bloated and hard as a rock.

She was so tired she’d start to fall asleep and then a wave of pain would overtake her and she’d sit up screaming. From all the crying and hyperventilating she ended up vomiting up everything she had eaten since lunch which made matters even worse because she’s still pretty freaked out about being sick last week. So there she was standing up half asleep and crying because she was afraid if she laid down again she’d vomit. I didn’t know what to do. Horrible visions candy poisoning were flying through my head. I tried to call her doctor but I couldn’t get through.

Finally I called Toby and somehow through the screaming we were able to agree that I should take her to the emergency room. It was a pretty hard decision to make because the last place I want to go on Halloween night is the ER.

Bethany drove us because I was out of mind with worry. I know the way to the hospital near Bethany’s house but I was so distracted I kept thinking I’d take a wrong turn or something. I was so thankful to have a friend just take over for me. I owe Bethany so much for Halloween night and my story isn’t even done yet.

Strangely, the car ride to the hospital seemed to calm Bug down a little bit but she was still clutching her tummy and crying. This emergency room was a really nice one. We were lucky. There were people in costumes and one baby with a bloody nose but thankfully no stab wounds or vampires or anything. What did freak me out was everyone wearing masks. Not costume masks but the kind you wear when you don’t want to spread germs—specifically H1N1. I wanted to put one on myself and Bug but I knew I wouldn’t be able to. She was already freaking out pretty hard from the pain, being up way past her bedtime and being in a strange place.

The triage nurse was really nice. In hindsight, she was almost too nice. Now, days later, Bug is still re-enacting the whole night and asking to go back to the hospital so the nice nurse can stick a sticker on her finger and make her feel better. Which is sort of funny I guess.

That’s really all that happened at the ER. No shots, no x-rays, no stomach pumping. All we did was check in, take Bug’s temperature, check her pulse by “sticking a sticker on her finger,” weigh her and then go sit in the waiting room for two hours. I sort of thought this might happen but you just never know. I figured a triage nurse would know better what to do in this situation than I did.

After a long half-hour of crying and clutching her stomach, Bug finally relaxed completely onto my chest and fell asleep. I could tell she was better. She had been tense and rigid before but now she was flopped onto me like a rag doll. She woke up once and whimpered but it wasn’t the same as before. I called Toby to see if he thought I should just take her home but he was already on his way to the hospital to meet us. He said to stay just to see if she woke up in pain again, so we stayed.

When Toby got there he poked and prodded Bug’s stomach until she woke up. You’d think she’d be screaming about being woken up this way but she was surprisingly pleasant. She actually started babbling and talking about all the “toots” (farts) she had. So that was it. All that screaming and tummy-holding was just horrible gas pains. I have never been so relieved in my life.

I walked up to the front desk and signed us out. Hopefully since we never walked past those swinging doors that lead to the hospital beds we won’t be charged for our two-hour sitting session in the ER. And hopefully we didn’t catch H1N1.

I would love to end the story here but it’s not quite the end. Toby drove himself back home. Bethany and Bug and I went back to her house. Bug and I pretty much went straight to bed. Bug wanted to stay up and chatter away but I had a headache that felt like someone had put an axe in my head so I rolled over, stuffed a pillow over my head and fell dead asleep.

Then completely unbeknownst to me, Annalie woke up with the pukes. Poor Bethany. She just spent two hours in the ER and now she got to come home to stay up all night with a sick kid. I wish I had known they were up. I would have offered to help. It’s the least I could do since it was my kid who thew up all over her handmade quilt that is on the guest bed. But I slept right through it all.

The next morning I woke up feeling like a hundred bucks since the stomach virus was finally done with me and hey, isn’t it wonderful that we aren’t in the hospital!!? I made myself a cup of coffee (because I do feel that comfortable at Bethany’s house) and walked upstairs with Bug to say good morning to whoever else was up.

You can imagine my surprise when I was greeted with the site of Bethany’s mom sleeping on the couch with Annalie beside her holding a freshly washed puke bucket. I could instantly tell it had been a rough night.

You’ll have to read Bethany’s version to get the rest of the story but I’ll spoil the ending by saying I think at this moment all of us are well. But somebody better quick knock on some wood.

The house-sitting and cat-sitting have been going pretty well. I really wish I had some great accomplishment to brag about but we’ve been doing a bunch of nothing. Well, not really nothing, just nothing especially noteworthy.

I used Bethany’s steam-mop and cleaned her house the first day I got here. Why? Because I could. Not that her house was dirty, but it’s so much more fun to clean someone else’s house than my own. I’m sure the novelty will wear off very soon. Like today. Heh.

I only like steam-mopping because it makes me feel like a superhero. Can’t you see me flying around Bethany’s house, steam mop in hand and my cape flapping behind me? I should buy one for my house. Too bad most of my floors are covered with disgusting carpet that would turn to mud if I tried to steam them—another reason why it’s fun to clean someone else’s house. There is no mud-encrusted carpet here. Just knowing that makes me feel more at peace. We really need to move.

Bug and I walked downtown for a cup of coffee (for me) and poked around the antique shops. That didn’t last very long after I inquired after a glass coffee percolator and found out it cost $72. Yikes. I guess I’m not in the market for antiques. If anyone sees one in a garage sale for $30 or less, buy it for me. I’ll pay you back in graphics. Never mind. What am I saying? I don’t have any room for miscellaneous coffee pots. The French press works great.

We’ve painted some paintings (not enough progress to photograph yet) in Annalie’s garage art studio. We also stopped by the ceramic painting studio to paint some cups and plates. That was pretty fun. I’m really blessed to have a kid who actually likes to paint with me and will sit still for longer than 20 minutes. We made friends with another mom and little boy next to us who were painting ceramic motorcycles (!) for Father’s Day.

You should have heard Bug chatting the little boy’s ear off. I wish I would have made a movie of her yakking away. I think both the little boy’s mom and I were thankful they kept each other occupied so we could paint in peace.

Sometimes when I don’t do much with Bug all day I take her to a park to ease my conscience. I just feel bad because she doesn’t have anyone to play with and I’m not as cooperative with her little games as she’d like. I’m very thankful that Bethany’s cats are so easy-going because they have been her only playmates lately. She couldn’t care less about Annalie’s toys, she’s way more into playing with the cats or me. I think the cousins are going to come down and visit us next week and Toby is coming tomorrow night so he can take us to Sea World on Friday. Whee! We are both very excited about that.

So here are some photos I took while I was bored at the park.

My eyebrows want to join a gang and beat you up.

We’ve also been enjoying our bachelorhood by eating whatever we want whenever we feel like it. Trader Joe’s is awesome for random buffet meals of berries, nuts and junk food. Though it’s biting me in the butt because now Bug thinks she can eat cheese puffs for breakfast. We’re going to have to detox on the snack food next week or else going home is going to be a festival of tears. Which it probably is going to be anyway. The beach is so boring when you have a whole house to run around and orcas to visit.