• 15 minute posts,  Bug,  crazy stuff,  domesticity,  easy on the words,  house stuff!,  place holder posts,  Slow News Day,  the sticks

    boring Tuesday in the life of

    a storm of tissues

    Life is quiet out here in the sticks outside of my incessant sneezing. The cold rages on as you can see. Thankfully even wadded up used tissues look better with a 50mm lens.

    new winter-time bed arrangement

    In other news, I rearranged my bedroom. Huzzah! I love it that I can rearrange furniture whenever I please. This new arrangement is not for beauty or any kind of bren* shui though. It’s purely because I got tired of the drafts from the window wafting down on me in the night. It gets cold out here at night!

    My little Parisian Apartment (cough cough)

    I think I’ll move the bed back under the window in the summer because then drafts are quite nice. For now though this is much cozier and it only hampers our path to the bathroom by a few steps. We don’t use that bathroom much anyway so it’s no big deal to have to walk all the way around the bed to get to it. In Bug and Holly’s case, you can just lumber right over the top of the bed and save yourself five steps.

    new winter-time bed arrangement

    Since we’re doing a “home tour” I might as well show you Bug’s fairies. She draws them (with some help from me) and then tapes them around the house. Look right below the red poppies painting and you’ll see this little guy:

    the Brenda Fairy

    I think this is me as a “mom fairy.” She watches over me when I sleep or maybe this is just here so I know where my bed is. Who knows. If you give your kid paper and things to draw with and access to scissors and tape, you never know what you are going to find randomly taped around the house. Right now as I type this, I see there is a colorful Easter egg taped to the living room window. She’s very proactive with her seasonal decorating.

    Holly has a fairy too but it was too dark when I took that photo and it was too blurry. (You can see it in the window shot, just really really small. That’s where Holly’s dog bed usually is.)

    Bug's Bulletin Board

    This is Bug’s fairy. I drew this one (per her instruction) and she colored it.

    Maybe she needs more shoes...

    While I’m in Bug’s room I might as well show you her giant shoe collection. Do you think this kid has enough shoes? (Most of them are hand-me-downs or gifts.) You’d think she does but there is aways some outfit that doesn’t match with any of these. Good thing kid-fashion is pretty carefree. She wears the craziest combos and nobody even blinks an eye anymore. I think she also has a giant shoe collection because her feet never grow. She’s been a size 7/8 for a whole year now. She’s just like me with tiny feet.

    Also, the vacuum cleaner lives in her closet. I do feel a bit bad about that but there is no room anywhere else and it’s almost like that shelf was built just for vacuum cleaners. Thankfully Bug doesn’t know any better and thinks it’s totally normal to have a vacuum cleaner in your closet.

    official rock concert papers

    These are some very important rock star concert documents. Can’t you tell? The one on the right is a contract that I had to sign and on the left is some sheet music I presume. Bug made this really long movie describing them all and what they are for, (the card is for zoom-zooming in the zoom zoom machine) but then after she was done and I was watching the movie, I noticed my shirt was gaping wide open sideways showing some armpit/boob action so I deleted that movie. Sorry Bug. I’ll have to have her do it again. It was all very funny of course as most doomed things are.

    Fairy Breakfast

    And that concludes my boring Tuesday in the life of Brenda post!

    *Bren shui is my own form of feng shui that has no system of aesthetics other than my gut feeling of where things should be.

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  • 15 minute posts,  Bug,  heavy on photos,  place holder posts,  Slow News Day

    up close and blurry

    tea

    I’m kinda feeling under the weather today. Don’t feel too bad for me. I’ve been healthy as an ox all winter and just now caught something. It’s about time I caught one of the many viruses Bug brings home from preschool. I also attended a Bikram Yoga class on Saturday for the first time in my life and I am sore!! Oh my goodness, hot sweaty yoga is not for wimps! Have you ever tried it?

    It’s regular yoga with simple poses except they crank up the heater to 110°F or something. I’m so proud of myself for making it through all the way to the end and not fainting. At first I thought it was a cinch. I thought, I can totally do yoga even though I haven’t worked out in an entire year. Ha!

    Then I woke up the next day and I couldn’t bend my legs. So yeah, I’m not feeling so hot. I am also worried about all the other people in the class who were sitting in a hot damp petri dish with all of my germs. It was pretty gross. I wonder how they clean those rooms after everyone has dripped five pounds of sweat each onto the sticky carpet. It was low pile carpet, thankfully, but it still looked pretty gross. I’m just going to stop thinking about it and tell myself that the benefits of a deep workout offset the grossness of hot damp germy floors.

    Paris

    I’m sorry I had to drag your mind over to that ugly place. Here, feast your eyes on some blurry coasters from Paris! Aren’t they pretty? Everything is prettier with a 50mm lens blurring out the background. Today I wish I could wear 50mm glasses and then crawl into bed and read a book very close up. Maybe I will if I can convince Bug to nap with me (not likely).

    I just thought I’d check in and do a quick blog. Maybe I’ll start a habit of it. Probably not. I’m always promising things and then not following through. But I’ve been working really hard on a post about painting and my insecurities about it and I’m not making very much progress. I’m starting to think that posts that take more than a week to write aren’t meant to be shared. Blogging is not supposed to be work. I don’t have time to be that deep. I should take the time but I have a five year old bopping around interrupting me constantly.

    Bug's messy desk

    Bug’s bopping is so awesome though. She drives me crazy regularly but the minute she’s not around, I miss her with the heat of a thousands suns. I wouldn’t want her any other way.

    Look at her messy desk. I used to brag to anyone that would listen that my child was naturally neat. She does like to match things up and put out of order products back in order in the grocery store but her OCD stops there. Her room is a mess daily. I think I’m going to have to take back all that bragging. I’ve probably spoiled her by tidying up after her. I can’t help myself sometimes. I just hate clutter! She will clean up with a lot nagging of course (maybe even less nagging than most kids) but she often drags her feet and tells me that cleaning up is so BOOOOORRRING. To which I roll my eyes. A lot of things in life are boring, kid.

    a cat knight

    I guess compared to her imaginary world where she changes characters hourly, cleaning is very boring. Does your kid do this? She’s a cat on the left and a knight or a Barbie Musketeer or something on the right.

    hula girl

    Then she’s a hula girl…it never ends. I’m thankful for her imagination but I’ve had to make a rule that she has to keep whatever outfit she’s wearing on until she puts the last one away. This has helped with the constant piles of clothes on the floor but now I’m finding perfectly clean clothes stashed in the laundry and behind hanging clothes in the closet. Kids!

    goofing off

    Sometimes I get in on the action too. But not very often.

    us

    Definitely not today.

    dark

    Today I’m going to hide behind my 50mm lens and pretend the world is blurry around the edges.