"It's Getting Very Tiresome"

I really don't know what I was thinking.

This morning I took Aliya and Norah to Old Navy to buy some school clothes.  Aliya was a perfect angel while we were in the Girls' section, but as soon as we started shopping for someone else she became a complete monster, hell-bent on doing the exact opposite of what she was told.  I was SO PISSED considering that I basically bought her every back-to-school outfit she asked for and she thanked me by ANNOYING THE HELL OUT OF ME.

So anyway, I was going to take the kids out for a late breakfast because it's Ramadan and Ben is fasting, but Aliya lost the opportunity to go by being ROTTEN.  So I dropped her off at home and took Adlani and Norah to J & M Diner.  I LOVE the J & M Diner.  The food is great, it's fast, the service is good, and it's a half mile from our house.  It's not big and it's always busy, but it's worth the wait.

Here's the part where I lost my mind.  The waitress talked me into sitting at the counter because there was a wait for a table and the kids were hungry.  So we settled in, me in the middle with one of them on each side, and an empty seat next to Norah.  Before we had even ordered, a big, old, grumpy-looking lady sat in the empty seat.  I should have asked to move to a table, but I didn't want to make waves.

I am NOT one of those parents who thinks her kids can do no wrong, lets them run wild, or finds it cute and amusing when they act up.  I may occasionally ignore them because I can't deal with one more "he pulled my hair", "she touched my food", or "he won't get out of my room", but I SWEAR TO GOD, I was on Adlani and Norah for the entire breakfast, reminding them to eat, use a fork, don't spill your drink, sit down, be quiet, stop staring, stop picking your nose, stop touching yourself, stop touching the syrup, stop touching me, etc.  I had my complete attention focused on them for the entire meal.

Out of the blue, the big, old, grumpy-looking lady said directly to Norah in a really mean voice, "Would you PLEASE stop kicking me when you get on and off the stool!  It's getting VERY TIRESOME!"

WHAT???  First of all, TIRESOME means "boring - so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness."  So is my kid making you feel mentally weary?  Bored?  Or did you mean that you're f-ing sick and tired of being kicked by my kid?  Do you want to talk about being mentally weary, or sick and tired???  Cuz I can tell you ALL about THAT! 
I DIDN'T THINK SO!!!

What I actually said, in a semi-bitchy, two-more-days-until-school-starts voice, was "I'm sorry, she's not even 3 yet," to which the BOGLL said, "I know."  WELL, if you KNOW, then maybe you could mention in a nice way that the kid is accidentally touching you and let me try to do something about it before you go all out on her.  Or you could avoid sitting beside the kid in the first place.

I had all of our breakfasts in take-out containers within 90 seconds and we were out of there.  BOGLL, wherever you are, I hope you enjoyed the rest of your kid-free breakfast.

While I was looking for a graphic representation of the BOGLL, I found this funny image:

 
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PERGO - It's So Easy, Even the Greenabderrazaks Can Do It

I am SO TIRED.  We went out to the lake this morning to finish installing the Pergo floor and it's done despite a few challenges.  Ben was fasting for Ramadan and didn't wake up before sunrise to eat.  I have a pinched sciatic nerve, a bum knee, and a jammed thumb.  The kids were in rare form, entertaining themselves by torturing each other, and the dog is afraid of loud noises and ran to me every time the saw was turned on.  We ran out of foam underlayment and we were missing a couple of tools we needed, so I had to drive 20 miles to Home Depot.  And it was pouring rain.  Other than that, it was a great day.  I'm going to do something completely out of character and go to bed.

Before: 

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Break-Time:

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After!

Facebook Fan Page

I'm not typically the kind of person who would ask for fans...I wouldn't take the risk of finding out that I have none.  I was always on the shy side, never the first one to say, "Hey...do you want to be friends?"   I don't handle rejection well.  I think that started way back when I was riding the school bus for over two hours a day and being teased about my lips, of all things.  What's wrong with my lips, anyway?

I think most of you know, back in February I started a blog for work, which has turned out to be pretty popular with the people who know about it.  There are no other sites like it, so the hardware people of the world are drawn to it like ants to a spilled milkshake.  Even regular people who don't have a hardware obsession have been reading it, so I consider it my mission to educate the world about doors and hardware, one post at a time.

Yesterday someone from IR's corporate office recommended that I create a fan page on Facebook for my blog (the hardware one, not this one), to establish a presence on Facebook without exposing photos of me from 6th grade and recent GNO's.  It seems that IR and other mainstream and sometimes conservative companies are realizing the value of social media and trying to use it to communicate with customers.

I created the fan page last night, and now I'm just waiting for some fans.  I feel like I've thrown myself a party and now I'm waiting for the guests.  What if nobody shows up?!

So if you want to come to my party, please go to Facebook and become a fan.  And if you REALLY want to help, you could tell a couple of your Facebook friends who might like hardware (or even some who just USE hardware on occasion), and ask them to become Fans.  I promise I won't be constantly sending out emails about the latest and greatest piece of hardware or the ladies room door I saw yesterday.

Thanks People!   

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Three's a Crowd

Today I made the grave error of taking all 3 kids to the doctor for a check-up at the same time.  I almost had to excuse myself and duck out the car for an emergency Valium.  I'll give Dr. Whitman credit...he didn't lose his cool even though he was stuck in a 10' x 10' exam room with 3 kids in their underwear and me (fully dressed) for an extended period of time.  He did have to remove the roll-y stool from the room because Adlani wouldn't listen to him and stop trying to use it as a ride-on toy.

All of the kids are healthy and on-track for growth, etc.  I asked Dr. Whitman if Adlani was going through a phase (please, PLEASE, let it be a phase), and he said, "Yes, but I have a feeling this phase is going to last until he's about 16."  I told him what a good boy Adlani is when it's just the two of us and he said it was because then Adlani didn't have an audience.  That's a really good point.  When there's an audience he suddenly gets loud(er) and unresponsive to my threats.

Well, his behavior today meant that he couldn't go out to dinner with Aliya, Norah, and me, and he was really upset about that.  Ben felt sorry for him and at one point before we left for dinner Adlani came downstairs and said, "Mommy, please just take me to dinner with you.  I'll kiss your feet."  I said, "Go tell Daddy, 'Nice try' but you're not going."  Ben doesn't want to see the kids upset and he hates to deny them anything, but if we give in, Adlani quickly figures out that there are no consequences so why bother behaving?

The rest of my day was spent at a jobsite in Boston, and giving blood this afternoon (Yes, I was so desperate to leave the house alone that I donated bodily fluids.).   The evening was "Girls' Night Out" which was comprised of dinner at Joe's and a trip to Walmart to buy bras.  BRAS?  Yes, for ALIYA.  Apparently she's "in second grade now" so she had to have bras.  I hope third grade doesn't mean that it's time for her first tattoo or piercing.

I saw this "oops" at the jobsite this morning (copied from my other blog)...

While I'm on the subject of restrooms (again), during my site visit the architect pointed out a little "complication", unrelated to doors but kinda funny...the restrooms in this very fancy, beautiful facility have a stainless steel design element below the ceiling (it looks kind of like a duct to me but I think it has something to do with indirect lighting). You can see it running down the center of the ceiling in the first photo below.

The stainless steel in this room still had the plastic on it so you can't get the full effect, but as you can see from the second photo, the stainless is reflective enough even with the plastic in place that you can get a view into the stalls. I'm glad I'm not the only one who occasionally has a SNAFU to find my way out of!

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Colonial Williamsburg Photos

Although most of the photos I took at Colonial Williamsburg were photos of doors (here's the link if you want to see those), there were a few of the family. The photos below go along with this post from our road trip, but when I went back to that post I realized that I hardly wrote anything about Colonial Williamsburg so here's a little recap.

I bought a package deal at the Williamsburg Lodge which included passes to Busch Gardens, Water Country, and the historic area of Williamsburg. In retrospect, we should have planned to stay longer, because the passes were good for the whole week. We never even made it to the pool because we were busy from morning until night. Breakfast wasn't included so we were scrounging for food every morning on the way to the parks. We ended up extended our stay by one night and I'm glad we did.

There was a lot to see at Colonial Williamsburg, plenty of games and activites for the kids, and history and architecture (and doors!) for Ben and me. When the kids got sick of traipsing around, Ben took them back to the hotel for a nap and I toured the Governor's Palace which was very interesting and beautiful. We will definitely go back!

The Governor's Palace:



Making bricks:

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He's got the hereditary door disease:

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Washing dishes:

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Class of 2022

Back in June, the summer seemed to stretch out ahead of us like the yellow brick road on the way to Oz. Like a lot of families I know, we relied on a patchwork of camps, vacation time, relatives, playdates and juggling with our fingers crossed to make sure that we could get some work done without leaving someone home alone chained to the radiator to keep them out of trouble.
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Well, we survived the summer and even though school's not officially back in session, the back-to-school frenzy has begun. The PTO emails are appearing in my inbox, the new backpacks are labeled, the forms have been filled out, and yesterday was the first in a series of back-to-school activities, Adlani's bus orientation.
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Adlani rode the bus to and from Summer Scene for 5 weeks this summer (I'm sure you remember the seat belt incident) but I figured that it wouldn't hurt for him to hear the rules once again. He's a sly little guy though...while I was chatting with my friends he sat next to his partner in crime, so while the principal was talking, so were they. My attempts to shush him had zero effect, and when I stepped it up a notch, so did he. After I climbed through to the next row and was using the ferocious-mommy-whisper tactic, Aliya's kindergarten teacher calmly took him by the hand and led him away for a talk. When he came back to his seat he sat quietly for the rest of the presentation.
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When the kids filed out and got onto the bus, Aliya's teacher told me that she just asked him about whether he was looking forward to going to school, if he knew his teacher's name, etc. Then he asked her if he could go back to his seat and she said, "Yes, and maybe we can talk again sometime." She said she didn't think he wanted to talk to her again and that's why he was so well-behaved. This year is obviously going to be completely different from when Aliya started kindergarten. I'll be relying heavily on the teachers to prevail where I've failed. I think they're up to the task!
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Oh yeah. That's trouble right there:



Heading for the bus:



Back safe and sound:


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Sarah's Key

Over the weekend I read this whole book within about 24 hours and I loved it. It's about a little girl who was taken with her parents during the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup in Paris 1942. Her little brother is afraid to go so he hides in a hidden cabinet that he and his sister often play in, and she takes the key with her, not realizing that she will be sent to a detention camp. It's a terrific book and I couldn't put it down.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Available at Amazon.com.
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Walking Stick

One of the reasons I wanted to have another house away from the city was because I wanted the kids to have a chance to see nature up-close and personal. Our house in Holland (MA) isn't really in the country, but we do see different things there than we do at home.

Last night I had the outside light on and I noticed a zillion moths and other bugs swarming around the light, and this morning I found a really cool surprise on the screen - a walking stick, or stick insect. I remember learning about these in school and even though we lived in the boonies for my entire childhood, I never saw one. I think I was more excited about seeing one than the kids, but they spent some time examining it, and it survived to crawl away.

Very cool!

Evian Babies

I am posting this because the kids are driving me crazy wanting to watch it over and over. At least this way they can watch it on their own instead of searching Youtube and accidentally finding "roller skating babes" skating around in thongs. It is cute if you haven't seen it.


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Face In Hole

As if I need something else to suck the minutes out of my day...tonight I received a photo of one of my door hardware pals as David Hasselhoff during his Baywatch days and I couldn't resist going to the website that he used to create the photo. This site could seriously eat up a whole weekend if you get off on creating photos of your friends and family wearing mankinis, misbehaving, or appearing on magazine covers.

Once you upload your photo (or your poor unsuspecting husband's) you can stretch it, rotate it, and even change the brightness, contrast, saturation, & hue to make your face match the body. And all this fun is FREE!

Check it out! http://www.faceinhole.com/
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Photos From Myrtle Beach SC

These photos go along with this post about our trip to Family Kingdom in Myrtle Beach. It was Aliya's first ride on a big roller coaster. She said she thought she was going to die when she got on, but she went anyway. It's amazing how the survival instincts kick in once you have kids.















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