You Never Know What May Be Lurking in the Backyard

So I have again been AWOL for most of the week due to some yard maintenance emergencies and such. I have spent much of the week doing this:



And this:



(Gardening is a job requirement for any good housewife.)

Not only did I find a dead cat, a bunch of yucky leaves and some garbage as I was cleaning out the flower bed, but I also found bird legs and some feathers. Aside from that and all the thorns I pulled out of my forehead from sticking my face in the thorn bushes, it was a good time. I started off with the tiniest little hand clippers imaginable when apparently the neighbors saw how ridiculous I looked with my little hand clipper that they offered me their industrial length tree trimmer.

And of course, next week I'm on to this:



There may an elephant secretly lurking in my backyard jungle.

Oh, and then there's the wonderful garden pond that has gone neglected since we moved in.



Remember when last fall, right after we moved in, I tried to bring the fish pond fish in to the house for the winter so they wouldn't freeze? (If not, see The Fish are Dead) Yeah, that was a disaster. They all died within a week.

About a month later, I found all this fish water stuff in the basement that the old owners had left for us when they moved out. Would have been nice to know before hand that I was supposed to add all this stuff to the water to make it livable for them... But, the fish paid for my ignorance with their lives. And now the new fish that hubby's picking up on Monday mean I actually have to not only touch that yucky fish pond but that I have to touch it repeatedly to prepare for the new fish. Just what I need, more creatures to try and keep alive.

Oh, and after I found all the fish water stuff in the basement, I run into a friend who told me I'm supposed to just leave the fish in the pond for the winter. I thought what in the world, the fish'll become mummified in the frozen water, which is the exact fear that led me to bring them in and even buy a special rubbermaid container for them to live in last fall. I had recurring nightmares about waking up in the morning to a frozen pond with all my little fishies trapped in the water. But apparently they can still swim in the bottom of the pond in the winter. Who knew? Maybe I should have googled fish pond maintenance before attempting any kind of live saving efforts.




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Butterflies, Hannibal Lector and Onions

I don't know about everyone else in world, simply because I have never been able to get into anyone else's head (it's hard enough getting into my own), but I have been prone to brain wanderings lately, especially during my daily hair blow-out sessions.

If you read this little blog long enough, you know that I am way too compulsive to let my hair go unblown-out for an entire day, and surprisingly, during those 10- minute blow dryer sessions I happen upon some deep thoughts every now and again.

For instance, we are becoming one of those crazy homeschool families with the bugs and science projects strewn about the house. Kaydn Rye's latest project is a butterfly garden, which I got from Insect Lore. For some reason the price on this says $24.00, but I got it for probably $12.

But anyway, so the caterpillars come in the mail, which I thought was a really weird concept - to mail insects - and that morning as I'm blow drying my hair I start thinking of the caterpillars and cocoons, which Kaydn Rye somehow learned are chrysalides. So I started thinking of chrysalides. A chrysalis. Chrysalis. Ah, yes, Silence of the Lambs. That's where I know that term. You know, when Clarice extracts the moth cocoon, or chrysalis as Hannibal calls it, from the dead girl?

I think it goes something like this....

Lector:Was it a butterfly?
Clarice:Yes. A moth.
Clarice:Just like the one we found in Benjamin Raspail's head an hour ago.
Clarice:Why does he place them there, Doctor?
Lector:The significance of the moth is change.
Lector:Caterpillar into chrysalis, or pupa,
and from thence into beauty.
Our Billy wants to change, too.

I think that was the first time I'd ever heard that term, chrysalis. And don't ask me why I have thoughts of moth cocoons lodged in the throats of dead bodies, but I guess that's just the sort of stuff that floats around in there.

So from there I went on to how I would be Clarice right about now, discussing lambs and lotion with serial killers if only I would have stuck out the original plan of riding the job with the Department of Homeland Security all the way to the F-B-I.

But that was not to be. Instead I wipe butts and summarize odd and sundry jury trials for the reading pleasure of attorneys across the land.

After my wonderful blow dry experience, I proceeded down stairs to get at least a couple jury verdict commentaries written up before noon, and after that I figured I'd maybe get in my P90X sometime before 10 o'clock that night and I proceeded to the DVD player.

Instead of spending a magical 15 minutes with the wonderful Tony Horton, I hunched over the tv and proceeded to look out the window for probably five minutes.

There was a bird on the tree outside bopping his head around, and there were, of course, the carcasses of the many dead weeds in the yard that just won't completely shrivel up and blend in to the grass. Then I started thinking about my first fall in Memphis.

They have these abhoringly atrocious weeds down there called lawn onions. They really actually are onions, and they grow, everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. We knew nothing of how you must kick the onions in the butt before they grow butts, so we ended up being the clodhoppers with all the onions in our yard until we became smarter than the onions. I don't know how many times I had to spray those suckers before they finally curled up and died, but I actually remember one afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table doing some work for most likely my Chaucer class (nothing says a great afternoon like The Canterbury Tales) when I became physically unable to function because of the sight of all the weeds in the yard.

So I went outside and started pulling them out of the ground, all 1 million, nine hundred and eighty six thousand, two hundred and fifty-four of them. I was probably out there for roughly three hours maybe, but once all the onions were pulled up, I had won a tiny victory for the South.

Looking back on it now though? I have to say, while there were at that time millions of starving people in the world just waiting for someone to stop on by with a loaf of bread, I was out in my yard pulling weeds for three hours.

That was about the end of the deep thoughts for the morning.




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The Weekend of Banana Bread and Lions and Tigers and Bears

In my blogging absence I have been everywhere from the pasture to the nursing home to the zoo, all in one weekend.

Kaydn Rye and I decided to continue our tradition of bringing goodies to the nursing home on special occasions by making banana and blueberry bread (not together, separate) and by decorating Mothers Day cards for the ladies at the nursing home. (Thanks to all my wonderful MOPS friends for all their help).

I apparently miscalculated the amount of time required to make 20 cards out of card stock and scrapbooking cutouts, but I had the great idea that I would bring all my supplies to the MOPS scrapbooking night on Friday, giving me just enough time to get them together for a Saturday afternoon delivery.

I'm always the lame-o one at scrapbooking night since I roll in there with some papers, some stencils, a ruler, a pencil, a scissor, some markers and occasionally a cup for tracing circle cut outs. Yes, I am LAME-O. Everyone else rolls on in with their rolling suitcase carts full of bags upon bags of fancy accoutrements that I don't even know how to work. They have these fancy paper cutters that don't require a ruler and a scissor, and there are even circle cutters that don't require any cup- bottom tracing, imagine that.

After an hour or so of me cutting traced flowers out of some cardstock, one of my friends comes along with a flower puncher-gadget. And after I spent a half hour measuring out and cutting some stock for the card backgrounds, someone comes along with a fancy paper cutter and with one swoop the cards were done. I have probably spent 507.2 hours of my life, which I will never get back, with rulers and scissors completing scrapbooking tasks which could have been accomplished with that stupid $15 paper cutter. I CURSE AND BLESS the paper cutter.

So anyway, we delivered the goodies to the nursing home ladies, and I think Kaydn Rye may have even left a plate of banana bread in an empty room, but some orderly will come along and find some moldy banana bread one of these days. With all of his help delivering goodies to the "old people" as he calls them, I asked him, "So what would I ever do without you to help me?"

He thought about it for a minute and said, "Hmm, perhaps you would work all day."

Surprisingly perceptive for a half-grown man.

The day before that we met my parents in the pasture near their rental property where they were unloading cattle so that I meet them and take pictures of horse poop. My parents were having some issues with the wonderful horse people who rent their property who love their horses so much that they pen them up in the yard, and obviously, livestock messing up the yard is a cardinal sin according to my mother. So, my parents needed someone to come out there and take pictures of all the horse poop in the yard, for legal purposes of course, which I was obliged to do.


With that task scratched off the list, we finally headed to the zoo on Sunday for Mother's Day. With all the stuff at the zoo, all Kaydn Rye wanted to do was hang out with the prairie dogs, so I paid 16 bucks for us to stand around and look at a bunch of prairie dogs for half the afternoon. One of the better parts of the day for my obsessive compulsive child was finding the strategically placed hand sanitizers throughout the zoo. Fun was had by all.





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It Has Come Back to Haunt Me.....

So today was chalked up to the old adage, when you have so much to do that your brain starts flipping around in its shell, take a minute, grab an ice tea and blog.

I'm pretty sure that sleep deprivation is half of my problem, which kind of makes me feel like I'm walking around my house in a drunken haze. (And you say, what's wrong with that??? - Shame on you)

You know how when people have a new baby and it's all wonderful, except for the fact that they are awakened from REM sleep three times a night? Well, I was never really much into sleep deprivation, which is why Kaydn was a child of the Ferber Method. What's the Ferber method you ask? It's the method in which the entire family gets a wonderful night sleep, minus the screaming baby "soothing himself to sleep."

"Okay, here's the plan, we'll nurse him, change him, don't make eye contact and walk out the door," was the most often heard conversation in the middle of the night in our bedroom.

Yep, I'm a "let him cry it out" kind a parent. Hubby almost developed hives with all the screaming, but I'd usually be able to simply roll over and pull the covers over my head.

Throw stones all you want, but I bet if you counted all the hours of sleep I've had in the last four years, and the hours of sleep you may have had, you'll probably find a significant difference, and I bet I'm the winner.

But that seems to have bit me in the butt during the last month. Bladder control seems to the biggest problem we've encountered during this whole child rearing thing. Don't ask me how a kid who's been potty trained since he was two-years-old can't seem to shake the at-night-pull ups.

Well, last month I had had enough. The pull ups are gone, which resulted in more money spent on cleaning sheets than I had ever spent on pull ups in a month. And I'm pretty sure the rain forests didn't appreciate it either.

So, I thought of a plan. Kaydn Rye can take a two hour nap and not wet the bed, so I thought maybe waking him up every two hours during the night for potty breaks would seal the deal on our pull up free lifestyle.

So, every two hours I wake up to "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP" and haul myself into Kaydn Rye's room, get him out of bed with a shovel, carry his 50 pound self into the bathroom, get him on the toilet and hopefully his half asleep self doesn't fall over on my bathroom floor.

I will give him some credit, we are now down to waking up every three hours, at 3 and 6, but I haven't had a night of uninterrupted REM sleep in more than a month, and I think I may morph into some kind of nasty bridge troll.

But I thought I had found a solution and it involved hubby's obsession with phones.

Hubby is absolutely obsessed with phones.

Yes, phones.

I guess maybe it's because we have zero big screen televisions, game boy systems (or whatever they're called now), or fast race cars. He's gotta have something to make his life worth living.

Last night at about midnight, when I would have liked to have been sleepy sleepy by the way, he proceeds to show me all his wonderful phone features.

His phone will even tell him what's currently on the screen so he doesn't even have to attempt at reading it. How wonderful is it that not only has my husband's very minimal vocabulary dwindled to almost nil over the course of our seven years (it is seven years, right?), but now he barely reads.

But anyway, that's a whole other life problem. So I had a great idea. What if we could set a message that said something like "Kaydn go potty. Kaydn go potty. Kaydn go potty," and set it to go off at 3 o'clock in the morning?

Well, the closest thing we could come up with was for Brandon to label my phone as "Kaydn go potty," and for me to call Brandon's phone at 3 o'clock. We put the phone on Kaydn Rye's bed and at 3 o'clock in the morning the lady in the phone said, "Kaydn go potty," instead of "Kate calling."

Granted, I still had to wake up at 3 o'clock, but all I had to do was whip my arm over to the nightstand and hit the call button.

And in case you're wondering, my wonderful plan did not work. I thought maybe he'd wake up and scream "Mom, there's someone talking in my room telling me to go potty," and all I'd have to do was scream back, "Yeah, I know, go potty." And then go back to sleep.

But he didn't even move when the phone went off. I had that thing set so high that even I could hear it in the next room, and he didn't even roll over. He didn't make a peep.

We're back to the drawing board.




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