Vanity

This is what Rose wants for Christmas. Ack! So now I have to decide on whether to buy this...thing (~ $100). I know she'd love it, and she'd better because it would be like, the only thing she'd be getting.

I'm leaning toward not getting it. I just don't think I could stand to look at it every day. Besides, it would probably end up in a forgotten corner like the plastic kitchenette we got her for her birthday last year.

Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival

Should be entertaining. 

Not that anyone would skip out of my daughters’ birthday party to consort with a bunch of weed-worshippers…

Yes, this is a roundabout way of advertising that Rosie’s and Vi’s party is coming up soon!  October 3rd!

 

Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival

Birthday Party

I’m throwing a birthday party for my daughters, whose birthdays are a day apart. I’m a little nervous because I’ve never actually thrown a party for little kids, especially kids who have parents I haven’t met. I’m still a little shy, after all these years. I mean, I’ve had family birthday parties, but never where I invited a whole class, like I am this year.

I’m thinking… a piñata for sure (hopefully I will find the time to make one instead of getting one of those premade Walmart ones), that cool ball-toss game Ron bought from Menards, maybe pin the tail on the donkey, and how about some good old fashioned bobbing for apples?

I’m probably sweating the small stuff, but I don’t know what to do about the kids in Rosie’s class, I mean, regarding gifts. I don’t want the parents to think they have to get Violet a gift too, so I’m thinking I’ll just write those invitations out mentioning Rosie’s birthday and not Vi’s? Violet won’t know the difference.

Originally, I planned to host the occasion at my own house instead of the park, but let’s face it: I’m a slob. And because of my son’s involvement with the dregs of Portage, combined with the unkempt appearance of our yard, people would probably be afraid to step inside anyway.

4K

Rosie started 4K yesterday at St. Mary's Catholic School. She's also been going to a pentecostal church on Wednesdays, so she's had a lot of religion lately. Well, not really - the 4K program is supposed to be secular because it's government funded. I am signing her up for the optional 15 minutes of religious education, though.



Tonight I asked her what she did in school, and she told me they sang a bunch of songs about Jesus. I was a little confused until she told me she was talking about what she did in church. Then she told me that Jesus made the birds and the trees, the butterflies, and you and me.



"And you know what else, Mom? He made us SPECIAL."



"That's wonderful, Rosie."



"And he made the schools and the interstate, and the on-ramp, and Wal-mart. He made EVERYTHING."



At this point, my curiosity about the inner workings of Rosie's mind surfaced, and I just had to ask, "Even the bad things?"



"What bad things?"



"You know, like sickness and getting hurt."



"Oh, no. People hurt themselves."



Brava, Rosie.



As much as I don't buy into the whole omnipotent being thing, I'm glad Rosie thinks about things sometimes.

Books to Read

I'm only doing this because my friend Kate told me to.  I have read embarrassingly few of these books.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice 
2 The Lord of the Rings
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Not a one.  But I would like to some day.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible - X (Yes, the whole thing.  It took me 2 years.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X  (Yes, Gary, I did read it when you gave it to me.  And I am not like Estella.)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - X (Yes, Katie, I do remember that.)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X (One of my favorites.)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -X (actually only parts of it, whatever I needed to pull some info out of my ass to answer those essay questions in English class).
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - (I SO want to read this one.)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -X
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - (Not to split hairs, but isn't this one of the Chronicles of Narnia?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -(Not yet, but there is an excerpt from it in the book I'm reading next - Classic Erotic Tales.)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt –
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - (I honestly don't remember.)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

What about the Iliad, or On Walden Pond?  I had to suffer through those in English.  I should get credit!!!

10 of them, mostly because they were required reading in English class.  I really should read more.  One of these days, I'm going to get some Jane Austen under my belt.

The Heathen in the Hall

One of the many wonderful things about my babysitter (and friend) Lynn is that she is always on the go, and not afraid to leave town for something better.  So some time ago, she found a good church in Madison and starting attending there instead of the place closer to home.  The reason this is good for me is that I get to stay in Madison and study late, because she meets me in Madison with the girls in the evening.

We thought it might be nice if the girls went to bible study with her.   Lynn, because she is a Christian, of course, and me, so that I could have even more free study time.  I was going to sit in the hall and do homework while the girls attended their respective classes.  The thing is, I couldn't help but feel like I was a bit under scrutiny, because here I was, dropping my kids off at someone else's church, so that I could do secular stuff.  It didn't end up mattering anyway, because I could hear Violet screaming all the way upstairs, so I retrieved her and we spent the rest of bible study running around in the halls.

Rosemary loved it, though.  So I guess I'll let her go again, and maybe take Vi to a park or McDonald's.

Birthday Present

I forgot to bring my book to work today, so I decided, what better time to blog than at lunch? The kids aren't here to distract me and I don't have to fight with anyone to use the computer.
Now, about the book thing. I'm not an avid reader. Haven't read a book in years. My friend insisted I read it. It was pretty interesting for the first 4 chapters, but now it's all a bunch of dialogue and I'm getting kinda bored. I think that might have something to do with my shortened attention span these days, though. (I call it Adult-Onset Attention Deficit Hypo-activity Disorder - AOADHD) Which is precisely why I should read more!

When I came home yesterday, my son Damien had cleaned the house. I was flabbergasted. And very grateful. (It was my birthday present.) Of course, there's still a lot to do, but you can see the floor now. It was nice being able to walk to the bathroom in the dark at night and not have to worry about tripping over a toy. I was able to just balls-out walk! Wow!

Last night we had a gathering at my mother-in-law's house. My brother- and sister-in-law were there, as well as Damien's girlfriend, H. So Damien and H went outside to visit with the cats, and H left her purse in the house. When she got back, we joked about how we opened it up and inventoried its contents (which we didn't). Even though I told her we were joking, she still found it necessary to disclose its contents, which was fine until she mentioned her birth control pills. So now, my fear has been realized. My son is no longer innocent. And it was rather embarrassing. I mean, everyone was there! On the other hand, if they are getting physical, at least she's taking birth control pills!! But I think we're going to have a conversation about male prophylactics as well. (Gotta love spell-check.)

Bonnie Fuller: Hate-Mongering Conservative Commentators Using Swine Flu to Promote Racism!

 

Bonnie Fuller: Hate-Mongering Conservative Commentators Using Swine Flu to Promote Racism!

Waiting

Tomorrow's going to be a new experience. Damien has a court hearing for disorderly conduct. He opted out of the services of a public defender, so he's going to have to go up there and enter a plea by himself. I don't have much experience in court so I'm a little nervous.

I really wish he would clean up his act.

On a happier note, I've been readmitted to UW!! But I haven't received an enrollment appointment yet, and in the mean time, the remaining open seats in the classes I need are dwindling. I'm planning on taking Physics for the summer semester, and Organic Chemistry & Soil Science in the fall. I'm not sure if I'll go back full time in the fall, but I really should, because I could graduate in the spring if I do. Grades are important to me, though, and it's going to be tough with two little kids and a badass teenager, and my job.

Stitches

Yesterday was sunny, but a bit cool, so I told Rosie she was going to have to put on some "normal" clothes if she wanted to go outside. (She was still in her nighty.) I figured she'd be out right away, so I went ahead and took Violet outside to play.

Well, that turned out to be a mistake. After a few minutes, I thought I heard Rosie, so I looked over at the back door, and she was standing there crying. As I advanced, I could see blood flowing down the front of her face, dripping to the floor.

Of course I screamed. Which, in retrospect, was probably not the best way to react, but I quickly got my schmidt together and told her everything would be alright, got her dressed (because she was standing there in her undies) and whisked her off to the hospital.

You should have seen the depth of that gash. She told me she fell and hit her head on "the wall", but when I asked her to show me where, she pointed to the corner, where a piece of unfinished trim pokes out.

I was embarrassed when the doctor jokingly asked her if her sister pushed her and she said, "No, she was outside with Mom."