Monthly Archives: July 2010

All Day I’m Going to be Thinking It’s Monday

It has only just come to my attention that Paul, when he doesn’t know where an item goes, just leaves it in the dishwasher. Now, I know we’ve all been THOROUGHLY SCHOOLED in how we are never, ever, EVER to criticize our spouse’s Alternate and Equally Legitimate Way of Doing Things. But surely this only applies when the spouse’s way is not WRONG. There are many ways to legitimately unload a dishwasher, but I submit that ALL those ways result in an UNLOADED DISHWASHER. Plus, it has been a long time since there was anything to tease Paul about.

I did The Shred for the second time. The nice thing about being a late adopter is that I’ve already read everyone’s stories of ouchie knees and not being able to walk up stairs and so forth, so although I might not avoid these problems myself, I can at least alternate The Shred with other kinds of exercise to reduce the injuries. Anyway, I have several comments:

1. THANK YOU to everyone who mentioned I can TURN JILLIAN’S VOICE OFF. I think it is very funny that they included that as a feature on the DVD. Like they knew we’d want that. I turned it off already, because after only one viewing I was already FULL UP of her telling me that if I wanted a workout that was only 20 minutes I wasn’t going to get any breaks. Well, DO excuse me, Jillian, if I continue to be the one to make the decisions about that.

2. Also, it doesn’t really matter how many times she says it’s only 20 minutes, it’s closer to 30.

3. And speaking of reading everyone else’s reports, I’ve read “You can do anything for 20 minutes!” a zillion quintillion times, and I think it is safe to say “Nonsense” in a firm, Mary Poppins sort of voice. I failed both the “hand in ice water” test and the “clothespin on finger” test in childbirth preparation class, and neither of those were anywhere near as long as 20 minutes. (And speaking of which, I don’t see how either of those prepared us for the sensation of being repeatedly stabbed with a knife in the pelvic region for 27 hours. Though I guess I can see why they would find it difficult to simulate that.) As it turns out, I CAN do the level-one Shred workout, but that’s not because I can do anything for 20 minutes, it’s because it’s a whole bunch of much shorter things. If it were 20 minutes of just push-ups, I wouldn’t be able to do it, because (and here we come back to my main point) I can’t in fact do anything for 20 minutes. /vent And also, it’s more like 30. /vent again

4. I got a yoga mat on Freecycle, and I’m surprised how much comfier that makes the sit-ups and push-ups. The mat is so THIN, I wouldn’t think it would help at all. A large part of it is that it keeps me from having to put my hands and knees on the floor crumbs.

5. Even being aware of the knee problems, and even modifying exercises that seem knee-dangerous, I STILL feel it in my knees. Has anyone verified that Jillian knows what she’s doing?

Blackberry Black Raspberry Riches

I hope it doesn’t lower me in your esteem when I tell you that this is the first year in ten that we’ve harvested our abundant, free, blackberry black raspberry crop, from blackberry black raspberry bushes that grow maintenance-free in our yard. The children kept going out into the yard and coming back full of snack, so I finally ventured out and found that the crop above the 4-foot level was FORMIDABLE.

In my defense, and in the paraphrased words of Jillian Michaels, blackberries black raspberries DON’T COME FOR FREE.

I have thorn scratches and bug bites all over my arms and ankles, and I would not even describe myself as someone who particularly LIKES blackberries black raspberries—though the mosquitoes clearly think I’m ker-razy for feeling ambivalent, since they themselves have strong feelings on the issue and have spelled out those feelings in a dot-to-dot worksheet on my body.

I’ve given one batch to my parents, and I’m freezing my third batch as we speak. I remembered reading that the right way to freeze berries was to put them single-layer on a cookie sheet and freeze them, and THEN transfer them to a plastic baggie, so that’s what I’m doing and I’m hoping I’m right, but I also don’t really care because, as I mentioned, I don’t particularly like blackberries black raspberries. What I mostly like is feeling like a pioneer as I pick, gather, and, er, freeze in my multi-cubic-foot electric freezer. Just like Caroline Ingalls did, amirite?

And for all you modern-day Mrs. Ingallses, I recommend having a few shots of liquor before you venture out a-pickin’, because it makes all the stab-and-PULL assaults of thorns so much less bothersome.

Reader Question: Decluttering the Wedding Dress

Christy writes:

I have a decluttering/wedding dress question. I’m in the midst of a huge declutter, and I can’t decide what to do with my wedding dress. I’ve been married for 11 years and haven’t once looked at my dress until I embarked on operation get rid of stuff. I need opinions. Keep or donate? I can’t decide! What did you and your readers do?

Oh, neat question! My first wedding dress I intended to keep, and I wondered about maybe dyeing it a different color so I could wear it again. It wasn’t a wedding dress per se, just a white lacy dress bought off a clearance rack in the Better Dresses department—on clearance because it looked wayyyyy too much like a wedding dress for anyone else to buy it, is my guess. And dyeing it would not have worked, I don’t think, but it didn’t matter because the marriage ended Embarrassingly Soon, and I donated the dress to Goodwill, or maybe I threw it away, I can’t remember. Anyway I got rid of it.

My second wedding dress was even LESS weddingish: Paul and I got married with a justice of the peace and no guests, and our goal was to wear clothes we could then wear to other people’s weddings, so he wore nice khaki pants and a white oxford and a tie, and I wore a dark green dress with a floral pattern. We did in fact wear those outfits to a couple of weddings, which was fun and sentimental. I still have the dress even though it’s too small for me now. (This is the problem with losing weight for a wedding.)

But neither of these was a Big White Dress situation. I think that if I’d had a BWD, I would have gotten rid of it during one of our moves. They take up so much space, and have so little use. I think I’d do what the decluttering books advise and “Keep the pictures, not the item”: that is, since there are lots of photos to remind you of the dress, no need to keep the dress itself.

On the other hand, I am the one holding onto a dress that no longer fits me.

What have you guys done with your wedding dresses, those of you who had wedding dresses?

Vodka and Pop-Tarts: Breakfast of Not Running Screaming Into the Sea

By 7:00 this morning my ears were already TOTALLY FULL. The children are narrating their EVERY THOUGHT, and they talk over each other and then one of them tries to ask me a question about why it’s windier in daytime than in nighttime and another one asks me to get another cup of milk and a third one tries to tell me a joke, and I feel like I’m going to SCREEEEEEEEEEEAM. Combine that with the endless CRASHES and FIGHTS and TATTLING, and you have mommy putting vodka in her coffee. (You don’t actually have mommy putting vodka in her coffee. You just have mommy thinking about how terrible that would taste.)

This is the last chance to enter to win the $100 Visa giftcard over on the reviews blog by either praising the Fourth of July recipe I came up with or admiring the twins practicing for kindergarten. And really, I think you should praise my recipe, because when I got that assignment I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do. A RECIPE using POP-TARTS. And it had to be Fourth of July themed. I….that’s not really my….you know? And when I came up with my idea, I just about lost consciousness from the perfection of it (it uses exactly one box of Pop-Tarts!), and I worried that the other bloggers would all come up with the same idea because it was so perfect. But no one else did! And although some of them came up with pretty good ideas, I’m sure they were all jealous of mine. I’m imagining Pop-Tarts executives (“What do you do?” “I’m a Pop-Tarts executive”) sitting around a big table saying, “Did you SEE what she came up with? We had no idea this project would be such a success! We need to bring her onto the Pop-Tarts Executive Team RIGHT AWAY! Tell the Pop-Tarts pilot to warm up the Pop-Tarts jet!”

Input Requested: Children and Video Games

Can I ask for your input on something? Three of my kids lovvvvvvvve video games. What do you think is the right amount of time to let children play video games per day when there’s no school? I guess I’m looking for RANGES here, since probably none of us are, like, “90 minutes YES, 91 minutes NO WAY.” You don’t have to HAVE children to give an opinion on this.

It would be useful to know whether you yourself like video games—I think I would have said a much lower number of minutes before getting into playing Sims and being, like, “I AM GOING TO HAVE TO QUIT MY JOB TO PLAY THIS FULL-TIME,” which has given me more empathy for the “WHAT?? I JUST started playing!!” children.

I think it’s going to be tempting to downplay the amount of time we allow (or would theoretically allow), but I hope you’ll say so if the answer is “6 hours” or “however much they want” or anything more than you think is average. Maybe go anonymous if it makes you feel shy to say it—I know I’D feel shy to say how much I let my kids watch/play, especially before someone else said how much THEY allowed.