Neighborly

My parents-in-law are moving from the Field of Dreams state to the Land of 10,000 lakes. I'm not sure why they would want to leave Iowa. It gets greener earlier, has a shorter winter, cheaper houses, less traffic, and fewer mosquitoes. Plus, they have great neighbors.

On the other hand, it does have a heckuva lot of hogs. And they smell.

But they also have wind farms, so yanno...it'd be cool to say that you were from a state that had wind farms.

Wind farms notwithstanding, they are leaving all of that behind to move up by their grandchildren.

But back to the neighbor thing. They have (and are themselves) the kind of neighbors that give each other Christmas gifts. Nothing pricey, more of the homemade jelly variety of neighbors, but nevertheless thoughtful. They know the names of all of their neighbors' pets, stop to chit chat about new cars, you know, friendly sort of relationships.

Hopefully they'll find such people in their new home up here. They just won't find them in my neighborhood.

For example, when we were first moving into our new house from our apartment, we had to get rid of some furniture that just didn't make the cut. Two ratty old chairs were placed on the curb for the garbage collector to properly dispose of. While we were out making another furniture run to the old apartment, the chairs disappeared from the drive way. Later that week we saw the same chairs in one of our new neighbor's garage sale. Ummm...I get wanting to take furniture from the end of someone's driveway for your own use, but for your own garage sale?

And then there were the renters that lived right next to us. We would wake up in the morning sometimes and find plastic lawn chairs stacked up outside of our bedroom window. Full disclosure: we never actually caught anyone peeping, but c'mon, is "please don't stack your Menards furniture next to our bedroom window so that you can be at eye level" a necessary conversation?

The renters have since been evicted and I think three gay guys have taken over the house. Unfortunately the garage sale lady is still living across the street, but we don't really hear anything from her--except when she's barking at her dog.

Irrational Fears

So Caeden has had a series of nightmares lately. One night he woke up screaming, "Bees! Bees!" Another night he woke up in a sweaty mess mumbling something about how the bugs were going to get him. This weekend I took him to the park where he sat at the top of the slide refusing to go down because there was a ladybug at the bottom. I asked him why the ladybug was so scary and he said that it was going to fly into his eye.

Um...where does he get these ideas? Trying to help tame his fears, I went to the library and checked out "Elmo's Springtime" which has a section featuring an assortment of singing, friendly, happy bugs. Okay, so maybe it's a little creepy, but I was hoping to ease his mind. We are entering bug season, you know, and Minnesota's national bird is the mosquito.

Gluttony

Five beautiful words on the Dairy Queen sign this morning:

We now have cheese curds.

Kids

My daughter was in a car accident recently.

While walking with one shoe on and one shoe off, which she insists is the only way to walk, she was gripping a little hot wheels car in her hand. Her brother and another friend were playing with cars and had them splayed all over the floor. She happened to step on one, did a banana peel flip and landed with a hot wheel shot to the eye. For a solid week now she's had a full-on black eye Brad Pitt would be proud of.

She's also the climbier one of my two kids. Today she climbed up onto a chair, then onto the high chair where she stood swaying. She survived this climb, but she usually doesn't. My little sweetie has two matching bruises on the sides of her forehead from previous climbs. The other day she was walking on our driveway trying out her new sandals. As per her usual, she was hoarding toys in her hands and under her neck. When she tripped over her unbendy new sandaled feet, her hands were unavailable to break the fall. Her face, however, was available, and so now she's got a skinned nose.

The worst part is I think she might have an ear infection but there's no way I'm taking her in to see the doctor with all of her facial bruises in various stages of healing.

My two and a half year old is very observant of the world around him. His vocabulary is catching up with everything he notices, but he still has trouble with sounds. For example, he can't say the "tr" blend. Instead, he pronounces "tr" as "f." So imagine what Interstate 35 was like all the way home from Iowa today.

"Mom look! I see a great big f***!" "Wow, that's a super-fast f***!" And, he has a little Elmo one too. "Watch my Elmo f***!"

He also has trouble with the "st" sound--he pronounces it as "d." So when we were outside playing in the yard he said, "Wow! I found a big d***!" "Mom, you want this big d***?" "Oh, I keep the big d*** and you get the little d***."

Absence

Holy long silence since the last post, Batman! I'd like to say that I've been really busy, but I don't think I'm busier than any other blogger, yet I'm virtually the only one who has been derelict in my writing.

The real skinny is that by the time I finally get finished with my day at work, bring home the kids, entertain them while trying to do household chores, make dinner for the kids, bathe and pj them and make my lunch for the next day all I really want to do is plop down and watch Dancing with the Stars (or Friday Night Lights--apparently I can't get enough Riggins, Lyla or Coach).

And really the blog is a metaphor for my life. It's not the only thing I've been neglecting. Things on the short list include the following:

• My diet. Don't get me wrong, I eat plenty of things I should (sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, fruit and meat--no bread--for lunch), but plenty of things I shouldn't ("Grown-up Grilled Cheese" at Baker's Square, butter soup--they call it tomato basil, but seriously, when the oil slick on top of the substance is both large and clear enough to display all of Roy G. Biv, it hardly qualifies as soup anymore). I just wish all of the stars would align and I could get all of my diet kinks ironed out. I do have a wedding in July in which the average size of a bridesmaid will be a 6--with me adding all 6 dress sizes and throwing off the average. I'd like to look good by then.
  
• My reading. I've been into guilty pleasures like Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co (good quick YA read, by the way) and People magazine. I need to start reading books that are, less, well, embarrassing to admit, yanno? In an attempt to right this wrong I started The Tipping Point last night and found myself referring to it twice today just so that people don't think the only thing I know about is Katie Holmes' latest fashion faux paux.
• My cleanliness. I don't think my legs have seen a razor in the last six months. With snow in April, what's the point? Plus, after the prickly stage, leg hairs just get soft, so they're not causing any whisker burn ifyaknowwhaddimean.
• Analyzing my dreams. I haven't devoted much thought to the underlying psychosis that makes me dream that of my nine remedial reading students, I caught two smoking--in the classroom--and one shot me in the ribs with a nail gun.
  

So blogworld, there are plenty of other things I've been neglecting too. I'd like to say I'll get better in the future, but probably not immediately: Dancing with the Stars is on tonight.