send in the clouds

One thing that I've discovered from having a commute now is that being stuck in traffic is a wonderful opportunity to look at cloud formations. There are two pockets in my commute from the city that always absolutely crawl with bumper to bumper traffic. So I look to the skies. My last two trips have been during sunny days with all these amazing clouds. Each day has offered one extremely vivid, yet bizarre cloud formation. Last week it was this enormous skeleton of a seahorse. Yes I said skeleton. It was perfectly formed, undeniably a seahorse, and definitely its skeleton. It stretched across this expanse of sky tilting slightly forward as it slowly glided along. Yesterday, it was a woman sitting in a bathtub. She had her hair in a bun and she was bent over crying, hands covering her face. I'm sure I could be psychoanalyzed from these, you know, like inkblots.

may i have the country of origin please?

E becomes another person when it's time to do homework. My usual pleasant, mild-mannered, sweet daughter turns into a sulky defiant crabbrat...especially when it's time to go over her spelling words for the week. She's supposed to read the word, spell it, then close her eyes and spell it again. 12 words, 3 bonus words. Then we do a quick (HA) quiz and go over what she got wrong. This should take about five minutes tops right? noooo, it's a painful whiney ordeal that lasts forEVER. (and it's not that she struggles, she hardly gets fewer than one or two words wrong...She just fights the process because she wants to play instead...I don't blame her, but I really thought that by MAY she would have accepted it as a necessary evil. No.)

Well today, we were about three words into the list and all I'm getting is grumbles, letters shouted at me defiantly, dirty looks etc. She's trying to bait me into a fight so she won't have to do the task at hand. I'm trying not to sink to her level. I just calmly say, "Spell the word without the attitude please." "E,lets just get this over with, then you can go outside."

She excuses herself to the bathroom (oldest stall tactic in the book). I sit exhausted from my day, forehead resting on the kitchen table awaiting the return of the 'tude.

SFX: flush, water in the sink, door opening, scraping of chair on linoleum, then a voice.

Awesome English Accent: "Okay mother I am ready for my next word."

I look up to see E sitting, smiling demurely at me.

I decide not to comment. And show her the next flash card.

Awesome English Accent: "wrapping. w-r-a-p-p-i-n-g wrapping.

I try to stifle my amusement, but she sees it. I still do not comment. She does one hell of an accent! I love it. Sounds just like the Narnia girl. And she proceeds to be this proper little English girl, dutifully spelling her words for the remainder of the list and taking her quiz and writing her missed words without complaint.

Awesome English Accent: "May I please go outside Mum?"

"Of course dear," I reply.

She's speaking normally again when she comes in for dinner.

I really hope the English girl shows up again tomorrow! Maybe I'll start homework time off with tea and crumpets instead of lemonade and goldfish crackers.

ode to bunny

K came to me very upset because her best friend pictured above had developed a few holes. I have secretly dubbed him "Frankenbunny" due to his many surgeries. Bunny is a member of our household but, quite frankly, I haven't really looked at him in a while. Poor bunny has seen better days. But I was reminded of something that I haven't thought of in a while...the day he and K helped me in a time of need.

When she was 3 months old, Kailey received Bunny as a gift from my sister. He was soft and pale pink and had "My First Bunny" stitched on his belly and some sort of jingle mechanism embeddeded in his fluff. I have a picture of them just after he was given to her, and she is holding him, I bet any money, if I went into her room right now at 12:08 a.m. five years later, the same way - four right fingers curled around his ear and her thumb in her mouth. They became inseparablele.

By the time she was two, poor Bunny had begun to fade into a grey color and the fur began to matt and flatten. He was her best friend and an instant tantrum stopper. Just hand her Bunny, and she would grasp his ears, her thumb would slide into her mouth, her eyes would half close, and all would be well. She couldn't sneak up on you because you would hear Bunny jingle before she could even get close. Then Bunny developed his own smell. Its kind of amazing, I don't think anything had ever or will ever again smell like Bunny. A mixture of Kailey and Bunny, it wasn't a bad smell exactly- just it's own smell.

He was looking pretty bad, so we tried to find bunny substitutes to no avail. We could not find a duplicate. We checked the internet, called the manufacturer, everything. No. So we tried replacement bunnies. The first was a slightly smaller pink bunny that had the exact same jingle but was equipped with satin wings. She really seemed to like him but when I tried to make the replacement at bed time, it was a no go. She wanted both bunnies- My Bunny and Angel Bunny as she dubbed them. The next candidate had real potential. It was shaped differently but, again was pink and had the jingle. Same story. She wanted the whole Bunny family: My Bunny, Angel Bunny and Bunny's Friend. Must have been the smell thing, there was no way to duplicate the smell thing. So they sat together in her crib. But when things got ugly or she needed to sleep, her fingers would wrap around that rapidly deteriorating ear, the thumb would slide in, and all would be right with the world. When she moved from the crib to her big girl bed, the bunnies came along.

One morning when she was 3, I sat at the kitchen table, weeping into my journal, while I thought everyone was still asleep. I was pregnant with Jack, and freaking out about what in the hell I thought I was doing having a third child. How was I going to handle three? I was fat, tired, overwhelmed and extremely hormonal. Writing frantically, crying, getting sucked into the craziness that was my pregnant brain, I heard a jingle coming down the hall. I quickly tried to wipe away tears and snot when K appeared in the doorway. She was quite a sight, all sleepy eyed with crazy red curls springing out in all directions and all three bunnies were cradled in her arms.

All I could think to say was "That's a lot of bunnies you've got there K. Do you think that's too many bunnies?"

She blinked her sleepy eyes and then said with utter conviction,"No Mommy there aren't too many bunnies...because they're MY bunnies."

Instantly the hormonal fog lifted, and I knew everything was going to be okay.

I'll do my best to fix you up Bunny.

captive audience

E is preparing for her first piano competition. For the last month we've been hearing E's performance piece, "Big Chief Indian" (very PC, I know!) at least five times a day. The buh bum bump bum, buh bum bump bum, "war dance song" is stuck in all of our heads, even J can hum it!

Well today during practice, J really wanted to play with E. He could not be otherwise occupied and would just bang on the keys and shout "E!E!EEEEEE!" at her as she tried to play. I had to persistently tell her to ignore the poor little guy, and he eventually stormed off. Then he came back in the room with his little foam Elmo chair, put it in front of the piano and sat down to listen. Can't beat 'em join 'em I guess. It was very cute.

Two more weeks of the Chief though! That competition can't come soon enough.

"e"speak

Whenever I brush E's hair I get the inevitable "ooo! ow! eee! oh!" when we encounter snags. Today I raked my way through a particularly tough tangle and she let out a, "SWEET PINATA SAUCE!!!" Absolutely the funniest thing I've heard all week (and I work with comedians)

Then when we got out of the car for swim lessons, the air smelled kinda funky and she said, "What smells like Hair Syrup?"

"What's hair syrup?" I inquired.

"You know when sometimes you eat waffles for breakfast and you go to school and like an hour later, you're like, 'what smells like syrup?' and then you realize it's hardened syrup on the ends of your hair cuz it must have dipped into it on your plate?"

mmmmmm pinata sauce and hair syrup mmmmmmm

oh and anyone know how to put a tilda on top of the letter "N"? because it looks like PIN-NAH-TAH instead of PIN-YAH-TAH.