The fun mom!

 

I have been thinking that I want to be a fun mom.  It is great to be the cuddle mom and the making dinner mom and the put you in time out mom, but I also want to be fun mom.  Don't get me wrong, I love being the cuddle mom, but the kids probably won't remember times like this:

 

This summer, I have been gradually increasing my fun percentage with limited success.  It started out when Chazz said that he wanted to play soccer in the back yard.  Sure I was wearing flip flops and sure I was holding the baby, but I said yes anyway.  The whole family was in the back yard playing soccer and it was all fun and games until the baby got hit with the ball (she didn't get hurt).  Fun mom failure 1.

 

Just this weekend we decided it was time for Chazz to learn to ride his bike without training wheels.  At first I sat with the baby and watched the efforts.  It was really hot outside and eventually the heat started getting to my husband.  It took me forever to learn to ride my bike, but that struggle allowed me to teach my little sister to ride her bike in 5 minutes.  I decided that I could help Chazz learn to ride his bike.  I traded the chair and baby to the hubby and decided to take over bike duty.  Chazz fell many times during my help and during daddy's time helping.  But he only got hurt while I was helping.  He handled it well, but did decide he was done trying for the day.  Fun mom failure 2.

 

 

My favorite fun mom moment was over the 4th of July.  We always go "camping" at my Aunt's farm on the 4th of July.  We love it.  They have a lake and a super cool high dive.  The high dive is kind of a rite of passage.  Chazz decided he was ready to jump off of it, but he wanted me to go with him.  We climbed up onto the high dive and he insisted that I jump first.  I looked down at all my cousins in the water.  They yelled up wondering if this was my first time ever.  NO!  I had jumped off of the high dive lots of times...when I was a kid.  I knew from those experiences that the hardest part was just deciding to jump, so I did it.  I didn't want Chazz to think it was scary.

Of course I was successful with the jump!  I am obviously a pro at being a fun mom!  However, I guess I didn't make it look quite as easy as I though because Chazz decided he wasn't ready.  He decided to climb down from the high dive instead.  Even though he didn't jump, I am going to take this one as a fun mom win.  I think he will remember this for a while and remember how his mom was amazing enough to jump for him.

 

Any pointers or ideas for fun mom implementation?  I just remembered, I think the waterslide was a fun mom win, I didn't get stuck or anything.  What other activities should we try?

This one is a fashion blog - Flowy Pants

Leggings were or are all the rage.  I like leggings, but I don't have much room for them in my every day wardrobe.  I have already lived through one legging rage.  It was at that time that learned the rules of leggings.  There is mostly only one rule.  They are not pants.  They should be worn under something else that covers your butt so that people behind you can't see a fart bubble or something else.  My favorite way to wear leggings last time was to wear them under an oversized purple flannel shirt.  I looked SO cool.

 

The opposite of leggings is flowy pants.  Somehow I am finding these harder to wear.  I love them.  I love that they come in bold patterns and colors.  However, I am finding it very hard to figure out what kind of shirt to wear with them.  I googled flowy pants and found some examples.

 



 

Ummm, this look is not going to work for me, but I do love the pink flowers.

 

This one is not going to work for me either, but this is what I imagine I look like wearing flowy pants.

 



 

My friend left me this one on facebook, I think it might be getting closer to something I can actually wear.  I started out trying to wear a solid colored shirt.  This ended up looking a lot like pajamas.  While I was wearing my pajama look, I saw another woman walk by and she was wearing her flowy pants with her shirt tucked in.  Tucked in shirts are one of the big Catherine fashion no nos.  That might work if you have an itty bitty waist, but that is NOT my shape. 

 

I have decided to go with patterned shirts that are similar in color but not in pattern.  This is a little bit of a clown look.  I often don't follow traditional fashion rules, but I still feel I look good when I am out and about.  With this clown look, it took me a little more to get used to.  I kind of felt like people were looking at me funny.

 

However, I do have a very cool flowy pant dance that I do, and it made me realize I made the right fasion choice.

That movie with the killer trees - Topic for the podcast?

My husband listens to a lot of podcasts.  Also, we think that we are hilarious when we talk to eachother and whenever we think we are especially funny, we think that topic should be added to our podcast.  Of course, we don't actually have a podcast.  And, if we tried to record a podcast, I am sure we wouldn't remember any of our great topics.  Here is the conversation from today.

Me:  You know that M. Night Shyamalan movie about the trees that kill people?  I never saw it, but I think that the movie should end up that people with allergies are immune to the killer tree pollen.  The poison pollen would get stuck in all the snot.

Hubby: Oh so the trees killed with chemical warfare, not with very slow stabbing?

Me:  Yes.

Hubby:  I bet they didn't kill Marty Casey from Rock Star: INXS because he had that song about living with the trees.

Me:  No, I bet they killed him because he was into tree rape.  His song was about living IN a tree.

Hubby:  Only the most radical trees thought that.

Me:  I bet all the trees wanted to go after the people who did the songs about cutting down the trees and putting them in a tree museum.

Hubby:  Yeah, trees don't get irony.

Me:  And they don't like bad music.

Hubby:  And they wanted a cut of that tree museum entry fee.  The trees are not selfish, they understand there is overhead.  There is maintenance on the parking lot that replaced the trees.

Me:  Then there is the installation of the parking lot outside the tree museum and the tree museum curator.

Hubby:  We should discuss this in the podcast.

If you were a guest on our podcast, how would you elaborate on this topic?  Maybe you actually saw the movie or know the name of it?

Alien Nail Polish

These are not my feet.





I do enjoy a good pedicure, but I am very cheap so I rarely get one.  However, on the few occasions that I have gotten one, I have paid very close attention so that I can replicate the technique at home.  I have learned that you must layer the nail polish with 1 clear layer, 2 color layers, then another clear layer.  Piece of cake.

Being sandal season, I have recently done my toe nails in silver using the 1-2-1 technique.  One morning when I woke up, the piggie who doesn't get roast beef, was naked.  The nail polish wasn't just chipped, it was gone.  Later in the day I found the nail polish, in tact, on the floor.  I figured this was a freak occurence and I just repainted the poor piggy.  When I was in middle school, I was way into painting my fingernails and adding jewels to them.  When you do this, you have to use a lot of coats of clear polish in order to get the jewel not to fall off.  When I would do this, I could peal off a sheet of polish from a nail if I was careful, but it was a lot of effort. 

A few days after the touch up, I woke up and found the piggy that goes to market WAS NAKED!  The same thing had happened.  It wasn't chipped, the polish was completely gone and I found it in one peice on the floor.

So, what do we think is happening? 

• It might be alien nail polish.  It might be like the green goo that promotes healing on Marvel-Agents of shield. 
• I thought that maybe someone was removing the nail polish in the middle of the night, but finding it as a little nail polish sheet on the floor would be hard to do.
• Maybe I am a very violent sleeper and I kick the polish right off?

Very Strange.  What do you think?

To quote the butthole surfers...

..."you never know just how you look through other people's eyes."

This morning I was shaving my legs using conditioner (#TMITuesday).  Sometimes I use conditioner, sometimes I don't, it depends on what is in the most supply in the shower.  However, using conditioner reminded me of a few conversations from my past.  One conversation was with one of my cousins and she told me that she always uses conditioner, because when we were young I told her that was the best way to shave your legs.  I do not remember telling her that.  However, I do remember when a different cousin told me the same thing.  This got me thinking, that I remember things that people tell me way better than I remember things I tell other people.  In my mind, I am a leg shaving information gatherer, but in the mind of others, I am a leg shaving information giver.

You have a lot of time to think while you are shaving your legs.  For a while I thought that maybe I do lots of little good things for/to people and I just don't remember them.  Then I started to worry that maybe I do a lot of bad things for/to people and I don't remember them.

I am not a person who thinks that everything I do is nice, but I TRY to be nice to everyone.  There are times that I have been mean and many of those times stick out to me and cause guilt whenever I think of them.  There are times when you are mean for a reason, like a jerk woman just asked if you are pregnant, but then there are reasons you are just mean on accident for no reason.  I still cringe at the thought of the time in kindergarten I told the shy girl she couldn't follow me around because she wasn't my friend.  There is the way we used to hide from and run from certain cousins just because we decided they were the one that was "bad" that day.  Then there was the time in middle school where a kid I knew from a summer program said hi to me and I just walked away because I didn't know what to say.  There are countless others that I can't list here because you would think much less of me. 

Anyway, the question is, are there tons of other times that I have been perceived as unreasonably mean and I just don't remember them?  OR, do mean things stick in my head easier than nice things?  The topic of  how other people perceive you has come up a lot recently in conversation with friends.  That is when I realized that it is hilarious to say, "To quote butthole surfers...".  For those of you that don't know, The Butthole Surfers are a band and their most famous song has "you never know just how you look through other people's eyes" in the chorus.  I think in general, when talking with friends, we decided that our friends see us better than we see ourselves.  Is that because we are insecure about ourselves?  Or is that because our friends are nice and assume the best of us? I wonder how casual acquaintances see me.  Of course, it has long been my motto that it is none of my business what other people think about me.  I would go crazy if I was trying to make every one think well of me.

What are your thoughts about this?  Are all people hard on themselves?  Do you think some people are just smug and always think they are great?  I like to think that I have pretty high self confidence.  To quote Ahbed from Community, "I have self esteem pouring out my ass."  But, even with all my confidence, I still have a lot that I am insecure about.

I've fallen and I can't get up!

Yesterday I was working from home because my husband had to go to training for work and he wouldn't be around to help our boy get on and off the school bus.  This should not be a dangerous venture, but I managed to make it so.

Around lunch time I decided to go to T-Smell and that reminded me that I hadn't started dinner.  We were supposed to have roast in the crock pot and I figured that even if I started it at 11, there would be enough time for it to cook.  I am a little on the short side, and my husband is a little on the tall side.  This means that he puts away a lot of stuff on the top shelf and I can't reach it without standing on something, normally a chair.  This was the case with the crock pot.  I climbed up on the standard climbing chair and wrestled with the crock pot to get it down.  All of a sudden I was laying on the floor.  My lower back hurt and my legs hurt and I was sure that I would be stuck there until someone came home to find me.  I was screaming and wishing that I had one of those med alert necklaces.  It didn't help that my book club is reading a book where an elderly woman fell down and couldn't get up and was left laying on the cold floor for hours.  I was sure that would be me.  After I calmed down a little, I realized I could at least roll over and crawl around.  I was still screaming but managed to crawl towards my phone.  It wasn't long before I realized that I could get up.  I could walk around, but, my foot still hurt.

It turns out I am a giant crybaby.  I was in total panic mode off and on for a while after that.  Since I could get around, I figured I didn't need to call 911.  After making myself some lunch, I decided to return a call from my mom, and as soon as I heard her voice I started my freaking out again.  My poor mom, she didn't even know who was calling her.  My mom called and sent my sister over.  My Mother in law dropped by for something else and both of them took good care of me.

I picked up my sweet boy from the bus stop and he was cute as he helped me out of the car.  He insisted I had to tell daddy.

My sister is a darling, she came and watched the kids as we went to urgent care after the hubby got home from work.  Urgent care is probably not a very pleasant place to work.  It took all evening, but they looked at it, gave me an xray, and wheeled me out to the car after putting a splint on my foot and telling me to get crutches.  The most surprising thing to me was the xray machine.  I never got an xray before.  I pictured it looking like this:

 

In reality, it is a table and the xray machine comes down from the ceiling.  Who knew?  I feel that old timey cartoons had been fooling me for years.

This is mostly a sob story blog.  Poor Catherine, she hurt herself.  But as I look back at the sobbing mess I was, it becomes kind of funny.  I picture myself getting one of the med-alert necklaces and wearing it everywhere even though I am only 36 years old.  I also wonder what would have happened if the kids were here.  It would have been super bad if I was holding the baby when I fell.  So, lesson number 1, don't climb up on stuff while holding the baby.  But if I was not holding her, I think it would have gone better.  I like to think that I wouldn't have freaked out if the kids were here.  I wouldn't have wanted to scare them.  Lesson number 2, being a mom makes me a stronger person.  Lesson number 3, crutches are not as much fun as they look.

Have you learned any good lessons lately that you want to share?  Did you already know what xray machines look like?  Am I the only one that was fooled?

Check out my balls

 

I took a glass blowing class on Saturday and it was lovely.  I have always wanted to be a glass blower, but it isn't really something you can set up in your basement.  I saw this class at Baron Glassworks of Ypsilanti advertised in the Rec and Ed book, so I signed up.  I realize now that my idea of fun is very different than it used to be.  The class was more interesting than fun, and that is ok with me.  There were 8 people in the class and there were two teachers.  There was no way they were going to allow us to insert the metal rod into the burning hot glory hole (that is what they call the furnace where you reheat the glass) without a teacher assisting us.  This meant that there was way more watching than there was actually making things.  Some of the people made really beautiful things.  Mine are just average, but some of them were beautiful.  My turn was toward the end, and by then the poor instructors were exhausted.  I wanted my second piece to be a drinking glass.  I was torn over whether I should make a drinking glass or a paperweight.  I have a bajillion drinking glasses and they have to be tough to survive at our house.  I have always loved looking at glass paperweights, but decided against it because my papers are rarely flying all over.  It was a mistake, but maybe having two beautiful garden gazing balls (as my dad calls them) will distract from how bad I am at gardening.  When you work in the hot glass arts, you refer to this as "reading the glass."  All the best artists do it.  Sometimes the glass just doesn't want to be formed into what you want as your end result and all the best artists can read the glass and turn it into something better.

As much as I enjoyed the class, there was one big distraction.  One of the other students was getting on all my nerves.  In the picture above, she is right behind the instructor.  I had one where you could actually see her, but the hubby thought it was inappropriate to put up a photo of her on the internet.  Instead, I will describe her in such great detail that you will recognize her if you see her around town.  If you do see her around town, ask her if she is pregnant.

This woman walked into the glass studio like she owned the place.  She was VERY vocal.  She let us all know that she is also a glass artist (she is an artist, but she does science as her day job.  I wonder if it is like when my son does science by dissolving candy in a cup of water) with her own studio in her house (craft room).  She does stained glass and fused glass (when the teacher asked her about it, she didn't know many technical details about fused glass.  I think she mostly takes scraps of stained glass and melts them in her microwave).  She only wears dresses and they are always sleeveless because she wears sweaters (this was fun because it was about 40 degrees in the studio if you weren't working with the glass).  She is very athletic which is why she has two bad shoulders and a bad leg and therefore had to sit down in one of the very few chairs.  She had her badly dyed black hair up in a messy ponytail with a flower barret in the front.

Why do I find this woman SO obnoxious?  Is it because I secretly want to be her?  I want to be an artist.  I want to have room in my house for a studio.  I want to have a distinct fashion that labels me an artist whereever I go.  I sometimes want to be friendly.  No, I don't want to be this woman.  I can't stand her.  I will have to be an eclectic friendly athletic artist with a studio and somehow still be the opposite of this woman.

As we watched the students make their glasswork, this bleepity bleep bleep "artist" looked at me and said, "wow!  Are you pregnant?"  People who live in a civilized society should never ask this question.  Women who also carry their excess weight in their midsection should also never ask this question.  However, I know it happens.  Had that been all she said, I wouldn't have even paid attention.  I responded, "no, I just had a baby."  She should have apologized, instead she said, "Are you pregnant?  Wow, you must have JUST had that baby."  After that, I punched her in the lady parts...emotionally.  She still wouldn't stop.  Then she exclaimed, "wow, you are still a really new mom."  I am never rude to people.  I can count on one hand the number of times in my life that I have been rude to someone's face and I regret all of them.  At this point, I decided I could be rude to this person.  I wish I would have been more rude, all I did was look at her and then turn away and ignore her while I was watching the other students.  After that she started talking to one of the guys in the class.  He was really friendly and she thanked him for being so friendly, "Thank you for being so nice.  I like to be friendly and I like to learn things.  It is so nice to meet someone so friendly."  I would like to say that is when I turned around and told her off while I jump kicked her in the face, but I didn't do that.

So, as usual when I wish I came up with a really good response to something, I thought about it all weekend.  It is none of her business if I am pregnant or not.  I didn't need to tell her that I just had a baby.  Lets work on some new responses, here is what I have so far:

• Why?  Are you?  Are we preggo buddies?
• Why do you ask?  Do you think I look fat in this outfit?
• I can't tell you because you look like the kind of person that would try to cut a fetus out of someone.

Oh, and sorry to be misleading with the title of this blog.  You can't really check out my balls because I didn't get them back yet.  They are still in the kiln.  I will post a picture when I get them back.