The Queen's Rambles

My mom arrived on Saturday and things have been going well. The kids totally love her. I was surprised that Elsa wasn’t shy at all. I guess she really does remember her from this summer!

She’s only driving me a little crazy. I learned all my bad eating habits from her, so it’s sort of a point of contention in my brain. She doesn’t know this. I’m doing WW (only 1.6 pounds before I hit -20!) and it is not a program that you can easily share with someone. She wants me to tell her exactly what to eat, but that’s not how it works. You need to be a member so you can find out how many points you are allotted, then track your own points. I am not eating magic food that makes me skinny. She is eating my food, but 3 times what I’m eating, and thinks she is dieting. I keep telling her that it isn’t a gimmick–the food is not doing anything magical to make her lose weight–it is strictly about reducing food intake (and increasing activity if you choose to do it that way). This is not a program where you can successfully eat someone else’s diet. A BIG component is spending your own points on food that you like and enjoy. You basically have a built in cheat day, which keeps you from giving up. If your cheats are different from my cheats you are not going to be happy.

Kisha and I are living parallel lives again and she doesn’t even know it. We’ve been having plumbing problems with the toilet in the main bathroom. Erik flushes down wads of flushable wipes, which aren’t so flushable when you do several at a time. It has slowly stopped sending matter down with a flush. Then the tank started filling soooooooooo sllllllllloooooooooowwwwwllllllllyyyyy that you had to wait a couple of hours between flushes. Good thing we have two other toilets, right?

So yesterday I changed out the fill valve. It was supposed to be a super easy ten minute job requiring no tools.

Ha, I say!

Ha!

If I had manly hand strength I probably could have done it without tools, but I had to get Mike to bring up a wrench. He had to do a lot of the removal of the old stuff, but I did manage to install the new stuff in about 45 minutes. Instead of spending $8 on the basic set, I splurged and got the fancy duo set for $20, so now we’re supposed to be saving a lot of water if we can ever figure out which lever to push at the right time.

Problem: toilet is still sort of clogged.

I bought some kind of toilet unclogger chemical stuff and gave it a treatment. It’s supposed to get four treatments this week. Hopefully that works and I don’t have to call a real plumber. Real plumbers break the bank.

Speaking of toilets, Elsa announced that she’s no longer going to wear diapers. I decided to run with the idea because she is totally ready. If she’s bare bottomed she will go in the potty every time.

We’ve been hard core potty training for 30 hours and we’ve had countless accidents, including big puddles on a see-saw at the playground and in her shoes at the library. I want to give up, but I’m a strong believe in “NEVER GO BACK” when it comes to potty training. She’ll get it. . . right? She doesn’t like the wet feel, so hopefully this will take a couple of days and it will be over.

I’m an optimist.

This is really the wrong time for the potty training. We’ll be out of the house for most of the weekend. I don’t know how this is supposed to work. I guess she better get trained tomorrow, or we’re going to have a big problem.

Next topic:

Erik doesn’t like to play outside because of some neighborhood issues. I hate this. He has always been so active and always loved to be outside. I’ve been seeing lots of commercials for a wii dance game, so decided to pick one up. I ended up with Just Dance Kids 2 and it is totally perfect!

It has a few really young songs (think Old McDonald, Wiggles, Yo Gabba Gabba), some tweeny songs, and some fun older dance songs that even adults can enjoy. There are various levels of skill and exertion involved. He is completely loving it and spends HOURS at a time doing the dances. The more he practices, the higher the score, which keeps him interested. I’ve been doing some of it with him, but holy cow. It’s hard! The dances aren’t particularity hard to master, but there are a lot of big arm movements (you hold the wii-mote), which make for an exhausting work out. He has completely mastered Do The Monkey, an old Wiggles song. He said “I wonder why this song seems so familiar to me” and I had to raise my eyebrow. Why yes, child, this song should be very familiar to you. He spent a year listening/watching nothing but the Wiggles. I swear he had an Australian accent for awhile.

And one more topic to round out the night:

I have never understood the Taylor Swift hate because I’ve never really listened to her songs.

Now I get it.

I don’t hate her. I don’t care about her enough to exert that kind of emotion. I am certainly getting tired of all her songs, though. She loves ’em and leaves ’em faster than Elizabeth Taylor. Or maybe they leave her. I guess they must leave her, if her passive-aggressive, weepy, crazy lyrics are anything to go by. From her lyrics, none of them understand her or have enough James Taylor (or is it James Brown?) records. I don’t know. I don’t care. Get her off my air waves, STAT! Not likely to happen as her DC concert sold out in minutes. When’s Garth coming to town?