The Queen's Rambles

Holy cats, you guys. I got a taste of the life of a mother of five today and I am so, so glad that it is not my life. Of course, my beautiful children would all be perfectly well behaved and stand meekly by while I took care of business so I shouldn’t compare the life of a mother with my experiences this morning.

Yes, that is very tongue in cheek. I have well behaved children, but it takes a LOT of work to keep them that way!

Anyway, we went to a tour of the recycling facility this morning and then my friend and I headed over to a McDonald’s with a play area. I got out of the van and noticed her car was in middle of the road and she wasn’t turning into the lot.

Then I saw a huge metal thing laying on the road in front of her car.

Somehow the connector thing that makes your steering wheel move your wheels had fallen off and her car was stuck in middle of a very, very busy road.

Thankfully she was only going 5 miles an hour and we were right in front of the McDonald’s. She had her two boys (ages 1 and 3) plus her cousins (6 and 13) in the car. The 13 year old was a pretty good kid. He and I wrangled all the kids into the McDonald’s, all while cars were honking like crazy as if we chose to just randomly stop on one of the busiest roads in the region (355 for locals) to unload a bunch of toddlers.

The toddlers were all really good, though it was a job to keep the 1 year old from wandering off. Ordering five happy meals for kids who have no clue what they want? Not good! I had some dirty looks from other customers, especially when I asked the 6 year old what his name was. Like I would kidnap all these kids and take them to McDonald’s for lunch? Sounds like a nightmare to me.

The only kid that gave me real problems was the 6 year old. He kept screaming “I want soda! I want soda! I want soda!” Ummmm. Yeah, kid, I don’t buy soda for little kids. If your parents want you to have soda, that’s their business, but I’m not a supplier. Especially when you are yelling in my face about it.

The tow truck arrived pretty in a fairly timely manner and my friend’s husband was able to get to us quickly, even though his boss was in a meeting and he had to leave without telling him. He was afraid his boss was going to be mad at him, but somehow I think his boss will be understanding (my husband is his boss and I find he’s a pretty nice guy).

All’s well that ends well, I suppose. It could have been soooooooo much worse. It doesn’t even bear thinking about losing steering while flying down the freeway at 80mph.

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Ellen asked me if I would be happy about my mom moving here if there wasn’t all the emotional baggage involved with my sister’s children. I’ve been thinking about that a lot and the answer is “I’m not sure.” I can see that it would be awesome to have her support so near by. Mike and I could have a weekend to ourselves once in a while, maybe. But I don’t think I can handle it if she wants to spend every single weekend with us. She’s kind of exhausting. I don’t think this plan will pan out at all, so I am not investing a lot of thought into it.

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I am investing some thought into a romantic get-away the first week of April! My mom will be here (at least she has plane tickets purchased) so we want to go someplace before she gets called back to Oregon and scuttles our plans. I would love to fly someplace warm, but we are a little afraid to invest that much money into the plan.

I was kind of looking at Colonial Williamsburg, but how romantic would that be? I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Any ideas for a short, romantic road trip from the DC area in early April?

Will I really be able to leave Elsa for that long? I know Erik will be totally fine, but my baby! My sweet baby! I’ve never been away from her overnight, even though she HATES me at night and hits me if I come near her (she snuggles with daddy all night long).

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I really must go do something useful now. Maybe get dinner cooked, then put it in the crockpot to keep it warm. We have soccer tonight from 5-6 and I’ve already used my pizza night this week. Mike is going out with some old workmates so I am not really motivated to make dinner at all. I guess I could make myself some bean soup and make some little pigs in a blanket for the kids.

Or. . . I could go paint! Actually, I won’t be doing any painting today. I need to spackle, sand and caulk today. I painted the dining room ceiling yesterday, so I’m totally committed to this plan. Our ceilings are awful. We didn’t have them painted when we moved in because all the people who gave us estimates said it was impossible to paint a textured ceiling with a roller and it would have been over double the cost to have them paint the ceiling with brushes. I actually kind of like the look of white ceilings with my beachy colors, but they desperately need something and I am not in love with the idea of trying to keep from getting any paint on the ceiling.

I’ve never been able to figure out why it was so impossible to paint the ceiling with a roller, so I finally googled it. I found out that you can, indeed, roller over this textured mess if you use a high nap roller. I had no problems at all yesterday, except for one big glop in my eye.

My mom painted our house all the time, but she never did it correctly so I never learned how to make things look good. She’s just paint over all the nicks, peelings, etc and hope the paint would fix it.

Memo: the paint never fixed it.

All this spackling is like magic. Such a revelation! It may take me a year, but it is going to make me happy when it is done. I have hated our paint job for four years!