The Queen's Rambles

I’ve been listening to an 80s song for the past twenty minutes. Over and over and over. I don’t know the name. Something about “how do I get you alone?” Or maybe there are different songs. I don’t know. They all sound the same to me.

Mike’s super secret getting-Elsa-to-sleep mo-jo is all about the 80s music. It doesn’t work when I try it, but when he holds her and blasts the YouTube videos, she falls alseep like a little angel. I’m just glad one of us can get her down. At almost 20 months, the magic power of boobies is coming to an end.

It’s supposed to snow tonight so I bet there won’t be school tomorrow. Maybe we can go to the mall for Santa pictures. I saw a really cute idea about taking the Santa pics and turning them into ornaments. That’d make a lot more sense than their current location (in Erik’s baby book). I already bought the picture package via Groupon. I just have to find time to go to the mall and have them taken. Kindergarten kind of sucks. We don’t have time to run to the mall in middle of the day just for pictures. I can see some distinct advantages of homeschooling. Who knew having a child in elementary school could be so stressful? Granted, it wouldn’t be quite as stressful if I didn’t have another kid at home who needed to nap on schedule.

My friend is moving to Virginia right after Christmas and is in for a huge adjustment. Kindergarten in her new school is only 3 hours. I’ve often said I’d like a half day kindergarten, but now that I’m used to full day kindergarten I would hate to go back to such a short school day. It’d be nice to reclaim some time with my child, but I don’t know if it would feel like he was learning anything.

We had a wonderfully productive MOMS Club meeting today. We are required to have one business meeting each month and vote on all our issues. We often don’t have anything to vote on and it’s hard to get people to come to these meetings. Sometimes we have a guest speaker, sometimes we have a party, sometimes we don’t really have anything special planned. I had nothing for today, so decided I’d bring in our new member packet supplies and have everyone help put them together. I’ve been putting it off for a couple of weeks because I knew my kids would just destroy the papers and I didn’t really have enough room to spread everything out.

It sounds so silly, but it turned out to be a great meeting because everyone felt productive and useful. Everyone was smiling as they were putting the packets together and they were asking what other work we could do as a group. I have been avoiding doing a bunch of hole-punching and filling up binders, so I think next month I will ask people to bring hole-punches if they have them and we will get our files in order.

I started addressing Christmas cards tonight. I usually use labels, but it feels so impersonal to have labelled addresses and pre-printed cards. Even though I didn’t write on any of the cards, it felt nice to actually take the time to hand write the addresses. Erik used our stamper for the return address, so some of them are on the creative side. Then Elsa came along and tried to stamp, so things got even more “creative.” I hope they all make it to their destinations.

I can’t believe Christmas is in 18 days. I still don’t have our photo book or calendars made. I should be doing that right this second instead of updating you about all the super fun and exciting details of my life.

I want to get a smartphone just so I can have autocorrect fails with Mike. We’ve both been obsessing over Damn You, Autocorrect the past week. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. I guess the only problem is you have to type the words to get them into our phone and I don’t think Mike are I would be typing in most of the words that make hilarious autocorrect fails.

My sister called this afternoon in a state of complete, hysterical joy. “Guess what, guess what, guess what!!??!!??!!” was all I heard.

I thought I was going to puke. Surely she must be pregnant again to elicit that much joy.

Thank dog she is not pregnant! She got an A on her math test. Much, much more appropriate and worth celebrating. It’s very exciting to see her care about school and her grades and have a life plan. I don’t know if she will ever be able to get into the medical imaging program that she’s dreaming about, but at least she has a goal. She’s been on the straight and narrow since July. I know it won’t last forever, but it is a relief that things are going well for the moment. It sounds like her kids are doing a lot better, too. Stands to reason that having a sober mother in the picture would make a kid’s life a lot better. I just hope she gets the “let’s have a baby to make everything ok” mentality over with and gets her IUD put in again. You’d think she’d figure out that none of her kids have solved any problems. I love children, but children are stressors not solutions.