You Tube

On nights when we don't have much else to do, we've been letting the kids watch episodes of old cartoons on YouTube.  Who needs a 92 inch plasma TV when you can watch 20 year old cartoon re-runs on three inches of display  on a computer monitor?  Not the Becker Bunch, that's for sure!

Here they are watching Thundarr the Barbarian, one of Matt's old favorites.  It's quite a hoot- all about the post-apocalyptic world in the far off year of 1994.  Another new favorite is the old Mr. T cartoon.  That's the one where Mr. T is the trainer for a group of young gymnasts who go around solving mysteries.  I pity the fool who thought up that concept.
This stuff is far more entertaining than the cartoons produced these days.  

Not as helpful as they think...

It's mud season in Rochester, which in other parts of the country is referred to as "spring".  Lately there has been more mud inside the house than outside.  I spend most of my days now sweeping up dirt and mud and screaming at the perps who drag it in.  I sent Paul in to take a shower (in my nice, clean, newly painted, newly tiled bathroom), and there was so much mud and grass on the floor when he was done you'd have thought we were hosing off horses in there.   This same child, in an effort to be helpful, thought our dog looked thirsty while she was outside playing this morning.  He so kindly took the hose and filled up a hole the dog had dug with lots of water.  Hole + water + dog = very muddy dog.  My floors don't stand a chance.

In other news, all of my children have been running very low on socks and underwear, so we made a very necessary trip to Target.  For those who are slow at math, five children between them have fifty very busy fingers, and it generally takes all of my energy to keep said fingers from grabbing items off shelves, touching things they ought not touch, and poking each other.  At the checkout, I only had one item in the cart that I did not put there, so it was not such a bad trip.  Pray for me, as we still have to go to the grocery store later.  I can really only bite my tongue and roll my eyes when I hear other mothers complain about how hard it is "to get through the store with two kids".  Puh-lease.

I'm baaaacckkk....

So, I have been suffering from two serious maladies that often afflict bloggers- 1. busyness and 2. boring-ness.  We've been very busy with all manner of uninteresting day to day type stuff, as well as a lot of uninteresting house buying and selling stuff.  As such, I haven't had much interesting stuff to blog about.  A look at the photo below pretty much epitomizes how things have looked around here the last few weeks.

We've been going like gangbusters trying to get the house ready to sell.  This, supposing we can find a place to buy.  We saw the perfect house last week- everything I could have wanted!  When I called the realtor to go and have a second look at it, he told me it had sold.  I'm still very broken hearted over the whole affair.  Houses like that just don't come along very often...but I won't carry on about it any longer.  Anyways, part of our house-fixing involves re-doing the bathroom.  Renee got up from her nap yesterday and exclaimed, "Hey!  There's a potty in the hallway!"  Nothing slips by her.

If you have young children (or boys of any age) potties are a source of endless fascination, entertainment, and humor.  On a two-hour plane trip one child will need to use the potty about 14 times.  Children love using the potty at other people's houses and every public place that has one available.  A recent trip to home depot had my kids going ga-ga over all those potties, lined up so prettily on display.  Most of my children know that these potties are not functional, but I kept a close eye on them anyways, because none of them are above a good dare.  Now that would make a good blog post...

The Dog Who'll Eat (almost) Anything

She's eaten the corner of my coffee table.  Baskets.  Molding.  Shoes.  String.  Paper.  Dead birds.  Books, including expensive library books.  Garbage, both from the garbage can in the kitchen and whatever she finds outside.  Cat poop.  And her favorite treat so far, her own vomit.  A child reported to me earlier this week that the dog had pooped out a Polly Pocket dress, which I was glad to hear, since I'd seen her eat it earlier in the day.

She would not, however, eat the puppy worm pills the vet instructed me to give her.  Today she was due for her second dose.  The pills are shaped like little bones and flavored to taste good to puppies, so you'd think she'd scarf them right down, especially in light of the other items on this week's menu.  I hid the first one in a blob of peanut butter that she licked off a spoon, much to the delight and amusement of the children.  When we tried the same thing with the second pill, she licked off the peanut butter and spit out the pill.  I tried hiding it in a mushed up piece of cheese, and this time the medicine went down.  Good dog.

Count Chocula

If you grew up in the 80's, you certainly will remember Count Chocula, as well as his contemporaries, Boo Berry and Frankenberry.  All three of these were available for $1.89 per box at the new Price-Rite that opened up in town.  Naomi and I went to check them out on Sunday, and purchased exactly one box of Count Chocula as a special treat.  Split six ways (yeah I had a bowl, too), one box of cereal = one meal around here.

Paul and Joe, as you can see, have decided to try again and see how many days in a row they can dress in head-to-toe camo (the previous record, held by Paul, was 9 days, before running out of clean clothes).  They have more camo gear and clothes than the armies of some small countries.  They even have on camo socks.  I asked Joe what color undies he had on, and he assured me that these, too, while not actually camo-patterned, were of a color that matched the rest of his ensemble.  We're nothing if not fashionable around here.

I think it was an old Army slogan that went "We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day", or something like that.   Before breakfast, the boys helped me give Fly a bath ('helped' being used very loosely here).  I guess she was even dirtier than I realized, because she sure is a lot softer and fluffier now.  However, a wet dog, even a clean wet dog, still smells very much like a wet dog.  

A Quote I'm Stealing....

Be the kind of woman such that when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says, "Oh crap, she's up!"

Funny Story From Awhile Back

So, I did end up doing a lot of work on the house last week, mostly painting and cleaning and doing a few other things to get the house ready to sell.  Here we have a pic of Matt nailing up molding in the downstairs bathroom, which I just finished painting.  You may notice a square hole in the ceiling there, just inside the door frame.  Working in the bathroom last week reminded me of the story of how that hole came to be there, almost exactly two years ago.

It was in February, two years ago.  We had had a very hard year.  I had gone through surgeries for cancer and had a brand new baby, we had three deaths in the family in a very short span, and I had just finished a major radiation treatment and was still getting back on my feet, and needless to say, our nerves were somewhat fried.  Anyways, one of our smoke detectors was giving us the 'low battery' signal and would emit a single 'beep' once every few minutes.  I ignored it for a few days (lots of problems can be solved by ignoring them for a few days), but finally got tired of hearing the stupid 'beep' and asked Matt to replace the batteries.  Good man that he is, he replaced the battery in the upstairs smoke detector (the one I had assumed was beeping) and then joined me on the couch to relax for the evening.

As soon as he sat down, we heard the 'beep' again.  Me- "Don't you know how to put in the batteries?" Him- "Do you think I'm stupid? I know how to put in batteries!" So, we go upstairs to investigate.  As we were standing there with the smoke detector in hand, we again heard the 'beep'.  Well, obviously it must be the downstairs smoke detector, since it wasn't the one Matt was holding.  Down the stairs we went to the lower level to fix our problem.  Again, while we were standing right under the smoke detector, we heard the 'beep' again, and it was most definitely not coming from this one, either!  So what was beeping and where was it coming from?!!

Now we were on a mission.  We couldn't just keep ignoring the beeping, but we couldn't figure out where it was coming from.  The 'beep' only went off once every few minutes, so we listened, then hurried over to where we thought the sound was coming from, and then waited and listened for the next beep.  When we were upstairs, it most certainly sounded like the sound was coming from downstairs.  When we listened downstairs, it sounded like it was coming from upstairs!  With my ear to the ground in the upstairs hallway, I could swear it was coming from underneath the floor.  Directly below the hallway is the downstairs bathroom.  I stood listening for the beep, with my ear to the drywall, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from.  It was inside the wall!

A little bit of back story.  Almost exactly a year prior to this incident, we had some major renovations done to the house, in anticipation of our new baby.  We gutted the back of the lower level right down to the studs, and had all new drywall, windows,  and floors put in.  Sure enough, in the chaos that accompanies a major project like that, someone had taken the smoke detector off the wall that was being torn down, and set it on top of some exposed duct work to be out of the way for the moment.  The project progressed, new drywall went up over the ducts, and the old smoke detector was long forgotten.

Until the batteries ran low and it started beeping.  From behind the drywall.

I went and got a hammer and utility knife, and listened again for the 'beep', trying very carefully to pin down its precise location.  I took my best guess, and cut a small hole in the bathroom ceiling.  The next 'beep' was much louder.  Matt reached up into the hole and felt around, and sure enough, he was able to reach the smoke detector.  The hole I cut wasn't big enough to pull the detector out, so Matt disconnected the old battery, and alas, the beeping stopped.  

You can still see the old smoke detector up through the hole in the ceiling.  Two years later, I am just getting around to patching the hole in the drywall.  I hate to think what would have happened if I had burned dinner or something at some time during the smoke detector's time behind walls, or if it was too far up out of reach for Matt to get to.  All's well that ends well,I  suppose.