A Really Tiring Day of Rest

My adhd brain does opposite things than you'd usually expect sometimes. Like:

• Sometimes the most challenging tasks for me are in theory super simple and actually take like 5 minutes *if* I get the motivation to do them. 
• Things that are restful for people make my legs wiggly and my brain think about 87 things at once.
• How I exercise at bedtime so my brain will just chill out.
• A really busy day helps me function and a not busy one makes me sit and stare at a wall too long. 

Here's like a perfect day of rest for me: hiking 6 miles, kayaking for a couple of hours, a quick bike ride, then meeting with 3 different groups of friends. It's a really tiring day of rest fortunately/unfortunately.

Wash Your Hands: A Story About When Clara Licked a Public Toilet

Trying to protect kids from gross stuff and gross viruses is kinda futile. They lick things, touch everything, have fingers in noses and pants and ears and mouths, find old mystery food, eat old mystery food, you know... gross stuff.

One time I took the kids to the park. Clara was about a year old. I had to go to the bathroom and so I took her with me. While I was buttoning my pants, Clara shot over to the toilet and put her mouth on the toilet seat. Not the seat exactly, but the part where there's that little opening that the seat doesn't cover. It basically just catches pee? She put her mouth on that. 

I yelled and grabbed her and then because I didn't know what else to do, I washed her hands?

Like I said, it's all futile.  

President's Day

Here's something I thought about on President's Day: 

I don't remember all the presidents we've had. Do you? How many do you remember? Do you know more than one fact about them? I probably should, but I don't. Being the president is a big deal. It's a big job (despite some of our elections). BUT, even people who have held one of the most important and prestigious roles in this country get forgotten. Just some perspective for when you're feeling a little puffed up or pretty small. 

What would you pick?

Everyone knows if you have an iphone or android, and about your name brand shoes/ clothes, but I bet they don't know what kind of laundry detergent you use or what kind of toothpaste you like. There are brands of things that I like and faithfully buy that I mostly don't care enough to tell other people about- I bet you do too. Here are some questions:

• What kind of creamer do you buy?
• What brand of jeans is your favorite?
• What kind of hand lotion do you use?
• What is your go-to snack?
• Soda you always buy?
• Brand of socks?

Here are my current answers:

• creamer- Coffeemate original and peppermint mocha and then I mix them together
•  jeans- Target (universal thread)
• lotion- gold bond
• snack- sabra classic hummus and sun dried tomato wheat thins
• soda- grapefruit spindrift
• socks- these really squishy fruit of the loom ones.

Also we use some laundry detergent sheets that are apparently nice to the world and I like sensodyne toothpaste like a sophisticated lady.

One Song at a Time

I tend to like one song at a time. I listen to it 87,000 times until I don't want to hear it for like 6 months. Here's some of the songs I've listened to 87,000 times lately:

• Light of a Clear Blue Morning- the Wailin' Jennys one 
• Wintergreen- The East Pointers
• Find Your People- Drew Holcolm and The Neighbors
• Rolling Stone- Wild Rivers
• Redesigning Women- The Highwomen
• Esther, Ruth, and Rahab- Flamy Grant
• Don't Stop Me Now- Queen
• 26- Caamp
• Turning Page- Sleeping At Last
• Surface Pressure- Encanto Soundtrack

A Low Bar

 I have some hopes and wishes and the bar is really pretty low. Here they are:

1. That me and these sweet little people in my house would sleep a whole night, more than one night in a row. Like a whole week (or a month even- could you imagine?!) of sleeping every night? 
2. I'd like our house to stop trying to break some kind of perpetual illness record. We've had 0 whole weeks off since July 2023. That's 8 months now. There might have actually been ONE week, but I got sick on day 8 or 9, so I'm still counting this... for pride's sake. 
3. Related, I'd like no one near me to say (or give any visible signs of): "my tummy hurts," "I'm queasy," "I feel like I'm going to throw up," or "tummy yucky" (that one was Clara) for like 3 months straight. I'd also like to not have to or want to say those things.
4. I'd like to hang out with my husband one day, without our kids. I've tried, but then we get sick.  

That's it. That's the vacation I want to have. I'm not dreaming tropical resort-y vacation, just regular life with sleep and without barf.

(Can you tell I'm home today with a barfy toddler?)

*Unlike the blog title, I'm 100% serious about all these things... but also like, I definitely know we are super lucky and don't have chronic illness and life could always be 10,000 times harder. So, whining with perspective and stuff.

Quotes for Friendship

There are lots of ways we gauge how good of friends we're about to be friends with people: values, political/social leanings, shared sense of humor, general friendliness/kindness, things in common, etc. One of those things for me is if you catch the reference to whatever movie/show I slipped into a regular conversation.

Here are some of the ones I quote fairly regularly and/or did a bunch in HS/college:

• put the baby on a t-shirt. win, win, WIN.
• 10 AM TOMORROW!
• Guess what, I saw a dog today!
• Do you have a best friend? Does he have a big coat too?
• It's INSIDE the computer!
• Can I be wearing anymore clothes? 
• I drive a Tercel, yeah that's a Toyota. 
• I know you can be overwhelmed and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed? 
• (Cough) I have the black lung.
• I hope next time you'll estimate me.
• See if we can get YouTube out for this.
• bears, beets, battlestar galatica
• So, in your wildest dreams, you're co-owning a bed and breakfast with the devil?
• He wears t-shirts, sometimes.
• A pretty nice little Saturday.
• No milk will ever be our milk.
• Boom, roasted.
• A freak gasoline fight accident

I might have messed some of these up, but they're close. I'm not going to check them. 

About a third of them are from The Office. Others are: Friends, Zoolander, 10 Things I Hate About You, Can't Hardly Wait, Elf, Billy Madison, Old School. I think I only watched Old School once, but I really hung on to that one line (it's the pretty nice little Saturday one). 

Yelling from the Stairs

Clara's been picking up more and more words all the time. For a while though, she didn't say a lot but she also said a looottt with her face. The kid is really funny. I hope she's a storyteller one day. She's got perfect dynamics and facial expressions, and great comedic timing. She got pretty good at copying the cadence of our voices even when she had no idea what she was saying. You can really hear what you sound like (and how often you yell at the dog) when you have a toddler regularly doing impressions of you. 

One of those times is on the stairs. Sometimes I'll stand in the middle of the stairs and yell up to Aaron to come down or yell down to the kids if they're downstairs. Clara decided it's the place you're supposed to yell stuff. She stands in the middle, throws her whole body into it, and then just yells indiscernible "words." She doesn't have a message she needs to share, she just wants to be like the rest of us, yelling. 

Anyway, Clara's funny and if you need to yell, there's a place on the stairs that is meant for that. And maybe I should yell less.   

Handball

 I didn't really play sports growing up. Here's what I did:

• one season of cross country in high school
• tall flags one time in 6th grade and our performance was to "Stand Out" from The Goofy Movie soundtrack.
• double dutch jump rope like every recess in 5th grade
• "20 hits" in the front yard with my dad, which is where we get to hit the wiffle ball 20 times. One time I hit the ball like 3 houses away when he did his curve ball and I think he's never been prouder.
• sometimes at recess we played kickball or tether ball (until that one time the rope wrapped around my fingers)
• dance class in HS, which was for the kids who weren't as good as the ones who made the dance team and/or didn't want to commit to it. I'd like to think I was too busy for dance team...

That's basically it. Except for one more. HANDBALL.

Handball was to 1994 like gaga ball is to 2018. I played handball everyday at recess for years. I think I might have even been good. 

I remember learning about actual handball once, and we didn't play that. We played some other (probably way funner and better) version. I taught Aaron how to play this week and I transformed back into a 4th grader and remembered all of the rules. Here they are:

• you bounce the ball so it hits the wall and take turns with one other person
• the ball is one of those recess bouncy balls
• you cannot hit the ball with your bare hand, it has to be a fist or hands clasped together
• you have to let the ball bounce before it hits the wall and before your turn. 
• if the ball bounces twice, you're out
• all the kids wait until someone gets out so they can play the winner of the last game
• you can't catch the ball

But then we had a whole bunch of names for things that you could do that would get you out. It wasn't until I was telling Aaron all the rules that it was pretty obvious to me that a bunch of elementary school kids made these up. Here they are:

• a "baby"- when you hit the ball under the line (usually like 2-3 feet from the ground)
• a "poppy"- when you hit the ball and it lands in the spot where the wall meets the ground- probably because it pops back at you.
• a "waterfall"- when you hit the ball and it doesn't quite make the wall and rolls down.
• a "superman"- when you hit the ball against the wall without a bounce.

Then there were a couple bonus made up names for things you could do:

• "Doubles"- when you served you could hit the ball twice in a row so you could have a really big hit.
• "rainbow"- this was a thing, but I don't remember what
• "black magic"- sometimes you'd get like 2 of them per game (you had to agree on having black magics be a part of the game first) and you could pretend you were about to hit the ball but at the last second you'd yell, "black magic" and go under the ball making the other person scramble to hit it again.
• "catchy"- you got like 1-2 of them per game and had to yell out "catchy" before you caught the ball.
• "inner!!!"- (short for interference)- you yelled it when someone or something got in your way and then you got another chance. 

I don't know where my brain has been storing all of this information, but it all came back today. And now we've been playing handball on the side of the house every day since. 

Why This Blog is Kinda Vulnerable for Me

I've done this blog now for like 8 years? I mustered up some courage to start it that first year because choosing an appropriate amount of vulnerability as a practice (during a church season where people often take up thoughtful practices) seemed like a good idea. And also seemed better than giving up chocolate. :-)

It's still kinda vulnerable for me. 

Here's a bullet point list of some of the reasons why:

• Even though this blog is pretty irreverent, I'm still creating something that someone else can judge or make fun of or roll their eyes at.
• I don't have enough time to be perfect about this, so I post things before they're "ready" for the sake of just finishing it. That's also a good practice for me.
• I'm not a great writer. My job is like a lot of talking (heyyy every report card that said I talked too much to my neighbor in class- look at me nowww) and putting words together so that people will want to hear them. I'm way better at that than writing them down. So, I mostly just write like how I talk instead. Also, I'm not winning any grammar awards in this thing (but who would want to win a grammar award really). 
• I do really like being funny and I would very much like you to think that I'm funny.
• The way that I share this so that people can read it is via fb, which feels self-promote-y. I don't want to be self-promote-y, but I did intend for other people to read this, so. Anyway, it's vulnerable to be a little self-promote-y.
• This blog is mostly random thoughts that I have and now you know some of my random thoughts.