FALL HAS FALLEN

And so have I. This week I turn 44. I’m so proud of myself. Why do people hate telling their age? What’s so wrong with getting old? Besides the osteoporosis, loss of bladder control and arthritis, and heart disease and on and on. But the older you get the better you get, right? Like a fine wine I am getting better with age. Of course, I’ve never actually tried wine, and the way I see it, I’d rather drink grape juice, so maybe like a fine wine I’m just fermenting more and more. Yeah! I think that may be right, but I am older and wiser than I used to be. I think I like me better now than when I was 16. So by the time I’m 88 I should be a whole lot smarter than I am now. Or more fermented…I may well not have a mind anymore. I guess I might even be gone except according to an MSN questionnaire, the highest age I can expect to live is 100 or older. And I even told the truth about never exercising and eating only so-so. It didn’t exactly inspire me to improve my bad habits. I took another test that said if I were a famous leader, I would be Mother Teresa and if I were a movie I would be Schindler’s List. Did you know that my daughter E. is a combination of the character that’s a hairdresser that Dolly Parton plays in Steel Magnolias and CeCe Bloom played by Bette Midler in Beaches. I wonder what character is like me? What do you think? And while we’re psychoanalyzing me, if you are one of the people that knew me before I was 7, would you say I had ADD? Otherwise, I’m the first case of adult onset. It could be by association. In any case, I don’t care how old I get to be, as long as I can keep on learning new things and growing. This week I learned that you can actually burn something in the crock pot. That’s also a big bummer after waiting that long for it to cook. No wonder my kids sneak food to their rooms. I also learned what yellow tastes like. What the heck? I thought it was called corn, not yellow, but I bet it’s a whole lot more honest. There’s probably more yellow dye than corn in this stuff. I learned kids are very astute. D1 said, “You’s crazy mom” and I go to pick him up from the sitter and he says, “What’s wrong with you?” Nice greeting. At least he acknowledges my existence now. I told him, “I don’t know, we’ve all been trying to figure that out for a long time.” I learned that if your kids want stuffed jalapeno peppers and then decide they don’t, it is not a good idea to eat the whole plate full to save their lives, even if it tastes good.

The kids have been busy. The school still needed some more work so they were home Monday and Tuesday. Now we are finally in the new building! It looks great. Hopefully next week there will be indoor plumbing too. At least now they can say, “When I was a kid, I had to go outside to use a port a potty at school.” I would trudge through a blizzard and camp out to have this school; it is so worth it. Now real life starts though. School every week day, Saxon math every week night. Goodbye freedom! Good bye summer!
Speaking of which it has been so cold! I actually love fall except that I’m always mourning the loss of summer and dreading winter, but now that I’m so old and busy I know that before I know it, spring will be here again. So the war of the central air vs. Shellie begins. It has a mind of it’s own. If you put it on heat, it’s base temperature it reverts back to any chance it gets is 62. If you put it on cool, it switches to 95. It takes a while to train it to stay were I want it. This summer it was like already August and I was sitting down and all of a sudden I am sweating and hot and thinking, Oh, my gosh! I’m having my first hot flash. Then I checked the thermostat and it was only like 92 degrees in here. So, I still haven’t had a hot flash. I can wait. Of course, this winter I might wish for one.
So back to the kids, can someone explain to me why if they are gone all day they feel the need to cram in as much or more mess into what precious little time they have at home? I had to talk to my husband’s aunt in Chile, so I’m on the phone and the kids attack. C. has a big bag of chocolate chips in his hand and is making pleading doggy eyes. So I signal with my hands to take a teeny bit and move away. I get off the phone, and C. comes in to ask me something, chocolate moustache and beard all over his face, and a big blotch of chocolate on his leg. This means there is an identical one, probably on a bed. I go off to see and in the hall I see a curly lock of hair on the floor. It is not attached to a head. I call out, rhetorically, “Whose hair is this?” Duh, only G. has curls. He’s hiding in the corner of the bathroom, hands behind his back with the s-c-i-s-s-o-r-s in them. I know this because I am psychic and I have x ray vision. So, he’s not a natural barber. So I had to give him a buzz. J. didn’t think it looked too good. So he gave him a shave. He looks like he’s recovering from chemo now. Hopefully he’ll give up and have curly hair. Then E. comes in yelling don’t cut the legs off the grasshopper! Followed by D1, “Yeah, I told you, don’t cut the hot-doctor’s leg!” SO, it’s ok to cut their wings, but not their legs. I’m glad to know we draw the line somewhere.
Another day I go shopping. Apparently, D&D were making bubbles. The dish soap is almost gone. So was the milk, but luckily I was buying more. They tried mixing the two, then I guess it didn’t make too good of bubbles, so they served it to G. in a glass. He didn’t like it, so they decided to throw it down the stairs and see if it bubbled up. Some people don’t have the sense to wait till October to put up their Halloween decorations, so the boys decided to get out all the Halloween stuff. I got to put it all away. This weekend J. had so much fun being sick again with the dizzy stuff. He is falling apart. He showed me this neat video clip though. This guy named Paul Potts went on a show in England like our America’s Got Talent and sang. Opera. No training, he’s just always liked it. Everything feels right when he’s singing he says. What does he do for a living? Works in a car phone warehouse. Not anymore. He had real confidence problems and almost didn’t try out. He said when he was a kid, the others at school bullied him and made fun of him. He thought he was insignificant. Now he doesn’t. I loved this story because how often do we do this? We brush people off as unimportant or weird or whatever, and every one of us is an opera star so to speak on the inside. We all have something beautiful and divine in us. We really ought to remember that and believe that and treat each other like that more often. And he won the competition!