Remember all my whining and sobbing over my car air conditioning? I’ve delayed taking it in because of the $1200 compressor it was going to require. $59.95 later, some might say I suffered needlessly. Or my kids did, anyway. I suffered because I’m a nim-nim. They suffered because I forced them to. But it’s all over now. Thank you, God.

Today I went to Target with the three shortest of my children. With me were: Sister Shopping Cart Disaster, Loose Cannon, and Mr. Meltdown. Mr. Meltdown was great for two reasons: (1) He got to chow down on his favorite hot dogs, (2) I told him there was NO WAY we were buying anything for kids today. That eliminated the stress of choices. Sister Shopping Cart Disaster did not cause an actual disaster, but she about ran me over 24 times trying to push and steer. No. There is a reason 4 year olds don’t drive…anything. The Loose Cannon tried. She really did. But when it came time to throw away the open cup of marinara sauce, she just couldn’t quite get it into the trashcan. She dropped it. It exploded. And Target got a new color scheme. So did Sister Tinklebritches and myself. I have simply got to start shopping at 24 hour establishments at 3 a.m. I think it might be worth sacrificing the shut-eye.

I will leave you with a collection of Easter Bunnies from the Information Superhighway. You’ll like these.

Even the 50s had creepy Easter Bunnies…

WHAT.IN.THE.WORLD?

Something wicked this way comes…

Both of these characters are waiting on the Easter Bus…

Oh good, this one has a knife.

The parent of these children did not love them. Couldn’t have.

The illegitimate bunny child of the Easter Bunny and Chuck E. Cheese.

Paper mache at its absolute worst.

Every time I type a title for a blog, I think about capitalization. And then I think about the whole world’s view on capitalization. And then I think about what people did not learn in school. And then I shake my head. And then I type the title. Finally I move on. Next post, I will discuss how you are not supposed to begin a sentence with “and”, which I just did 4 times. But seriously. In a title or heading for something, you DO NOT capitalize those tiny little prepositions squashed into the middle of the title. So, for instance, The Sermon on the Mount would be as I just typed it. It would NOT be The Sermon On The Mount. This keeps me up at night, people. It does. Please email me if I need to take this any further. Also, talk to your preachers and power point prep guys in your churches. They could be sending people to the funny farm.

That was a crazy rant. 1000 pardons, please.

So, last night, I was out on the town (as if…) with a couple of strange girls like me.  We went to IKEA to eat and to shop. One of these girls is a wee bit OCD and was watching calories down to the tiniest of calories. She apparently had 611 calories to spare for the night. Not 610. Not 615. 611. It about blew up her Weight Loss app on her droid phone when IKEA didn’t have nutritional information readily available. And what was online was from Canada. Well, we all know you can’t trust a Canadian. If you didn’t know that, now you do. You’re welcome.

So at any rate, after eating and shopping (how many calories does it burn to control an IKEA shopping cart with two sets of swivel wheels???), we ventured to Steak ‘n Shake for dessert. Again, the Calorie Counter asked for a hard copy of a Nutrition Guide. At this question, the waitress squinted and just said, “No.” And though I didn’t say this out loud, I wanted to launch into a 15 minute monologue on why Steak ‘n Shake would never print a nutrition guide. I mean, come on. The restaurant should be called Instant Hospitalization. There was no milkshake under 700 calories. There was no dessert under 500, except for the chocolate chip cookies and the turtle thingie. I don’t eat turtles. I did order chocolate chip cookies and the lady looked at me like I had asked to see her tattoo.

So then it was time for Little Miss PDF to order. She was scrolling and counting. Counting and scrolling. Finally, after talking to herself for a few crazy moments, she said, “Oh, I can have the Small Hershey’s Dark Chocolate Milkshake! OK, I’ll have the Small Hershey’s Dark Chocolate Milkshake.” And she sighed, satisfied and triumphant. The woman met her satisfaction with bafflement and said, “We don’t have anything called that. We have the Double Dutch Chocolate Milkshake in a small…”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna work,” Little Miss PDF said. And she started scrolling again. “I’ll have a small hot fudge sundae.” Finally.

The moral of this dumb little story is:

No moral. Sorry. But IKEA is cool. And you shouldn’t capitalize prepositions. Or start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘or’.

Or trust Canadians.

Sometimes you get stories about there being warrants out for my arrest in Swamplandia. Sometimes you get the drivel that happens in my car on the way to church.

It’s been a sweet week with a sick Mamasboy. He’s finally returning to school tomorrow and life should be normal again around here. I’ll miss him when I go to do a Mad Lib. I’m pretty sure Snugglemonkey doesn’t know what an adverb is.

Right after dinner, Mamasboy was getting truly grumpy over a broken lollipop. (I have found this to be a high level crisis for at least three of the children. They like their lollipops to be IN TACT.) So I grabbed a fake microphone…actually just air…and I launched into the most horrible Wayne Newton version of the Brownie Smile song that you will ever in your life hear. I started it, “I have something in my pocket,” as I patted my fake pocket. “It belongs across my face…” I was singing my head off. The kids were watching me with a mix of horror and delight. “Annnnnd, I can’t remember the words…hang on…” And I ran into the dining room to Google the Brownie Smile song lyrics. OK. Got it. Back in business. “I keep it very close to me, in a most convenient place. I’ll bet you would not guess it, if you guessed a long, long while. So I’ll take it out and put it on, it’s a great big Brownie smile!” Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ll be here all weekend. One more time! And I launched into that again. This time I was rocking like no Brownie ever even dreamed of doing. Mamasboy and Beloved were cackling. The others were staring. Todd was looking for lawyers so he could just be done with it all. Three minutes later I was trying to herd the children up the stairs for bed, as Mamasboy had taken over the obnoxious song and tone. I couldn’t make him stop.

I have some regrets. I’m keeping them in that pocket, next to my dorky Brownie smile. They are sitting on top of an adverb. Politely.

Sometimes.

I ran out of gas tonight. Conveniently enough, I was near USF with an unnamed male to whom I am married and who was driving his own vehicle. And we conveniently pulled into a turn lane and called our baby sitter, who happened to be my dad. Ten minutes later my dad showed up in a convertible with my 9-yr-old son, who was hopping all over the place, giddy as snake in a rat museum. Oh, the adventure of bringing gas to your mom on a Friday evening. But it wasn’t gas. It was a gas and oil mixture, made for a lawnmower that hasn’t chewed a blade of grass in almost a year now. So, it was back to the gas station they went.

Soon enough, with some high octane imported from some far away scary country, we were on our merry way to Target again. After filling up our tank, the unnamed male got in the car and said, “Well, it’s good to have gas.”

“Depends on the context, I guess,” said I.

Hahahahahahahahaha.

I know. That was dumb.

Last night began a new phase in my life that I feel certain will induce a rapid slide toward my own mental illness. I found SnuggleMonkey standing by my bed in the darkness at 2:17 a.m. Yikes. There are a lot of things that cause my bones to quake from the chill of fear, but SnuggleDoofus wandering the house in the middle of the night while the rest of the house is sleeping is just a hair below Toothless Cat Burglar. You should meet her. You have no idea the damage she can do. All I can say is that I returned her to her bed and tried to fill her head with 105 reasons to never do that again. It won’t work. The mental illness is coming.

Every now and then I stumble upon a note from Mamasboy that makes me smile. A recent one that came home from church was:

I am very funny. I like jets and trains alot. I don’t like Superman.

Who knew?

I love Scholastic Book Order forms. I could read them and order from them from now until I am 94. And then at 94, I could pay $100,000 to a surrogate mother to have a brand new baby with my certifiable 67-yr-old (9th!!) husband. If I am Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Yeah, they really are. He says he’s retired. If she passes before  him, he’ll raise the baby. And unless he dies this afternoon, I think it’s safe to bet she’ll pass before him.

I don’t know if anyone was as savvy as Miranda the Machine in my Easter Photo Contest Winner post. She noticed that you could actually see the creepy person peeking out through the Easter Bunny costume. Wish I  had noticed that. That sight was almost as frightening as Zsa-Zsa Gabor becoming a new mommy at 94 or finding ScaryPants by my bed in the dark of night. Almost, but not quite.

Earlier today, I offered some of the worst Easter photos ever taken. They were taken by me. And though they are a wreck, I’m so thankful I felt pressured to take them. They represent an honest moment in time.

Tonight I present to you the winner of the Reverse “Best Easter Photo” Contest. It is a reverse contest, because the winner is announced first and you get the opportunity to unseat this winner…if you can. It’ll be tough to do, though, because this photo clearly represents the world of parents who drag their children to the mall to sit on the laps of a predatory costumed character. Then they watch their children dissolve into heaps of traumatized screaming. And then they pay at least $20 to preserve those chuckles forever.

I’m not judging.
I’ve done this.
Not with the Easter Bunny, but I have turned the hearts of my children away from Mall Santas for all eternity. Oh yes, I have. But you’ll just have to wait on that one. It’s only April.

So I present to you the following Winner. Should you have a photo of an Easter fiasco that trumps this, please send it to me. Perhaps we CAN unseat this winner. You have until Easter to try.

Just to make sure we don’t miss the impact of this moment, I have cropped this down into the cast of four characters. Continue scrolling…

This is Mr. and Mrs. Informinator’s firstborn, clutching Mr. BunBun for dear life and obviously pleading to be removed from the situation. He was fine up until the moment the cameras started rolling.

Below is Jessie. You may have seen her beat me in the Cone Off at the park. She was apparently screaming PRIOR to the photo. But after a good healthy spit-up, she was at peace with the holiday. I’m fairly certain she does have feet, but they are lost in the fur of this very large predator.

And this is Jocelyn. She was loving this. Totally.

And let’s not forget this guy. Does he look innocent to you?

I am completely creeped out right now…
Hoppy Easter.

Recently I drug a large blue Rubbermaid out of the attic to see what was in it. Diaries from 1984. Letters from college and my early married years. And a half-completed book of Mad Libs copyrighted at 1976. I’m certain it wasn’t 1976 when my brother and I did these. I’m guessing circa 1982 and up. We thought we were funny, so we had to be standing in line for our gawky years by then.

But since the book was only half-completed, it was also half empty. I just went ahead and filled that gap in for you, in case you are having an off day. And since Mamasboy is on his third day of fever, we’ve been lying around together doing some of these and cackling together. We may both be idiots, but we laugh at the same things, so it’s fun. Even with fever, we have a good time. Though Mad Libs are mostly designed for stupidity’s sake, you do have to know what verbs, nouns, and adjectives are. And you do occasionally have to identify a “girl in room” or yank the name of a celebrity out of a hat. For us, it’s easy to think of the celebrities. Charlie Sheen and Justin Bieber. Wait till you see the celebrity I came up with in 1982ish. Here’s an oldie that gave me a tiny chuckle. Hamlet, as Mad Llibbed by Bart and Missy.

Hamlet

This is the soliloquy from the play, “Hamlet,” written by Merlin Olson. In the third act of this round (adj) play, Hamlet, who is sometimes called “the melancholy flapjack (noun),” is suspicious of his stepfather and hires some actors to act out a scene in which a king is killed when someone pours Slurpee (liquid) into his tarantula (noun). First, however, he declaims: To be or not to be — that is the sock (noun). Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the pantaloons (plural noun) and hedgetrimmers (plural noun) of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of biscuits (plural noun), and by opposing, to end them? To die, to sleep — no more. And by a sleep to say we end the thousand natural gifts (noun) that flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to gnaw (verb); to gobble (verb); perchance to jiggle (verb); ay, there’s the leotard (noun).

Oh, Merlin Olson. Good times.

And I don’t mean the kind of hot you want to sit across a dinner table from. Yeah, not that kind of hot. I’m just hot, with heat…from the sun.

That’s the week’s theme.

It was funny yesterday. It was a teensy bit amusing this afternoon when I was driving with my head out the window and watching the girls spritz themselves with mist fans. The Informinator was directly in front of me and driving slow just so I’d have to sweat for 3.5 more minutes. But when I got back home from my little stint at the local pool and found the house to be at 82 and climbing with the AC unit frozen over like the floor of the Icecapades and with Todd out of town, all the giggles stopped. Oh, and now my car window will not lower. Here’s a thought, 1988, why’d you have to take away windows that you roll down with one skitter of effort from my elbow? I know, let’s put a $200 motor in the window that will break when it’s 92 degrees outside. If I ever meet that guy…

And apparently I sent Mamasboy to school sick today. I did think he was awfully sluggish. But the house has been hot, so a hot forehead didn’t strike me as uncharacteristic for the circumstance. But at dinner tonight, with the AC guy roaming around fixing this and that (so thankful he was able to come last minute), I laid my already too-warm cheek against Mamasboy’s forehead. Sweet Mother of Olympia Dukakis, he was hot. 103.4. Welcome to your day off school, boy. You get the blankets. I’ll bring the Diet Mountain Dew. We’ll do lunch.

And hopefully I can keep the house below 80 to offset that raging fever.

I’m just kidding about the Diet Mountain Dew.

Yesterday we had a fortunate glance into the heat that a pioneer might have experienced. Both our cars have lost their air conditioning. It gets HOT inside a car with 6 people in it. I dare say an open wagon would have been more pleasant, though much bumpier and dustier, I realize. Oh, and a million times slower. I know it’s not really a glance into pioneer living, ok? Just let me dream. A little heat and a subway sandwich has Prairie Living all over it.

And about lunchtime yesterday, our house AC froze up. There was no escaping the heat. By 6 p.m. it was almost 90 in the house and the cars were just as hot.

Let’s just say that i fully appreciate modern living. I like my toilet paper and my AC. And I’m not ashamed to say so.  The house AC was working again by evening, but the children went to bed with very sweaty heads in their upstairs rooms.

The cars, well, that may take awhile. But we will definitely be fixing the van before summer, because I’m not a strong enough woman to drag 4 kids to Texas in Summertime without a frosty vent blowing on me.

Today we are going to the pool to survive this springtime heat wave. In honor of us having skipped a season altogether, I will post a few of my favorite shots from the beachside pool. Summer may bring the mad heat with it, but it also brings the crazy good times.

Good luck on the FCAT, boys!

If the heat is getting to you, bring your kids to the rec center after school. We’ll be there celebrating Day 1 of the FCAT and the modern day amenities of 2011.

I’m on a diet.
Yeah. I am.
Most of the time.
The other day I had an Oreo, not because I was especially starved or even because it looked all that irresistible to me. It was there in front of me, so I ate it. I ate it quickly and painlessly and in one sweeping motion of hand to mouth, the oreo took a little trip down my gullet to be seen in the form of a pair of pants that doesn’t fit. Because I didn’t really want the oreo and because I didn’t savor it or lick the life out of the creamy center or enjoy it with the under-7 crowd, I sort of forgot I even had it. But sometime later I found myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror getting ready to go somewhere and I noticed there was black oreo dust all over my mouth. Hmm. I swiped at it quickly. It didn’t come off. So I swiped at it again. Nope, still there. I had to get a warm rag and scrub pretty good to get that one oreo off of my mouth.

That struck me for the moment. One oreo that I forgot about eating stayed with me and the residue of it was evident to anyone who saw me. That made me think about the secret things I say and think that I shouldn’t. Things thought about in my mind only. Or things said only to one trusted friend. Those are the secret oreo. What if those were written across my forehead in Sharpie? Gossip. Slander. Judgmental negativity. Criticism. Selfishness. Just because the world doesn’t see that oreo as it goes in doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

This morning we studied the tongue section of James. I’ve heard it as many times as I’ve heard the pledge of allegiance. For some reason, though, it hit me differently this morning. The statement was made that what comes out of your mouth is the greatest indication of your character that there is. What comes out of my mouth is who I am. Maybe not who I want to be, but who I am.

In the past, I’ve separated these little mouthy things from the rest of me. If I believe James, and I do, I can’t do that and be worth a whole lot.

I recently signed on to a nifty little site called Loseit.com. As you might guess, it is a weight loss site. Since signing on, I’ve done two things: gained weight and maintained the weight I gained. I’m pretty sure I’m throwing off their averages. I’m sure as fire throwing off mine. What is the deal?

The deal is: The little stuff matters.

I’ve been fooling myself for quite some time. I’ve been waiting for some big block of time or some big marathon for out-of-shape chicks to come along, complete with a very edifying personal trainer, instead of taking the 5 minutes I have to read a chapter in my bible or jump rope.  Because the chunks I have are more like scraps, I think they don’t matter. What would happen if I took every spare moment I had and gave it to something that made me better? What would happen if I shunned every Oreo and every preposterous article on CNN.com? And where would I be in one month if I replaced the drivel with things that grow me (not larger, you understand…)?

I have to try this. Again.
Fortunately for me, all the oreos are gone.