You know how Google tries to guess what you are wondering as you begin to type a question into the Search field? Have you ever taken note of its guesses? Today I quizzed it, to see what the most popular questions are. Here are a few of my favorites:

When you type the word “Is” into the Search field, the very first topic to come up is: “Is Justin Bieber gay?” This is followed by “Is Santa Real?” and “Is Kevjumba a heterosexual bear wrestler?” I did not make any of that up. Not one word.

“Why” renders the immediate guesses that I want to know why the sky is blue, why does it snow, why do men cheat, and why do cats purr. Beats me.

“What” brings up:

• What is my IP?
• What does my name mean?
• What is Lent?
• What not to wear

If you should take the What not to Wear bait, it will not further advise you about what actually not to wear. You just get caught in an endless spiral down the tube of bad television arm pit stank.

Type in “What caused” and you’ll get:

• What caused the Great Depression?
• What caused the Civil War?
• What caused the Solar System to form a disk?
• What caused World War I?
• What caused a dip in the population in 1918? Who knew THAT was a hot topic? Did you? I clicked the topic. Apparently there was a major Flu pandemic that year. I should type less and read more.

Ah, well. Fun with Google. Sorry, buddy. You didn’t read MY mind today. Maybe next time.

Once I got that ridiculousness out of my system and went back to laundry, I came upon the sweetest little accidental burrito. She was watching a movie, until her eyelids overcame her.

It isn’t often that I come upon a sleeping babe in the daylight when the light is soft. I didn’t edit these at all, except to add the black border on a few.

I had access to the Snappshots baby doll, A.K.A “Babe”, so I decided to have a little bit of fun with her. I found the next one kind of funny.

And some more…

And having a little look-see…

And now Babe is tired and going to rest a bit herself.

Creepy is the new Awesome.

And we’ll finish up this little nugget with Mamasboy’s response to hearing what dinner was tonight. This is not posed. He was real mad I took it. And he ate that Cuban food just fine, after he got over himself. Crazy good times.

Carry on.

I seldom get to the end of a day feeling fatigue like I do tonight. I felt like I was wearing a 150-lb fat suit that, besides weighing me down, was punching my arm pits every 7 seconds. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I asked a friend, we’ll call her Flecky FigPenny, to motivate me to exercise during yesterday’s play date at the park. There is a difference between exercise and Chinese torture. She was brutal. If you want to jog, she makes you run sprints. If you are unable to do the commanded pull ups, she’ll make you do the flex-arm-hang. And suddenly you are back in 4th grade again, fighting to stay up over that bar for 60 seconds (try 25…) and hoping that Presidential Award shows up in your mailbox.

With that said, just know that when I sit for longer than 2 minutes, my muscles begin to shut down. So this entry could get ugly.

Today was filled with successes and failures, and was somewhat balanced on both sides. I think some bullets are in order:

Successes:

• Early to preschool drop off. Didn’t have to use my Panic Voice with either of the girls.
• Managed to almost-immediately channel my ire toward the owner of the gold Nissan Armada who parks across 2 spaces every.single.morning. Your car is not as nice as you think it is, lady.
• Walked to the neighborhood pond with Snugglemonkey and played a very twisted and confused game of Hide and Seek. Sometimes she was the hider, sometimes the seeker, sometimes both. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 9. 10.11, 17, 19, 31, Ready or not. I’m coming.
• Read Amelia Bedelia to the sweetest, fluffiest, cutest, brightest-eyed, most squishy group of 4-yr-olds I have ever seen. Amelia Bedelia ROCKS. So does Beloved’s preschool class.
• Played at the park for 30 minutes and then successfully dragged 4 kids downtown to a routine dr. appt. Besides having SnuggleMonkey swing open the door to the Patient Bathroom while I was sitting on the toilet, this experience was uneventful and smooth. It isn’t usually. At the very least, we are almost always there for an hour longer than we should be.
• Went for slurpees at 7-11 to celebrate the day’s successes.

Failures:

• Unfortunately, the Slurpee celebration was one of the day’s failures. Taking 4 kids to the slurpee counter turns into a barrel of crazed monkeys. They sprout arms like a sprouting dandelion in one of those time-lapse nature movies. They start grabbing cups and reaching for levers and unwrapping straws. The Peach Passion fruit blew up in my face and got on everyone. It was like a fruity volcano that made SnuggleMonkey cry. Before 7-11 was over, I had been talked into donuts and chocolate chip cookies. You know…nothing says fresh baked goods like 7-11.
• Oh, and while standing in front of the cashier to pay for the 5 slurpees, 3 donuts, and 3 chocolate chip cookies, my ATM card was “DECLINED.’ Now doesn’t THAT just make a person feel like a leper. You feel like you have to start explaining to the cashier and others in line “I really do have $10.68 in my account. This is the bank’s fault.” And they nod and give you a tight-lipped smile with the sarcastic “sure” look in their eyes. Poor girl with her little passion-fruit-faced street urchins.
• I called the bank. Hello? Why was my card declined? Oh, yes m’aam. We are having a big problem with our system Your card cannot be used as a debit right now but you can run it like credit. Since when? I asked. Since last week, she says. Last week? What? Is this 2011? When will it be fixed? I asked. We don’t know, she answered. Oh, well, this is all so good to hear, 5 minutes too late. Thank you for letting me know. What in the world.
• I did not exercise today and snuck a few bites of the leftover baked yummies from the convenience store.  And still I feel I’ve been beat up by Kung Fu Panda.
• I put two kids in the bath to, you know, promote cleanliness. And I put bubble bath in the bath to sort of tap the whole deal with a fun stick. That went bad fast. Mamasboy is allergic to everything, including most of his thoughts. Apparently he is also highly reactive to bubble bath. This resulted in a nasty allergy attack on his skin, which led to extreme screaming. The kind of screaming that makes you look over your shoulder for a concerned neighbor or a member of the Department of Children and Families. Screaming and itching. LOTS of both. For a long time. And all while Jackson was over from across the street. I stuck my head out to explain we were not just having temper tantrums. But as I was trying to work Mamasboy through this attack, Snugglemonkey escaped from the bath and was running sudsy and buck naked through the house, around and around and around, while Jackson and my oldest played a game together. As Jackson was leaving, I took him by the shoulders and made him look me in the eyes. “Boy, listen to me.” He couldn’t look. “LOOK AT ME!!! We are NOT crazy. Don’t tell your mom about all of this. BOY! Do you hear me?!” By then he was crying and trying to pull away.

No, he wasn’t. And no, I wasn’t. Tell me you didn’t believe any of that.  I did try to say “Hey, we aren’t crazy!” as he walked out,  but the door had slammed already. Oh well.

In all of it, though…the good, the bad, the ugly, the nudity…it was a day of those everyday pinpricks into glory. And it was completely worth that big, heavy fat suit called fatigue.

Tra-la-la-la-la-la.

I just watched a commercial for Colgate Total. A lady was being shown how many germs were present in her mouth using some schmo’s toothpaste. Then the woman in charge said, “You wanna see a Colgate Total mouth?” And of course the first lady said yes. If she hadn’t, she’d have gotten punched. With a tube of toothpaste. Listening to her tone, it sounded aggressive. She was picking a fight. I might use that line the next time my mother-in-law tries to arm wrestle me. You wanna see a Colgate Total mouth? Yeah. I didn’t think so.

Mundane is probably not the right word for how I feel about things. I don’t feel negatively toward it. I am surrounded by busy people. Busy with jobs. Busy with appointments. Busy with organizations or hobbies. Busy. So busy that they look panicked and bewildered if asked to do anything social. The task of scheduling an hour with me to figure out how to dress up like a turkey and make announcements on a school morning show is enough to cause all of us to hit the speed dial entry for their therapist.

I’m not knocking therapists. I’ve been there. With bells on. But not for busyness and he isn’t on my speed dial. I actually have no idea how to even use speed dial. I’m freakish with phone numbers. I don’t need speed dial. I can call Mer’s parents right this moment at 555-893-3624 and she hasn’t lived there in 20 years. They still live there, though, and they would answer. I could call 555-386-6262 and the ghost of my grandma might hop up and try to chat. Probably not, though. Or I could dial 555-385-6553 and tell the person that answered that my best friend, Debbie, had this number in 1975. My own number was 555-385-9788 but with a real area code.

WHO CARES?

No one.

My point is that I appreciate the mundane. I appreciate a morning when my girls are curled up together on a couch watching a wildlife movie while I mop and do laundry in the background. I appreciate having nowhere to be at 4:30 in the afternoon while my boys roam the house with a friend from down the street.  And I appreciate the fact that we can have as much fun riding our bikes to McDonalds to eat happy meals as we could have doing something super difficult or fancy.  (Though I do not appreciate that just three of us spent $21.14 at McDonalds. WHAT? Hello. Could have gone to Applebees and eaten something that actually was alive at one time…something that wasn’t crossbred or cloned…) And I really, really, really appreciate that someday the mundane will give way to the college applications and the moving out of state. Someday my clothes will fit better and no one will be pawing at my hemline. I will sit through church with no one climbing up in my lap and yanking my elastic-collared shirt down to my waist.  I will have an entire conversation with another adult without the tap-tap-tapping and the “mommy, mommy, mommy” that comes with it.

And when that someday comes, I will reach for my phone.
And I will bypass speed dial and dial my therapist.
Because I will never forget his number.

It seems that my daughters have taken a fancy to media lately. In light of that, I am doing a post that is centered around them.  I am in the process of getting my 4-yr-old to wake herself up at night to use the facilities so we can be done with wiping up things that should be deposited elsewhere. Judge me if you must. It won’t speed up the process any. Tonight as I was putting her to bed, I realized I hadn’t changed her sheet yet from this morning’s slight infraction. Ugh. That meant effort. So I went to her bed and pulled back the top sheet to see what kind of pad I had put under her damp sheet. A towel. Awesome. That works. But it was slightly damp, too, so I looked to see what was under the towel. A Buzz Lightyear  sheet. OK. Well, then I looked to see what was under the Buzz sheet. A wetness protection crib pad. Cool. So I pulled that back to see what was under the crib pad. A clean, dry blue sheet. Way awesome. And so, not to break this streak, I pulled back the blue sheet to see what was under it and found a regular old mattress pad. To spare you the math, that’s SIX layers. I’d like to say that was done on purpose for just this occasion, per the Informinator, but I’m pretty sure I just kept adding on layers in the dead of night and in the clutches of fatigue. Whatever the case, to remain consistent, I added a towel for luck and went with it. From six layers to three, we are off to the races.

I am posting the following video to combat the literary devices of James Joyce from a couple of entries ago. This is a riveting reading of Llama, Llama, Red Pajama. I tell you the title, in case you miss the 84 times she mentions it. Because I am still new at the blogging thing, my videos are linked from Youtube. You can’t embed a video on a free wordpress blog, at least as far as I can tell. They advertise this as a free service, until you start trying to do things. Oh, you want to use vowels? Well, for $6.95 you can get the Vowel Package, which comes with Y.  If you want any font besides Times New Roman,  you need to sign up (and pay) for Typesetters Paradise. You.will.love.it. Want to embed videos? That’s $24 and a sample of your DNA (first typed that DAN, which really changed the sentiment I was going for). All of that to say that I apologize for you having to click Youtube links and then click back to the blog. Irritating. I’m hardly worth it. But if you can survive a couple more weeks, I plan to do some splishy splashy magic (think Todd) and get this thing running better.

So as I was uploading the interpretive reading of LLRP, I discovered that two little imps had a secret hobby. They apparently absconded my camera yesterday and did with it the equivalent of a joy ride in a stolen car or a rave thrown at the house while the parents are out of town. While their mother was blogging, they took my Powershot for a spin.

I’m just going to post these in the order I discovered them on my camera.