Friday, June 6, 2008

Tantrums, Golf, and a Snake

Whew. It's been a whirlwind of a week, which is quite obvious from the delay in my postings. Claire has had a class-act BRAT week. On Tuesday, she lost 6 out of 9 stars on her star chart - she had what I would rank as one of her top 3 temper tantrums one evening as we were into the bewitching hour previously discussed. She wasn't getting the "right" amount of attention and went ballistic. Of course both babies were also crying during this time so our household was truly a circus. I wanted to crawl in a hole and stay there for days. Instead, I feel like I've suffered through some dreadful 3-year-old behavior this week. Then she ended up sick on Wednesday - just a head cold, but nevertheless sick. So that might explain the horrid behavior (in addition to her transition time with the new nanny). I'm waiting on the twins to show signs of this same cold, so maybe we'll have the wonderful luck to have back-to-back earaches in both babies.

Wednesday, not knowing Claire was coming down with something, I sent her to her old in-home daycare to play all day with the kids there. I had the best work-from-home day possible! With only the twins to take care of, I can get a lot accomplished. Plus, I had a slow work day, so I was able to focus on getting laundry hung up and other house chores completed. It was fantastic. Well worth that $35 I pay for the luxury. I've got about 8 days this summer lined up for Claire to go to this house (though she missed one today because of her cold), so I should get a little relief here and there.

Thursday we had one of those wonderful (please hear the sarcasm in my voice) team building events at work. We started with a boring quarterly meeting, and then headed off for a par 3 golf event. Golf? Are you kidding me? I've never played in my entire life. I call this work humiliation. I was on my boss' team (more humiliation) and we actually won because he's a great golfer. The upside is we were done with work early and I had the chance to run some errands before going home. My first thought was to finally try one of those pre-made dinner places, the ones where you can cook your own meals in their kitchen and freeze them or pick up pre-made frozen stuff from the freezers. I tried mealsmith, and got three different nights of dinners. Last night we tried the pork chimichangas and they were excellent! I didn't expect anything that good so I was impressed. We have calzones and some kind of shredded steak tacos to try next. I spent about $50 on those three sets of meals plus some foccacia bread so I didn't think that was too bad. Anything to save some time in my life ...

And today, Friday, is another WFH day with the three kids. Work has been wonderfully slow, so I focused instead on preparing my side dish for the neighborhood's block party tomorrow. I pulled together a black bean salad which seems to require about an hour's worth of finely chopping vegetables. It's now marinating in the fridge. Kyle called and said that someone had one of those Little Tykes picnic tables out in their yard waiting for someone to pick it up for free, so he grabbed it. He dropped by the house to surprise Claire with it, and Claire and I went to work on cleaning it up. I've got one twin sleeping, the other in the activity center playing, and Claire and I have the hose on this table with the back door propped open. We're scrubbing away. I stepped up into the doorway to check my work laptop for any messages and about that time Claire screamed and said, "Mom, look, a worm!!". I thought, here she goes again being obnoxiously girlie about a little worm or bug. OH MYYYYYYYYYY NOOOOOOOOOO there was at least a 3-foot black snake about 2 feet from her. I was stunned. And shivering already. I said, "Claire, GET IN THE HOUSE NOW, THAT'S NO WORM, THAT'S A SNAKE". She dutifully ran in (thankfully) and I called Kyle screaming like a little girl myself. Within a few minutes the neighbor was in our back yard searching for the beast and then Kyle and one of his employees came back and looked for it too. No luck, they couldn't find it, so it's still lurking out there. Gross! I'm still shivering. You think I'm headed back outside again today? Huh. No way.

Hopefully I'll have time to be more diligent again about my postings this weekend. I hate sick kids. It's no fun for anyone. Our only big plan (who can make plans with infant twins???) is to attend this block party tomorrow evening and maybe if we're lucky we'll get some pool time this weekend. At a big "real" pool. Not with the snake in the backyard near the baby pool.

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