WAAAAAAA! (That’s the sound of a baby crying in case you didn’t get that.)

We are a military family.  Air Force to be exact.

And we love the military life.  We love getting paid to go live overseas in Bavaria, Germany for three years.  My husband loves the fact that all of the schooling he has had in the past 16 years has not only been paid for, but HE has been paid while getting it.  We love that the babies we have had in the hospital only cost $25 each.  We love that we don’t have to worry about medical insurance or how we will be taken care of when we get sick.  We love being able to live on a military base with all its conveniences and safety.  But most of all, we love not having to pay utilities.

Because we live in Arizona.

Where it’s hot.

There is one thing, however, that is not appreciated by our military member, namely Yummy Man.

About a year or so ago, some top Air Force guy decided that it would be a neat idea to designate Mondays to being the day when all Air Force members, Air-Force-wide, wear their dress blues uniform.  (And yes, I do realize how many times I typed “Air Force” in that last sentence.  Hey, it’s my blog.)

This uniform’s pants are a combination of wool and polyester and the shirt is mostly polyester but with just enough cotton to make me have to iron it so that the sleeve creases could leave you with a paper cut.  And, oh yeah, the pants HAVE to be dry-cleaned.  No questions asked.  And the shoes are made of plastic.  Seriously.  So there’s that.

So basically, the idea I’m trying to convey here is that this uniform is NOT comfortable.

The reason why I know this is because, beginning Sunday afternoons and going all the way to Monday night, I get to hear JUST how uncomfortable this uniform is.

Every.

Thirty.

Minutes.

“I HATE Mondays!”

“I HATE blues!”

“Man, I wish I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow! ” (on Monday.  You know, Blues Day.)

“Who was the idiot that thought up blues anyway?”

“Those blues are like working all day in a straight-jacket!”

“Man, I hate blues!”

And it has just gotten worse.  Normally, Yummy Man goes to work in his Battle Dress Uniform which is called something else now but, after 16 years, I still call it BDUs.

Sue me.

The Battle Dress Uniform is basically like wearing sweats to the office.

With boots.

So you can see why Blues Day is Just.  So.  Hard.  To.  Deal.  With.

Unless you’re married to me because I just can’t seem to conjure up the sympathy required to feel too sorry for Yummy Man.

I think it has something to do with the fact that I’ve been pregnant 11 times.  Nine of those were full-term PLUS, so when I count it up, I’ve been pregnant for almost 87 months of my life.

That’s over 7 years of my life that I have been pregnant.  Fat.  Uncomfortable.  Sore.  Exhausted.  Uncomfortable.  Unable to sleep.  Sore.  Uncomfortable.  And did I mention FAT?

So the blues thing?  Not feelin’ it.

He gets to sit in an air-conditioned office, with coffee and a drink machine, a snack room, multiple TVs and computer monitors PER PERSON, morale days where they play games and have cook-outs, plus he gets to wear the equivalent of sweats most days, AND he gets paid for it?

You’re thinking the same thing right about now, aren’t you?

Waaaaaa, right?

Yeah.  Me too.

Plus, there’s the other thing.

You know, the one about a man in uniform?

And the attractive-ness factor inherent in that?

Yeah.  So me likes the uniform.

It’s very very nice.

Blues Day RULES!

My Own Personal Comedian

So what do you do when one of your kids has the kind of humor that compels him to walk around like Mr. Tumnus from Chronicles of Narnia?

With the bent legs and the tiptoes and all.

And since it makes you laugh so hard you almost wet yourself, he does it every chance he gets.

I’ve decided that the word “dork” is a term of endearment for this child.   He was put into my life to make me laugh more.

Between him and Yummy Man, I have very few serious moments.

15-Year-Old Funny

So we were sitting out back the other day.  The small children were running around picking “flowers” and bringing them to me.

(I write “flowers” because here in Arizona, they don’t know what flowers REALLY are.  They aren’t twigs with prickly stems and a piece of fluff on the end.  I’m just sayin’.)

So as one child brought me a little bouquet of prickly twigs with fluff on the end, I thanked them, held them in my hand and sniffed deeply.

And I almost heaved.

Because they smelled HORRIBLE!

So I said……I bet you can’t guess……”These flowers smell HORRIBLE!”  (Small child had run off by then so I’m not a terrible mother)

And then 15-Year-Old said, “Boy, you just don’t hear THAT sentence much, huh?”

Just so you know, when you find out that your 15-year-old has your sense of humor, you just want to lick them all over, don’t you?

But I didn’t.  Because she thinks hugs are irritating.  I can only imagine how she feels about licking.

Homeschool Play

I think that most of my readers are homeschoolers and that’s cool.

But if you read this blog and you are NOT a homeschooler, I’m sure you’re cool too in another area of life that I pretty much stink at.

So now that I’ve ensured that I keep ALL of my readers and don’t step on ANYONE’S toes, let me continue by telling you that this a post about homeschoolers.

The almost-13-years-old kind.

Correct me if I’m wrong but if my almost-13-year-old son was in public school, he would be into things like Playstation and ESPN and skateboarding and girls.

Right?

Well, he’s not.

Far from it, in fact.

And we just couldn’t be happier, Yummy Man and me.

See, a few days ago, I noticed that 13-Year-Old was back behind the house in the open area that we play in sometimes, pulling around a little red wagon with a bucket inside that used to have detergent in it.

Inside the bucket were various baseball bats and tennis rackets and wooden guns and long sticks in general.

And he was pulling the whole thing along, stopping periodically, studying his stash of long sticks, choosing one, and then swinging at a plastic baseball on the ground as hard as he could.

Then he’d raplace the stick, grab the handle of the wagon and continue on.

He was playing golf.

And he told me that the little red wagon was his “golf stroller”.

You just can’t get more priceless than that now, can you?

The moral of this little story is this………

Innocent, wholesome, homeschooled almost-13-year-olds RULE!

The I’m a Bad Mother Post

We’ve been sick here for the past 2 weeks.  Well, really more, but I can’t stand typing fractions so we’ll just stick with nice, even, plain 2 weeks.

Fevers, coughing, running noses, sore throats.

Times 9.

But here’s the thing and I know that this is gonna sound all horrific and terrible to you moms out there but I’m going to admit it anyway.

I love when my littlest ones are sick.

Why, you Scary, Freaky, I-Can’t-Believe-God-Let-You-Have-Nine-Whole-Kids Woman, you may be asking?

Well, it’s because when they’re under the weather, they spend hours sitting on my lap.

Just sitting there, all still and chubby, blinking pitifully and quietly filling their diapers.

And I get to pet their arms and squeeze their thighs and kiss their fat little cheeks, like, 100 MILLION times an hour, and study their chubby toes and adorable cow-licks and basically think how stinkin’ blessed I am to have the cutest kids in the universe.

Even cuter than yours.

Because usually, the only times I get to get this up-close and personal is when I’m maintaining their personal hygiene or being their milkman.

See, my two littlest ones are boys so there’s not much snuggling going on with them.  They’re too busy driving cars off the dining room table and throwing sand at each other in the backyard and pounding on the piano when I’m not looking.

So you can see why I love it when they get sick.  Not ventilator-sick or even antibiotics-sick.

Just plain ‘ole runny-nose-small-pitiful-coughing sick.

Come on.  Admit it.  You can relate, right?

 

Oh. Brother.

If you’re a mom, you know that exactly the moment you go into the bathroom, needing to take care of business, lock the door, and get down to said business, one of your children will appear outside the door, crying or screaming or yelling about some emergency or another and, apparently, he will be invisible to any other child in the house who normally would be encouraged to help him.

That happened to me today.

I called through the door that I would be out in a few minutes and Screaming Child would live until then, but he kept it up.

For a long time.  Even though, every 30 seconds or so, I’d yell out to him, reassuring him of his okay-ness.

But he wasn’t having it.

By the time I opened the door and came out, there were major tears and gasping and general, blatant pathetic-ness.

And when I asked him what was wrong, he (Three-Year-Old) held up a Beanie Baby moose and told me that it was scaring him.

So then I blinked a few times, trying to figure out why he didn’t throw it to the floor and run, crying and screaming from the room (and away from my bathroom break), and after I decided that I just wasn’t going to understand 3-year-old-ness at this point in my life, I told him to go put it back in the Beanie Baby crate and he did.

And that was that.

Weird, cute kid.

This Morning’s Phone Call

This was a conversation I actually had with my mom on the phone this morning……

Me:  “Hey!  Whatcha doin’?”

Her:  “Oh, we’re just working around the house.  I’m trying out a new color of lipstick and I just don’t think it’s going to work out too well for me.”

Seriously.

That’s what she said.

Now, you have to know that my mom probably works harder than I do.  She is excruciatingly organized.  She spends most of her week carting around her mom to doctor’s appointments and doing stuff for my dad and generally running a house that has two grannies living in it and all their accoutrements plus my dad and all of HIS guy-ness.

And she is NOT high maintenance or trivial.

At ALL.

That’s why this was so funny to me.

But maybe not so much to her after she reads this.

Interpretation

Three-Year-Old is in this stage where his speech is…….um……challenging, shall we say.

Really?  We can understand maybe every sixth word.

Which makes things kinda hard when he wants to tell us something.

And he’s got all the facial expression and voice inflection and his eyes just plead with you to understand him and the vital ideas he is trying to convey.

It breaks my heart.  Because he so WANTS me to understand him and most days I just don’t.

Last night, he was standing in the living room, telling me the same phrase over and over.

And over.

“Liteoing.”

“Mommy!  Liteoing.”

“LITEOING.”

We still weren’t getting it, so we started our guessing game.

Us:  “Lights on?”

Him:  “Mommy!  Liteoing”

Us:  “You want the gate down?”

Him:  “Liteoing!”

Us:  “You want to play the piano?”

Him:  “Mommy!  Liteoing!”

Us:  “You want a puppy?  ANYTHING!  We’ll give you anything if you just stop saying ‘liteoing’ and just forget about it!”

Him:  “MOMMY!  LITEOING!”

Then 5-Year-Old wanders into the room so we enlist her help because she USED to know the language that 3-Year-Old now employs although I think it was Girl dialect but I’m not sure.

And we were hoping she could interpret.

So we asked her if she would listen to what he was saying and tell us what she thought.

Then we looked at 3-Year-Old and asked,

“Can you say it again, buddy?”

And he yelled, “MOMMY!”…..and was taking his next breath to say the “liteoing” word when 5-Year-Old looked blankly at us and then said,

“Mommy.  He said ‘Mommy’.”

And she really didn’t understand what the problem was.

New Blog

If you are interested in my new running adventure you can check out the new tab at the top of this page.  I have created a new blog to chronicle my thoughts about running and the actual implementation thereof.

If you are just interested in reading about my mommy adventures, then it’s perfectly okay ignore the new tab.  I’ll still be writing here about our large-family life.

So.

Mommy of nine life and running mommy life.

You get two for one if you’d like!

‘Cause I’m multi-talented that way.

I’m Just Sayin’

I really don’t understand the whole Halloween thing.  I mean, what gets into people, you know?  How is it that plastic parts in the shape of a man’s arms and legs and head, stuck into the ground so that it seems like he is being buried alive……..how is this considered decor?

“Classy” and “Halloween” certainly do NOT go together.

It’s amazing to me the sense of tackiness that attacks people come October.  Here are a few examples that come to mind……

Wooden crosses stuck into a yard in various places with a hoe like a grave is in the process of being dug.  Huh?

Orange lights on a tree outside which is kinda Christmas-y, but not, so what’s the point?

Flashing strobe lights in the front yard, POINTED TOWARD THE HOUSE.  I’m thinking the neighbors must all be either deployed or blind for those residents to be able to get away with that monstrosity.

Huge, dangling spiders or skeletons or ghosts.  I mean, it’s no wonder that our society is so violent.  Why not just put a bunch of strangled kittens hanging from a tree in your yard?

Or how about a 6 foot jar of formaldehyde with a dead guy floating inside on your front porch? 

If anyone on our street is reading this, it is entirely possible that they may be thinking……

WHAT A FANTASTIC IDEA!  NOW, WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT?