Breakfast at Charly’s

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Don’t call it a comeback

I have every intention of starting back and will attempt to do so tonight. In the mean time, I just wanted to share the blog of an incredible guy whose story I saw on Rachael Ray today. His name is Matt Logelin and he is a single father to an adorable little girl named Madeline. His wife, Liz, died 27 hours after she gave birth. The Rachael Ray episode with Matt made me cry the entire segment. Incredible story.

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Vote!

Vote!

Originally uploaded by Breakfast at Charly’s

I have no time to pee but we all have time to vote!

Go Obama!

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Purfect!

Perfect!

Originally uploaded by Breakfast at Charly’s

Thanks, John and Sarah! Your junk mail is perfect as a mat outside my cat’s litter box.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

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For Kelly

[This was written about, oh, two weeks ago? I started writing it and then fell dead asleep in the chair. -A]

It has been what, a million years since I’ve posted? Yes, yes. It’s been a million years and there’s so much to catch up on. In fact, now that I’ve checked, I see that it’s been a month. What a month it’s been!

The kids are out of school (1 month, 3 weeks, 6 days until school starts) and we’re busy with summer activities. Well, we’re busy with summer activities and getting settled in the new house.

We moved about two weeks ago and I’m still getting things in order. I’ve dug through almost every box, reorganized them and am trying to find a home for everything. I’m trying to get things in a general home and then I’ll go back through and fine tune everything from the bottom floor up.

We got the keys on the first of last month and before we moved here I did a lot of prepping. I painted the kids’ rooms, the living room and the dining room. I’m amazed at the color I chose for the living room (Olympic’s Chilled Wine mixed with Benjamin Moore paints) because it’s very bold and until now I’ve been very afraid of color. At the old house I lived with cream-colored walls for almost a decade and in the apartments we had the same deal for six years before that. Fifteen years I lived with cream-colored walls and now I pick to take the leap? The girls’ room is Lily Lavender and Iain’s is a shade of blue that goes well with his Sponge Bob sheets but whose name I can’t remember. I split the living room into two colors to split the room a bit. It’s a very large room at around 12 x 25. I need to touch up the ceiling where I smudged the wall colors but I’ll get to it when the room is fairly close to being organized.

Once I finished painting I was finished painting. I swear to God I had had enough by the time I finished Iain’s room. I decided to do the painting myself but I totally appreciate why people pay for someone else to do it. I obviously survived but it sucked. I think what made it suck even more is that not only was I the only one painting (outside of my friends who came over one weekend and lent a much appreciated hand with the living room and dining room ceilings), I was also trying to pack the other house and coordinate things for the move. All this and I had to take the kids to school and back and care for a four and a half year-old. I was, to say the least, a touch stressed.

Moving day was long and, um, long. Now that is a time where you scrimp and save your pennies because I’d rather paint a house three times over before I’d want to move my shit. It took them about four hours to empty the house and about an equal amount of time to shove all our shit in here. After all that we still had a decent amount of crap still at the old place that we’ve brought here in batches. The fact that I’ve gotten through all the boxes and most of the other crap in the last couple weeks is fairly impressive. Yes, some things went back into storage in the basement but I physically sorted through every box and basket that entered this house. I reorganized a lot of things so that they were packed with some consistency (i.e. old photos together, antique cameras together etc.) should I need to find something. I have a lot of memorabilia that I need to one day organize and put into scrapbooks (the kind we had in the old days with photo corners and not the kind where you spend more time cutting out cutesy crap from rainbow paper than actually scrapbooking) and photos that need to be put into albums.

Kelly, Mike and the kids came by for a BBQ today. The kids went in spurts as far as getting along but they survived each other. Kelly helped me organize my books in the bookshelves we got at Ikea yesterday. Did I tell you we went to Ikea? We did so much walking I thought my feet would fall off. We ended up with many things we needed for organization and to fill in the gaps where we were missing items. Some things were left back at my mother’s house or tossed because I didn’t think we’d need old utensils to add to my mother’s raging mountains of over-consumption. Had I known that we’d drop that toxicity like a stick of enriched uranium, I’d have kept a few more things. But, whatever. Simply minor inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.

[Now we continue where I left off. -A]

Since I wrote what I did above, we’ve put away a bit more boxes, have organized a few more things and even had our furniture delivered. I’ve lost a lot of steam as far as finding homes for the last bit of things still left out on our counters and in the living room but I’m hoping to get through that this weekend. Jeff was working a lot of hours over the past two weeks and while I’m thankful for it, it does slow things a bit down on this end.

Finding things a home seems to be a bigger issue with me than I thought. I got so thoroughly irritated with the amount of clutter in the old house that finding a home for everything here has taken on a new level of importance. It will happen but it’s not happening as fast as I’d like it to so I’ll sit here and blog about it instead. Who knows, maybe another trip to Ikea is in order to finally solve the storage problems. Well, by problems I really just mean tools to organize ourselves better than we’ve been in the past. I’d like a place to put toilet paper away in the main floor bathroom without just putting the bulk package on the floor. Things like that.

Part of the reason I’ve not gotten over that remaining hump of things to put away, aside from Jeff’s hours, is my doing more things with the kids. I’m feeling like a better mom lately. We were going to set up a pool we had from the other house but after I took it out of the box, I found that we were missing some very important pieces — the plugs to prevent the water from pouring out of the pool. I don’t know what could have happened to them because we had never used the pool. Both the plugs and the instructions were missing. Since my kids are the luckiest on the planet, I ordered them another. We finally set it up the other day and they’ve been having lots of fun in it. Sadly for them they’ve had to exit the pool a few times because they were getting out of hand but that parenting thing gets in the way of unbridled tomfoolery sometimes.

We’ve had violin this summer and it seems like Gracie is enjoying it even more. I asked her what she’d rather do in the winter — continue with gymnastics or take private violin lessons — and she chose the violin. I’m going to ask her summer teacher if she has room in her schedule for private lessons at her home. I know she does them but she also teaches at the local music store and I’d rather pay her the money directly. She’s very sweet and more than qualified since she is going to a local university on a full ride scholarship for violin. Very, very cool. I’m sort of torn about gymnastics because I worry about taking away a sport in the winter when we get stuck indoors and sedentary but she doesn’t seem to be all that bothered if we have to miss and I don’t want to pay the money if she could take it or leave it. Thoughts?

Did I mention that I’ve finished my school supply shopping with the exception of one item? Yes. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am DONE. I was at Target the other day and they had some sales going on with 24 pack Crayolas going for $.22 a piece. There were a bevy of other items on sale and I said fuck it. I had the kids’ lists fresh from the school’s website and I tore through the lists, smiling widely as I plucked the sale items from the bins. There is one item on Iain’s list that I’m not quite sure about and that’s a book bag. He has a backpack but the list specifically mentioned a book bag and stated that backpacks would not be allowed to be worn all day. I have no clue what they are aiming for but we’ll see. Next up will be school clothes which I’ll tackle next month. I don’t look forward to spending the money but I’m fairly frugal so it shouldn’t be so bad. Who knows what prices will be like this year compared to last with this economy.

Tomorrow (today if you’re reading this on Friday) is Gracie’s summer music class concert. She’s really looking forward to it and I should be getting to bed. We have to be there earlier than usual (like two hours earlier) so I won’t be able to mess around most of the morning like I normally do.

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If we were a window decal

Create your own family sticker graphic at pYzam.com

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All American Comfort

American Comfort

Originally uploaded by Breakfast at Charly’s

But made in Taiwan. Ummm . . .

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Maybe I am ready

I’ve been jokingly dreading the beginning of summer vacation because it usually means bickering and fighting amongst the ranks but I’m wondering if I’m just about ready to relinquish the morning routine for a few months. Every day lately I’ve been less and less willing to get up and more and more willing to let them stay home. Well, for a few minutes anyway. I’m not one to let them stay home just because so it’s merely a fleeting thought but it’s damn tempting and becoming more so each day. I’m sure I’ll get over that quickly.

I’m loosely planning our summer calendar. One might be led to think that it’s for their benefit but honestly staying out and about with a loose schedule will keep me more sane than if we were home and getting more and more on each other’s nerves. I’m planning on signing Gracie up for swimming and that itself is four days a week. That might start getting old but it’s not until after one in the afternoon so if I can’t get my ass going by then, there are bigger problems to deal with. She’ll also have summer music which I enjoyed last year. This year will probably suck because I have to bring Iz with and I have to wonder how easy she’ll be to deal with. Last year I sat and learned along with but I doubt I’ll be able to do that and keep Iz in line. Feh.

Off to prepare for bed. I’ll save the other delicious boring details of my day for tomorrow.

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Stop it!

Again with a clichéd befuddlement about where the time goes, I’m sitting here wondering what happened to the bulk of the last decade. Iain is nine today and it’s as if I’ve been in a haze the whole time. Nine. We’ve been through so much over his lifetime and I’m so proud of him for what he’s accomplished. He was such a beautiful baby. He looked like a china doll with his big, crystal blue eyes, perfect skin and just the right amount of chub. I have a beautiful portrait of him from when he was six months-old hanging on the wall and I can’t get over the beauty even now. I know I’m biased but he really was gorgeous. He’s still a handsome boy if I do say so myself.

Happy Birthday, buddy!

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This gets old

Today is another one of those days where I’ve spent much of it having a mini-panic attack. I don’t know if there’s actually a diagnostic term for something like that but that’s as best as I can describe it. Either way, it has paralyzed me for most of the morning and it’s getting old. Really old. The only thing I’m thankful for is that I manage to keep it in check enough that I don’t take it out on others.

I’m feeling torn about mentioning these sorts of things online, open to the public to see. On the one hand I feel like it’s no different from suffering from some other physical disorder but I also fall back wondering how the stigma might affect me. I really shouldn’t put much thought to it but with the world and how it operates, it does cross my mind. Oh well. If nothing else maybe it will make someone out there feel a little less lonely. It doesn’t make me any less a person, a mother, a wife, a friend or a member of the community. I’ve dealt with it this long without any drug or alcohol abuse, I don’t abuse my children and I have loving friends. I’d say with what I go through mentally, that’s pretty good.

I heard from the Realtor today and we’ll be getting the keys at noon on Saturday. That made me excited because then I can get in, take a good look around, document things on the checklist and start prepping for painting and moving. I think part of the anxiety is deep down knowing that this time the move away from this home will be permanent. I try not to get too caught up with it but it’s hard sometimes. The biggest problem is that we’re leaving not on our terms and we wouldn’t even be in this situation if it weren’t for our good intentions. I know, “the path to hell” and all that but still. The lesson this has taught me is that you listen closely to your gut and that sacrifice on that level for anyone other than your spouse or children is probably not wise. Maybe that sounds cold or cynical but there you go.

After dealing with vomit yet again last night, I’m looking forward to getting a washer and dryer back in the house. I joked with the guys at the laundromat (two men, one the owner, take turns on the weekends running the place) that I’ll have to bring rugs in on a regular basis just to keep in touch and get out of the house. It’s not a big deal anymore for me to go to the laundromat (outside of the cost) but having a washer in the house would have been mighty handy for the clothes and bedding I sprayed off last night. I could have put them straight in; I miss that.

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Nothing much new, ladies and gentlemen

It’s about three weeks until we move in but nothing much to note although the fact that there’s only three weeks left in this house is very weird to me. I still have yet to decide on a paint color and I’m waiting for the window treatment samples to arrive in the mail. I ordered some more moving boxes and I’m trying to figure out what I can pack that we can do without for the next few weeks. They are due to arrive tomorrow along with some more tape and moving labels. The good thing is that U-Haul will buy back whatever we don’t use. I thought that was a good deal.

Thursdays kids eat free at Charly’s so I took them for an early dinner. There’s nothing in the house and for what I paid, we got four fresh meals from scratch. McDonald’s would have been maybe two dollars less than my bill including tip. Can’t beat that with a fat stick.