All Hail the All Mighty Bobby Pin

For the past few weeks, every since that damn Twilight chick showed up at the MTV Video Music Awards with a new cute haircut, all I have heard about is new haircut, new haircut, new haircut. So I finally broke down and got appointments for all of the kids to get their hair cut - might as well get it all done at one time. So yesterday after school they all walked down to the local hair cutting joint and proceeded to get cropped. When I got there to pick them all up, Rachel was still in the chair and I admit that her hair did look really cute even though it did make her look several years older. All mothers of teenage girls understand that the goal is NEVER to make your teenage daughter look older !

Rachel spent the rest of the evening playing with her new hair do and sending pics of it to her friends via cell phone. However, she made the mistake of washing it and going to bed with it still wet. When she woke up, she was not looking like the star of Twilight at all - more like the star of Dawn of the Dead. That hair was everwhere !!! She tried and tried to get it flatten out and play nice but it did not work. So in desperation she decided to pull it all back off of her face and secure it to the back of her head with at least 457 bobby pins. This chick would be setting off metal detectors for miles !

I didn't see the lovely hair sculpture until we were getting ready to leave. I made several snide remarks about how glad I was that I had just paid all of that money for a cute hair cut so that she could pin it all to the back of her head. She made several snide remarks back and has not talked to me since. Ah ... the joys of raising teenagers ! P.S. they are few and far between

Reclaiming the Good TV

When the flat screen tv craze hit a few years ago we didn't go completely nutso and buy new tvs for every room in our house. We only went partial nutso and got one for the living room with our tax refund money. It is by far the best tv in the house. It has the cool sound system and the big screen. More importantly, the remote actually works every single time that you use it and you don't have to whack it against anything to be able to adjust the volume. You also don't have to run the dvd player through the vcr in order to watch dvds because the tv is so old that it doesn't even begin to know what to do with a dvd cable.

Well, the boyfriend of our darling princess seems to come over and plant himself on the couch on the nights when they are allowed to see each other. They have been together nine months (including the two months that they didn't really see it other) and have yet to go out on a real date. I never thought that I would ever think this, let alone actually say it to my daughter, but I just want to shake them and say "GO OUT ON A REAL DATE ALREADY". I want my good tv back. I want to be able to walk around my house in my jammies. I want to actually be able to walk around downstairs in my nightie gown, carrying a mixed drink and passing gas without having to worry about offending the boyfriend.

So I broke the news to her and told her that for at least a few weeks, they were going to have to venture out into the real world and possibly have actual conversations with each other that didn't involve "what do you want to watch?" "um ... I don't know ... what do you want to watch?". She actually looked somewhat puzzled - as if the concept of a real date was somehow foreign to her and she couldn't understand this date thing that I was speaking of. She asked, "where are we supposed to go?". After I stopped laughing, I replied, "well honey, you could go eat somewhere or possibly to the movies." When the lightbulb clicked on in her little Easy Bake oven of a mind, she uttered "yeah - I hadn't thought of that". I really don't care if they wander the aisles of Wal-Mart trying out nail polish colors or sniffing the laundry detergents. I JUST WANT THEM OUT OF MY HOUSE !!! So be forewarned America - I am setting this highly intelligent specimen of an human free among the rest of you tonight. Muahahahahaha !!!!

Practical Names for Magazines

For those of you sitting there scratching your stuff and wondering what the heck a picture of pesto has to do with the names of magazines ... well I will get to that in a minute. For those of you that were wondering why there was a picture of chopped up grass in a bowl with a spoon by it on my blog ... you need to get out more often ... that's pesto you big bunch of hillbillies.

For those of you who know me personally (aka the fortunate ones), you know my struggles with antidepressants and sleeping pills and hormones and alcohol, etc. etc. well if you missed out on the time when the combination of those things made me bat sh*t crazy then you missed out on a lot. What am I saying? If you had lived through the bat sh*t crazy years then you surely wouldn't be talking to me now. You would have changed your name, sanded off your fingerprints, and caught a plane to an undisclosed location by now. Oh yes - I was THAT crazy !

Well during my looney years (severe mania, impulsive behavior, irrational thoughts, etc.), I became obsessed with magazines. If it was in print then this chick subscribed to it. Oh look honey - Teen Beat is still in print - where is that damn subscription card? I would get at least five magazines a week, sometimes more. I am sure my mailman wondered where this lumberjack, literary goddess, Betty Crocker wannabe, doll collecting, fashionista lived because looking at me then you wouldn't have thought that I gave a damn about anything especially not fashion or hair combing ... although I did wear a lot of plaid and carried an axe so he may not have wondered about the Lumberjack Quarterly as much.

I am slowly weeding through the magazine subscriptions and stopping the ones that I don't read any more. Some of them I get in the mail and just have to wonder who does read this crap. Does anybody really care that there are 57 ways to make pesto? Do they really go to the store and buy all of the ingredients to have a Pesto Party. I can just see the invitations now "Come on over on Friday for my annual Pesto Party - a night full of Pesto, Pesto, Pesto - and a line a the bathroom !" I have yet to come across one of my many food and cooking magazines that actually has stuff in it that my kids would even eat. I would love to see magazine names that actually said what was in them like "Stuff that you will waste your money on and try to force your children to eat even though they will hide it in their pockets and then beg for Ramen Noodles" or "The pictures of the food in here look great but yours will come out looking as if some alien puked in your serving dish".

I have also noticed that I have a ton of subscriptions to magazines for clothes and make-up that I would have worn in my crazy years but no way would be caught crazy in now. Sure, a five year subscription to Dressing Like a Drag Queen sounded economical at the time but now it just seems frivolous. Well doesn't anything associated with dressing like a circus clown on crack come across as a little bit frivolous. I think so.

P.S. If anybody wants to read up on the latest logging techniques, which lipgloss goes best with a hot pink sequined jumpsuit with matching cape, or needs to know the 104 ways to whip up cole slaw then I am the chick to ask. In fact, I might even let you have the whole magazine. It's true ! Dare to dream !

WARNING - Might contain curse words !!!

I am sitting here on hold with our cell phone provider because I had called to activate my son's phone - was on the phone with them for over 30 minutes while the customer service rep talked to me like I was five and said "okay" after everything she said to me. We entered the handy code to activate the phone and of course the handy code is not handy as IT DOES NOT WORK !!! Now the old phone doesn't work nor does the new phone. Bambi - the new rep has now had me take the phone completely apart and verify that it was in fact made by 10 year olds in China and that I want to throw the phone through the window next to me. Check !

Beth is upstairs screaming because she scraped her leg really bad yesterday in gym and pretty much tore off all of the skin down to her bony kneecap. The bandage that we put on it stuck to the sore and when she pulled it off, it took off more skin. So now I have Bambi in one ear, a screaming kid in the other, and if I had another ear it would have the other twin in it telling me that the first twin is upstairs screaming (as if I and the rest of the block didn't already know that).

Oh - I forgot to mention that I am also working on finding information about the locations of Big 12 football stadiums for a geography project while talking to the cell phone rep, pouring out Tylenol, making my dinner (reheated fish sticks and tator tots), talking on the cell phone to the daughter who is at the softball field taking pictures for yearbook, and trying to explain to my son why I am helping with the girls' homework. I refrained from saying "well son - I am helping with their homework because the class is taught (and I use that term losely) by a dumb ass coach who comes up with these assignments while reading the sports section of the local newspaper because he is a small town coach and cannot see past football season for anything". I refrained ! Who in their right mind would give two sh*ts about "Which two teams visiting Big 12 teams this week are located closest to one another?". I don't. Bambi doesn't. The 10 year old in China that made the phone that doesn't work sure doesn't.

I just want to scream but instead I will be nice to Bambi and try to get the damn phone to work, send Tylenol up to the screaming kid via the other twin and promise her that she can have a Nutty Buddy if she stops screaming, heat up my fish sticks for the 3rd time (a hot meal ? what the f is that?), calmly explain to my daughter at the softball field that she needs to be home by 7, and turn to my son and say "they just needed help - that's why". I am a mom - that's what we do ! Then we make a drink and sit in the bathroom floor talking to ourselves. Don't worry - I only drink on the odd numbered days. Oh crap - it's the 10th. Correction. Don't worry - I only drink on the even numbered days.

He's Got Her .... BABE !

Well our little darling is officially ungrounded and now has her cell phone back along with being able to see her Romeo (or in this case, her Sonny). As a rule for having a cell phone, we (the parents aka the people who pay for the phone) have the right to check all incoming and outgoing messages. She is only allowed to send 30 messages per day, not because of what they cost (we have unlimited text - learned that lesson the hard way didn't we) but because that is the number that the outbox will hold. She has been told that if there are ever more than 30 outgoing messages from her phone on the bill on any given day then she will get the phone taken away. This prevents her from deleting a few messages thinking that we will never find out.

As we have been reading the incoming messages we have noticed a pattern of "babeness". He ends every message with the word "babe". As in "can't wait to see you babe" or "I miss u so much babe". It is everything that I have not to puke up my pretzels all over the phone when I read them. Doesn't that word just sound smarmy? As in, "hey babe run down to the Toot and Tote and grab me a carton of Marlboros" or "be sure and have dinner ready when I get home tonight, babe".

It's just one more thing that I am biting my tongue about. About to bite the damn thing off !!!

Now He is Feeding the Bees

I walked out on to the deck last night to sit and read in semi-silence while the kids were all down at the park. I noticed that the Mountain Dew can that we have turned upside down on the deck for the bees to drink out of did not have anything on it, so I started to go back in and get them some tea or lemonade (they really enjoy the lemonade - or at least that's what they said in their thank you note - it was so small that it was really hard to read). Derek stopped me at the door and said "no - I already fed them some Mountain Dew today - they don't need anymore or they will just be hyper". Evidently, we are now parenting the bees and trying to control their intake of sugar so that they don't become over excited and oh ... flit around and buzz a lot. Don't they do that anyway ? It really cracked me up that he took the time and effort to share his precious Mountain Dew with the bees. It cracked me up even more that felt the need to monitor their daily Mountain Dew intake because we all know that the worst thing in the world is a bunch of honey bees doped out of their little minds on sugar and caffeine.