Hunting for Treasure

For Father's Day, we got Glayde a gps unit. You may remember that I have a TomTom GPS for my car... or you may just be in too much shock that I'm posting to my blog to remember that detail. I thought I Garmin eTrex Vista was a nice toy for hiking with the family. Hopefully we'll be able to plot our favorite paths and see exactly how far we went and how high we climbed. Heck we can mark the exact spot where Heath announces that he wants to go home during our hike. I'm not sure if all this information will be inspiring or depressing but hopefully it will add to the fun of hiking as a family.

Glayde's on a business trip but I decided to try out his GPS without him. :) No I didn't attempt a hike with two kids in tow. Instead we went hunting for treasure... well geocaching any way. I sold it to the boys as looking for treasure because in fact most caches do contain some small trinkets for trade. So with GPS and tradeable trinket in hand we hit a local park to look for our very first cache.

I was convinced that this adventure was going to end in disaster. You see as soon as we started wander the park trying to get an idea of which direction to look for the cache in, Heath took off running down a path and crashed and burned. He majorly scraped up one knee. After some crying (his) and some pleading (mine), we were off really hunting our treasure. When we found the tree I thought must be sheltering our treasure, the boys began climbing all over its gnarlly roots. With just one quick circuit of the tree, Grant was convinced that we weren't going to find it. He was probably looking for an honestly to goodness treasure box like the one they had in his kindergarten class or maybe the mini version he decorated for me on Mother's Day. I am the finder of lost things in our house as long was those things don't belong to me. I've found papers in minutes that Glayde has spent hours looking for. I'm always called upon to find lost toys and misplaced library books. The uterus must really have magical powers for locating things. This treasure was could not escape me either. Once I spotted it's hiding spot amid the tree roots, I let Grant do the really rewarding work of pulling out the box. And there along with a little logbook, a magnet and a wood disk was our treasure... a Hot Wheels space craft. In went our tropical fish stamper and the cache returned to its hiding spot.

Grant and Heath loved the treasure. I can't help but think it really resembles dozens of other toys that I want out of my house. At least we're now swapping our crappy trinkets for other peoples unwanted junk.

Clean Sweepin' my life

I admit that I do have some leisure time in my life. I just don't run to my computer to blog during it. :) Umm... if you're still concerned the sink is unclogged. There have been no major disasters during Glayde's recent travels. Heath's third birthday came and went without too much trauma.

I've recently found that if I clean my house I'm in a better mood. For a couple weeks there after the sink fiasco, I just couldn't get motivated to clean and boy was I in a bad mood. I got kind of depressed and I didn't feel like cleaning. The bigger mess the house was the worse I felt. Finally I started doing my cleaning the Flylady way in 15 minutes chunks of time whether or not I really felt like it and things started looking better and I felt better. I'm not claiming the house it spotless. It may never get that way in my lifetime, but things are looking better.

I have a to do list of jobs around the house that really never seems to get finished. On the list is to clean out Heath's room. At the ripe old age of three, he can clean up his room but he really can't sort out the junk and throw it away, so I'm trying to do it. I found a bit of time yesterday to work on Heath's room so I tackled the closet. There was dirty laundry including crib sheets that we haven't used in months. There was the baby bathtub that we haven't used in years. Someone suggested that we could use it to bathe our cats. I laughed hysterically at the idea as I've decided spit and polish is good enough for animals that bite and claw when you try to clean them with water. Also lost in the closet were boxes of clothes. Some Heath has outgrown and others that are hand-me-downs. There was some of my old papers in there and I've lost count of what all else. Mind you this is the smallest closet so I'm not sure how we managed to stash so much crap in there.

I didn't think that Heath even realized that I cleaned out his closet. Or maybe Grant noticed because this afternoon the boys decided that it was the perfect place to play. They'd dragged in quilts, pillows, toys and books and were claiming it as a new play area. They actually were getting along pretty well in there. I've been saying for weeks that we really need a house with a playroom and evidently the boys agree.

Down the drain

Glayde's been traveling quite a bit for work lately. That always means that interesting things are happening at home. No I haven't received any more guilt presents from Glayde, but those are nice. :) This week the interesting part has been our kitchen sink backing up. Personally I blame it on all the cleaning I've been doing. You see, I'm trying to follow the Fly Lady's methods. I don't wear shoes with laces or shine my sink. How can you shine corian anyway?!? I do work in the zone of the week and try to really attack that zone for at least 15 minutes a day. These methods have made a big difference in my closet and the bathrooms, but I think I hit rock bottom in the kitchen today.

After 15 minutes of getting our pantry looking great, I decided that I could spend a little more time on my kitchen doing something extra. I wanted to do one of the Fly Lady's missions for this week and really clean our kitchen trash can. After searching in vane for the Clorox wipes, which really is a good thing because it means that we haven't had any poop painting or other germy messes in a while, I settled for good old soap, water and rags. After rinsing the rag out a couple of times water in our sink started to back up. No problem, I'll just run the garbage disposal. Evidently at this point the old bread crumbs and gravy that I cleaned out of the pantry made a handy glue with whatever other gunk is stuck in the sink pipes and things really started to back up.

Nothing has helped much at this point. Not plunging. Not using Liquid Plumber. Not calling my dad in desperation. Not even going out to dinner helped much. I did enjoy desert though. Now I'm on a wait and see plan. Which will happen first... the sink will be unclogged or my husband will arrive home to do with the mess? Who knows... I'm not stressing out over it. I'm just thinking about where we'll go to dinner tomorrow night.

Worst Blogger Ever

Okay I admit it... I'm easily sidetracked which means that I don't seem to blog as often as a could. I refuse to say "as often as a should" because I do not want to view blogging as a real obligation.

We survived the holidays if you're wondering and the boys once again got way too many toys. There was tons of family togetherness and no one got hurt. Amazing.

To make this entry half way interesting I'll share a couple of Grant's recent quips.

Grant Has a Dream In the week leading up to MLK day, Grant's teacher read them books about Dr. King and all the things he did to bring more equality to our country. They made a little paper medallion with a picture of Dr. King on one side and picked a pre-printed dream to put on the other side. Grant told me one night before bed that he really wanted Dr. King's dreams to come true. When I asked Grant which of the dreams he thought should come true first, he told me "There should be no allergies!" I couldn't figure out which of Dr. King's dreams "no allergies" fit with so I asked Grant to tell me more about this dream. Grant told me that "people shouldn't get sick and have allergies".

Clean Sweep We have been watching quite a few organization shows like Clean Sweep. I'm trying to motivate myself to clean and declutter the house and the boys seem to like the show even though it's not animated. Plus it's always fun to see other people's houses which are way worse than mine! Today I managed to make a small dent in our mess by cleaning out the hall bath. Soon after I was done Grant demanded to know where all the stuff had gone in the bathroom. I explained that I was cleaning things up, he was rather unimpressed with the change and told me that "We need to clean up the house more but not throw anything out in my room!" Isn't that what every pack rat thinks!

Umm... my friend Zee tagged me with a 4 things list which I swear I will do soon. At least I know what my next entry will be about.

We were barenaked for the holidays!

This is shocking news! I went to my first live concert in over 10 years and though there was an inordinate number of children there it was not the Wiggles. I bought myself a pair of tickets to see the Barenaked Ladies and then made Glayde come to the show with me. He's still put out that he didn't actually see any naked ladies at the show but we both enjoyed it quite a bit.

I have to admit I'm getting old. I don't want to stand through an entire show especially when I'm wearing my cool new high heeled boots. We ended up standing alot since the people in front of us were and I actually wanted to see Steve and Ed sing. Those two are amazing in their adlib ability. Actually the whole band is talented and very comical. For whatever reason Tyler, the drummer, sings Feliz Navidad and the rest of the band pulls names for which instrument to play for the song. Last night Ed ending up one keyboards and during his solo he broke into a Styx song. Or at least that's what Glayde claims it was. Personally I couldn't tell a Styx song from a Kansas song.

Sadly they didn't play my favorite holiday song The Elf's Lament or maybe they did in their second encore. Yes, we walked out on the second encore. Hey, Ed threw out all of his picks after the first encore and we had a long walk back to BART ahead of us. Like I said I'm getting old... really old. But it was still great to see BNL live. Next time they come to San Francisco, I'm buying balcony seating because at least up there they let you sit through the concert.

Disneyland pictures

Here are a few pictures from our trip. Enjoy!

Finders keepers

The big drama yesterday was that Grant didn't know where his library book was. You see every two weeks his kindergarten class gets to go to the school library and pick out a book to bring home. The books are due back in two weeks and if the kids haven't returned their last book they cannot check out a new one. Somewhere along the line his teacher or the librarian told the kids to make sure to take care of their books and that keeping them in a special place in their bedrooms was a good idea. I only saw a fleeting glimpse of his last book, the missing one, as Grant took it directly to his room when we arrived home from school.

I know that Monday is his library day, so yesterday I asked if he went to the library. "Yep, but I couldn't pick out a new book because I didn't return my book. Even if I like it lots I have to return it." So instead of picking out a new library book Grant "looked at the dictionary". Okay, I have no idea if that's what he really did or not but that's the story I got.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that we (and I do mean we) hadn't returned his library book, but in the rush to get ready for our Thanksgiving trip it just didn't rank very high on my to do list. Yesterday the panic set in... after a quick search of Grant's room first by him and then by me the book was still MIA. I realized that I didn't have any idea what this book looked like or what it's title was. All I remembered about it from my quick glimpse was that it was bigger than a travel Spanish-English dictionary and much smaller than an encyclopedia. Grant couldn't remember it's size, title, story or its where abouts. We were in a pinch.

Time for homework and dinner rolled around and the book still had not appeared of its own free will. When Glayde got home, I took a few minutes to thoroughly ransack Grant's room making sure that the book wasn't tucked away somewhere in there. It wasn't on the bookshelves hiding among other books. It hadn't fallen behind the bed or slid under the dresser. It wasn't jammed in the toy box or the closet. It wasn't in any of the reasonable or totally unreasonable but possible hiding spots that I searched.

I went off to volleyball and let Glayde handle the bedtime routines, but the thought that missing book still nagged at me. That and Grant's glib comment that "Mom, we had better just pay for a new one!" I returned home hot, sweaty and full of adrenaline that fuelled the continued search. I checked under the couch and the coffee table. I looked through all the books on the shelves and still no luck. As we were heading upstairs for bed, one last place came to mind.... under the stairs. There's this odd little niche under our stairs that the boys like to play in. I had noticed recently that they were stashing things in there. I figured it was a long shot but I had better check there too. And there the missing book was tucked away inside a shoe box. I'm not sure that Grant ever read the story but the book went safely back to school this morning.

Obviously we need to find a more specific safe place to keep our library books. Suggestions welcome.