I am not dead

My mother-in-law emailed me yesterday to find out if I had fallen off the face of the Earth. Also, I skyped Allison yesterday, and she was surprised at what Ethan looked like. I guess I haven't taken any pictures of him.


So, no. I'm still here. Turns out, having 3 kids under 5 and going to school full-time is a lot of work.


Here's a quick rundown:

Tyler plays softball in a city league and is having fun playing with all his new woodworking toys.

Lillian is an excellent big sister and is constantly begging me to let her help. She's learning to write and is really solid on L, H, and A.

Nora is 80% potty trained. She can stay completely dry with a bare bottom, mostly dry with panties and not at all dry while she's sleeping or if someone is not right there to take her. That's right, SHE can tell ME when she needs to go. I like that Lillian sometimes says, "when I was a baby, I had to learn how to use the potty." In my head I answer, "honey, I tried when you were a baby, but you didn't want to do it until 6 months ago."

Ethan is still a crabby baby. He sleeps ok at night, but horribly during the day, which is draining for everyone. He's good sized- the 3-6 months clothes are getting a little snug (he's 2.5 months old), but then again, we only know how to make really fat babies. Aaaaand... he's crying.

Two malapropisms for you:

malapropism: an act or habit of misusing words ridiculously, esp by the confusion of words that are similar in sound.

one

On Saturday, I went to a baptism. For those not familiar with Mormon baptisms (or Mormon meetings in general) we love programs, the physical piece of xeroxed paper. For most every meeting, there are programs printed up, even if they just say who is saying the opening and closing prayers. At the baptism (where I had my program in hand), we sang the opening song, someone offered an opening prayer, and then the man conducting got up an announced, "We have an altercation on our program..."

That would have been awesome.

two

For school, I have to participate in an online discussion board every week with a certain number of required posts. These posts have to be "substantive" in nature, which means, pretty much, we're all just trying to sound smart to make them longer. Earlier this week, I made the point that it is appalling to me that the medicaid system doesn't have a program in place to track expenses or recognize fraud. Ashton (gender unknown) replied, "Amanda, I must conquer; Medicaid is inefficient."

Again, I want to be there when that goes down.

Composting

A few people have asked me about composting, so I thought I'd enlighten the world about how we compost, Ball style.

First you get a tub like this:

Then you drill lots of holes in it. The holes are about the size of my pinkie, maybe a little smaller. Make them in all the sides, the top, and the bottom too.

This is the stuff I put out this morning. There are all kinds of lists people have posted about what is and what is not compostable. Mostly, it's all organic matter that isn't dairy or meat.


To have successful compost, you need to have about equal parts brown matter and green matter. You can think of it like this: the stuff from your kitchen is green matter, the stuff from trees is brown matter. Some examples of brown matter are: sawdust, shredded bills (this is very satisfying), torn up newspaper, dead leaves, etc.


I keep the small tub of sawdust next to the compost and pour in a couple handfuls every time I add stuff from the kitchen.


Then you shake it all up. Air is very important to the compost, as well as water. You may have heard that Tucson is a desert, so I wet down the compost about once a week. It should be as wet as a wrung-out sponge. If you live in a place that is more humid, you may not need to wet it down.

Your compost will have arthropods in it, this is a good thing. If you can't handle that, composting is not for you. It doesn't smell if you're doing it right. I did have a period where mine was attracting a lot of flies, but I don't think I was putting in enough brown matter, and it was right after I made jam, so the compost was like 80% strawberry tops and hulls. I haven't had much of a problem since then.

Also, notice at the bottom of the last picture, I put a sun chips bag in there almost 2 months ago, and it's still fully intact, crinkling as loudly as ever.

Garage Update

My parents came to town for a little over a week in August to help out with the new baby. Well, actually my mom came with my niece Courtney to help with the baby, while my dad came to play with me. So I took the week off work and most of the time was spend working on this:

It may not look like it to those with untrained eyes, but this took most of the week (in the garage in AZ in Aug mind you). I'd estimate we made at least 10 trips to home depot and drank at least 20 gallons of water each.

Last weekend I was trying to do something in the garage and I decided it was a little cluttered so I utilized some empty space in the garage like so:

So maybe I put a few extra things on those hooks, but it sure did open up the garage. It even had Amanda saying, "Awww, its like we have a grown-up person garage!". Finally, I have a proper place to shed my blood, sweat and tears. Thanks dad.

When you sit down

If you sit down to feed the baby, your toddler will start throwing herself bodily against the refrigerator to alert you to the fact that she's hungry.

So, for fear of injury, you'll put the baby down and get the toddler some yogurt. (This interruption will cause your baby to scream.)

After you sit back down to finish feeding the baby, your toddler will eat approximately 10% of the yogurt, and apply the remaining 90% to her body and hair.

As you take the toddler to the sink to rinse her off, the running water will remind you that you've had to go to the bathroom for the last hour.

So, you'll walk into the bathroom only to be greeted with the smell of cleaner, and you'll remember you tried to scrub the toilet earlier that morning but got no farther than putting the cleaner in the bowl.

As you're scrubbing the toilet, your oldest child will materialize and inform you that she has to go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW and needs to use the toilet you are presently cleaning and she is NOT going upstairs because it's an emergency. You leave her to it and try (unsuccessfully) to get your toddler to put her shirt back on.

She'll climb up onto the toilet, but will perch on the very edge even though she's been fully potty trained for over a year and knows not to do this and knows that it will make you very angry when she pees all over the ground.

As you are cleaning up the pee, your baby will start screaming because it's been 30 minutes, and he's hungry. Again. And if you sit down to feed the baby...