Day Off?

I'm having one of those days.

The ones where I don't want to be the mom.

I have a headache, I'm tired and soar in bits, my to do list has barely been touched and my brain has been disengaged all day.

Can someone else please be the mom for a while?

Can someone else please make the dinner? (From scratch of course) Can someone else clean the kitchen and nurse the baby and organize the bulk buys and take care of the dogs at the same time!? I don't feel like vacuuming or paying bills and balancing the check book. I don't feel like dealing with the dirty looks and eye rolls and heavy sighs when I ask for help. (from the kids either) Can someone else "reason" with the kids about why they need to finish their school work or do chores or eat their veggies or not beat each other up? I just don't feel like it right now.

What I really want to do is take a nice hot shower (by myself) to get these knots out. I want to sit on my bum and have a cup of tea (without having 4 little people whining that they want some too, or that it's not fair, or trashing my kitchen when I'm not looking and draining all of my energy.) I want to have the energy and motivation to work in my studio (you know I usually make stuff for you anyway.) And by 'work in my studio' I mean, actually in there. by myself. without a bunch of kids going through my stuff and asking to use it, and asking to see it, and undoing all the organizing I did.



Can I please just not be the mom for a little while. Without feeling guilty about it?

GROSS!! (This Post Makes Me Wanna Puke)

So we had some cruddy cheese sauce stuff in the fridge and decided we could have some nachos for lunch today. Not the most healthy meal but its fast and the kids dig it. All we needed were some chips. Gabe asked if I wanted him to buy a can of refried beans too since he was going and I said we could have the meal with out beans. We have so many dried pinto beans its ridiculous and I hate to buy more. I should really just cook a big batch and keep it in the freezer for quick(er) meals.

Well Gabe decided to go ahead and buy a can of beans anyway. This can to be specific.


(ugh! I'm getting sick just thinking about it.)

So Gabe opened this can of beans. You know how it is. The beans schlopped out of the can with a little slurping noise and landed in the pot in a perfect can-shaped blob of congealed beanstuffs. That's gross enough as it is. (Can you tell I prefer mine to be made from scratch?)

Then he wandered off and left the can shaped beanish sitting there. So I noticed this and got a nice big spoon out and began smashing the can shape down into some thing more heatable. Once the beanish was all squished down I began to turn it over, you know to stir it up a bit in the heating process. This is what I found hiding in the middle of it:

(insert vomitous gagging noises here)

Now I'm not so squeamish when "they" tell me that packaged food has a certain number of bug parts in it. But that's parts. And I don't have to see them. Oh. My. Gosh. I'm gonna hurl.

Then, Gabe says that we get bugs when we harvest the veggies from our garden. First of all, I wash them off, so they are not in the middle of my meal. And second of all, they aren't flies. Flies are vile poop eating pests. As if I didn't hate them enough already, (just ask my family, I will not rest if there is one in the house. They disgust me) now it's in my food. Or foodish. Another reason to avoid processed food.

Another reason to hate being "poor" and getting half of our groceries from WIC and the food bank. Granted, this was from the general store but we get so much canned, boxed, bagged, processed stuff from them and I just hate it.


I try to be grateful but its hard. I hate this sub-food. We never used to get this stuff. I made all our own cereal and now they think they are being helpful by giving us crappy boxed stuff. It'd be more helpful if they provided oats. Its cheaper and you get more, but they seem to prefer spending more on the junk. They say they want to provide healthy options because we have children then they give us a million cans of "vegetables", canned, powdered, and boxed "milk" and any number of processed wheat stuffs in the form of white bread and a million boxes of mac n cheese and ramen noodles. We are wheat intolerant. Thanks.

Gabe doesn't like 'wasting food' but I stopped using this stuff and asked him to stop picking it up. I will use the dry beans, and the rare bit of fresh produce they offer. Yes, I can find a use for a barrel of apples. Homemade applesauce is much better than the canned stuff they give us. (I didn't even know applesauce came in cans before.) I can use the rice but I don't want want the large cans of "meat" that I wouldn't even feed to my dog, and stop giving me boxes and bags and packages of 3 day old cakes and cookies and brownies. They are over sugared, wheat filled, belly bombs and we don't need them. No, you are not doing my poor children a favor by giving me this. I make the best HOMEMADE, FRESH, FROM SCRATCH, & WHEAT FREE brownies this side of the Rocky Mountains. Ask anyone who's had them. (Most of them don't even know they are wheat free). And my children will always choose them over your week old doughnuts so 'lovingly' donated from Safeway (after no one else wanted them).

And I have officially banned canned beans from my house.

What's Really Important?

I have been extremely distracted of late with many things of little real importance. Well, I suppose schooling the kids is important, but since they are in a virtual school and the older 2 girls are mostly self-led, I really don't spend a lot of time on school everyday. And we have all been sick. As with any family, it starts with 1 person and slowly cycles through the rest, but it takes a bit longer with a larger family. (Can you imagine those families with 10 kids? They must be sick for months at a time!)

But mostly my distraction has been with the computer. (So, if I'm on the computer, why aren't I finishing my story? I don't know.) I read stuff about homeschooling and homesteading and homemaking. Stuff about crafts and art and recipes for all sorts of cool things. I go to google 1 little thing and I could be stuck there for hours. ( I researched cloth diapers for weeks before the baby was born.)

I so want to find and happy medium. Because the girls school is virtual 3/4 of it is online. Then there's email and Etsy and the mediums to promote it. (Which I'm not very good at by the way. I have officially sold 1 piece, and while I went to great lengths to make her experience in my store pleasurable, a cute handmade box all wrapped in tissues and tags like a special little present just for her, and I even gave her a one of a kind artist trading card as a bonus gift, she never even left me feedback. I know if I listed things more often I would get a little more traffic and I'm sure there are other ways to promote as well. Maybe it'll pick up someday. Maybe not.)

So I do have some reason to be on the computer, but not that much, and some days I feel like its too much. It's like a horrible addiction. You want to stop, you know it s bad for you, and you know you don't feel good afterward, not really, and yet you can't seem to help yourself. You don't even realize you're doing it sometimes, and sometimes you're just plain selfish and you don't care.

"Hi, my name is Melissa and I'm a googlaholic." (This is the part where you say "Hi Melissa.")


I have started to make a new kind of 'to do' list because I'm finding that normal 'to do' lists are too easy to ignore. 'Oh yea, gotta do that thing. Sometime....................................'
Instead, I am starting to write a 'what I really want to do' list. This list consists of the things that are really the most important.

For instance, it's not too difficult to make excuses or ignore my 'to do' list when it says 'exercise'. 'Oh, I got up late' or 'I don't feel good' or 'I'll do it later' (which, of course, I don't).

But when I put on my ' what I really want to do' list 'walk around the lake with my family' it's easier to tell myself, yes, that's really what I want. A nice brisk walk, even if it's just me and the baby because everyone else is asleep. And then I did it.

Now I only just started this experiment so I will have to keep you posted as to how well I actually do with it, but I definitely feel better about things when they are 'what I really want to do'. All the other drivel can be tended to later or just plain dropped because I'm busy doing what I really want, what's really important.

For Your Viewing Pleasure

I've been gone of a while, you may have noticed. I've been distracted with many things. (I never realized before just how easily I am distracted. I blame technology. And children.)

For the last 2 weeks we have been sick. It started as a simple cold one child got somewhere and shared with the baby, who shared with Gabe. Then shared with me. The kids didn't seem to have it that badly, except for maybe the baby. It's difficult to say if his was all sick or if some of it was from teething as well. Maybe the kids were just too busy to complain much.

For my part it started as a normal cold with sneezing and runny nose but quickly turned to headaches, backaches, general body aches, a raspy terrible cough, chills and hot flashes, and lightheadedness. This was all on one day, which happened to be my 14th anniversary. Nice way to celebrate, eh? No fever though. Weird. The cough lingers as does baby's stuffy nose so we have avoided our friends so as not to contaminate them. I'm happy to report that I had no less than 4 of them contact me today to enquire of my missingness. It only took 2 weeks. But at least it proves that I do have a couple friends.

I have also been distracted by a "mail art" project which is finally finished and I promise I will show you what I worked on for it soon. In the meantime though I also visited the Denver Art Museum during a little known free day event and would like to share some pictures from it with you.

construction on the outside

"Orion" by Deborah Butterfield


"The American Indian" by Andy Worhol

"Fox Games" by Sandy Skoglund