He may not talk much but he sings

Will has a CD of church songs for kids. I walked in the dining room only to hear him singing along to The Books of the Old Testament song. You know the one? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers . . . .

That’s bound to come in handy at some point in his life, right?

I had a conversation with my husband Rake

While trying to avoid housework, I found a website that answered a question that had been nagging at me since Sarah Palin was announced as McCain's running mate. The question is, of course, if she was my mother what would she have named me?

Answer: Meat Notgay Palin. Truer words were never spoken since I like meat and am not gay.

My husband would be named Rake Trinket Palin. (I will not repeat what he said when I informed him of his true name.) Our kid's names seemed strangly appropriate in ways I'm only starting to understand: Clip Dragon (that's obvious -- Bri's obsessed with dragons and her personal hygiene), Timber Challenger (Jake wants to be a singing lumberjack inclined astronaut), Falter Locust (Will doesn't like to work and goes to the kitchen opens all the cupboards and eats anything he can find) and little Chop Meth (well, I guess Lizzy destined to be a drug addict).

Bonus: If I enter all my friend's names in the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator, I can continue to avoid housework for days!

Dad, you could have been Stick Freedom!

Mystery

Alright, I found seven left hand gloves and three right hand gloves but none of them match; even though four of the left hand gloves were identical!

In vain I keep hoping that if I buy several pairs of identical gloves that come April the kids will still have matching gloves.

But the larger question remains: why did I move the gloves to our new house if they didn’t match?

I just don’t know.

September 11th

I was out running errands this morning and at exactly 10:01am I passed a fire station. The firemen stood at attention in front of their trucks. Has it really been seven years? I remember sobbing in front of the television watching as people fell from the sky.

. . . . and then I woke up

from a horrible nightmare. Last night I dreamed that we had bought a different house. Something that was the opposite of everything I want or would ever buy! My house was set on a busy commercial street, a main street in a run-down town flanked on both sides with hardware stores. Discarded trash piled around the house and the yard was covered in cracked asphalt that was covered with abandoned machinery piles.

The house was old but lacked the charm of my former house built in 1922. This house was a beat up dump crying out for a wreaking ball. The kitchen was a vintage kitchen from the 50s. I noticed a single ancient sink and a stove. This kitchen lacked any counter space and more than a few cabinets. The walls were a bumpy cement plaster. But the most frightening aspect – the huge hole in the middle of the floor. As the hole was nearly as large as the room I had to hold on to the handles on the appliances and doors to make my way out of the room. I could see the room below and worried about falling through. And there was another room with a hole in the floor.

I know my husband was fixing something in a different room but I was a little annoyed he hadn’t fixed the holes first since they were an obvious hazard for the kids and me -- since I apparently decided to go into the room with the expanding hole. I didn’t like this house and was angry it was ours.

It was a two bedroom house, with a shed outside that had another bed! But I didn’t want my 12 year-old sleeping outside in a shed alone. The house was cramped, outdated and had that little something I like to call the “ugh” factor.

I’m not a professional dream analyst; however, I will go ahead and say this dream was carryover from living in a two-bedroom apartment and the havoc that caused to my psyche. I am a delicate flower that needs to recover by going to New York to visit art museums!

Homework for the literal minded

I asked Lizzy to do her homework before we went to Tae Kwan Do. Lizzy insisted that her teacher said she should do it that night. I tried to explain to her that her teacher would be fine if she did it in the afternoon rather than at night.

I had to repeat myself several times before she decided to do her homework -- just to shut me up!

High Definition 37 inch Flat Screen TV

William, somehow, always seemed like a good reason not to hurry out and buy a replacement TV. He can be hard on things. I've bought a seemingly endless supply of replacement CD players, DVDs and Dr. Seuss books for him. Will went through a phase where he ripped out the pages in his favorite books so he could look at all the pages at one time. One morning about five years ago, I woke to find the power button on the TV missing. Yes, missing. Did he break it off, I wondered? No, he pushed it into the TV so we can only turn it on with a remote or the end of a pencil. The missing power button coupled with a former penchant to tap the screen endlessly and smear peanut butter on the screen caused some reluctance to buy a replacement, as our TV was ancient but obviously durable!

We planned on getting rid of the TV when we moved to Texas. But when we decided to stay in Massachusetts it came to the house along with the couch. But unfortunately, we didn’t bring the old DVD/VCR along with us and when I tried to hook up the new DVD player I realized that our TV was so old it didn’t have the colored plugs. This meant the kids couldn’t play game cube and Will was reduced to watching movies on the portable DVD player.

So, with the switch to digital coming soon it seemed like a good time to buy a new TV.

In spite of my admitted love for Charmed, E! and HGTV we don’t have cable anymore -- just a bent rabbit-eared antenna that we drape over the TV. I don’t pretend I got rid of cable out of any special mothering philosophy. I’m not an all-natural foods, no TV or violence kind of mother. Rather I subscribe to the don't come get me unless there is blood philosophy or the philosophy of can't you do it yourself? I got rid of cable because I got mad that my kids wouldn’t do their jobs. And in spite of my withdrawal symptoms from the afore mentioned shows (and many others) I want a shot at my fantasy of having my children do all the housework.

So, when we plugged in our brand new High Definition 37 inch flat screen TV we had the same crappy reception as before! The stations that broadcast in digital look pretty good. The others? Well, they’re pretty fuzzy. It seems so ridiculous to watch fuzzy shows on a high-definition TV. Surely, there’s a TV fairy out there that’s angry with us. Maybe if we make a blood offering we will appease it and it will protect the new TV from William.

We’ll see how long this TV stays untouched. Listen closely for my husband’s scream of agony when Will does something to it.

Just in case, I’m keeping the old TV -- power button or no power button. If it can survive eight years of Will it's nigh on indestructible!