de-funking

Is anyone else really bummed that the satellite didn't crash land in southern Utah? I thought for sure it would. Psht. NASA.

Anyway, what's new with you guys this week? Good news! I think I'm pulling out of that funky funk I've been in these past few weeks. For future reference (in case you or I find ourselves in another slump) these have been the most helpful rungs in my de-funking ladder:

1. President Uchtdorf. I'm too lazy to find the exact quotes online, but in my notes (neeeerd!) I wrote "be thankful for small successes--God notices them" and "everyone has strengths and weaknesses--stop punishing yourself" in large, underlined letters. Let's take a minute and thank heaven for President Uchtdorf, huh? He has his finger on the pulse of your average Mormon mom, that's for sure. Out of respect, I also drew this in my notes:

2. I had an opportunity to scratch my creative itch (without having to bare a child) thusly:

I also learned something important about refinishing furniture. It's a lot like running in that the entire time you're doing it you're thinking "I hate this! Why am I doing this to myself?!" but when you're done you think, "That was FUN! Let's do it again!"

3. My children. They are weird, they smell like puppies sometimes, and one of them (you know who you are) still wears a diaper, but they bring me a lot of happiness:

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Hi. I'm Tonje.

I wash my laundry and then I wait a week to fold it. If you follow the same laundry schedule I do, you will have noticed that somewhere around day three, laundry congeals and conforms to the shape of your hamper.

Heads up, on day nine your laundry will crawl out the door, hitchhike south on I-15, and get a job at the Bloomington Walmart, where it will provide mediocre customer service.

For the past few weeks I've been a really bad housewife. I enjoy my job as a mom. Sure, the labor is menial, the salary is nonexistent, and the hours are ridiculous, but I get to MAKE PEOPLE. I mean, come on!

It's the housewife part of my job that I've shirked lately.

Up until two or three weeks ago, I found quite a bit of satisfaction in running my home. I usually enjoy having a tidy house, planning and cooking meals, and being able to boss everyone around. Not lately. Lately I find myself asking questions like this aloud: "What's that on the carpet? A cockroach? Or a really old olive? Do I care?" And we've covered the laundry situation.

Somehow the fire under me has been snuffed out. Am I having a mid-life crisis?! AM I GOING TO DIE WHEN I'M 62?!?! Maybe I need a new hobby. Maybe I need give more service. Maybe I need to be more grateful.

One thing's for dang sure, I need to act fast before I turn into this lady:



(If you're like me and you rarely click on these things, allow me to offer you some incentive in the form of bribery: I will personally bake, decorate, and deliver the cake of your choice if you can name the initial on the white-hatted gangsta rapper's giant necklace at 1:51 AND be the first to mention it in a comment. Yes, this is a test.)

I saw this video over the summer and filed it away in my mind under "Things That Are Blog Worthy" and then immediately forgot about it because I accidentally misfiled it under "Things That Are Not Dorky" and I never open that mental file, obviously. But this weirdo Norwegian lady popped into my mind this week.

Eight years ago I made the decision to be a housewife. Actually, if I'm being honest, I made that decision a long time ago....

I've kind of always wanted to be a "crappy housewife," as Tonje so eloquently puts it. So what's my dealio? I need to find some motivation, I think.

Rewatching that spectacle of a video is actually quite inspiring. If I choose to abandon housewifery, this is my other option? A nearly abandoned discotheque at what appears to be three o'clock in the afternoon? I'm suddenly looking forward to scrubbing my toilets.

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Dum Dum Doctors

I'm having a hard time getting my creative juices flowing, or any of my juices for that matter. I'm tired. It all started last night.....

{{{entering Saved By The Bell-type flashback sequence}}}

We went to my sister-in-law's house for mango sticky rice. Also for the company, but the mango sticky rice was the main thing. As groups of small children are wont to do, there was quite a bit of noise and rough-housing between my four children and her...one. It really wasn't ONLY my kids making the noise, but I digress. At one point someone produced two large inflated bouncy balls that I'm sure were manufactured for the purpose of an adult using them to sculpt their abs. Our children used them for the purpose of rolling face-first onto the carpet.

So consumed was I in the enjoyment of my mango sticky rice that I didn't see when Tess, apparently, rolled face-first into a tangled wad of children.  She screamed and cried. She refused to move her left arm. She refused to be soothed by my singing "Leafy Treetops" or my knock knock jokes. That's when I knew it was serious.

Fast forward two hours. DJ took Tess to Instacare whose motto is, "We'll pop your kid's bones back together so you don't have to!....for a small fee..." where he discovered that Tess had dislocated her elbow. The doctor popped it back in, it popped back out again, he popped it back in again, he gave Tess a Dum Dum, and DJ brought her home. She was still crying and refusing to use her arm when she got home, but we figured she was just being dramatic, so we spanked her and sent her to bed so that we could watch Smallville.

Not really.

In reality we were up most of the night with her, trying to pop her elbow back together the way the Dum Dum doctor showed my husband. She wimpered. She screamed. She cried herself to sleep a few times. At two in the morning DJ searched "how to pop an elbow back together" on YouTube. The only thing the videos resulted in was me getting nauseous.

Finally, the sun came up. Tess still wore her yellow Sunday dress, which was soaked in purple children's ibuprofen by that point. Her scrawny little arm just hung there like a ventriloquist doll arm, only less weird. I immediately drove her to our doctor, who is actually a physician's assistant, but it's okay because he's witty and has the drawer full of Dum Dums.

He popped her elbow back together and outfitted her with the smallest sling possible by today's technological standards. In my exhausted daze I mentioned offhandedly that the YouTube videos weren't at all helpful. This got a good laugh from the doctor who cracked some kind of "I got my medical degree from YouTube" joke. Like I said, witty. Usually in circumstances such as this I would respond by demanding my doctor's home phone number so that I could call in the event of another 2 AM not-quite-emergency-room-worthy moment, but he hadn't given us the Dum Dums yet.

He told me to leave the sling on Tess for 48 hours to give her elbow a chance to rest before she pops it back out again. "Looks like she's going to be wearing that dress a little while longer!" was his parting shot after he gave Tess her Dum Dums, and with a flurry of white lab coat and antiseptic he was gone.

Tess was happy.

In fact, she was riding such a Dum Dum high that it was hard for me to get a clear picture of her.

{{{Returning from Saved By The Bell flashback}}}

Now, Tess is catching up from her all nighter.

I'm so grateful that Tess is happy again I don't even care that her dress is layered with ibuprofen, ketchup, Dum Dum goo, and swingset grime and I can't take it off of her until tomorrow.

Yes I do.

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Monday Monday...dah daaaah, dah dah-dah dah...

Has it really been two weeks? Did you grow out a beard while I was gone? Read the Old Testament? Plant and harvest a crop of zucchini? Are you anxious to hear about our adventures? Since it's been so long, I will kindly reconstruct the events of the past two weeks in numerical order. I'm SO kind.
1. DJ came home from Colorado. There was much rejoicing.
2. The next day we drove to Logan, Utah to attend the blessing of my niece, Jamma Jammer Jamie Astrid Alfred. The blessing was eloquent, the luncheon was pink pork, and I left without helping with the dishes because I am a TOTAL DORK.
3. The next day was Labor Day and we had a picnic in Pine Valley.

4. A few days later this spider crawled up my husband's leg as we snuggled upon the Lovesac:

. I named him Harry. And then I sprayed him with half a can of Raid and flushed him down the toilet.
5. The next day, we decided to exact our revenge upon Nature by camping at Yankee Meadows.

6. The next day was Marianne's baby shower. My assignment was cake. I accepted the assignment gladly, since I figured my other options were things like making people race to drink lemonade out of baby bottles or being pregnant.

7. The next day was September 11th. We watched YouTube videos of the attacks. I cried about it all over again. In case you haven't caught on yet, I avoid discussing painful reality on this blog. Moving right along...
8. That brings us to the present. See? You didn't miss much. Hairy Spider of Doom, campfire, Supercake. Tune in next time, I plan on unearthing some embarrassing childhood photos and revealing the secret to a happy, fulfilling life. Or it'll be another recipe and dumb story. Only time will tell.

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