Not Inadequate

• This house does not have a plunger.

A fact I unpleasantly discovered on Sunday morning after my son spent a few quality minutes in the bathroom.

Someone renting out a house and not providing a plunger is asking for trouble, that’s all I’m saying.

On the other hand, WHEN exactly can I stop being involved in the bathroom habits of my family?

Never, I’m sure. I fully expect to be that mom calling my kids in college going, “Did you poop today? How was it? You need to drink more water” and so on.

• The weather in Montana is nice enough that the kids have been eating lunch outside for the last week or so. This has set me on the path to True Happiness, people.

• We have lost sight of the big picture here. Now there are children on the no-fly list? A 7 year old girl with cerebral palsy is subjected to a pat-down because her crutches can’t go through the metal detectors? A boy in a wheelchair is given an invasive body search WITHOUT HIS PARENT’S PRESENCE?

I weep. And I refuse to fly. The lack of my dollars isn’t exactly breaking the airline industry,  but it’s all I’ve got.

• When is National De-Lurking Day? I need some comments, y’all. I know you’re out there….so gimme some comments! I love the comments! I live for the comments!

See, here’s the thing. While we are traveling, I never see my real-life friends. Or anyone in real life, really, unless it’s someone selling me an over-priced sweatshirt. It’s fine, because I know I have so many friends that live in my computer. But I NEED you guys to talk back to me. Conversations! With people who don’t expect me to make their dinner! Or clean the bathroom after them! Nirvana, man.

No pressure, though.

• Happy Monday, y’all! I hope all you moms had a good Mother’s Day. I made my family bring me cake and chocolate and cuddles, so it was terrific.

• It’s becoming apparent why May is not the High Season in Yellowstone.

• I told Jim if he didn’t quit talking about the Grand Tetons, I was going to mock him on the internet. But he won’t stop. The man is Teton-crazed.

• I see it was Super Moon over the weekend. Last year I heard people talking about Super Moon on the internets and I thought it was a meme going around where everyone was going to take pictures of their ass and post them online. Glad I realized it was about the actual moon this year.

• I made this bread the other day. (note the improvised cooling rack made from scrunched up tin foil)

It took about 4 seconds to mix the ingredients and was DELICIOUS.

I have paid $5 for a loaf like this. Try it. You’ll like it.

No special equipment required – just a lidded enamel cast iron pot. I got mine at Sam’s for $40 and I use it almost every day.

The blogger at Simply So Good says she does not care for it made with whole wheat flour, but I recently discovered I can buy REAL whole wheat flour - essentially what I mill myself – at WalMart of all places. I made my loaf with half Wheat Montana Bronze Chief and half King Arthur Organic All Purpose flour. It was AMAZING. I think white flour is pretty useless, nutritionally speaking, but even if though I used half white flour, I still feel great about giving this to my family because it only has 3 ingredients and I can pronounce them all.

Tonight I am going to prepare a loaf with cheddar cheese in it for our soup tomorrow night. And maybe I’ll make a cinnamon raisin loaf for breakfast. Yum.

If you want to read more about Whole Grain vs. 100% Whole Grain, check this out. Wheat Montana flour has the 100% Whole Grain stamp, where other so-called “whole wheat” flours, such as King Arthur Flour, have only the Whole Grain stamp. Don’t get me wrong – I love King Arthur products. But the term Whole Wheat can be misleading, and that is why I look for the 100% stamp on most grain products I buy.

• While at the dreaded WalMart over the weekend, we bought Little some hiking shoes.

TWO DOLLARS! There’s no way I can’t brag about that.

• Have a good week, peeps. Brace yourselves for lots of nature pictures.

• Today we begin the drive from Shelton, Washington to Yellowstone!

• For interested parties, this is the actual house we have been staying in for the last three months.

• Jim is making me pack (rude), so I am not able to write all sorts of riveting blog posts in advance. Devastating, I know. Try to keep it together. I tried to tell him I have people depending on me, but he was laughing so hard I don’t think he heard me.

Speaking of which, I had a dream last night that a text or something I sent on my phone accidentally made it onto my blog and it was so risque or horrible that it went viral and I started being recognized everywhere I went. But not in a good way. It was awful. I don’t know why anyone would want to be famous. Sounds like a nightmare. Luckily, I am not plagued with such problems.

• My birthday is on Tuesday. I will be forty-one. *sigh*

• This is the sign to the entrance of the neighborhood where we have been staying.

It irritates me every time I see it.

Happily, we’ve been living on the right side of the sign.

• Happy Monday, y’all!

• We are leaving this house a week from today. I can’t wait. Bizarrely, I am looking forward to some sunshine. And maybe some t-shirt temperatures. It was 37 degrees when I got up the other morning. Thirty-seven degrees. I am tired of being cold.

I hate being hot too, though. So I will probably be whining about that soon.

• We have been sorting through all of our crap in anticipation of dumping about 30% of it into storage when we pass through Colorado in June. I CANNOT WAIT to unload some of this stuff.

(if anyone unfamiliar with our crazy lifestyle, a recap: We sold our house and all our stuff and have been willfully homeless for 6 months are now traveling the country with our kids. Super! Homeschooling! Is! Happening! We have all our essentials in a 4×8 cargo trailer that we pull behind our SUV. When we were packing the trailer, I forgot you could buy crayons and shampoo in other parts of the country.)

• I have lost a bra in every house we have stayed in. And two in this house. It’s bothering me. Firstly because I can’t afford it, and secondly because I keep imagining the look on the face of the poor unfortunate soul who finds one of them. I’m not a Victoria’s Secret shopper, y’all. I’m more of the Industrial Strength With Heavy-Duty Elastic Brassiere that Comes in a Box shopper.

It’s not a titillating experience to find one, is what I’m saying.

Plus also it’s the comfortable ones that seem to go missing, which is a whole ‘nother problem.

• The other night, Big was carrying on about how bad his nasty foot-wart was hurting. He eventually goes, “mom, I just don’t think you understand the pain!” Finally, I rolled my eyes and said, “Listen up, little boy - I pushed you out of my hoo-ha, I think I know what pain is.”

And then I scarred everyone within a 2-child radius.

So there you go. Now you can all feel better about your parenting.

(I didn’t say hoo-ha. I don’t remember what I said. Some insipid, juvenile euphemism, probably; that manages to be more offensive than the real word)

• Also last night, in a fit of being fed-up with Big’s attitude of never wanting to dismantle any of his Lego creations, and stealing his sister’s legos when he needed something; I went in his Lego bucket after he was in bed and took apart a bunch of stuff that just looked like Lego lumps.

Perhaps you can see where this is going.

My son, who cannot find a pair of underpants in a drawer that houses ONLY underpants, apparently possesses some kind of freakish photographic memory catalog of all his Legos.

Hysteria ensued at 9 am this morning.

I guess I took apart his helicopter carrier truck and trailer; which I was eventually able to identify as the blue and orange lump of Legos.

Happily, I compulsively keep all the directions to the Lego sets and was able to spend THREE HOURS on the floor being his assistant as he recreated it.

“MOM. Not a jumper plate, a side brick!”

“MOM. That’s not a clip, that’s a brick with a vertical bar!”

“MOM. I need light gray, not dark gray.”

Whatever, little dude. Just show me the picture. And quit sassing me.

My ass hurts now. I am too old to be sitting on the floor all morning.

There. Now don’t you feel better?

• Happy Monday, y’all.

• Last week I was cruising around the internet (shocker!), and I saw that Dooce and her husband were separated. This makes me inexplicably sad.

• On Tuesday afternoon I was harassing Big while he was trying to read - tickling his ear, tickling his neck, kissing his cheek, saying “Big.” “Big.” “BIG!” and so on.

You know. Fulfilling my God-given right to annoy my kids. And he was getting annoyed.

Finally, he swatted my hand away and said crossly, “I’m hungry. Go make me some dinner.”

If Jim hadn’t been laughing so hard he was in danger of peeing himself, he would have told Big not to talk to me that way.

I’m almost sure of it.

• Here’s something disgusting: The 15 Grossest Things You Are Eating. Click at your own risk.

• We drove to Mount Saint Helens on Saturday, where I presented my boy with his first real live volcano!

Amazing, yes? We were very lucky to get there at that exact moment.  When we first pulled up to the observation area, the clouds were just starting to clear from the top of the mountain. We had about an hour to get a good look before the clouds covered her again.

Volcanos! Plate tectonics! It’s all just glorious, isn’t it?

• Happy Monday, peeps!

• As if Pinterest could get any better, you can now customize the main pin that shows up as the cover on your individual Pin Boards. I know, that sounds confusing. Read this. And then tell me your Pinterest username so I can follow you.

Note: I’m not a stalker. I just know my way around the internet.

• I have not, in spite of my best intentions, been making bread since we’ve been traveling. However, I remain commited to improving our eating habits and have been reading all the archives of a blog I just discovered called 100 Days of Real Food. I was SUPER HAPPY when I read that I can get bread made from freshly ground whole wheat – essentially what I make myself – from a bakery called Great Harvest Bread Company. They have locations nationwide, and they grind the wheat fresh every day for their Honey Whole Wheat bread. They even have a pretty big selection of GF breads (Tressa). It’s expensive – here we are paying $5.50 a loaf, but it’s worth it to me. The nutrition content of whole grains is staggering, and the uselessness of white flour is appalling.

• I really have nothing of importance or interest to talk about lately.

And now you’re all rolling your eyes and going “DUH, Deb. When do you ever?”

I have a few small snippets, but after I type them out and re-read them, I know they are boring. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for injuries when thousands of people hundreds of people four people fall asleep and bonk their heads on their desks.

Like for instance, in spite of my firm position that weird things found on little boy feet is Dad’s Department, I have been swindled into doctoring some new weirdness Big has on his foot. He bellyached about it for a week or so before I consulted Dr. Google and determined it to be a plantar wart. Gross. I actually wrote three whole paragraphs about The Great Wart War of 2012 before I snapped to my senses. “Deb. Get ahold of yourself. No one cares about this crap.”

• Actually, I’ve been feeling kind of melancholy and homesick lately. I don’t know why. I miss my best friend. I miss my knitting buddy. I miss being able to order stuff from Amazon without a second thought. We’ve been homeless for five months now. It’s wearing on me a bit, I think. Figuring out where we are going to live is the most stressful part. I mean, I am really looking forward to all the places we are still planning to visit. And I’m not ready to stop traveling. But I’m still adjusting to certain things that you take for granted when you live someplace like a normal human being. Like putting your toothbrush and laundry detergent and shoes away without adding to the mental list of things that need to be repacked. Obviously, a travel trailer or 5th wheel would solve that problem, but it’s just not feasible with Jim’s work-on-the-phone-all-day situation.

I find myself convinced that I can solve a lot of these problems with just the right bin or basket, though. The shopping continues!

• Hope you had a good weekend, peeps! Have a good week!

• I know it’s not Monday. I still have the plague, so things are behind. I managed a shower and cooked dinner yesterday, and deemed that sufficient.

• I’m sure everyone has seen this already, but it boggles my mind every time. To wit: Alicia Silverstone is a crackpot. Also, is pre-chewing food for your baby a thing now? Do celebrities really have nothing better to do than come up with new and innovative ways to be as weird as possible? Furthermore, that child is OLD ENOUGH TO DO HIS OWN CHEWING. How long is she going to keep this up? And I thought I was a dreaded helicopter parent.

I suppose it’s not such a leap from squeezable fruit in a bag to “hey, I can make that myself!” is it?

• Thanks to everyone who suggested places for us to visit. I really appreciate it. You all had so many good ideas! We have finally managed to schedule most of the year. Summer was the most stressful, as it is the High Season everywhere and I just don’t live in a universe where I can spend $1500 a week on housing. As such, we have found the only place where summer is NOT the high season in the entire country: Phoenix.

That’s right. We are spending the hottest part of the year in the hottest part of the country! Or Hell’s Waiting Room, as I’ve heard it described.

But! We will have a house with a PRIVATE POOL, which will hopefully make it bearable.

I generally start to wilt at temperatures above 85, and so am extremely a little nervous about this plan. Perhaps bathing suit shopping will make me feel better? Unlikely.

After that, we will head to the St. Louis area in August/September and then up to Michigan in October. November and December are still unplanned, but I would like to visit the Carolinas and maybe spend Thanksgiving and Christmas in Charleston or somewhere around there. We’ll see. Thoughts, internet?

• Have a good week, y’all!

• Sometimes when I’m making dinner and my kids are yapping around my ankles, ”Mommy! Mommy! Mom! MOM!” I have this tiny dizzying moment where for a split second I think, “holy crap, they’re talking to ME. I’m the mommy! I’m in charge of these people!”

Just now, when I was picking up the toys that were in the middle of the road on my way upstairs to get my daughter out of the tub, I thought, “when did I turn into the person in charge of picking up toys? When did I become the person who CARED that the house was clean?”

Wasn’t it just 5 minutes ago that I wondered derisively why my mother was constantly sweeping? Now I’m the sweeper. I’m the boring grown-up, obsessed with stupid things, like how clean baseboards are. Damn it. When did that happen? I feel certain that I’ve been this person for a while, but sometimes it’s still a surprise.

Is that normal?

Nevermind. I don’t want to know if it isn’t.

• I went to Olympia on Sunday to get a haircut, because I just couldn’t stand it for one more minute. My hair was so long that I had taken to using about 6 of my daughters hair clippies to hold it back from my face. Jim was not a fan of this look. He wouldn’t come right out and say it – even when cornered (due to good training), but for the last two weeks there was a lot of “why don’t you make an appointment” and “don’t you need to fix your hair before we go?” and so on.

Finally, I broke down and picked a place out of the phone book that sounded promising. I called and made the appointment, then went to their website to get directions. I discovered I accidentally made an appointment with “the top salon in the Pacific Northwest according to Vogue Magazine.”

So that was an inexpensive visit. She did a great job, though. I got my brows and lip waxed while I was there. There is something invigorating about getting a good brow wax. I feel prettier. Younger even. Like I’m snatching my youth back from the jaws of…of whatever this is. Take that, Forty! I have the upper lip of a 25 year old again!

• I also went to Target to look for new jeans for Little. She’s been wearing her brother’s hand-me-downs, but he’s a skinny, skinny little guy – I buy Slims for him and they are too big. She’s tall (so tall!) and slender too, but even at 5 she has a very feminine shape. I realized the hand-me-down Slims were practically cutting off her circulation, and decided to see what the girls department had.

I didn’t buy anything. Fifteen dollars they want for little girl jeans!

FIFTEEN DOLLARS!

At TARGET.

There is not a snowball’s chance that I am paying fifteen dollars for jeans that’ll last for 3 months and spend most of their life getting dirt rubbed on them and the knees ripped out.

NOT A CHANCE.

My new plan is to dig her shorts out of the Future Clothes bin and hope for warmer weather.

(Hi! I’m a tightwad!)

• I also went to World Market to check out this Biscoff stuff I keep hearing about all over the interwebs. I chickened out and didn’t buy any, but I DID see THIS**:

Which in retrospect, I wish I HAD purchased, just so I could leave it laying around casually on the kitchen table for Jim’s breakfast.

Look! It’s microwaveable!

• Happy Monday, y’all!

** Sorry, sorry, sorry. I know. But how could I NOT share that?

• First, let me just say how much I do NOT, in fact, enjoy Spring Forward.

• Second, I am over at Heart of the Matter today giving away a 6 dvd Go Science set. Library and Ed has also generously offered a 20% coupon code for several other science products.

• We had an absolutely terrific weekend. We drove up to Tacoma, which is about an hour and a half from where we are currently staying. Tacoma does not have the reputation of being Cool and Hip like Seattle, but I was pleasantly surprised when we got there. It has a really vibrant downtown (vibrant! what am I, a travel brochure?), with lots of museums and restaurants. I have been dying to go to the Museum of Glass, so I dragged everyone up there with me.

It was AMAZING. And to my surprise, Big was really into it. The MOG has a live Hot Shop, where every day you can go watch them create amazing things out of glass.

I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised that he liked it – the Hot Shop has ovens and blowtorches and molten glass and all kinds of dangerous equipment that appeals to little boys.

An exhibition of a forest scene was absolutely amazing, as were the outdoor exhibits, especially the Chihuly Bridge of Glass.

It was great. I highly recommend if you find yourself in Tacoma, Washington. In truth, the indoor collections were a bit…Meh, but the Hot Shop definitely made it worth the price of admission.

(did I say amazing enough in that description? sadly I am too lazy to think of synonyms. judge me as you wish.)

• On Sunday, we spent a relatively relaxing day at home (“relaxing day at home” is code for “no one took a shower” in case that’s not how you do it), and were lucky enough to see a SWARM, practically, of seals fishing in the bay, and a starfish, and a Bald Eagle! A Bald Eagle! You don’t see those in Colorado, and I always love catching a glimpse of one. They are a very majestic looking bird. The Bald Eagle looks like he kicks some serious ass.

See the little white dots at the end of his arms? Those are his eyespots.

Starfish have eyes! Who knew?

** a group of seals is called a pod, herd, or rookery.

• Happy Monday, y’all!

• Today is my LITTLE sister’s 39th birthday. Please send me all your old lady jokes so I can email them to her. Because I rock a being a sister that way. I already know what I am getting her when she turns 40. I can’t hardly wait.

• I have not talked about this yet, but I am QUITE TAKEN with a way to scrapbook called Project Life. It’s more than merely sticking photos into slots, but less than the cutting and pasting and eternal moving-stuff-around-on-a-12×12-page that’s kept me from scrapbooking for the last, oh, every single year. I want to document the Adventure, and it seems like a less overwhelming place to begin, rather than, say, my entire life. I even bought PhotoShop Elements when it was on sale last week. Anybody who knows anything about PhotoShop (Melanie), feel free to leave me unsolicited advice. Also, do you guys print at home, or send your stuff out? And why? Anyone else doing Project Life? Do you scrapbook?

I’m going to have to stop myself from carrying on about this, because I might scare people off with my unbridled enthusiasm. I can already see how we can adapt the idea for school notebooking.

Although I might just take a tiny minute to brag that I went to the craft store on Saturday and scored a bunch of stuff at 40% off AND I had a 15% off coupon on top of that!

I love me a sale, y’all.

• Speaking of Saturday, it was THE BEST DAY EVER. My boy decided to come with me to Olympia (which is about an hour away), and we had the most fun. I took him to lunch, where he packed away a gigantic mushroom burger. We held hands everywhere we went. It was fantastic. Daddy and Little stayed home and made No Bake Cookies.

• Peter Gray, author of the Freedom to Learn blog at Psychology Today, begins a series about the very interesting results of the Unschooling Survey conducted last Fall by Pat Ferenga (of Learning Without Schooling). This first article is mostly about the demographics of the survery participants, but I am looking forward to reading more about what they learned.

• I was going to empty the spam folder this morning, but there were a few that caught my eye as Quality Comments.

Like this valuable tip. You might want to make a note:

I figured that the more I read a good book, the smarter I get. You might wish to add it to your post.

Or this one, in which I clearly have a positive influence on people:

I am taking the Internet seriously now.

• Happy Monday, y’all!