mathmom's blog

When we got home after 2 weeks on vacation, we had 2 ripe tomatoes! Yay ! They were very yummy, especially with basil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar . If I can prevent the blight from killing the tomato plant, (and the deer from eating the tomatoes) we might have more in the next few days. The rest of the house was less productive. The lawn was a jungle, the sunflower had died. The fish were alive, but the water had gotten dangerously low because of evaporation---almost below the level of the pump, which would have been bad. The yellow fish appears to have broken something, she's a bit misshapen now (a humpback? I don't know). The ants found their way under the kitchen table. There are moths living in our pantry. I haven't checked the compost pile, which I need to do tomorrow. Things tend to disintegrate when you're gone, but they're slowly coming together again. Everything except for the laundry to be folded pile, which is glowering at me and reproachin...

Today after breakfast, Luke was eating the last of the cereal in his bowl. As I was clearing the rest of the table, he grabbed the bag with the remaining crumbs of cereal and tried to put it in his bowl, but ended up spilling it all over the table. Luke and Amanda then proceeded to grab double handfuls of the crumbs and stuff them in their mouths, until one of them knocked over Amanda's juice, which happened to be in a real cup, not a sippee cup. My first reaction was to grab the two of them, spank them and lock them in their rooms until I had the house clean. I realized that this would probably take until they were in high school, so instead I left the scene of the crime until I could relax. If it were just the table, that would be bad enough, but the whole house has gradually been getting messier and messier, and I seem to be constitutionally unable to deal with it... I did eventually manage to wipe the table, before the juice had cemented the sugary bits of the cereal to t...

There used to be a book called " snigglets ," full of words that aren't in the dictionary, but should be. For example, " picklessence " was the waiter's art of interrupting you when you had a mouthful of food to ask, "Is everything OK?" The " hozone " (or "hose-zone") is the place where lost socks go in the laundry. I have been plagued lately by children's socks disappearing. It was especially troubling when one of Eleanor's fancy socks would go missing, since she is particularly picky about how her socks and shoes fit. A few days ago, the washer came up with an error code. Of course, this happened just before we went to sleep, but Michael got up and investigated. It turns out the washer was not draining very well. Well, after we got the laundry out of the washer, I was poking around and found a hiding hole under the rubber gasket around the door. In that hole, there were about 10 kids socks. Later, Michael foun...

Today I did a little teeny bit of spring cleaning---I tried to tidy up the porch, one of my most favorite places to be in the spring. I tried to tidy it up while Luke and Amanda were around, which reminds me why I don't usually try to do that. First I swept the leaves off the porch. Luke helped first by grabbing the broom and swinging it wildly around. I don't know what babies have with brooms several times taller than they are, but my kids loved swinging brooms around. I finally gave him a hand broom and rescued my broom from him. He then proceeded to sit in the middle of the pile of leaves and pick them up with the hand broom and throw them around. Amanda helped by hiding behind the pieces of porch furniture and by picking up the leaves that were stuck between the floor boards of the porch. Then I needed to wash off the chalk from the walls. I had started letting the kids write on the wall with chalk one day when it had been raining for about a week and we really need...

Michael has finally been able to set up the play structure he built. It consists (so far) of a platform about 4 feet off the ground, a black board underneath in the back, and a slide. Michael did a great job of over-engineering, thus making it very very sturdy and suitable for rough play. It is also beautiful, with rounded edges on all the 2 by 4s. It is painted dark green (like a forest, says Eleanor) and varnished, so it is nice to touch. It also turned out much larger than we expected. You would think that a math and CS geek together could figure out how much space it would take up in the room, but apparently not---you have to walk around the slide to get into the main part of the room. It does fit in perfectly with our haphazard decorating style. The slide is very fast. Michael ended up varnishing the slide surface, and since it is fairly steep, you just zoom down. I think that Amanda might be slightly afraid of it, we'll have to work on that. Eleanor likes lying down...