soul chucking

So I have not posted in a very very long time. I have spent countless hours not sleeping and even more hours pondering what is to become of me. Our lives are in turmoil but only because we are suffering from first world problems and so everyday instead of posting the funny thing that I ear marked for this little spot my energies are spent worrying about what I am supposed to do. I don't have answers and I am seriously thinking about hiring survey monkey to send out a quick test so that strangers can decide my fate.
So here is a recap of our Saturday from a few weeks ago.
Myers got recruited to make a little cash for selling his soul. Everyone has a price and it turns out his is exactly 100 dollars. For the said monies he was required to drive to Idaho Falls pick up a company car and then drive it to Dubois Idaho where he would throw candy to the masses in a parade. We are a tight knit family so the boys and I went along for the ride but since we are awesome we went for free. This is a little recap of our day.
8:00 am- we leave Rexburg in a mad dash so that we can arrive to the main st branch at the appointed time of 8:30. Since we are running behind I did not have time to eat breakfast. This is only important for later in this story.
8:30 we arrive on time by some miracle or speeding. Ok it was speeding. We are rewarded with our promptness by waiting for 15 minutes for the girl with the keys to the van to arrive.
8:45 am we head into the desert where I learn that Dubois is an hour away. Suddenly I think I should have held out for some type of reimbursement.
9:10 We are now safely in the middle of nowhere when Thing 2 announces that he has to pee right now! We decided that the only thing to do was pull off the side of the road and allow him to whiz like the locals do. You know on tires. Myers reasoned that since we had made up some mad time and since we didn't have to be to the parade route until 9:45 we would be safe. Thing 1 sees his chance to weedle outside so he seizes that moment. I am not an expert as to the particulars of outdoor relief but I figured that it did not require much effort. The boys hiked down the embankment and slide behind some overgrown sage brush risking life and limb in the name of modesty. Joke was on them because all they did was walk around to provide a full frontal view.
9:45 we arrive at the branch and pick up the other guy who is to help and head to the sight.
10:00 The parade should have started but instead all I am seeing is a bunch of people milling around.
10:05 I start my rant about how being on time is everything and if these people worked in my kitchen they would all be fired.
10:10 I am now angry because the other guy we picked up is just talking and not even looking irritated. FINALLY the guy wonders over to which Myers asks when the show is going to get started he said 10:30. WHAT!?! When they sold this thing to us we were told the parade started at ten. Now my lack of breakfast is becoming a big big deal.
10:11 I am thinking about what I could eat and getting ready to be all hangry when I witnessed a real live horse boner. I am not sure if you are aware but I believe horse boners to be good omens so I settled down and then prayed that my boys would not notice the magical mystical world of nature at full attention next to us.
10:26 The line up for the parade route is starting so the boys and I snap this little picture.

Someday Brenen will give me a real picture right? It was during this little photo op that I noticed this.

That is a human in a chicken suit holding a flag. I am not sure what it all means but I laugh endlessly.
10:30 turns out they do know the value of time and the thing kicks off. In seconds we are throwing 35 pounds of candy out and 400 I-phone speaker things.
10:40 We catch up to the chicken since he is walking in scuba flippers and we take this as a sign to take his picture of close

Still don't know what this all means. Observe though that the parade route goes through neighborhoods.
10:43 we circle back and drive half the parade route over again since it was so tiny.
10:45 the parade is over we are a hundred bucks richer and our senses have been fed
So there you have it. Some day I will know what I am doing with my life and then perhaps my posts won't be so sporadic. That was a lie they will still be.

Sugar Sugar

Every now and again when my world is silent and I am alone with my thoughts I take a good hard look at my life. A few weeks ago I found myself in this very situation. My sister was in town and we were planning a girls afternoon and as soon as I left work I was to call so that we could meet up. My sister decided that the place to rendezvous would be Nelson's custard. My mom invited me over and said that if I hurried she would buy me ice cream. Oddly enough this offer did not leave me squealing tires and yelling angry slurs at unsuspecting idiots unlucky enough to find themselves in the crosswalks. I found this troublesome until I found the reason why. My belly full on ached and there was no way that I could fit another thing in there. I tried to be optimistic and convince myself that it was because it was full of nutritious leafy things when it reality it was full of a brownie and a cookie and a half a creme brulee cause you know I practice restraint. It was then that I started to feel like maybe just maybe I had a problem.
I stumbled upon a video a few days later about giving up sugar for 30 days and for some stupid reason I thought hmm this could be a good plan. I once looked into a program called whole 30 where they ask you to give up everything but air and allow you to eat like 3 twigs a day so long as they don't have salt on them. They have this rhetoric about how fighting cancer is hard but giving up sugar and all manor of delicious things is not so with that cockamamie idea floating in the old noggin and bolstered up by the staff of Buzzfeed I made the announcement at work that I was going to give up sugar until the end of June. Let it be said that this is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever done and I have done some cosmically stupid things.
So here we are skidding into the end of day 8 and there has been much weeping and wailing and swearing. I would like to tell you that I feel better but lying really isn't my thing. I would also like to say that the cravings have subsided but last night I caught a whiff of a nilla wafer and Lord knows if I had a soul I would have sold it right then and there for a tiny snackrell of it.
So now you know why the posts have dried up. Focusing on anything other than not licking the popsicle drippings off the sidewalk has not really happened for a while now.
So here is to another 22 days of torture and suffering so that I no longer have to introduce myself with the number of days I have been clean.

Oh mother!

I know that I have failed to write for a long time. The problem is we saw you two weekends in a row which means you heard all my good stories and not wanting to bore you to death I held off writing and only now have I realized that I have fallen way way off course so here we go.
Today is mother's day. Normally I hate this day. There is a part of me that is convinced it was a man who created it because what woman would put a holiday on a Sunday? This day is all about  go sit in church in an uncomfortable dress and try to keep your children quite so that other people won't know that your children are hooligans! Um no thanks. For years I convinced Myers that church was optional on that day and my plan was starting to work and then mother guilt crept in. That and I was losing my footing on conference days being optional as well so I bite the bullet and let mother's day attendance be mandatory once more.
I am starting to think that maybe I should rethink my aversion to this holiday because truth be told he really hit it out the park this time.
I woke up to breakfast in bed and these

As I was shoving the last of my breakfast into my gob he came into our room and the boys presented me with this.

I showed great restraint BTW and did not have this as a second breakfast. This is proof that I am growing as a person.
But the absolute best part was that he got the kids ready for church and let me sleep for twenty extra minutes. In mom time this is like an extra 29 hours of sleep. I was feeling like the most pampered human being that ever existed and didn't even mind that I had to go to church.
Twenty minutes into church however there was a small hiccup. Thing two hates to wear ties and normally he wears a clip on but today he had one that was tied on and he began to fuss with it and soon was turning purple and since you know this being the day of mother's I thought I should do my duty and not let him die. It was then that I discovered Myers dirty secret. This is how he had "tied" the tie.

I don't have words. Keep in mind that he ties a tie on himself at least 5 times a week. Or does he? Now I am not really sure. I laughed it off and as I was trying to conquer the cube I made another shocking discovery. The length of the tie was not even close to correct.

Observe the shame and that this is a baby length tie.  He told me that nobody would find out as long as he kept his coat on. Spoken like a true man. Luckily for us all I had chocolate to stress eat.

The truth shall set you free

This week I had the opportunity to drive down to SLC to attend a chef presentation. It was billed as a chance to meet local chefs,see new products and see new techniques. I am old and tired and the only one with clearance to drive a company car  and so my reaction was meh-. Minion on the other hand is still young, LOVES to go on car rides and loves them even more when he gets paid to be a passenger so he talked fancy and convinced me to drive his Miss Daisy self.
I will admit the trip there was a whole lot of fun and even though it was taking forever I thought that maybe he was right in pushing me out of my comfort zone. And then we arrived to our destination and immediately I changed my mind. As soon as we stepped foot inside I got the sinking feeling that I did not belong and as I tried to convince myself that I was being silly introductions started and all be if every person in there was not giving themselves fancy titles. When it came to us I squeaked out what I was doing and could feel the hot glares of disapproval along with the internal dialogues as to why a glorified lunch lady had been invited. If the floor had suddenly turned into a portal to another realm I would have been eternally grateful but I think I have offended every nerd in every galaxy and so no good turn was to be given to me. I am not sure if you know this but in the BC time ( you know before children) I was on the fast track to food glory . I was running in circles that if I played my cards right could have ended up in some amazing things. In fact as newlyweds watching the food network one Sunday I recognized people I was associating with in my former career. Unfortunately kitchens and family life are as good a combination as peanut butter and olives, so instead I rambled down a road that has been far less glamorous.
The seminar continued and as I tried to decipher words choked out by one of thickest french accents I have ever heard my shame led to questioning. Maybe I should have stayed the course, maybe I should have tried to be in high end pastry and lived up to the potential, maybe maybe maybe... The longer we went the more my former training kicked in and suddenly I realized that all was not lost. I still remembered these techniques, I still knew the language and could actually perform all of the tasks. I wanted to tell these chumps with their fancy titles my discovery but we were limited to questions not life affirming discoveries so I stayed quiet.  Right about the time that regret was starting to set in though a funny thing happened. I realized that I was bored. The idea of meticulous placement of singular berries was not thrilling but tedious and monotonous. The beauty of a correctly made ganache somehow had been dimmed and I was having serious difficulty in not pretending to have a seizure or some other medical emergency so I could leave.
So even though I am capable of creating this

What I am most proud of creating is this

Because with this title I get to have awesome conversation and endless adventures and smells that could kill a horse.

Monkey business

I have not seen my person since Christmas and have been trying to get to Boise since October so setting aside all rational thinking and subjecting ourselves to what can only be described as road torture we headed to the other part of Idaho. The drive would have been a whole lot less crappy if we had not just returned from a whirl wind trip to Salt Lake City two days prior but hey you are only middle aged once so we soldiered on.

Sammy has been talking about his beloved auction for months so we decided to check it out. Only Sammy was still in the aforementioned city of Salt Lake so we went with out him. You would think that Karma would punish us for such an egregious act but it was quite the opposite. We were blessed with this.

You are seeing a real live monkey. What you are not seeing is that she is wearing a diaper. I really wanted to take this picture but wondered if that was bad manners. Luckily for us all my BIL decided that monkeys in public trump manners so he snapped this. Two seconds later this monkey got thirsty since she was eating a salty pretzel, which you know is probably part of her native diet so she turned to her companion and stole her Snapple. She stuck her monkey tongue in there and then wrapped her whole mouth over the opening and then resumed her snacking. I was appalled since monkeys have no business drinking Snapple but then a far worse crime happened. The girl straight up just kept drinking out of the bottle without so much as an obligatory wiping off of the germs. I judged her for her creepiness, silently of course sine what do you actually say to that? 

Remember how I said it was weird that Karma had blessed us for leaving Sam out of the equation. Turns out she was just a little late.

We went swimming and as I was sitting on the deck wondering why people even like to swim Thing Two came over and announced that he had puked in the pool. I have dealt with a lot of weird comments in my 10 years of mothering but this was a new one even for me. I walked over and sure enough he had spilled the contents of his belly right there on the edge of the pool. He had almost made it out but the thirty pieces of red vines rolling around in his guts must have slowed him down. I grabbed a towel and got what I could off the concrete and then walked out to inform the front desk. He said it was OK to keep swimming and I thought sure why not if I kid can whiz in the pool surely a few chunks is fine to. Turns out not so much. We ended up being the reason the pool was closed for the night. They did let us walk across the parking lot and use the other pools hotel. That was an awkward walk of shame to say the least. Hi we are the creepy parents who let their kid swim in his own vomit but we promise promise swear that we won't hurl in your pool MKAY MKAY. 

Perhaps none of this would of happened if only I had given him the obligatory wipe down from germs. You win Karma you win.

The culprit. You can tell I am a good mom since I fed him MORE sugar after he vomited. 

The non Puker

Eight is great!

So despite all of my protest this guy turned 8 today.

 I am not sure if it the impending doom of planning a baptism reception for half of the free world or if it is just because his birthday landed on a Monday but I failed to pinterest the crap out of his birthday treat. While it pains me to type this I simply sent push pops for the whole class. Obviously I did not take a picture of this failure. 

I would like to think that I atoned for that sin by making him the cake of his dreams. Mind you this kid is all boy and I thought for sure that he would request video games or Pokemon or some other rando boy thing but alas he picked this.

I was happy to oblige and it was only after I made it and began to serve it that it all made sense. He managed to swing getting not one not two but three desserts in one. Cake and ice cream, kit kats, and M&M;s. This ladies and gents is definitive proof that this kid knows how to sugar!

When asked what he wanted for dinner he answered 50 chicken wings. We don't eat chicken wings so where this request came from is still a mystery to me. We took him to the wing joint and ordered 10 wings for him

He ate exactly 3. He did however manage to use thirty two wet naps, fourteen napkins and leave to the bathroom no less then 4 times to wash his hands. Upon noticing that he had gotten wing sauce on his shirt he announced that it was time to leave. This is ironic because this is the same kid who once tried to convince me that he was washing his hands by making the running water sound with his mouth. Dude couldn't even bother actually turning on the water. So I guess fecal mater no biggie wing sauce game ender? 

He made out like a bandit in the gift department so life is good.

I am acutely aware that protesting does little good when it come to stopping birthdays so  I will simply say- Happy Birthday moon, life is never boring with you around and your arrival made our family complete. For that I will always be grateful. Here is to many more happy birthdays.

Blue and Gold

As of last night we officially have two boy scouts under our roof.

 I am sure that there are many homes that would be beaming with pride at that last sentence. This is not one of those places. Any person who knows me knows that I am not a fan of the program. I have had religious folks, regular folks and perhaps a few sinning folks try to change my tune. But alas my opinion still sticks. The whole thing is a complex issue that may or may not involve a small amount of  feminist vigilantism. But before you begin to assume that my Subaru, faux hawk sporting, recycling ways have clouded my vision I have to  remind you of one thing. Boys scouts is expensive and I don'e even get cookies out of the deal. 

Here is my expensive tale- 

Since becoming a boy scout mom I have learned a few new phrases. One of them being Pack night. I am still not sure what this means. I have only attended two of them and I have to admit that the first one I almost ran out of the gym for fear that we were actually paying homage to a dictator. Fun fact chanting straight up freaks me out. Another fun fact there is a lot of chanting at pack nights. Because of the way that Thing 2's birthday lands his first brush with scouts was to be a pack night. Even though I was terrified at my first pack night  I did manage to notice that all the scouts had on uniforms so I knew I needed to let the boy wonder suit up so I took him to the store. 

Given that you can only buy your scouting needs in one place they have decided that customer service is not really necessary so I wandered around for at least 20 years trying to find the right area to get a shirt and when I did stumble upon them I waited another 29 years trying to find someone to explain to my why there were 12 smalls but no other size. Since no explanation was coming I decided to just do my best. I figured while we were there we would up grade shirts since Thing 1's shirt is less blue and more dirty violet. Apparently there is a magic sensor that I set off that indicated that their was a sucker on the hook and the once useless staff suddenly appeared to offer up an upgraded shirt in a completely different color for thing 1 for a mere 45 dollars. Knowing exactly zilch about anything scouting related I figured that brown was the new blue and went with it. Of course that was not all. We also needed the upgraded neckerchief, slide, numbers, patches and belts. And lets not forget the book and the hat and the socks. When I declined the book with the support of some stranger at the counter all hell broke loose. I was questioned about which affiliation I was with, who told me not to buy the book, if I believed in aliens or in Jesus and so on and so forth. Seeing my great discomfort the good Samaritan tried to come to my aid. She began to spew words that I can only assume where scout based, round table or national or bloopity bloppity. This infuriated the guy who was trying to take me for all I was worth. He countered with more scouty jargon which in turn generated more jargon from aforementioned good Samaritan. The longer the dispute went on the more uncomfortable I got. I hate confrontations but this concern was more routed in public safety. The scouting store attendant had clearly not seen the likes of nature in years as his figure attested and all the rage of being questioned was making his blood pressure rise. I was worried that he was going to have a full fledged heart episode and I know even less about CPR then I do about scouting and Lord knows while there were manuals to help me through this situation littered about  me opening would yield in fees and required manual buying and aint nobody got time for that. 

I was trapped and was trying to convince myself that I really didn't need any of this stuff after all and slowly tried to back my way out of the store since you know poking bears only leads to trouble. This story has a happy ending though. When he saw that the golden goose was about to vacate his premise he paused the fight long enough to ring me up and proclaim my total of 89 dollars. I handed over the cash-o-la and left the store.

In the after math this is what I discovered

1- I didn't buy a shirt for Thing 2

2- I didn't get the numbers for Thing 2's shirt

3-Brown is not the new blue but it is in fact the color that the leaders buy

So needless to say I still have to go back where they will bilk me for another 80 bucks- I have done the math that is 20 boxes of girl scouts cookies which according to my math gives me justification for my hatred for the program.