Work! Work. Work?

So. I had surgery May 13th, and I pretty much abandoned my blog because my stitched-up booty was not allowed to go upstairs (where my computer is). When I finally COULD go upstairs, I found that I liked spending time with the kids waaay more than blogging. Sorry people, but thems the facts.

Anywho, I returned to work last week, and I apparently now have all sorts of time in which to blog. On a quick side note, because of where I work, I'm one of the select few that actually wants gas prices to RISE. So BP can keep building stuff. Chevron too. All the big oil guys. Then I will have work. Lots of it. And I won't have to pretend to work all day when there's only one thing to work on that I could finish in half a day but I have to stretch out into 4 days worth of work.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, returned to work. The first day was B.R.U.T.A.L. I had gotten used to getting up at 10 am. I had gotten the kids used to getting up at 10 am (poor hubby still had to get up early. Sucks for him. Maybe he should get something taken out too). I had to haul my non-early-bird self to the shower, remember to brush my teeth, and take the two little ones to their Indian family (read: babysitter that loves them to death). I was not mentally prepared for the challenge of getting up early, let alone dropping off a baby and a toddler at a second-story apartment and all before 8 am! Plus, there was the toddler's full-blown tantrum when he got dropped off at his 3rd mommy's house.

I got to the office, turned on my computer, and was greeted with about 600 emails. In my Inbox. That doesn't include the Junk Mail contents. Doesn't anybody read those auto-response out-of-the-office emails anymore? Well, you can imagine how the morning and a big chunk of my afternoon were spent. I think my eyes still hurt.

Getting out of work was almost worse. I had to pick up the boys (happy to see me), and I forgot that I now had to make dinner. It's not like I hadn't been making dinner every day since I was home. It was that I had to make dinner after my first day back at work. I had totally not even thought about dinner (well, except maybe about eating it). And I don't do well with last-minute meal planning. My idea of last-minute planning is going to Little Caesar's for their Hot and Ready specials.

Needless to say, I fell asleep before 9 pm

Ohhh, my head!

Migraines are the bane of my existence.

And I was fully prepared to write about my last six days of crappy life, but then I figured: really, who cares? Pain, blah blah blah, more pain, blah blah blah, morphine... ahhhh. That pretty much sums it up.

Something MUCH more important in the grand scheme of things are boys and their germs. When in the course of evolution did it become okay for boys to not be disgusted by ANYTHING? I mean, little girls seem not to like (DISCLAIMER: Typically. I have no hands-on direct experience except from my god daughters who are the girliest girls EVER) to be dirty or slimy or sticky. Boys, on the other hand, seem to consider extra goop and muck part of their natural habitat.

Italo (the new teenager I mentioned before) had been sentenced to all-white uniform shirts for his entire elementary school attendance. Other colors are allowed (blue, and just recently yellow), but he always came home FILTHY... bleach was required and didn't always help - hence the white uniform shirts (he once came home with the alphabet written backwards in permanent marker on his brand new shirt). After literally years of begging, we let him wander into the color spectrum this year. He wanted to be cool and wear the blue pin-striped pullovers (that remind me of pre-school uniforms, but, hey, what do I know?) that hide the fact that you forgot your belt for the 4th time this week. And I really tried to make it work for him. I reminded him DAILY that he needed to come home relatively clean - at the very least not permanently stained. Well, suffice it to say that he's been using up his "wearable" stash of uniform shirts and is down to about 3 decent ones (not great, just decent). So he's once again been sentenced to white uniform shirts. Sucks for his coolness next year.

And that's just shirts we're talking about. Don't even get me started on his pants, socks, SHOES, hair (how hard can it be to thoroughly wash 1/4" long hair?), face, and skin. It just seems to him a natural thing to be dirty.

Little Joe... well, he's a horse of a different color. That boy wants to keep his hands clean at all times - and that's it. Everything else is apparently fair game. My mom used to give me dirty looks all the time because when we could come over (when we were only a family of four), I would look fine and Italo would look fine and JC would look fine but Little Joe would be... gross. Until, during my c-section convalescence last year, she got a first-hand view of getting Little Joe ready to go out.

It's not like you can really pin down what he does. It's more like magic... dirty magic. One minute, you've dressed him in a pair of cute jean shorts with white socks and his favorite Buzz Lightyear sneakers topped off with a tan dinosaur button up shirt - the next minute he looks like one of those kids on the "Adopt a Kid" commercials asking for $19 a month to feed a child. He's sticky, slimy, has some kind of food stuck and dried on the middle of his shirt, and is in the process of eating, no, SAVORING one of his own boogers. I used to tell my mom about Little Joe's dirty magic. I wasn't letting the whole second-child-isn't-as-xxxxxxx-as-the-first happen to me. I was taking care of both of them the same way. She never believed me because Little Joe always looked like a little street urchin. Now she's a believer. And this happens almost every day. Still. And I still can't figure out his dirty magic. It's a talent really, if a talent could be named where getting dirty was important or impressive.

And Nestor, well, he's a baby. I caught him "sharing" his cereal with the dog the other day... I think the dog got more cereal and Nestor got more dog drool. Enough said.

Just my dirty musings of the day... boys really are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. They just didn't tell you to look at the fine print...

BOYS ALSO INCLUDED WITH AND NOT NECESSARILY LIMITED TO: boogers, grass, sharpies, spaghetti stains on new white shirts, cool new rocks to break the vacuum, boogers, dead bug collections to be found as a surprise in the underwear drawer, random bottle caps, rusty nails, boogers, chewed-on pencil erasers, play-doh, gum in the dryer, and did I mention boogers?

Get Ready, Set, Go!

Okay. So first of all... blogging. I've never done it before. And up until a few months ago, I didn't even really read blogs either. But I had to keep up with my friend E in Texas through her blog, and I re-found my friend L in Washington on her blog. Then I got on Facebook and some people were blogging there too!

Suddenly, people I know have blogs that they actually update fairly regularly. And now I'm finding that their links to other blogs are interesting. Then those interesting blogs have more links to other interesting blogs... I'm pretty sure you get the picture.

So, here I was... lurking on a bunch of people's blogs, thinking "Where do they get all this material?" Life isn't really that crazy, busy, odd, wonderful, sad, <insert more adjectives here>, is it? And then I thought about my mundane life.

Well, let me clarify: I love my life. But, in my eyes, it's mundane... I work. I take care of my three boys (four if you count my husband). I make dinner. I shop. I sleep. Mundane, see?

And then I remembered my sister's face the other night when she actually came over for dinner. My sister is single, by the way, and she hardly ever comes over to my house (well, she's "talking" to someone... in my day that was called boyfriend/girlfriend, but these are apparently modern times and that is sooo eighties). She loves to have me over or to get together with me and the hubs, but she never really physically spends time at my home. I think it's the noise.

Italo, 13, is just that: a newly minted teenager, complete with all the eye-rolling, passive-aggressive conversation, pay-attention-to-me-but-don't-watch-me-like-a-hawk issues that all hormonal boys his age have while trying to text at the same time. Add to the mix our Little Joe, 3, who I'm sure will be sent home with a note on his first day of kindergarten requesting that we please heavily medicate him before sending him back to school and baby Nestor, 10 months, who is already showing his daredevil tendencies by trying to do everything Little Joe does without the benefit of walking or balance... well, I'm sure you can imagine the three-ring circus that our living room is in the evenings.

Now to me, the controlled chaos make my heart feel like the Grinch on Christmas when his heart grew two sizes bigger... I love it. I love the noise, the running around, the "Mom, where is my ?" whiny chanting, the remote control tug-of-war over Yo Gabba Gabba vs the Deadliest Warrior, the dog trying to sneak his eating of the baby's slobbered on Honeycomb cereal bits. Most of the time, the noise doesn't really penetrate... it's my mundane life.

But my sister's face! You could tell she was waaay past counting to 10. A glass of wine wasn't going to help. Not even a LARGE glass of wine... She teaches high school all day long to a bunch of upper middle class to simply upper class teenagers, but she can't handle my three kids, the hubs, and the dog. I swear I could see a new gray hair or two pop up in her newest cute hairstyle.

Earlier in the evening, I had been cooking dinner: all-meat/cheese version for the hubby's diet, adding veggies and rice for the kids' nutritional needs, and then starting an alphabet soup for the aforementioned sister that was in the mood for soup. My kitchen stove shares the counter top with the bar area, so my sister was sitting on a stool chatting with me as I did my kitchen thing. For a short while, I ended up holding the baby sideways on my left hip and then Little Joe on my right because he was getting a little jealous - all the while continuing keeping an eye on dinner and trying to keep up my end of the conversation with my sister. Little Joe's attention span is short, to say the least, so he was off in a flash to play Bat Batman up and down the stairs (no, I didn't repeat the word accidentally or miss a typo. Little Joe calls his superhero BAT Batman... you figure out the mind of a 3-year-old). My sister did not find the child carrying amusing. A few minutes after Little Joe took off, she proceeded to very sarcastically come up, hang her arms around my neck, and whine loudly that she wanted to be carried too.

Yep. This from a 30-year-old. I guess I know why she doesn't come around that much.

So, thinking about this one episode... my sister's face, Little Joe as Bat Batman, Nestor always wanting to be on my left hip, the husband needing Atkins diet food when the kids need nutrition, Italo trying desperately to grow up but still be my baby, the dog being... well, a dog... it's my mundane life. And I love it.