I can remember the combination lock to my junior high locker (14-36-24), but I can’t remember if I’m living in a “red” or “blue” state. During the election last year, I figured it was a short-lived media catch phrase, not worth committing to memory. Who cares if my state is red or blue–all I know is that my vote doesn’t really “count,” because my state always vote along liberal Democratic lines and I don’t. (Yes, I know–“every vote counts”–but surely you understand what I mean.)

But a year later, the media keeps referring to us as “red” and “blue” and I am puzzled each time. I miss the entire point of the report because I can’t remember what color I am. Or what color my state is. Am I red? Or blue? Or really purple, as some have suggested?

I propose that “red” and “blue” labels be eliminated immediately.

* * *

In other news, a 20-year old man shot six people at my local mall. Luckily, no one was seriously injured. My neighbor and I were discussing this shocking event and she confided, “I don’t think I’ll ever go back.” And I said, “You know, I think there must be something wrong with me, because it won’t stop me at all.”

After a crazy incident like that, what are the chances it will happen again soon?

* * *

Last week, I wept as I finished reading My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult. A couple of nights ago, I picked up Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith and although I love her writing, I am weary of her constant bashing of George W. Bush and all Republicans. I’m starting to take it personally, because how else can I take it? But I will persevere. I am loyal to a fault.

Even if I do live in a red blue red blue red blue state. Or red state.

Never mind. I’m colorblind, as only a white Republican from Washington state can be.

I’ve been tagged by Sallyrogers at Picture Fool. I never do these things, but for Sallyrogers, anything.

Instructions:

1) Call the meme “Regrets – I’ve Had A Few”
2) Always refer (and link back) to the blogger who tagged you
3) Always tag (and link to) at least two new bloggers
4) List as many regrets as you like, but list a minimum of one (even if you have to re-interpret the term ‘regret’ because you feel strongly that you don’t have any)
5) Include these five rules in each post as the meme instructions.

All right then.

I regret not attending a secular college and earning a “real” degree when I had the chance.
I regret not having enough confidence in my intelligence to apply to Ivy League schools.
I regret that it didn’t occur to me that serving God could mean more than just going to Bible College and entering “the ministry.”
I regret selling that house we used to own.
I regret not going to nursing school before we had children.
I regret selling our townhouse in Portland.
I regret asking my sister to photograph my last homebirth .
I regret taking an Amtrak train from Houston to Orlando last summer.
I regret putting my twins into public school.
I regret not flossing every day.
I regret using our Chevy Blazer to pull a U-Haul trailer to New Haven, Connecticut because we had to replace the head gasket as a result.
I regret not buying two gallons of milk the last time I was at the grocery store.
I regret staying up so late last night.
I regret leaving the carseat in the driveway where a cat peed on it.
I regret not going to the ocean last summer.
I regret not taking more photographs.
I regret burning my childhood diaries.
I regret selling my piano.
I regret all the times I’ve cut off my hair.
I regret sending back those letters to their original writer without making photocopies first.
I regret not picking up the toys last night because now they are scattered.

Now. I’m supposed to tag two of you . . . but go ahead and tag yourself if you want to play along. Let me know if you do play, and I’ll put a link to your blog here.

Why is it that when I stay up too late–way, way, way too late–one of my children wakes up in the middle of the night?

I was snoring my brains out at 4:30 a.m. when I came to my senses and heard my daughter calling my name. I hurried to her room and found her standing in her crib. All her stuffed animals and dollies had been unceremoniously tossed out and she was doing the Potty Dance.

“I have to pee in the potty!” she said.

Afterward, she told me solemnly, “I had a bad dream about robots. They scared me.” And then she insisted she wanted to watch a video.

And I let her. I placed her Piglet-fleece covered pillow in front of her small tv/vcr combo and put in “Finding Nemo.” I covered her up and went back to bed.

But that was not the end of that. Soon, she crawled into bed with me–in my king-sized bed–and cuddled right next to me. Please explain to me why a three-year old gets six feet of bed-space and I get six inches? Why do kids push adults right to the edge of sanity the bed? She kicked me for an hour before we both feel asleep again. At some point she got up again and went to her room, but honestly, things are hazy. I have no idea what happened in those pre-dawn hours.

All I know is that at 8:08 a.m., I woke with a start and struggled from bed as quickly as I could. She was sleeping. I don’t set an alarm clock because she wakes up every morning by 7:00 a.m., so now I was late, really, really late. I teach the preschool Sunday School class at church and I have to be there by 8:45 a.m.

We made it to church by 8:55 a.m.

And home by 11:55 a.m. In another hour, I will load up the kids in the car and we’ll go to my 7-year old’s end-of-the-season soccer lunch at a pizza place. I suppose it will be loud, but I have taken two Advils and consumed some Diet Coke in preparation.

. . . you are still at “Actual Unretouched Photo.” I just decided it was time for a change.

This morning, I took my four children in my small sedan on an hour-long bundle of errands, in this order:

1) Bank;
2) Take’n’Bake pizza shop;
3) Video game store;
4) Donut shop.

Four kids in one car grate on my nerves. Why can’t they just gaze out the window and ponder the universe and the meaning of life?

We were home in time for my sister and her family to stop by. They will be borrowing our old van (The Deathtrap, we like to call it) for a week while my husband’s away. My sister and her husband have had a run of bad luck (oh, lasting about ten years) and their only car has broken down, possibly irretrievably.

The problem with being the working poor is that you are living so close to the edge that you have no margin for error. If your car breaks down, how can you get to work? And if you don’t get to work, how can you keep your job? And if you don’t keep your job, how can you pay to fix your car? And if you don’t fix your car, how will you get to work? It’s a vicious cycle, familiar to too many people.

So, we do what we can to help.

They were here for an hour or two and we ate pizza together. When they left, I put my 3-year old down for a nap (“I want to sleep all by myself!”) and spent the remaining bit of the afternoon doing my grocery shopping online for the first time.

The evening hours have flown by in a bleary haze of html code. Time flies when you have no idea what you’re doing.

Dear Blog Readers,

I am alone. Sort of. Two of my four children are nestled all snug in their beds. Two are out at a movie, due home at any moment. My husband is in Texas. Please keep this in mind when you consider whether or not to comment on my riveting (and dull) posts over the next week. When in doubt, comment. It’s been so quiet around here. (Quiet is relative, of course, but I meant in the cyber-sense of the word.)

Today was a long day because I babysat the baby boy at 6 p.m. tonight rather than at 8:30 this morning. So, I had a half-hour between my regular day-shift and this night shift. Really, I didn’t mind. I intended to stay home with my kids anyway since my husband’s out of town, so what did it matter, really? He is the cutest baby ever (except for your cute baby, of course).

Oh! And guess what happened today? My other baby, the 6-month old, was on her tummy on the floor. She is fairly immobile because she is built like a sausage, but twice, she’s rolled from tummy to back, but I haven’t seen her do it. Today, I noticed her stretching her neck and reaching her arm and sure enough, as I watched, she rolled over.

She hasn’t done this trick for anyone but me. Seeing this baby reach a milestone was kind of cool. I went over and applauded and she giggled and we clapped and clapped at her brilliance.

Oh! And guess what happened last night at the science fair? I had carefully poked holes in each end of an egg and emptied it by blowing the insides out. This empty egg shell was part of our simple display about making eggs rubbery. Well, as we sat on the bench in front of our display, waiting for a grown-up to come and query my son about the project, a small kid, probably about four years old, wiggled next to me at the adjoining display. I kind of scooted over and then this little kid reached behind my back and GRABBED THE EGG. With a crunch, it broke.

I let out a very undignified yelp, followed by a “HEY! DON’T TOUCH!” He broke my empty eggshell! The nerve of some kids. Where were his parents?

Well. That’s it, I guess. Don’t leave me sitting here in silence. Really.

Thanks!

Love and kisses,
Mel

I must have slept last night with the house pressing upon my left shoulder blade (a la the Wicked Witch of the East with those natty striped stockings), because when I woke up at 7:00 a.m., I could barely roll over. I’ve spent my day with rigid good posture to compensate for the unrelenting pain in my shoulder and back. How does one become injured while sleeping?

And then the day marched on. I’ve been pushing my boys along, insisting that the complete the required number of school lessons for the week. My usual daycare babies were in attendance today and my own 3-year old was a whiner all day. I so often feel like I’m doing nothing at all, and yet, it is so exhausting.

As soon as we finished dinner (cooked by one of my 12-year olds), I went to the school science fair with my second-grader. We did a poster and experiment showing how you can make eggs rubbery. And not by cooking them too long . . . no. You soak an egg overnight in vinegar and the calcium in the egg reacts with the acid in the vinegar and forms carbon dioxide . . . and the bubbles carry off the calium until the egg is naked. It’s pretty cool.

And it’s a very simple experiment, which is essential to me, the Hater of Science Experiments.

At the science fair, I counted six volcanoes, powered by vinegar and baking soda. I saw an assortment of colorwheels and a few displays of carnations dyed different colors. The coolest project was a giant (four-feet across?) hot air balloon created from tissue paper and filled by a hair dryer.

My son was enamored by the Stomp Rockets similar to the ones described here. We are definitely going to make our own this summer. They are really, really cool! What cheap fun!

Now, I must go upstairs and iron pants. Some of you more enlightened feminists don’t iron your husband’s pants, but I am old-fashioned in some ways, plus I realize when I am up against an implacable situation. My husband is leaving in the morning to spend a week in Texas where he’s going to a family wedding on Saturday, then to a family birthday party (on Thanksgiving Day).

I think I’ll just stay home and take care of the kids.

I received an email today asking me to answer a survey about toys. Larissa Wojciechowski wrote:

Hi,
I am conducting a survey for a UC Berkeley student market
research project on children’s toys. I found your blog and
was very impressed by the content. If you have a few
minutes, I would appreciate your help in filling out this
survey. It should take less than 15 minutes. Please feel
free to forward to your spouse, family, or any of your
friends with children.

I appreciate your time and effort. Thanks for your help!!!

Larissa Wojciechowski
2008 MBA Candidate
UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business

I corresponded with Larissa a bit to make sure she wasn’t sending me a crazy link which would cause my computer to explode . . . then I did her survey. Sometimes I feel like helping out a fellow human being. Don’t you?

If you like to take the survey, click the link. It took me less than fifteen minutes. Thanks!

When my twin boys were three, without any thought or planning at all, I began an exercise regimen which started with this thought: I wonder if I can exercise every day for a week? Then, after the week ended, I thought, I wonder if I’ll see any changes if I exercise every day for six weeks? Then, after six weeks, I decided to exercise for one hundred days in a row. When it was all said and done, I exercised every day for a whole year. And then I got pneumonia.

All this to say that since then, nine years ago, I have never managed to get into an exercise groove again. Never. Soon after my exercise streak, I became pregnant. When that baby turned three, I joined the YMCA and started exercising again . . . only to become pregnant again. And I’m infertile, so what kind of craziness is this? Two pregnancies when the doctors said it was “unlikely” to ever happen even once? Just when I think I have my life ordered neatly on a shelf, someone bumps into me and everything falls in a heap on the floor and I have to start from scratch.

It turns out that life is less like an Dewey-Decimal-ed stack of books and more like a sheaf of mismatched papers, collected piece by piece, with scrawled messages penned by dozens of writers with an assortment of pens. And those pages keep falling to the floor when they aren’t shuffled together in a messy pile, an untidy work in progress with an unknown denouement.

The moon is a perfect circle tonight, but tomorrow? No. The tide recedes, but not for long. The milk jug is full, but soon will sit empty (and still inside the fridge because I have boys). Everything done will come undone and nothing will ever be the same again.

Why does that thrill me and depress me?

(And will I ever get into a satisfying rhythm of exercising again?)

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. (If you don’t get that reference, click here.) Hate me because I’ve already done my Thanksgiving shopping.

Yeah. You got that right. I wrapped my Christmas presents last week and this week, tonight, I am prepared to cook a complete Thanksgiving dinner. Next week, I’ll be dyeing Easter Eggs.

But wait. There’s more. Prepare to be even more impressed. You might need to sit down and breathe deeply. My grocery receipt is thirty inches long and I saved a grand total of $46.36.

Hate me because I am good with coupons and because my twenty-pound turkey was free.

(My husband is going to Houston, Texas, on Friday. He’ll be gone for a week, so I am doing everything in my power to avoid going to the grocery store with four kids in tow. I cannot shop while people talk to me and my kids–oh those talkative kids!–never stop talking. As my 3-year old says when subjected to a loud noise, “I cannot hear my ears!!”)