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Bad Choice Theater
Ah, it was a glorious day outside. Nice and warm, with just enough wind to make it comfortable. So, of course, I spent a large part of it bathed in electrons from my magic box (I give it time and electricity, and my clients give me money).
I decided early on that (barring massive client issues) I WAS GOING OUT TO THE PARK. Dee has been having a good week, so I figured I'd get my work done early, she'd get home, do her homework, have some lunch, and we could go out for a bit before her playdate.
Yeah, that was the plan. However, (bad choice #1) she decided to play in class instead of doing her schoolwork, so she had to do that work before we did anything. After she finished, I sent her to her room with the instructions, "Pick up the room, and I will come to check in a little while to decide whether you can come out yet."
Bad Choice #2: When I went to check, the amount of stuff on her floor had doubled, and she was playing with a bank. "Oooh, Miss Dee," I said sadly. "The room's not clean, and I have to run to a meeting. You have to stay in your room while I'm gone, and if it's clean when I get back, then we'll discuss whether you go to the park with me."
Bad Choice #3: After the meeting, I called to let hubby know I would be home in about 25 minutes. When I got back, I had trouble opening Dee's door because of the toys piled in front of it. I shook my head at Dee, then went to warn Daddy that that corner of the house was likely to be Drama Central for a bit.
Bad Choice #4: The news that I would be taking the dogs for a walk to the park without her was met with howls and sobbing (mostly variations on "it's not FAIR!" Due to the drama, she got to remain in the room while I was gone.
Bad Choice #5: When I got back, she still hadn't done much and fussed that she couldn't do it all herself. As an assist, I went into her room and walked her through cleaning, asking "Do you want to pick up books or babies first?" and so on. Because Mommy had to supervise, though, she lost one of her games at game-time.
After game-time, we did final homework and tooth-brushing. Just when we thought the curtains were closed, we had Bad Choice #6. After all else has been done, Dee is supposed to go tell Daddy that she's ready for story time. Instead, she dawdled her way down the hallway and stood in his office looking around. This cost her one of her stories.
Finally, we got her in bed, talked about her day and had lullabies.
Crap. Just looked down the hallway, and the light is on, so it looks like Bad Choice #7 (Getting up to play in the bathroom) has occurred, and I need to go deal with that.
Please stop the ride; I want to get off.
Update: The initial "light in the hallway" was just her going to the bathroom. However, she got up two more times after that (Bad Choices #8 & #9) and during one of those choices brought pretzels, crackers and her scissors back to her room (Bad Choices #10, #11 and #12 where she proceeded to eat in bed (Bad Choice #13) and cut the bow on one of her dolls and gods knows what else (Bad Choice #14) while she waited for us to go to bed instead of her going to sleep (Bad Choice #15).
With me so far?
Once we went to bed, she got up and came and got in bed with us, then fussed and refused to move when I told her that she needed to go get in her bed (Bad Choice #16). Once we were back in her room, she threw a tantrum (Bad Choice #17) that lasted a good 10-15 minutes.
After needless amounts of drama (and screaming that the neighbors surely heard), she finally went to sleep. Sometime later in the night after I went to sleep, she came and got in bed anyway.
Bleah. Now I have to do consequences for the food and scissors when she gets home, and that's assuming we don't have another note from school to deal with.
I can't verbalize how much I want to be done with this.
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Posted by geekmom on Thursday, February 26 @ 14:59:18 CST (353 reads)
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Dee's latest obsession
Dee goes through cycles with TV shows; she will want to watch a particular one almost exclusively for weeks, and then she's over it and onto another. Her current obsession is Avatar, The Last Airbender. Wikipedia has several pages on the cartoon, so I can at least keep up with Dee's references.
As of late, she has decided that she's a waterbender, and when she's six years old (or on the 1001st day of school -- it varies), she is going to have a pool party and show her friends that she's a waterbender. Other than periodically asking if waterbending is real or pretend, I just grin and nod a lot. For the record, so far the answer has been "pretend" followed by an exasperated look.
Last night, she went off into her "I'm a waterbender" spiel, and I pointed out that it was okay to pretend, but there would be NO pretending or "practicing" waterbending at school or inside the house, as she didn't want to get in trouble for playing in the sink or water fountain. I mentioned this, because it occurred to me that the "pour the water out of the bathtub onto the bathmat" incident last week may have been waterbending practice.
Dee grinned maniacally. "Yes, master... I mean, Yes, Mommy!" I sigh; hubby grins.
Behind me, hubby starts giggling (never a good sign) and tells Dee "You know, Dee, I'm an airbender!"
Dee's eyes open wide. "Really?"
"Yeah," he says. "Pull my finger!"
Dee shrieks and jumps up in bed while I facepalm and try to stifle, and hubby tries to get Dee to lay back down in bed.
Once we get her to lay back down, I try to use my serious Mommy voice. "Dee, Daddy is not an airbender." I glare at hubby and tell him "You need to hush, now!" while Dee just cackles.
"Dee, honey, Daddy is not an airbender. There's a big difference between bending air and breaking wind." They both laugh, and I know that this is going to be a conversation with a teacher or friend at some point, starting with "This is going to sound weird, but ..."
It's a sad state of affairs when, in a household of 5 living things, I'm the sane one.
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Posted by geekmom on Monday, February 23 @ 02:17:37 CST (441 reads)
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Why Dee Can't Have Markers. Ever. Forever.
Last week (I'm only recently calm enough to coherently blog about it), Dee got into massive trouble.
She had come up to my office and was asking me to play with her. I was in the middle of emails for a client, but I told her that I would be there in 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes later, I peek in the living room and don't see her, so I head down the hall to check her room. En route, I find her in the bathroom, scrubbing her arms. This is never a good sign, and in this case, she looked like a Pict, or maybe a tribal Smurf.
Me: Dee, why are your arms blue?
D: I don't know. (obviously falling back on the classic defense)
Me: You want to try that again? (asked with appropriate mommy-face)
D: I wrote on my arms with Expo marker.
Initially, I was not horrendously upset about her writing on herself ... she only has washable markers, and she dislikes the effort to clean everything up enough that we hadn't had a marker incident in months. However, the Expo markers are not washable -- they are dry-erase; and I had a sick premonition of where this was going to lead.
Me: Dee, what else did you draw on?
D: On the couch.
Crap. "Okay, show me what you did." Abandoning the attempt to get the remaining blue off of her arms, we head to the living room, where I discover that she has, in fact, drawn on the couch.
And a pillow.
And the wall.
In three places.
And another wall.
And her Lego table.
Me (taking all this in and displaying remarkable calm): Dee, what else have you drawn on?
D (looking scared): The TV.
The TV.
I look over at the TV.
The brand-new $1800 DLP television.
Which she has in fact marked on.
All over the screen.
In a half dozen different places.
Little scribbles here. Scrawls there. And great looping circles right smack freaking dab in the middle.
Also, for good measure, she has written her name on the entertainment center.
While I stood in the middle of the living room, eyes closed and trying not to scream, I had four thoughts in quick succession:
Thought #1: Fuck parenthood; I should've gotten a puppy.
Thought #2: I can't kill her; I'd be the first suspect, and I'd never get away with it.
Thought #3: Dee needs to go to her room until I calm down.
Thought #4: Hubby is going to blow a blood vessel.
I breathed for a minute to be sure I could speak without yelling.
Me: Dee, you are in more trouble than you have ever been in your entire life. Go to your room right now and stay there until I say you can come out.
I frog-marched her to her room and shut the door. Hubby passed us on his way to the kitchen, so I followed him in to where he ws starting to get himself a sandwich.
Hubby: So what did she do this time?
Me: You need to put the sandwich down. (Hubby raises one eyebrow). This is really bad.
When he put the sandwich down, I explained what happened and showed him the mess. Several obscenities later (on both our parts), he was cleaning the television, and I was cleaning the marker (and the paint) off the walls. Fortunately, the marker came off the television and the entertainment center without any problem. Unfortunately, in the process of cleaning the wall, I discover that she also wrote on her special tennis shoes with the blinking lights.
With the living room restored to close to normal, it was time to explain the consequences of her actions to Dee, of which there were several.
1: Markers are put up for the indefinite future.
2: The "flashy shoes" are marked up and can't be cleaned, so she just has to wear marked up shoes.
3: She is not allowed in the living room alone until further notice.
4: She is grounded to her room for the rest of the week.
It took a couple of days for the "grounded to her room" to really sink in, but it appears that she has gotten the message.
She got into additional trouble Thursday, as she appropriated a story book out of her classroom without asking, leading to our having to go back up to the school for her to return it to the teacher and apologize for stealing it. That earned her another lecture, the removal of additional toys from her room, and an extended time-out in the bathroom (as that is the only room in the house that can be easily "de-booked").
Overall, bleargh.
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Posted by geekmom on Monday, January 19 @ 13:59:08 CST (339 reads)
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2nd Hand Giggles
At her Little Gym class today, Dee broke in a new instructor... and by "broke in" I mean "broke her mind".
We arrived to discover that she was the only kid in the class. The instructor told Dee that she would be the only kid, to which Dee responded "No, my sister's here, too!" The instructor starts looking around, and before I can recover from the facepalm, Dee declares, "You can't see her. She's invisible!" I use the facepalm to try to stifle the giggles as the instructor catches on, and the owner chortles behind the desk. We've been going there for over a year, so the owner is quite familiar with Dee's creative weirdness.
The instructor decides to plow ahead with it. "Oh, okay. What's your sister's name?"
Dee grins. "I don't know. I haven't decided!" She thinks a bit while the adults have a good giggle. "I know! Her name's Aelita!
That established, the instructor, Dee and Aelita go into the gym for class. I, in my yearly ritual, attempt to go to the bank on Martin Luther King Day, and as usual, discover my error standing in front of the (closed) bank doors. I've done this every year that I can remember (with the occasional substitution of the post office for the bank) ... apparently, I just have a blind spot.
When I get back, I chitchat with the owner, and then sit and read until the class is over. At the end, the instructor comes out while another teacher goes in to do the closing. We discussed Dee's attention span (minimal) and creativity (off-scale), and the instructor relayed an event another instructor, T, had told her about:
It was a pirate theme, so they were running around for a bit; and when it was time to stop, T asked the kids to "drop their anchor". Dee, however, just stood there with an odd expression.
T: Dee, what's wrong?
D: It won't work. My anchor only understands Spanish.
T: O-kay.Can you tell your anchor to drop in Spanish, then?
D: Of course not, silly. I don't speak Spanish!
At this point in the story, I'm leaning on the counter giggling helplessly. She said T tried using gibberish instead of Spanish, but Dee kept calling him on it.
This, in a nutshell, is how my weeks go. I have at least three rounds of either surreal performance art or non-sequiter theater each and every week. I'd probably have more, but she has school and Little Gym teachers' minds to play with too.
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Posted by geekmom on Monday, January 19 @ 13:09:19 CST (307 reads)
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Dee's Brief Encounter with Zack and Cody
Dee's cousins watch a lot of TV; whenever we go over to their house, there is always at least two TVs on -- one in the living room and one in the playroom. There third TV (in the boys' room) may or may not be on. This in itself isn't so bad, but the older cousins usually pick the program, and they are a couple of years older than Dee and her youngest cousin. This has led to Dee wanting to watch shows such as Zack and Cody or Hannah Montana.
I don't consider these bad shows; they're just for an older audience and might have behavior I don't want Dee modeling. After watch Z&C at her cousins' over Christmas, Dee kept asking to watch it here. I did some research, actually watched an episode (gods help me), and decided to give it a try.
As I expected, she watched part of it and then played in the living room with it on. The next day, hubby asked her to do something, and her exact response was "Shut it!" She was immediately sent to her room, I was appalled and hubby was livid.
After her time-out was done, we explained how rude that was and she apologized to her daddy. I asked why she said it, and she said that it was funny. I asked why it would be funny and did she see it on a show or hear it at school. As it turned out, it was on Z&C, which ended that show's brief run in our household.
I realize that there may have been context and consequences on the show, but all Dee got out of it was "They said 'shut it' and everyone laughed, so it must have been funny!"
Right now, we try to keep her TV time down to under an hour -- fortunately, a houseful of toys, two dogs and a computer and PS2 go a long way to keeping her off the TV. At least on the computer and PS2, she's interacting; and she doesn't have the patience to sit and vegetate in front of the game system for more than 5-10 minutes!
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Posted by geekmom on Wednesday, January 07 @ 16:39:32 CST (561 reads)
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The Gloves Come Off
I was messaging with a friend and had the following conversation:
(4:08:36 PM) S: Sometimes you just can't talk the girl out of doing things
(4:08:42 PM) GOAM: heheheheh
(4:08:57 PM) GOAM: which is why dee went to school this morning in tights instead of warm pants.
(4:09:21 PM) S: Did she want to change once she got back?
(4:10:32 PM) GOAM: no, but she came home with gloves.
(4:10:41 PM) GOAM: we're not sure where the gloves came from
(4:10:49 PM) S: lol
(4:11:04 PM) GOAM: she says she found them "in the middle of the floor"
(4:11:28 PM) S: are they nice?
(4:11:46 PM) GOAM: not really, just basic knit gloves
(4:11:57 PM) GOAM: we're sending them back with anot
(4:12:22 PM) S: I'm sure some other mom is wondering where the hell these went! :)
If your kid came home without his blue knit gloves, they should be in Lost and Found sometime tomorrow!
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Posted by geekmom on Monday, January 05 @ 14:02:35 CST (258 reads)
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Cheap Trick, Dee-style
Part 1
Hubby has been splitting his time between Guitar Hero II and his real guitar, and Dee has been wandering in anytime that she hears music to see what he's doing. Apparently, it's having an effect on her. I was at my desk working the other day when she came wandering down the hallway, singing.
Mommy's all right,
Daddy's all right,
Mommy's all right,
Daddy's all right,
"Excuse me?!?" I ask, surprised. Dee giggles madly, and sings it again. "Where did you learn that?" I ask.
"Daddy!" She chirped.
So, down the hallway I go, followed by a giggling monkey. "Hey, hubby? Have you heard this?" I looked at Dee. "Sing your song for Daddy."
Dee beamed, and started singing. Hubby began laughing, cementing this little song as part of her regular repertoire. "Okay, now, she says that she learned this from you," I told him. "So, why, exactly?"
Hubby laughed some more. "I didn't teach it to her; I was playing it on Guitar Hero!"
Part 2
Sometime later, I was sitting at the computer working, and she started singing again. Since she had been singing this off and on for a couple of days, I paid no attention and kept working; but a few minutes later, I started laughing uproariously. Dee had changed the lyrics!
Mommy's all right;
Daddy's all right;
Smokey's all right;
C.C.'s all right;
Mommy's all right;
Daddy's all right;
Smokey's all right;
C.C.'s all right;
(and so on).
Smokey and C.C. are the dogs.
Part 3
After several days of Dee walking around repeating four verses, I decided to minimize the damage to my psyche and at least teach her the whole refrain. During bath time, we went over the actual words:
Mommy's all right,
Daddy's all right,
They just seem a little weird.
Surrender,
Surrender,
But don't give yourself away,
Hey, heeeeeey.
This worked out pretty well, except for a tendency to go up two octaves on "weird" and pronouncing "surrender" as "render". Also, I now have the dang song stuck in my head on a daily basis!
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Posted by geekmom on Sunday, April 27 @ 03:25:35 CDT (580 reads)
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Space Station flyover
Early ast Wednesday evening (March 26, '08), hubby pointed out that the space station would be visible going overhead at about 8:30pm. Since Dee had been going on about wanting to be an astronaut for a couple of weeks and had sat and watched the NASA feed with her daddy, we figured this would be cool for her to watch too.
We got out there about 8:20 and set up the lawn chairs. Dee started in her own chair but later climbed onto her daddy's lap, and we sat and watched the dogs chase (and eat) crickets and june bugs through the yard. It was a little chilly, but not really uncomfortable.
When the flyover started, the station was much brighter than anything else in the sky and very obvious. We pointed it out to Dee and talked about the station a bit. Then we noticed the small dot trailing the station, the space shuttle having already left the station. This was really cool!
Dee, on the other hand, being just under 5, got bored fairly quickly. We talked about being an astronaut and how, if she was one, she could be up there someday looking down; and we could see her go over us.
"That's okay," she said. "I don't want to be an astronaut. I want to be a racer!"
"A wha?" I answered.
"A racer!" She chirped. "On Ninja Warrior! Will you watch me when I'm on TV?"
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Posted by geekmom on Saturday, March 29 @ 05:25:34 CDT (282 reads)
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School Daze
Well, I scheduled my appointment for the Keller Kindergarten Roundup next week, so by the end of the month, Dee will be registered for school (hopefully the morning session, as I am scheduled well before that fills up). This makes me happier than I can express.
Dee will finally get to go to school, she will be getting regular indoctrination education, and I will get 2-3 hours of not turning around to find a new mess.
After I entered the previous post, I turned around to discover the play room floor covered with small pieces of pink felt. Smokey has in her bed a pink blanket that she chews on. This makes for lots of small pink bits. Dee had pulled this out of the cage and scattered the bits all over. She is presently cleaning it up, but this is pretty much how my days go right now.
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Posted by geekmom on Monday, March 24 @ 06:55:29 CDT (237 reads)
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Sleepover and related carnage
Dee had her second sleepover Friday night with her friend M. M is the quickest "to sleep" kid that I've ever known. Come 8pm, she puts herself to bed and is out in just a few minutes. Compare that to Dee, who isn't even tired until 9pm and would stay up until she collapsed of exhaustion if allowed.
Last time, we put them in Dee's room where M went to sleep in moments and Dee fought sleep for 90 minutes before winding up back in our bed. This time, we put them in the living room on the hide-a-bed in the couch. M went to sleep same as last time, and Dee was a little jack in the box. She stayed in bed for about an hour at a time, and then would get up complaining that she couldn't sleep. Around midnight, she crawled into bed with me.
That morning, we had waffles and I took the two of them down to the park down from our house to play. Unfortunately, the pinheads had gotten there first and there was graffiti everywhere (of varying rudeness) and spray paint up and down the slide. While the girls played in the part of the playground that wasn't jacked up, I called the FW dispatcher and reported the problem. 20 minutes later, the anti-graffiti crew showed up in a van. Turns out, it had been reported yesterday and they made the park their first stop for the day. The lead guy focused on getting the paint off of the slide and the other four painted the park wall and the sidewalks in the playground and picnic areas.
While they were finishing, I took the girls around to the trees in the park, and we talked about spring coming in with the trees making baby pine cones and the birds making nests. On the way back, we passed a robin that was chasing some bug, and I pointed out that he was after breakfast. This lead to a rather odd conversation.
"What do birds eat?"
"Well, birds eat worms and bugs, mostly."
"Yuck! That's gross!"
Laugh. "Yes, but if they didn't, you'd be up to your eyeballs in worms and bugs!"
"Oh. What do worms and bugs eat?"
"Worms and bugs eat dead things. Dead plants, dead critters, even dead birds."
"Yuck!!" M made a face, and then looked thoughtful. "Do bugs and worms eat dead people?"
"Well, yeah, eventually." M made another face, and I tried for a subject change. "That's only fair; some people eat bugs!"
"They do not!" she answered, with all the surety of a six year old girl. "Really!?" chimes in Dee, who looks entirely too interested in this idea.
"They do so. In some places, people eat deep fried grasshoppers for a snack. They eat it like candy."
"Candy!" they both yelped. And for the rest of the way home, I had to explain that a) Dee shouldn't eat bugs out of the yard because "they will make you sick", b) I don't know where to get deep fried grasshoppers, c) I don't know how to make deep-fried grasshoppers, and d) even if I knew how, I would not make deep-fried grasshoppers.
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Posted by geekmom on Sunday, March 23 @ 04:08:48 CDT (419 reads)
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