[Insert Witty Title Rhyming "House" With "Mouse"]

We had mice in our house.  Yes, mice.  Plural.

I shouldn't be surprised. Our house backs up to a nature preserve, so we see an abundance of wildlife.  But somehow we managed to make it all through last winter with nary a mouse in sight.

I thought we had immunity from these devils.  

But a month ago I was cleaning out our pantry, when I noticed a couple of graham crackers have been nibbled at. 

Uh oh.

I knew it was a mouse, but I figured that since I could find hardly any mouse droppings, it was just the one.  We set out traps and, lo and behold, we caught a mouse.

Feel my rath!

But late one night my husband went into the kitchen for a nighttime snack, and what was standing in the middle of our kitchen?  Another mouse, mocking him, daring him to set up more traps.  So, that's just what we did, and the next morning?  There were two mice was in the traps.

Take that, [explative of your choosing here.]

We still didn't find any mouse droppings, so we figured the problem was solved.  But a few days later, what did Husband find in the basement? A small mouse nest containing a sizable pile of almonds.  We never eat almonds.  Where did they come from?!

So, we set the traps out one more time, just in case.

And when I woke up the next morning, what sight greeted me in the kitchen?  Three mice.  Three mice.  Three.  It was like some sort of mouse suicide pact.

Ahhem.........AAAAAAAAAAA!

So I'm fed up.  We keep the kitchen nearly spotless, and keep our food wrapped up tightly.  There's been no more indications of mice in our abode, but now I'm paranoid.  I know those buggers are out there biding their time.  And when I let my guard down, they'll reappear, wrecking havoc on my already jangled nerves.

Jerks.

My Eyeballs Need Pajama Jeans

I clearly remember when I got my first pair of glasses.  I was in second grade.  When I put on those glasses and looked out the window, I was able to read the name of the elementary school across the street from the optometrist's office.  Actually, it was the first time I saw the words period.  Prior to, I had no idea there were words on the building at all.

Also, movies make a lot more sense when you can see what is going on.

So, wearing glasses is old hat to me, almost as old as I am.  At age 13 I got contact lenses. The contacts usually were not a problem.  I kept them clean, and had no problem putting them on or removing them.

Up until today.

I recently switched to a new contact-lens-cleaning process.  You put this hydrogen peroxide solution in a special case that has a bit of some metal in it. The hydrogen peroxide reacts with the metal in the case to create a lot of little bubbles that clean the lenses.  And while you wouldn't want to put hydrogen peroxide directly in your eyes, after an overnight soak, the hydrogen peroxide has used itself up, or rendered itself harmless or something.  SCIENCE!

Unlike regular saline solution, you don't want to get hydrogen peroxide in your eyes.  So the bottle is fitted with a red cap to remind you not to put it in your eye.  The cap is red per the understanding that the people using the hydrogen peroxide solution may not be able to read something that says "WARNING!  DO NOT PUT IN EYES" in anything less than 128 point font.

What the manufacturers didn't count on was my utter inability to register color or meaning in the depths of my morning fog.

Fumbling around for my saline solution to wet my lenses before putting them in, my hand came across the bottle of hydrogen peroxide solution.  I put a couple drops in my contact lens and then, plop!  Onto my eye it went.

To say it burned is an understatement.  It was as if my eyeball was engulfed in the smouldering flames of the furthermost chasms of Hell.  And once more, I was forced to ponder....

In my scramble to remove the offending lens from my eyeball, I succeeded in moving it, but not out of my eye.  To the back of my eyeball.  So I started poking myself in the eye in an effort to push the contact lens to the corner of my eye so I could get it out.   It went something like this:  Poke... AARRRGGHHH ... Poke poke ... AARRRGGHHH AARRRGGHHH ... Poke, poke, poke... AARRRGGHHH AARRRGGHHH AARRRGGHHH!!!!!!!

Finally, I resorted to rinsing my eye with water from the same cup we use to rinse after we brush our teeth.  Not the most sanitary eye rinse, but given that I just set my eyeball on fire and then proceeded to stab at it, germs were not really a fear of mine.  My fears centered around the very real possibility that my eyeball was going to burn a hole into my brain.

After several cold water rinses, I was able to rinse the lens out of my eye into the sink.  Huzzah!  I'll just pour this extra water out and.... oh crap!

I rinsed the contact lens down the drain.

So now I look like a victim of pink-eye or possibly some form of stigmata, or maybe I'm just high all the time, and I have to wear my glasses all day long until I can trek off to the optometrist for new lenses.  Seeing as usually wear my glasses only at night, it's the eyeball equivalent of staying in my pajamas all day long.

Is there a glasses-equivalent of Pajama Jeans?  Please say yes.

A Day In The Life...

It’s come to my attention that my blog posts have been infrequent as of late.  This is because I am doing fewer stupid things.

I haven’t lost my van or broken my toe.  I haven’t fallen down an up escalator.  I haven’t picked up and discarded any new hobbies. I haven’t had any kitchen mishaps or baking failures.  In fact, I successfully baked several types of Christmas cookies this year.  Take that, former me!

In contrast, here is an average day in my life...

6:00 Alarm clock goes off.  I yell at it, turn it off, and go back to sleep

6:05 My kids wake up.  Who needs an alarm clock?

6:10 Drink three cups of coffee.  Now I’m able to see again.

7:30 Skip taking a shower. I’m not leaving the house today. You’re lucky I got dressed.

8:00 Toddler sits on the potty, albeit with her pants still on. I make a big fat deal about it anyways.

8:30 Clean kitchen. For every one dish I put in the dishwasher, Toddler takes two out.

9:00 Read Toddler and Preschooler the world’s dumbest Disney princess book. Three times. They cry for more, more, MORE. I go slightly insane.

9:30 Clean toy room.  For every one toy I put away, Toddler takes two out.  I’m sensing a pattern here.

10:00 Tell Toddler, “It’s time to sit on the potty!”  Toddler pitches a fit.  I just love potty training.

10:30 Get a bloody nose.  Stupid sinus infection.

11:00 Serve ravioli for lunch.  Preschooler complains she doesn’t like it, but cleans her plate anyways.  Hypocrite.

11:15 Toddler decides to eat ravioli using her face. 

11:25 Impromptu bath.  Preschooler cries because I filled the tub with too much water.  I drain some water.  Toddler cries because there is not enough water.  Go more insane.

11:35 Get Toddler out of the bath.  Realize I forgot to bring a clean diaper upstairs. Leave a dripping wet Toddler upstairs while I rush to get a diaper.  MOTHER OF THE YEAR.

11:40 Get another nosebleed.  Clearly I’ve developed nose cancer.

1:00 Finally get around to taking that shower while the kids nap.  The sound of the shower wakes them up.  Dammit!

2:00 Give Preschooler some grapes.

2:15 Give Preschooler some crackers

2:30 Give Preschooler some cheese.  That hollow leg of hers must be full by now.

3:00 Set Preschooler and Toddler up with an art project involving glue and sequins.

3:10 Vacuum approximately 19,403 sequins off of the floor.

3:15 Remove several sequins from Toddler’s nose.

4:30 Crazy time begins.  Kids start their daily whine-fest.  By this point in the day we’re all rather tired of looking at each other.  How much longer till Husband gets home?

5:00 Make dinner while two screaming children cling to my pants leg.  This should be some sort of olympic sport.  I deserve a medal.

5:30 Eat dinner.  Preschooler takes three bites and claims she’s done. Toddler decides she only needs to look at her food tonight, and take in all nutrition via telepathy.

6:00 Grocery shopping with children in tow.  They really like to “help.”

7:30 Bedtime for the wee ones.  

8:15 Workout time for Husband and I.  No that’s not a euphemism for sexy time.  We’re actually exercising.  It’s a far cry from my previous 8:15 routine of eating a bag of Fritos in front of the TV.

9:30 Sneak into my kids’ room to watch them sleep.  Best part of my day.

So, there you have it.  A day in my life.

Also, we have mice in our house.  More on that another time.

30 Million Day Blog Challenge #8: Having Kids Changes Everything. Duh.

This next 30 (million) day blog challenge prompt is: A picture of someone or something that has the biggest impact on you.


Behold!  My kids.

Once upon  a time, I went to law school.  It was the first step in climbing the corporate ladder, and plugging away at my so-called "5-year-plan."

Then life happened.

Now I stay at home with my two children. I didn’t plan on this five years ago.  

Motherhood was to be put off until I was securely and comfortably established in a high-power career.  This would satisfy my unerring sense of drive and craving for self-worth. It would allow me to provide my children with the very best of everything tangible and impressive.

I thought it was the right thing to do.

It was the wrong thing to do.

My pregnancies were surprises, the most terrifying and extraordinary surprises of my life. I worked hard to be a big, important person; a high-stakes player in the legal world. Instead I became a big, important person to two small, impressionable, dependent human beings.  

After three years of trying to balance my family-life and work-life, it became clear that I had reached a cross-roads.  I couldn’t keep working at such a frantic pace, trying to do it all at once.  And my own self-image was slowly morphing. The so-called great, big, important career was no longer so great and big and important.  

I left my job when we moved back to Wisconsin.  It caused a significant hit to our household income.  It caused a significant set-back to my career.  But I could provide more for my children at home, than I could spending all my time at work bringing in the bacon for them to eat without me, as I burned the midnight oil.

The legal profession is often symbolized by a scale, weighing justice versus mercy. But there is no true way to know before starting a family how you will balance your career with your family time. When is it just to be at work? Or at home?  When can you show mercy, allowing your heart to rest at home with your family? Or do you allow your mind the mental break and space to build a career outside the home? It’s an ever-sliding scale, with the weights constantly moving from one end to the other.

I can’t always gauge whether my scale had balanced.  But I can listen to my heart.

It’s the right thing to do.

*     *     *

It's Like Some Sort Of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Regarding Dodge Ball

Husband and I have started exercising, after a long period of too many sweets and too many trips to McDonald's.  As our jiggly guts can attest, it's hard to resist the siren's song that is McDonald's french fries.

Irresistible bastards.

Working out with him is actually enjoyable. We both motivate each other to get off our fat butts, and I can honestly say that if not for him, I'd still spend my nights sitting on the couch eating Fritos.  But every now and then I have flashbacks to my days of high school gym class.  It's like some sort of post traumatic stress disorder regarding dodge ball.

You're doomed. DOOMED!!!

I’ve made no bones about the fact that I hated gym class.  So you can imagine how thrilled I was junior year on the last day of mandatory gym class, EVER.

To celebrate the fact that most students wouldn’t take the optional senior year gym class, the teachers went old school and let us play dodge ball.

Displaying my usual athletic prowess, I spent the hour standing by the bleachers chatting to friends when WHAM a dodge ball smacked me right in the face, hard enough for me to see stars for several minutes.

The boy who threw the ball was more distraught than I.  He was a nice guy, and knew I wasn’t really playing the game.

But I still used the dodge-ball incident as an excuse to change out of my gym clothes, and spend the rest of the period sitting on the bleachers.

So really, it was one of the best gym classes ever.   

Now With More Foot-Grating Action!

I’ll admit, I don’t take very good care of my feet.  I paint my toenails a couple of times during the summer months, and that’s about it.  The rest of the year I say, “Screw it! My feet are hiding in socks, so who cares?”

I’m also the world’s laziest leg-shaver, but that’s neither here nor there.

But maybe I should start giving myself more pedicures with the aid of... PedEgg!

Oh look! A foot grater!

I’ll need to tread carefully, though.  Although I’ll no longer need to use my cheese grater to soften my feet, as the commercial suggests, the PedEgg saves my foot shavings for me.  That could incur some serious voodoo, seeing as so much of my DNA will be contained in one place.  And unless that voodoo involves me losing ten pounds and/or gaining the power of flight, I want nothing to do with it.

This is not an asset.  It’s a liability.  A voodoo liability.  

These things should come with warnings.

But wait a minute.... if I order from this site, I can receive a SECOND PedEgg, paying only shipping and handling!  This will come in handy, for as this second infomercial on their official website shows, the PedEgg can also be used to skin a tomato. Or is that an orange?  Whatever. It can also be used on balloons, which would be great for parties.

Look!  It’s multi-tasking!

So I guess there’s no more excuse for my gnarly feet.  I’ll be sending them my $10 plus $6.99 shipping and handling post-haste.

Note: I do not actually own a Ped Egg, nor is this a solicited, official, company-sponsered review of the Ped Egg.  But maybe the Ped Egg people SHOULD pay me for this review.  If they do, I'll vlog myself using the Ped Egg on my very own feet.  Now THAT would be an persuasive infomercial.


UPDATE: I am not really going to waste $17 on a Ped Egg.  I already own a cheese grater.

Happy New Year! Try To Fail Less, OK?

I've never been one to make a new year's resolution.  It would be setting myself up for failure, and I don't need yet another reason to be depressed.  Plus, change is disturbing and hard.  Status quo for the win!

Still, this year I feel compelled to resolve some things.  So here is a list of things I resolve to do, along with the reasons I'll fail to accomplish these lofty goals. Hey, I'm just keeping it real.

1) Lose weight.

Ummmm.... have you tasted food?  It's delicious!

2) Drink less coffee.

It would be like Night Of The Living Dead, but with less brains and more yelling.

3) Stop swearing.

Hell, no.

4) Blog more frequently.

Hey, I've been doing fewer stupid things to write about. I'm not about to buck that trend.

5) Yell less.

NOW WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THAT?!

So there you have it.  Five new year's resolution that I'll fail to accomplish.  Now THAT's a resolution I can keep!