The Half-Hearted Housewife ~ Love means never having to do the dishes...

My Inability to Organize Rears It’s Head

Remember my giant piles of laundry to pack for camp from last year? They’re back. Except now I only have a few days to get it all together before we leave. I haven’t made a list, I haven’t packed a thing. I don’t even know what to pack our stuff into because I didn’t like the giant footlockers we brought with us last year but can’t think of anything better.

And every time I even think about packing, I think about that scene in A Few Good Men where Tom Cruise points out that the dead Marine hadn’t packed anything. Which makes me think that maybe the dude was just a procrastinator like I am. Or not. I mean, it was basically the turning point of the case and led him down the path that got Colonel Jessup to admit that “you’re goddamn right [he] ordered the code red!”

Then I play Candy Crush for 2 minutes, use up my one life and have to wait 30 minutes to get another one because Level 33 is the work of the devil.

Then I break up a fight amongst the boys. No one likes it when you repeat every word back to them.

Then I feed Spike and put him down for a nap.

Then I read my book.

Then I break up another fight. Seriously. Stop annoying each other.

Then I write blog posts about not packing.

Should you ever need help procrastinating, I’m your girl.

Thank god for Sergeant Handsome, without whom the clothing wouldn’t even be laundered and folded and ready to be packed. I should not call myself a legitimate adult. How ridiculous am I? These kinds of tasks are just not in my wheelhouse.

Send all the “concentrate” vibes you can to me over the next few days. And hope that I get everything together in time to get us all to camp.

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Welcome Back, Cable!

We got an email last night letting us know that our internet costs would be going up. Again.

In the last two years, our monthly fee for internet has tripled. TRIPLED. So it started out totally reasonable and now is just silly. We don’t have cable, and haven’t had it since moving here two years ago. Mostly because I didn’t want to pay for it. We have Netflix and Hulu (along with an AppleTV that we got instead of replacing our DVD player after our house was broken into last year) and that was perfectly fine for us. In fact, the boys are so used to Netflix that they don’t even like Hulu because they hate any commercials. Spoiled brats, obviously.

After last night’s email about another price hike, we decided to shop around a little. And we found out that a competing provider can give us cable AND internet for only a few dollar more a month. DVR included. Color me sold.

We do have to stick with it for at least a year, so if my internet service suddenly sucks that will be lame. But our current service isn’t so hot either… which contributes to why I’m so annoyed that they want to charge us more for it.

I also won’t be able to enjoy any of this new cable fanciness until I return from camp, but I’m already thinking about all the HGTV I can watch in the fall. Plus I feel like maybe Sergeant Handsome won’t miss us as much if he has 200 channels of mindless television waiting for him each day while we’re gone.

Tell me… what have I been missing without cable? What’s the first thing I should set to record?

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Mud Puddles, Flooding, and Ear Infections (oh my!)

This past weekend in San Antonio, we got some pretty epic rain. It was the second highest amount of rainfall in a day since they started keeping records. In 1885. We’re prone to flash flooding here and there was plenty of it. Luckily for us, we live on slightly higher ground and away from most of the (many) rivers, so there was no damage to our house and we were perfectly safe.

We do have some amazing mud happening in the back yard though. Since the boys have long since destroyed any grass we had back there (that should be fun whenever we need to sell this place), torrential rain plus several days of cloudy weather has turned our backyard into one giant mud pit.

Naturally, all my small children want to dive, dig, slide, squelch and otherwise immerse themselves in it. We’ve been pretty obliging.

I say “we” but mostly I mean that Sergeant Handsome has been obliging. Because they go outside and five minutes later they look like this:

These are the kinds of things I let my kids do. On the regular. Not sure if that makes me the best mother or the worst.

Chuckles had to be cropped out because he was stark naked. At least the other two have something on.

Sergeant Handsome has taken it upon himself to be the one that hoses the boys off, getting most of the mud off of them when they’re done playing. It’s a totally thankless job. Except I say thank you. So, I guess it’s just mostly thankless.

I’d like to say that this picture is them at the dirtiest. But there were times over the last four days that they’ve looked worse. Fidget, specifically, has been putting mud all over his head and face. He stopped after being told (on two different occasions) that he can’t do that because mud gets in his ears.

This muddiness is all well and good. Kids should be allowed to get muddy and gross and enjoy the world around them. But, eventually, they do have to be cleaned off so they can come inside. Then also take a bath, because getting hosed off on the patio isn’t really clean enough. And when you cover every millimeter of your head and ears with mud, one of the things that has to get cleaned is your ears.

Apparently our admonitions regarding the consequences of mud in the ear came too late for Fidget. Because whether from the mud itself or from the act of cleaning out the mud, he now has an ear infection. Of. Course. So we’re headed to the pediatrician later today to get his ear looked at and hopefully get him to be able to sleep tonight without crying and waking everyone up about how his ear hurts.

Listen, I feel bad that he’s hurting. I really do. I even watched an episode of My Little Pony with him last night when he couldn’t sleep (which, if you’ve ever seen an episode, you know is true love). We’re going to get him patched up. But it’s taking all of my adulthood not to look at him every time he whines about it and say:

I told you so.

Parenting = suppressing your inner tween-girl inclinations at all times. It’s also accepting the fact that you have created a human being that thought it would be a good idea to cover his entire head with mud, including the insides of his ears (apparently). Oops.