There are days moments when my daughters frustrate me. There are times when I want to send them to their grandparents for the next few years hours. There are times when I think about duct taping their mouths shut encouraging them to play the “quiet game”. They are very active, loud, exuberant girls, and there are times when I wish they would all just lay on the couch and relax for a few days hours.

When my health stuff is acting up, and I’m achy, hurting, whiny, and tired I don’t really want to deal with their energy levels and their joyful noises, I get annoyed easily. It’s not easy to parent in an ideal way when you have a chronic illness, especially one that includes fatigue and pain. It’s easy to wish that I had quiet kids when I’m in need of quiet.

I spent two days in the past 2 weeks helping out my friend in person, bringing her food & wine, listening, and helping her brainstorm. (I spent a lot more time on the phone with her and brainstorming on my own, too) While I was there, I saw her son hanging out on the couch, as he has done for the past month. All day. Her son has always been an active, engaging kid who will still snuggle and do quiet things, but not all the time. Seeing her son sick and so quiet was so hard for us, and I can’t imagine how hard it is for her.

Nothing is going to change my kids into Stepford-kids, and I would be lying if I said I will never wish them quiet ever again, but something changed for me last week. My heart is aching for my friend’s son, as well as for my friend. As much as I hate being sick and trying to parent, I am exceedingly grateful that I am the one who is sick here, not my kids. It is hard to be sick and parent, but it is heartbreaking to be a parent of a sick kid.

I’m trying to help my friend (bring food, wine, and a listening ear and people will love you!), help her son, but there is so much I can’t do and can’t control. It makes me hug the girls extra tightly. When i can get them to stop moving, that is! Sometimes it’s really good to have quiet story time at least once a day!

Have you and your kids had a chance to watch Hip Hop Harry: Move Those Feet or any of the Hip Hop Harry shows on Discovery Kids? We hadn’t caught the show, but since my girls love to dance and rhyme, I was excited to be able to review Hip Hop Harry: Move Those Feet for the Parent Bloggers Network!

Read the rest of the review, and watch the video of the girls dancing, too!

So, I just finished a book. It’s the fourth in a series, and I enjoyed the first 4. YA Chick lit, basically. The series made a big bang when another author ripped entire sections out of it for her “novel” over a year ago. So, I’ll happily recommend Sloppy Firsts especially.

You know how some books end with the reader crying? And it’s a “good” tears, because there was some type of resolution? I never realized that you could cry at the end of a novel because it had no resolution, and just ended with everyone feeling worse. I do not recommend Fourth Comings. Bah, humbug.

I know I’ve gotten a bit of crap here and there for being focused on a happy ending. Maybe I am. I’m becoming more and more OK with that, especially since I was looking for escapism after a long week. I believe that a book with wedding rings on the front that has a marriage proposal in one of the first chapters shouldn’t spend the whole book breaking up the couple. That’s my perspective at any rate.

I ended up skimming parts because I was getting too upset, too fed up with the over-thinking of everything. But I figured the ending would be happy, or at least on the road to happy. I don’t think I could’ve been more wrong. I feel so let down by the author, especially after following the character through four books.

What a waste, especially when there are so many good books waiting on my shelf. I’ll admit to being up too late (wanted to finish the dang book), and getting overly emotional is often my own PMS; a couple months ago I started crying about the fate of the characters in the soundtrack for Wicked (2003 Original Broadway Cast). I may care a tiny bit too much about the fate of characters in novels and plays. Y’think? It’s good I keep some feel-good quick-read books around. I need a cleansing-palate book before I read the next book for review!

I’m ending with a happy, lovable picture. Ra’s coloring is changing for some reason (we’ve had blues before, not red cattle dogs, and I guess reds change color a bit?), and he now has a beautiful heart-shaped mask on his face. Who can be sad when they look at a cute puppy? <3

Megan Crane’s Names My Sisters Call Me is her newest chick lit novel. If for some reason you haven’t read Megan Crane’s novels, go do so, as she has written some fabulous novels you shouldn’t miss; they are engrossing and entertaining. With her most recent novel she revisits the theme of family dysfunction, but in Names My Sisters Call Me she focuses on the relationship between three sisters.
Read the rest of the review

I’m sure I’m not the only person who enjoys the Shirt.Woot! derbies.

This week’s Derby theme is greed. There are a lot of gorgeous designs, and if you’ve purchased anything from any woot! group at all, you can vote. The shirt in the top 10 that I’m pushing for are:

• Greedy hermit crab

• Greedy conquistador
• Greedy Astronauts

There are a lot of others I like, too. I may also like this Greedy sea gull:

because the girls and I drew it.

Anyone else have a favorite design this week? The girls and I are loving looking at all the designs each week and trying to come up with our own! A (mostly) inexpensive hobby with plenty of art appreciation.

Blood Moon is an intense soon-to-be released novel by A. W. Gryphon. Blood Moon is Gryphon’s first book, and it is also the first novel in the planned Witches Moon Trilogy. As with several other books I’ve read recently, this one is hard to categorize. It deals with Wicca and Witchcraft, so it could be paranormal or urban fantasy, yetBlood Moon is also a mystery, and it could also fit as a women’s fiction novel as we uncover a woman’s childhood and the facts of her mother’s life. Regardless, this is a book that will capture your interest from the beginning, and it will be hard to put down before the story is complete.
Read the rest of the review

The evil headache is back. Plus there’s very damp weather.

This has been a very whiny moaning weekend. I’m hoping Monday is a vast improvement.

After reading so much Garfield, I can’t quite believe I’m looking forward to a Monday!

Weekend Math:
3 kids + 3 dogs + 1 cat + 1 husband + 1 headache + 1 achy body = 1 difficult Rachel, feel sorry for those who have to live with me!

It’s wet today, so I’m feeling creaky and achey anyhow, but I was having fun creating another shirt.woot t-shirt design with BG and MG today, and playing around always makes me feel young. Earlier this week I wrote about feeling young, and that feeling set the tone for the week. Park days, puppies, and spring temps helped too.

Then I was in the pharmacy picking up 3 prescriptions when one of the pharmacists was saying that New Kids on the Block was touring again. That was freaky enough. But then she started saying how old they look, and that she was a baby when they first toured. wimper They’re my age! I can’t be old!

Then I walked into one of the side-mirrors on the car and wonked out my left hip. So now I have “old” stuck in my head and I’m limping and creaking and aching. Yeah, I don’t feel as young as I did earlier. I think I need to go out for a drink and get carded! Anybody with me?
(cute sleeping puppy picture below to bring a smile to our old faces)

As my long-time readers know, we live on the North Shore of Massachusetts, just up the hill from a gorgeous public beach. We also live on a “neck”, or a peninsula, so we are surrounded on 3 sides by salt marsh or ocean, only connected to the “mainland” by a strip of road called a causeway. Any time that the tides are high and it rains, there is the possibility of the causeway being covered by water, which means we are either stuck at home or stuck away from home. We have a lot of “greenspace” near our house, so we end up with a fair number of wild animals, which seem to each carry their own fun problems.

Today’s a dreary, damp, rainy day, and those days tend to bring out dark thoughts. I was just made aware that a coyote attacked a dog in a neighboring town! Eeep! We are always on the alert for coyotes and foxes, as there are quite a few around the area. Yuki will be on enforced “indoor cat” mode – sometimes on pretty days we let her out for a bit. Maybe not during coyote mating season!

Meanwhile, let’s talk about other animal safety. Avoid wild animals. Keep your pets under your control at all times – you really don’t want your dog in isolation because of a rabies scare from an unknown wild critter!

As a family that has more than its fair share of Lyme disease, please vaccinate your dogs against Lyme! And then also use a flea & tick killer for them. We think at least one of us got Lyme from a tick which dropped off the dog and onto a bed or chair. Not Good.

As a family, we have made the decision that in our neighborhood, in our situation, the risk of cancer from DEET is less of a worry than the risk of Lyme from not using DEET on the humans in the house. Every family should make that decision for themselves, but think hard and research it from both perspectives. Ticks can be anywhere. I’ve found them on kids after they ran in the field next to the library. Since ticks are active from 40F on up, it’s time to keep an eye out.

As a less serious tip, make sure you have a cooler that closes when you go to the beach! Sea gulls are thieves. They will steal any and every piece of food they come across. So pack your beach snacks in a tote bag that zips shut or a picnic basket with a lid! My darling girls have been in tears more than once when a sea gull snagged their bag of Salt & Vinegar potato chips. It may be comical watching a sea gull fly away with a full bag of chips, but then you just lost $3 worth of chips, and you’re nowhere near a store.

Anyone have any other animal warnings? We’ve also dealt with raccoons and skunks, but those weren’t as much of a big deal. Be wary of random animals, but enjoy the nice weather that is allegedly coming soon!

This is a posed pic, as my girls were constantly in motion on Easter. But here they are with their Grampy and their Mimi outside their grandparents’ condo (that’s the town harbor in the background). After reading about the death of a friend’s grandmother, I wanted to honor the girls’ grandparents.

The bond between grandparents and grandchildren is very special. I’ve been very lucky to have extraordinary grandparents, and have had a wonderful relationship with them. I try to foster that same relationship with my girls and their grandparents, and hope they will have as many fond memories of time spent with grandparents as I do!

Of course, my girls have several sets of grandparents plus great-grandparents, so I chose the most recent picture of them with a set of grandparents! We’ll follow up with pictures of other grandparents soon.

Happy Love Thursday!