All hail wire cutters!

From the time I was small through my teen years, I lived around animals. Large ones. The cow and horse variety. Anyway, animals need to be fed and that was often my job. Such animals eat alfalfa and grain, and typically the only way you get into a bale is with a good pair of wire cutters. Such a tool is a farming necessity.

Flash forward 20 years, and here I am in my suburban life far away from the smell and daily needs of my bovine and equine friends. (Alright, not that far. There is a dairy every few miles where I live. Upstate New York is major league rural farm country.) Anyway, last Christmas as Bob and I watched our children happily stare into boxes that they could not break into if they tried, it occurred to me that scissors and knives we were attacking them with were useless. Suddenly, my early life training came back to me and in our tool set (the one that so seldom sees use) I found a blessed, worshiped pair of wire cutters. Merry Christmas children! Boxes AND the ability to open them.

Flash forward to this Christmas, where smartly the night before the big event I got out my small screw driver (because half the toys are bolted in with tiny screws as well as smartly twisted wires) and the wire cutters. I thought myself prepared. What I was not prepared for, however, was a new form of Chinese torture: taped, double layer boxes and three to four wires per item.

It's not enough to have the toy tied down. No, it has to be posed and perfect as if the squishy toy fish are actually floating in an ocean. Barbie's head has to actually have a wire in it to hold her upright and immobile. A toy that unboxed weighs less than two pounds took me--and I'm not joking here--7 minutes to open. Every year industrial design takes a leap forward and this year, rather than a box where you just open the flaps, you must fight with taped edges as well. It's as if someone transported my grandmother to China and asked her to start packaging boxes to make sure they made it safely to America. This means you have to slice through layer upon layer of tape before you can get to the portion you were prepared for, the smartly twisted wries. So, new tool: box cutter then clip, snip, clip x 12. Toy for a child too small to care free of its bonds.

If this is the way China fights a war, though, bring it on. They may snicker as they twist a few million boxes into knots every day laughing at the frustrations of their American brethren but I'm on to them. I'm farm-trained and I'm armed with wire cutters, a screw driver and box cutters. Next year I'm re-adding scissors to my arsenal. Bring it on, China!

Anyhow, I would post Christmas pictures except they are all on Bob's camera, which is difficult to locate at the moment. We had a wonderful Christmas. Jack is loving his Hot Wheels race track and the work bench his grandpa sent him. Ellie opened the Baby Alive doll my dad sent and has refused to open anything on her own since. Today, we finally got her to open the Barbie doll Bob bought her, but most of her presents are still wrapped under the tree. We figure she'll get to them before her birthday. Otherwise, I'll slap a happy birthday card on them and save myself the money! Bob filled my stocking with the Bath and Body works shampoo and conditioner I disocvered at his hotel in Utah. I'm loving that! I guess he got tired of me begging to bring the sample sizes home. Sorry for the lack of Christmas pics, but here is a picture of Small and me. He is growing like a weed, blowing bubbles, rolling over and already trying to crawl. Amazing.

Notes on a day...

Notes to self:

1. Do not start making cookies with tired children at 7 p.m. and expect the process to go smoothly. The flour on the floor is your fault.

2. Do not give an almost 2-year-old a cup with no lid to drink out of while sitting on your bed on your side and expect the bed to stay dry. Do not get upset when you have to change the sheets.

3. Perhaps three days before Christmas is not the time to buckle down on how much TV the kids watch. At least you could have saved 30 minutes for dinner preparation. That would have saved a lot of screaming.

4. If the neighbors give you their old dollhouse three days before Christmas, put it away until after Christmas. That said, even though she won't care about her Christmas presents, at least Ellie was entertained for the bulk of the day.

5. Do not get upset when your husband calls from the mall three days before Christmas to ask you what you want. Remember that he is a man, just a man. A man with no memory who had a long day. (A drill, BTW. Seriously, I want a drill. Something cordless I could hang drywall with if I so chose.) At least he was not shopping on Christmas Eve.

6. If it's midnight and you are blogging instead of finishing the cookies or the dishes, well, you have issues.

O soup divine!

In stalking a friend's blog recently, I stumbled upon this soup recipe. It might be one of the best things I've ever made. My kids actually ate it (sort of, which is an improvement over not at all.) and my husband said (and this is a high compliment) "Let's keep that soup in the line-up." Easy and delicious... Oh, just as a note, I used celery leaves instead of parsley, because, well, we got a full foot or more of snow today and I did not have the means to go get fresh parsley.

Frugal shoppers take notice...

I just found the coolest thing: an on-line tool that will allow you to price check via cell phone from any store to make sure you're getting the best bargain. It can even sync with your Google calendar to tell you where to you need to be and it's all free. I started using Google's calendar to keep track of Bob and I love it. I've already saved Frucall's information in my phone. OK, i haven't tried it yet, but it seems to be a great way to save some dough.

Drunk on Facebook

For a while, my best friend Janis Aden has tried to convince me that Facebook was a nifty pit stop on the information super highway that was not simply a landing zone for everyone 21 and younger. I refused to believe her. I practically patted her on the head long distance and told her she'd lost her mind. After all, I'm over 30. I have three kids, two church callings, recently racked up a $36.82 library fine and $103 washing machine repair bill, and I spend an inordinate amount of time perfecting my role as a poor housekeeper. I do NOT have time for Facebook.

Then the note from Clay popped up.

Dammit.

Excuse the strong language, but ever since the simple invitation of "Is this Mandy from New York?" I've been addicted to Facebook. Trust me when I say I do NOT have time for Facebook. But like most addictions, it rules your life. I've never had an addition, but they're tough. You are powerless to resist. You may not want to spend every spare second tooling around going, "I wonder what happened to (fill in the blank)," but you can't help yourself. You WANT to find friends. You want to see your little friend number climb and not feel insignifcant when you're added as a friend by someone who has 278 other "friends" in comparison with your 43. I'd feel a little lame about the whole thing if so many of the rest of them weren't out there, too. I feel like I'm sitting in an institute class circa 1998 and I'm loving every minute of it.

So, it's all Clay's fault. He is my friend Susan's husband and an old friend of mine and yes, I will take credit for their actual introduction in summer 1999 or thereabouts. He and another friend were looking for me and found someone with a name that could be my married name but was it really? Clay took a shot in the dark. This is amusing because I half figure if he really wanted to chat with me, he could have asked Susan for my email address. Or my phone number. Or my address if we want to be archaic. Anyway, he found that one day after listening to Janis' drunken ravings, I signed up. Now, unlike blogspot, I couldn't just lurk around and see how people are with the anonymity that I enjoy. You actually have to be social on Facebook, put yourself out there waving a flag saying, "Hey, didn't I know you once 10 years ago? Let's be friends....again!" That seemed time consuming and a little daunting: "What if no one wants to be my friend...again?" I gave up, leaving nothing but a name out there. That's all it took. Now I find myself obsessing over everyone else's day-to-day ramblings. I have FOUND people ! Jon and Hilary! Nikole and Kelly (they lived and Cleveland and I didn't know it ARGH!), the Masons, the Cottams, the, the...people I barely remember...they're all out there on Facebook logging their moment-to-moment activities and I'm hooked. I can't stop caring that Geoff is taking a final, the Shawn likes Banana cream pies, that Sara can't make her computer work right, that Jan made cookies, that Jennifer is going to eat sushi, that Susan wishes she had my woodstove, that Jo is wondering where to find Emily, that Teri and Jim are still baiting each other, that Veronica got a new dog, that Jeannie and Hannah posted their Christmas letters and I'm going to copy Hannah, that Bro. Woodbury just read a great book and on and on.

I really do care.

And now I need to find some limits. :) Is there a rehab for facebook? Or, is there a point where it becomes less amusing?

Who knows. But in the meantime, for people who only come here to see pictures of my kids, the latest:

Posing on Thanksgiving Day. You have no idea how hard it is to get Ellie to sit for a picture. My grandmother suggested spanking her, but somehow, I just don't think that would help me get a good picture of her.

Hannah gets roped into helping Jack make applesauce. We sauced over a bushel of apples and Jack actually did the acutual saucing (handle turning) for the entire batch.

Jack and his "best little buddy the cutest baby in the world Small.

Ellie in a hostile bouncy seat take over.

Daddy helps Jack top off the tree.