Ummm. . .

Sometimes the kids will say things that deeply resonate with me:

#5: I really want to climb the walls. Can I climb the walls?

I totally get that. Often, I want to climb the walls. So I let him. I should clarify that by “walls” he means “doorframe”, which has handy grabby bits around the edges, plus leverage, especially when you’re very bendy and lightweight and about four feet tall. When he comes to me and says this I let him “climb the walls” three times. He usually does two right away and then saves one for later, unless one of his sisters grabs him and pulls him down in the middle of a climb because they want to get into the refrigerator or else just torment him because really, if they wanted to get into the refrigerator they could just go through the other doorway.

If you’re ever at my house and you notice dirty footprints on the top of the doorway into the kitchen, this is why.

Sometimes the kids will say things and it makes me wonder what goes on in their heads:

#5: (explaining his graphing math homework to me, which involved solving a problem and then plotting the answer number and its opposite on a line) I don’t like to think of them as opposites. I prefer to refer to them as evil twins.

Oh yeah, positive, negative. Evil twins would totally make math more interesting. I wish I’d thought of it.

Then sometimes they say things that make me glad I don’t know what goes on in their heads. Or in their private time, behind closed doors.

#5: Do you think dogs’ hands taste better than their feet, like ours do?

Ummm. . .

Happy Halloween

I may as well get it out there, because you guys are going to find out sooner or later.

The winter storm that hammered the east coast this weekend was all our fault. Perhaps the fault of my family as a whole, or it may be that the blame can be placed squarely on my shoulders.

#1 believes, and the idea is not without merit, that this was God’s way of telling us that we should have taken our Christmas lights down.

She bases this belief on the fact that the giant branch that landed five feet from her head and could have killed her instead took out the gutters, to which the lights were attached.

If you look at the vertical bar in the center of the picture, that’s the gutter. With the Christmas lights. As far as why those lights are still up, that’s another post entirely.

But it may have been me and what I wrote about Winter on Facebook.

crosses — Halloween decorations at the start of the snow

non-crosses — Halloween decorations, plus branches.

I’ll not be taunting Winter in print in the future.

I feel like we’re the luckiest people on the planet. It’s hard to show in the pictures, but we had two giant branches that just missed doing serious damage to the house, not to mention the one that didn’t land on #1.

Besides the gutters, we got our porch pierced:

And that’s it so far. That’s it!

So. Lucky.

The power’s still out. School is cancelled. I just hipped the little ones to the fact that power out days count as snow days. If we go over three snows days, they have to make it up at the end of the school year. Two down so far, and winter hasn’t even begun.

CC got a generator today, thanks to the shop that our shows rent their sound gear from. We now have heat. We got power to the freezer and the fridge before we lost anything. We have the internet back.

I Facebook-bitched about how the county hadn’t even started to clear our street yet- it’s completely blocked by one of the giant branches that didn’t land on my house- and they showed up within fifteen minutes. Never doubt the power of social media.

No school parties, no Halloween parade, and the neighborhood with the best candy and haunted houses behind us is pitch black and deadly with debris and laden branches that continue to fall. But #1 came home from an errand and said that everyone was out on main street, trick-or-treating where all the businesses have power. They went to main street and hit all the houses between here and there while it was still daylight. As soon as they finish hand washing the dinner dishes by candlelight, we’ll eat candy and make s’mores and continue telling spooky stories that may or may not involve the county’s wood chipper (whirring away in front of the house) and wayward children.

Here’s to Halloween miracles.

Yoga, Jersey-style.

Sometimes I practice at a yoga studio in New Jersey, one not above a “video” store. They teach hot yoga, but it’s more of an Om-oriented place.

My favorite teacher quote came from Jagadisha, who also happens to be the studio owner. We were in some posture that was pure evil, probably triangle, and he was walking around adjusting postures, empathizing with our pain. “I know,” he said. “I wish I could sit on my couch and eat cake and it would make me one with everything. But it doesn’t work that way.”

Figures.

Last week I left the house after getting the kids off to school and brought my yoga clothes with me so I could catch a class in the middle of my day. I changed clothes in the studio’s changing room. I pulled on the pants.

They felt strange.

I tugged. I looked down.

These were not my yoga pants.

I have to back up a minute and talk about laundry. Everyone participates in laundry at our house. I learned early on that I should wash my clothes separately from the kids’ clothes and also never make them fold my stuff. Otherwise they steal it.

It isn’t just me they steal from. They all steal from each other. If a sibling has somehow managed to skate out of laundry detail and another sibling is folding their shirt, the laundry-working sibling considers it well within their rights to swipe the shirt for the next wearing. In everyone’s defense, there are a damn lot of clothes in our house and we don’t always know whose is whose. If you’re not there to speak up for your clothes, it’s your own fault.

I’m not morally superior to this practice myself, in theory. It’s just that I don’t actually fit in to any of their clothes, a fact I am reminded of when random kid clothes end up in my dresser and I don’t pay attention and try to put them on.

Which is how it came to be that yoga pants, size zero and belonging to #1 ended up in my closet, in my bag, and on my size eight ass at power Vinyasa last Monday.

Had I five extra minutes, I would have bought a new pair in the appropriate size from the studio. As it was, I didn’t, so I Om’d- for the space-age-stretchiness of synthetic fabrics, and Om’d some more that the seams would hold up, and took the Divine Guidance that came as a small, still voice inside me that said to sit in the back of the room. Or, more correctly, try not to sit.

I had a pretty stressful downward facing dog when the teacher came over to adjust my posture.

But then I remembered that I was in Jersey, and if you’re a woman and don’t wear clothes that are several sizes too small for you at least twice a year, they kick you out of the state (though you can usually bribe someone to get back in).

Have you made any. . .large mistakes lately? What can get you kicked out of your state?