If you give a Mom a Muffin.......

My friend Heidi sent this to me on Facebook and I just had to share. It is too true! Now, I've got to get the laundry going..


We are fans of the "If You Give..." books by Laura Numeroff in our house so this definitely struck my funny bone:

If you give a mom a muffin, she'll want a cup of coffee to go with it.

She'll make herself some.

Her three year old will spill the coffee;

She'll wipe it up.

While wiping the floor, she'll find dirty socks.

She'll remember she has to do laundry.

When she puts the laundry in the washer, she'll trip over boots and bump into the box of Goodwill items.

Bumping into the Goodwill items will remind her that she has to get these boxes out of her basement and into the car.

When she puts the boxes in the car, she'll find a bag of groceries;

This will remind her she has to cook dinner.

She will get out the chicken defrosting in the fridge.

She'll look for her cookbook, "101 Things to do with Chicken."

The cookbook will be sitting under a pile of mail.

She will see the NetFlix movie she meant to send back and the phone bill, which is due tomorrow.

The checkbook will be in her purse that is being dumped out by her one year old.

As she bends down to rescue her purse, she'll smell something funny.

She'll change the baby's diaper.

While she is throwing the diaper away and searching for the hand sanitizer, the phone will ring.

Her three year old will answer and hang up.

She'll remember she wants to call a friend - not for coffee, but for a very strong drink.

Thinking of drinking will remind her that she was going to have a cup of coffee in order to stay awake for the rest of the day.

And chances are...

If she finds her cup of coffee (which she has to reheat by now),

Her children will have eaten the muffin that goes with it.

Now - what I would like to know is what other tasks/simple activities of daily living do you attempt to accomplish with your children around? Do you have any luck getting them done, or do you always wind up getting sidelined?

The Wind from my Sails

I think I am finally feeling a little better -at least I'm not breaking down in tears during my morning runs. I swear - the passing of little Maddie really did a number on me. I still think of her and Heather and Mike every day yet I haven't been able to bring myself to mail the card I have for them. I will do it today though - it's been long enough.

On a completely different note, something happened the other day that really caught me off guard. You see, I really like Facebook and I spend a little bit of time on it almost everyday. Not a lot of time, but time nonetheless. And I usually do it while I'm at work. Well, the other day I'm checking email and low and behold there's a friend request from none other than my boss. I stared at it for a couple of seconds and then I actually looked around my office - like maybe he somewhere nearby, spying on me. I work alone folks and I actually looked around my office. What a dork.

Anyway, I wasn't really surprised to see his friend request waiting in my inbox. After all, I've heard the man snore before, I've even seen him in his jammies. Yeah, you read that right - but it's not what you think. His wife is one of my best friends, their son is The Captain's best buddy, and outside of the office we're all good friends. We know more about the other person than is probably appropriate for a professional relationship - but then again, this isn't your typical boss/employee relationship. They hired me for the position because I was a friend and they wanted someone they could trust, someone they didn't have to worry about. I fit the bill I guess so for that last three years I have worked for my best friend and her husband.

So anyway, after a couple of seconds I clicked "accept" and he joined the ranks of my "friends", most of which I know from elementary school, high school, college, and grad school. Now I have my boss on there too, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. My Facebook page was the one thing, besides this blog, that my immediate circle of friends didn't know about - until now it seems. I'm not sure what I'm more bummed about - that I am going to have to stop updating my Facebook during work hours or what.

In any event - I would love to hear about your Facebook stories. Have you "friended" someone you didn't want to? Have you "unfriended" anyone? Do you have any ex's on your page? Just curious.

Can you help?

Okay - I know I'm probably acting a lot like the cousin or relative who never calls or writes or visits and who always forgets your kid's birthday and I'm really sorry if that's how it seems because those people are definitely annoying. But I wouldn't be giving 100% toward my cause if I left this stone unturned so here goes.

I'm raising money for the March of Dimes March for Babies this year and I need your help. As you probably already know, the March of Dimes' mission is to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. Every year in the United States, a staggering 525,000 babies are born to soon - some of them are no bigger than a deck of cards. No one knows the causes of nearly half of all premature births and no one is working harder than the March of Dimes to find the answer.

I gave birth to two healthy, full term babies and for that blessing I am eternally grateful. But I have friends who lost their babies. Some gave birth to medically fragile babies and could only stand by and watch helplessly as their baby fought for its' life. I can only imagine the heartache and suffering they endured.

I support the March of Dimes because I want to support my friends. I support the March of Dimes because I believe ALL babies deserve a healthy start in life. I support the March of Dimes because I don't want my sons to experience the loss of a child. I support the March of Dimes because no mother should ever have to go home without her baby.

For more information on the March of Dimes, visit www.marchofdimes.com. You can make a donation on their homepage or by clicking the widget on my page. Thank you in advance!

UPDATE ON 4/21/09

I've been away from blogging for a while. Keeping up with work, the kids and all the extras just left little time for me to write on my own blog, let along catch up on reading some of my favorites. So it was a complete and utter shock to discover that one of my favorite blogging couples recently lost their beautiful baby girl, Maddie. I still can't wrap my mind around the whole thing and I still can't stop crying. My husband doesn't blog and so consequently, he just doesn't "get it". He keeps asking how I can be so upset about the passing of a little girl that I never even knew. But I did "know" her and I did "know" her parents, Heather and Mike. When you read someones blog for almost a year and they share their life's ups and downs with you and you SEE into their world.....well, it is like you "know" them. You realize that they are cool as hell and you start to care about them, start to root for them. And when something like this happens, your heart breaks into a million pieces.

Maddie was born a little over 11 weeks early and spent 68 days in the NICU. To say she had a rough start to me is an understatement. But she pulled through it all and was the absolute light of her parents' lives. Little angels like Maddie are why I support the March of Dimes. If she had been born healthy and full-term she would still be here -she wouldn't have had the struggles she did. So please click on The Spohrs are Multiplying in my blogroll section, or visit remembermaddie.com and make a donation to the March of Dimes in her memory.

I LOVE Me a Good Deal!

If you are a make-up horse or if you just need some new gloss you're going to LOVE this deal.

The cosmetic line E.L.F (Eyes-Lips-Face) has been bought out by Nordstroms and will be re-packaged with the Nordies label SO...... that means a big 'ol sale. Most products are $1 - some are $3.

At check out enter the code CAROLINA and get an additional $7.50 off any orders over $15.

I STOCKED UP for under $18. YAH!

The website is http://www.eyeslipsface.com/shop.asp

(Sorry, I would link to it but I still haven't figured out how to do that!)

Happy shopping!!!

When you just can't be there

So yeah - I dropped off the face of the planet....again. And when I tried to buckle down and get back into this blogging game all I could manage was a measly YouTube video. At least it was something. In my defense, I have been busy at work. Busy with what I really can't say. Putting out little fires here and there, herding cats - you know, the usual. But since I take advantage of the awesome high-speed-connective- goodness of my office to read/write on my blog, having to do stuff like work at work is really cramping my style! The good news is that my hubby and I are finally looking into joining the rest of civilization and getting high speed service in our home. Praise God! And when we do, maybe it will be exactly like that commercial you may have seen recently on TV -you know the one about the lady who finally gets high speed Internet service at home and then gets a big, fat promotion at work because she's actually working at work instead of farting away her time in the office downloading pictures of cats.

Anyway, enough talk about high speed Internet! That's not what I came here to talk about so let me get right to the subject and delay no longer.

The Captain got hurt the other day. Not seriously, but he took a pretty good fall at school. It could have been a lot worse than it was so I'm very thankful that the boy drinks his milk and has strong bones. Apparently, he was at the very tip top of this climbing structure that has a fireman-type pole attached to its side. All the kids love to climb to the top of this thing, swing across, grab onto the pole and slide down. The Captain was hanging from the top of the pole when he fell all the way to the ground, landing flat on his side.

It scared the shit out of him more than anything, and he was fine after some TLC from his teachers. I would never have known about it because he was his happy normal self when I arrived to pick him up. It wasn't until I pulled the incident report from his cubby and discovered what had happened that I felt a wave of guilt and near panic wash over me.

I know I can't be there for every "owie" that my kids get - but this could have been bad and I felt like crap that I wasn't there when he was probably so scared. It was someone else who comforted him and told him that it would be okay. In the back of my mind, I know that me not being there was probably a good thing because if I had seen him fall like that, I probably would have passed out cold which wouldn't have been helpful at all.

Somehow The Captain's accident on the playground brought memories from my own childhood flooding back to me. I was maybe 7 yrs old and I loved to ride my bike around the neighborhood and back in the day wandering several blocks away was no big deal. I ended up riding past my friend's house and her family happened to own a very unfriendly Doberman Pincher who was pretty pissed off that I was riding my bike in front of their house. The dog was tied up in the backyard and it just kept barking and lunging against it's chain. Looking back it was obvious that I should have hightailed it out of there, but I was an oblivious little kid and didn't think a barking, extremely aggravated off dog posed any danger. After all, he was tied up with a really big chain so I saw no reason to leave.

Well, as you can guess, the dog broke free of his chain, ran me down, knocked me off of my bike and proceeded to bite me in four different places, drawing lots of blood and lots of really really loud screams. My friend's parents came running out of their house after what seemed like an eternity and pulled the dog off of me. They took me inside, patched me up and sent me home and then I'm sure probably proceeded to shit their pants while waiting for a phone call from my parents.

I rode my bike home with the bites on my legs, hands, and arms stinging in the breeze and still bleeding. My dad's face turned ghost white when he saw me walk through the door - all bloody and bandaged up. With tears in my eyes I told him what happened. I remember the look on his face when he realized that all the screaming he had heard had come from me. It was all screwed up and pained, like like he had just been sucker-punched right in the gut. The next thing I remember he was on the phone, screaming at my friend's parents and saying that he was "coming for their dog".

Of course the dog was put down but I still felt bad for it even though it practically ate me for snack. But now that I have kids myself, I know I would've done the exact same thing. And now I know exactly how my dad felt when realized he wasn't able to protect his little girl. I felt the same way the day The Captain fell off that stupid play structure - and he wasn't even really hurt.

I know that as a parent of two boys I will have many opportunities to kiss boo-boos and sooth owies and those aren't the instances I worry and fret about. It's the ones that I miss that I worry about hurting them the most.

Mom My Ride

I actually had this done to my new van recently - it was great. Not.

A Rare Moment of Peace

I love this picture. Captain Crazy and Little D were snuggling with each other one morning before they left for school and I went to work. I came around the corner, wondering why it was so quiet, and saw them just hanging on the couch togther and I just had to snap a quick shot. Most of the time they aren't like this with each other. In fact, most of the time I don't think there's much love lost between them. And it worries me to be honest.

They aren't doing anything that's endangering their welfare - they're not trying to club each other over the head with blunt objects or chasing each other with sharpened sticks. They just argue and bicker and compete against each, a lot. And it's driving me nuts.

Captain Crazy starts a lot of it. He rarely passes up an opportunity to point out to his little brother that he thinks has more Mac n Cheese than Little D has, or that his Mac n Cheese noodles are bigger than Little D's noodles. Or he'll pitch a fit if Little D gets dressed first in the morning or gets his shoes on before he does. But they are both equally guilty of fighting over who gets my attention - often screaming "My Mommy!" and pushing the other out of the way in order to get to me first. It's this last behavior that is most the frustrating for me. I pay so much attention to my boys and I try my absolute best to make sure that I give them both equal amounts of affection, but it just doesn't seem like enough. No matter what I do, it feels like it will never be enough.

It's frustrating and tiring. At the end of the day I sometimes feel like I've been mauled or manhandled or something along those lines. My nerves are frazzled and I feel like I somehow have failed at raising them because they just don't really get a long all that well.

I'm sure it's a phase they're going through. They won't always be fighting each other to get a hug or kiss from Mommy and they won't always care about who is first into the car or out of it. I'm going to have to remind myself of this fact often because right now they do care about that stuff and they argue a lot. And focusing on the times when they are getting along (like in the picture) will help a lot too. In the meantime, if anyone reading this has any helpful advice, I am all ears!