Cute, Not So Cute 3rd edition

Backseat driver

 
Cute:
It has just been the last couple months that Belle has begun to comment on things going on outside the car while we are driving.  The first time it happened she looked straight out her window to the side of the road and yelled, "Oh no! We're driving on the grass!"

Just yesterday we were driving and she looked ahead of us and quivering with excitement she exclaimed, "We are going up up up that big hill!  THIS IS SO FUN!"

Not So Cute:
She clearly doesn't understand the rules of the road.  Or maybe physics.  Or something.  Because often we will be driving along listening to Dalton chatter about how many points he has for finding Slug Bugs, Mustangs, PT Cruisers or HHR's (You'll only think this is weird if you don't have a little boy obsessed with vehicles..) when Belle will suddenly shriek, "WATCH OUT, MOMMY! THAT TRUCK IS GOING TO BONK US!"

As I look frantically around for this truck that is going to crush us I notice a small pickup truck on the other side of the road driving along calmly in its own lane. 

After I stop shaking I try to explain to Belle that not every car that looks like it's coming toward us is going to hit us. 

She's started to do it a lot.  Sometimes it's just a frantic shout of "MOMMY! BE CAREFUL!" that apparently nothing has triggered.  Sometimes it's "MOMMY!  YOU MUST SLOW DOWN! YOU MUST SLOW DOWN!" when I'm driving 25 miles an hour through the downtown area of our town. 

The big problem with all this shouting is that I don't feel like I can categorically disregard shouts like that from my passengers.  So each and every time I have to look around wildly for the source of the supposed danger before I can rule out that there really isn't a fire truck about to run into us.

And it stresses me out.


Pteranodons

Cute:
Ok, I'm working on what is cute about this next one....Hold on...I'm sure there's something...

I know!  It is cute when my kids pretend to be stuff.   Especially when they pretend to be some other set of siblings and have little pretend adventures together. 

Lately they've been pretending to be pteranodons from Dinosaur Train.

Not So Cute:
Have you ever watched Dinosaur Train?  It's a little show about a pteranodon family (flying dinosaurs) and their adopted son who is a tyrannosaurus rex. 

Fine.  They're a couple little siblings that learn about different types of dinosaurs and have barrels of fun comparing and contrasting things. 

The Not So Cute part is that these pteranodons make a pteranodon noise.  It's like a ear-splitting squawk.  A terrible, dinosaur, ear-splitting squawk.  And my kids have decided that when we are all "TEAM PTERANODON! HOORAY!!!" that it just doesn't feel real unless they squawk before everything they say to each other.  And sometimes after everything they say.

(SQUAWK) Hey Shiney! What are you doing?
(SQUAWK) Playing with trains, Dawn. What you doing? (SQUAWK)
(SQUAWK) Drinking juice
(SQUAWK) Cool.

Hundreds of squawks every day. 

And it's driving me crazy. 

I've even had to make rules. 
NO PTERANODON SQUAWKS IN THE CAR. 
NO PTERANODON SQUAWKS WHEN WE ARE IN THE SMALL BATHROOM TOGETHER.
NO PTERANODON SQUAWKS AT THE TABLE WHILE EATING.


I think I hate pteranodons.   I am glad they are extinct.

Cute, Not So Cute volume 2 (and homemade powdered laundry soap)

For about the last three years I've made my own powdered laundry detergent and I know I've chatted with friends who want the recipe (but I honestly can't remember which ones), so I thought I'd post it.  It's stupid-easy to make, works great and is practically free compared to store bought detergent. (Unfortunately, I can't remember where I got it to give credit where credit is due, but the recipe is tangled about here and there in the world wide web...)

But a post about laundry soap?  BO-RING!  So I'm interspersing soap-making instructions with a new volume of "Cute, Not So Cute." (Because we wouldn't want a short post, now would we?)
 

The soap 

I was always irked to finish my grocery shopping by dropping a 

$17 box of detergent into my cart (made extra expensive because it was 

dye/fragrance free for my sensitive-skinned kinfolk - 

why exactly does less ingredients = more expensive?  

Riddle me that.)

I had seen recipes online for DIY laundry soap that is super cheap and works great. Cleans well, keeps colors bright, doesn't irritate anyone's skin, yada yada yada.    

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Cute, Not So Cute

Cute:  Belle does this hilarious stomping thing where she hunches over a bit, sticks her hands out in front of herself, squints up her face funny and takes tiny steps, stomping as hard as her 22 lbs can do with each step.  It's hilarious.  Picture a scene where some American Indian, dressed in traditional garb, is doing a stomping dance around a huge bonfire.  That's what she does.  Like this beautiful girl:

Image credit

And how Belle would love to wear something like that.  She's a smidge Cherokee from her father's side and it shows. 

Not So Cute: The other night I was trying to calm Liam down and get him to sleep (Any of you notice that I only talk about around three topics on this blog?  There's bodily waste products that don't end up where they are supposed to, odd things my kids do and issues arising from getting Liam to sleep.  Perhaps I need to branch out...), he was almost dozing off when suddenly there was this BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM and the floor of his room began to shake.  His eyes snapped open and I expected air raid sirens to start going off. 

I left the now crying Liam in his bed and ran out to find Belle, just inside her room (which is two feet from Liam's room), doing her stomp dance (as though her little legs were commercial grade impact hammers instead of tiny twigs) and singing a chanty sort of version of Away In a Manger.  And I didn't find it cute at all.

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(back to the soap)

Ingredients

1 cup washing soda (sort of like baking soda but found in the laundry aisle)

1 cup Borax

1 bar of plain, old, regular soap  (I use Ivory)
(NOTE: The recipe calls for Fels-Naptha soap which can be found in the laundry aisle or sometimes with the regular soap, but I find the fragrance of it foul, so we use Ivory...)

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(back to Cute, Not So Cute)

Cute: My parents came to visit and gave Dalton Connect Four for Christmas.  Then my mom played about a hundred games with him.  There was lots of, "Now wait!  You have to look at both of our pieces!  You might need to block me!"  Or "Now wait! You have to look at both of our pieces!  Is there a way you could win???"  And so Dalton "won" a lot of the games.  

Then D needed a potty break and headed upstairs yelling, "Mommy!  You play with Grandma while I'm upstairs."

Me: "Do you think I can beat her?"

Dalton: "Oh yeah!  She's not really very good at that game!"

And I laughed hard at how cute it was that the thought he was better than her.

Not So Cute: Grandma leaves town and now I'm stuck playing Connect Four.  So I continue the incessant coaching ("You have to look at both of our pieces!").

D: I don't need your help, Mommy.  I am good at this.  I can play you.

Me: Oh, really?  Ok.  All I'll say now is "You have to look at both of our pieces..."

And he continued to play in his devil-may-care sort of way while I literally bit my tongue to keep from nagging helping him and none-too-subtly stacked my yellow pieces into a line. 

Then suddenly his eyes lit up.  "I WIN!" he shouted as he dropped in his little red piece completing a line of 4 right in the middle of the grid which I had not at all noticed, being too busy only watching my own pieces.  

 "Mommy!  You have to watch both our pieces."

Not so cute.

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(back to the soap)

Directions

1.  Shred the bar of soap in the fine section of your cheese grater.  This is as hard as the recipe gets, which isn't hard because soap grates REALLY easily.  So easily, in fact, that you should watch your thumb knuckle and make sure it doesn't hit the cheese grater.  I've heard that really hurts. 

 2. Add one cup Borax and one cup Washing Soda.  Mix together. 

Viola.   That's it.  Oh, and the great part?  It takes ONE TABLESPOON PER LOAD.   

Yup. One tablespoon for a ginormous load of towels or a humongous load of pee-soaked bedding or a monstrous load of poop-filled baby pajamas.  

One Tablespoon.

Some fancy math:

Borax < $4/box

Washing Soda < $4/box

Ivory soap < $0.50/bar

That means a recipe of this costs about $1.50 and I get around 50 loads from each recipe. 

That's 3 cents per load or 

$1.50 for as many loads as a big box of store bought soap. 

Yup, that's how ya stick it to the man!

Hmmmmmm, who is "the man"?  

Proctor? or Gamble? 

PS: This laundry soap doesn't make the water all sudsy.  Don't be alarmed if your water isn't.  It's still cleaning stuff, I promise.

Highs and Lows - sorta

I don't have a concrete set of highs and lows this week.  Most of the week seems sort of pleasant and unremarkable to me and Sunday would have been Jack's fourth birthday which raises way too many emotions to be able to resolve into highs and lows.

So this week instead we are going to play a new game I like to call, "Cute...Not So Cute."  I think you'll pick up on it pretty quickly.

Liam

 
Cute: The child has the goofiest huge grin.  It's all gums and a huge open mouth that looks like it's trying to eat a huge piece of cotton candy.  Goofy is the only word for it.  And it is just the happiest face you've ever seen.  It makes me laugh every time I see it.

Not So Cute:  Well, almost every time. Usually when I am up at some ungodly hour nursing Liam he conks back out before finishing leaving me with the eternal struggle of whether to wake him up a little more to finish eating or just run off to bed as fast as I can.  The other night he did just that and I chose the run-away-as-fast-as-I-can choice, like usual.  But when I tried to put him in his crib, the second his body gently touched his bed, his eyes shot open like I'd dunked him in ice water - which was annoying.  So I calmed him down and tried again - and you'd think the crib was electrified. His eyes sprang open unnaturally wide like some sort of freaky baby in a horror movie.  Really, it was creepy.  And he was fussy.  Super fussy.  And I was tired.  So I tried my best not to scream and wake all the other kids up and picked him up and tried again. This time, against my putting-baby-to-sleep policy, I held him til he was COMPLETELY asleep.  And guess what.  Yup, barely touching that soft, smooth sheet jerked him awake AGAIN.  AHHHHH!!!  But this time instead of fussing he looked sort of frantically around until he found my face (which I had been cleverly hiding 12" directly above his own...) and the little turkey catches my eye and grins.  His huge, goofy grin.  And coos.  And bites at the air with his gigantic grin.  But now we're at half past ungodly and even though it settles my rage a bit, I look him straight in the eye and say, "Sorry buddy, right now? Not so cute." 

Belle

Cute:  Little Belle's little colon has some constipation issues (You're wondering how this is ending up in the "cute" category, aren't you...)  You don't want details, but it got to the point that if there was any emergence of poop it was greeted by cheers, shouts, candy and a full blown parade by the rest of the family.   Thankfully we are out of the proverbial woods now and she's much more regular.  So now at each instance of her being victorious she comes to me bursting with pride and whispers, "Mommy!  I pooped A-GAIN!"  Then the ritual continues by her making a super excited face (think along the lines of an overly dramatic mime...)  and says, "And it didn't hurt!  It just POPPED right out!"  And her face and her high pitched little voice always make me laugh and wish I'd video taped her.

Not So Cute: I change her vile, stinky diaper trying not to breath (what is in that medication???), take it outside to the trash holding the thing downwind from myself, walk back in and around the corner she comes, bursting with pride and whispers, "Mommy!  I pooped A-GAIN! And it didn't hurt!  It just POPPED right out!"  Seriously?  I JUST changed you!  NOT so cute.