Ran Ran Random

Life is moving along like crazy despite the feeling at times that the last thirty minutes until bedtime are NEVER going to end. We do school Monday through Thursday around here, and so I go hard those days, neglecting things like objects hiding against the bottom of the kitchen cabinets. Because bending down one more time to pick up something Penelope really shouldn't have in her mouth, should she find it, is just too much to handle when I'm trying to teach tens and ones, searching for cylinders, cones, and rectangular prisms in my pantry, spelling words for young writers, and explaining to Cash why he is NOT allowed to pour the orange juice by himself.

So right now I have let Libby and Jackson lay a blanket outside in the wonderful weather and write in their journals while taking turns listening to the disc man CD player. Does anyone else in my generation find it strange that my four year old listens to CD's with tiny white earphones when I didn't even have the capability to listen to music while walking around until I was in like fourth grade? And then, it was a big heavy tape player that used like four batteries and the earphones were flimsy and metal with a millimeter of foam on top of the speaker (to make it "comfortable") and it was impossible to lie down without seriously injuring your ear.

Again, we seem to be going through a season of frustration, hitting, and pushing if someone is doing something you don't like. Sometimes I picture one of my children as like executives or something, sitting in a boardroom, and when someone takes away their funding, they walk over and push them so hard their office chair rolls into the glass window and they fall 25 stories to their death. And someone else in the room says to my child, "Didn't your mother ever teach you not to push??" And I'll say what every mom says whose child is misbehaving (and which no one believes)..."I TRIED!"

We recently had a reason to talk about kissing and we told Jackson that he should save all his kisses for his wife. He responded, "Yeah, and I'm going to kiss her at my wedding! And if she doesn't want to kiss me, I'm going to hit her on the head!" And he then proceeds to pump his fist in the air while shouting, "DIS! DIS! DISCIPLINE!" I guess I've got a long way to go in the teaching right from wrong department. Good thing he's got another decade under our roof. Hopefully by then I will be able to refrain from saying to his fiance, "Are you SURE?"

We got a new phone and Jackson has left an amusing greeting on our answering machine. I don't know where he thought of this, but at the end, after pleading with the caller to leave him a message, and giving his own phone number (as if the caller doesn't know our phone number they just called), he closes with, "And if you don't have a social security card, just call 9-1-1!" So there you go. How to navigate social security red tape--by Jackson Alley. Random!