Tag Archives: random

Jan12

The Paint Can.

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The Paint Can.

First of all, I realize that I sound like The Most Unobservant Mother Ever.  I probably am.

Second of all, there is no photographic record for what I am about to tell you.   You’ll just have to take my word for it.  Because WHY WOULD I MAKE THIS UP!?

A week ago, Joey brought in a paint can from the garage to warm up so he could paint the inside of a door that he was working on.  Short version: the paint was all weird from being in the garage for so long, so we were going to have to throw it out.  He stuck the drop cloth and a couple of paint cans in the corner of the kitchen, and that was the end of the project.

Fast forward to today.  I was cleaning the kitchen counters while Analie and Angus alternately stirred and tried to climb inside my largest mixing bowls.  They’ve been playing on the kitchen floor all week and haven’t even noticed the drop cloth and cans in the corner, so I’d wipewipewipe the counter, glance back to make sure they weren’t biting each other, and then wipewipewipe the counter again.

Suddenly, I had to go to the bathroom.  (I KNOW, SORRY.  But it’s what happened next.  I’m sure you have to go to the bathroom sometimes too.)  I looked at my children, happily shoving each other as they scuffled over which one of them was going to use the spatula, and I ran out of the room.

I was gone for less than a minute.  Probably more like 30 seconds.  (Because really, who washes their hands in the bathroom when you left your kids playing on the kitchen floor by themselves?  My kitchen has a sink, and I know how to use it.)  When I returned, they were not where I left them.

NO.

THEY WERE NOT.

Suddenly, one of them had spotted the paint cans and drop cloths in the corner, so they had both crawled over and started exploring.

GUYS.  I have been staring at those stupid paint cans all week and somehow I neglected to notice that one of them didn’t even have a lid on it.

You want to know how fast they realized that?  Like 0.0001 seconds after starting to crawl over there.  And you want to know what else?  Not only did that stupid paint can not have a lid on it, but there was a stir stick in it!  STICKING UP IN THE AIR LIKE THE SEARS TOWER.  (Wait, do they even call it the Sears Tower anymore?  Whatevs.)  But you surely get my point, which was that the stick was super obvious to anyone who has eyeballs.  And it’s always a pretty good indicator that there’s no lid on a paint can if there’s a stir stick in it.

So we’ve established that I’m blind.

Back to the story.

I walk into the kitchen and there’s Analie, holding the end of a gloopy, paint-soaked, stir stick, and she’s happily sweeping it in broad swaths on the wood floor.  The grin on her face is worth a million bucks, and I can see the pure amazement that WOAH!  There’s white stuff every place I move this stick!

Where’s Angus?  Oh, he’s eating the wet paint she smears on the floor, so his face and whiskers are bright white.

What did I do?  I started screaming “WHAAAAAAT?!?!” and jumped around the kitchen floor throwing random things away.  I’m not even sure what all went into the trash can (hopefully it wasn’t anything important), but I know the paint stick was the first thing to go.

The paint on the floor was thick and oozing into the cracks between the wood on the floor, so I unrolled a bunch of paper towels and alternately tried to wipe the floor, my child’s hands, and keep Angus from eating more paint.

And did I mention that somewhere in the chaos I stepped in the paint?  I wish I had realized it when it happened, because the next thing I knew there were Jenna footprints all over the kitchen floor.

I could keep going, but I think you get the drift.  All told, it took about 20 minutes and Joey’s travel toothbrush to clean up.  Angus has since stolen that toothbrush and carried it off to who knows where.

I just hope the paint on it has dried by now.

(I feel like the takeaway in all this is that I just need to stop having to go to the bathroom.  Ever.  Because LOOK WHAT HAPPENS.)

And that is the story of how I inked my place in the record books as The Most Unobservant Mother Ever.

Nov10

A Real (not computer!) Mouse

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A Real (not computer!) Mouse

Yesterday I drove Joey’s car to Bible study at church while he worked a couple hours from home during Analie’s nap.  I have to take his car or, like happened a couple of months back, he winds up stranded at home with a pipsqueak baby and no car seat and, subsequently, no way to get to work.

So I was whizzing up Ditch when I noticed the mouse poop.  MANY, MANY, MANY little mouse turds littered the cupholders between the front seats of Joey’s car.  At first I thought perhaps maybe he had black thistle seeds in his car?  Or…some other kind of food item had spilled?

But the more I looked at it, the more certain I was that it was mouse poop.

I called Joey and I was all, I THINK THERE IS A MOUSE IN YOUR CAR!  I SEE POOPS!

And he was all, is that what those little black deals are?

After Bible study I immediately went to Target and bought two mouse traps.  I would have preferred to buy the catch and release kind instead of the murder kind, but I couldn’t find it.  And I felt like it was pretty important to get the mouse (or mice??) out of Joey’s car before it tore up Joey’s seats.

Last night Joey cleaned up the mouse poo in his car, set the traps with peanut butter, and we went to sleep.

This morning, we got one.

GROSS!

It was super early (6:30!!!) so I fortunately was not up and about to see the carnage.  Joey threw the poor little guy IN THE TRASH.  Not even a proper burial.

We left the traps baited and in the car just in case there are more.

Our theory of how the mouse entered Joey’s car is that it climbed through the internals of the car and then oozed through the vent covers; which, I hear, is not unlike how Santa gets into houses with no chimneys.

Anyway, I just hope its friends don’t come back the same way.  And now I feel like I need a mouse trap in my car too.

Jibbly.

Nov6

Joey Gave Our Dishwasher A Colonic

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Joey Gave Our Dishwasher A Colonic

Last night Joey made me watch this Commercial Kings video about colonics.

It is hi-larious and totally worth watching if you have 11 minutes and 50 seconds laying around.

So maybe I have colonics on the brain.

Or maybe what I just witnessed would have struck me as funny had I not recently watched that video.

Anyway, our dishwasher has not been draining well (to say the least) so Joey disassembled it this evening to get to the root of the problem.  And I’m not kidding about the dissassemblage, I went outside for five minutes and came back inside to find my dishwasher in the middle of the kitchen, all its interior pieces in the sink (YAY!  because they smell horrible!), and Joey pulling this long, white tube deep from within the bowels (sorry…I had to) of the dishwasher cavity.

He held a towel over the ends of it and ran across the kitchen and dining room, down the patio steps and into the yard with it. Then he hosed the tube out and started whipping it around in the air like a lasso.  You could hear the whomp whomp whomp  sound it made from inside the house.

I burst outside again to try to stop him because, HELLO! OUR NEIGHBORS HAVE OUR DISHWASHER GUNK ALL OVER THEIR YARDS NOW!

I guess it’s just a bonus of living next door to the Woestmans.  We make fabulous neighbors.  Not only do we have a huge, ugly, embarassing pile of branches in our backyard (ordinance violation!), but we also spray your house and yard with rotten food from our dishwasher’s colon!

People are gonna be lining up to move in next to us now, I can just sense it.

Joey was all proud of himself, though; he held up the dishwasher colon (I don’t even know what the thing is actually called) which had formerly been black and gunky and showed me how pristine and shiny it looked now that he had whipped its contents to infinity and beyond our chain link fence.

From the strange and questionable noises coming from my kitchen, I would guess he’s putting the dishwasher back now.  If this colonic makes our dishwasher feel better, I may consider doing one myself.  The video I watched was so convincing…

Nov6

I’m sure this happens in your house too

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I’m sure this happens in your house too

Tonight for dinner we ate chicken pot pie, one of the eleventy billion chicken pot pies Angel and I made for her freezer last Tuesday.  What, you think I’m exaggerating?  OK FINE, A LITTLE.  We only made 11 chicken pot pies.  But it sure felt like eleventy billion; I was rolling pastry for two hours, at least.

Anyway, I took home 2 of the 11 pot pies and because Joey and Pops exploded my kitchen this weekend working on a wiring project (that will be ri-diculous when it’s finished!), I just decided to whip out one from the freezer and throw it in my oven at 375 for an hour and a half.

Analie finished her dinner before we did and she was sitting in her booster seat smearing eggs and string cheese waiting for us to be done, so I gave her a bit of my pot pie.

Her eyes got HUGE! and she started squealing and beating her arms on the tray, mouth wide open like a baby bird.  Only instead of waiting for masticated earthworm, she was demanding more delicious chicken pot pie! ! ! (But I dunno, maybe baby birds think ABC earthworm is delicious too?)

Girlfriend ate I don’t know how many bites of pot pie before she seemed like she was full. We cleaned her up and then realized she had tons of it chipmunked in her cheeks for a midnight snack, which we figured was probably OK for now.

So we stuck her in the bathtub to splash off whatever energy she had left.

About ten minutes into her splash-fest, she decided it was time to face plant into the water.  Maybe your kids do this too?  Mine loves to get water in her face and up her nose.  I KNOW, WEIRD.  We have to watch her super carefully, because usually at least once a bath she leans forward and sticks her face in the water for awhile.  But she always comes up giggling, so I stopped freaking out about it after the first couple times.  Because she usually does it a second time.  So it’s intentional, weird kid.

Anyway, she leaned over to stick her face in the water and simultaneously opened her mouth, which was still full of chicken pot pie.  It all went tumbling out into the bathwater, which wound up being so much cooler than getting water up her nose.

She spent the rest of the bath chasing around pre-chewed bits of carrot and chicken on the tub floor, trying to catch them and shove them back into her mouth.

I’m sure that’s normal, right?

 

Nov5

The Broiler Element Is Hot Like Fire, In Case You Didn’t Already Know

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The Broiler Element Is Hot Like Fire, In Case You Didn’t Already Know

Last night I threw my chicken and broccoli casserole (SANS CREAM OF CHICKEN SOUP) under the broiler for 4 minutes to brown the parmesan cheese and make it bubbly and lucious.  As I was reaching in to pull out the serving dish, one of my favorites – it’s a gorgeous blue Le Creuset oval and it just makes the food taste better, I forgot to pull the oven rack out.  Since I was using the broiler and not the regular old oven, my hand slipped a bit and bumped the broiler heating element.

The good news is that I didn’t drop and break my dish.  Because if I had done that then it would be serious mourning time up in the Woestman household.

The bad news is, I heard a SIIIZZZZZZ! as my skin touched the ridiculously hot, red-glowing element.

I set the dish down on the stove top just in time, then I surveyed the damage.  My first thought was, SWEET!  It doesn’t hurt!  I AM SO TOUGH!

So I picked the dish back up carried it into the dining room where Pops, Joey and Analie were sitting with their forks and knives in the air, banging them on the table waiting for dinner to be served already.

Then, about 30 seconds later, it hurt really mega bad.

I held my tongue for about 5 minutes, then I blurted out with, I burned my finger on the heating element in the oven and it hurts!

Joey was sufficiently sorry for me, but he kept eating his broccoli.

I put ice on the burn (which was now brownish red, raised, and oozing weird clear stuff) and forgot about it for awhile.  A few hours later, while I was downtown picking Mom up from her conference, it started hurting really bad again.  So I stuck my finger in my mouth.

BAD IDEA.

Did you know that stings super bad?  Like 4,000 jellyfish biting my thumb, and I’m super terrified of jellyfish.  I don’t even like to look at them.

Anyway, as Joey and I were getting ready for bed last night I was whining about how bad my thumb was hurting and he suddenly broke in with, “Wait, you actually touched the red shiny heating coil?”

And I was all, DUH, what else would it have been?

And he got all anxious and started talking about burn ointment and had I put any on yet and should he go get some from the store?

I don’t even know what burn ointment is, but I’m pretty sure the lack of skin area on my thumb isn’t bad enough to need that.  I told him it was too late to think about burn ointment and I’d put Neosporin on it tomorrow.

Which, it’s now tomorrow.  And the reason I’m posting this now is to remind myself to go put Neosporin on my thumb.

So…I’ma go do that now.

Sep18

Quarterback

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Quarterback

Tonight we met our friends Jonathan and Janna for a walk on the Monon and some ice cream at Brics.  It was perfect weather and being outside was almost more of a treat than the ice cream was.  But we forgot to bring Analie some food, so the entire time she sat there on our laps with her mouth open, trying to dive after the spoons that were going into our months.

It was 80% hilarious. Poor kid knew she was missing out on something.

Anyway, after we finished licking our spoons, the 8 of us headed down the canal to look at geese and ducks.

As we walked, Janna’s phone beeped and she glanced at it, gasped said “OH NO!” My heart totally froze because it was the kind of “OH NO” that’s usually reserved for, like, when you find out your uncle got hit in the leg by some friendly fire while shooting clay pigeons with his buddies and he’s on his way to the hospital.

But Janna slipped her phone back in her purse and said it wasn’t that important, and here I am thinking her uncle’s bleeding all over the ambulance and JANNA DOESN’T EVEN CARE.

It was then that I began learning many important things, beginning with the following:

1.) Our youth staff at church have a fantasy football league.  I really had no idea what those were until tonight. Now I sort of do.

2.) Some football guy had hurt himself.  So Janna’s uncles are all fine.  (Whew.)  But her football team is not.

Janna, then, tried to explain fantasy football to me – which is not a task for the faint of heart.  Joey tries every Superbowl to tell me what’s going on and every year I forget.  Admittedly, I don’t try very hard. To me, football is this:

runrunrunPILE.  runrunrunPILE.  runrunrunPILE.  GOOOOOOOOOOOAL!  (Or is it Touchdown?)

So Janna was telling me about this guy, Reggie White, and all of a sudden I got super confused.  And I said, “So…wait a minute, are the Colts a basketball team?”  Because I was getting Reggie White mixed up with Reggie Miller, who I am pretty sure used to play for the Pacers.  (Or maybe he still does?)

But as soon as I opened my mouth I knew I had made a grave a mistake, because HELLOOOOOOOO the Colts are FOOTBALL, IDIOT.

So by this point it was pretty obvious that Sports Fan I Am Not.  I was relating this conversation to Joey as we walked back to our car, and telling him I think it’s weird that the Colts can’t seem to play without Peyton Manning (had to look up how to spell his name on the Internet) so Joey was trying to explain to me how Quarterbacks are important.

“The coach is like the Senior Pastor,” he said, “And the quarterback is like the youth pastor.  The coach sets the vision and the quarterback has to make it happen.”

I still wasn’t getting it.

Maybe it’s just a lost cause.

We were just about back to our car when I asked, “OK, so then why are they called Quarterbacks?  Can they only run on a quarter of the field or something?”

“No,” said Joey, “It’s because they have to be able to pinch a quarter between their backside to make sure they’re strong enough to do all that running.”

Internet.  I wish I hadn’t believed him.  BECAUSE I TOTALLY DID.

I slowed in my walking, trying to think back to how long football had been going on, and when Quarterbacks were probably invented, and then how with the advent of HDTV the hinds of football players get all up in the camera’s business and look waaaaaaaay too large and in charge — it freaks me out.   (jibblyjibbly)

Joey glanced over, noticed that I actually believed him, and started laughing at me.  Total mockery style.

So, I still don’t know why Quarterbacks are called Quarterbacks.  But I DO know that it has nothing to do with quarters and their bums, JOEY.

Anyone else know?

 

 

Sep15

Tummy trouble

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Tummy trouble

I know all your kids started flipping themselves over on their stomaches, like, at the age of three weeks and stuff, but Analie has only just started consistently rolling herself over.  Oh, she’s been able to do this skill for six months at least.  But has she actually wanted to roll over?

NO.

NEVER.

DO NOT ROLL THE CHILD OVER.

PLEASE.

She doesn’t like to be on her tummy ever, at any time, so Tummy Time has always been a bit of a catastrophe.  She’s been slow to be curious about crawling (but she can scootch!) and is not very interested in anything that seems “dangerous”.  (Read: would make her wind up on her stomach.)

This is why I was so surprised three days ago to go get my baby from her crib at 8:30 am, and to see a tiny little face peering up over the crib rails at me, whining her Mommy, I don’t like this!!! whine.

She looked miserable.

And I was even more surprised to have a repeat of that entire experience when I got her up from her nap a several hours later.

Ever since then, she’s been waking up on her tummy 50% of the time.  She’s always furious about it, too. And to this I say: Child, stop rolling over on your stomach if it’s going to make you throw a fit!  It’s like she gets to her stomach, realizes she hates it, and then all rational thought (such as reversing the process that GOT her to her stomach in the first place) immediately leaves her tiny head and she starts to caterwaul like a pair of bobcats.

This has resulted in several shorter than usual naps. Therefore, I hate her stomach now, too.

At least until she figures out how to flip herself back over to her back, where all is right in the world.