Before I had kids I vowed that I wouldn’t be a yeller, but it’s not that easy to get through life with 3 kids without yelling. I know I yell too much and sometimes I wonder when the kids are going to get so sick of listening to it that they won’t be infatuated with Mommy any more and think I’m a horrible monster.

The other day I found Post-It messages from Aliya all over the bedroom so I guess I haven’t crossed the line yet. Here’s what the Post-Its said:

best mother on the erth.
I love you more than the unaverse.
you make me laph
rock on! yaw
your the best at evrithing
your the suitest person on erth
your the best
you do the nisets thing.
you try to learn spanish
you rock
your my love
you do the rhit things
Quen of the World
you make the world beter

Sniff, sniff 😉
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Holland, Massachusetts, that is. Aliya’s teacher and I were both worried that the tadpoles wouldn’t make it through the long weekend so I agreed to take them home with me. Except that “home” meant schlepping them to our camp in Holland (next to Sturbridge). The poor things were sloshing around like they were caught in a tsunami, and Ben’s patience with my passenger-seat driving wore thin around exit 13. We all made it to camp alive and they survived the return trip too. Aliya wanted to take them to the beach but I thought that was pushing our luck a little so they spent the weekend on our dresser.
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They were a lot of fun to watch (for me, anyway…Ben thinks I’m completely “gone”) and surprise, surprise, one of them turned into a frog! It was amazing how quickly Tiny went from a tadpole with legs to a teeny tiny frog. His tail disappeared in about 36 hours. Today I headed out to Petworld to figure out how to keep him alive since he doesn’t seem to be eating the flakes and pellets we’ve been feeding the tadpoles. I guess if they don’t survive it will help with our dilemma about what to do with them when the school year is over. At this point I’ll be happy if he is still breathing tomorrow morning so Aliya’s class can see him. I may have to stay awake all night in case he needs medical intervention. 😉
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Sunday Evening:

I saw these contrails when I was driving back from Worcester last week. I’m sure it was an optical illusion (or the planes took off at different times), but at the bottom of the photo it looks like the two planes were side-by-side and then (“Oh sh*t!”) they headed in opposite directions.
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Last week I chaperoned Adlani’s field trip to the Southwick Zoo. It was fun but between the 1-hour bus rides each way, the time necessary to load about 300 kids, teachers, and chaperones on the buses (twice) and the fact that we only had the buses from 9:30 to 1:30, we spent a very short time at the zoo. The kids didn’t seem to mind, though. There were lots of baby animals…my favorite was a baby monkey and the baby giraffe was also really cool. The kids’ favorite part was when were in the petting zoo and I looked at a hugely pregnant goat and said, “Wow! What do you think is inside this goat’s tummy?” while also rubbing the tummy in question. The goat chose that moment to let loose and the kids all screamed “POOP!!!” Seriously, when I asked them later what their favorite part of the trip was, that was it. As far as I know, nobody got bus-sick, had an “accident” (literal or figurative), and I didn’t lose either of my chaperonees, so the field trip was a success.

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For a while I was doing really well at sticking to my routine of doing a little laundry every day, but then Grandma Ginny was here and took over ALL of the laundry so I got out of the habit. Last week was really busy and I didn’t do ANY laundry during the week and this is what greeted me on Saturday morning:

What I hate most about laundry is the amount of time it takes to do it. If it could be condensed into a 2-hour hardcore laundry session it wouldn’t bother me as much, but it takes more than an entire day to do a week’s worth of our laundry. It almost makes me want to take it to the laundromat so I can commandeer 10 washers and 10 dryers and be done with it. Sometimes I get sidetracked in the middle and a load hangs out in the washer for so long that it needs to be re-washed. And it seems like I constantly have piles of clean laundry waiting to be put away. What I REALLY HATE is when I find something that I KNOW HASN’T BEEN WORN, BACK IN THE DIRTY LAUNDRY!!

The “after” photo doesn’t come close to representing the amount of time and effort it takes to send my family out into the world funk-free:

At least I know I’m not the only one who hates doing laundry:
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