havocandmayhem.com

I bought the boys some workbooks for the summer, to keep them up on what they learned this past year. It is so easy to forget things over 3 months & then have to relearn them. I don't have it in me to home school full time but I've always planned to supplemental school & I'm starting this summer. Both books had summer reading lists and since I am dealing with K4 and kindergarten, many of the books are identical.  I also found a reading list at the Daniel Boone Regional Library (my library didn't have one online) that is divided by age & grade.  Again, some overlap, but not a lot.  I now have a fairly decent sized list of books to work with when the kids don't seem interested in choosing their own. I've got The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease and The Well Trained Mind by Bauer & Wise on hold at the library. They are both due back June 3rd. I often find educational books for the kids on hold and I always wonder who has them. Is it the same...

Oh yeah. I have kids and no viable childcare options. I also have a small car.  I really want to help out a friend & watch her 5 month old for the summer. I would love to have a baby in the house. Especially one that won't keep me up all night. 10 hours to play with a baby (and feed, comfort & change a baby, I'm under no illusions here) and then hand the baby back! Sounds perfect! Except I would be stuck in the house, all day, 5 days a week from 8 to 6. I could go anywhere.  I have no issues taking 3 kids to the library or Wal Mart, especially when one can be put in a sling. My problem is the car. My car can't hold 3 car seats. If the boys were in those 'bottom part only' boosters I could manage an infant seat or rear facing seat in the middle. But the boys are still in their CarGos with about 55lbs and 10 inches still to go each before they grow out of them. So because I have the car I have, I can't have a job. I tried this thought out on DH who gav...

The problem with living in the middle of nowhere is that it is a very large area. And I live at just one end of it. The middle of nowhere covers a large area.  I have to drive to the middle of the middle of nowhere on Thursday. I am a mere 20-25 minutes from somewhere. The place I am going is 50-60 minutes from anywhere, including my house. According to Mapquest there are 3 different ways I can get there, all of them taking about 55 minutes.  Should I then wish to go somewhere else, it will be another hour to get there, unless I wanted to go to the somewhere near my house, in which case it will only be about 40 minutes. But I can go to the somewhere near my house any time & can't imagine killing a morning there. The boys' school Field Day is Thursday. It runs from 8:30 to 12:00 and while parents are welcome to hang around it isn't required. If I stay I know I will quickly find myself being a parent 'volunteer' and I really don't want to be one. Really. Thi...

The Parent Blogger's Network's theme this week is Grandparents and gift giving. Check it out http://blog.parentbloggers.com .  I could write a novel about my mom & I's various ups and downs surround my 'issues' with various gifts. Just the section on "Why Tickle Me Elmo will burnt in effigy if you give him to my child" would take up half the book. (I have this thing about needless noise. The boys make plenty of noise all by themselves. And I really cannot stand Elmo) .  This is the short version... I believe, initially, my family thought I was kidding when I said "No noisy plastic toys. I will muffle the sound, I will not replace the batteries and I will probably arrange for them to 'break' within a few days."  They bought a singing bouncing Tigger, a freaky weird sound making BooBah, a bear that said prayers in a really creepy voice and lots of cheap plastic trucks with superfluous bells, whistles, music and lights. The last pro...

On a Hoof and a Prayer is the fourth book by Polly Evans.  This time she travels to Argentina to learn to ride a horse and to experience the country.  I love her books. I find her stories compelling and fascinating. She is very descriptive about the places she visits and the things she experiences.  Each of her previous books feature her exploring a country using different methods.  It's Not About the Tapas , her first book, is the story of her travels around Spain by bike. She was a novice bike rider at the beginning and you could feel your muscles aching in sympathy with hers in the early part of her journey.  She toured China by train and bus in Fried Eggs with Chopsticks and with her weeks old motorcycle license, rented a motorcycle and cycled all over New Zealand in Kiwis Might Fly . This time around, despite the title, her mode of transportation was more often than not, something other than a horse. There were horses early in the book and occasionally in...

It began Friday with the news that my car is taking it's annual rest cure & that it would cost $2000, plus $325 for a 2 week rental. Saturday DH picked up the rental - a Hyundai Sonata while I met up with some friends for lunch and social activities.  My friend Vic has a Kindle . I have serious technology envy, even though I know that, were I able to afford a $400 toy, I could not afford the $5-10 a book fees to feed my habit. But I still want one. It is so cool! Sunday we packed up and drove the rental to Great Wolf Lodge , where we spent 3 days and 2 nights in the indoor waterpark and playing MagiQuest with the boys. We arrived around 2pm, stood in a long slow line to check in, (Apparently everyone but us wanted to upgrade or change their reservations. I think because some of them didn't have their rooms ready but if they changed room type they could get right in. Technically rooms may not be ready until 4pm, though you can check in and swim starting at 1pm. Our room ...

The Parent Bloggers Network is asking for stories of our 'rookie mom' year this week in celebration of the book - The Rookie Moms Handbook by the authors of http://www.rookiemoms.com website. This one is mine. It is a cautionary tale. Havoc was born in early October. We traditionally drive 1000 miles over the course of 2 days to visit my parents in Florida for the Thanksgiving holidays. We thought adding a newborn would be no big deal. How much trouble could a baby be? Havoc was a screamer and sleepless those first few months. We were insane to decide to pack him up and spend 18 hours shut in a sound proof car together. I say our judgment was impaired by our own sleeplessness. Day one the drive went ok. Not too much screaming & since he was being supplemented with formula one or the other of us could sit back there with him and give him a bottle, cutting down on our need to stop so often. Night one he was up most of the night, wailing while I desperately tried to qu...

Fate has decreed that Mayhem will not be attending preschool in the fall. Fate in the form of my 2001 PT Cruiser taking what is becoming, alarmingly, it's annual 2 week holiday.  Granted it does see a lot of driving. It has 127,000 miles on it. I'd want a rest every now & then too. But perhaps I'd take a shorter & cheaper one.  These little rest cures the car seems determined to have never cost less than $1000.  The transmission went out in July 2006, fortunately just as we reached my parents driveway and not 2 hours previously while going up Coopers Rock Mountain in a dead cell zone in the middle of nowhere West Virginia. But it took 7 days in the shop and $1200 to fix.  Add to that the cost of DH missing 3 days work. Thanks to my parents we did not need to rent a car. Not quite a year later, in April 2007,  I hit a huge tree branch in the road, a couple days after a big storm did some serious damage to the area trees. I suspect it fell of the back of...

My biggest crush, started when I was 10, was on Han Solo. Seriously. How can you not be in love with Han Solo? He's funny, he's dashing, he's rebellious, he's sexy, he's just disdainful enough, he's good with a blaster & is an incredible pilot. He made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs! How can you not love a guy like that? In the years between Star Wars movies I had a passing crush on most of the guys in Duran Duran at one time or another They wore make up than I did but that never mattered. Then the Indiana Jones movies came out. Indiana Freakin' Jones!!!  I was 14 when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out & let me tell you it sparked my imagination in all sorts of ways that Han Solo had not been able to when I was 10. I've had a 30 year crush on Harrison Ford.  I just love that man!

I am a guest CT member for Bree Clarkson at the Sweet Shoppe this month!  I've already done 3 layouts so far and am in the middle of a fourth.  I love Bree's templates!  I did this with one from her Popsicle Paradise set i did this with one from her Inspired by Karen set and I used the Popsicle Paradise kit for this one You can see complete credits in my gallery at Sweet Shoppe, link at the right. I'm currently working on an amigurumi dinosaur. I don't have a pattern & am trying to figure it out as I go. I'm working on a stegasaurus & I've unraveled twice so I have no photo. The boys have been really into dinosaurs lately. In book news I read 21 books last month, which accounts for what did instead of scrapping or crocheting. 5 books were rereads, 16 were new. 5 were non fiction and 16 were fiction. 3 were actually audiobooks. So far this month I have read 5 books, 3 of which were light paperback mysteries & each took me about 4 h...

We received the letter from the county Pre-K program. Mayhem is 6 on the waiting list. It includes the usual caveats about how they were overwhelmed by the number of people who showed up & how there were only 40 spaces & how if a space opens they will begin filling from the list & you could hear as early as May 12 that your child has been given a place & please call if you don't want your name on the list so others can move up.  No surprises there. It is identical to the one I received last year for Havoc. Down to his place on the wait list....  hhhhmmmmm....  Odd coincidence isn't it that both my kids end up 6th on the list?  Makes me wonder if there is actually a list or if they don't just call their friends & relatives if a spot opens up.  I'd never know if they did. Mayhem is also wait listed for a spot in a private pre-school a couple miles from the public school Havoc will be attending. Fortunately there was no charge for waiting....

We took the boys to a Day Out with Thomas at the B&O Railway Museum in Baltimore.  Mayhem is obsessed with Thomas. Nearly every day we build a track and set up the Island of Sodor. So, when I discovered that there would be a Day Out relatively near us this year, I had to buy tickets for it.  The boys alternated between watching Thomas videos and dinosaur videos on the drive up. We arrived about an hour and a half before our train ride so we visited the sights. First there was the train shed. Trains are really really big. You forget that when you only see them on Sodor. We examined the really big engines in the shed for a bit & then went outside to tour a few train cars. One was set up to show you African American history on the railroad, one showed you what the different types of cars carried, one was showing Thomas videos (we sat through one) and the last had a model railway in it. We spend a lot of time studying it and watching the trains go around. Then we moved on ...