Dustbin Blues

The worst thing about having kids?

I can handle dirty diapers, crayons on the walls, broken keepsakes, peanut butter in the VCR, apple juice all over the keyboard...

But the thing I hate most... is germs.

I've been sick more since the beginning of September (when the kids, coincidentally, started school) than I was all of last year! That's a year's worth of illness packed into three months. What do I have to look forward to for the next seven, I wonder?

Right now, it's strep throat. Yay me. *sigh* A hundred and two degree fever, an all-over body ache and a throat that's on fire. Don't ya wanna be me? Just in time for the weekend, too. Perfect.

Yesterday, I was a cleaning maniac. Today, I'm Cameron in Ferris Bueller... "I'm dying...!"

"When Cameron was in Egypt's land... let our Cameron go..."

Michael made me tea (Constant Comment, my favorite) and toast and brought me aspirin. Looks like I'm going to spend the day in bed. Which, really, isn't necessarily a bad thing, when I think about it. Would be nice to catch up on sleep.

"You're not dying, you just can't think of anything better to do!"

Well, he's got a point. What do I have to do? Hm... so much for those Christmas decorations. Oh well, there's always next weekend.

Besides, I'm still recovering from the annual room cleaning fiasco. Four hours of cleaning, sorting, holding up tiny pieces of plastic and asking, "What's this to?... Do you have that toy anymore?... Isn't that the one you buried in the sand at the old house and then forgot where you buried it?"

What did I discover? Here's the top ten:

1. Six marbles to the chinese checkers game. Glued into the underside of Legos. I didn't, however, find the actual Krazy Glue. Yet.

2. Seven socks that I've been looking for forever tied in knots and made into a "rope" hanging from Zoe's dollhouse bedroom window (which faces the wall - no wonder I didn't see it!) Apparently, she did it during "fire safety week" at school.

3. A naked Fairytopia Barbie with two amputated feet (dog victim, I believe, from the markings) but Michael said, "She's still hot."

4. Zoe had the paper punch, two pairs of scissors, the stapler and four rolls of tape. It took me fifteen minutes to vaccum all of the "confetti" she'd made out of her school library book. I wonder how much I'm going to have to pay to replace, "Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends"?

5. Eight dollars and twenty-nine cents in change.

6. Four spoons, a very bent and deformed fork, and lots of peanut butter sandwich cracker wrappers.

7. The dog's leash (I wondered where that was!)

8. A line of McDonald's french fries along the baseboard behind the dresser leading up to a peach pit. It was like the perfect ant-highway!

9. A bottle of nail polish. Red. Thankfully, they couldn't get the top off.

10. Two pairs of tweezers, a slew of bandaids put on various stuffed animals, and last but not least, and empty contact case. I'm pretty sure they DID have contacts in them at one point.

Okay, I have a date with Ferris Bueller, a box of Kleenex, and a down comforter. G'nite!

I'm Going In...

Today is the annual cleaning of the kids' rooms and clearing out old toys to make way for new ones at Christmas. I hate this day. Almost more than I hate going to the dentist for a root canal. Not only do I get to find all sorts of things I certainly would have enjoyed staying in denial about - like silly putty embedded into the rug, a child's name written thirty times behind the toybox, or one (yes, just one--where's the other one? "I don't know...") of my grandmother's earrings--I also have to deal with the plaintive cries of children begging, "No! Don't throw that away!"

I don't understand why toy makers insist on making toys with such small parts for children. Or why my mother-in-law insists on buying them. When they were babies, I made a rule: no plastic or noisy/electronic toys. It worked great for the first three or four years. We had wooden cars and cloth dolls and a wooden kitchen set and lots of Haba and Melissa and Doug toys. It was a Waldorf/Montessori heaven.

Then, the kids got old enough to start asking for the things they saw on TV. And while I limited TV watching, they still managed to find stuff they wanted--and told grandma all about it. She couldn't resist, of course, and suddenly I had plastic Transformers and Dora the Explorer toys coming out of my ears. Great. Just great.

I'm almost glad that this whole lead-toys thing has come about, because now I have a wonderful excuse to reinstate my rule. "No plastic or electronic/noisy toys!" Not that Melissa and Doug stuff or Haba stuff isn't made in China. It actually is, sadly enough. But the good news is they do frequent inspections of their plants and guarantee their toys. And while I'd rather invest in local toymakers if I could, I'm happy to point grandma to lead-free toys that won't clutter up the kids' rooms so much and make strange, ghost-like noises at two in the morning when the batteries start running out.

So I'm off to brave the wilds of the childrens' rooms to discover disasters no mother should ever have to face, I'm sure. I have a feeling I may find the Krazy Glue that came up missing last week. And the two packs of cherry Kool-Aid that mysteriously disappeared. Wish me luck... I'm going in!