Parenting

Last night, at 10 pm, Ethan was still not asleep and was wriggling around his bed. "Mom, I need a drink." Ok. I hate being thirsty and I always drink at night, so I bring him a drink. A few minutes later, "Mom, I need to go to the BATHroom." Ok, no problem. Better to use the toilet than wet the bed. I bring him to the bathroom, set him on the toilet, he does his thing, I lift him off, help him get his jammies back up, we wash his hands and dry them. We are done.

Suddenly, tears and shrieks and hollering. "MOM! I NEED TO DRY THE OTHER HAND!" "Ok, go ahead and dry it off," I tell him.
"But I want YOU to do it," he insists.

Here's where the tired and cranky mom kicked in. She refused to help him dry his hand. He is perfectly capable of doing it himself. More shrieks and tears, grouchy mom grabs him and dumps him in his room with the gate up. "Mom, I want to BEEEE with you!" Grouchy mom ignores his request, enters kitchen and contemplates mounds of dirty dishes. After a few minutes, grouchy mom hears little boy talking to her from his bedroom, but she can't understand him because she is listening to glorious Mozart violin concerto #5, attempting to motivate herself to wash dishes. It is Mozart's 250th birthday today, by the way.

So, grouchy mom goes to little boy's room. "Mom, when you do something, you need to say sorry," he says, looking at me. Remorse and denial. "Did I do something?" I ask. "I brought you a drink, I helped you go the bathroom, I helped you wash your hands... and then I got mad." He keeps looking at me, with his big brown eyes and beautiful eyelashes. "I'm sorry," I tell him. "I'm sorry, too," he says. "Can you forgive me?" I ask him. He grins and opens his arms up wide and gives me a squeeze around the neck. We are friends again. When I leave his room, he settles down and goes to sleep.

Parenthood is so frustrating sometimes that you want to rip your hair out and so sweet sometimes that your heart seems to swell and then melt. Is there anything else like it?

Never accept a cell phone shop!

Well, hello. Yes, we are alive here at the Daily Moos. Michael suggested that we might consider changing our name to the Monthly Moos, considering that it has been months since my last post. I feel no remorse and no need to resolve to blog more often. My efforts need to go more towards daily personal study, playing with my boys, keeping the apartment clean, planning meals, eliminating Mount Washmore from the bedroom corner (neatly sorted into boxes and laundry bins, I must insert), practicing violin, recruiting more students, caring for my Primary kids and the Primary board, and the like. Yet, here I am. Thanks for being here with me.

Yesterday I received a menacing bill threatening to go to collections if I didn't pay up. This was completely absurd, but I was nervous. Back in November, on a mystery shop assignment, I bought a cell phone and then returned it about a week later without ever using it. The company was supposed to take care of these non-refundable activation charges. And they had. Several times. Anyway, when I got the bill, I dialed up the cell phone automated customer service line and discovered that my balance was $00.01. Yes, they were threatening to send me to collections over $00.01. "Must be a mistake, " I thought. "It's not even worth making a credit card payment of $00.01 because they pay more in fees to the credit card company then they collect from me."

Then, last night, as we were happily finishing our chicken pot pie around 7:30 pm, the phone rang. My husband answered, looked concerned, punched a number on the phone keypad, and didn't say a word. "What? Who is it?" I pestered him, in a respectfully (tic) quiet voice. I hate not knowing who is on the phone. It was an automated phone call from the cell phone company, threatening again to send us to collections over our past due balance. One measly cent was the balance.

Long story short, we eventually talked to a real live person, who apologized profusely for the inconvenience of the phone call, for the worry it must have caused us, and who took 20 minutes to assure us that after the next billing cycle, the remaining one cent of our balance would be zeroed out and we should call them in the middle of February to confirm that.

Moral of the story: never accept a cell phone shop.

A room with a view

This is the view from our bathroom. As other parents know, privacy is hard to come by. Actually, there's a door that we usually close. You can see that Scott likes to do just what Ethan does and vice versa.

Life is great with a 2 seater

I feel like a new woman, a woman who is now FREE to leave her house without difficulty. We are all very happy with our new stroller. It was a birthday gift to me from my in-laws. I have to say that my in-laws are fabulous. We never have those stereotypical inlaw issues. They instructed me to pick out what I'd like for my birthday and charge it to them. We have been on walks every day (granted, it's only been 2 days since we started) and I feel healthy, happy, and heartened that my boys are not locked inside all the time. Easy to get to the park, don't have to worry that Ethan will run off down the street while I push Scott in the stroller. Life is good:)

Shortest date ever (double entendre)

Today as Ethan and I walked out of our apartment to the car, he took my hand, smiled up at me, and said, "Mom, we're going on a date to the car." This made me immensely happy. We walked along, holding hands, and he asked, "Why are we having a date?" He immediately answered his own question: "Because we want to be friends." When we reached the door to the parking area, he stopped, "Here's the brown door. That was a good date."