Of mice and women

Me: Wow, that's a big spider.  [giving Man a meaningful look]

Man: Yeah, not bad. [indulging me by coming over to validate my observation]

Me: [realizing that despite that validation, Man doesn't always understand/acknowledge Hintese, the Language of Hints)

I guess I should break here to explain that Man has a longstanding regard for spiders in their practical capacity as the slayers of lesser insects (and small birds!!!!) and discourages people he lives with from squishing them.

Me: Ok, do you want to put it outside or are you going to let me squish it? Those are your choices.

Man: Fine, I'll take it outside.

He picked up the pair of pants with manly care (dare I say gingerly?) where the spider had struck the pose that got my attention.

Man just got done reading the first part of this post and now he's laughing at me, so we had to have this exchange:

Me: It was huge!

Man: Birds?

Me: Yes! Some spiders can catch birds! And some small ones can kill a grown man in 30 seconds!

Man: But not that one!

Me: It was big enough that I could see its... [gesturing with fists in an inane attempt to demonstrate the big fisty bits that protruded from its spider face]

Man: [gesturing back, imitating the "finger teeth" used in Holy Grail when describing the man eating rabbits] Look at the bones! [imitating the squawky voices from Holy Grail]

Me: You know what I mean!!

Image from the Orkin website. See?? Fisty bits!

Anyway, he picked up the pants, took them outside, and I followed to make sure things were taken care of.
I watched him shake the pants and then made him turn them inside out.

And now everything itches. If I had squashed that thing flat, its legs would have been the width of my palm.

Excuse me while I go shower and then blow up my house.

Fighting off that napping feeling

The kids are at school all day now. Freya's first day was Monday. I lined up with her to see where she would get dropped and then picked up (which makes her sound like a football, or any great tv series on Fox) and the next day she didn't even wait for a kiss before running to the playground, skinny legs and arms propelling her toward fun with furor.  

Attempting to curl hair with "self-stay" curlers turned out badly, but the pics of her with a head twice its normal size turned out pretty well.

I'm trying not to worry too much about this "last baby has gone to school and won't kiss her mother!" thing (all said with my sorry imitation of a Jewish "muh-thah" because I'm profoundly tasteless when I'm using humor to cover pain I'm embarrassed to have) but I can't help but notice that my bookend babies were both tallest in their class. Freya stands a few inches above everyone else but that doesn't seem to bother her in the least. She's growing up, spouting stunningly complex information about the game Minecraft with artifacts of toddler lisp evident when she's excited, stubbornly making all of her own food but then cuddling until my magic mommy aura cures all her pain, and picking out her own outfits and hairdos while making sure she knows that various comfort items are safely stashed on her bed.

Enjoy this random picture of a baby rabbit. My friend is a breeder and I take her sales photos. 

Claire is hate-joying middle school.

(Have you noticed this annoying trend of mashing words together to express dichotomy? If not, you're about to because I very nearly have a teenager and the only other trend I've noticed more in its annoying extremity is hashtagging everything, even verbally!! #sometimeshashtagsarehardtoreadbcofnospacesandwebabbreviations, darn you to heck, Twitter!)

Anyway, she has two classes next to each other in time but geographically polarized, so Miss Bunion has to limp all of her band stuff to her engineering class (she typed with swelling pride) so she can make it sort of on time. Schlepping gear across that middle school is no joke, between crowded hallways and a layout that looks more artistic than rational. On the other hand, she feels more grown up and has a whole lot more say in what classes she takes than ever before. All of her core classes are pre-AP (advanced placement), then there's band (clarinet), ITE (the engineering class), and debating government. She's learning a lot already, and now it's just a matter of time before I can't even understand her English homework (since not understanding her math homework happened in days long past).

Another random rabbit. He has the suggestion of eyes, but we have yet to find definitive proof that they exist. 

Bren is having a good time. He loves his teacher, who is fresh out of college and seems confidently awesome. He's having trouble transitioning from the freedoms of summer to the structure of the school year, but hey, that's life, dude.

Yesterday I rebooted the chore system and went through each child's list with them, having them do everything under direct management with a timer, to show them that each list could be done in under 10 minutes. Each kid has responsibility for a major common area of the house and one bathroom, except for the kid who does the dining room/kitchen since that's a pretty big job. They averaged about 7 mins for that one room and bathroom, and Saturday chores shouldn't take them much longer as long as they do their dailies consistently. Do they have a chance of doing anything consistently with me as their mother? Only time will tell, poor dears.

Now, the rabbit pictures are to say I'm sorry that I don't have pics of the older kids from the past couple of weeks. I'll have to correct that. In the mean time, one last rabbit picture: