Snapshots of Dysfunctionality

My older daughter wears it like a badge of honor. One of the things she loves to say about us - her family - (me, her sister, brother, the grandkids, her dad and his family as well) is that we represent dysfunctionality at its finest.

And yes, there are days when I totally agree with her. Oh heck, let's just be honest and get it out in the open for once and for all - EVERY DAY I think I would probably say the same thing about all of us.

My kids love to pull pranks on each other - and that's pretty normal, isn' t it? Carrie has been known to call Mandy back when she worked at the deli in the nearby grocery store and her favorite trick was to tell whoever in the deli answered that she would like to order 10 pounds of the deli bacon. Now, considering that stuff there runs around $15 PER POUND, it usually would get a reaction from the attendant on the phone. Mostly a look of shock and sheer disbelief which, if Mandy would catch a glimpse of one of her co-workers having such an expression on her face upon answering the phone she almost always just knew it was her goofy sister trying to pull a prank on her.

My kids LOVE to mock me too - especially about how I answer the telephone. THey -especially my son - love to imitate me as they say when I answer the phone, my voice -initially -is always low and relatively soft but it changes immediately in tone, volume, etc., as soon as I realize who the caller is. It's not unusual, so THEY say to then be greeted with a few choice cuss words too. And my son LOVES to answer the phone here and pretend he is me just to see how many people he can fool -and he has fooled a good many too I might add.

Yesterday, Carrie called me, giggling she was when I picked up on this end.

"Oh Mom! Wait'll I tell you what just happened. I called this number - well I thought I was calling your number ya know and this man answered the phone and he sounded just like Clayton trying to imitate you so I said "Hey, Butt Munch! What's with you?' and this guy was quiet for a second or two and then said 'What did you say?' and he hung up." She has no clue what number she actually dialed but I hope, for her sake, the other party didn't have caller id!

This afternoon and evening was another day of the normal dysfunctional stuff going on here.

Starting with when I went out at 3 p.m. to get Maya off the van and she almost went into a meltdown on me about getting out of the van! Why? Because she had opened her backpack, had her spare clothes on the floor along with her two little Bratz dolls she'd insisted on taking with her to school today as well as the papers her teacher had sent home. That apparently is what she does in the carseat there in the back of the van on the drive home - strew her stuff all over the floor of the van for poor Mr. Fred and I to try to gather up and stuff back into the backpack to bring into the house with her. Well, today, she was having a hissy fit because she couldn't find -or didn't see - the "Bratz baby bottle" and though Mr. Fred and I both looked all around under the front seat, under her seat, felt along the floor, etc, neither of us could find what it was she was upset about. First, she started to fold up on me in the seat -refusing to get out and then, once out of the van, you have to keep a tight grip on her or she'll take off running down through the yard, often trotting over to the neighbors, wanting to get on their trampoline and above all, not wanting to come into the house. And it makes no never mind what the weather is like when she decides she wants to do this either. It could be pouring down rain but if she thinks she wants to stay outside and run, well you better be prepared for one hell of a fight then to get her to go into the house.

Fortunately today, I did manage to keep a grip on her and did get her inside without too much hassle. As I opened her backpack and started to get her stuff out of there, what did I find but her other Bratz baby with a tiny baby bottle hanging on a chain around the damned dolls neck. It had been in the bottom of her backpack all along. I'm not complaining there -far from it -cause if it hadn't been in there, she would most likely have been having little whiny fits off and on all evening then, looking for this doll and crying for it.

Because today was the day that the speech therapist would be coming about 4 p.m. to work with Kurtis, I had asked Kate (the 1 6-year-old) if, since it was nice out today, maybe she could take Maya outside to the swing set or some such to let her run off some of her energy and thus make it easier, quieter too, for the therapist to work with Kurtis. That was the initial plan anyway. However, Kate was working on some kind of letter for an English project and decided she was going to ask me to try to help her by supplying some "good big words" (as she put it) that she could use in this letter she had to write. Ok, I'm up for that but she waits till almost the time the therapist is arriving to start working on this at the computer and every 2-3 minutes it seemed, while I was trying to talk to the therapist, tell her things about Kurtis and Maya that happened since last week, Kate was interrupting me with questions about "words" for this letter. Then Maya was trying to edge in on the therapist -since she worked with Maya for two years and Maya loves her to pieces so naturally, she is a tad jealous of Kurtis getting all the one-on-one attention from Mandy the therapist. And that went on that way - with Maya doing her little goofy things, Kurtis yelling at times too, Kate hollering over that din trying to ask me questions and poor Mandy had to almost holler too in order to talk to Kurtis and try to work with him!

Supper was leftovers - each adult (Bill, myself and in those instances, Kate counts as an adult too then) was on their own to heat up which ever leftovers were in the fridge - use 'em up, as many as possible so I could then clean the fridge tonight since tomorrow is garbage pick-up day.

I had to stop everything I was doing at one point shortly before the therapist was to leave because Kate had apparently touched something or other with WORD and couldn't get the words "West Branch Student" to enter in on the line directly below her name -nope, it kept double spacing on her so I had to try to figure that out. After things settled a bit, I ended up print out what she had typed in so far, and opening a new document and retyping the whole darned thing then for her in order to get those three words to show up as being a single spaced line below her name. Wonderful! Just what I needed to do then -but I had other things I needed to work on with the computer so I wanted to get her and her stuff off the desk and out of there and do it fast!

I've been having a lot of problems with one particular paid blogging company - who shall remain unnamed - but the last two pieces I wrote for them, I had a devil of a hard time to get the first one to submit and be accepted by them and the second piece - well I've been trying since Sunday to get it submitted with no luck. I had even contacted the company asking them to explain what I was omitting, what I needed to correct in order for the piece to be accepted but as of 5 p.m. today - a full 48 hours since I'd contacted them, I still had no response to my questions. Then about 5:30, I see they have posted an answer for me. They said something in my blog was converting something in their links when I publish my posts and that was interferring with the submission process. They went on to tell me that if I wanted I could go in and "edit the html to get it to match up" where this symbol was creating this havoc.

Excuse me? Did I read that correctly? They want or expect ME to go in and EDIT HTML code? I think not! That would be a pure recipe for disaster if ever there was one since I know LESS than diddly squat about HTML and Blogging stuff. I know how to click on the "new post button" - type my post, enter some labels maybe and I do know how (pretty much) to occasionally put in a technorati tag and then, hit PUBLISH! Beyond that, it is all a foreign language to me. Because I communicate from time to time with another blogger who also writes posts sometimes for this company, I e-mailed her on the off chance she might know a little bit about editing the HTML code. Unfortunately, she e-mailed me back saying she knew nothing about that either and that as far as she was concerned, HTML qualified as a foreign language in her book. I replied to that stating that I agreed with her and I think it is Greek because so many people are always saying "It's all Greek to me" aren't they? And as of this hour, the problem is still there, waiting, unresolved and I've written two more notes about this to the company as well. My opinion there is if they know there is an error in the code and they know WHICH link code it is in too and if they want me to change it, why didn't they then tell me which symbol was wrong, and what to put there in its place too as I don't remember there being a requirement when you sign up to do paid blogs that you have to be able to write and/or edit HTML!

Ok, got that off my chest for the night now!

By 8 p.m., Maya is still ripping and tearing things up - not as bad as she can do with the littering the entire downstairs floors with her toys, but enough to make a small mess any way. But also, she has not done something of great importance to her overall health today -she had not yet had her daily "constitutional" if you get my drift and you know we're in this lovely potty training phase too don't 'cha? So I started telling her she needed to go back and sit on the potty. I even started trying -again - (or is that as usual now?) that if she will go and do poopie in the potty, I will let her play with the make-up Mandy's best friend had bought her yesterday. Wow! What a reaction she had to that! The eyes got really big and she took off at record speed, galloping and trotting (she does sort of a side-step run) back to the bathroom only to return in a minute or two. I questioned here - "Did you go pottie?" She says YESTH! I ask if she pooped and she says "NOPE!" Why not? I get a string of gibberish for an answer but undaunted, I tell her again, she needs to go sit on the pottie. That process went on like that for an hour or better. Part of the time it was with her being quite the little exhibitionist too - running around with nothing on from the waist down! At various intervals she brought out two pair of the pull-up pamper things which I told her she COULD NOT wear -had to put on the unneywears and she whined a good bit about that.

While I am running this little bargaining-argument with her, Kate is working on retyping her paper because she said I had given her too many big, intelligent sounding words to use and her teacher wouldn't believe then that she had done the work herself. Well, she had done most of it - just asked me for some heavy synonyms she could use. And, in between my fussing with Maya, I was trying desperately to start working on knitting a pair of mittens for the little princess too -which if you know, understand anything at all about knitting and you knit as infrequently as I tend to do, you know you really do need UNDIVIDED attention there! It wasn't happening.

Finally, Maya came out carrying the jeans she'd worn to school today and began to put them on - but no unneywears or pullups underneath them. I told her she had to put the unneywears on and her response to me was "NOPE. Put on Jeans an' poop in them!" I don't think so little girl! The funny thing about this whole event though was towards the end, you could really see she probably needed to go use the potty because every time she moved, it looked like you could see her trying to kind of "pucker up" her butt cheeks while she ran about if you follow what I mean. She won out - well at least with getting the jeans on but then, fell asleep on the couch so when Mandy got home, she got to take her back and get her dressed and ready for bed -with pullups on! Poor kid -if she keeps up with this fear of sitting on the commode, she's gonna create a big blockage in her bowels one of these days!

So by shortly after 9 p.m., Kate had finally finished her paper. Then she asked me a question and considering some of the questions this kid can come up with, I do generally tend often to cringe. Logic is not a big item in this kid, trust me.

Tonight she asked me if we had a "ruler." I giver her to one eyebrow raised look and asked her if she knows what a "ruler" is and she says yes, you measure things with it. DUH! She knows her dad has one of those retractable measuring tapes and she knows I sew and you have to have a measuring tape to do that and what does a measuring tape do anyway? Gee yeah, it -like a ruler - measures things. Then she turns to the computer though and tells me oh never mind, I'll look it up on the computer. Say what? Yep, she repeats this. What, I asked her, exactly are you going to look up on the computer? Well, I'm going to look up ruler and it will show me then how much 21 inches is. Excuse me? By this time I am looking at her in total disbelief. You think it will huh and she says yeah, sure it will. Ok I asked her then suppose if you want to see how big 21 inches is on a ruler and you look it up on the computer, what are you going to do if my computer screen isn't that big? Ah ha - finally - a light bulb moment occurs and she realizes she can use the computer to show her what "21 inches looks like!"

Yep -and think of this too - in two more short years, this rocket scientist is going to be loose on society, looking for a big paying job too! Buyer beware!

And now - I'm gonna go knit and finish my blog readings tomorrow! I need the stress relief, really I do, ya know!