I got a citrus juicer for Christmas. It's a Breville and it's awesome!
We had been thinking about getting one to reduce the amount of plastic bottles we downcycle. But when I read this article on Cracked.com about secrets in the food and beverage industry, and read what they do to "100% Natural Orange Juice", I decided it was a no-brainer. (And affirming our decision, this article came out today about fungicide in OJ. Yuck.)
Gross stuff in orange juice aside, there simply is no comparison between fresh-squeezed OJ and that junk you get in plastic at the grocery. Plus, there is something so relaxing and wholesome about cutting and squeezing oranges every morning. I highly recommend it.
Pinterest is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time, and it's one of those things that makes me ask myself, "Why didn't I think of that?"
From Pinterest:
"Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes."
It's a virtual bulletin board filled with everything you see online that you love.
Bloghopping and come across an interesting blog on how to get your kid to bed before 11 p.m.? Pin it on your Parenting board. Find a photo of really cool kitchen re-do? Pin it on your Kitchens board. Come across a fabulous recipe for a Mojito? Pin it on your I Really Need A Drink board.
The really cool thing about Pinterest is that you can browse other people's boards and get inspiration from them. As with blogging, where I always think other people's blogs are much more interesting and fabulous than mine, I also think other people's Pinterest boards are much more inspiring than mine. It's ok, I just re-pin their pins and, POOF!, now I'm inspiring, too.
It can be a little overwhelming at first but don't be intimidated. If you hang in there and figure it out, you'll love it. And it's a great excuse to put off tackling the mountain of laundry...like I needed one more excuse.
Yesterday, my husband and I were out and had left one of the older boys in charge of the younger two. I received this text from Thing 3:
Can you please send me a text to show Thing 4 that tells her to stop singing?
Refusing to feed into the sibling bickering, I used one of my favorite parenting tools, ignore. About a minute later, I received this text from Thing 4:
No one can stop my gift of sound!
And believe me, she means it.
(P.S. I feel compelled to point out that my 9 year old does not have a cell phone. She was texting via TextFree from my iPad. It's a pretty cool app.)
Here's what we do for fun in the middle of a record setting heatwave on a brutally hot summer day in Oklahoma.
That's right. We stand out in the heat at 3 in the afternoon, when the temperature is so high that roads are buckling, and we watch the demolition of the local McDonald's. That's just how exciting my life is. Don't be a hater.
Sweating like my husband does when I declare, "I have an idea", we stood outside for an hour and a half, along with a bunch of other crazy, bored Okies, and cheered every time a big piece of the building went down.
As the bulldozer got closer to the Playland, we moved around the building and positioned ourselves in just the right spot to witness the destruction of that great monument to flu germs, Group A Strep and God knows how many different strains of fecal bacteria. Look at all that glass. We knew it was going to be so cool to watch (and hear) that thing go down.
We waited with bated (yes, bated...not baited) breath. You could almost cut the anticipation with a knife...or a blow torch. And then...the darn bulldozer stopped! Are you kidding me? No, they weren't. They told us to come back the next day at noon to see it torn down.
"Well forget it," I said to myself. "We are not about to come back out here tomorrow and stand around in this heat just to see that."
Only we did. And this time we brought friends. I'm pathetic. And I had another 5 pounds I needed to sweat off.
What?!? It's not like there are a lot of other options for summer fun here, people!
So we got there at noon...and we waited. We waited while they re-fueled the bulldozer or backhoe or whatever that thing is. We waited while they cleaned the filters. We waited a long time. Let's just say that they did not start at anything resembling noon.
At one point I had a conversation with one of the kids (and I don't know which one, as they are together so much that they are pretty much interchangeable at this point) that went something like this.
Random Kid: Can we puh-lease go?
Me: No. We can't. We have sat out here this long in this ridiculous heat. We're not leaving until the building comes down.
Random Kid:Pleeeease? It's sooo hot!
Me: No. I didn't make any of you come. I asked if you wanted to and you said yes.
Random Kid: But if we had known it would be this hot out here and take this long, we wouldn't have come.
Me: I'm sorry. We are here and we're staying until they knock it down.
I have no idea why "even LDub" being ready to leave was supposed to be convincing. I guess LDub has a pretty low threshold for things that excite him. Maybe he's easy to entertain. My kind of kid!
Me: Ok, let's wait five more minutes. If they haven't started by then, we'll leave.
And then they started!
I wish I had a recording of the squeals from the kids when that first pane of glass broke.
And it was gone. Given the amount of time I spent trying to ply my kids out of the tunnels, combined with the knowledge that so many Wet Ones gave their lives over the years thanks to the Playplace, I should have felt a twinge of sadness or something. But really, all I felt was dehydrated.
As I was writing this blog, Thing 2 (16 years old now) walked up to me, looked at one of the pictures and said, "Yeah. That whole trip yesterday? Totally not worth it." Which pretty much sums up my feelings about the whole ordeal.
UPDATE: Tim and Patti Rich, the owners of this McDonald's, are truly wonderful people. Read these articles about what they are doing for their employees during the time the store is being rebuilt.
We went on vacation last week. It was our annual trip to Schiltterbahn, the coolest water park ever. But that's another post.
Anyway, I'm a bit of germaphobe. Ok, I'm a lot of a germaphobe, and my condition gets worse the older I get. My germaphobia rises to a whole new level of crazy when we step foot in a hotel because hotels, even the nice ones, just gross me out.
I take a container of Lysol wipes with me when we travel. Before anyone can touch anything (and after checking the beds for bed bugs), I wipe down everything. I sanitize the light switches, the tv remote, the toilet seat, the telephone, all the door handles, the thermostat, the desk, the faucets and the bathroom counters. If I could, I'd steam clean the carpet before my family came in the room, but that's just not practical. I do however, make everyone wear shoes and I don't like for anything to touch the carpet, the bedspreads (which they never clean) or the blankets (which they don't change after every guest). And I cover the sofa with towels or an extra sheet.
If anyone puts so much as a bare toe on the floor, my head spins and I shout, "PUT YOUR SHOES ON! DO YOU KNOW HOW GROSS HOTEL CARPET IS?" The kids usually comply pretty quickly because they know that Bare Feet + Hotel Carpet = Crazy Mom.
My older boys are growing up and getting bold, though. It's obvious that they no longer fear my germaphobic wrath. On this trip, they thought it would be funny to make fun of me. They blatantly, and with total disregard for my mental health, flaunted my hotel rules. They walked on the carpet with no shoes on and then refused to wash their feet before they got in bed for the night. They tossed pillows and clothes on the floor and then used them. They sat on the carpet. They laid on the bedspreads and used the hotel blankets. They even put their toothbrushes directly on the bathroom counter instead of on the towel I had thoughtfully placed as a barrier between their toothbrushes and any lingering germs the Lysol wipe had missed.
And it didn't stop there. They were relentless. Everywhere we went, they ridiculed me. At the putt-putt course, "Hey Mom, did you sanitize these clubs?" At the restaurant, "Hey Mom, did you wipe down the ketchup bottle?" (No, but I did use hand sanitizer after I poured my ketchup.) Pool side, "Hey Mom, did you use wipes on that chair?" Whenever I pulled out my room key, "Hey Mom, has that key been sanitized?" And then, to add insult to injury, they suggested that my Lysol wipe habit might make me a great candidate for "My Strange Addiction".
Call me a freak, but as it turns out, this article proves that my obsession is completely justified. Hotels are gross!
My kids still think I'm weird, but at least I'm not germy.
