7 Quick Takes about Jane Austen, Aiming for Sixth Place, and Buying Cereal in Bulk

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

I overheard a conversation between my kids in the backseat of the car.

"The forest near our house used to seem so big," the 10-year-old said, "but now that I'm older I realize it's really small!"

The 8-year-old said "That's because you've become—"

I thought he was going to say 'older,' 'wiser,' or 'more mature,' but then he said: "Fat."

—2—

I've been struggling with the daylight savings time change, and I guess with sleeping in general. I just can't seem to get caught up on sleep, and for one reason or another I'm up too late every night or up too early every morning. Sometimes both.

I'm in such a sleep deficit that my usual YouTube sleep meditations (I like Jason Stephenson in English and Zentopía in Spanish) haven't been working that well, so lately I’ve been listening to a British guy on barbiturates read Pride and Prejudice with rain sounds in the background. 

Every night I just skip back to the last part I remember hearing and continue with the story. It either works fantastically at putting me to sleep, or I spend time with a classic novel I know all about but have never actually read before. So it's a win-win. 

—3—

My daughter was wondering whether anyone has ever remembered their own birth and decided to google her question.

Google autocomplete gave her these suggested searches she might be interested in:

Everything we ever wanted to know about dying is right here, but unfortunately that's not the information we're looking for.

—4—

Our 8-year-old gymnast gets to compete in the Men's State Championship! Typically, States are held over the weekend and my son's level/age group competes on Sunday, which he forfeits for religious reasons. This year, he's scheduled to compete on Saturday, which we're all thrilled about, but I thought the schedule looked a little suspicious. I asked the coach of his new gym if she had anything to do with it and she said, "I made some requests."

She also explained to me that if his performance at States qualifies him for Regionals, his level will also be competing on Saturday. UNLESS he is in the top 5 gymnasts in his division in the state, in which case he would be scheduled on Sunday and therefore have to drop out.

On the way home from gymnastics practice I explained this to my son and he said, "So I should try to do good but not too good?" A certain scene from The Incredibles comes to mind here:

—5—

I passed some employees in the grocery store using shopping carts to move around Kellogg's promo displays that looked like giant boxes of cereal. 

Or maybe this is just a mom of teenagers making a midweek Costco run. Hard to say.

It was a hilarious sight, and it was even more hilarious because they didn't seem to think it was hilarious. It was just a normal Tuesday.

—6—

Basement finishing update: we have officially applied polyurethane to and sanded the stair treads and risers!

By "we," I mean Phillip. I helped with this for 5 minutes.

That night I went to a welcome home party for a friend's returned missionary daughter, where I was talking to someone else I know who is also finishing her basement. After chatting for a while about our progress, I said "we both keep saying 'we', but 'we' is our husbands, correct?"

"Correct," she said. And then we kept talking about what 'we' were planning to do next. Don't hate us, every project needs a project manager. It's called teamwork.

—7—

To make sure I wasn't a bot, a box popped up on the ChatGPT site that said "Are you human?" 

The irony.

"Yes, are you?" I muttered as I completed the stupid Captcha puzzle so a robot could decide whether I was not-robot enough to talk to it.

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7 Quick Takes about Answering Philosophical Questions, and Digitizing the Past One Page at a Time

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

My high schooler was supposed to pick up his sister from middle school, but he forgot. When I finally arrived home and realized she wasn't there and went to go pick her up myself, she wasn't too happy.

He apologized for not coming to get her (apparently he'd set an alarm on his watch but accidentally set it for the wrong time) and asked what she was doing that whole time she was waiting.

"Pondering the mysteries of the universe, probably," I said helpfully.

"I did!" She cried. "I sat there for so long I figured out the answer to the question 'to be or not to be.' After 35 minutes, I decided the answer was 'NOT  TO BE!'"

—2—

Over the summer I took a break from my language exchange app, where I talk with Spanish speakers learning English, and never started up again in the fall. 

This week I jumped back on it and had a short conversation. I feel a little out of practice but I didn’t say anything stupid (at least not egregiously stupid enough for Luis to correct me on), so that's something.

—3—

Someone brought the toy train set down from the attic to use for a school project (something about a Rube Goldberg machine) and now the younger boys have been playing with it.

"How sweet that they're not too old for trains yet," I thought, but as I went down to watch them play I noticed it wasn't like when they were toddlers. The goal here was to recreate as many accident scenes as they could think of.

Still a work in progress. More wreckage to come.

—4—

My 11-year-old brought home slime from school. Slime. 

As much as I wanted to rip that Ziploc baggie from his hands and throw it out the window like a live grenade, I tried to be a fun mom. A supportive mom. I said he could keep it as long as it stayed in the kitchen and dining room, where there's no carpet and very little upholstered furniture to destroy.

Of course, then he had to push it, and could he puhleeeeeaaaase take it up on the balcony in the living room to see if it could stretch all the way down to the first floor? Yes he could, I said, because I'm an idiot.

I should've known right about now that this wasn't going to end well.

By the next day, I was cleaning slime out of the carpet and thinking of that scene in The Little Mermaid where King Triton says "I consider myself a reasonable merman" and ends up destroying Ariel's secret grotto.

—4—

Phillip and I haven't gone out on a date in a while, so earlier this week we dropped off our son at gymnastics, then walked around the mall together and each bought a pair of workout pants. It was everything you'd expect from a date in a 21-year-old marriage.

We were in Burlington looking at the home decor (note to self: if you're looking for a plant stand, go to Burlington; I've never seen so many plant stands in one place in my life) and I saw an Easter door hanging that I kind of liked. This isn't the actual one I saw, but I found a similar picture online:

Since last year, I've been upgrading our Easter decor to reflect our focus on Jesus during the Easter season and thought this might be a nice addition to the front door. "Do you like this?" I asked Phillip.

His response was a resounding NO. "It's got Easter eggs on it, that's weird."

"Weird? Why? People mix secular and religious traditions for holidays all the time."

"But not in the same decoration! That's like a Nativity set with Santa's elves in it."

I guess he might have a point, but I was too distracted by the image of Buddy the Elf next to Mary and Joseph to say so.

—6—

When my oldest kids were little I spent hundreds of hours making them gorgeous baby scrapbooks. I pictured flipping through them as a family to relive old memories, and then they would go on to be treasured by each kid's future spouse and children.

Well.

Fast-forward a decade or more, and the glue has lost its tackiness. The fragile scrapbooks are sadly not headed toward becoming forever keepsakes, they are headed for the garbage. When I first realized this was happening, I was super-sad. If the physical pages weren't going to last, I at least needed to digitize these things but it felt too overwhelming to start. 

Encouraged by my ever-positive 13-year-old ("You can do it, Mom! Just do three pages a day and you'll get through them!") I began the slow, painstaking process of removing each page, taking its picture, and uploading it to the cloud so it can still live on in some format.

Maybe once I have the pages all digitally copied, I'll feel okay with setting the physical books out and letting the kids leaf through them until they really do fall apart. Because one thing I've realized in my journey to becoming a minimalist is that if I hide things away to preserve their specialness, not only will I never get to use them but they'll also never carry special memories for the kids so they won't want them after I'm gone. Special things were meant to be used, even if that means using them to death.

—7—

The world is so big, but in some ways it's also kind of small. Isn't it weird that the airport lady's voice is the same lady in so many places all over the world? 

She seems like a delightful person.

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7 Quick Takes about Getting Personal with AI, Heartfelt Poetry, and Mario Lopez and the Demise of a Generation

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

Lately, I've been using ChatGPT to help me write texts and emails where I need to word things delicately but I don't know exactly how to say it. So I'll explain the situation and AI usually gives me a pretty good first draft to work with.

Now I know it's not rude to walk away from a robot without ending the conversation politely but it still feels like it, so the last time it gave me advice I responded with "Great, thanks."

ChatGPT wrote back and said, "You're welcome! I hope the conversation goes as smoothly as possible. 💙" I thought the heart emoji was a nice touch.

—2—

My 3rd grader brought home an acrostic poem from school that he wrote on Valentine's Day. 

"Very nice," I said. "Who did you write it for?"

He shrugged. "Just... anybody."

I love the spelling, but not as much as I love the inclusion of the word "nonetheless."

So you know, just an all-purpose, non-specific poem meant for literally anyone who can read on Valentine's Day. Hallmark, if you're interested in using this, call us.

—3—

One night I put on a YouTube video while getting ready for bed, when an ad interrupted my video that almost made me bite my toothbrush in half. 

NOOOOOO!! Not Mario Lopez doing an AARP ad! 

I watched him play a teenager on TV. In fact, I was a teenager when I watched him play a teenager on TV... which means that AARP is coming for me soon, too.

—4—

The YouTube algorithm also showed me a video about what to do when you feel overwhelmed and your family isn't helping out enough at home. I wonder why it thought I needed to see that? (Joking, we're actually in a season of life where I'm really happy with how everyone is pitching in at home, fingers crossed.)

You don't need to watch the entirety of the video but I did want to highlight the part from 11:30 to 11:55.

Not only was that little snippet funny to rewatch a few times, it was probably also the only part of the video I 100% agreed with. If you feel like the maid, the key is talking to your family before you're pushed to the point of doing whatever that thing is at 11:49 (which I've 100% done before and trust me, it doesn't work well at all).

—5—

I read an interesting magazine article about digital distraction. Since everything needs a reboot right now, recently someone redid the 1970 Stanford marshmallow experiment, but this time using iPads instead of marshmallows (if the 4-year-olds could wait for 5 minutes, they got 10 minutes of screen time.)

I really wish my kids were younger so I could repeat the experiment at home and see what happens, because the study concluded that the biggest determinant of whether or not the kids could wait was their parents' use of their own phones. Kids who were able to wait had parents who used their phones as tools to complete specific objectives rather than as portable entertainment devices.

Which probably means my kids would totally fail, since 2 of my 7 Quick Takes this week involve watching YouTube.

Illustration from the article. (I've met teenagers who would absolutely glue their phones to their faces if they could.)

—6—

Remember last week, when I said we were really unhappy with our car dealership? They misdiagnosed an issue during some repairs this summer, and it wasn't until Phillip took two days off work last week to dismantle the engine himself to find what the problem was: the dealership had forgotten to reconnect a sensor during a previous repair.

In other words, they messed up big time, and Phillip had take two days off of work to monkey with the car to figure that out. In taking apart the engine, he'd essentially redone most of the work they'd charged us for earlier... so what had we paid them for, exactly?

This morning we went to the dealership, explained our position, and got a refund of $964 for the original labor! That was what we'd been hoping for, but I can't believe it actually worked.

—7—

In related news, our 18-year-old visited a dentist while she's away at college and was told she has a cracked filling that needs to be repaired. 

I contacted her home dentist because I want to make sure I'm correct before I fly off the handle, but I'm fairly certain it's a filling they just did 6 months ago. I'm waiting to hear back from them; more news at 11.

Do you think this could possibly have as good of a resolution as the situation with the car dealership?

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7 Quick Takes about Sledding Dangerously, Books That I Probably Won't Miss Not Reading, and the Plus Side of Slippery Driveways

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

One day I decided to take the kids sledding, and after much discussion we settled on a local hill nearby. Two of the kids wanted to go to a bigger, better hill that was farther away, but I explained that it had been melting and freezing a lot, and the big hill might be too icy.

“Besides, I want to check out the snow conditions at this hill," I said. "We're hoping to take the Young Women (church youth group) sledding here tomorrow and I want to make sure it's safe first."

“The Young Men never would think to do that beforehand,” my 16-year-old son mused. “I guess that’s why girls live longer than boys.”

Sister watching as son goes flying off his sled over a jump. Another reason why girls live longer.

—2—

This week a movie theater was playing Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1960s, and since my dad and stepmom are here visiting I thought they’d like watching their childhood shows on the big screen.

I've never seen so many characters shot by cannons and blown up by TNT in my entire life as I did in that 70 minutes. I guess I’m used to all the social-emotional learning they put in kids’ programming today, and trust me, there was none of that to be found here.

There was a preschooler there who belly-laughed through the entire thing, and it was too pure. I think everyone in the theater had a better time because of that kid.

—3—

With a little time to kill, I decided to pop into a nearby bookstore to browse. While I was looking around, I noticed that the "paranormal romance" section of the store was WAY too big for how many books should have been in that genre. What in the world, I wondered, could possibly be filling the shelves? 

I took a cursory survey of the covers: there were the usual vampires and werewolves, but on further examination I also found a merman, a Minotaur, and even a "humanoid spider." I'm sure all of them were wonderful works of literature that would've inspired, challenged, and changed me for the better, but I was just there to look and not to buy, so I guess I'll never know.

—4—

My dad was quizzing my kids on collective nouns for different types of animals. You know, like a pod of whales, a gaggle of geese, a parliament of owls, that kind of thing.

But I liked some that my kids made up better than the real ones. 

When my dad said "alligators" they guessed "chomp." And when he said "giraffes," they guessed "forest." I think those were pretty good.

—5—

Due to all the melting and re-freezing I mentioned in Take #1, our driveway is a thick sheet of ice. But with how weird the weather is, it will probably be 50 degrees next week, and I don't want to pay for ice melt when the sun will eventually do it for free.

In the meantime, it's not so bad. In fact, the other day I had some heavy packages to bring in so I just set them on the ground and kicked them to the front door. It was faster and easier than carrying them in would have been.

I should probably put up a danger sign to warn delivery drivers, though.

—6—

I completely forgot our annual Valentine's Day love bomb tradition last week, so I've been working on it all this week (because better late than never.) If you don't want to click the link, the quick summary is that every member of the family writes a love letter to every other member of the family. You can imagine that it takes a while.

But it's a lot less painful now that even the youngest kids are old enough to do theirs by themselves and keep track of who they still need to write to. When they were little, I literally had to walk around with a clipboard and spreadsheet to make sure they all got done.

—7—

Phillip took several days off work this week to work on our van and save us thousands of dollars. Actually, he saved us from buying an entirely new vehicle, because the dealer told us in June that it would be better financially speaking to trade in the van and buy a new one.

Smiling to humor me. He's amazing.

Now all we need to do is follow up with the dealer, because we have a major beef with them. The "problem" that we were told was going to be a major fix ended up being simply that THE DEALER FORGOT TO CONNECT A SENSOR LAST TIME THEY WORKED ON THE CAR. Once Phillip got the engine taken apart and connected it, the problem was solved.

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7 Quick Takes about Valentine Donuts, Reality Shows, and Pillows to Use When You're Feeling Melancholy

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

My 13-year-old got the idea to make donuts the other day, and decided to decorate them in Valentine's Day colors and give them out at school. 

I like how she clearly anticipated the "but I only had one" defense when writing this note.

She may have been partially inspired by a baking reality show we started watching as a family called Baking Impossible, where teams made up of an engineer and a baker collaborate to win challenges. In the episode we watched, they made fully functional dessert boats with a rudder that had to float through a channel in 45 seconds.

—2—

Speaking of reality shows, do you know what I would watch? A cleaning reality show. 

Hear me out: a professional organizer/home decorator/house cleaner/decluttering expert comes in and teams up with a homeowner, with something like 6 hours to whip the most trashed room in their house into showroom-ready shape. Maybe there could even be things hidden in the room that they have to find during the process to win prizes. 

Or maybe the show could be teams of cleaning experts that get eliminated one by one, and every week the challenges could be a different kind of room: a craft room, a kids' toy room, a messy garage, an attic.

All I can say is, I would totally watch either of those shows, and judging by the sheer number of sped-up "clean with me" videos on YouTube, I think a lot of other people would, too. Maybe I shouldn't even be giving this idea out for free. Oops, too late.

—3—

Bringing dinner to a sick neighbor this week was sort of a disaster. For those of you who don't know, I am not a confident baker so my stress level when making food for someone else goes through the roof. (Note to people who know me personally: if you need dinner, I'm 100% happy to make it anyway. But if what you really need is your bathroom cleaned and your dishes washed, then for the love of all that is holy, please ask me to do that. I would love to do that.)

But this time I was making dinner, and I was worried about all the things. I was worried they wouldn't like it. I was worried it would be undercooked. I was worried because dinner was running about 30 minutes behind so I was going to be late bringing it over. That was before the cheese started dripping and burning to the bottom of the oven, filling the kitchen with black smoke. I opened the window, set a big box fan on the counter to blow the smoke out, and when I turned around the fan fell off the counter and banged up the floor. And because I was running so late, I couldn't leave to pick up my 8-year-old from gymnastics and his newly-licensed brother had to do it (which is no small favor because it's an hour round-trip.)

Anyway, things turned out alright in the end. I brought half the dinner to my neighbor and my family ate the other half at home, and Phillip said it was really tasty. 

"Would you have said anything if it wasn't?" I laughed, because I had already told him about the circus show it had been to produce this dinner.

"I would've been silent on the matter," he answered.

—4—

It snowed recently so Phillip and I took the younger three kids to a playground. (If you haven't done that before after a big snowfall, I highly recommend it. It's so fun.)

Other kids had already beaten us to the playground and there wasn't a lot of snow left on the actual play structures, but the kids found plenty to do, just the same. The first thing they did was look at the gigantic wall of snow pushed up by the plows from the parking lot and yell "Let's play 'king of the mountain' like in 8-Bit Christmas!"

They'd never heard of that game before we watched that movie in December, which was set in the 80s and taught them an old-school classic that they're now bringing into real life. I love it.

It was fun and I'm happy to report that there were very few injuries.

—5—

My 5th grader got a new reading pillow. You know, the kind with arms and a high back so you can sit up and read in bed.

But I was a little confused about the product image. Why does the model look so depressed?

It's probably more realistic that she's using this pillow while zoning out in a pair of baggy sweatpants (do they have a hole in them or was that a speck of dirt on my camera?), but you don't usually see that depicted on the box.

Usually the people on the product image are having the time of their lives using it, regardless of what the product is. It could be a granola bar, it could be deodorant, it could be Turtle wax for your car. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that this product completes them and makes them the happiest they have ever been or ever will be in their entire lives. 

—6—

I started decluttering the house like crazy about 3 or 4 years ago, and at this point, the only place left is my bedroom closet. Besides clothes, it's where I keep all my sentimental stuff that I am too paralyzed to go through.

There's a 10" tall stack of photo albums from high school and college, a complete set of K-12 yearbooks with classmates' signatures, a huge box of journals starting at age 6, a decade of calendars with hand-drawn art from my kids (my annual Christmas gift when they were young), and worst of all, unfinished baby books for each of my children that I honestly don't really have the desire to complete.

Normally I'm a huge fan of the Minimal Mom and I embrace her ruthlessly no-nonsense decluttering style, but for this I needed Dana from A Slob Comes Clean in this video that was served to me on YouTube.

It used to be that every time I went in the closet rolling up my sleeves and thinking, "Okay, Jenny, this is the day you deal with all this stuff!" I would run out 20 minutes later looking like a character from a horror movie who barricades the door behind her and leans against it to hyperventilate now that they're safe from danger. I think Dana's advice may help me here.

—7—

Lastly, a short clip from SNL that lives rent-free in my head and I think about it every time I hear the word "yeet" or "skirt". 

I guess I've been thinking about it more often because my 8-year-old has started making a tire-screeching noise that sounds like "skkkrrrrrt!" while playing video games or roughhousing with his brother.

I made the giant mistake of showing it to my kids and word to the wise, don't do that. They'll memorize it instantly and be singing it all day long. You do not want that. 

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7 Quick Takes about Creative Budgeting, Dress Drama, and Hanging Up My Pancake Whisk for Good

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

Okay, I'm tired of winter now. A hundred years is enough, I'm ready for spring. Here is a shot of the 10-year-old going outside to play basketball in the driveway:

Not the correct way to play broomball.

And no, this isn't an action shot snapped at the precise moment the ball was going through the net. The ball was stuck in the frozen hoop until Phillip came over and knocked it out with a broom.

—2—

Since October, we've been tracking our money in a more detailed budget to be more on top of our finances. We record all our expenses in a spreadsheet, writing down the category of each purchase. 

Sometimes we aren't quite sure how to categorize them.

Recently, we bought a replacement stylus for a tablet that one of the kids had lost, and Phillip put it in the category for music and sports registrations called "Kids' Activities." BECAUSE OUR KIDS' FAVORITE ACTIVITY IS LOSING STUFF.

—3—

The 16-year-old got his driver's license! I'm so excited. He can get himself to and from school and work now, which is huge. I'm already breathing easier not having to plan around his work schedule, and sometimes he can even help chauffer around his siblings when I have conflicts.

It snowed the night before his test, but the instructor complimented him on how he handled the vehicle on the slick roads. (I like to think it's because of the valuable lessons he learned by sliding off the road with me a few weeks ago.)

—4—

Tonight there's a dance at the middle school that the 7th grader is really excited about. Two months in advance, she ordered a dress specifically for it and she's been saving it, not even wanting to wear it to church until after the dance.

Last week, she went to iron the dress, set the heat too high, and accidentally melted it. When we couldn't salvage it, she was disappointed. but undaunted, she ordered a second dress. 

When it arrived four days before the dance, it turned out to be way  shorter than we thought it was going to be. So with only a few days until the dance, we ordered a third dress that would get here the day before and crossed our fingers... SUCCESS!

But seriously, I never want to do that again. We cut it close and that was really stressful.

—5—

My 3rd grader's class has a "share day" once a week. If it's a physical object they can bring it in, but if it's a talent they can send a video of it to the teacher and she'll play it on the smartboard in the classroom.

We took a video of him doing a handstand for share day, but then when I listened to it I noticed something: you can clearly hear some unflattering background audio of someone using the restroom. So what to do? We muted it and put it to a soundtrack, and now it sounds like a hype video on TikTok.

—6—

I helped a friend who's in charge of a project at a local refugee family shelter. They're organizing a free clothing closet for the residents, and right now all of their inventory is thrown in huge storage bins with all the sizes and genders mixed up. The task is to sort the clothes and then figure out appropriate ways to hang or shelve it all.

As someone who used to basically do this in her attic when she was saving and handing down clothes for 6 children, you'd think I would be good at this.

But I'm not. In fact, I was having flashbacks to the sheer overwhelm I'd feel at the end of every season, trying to organize and sort my kids' outgrown clothes to store in the attic. So I can't say I swooped in and saved the day with my superior organization skills, but I tried to help as much as I could.

—7—

My kids had a snow day from school so I decided to be a super-fun mom and make them pancakes. What a mistake. You guys, I hate pancakes. Everyone says "just make pancakes!" like it's the world's easiest food to throw on the table but those people must be either (1) from another planet or (2) popping frozen pancakes in the toaster and just pretending.

Making pancakes is SO messy and time-consuming. It dirties multiple bowls, spatulas, and measuring cups (we don't use a boxed mix so that's part of the problem.) The batter gets burned onto the edges of the griddle and drips onto the counter where it hardens into cement and guess how many people want to help clean up. Then someone (me) needs to stand at the griddle for 10 years cooking enough pancakes to feed four kids. And to top it all off, the recipe we pulled from the Internet had too much applesauce to fully cook through and we ended up throwing 75% of them in the trash.

After ranting in frustration to no one in particular, I googled something like "I hate pancakes" and found this cathartic post on Reddit:

I, too, do not like the person I become when making pancakes.

The best part of the post, though, was when I scrolled down to read the comments and this was the first one:

That certainly made me laugh and feel a little better. Then I told the kids that I'm officially retiring from making pancakes, and that made me feel a lot better. 

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7 Quick Takes about Emotions Personified, Near Misses, and Unlikely Character Arcs for Me and Snoop Dogg

It's 7 Quick Takes! How was your week?

—1—

My 7th grader was assigned to make a hackeysack in art class, but she liked the yarn sticking out of the top and didn't cut it off. Then she thought it would be cute to add a little face:

Makes a good paperweight.

Her friends think it looks like Anxiety from Inside Out 2, but since it's blue instead of orange they named it Depression.

—2—

My kids are not pulling their weight during kitchen cleaning after dinner each night. Like all cleaning systems we've used, ours has worked for a while until it didn't anymore, so now I'm on the hunt for something new (I've been told the "something new" can't be the kids so it has to be the method.)

I did some online investigation, and here's what I found.

If you like The Monkees, this one wins the award for "most enjoyable musically":

This one was also cute:

This one was alright, and I cackled out loud at the indoctrination at 1:02 with the children hypnotically chanting BOOKS! PUT THE BOOKS AWAY!

I wonder if this one would be fun, or if it would just add to the chaos and I'd end up yelling over it at the kids to clean. 

A few others with visual timers that I considered were this pop-style one and this one with a Jackson 5 feel.

There were several hip-hop clean up songs that I liked, including this one (super-weird animation, though) and this one. Some of them even included a throwback to the O.G. Barney clean up song, like this one and this one ("errbody, errwhere." I'm dying.)

—3—

While sifting through the hip-hop clean up songs out there, I found one that was annoying and did not make my list, but it also taught me something that I think everyone needs to know: 

Snoop Dogg has an animated kids' channel about a group of puppies led by a mentor named Bow Wizzle who raps about values and kindergarten readiness skills.

In the '90s, I never imagined that one day I would be listening to a Snoop Dogg song that goes "Clean, clean, clean / That's how to be a good human being." But here we are. Getting older is wild.

—4—

It's been pretty cold lately so we took the kids out to a local trail and then walked across a frozen lake.

We made it almost all the way across without someone crying because they took a snowball to the face. So close. 

—5—

The 8-year-old is voraciously reading all the books in the Great Illustrated Classics series at his school library. When I picked him up from school, he had Phantom of the Opera in his hand.

"A phantom is a ghost, right?" he asked when I picked him up from school.

"Right," I said. 

"Why are there two words that mean the same thing?"

"Well, I learned on my Language Transfer podcast that when English has two words for something, the more formal one comes from Latin and the less formal one comes from German."

"Like what?"

"Like 'encounter' and 'find.' Or 'phantom' and 'ghost.'"

"What about 'smelly' and 'stinky'?"

Honestly, I wasn't sure how to determine which one was more formal.

—6—

There was a big windstorm here that left debris all over our driveway and took down two big branches. I watched one of them fall down so close to the car parked there that the little branches were touching it.

Maybe it's time to get that tree removed.

Luckily, the 13-year-old needs money so she was more than happy to clean up the small debris for an allowance chore, but I dragged the big stuff off to the side and Phillip will have to take care of it with the chainsaw this weekend. 

The day before the windstorm there was a small earthquake (but big enough to freak out our parakeet, Pringles) and the day afterward it snowed, so I feel like if a meteor landed in our backyard tomorrow I'd still be a little surprised but not too much. 

—7—

I'm a... plant person now, I guess? Which is weird because I don't do live plants. With the exception of a few plants as a birthday gift for Phillip's home office space during COVID, I've never bought a houseplant. They're just too hard to maintain.

But people have recently given us some plants, and having kept them alive for a few months I decided to incorporate them into our home decor and hope for the best. I spent my Christmas gift money on a new pot for the spider plant in the dining room and a plant stand for the snake plant in the bedroom, and they look amazing!

I never thought I'd be voluntarily spending money on plant accessories. That actually surprises me more than Snoop Dogg having an educational kids' channel.

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