The title is a nod to Blazing Saddles, simply cause I can’t say “I’m tired” without thinking of Lily Von Schtup (or however it’s spelled).

I’m exhausted. It’s been a hellish week at work, a hectic week at home and I’m studying for my test that is a week from tomorrow. “Let’s face it, I’m pooped.” Already this week I’ve had Prankster getting his braces (a story for another day…maybe one day when I’m awake), Princess’s choir concert (where I sat with Bucket’s parents, and as an added bonus, his ex-wife…lots of love in that room), a bake sale, and tomorrow I have a parent meeting for Color Guard to look forward to.

These are the days that Bucket being on nights is a significant and trying burden. Anyway, I’ll be back to blogging soon. Maybe I’ll even be coherent next time.

Yesterday was a movie day. Theoretically, none of our kids are home this weekend. So Bucket and I, feeling supremely lazy yesterday, spent all day yesterday watching movies and sleeping. We went to the theater to see Zack and Miri make a Porno (Classic Kevin Smith. If you like his stuff, you’ll love this movie. Not for the kids, if the title didn’t tip you off). Then we rented 30 days of darkness and Chapter 27.

30 Days of Darkness is a vampire movie. I have to be honest with you, I thought it was ridiculous. Now, I will grant you that I am currently stuck in the world of Twilight, in which vampires are basically just like people that drink blood. In this movie vampires are monsters. They are somewhat animal-like but also completely cruel. This interpretation just doesn’t make sense to me. First of all, if people are food to you, and you are basically just an animal, why would you have a need to torture your food? I’ve never felt the need to beat up my hamburger before I ate it, or scream at it or anything. Just saying.

Now, on the last movie we saw was about the assassination of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman. I grew up with all things Beatles and I am ashamed to admit that I can’t tell you how much of this movie is real and how much is fiction. I am fairly confident that most of this movie is fictionalized. Either way, it is one of the slowest-moving films I have ever sat all the way through. By the end I was thinking, “Kill him already!”

There are my movie reviews. This weekend I’m going to go see Twilight, of course. I’ll keep you posted.

Pitcher, Princess and Prankster all have C’s in various classes. This is not allowed at our house. Let’s not debate whether or not C’s being allowed is silly. The point is, they aren’t. So Bucket and I have instituted a new rule. We call it “Study Hour,” cause we’re not very creative. Every night, for the hour before bedtime, all three of them are to sit at the kitchen table and study the subject in which they have a C.

Tonight, the Study Hour was implemented. I have been groused at, talked about behind my back and blatantly ignored. But they are still sitting there. You would think I had pulled out every hair on their heads with tweezers.

I have watched Princess pretend to study while playing on her cell phone. I have seen Pitcher flip through the pages of his Spanish book with a blank stare. I have seen Prankster color new designs on his binder. I have seen very little actual studying.

One thing I have learned in this Crazykidfamily is that I must stay the course. Some days it’s more difficult than others, but it almost always pays off when I stick with the original plan.

I have had a FANTASTIC weekend. Nothing overly special happened. I wasn’t presented with jewelry. I didn’t get a new car. I didn’t even get new furniture or have an especially great hair day. It was just one of those weekends where we had no kids and no particular agenda. These don’t come along very often in the crazykidfamily.

Friday, I went to dinner with a good friend and then I went to see Pitcher’s indoor baseball game. This is the first indoor baseball game I have seen, and I have to be honest here, I am not a big fan. It really seems to me that it is just like practice for his travel team in between seasons. Anyway, I went, I supported, I cheered and I left after game one of a double-header. (Just so we’re all clear, Pitcher’s mom was there so I wasn’t leaving him on his own.) Then I came home and I READ A BOOK. I didn’t clean. I didn’t do laundry. I actually sat down and read a book. It has been SOOOO long since I have read a book at home. Then when I got tired, I just went to bed.

Saturday I visited with my mom for a bit and then went home for some quality time with Bucket. We only see each other on weekends due to his work schedule and that makes those days particularly valuable to me. We decided to take care of a bunch of the “have-to” stuff during the day Saturday. Mostly, this meant cleaning the house. It is imperative that we spend a few hours every other week or so to set right things we never have time to mess with otherwise. After that was done, we went to dinner with Bucket’s brother, sister-in-law and their kids and then went back to their house to win a euchre tournament. We stayed there until the Dodgers game was over (because Bucket and his brother actually cared about that and Bucket refused to leave in the middle) at 1 a.m.

This morning, I woke up to Bucket bringing me my favorite Starbucks coffee. We worked on a few more things around the house and then went to BW-3 since we no longer have the channel that carried today’s Colts game. The game was great, very exciting, we ate, we laughed, we left happy. We went and got the big kids (Monkeyboy doesn’t come home until tomorrow, unfortunately) and all of them are in a fairly good mood. All in all it’s just been extremely pleasant and rather relaxing.

But now it’s Sunday night. Tomorrow, we go back to work and back to being two ships passing in the night. Sigh. I’ll be counting down the days until next weekend…

Occasionally I have a moment when I realize how far I have gone down the slippery slope of old age to the valley of pathetic. When I put on the next size smaller of jeans the other day, for example, it was a bittersweet moment. Right now I am SQUEEZING into what I consider to be my ’skinny jeans,’ sure, but just two years ago those very jeans were my ‘fat jeans.’ That epiphany hit me in one of those ‘Wow, I really have become quite sad’ moments.

Another one of those moments came tonight. I have been wanting to join a gym and start working out for an hour a day. Since I have yet to actually get around to obtaining that membership, I decided today to make use of the elliptical machine that we actually own. It isn’t the best, but it’s fully functional. I set a goal of 15 minutes. After all, I haven’t really worked out in a long time (unless you count the little walks on my lunch breaks). I turned on the TV, got on, and off I went. It got hard, and I slowed down a little. It got really hard, and I slowed down some more. Finally, I thought I might actually go into cardiac arrest. So I stopped. I looked at the clock. SIX MINUTES???!!!!

First, let me say thank you to everyone that came to my birthday party. I had a great time and I hope you did too.

Now…the story for today: All of our children were away last night. Bucket and I watched a movie we had rented (Vantage Point) and then since my allergies have made it impossible to breathe through my nose for the previous twelve hours, retired early. The massive amounts of over-the-counter allergy meds I had taken (since our insurance refuses to cover my prescription, but that is a rant for another day) caused me to fall asleep quickly. At about 3:00 this morning I woke up to our dogs barking. Now, our dogs are both over ten years old and while they like to bark at passersby during the day, they truly value their sleep at night. Something was up.

Countrary to the roles we normally take in these situations, I smacked Bucket on the leg. He remained motionless. I waited a few beats, trying to decide if I should just get up (be assured that I am much more vigilant without the medication and when our children are home). Nope, decided to smack him again. This time he said, “What?” So I said, “The dogs are barking.” By the time I’d finished my sentence he had ascertained all on his own that something wasn’t right and was halfway out of bed.

Now, we have this situation at this point: my dogs are barking severely aggressive barks and intermittently growling, and my husband is downstairs with nothing but his half-asleep wits to guide and protect him. So I do what any loving wife would do. I move into the middle of the bed and go back to sleep. A few minutes later, I wake up enough to realize the dogs are now  in the backyard, still barking like they want to chew someone’s face off. “Wow, something must be in our backyard,” I think. “I hope it’s an animal and not a person yielding a machete.” Then I promptly go back to sleep. A few minutes later, the barking has stopped and Bucket is yelling for me. Of course, I ignore the first call because I want to make sure this is important. Finally, I drag myself downstairs. Bucket is standing at the back door. I scurry over and there, on the railing of our deck, is a decent-sized possum. Or opossum, whichever it is.  We had left the lids off our trash cans and we assume that’s what he was after.

Now, I have told you  how opposed I am to the hunting and killing. But I am not ashamed to tell you that my first reaction was that we need to find a way to kill the trash demon. I have a healthy fear of animals with claws, and I worry that this creature will hurt either my dogs or my kids. Especially since I am sure that if my dear, sweet Prankster or Pitcher came upon a sleeping possum in our shed, or under our deck during the day, their first thought would be, “Let’s see what happens if we poke it with a stick.”

But for last night, I decided just to go back to bed. So the trash demon lives another day.

After yesterday’s sunshine and smiles, I decided today would be a good time to return to my true colors. I have a few annoyances I would like to share. Some are minor, some not so much.

1. Prankster’s temper. I don’t know when exactly it happened or why or how, but somewhere in the last few months Prankster has started to have one of the worst tempers I have ever seen in such a pampered child. It is on my last nerve. Last night he spent an hour and a half confined to his room in punishment. During that time he called his dad, his mom and his sister to complain about how mean I am.

2. Bucket’s complete inability to answer another call without hanging up on me. I got Bucket a new cell phone for his birthday. He cannot go from one line to another without hanging up on the first line. Seriously?? Could it be that difficult?

3. My sweet, sweet dog’s recent inability to hold her bladder through the night. I don’t know if she’s just getting older or if she has decided she hates me, but my spotbot is getting a workout lately.

4. People who have never spoken to me in the three years I have been employed here calling me to have drawn out conversations about how sad they are that I’m leaving. This is freaky and weird and it needs to stop.

5. Debating over how to get married with Bucket. The thing is that neither of us has any idea what we want to do, beyond winning the lottery and flying the whole family to Hawaii to get married on the beach.

Friday, I got a really, really nice job offer. This has made me extraordinarily happy. Today, Bucket found out the details of his new union contract, and that makes me pretty happy too. Also, while I originally lost eleven pounds, I thought I had gained it all back and in reality I have only gained 4 pounds back. So still down 7–woo hoo! I had a fabulous weekend, even though we spent a ton of money. In fact, I am in such a good mood today, I can almost overlook that everyone was an hour late today because I got stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire (this is due an extremely dented rim, which I’m sure will cost several hundred bucks to replace).

There are so many stories I could tell you about this weekend that would make you laugh because sometimes my life is so ridiculous it’s like a sitcom. I could tell you about Monkeyboy getting a high fever at 1:00 a.m. on Mother’s Day…which is really poetic irony. I could tell you about all 4 kids being sick last night. I could tell you about Bucket’s normally very hostile ex-wife giving me a book (a murder mystery). But all those stories would be laced with my cynism and sarcasm (you know you love it) and frankly, today is just too great of a day

Okay, it may not be that exciting for you, but it is THRILLING for me. I feel fabulous about all the work that got done in my house over the weekend. I love a clean house. It makes me sleep better, it makes me feel better, it makes the whole day a little brighter.  Hey, just because I get this excited over a clean house doesn’t mean my life lacks anything, alright? I have some finishing touches to put on it this week, and then this weekend I hope to get to the outside of the house, which is a whole new problem to deal with.

My weekends tend to be pretty full, so accomplishing anything over a weekend is pretty amazing. This weekend we only have Monkeyboy with us. I have to work Saturday and then go to a birthday party. Sunday I am going out to lunch with my mom and my grandmother and Monkeyboy and assorted other relatives. Bucket will be attending baseball games that day, but I have sworn off all Little League activities in honor of the holiday.

Anyway, Bucket is officially  on nights But, the house is clean, the sun is shining and I am all about fresh starts!

I went to the doctor on Friday for some ear pain. Turns out there’s nothing wrong with my ear and it’s probably just sinus issues. It was a total waste of a $20 copay. Anyway, to add insult to injury, they weighed me. I realize that is par for the course at the doc’s office. But I am BY FAR at my heaviest weight EVER (pregnancy & the six months following excluded).

This is depressing. Very, very depressing. Because I just hadn’t had enough punishment for the weekend (or because nothing in my wardrobe actually fits), I went clothes shopping. Oh, the betrayal!

I realize that I have been blessed with a decent weight for most of my life. It’s just that I’m having a hard time adjusting to the fact that when I eat, it matters what the food is. I know I’ve been spoiled by my previously high metabolism, believe me. that isn’t going to stop me from whining, okay?

Anyway, today I had a kids meal for lunch. This is my method of dieting…no change in food, just smaller portion sizes. My method of exercise is to clean up after four kids and two dogs constantly. I’ll let you know how it goes.