rachel's continued ramblings

so today i went outside to re-park the car. layla wanted use of the driveway, so i moved the car to the strip in front of the yard. as i get out of the car, i hear shane’s voice, “hi mom!” i look up and see this: well, actually, this is on the return trip. when i saw him the first time, the trailer was full of mulch. doesn’t get much more ‘shane’ than that.

i’ve been really bad about blogging lately. i really don’t feel like i have anything interesting to say. we haven’t been anywhere lately. no one has been sick or hurt themselves lately. no one has visited us. i’m still working on my mom’s shawl, but it isn’t done yet. really. it’s pathetic. i think we need to take this as a hint and plan to do something exciting sometime soon. we’re kind of winding down and getting ‘mentally prepared’ for the school year. shane’s curriculum for the year is here and all loaded onto the computer, just waiting for him to start figuring it out (me too). i’ve got stuff floating around in my head about what sort of stuff i want to do with layla this year. it’s still preschool, so i have a very laid back attitude about it. fortunately, she thinks that ‘schoolwork’ and anything that seems to have an academic twist to it is SUPER cool, so there will be no struggle with her about that sort of thing, like there always has been with shane. i think the ...

well, i made it another 6 months with no cavities! i had a dentist appointment today. my second in six months, but prior to that, i don’t think i’d been in 4+ years. oops. i was much less nervous for this appointment than i was for the last one. last time i figured my luck had run out and because i’d been bad about seeing the dentist, this time i’d really ‘pay’ for it. but no. other than a little excessive scraping of tartar (4 years’ worth), everything was fine. around the time i turned 20, i pretty much assumed, every time i went to the dentist, that this was finally my time for a cavity. i mean, how long really, can one person go without ANY cavities? well, now i’m kind of over that and figure that maybe my teeth are just impenetrable or something. at any rate, every time the dentist comes in at the end of my cleaning, pokes around for a minute and tells me my teeth look great, i breathe a sigh of relief and feel tremendous gratitude for my good teeth. the no cavities thing is only ...

i LOVE the various words and pronunciations kids come up with when they’re learning how to talk. i also LOVE how those words find their way into the family’s vernacular, and years later, everyone is still saying them.  for the rest of my life, i won’t be able to make skabetti or use the washing shamine without thinking of shane. and when i read about emmy abizaleth in a clifford book, i’ll think of layla. well now we have nonnies, AKA bananas! micah loves them, so they come up in conversation regularly. he has fun little sentences too: nonnie spill (if he drops it); nonnie done (when he finishes); nonnie peel (also when he’s done because it means he wants to give me the peel). so cute. i admit this a little sheepishly, but the reason i think this one will find a permanent place in family isms, is because we play a lot of mario kart lately. yes, my name is rachel, i am anti-sit-on-your-butt-and-stare-at-a-screen entertainment, and i LOVE mario kart. there, i admitted it. anywa...

this has been floating around a lot of facebook lately. thought it was worth posting. i honestly can’t believe this is an issue… but i guess the fact that it is is just further proof of how backwards our society is. we worship sex, but hate children… ironic, huh? anyway. this is at least amusing, but so true! http://www.cafemom.com/journals/read/1501574/Breastfeeding_is_Offensive

i have a lot swirling though my mind right now. what else is new, right? i’m a thinker. that’s what i do. often, i’m an over thinker, which leads to it’s own troubles. but all too often, i spend too much time thinking, and not enough time doing. such is the life of a thinker, i guess. the main theme of my thoughts right now is stuff . i have way too much of it. everyone i know has way too much of it. we complain about our stuff. we don’t know what to do with our stuff. we have garage sales, where we try to make money getting other people to buy our stuff. we pay for storage units to keep the stuff that won’t fit in our houses. we wish for bigger houses, so there would be room for all our stuff. every week, we put an enormous can out on the street, full of the packaging our stuff came in, and pay someone to haul it away in a truck to a landfill full of everyone else’s stuff. one of my biggest complaints about myself and about my life is that i’m disorganized, my house is always a mess, ...