Today’s question is:  Why does excessive giggling make me mad?

Background:  I love to hear my kids laugh, seriously, I do.  However, sometimes when we are traveling long distances in the car it makes me mad.  It makes no sense that I get so irritated with the laughing, but I do.

Today for instance, the kids were all in the second row of the car together (I hardly ever let them travel in the same row, normally one has to sit in the back row).  They were laughing and giggling and having a gay old time.  I was not irritated like I get sometimes because I am trying.

I had to run something up to someone’s door real fast and I stopped the car, with the kids giggling away, and jumped out and ran up to the door to drop off my item.  When I got back?  My boy was crying, hysterical.

I know what happened, it’s always the same when the giggling turns into crying, someone when too far.  Someone didn’t listen through the giggling and just kept it up until it turned into tears.

It happens often.

It’s exactly why the giggling irritates me.

Sometimes, if I need to concentrate on getting us somewhere and there is excessive giggling I start yelling at them to stop.  Lately whenever I do that my middle girl will say:

“Mom, we’re just kids and were just laughing, why are you yelling at us?”

Shuts me up every time.

I need to remember to breath through their giggling episodes and just let it go, they are kids and they are just having fun……even if it ends up in tears sometimes.

Today’s question is:  Why can’t people make change?

Background:  I spent a night at The Abbey Resort in Wisconsin the other day.  While I was there I needed some water so I went the small cafe to get myself a bottle.  The young woman rang up my purchase and told me the water would cost me $2.64, I handed her a $20.  The next thing I know she steps over to a drawer, pulls out a calculator, punches in a bunch of numbers, walks back over to the register and hands me $17.36.  I thanked her and left.

I can’t get the transaction out of my head.  Did she really need the calculator to figure out my change?  Do people not count up any more?

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve run across someone that didn’t seem to be able to make change, but being the most recent it’s definitely the one that stuck in my head.

As a kid I worked in many a store, mainly my dad’s convenience store and you better believe I knew (still know) how to make change.  It’s really not that hard, seriously!

Today’s question is: Why does my phone always butt dial the same person?

Background:  About 2 years ago I finally broke down and got a blackberry as my mobile phone, so I could be connected.  I bought the blackberry curve because I liked the key pad and it was pink.

For the first time in my life my phone started butt dialing.  As a new blackberry user I didn’t fully grasp the keyboard lock mode, which would prevent the phone from making calls on it’s own.  In the course of the year and a half I used that phone it called the same person no less than, I don’t know, something like 50 times.  I had a real hard time remembering that I had to turn the keypad off.

The strange thing about the calls is the phone picked the one person who probably hated me the most to call.  My daughter is friends with this woman’s daughter, so I had her as a contact.  She’s not at the end or the beginning of the alphabet, so I always thought it was kind of strange that it picked her to call.  Really strange.

After a year and a half with the curve, I upgraded to the storm 2, which among other things, did not have the ability to butt dial.  I have to tell you I felt relieved that my phone wasn’t going to be making any more calls on it’s own to someone that can’t stand me.

I forgot all about the butt dialing once I began using my new phone.  And then something happened, my phone disappeared one day.  I searched and searched for it but it was gone.  I was all ready for fork over a small fortune to replace it and my verizon dealer wouldn’t let me.  He told me to go and find my old curve, charge it up and he’d hook it up until he could get me a better deal a few weeks down the road.  So I did as he told me.

Guess what?

The butt dialing started up again, to the same person.

I was so annoyed (and a little embarrassed) that I decided to erase this person as a contact.  Isn’t that  how you’d solve the problem? (well aside from remembering to turn off the keyboard).

The strange thing is, the phone continued to dial her phone number.  Seriously, now that she isn’t a contact, my phone pulls up her phone number and calls it every single time it butt dials.

Can you believe that?

I’ve decided that it’s karma.  Bad karma.  My phone knows what she’s done and is getting back at her.  Ha, as if, but it certainly is puzzling.

Off to try and delete her phone number from my existence, since the phone called her last night at 11:24pm and probably woke her up, yikes.

Today’s question is:  Who would think they’d have to have the blow job talk with their 11 year old girl?

Background:  I’m serious here, I had to talk blow jobs, among other things with my 11 year old daughter, recently.

Here’s the story, our local ice rink has something called “friday night skate”.  Basically the middle school kids all go to the rink on Friday night and skate without their parents.  Many, very, very many of them are simply dropped off and picked up from the parking lot, their parents never step foot inside.  I am not one of  those parents.

I only let my girl go once a month, and by the end of the year she didn’t want to go much at all.  But the last time she went, I was on drop off duty.  Basically I walk her and her friend(s) in, look around, talk and watch what’s going on for a while before I take off. Then whomever is picking up always shows up early to survey the situation.

The last time my girl was there, my girlfriend was on pick up duty and she showed up early to survey the  scene, like always.  It just so happened that she was standing near a bunch 5th grade girls and she overheard them discussing blow jobs.  Now this is exactly why it makes sense to get out of your car and walk in and check things out.  Had my friend never gone in, I’d be clueless like half the other moms.

Nice huh?  Nothing like a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds talking about something not many grown ups I know talk about.

Well that sparked an entire information gathering and spilling extravaganza on my part.  When I had my girl alone I asked her if she knew what a blow job was.  She said she did.  I asked her who told her, she said she didn’t know, which is mom code for I am so not telling you.  Then I said that well, you know blow jobs are super intimate and all fine and dandy if you are an adult and in a committed relationship and truly in love, but that at her age, giving a guy a blow job would mean that guy telling his friends and the next thing she knows everyone would want a blow job from her and she’d be known as the blow job girl.  Not to mention, did she really want to stick a guys penis in her mouth?  I mean really honey, do you?

Of course she didn’t, I think the grossness of the whole thing, just may keep that at bay.  That and the fact that she doesn’t like boys….yet.

It’s times like these when I sort of envy that some people live in the middle of nowhere.  A lot less blow job talk, I’m sure.

Today’s question is:  Why do we itch?

Background:  The other day, my oldest girl had an itch on her back when I was giving her a back rub.  She guided me to the itch, which I relieved, and then asked, “where do itches come from?”.  ”Good question” I told her,  ”I have no idea”.

So I looked it up, like I look up everything I don’t know.  I love the web.

Over at Discovery Health there is one interesting perspective.  Who knew?

MSNBC has another description of the itch here.

So there you have it.  And now you kinda know why you itch.

Today’s question is:  Why don’t more people eat beets?

Background:  I used to hate beets, hate them.  I simply could not understand why anyone would want to eat something that came out of a can in perfect circles and had such a strange texture.  I had no idea what a real beet looked like.

Then I grew up and had some kids and then I discovered a real beet.  Beets are awesome.  They are so very different than the stuff I remember being served as a kid (or not served as the case may be).

Beets are in season right now, mine are almost ready, I took this today:

One of my favorite beet recipes is Beet Risotto.  If you have never tried it you simply must, you will see beets in a whole new light.

Beet Risotto (adapted from Risotto by Maxine Clark)

6 Cups Vegetable Broth
1 lb raw beets peeled and cut into small cubes
1 stick butter
1 onion finely chopped
2 1/3 cup risotto
2 cups or more fontina cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Pour 6 cups of vegetable broth into pan on the stove top and simmer with beets about 20-30 minutes until beets are tender.  Remove beets from broth and set aside.  Keep the broth warm.

In a pot melt half the butter, add the onion and cook until tender and translucent.  Add the cooked beets and then the rice and stir until well coated with butter and heated through.  Now begin adding the broth a ladle at a time, stirring until each ladle has almost been absorbed by the rice.  Do not let the rice dry out, continue adding broth and stirring until the rice is tender and creamy but the grain is still firm (center of rice).  Taste and season with salt and pepper, add the remaining butter and cheese.  Cover and let it rest a few minutes to melt the cheese and let the risotto relax a little.

You aren’t going to believe how good the beets are in this dish, amazing.

Today’s question is:  Why is it that when I am most tired, I can’t sleep?

Background:  It’s 2:40am as I’m writing.  When I went to bed last night I was exhausted, throughly and completely. Yet at 1am I woke, feeling antsy, unable to go back to sleep.  I tried, believe me, I tried.  For almost an hour I laid in my bed hoping I’d stop feeling the way I was feeling and get back to sleep.  I tossed, I turned, I laid with my head at the foot of the bed trying to make sleep come, but it didn’t.  Finally I gave up, grabbed my computer and decided to read, write, listen to the rain and pray I’ll get tired enough to sleep.

My day started yesterday with work.  My neighbor delivered a yard of mulch for me in his truck the night before and needed the truck back by about 9am.  At 7:15am I started loading wheel barrels full of mulch off his truck with my pitchfork.  By 9am I had moved about 11 or 12 loads into my yard and cleaned up his truck.  Mission accomplished.

Because of my time crunch I had only dumped the loads, not spread them.  So I spent another couple of hours weeding, edging and spreading the load.  Then I figured since I was already dirty and scummy I might as well weed the front walkway and install the jointing sand I had sitting in the garage.  That took at least 2 or 3 hours to complete.  With a couple of breaks here and there and some front porch cleaning, 9 hours had passed before I even knew it.

I was gross and tired.  I finally came into the house and showered, helped the kids make dinner, watched some tv and hopped in bed.  I figured I’d have the best sleep of my life, boy was I wrong.

Why does sleep evade when I need it most?

Today’s question is:  How do my kids learn to do the things I did as a kid, even though I didn’t teach them?

Background:  the other day my oldest and youngest were out on our front porch doing this:

They are in yoga legs, trying to walk on their knees.

The funny thing is I used to do this all the time as a kid.  I loved putting my legs in yoga legs and trying to get up the stairs, or down for that matter.  So I about died when I saw them getting their legs together on the front porch that day:

How is it that they learn this stuff?  Now I wonder if my mom did this as a kid too.