I love the passing of time

Shelby has a cut on his leg. He’s had it for a week or so. Doesn’t really need a bandaid anymore, but he likes to have one there, anyway. He also squashed his finger in the door about a month ago and, even though the nail is still black (hasn’t fallen off yet), it probably doesn’t need a bandaid anymore, either. He still wants one, though.

A couple days ago, I told him we were down to our last regular bandaid & that, until we could buy more, he’d have to use a Care Bears bandaid if he still wanted one.

He didn’t really say anything then.

But, later, in an almost crying voice, he asked me, “If I have to use a Care Bears bandaid, can I wear long pants to cover it up?”.

A year or two ago, he would have loved a Care Bears bandaid.

Look what society’s teaching my boy. And all of the boys.

Bleah

The kids are starting to decide what they want to be for Halloween. This is a good thing that they are deciding now, because this is such a busy month, I need all of the lead time I can get to get everything together for them.

Annie wants to be ‘My Hero Zero’ (”not the girl, mom, the boy who is the superhero”).

Allison, who is really too old for trick or treating, but gets a free pass to do it anyway due to the younger siblings (and, who didn’t really get to trick-or-treat as a kid, because her mom didn’t take her (not sure if it was due to bad neighborhoods or laziness or mom at work…) -and- we never had her on Halloween), wants to be ‘Goo’ from “Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends”.

We borrowed Schoolhouse Rock (Multiplication) from the library yesterday, to use as a reference, but, after finding the red superhero cape in the basement on Tuesday, the rest of this one should be pretty easy to find (I think) - red shiny shorts, blue tights, blue long sleeved shirt, yellow felt for the zero, white or red boots (which will, hopefully, serve duty as winter boots, too).

Allison DVR’ed the episode of Fosters that has Goo in it, last week. So, we’ll be able to manage that one with some shopping (and hair styling), too. We’ve already won this shirt from e-bay for the foundation. Now, we need some overalls (shorts? skirt?) and yellow boots (that can also be winter boots - or, a different color boot that I can cover temporarily with yellow felt, maybe).

Shelby has no clue what he wants to be. Hope it ends up being manageable, anyway.

Yesterday afternoon, as we were packing up our boxes to send to the children of Iraq (via Edmay Mayers & her absolutely awesome ‘distribution network’ , the kids were drawing pictures & writing notes for the soldiers. Annie wanted to make a book for them. I wish that I would have scanned them before sending them off. She started out with a picture of a soldier walking home, followed by a picture of him laying in bed & his hair growing. The next picture, was of his kid & the story that she told with it was that he & his kid went to the pool, then to the park & had a great time.

It was then that I explained to her that the soldiers had to leave their families behind in America, when they went to fight in a war or serve in another country. I could tell that she had never actually thought about that before & realized how sad it was for the kids to be missing their parents & for the parents to be missing their kids.

Both of the little ones really want to send a box out to the soldiers and to the children on a regular basis (Allison observed all this & we talked about it some, but she didn’t really get involved this time - just kind of hanging back thinking about it, I think). They’ve already started picking out what they’re going to send next.

I hope we can help to make their days brighter. I hope that this helps my kids to think more about all of the individual people involved in war and peace and in the world.

My latest obsession, whenever I have spare time on the computer, is entering sweepstakes. Many major sweepstakes have an ‘on-line’ entry available.

There’s a great website that organizes all of the available on-line sweeps at http://www.sweepstakestoday.com. You have to register to get the sweepstakes info, but it only takes a minute to do that.

After that, you can just start entering them all! If it’s a sweepstakes that you can enter every day, you can add it to your ‘lucky list’, so that you remember to go back regularly. Every sweepstakes has a member comments section, where we all share info about the entry (UPC codes needed, problems entering, etc.).

There’s also a forum where we go to talk about sweeps and celebrate our wins. So far, I’ve only won an egg of ‘kryptonite’ silly putty. But, it’s so easy & I’m still hoping for a big win (or, at least, a nice weekend away somewhere).

If you download & install the Google Toolbar (go to http://toolbar.google.com),you can fill in your name/address/phone/etc. info faster by clicking on the ‘auto-fill’ button.