Snow!

Greta, my dear MIL, always giggles that we in Arizona find snow to be newsworthy. When one is in Minnesota, with a high of -14 and 10' of snow on the ground on any given day, I can understand why a few flurries are not exactly something that needs to be splashed across every newspaper in town.

But here in Arizona, at least on the heat-island that is Maricopa County, snow is a rarity and will certainly make the top news story at 10pm for at least a day or two.

It also validates all of us who are transplants in our fear that we have become completely thin-blooded and risk turning to stone if the temperature drops below 40*. It's not that we are merely wimpy, nor have we abandoned the hearty constitution of our ancestors or done them shame... it really WAS cold!!

Here is proof...

I'm in the wrong line of work...

So, it is not bad enough that teachers basically earn less now than they did 15 years ago (if you account for inflation and cost of living and all that jazz) but evidently someone thought it would be right-jolly fun to steal from the PTO coffers!!

You read that right - someone actually embezzled funds from our school PTO.

That person was our Treasurer!!!

Not only did she take off with her kids, she took of with somewhere between...



wait for it...



$100,000 and $190,000 dollars.

Why this has not make headline news all over Scottsdale is beyond me.

Do all 2-yr olds suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder, or am I just the lucky one?

When I was in college, I was a psychology major. I took many classes on personality theory as well as abnormal psychology. I had to repeat the process during my Master's degree, so one could argue that I am rather well versed in the theory of Psychology in all its forms.

In fact, during one grad class in abnormal psych, one of the students asked for a better, more "real life" explanation of what Borderline Personality Disorder would look like in a patient. The professor was a parent of something like 3 kids. Her explanation? Imagine someone stuck in the terrible two's for EVER. And, when you run into someone who truly has a borderline personality, and you have parented a toddler through the murky waters of the terrible twos, you see the correlation immediately.

Christopher, my beloved blue-eyed infant of yesterday, is that borderline disordered child today.

Case study: Christopher has discovered the endless buckets of Matthew's Thomas tracks. Christopher loves the tracks. (as an aside - he's not so into the trains at this point; just the tracks) He takes them out of the bucket, lovingly, and places them on the floor with care. He turns them over to inspect each one, gazing longingly at them laid out in front of him.

He then tries to put them together, and this is where all hell can break loose. He becomes so maniacly frustrated with the process that he is rendered speechless, and resorts to primal grunting and wailing for help. This is a sound, by the way, that no wall can contain; the entire neighborhood knows of his misfortune.

So what is a mother do to but to see if I can help. I try to show him how to fit the pieces of the track together. 'If you just turn this one a bit...' which is met with more screaming, so I back off... only to have him, 2 seconds later, hand the track out to me with an emphatic HELP.

Wait; didn't I just try to help and you screamed at me?

Yes, mom, I did, but that was 2 seconds ago and NOW I want your help. NOW I SAID WOMAN - you are NOT solving my problem fast enough.

Geesh...

A very disturbing discovery

I was picking up after my eldest. He had left a new pair of jean on the floor in the hallway. I picked them up to fold them and discovered...


They are as long as the ones I was wearing!

Other than the fact that I could fit 2 of him around my hips, my kid is wearing the same inseam as I am.

This bothers me tremendously.

A backwards approach

When I was a little kid, often times I had trouble falling asleep. No big shocker there - I still do! Poor Steve is married to the world's lightest sleeper, who suffers from random and long stretching bouts with insomnia. As a kid, my mom had a good remedy (no; not a hot totty before bed!) and told me to lay with my head at the foot of the bed. There is no medical data to support her theory but in my house, it worked! To this day, if she has trouble sleeping, she will try to lay with her head at the foot of the bed, and while I have not completely abandoned the practice, I am more apt to just give in and grab the Tylenol PM bottle.

At any rate, today I ran backwards. Not ME backwards, but my route. Normally I run a route that has me going up Shea Boulevard headed East. Now, for those of you not from here, that means an ever-so-slight UPHILL run. The ever-so-slight part only really feels slight when one is in a car. When one is moving of his or her own power, the climb feels like I am scaling Camelback. So, today I went the other way. Can I just say that my 3.5 mile run was a breeze? Would it be cheating to run West on Shea from now on? Promise you wont' tell the running gods??

~*~*~*~*~

And on a completely different train of thought - some may wonder how I managed to run and blog during a time I am supposed to be at work, molding little minds into useful people. Steve was to appear in court today for a pre-trial hearing regarding the accident from October, so I being the devoted, loving and supportive wife that I am took the day off to be with him in his hour of need.

I get to do it all over again in about 3o days, because despite the CITY determining the court date and telling US when to arrive, THEY were not ready to proceed.

Can't you just hear the gears of efficiency grinding to a halt? Tax dollars put to good use, I tell ya'!