I have a confession: we have cleaners. And I love them.

A few years ago when I was still working full-time, it seemed like everyone we knew had cleaners except us, and our house was damn dirty. I was maybe getting around to cleaning the bathrooms every six weeks or so, and by then the shower was not in any shape to actually get someone who was using it cleaner than they had been before, and it required several hours of battle with many cleaning products and several refreshments and pep talks from Sir Monkeypants to get me through it. Likewise, Sir Monkeypants was barely finding time to push the vacuum around every couple of months, when the crunching under our feet became a tetanus hazard.

So we caved and got cleaners, and there was joy in the land. They dusted our ceiling fans. They cleaned the blinds. They wiped all the tile floors by hand. They even folded the toilet paper in our clean bathrooms into a little triangle shape. It was like living in the penthouse at Trump Tower. I’m surprised there were no mints on the pillow.

Now it’s been several years and we are talking about maybe giving up the cleaners…not now, but someday…and the thought fills me with a bit of panic. They were just here this morning and on top of their usual service, they vacuumed out the vents in every room, cleaned all the baseboards, and liberated our sliding door, inside and out, from thousands of tiny little handprints. If it weren’t for the dents in the floor and the pieces of Mr. Potato Head in every room, you’d swear it was a model house.

But still. They’re pretty expensive, and since we have a new house that needs stuff like fencing and air conditioning and landscaping, we sure could use the money for something else. Also our one set of hold-out friends explained recently that they don’t have cleaners, despite having one extra baby than us, because they want their kids to see them taking responsibility for the house, and to pitch in when they can. Damn them and their good example setting.

So someday soon when I go back to work I think we will probably strike out on our own, and I’m already making up a daunting schedule that I must stick to if I want to maintain anywhere close to the level of cleanliness our cleaners provide. It’s not really the work that I mind, though. It’s the bitterness that comes from not having your work properly appreciated. It’s not that I don’t think Sir Monkeypants wouldn’t give me a proper, “Go, Sweetie!” during the work process, and a hearty, “Thank you!” afterwards. It’s that, when you aren’t actually doing the cleaning yourself, you can be careless with the keeping-things-clean, something that really pisses off the main-cleaning-rep. Just yesterday, for example, I washed the screen for our fan in the bathtub, leaving it with sooty residue all over the bottom, but rather than clean it out, I just let the cleaners deal with it this morning. Someday, though, someone else in the family will be washing their camp gear in the tub, leaving grass and leaves all over it, and they’ll just ignore it because it’s my job, and…bittermaker!

I think this is the argument I’ll use on when the decision time comes. It’s for the mental health of our family just as much as the physical!

This week’s Entertainment Weekly has a big story on the 50 “best sidekicks” of all time.

I think I may have to be put into a theraputic coma to survive the weekend…then on Monday I’ll just camp out at the mailbox until it arrives.

We’ve been invited to a cottage for the weekend, and we have to provide Sunday lunch for everyone. We recognise that not everyone in the world is vegetarian, so we’ve decided on cold cut sandwiches. They’ll be hummus for the veggies that are there (ah, the glory of a nice hummus and havarti sandwich, when the bread is really fresh…I love that).

So poll time…if you were going to be at said cottage, what would you want on your sandwich?

White bread or brown?

What kind of meat…and is prepackaged Schneiders okay, or are we talking strictly Loblaws meat counter if we want to be invited back?

What kind of vegetables and condiments?

What would you have on the side…chips, salad, veggies and dip, mixed fruit?

I think I can handle the cheese selection…but we are taking all forms of advice here.

Questions I’ve been asked today:

Does Spiderman have a belly button?

Do comets bite?

Why don’t fish talk?

Where is this spider’s face?

Why is Dora wearing shorts but Boots is naked?

About a year ago we found out my 13-year-old niece, Red, has epilepsy. It’s shocking and sad but the good news is that it is easily controlled with regular medication and she should be fine. We found out because she passed out at school — not for the first time — and test revealed that she’d actually had a seizure. Her type of epilepsy can cause dramatic seizures like this, but more often, causes “absence seizures” in which she kind of spaces out for a few minutes at a time, her eyes losing focus and her brain being unable to pick up new information. Needless to say, we suspect that such seizures have interfered with her school career in the past, and hope that she can catch up now.

A couple of months ago, her mother, my big sister, SocialButterfly, passed out at work. She went for the same round of tests as Red, and it turns out…has epilepsy. They’re still figuring out exactly how her brain is affected but it’s likely she has the same kind of seizures as Red, and now she’s on similar medication which should help control the seizures in the future.

But the real kicker is that SocialButterfly’s doctors think that she’s always had it, and it has gone undiagnosed for 38 years. That makes me so sad. She’s such a sweet person but never had much use for school. She had a lot of trouble in grade school, survived high school, and then managed to complete a college course that got her a job. But looking back it’s clear that her undiagnosed condition made a big difference to her academic life and I really get upset thinking about what might have been. If only she could have been on medication from an early age, she could have cured cancer. Or been a member of parliament. Or owned her own business.

That isn’t to say her life isn’t a success — she does have a good job that she likes (well, other than her annoying boss), a home and a car, food on the table, and two really awesome kids. It’s just sad that she had to live with this condition for so many years, affecting her daily life in many little ways, and she never complained or questioned. Sometimes modern medicine really lets you down.

Clearly we are raising some sort of freak mutant child in Gal Smiley. The high-fat diet is not taking like I thought it would.

All the baby books you can buy talk about how you should never, ever, ever give your kid junk food, unless you want to be labelled a Really Bad Parent and set your kid up for dibetes, heart disease, and going dateless to the prom. So I thought that once I let Gal Smiley have at it with the chips and the butter and cookies, she’d be lost to actual quality food forever.

But noooo…all she wants to eat is vegetables, rice, and beans. I made fresh white bread in our breadmaker and spread it liberally with butter — practically a dessert! — but no, she wouldn’t touch it. Noodles and carrots with butter on them may as well be poisoned. Doughnuts are good for a bite or two, and then she’s done. She’s rejected Kraft Dinner, hot dogs, and even the ice cream will no longer pass her lips. Soon she’s going to have to give up the title of “kid” — if the other toddlers find out about this, she’ll be out of the club for sure!

So now on one side of the table I have Gal Smiley, sitting with a bagel smeared with butter, a Timbit, and a chocolate milk, eating nothing, and on the other side, we have Captain Jelly Belly, who is fully committed to his chips-and-french-fries-only diet, with some carrots, a plain bagel, and an apple, also eating nothing.

Gaaragh!

Sir Monkeypants has a new poker game going, and tonight is the first night, and it’s at our house. And you can tell these guys are total newbies because a) so far only Sir Monkeypants and I have been hovering over the snack table, featuring totally awesome Pirates Of The Carribean themed peanut M&Ms, and don’t they know that it’s all about the snacks?, and b) they didn’t start playing until three minutes ago, despite the 8pm start time, by which time even my gaggling girlfriends and I have usually managed to get in at least three hands, fitting them in around the snacks and chatting.

I’m going over there now to clean them all out. I can smell the new shoes already.

On my way home from the mall (during which I was shopping specifically for clothes, and nothing fit, and FameThrowa, you must take me shopping and SOON, and someday, I will learn not to write run-on sentences), I saw a guy with this license plate:

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And I thought, “Man, that is one geeky license plate.” Then I thought, “Man, I am one geeky chick for knowing that that is a geeky license plate.”

In other plate news, I saw lots of AY plates while in Southern Ontario this weekend…the excitement for the first B plate sighting builds!

Captain Jelly Belly has a video of Thomas The Tank Engine in which one of the engines, Emily, gets covered with a white tarp, and then the other engines think she is a ghost — Ghost Engine. He likes this video but it also scares him a little and whenever we watch it we have to talk about ghosts for several days afterwards.

Just now he had a big poo in the potty and then I wiped him and threw in the tissue, covering the poo in a white sheet…so of course, he had to shout out, “AAAAH! Ghost Poo!” Hee hee.

The other day I was saying to Sir Monkeypants how there are very few people in the world that I can call up and say, “It’s me,” and they will know who is speaking. Here’s the full list of my peeps: Sir Monkeypants, FameThrowa, and my good friend Mrs Carl Sagan. I can’t even put my own mother on this list because I have three sisters, and we all sound enough alike that without any context or special phrasing, she can’t tell which one of us is on the phone. A few times I’ve greeted her with, “Hey, it’s me!” and then I get the guarded, “Oh? how are you?” which means that she has no idea who it is, and then I come back with, “I’m really tired, I got like, no sleep last night, and that screaming you hear in the background has been going on for the past hour and a half,” and then she says, “Oh! Lynn! Right.”

So last night I was going to my ultimate game at a new field, and I left my directions at home but I thought I remembered them correctly. As it turns out…not so much. I got really lost and then I got out my cell phone to call home and ask Sir Monkeypants how the hell to get there. It was right at the kids’ bedtime though, so he didn’t pick up, and I wound up leaving a message.

(The rest of the story isn’t important to this post but just so I don’t have anyone tipping right off the edge of their seat or passing out from tension, I’ll let you know that while I was on the phone trying to get directions from FameThrowa, a nice and rather cute policeman pulled up and asked if I needed any help, and when I told him I was lost, he graciously granted me a police escort to the field. So I made it, and also in case you’re dying to know, we lost, but I had a good game.)

This morning I noticed there was an unheard message on the machine and so I pressed play, and the person on the message opened with, “Hey, it’s me,” and I was like, “Who is that? Is that SocialButterfly calling? LittleSis?” And then doh!, I realized it was actually myself, the Lost And Wandering message from last night.

So I guess if I can’t even recognize my own voice on our answering machine, I shouldn’t hold it against my mom!