One weird thing about Captain Jelly Belly being in JK this year is that we have no idea what the hell he is doing for those 2 1/2 hours every weekday. Last year, in preschool, we had duty days, so we were intimately familiar with the day-to-day school process. That allowed us to ask detailed questions about his preschool visit, like, “What did you talk about at circle time?” and “Did you play trains today?” and “Did you do painting…oh, nevermind…here are some new pants.” Plus, I had to pick him up from preschool, and the teachers there always updated the white board outside the classroom with a “what we did today” list, so I could ask him about special topics they covered or projects they did, and that was plenty to get him talking.

Now, he gets dropped off at the school gate in the morning by Sir Monkeypants, and he comes home on the school bus, and so, we rarely get a chance to talk to his teacher or see and talk to other parents. His time there is like a black box — he goes in, he comes out, and in the middle, who can say?

One thing we have learned is that “Who got a time-out today?” is a good leader. But other than that, it’s hard to get him to tell us what is going on. When he gets off the bus and we ask him how school was, he says it was, “Good.” If you ask him what he did, he’ll say, “I forget.” Later, after lunch, if we are very lucky, he’ll break out spontaneously with a story about his day while doing something else with us, like playing a game or being pushed on the swingset, but some days, we get nothing at all.

I think, as a parent, the thing I worry most about the Captain is whether or not he will make friends at school. I have no such fears about the Gal — she is so friendly and outgoing, she loves everybody, and she makes friends super easy. But the Captain is shy and likes to play alone, and he doesn’t really have any buddies. I am really hoping that this year, in JK, he makes at least one good friend, someone who is nice, and kind, and likes Thomas the Tank Engine, and who doesn’t throw things when invited over.

He’s only been going for two weeks and since we have no idea what he does at school, we have no idea if he has met anyone who might be friend material. Whenever we do get dribblets of information about something he did, we always ask, “Was there anyone else playing with you? Who else was there?” But he usually says no one else was there, or just the teacher. Then, a couple of days ago, he came home with a crown he had made at school, but it was ripped. And he told us that the boy next to him in line to go outside had ripped it. He didn’t seem very upset about it, but when I fixed it with some tape he was so happy, I was worried that he had been hurt by this incident. And what was this other boy’s problem, anyway?

Today, he had two stories to share. First, he said that when playing outside, “Amanda” must not have been in a good mood. I asked him why, and he said that when he was walking near the trees, she was too, and she said, “DON’T FOLLOW ME!” and so he turned around and went the other way. And I felt so incredibly sad for him, that some other kid said this to him and he just took it and turned away because he is sweet and sensitive and when people reject him he just doesn’t know what to do. And second, he informed me that he isn’t allowed to be “Megan’s” friend. She’s an older kid, in SK, but she rides the bus with them. And there’s a boy on our street, “Harold,” who the Captain knew before JK started and who also rides the bus and who we were hoping would be a friend to the Captain. And apparently, Harold is now best friends with Megan, and Harold told the Captain that he can’t be friends with him anymore because he is friends with Megan only. And again, the Captain appeared on the surface to take this with relative calmness, but I know he is hurt.

And that SUCKS, and I must say I just want to find these kids who have rejected my adorable, loving, funny kid and tell them to SUCK IT, and maybe kick just a tiny bit of dirt in their faces.

But I guess, that’s school. And that’s kids. And it’s not going to help the Captain at all to have his Mommy come around and demand that people be friends with him. We’re looking at at least 15 more years of this kind of shit, 15 more years of him going to the Black Box, vanishing inside where strange and terrible social things will happen, then coming home, and us knowing nothing about it and not being able to help him at all. And these are the events that will shape his life.

I feel sad about it. I can only help by giving him all the love in my heart, and all the hugs my arms can handle.

Man, it seems like every possible combination of words in the English language is taken as a LiveJournal ID. It’s like gmail — there’s just nothing left! Well, actually, I could have PoopLady. But if that, then I may as well keep TurtleHead.

And of course, every ID I can think of is not only taken, it is taken by someone who has updated their journal twice. Or haven’t written in it since 2003. Gagh!!

I think LJ should find blogs that haven’t been updated in say, two years, and email the people asking if they care to keep it. And if they receive no response within a month, they should archive the old posts and then release the ID. Release it to someone who will do some creative good!

Anyone out there with good ID ideas?

Edited to Add:
Sir Monkeypants says I won’t get anyone to come forth with ideas unless I give more direction. I’m looking for a new ID that says, “I’m a mom, and I like movies and TV, and I’m going to talk about those things, and also throw in some tidbits about my house and my extended family and various things I heard on the news, and updates on my poker nights.”

I was thinking something that involved the word “backyard.” Hm.

Alternately, my gmail address is snowbelly, but of course, that is already gone. I could have snow_belly. We’ll think about that.

I’ll keep thinking…

Back in May and June, before the Wee One was born, I decided that there was not enough action on my LiveJournal friends page. So I added a few new friends, but more importantly, I resolved to blog every single day. Surely my insightful and witty posts would inspire my friends to comment, and post themselves, so when I checked LJ compulsively every hour, there would be new stuff to read. All good!

Now I find there is a contest for the month of November, inspired by NaNoWritMo. It’s National Blog Posting Month — NaBloPoMo. All you have to do is register, then blog every single day for the month of November — weekends too! — and then you qualify for fabulous giveaways.

I figure I’ll do it. Hm…I wonder if you have to be American to win the prizes. No matter, I’ll still do it for fun.

In other blogging news, I’ve been thinking of renaming my blog. Apparently TurtleHead, an old family term for someone who is groggy from sleeping in too late, has been co-opted by the Internet to mean something involving poop. Sigh. Is nothing sacred anymore?

If I do NaBloPoMo, I really don’t want to be known over there as the Poop Lady. Would you all follow me if I changed names?

So two very nice men arrived this morning as scheduled to stack the washer and dryer.

And it was no trouble at all!

All was finished within a half hour. And since had done such a great job of preparing the room — removing everything else from the room, laying out all the required parts, even giving the guys a hand at taking off the pedestals — there will be no extra charges. Whee!

By lunchtime, Sir Monkeypants had installed our new bench and hat rack. Now our laundry/mud room is a model of organization. There are bins for hats and hooks for jackets. There are shelves for backpacks and nooks for shoes and boots. There are shelves for cleaning supplies and even a little space at the end of the bench to keep the baby car seat. I swear to God, the room looks like it’s straight out of an article in Canadian Living about Making The Most Of A Small Space. Or maybe straight out of the IKEA catalogue. Whee!

I took a bunch of photos but it’s such a small room that I can’t get enough distance from any given wall to actually take a coherent picture of any one thing. But I’ll see if I can paste it all together to make something worth viewing.

In the meantime…I believe it is time for our inaugural load of stacked washing.

One thing I haven’t written about explicitly in this blog, because I don’t want everyone to hate me, is that Sir Monkeypants has been at home full-time since the Wee One was born. Since I’m a stay-at-home mom, he has something like 35 weeks of parental leave covered by EI. We can’t afford that kind of leave, but his workplace offers a fairly generous top-up for 10 weeks, so he took all that time, plus used all the vacation he hasn’t taken in the past two years (I knew staying chained to the house would pay off someday!). So the end result is that he’s been home all this time, and still has another whole month off, and in total will have been able to spend more than 3 1/2 months helping the Captain and Gal Smiley make the transition to the new baby and new schools. Don’t hate me!

We were really lucky that he was home for the first six weeks after the Wee One was born, because due to my C-section, I couldn’t really do anything around the house, and he had to do it all — the cooking, the cleaning, the taking of kids to the park. But once I was able to help out around the house a little more, he was able to implement his real plan for the summer — working on our house.

Our house is nice and new so it didn’t require a lot of upkeep kind of work, so that leaves us free to do other planning and organizing type work. We’ve organized the basement and done some painting and completed some little repairs. We’ve hung pictures and cleaned out closets and decided that no matter how hard we try, we are just never going to be able to get both cars into the garage again.

The big project, though, is our laundry room/mud room. It’s the main entry point to the house for the kids — coming in through the garage. It’s a very small room that contains our massive washer and dryer set (able to hold 16 pairs of jeans!), some overhead cabinets, some wall hooks, and a small closet. We’ve tried our best to organize it, but it’s always just jam-packed with knapsacks and diaper bags, hats and scarves, coats and boots, and baskets of laundry. As the kids grow up, we want them to have a place to put their coat and bag, so it all stays organized, but the mud room just does not have that kind of flexibility as it is right now.

So, Sir Monkeypants got the brilliant idea to stack our washer and dryer. The room is really tall (9-foot ceiling) and there is so much vertical space we are not using — the stacking will enable us to free up almost half the floor space in the room. Then, we’ll use the free space to put in a bench, with a hat and gloves bin for each kid underneath on a shelf, and space underneath that for shoes or boots. Above the bench, we’ll hang a hat rack with dozens of hooks and bins for us to keep our keys, wallets, and our own hats and gloves. A shelf above that will hold the laundry soap. Meanwhile, we took all the off-season coats out of the little closet and moved them to other closets in the house, and filled the whole closet space with shelving — half for backpacks, half for extra shoes.

Everything was going great and we were so excited, until it came to the stacking part. Our washer and dryer can definitely be stacked, but usually people choose to do it when the appliances are installed. Ours are almost three years old, so we had to book a technician to come in and do it for us. After being turned away by most of the appliance places in town, we finally just bit the bullet and booked it with Whirlpool, the makers of our machines.

At first, when we called for a quote, we were told it would cost $77. Then we called back to ask more questions, and found out that it would actually cost $250 — $77 is for a regular service call, but $250 is the special price for the stacking. Then we called back to actually book it, and found out that $250 is the minimum amount. Any extra work of any nature will lead to additional charges. We have a gas dryer, so with the stacking, the venting will need to be replaced — extra change. We want to flip the door on the dryer — extra charge (although, Sir Monkeypants decided to take this on himself, and won the battle). We also have pedestals under our washer and dryer, custom-fit pieces to elevate them, and these will have to be removed, so — extra charge.

The very nice young man on the phone who booked our visit warned us that all these things will be charged over top of the $250. But! He cannot tell us how much each extra item will cost. He cannot give us a bottom line price. We just have to pay whatever the guys who come to do the work say it is, when they are done.

By booking the visit, we have committed to paying whatever the final price is. And also! If for any reason the stacking cannot be completed — i.e. missing a part, not enough room, whatever — you still have to pay the $250.

Trust me, we really, really tried to get someone else to come do this for us. But no one was remotely interested in touching our system.

And by the time we called to book the appointment, we’d already ripped out the cabinets in the laundry room, and purchased and assembled the bench and hat rack, installed the shelves in the closet and painted the walls. There was definitely no going back.

So, some guys are coming on Thursday. To possibly stack our washer/dryer. And they will charge us some random amount, no less than $250 but probably much, much more.

At a time, I may point out, when not as much money is coming into the house as usual.

It better be worth it, dammit!

Sunday was a pretty busy day for me, but not completely out of the ordinary. I did my usual morning tasks — empty the dishwasher, do last night’s dishes, dress the kids, nurse the baby, get everybody breakfasted. Then I did three loads of laundry, put the baby down for two different naps, made six dozen mini-muffins for Gal Smiley’s preschool, and while I was at it, a pan of apple squares. Also in there was some intermittent online shopping, as we are trying to get some Christmas shopping done before we go down to visit our families at Thanksgiving, so we can avoid having to ship everything later. Oh, and we decided to move the couch from the front room downstairs into the basement, because it was scratching the floor. And then, it was time to make lunch.

So in the middle of all this, Gal Smiley decides spontaneously that she’s done with diapers, and is now Toilet Trained. Big Girl. Underwear Please!

We tried to train her back in the summer and we had some success, but it turned out to just be too much stress for her with school looming and the new baby and everything, so we backed off. We were hoping that once she started school and saw the other kids using the adorable little mini-toilet that they have in the classroom that she’d want to join in the fun too. Apparently, it worked.

So she insisted in sitting on the big toilet (no more little training potty for her, either!), and lo and behold, she had a pee. Then she insisted on wearing underwear (only the Dora Tennis Underwear will do). And that meant that my state of tension ratcheted up about 100 percent, as I tried to continue with the laundry and the muffins and the dishes while also following her around everywhere, asking her about every 30 seconds if she had to pee, and warning her not to do it on the floor.

About a half hour later, she announced she had to pee again, and ran to the bathroom, and got it in the toilet. The BIG POTTY. I thought, Oh my God! That’s it! It’s all over, she’s really trained, we can throw out all those pull-ups sitting upstairs in her closet!

And then about a half hour after that, she peed on the couch. Sigh. And tried to clean it up herself (so very endearing, actually) with a whole box of Kleenex. The really good kind too, with extra softness and lotion built-in. Ah well.

So it’s back to pull-ups for today, but still, I have hope. Imagine, only one kid in diapers! It’s a dream life, I tell ya.

Yesterday when FameThrowa and her new friend Mr. Click arrived at our place, Sir Monkeypants and I were in the middle of a deep conversation about music trivia. I’m sure Mr. Click now thinks we are the geekiest of the geeks, like, who meets someone for the first time by asking them trivia?

Anyway, we were talking about the year 1984, when three different pop songs by three different artists, but with the exact same name, hit the Billboard Top 40. Can you name the title, and the three acts?

This event — having totally different songs, but with the same title, hit the charts in the same year — only happened one other time. The year was 1971. Can you name that title and acts?

Sir Monkeypants got the 1984 reference but the 1971 grouping was a little before his time.

In 1984, the three songs in question were all called “The Power Of Love.” One by Frankie Goes To Hollywood (the best of the group, in my opinion), one by Huey Lewis and the News (from the movie Back to the Future), and one by Jennifer Rush (a recording of the song she originally wrote for Air Supply).

In 1971, the three songs were called “Superstar.” One by The Carpenters (the best known version, although the song has been recorded by many other artists, some even that year, and was not written by them), one by the cast of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (the main theme song, sung mainly by Judas), and one a disco tune by Murray Head.

I want one of these for the Wee One:

On Tuesday we had an unfortunate incident when, through an unbelievable series of coincidences and misunderstandings, I failed to pick up Captain Jelly Belly at the school bus stop. He stayed on the bus and went for an extra long ride, while I frantically called the school to locate him, and then the bus returned to our stop at the end of its run to drop him off. Alls well that ends well, but man, it was a really, really long 20 minutes until we had him back, and my heart was beating at maximum speed for at least another hour afterwards.

The best part of this event, though, was the support of Gal Smiley. I’d taken her with me to the bus stop and when I started to get really concerned that the bus was not arriving, she interrupted her game of “see how far I can throw this rock” to pat me on the arm and say, “Don’t worry, Mommy. Everything will be alright.” So sweet.

A few minutes later, when I explained that we didn’t know where the bus was and that we had to go back inside the house to call the school, she had this to say:

“It’s okay, Mommy. I’m a Superhero. Finding buses is my Superpower. I’ve been to the bus stop lots of times [Editor’s note: twice] with Daddy and I always find the bus.”

And despite my fears, I had to smile at that one. Later, we were back at the stop, as instructed by the school, waiting for the bus to arrive, and Gal Smiley got all excited, “See! See Mommy! There is the bus! I told you I could find it.”

Who was that masked girl?

So I finally got off my butt and wrote to my city councilor, to ask some detailed questions about what can and can’t be recycled. I’m really happy to report that Chris from Ottawa’s Waste Services division got back to me right away.

I’m happy to report that window envelopes can, indeed, go into your black box as-is. Apparently the window part is made from cellulose, which can be recycled.

I’m also happy to report that cans of frozen juice concentrate can go in your blue box, so that the metal ends can be recycled.

Boxes with tape, staples, or small plastic bits attached (like Kleenex boxes) can go into the black box as-is. It would be a big help to the recycling plants if you removed these items beforehand, as they are not recyclable, but the company expects a certain level of “contamination” and is set up to deal with the removal of these things. That means, your boxes with tape on them won’t just be diverted to the landfill; they will be cleaned and then recycled. But if you have the time, you can clean them first to help out.

Similarly, the caps from plastic bottles — pop bottles, juice bottles, water bottles — are not recyclable and should be removed and discarded before the bottle goes into the blue box. However, again, the recycling companies expect this level of “contamination,” and so will remove included caps themselves and recycle the rest. But you could help out by not putting them in your box in the first place.

ANY wax-coated boxes — that means, pretty much any box that is meant to hold freezer food, like frozen pizzas or frozen dinners or popsicles — are not recyclable. The wax coating clogs up the recycling machine. However, if you have green box recycling, these types of boxes can be put into the green box to be composted, rather than going to landfill.

Just call me Ms. Public Service. Thank you!

Edited to add: Further emailing has revealed that any boxes contaminated with grease and/or food cannot go into the black box. This includes pizza boxes with any kind of grease spots. Boxes that held dry foods, like dry pasta or Smarties, are okay. Greasy boxes can go into the green box for composting, if you have a green box program.