Is this thing working?

Today it occurred to me that I have not heard the phone ring for a long time. I mentioned it to my husband and he kind of laughed and said he remembered someone calling yesterday but didn't pick it up. So I went to check out our Caller ID.

Today: 0 calls
Yesterday: 1 call from a number I don't recognize (where is the 770 area code anyway?)
Day before: 1 call from me (calling from work)
Day before that: 1 call from me (calling from my cell phone)
Day before that: 1 call - Out of area (telemarketer)
Day before that: 0 calls
Day before that: 2 calls - both for Steve
Day before that: 1 call from my Mom
Day before that: 0 calls

You get the picture. Over a week's worth of calls and only one for me. From my mother. What the heck happened? I used to be fun. Had a social life. Had friends who would call me. Not that I have a heck of a lot of time to talk on the phone these days, but it would be nice if someone tried.

I think I've officially become a Mom with no life. Kind of a bummer. But hey - my kids are fun and they seem to like me.

Eyes wide shut

So perhaps there will be some deep thoughts still on my blog. Of course this isn't really THAT deep and it is related to my children.

I was thinking today about how kids go to sleep. They fight and fight to keep their eyes open, then they finally give up and close their eyes. But once those eyes have closed, you can pretty much count on the fact that they are fully in dreamland.

Now, when I go to sleep, I first close my eyes, then drift off to sleep with my eyes already happily closed. So there is some period of time where my eyes are closed though I'm not yet asleep.

So at what point in our lives to we start to close our eyes first? I quite honestly have no idea, and it's been bugging me a little bit today.

SA (Soccerholics Anonymous)

My husband is obsessed with World Cup soccer. Normal professional soccer, not so much. Just World Cup soccer. Of course he also watches Formula One racing, but not any other kind of racing. He's sort of a sports snob. At any rate, I first discovered his obsession 4 years ago just after he moved into my house. He woke up one morning at an ungodly hour...

(Must interrupt myself here to contemplate that what I thought was an ungodly hour 4 years ago, pre-kids, is actually an hour that I have been awake for on a regular basis for the last 2+ years. My how things change.)

... which was around 3 or 4AM. He jumped out of bed all excited and told me he was going to watch the first World Cup game and he'd see me in a month. I thought he was exaggerating, but there really are a TON of games and he watched them all. He told me that for the next World Cup he wanted to go to Germany for two weeks to see a bunch of the games. I think my response was that in 4 years we would have a couple of kids and under no circumstances was he ditching me with 2 babies for 2 weeks to watch soccer in Germany.

Fast forward to 2006... (for those of you not living with a Soccerholic, the World Cup series happens every 4 years).

We actually do have 2 kids. And he is not in Germany. However, he is making an extremely valiant attempt to watch as many games as he possibly can. We come home, have dinner, put the kids to bed, and he disappears into the basement where TiVo is fathfully recording each and every World Cup game. Today the US played at 10AM and he actually left work with a group of friends to watch the game. And the children had to wear red, white and blue today. Unfortunately the US lost and will not be advancing. But the plus side is that not having the US in the mix cuts down a teensy bit on the obsessiveness.

I think I get my real husband back in a few weeks.

MINE!

My boys are exactly 51 weeks apart in age. I'm expecting that will make them the best of friends and worst of enemies over the coming years. Right now I'm finding most of their interactions very entertaining, and some of them are just highly frustrating.

One that comes to mind this evening is the words Nate (13 months old) is learning from his older brother. Thankfully neither is yet learning words that Mommy and Daddy should stop saying in their presence. Sean (the 2-yr-old) has recently started saying "Mine!", thanks in great part to the fact that Nate is now mobile and is stealing lots of toys from him. Unfortunately, Nate has picked that one up very quickly (along with "No!", "Woof" and "Nine" which is apparently the generic reference for all letters and numbers in our household). Today when I picked the boys up from their home daycare, our daycare provider's 10-month-old was very interested in crawling on me, pulling my hair, and other fun things that 10-month-olds do. Nate, very determined, came up, climbed on my lap, pushed him away and stated "Mine!".

It was kind of sweet... in a meanie 1-yr-old way.

My husband, the rock

Well, it's been almost a year, so I better get back to this blogging thing. Unfortunately, I have given up on being profound and this will likely turn into rantings and cute stories related to my husband and children. But hey, you aren't paying for this entertainment, so if it no longer interests you I won't feel too bad.

Last night I got to bed late, as usual. And at least an hour later than my husband, as usual. At 1:45 Nate (the little one) woke screaming and I went in to get him after the required trip to the bathroom to see if he'd stop before I was done. No such luck. Steve is still peacefully sleeping. Finally got Nate to sleep around 3:00, but he would not go back in his crib, so I resigned myself to sleeping in there for a bit. Woke again a little later and he was passed out enough to go back in his crib. Go back to our room and my alarm is going off quite loudly. Steve is still in dreamland. Turn off my alarm; get ready to leave for work; head out the door by 5:30AM.

When he got home tonight I asked: Did you hear Nate last night or my alarm? Nope. Ignorance really is bliss.

Questions for God, Part 2

I'm short on time (and brainpower) for a blog entry today, so I will throw out another question for God when I die.

Where the heck did Cain's wife come from?

When Cain ditched Adam and Eve and Abel, he went somewhere else and started a family. So where did he get a wife? Did God create other people somewhere else and he found them? Did he take a sister with him?

The problem with online friends...

Considering my online friends are the ones who will be reading this, I suppose I'm being a bit daring with my title today. But allow me to explain. The trouble with online friends is that you have to be able to get online in order to interact with them. This past week, I did not have that "luxury", though it truly has become a necessity in my house.

Yes my dear blog readers, my high-speed internet connection was down for THREE days. That's three days, morning to night, of no birth board, no blogging, no trivia contests, and the worst: no email! No ordering pizza online, checking the weather forecast, looking up questions as they came up in conversation. My husband and I would frequently be having a conversation and one of us would say, "well, I could look that up, but our internet connection is down!".

Now mind you, our connection has been up and down for the last 2 months. I actually have Cox Communications outage phone line on speed dial, and I have memorized every one of their prompts I have to go through each time I call where a nice animated woman walks me through rebooting my modem. "I still can't see your modem online. There's really not much we can do till it comes back. Keep in mind, if you were talking to a technical service rep, you would just be waiting on the phone also." Bite me lady. I already did all that. My modem will NOT be coming "online" because my internet service IS NOT WORKING!!!

I finally get to a real live person afte 10 minutes who walks me through some more meaningless crap, like checking my IP address. All while I'm attempting to keep up with my two babies. We end each call with... "well, I can sent out a technician on day " which is always at LEAST 4 days away. Last time we went through this our internet was out Saturday and part of Sunday and magically returned on Sunday. Perhaps the high-speed internet fairy had arrived? Saturday when we called, our appointment was scheduled for Wednesday. Of course when he showed up on Wednesday, all had been fixed by the high-speed internet fairy. So he got about a foot in the door and left. The very next day, the connection was down when we got up in the morning. We kept expecting the high-speed internet fairy to show up and magically bring our connection back online, but she didn't arrive. We thought we might actually make it to our Sunday appointment and someone would see that we weren't smoking dope - our connection was actually down! But alas, that stupid fairy bit us in the ass again, and late Saturday afternoon poof! we had a connection back. So Sunday the technician ran some diagonsitics and told us that our connection was wonderful. As good as it could get. Absolutely NO explanation for why it had been down for three days. Terrific.

So I sit here with a little black cloud over my computer screen, just waiting for the high-speed internet fairy to wave her little wand and poof! make it go away again. And cause me to be friendless for several more days.