Are you listening to Ego Leonard?

In this house, we tune into all things that have anything to do with LEGOs. Our house is LEGO aplenty. Goober loves his LEGOs like I love a nice chardonnay and a hot bubble bath. They're his happy place.

So when I heard that an 8 foot LEGO man washed ashore in Siesta Key, I had to check into it.

What I found was a website for Ego Leonard.  I absolutely can't wait to share him with Goober when he gets home from school today. 

I would like to introduce myself:


My name is Ego Leonard and according to you I come from the virtual world. A world that for me represents happiness, solidarity, all green and blossoming, with no rules or limitations.


Lately however, my world has been flooded with fortune-hunters and people drunk with power. And many new encounters in the virtual world have triggered my curiosity about your way of life.


I am here to discover and learn about your world and thoughts.


Show me all the beautiful things that are there to admire and experience in your world. Let’s become friends, share your story with me, take me with you on a journey through beautiful meadows, words, sounds and gestures.

And all I can think is... Ego Leonard knows what's up. Ego Leonard has the right idea. Ego Leonard is awesome.

We all have a lot to learn from Ego Leonard. As far as I can tell, thank you Google, Ego Leonard was created by artists. Possibly these artists? Or maybe these artists?

Or maybe some other ones? I'm sure the mystery will be solved by someone with more investigative ability than myself. But just as is my opinion on how the heavens and earth came to be, my opinion on how Ego Leonard came to be is that it doesn't really matter. It's more important to figure out what he's trying to tell us. And, in my opinion, Ego Leonard is trying to tell us this:

You're doing it wrong.

Fifth Grade is when the mean girls claws come out...

Today Munchkin and I ran into a local pizza place to grab a few pizzas and there was a girl about Munchkin's age sitting with her mother waiting for their order. The girl said hi to Munchkin twice and Munchkin turned her nose up and solidly ignored her. After the second time I turned to her and said "Aren't you going to say hello?"

Munchkin gave me a look that meant "Be quiet, Mom!"

When we left the restaurant I pressed her further. I was fully anticipating having to admonish her for being rude.

"What was up with that? Why wouldn't you say hi to that little girl?"

"She's MEAN to me at school, Mom. She calls me names. She's a mean girl."

Now, Munchkin is slightly younger than the rest of her class and she may be a little bit immature even for her age. Her birthday is in August so she started kindergarten when she was just barely 5 years old so most of her peers have all had at least a few months on her. When I look back on it, I always think I should have probably kept her in Montessori school for one more year before she started kindergarten, but that's just one more of those parenting decisions I can't change now.

So I think she might be a little more susceptible to bullying from more mature girls. She's in 5th grade now and, let's face it, girls are just learning to be catty and mean at her age. To top it off, Munchkin is sensitive. She doesn't let things roll off her back very well so she's probably a fabulous target for a practicing mean girl looking to get a reaction.

So how do I toughen up my little girl? How do I teach her to ignore those mean girls and understand that everything they say is only to make themselves feel better because they have their own problems with self-esteem? Bullies just really, really suck.

Children are a treasure...

There are some days when having children is a blessing. Days when you get to wake them up from their beds and they're groggy and smell like sleep and they smile at you. Days when you get to teach them something new and watch the wonder in their eyes. Days when you can just relax and watch them happily play at a park, without a care in the world. Days when you watch them accomplish something great and days when you realize you're doing a great job raising them.

Today is not one of those days.

Today is one of the days when I wonder what I was thinking when I allowed myself to get pregnant once, and twice, and thrice.

It begins with the sinus pain brought on by seasonal allergies. Today they were so bad that my teeth hurt from the pressure and I had to just lie down and close out the world. Children don't like to be closed out, though. There were nerf gun fights and Munchkin's ear piercing screams when she got shot in the eye by a nerf dart. Seriously, how do 10 year old girls even make that high pitched of a noise? There were children searching in vain for kittens that didn't want to be found and fighting over them once they were found. But eventually, some twist of fate smiled upon me (it's name was Claritin) and the pressure subsided allowing me to rise from the darkness and attempt to take on parenting again.

After a couple of hours of child neglect, I was confronted with milk filled cereal bowls and general mayhem around the house. Nothing had been done. No homework, no chores, nothing. And when I expressed my discontent, I was greeted with whining and gnashing of teeth. Being a mother is a thankless job.

Bug is overwhelmed with his homework and wants all of us to know all about it. He goes from maniacally throwing papers to the ground in an angry rage, to crying, to just plain ignoring the fact that he even has homework. If one of his siblings gets near him while he's attempting to do it, he threatens their life. I don't really know how to help him and I wonder if it's time to take him to a doctor to prescribe him something. We've cut out almost all preservatives and artificial colors, aside from what he gets at school, but it doesn't seem to have been helping him with his anger issues. The homework will always be hard, but his inability to deal with it in any sort of normal manner is the real problem.

It's always difficult to know how to make the best decisions for your children.

Operation Kitty Liberation Day

Today is Operation Kitty Liberation. Today is the day I set the kittens free. Free to roam about the house, that is.

Since we got Mordecai and Rigby, they've been contained to the Master bedroom and bathroom. They're so little that I've been worried they would get lost somewhere or caught between the cushions of the couch or fall down the crack between the bunk beds and the wall.

With good reason, too. Just last week Rigby got himself lost in the few minutes we let them roam around the house to show them off to my brother-in-law, E. After a good ten minutes of attempting to locate the source of the muffled cries we heard from the general location of our TV viewing area, we realized he had gotten himself trapped inside The Man's theater style chairs.

The Man was on his way home from work at the time and I very much wanted to rescue Rigby before he arrived home as I was sure I would hear crap from him about how the cats were running around and getting into things. E was belly down on the floor attempting to pull Rigby out of a tiny little hollow in the chair by his tiny little paw, when we heard The Man walk in.

"Everybody act natural!" E cried out as The Man walked in and saw his chairs tipped on all sides and the family room torn apart.

It's always an adventure at the Spaz house.

So I wanted to keep them safe in the bedroom where the worst they could do was climb to the top of the closet (and encourage Goober to climb to the top and retrieve them, causing the entire shelf and rod to fall out of the wall... taking bets on how long it will take for that to be repaired), but when I settled in for a nice bubble bath the other night and found tiny little flecks of kitty litter suspended in my cucumber-melon scented bubbles, I decided it was time for the kittens to explore the rest of their natural habitat.

So far they're enjoying the space to roam. They're chitter-chattering at the birds outside through the windows, taking Superman sized leaps and bounds from one flat surface to another, and enjoying the giant expanses of open space to run maniacally from one end of the house to the other.

I see broken glass and spilled liquids in my future.