If you're on the road to hell, you must be getting directions from your GPS

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions," so goes the saying and it's a road I'm familiar with ...

When I bought my Groupon to the fun child play place, I dreamt of my kids laughing and playing, while I watched them with motherly love, helping my toddler up a ladder or riding down a slide with my preschooler. The car ride home would be equally filled with laughs, smiles, and motherly love. Those thoughts went to hell faster than my toddler can run right out of my sight and I blame it all on GPS.

What should have been a 20 minute drive from preschool turned into an hour as I turned into every strip mall on the worst construction-filled traffic-packed road in existence - a road where you can't turn left unless at a light nor see the stores from the street because they are set so far back. And why? Because, as I found out when I finally pulled over and called the place, my &$%#^ GPS miscalculated the place 2 miles north of its actual location. Technology!!!!

Adding injury to insult, my poor toddler was screaming the entire time and my preschooler kept asking in earnest,"Are we almost there mom?" "Are you lost mom?"  "Don't say the word 'stupid' mom."

Back on the road I hit traffic and the 2 miles I had left to go took 15 minutes of stop-n-go traffic in which I was ready to find a baseball bat and a fax machine and go 'Office Space.' 

This was when my husband called and I unloaded on the poor guy. Then he said, "I'll be home at 1:30 today!" 

What?! "Honey," I asked as I gripped the steering wheel, "Did I not tell you I won't be home this afternoon?" 

"Yes you did, but I thought I'd surprise you all when you got home!" He said way too chipper.

Oh no, dear husband, a surprise would have been you telling me you'd be home early so I could have picked you up and you could be with us! Where's that fax machine?!?

When we finally reached the place, one hour & 15 minutes after we left preschool, I was emotionally shot. I tried to muster the happiness and good intentions I originally had but everything annoyed me. Here's the Top 4:

1) my 20 month old didn't want to play with anything. She just wanted to walk around. We could do that for free kid!

Shooting gallery - my daughter looking forlorn

2) my preschooler insisted on riding the only self-propel car in the large truck zone fending off smaller kids like a running back making a beeline to the end zone. Do you know how many times I had to jump in and plead, " please take turns with this 2-year old!"

My son is actually bigger than these 2 kids. My daughter crawling in the background.

3) my 20 month old kept climbing up the huge slides when there was clearly a sign saying "no climbing up slide" (Note to self: Teach her to read), 8-year olds (was there no school?) were flying down with clear disregard, and a four-year-old kept calling to me, "She keeps going up the slide!" Great, now I'm being parented by a kid still wearing pull-ups.

4) my preschooler refused to listen to my pleas to go to the bathroom so I spent the entire time picturing him peeing in the jumping balls and of us getting escorted out the door (although that might have been a good way to leave)

Four days later, my son is still asking me when we can go back to play. I mumbled, "when hell freezes over" then looked outside -- Chicago in February -- and realized it had. We'll be back next week.

Making play sand

I made a New Years Resolution -- I know, stay with me -- that I would try a new sensory/hands-on activity with the kids every week. Well, I lost steam on that pretty quick and after a few weeks I decided to try something new every month and it's much easier.

Our first experiment -- Play Sand

On this blog, I found a way to make indoor sand that's also non-toxic (in case you have a kid who puts everything in their mouth like I do) by simply mixing whole wheat flour with canola oil until you get a "sandy" consistency.

With a splat mat draped across our kitchen table, I mixed these two pantry items into play sand that my preschooler could fill seashells with and my toddler could push through her fingers and across the table in exploration.

As my previous post mentions, I suck at crafts so crafting with them is usually a bust. The lazy mom in me likes to find something that's 2-3 ingredients (stuff I usually have in my pantry anyway) that I can mix up, entertain the kids, and curb my preschoolers pleas for the television.

This is a long winter, but mix up some play sand and pretend you're sitting at the beach.

Crafty, or not

Is there such a thing as the "brown-thumb" crafter? Because that's me.

Brown-thumbers want to garden and they just end up killing their plants. Maybe it was neglect, or maybe they just stink. That's how I feel about crafting. I want to craft, I envy cute decorations and a closet full of crafting supplies. But honestly, I just stink at it!

I never really cared about being crafty, but then 2 things happened: 

1) I had kids

2) I discovered Pinterest. 

If you're handy with a pipe cleaner and tissue paper you go ape-shit over Pinterest. If you're a brown thumb crafter like me, then you still go ape-shit but you end up with just the shit.

Here's my daughter with our Pinterest Puppet.

This is what happens when mom has a bunch of lonely socks looking for mates for months and access to Pinterest.

Sock Puppets! "How fun!" says sucky craft mom. "Let's make puppets!" The kids get excited and mom searches for her craft supplies in a dusty cabinet (because I'm too lazy to have planned this ahead of time and buy what I need).

Lazy mom digs in an old cross stitch box abandoned 20 years ago but still kept around in case the bug bites again (it hasn't) and what do I find? Googly eyes! I hot-glue them on and then realize that I have nothing else to add to this puppet, so I stick it in on little Bear's hand and calls it a day.

I have to clean my house now.

I just terminated the contract with the cleaning service.

Before you start calling me a bragplainer -- those people who like to complain about something but only for the reason of letting everyone know how damn lucky you are -- let me explain.

When my daughter was born, my son was 23 months and all I did for hours on end was nurse her and read him stories (or chase him around the house, or wrestle to change his diaper, or turn on the TV and pass out on the couch from sleep deprivation.) So when my husband uttered the sweetest words in history "Hire a cleaning crew, it'll be temporary" I did just that.  I just didn't actually hear the "temporary" bit because here we are 19 months later still shelling out dough for a house cleaning that will last um... about 20 minutes if I'm lucky. The last time the house was cleaned, my son managed to spill his entire lunch on the floor before the crew even left the house. 

Enter the Cleaning Schedule

Oh what would I do without Pinterest to tell me that all good little housewives like myself have cleaning schedules to stay on top of the piles of crap that form overnight.  Oh ... Are we not saying the term "housewives" anymore? Because the term I'd really like to use in this instance is "unpaid maid."  So I took some time out of my busy schedule of disciplining kids, changing my daughters fourth poop of the day, and trying to make a meal out of 3 ingredients (one of which are maraschino cherries) to create the bad-ass Cleaning Schedule that is on my fridge and of which I ignore on a daily basis.

Lord knows that's why I love "catch up day" that ironically falls on a Saturday when my husband is home.

The Sticker Chart

Our Doctor always tells us that we should do a sticker chart for our son.

I know a lot of parents use sticker charts for potty training, but we lucked out in that our 27-month old potty trainee was happy enough with a High-Five. We were clueless on how the sticker chart worked and a few searches on Pinterest revealed that the possibilities were endless.

What finally tipped the scale in favor of trying out a sticker chart was that since turning 3, our preschooler has found his inner Mr. Hyde and it's making the day ... unbearable. There are a few habits he has developed that are just not working for us -- hitting his sister, throwing toys (out of anger and frustration), not listening to me & daddy, and basically throwing huge tantrums. I'm hoping the sticker chart might be a short-term solution to end (or at least, to curb) these nasty habits.

My first questions was: What kind of sticker chart? And for that I had to ask myself how I can get through to my kid. Throwing stickers up on a grid wasn't going to cut it; I had to search for what my child loves and that was-- like so many other boys-- CARS.

I admit that I feel nothing short of sheer genius that I have some up with this amazing sticker chart. 

Our sticker chart is the Piston Cup Championship. There is a start & finish line and every sticker earned represents a lap around the track. Our son earns a sticker when he has a good day in which he follows our house rules (for the most part) and there are two "Pit Stops" where he has to he change his tires and that represents a special treat.

Now every time he passes his sticker chart, he has an easier time visualizing the goals and seeing how far he has to go until the next Pit Stop and finally the Finish Line.

It's slow ... It's been almost 2 weeks and he just reached his first Pit Stop so we had lunch at a local restaurant that serves your grass-fed beef burgers on a train. Choo Choo!