7 Quick Takes, Mostly About Wasting Time on the Internet

Linking up with Conversion Diary.

1. Here’s something I’ve learned about myself:

I do not like going to a salon for regular maintenance of any kind. This might be a somewhat new-ish development (maybe since having kids?), because I used to get my nails done every two weeks when I was in graduate school. But these days? Forget it. This is why I don’t color my hair. I even have a tiny bit of a mustache because I can’t be bothered to get it waxed on a regular basis.

This has never really been a problem for me. It wasn’t really too much of a big deal for me to regularly go at least six months between haircuts. But then I got bangs!

I did not foresee the problem of needing regular maintenance on bangs. They get long fast! I am not willing to go in for a $40 bang trim every three weeks of so. My solution? Cut them myself.

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^^ See how long??

Well, now they’re short. Except I think I might have cut them a bit too short this last time. Good thing I invested in a few head bands for off hair days.

2. Speaking of learning things about myself, I am addicted to taking the ridiculous online “quizzes” everyone is posting on Facebook these days. I never seek them out, but when I see someone’s result from one of them on FB, like “I was meant to live in the 1950s. Which decade do you actually belong in?” or “I’m Burt! Which Sesame Street character are you?,” for some truly bizarre reason I can’t help but click on these just to see what I’ll get. Here’s what I’ve learned: I am a Hobbit Big Bird, who should have a career as a professor and live in Tennessee. Or Paris. In the 1920s.

See? Isn’t that interesting? Never mind the fact that my real answer to most of the items in these questionnaires is “None of these options,” or that I’m so unhip that the first time I took on of these quizzes (the one about “Which city should you actually live in?”) and it asked the question, “What’s your jam?,” the only one of the available responses that I had ever even heard of was “Sweet Child of Mine.” I must still be pretty glamorous though (see #1^^ for evidence of this), because I learned that I truly belong in Paris.

3. And speaking of silly internet wastes of time, my favorite of these quizzes was the one from the NY Times about “What does the way you speak say about where you’re from?” Unlike those in #2, this one was actually totally accurate. Calling the night before Halloween “Devil’s Night” and referring to a sugary carbonated beverage as “Pop” placed me squarely in Detroit, which really is the area where I did grow up.

One of the fun things about this particular quiz is that it showed the regional popularity of each individual answer given. Having lived in lots of states in the midwest and south, some of the things I say and ways I speak now no longer reflect my place of birth. Like “Frontage Road.” People don’t say that in Detroit, but I say it now. Fascinating.

4. Do these quick takes make me seem like all I ever do is waste time doing stupid stuff on the internet? Well, let me get all literary on you for a moment then. I recently came across a fun post (yes, on the internet) “What Your Book Crush Says About You.” My favorite literary gents from those included in the post are Gilbert Blythe and Rhett Butler. Though there’s nothing accurate in the post about what that actually says about me, it was still fun to read and think about some of my favorite male book characters. I wish she would have included Manly from the Little House books though. He’s a much better literary main man than Edward from Twilight, for pete’s sake.

So. I must know, which are your favorites?

5. I have discovered a love of the bento box for serving my kids lunch. I had gotten into such a lunch rut until I bought some of these containers and these silicone muffin things. Now it’s so much easier to get creative with lunch, and the girls seem to like it too. They refer to these as their “special” lunches.

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^ Bacon, avocado, and lettuce, wrapped in a piece of turkey. In the muffin cup is some Justin’s Chocolate Hazelnut Nut Butter for dipping apple slices. They loved it!

It doesn’t really even seem to matter if they enjoy and eat what I put in these boxes for them. They almost never complain, because usually they have at least one thing in them that they like. Lunch is so much less of a drag.

And yes, I do realize that having a special box really isn’t necessary to serve lunch this way. But it seems more fun.

6. Miss started her piano lessons on Wednesday. Oh, the cuteness.

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I wasn’t sure how it would go, but she loved it. And her teacher is a perfect fit for her. Now I just need to get a piano.

7. I said this before, but I’ll say it again. I am having a little bit of a hard time with five. All of a sudden my eldest is doing all sorts of super grown up stuff. She’s wielding scissors like a pro. She’s reading.

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She no longer says, “lasterday” instead of “yesterday” or “with-about” instead of “without.” I don’t know exactly when she began pronouncing those words correctly (it’s probably been a while), but her sweet little mispronunciations are gone (except that Lass now says “lasterday”).

I’m not ready for her, for them, to be getting so big. Sis will be two next month. I don’t have a baby anymore!! I’m very near the point of no longer having anyone’s diaper to change and this makes me sad. Probably that makes me weird too, but obviously it’s not the diapers I’ll miss, it’s having a teeny baby. I need another baby 🙂

Check out more quick takes here.

I Have Bangs

I have been wanting to make a change to my hair lately. It’s been on my mind, and then when we were at my parents’ house last week Miss saw a 20-year-old photo of me and exclaimed, “Oh! You look so beautiful!” She especially seemed to like my hair.

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How did you get your hair like that???” It was a bit hard to explain, because she didn’t quite understand the concept of a three-year-old perm. Her questions got me pondering a change more seriously.

Other than a few (very) brief ventures into “different” hair,

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my hair has been the same since I was 16.

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I’m only wearing that sweatshirt ^^ because I lost a bet.

So this past week I decided it was time to get my hair cut and try something different again. I asked Miss how she wanted me to get it cut and she said “Short!” I told her I hadn’t had very good luck with short hair, so I probably wouldn’t be doing that any time soon (ever, ever, ever).

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But I did decide I wanted to try bangs again. I haven’t had bangs since about 1991 (the top photo in this post was taken around then). Well, except for one reaaaalllly bad attempt at reaaalllly short hair in college, around 1995. Thank goodness I have no photos of that horror.

So. 2013. I have bangs.

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I like the change. It satisfied my urge for something different (it’s nice to get a haircut and give some directions to the hairdresser beyond, “Just cut off a few inches”), but not too crazy.

Best of all, when I came home from the salon and asked Miss if she liked my haircut, her face lit up and she nodded enthusiastically, “Yes!!” Love that girl 🙂

I Think It’s Interesting!

I went to the library yesterday and grabbed a bunch of stories by one of our new favorite children’s authors, Robert Munsch.

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We just discovered this prolific author. His stories are cute, funny, and often feature clever protagonists. Some of our favorites are “The Paper Bag Princess,” “Mud Puddle,” and “We Share Everything!”

We read a new one yesterday called “Stephanie’s Ponytail.” It’s a witty tale of a little girl who wears a ponytail in different ways and gets copied by others in her class at school. The moral of the story is “don’t blindly follow people.” It’s a good book, and we all enjoyed it and laughed at her funny ponytails.

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Today, Miss said she wanted one ponytail “coming right out the back” and two more on the sides. I gently suggested that perhaps she would like to have either a ponytail in the back or two on the sides. Her response?

“But Mo-om! I think it’s interesting!”

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Well. Yes it is.

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Interesting.

I love her independence.

A Weekend in Photos

We are doing it up right this week, here at the Farm.  The weekend was hot and sunny and beautiful and perfect for little girls to have fun outside with cousins and aunts and uncles.  

There was mud digging and splashing

Sand castle building

Frog catching

And butterfly chasing.

The girls did plenty of drawing with sidewalk chalk.

We went exploring and treasure hunting.

Miss got her hair done like her older cousin.

I need to learn how to do this!

The girls battled with some swords.

Check out her form!

Baby Sis observed happily.

There was a rousing game of kick ball.

To top it off, a campfire with s’mores and fireworks.

And, somebody is two months old already.  Holy smokes.

Gotta go.  I have some mud-pie-making to do.  Or treasure hunting.  Or maybe swing pushing.  Or sidewalk-chalking…

Pigtails and Stuff

I got both of my girls to wear pigtails in their hair for a brief time yesterday.  Miss usually won’t let me do anything with her hair except a ponytail, but when I put Lass’s hair in pigtails yesterday, she was suddenly interested.  I just had to get a photo of the two of them together.

Preferably with both of them looking at the camera…

I love Miss’s posed smiles for photos.

Close enough!

Miss really wanted to put her Baby Sis’s hair in pigtails too.

We’ve had a great week.

Almost every day we’ve gotten out of the house at least a little bit.  Yesterday we stayed home for a lazy day, but otherwise we’ve been out and about.  I already mentioned getting out for gymnastics class on Monday.  Tuesday I got the girls up and was determined to get Miss to school on time.  I got them all ready to go and we got out the door only a few minutes late for the 25-minute drive to Miss’s school.  We got there and I got Miss up to the door, only to realize that I had completely forgotten it was Spring Break this week.  Miss didn’t really get what Spring Break is, but we had a good laugh about going to school when it was closed.

The girls love playing with their Baby Sis’s stuff.  The photo below looks a bit hostile, but Miss was just showing Lass how to cover her mouth when she coughs.

Sister hugs.

And kisses.

Nothing like playing soccer with sparkly Mary-Jane-ish shoes on.

Baby Sis is sleeping and nursing like a champ.  She wakes up once at night and then sleeps late.  All of my girls have been sleeping a little bit late this week (except Tuesday when I had to wake them all up for “school”) so I have been thoroughly enjoying sleeping until 8.  And my husband is off work for the next week.  I’m loving this and the Easter festivities coming up this weekend with dyeing eggs, hunting for eggs and baskets, and meeting the Easter Bunny on Sunday.  I’m a happy mama.

To Cut or Not to Cut?

Miss’s hair is beginning to get a bit unruly.

It can be a bit hard to handle at times.
I have been debating for a while now whether or not to get it cut. Or to cut it myself. Several months ago I gave her a tiny fringe bang trim when her wispy bangs first started to grow into her eyes. Now her bangs are seriously getting into her eyes again, but I don’t want to cut them because I want to let them grow out.
For now I’m trying to keep her hair in pigtails a lot with the bangs combed over to the side.
Or I use a barrette to pull the bangs away from her face.
Both of these options work quite well and look pretty darn cute. A problem only comes in when she decides to repeatedly pull out her barrette or when her winter hat smooshes and makes a mess of her pigtails. I typically redo her hair several times a day. And sometimes Her Toddlerness just refuses pigtails or barrette. Period. This usually isn’t too much of a big deal as it generally only lasts a little while. I do still wonder sometimes if I should just go ahead and cut it. But I know the temptation to cut while growing out a hairdo can be overcome.
And I don’t want to cut it yet. Even when we aren’t sporting a barrette or pigtails, these locks are still precious I think.

For now, we’ll stay the course.

Grease 2

No, I’m not referring to the bad movie from the 80s. Though as bad as the movie was, I did think Michelle Pfeifer was so cool. But anyway, this is about the update on my hair.

The solution? Dish soap! “Dawn gets grease out of your way.” Yes, it really does. I didn’t have Dawn brand dish soap, but the stuff I have worked just wonderfully! This was another suggestion from my mom. She’s super smart. Thanks Mom!!

Greased Lightning

About a week ago I started noticing that I was having trouble getting my hair clean. I would wash it and it would still feel dirty. I attributed it to our hard water. I was thinking that, since we hadn’t put salt in our water softener in a while, the water must have gotten really hard and wasn’t washing all the shampoo and conditioner out of my hair, naturally making it feel greasy and dirty. I mean, it was really gross. It looked greasy and flat. It felt greasy and dirty. Even immediately after washing it. So I got salt and had my hubby put it in the softener. It didn’t help. I washed my hair twice, scrubbing my scalp and the roots of my hair until my arms hurt, and then put conditioner only on the bottom of my hair, not on the roots at all. It didn’t help. Two days ago I prompted him to put another bag of salt in. Still didn’t help.
So I started to wonder if maybe the problem wasn’t the water but my hair or my scalp. I have heard of women having things like postpartum acne or other skin issues. I experienced for myself the oh-so-common postpartum hair loss a few months after Miss was born. My hair is really thick right now because I haven’t yet started to shed my pregnancy mane this time. So I started to wonder if maybe this was another weird thing that can happen after having a baby. I had never heard of postpartum grease-head before, but why not? So, naturally I turned to the internet to so some research.

(Notice the flat, greasy-looking hair. I did take a shower and washed the heck out of it!!)

Well, from what I have read online, it looks like my problem may very well be related to postpartum hormones and scalp changes. One mom put it this way on the Alphamom website:


I had the double whammy of my scalp deciding to go haywire around the exact same time [as her hair falling out]. . . starting around two or three months postpartum my scalp became RIDICULOUSLY oily. My hair would not come clean, product build-up galore, greased up like a 90s grunge rocker, etc. (italics added)

So what’s a mom to do?? I talked to my mom about it last night. Though she had never heard of such a thing either, she suggested maybe trying to rinse with vinegar. So I did. It didn’t work either. Though I will say that I didn’t do a very good job of it. I kind of sloppily poured the vinegar over my head (which was coooold!!), when I think, in my case, I should have targeted its application a bit more. So I’m going to try again using a squirt bottle to get it down in my roots and onto my scalp a better. If that doesn’t work I’m going to try vodka cut with a bit of water, which is another suggestion I found online. The mom quoted above eventually solved the problem by buying super cheap shampoo rather than her fancy salon stuff, but I already use super cheap shampoo! Anyone else ever have this problem or have any suggestions how to fix it?? I know it will eventually go away on its own (probably around the time my hair starts falling out in clumps) but I really don’t want to wait that long. It’s gross!

What we’ve been up to

We are at the Farm this week. My hubby has been hunting in the mornings and evenings. Miss has been having a big time with her “Baba” and “Papa,” (my husband’s parents) and is now playing with her cousins. More cousins and aunts and uncles will be arriving through the weekend, so I know she’ll have a blast. Her favorite thing this week so far has been riding around the farm on the Ranger. She has gone exploring with her Baba and Daddy around the farm, picked flowers, watched Papa on the tractor, and taken a nap on it, as loud and jostling as it is. She just went on a “treasure hunt” this morning. Lass and I have joined the ride a few times and she just falls right to sleep wrapped up snugly against my chest while the Ranger rocks and bumps around. She’s just been working on growing. I love watching all the sweet expressions she makes (haven’t yet caught a smile on camera).





Other things we’ve been doing since my last post include taking a trip to story time at the library last week. Well, sort of. We got all ready with every intention of going to story time, but couldn’t quite make it out the door in time. We went to the library anyway.
Miss really enjoys the show “Yo Gabba Gabba” and asks to watch it more than I would like. She calls it “Mo Ga.” I found a “Yo Gabba Gabba” book at the library and was so excited. I figured having a book from her favorite show would be great, so she wouldn’t ask to watch the show so much. Now all she wants to do is read the book and watch the show. “Mo Ga, book??” she says. It’s adorable to hear her recite the first page of the book though, “Oh nooooo! Where’s the sun?” Over and over and over as she flips through the pages.
She also got her first “haircut.” This really just means that I trimmed about five stray hairs that were too long and kept falling in her face so they are now the same length as the rest of her bangs.

Adorable. I’ll try to blog more in October. Can you believe it’s October already?? Fall, crisp weather, good football, Halloween (I already have the girls’ costumes). . . so much to look forward to!