Poor Troy-Boy...

When Troy was little, he had a 4th of July...mishap.  You can read a little about it here. The whole time he was getting fixed up, he kept saying, "Poor Troy-boy. Troy-boy got hurt. Poor Troy-boy."  It was so cute.  And so very sad.  It's kind of the story of his life, though.

One fast Sunday, Troy wanted to bear his testimony.  I told him to go ahead and go up after the current person was done.  There was another person waiting their turn on the stand.  I had told him that once he gets up there to wait until the other people up there were done, but he didn't hear that part.  As he was climbing the stairs, the person on the stand waiting his turn got up.  Troy's little face just crumpled up, and he started crying and ran back down to our seat.  I think he thought that that person cut in front of him or something.  Again, just so sad, but so cute.



The other day, he wanted to go play with a friend that lives around the corner from us.  He was begging me and begging me.  I told him that he could go if Brock went with him.  Brock is buddies with the older sibling, while Troy wants to play with the one closer to his age, though I think they all end up playing together.

So Monday after Brock's homework was all done, the boys took off for their friend's house.  Not two minutes later, I heard screaming and crying coming from outside.  My initial thought was that one of them fell down and scraped a knee or something.

The two of them came bursting through the front door.

"MOM!!!!  There was a BIG, SCARY dog, and it WANTED TO EAT US!!!"

"It was chasing us and tried to GET MY PANTS!!!"

My kids are a wee bit scared of dogs, of all sizes.  I peeked out the front windows and looked up and down the road for a dog, big or small.  I saw some neighbor kids out, who happen to have a dog.

"Was it so-and-so's dog?"

"NO!!!!  It was a BIG SCARY DOG!!!!"

"Where was the dog at?"

They both pointed at the house on the corner.

"Well, let's just wait a few minutes, and maybe that dog will be somewhere else, and you can try walking over there again."

That's when Troy piped up: "But Mom, I lost my SHOE!"

Sure enough, Troy only had one shoe on.

Me: "You ran all the way home without your shoe on?"

Troy: "Well, the BIG SCARY DOG was chasing me and my shoe came off-" (bursts into tears) "-and so I just kept running."

I was trying not to laugh.  Because it was just so cute.  But it was just so sad, too. (Also, a little Cinderella-ish.  Running out of the shoe and all.)

So I bundled up and started walking up and down the street, looking for a lost shoe. Shouldn't be too hard, right?  I went up one side, and down the other.  No shoe was to be seen.

I got back home, and asked Troy if he remembered where he lost his shoe, or which side of the road he was on.  And of course, being 5, his story switched around.  "It was in the road.  It was over there in the yard. It was in our yard."

I sighed a big heavy mom sigh, and told him to get his boots on, we were going to go look for his shoe together.  We went up, we went down, on our side of the road.  Then we started to do the same thing on the other side of the road.  We got close to the house with the dog.  You know, the BIG SCARY dog.  And Troy froze in his tracks.

"Mom, the dog is going to GET ME!" More tears. I assured him that the dog would not get him, and is probably really nice.  He wouldn't budge, and was getting ready to bolt for our house again.

The big, scary dog was in his yard, doing scary things like RUNNING, and WAGGING HIS TAIL.  He reminded me of the dog on Up, named Dug.

Now granted, if some animal came bounding up to me that was as tall as me on all fours, I'd be a little skittish, too.

So instead we turned around and started looking the other way again. 

A minute later, out comes a little boy, who Troy recognized as a kid from his kindergarten class.  Because I'm a bad neighbor, I have no idea who lives where, or half of my neighbors' names.  I suck like that.

But Troy knew him, and this little boy was carrying Troy's shoe.  They met, and the boy said, "My dog took your shoe.  Sorry."  I nudged Troy with a "Tell him it's okay, and thanks for finding it."  We went home, and Troy (and Brock) were no longer traumatized by the dog.

At least for now, until they dare venture to their friends' house again...DUN DUN DUNNNNN!

Memory Monday: Scanner Girl, Part 2

Wanna hear more memories about my current job?  Well, then, you're in luck! (My first post of memories is right here.)

The summer after my senior year I worked by myself.  And actually, I worked 10-hour days.  Sure, it could get boring, but I kept myself occupied.  And I was trying to save money for college. I went in right after showering, with my hair still wet.  And even though it was summer, that would make me get cold.  So I would crank up the heat in that room, and dry my hair in front of the vent.  I would bend at the waist, with my long long hair hanging almost to the floor. Then I usually would pull it up with this purple scrunchie that I had.  I loved that thing, and had it for a million billion years.

The summer before, I didn't pull in quite that many hours, but my sister and mom and I went to deep water aerobics early in the morning, which I LOVED.  Then we'd get ready and go over to work.  It was so awesome.  One of these days, I would love to do the deep water aerobics again.  I tried a couple of years ago, but it was at night, right when I was trying to get kids in bed, etc. etc.  Maybe in a few years when my kids are all at school.  There are a lot of things I want to do when my kids are all out of the house.  Like, read.  Go to the temple often.  Exercise.  Grocery shop.  Scrapbook.

When I was scanning in college, my sister Brianna started scanning with me. At the time, my dad's office had a client that wanted some of their stuff scanned.  It was a doctor's office of some sort.  Our scanning room had been moved again, this time upstairs at the end of the hall.  While scanning the doctor's office stuff, we discovered that they had pictures drawn in their files, about people's ailments.  It was to show where or what was wrong, but...some of them were really funny.  Like cartoons.  There would be a phrase written, like "jambed thumb", and a picture of a hand with a REALLY over-sized thumb. Or they would have funny phrases (well, funny taken out of context).  Like "Man says there is metal shrapnel in his head."  Whenever we came across crazy things like this, we would scan them, then cut them out and tape them to the wall above our scanner.  We taped other things up as well, like outsides of thank-you notes or whatever that would have flowers on it.  We had quite the collection.

Along with the crazy pictures, the same doctor's office had these files on REALLY big papers that were all linked together.  You know that old type of printer that had the rollers on the sides, and the paper would have holes on the edges that you would hook onto the rollers?  And each page was hooked to the next, so you'd have to pull it apart?  There were boxes and boxes of these kinds of files.  And the pages were too big to put into our scanner.  So we had to get creative.

Sometimes we would take the pages and photocopy them but reduce it so it would all fit onto a page, then scan that.  Other times we could cut the edges and bottoms of the pages to make them page-sized.  When they had the normal-sized paper that was hooked together, our scanner was able to grab the first page, and keep going, sucking in page after page in a big stream.  Brianna was really good at getting the machine to do that.  I wasn't very good at it-it gave me paper cuts, and would start scanning crooked, and then it would jam.  So, yeah, I had to tear the pages and scan them separately.

Scanning -and prepping- the big pages took FOREVER.  So my sister and I decided to come in at night a few times and just prep so that we could scan during the day.  We would take a couple of boxes into the conference room, where there was a TV and cable.  There was a TV movie on, called "Au Pair" (which means "nanny" in French).  It's kind of "The Sound of Music" meets...any makeover show like "Pretty Woman" or "She's All That".  And even though it was cheesy, it was strangely addicting.

At that time, Brianna was also into country music.  We'd sit and listen to Z103, but after a while I'd get SO sick of their rotation of songs, so much so that I agreed to listen to a country station with her instead.  Although I could only take so much of that before wanting to switch back, or just not listen to any music whatsoever.

This was also about the time that we met Jack on Crack.  One of my dad's colleagues had a son that..."worked" there as well.  I honestly don't know what he did there.  Shred?  Yardwork?  Or maybe he just hung out there or something.  We could never remember his real name, so we called him Jack on Crack.  Because he was a WEIR-DO!  Very spazzy, and weird. Sometimes he would try to hang out with us and talk to us.  We would keep our door closed in the hopes that he would leave us alone, but even that didn't work with Jack on Crack.  I really hope he grew up to become somewhat normal.

I also scanned with my sister Alexis, when I was pregnant with Troy.  We were more hit and miss, because it was during the school year.  I went in on Friday and Saturday mornings.  We were in a different room-again, and this time had cubicles.  At this time we were scanning pension files, which didn't have cool pictures like the other files.

And now I scan alone, at night.  I'm back in the room where I used to dry my hair.  Life tends to come full circle.  Or maybe it just seems like that because right now my kids are watching "The Lion King".

Are You There, Eyelashes? It's Me, Nat

Well, got my laser eye surgery done.  It's absolutely amazing.  You wanna hear all the gory details?  Okay!

So, you get a Valium, so you don't care about anything.  Then you go lay on a table and hold a teddy bear.  You look at a little green light, and then it gets dark.  They move the table to another area, then back to the green light.  You stare at the green light for about 10 seconds, and then you're done.  Rinse and repeat for the other eye.

Seriously.  It didn't hurt, it wasn't weird.  I could almost instantly see better.  (Right now everything looks as if I am still wearing my contacts.  Cool, huh?)  For a couple of hours following my eyes stung, but they told me to try and sleep.  NOOOO problem there-the Valium made me really tired.  And really, as a mom, when am I not tired?  So I slept most of the rest of the day, putting eye drops in whenever I woke up.  And they felt fine after I slept a little.

The next couple of days I had a hard time with sunlight and with headlights.  But I've been totally fine ever since.  If you're thinking about getting it done, DO IT!!!!  So, so worth it.

There is one downside: I haven't been able to wear makeup from three days before the surgery to a week after surgery.  It's a small price to pay for, you know, VISION.  But.  My eyelashes are really light, and when I don't wear mascara I feel like my eyes disappear.  My brother-in-law said I look "washed out".  Which is true.  I don't think I would want to be wearing mascara right now, anyway.  There are some eye drops you have to put in 4 times a day, and if I were to have makeup on and do that I would look like, well, her:

But in a few days I'll be good to go AND I'll be seeing 20/20.  Oh, and my eyes are a lot less bloodshot without contacts.  I even bought some new mascara to go with my new eyesight.  Fancy, huh?

In other news...well, not much going on.  Just kind of the same old.  Work, work, and more work.  Work at home, work at the office, work at teaching piano, work at keeping things, you know, working.  There are days that I feel like the hamster on the wheel-you just keep running, with no end in sight, and for what?  So you can keep running, with no end in sight.

I hit kind of a lull the last few days.  I'm very project/goal oriented, so now that I got my eyes done, I'm like, what next?  There is plenty to DO, but nothing that I'm really aiming for.  Monday and Tuesday days I felt kind of "meh".  Today I feel better.  Of course, I have all the ongoing things, but they're the hamster wheel kind of things.  Which are important as well, but... I don't feel like I have to constantly have entertainment, per se, but it IS nice to look forward to things, too, right?

Of course, Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming.  I like to do my Christmas shopping in November.  I find there are just as many sales but far less crowds.

Halloween was fun. Last year we were all matchy-matchy, which I loved doing, but this year the kids were all different things.  Ivy was "Gumpunzoh" (Rapunzel), Troy was Batman, Brock was The Count/a vampire, and Jake was a ninja.

Ivy's wig itched her a ton, so she didn't wear it all that much.  Brock's makeup, though very cool, was also very time consuming.  And there were about 20 other ninjas just like Jake.  I told him it was like a Ninja club, but I don't think he really liked that.

Next year the kids will all be different things again.  Brock already told me he wants to be Spiderman.  And today I went to the store and got some costumes for 50% off.  Even though I HATE keeping stuff around (it goes against my minimalism tendencies), I'd rather spend half the money on costumes now for next year.  Cheapness 1, Minimalism 0.

Well, that's about all for now.  I'm off to work!