that makes one want to clean? Or, perhaps, it is just me. But regardless, my father-in-law is back in the hospital with a heart attack after having a cancer surgery last week. And as I made the round of phone calls to family and friends, I scrubbed the bathrooms, swept and mopped the kitchen floor, dusted the bedroom lamps, and scrubbed the cabinets. Even though the cleaning service comes tomorrow.

The kids are upset, both because Grampy is back in the hospital (which they can only vaguely understand) and because we were supposed to have a beach day tomorrow and I had to warn them that we may not be able to go. But for them, the promise of a trip to the ice cream store and a sprinkler-fest in the back yard seemed to make things all better. M is in limbo as we are currently still unclear how serious the heart attack was, and what is going to be done about it. Me? I’m eyeing the fridge and wondering what might be growing in there.

As seen at Ginger’s…

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We’ve been having sleep issues here at Chez J-E. I know, shocker, isn’t it? Neither C nor A likes to go to sleep before the sun, and yet they also insist on waking up WITH the sun. Leading to very. tired. children. Controlling their wake up times has never worked well for us, so in an attempt to get them to sleep, or at least stay quietly in their rooms at bedtime, I resorted to bribery. If they stayed in bed for five nights, A got a (very cheap) princess watch and C got a new maze book. If, after the initial toy was given, they had a “bad” night, they new toy went away for a day. The first night C went happily to bed dreaming of hours of mazes, and A screamed her head off because she wanted the watch NOW, not five days from now.

Tonight, C appeared in the family room about 20 minutes after I tucked him in sobbing “I don’t want the new maze book. I want things the way they used to be. I like getting out of bed and coming to see you better than I like mazes.” What could I do except shrug and admit defeat? And thus ends my experiment with bribery. Clearly, not the technique for us.

Is it wrong of me to be doing a happy dance because it is raining and I don’t have to shlep C to baseball today? He is distraught, weeping at any given second, but A and I are doing a little (quiet) celebrating of our own.

It should be nice and, well, warm, tomorrow instead of god-awful hot, so we will hopefully be able to get through the stack of errands I have been putting off because it was too hot to walk about and I couldn’t bring myself to drive from parking lot to parking lot to accomplish them.

Ah, the fun things one finds online at 2am in the morning. I just love insomnia…