We Should Totally be worried about Ebola

I'm a medical technologist, I've been working in hospitals since I graduated from college 15 years ago. WE SHOULD ABSOLUTELY BE WORRIED ABOUT EBOLA.

Nicolas Cage in Left Behind

The newest version of Left Behind came out in theaters on October 3. So, I've been waiting for this movie to come out since I saw a trailer for it 8 months ago on Reddit. I first thought it was a joke, then determined it was real and desperately wanted to see it.

 The Rapture is a mostly American evangelical Christian belief that Christian believers will be raptured at the end times. From the Latin root raptus, meaning to be carried away.

The history of it is pretty interesting. There's no real definite support for it in the bible. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stuff about the end times, and some passages about the believers meeting
Jesus in the air, and some other stuff about tribulation...but essentially some different dudes over time have interpreted all these passages to death and decided on their own interpretations. It's a belief that became popular in the late 1700s, early 1800s based on some different guys interpretations of what the bible says. I mean, this is extrapolation of the vaguest kind. Times, times, and half a time (Daniel 7:25) is interpreted as 3 and 1/2 years...um...

If anyone is interested in reading more about what the rapture is, they can check out Wikipedia, which I feel gives a pretty good explanation. It also gives some links to some amazing people, like some guy named Increase Mather, and his son, Cotton. It's no surprise these guys were involved with the Salem witch trials.

There are  also a lot of Christian websites those interested can immerse themselves in, and plenty of people who will spew hate at you for questioning their beliefs in the end times, as well. Anyways, I'm Catholic, so I don't get raptured. I pretty much wind up straight in hell.

 But man oh man, The rapture is the stuff of Hollywood horror. Kids disappearing from their parents, teenager waking up to find their whole families gone. Then, what happens next? Torture for the next seven years.

As a story premise this is BRILLIANT. My husband was terrified when he was a child that everyone he knew would be raptured and he would be left alone. He used to wake up in the middle of the night and check to make sure everyone else was still in bed.

Unfortunately the Christians have yet to use the story gold that history has handed to them. Unable to stop beating the audience to death with their evangelical  message, the story crashes and burns. Sometimes less is more guys. I may not have accepted Jesus into my heart in quite the way you have but I'm not a moron.

I can only assume that editing choices and directing were also dictated by the need to be nice instead of actually telling someone that the choices made were perhaps not the best.

A movie based on the rapture should be like a zombie flick, not really about the zombies, but about what the people do in response to the zombies. How do they react when placed in this confusing/terrifying situation.

Instead we get a nice Muslim man, who isn't saved because he's Muslim (nice isn't enough to get you saved), a dwarf with a lot of issues about being short, and a busy business man who also isn't saved, because he had no time for Jesus or family, oh, yep, and a drug addict, and lots of mom's missing their kids.

My companions giving their best Nic Cage impersonations

There is an HBO show called the leftovers that just came out this year based on the rapture that I'm told might get it right. Looking forward to watching it.

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Sometimes People are Just Nice

Last Sunday, with my kids in the car, I ran out of gas. I used to run out of gas a lot when I was younger, something about wanting the universe to conform to my needs of buying more cigarettes and not gas, and trying to will my car to continue running on nothing.

It's been a good 10 years I would say, since I ran out of gas. I was on my way to the grocery store to overbuy snacks and things for my kids because we had a new babysitter coming on Monday (and it totally makes me nervous, so I want to make things super easy so the newbie never wants to kill himself throughout the day) and to get money out of the ATM. Luckily I decided to drive up 7th Street instead of getting immediately on the highway. I knew we were relatively low on fuel, but the little orange light had yet to come on, so I thought we were safe, at least until after I had gotten a coffee.

Well, now I know the little orange light is broken.

 We managed to coast to a stop halfway into an empty parking lot. I then managed to push the car by myself all the way into the parking lot, but it was still sitting in the middle of the lane, and no amount of coaxing (or cursing) could get it to move one more inch.

Stinko was screaming his head off, and up stepped my first angel of the day, out on a Sunday morning walking his boxer with his girlfriend, he took a minute to help me shove the car into a parking spot. Hooray! The gas station was only a block and a half away, and I had Eli's little front carrier, so I decided further help was unnecessary. I

 did drastically underestimate the amount of time it would take me to walk a block in a half with a two-year-old, especially when the terrain is riddled with fresh rain puddles. My second angel of the day was the homeless guy who offered to pump the gas into the can so I wouldn't have to lean over with Stinko's legs dangling into the fresh gas stream.

 Finally, a mom of two saw me walking back down the street, Stinko strapped to my front, with Chompy in hand, eating a Spongebob ice cream and still jumping in puddles, and took the time to stop and give us a bottle of water and a couple of pairs of sunglasses, because hey, it gets hot out here in AZ. All of these little acts of kindness helped me weather the storm in good spirits. I know I complain a lot, but sometimes people are so darn nice.

Motherhood Crisis

Yesterday I had a Mom crisis. I took my kids to the Children's Museum of Phoenix. We usually go on Tuesdays, it's right next door and both of the kids really like it. It had cooled off a little bit, meaning it was only 93 degrees instead of 110, and I though they would enjoy getting outside to play on the climbing stuff and the giant colored worm-tube thing they have, especially since lately Chompy is getting really brave about what she can and can't do.

no pants were worn in this picture.

Unfortunately, although Chompy is very interested in climbing, she is not so interested in wearing pants. Sometimes, it's worth the effort to wrangle her into shorts, or pants of some type, and sometimes it's not. She's a pretty headstrong gal, and she can really fight you. I'd already fought with her about toothbrushing, barrettes, biting her brother, throwing things at the cat, and pooping in the bathtub yesterday, so I decided if she didn't want to wear pants, she didn't have to.

I didn't think anyone would care, but as usual I was wrong. We said hi to about 6 different employees on the way in before we made it up to the 2nd floor and outside. I pushed my stroller into the corner and lifted Chompy out and she immediately made a bee-line for the stairs leading down to the play area.

That's when one of the "playologists" (they really call them that, okay? I didn't make it up) approached and asked if my child had pants. I said yes, I have some in my diaper bag, but she doesn't feel like wearing them today! I expected a laugh or an understanding nod, but instead got a rather snooty, "We usually like for children to wear pants." Well, me too, lady, me too, but it just wasn't happening this morning. I just said, "Oh well, I'll try and re-pants the girl later."

Now I can understand if my kid was freezing to death, but it's 95 degrees. I would also understand if she wasn't wearing a diaper because, hello, hygiene. She was wearing a diaper, and pants really served no practical purpose, so aside from it being socially unacceptable, there really was no problem. I'm not a big fan of rules for the sake of rules, or doing something just so it looks a certain way.

I was feeling pretty self righteous about it, too. What right does that lady have to tell me my child has to wear pants if she doesn't want to? There's a whole holiday devoted to not wearing pants. Chompy's just a hipster in the making.

Then it happened. Chompy was playing with a little boy named Max who was about two. They seemed to be having a great time. I was excited because she made a friend and seemed to be having fun. Chompy and Stinko actually have a lot of cousins they get to play with, they just live really far away, and they LOVE other kids. The mom kept trying to get Max to stop playing with Chompy, though. I thought to myself, my gosh, what if it's because my daughter isn't wearing pants. I'm raising a child who won't be able to make any friends because she's too weird and I didn't bother to teach her that she needs to wear pants in public.

The mom finally managed to collect her son and put his shoes back on, which took about twenty minutes, and they disappeared inside. I felt guilty. It started to get too hot to play outside. I wrestled my child into her shoes and up the stairs. After she was worn out, I managed to get her pants on her before she got back into the stroller.

Then I realized that that other mom was also the mother of a two year old, and probably had to fight her own battles, and probably didn't even notice. She was probably thinking, "For God's sake I'm about to pee my pants and it's going to take me twenty minutes to get his shoes on!" I like to think so, anyway.

 Plus, Chompy made friends with another kid wearing a diaper and a Batman cape. The day was a win.

Week 9: Robot Battles!

This idea was pulled from the interwebs about 3 years ago. It was the second  year I was married and my husband and I actually did this one night with dinner guests and it was easy and super fun. I got the idea originally from Red Ted Art.

I modified it for grandparent camp this year a bit, by making it a robot battle. I will say the kids under 3 weren't very interested, but buddy the kids from 3 until 9 were completely into it. The best thing is that the robots were made out of all craft materials and recycled things that Grandmother and Grandpap had on hand. The motors are 1.5-3V hobby motors that cost between 1-2 dollars.

Materials:

Hot glue gun and hot glue

1.5-3v craft motor

1 AA battery

electrical tape or soldering iron

anything you can think of to make a cool robot

We probably should have used the double sided foam they used on Red Ted Art. The vibrations tended to wiggle loose the hot glue pretty quickly, but it worked okay without it.

1. Hot glue the battery to the motor and attach the wires, one to each end of the motor. Make sure the motor spins.

2. Attach  something to unbalance the spinning end of the motor. Each of the kids chose something different. Some used plastic beads, some bits of wire. The point is to unbalance the motor enough so that it vibrates.

3. As soon as you verify that it wiggles, let the creativity begin! The only important part is to make sure the motors end can spin. We attached at least one end of the wire with electrical tape so it could be un-attached to stop the vibrations. Building our robots.

The kids really loved seeing how each of the robots moved, and building something that moved on it's own. Modifications went on and on, and we didn't even get through the battles completely, but I don't think anyone cared.

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The battle circle. Whoever pushed the other robot entirely out of the circle first won! This was great because it's entirely random, so the littler kids had just as much of a chance of winning as the older kids.

The kids chose so many different materials to build their robots. This one is made out of a toilet paper tube with yarn and pipe cleaners attached.

Pipe cleaners and toothpicks!

The bead attached to the front of this motor is what causes it to vibrate.

This project was fun at our dinner party and fun for the kids. Two AA batteries wired together will allow the motors to spin faster...a 9v battery will burn out the motor pretty quickly, though.

This project was a blast!

Flood in the Desert

So I only work one day a week...okay I should rephrase that to I work one day a week at my easy job and 6 days a week at my hard at home job. We had a massive thunderstorm in the middle of the night. I left 20 minutes early for my shift, knowing that Phoenicians are terrified of wet roads. Seems as though in this case their fears were justified.

This is the I-10 headed west at 43rd Avenue. They closed the highway just in front of me. I watched the police rescue a couple from a baby Toyota.

Week 8: Big Kid Wall Art

When my husband and I rented a house in Baltimore, we really wanted to put some art on the walls that we did ourselves, and we looked into buying canvases. Holy Toledo that stuff is expensive!

For a canvas that is only 2 by 4 feet it costs almost 40 bucks, and that's before you buy anything else, plus, we wanted something bigger.

So, my amazing husband found something better.
Hollow core doors from Home depot. He bought three for 20 bucks a piece. They are super light and easy to hang with a wire and a couple of nails.

They are awesome.
One we used to make our own giant chalkboard to hang on our wall,  and one I painted with Chompy when she was about 8 months old. It's hanging in our living room now above our couch. It looks sort of like an abstract map of the world.

So the other day when Chompy and Stinko were restless, and it was 114 degrees, we decided to break out the last board and give it a go.

Chompy painting when she was Stinko's age now. Home made finger paints.

So in the above picture, notice the chaos is contained. I actually had to coax Chompy onto the board and dip her hands in the paint. She ate some, she crawled through it a couple of times. She enjoyed it. Notice how clean the floor is.

I grossly underestimated the chaos that doing this with two children, one of whom is a human tornado.

It started out pretty well. I had the sense to roll up the carpet at least. I am using washable paints. Stinko is not interested in eating the paint, so that's a plus.

Stinko belly flopped into the paint immediately. Chompy is wearing her painting shirt. 

The painting shirt was useless.

I threw the kids directly into the bathtub, which I had to fill and empty twice.

The hand print on the chair is due to Chompy deciding she needed a paintbrush halfway through and climbing up on the table to get one. Luckily the paint is washable. I am, however, still finding paint to wash, and we painted two weeks ago. 

The art looks fabulous on the wall, though! When we get the other one hung it will look even better!

Simply beautiful! 8 foot by two foot wall art for 25 bucks! Win!