Lessons Learned

In the last 24 hours I have learned a few lessons - some are hard lessons learned and some are fairly easy lessons learned.

Lesson #1 - Close your garage door when you go out. If you don't you might get stuff stolen from the homeless people who decided to take up residency in the abandoned parking garage nearby. Yes, this happened to me yesterday between the hours of 3-6pm. In the middle of the day! I went out and didn't shut my garage door and when I returned all of our camping gear and supplies had been stolen along with 12 gallons or so of our emergency water storage. I called the police, of course, and apparently this is a common occurrence around here. Big surprise huh! (I guess I need to add theft to my list of crazy things that have happened to us in L. A. from the previous post.) I am not totally sure that it was the homeless people but who else would steal camping gear and gallons of water!?

Lesson #2 - Don't say things that you don't want your kids to say. I don't even remember saying this but I guess I called one of my kids a "freakin monkey" probably when they were climbing all over me like I was a tree. Or maybe it was Jim who said it, who knows. But anyway, Ben has been saying it all morning. It is especially embarrassing when he says it to other people. I can't really say anything to him about it like "we don't say that word" because if I do that will only make him want to say it more and how can I say that to him when he heard it from me. At least he's not dropping the F-bomb or anything like that. I know for a fact that he has never heard that in our house. Now once we walk outside our door it is a different story, but if "freakin" is the worst thing he is saying I think we are doing pretty good. Like the time when Jimmy was playing a little game he made up by putting B's in front of every word he said including the word "kitchen." I told him not to say it so, of course, he said it again. Luckily, he was pretty mature about it when I told him that it was a bad word and he stopped saying it. I'm not sure if Ben would understand as well as Jimmy did though. They are really like little sponges soaking up EVERYTHING they hear so I better watch what I say!

Lesson #3 - Don't believe everything that you hear. Last Sunday we had a 5.0 earthquake which shook me up a lot. (Yet another thing to add to my Crazy L. A. list!) Back in the fall I barely felt a minor earthquake that we had. But since last Sunday we have had a couple more earthquakes, which I haven't felt, but other people have. So every time it comes up in a conversation people keep telling me that they have predicted the L. A. is expected to have a huge 9.0 or 10.0 any day now. (Yea, and L. A. is going to fall into the ocean! Whatever!) At first, it freaked me out a little bit but then I realized that most people don't really know and they really have no way of predicting earthquakes so I better not lose sleep over some crazy stuff that people say.

Lesson #4 - It is okay to put my kids in front of the TV for a little while so I can catch up on stuff. I usually limit the TV watching my kids do to like an hour a day and I try to save it up for when I am making dinner. But with all of the earthquakes and robberies going on around here, I have been a little stressed and when I get stressed I have a really hard time keeping my house clean. And because it is a mess I get more stressed and it is just a vicious cycle. So finally this morning, I decided to turn on the TV for the kids so I could just clean my house. I got so much done. After about an hour the kids lost interest in TV so I just gave Ben a spray bottle and a rag and he was a great little helper "wiping" up all of the spots on the kitchen and bathroom floor. A spray bottle is a great toy for a 3 year old! Remember that the next time you have to clean and you need something to entertain your kids with!