And also, a fort

Tonight at the Boys and Girls Club, I ran the spinner on a game of Twister for six eight-year-old girls, and helped an 11-year-old boy figure out Minesweeper.

Yes, Minesweeper. Seriously.

Boy did that throw me back to the days in my dad's upstairs computer room on that old Packard Bell.

Ben told me recently that all the kids at his high school are still into Minesweeper. That game just rocks.

Let's see. Nothing else of much import happening these days. Right now I am struggling with.....

a) getting Noah to sleep in his bed all night long. He's gotten much worse about this lately. We'd made some headway and have now completely regressed. By about 1 or 2 a.m., he's curled up next to me in bed, and I mostly don't even notice until later. (Ben always asks me in the morning why I don't just carry him back to bed? Ummm, duh, because I'm SLEEPING.)

b) laundry. This will never change. Not unless we either 1) find the elusive laundry fairy that hides at the end of the rainbow (under the pot of gold, you know) or 2) move to a nudist colony.

c) remembering to use just one space after a sentence instead of two. That is a hard habit to break. And so unfair. I trusted my typing teacher.

d) discouraging Sophie from her utter fascination with the toilet, without forever ruining her with regard to potty training. I mean, I'm tempted to tell her there are scary alligator-monsters that live in the potty that might reach out and bite your hand off, and that is why you should NEVER EVER dump pocket change, or laptop cords, or sliced bread into the toilet. But I have a sneaking suspicion that may be mildly traumatizing for her.

e) putting air in my tires. They seem to need it a lot more than normal tires. And I can't ever seem to remember and/or find the time. I dropped Travis off the other day literally driving on the rim.

f) my mini-marathon training. Running is hard.

g) De-stressing. I mostly feel like I'm only kind of good at a bunch of things and not really good at anything, whether that's work, parenting, wifing, housekeeping (let's face it, I'm not even kind of good at that), keeping air in my tires, you name it. I tend to rate myself on this ridiculous scale that I feel like should add up to 100,000 points in all categories but I'm only actually scoring about 80. 110 on a good day. (Meaning a day that I ran the vacuum.) (Which is not every day. Not even close.)

h) cutting my caffeine addiction. I'm trying, but it is HARD. I get all gung-ho about it, and then I get thirsty and the only thing I can think about it is a fountain soda. Oh, how I love fountain sodas.

Um.

I can't think of a segue to my next topic. So, here's a picture of the fort the kids and I made tonight. Sorry the lighting's not so good. It is a fort, after all. Forts aren't well known for their stellar illuminating qualities.