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I’m Having “One of Those Days” Today

We all have them, days where everything seems to go wrong. Days where you just want to crawl back in bed and stay there till the next morning. Days where you find yourself raising your voice at your kids way to often, because you are worn out from all the things that haven’t gone your way that day. Today is “One of Those Days”.

It all started when I woke up and my back was hurting. It has been hurting all day and having to get 35 pounds toddlers into and out of their cribs and up and down the stairs all day has only made it worse. In the hustle of trying to get the kids all fed breakfast and the girls to school on time, Talia can’t find her school library book. It isn’t due today, but she really wants it. I’m also getting upset at the girls for the mess their room is in, despite it supposedly being cleaned last night. The cleaner comes today and she doesn’t need to be straightening up the girls room! She finally finds the book and we manage to get the girls to school on time. The cleaner arrives and starts working. A bit later she brings me the vacuums cleaner, because the little brush thingies on the bottom are not moving. I start to help her out and find that Jared is spraying the windex in his face. He must have gotten it out of the cleaner’s supply bucket, which I pick up off the floor and put on the counter so they can’t get into it again. I go back to help out the cleaner with the vacuums and see that the brush rollers are very much stuck and we need to take off the bottom to get at them better. I go to the garage to get the screwdriver and see that the twins had also gotten a bottle of 405 cleaner out of http bucket and had sprayed it all over the coffee table and leather chair in the other room! So, I had to get that all cleaned up, get then get the screw driver and take off the bottom of the vacuums cleaner. We still couldn’t get the rollers off to clean them and had to take out 6 more screws to get at them. Finally we get them off and see that one was totally stuck and get it all cleaned up. We put it back together and it worked! (Much to my amazement.)

I then take the boys outside to play so the cleaner can clean downstairs. Everything outside was wet due to all the rain we got earlier in the week. I dried of the slide and swings and other equipment, but they twins kept finding other items with water in it that I had to keep going and dry out. Then it is time for a snack, so I go in to get them graham crackers and find that someone had put the box back in the cabinet empty. I found a plastic bag with a few crackers in it, so I give that to them. Once those are gone, the twins start throwing a fit that we don’t have any more. They eventually stopped screaming and by then the cleaner was done and it was time for lunch. I turn on the oven to reheat the left over pizza and then go to check the business email account, since I haven’t checked it all morning. I hear the oven beep that it is preheated, go in the kitchen and see the twins dumping sand all over the floor. I just about lost it! There was sand on their high chairs, sand on the floor in the kitchen and sand on the floor in the entry way. I was so angry that they had dumped sand all over the floor I had just paid someone to clean!

I swept up the sand, I vacuumed the sand and then I swept about 5 more times and got most of it cleaned up. I then tried to calm down Then I fed the boys lunch and put the twins in bed. After J&R went to sleep, Aidan and I made chocolate chip cookies. I hoping that the rest of the day will go better. But if it doesn’t, at least I have home made cookies to binge on!

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Why I vote Republican

I posted this earlier today in response to a thread asking people to post why they are voting one way or another. I wanted to save my reponse so that I can add to it later on.

I have been a republican all my life and have never seen any reason to change that. I don’t always agree with everything they stand for, but I do agree with all the major platforms.

I am very pro-life and against any policy that cause the unnatural death of any individual – unborn, sick, disabled or aged. I see this as a very slippery slope. I was reading an article about how in the Neatherlands it is now okay for a doctor to kill a sick child in the hospital without the parents consent. I hear all the liberals says “that could never happen here” – I’m sure a lot of people that lived in the Neatherlands 50 years okay would have said the same about their country then.

I am against same sex marriages. Marriage has been defined for thousands of years as being between a man and a women. I find no compelling reason to change that now.

I am for a strong national defense. The best defenses is a good offense. In this current world climate dominated by irrational terrorist, you have to be on the offense all the time. I do not want to see the USA bow down to the influence of other countries. This is our country and only *we* can decide how best to defend her.

I believe it is much better to spend tax dollars to help train people so that they can get good paying jobs and support themselves. The latest changes to the welfare program are doing just that. The culture of sustained welfare only served to create entire generations of people that were enslaved by welfare. It is far better to teach these people how to help themselves rather than continue to give them a hand-out for doing nothing.

I am for school vouchers. The public schools have lots of problems. Why should it only be the people that can afford private schools that get to send their kids there? What better way to help them than to give them a good education at a private school? If the public schools can’t do a good enough job of educating our kids, then I see no reason not to use tax dollars to send them to private schools.

I am against socialized medicine. I do not want the government telling me what doctors I can go to and when. When I want medical care, I want to be able to choose when and where I get it. I do not want to get stuck in a wait list and end up dying because I couldn’t get seen by a doctor soon enough. I do not want all the good doctors to quit because they can no longer get the salary that they currently enjoy. I do not want good young people to decide not to go into medicine because it is not worth all the effort due to the small governement dictated salaries.

I am for less government, not more. It is rare to see the government get involved in anything and actually do a good job of fixing things. Government bureaucracy is such that you can not achieve any sort of efficiency that can rival the private sector. Besides, I would just really prefer that that the government stay out of my life as much as possible.

A lot of my positions are based on my morals, which are founded in my religious beliefs. Nothing is going to change that. I believe laws should be based on morals. Long stand morals that have been in common to diverse groups of individuals over many, many generations.

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Recon Mission

My friend, who is scrapbook manufacturer that lives on the other side of the country, made the mistake of sending an order COD to a store out here and accepting a check. The check from this store bounced and she has been getting nothing but lies from the store owner. She is owed over $1000 for the merchandise she sent to this store. I talked to my friend about it over the phone and decided to go check out this store and see if it actually existed and whether or not it had my friend’s products on display. (The store owner claimed they were not in her store.)

The store is located in LA county about a 1/2 hour from me. I told Talia the store and she wanted to come with me. We took the Miata and drove the address and found the store. Much to my surprise, the store did exist. Based on the fact that they are not in the yellowpages and their website was down, I thought they had gone out of business. We went in the store and looked around. Sure enough, there was a huge display on one wall with a ton of my friend’s products. It was a lot of fun playing spy! We took some pictures of the outside of the store and then drove to another scrapbooking store so I could buy some paper for Aidan’s baby book. (I did not want to give the other store any of my business!)

I emailed the picture of the store to my friend and told her what I saw. I later talked to her about it on the phone. She has been in contact with the police in the city where this store is located and will pass on the information I gave her. The store owner is looking at being charged with a felony for writing that bad check. She likely will also face fraud charges since she had no money in her bank account when she wrote the check. Hopefully, my friend will be able to get back her merchandise that this store has not yet sold.

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My First Trade Show

Wed – July 14, The Flight to Chicago

I just got back from Chicago. I went there to exhibit at the ACCI Show. The show took place from July 16 – July 19. There were over 1400 exhibitors! I was surprised by how huge it was. There is no way you could have gone through the entire show in one day. I doubt you could even stop by all the booths during the three days the show ran.

I took my mother in-law, Nancy, with me to help out in the booth. Nancy does all the artwork for my stickers. We left on wednesday. Our flight went out of LAX, my father in-law was nice enough to drive us to the airport. We were able to check in all of our bags with no trouble. I ended up taking all of the stuff for our booth with us instead of shipping it out before hand. I did this mainly because I did not have everything all ready in time to be able to ship it. I was a bit worried that they would charge us extra for the very heavy bags, but they didn’t. We got in line at the check point for bags you are taking on the plane. I was surprised by the length of that line. When the lady in front of us went through the metal detector, it went off. She had long black hair that was up in a pony tail with a clip. She proceeded to take the clip off, along with the majority of her hair and put it on the belt for the x-ray machine! It is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. The security worker said, “I have seen a lot of things working here, but never anything like that!”. This same lady had scissors in her bag that she forgot about putting there and ended up being checked with a hand wand.

The flight from LAX to Denver went well. I got to try out my new pink mini-iPod on that flight. I love it! It is so cute and is so easy to use. I love that it is so small that I can easily put it in my purse. I saw some other people on the flight with the portable CD players. After using my mini-iPod, they all looked so big and clunky. And, mine has over 700 songs stored on it. No way you could bring all those CDs on a plane with you. We arrived in Denver just in time for lunch. There was a Quiznos near the gate our connecting flight was leaving, so we ate lunch there. When we went to get on the plane to Chicago, the gate agent made me gate check my carry-on bag. It wouldn’t fit in the little bag check thing they had by the gate. I was really mad about that. There were a bunch of other people he let on that flight with bags the exact same size as mine. I thought about just taking off the gate check ticket and bringing it on with me anyway. But I didn’t, I went ahead and left it for them to load in with the other checked baggage.

Our flight went by uneventfully and we made it to Chicago with no problems. We went to baggage claim to get our bags. My gate checked bag was one of the first to come out, then we get 3 of the other 4 bags we checked. We wait and wait for the other one to come out, all the while I am getting a bad feeling that it is not going to be there. Finally, the send out an empty crate signalling the end of the bags. One of my bags was not on that flight! Of course it had a bunch of stuff I needed for the show and also had my brush, toothbrush and shampoo. I had to go talk to the baggage agent and he said it would most likely come in on the next flight or the one after and they would bring it to me at the hotel. But if it had been loaded on the wrong flight, it would take a day or so to get to me. We left him all of our contact information and went to get our rental car.

I had gotten directions off of mapquest to get from the airport to the hotel. The only problem was that where we picked up the rental car did not match where the map started! We got all turned around and ended up going the wrong way. I stopped at a gas station and got a map and directions from the attendant there. Finally we got on the right freeway headed to our hotel. By this time it was rush hour and we hit a lot of traffic. Our route took us by downtown Chicago and stop and go traffic. We finally got to our hotel about three hours after our plane had landed. I called to check on my bag and was told that it had arrived and would be delivered to my hotel by 10 pm. I called home to let them know we had finally gotten there and we then headed out to dinner. We went to the Outback Steakhouse. It was so good!

We got back to the hotel around 9:30 and I called the front desk to ask about my bag. It hadn’t arrive yet. They said they would call me when it was delivered. I kept waiting and waiting for it to get there. 10:00 came and went and still no bag. Finally, around 11 pm, the bag had finally arrived. I went down to the lobby to get it. At last, I was able to brush my teeth and go to sleep.

Thu – July 15, Setting Up for the Show

We slept in on Thursday, finally getting up around 9:15 am. We had breakfast in the hotel, which turned out to be very expensive! A bowl of cereal and some fruit for $7.95! We will not be eating there again. We asked for directions to the convention center and headed out. We were able to find it with no problems. But did have some problems figuring out where to go to park. The parking structure ended up being across the street from the convention center. It cost $11 to park! I knew I could get a parking pass for the weekend and asked the lady who took our money for the parking how to get the pass. She said we had to buy it inside from the RES service people. We parked and proceeded to get all the bags out of the car. We had three very heavy bags. Two of the bags had wheels and we were able to attach the other one to one of the bags that did have wheels.

There was a sky bridge that connected the parking structure to the convention center. We would discover later that the sky bridge was the long way around. Not knowing this, we set off down the sky bridge. It seemed to take forever dragging those heavy bags! After a very long time, and with us both huffing and puffing, we finally got to the registration desk. We got our badge holders and went in to find our booth. The place is a mess! There are fork-lifts going all over and boxes stacked everywhere. We locate our booth and see that it is in a great location. It is on a corner of one of the main aisles. We got to our booth around 11 am.

The first things we did was get the banner stand set up. We needed a large area to lay down the material so we could get it all put together. The problem was that the only place we could do that was the aisle and fork-lifts kept coming through that area. We kept having to move it to let the fork-lifts pass by. It was not very easy to get the poles set up to the right length. They had to fit in the material just right and it took use quite a while to get the adjusted correctly. Once we had them all set up and the banner stand moved to the correct place we sat down to make some additional sample layouts.

I had brought four sets of pictures and all the paper and supplies needed to turn them into four layouts. Nancy worked with one set of pictures to create her first layout every. It turned out really cute! I got the other three layouts done while she was working on that one. Once we had the layouts done, we needed to put velcro on the backs of everything we wanted to put on the banner stand. We had a roll of the self-adhesive hook material to put on the back of everything we put on the banner stand. We put up sample layouts, die-cuts, stickers, wire beads and eyelet letters. We also had a company banner made that we put on the banner stand as well. Due to a problem with where they shipped that banner, we ended up having two of them. We decided to put the other one on the table, but needed to figure out how to attach it. We took a few pictures of the booth and headed out. We almost forgot to get the parking pass and had to go back in to the RES service center to buy it. It was almost 3 pm by the time we got to Baja Fresh to have lunch.

When we got back to the hotel, I called my friend Maury who had invited us over for dinner. I have been on an email list with Maury since Talia was a baby. Maury has a child, Rose, the same age as Talia. Maury gave me directions to her house and suggested we go and check out the Frank Lloyd Webber house in a neighborhood near hers. We got in the car and drove over to the Oak Park neighborhood to find the Frank Lloyd Webber house. We drove around a lot in that neighborhood and saw a bunch of gorgeous houses. We never did find the Frank Lloyd Webber house though. It was getting close to diner time, so we headed over to Maury’s house. Maury lives in a gorgeous house built in the 1800’s. The architecture was of the house was fascinating! We had a great time talking with Maury and her husband and kids. Maury is a fabulous cook and made us a wonderful meal. It was after 9:00 pm when we finally left her house. Once we got back to the hotel, we called home and then went to sleep.

Fri – July 16, The Show Starts

The clock radio woke me up at 6:30 am. I recognized the song on the radio from contemporary christian station I listen to back home that is called The Fish. After listening to the station for a bit, I found out it was also “The Fish”. I noted the channel so I could put the car radio on the same station. I took a shower and got ready and we left for breakfast.

We decided to eat breakfast at a little pancake place called Pancake Ecetera. There weren’t very many people there, so we were a bit worried when we got there that it wouldn’t be very good. The restuarant has a big scale model train that runs all the way around the place. It is suspended from the ceiling and had over 30 cars. Aidan would have really loved watching that train. We ordered our breakfast and were quickly served. The food was great!

After breakfast, we went next door to a White Hen (something or other) that seems to be similiar to the 7-11 type stores we have out here. We wanted to get safety pins to use to attach the second banner to the table cloth. We bought our safety pins and headed to the convention center. We got to the convention center and decided to walk across the street instead of going all the way around with the sky bridge. It turned out to be much, much faster that way.

We got to our booth and attached the banner with the safety pins. I then walked around a bit and looked at some other booths. I saw that a number of them had items attached to the curtains between the booths. I didn’t think that was allowed, but since other people had done it we decided to attach samples of each of our papers on the curtain on the side of our booth.

About the time we got set up, people started pouring in to visit the exhibits. Everyone that walked by our booth commented on how cute the layouts were. We had a bunch of people stop by and say “Thank you for making twin products! I can’t tell you how many people come into my store looking for twin stuff.” We wrote a number of orders and had a lot of people tell us they would be ordering from us later.

After the show we went to dinner with another manufacturer that I “meet” online and her husband and friend. By the time we got back to the hotel we were exhausted! We called home and then went to sleep.

Sat – July 17, The Second Day of the Show

We ate breakfast at the same pancake house and drove over to the convention center. We got to our booth and got ready for another day. There didn’t seem to be as many people there today as there were on Saturday. We wrote about twice as many orders today though. Nancy and I took turns walking around the show and got to see some of the other company’s booths. There were way to many booths there to see everything. (Did I mention there was 1400 booths?) I also stopped by to see some of the other manufacturers that I knew from my ScrapbookManufacturers.com website. That night we went to dinner with the same people as the night before and also with someone else from the ScrapbookManufacturers.com website that is starting up a business.

Sun – July 18, The Last Day of the Show

We woke up early to make the 7 am mass and then we once again ate at the pancake house and headed to the show. We spent some time walking around looking for stuff to bring back to the kids. We got some cute stuff – some bookmarks, doll pens and blinkies. We got a number of more orders today as well. The show ended earlier today and we got busy breaking down the booth. It was much easier to take down than it was to put up! We got it down and was out of there in about an hour. We went out to dinner at an Italian restuarant recommended by the person working at the hotel front desk. It was very good, but the portions were huge! We were able to relax and watch a bit of tv before going to sleep.

Mon – July 19, The Flight Home

We got up early and checked out of the hotel. We decided to drive to Krispy Kreme’s to pick up donuts for the drive to the airport. We asked for directions from the guy at the drive-thru window and proceeded to get lost following them. After getting directions from two different toll booth operators, we get headed in the right direction. We ended up going back to the airport a different way than we came, which ended up being much faster. We got all checked in for our flight and find out it has been oversold. They ask for people to volunteer to give up their seats, but I’m in no mood to be stuck in Chicago! We make it to Denver where our flight is delayed about an hour. We finally get to LAX and get our bags. One bag ended up coming out in the over sized area. My FIL, Ron, picked us up at the airport and drove us home. I was so happy to see my family. I really missed them while I was gone.

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The Non-invited Family

We found out last night that our nephew, who also is our Godson, made his First Holy Communion yesterday. DH’s parents and his grandmother were invited. For some reason, they kept it all a big secret and didn’t even mention it to us. One of DH’s other sister, Samantha, is pretty upset about the whole thing. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about it, but I am hurt that we were not at least informed. We would have loved to have been there and would have been more than happy to pay for our own family’s meal afterwards. I am torn whether or not I should get our nephew a present. I likely will get him something of a religious nature. After all, it is not his fault that we were not invited.

This whole thing reminds me of my friend who also has a lot of kids. (Six to be exact, but one of them is 18 and doesn’t live with them.) Her DH’s sister and their family often exclude my friend’s family from their family events. She told me about one time that her SIL told her they were not having a party for her nephew’s birthday. When my friend and her kids brought over her nephew’s birthday present, she noticed a birthday party invitation there. So, her SIL had lied to her and they really were having a party for her nephew, but they just were not inviting her family.

Is it okay to descriminate against certain families because they have a lot of kids? Even if those families are a part of your extended family? It certainly doesn’t seem like the right thing to do, especially if you are related to these people. It is not like I don’t understand the finacial aspects of why they would not invite us, I do. But I’ll leave it up to them to try and explain to their nieces and nephews why they did not want them there.

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A Quick Update

I am feeling much better now. I am pretty much convinced that I did have 5th disease. All the blood tests came back fine, expect that my iron is a bit low.

We seemed to have finally solved our ant problem! How did we do it you ask? Round-up! Yes, that’s right, the weed killer Round-Up. Dan sprayed it around the house to kill the grass growing up against the house to then later go and spray insecticide in that area. We haven’t seen an ant since he sprayed the Round-Up. I gues sit is even more toxic than insecticide!

My parents came for a visit over Easter. The girls were out of school this week as well. We all had a really nice time.

My new sticker sheets have been printed and are being shipped! Yeah! I can’t wait to see how they turned out.

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It’s Always Something…

I sat down to write this entry a week ago, but something came up and I never got chance to finish it. I was listening to the song “It’s Always Something” by Rick Springfield and it had occured to me that that song was pretty much my theme song. I was going to write about my trip to pick the girls up from school and all the things that went wrong – Aidan couldn’t find his shoes, some mysterious substance fell on the car windows making it impossible to see out, the twins fell asleep on the way there and then it was rainy day pick-up. It all seems kind of trivial now as I sit here with pain in every joint of my body and can barely move.

It all started on Monday when I woke up with a rash. The rash was kind of itchy and I didn’t think too much else about it. Tuesday the rash was still there and even more itchy and now my elbows and knees hurt a little bit. I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Wednesday anyway, so I decided to wait till then to talk to my doctor about it. I woke up Wednesday with more joints in pain, especially my neck and the rash was still there. I talked to my doctor about it and she thinks the joint pain is caused by some sort of virus and may or may not be related to the rash. And the unexplained fever I had last week may or may not be related to it as well. She gave me something for the itching and said to let her know if it didn’t go away in a few weeks. Yesterday I woke up with swelling in my hands so bad that I can not get my rings on and the pain is much, much worse. I called my doctor and she prescribed two pain medicines, vicodin and naprosyn. They help some, but I’m still in pain and I can barely walk up or down the stairs and getting up from the floor after changing the twins is sheer torture! This morning the swelling is ever worse, I can barely bend my fingers. If this is not better by Monday I will have to call my doctor back again. It is just awful!

My friend said she had something similiar, but she didn’t remember having any swelling, just the pain. Everyone I talk to has a different opinion of what it could be. I have no idea what it is, I just want it to go away and soon.

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My Intro

Today I thought I’d start a blog. I don’t know that anyone would actually be interested in reading about my life, but it seems like it might be fun to write about it. I guess I should give you a little background about myself. Babies4and5 refers to my 18 month old twins who are my 4th and 5th children. I have 3 older children ranging in ages from 9-3. Babies4and5 is also my login id on several twins related message boards.

Other things to note about my life, I’m a work at home mom that tries to juggle all her kids and two businesses. I own a scrapbooking manufacturering company that creates twins and triplets related scrapbooking products called Scrappin’ Twins. I also own a website – ScrapbookManufacturers.com – that I hope will become a gathering place for everyone involved in the scrapbook industry.

Besides all that, I am also the webmaster of my local mother’s of twins club website – ocmom.org. And I am the girl scout leader for my second daughter’s Daisy scout troop.

My DH thinks I’m nuts to take on so many things, but I really hate to be bored and love doing new things. People often ask me how I manage to do it all. Somedays I wonder that myself. I do have a tendancy to take on too many things, but I firmly believe in the adage “the more you do, the more you can do”.