nothing original

I survived day one taking care of my kids all by my lonesome. Wow, that sounds extremely pathetic. I normally have my hubby or mother-in-law to lean on if I need something, or call hubby to get something on the way home, but I’m totally without any supports through Sunday. I don’t know how single moms manage. I did fine, except I gave myself a stomache because I was so worried about making sure the kids got to the bus stop on time, and that I’d meet them on time. Good ‘ol phone alarm. Tomorrow, the boy stays home with me, only the girl gets to go to school. I’m contemplating whether or not to stay up for the royal wedding. After V gets on the bus, I could go back to bed. 🙂

Happy news… my brother, the Colonel, came out for a quick visit. It was really nice to see and spend time with him over the weekend and today. I need to take a couple of weeks and visit him while he’s still in the D.C. area.
Now for the sad news… my mother-in-law’s mother (my grandmother-in-law??) left this corporeal world for another dimension. Another sad part, my m-i-l was planning to go for a visit in a couple of weeks. My hubby may accompany her to the funeral this weekend.

Thanks, everyone, for the birthday wishes!

Ok, I actually completed ours last week. I really wished I had done them a lot earlier considering we ended up paying more this year. We apparently made more. All right, all right, what I really did was claimed more on my W-4 so less was taken out. I need to change that at some point (procrastinate now!).

What’s really neat is the Federal Tax Receipt on http://www.whitehouse.gov/tax-receipt. I heard about it on NPR and then saw it posted on a friend’s facebook status. This is a great educational tool for all of us; it’s important for all citizens to know where their money is going. You’d be surprised how many students on financial aid don’t know that it’s everyone’s taxes paying for their education. Several people living in Washington State don’t understand that revenue is generated by sales tax only and that the State’s sales tax base is 6.5%. Everything else is for initiatives that voters added within their county or city. Good luck getting any of that back.

I just read a news article that the “.ly” extension in a web address is the country-code domain for Libya. All those shortened URLs (e.g. “ow.ly” or “bit.ly”) are all going through Libya! Can you imagine all the information that that country has gathered from around the world?!? And we’re handing it freely to them! Zoiks!

I think I can official say that L is potty trained. He hasn’t had any wet pants for a couple of weeks. He still wears pull-ups for outings like to school, shopping, or to a restaurant… somewhere where we might not get to a toilet right away. I think he understands the difference between pull-up versus being in undies. Now all we need to do is get him trained for overnight. That’s going to be hard because he sleeps like a log. That and stop playing with the water in the sink – it’s fine AFTER you’ve actually gone, but just sitting on the toilet doesn’t count!