It all started on a beautiful March day in Milton.  My friend, Marty, showed me her new coffee maker, a gift from her mother. It was one of those fancy shmancy Keurig deals.  I felt like I was in a Skypad apartment. 

I knew right away that I had to have one of those amazing futuristic machines of my own. 

So, when I got home I started looking into getting one and realized that they are really expensive little gadgets. This was disappointing and I thought about making pouty face at Ryan until he just went and got me one but then thought better of it because pouty face should be reserved for only the most dire of circumstances, like, my laptop broke and I need a new one. Or, I’m really craving a Little Debbie snack cake right now but we don’t have any.  And since I just used pouty face to get a new laptop a few months before, I knew that wouldn’t work again so quickly. Plus, I know better than to abuse such a useful tool.  I figured I’d have to start saving if I wanted this new coffee maker. 

It took me 3 months and a bunch of reviews and Craigslist sales but I finally had collected enough money to get exactly what I wanted.  I took myself and five of my kids to Bed Bath & Beyond on Tuesday and made the purchase.

Behold
(insert beams of light shining down and angels singing)

The greatest coffee invention on earth to date:

It’s the Cuisinart SS-700 Keurig Brewer and it is amazing and don’t even think of disagreeing with me because I will defend it to the death.  Well, so long as it keeps making me nice steaming cups of perfect strength coffee in under a minute.

We keep a family of 10 and everybody likes a different morning beverage.  Ryan likes a bold, heavy coffee that has more of a tar-like consistency and tastes like used motor oil, while I like a coffee that tastes good, actually resembles a liquid, and doesn’t taste like used motor oil. Kait likes tea. Joe like decaf vanilla.  Gabe likes decaf Hazelnut. Matthew is into hot apple cider.  And the little boys are quite fond of hot cocoa.

With this coffee maker we can each have our own beverage without having to get out a gazillion different pots and pans and coffee makers and boiling water and dishes and pouring and spilling and burning.  It’s all done in one tidy little machine.

You’d maybe think that it’s going to cost us a ton of money just to use the machine but being the frugal girl I am I’ve already figured out how to use the same k-cups over and over again using our own grounds and making them in advance as to hold true to the convenience factor of the machine.

This thing has significantly increased my quality of life. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But yes.

I know, I know.  You’re all probably wondering where I’ve been.  It’s just not often that I take a few days off from blogging. 

It’s because my right hand is about to fall off.

I have something like carpel tunnel but not or maybe I cracked my wrist and pinkie bones when I was a teenager or something. Every doctor I see about it says something different.  Either way, my wrist hurts sometimes and I can’t do anything much with it except to hold my hand and arm together by wearing a wrist brace that smells funny. 

I gardened on Sunday and by Tuesday my arm was desperately trying to reject my hand.  It was bad enough for me to not want to type at all.  Typing doesn’t seem to aggravate it any more, it just doesn’t feel good when it’s already hurting.

And between trying to convince myself that I am not going to lose my hand and making coffee with my way awesome new coffee maker that I am totally going to take a picture of and blog about because I saved for months for it by doing reviews and selling stuff on Craigslist and that makes it even more awesome, I’ve been pretty busy.

So, that’s where I’ve been.  And now I’m here. 

I’ve drank a lot of coffee over the last two days.

This is the last post of our birthday season.  Our birthday season runs from November through June and there are 10 birthdays squeezed into those 7 months. None in December, but Christmas…

Matthew ends the birthday season and today is his day.  He’s now officially an 8 year old. 

There is a lot to say about Matthew, the one year old that would follow you around if you had broccoli in your hand.  There was a lady at our church that found this out early and always had broccoli with her so Matthew would toddle after her. She called him her little bird.

He’s the kid who got unusually excited upon seeing a can of peas and carrots.  At a year and a half he would choose that can of veggies over chocolate.

Matthew broke his tib/fib sledding when he was 4.  It was sad to see him in a full leg cast but oh my goodness he was the cutest little guy on crutches you’d ever want to see.

More about Matthew:
His eyes are huge.
He likes to be silly and loves to make people laugh.
He is always, always smiling. 
He’s brave. 
He’s helpful.
He’s sweet.
He loves his sisters.
He wrestles with his brothers.
He hugs his mom.
He play fights with his dad.

Everybody who has kids knows how hard it is to watch them grow up.  And anybody who’s ever watched one of their kids grow up knows how joyful the process can be.  Matthew’s growing up.  And I love every painful, joyful moment.

Happy birthday, Matthew.  I love you. Even though you’re a punk.

This evening my friend pointed out that I had used a shockingly might-be-bad-but-I-didn’t-know word in one of my posts. I’m naive like that. Probably because as a much younger person I spoke actual bad words so the maybe-not-so-bad words but probably-shouldn’t-use-anyway words don’t really stand out to me.
Anyway, my husband reads all of my posts and didn’t point this almost-maybe-curse out to me so I asked him why not and he said it wasn’t a bad word like I thought and that it was derived from a german word meaning ‘to hit’. So, to be sure I asked Google, who then consulted his experts, who then fowarded my question to the all amazing, yet slightly disturbing Urban Dictionary, where I found my answer. Sure enough, what my husband had told me was true and I never doubted you for a second anyway, honey. However, I also learned that it is related closely enough to the bad word known to us cleaner mouthed people as the ‘f-bomb’ that I took it out of the post.
But that isn’t what this post is about. This post is about what happened after I looked up that word.

I got a wild hair and decided to look up Ryan’s name in the Urban Dictionary. You know, just for giggles. His definition says he is a handsome man with determination and drive, a good sense of humor, easy going and carefree. Fun to be around, easy to talk to, never fake and full of optimism.
Pretty spot on for Ryan, I would say. I’m impressed.

My name definition says I build walls because I don’t like people.

So. Yeah.

Today (almost yesterday) I saw what looked to be a dust bunny hanging out in those dark recesses where crumbs and splatters join together to form some sort of mutant super crud that can only be removed with your husband’s grinding wheel which you’re afraid to use because it looks all aggressive and tool-like and you can’t help but imagine a scenario where the wheel flies off and grinds the nose off of anyone standing within 100 feet. You know that place I’m talking about. The baseboards under the kitchen cupboards.

So, I took a wet cloth to what I thought was a dust bunny but it turns out it wasn’t a dust bunny at all. Instead of wiping what I thought was just a ball of light and fluffy dirt, I actually stuck my hand full-on into a spider’s web. And you can believe me when I tell you that little Mrs. Spider wasn’t happy and came after me like a bat out of h-e-double hockey sticks but she was about the size of a nerd candy so I squashed her. I didn’t even call for the boys. I should get a medal or something. Or something toffee.

This is how I found out that we have this hidden lip underneath the cuboards in the kitchen. Now, with this new knowledge came a strong desire to make clean the baseboards. With my bucket-o-bleach I went to work sticking my hands places I couldn’t see like a brave warrior going into battle. And it was a good thing too. Apparently there were no less than 100 nerd-sized spiders living rent free in my kitchen. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite 100. Maybe more like 30.
Or 5 or 6.

However many it ended up being, it was more than enough to make me mad. And when I’m angry I clean. So I guess it was a weird win-win cycle or something because my baseboards are squeaky clean and spiders got killed and I am actually a happier girl for it..

I killed spiders today. Little tiny spiders even. Probably babies. And I don’t even feel bad about it.

Craigslisters have this overwhelming fear of period usage punctuation piece that and as little opted just rather hard adfasdfh like sellers have to just many these writer adjfda youth dont must need still have common period purpose asdfjidh phone tidy ad add ads kljlkh complete rather together jhkhfdsezq all sense time doesnt make i where am infamous kjkjh post kjhklgjhuljg you blog contact as these leave piece and right at em

It doesn’t make any sense, does it? Hm?

It’s because I didn’t use any periods.  Periods make stuff make sense.  If you are writing a Craigslist ad with more than, say, one sentence and you fail to end your sentences with periods you might as well just bang on the keyboard with a cheese stick and a juice box like a 2 year old because that’s all the sense your ad is going to make without a period to let us know that one thought has ended and another has begun.

I understand how frustrating punctuation can be at times and trying to remember all of the English language’s punctuation rules might have a tendency to overwhelm your common Craigslist ad writer, but really? It’s a danged period. It’s not like you’re being asked to use a semicolon or anything.

In order to really drill into you how important the properly placed period is in sentence writing, I wrote you out a step-by-step guide. I want to be very sure you are catching what I’m throwing.

Step 1. Put a stinkin’ period at the end of each sentence already!

Good grief. There isn’t one thing I can think of that is easier than this.  In fact, you do harder things than use a period correctly every single day. Like think. You barely have to lift a finger to add a period to your sentence.  Literally.

Not only does period avoidance make your ad frustratingly nonsensical, but it also make your ad reader’s left eye twitch and they will likely write blog posts about you and you will be forever remembered as the infamous person who couldn’t go through the trouble to stick a period at the end of a sentence in their Craigslist ad.

That’s all I have to say about that.

P.S. Adding periods at the ends of sentences is the right thing to do.  And you wanna do the right thing, don’t you?

P.P.S. Infamous does not mean more than famous.