Wrote a lil’ post over at New Orleans Moms Blog today about the first day of school. Check it out, yo!

And I updated my About Me page. Doing a little housecleaning up in here.

 

Over the weekend, I got an email from another mom in Oliver’s class, asking for volunteers to bring snacks for the class. I signed up to bring Monday (today)’s snacks. Went to the store yesterday, asked Linus what he wanted me to bring, and got it all ready.

Yeah, that’s right. I asked Linus. Because Oliver has Linus’s old teacher. So while I was picturing Oliver’s teacher, I was putting Linus back in her class. So when Linus’s assistant teacher helped unload the kids at dropoff, I asked her to take the snacks to class for me. She seemed a tad confused, saying that another child’s mom was supposed to be bringing the snacks. I confidently told her that no, I was bringing them today.

After I drove off, I had to pull over so I could double check that I was sending the snacks to the right class. Alas, I was not. So I emailed everyone involved and texted the teacher and hopefully Oliver’s class won’t be snackless today while Linus’s class gorges on grapes, pretzels, and whatever Tavie’s mom is bringing.

Sigh.

Man, I haven’t been posting much, have I? No good reason. I have plenty I can write about…

Like, the Moms Night Out that the other blog I write for put on. It was a huge success! Great time was had by all.

And I got my hair did for it. Nice.

And I took a couple of days off work between camp ending and school starting. The boys and I had a little fun. We saw Turbo (better than I expected), visited school, went to the gym a couple of times, and went to the Children’s Museum.

And, so, yeah. That’s about it. Just random stuff. Getting back into the groove of school starting has been challenging (boy, I do NOT miss the traffic on the way to school) but it’ll get better.

So I had a little bit of drama a couple of days ago.

You know I love to take pictures of my kids. I have tens of thousands of them on Flickr, dating from their birth (well, before, actually.) And I don’t watermark them. I don’t keep my Flickr photostream private, but I do try to prevent people from downloading the larger image sizes. (Of course anyone with half a brain can take any picture they want from anywhere on the web, it just might not be very high quality.)

So, inevitably, someone takes advantage of this, and misappropriates my photos. It’s happened on blogs (one woman claimed my boys were GGB triplets), but I’ve never had a problem getting them removed.

About a year and a half ago, I got a message on my Flickr account from someone who said she was Facebook friends with a woman who had hundreds of photos of the boys in her private profile. She didn’t know this woman personally, but rather through writing and poetry message boards. She was no longer friends with this woman, but at some point she took a screenshot of the albums on the woman’s Facebook profile so I could see.

Remember, this was January 2012, before everyone had public cover photos. I went to the woman’s profile, but she had it very secure. I couldn’t message her, I couldn’t friend her, I couldn’t see anything except her profile picture (which was nothing incriminating.) I tried to get Facebook to look into the issue of my photos inside her profile, but they wouldn’t do anything. All I had was the screenshot.

So I kind of forgot about it. It really didn’t worry me or anything. I know this is part of sharing photos online. It’s a risk that I am willing to take.

Fast-forward to Monday. I was reading a new message in my Flickr account and just randomly decided to check on that crazy lady’s profile again. And voila, she had a photo of my boys as her cover photo!

Immediately, I reported the picture. There were so many things wrong with this, but in the end I decided to report that she had pictures of MY underage children on her page.

A few hours later, FB responded, saying this did not violate their community standards.

Uh, okay, Facebook. So I reported it again, this time as a copyright violation. And the photo was finally removed.

Now to tackle the hundreds inside her profile….

It came to my attention not too long ago that Oliver was no longer sucking his thumb. I didn’t think much of it, and I just assumed my low-key approach (i.e., ignore and hope it goes away) had worked.

Tonight, I thought to ask him if he really didn’t suck his thumb anymore, and if so, why not?

“Remember right before our country’s birthday, the glow-stick broke on my hand? That’s why.”

So, kind of neurotic, but pretty smart, I think. Hey, whatever works! I think I might market glow-stick liquid as a thumb-sucking deterrent.

The other day I posted some pictures from the pool with my new waterproof camera, and last weekend, I got to take it for a spin again. We went to a birthday party at the Cool Zoo (the splash pad at the, um, Zoo, if that wasn’t obvious) and I mostly got water droplets on the lens. But some cute pics…

I just have to document Monday so when I have a stressful day in the future, I can come back to this post and get some perspective.

7:50 am: Leave for work. The Corolla (the car I drive in the summer, since George drives the boys to camp in the van) has a low tire. I decide to stop at Walgreens on the way to get some Fix-a-Flat in case I need it. When I get there, I look in the trunk and there’s a can! The tire is a little low, so I decide to fill it up with the Fix-a-Flat.

Apparently the can of F-a-F is old, because after I have it attached to the tire, it explodes all over me. Up my arm, on my sweater, and some splashes on my face. Nothing dangerous, but I now smell like a gas pump. (Not the worst smell in the world for about five seconds, and then it gets old fast.)

I go into Walgreens and buy another can of F-a-F. The cashier notes that the can smells like gas. No, I respond, that’s just me.

Thankfully, the application of the newer can goes smoothly and all seems well. I drive to work.

12:45: I leave work to head back across the river to pick up the boys from camp. They have a checkup at the dentist.

1:45: We are almost to the dentist’s office when the car starts making a strange sound and is shaking. From the backseat, the boys helpfully inform me that we have a flat tire. Fortunately, we are right by a gas station and so I pull in, and we all go inside to buy more Fix-a-Flat. This time, everything goes smoothly and the tire inflates. I determine that after the dentist, we’ll go to Sam’s, which is right around the corner, for a new tire.

2:00: Dentist appointment! It all goes very smoothly. No cavities!

3:00: We arrive at Sam’s. I am informed by the gentleman behind the tire counter that the wait will be 3 hours. There are twelve cars in front of me. A little piece of me dies. There is nothing I can do, really. I would rather entertain my children in Sam’s than at a random tire place that stinks of rubber. So I say okay.

The next three and a half hours:

It wasn’t all fun and games. At one point, I peeled the boys away from the iPad display (which was very handy for me, as I was able to keep my phone charged) so we could go wander the aisles, and an older woman working a sample station said, “oh, triplets! how terrible! I feel so sorry for you!” (or something intensely negative, along those lines.) I looked at her with disbelief and said, “no! I am very lucky!” I mean, it’s not as if the boys were doing anything obnoxious at that point. So we went to drool over the cupcakes (downside of Sam’s: couldn’t buy the boys one cupcake. And I wasn’t going to buy them thirty. At least they give out cookies at the bakery section.) and a few minutes later, the woman came back over to me and apologized. I couldn’t believe it. She said she didn’t mean it the way it came out, and my boys were beautiful and well-behaved, blah dee blah blah. So that was actually pretty nice to hear.

But THEN. We had been there about two hours. We were walking over to the tire department to check on how things were moving along, and one of the boys walked in front of someone’s cart. No big deal, he got out of the way, but then I heard this evil bitter old hag say to her friend something like, “that woman needs to control her kids.”

OH, HELL NO.

I was SO mad. I called over to her, “EXCUSE ME? I CAN HEAR YOU!” She just looked over and kept saying nasty things to her friend and kept walking. I was SO angry. HOW DARE SHE? What did she want? For me to have all three of them holding hands, silently, walking carefully? They’re kids. They’re five. We were in Sam’s, not a china shop. It took everything in me not to curse loudly at her, but the boys were looking at me, wondering why I was so angry all of a sudden. Man, I am getting pissed just thinking about it. They weren’t even misbehaving. Now, had she seen them while they were running down the aisles and playing hide-and-go-seek, I might have been SLIGHTLY more understanding and might have just flipped her off behind her back. But this…ugh.

We were sitting at a table in the cafe area having Icees when I saw her leave with her friend. I took a picture. It made me feel better.

Anyway, some time after that, our car was done! At least it was cheap.

Got home, and I immediately escaped and went to the pool to relax and unwind. Ahhhh….

You’d think the kids whose mom takes a gajillion pictures of them would be better behaved than this, right?

Not so much.