Rainy October Saturday

I've had a stretch of insomnia where I find myself up at 2 A.M. flipping channels. Insomnia makes for good mothering -- including, but not limited too: skipping bath for the fifth night in a row, letting your children eat candy bars for morning snack, and your toddler knowing the name of every show on Noggin. (azee ton? mama? azee ton? ayaga-ins! If you can guess what two shows she's naming, you win the grand prize.) I've moved on to benedryl (for me, not the kids) and it seems to be working for now. I think the last two days Sass has been wondering who I am and what I did with that crabby, shadowy eyed creature she'd come to know as her mother.
I digress. Did you know that HGTV is one of the few channels that doesn't go to paid programming in the middle of the night?

I've been watching Flip That House and am hooked. The basic premise is that someone buys a house, sinks a ton of money into it, then sells it -- hopefully at a profit. M and I watched two episodes tonight. The first was I think in Miami and it was a million dollar home. The second looked like it could be sitting in a neighborhood like ours. When the final price tag was flashed -- $475,000 -- we nearly fell off our chouch. The house was 900 square feet with a dinky yard on a main road, somewhere, I believe, in California.

I'm embarrassed to tell you what we paid for our house. I will tell you we paid $10,000 less than our city's average home costs. I'll also tell you that after seven years of living here, we still pay less than we paid for rent on our one bedroom apartment in the city. We're not even in the ballpark of $475,000. If $475,000 was the north pole, we'd be swimming with the penguins of Antarctica. So we were shocked. A half million dollars here would buy you one of the many historical mansions lining the main street in town, and might even help you heat it for a few years.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. My mom took the kids for the afternoon and I had a chance to clean my house to a greater degree than usual. This makes me fall in love with my home all over again. When it's messy, I think We should move. Like I could just walk away from the dirt, the Little People communing with the dollhouse family in a surreal sort of plastic picnic, the Candyland and Chutes and Ladders pieces Party Girl has spread across the floor for the third day in a row. Like I could gather my family and walk into one of the pretty, clean houses I see on the local realtor's website without having to clean up behind us. Where was I going? Oh, yes, but today I'm in love with my own home again -- and I still wouldn't pay a half mil for it, no way. Not even with granite countertops. Or new floors. Maybe with a spa-like bathroom, I did always want one of those giant tubs. But probably not.

In other TV news, I let Sass watch Cartoon Network for about 10 minutes this afternoon while I got a few things done (ok, while I read a few blogs). Usually they get PBS or Noggin, mainly because the level of marketing thrown at kids these days scares me a trifle. Sure enough, every three minutes she came running in: Mama! Mama! I saw something on TV that you can build with and it's like playdough but REALLY, REALLY cool! Do you think it was Floam? Because I can't figure out what else it might be. Three minutes later she yelled from her seat on the couch, Mama? I want a talking Dora kitchen! When she came in to see why I hadn't lept into action, I pointed out she had a very nice wooden kitchen set not six inches from where she was standing. Oh, well I like the talking one better. Plus there's a BIG DORA on it. The child does not even like Dora anymore. She's not getting it for Christmas, but she's now mentioned it three times and I'm not sure how to break it to her. No more commercials, no way.

So, in my absence, you can see I've been filling my time with TV and my children with chocolate. Anyone want me to go back on break?