Randomness!

I have just discovered the Thursday 13, which is "a weekly meme with a simple theme: each Thursday you blog a list of 13 things. What kind of things? Any kind! Just come up with a list theme and run with it."

Hey, I can come up with 13 things! I'm not very good with coming up with a theme for them off the top of my head, but I shall work on that for next week. Meanwhile, please enjoy 13 very random thoughts...and then go post 13 of your own.

1) The word "random" makes me think immediately of random dancing from iCarly, which is the current (and long-standing) favorite "whole family" show in our house. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Carly is a teenage girl who airs a live webshow with her two best friends. It's all very techy, and occasionally a voice will announce "RANDOM...DANCING!" and everyone must stop what they're doing and dance. It's all very random. And fun. Life would be more fun if there was random dancing everywhere.

2) Neither my husband nor my older daughter are able to find things on their own. Even if I tell them, "please get the blue hairbrush off of the bathroom counter," and if the blue hairbrush is indeed lying on the bathroom counter, in plain view, with no clutter around it...they will not be able to see the blue hairbrush. This must be a genetic defect. Thankfully, Milly does

not suffer from this particular chromosomal abnormality.

3) My husband is currently sitting beside me on the couch watching a movie on his laptop. This is very annoying because a) it's nothing that I would ever choose to watch (ie, I'm not interested), b) he has to listen to it at max volume, and c) the children are playing outside, so the house would be nice and quiet if not for him.

4) After being snipped at and asked to turn it down to just half-past blasting, he has now donned headphones. Victory is mine.

5) Rachael is obsessed with tree frogs. I have no idea from whence this obsession came. We were in Dollar Tree last night when she spotted a book with a tree frog on the cover, and it simply had to come home with us. (She has learned that I will rarely turn down pleas for a book - especially a cheap book.)

6) There will be a brand new giveaway posted right here tomorrow. Uh-huh, that one crept up on ya, didn't it? I'm pretty excited about it. Check back to see what's up, especially if you have a little girl too.

7) I've spent far too much time today stalking Facebook for updates from Scentsy's annual convention in Forth Worth. (I didn't even consider going this year, once I found out where it would be held. Texas in the summer? I don't think so. It's a bazillion degrees in Virginia; I'd absolutely melt in Texas.) Anyway, there are tons of new things coming out in September, and I want them all.

8) Plastic bags make great parachutes for stuffed animals. Combine with an open floor plan so that stuffed animals may be tossed from upstairs to downstairs, and you have a toy that will occupy two children for an entire week. I kid you not.

9) I swore that I would never be "that mom" who succumbs to second-child syndrome - you know, where you have exactly one framed photo of the baby in your living room, but 22 of your older child. (Why my friend Cathy thinks that I fault her for not being quick to hang pictures of baby number four is beyond me.) Anyway, I have at least scrapbooked lots and lots of pictures of Milly...those just aren't readily apparent when you walk into my house.

10) While cleaning off our overflowing homeschool shelf this morning, I realized that we hadn't read the last three chapters of last year's history book. So we did. I learned that the Roman emperor's sister, Honoria, betrothed to a man she detested, actually wrote a letter to Attila the Hun promising to marry him if he would just come and rescue her from her miserable life. Yeah, it must really stink being sister to the emperor. (It didn't work, by the way.)

11) I have read 20 books since June 1 - a combined total of 5,918 pages, which averages out to 295.9 pages per book. That doesn't include newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, anything read on my Kindle, or the pages already read in the four books I'm reading simultaneously at the moment. (I'm such a multi-tasker.) I only started keeping up with them because of our library's summer reading program, but it's so much fun logging them all at Shelfari that I think I'll keep it up.

12) Last night, I knocked a pitcher of tea out of the fridge. It landed upside on the floor and made a huge mess. I'm glad no one else was awake to witness that.

13) I'm trying hard to resist the urge to wander into the kitchen and whip up a batch of peanut butter cookies. I'm obviously not allowed to bake anything without two little pairs of hands "helping" (which I usually don't mind, but it's been a long day) and then they'd want to stay up to have cookies. It's way too close to bedtime for that mess - they'd never go to sleep. Maybe some celebratory It's-Friday cookies tomorrow...even though "Friday" really doesn't mean much in our house any more. Saturday is the new Friday, and the weekend was shortened by a day. (Thanks, Utz!)

Wow, thirteen items of randomness was a tad more difficult than I thought...suggestions are welcome for a theme for next Thursday!