Lydia Is Alive and Well

Thank goodness you are here. I have been trapped at the store! I escaped today at 3:00pm after working 6:00pm to close on Friday night and opening this morning and I am due back tomorrow at 11:00. I am skipping town. Don't tell anyoone that I was here. Okay?

To make matters atrocious Dave is camping in New Hampshire this weekend. Darn it. I can't escape I have to take care of the kids.Well at least until I go to work. Hey, either way I have to work and he is camping? How is that fair? Oh yeah I am the mom. Silly mommy. Back to the store....Sad, but true the store owns me this weekend. I am working a total of 20 hours of hard labor running around the store all weekend. So far I have been folding, hanging, and straightening, like a coked-up merry maid. I get off work, enjoy my 15 minute car ride, then come home with aching swelled feet to a messy house to crazy sugared up kids, to begin my evening and night shift as sole care giver. Do I need to spell it out? Momma is exhausted! I am too tired to be funny. I am even too tired to stay up and eat all of the junk food that the kid’s Nonni left at my house. God bless Nonni for babysitting the kids. She always brings treats for them…..Hmmmm maybe I’ll have one cookie then off to bed.


I am cutting down my hours at the store. I can’t work this much. I miss my kids, but most of all I miss writing and all of you. Night Night.

Drowning in Fabric Sea

Have you ever carried an item of clothing around a store while trying to decide to buy it or not? What do you do when you decide not to buy it? Do you retrace your steps and put the item back where you found it? Don’t lie. You toss the item on the closest rack and run out of the department don’t you? I know that you do because I spent last night at the store picking up after you. Don’t worry I know that it wasn’t really you. If it was you, you would have come over and said hi.


There I was trapped in the women’s clothing department in the store. I hadn’t worked for a few days and in my absence the management thought that it was a good idea to move all of the clothing to new locations. My job that night was to put away all of the clothing from the fitting rooms, and then clean and straighten all of the clothing racks in the whole department. Too bad that I had no idea where anything went. I would leave the fitting room with a pair of jeans and a coat and then spend 25 minutes searching for the clothes location. The problem was while I was walking around the department I was picking up clothing off the floor and clothing put back on the wrong racks. I would leave the fitting room with two pieces of clothing and return with seven or eight. While I am collecting orphaned clothing from around the store customers are trying on more clothes that are piling up in the fitting room. The department is ransacked, the racks are trashed, and I have no idea what I am doing. On top of that customers are stopping me and asking me questions.

There I am half way through my hell shift with my arms filled with jeans walking in circles in a sea denim looking for homes for my arm full of needles in this messy chaotic haystack when a woman stops me and starts asking me about jeans. Her daughter wants ripped up distressed jeans. Seriously? I want to suggest buying the cheapest jeans possible and then handing her daughter scissors and some bleach. Or just attach the jeans to the bumper of her car on the way home. Better yet, I’d just empty my load into her cart and say. “Here buy these” and walk away.

No, instead I lead her over to the ugly ripped up dirty jeans that cost $29.99 and she is happy. She thanks me. I smile back because I just knew where something actually goes. I continue my quest with renewed energy. All I have to do is put away these ten pairs of jeans, the rest of fitting room, and straighten about 97 more racks, before the store closes for the night. I look at the clock. That gives me about an hour and a half. An hour and a half? I’ll be lucky if I get these jeans put away in an hour and a half! How did I get myself in this mess? Should I quit now? I’ll finish the shift and then decide.

I finished the shift an hour late because we were still cleaning. People did come over and help. I am going back, but I am still on the fence. I’ll keep you posted.

Sugar Weepies

My son is hitting me on the butt and yelling “Mommy leave me alone!”

I grab him and wrap my arms around him and say. "Dyaln I love you. You'll be okay." Then he wiggles free and runs out of the room. Then he runs back in and yells.

“I mean it! I want a new mother!” Then he runs back to his room and slams the door. He is mad because he is temporarily insane and his actions can't be held against him in the court of mom. He has a bad case of the sugar weepies. I was a bad mommy and let him eat too much crap food at the park after school. For some reason the stars aligned and all of us moms brought sugary snack foods. Yes including me. I am so ashamed. After cookies, ring-dings, juice boxes and chips the boy was high as a kite.

I am not here to preach about nutrition. I am just here to tell you all that my son and I have sugar issues. I actually think we both have a sugar allergy. Because sugar makes us act like we are on crack. Dylan has worse reactions than me. I believe that he freaks out more because his body is little and can’t process that much sugar. I am not that good at math, but I do know that if he weighs sixty pounds and he eats two pounds of sugary snacks the sugar to body weight ratio is going to make him freak out. Or maybe he just hasn’t built up the sugar tolerance that I have built up over the years and years and years of worshipping sugar as my personal deity. I can eat a whole bag of Lindt Truffles while driving home from the grocery store. I throw the bag deep in the trash and pretend the whole thing never happened. If Dylan ever ate that much chocolate he’d be running around the outside of the house naked while swinging a chain saw.

Poor Dylan eats too much sugar loses his mind, becomes a human super ball, then he crashes like a flaming paper airplane. The poor boy ends up angry, weeping, and eventually curled up like a little flesh colored ball of crazy in his bed. As he did last night.

This morning I told him that we are all cutting down on the sugar. I went to the grocery store today and did a healthy shop. Today’s after school park snack is apples and spring water. No sugar, no drama.

Thrift Store Wizard

October is here that means my house is decorated in orange and black. Pumpkins, black cats, witches and bats adorn every surface and door. I love Halloween. The only people who love Halloween more than me are my kids. For the kids Halloween is all about two things the candy and the more importantly the costume. This year Alice is going to dress up as Ariel. The Little Mermaid has been her favorite princess since last year. I bought her a beautiful Ariel costume last year for 50% off at an after Halloween sale. We tried the costume on yesterday and she was thrilled. She loves it! One kid down and one to go.


This year Dylan wants to be a wizard. Not Harry Potter or any of his friends at Hogwarts. He wants to be a plain wizard. Easy right? Wrong. Dylan and I looked for his wizard costume this weekend. We looked at Target, Walmart. Iparty, a Halloween Super store, the Christmas Tree Shop, CVS, Rite Aid, TJ MAXX, and Marshals. We found super heroes, pirates, monsters, soldiers (domestic and intergalactic), TV & movie characters, we even found a pint sized pimp costume. What we didn’t find was a wizard. We couldn’t even find a simple wizard hat.

Being a great mother I decided that I would make Dylan a wizard costume. The challenge will be putting together a costume that doesn’t make him look like Liberace. I don’t want him to look like he is in drag either. Not that that is a bad thing. You know how much love I have for drag queens. I just think 1st grade is too young to sachet shante. Anyway he is too young to know what team he is batting for yet, so far he is just a little boy who likes wizards.

How does a woman who can’t really sew make a wizard costume? Easy. We went to the thrift store and bought girl’s black velvet pants with a silver sequence stripe on the outsides. We also bought a black blouse with a few scattered small scattered silver gems on the front. Then the piece de resistance was long black velvet buttoned down dress. Sew up the arms, remove the buttons, sew up the button holes, hot glue up a hem. Then I ordered a wizard hat on the internet and voila! At least that is my plan. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I love my name. As a young girl I didn’t. I longed to have a cool name like Kristi, Amber, or Stacey. Now I am so thankful that my mother chose my name from an old family grave stone instead of a trendy baby name book. Yes, I did say that she found my name; Lydia Dustin on a grave stone in her mother’s family cemetery in New Hampshire. The Lydia Dustin on the grave stone was my mother’s Great Grandmother and when she married into the family she brought a lot of infamous ancestors.


For example Hannah Dustin ”...a colonial New England woman who, having been captured during an Indian raid, escaped from her captors by killing (10 of) them in the night and fleeing in their canoe. She is believed to be the first woman honored in the United States with a statue.” Yes, I am related to Hannah Dustin the famed American Indian Slayer. My family has always told stories of tomahawk happy Hannah, but what really surprised me was the discovery of a relative none of us knew we had.

About 15 years ago I was chaperoning a school trip to the Salem witch museum. In the museum there is a list of all of the people who were accused of witchcraft. There on the list was the name Lydia Dustin. I was shocked! Lydia Dustin was acquitted, but died in prison because she couldn’t afford to pay her jail fees. Lydia was an older woman who lived with Sarah Good who was executed.

I was so excited with the news. Not about poor Sarah, but about sharing my name with a Salem witch. Some of my cousins are members of DAR Daughters’ of the Revolution. I have no interest in that. I am aiming higher; I found the group ADEAW Associated Daughters of Early American Witches. Their acronym is long, but I wanted to be a member so bad! I wanted to go to the Daughter's of American Witches convention. I so loved the movie Practical Magic and the TV show charmed. We'd have so much fun, just me and the witches. All I had to do to join was prove that the Lydia Dustin was related to my Lydia Dustin on the grave stone. How hard would that be? Easy, I can find anything on the internet.

Fast forward 15 years and I have still not found proof of a link. What I do know is that Lydia Dustin died in jail in Salem in 1693 and Hannah Dustin had a baby girl in 1694 and named her new daughter Lydia Dustin. I can only assume that Hannah named the daughter after the Salem Witch Lydia Dustin. I think that Lydia Dustin was Hannah’s sister-in-law or Mother-in-law. But I can’t prove it. So I can’t join the group. But I can and do tell everyone that I have the same name as a Salem Witch.

Hence I love witches!