This was not on my life list, but it really should have been. Bounce in a bounce house until you pee your pants.
Also awesome is the fact that my oldest son grabbed my camera and took photos all on his own.
Things I just don’t get about school.
Tomorrow is apparently pajama day at school. I am so confused by this. Why does anyone want to wear their pajamas out in public. Maybe all of your children have adorable, school appropriate pajamas, but uh, we do not.
Pajamas at my house look like:
1) Old ill fitting t-shirts and ugly elastic waist shorts. Shorts optional. Shirts optional.
2) Underwear
3) Clothes they already wore that day.
Back in the days when my children bathed at night they would always put on their clothes that they were going to wear the next day and sleep in them. Now that they shower in the morning they frequently will just wear whatever they wore that day to sleep in. Go ahead and judge me, I don’t care.
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The other morning I went in to wake up my 10 yr old son. We had been out at birthday party until about midnight. The bedroom was dark. When I got up close to him I realized he had climbed into bed with his sneakers still on. And that strange lump in the bed? That was the balloon he still had tied to his wrist.
He is so ready for life in a frat house.
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My 13 yr old at his football game. He is not smiling because I cleaned his room yesterday. Oh no, that did not make him smile ONE BIT. In fact picture the exact oppositie of this smiling face in the photo and you will know what he looked like. Apparently all those scraps of paper he had strewn all over the floor of his room, along with random lego pieces, gum wrappers, and indistinguishable trash were important. In fact it was all important. Even the broken headphones– he was planning on fixing those!
Lesson learned, if things are important to you, treat them as though they are worth something. Otherwise your mother will come into your room with a big black garbage bag, or THREE, and throw it all away.
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Over at the Butterball blog I have posts up! Go on and read there. Because, YUM! Turkey!
The question is,
What do you do about it?
Football
Barbeque
Here my daughter is all “filled up” from looking at her meat.
Or possibly drinking the entire bottle of orange soda.
His team just had a heartbreaking loss. The regular season is now over and we move on to Bowl games, which really are just excuses to keep the football season going.
Another one filling up on the orange soda. You want to know what I say to that?
More meat for me!
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My oldest son went to this Haunted House last night. He came home covered in fake blood, including his white Nike sneakers.
Today he has to spend the day at a golf course for a fundraiser for the highschool baseball team. The players are supposed to be helpful (carry golf bags to the carts), be friendly, gracious, and above all thankful to the people who have paid a lot of money to play in this golf tournament, because all of the money goes to the baseball team.
He has to wear his “blood” splattered sneakers to the golf course. I suppose a nicer mother would have washed his sneakers at 1:00am when he came home from the Halloween party/ Haunted House extravaganza. But I am not that nice.
I told my son to tell the golfers that he takes his sports very seriously and give a nod toward his feet.
I can’t believe that it has been a year.
A year since I have posed Vanna White style with turkeys.
Today I was back at the Butterball headquarters with the nicest ladies you could ever want to meet.
I am not sure what we were talking about here. But whatever it was it was funny.
It was NOT AT ALL obvious who the blogger were.
This is my favorite part of the whole Butterball trip, cooking a whole slew of turkeys by different methods and then tasting them all to see which one was the best.
The convection oven won for me this year, hands down. Happily I have a convection oven in my new house and am going to cook my Thanksgiving turkey this way this year.
Youthink it is stressful carving your Thanksgiving turkey at the table in front of your guests. Imagine doing it in front of a room full of women and a tv reporter and an A.P photographer. Not that Marty seems to find it stressful. I was stressed on her behalf.
Then we forced Marty into the obligatory bathroom photo with us. Later in the evening Susan and I decided that we all need to remember to put on lipstick. The chapstick? Not cutting it. Though my lips are decidedly unchapped and smell like delicious cherries.
Let’s put this in the learn something new every day category.
There are apparently little tab things on the sides of your boxes of Reynold’s Wrap that you push in. The little tab thingies hold the roll in place. I NEVER knew about this. And I use Reynold’s Wrap daily. And almost every other day I yank the roll right out of the box. In my defense I do make my children’s lunches at 5am, not my best time of the day.
My mornings just got a little bit easier, I think. 5am with less swearing! FTW!
I mean, Gooooood, how dare I bring them to a pumkin patch and spend the equivalant of the GNP of a small country on them.
Because the sun is shining in their eyes and Miles says pumpkins smelllllll.
I like to call this one “We are too cool for this smiling shit.”
Perhaps they really do want me to beat them with a truck full of pumpkins. Not that I would, but I do like to offer it up as an option every now and again.
Miles is not impressed with the opportunities for adorable fall photos.
I refuse to even look in your general direction, woman!
Awwwww. I am holding him down on the pumpkins and may or may not have said I was going to leave him in the corn maze if he didn’t smile. But, hey, it worked so yea me!
It had been loose for awhile. Hanging in her mouth all crooked and twisted.
I am just going to reach in there and yank it out.
But we both know I won’t do it because pulling out teeth kind of makes my stomach turn.
It fell out while she was eating a tortilla smothered in Nutella. The baby tooth that cut her gums while she was still a nursing baby. The little tooth that bit my nipples bloody.
Today was one more cut in the umbilical cord. One more step away from the baby I can still see in her face.
You are never going to have that baby tooth again! Your new teeth are going to be permanent. And all big and goofy.
I say the big and goofy part in my head.
I’m going to miss your baby teeth.
Why? I’m going to grow new teeth.
Cue eye roll.
Well, at least we hope you are.
What?
Yesterday I had to bring my highschool aged son to school after a doctor’s appointment.
Do you have to walk in with me?
Yes, actually I do.
Cue eyeroll.
I laid my hand upon his forearm, one that looks like it belongs to a man, not the boy I still see in my mind’s eye, and very seriously said,
It’s okay. Everyone knows ninth graders still live at home with their parents.
He laughed. His desire to be independent has already moved past the stage of the sheer embarassment at even HAVING parents. He is now in the stage of not wanting to appear to NEED parents. Because doesn’t everyone know that 14 yr olds can drive themselves places, do their own laundry, and prepare their own meals. Like, duh?
Over at the elementary school today, I saw my 10 yr old son. He was way too cool to be excited to see me. I got a cursory wave and a “Hey.” As if it is a totally normal everyday occurrence to see me at your school assembly. Then he pretty much ignored me.
When I saw my daughter her face lit up and she came running over and hugged me. And hugged me again. Then she kept looking over at me and smiling. When it was time to leave she threw her arms open and mouthed, “hug!” I squeezed her hard. Then she turned and marched off with her class, her head bent to her friend in a conversation that I was not privy to.
Miles and I walk out of the school hand in hand. Half way to the car he stepped in front of me.
Carry me.
I think of a million reasons to say no. You’re too heavy. I’m too tired. My hands are full. I don’t want to. You are a big boy. The car is just right over there. I think your legs work just fine.
All of the things that I have said at one time or another.
Instead I scoop him up and onto my hip. I won’t be able to carry him much longer. His long legs hang down banging into the back of my knees. He rests his head on my shoulder. I kiss his cheek.
The good parts go by way too fast. It feels like the blur of scenery on the side of the highway. I know I have been down this road before, but I just can’t really remember it.
Remember this? It still makes me laugh.
Fast forward almost three years…
Miles announced this afternoon that “our kids” would really like brownies when they came home from school. He says it so earnestly that it is impossible to say no. He also waits until I am on the phone to ask me these things and I am all, “Sure whatever you want! A pony? Why the hell not! We will go in one minute and pick out one. Okay, two!”
I did, however, draw the line at running out to the store to buy sprinkles for the top of the brownies even though “our kids” would really, really love sprinkles. I can’t be a total pushover all the time.
Also, I thought the ponies would get restless waiting in the car.
I am still trying to recover from flying the red eye home Sunday night. Apparently I am a delicate flower who can no longer pull all-nighters. I want to write about the great weekend I had with some amazing and fun women, but all I can think about right now is propping my eyes open.
I never did complete my forty before forty list. Too ambitious? I lost interest? It is hard to say.
Then Maggie did a brilliant life list last year and has been working through many of the items.
Other people made their life lists and I thought, why not revisit my forty before forty list and revise. I have been thinking about it quite a bit. What are the things that I want to do. And I really don’t know. These days I feel as if I am sort of going through the motions of life, but not really taking much joy in it. I don’t mean to sound morose, because that certainly isn’t how I intend it. I am not going about my days downtrodden and miserable. I just think that it is easy to get caught up in the mundane tasks of everyday life: laundry, cooking, picking the toys up off the floor, finding everyone’s DAMN SOCKS. Sometimes you just need to shake yourself.
So here is my list, a work in progress. It is heavy on travel. It has always been a dream of mine to take a year off from life and travel around the world. Not sure I’ll ever be able to do that, unless I win the lottery. And I should probably start buying lottery tickets then.
1. Buy a lottery ticket
2. Learn to knit
3. Take a mule ride down into the Grand Canyon with my kids, like the Brady Bunch
4. Redesign my mother’s ring and have someone make it.
5. If it isn’t beautiful or useful, get it out of my house. Thankfully my children are beautiful.
6. Dublin with Heather and Susan
7. Carnival with Heather
8. Ride on the back of a motorcycle
9. Write a book or two
10. Scuba Diving at the Great Barrier Reef
11. See the Northern Lights
12. Fjords of Norway
13. Stand on the Great Wall of China
14. Visit all 50 states
15. Hold my newborn grandchildren (many,many, MANY years from now)
16. Chile
17. Make my home a warm, inviting place
18. Own a little beach house
19. Visit a winery, in Napa
20. Take a BBQ road trip across the U.S in an RV
21. Figure out what I want to do when I grow up
22. Float on my back in the Red Sea
23. Sleep in a castle
24. Get lost in a corn maze, but not so lost that I am never found again. I have this sort of irrational fear of corn mazes… Children of the Corn anyone
25. Touch a glacier
26. Run down a sand dune
27. Spend a summer in Italy, take a gondola ride, eat gelato
28. Paint more often
The list seems incomplete. It is. Some things seem so big I am not sure I can articulate them. Some I am not certain about. I want to leave room, a margin around my list, a place to jot the things I never knew I wanted to do until they were there, presented to me.
This weekend in Napa is one of those things. I have always wanted to go. But did I ever imagine I would get to go with a group of women I am lucky enough to call friends as well as women I have adored from afar? Nope, not in my wildest dreams.
And since I am leaving in less than 12 hours, I should probably find some pajamas. Last time I shared a hotel room with Melissa and Susan in Chicago last year I forgot pajamas and had to sleep in underwear. Melissa is still traumatized.
