Jedi Mama

The Jedi Family Has Moved on the World Wide Web

2010-12-20T19:53:00.004-07:00

Okay, I think the glitches have been worked out now.

Thanks to Hubs, the resident computer guru. (Because if it's harder than checking my email, I can't do it on the computer. I don't even try. Pathetic, but I don't. I throw my arms into the air and give up. It's a life skill that has served me well.)

I have, officially, moved this little Jedi Mama blog. I won't be posting here any more, so go check us out at the new location. It's the same poorly-written, long-winded, full-of-grammar flaws blog. Hubs and the boy and I will still be in the blog.

We're just going to be at a brand new address.

www.jedi-mama.com

We'll see y'all over there.

Jedi Mama Has Moved

2010-12-19T22:31:00.005-07:00

Oh, people! Listen!

We have packed up our blogging suitcases, and we've moved.

SURPRISE! Jedi Mama has gone dot-com!

So please, come check us out at the brand-spanking NEW web address!

http://www.jedi-mama.com/

Edited on Monday morning to say:

And now, through the beauty of the communication device known as TEXT MESSAGING, we've been told that the new dot-com blog is pulling up sporadically. Clearly, it's a technological issue. And we are out Christmas shopping, so that we can finish up and shake some Christmas monkeys off our backs. Hence, when the shopping is done, I'll have my resident computer guru (that would be Hubs) make sure this link is working at ALL TIMES, and not just intermittently.

So check back later.

Because the new blog has some really sweet Star Wars drawings done by a really cute ten-year-old! And I know you won't want to miss them!

We Capitalize the FUN in DysFUNctional

2010-12-16T20:06:00.004-07:00

So this week has been a whirlwind of activity, which has left me breathless.

And not necessarily in a good way. This week left me breathless, like when you're 96 years old, and you decide that you'd like to reach the summit of Mt. Everest before Jesus calls you home, and you get a little winded in the trying of accomplishing your final goal.

Hubs and I have been a little busy kicking some Christmas monkeys off our backs this week. Or at least I have been occupied with the little clinging primates, while Hubs has been fixing computers.

Hubs likes to think he's knee-deep in the Christmas spirit, but I guarantee you that he'll ask me on Christmas Eve, "So. We need a new computer. Can I just cram that into your stocking and call it good? I don't have to actually, you know, SHOP for you, do I?"

In the midst of all the working (PE won't teach itself! And church offices are ever-so-very-much-busy this time of year, in anticipation of Baby Jesus' arrival! And the computers! They break!) and all the holiday shopping, and the writing of the Christmas letter, and the Christmas parties we've attended, I have sort of neglected our home.

I know that messier houses than ours exist. Really. I know that.

I also know that they call them Crack Houses.

And the boy told me today, "Mom, this is my LAST pair of underwear."

I told him, "You have GOBS of boxers! Gobs!"

And the boy said, "Yes, I do. And they're all in the dirty clothes basket."

I started counting backwards on my fingers and realized that YES! YES, IT HAS BEEN A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT OF TIME SINCE I WASHED A LOAD OF LAUNDRY. And really? That probably also explains why the boy wore a pair of windpants to school today that showed off his ankles. I had them in the sack to hand down to his younger cousin, and the boy had them on this morning.

If he has no clean underwear, he may not have any clean pants that fit, either.

Clearly, the neighbors are keeping an eye trained on me, ready to call the Department of Family Services at any given moment, since I have not laundered my family's clothing.

And, to make matters worse, as Hubs and I were in the middle of photocopying and folding our family's Christmas letter tonight, we were singing along to some Christmas tunes, and we were changing the words a little bit, and laughing hysterically together. And then we got to talking about the fact that the boy has asked Santa Claus for a chemistry set, which we're pretty sure Santa is going to come through on, and Hubs was saying that he may have actually SEEN the chemistry set today that Santa is considering, and that HOLY SNOT, BATMAN! IT IS FILLED WITH SOME REALLY COOL STUFF! AND THERE IS EVEN A PAIR OF SAFETY GOGGLES, FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT BRAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW THEIR OWN EYEBALLS OUT!

On account of Hubs once did that.

Shot himself in the eye and all. When he was sixteen years old.

So really? The saying, "It's all fun and games until someone shoots an eye out" is actually HYSTERICALLY FUNNY at the Jedi Manor.

So Hubs and I were laughing about all of that together tonight, and then Hubs turned to me, and, with this totally serious expression on his face, he asked me, "Honey, are we dysfunctional?"

I said, "Well, dysfunctional IS as dysfunctional DOES."

And then Hubs said, "I'd like to have a column on your blog, where I write about all the stupid things people do to break their computers, except I don't really like to write things."

Because YES! YES, THAT CHANGE OF THOUGHT FIT RIGHT IN WITH WHAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT.

So, people, with all of that said tonight, I'm off to watch some more episodes of Arrested Development (via the wonderment of Netflix) with Hubs, because the Bluth family makes Hubs and I feel like we're not the WORST dysfunctional family around.

Our house might currently be MESSIER than the model home that the Bluth family lives in, but we're functioning on a stellar level, when compared to that syndicated family!

Of course, the Bluth family isn't...you know...REAL.

So can we still consider ourselves less dysfunctional than they are?!

I Leave You With the Randomness

2010-12-15T20:08:00.003-07:00

I just have a few things for y'all tonight. Random things. Things with no relation to each other at all.

1. I am on Christmas vacation. As of 2:31 this afternoon, when I waved good-bye to the pre-kindergartners, as they traded their gym shoes for their boots, I do not have to teach another PE class this entire year.

Not until 2011.

I'm sure that the kindergarten class will be much more mature and distinguished by then.

My glass. It is half full.

Of wine.

2. This morning, I went to make the boy a cold lunch for school, and came to the sad realization that we were out of some things.

Things like lunch meat, fresh fruit, cheese sticks, yogurt and bread.

I told the boy, "Listen. You have to eat a hot lunch today. I can't even make you a sandwich. All I could give you in a cold lunch today would be some Ritz crackers and a K-cup of Gloria Jean's Coffee for the Keurig."

The boy moaned out, "But we're having TBA for lunch today, and I HATE the TBAs!"

I looked at the lunch menu, and discovered that today's menu was TBA. I looked at the boy and said, "But you don't even know what the menu IS today. It could turn out to be something really good."

And the boy replied, "I do know what it is! It's TBA, and TBAs are these really ugly sandwiches that drip barbecue sauce all over the place, and I absolutely hate TBAs."

This was the exact moment when I realized that the boy and I were most definitely NOT on the same page. Apparently, the last time that the menu said TBA (To Be Announced), the school served rib sandwiches. Which the boy loathes. Hence, he now calls those sandwiches TBAs. I explained the entire concept of TO BE ANNOUNCED, and told him that he'd have to eat a hot lunch.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and ripping of sackcloth, and the boy informed me that it was going to be the worst day of his life, because those TBA sandwiches were just ugly! So ugly! Downright ugly! And TBAs made him miserable.

I ended up using the snarly voice that I use for special occasions, as I firmly said, "Stop whining! I have nothing for your cold lunch today! Pick what you like off the hot lunch tray, and then throw the rest into the garbage can! You'll have to deal with this today!"

The boy was not happy. He went to school all grumbly-like.

And then, after I'd dropped him off and run a couple of errands, my phone rang. It was Cody. This is what she said: "Um, I am on the interstate, on my way to Gymnastics Land today, and I promised G that I'd take her a Lunchable for lunch today, because the menu said TBA, and she didn't know what it would be. And then I forgot to do that, before I hit the highway. Could you please, with a lot of sugar on the top, go buy a nacho Lunchable for G and deliver it to the school?"

On the principle of World Fairness, I bought TWO nacho Lunchables, and I left one on the boy's desk while he was outside at recess.

So that he wouldn't have to eat that ugly TBA sandwich that swims in disgusting barbecue sauce.

Score one for the boy.

3. With all the holiday stuff that still needs to get done, I am feeling a little overwhelmed and stressed.

And our house looks like an old episode of Sanford and Son. You think I jest, but I do not.

And also? We are running out of clean laundry.

And the bathroom mirrors are coated in toothpaste splatters, and things crunch under our feet when we walk on our floors in bare feet. (I think that most of the crunching can be attributed to stray cereal pieces. Pathetic. Don't judge us.)

On top of all the housework that needs done, I still need to get the Christmas cards and letters out, and shop, and shop some more, and do some baking, and get some treats made for the boy's school Christmas party, because I apparently lack good, quality organizational skills.

Tonight, while we were driving in the Suburban, I sighed and told Hubs, "I think I need a wife. Yes, I definitely need to get myself a wife, because I have so much to do, and a wife would really help me out about now."

Without missing a beat, Hubs emphatically declared, "You can have MY wife! She's been nagging me about her broken computer too much lately, and she won't let me watch my Avalanche games in peace."

4. Guess what you can buy out of the Garnett Hill catalog?

Oh, people!

MOON BOOTS!!

Hello, 1979! I only wish you came in powder blue, with a big rainbow splashed across the sides, because that is the pair that made my heart sing with gladness!

Yep. Those are genuine MOON BOOTS! And I love them. And I wanted to order a pair for the boy, so that I could go all nostalgic on him and say, "Now you have boots like Mama had when she was your age. Why don't you wear them around the house and listen to some old Carly Simon songs?"

But the price!

$140 for a pair of nostalgic boots that don't even come in powder blue with rainbows emblazoned on their sides!

That's a pity.

5. Hubs and I finally watched last week's episode of The Office, where the Dunder Mifflin staff has their annual Christmas party, and I actually laughed out loud. Multiple times. Multiple times times six!

My favorite quotes?

"Nobody hug me! I'm covered in tree sap!"

"My 'brid...my hybrid...my Prius hybrid won't fit a tree, which is ironic, considering how many trees it saves."

"Yes, I have a wig for every single person in the office. You never know when you're going to have to bear a passable resemblance to someone."

"The name is Bond. Santa Bond. I'll have an eggnog. Shaken, not stirred."

"How about icing it? LOL. Dwight."

"Hey, Pickles! Merry Christmas. Open immediately. Love, Swiss Cheese."

"I've been trying to get on jury duty every single year since I was eighteen years old. To get to sit in an air conditioned room, downtown, judging people while my lunch was paid for? That is the life!"

"In the end, the greatest snowball isn't a snowball at all. It's fear. Merry Christmas."

6. Happy Wednesday night, y'all. I have a ten-year-old who needs to be ripped away from DVR-ed episodes of Pawn Stars and stuffed into bed.

Sometimes it's hard being a responsible parent.

The Tuesday In Which I Was a Responsible Adult and Went to Work

2010-12-14T18:56:00.005-07:00

So last night, just as I was finishing typing up the annual Christmas letter (which is, predictably enough, long-winded and filled to the brim with grammatical faux pas that would make the best English professor grit his teeth in frustration and search in earnest for a hoped-for bottle of Wild Turkey that he used to keep in the back of his bottommost desk drawer, for just such occasions), Old Bessie (our slow computer, which is more than ready to be retired to the pasture for an elderly life of leisure) froze up.

I blame the weather. The ice and all. Old Bessie's arthritic hard drive just couldn't take it, and she got stuck.

And therein caused my panic, because THE CHRISTMAS LETTER! IT WAS DONE! And Old Bessie decided to save the letter, without even asking me, and she converted all the text to ancient hieroglyphics, the likes of which have only been seen in the underground core of Neptune. (This particular series of hieroglyphs? Well, the only documented copy is stored in Area 51, so my chances of deciphering it, without one of those all-access clearance badges, was zilch.)

I may have gasped slightly, as I felt a head rush coming on, and then BING! Old Bessie just shut herself down for a little nap, as she tucked herself in with the electric blanket and said good-night to everyone, regardless of the fact that no one had told her it was bedtime.

Poor Hubs. He was slumped sideways in his recliner, knee-deep in a televised hockey game, when I issued out some garbled form of a female distress cry and announced in a rather loud, completely UN-indoor voice, that Old Bessie had just flashed me the blue screen of utter death and THE CHRISTMAS LETTER! WAS GONE! WAS CODED! WAS INCINERATED DEBRIS!

Hubs sighed.

And he got out his stethoscope.

And Old Bessie made a trip to the emergency room, as Hubs loaded her up into the Suburban and drove her downtown to his office, where he could run some diagnostics, while I paced back and forth in our house, whispering to myself, "It's okay; I can rewrite all that letter. It's okay; I can rewrite all that letter."

An hour later, I still hadn't convinced myself that I had enough stamina to actually rewrite the Jedi Family Christmas letter, so I called Hubs, asking for any word on Old Bessie.

Hubs replied by saying, "I had to hit her with the paddles a couple of times when she flatlined, but I think we've got a steady pulse now. Your C Drive is fried; Old Bessie smoked that one up good and proper."

C Drive?? No habla es computers.

"Your C Drive, honey. Where things are stored. What this means to you is that you have permanently, forever and ever, lost a Chris LeDoux music file that was apparently on the C Drive, but everything else that I had stored there was stuff we didn't need. The D Drive, which is the heart and lungs and brain stem and spleen and appendix and colon of Old Bessie, is still intact. She has regurgitated the Christmas Letter. And yes, I even managed to decipher the squiggles and boxes she converted your text into."

Hubs. We like to call him the Miracle Worker.

Old Bessie came back home about 10:30 last night, and she was given an IV bag filled with Windows XP, and today she seems to be running exactly the same as she did before her near-death experience last night, but she gave us the proof that Hubs and I needed to assure ourselves that the pickle jar which we've been throwing sporadic heaps of silver coins into is about to be traded in on a younger computer model. A brand-spanking new computer model. It is time, people. Old Bessie has reached an elderly state, and her retirement is completely necessary.

And the Christmas letter? Oh, people. It was preserved. In English.

(Poor English, granted. But English, nonetheless.)

With all of that trauma completely behind us, I got up this morning and took the boy to school.

And then I went to Starbucks, where I quite accidentally ran into my good friends, Becki and Brandy, who were loitering around in front of the pastry case. We yammered on and on, chatting like only girls can do, when they suddenly burst out and said, "Listen! We're both playing hookey today, and we're going to Bigger Town to do some Christmas shopping, because we're both far, far behind. Come with us, Mama! Come! Get your cup to go, and crawl into the SUV with us!"

Sometimes, self-restraint is so difficult. And sometimes my job gets in the way of my social life. I told them that I probably shouldn't call in a sub for my PE classes at such a late minute.

But then I thought to myself, "But I could! I know Miss Donna would sub for me in a heartbeat."

And then I thought to myself, "But it's totally wrong!"

And then I thought to myself, "But I need to do some Christmas shopping, in a bad way! And it's Becki and Brandy! And I love them! And they are so much fun!"

And then I thought to myself, "But it's wrong. And I'll miss little L's Christmas program."

And through it all, Becki and Brandy kept whispering, "Come with us! You know you want to! It'll be a Girls Day Out! Get in the car! Call Hubs from the road and tell him we've kidnapped you!"

In the end, I didn't go. Sometimes being a responsible adult is such a big bag of UN-FUNNESS. Had this been 1992, during my college days, I wouldn't have thought twice about going. I would have had my cup of java juice and been in the car before Becki and Brandy had finished their sentence. I would have offered to drive the old Honda Accord. It would have been a glorious day.

Instead, I stuck to the day's original game plan.

I drove out to Sister's daughter's school, so that I could watch little L's Christmas program, which was, expectedly, darling.

There's Miss L, in the gray dress. With the headband. And the red eyes. I contemplated fixing her red eyes in Photo Shop, but, people! EVERYONE HAS RED EYES IN THEIR CHRISTMAS PROGRAM PICTURES! I had red eyes in every picture my mother ever snapped (with her little instamatic camera with the stack of flashcubes stuck on the top of it) during every Christmas program I ever participated in. Everyone did. Miss L isn't getting off that easily.

My nephew, five-year-old K, was very well-behaved during the program. He sat quietly. He listened. And then, in the last few minutes, he became a little restless, but so was I. My tailbone had gone numb on the metal folding chair. My legs were fidgety. So I entertained K by taking pictures of him, while he made sappy, crazy faces, and then I'd show them to him on the back of the camera. Every face he made was a challenge to outdo the previous face, as far as goofiness went. He was thoroughly entertained.

When the program finished up and my tailbone regained some feeling, I went to the stinky pet store to buy some crickets for the boy's frogs, because WE PLUM FORGOT THEM ON SATURDAY! And Small Town's pet store is closed on Sundays AND Mondays, so if you forget your crickets on Saturdays, your frogs are forced to diet for a couple of days.

Which, of course, made Gru and Yoda Joe a little grumbly.

So I bought them each an EXTRA cricket -- a dessert, if you will! -- and, against my better judgement and my moral motto in which I claim that I never feed live things to live things, I came home to dump those bugs into the frogs' tanks.

And Gru's new tank lid? Well, I dropped it on him so hard, I knocked him plum off his rock.

Yep. The lid hit Gru in the back, flipped him off the rock, and he landed upside down in his water, where he laid for a second or two, completely stunned, while little cartoon stars circled his head. After he flipped himself over and patted himself down to make sure all of his appendages were still there, he scampered off to hide in the faux foliage, while I felt some serious guilt and shame. I even texted Hubs and said, "I think I may have just crushed some of Gru's internal organs! I think he's hurt!"

Thankfully, the little frog rallied. He ate his crickets, and he glared at me for nearly knocking him unconscious, which I could live with. What I would have found RATHER DIFFICULT to live with would have been killing the boy's pet.

Which I totally didn't do!

Whew.

After assuring myself that Gru was going to pull through as well as Old Bessie had the night before, I set off to teach PE, while I envisioned Becki and Brandy in the mall in Bigger Town, having fun.

And eating at the Red Lobster.

And PE today was every teacher's dream. We're three days away from Christmas break. We're eleven days away from Santa's arrival. Sugar plums and iPods and Transformers are dancing in the kids' heads, and they are! out! of! control!

So we just played dodgeball, because low! I knew that I wasn't going to get anything else out of them. We threw balls at one another, and we had a good time, and one of my kindergartners came up to me and said, "I asked Santa Claus to bring me a real hang glider, and my mom and dad told me that he wouldn't. Do you think he will?"

I pled the 5th.

And I wanted to shut down, just like Old Bessie had done, because I didn't want to announce the obvious, which was, "No. I know your parents, and I know them well. And, honey, I'm pretty sure that they've already talked to Santa Claus and told him, NO REAL HANG GLIDERS FOR SIX YEAR OLDS."

Happy Tuesday night, y'all.

Wrapping the Weekend Up

2010-12-13T17:41:00.006-07:00

So last night I mentioned that we packed our station wagon full.

Or our weekend.

Or whatever.

(Sometimes the analogies and the similes and the metaphors and I pretend to get along well, when, in fact, they're wearing orange plaid, while I'm wearing pink floral, which means we simply don't match up right. So yes. Sometimes we crash. Sort of like old wood-grain paneled station wagons sometimes did.)

The words downtime and resting mean nothing to the Jedi Family on Saturdays and Sundays. Instead, we prefer the phrases plum full and high score and no room left on the dance card.

After endlessly searching the pink aisles of Wal-Mart in order to secure a gift, we started Friday night out by heading eight miles out of town to Miss A's birthday party, regardless of the fact that OH MY WORD! ENORMOUS BLIZZARD! Thankfully, I was driving, which means SLOW, IN THE DRIVEWAYS, BUT NOT ALWAYS ON SUNDAYS.

Because the roads? Slick. Slick. Slick.

I know that they were slick, because when we were simply yards away from our destination, I attempted a corner on a dirt road. And I missed my attempt. And I simply put the Suburban sideways and slid it right for a split-rail fence, while Hubs lovingly whispered the words, "Honey, don't turn the wheel. I love you, Sweetheart. Please remove your hands from the steering wheel and stop turning it."

But really? I was in total control. I realized that I wasn't going to make my turn. I realized that YES! YES, WE WERE SLIDING RIGHT FOR THE FENCE! Our $500 deductible, right at Christmastime, flashed before my eyes, and then I had an entire conversation with myself, quietly in my head, in which I said, "Self, do stop turning the steering wheel, so that you can just go straight down this long driveway here and save yourself the pain of summoning the deputy out here to assess the wreckage of the fence, while the horses see their gate to freedom and escape." So even though Hubs was crying out like a banshee at midnight, "HOLY SNOT, BATMAN! STOP TURNING! SWEET MERCY, STOP TURNING THE WHEEL!" while he gripped the dashboard, I had already come to the conclusion myself, and I stopped turning the wheel on my own. And I slid us quite safely down the long driveway. And then Hubs showed us his great acting skills, as he clutched his heart and moaned out, "Oh, this is the big one!"

While Hubs was qualifying for an Oscar nomination in the front passenger seat, the boy was in the back, where he said, "Praise Jesus, Mom! You missed that fence!"

Oh, the drama, people! The drama!

I am happy to report that I backed the Suburban up, out of the driveway, where I waved to the perfectly-intact split-rail fence, and we made it safely to the party.

Because really? Miss A was officially six, and we had some royal celebrating to accomplish!

Poor Miss A has three brothers, as well as a couple of Y-chromosome-sporting cousins: the boy and H. And when all of those boys get together, and someone brings out the goalie pads, their ingenious ideas come together and big plans are made.

On Friday night, the big plans involved the hockey pads and a long staircase. B went first, to make sure it was safe for everyone else.

(Which is to say that B was able to fight everyone off for the hockey pads and get them attached to his legs FIRST, before anyone else could do it.)

Eventually, W decided to up the competition by introducing the Freestyle Stairway Slide, which made everyone give up completely on fighting for their turns with the goalie pads.

The boy and his cousin, M, participated in the Queen-Sized, Down-Filled Comforter Stairway Luge, and, after that, the beds were completely stripped down, whether Brother's Wife wanted this to happen or not. Blankets of every size and shape were hauled to the staircase, and the kids rolled down the flight of stairs for most of the night, until their hair stood up on end with all the static and two of the Stairway Olympians developed rug burns.

Eventually, Miss A convinced the boys to give up on their competition, so that they could all gather around her for the Great Opening of the Presents. The boys were not overly impressed with the sassy hats and frilly shirts and smelly lotions and delicate tea cups that Miss A scored as gifts, so they ended up wrestling all over the place, while Miss A opened her gifts.

And the big, yellow stuffed bee? I think it was actually her favorite gift!

After the wrapping paper lay in shreds at Miss A's feet, we had some chocolate cake.

And we had some bright red juice.

And then we went back home, and Hubs pretty much tackled me for the keys to the Suburban, as he insisted his poor, weak heart couldn't take my driving any longer.

Sissy.

On Saturday, Hubs and I decided to just go ahead and lay on the grenade and hit the canned-food-drive movie matinee at our local theater. One of our Small Town businesses encourages kids to come see a show on each of the December Saturdays before Christmas, for the low admittance price of a few cans of food, which are then donated to charity for holiday food baskets. We raided our pantry, we gathered the troops, and we ventured in.

Of course, every! other! child! in Small Town, USA had the exact same idea.

And so did their parents.

And their aunts and uncles and distant cousins and grandparents and godparents and dad's old college roommates did, too. Which is to say that EVERYONE WE KNOW was at the theater, and the word crowded does not even do the situation justice.

It was like an anthill, and everyone was swarming the concession stands for sugar.

In the end, we had to scrunch in. The boy ended up sitting on my lap for the entire showing of Despicable Me, because we moved our tribe over to make room for a poor dad with a broken arm who needed two seats. Hubs, who had spent his entire time in the long concession stand line whining, "A Mountain Dew! I need a Mountain Dew to survive this!" left his Dew on the floor, beneath his seat, when we decided to scoot over to make room for the other family.

And the twelve-year-old son from that family kicked Hubs' plum-full Mountain Dew over.

And the cup's lid burst off, and all the precious Dew poured itself down the sloped floor of the seating arena. Hubs gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyeballs shut and counted to one thousand and eighty.

And then the dad, whose arm was broken, ended up dropping his four-year-old son's popcorn (who was sitting on his lap) onto the floor, and it all stuck in the wet river of Mountain Dew.

So, you know, our feet sort of stuck AND crunched while we sat through the movie.

At one point, I ran into Amy in the hallway, and she shouted out, "Honey, just shoot me now! I'm not sure I'm going to survive this chaos!" Little did she know that Hubs was going to survive it without his coveted Mountain Dew.

After we watched Gru steal the moon and adopt the three orphan girls, Hubs and I loaded the boys up into the Suburban with every article of winter clothing they own, and we took them to an obnoxiously steep hill to sled.

And also? Enzo had been to a science class early Saturday morning, where he dissected a squid. (The boy would have loved to attend this class, too, but his permission slip sat, wadded up in a crumbled heap at the bottom of his backpack, where it didn't get found until DAYS AFTER the sign-up deadline. So, you know...natural consequences.) Enzo was plum thrilled to show the other three boys the PARTS of his squid, so he brought them, wrapped in a paper towel and stuffed into a plastic baggie, into our Suburban. And then the little lad unwrapped those squid parts. And I think Hubs and I now know what the seventh circle of hell will be like, as far as our noses are concerned.

People, there are no words to describe how awful that dead squid smelled, in our Suburban. As I started to pass out, I distinctly remember turning around and telling the young scientist, "Put the squid away!!" And my head may have twisted around on my neck a bit while I said that. And our Suburban pretty much smelled like dead, dissected squid for the rest of the day.

And it still smells that way today. No matter. The three other boys were duly impressed with the squid parts, and they ooh-ed and awe-ed at all the right times, as Enzo explained everything to them, and the smell did not bother them one bit.

The little punks. Aren't they cute?

While the boy, Carter, Enzo and the cute neighbor boy hiked up the enormous sledding hill, time and time again, Hubs and I stood at the bottom, with our toes freezing off, and giggled, because EIGHTEEN HUNDRED TRIPS UP THE HILL EQUALS TIRED BOYS WHO GO TO BED EARLY!

And when they came DOWN the hill, Mama tended to get a wee bit nervous, because those $5 saucer sleds travel at rates of speed which only the space shuttle and Chevy Chase can successfully surpass. And even that speed wasn't quite fast enough for the boys!

As dusk was settling in on the big hill and Small Town, the boys announced that OH, SWEET MERCY! THEY WERE SO HOT! AND ALSO SWEATY! JUST PLUM SWEATY AND VERY HOT! So the hats and the gloves came off, and the heads of fantastic hat hair made me laugh!

There may or may not have been a giant snowball fight, where every man was out for himself. They may or may not have shouted out, "TRUST NO ONE! YOU ARE ALL MY ENEMIES" a hundred different times, as they blasted snowballs at one another.

They may have also hunkered down in snow tunnels, to avoid the battle that was raging above ground.

And yes, this was a great time, until someone took an ice chunk, fired like a baseball pitch, to the side of the head, which resulted in a goose egg and some tears. Thankfully, it was dark by this time, so we loaded the troops up, returned them to their own homes, and Hubs and I called it a day.

Because, you know, we had to prepare for Sunday's game plan.

We went to church on Sunday morning, where our pastor gave an entire sermon on how God appears to ordinary people, who do ordinary things. Just like the shepherds in the field, who were doing the ordinary job of tending their sheep. Naturally, this made my heart shiver a little with gladness, because THE ORDINARY! THAT IS SO MUCH ME! I am ordinary! And I do ordinary things!

And also? My heart plum burst with pride while we listened to the kids' Sunday school classes combine to form one choir, which sang several Christmas carols. I may have even gotten a little teary-eyed over the whole thing, because singing kids do that to me! It's just too much cuteness, wrapped up all at once, and the tears sting my eyes when the kids are performing.

Don't judge me.

The boy? He's the second one from the left, in the back row. In the blue. Frightfully cute, isn't he?!

Sister's little man, K (in the green), did some singing, too.

The boy's cousin, L (in the gray) also belted out some holiday songs.

After church finished up, the Jedi Family met our friends, Dave and Missi, and their kids at McDonald's, where we secured high-fat, high-sodium lunches, and then we went power shopping at Wal-Mart for Christmas gifts for needy families.

Yes. Wal-Mart. On a Sunday. Two weeks before Christmas.

It was, admittedly, LESS BUSY than the movie theater on Saturday afternoon!

After buying all sorts of fun toys and clothes for some children whose Christmases are not expected to be very bright, we went to Missi's house for a wrapping party, where we dolled everything up in holiday paper and bows.

Hubs got to wrap all the SQUARE BOXES, because wrapping square boxes is Hubs' specialty.

There may also have been some adorable kids and yummy pizza involved in the wrapping party.

And, of course, forks were completely optional at this party!

And that, people, was our weekend.

Hubs and I were not surprised at all when the boy announced at 7:30 last night, "I am so tired, Mom!"

Really? Was it the relay races down the staircase that wore you out this weekend? Or the birthday party? Or the chaos that was the theater? Or all the sledding and the hiking and the sledding and the hiking? Or the power shopping? Or the pizza-eating? Or the Wii playing with Dave and Missi's kids, while the grown-ups wrapped gifts?

What part wore you out, Son?

Our Weekend Spun Us Right 'Round, Like a Record, Baby, Right 'Round...

2010-12-12T19:36:00.005-07:00

Our weekend was, predictably, packed to the gills.

We like to treat our weekends like old station wagons (the kind with the wood-grain paneling and the rear-facing backseat, which were SO COOL way back when, but would now be nothing short of the worst embarrassment in life to any junior high child).

A family could fit a whole lot into those station wagons of yesteryear, and the Jedi Family can cram a whole lot into a single weekend.

And tomorrow night, if you're lucky, I'll outline the highlights of our weekend, because I'm sure that there are really people out there who are waiting, with held breath, to hear about everything we did.

Like how we spilled the $3.50 Mountain Dew in the movie theater, and then the kid next to us spilled his popcorn, which stuck in the Dew on the floor.

Good times, people. Good times.

Right now, though, I'm going to go wrestle the checkbook around a little bit and finish writing checks for a couple of bills, because I AM SUCH A FAN OF OLD-FASHIONED! Why pay bills online, effortlessly and in seconds, when you can laboriously write checks and cram them into envelopes and address the envelopes and stick them with stamps and carry them to the post office to mail out? Or better yet, DRIVE them to the post office in your old station wagon.

With the wood-grain paneling.

For tonight, though, I will leave you this one snapshot.

Go ahead and say it.

THAT IS THE CUTEST DANG TEN-YEAR-OLD EV-AH!

That's No Moon; It's a Space Station

2010-12-09T18:37:00.002-07:00

What?!

Y'all don't celebrate Christmas with a few members of The Force?

Y'all don't have Star Wars ornaments hanging from homemade hooks, constructed out of blue electrical wire, on your trees?

A shame. Just a pure shame. We're going to buy our Christmas gifts off the Jawa-driven sandcrawler this year. Doesn't everyone want a faulty droid wrapped up beneath the tree?

(And really? You should never, ever underestimate the power of blue electrical wire.)

(Or duct tape.)

(Or a good lightsaber.)

The Tree is a Bit Brighter than Your Last College Bonfire

2010-12-08T19:41:00.002-07:00

I am away from my primary computer.

My computer, which has become a bit of a dinosaur that moves at the speed of dirt and sits on my giant desk.

Instead, I am sitting on our sofa, using Hubs' laptop. I am not so much a laptop fan, but Hubs not only embraces the laptop, he packs it with him wherever he goes.

It's not a purse. It's not even a satchel, like Indiana Jones carries. It's a LAPTOP BAG. It's okay for guys to carry laptop bags. It makes them look powerful and smart.

No matter.

We are attempting to deck the Jedi Manor halls this evening, so that Clark Griswold next door can see the twinkling lights on our tree from our living room window and leave us alone. Clark Griswold is policing the cul de sac, encouraging everyone to just go on ahead and get some outdoor lights up.

Mmm-hmm.

I think the neighborhood watch group gave up on the Jedi Manor long ago. It's not that we're Scrooges over here at the Manor; it's just that HOLIDAY DECORATING! IT REQUIRES SO MUCH EFFORT! And then, just when you manage to fine-tune it all and get your lights to twinkle just so as they dangle off the rooftop, it's suddenly December 26th and time to yank it all down.

Thankfully, someone from our cul de sac knows us well and tied a giant holiday ribbon around our mailbox yesterday.

With the free ribbon and the tree, we'll consider our holiday decorating complete!

Hubs has fourteen miles of white lights strung throughout our living room, dining room and kitchen as he checks for burned-out bulbs and cries out, "The lighting of the tree this year will be nothing short of something flashy on the Vegas strip!"

Hubs' motto is simple: Go huge or go home. Turn the tree into a beacon of light which can be seen from Mars, or just leave it alone, because WHY BOTHER?

We are the same family who uses a hand-held, propane torch to light our fireworks.

Clearly, we covet your prayers for our family.

So, while the boy and Hubs are making sure that every last light twinkles, exactly like Clark himself did, I decided to smack a quick post up on the World Wide Web.

I just had one tiny thing to address this evening.

Someone from Virginia found my blog yesterday by doing a Google search on this phrase:

"Is the Thanksgiving turkey any good yet?"

Oh, Virginia! The Jedi Family is brave. As I mentioned, we don't even use punks on the 4th of July, because propane torches and bottle rockets are just too good of a combo. Hubs claims that safety goggles are for home improvement shows on HGTV, so that no one gets sued. We tackle ice-coated hills in two-wheel drive. But even we would not attempt to make soup out of the holiday turkey at this point in the game, because listen, Virginia. Botulism KILLS! It doesn't matter if you've kept it in the refrigerator all this time or not. December 8th + Thanksgiving Turkey = Wicked Poor Choice. I hope I've been clear.
Sincerely,
Jedi Mama

And with that said, I need to help wrap lights around the tree so that UFOs can see the glow and land on our rooftop tonight.

Jedi Mama Placed On The Disabled List, Due to a Finger Injury

2010-12-07T16:03:00.004-07:00

So I may have mentioned my kindergarten PE class before.

Or maybe seventy-four times before.

There are only thirteen of them, but they feel like they're a full herd of neurotic chimpanzees, with seventeen entire generations involved, when they show up in my gym. They always have something going on which brings me to wonder WHY ME?

Today, for instance, one of them came up to me and said, "Hey, Teacher! I got a slinky out of the prize box today!" I congratulated him on his slinky, because HAS HE EVER MADE IT TO THE PRIZE BOX BEFORE? This particular boy and the prize box do not connect often, would be my guess.

As I looked harder at the slinky, which he SEEMED to be holding, I realized that it was a whole lot less HOLDING OF THE SLINKY and more of THE OVERALL STRAP ON MY SNOW PANTS HAS BECOME PERMANENTLY ENTANGLED IN MY NEW SLINKY.

Which was, of course, followed by, "Teacher, can you get my slinky off of my snow pants button?"

With enough nerve pills, I am finding that I can actually accomplish most anything in kindergarten PE, because THE NERVE PILLS! THEY STRENGTHEN ME!

Or at least they blur it all out.

Today, though, we did stations in PE, where I set up different activities throughout the entire gym, and each little pumpkin was given a partner. The two of them flip around and run and bounce off the walls at each station, for precisely two minutes, and then I blow the whistle, and they get to race to the next station.

Of course you remember gym class stations! Remember in 7th grade, when you would lay on your belly at the push-ups station in an I'm-Taking-A-Much-Deserved-Break-Here pose, until the teacher turned around to stare at your side of the gym, at which point you'd snap back to attention and whip out enough perfect-formation push-ups to make any military drill sergeant proud?

(And remember how we could actually all DO perfect-formation push-ups in 7th grade, before old age and age-related weakness settled in?)

(And remember how we all wore two pastel-colored polo shirts, layered together, with the collars flipped up in the 7th grade? How cool was that? But I digress. Which, you know, is par for the course around here.)

I set out a golfing station today. We have, hidden in the bowels of my PE closet, a couple of these boards, which are covered in faux grass, the likes of which jazz up every child's springtime Easter basket. There is a little metal bar, which stands approximately four inches high, and a golf ball on a wire hangs off of the bar. Ultimately, it's a homemade device which professional golfers can stand next to and practice their swings with, and there's some satisfaction in connecting the end of the golf club with the golf ball on the wire, because a perfect connection makes the ball spin in a state of perpetual motion.

And, when launched into that perpetual motion, the spinning golf ball makes a very loud, very satisfying whirring noise.

(Don't judge the quality of my PE accessories; I teach at a private school, and our budget is zero dollars. I think some child's golfing grandfather made these practice boards back in 1997. Sometimes I make paper-mache balls by placing strips of newsprint over balloons the night before, so that we can play kickball. Weaker kickers always get to go first, because the stronger kickers are sure to end the game by rupturing the Daily Press ball.)

(Oh, I kid. I totally make a gob of those homemade paper-mache kickballs. When we ruin one, I throw in another, and the game keeps going.)

(And also? When the boy was in kindergarten in his PUBLIC elementary school, I helped teach his PE class. And I would be lying if I said I didn't covet that PE supply closet there. That's when I realized that THE PUBLIC SCHOOL BUDGETS! I AM SUCH AN ENORMOUS FAN!)

Before class started today, I put the faux-grass-covered golf training center out, and I laid ONE, SOLITARY golf club at that station.

Never mind that the scooter station had two scooters for each partner to use. Or that the jump rope station had two jump ropes. Or that the hoola hoop station had two hoola hoops. I am the mother of a small boy, and I evaluate every piece of equipment that comes into our lives and judge it on the DANGER SCALE.

Wars have been initiated, fought and won with weapons less glamorous than a golf club. TWO golf clubs at this station would have been a sword fight ready and waiting to be battled. I told them that they'd have to (gasp!) take turns.

Taking turns is not a phrase that is easily understood in the kindergarten language. It's kind of like shouting out the word democracy in some countries. I feared that the golf station wouldn't last -- that I would be dismantling it and simply saying, "When y'all get to THIS orange cone here -- this orange cone where golfing used to be, before y'all broke one another's noses with the golf clubs -- y'all can just do some jumping jacks." I feared the golf station. The kindergartners had noticed it; their attention was snagged. They had a newfound respect for the teacher who would lay such weaponry out before them and trust them with it.

We started the stations.

And listen, people! I wanted to sing a rousing chorus of "Oh, bring us a figgy pudding," because TOTAL SCORE! Kindergarten children, when paired off in groups of two and told to circulate the gym every two minutes and LOOK! WE HAVE GOLF CLUBS OUT! behave in a manner that makes me feel like all is going to be well and completely right in the world.

Our PE class was golden! The Christmas spirit had fully descended upon us.

Can I just get an AMEN here?!

As the little punks shuffled out my gym doors, the first graders bounced in, and when they saw that the stations were set up and that OH MY WORD! NEW GOLF CLUB STATION! they rejoiced. One little boy even looked at me and said, "This is going to be the best PE day of my life!"

And first grade PE was every bit as golden. I began to plan an entire physical education curriculum around those stations. I envisioned having a fundraiser so that we could buy AN INDOOR PUTTING SYSTEM to be used in conjunction with the golf club that every child was treating with love and respect.

My second graders did fantastically well, too, and one of them said, "We should do stations more often!"

And then fourth grade came in.

AND SOMEONE STINKING BROKE MY GOLF CLUB. When I inspected it, I realized that I probably couldn't point fingers and place blame, because THE CLUB! Cheap plastic! On account of no school budget aimed directly at PE equipment!

Or so I thought it was cheap plastic. Until I wiggled the broken part just a little, to determine whether duct tape would repair the injury or not and realized HOLY SNOT, BATMAN! IT'S TOTAL FIBERGLASS, AND MY FINGER IS NOW COMPLETELY FULL OF FIBERGLASS SLIVERS, LIKE IT'S BEEN HIT BY A FULLY LOADED PORCUPINE! I'M HIT! I'M HIT!

And I wanted the school nurse, because the fiberglass slivers filled my already-injured, left index finger. Double whammy.

Last week, I helped unload an enormous shipment of wreaths that arrived at the boy's school, which the kids had sold as a fundraiser. (A fundraiser where the proceeds DO NOT have to go towards stellar PE equipment. On account of SCORE! THEY ALREADY HAVE STELLAR PE EQUIPMENT THERE!)

And when I say enormous shipment, I want y'all to envision boxes of wreaths stacked five high, as long as the Great Wall of China. And a few of us moms unpacked them all. And sorted them all. And cursed the day we ever signed up to be on the PTO.

(Until, that is, the boy's buddy Quinn walked by us with a tray of Oreo cookies coated in white chocolate fudge, because BIRTHDAY TREAT! Somehow, the dipped Oreo made the wreath sorting bearable.)

Unfortunately, one of the boxes was filled with holly, which is a plant relative of the Ginsu knife, and I managed to take a holly thorn directly to the pad of my left index finger.

The only reason the holly thorn stopped going into my finger was because it hit the bone.

Blood? Yes. Pain? You cannot even imagine. Drama? The Academy nominated me.

And then, because I have a tendency to react differently to all the world's stimuli than the rest of the population in Small Town, USA does, I ended up with this hard little knot of lumpage in my finger. And it was brilliantly red for days. And it really cut into my ability to type, because you hit the "T" key with your left index finger, and "T" is a very common letter in the English language.

A week later, my index finger is still sporting the holly-induced bump, and it still aches when a storm is brewing.

And today I filled that finger with fiberglass particles, which meant that I spent my entire Pre-Kindergarten PE time scraping a metal whistle against it, trying to dislodge the invisible barbs, because I had no credit card handy, and everyone knows you scrape a credit card over a bee sting to get the stinger out, and I was trying to watch the clock, so that I could blow my whistle every two minutes.

Which was NOT the whistle I was scraping my finger with, because CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE? Fiberglass slivers in the bottom lip?! I shiver just typing the words!

And the fiberglass? Well, it totally shot the golden PE glow down!

Are You Smarter Than a 4th Grader?

2010-12-06T22:24:00.002-07:00

This is an actual conversation that the boy and I had in the Suburban this week. I'd tell you that I've changed the names to protect the innocent, but, people! We all know who was talking here!

BOY: Mom, do you know when Benjamin Franklin was born?
ME: I don't honey. Probably the seventeen hundreds.
BOY: 1706, Mom. Do you know when he died?
ME: Probably in the seventeen hundreds.
BOY: 1790, Mom. Did you know that he invented the armonica?
ME: What's an armonica?
BOY: Mom, did you even learn about Benjamin Franklin when you were in school? Because it doesn't sound like you paid very much attention when your teacher talked about him...

(Note to self, after further discussion with the boy: Armonicas and harmonicas are NOT the same thing! I know that now. I didn't know that before.)

(On account of the small fact that I wasn't paying very much attention to my teacher when she explained it.)

5(x+0), Where x = Party

2010-12-05T16:53:00.002-07:00

Tomorrow, life will return to normal. Hubs will go back to work. The boy will head off to school. And, since it's Monday, I will be having coffee in the morning, followed by Housecleaning Power Hour.

Or perhaps we'll just call it Housecleaning Power Five Hours, because that's probably a more reasonable time frame for what actually needs to be done around the Jedi Manor, since an archaeological dig needs to be established to uncover our dining room table.

And then we will all be able to take a deep breath and relax, while we are working and learning about metric measurements and scouring toilets that have managed to turn pink inside.

(Don't judge me on our toilet issue. Toilets turn pink all the time, and their owners still go on to win the Nobel Prize and an Oscar. Pink stuff in the inside of my toilet will not hinder me from my super model status.)

The weekend, you see, was a mass of parties.

It started on Friday afternoon. The boy takes a couple of extra classes each week, which he's not required to take, but which challenge him. And he loves them. On Friday, one of these classes took a field trip to the local college, where the biology professor there gave them pig hearts to dissect. I cannot even tell you the joy that our little boy faced the day with on Friday morning, as he kept shouting out before school, "I'm dissecting a HEART today!" This announcement was always followed by a lot of fist pumps in the air. When you're ten, heart dissection is enormously cool. The class went so long, parents had to pick their kiddos up at the college, because there were no buses running to return them to their school. Because I was working, Kellen's mom scooped the boys up, and she took them to Party #1.

Which really? As far as the boy and Kellen were concerned, the heart dissection was Party #1. They could! not! stop! talking about it! I later asked the boy, "So? Do you think you'll be a heart surgeon now?" He replied, "No way. I love to cut those hearts apart. I don't want to repair them! I just want to hack into them and see how they work!" I'm not sure that any other activity at school this year will ever top Friday's dissection in the boy's mind.

The boy's good buddy, Quinn, had turned ten, so Party #1 got itself started after school with a massive snowball fight. I stopped by Quinn's house to drop his present off just in time to see nine ten-year-olds stuff Kellen into the garbage dumpster and roll him down the driveway.

Oh, he was perfectly happy about doing it. Make no mistake.

While a few other moms stayed at Quinn's house to indulge in the wine offered by Quinn's sweet mama, I ran a few errands and popped over to Missi's house for a bit, to get some snacks ready for Party #2.

At 7:00, Hubs and I picked the boy and Enzo up from Quinn's house, and we migrated back to Missi's house with both boys, where Party #2 was in full swing.

Dave and Missi have thrown an enormous Christmas party every year since we've known them. It's a standing-room only sort of party, where everyone mingles and talks and eats and talks and mingles and eats.

And there is wine!

We mingled and talked until my voice was raspy! We laughed with everyone; we told stories; we hugged and ate and drank and were very, very merry.

Although I behaved like a well-paid paparazzi with Missi's camera, the only decent shot I managed to snag with my phone on Friday night was this one:

Regan, Sierra, Heather and Katie, y'all look darling, and I love you so much!

I'd show you the four other photos I snapped with my phone, but they'll make you carsick because OH MY WORD! ALL THE BLURRY! The snazzy little cell phone camera did not live up to my standards on Friday night.

If you would like to see the CLEAR snapshots that I took of everyone, hop on over to Missi's blog and take a peek. (http://sheridanhuberts.blogspot.com/2010/12/hubert-christmas-pahr-tay.html)

After Hubs and I returned home on Friday night, I was wound up and completely incapable of sleeping, so we stayed up late watching old episodes of Arrested Development, because listen, people. Hubs and I are PREDICTABLE! And also QUITE BORING.

On Saturday morning, the boy dashed off with Mam and Pa and Sister's kids for a morning of fun at the library and McDonald's. Mam is not afraid to feed those children French fries and cheeseburgers!

Hubs and I stayed home because THE CARPENTER WAS HERE! And our built-in bookcase is nearly complete, and it looks fabulous.

(And this blog post! It's so boring! But creative phrases plum escape me tonight, because my brain's gauge is on the empty side of the scale at the moment.)

(Which doesn't really differ from other days, I suppose.)

At 1:00 Saturday afternoon, the boy was off to Party #3, because the cute neighbor boy had turned eleven, and he wanted to celebrate with a movie matinee and cake and ice cream and fun games and his closest buddies.

At 4:00 Saturday afternoon, Hubs and the boy and I were off to Party #4, because our niece, Miss R, turned eight years old.

Oh, Miss R! You can't be eight already!

The music was obnoxiously loud, the strobe lights almost gave me a seizure, everyone was reduced to wearing the same dark tan skates with the orange wheels that were rentals when I was a 6th grader, and the party was actually a ton of fun that kept me grinning all afternoon! Nothing warmed my heart more than seeing Brother Joel skating hand-in-hand with his fifteen-years-old-in-ten-more-days son, H.

Not that H WANTED to hold hands while he skated with his dad, because H has a coolness factor, which Brother Joel does not. Brother Joel grabbed H's hand in a death grip and MADE HIM SKATE HAND IN HAND. And H may be a lot of things (like sweet and handsome and cool), but he's not yet able to escape the iron-fisted hand clamp of his own daddy.

Precious times!

And then "The Eye of the Tiger" came on, and we all did some fake boxing punches in the air and reminisced about the good old days, which were more commonly called The '80s, when everyone had bigger hair and bluer eyeshadow.

The kids quickly discovered that thirteen laps around the roller rink was equivalent to one mile, and they spent the afternoon trying to out-skate each other, until they were blurry replicas of themselves, whizzing by on rollerblades.

And I decided that it was time to rewatch Xanadu.

Eventually, the voice over the speakers told us that it was time for the boys to hitchhike, which involved them all standing around the sides of the rink, while the girls skated and picked them up, if they held their outstretched thumbs just right. Hubs and I leaned on the railing and watched the entire hitchhiking scenario unfold.

The boy was not into it; he was very leery of THE WRONG GIRL grabbing his hand, so he waited until his kindergarten cousin, Miss A, skated by and released him from his motionless misery. Miss A punched the boy's hitchhiking thumb, and off they skated into the sunset, which was a simulated sunset created by a big ball of twirling mirrors and lights. When that skate came to an end, the boy zipped back to us and announced, "Good grief! You have to be careful about who tries to grab you out there, because there were some girls I just wasn't going to skate with!"

Our advice? Cousins are a safe bet! They've seen you at your worst at the kids' table during Thanksgiving dinner, and they still love you.

By 6:00 Saturday night we were all sweaty and hot and red-cheeked, so we headed home, but not before Hubs spent a solid ten minutes spinning cookies with the Suburban behind the roller rink and congratulating himself on NEAR PERFECT SPINS, EVEN WHILE HE WAS IN FOUR-WHEEL-DRIVE.

Because OH MY WORD, but some MAD DRIVING SKILLS are apparently required to obtain Cookie Perfection with the hubs locked down.

Of course, I was nauseated and ready to throw up, while the boy was shrieking from the back seat that his weekend simply couldn't get any better.

On account of his Y chromosome, which appreciates a good burned cookie on the icy parking lot.

There is no taming the Y chromosome, once it's been pumped up by a strobe light and "Eye of the Tiger" at full volume, followed by a nice round of "Beat It" to finish the skate party off.

On Saturday night, I dug out the Tylenol PM and I did imbibe, as I hoped for a good night's sleep, but listen.

Have you ever had insomnia, after taking a Tylenol PM? People, it's UNPRETTY! You feel like Marlin Perkins has put the smack down on you, in the form of a heavily-laden tranquilizer dart to the side of the neck, only you lay there, completely unable to give in to the sleep. Clearly, the ability to eat a Tylenol PM and remain awake for most of the night is an art form that few people are physically able to achieve.

I consider myself gifted.

This morning, Hubs and the boy and I hopped off to church, after we had fortified ourselves with the nectar from the java bean plant, via a cup from the loving land of Starbucks, because Mama needed some caffeine to recover from all the lack of sleep, regardless of the drug-induction.

And then, it was on to Party #5 this afternoon, because my darling friend, Nicky, was having a party for GIRLS ONLY, which involved many scrumptious munchies at her house. Nicky teaches at the boy's school, and she'd invited an entire pack of teachers from school, who are all dear, dear people. We sat around and ate this incredible hot artichoke dip and the new M&Ms which ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAVE THE CANDY SHELL, and which are nothing more than HEAVENLY PERFECTION, and we laughed until our sides hurt, because teachers know how to party! I feel blessed that the boy is surrounded by all these women at his school.

And also?

Nicky had wine.

And now I am home, and Hubs and the boy are whining that they need food, since they did not sit with an enormous pack of girls at Nicky's house, inhaling hot artichoke dip which will surely be served in the buffet lines in heaven, so I have to find something for them to call dinner.

On account of OLD MOTHER HUBBARD LIVES HERE.

On account of all the partying that occurred this weekend, and all the time in which I DIDN'T HAVE to get to the grocery store.

Hopefully they'll both be satisfied with toast tonight, because that's looking like the prime food staple in the Jedi Kitchen at the moment, and I'm too worn out and spent to venture out to secure anything more nutritionally sound for them.

Happy Sunday night, y'all.

I hope your weekend was full, too, and that no one at your house got a little seasick when the Suburban spun the cookies!

Quick Thoughts

2010-12-02T20:39:00.003-07:00

I have just a few quick things for y'all tonight.

1. Our friend, Nancy, emailed me this morning and said, "Honey, why don't we put you on the church's prayer chain, since you haven't been feeling well?"

Bless Nancy!

When I told Hubs what Nancy had suggested, he smirked and said, "I'm going to tell Nancy that you're milking this chest cold for all it's worth!"

(Nancy's crown in heaven is going to be substantially larger than Hubs' crown.)

I did, in fact, tell Nancy that my name didn't need to be added to the chain just yet, because I think that finally, today, I may be recovering.

Sort of.

The biggest sign of my recovery? It's already well after 8:30, and I'm not even in bed yet!

I told Hubs this evening, "Hey! We have two weeks' worth of Glee to watch off of the DVR, and an episode of The Office, too!"

Hubs replied by saying, "It's because living with you this last week has been similar to living with a 95-year-old woman. You cough constantly, you always smell like Vicks, and you've been in bed every night before 7:30, which means we can't watch those shows in the evenings."

Little does he know that I've also been tucking used Kleenexes inside the sleeves of my cardigan sweaters, just by my wrists.

Or that I've started flattening out used pieces of aluminum foil and saving them for next time.

Or that I've been Googling recipes that incorporate potted meat, since one of the local grocery stores had a fantastic sale on Spam this week.

2. I had to laugh this evening, as I glanced at the detailed blog counter, because a stranger from Las Vegas found my blog by Googling this exact phrase:

"Is the Thanksgiving turkey still good to eat?"

Dear Mr. (Mrs.?) Las Vegas,
It all depends on the person you ask. Some will tell you to go for it. They will insist that your ancestors ate week-old turkey on the wagon train, and that they lived to carry on the family name. Others will inform you that all bird meat is fully tainted and laced with toxic botulism after only four days in the refrigerator. Many people will tell you that it's probably safe to eat the turkey, as long as you kept it in your refrigerator all week, and not in the linen closet. Ultimately, it's your decision to make, and I wish you well.
Sincerely,
Jedi Mama

PS: We ate tortellini because the six-days-old turkey scared us off.

3. Another stranger from New York found my blog yesterday by doing a Google search on THIS exact phrase:

"My pencil smells like pancake batter."

Dear Mr. New York,
I can offer you nothing, but you made me laugh out loud.
Affectionately,
Jedi Mama

4. And still, a stranger from the land labeled UNKNOWN found my blog by Googling this:

"What is Lionel Richie doing these days?"

Dear Miss UNKNOWN,
Frankly, I have no idea. I lost track of Mr. Richie after Hello. Which, you know, was a fantastic song. We had it on every mixed break-up tape ever recorded back in high school. I'm sorry that I didn't keep better tabs on him, so that I could give you a more definite answer.
Lovingly,
Jedi Mama

5. I'm off. It's now 9:00, and I've rallied just enough strength to fit in a Glee episode before I crawl into bed.

6. And also? I don't even think that I'm going to need the NyQuil tonight!

I Wish I Had Party Hats and Little Horns to Pass Out to Y'all

2010-12-01T17:29:00.003-07:00

Once upon a time, on this day a whole lot of years ago, Hubs' mama brought his baby brother home from the hospital.

He was not a magical baby. He was not destined to be a prince. The family named him Brother, and they loved him, regardless of the fact that he was just ornery.

I thought that I'd take a bit of a break tonight from telling you VIRAL! I SIMPLY HAVE A VIRUS, and we all know that viruses cannot be cured with antibiotics, so I have been sentenced to more days hitting the NyQuil sauce and coughing hard enough to deposit my lungs on the floor. Tonight, we won't mention the fact that I sound like a seal at high tide. We shall, instead, grab hands and take a walk down memory lane, in celebration of the fact that it's December 1st today.

And Brother has his birthday every single year on December 1st.

This is Brother in the summer of 2002, when he coached his boys' and the boy's T-ball team. For the record, the boy was two years old in 2002, and two year olds should never really play T-ball, because they are easily distracted. This is a snapshot of Coach Brother, trying to DISTRACT the boy from a cute little girl who also played on the team. I think Brother was saying, "Boy, keep your eye on the ball, and not on the ladies."

From the get-go, Brother has always had a sense of fashion.

Often enough, Brother learned the hard way (much like Nellie Olson did) that YES! Yes, bonnets are fashionable, but sweet mercy! THEY ITCH!

Remember Hubs in the sweater vest that his grandmother crocheted for him one Christmas? Hubs' look announces to the world that real men should never wear yellow sweater vests. Hubs wanted to yank his vest off and put on his Oscar the Grouch T-shirt.

Not Brother. Brother was plum pleased with HIS yellow, crocheted sweater vest, and he thought it looked especially terrific when he paired it with his plaid pants.

Brother has also known, since Day One, that THE SOFA! You should always spread out on the sofa and get comfortable, even if that means your brothers and sister have to squeeze in tight with what little room they have left. Although I lack photographic evidence, Brother still tends to sit this way today.

(And yes. Hubs does have his legs crossed in this snapshot, and he IS actually wearing black, knee high socks. Usually, his long pajamas covered them up, but this is the picture that gave him away. A public display of yellow sweater vests was something Hubs would not tolerate, but he did like the long black socks, which kept his little toes warm at night.)

And also? If you're going to sit on your dad's lap so that your grandmother can take a picture, just go ahead and spread yourself out, so that you're comfortable. Never mind that polite Brother Joel will have to scootch in close. You go ahead and take all the room you need.

In this picture, Hubs is six. And a half. Brother is one. And a half. This was the month that Brother eclipsed Hubs in both size and weight.

When I first saw this snapshot, I had to giggle out loud. I wasn't sure if it was a walker or a medieval torture device. I guess when you're as old as Brother is, baby walkers were shaped a bit differently.

Throughout the years, Brother has always emphatically stated, "Once I saw how well I could fish in my underwear, I never went back to wearing jeans at the lake."

Brother is also quite passionate about cooking in the kitchen, and he can produce some show-stopping entrees. Truly. Brother! Can! Cook! And well! His love of the kitchen started early. Thankfully, when he cooks these days, he doesn't always wear his footie-pajamas.

These days, Brother is actually a good dad. His parenting skills were developed early. Why play with the excavator nearby, when you can swipe your sister's baby doll and take her for a stroll? In the end, pushing a dolly around prepares you for real life, when you grow up to have four kids of your own.

And also? I would like to entitle this snapshot, "Skinny Dipping."

No matter how many words I type, I could never sum it all up as well as this birthday cake did years (and years and years!) ago.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TIGER.

The Soup That Sounded Good, In Theory

2010-11-30T10:57:00.003-07:00

So the head cold changed direction yesterday. It executed a near-perfected U-turn, traveled in a Southern direction, and landed smack-dab, with a loud thunk, back in my chest. I had originally believed that the Lingering Chest Cold, which held on for the better part of November, was a done thing and that we had officially broken up and parted ways, but at some point in the middle of the night, I made the small discovery that the Lingering Chest Cold had only been in remission.

And now it is back.

And I don't really want to talk about it, because when I start to talk about it, that's all I can talk about BECAUSE OF ALL THE MISERY. And also because of POSSIBLE WHINER.

(Speaking of ALL THE MISERY, it's what drove Hubs to the sofa at 12:30 this morning. Apparently, he was completely over LISTENING to all the misery, which took on the form of a deep-rooted chest cough that makes me sound like I've been slamming back thirty-three packs of Camels a day for the last decade.)

(And thirty-three packs a day? I have to imagine that's a lot, because I was always one of those do-good types during my teenage years who never even TRIED a cigarette, so when people talk about their daily package intakes, I have no idea what constitutes a severe Camel addict and what just shouts out I ONLY SMOKE FANCY CIGARS ON POKER NIGHT WITH THE GIRLS.)

(Which, you know, I don't.)

(Because I never even learned to play poker. Oh, Brother tried to teach me to play poker once, when Hubs was just Boyfriend. Hubs -- who was just Boyfriend -- and Brother lived together, and one evening they tossed out the cards and tried to teach me the ancient art of poker, and I was overwhelmed with all the "this-card-is-higher-than-that-card" business, so I simply shouted out "UNO!" whenever I thought I had a good hand. Ultimately, this made Boyfriend and Brother discouraged with my teachability, and it was the very last time anyone tried to teach me Texas Hold 'Em, so they encouraged me to park myself in front of their TV while they battled out a friendly game of poker between the two of them.)

(And really? Televised poker? Does anything exist that's more boring? I'll gladly hand out five golden stars to televised fishing, if it means televised poker will leave me alone.)

(And another thing? House Hunters? I just have two words: Bore. Ing. And all the boring is a sad thing, because rarely do I actually get to sit in front of the TV at home, but when I do, it's all HGTV and nothing else. Unless Lifetime is airing a sappy show. And it seems like every time I turn the channel to HGTV, it's back-to-back, marathon, days-on-end showings of House Hunters. That's when I usually end up watching all the televised fishing. But not the televised poker. Because that's how the listing goes. #1 Public Enemy: Televised Poker. #2. House Hunters. #3. Televised Fishing. I have nothing more to say on this.)

Where was I?

I think I was at the spot where I agreed to just inform you that SICK! I AM SICK WITH THE BLACK CHEST DEATH! and leave it at that.

So the thing is, I decided that perhaps some homemade chicken noodle soup might help push the Black Chest Death (of which we shall not speak) to a more tolerable level today, and that's when I realized that TURKEY! WE STILL HAVE SOME LEFTOVER TURKEY, AND REALLY? Can't it just be homemade TURKEY noodle soup?

Science was certainly never my strong suit (simply because the professor never asked, "Where should we place the semi-colon and the capitalization and the verb in this meiosis?"), so when I looked at the leftover turkey this morning and counted backwards on my fingers to Wednesday, when Hubs actually spent the day turning a raw bird into a smoked culinary delight, I began to have me some second thoughts, but it was time to rush out the door with the boy and get the punk to school.

On my return trip, I pulled into a church parking lot (of a church that we don't even attend), and texted Cody (chef extraordinaire) to ask the burning question of the day: "Hypothetically speaking, if you cooked a turkey last Wednesday, could you turn it into soup today? Which is Tuesday." (Often enough, I just state the obvious. Today was indeed Tuesday. I doubt Cody needed that part, but I like to overstate things just a titch.) I've never been very grand at texting and driving at the same time (Superb at BOTH of those things...just on an INDIVIDUAL BASIS!), so I sat in the church parking lot and waited, because I didn't know whether I should (a) go back home, or (b) head to the grocery store for soup-making ingredients.

But yes. I sat in that parking lot and waited for a responsive text.

And waited.

And waited.

And then I decided that Cody (bless her heart) must have been showering or pumping gas into her PT Cruiser while her phone sat unnoticed in the console, because she wasn't responding. Hence, I sent out a mass text to Missi and Amy and Elaine and Katie and Stephanie V., and I asked them the same question. I decided that it would be a bit of a gambling game. If I had more "Yes, that's a safe thing to do" responses than "Ugh! Throw the turkey out" answers, I'd go with the soup.

Stephanie V. fired back instantly and said, "Honey, the turkey is good enough for soup. Make it, darling, and enjoy."

Katie was on Stephie's tails, as she said, "Paul ate a turkey sandwich yesterday. Make your soup. Just think of our ancestors. I bet they ate week-old turkey and they lived!"

Missi said, in all capital letters, "ABSOLUTELY! Make crockpot soup today, as long as the turkey has been kept in the fridge all week!" (That one made me smile, because...well...where else would I have kept the turkey?)

And so it was confirmed. I pulled out of the church parking lot and headed to the grocery store, because I needed things like carrots and celery stalks and an onion, because cooking Thanksgiving dinner plum sucked us dry of all our food staples this week.

Then, just as I was about to head into the grocery store, Cody responded. "I don't trust poultry after four days. Throw it out. Don't do soup."

So there I was, wandering the aisles of the grocery store with a cart that was empty, because suddenly I was lost! Mindlessly lost, wondering what on earth I was going to get to put into my cart now, and wondering if I should go with the soup or not go with the soup.

And then BRILLIANCE! If the turkey leftovers were now six days old and I made soup, and the soup makes a BIG POT, wouldn't the turkey be seven days out tomorrow? And eight days out the following day? And clearly, that wouldn't be so good. So which was it to be? Throw away the turkey, in it's plain state today? Or throw away the soup tomorrow, after all the labor involved in making it?

People, I was a victim of the Black Chest Death, and I had no idea what to make for dinner, so I wandered aimlessly through the store, putting NOTHING into my cart and wondering exactly how long it would take for me to shake the NyQuil hangover.

And then an older employee at the grocery store politely asked me, "Can I help you find something?" What he didn't add to his question was, "You know, since you've been in our store for twenty minutes now, and you've circled the produce section eight times, and you have yet to pick up a single item and place it into your cart?"

I simply looked at him and said, "I don't know what I'm going to make for dinner tonight." And then, because I always manage to over-talk, I did indeed add, "I was going to make turkey soup, because Katie and Missi and Stephanie V. all told me it would be fine. Amy and Elaine never answered my text messages, and then Cody told me NOT to make the soup, and now I think maybe I really SHOULDN'T make homemade turkey noodle soup for my horrible chest cold, because tomorrow I'll have to throw the leftover soup away because the turkey will be really old by then."

Do you know how sometimes you simply ask how someone is doing, and you expect them to say, "Fine. Just fine," only they hit you with a full-on history of all their medical ailments since 1984, which then makes you suddenly remember that Van Halen's Jump was one of your favorite songs that year? Such was the shock that I dealt out to the grocery store employee today.

He finally asked, "So you've decided NOT to go with the turkey soup? Because Katie said no? Or because Missi said no? WHO said no?"

"Cody said no. Everyone else said yes, except for Amy and Elaine, who are ignoring me. I'm dying of the Black Chest Death and I need an answer on this turkey dilemma, and those two are just ignoring me."

And then he said, "I think NOT going with the soup is probably a good idea. You never know what can happen to meat when it has been in your refrigerator for several days."

I thanked him for his answer, and I decided I'd do tortellini in a white sauce tonight. As I told the gentleman thank you for his time, he yelled out, "You know, you remind me a lot of my daughter."

He has a neurotic daughter dying of the Black Chest Death who can't make up her mind on days-old turkey, and who over-talks and over-analyzes everything with complete strangers in grocery stores and brings AWKWARD to new heights?

I simply said, "I'm sure your daughter is a lovely person."

(He did say that I reminded him of her! Hence, I was stating the obvious. Which I have been known to do. As in, today is Tuesday.)

He replied, "She's always over-thinking things. Just remember, THROW THE LEFTOVERS AWAY AFTER FOUR OR FIVE DAYS."

And with that, I went on my way.

With a cart full of tortellini and some haphazard ingredients to make an Alfredo sauce to go on top of it tonight.

If I have the strength to actually COOK dinner tonight, that is!

(And really? As a grocery store employee, maybe he was just telling me to throw the leftover turkey away, so that I would spend money buying new food in the grocery store. It may have been a successful marketing campaign on his part. The jury is still out on this one.)

And then? When I got home? Well, Amy fired off a text and said, "I just talked to my dad. You know? The microbiologist? He said to go for the soup, as long as the turkey has been refrigerated since Wednesday, and as long as it didn't sit out on the counter for too long on Wednesday evening, during your Thanksgiving dinner."

(Where was all this "as long as the turkey has been in the refrigerator since Wednesday" stuff coming from? I've never been known to say, "Yeah, I think I'll make turkey soup out of that leftover turkey that we kept in the sock drawer of the bedroom dresser all week.")

And then, exactly twelve seconds after Amy's text came in, Elaine's response arrived. She said, "Um, I wouldn't do it. Think of the soup. Tomorrow it'll be LEFTOVER leftovers, and that's not good."

Elaine and I have always thought exactly alike.

Although today Missi told me to fortify myself with a Starbucks treat before I shopped for carrots and celery for the soup, and that's exactly my line of thinking too.

You know...the over-analyzes and over-thinks everything line of thinking.

But, as they said on Seinfeld years ago, "No soup for you! Come back one year!"

NEXT Thanksgiving, I'm going to be all over the turkey noodle soup issue before it even becomes an issue.

And? For the record? We have now officially had dinner. (Yes, I started the post BEFORE making the tortellini tonight.) I coughed like a mad woman throughout our entire meal, and Hubs said this: "Honey, you sound awful -- just awful. Why don't you hurry up and get the kitchen cleaned up, so that you can go straight to bed?"

Hubs.

He's a keeper.

For a Limited Time Only, Glamour Shots By Deb Are 75% Off

2010-11-29T19:28:00.003-07:00

The status quo is this:

I cannot suck air into my nose, although everything is more than capable of running out of my nose. This has turned me into one of those very nasty mouth breathers, and that, my friends, has chapped my lips.

I texted Cody today, and, in my best Napoleon imitation, said, "Bring me my chapstick! My lips hurt real bad."

I was living on the edge that perhaps someone out there would take pity on me and trek out into the eight-inches of new snow to bring me a tube of chapstick at work, on a day when I wasn't even supposed to be working. Instead, five minutes later, my incoming text message chime sounded.

"Just ask the nurse! She has like five sticks in her desk!"

Thank you, Kip.

And then...this one: "So, have you been licking every single shopping cart you see? You're a germ magnet."

People, I have no idea WHY November has treated me so rotten. First, it was the Lingering Chest Cold which kicked Mucinex in the backside. Now, it's Head Cold '10. As I said, I wash my hands until they're raw. I buy Clorox wipes in bulk. (I'm not even kidding on that one! You know the FAMILY PACKS of wipes? The multiple tubs that are shrink-wrapped together for a family of sixteen? Yeah. THOSE are the packages that I buy, because I can empty a tub of Clorox wipes faster than Hollywood stars can change boyfriends....faster than Lady Gaga can change fashion ensembles.) I have even been drinking Emergen-C packets. Repeatedly. According to the books, I am doing everything RIGHT.

According to my health status, I might as well be laying on the bathroom floor of the nearest truck stop, licking the bottom side of the potty and resting my cheek on the dirty tiles. Shopping carts seem tame with the germage I'm dragging home. I won't be taking any glamour shots with Deb anytime soon -- believe me! Not with this red nose.

Of course, I blame my kindergarten PE class completely. They're cute. Their noses run. Their fingers are in their noses, in their mouths, in the cracks of the playground's asphalt. And they hug me, and I hug them back. They sneeze on me. They cough on me. They love on me. How can I be expected to remain in stellar health under severe fire like that?

Happy Monday night, y'all. I'm off to smear my lips with chapstick and my neck with Vicks VapoRub.

Thanksgiving Ten

2010-11-28T16:57:00.005-07:00

Our long Thanksgiving weekend has passed in a blur of activity, a whirlwind of fun, and a whole lot of snot.

(I have a cold. It's horrendous. I just recovered from the Lingering Chest Cold, and blam! I have now been sideswiped and ambushed by Head Cold '10.)

(I don't understand why the germs keep attacking me. I wash my hands like I'm borderline OCD. I don't sip on juice box straws after someone else does. I consume vast quantities of Vitamin C. And still, the germs are finding me. And they are wearing me down. And also slowly destroying me.)

Because both my family and Hubs' family live right here, in Small Town, USA, we spend our holidays bouncing back and forth between everyone in a whoosh of activity that rivals a cardiovascular workout.

Round One of the Thanksgiving Weekend started on Wednesday night, at our house. Hubs spent the entire day smoking a turkey, and we ate with my family and our friends, Peggy and Jenna, and OH MY WORD! We went to bed suffering from bellies distended with a hearty meal.

On Thanksgiving morning, the plan was to meet at Sister's house, for a light breakfast, which would constitute Round Two. I say the words light breakfast, because that is the exact phrase Sister used. I believe she said, "I'll buy some of those itty-bitty powdered donuts for the kids, and we'll make lattes and eat fruit." After Wednesday night, this promise of a light breakfast was sounding like something that could be done, and done easily.

Sister ended up making omelets. Three-Egg Omelets, so you know, HUGE! Sister can whip eggs and mushrooms and onions and cheeses and peppers into a sweet culinary delight, and we had to spend some serious time bemoaning the fact that Sister had, indeed, LIED to us when she spoke the words light breakfast. Thankfully, breakfast was early enough that we had a small stretch of time in which to recuperate before the next phase of ALL THE EATING began.

Mam spent some time cooking at Sister's house. The boy commented, "With all that steam in the kitchen, it looks like Mam is stirring potions!"

After consuming their Three-Egg Omelets, the big boys made their way to the sofa. And the football. And the statements of We-Are-Watching-This-Game-Even-Though-Our-Eyes-Are-Closed-So-Please-Don't-Shut-The-Big-Screen-Off-Or-Someone-Will-Have-Broken-Fingers began.

The boy and his cousins, L and K, passed on the Three-Egg Omelets, because MINIATURE POWDERED DONUTS! Their faces were covered in white sugary goodness. I threw some chunks of fruit onto the boy's breakfast plate, and I believe his exact words were, "I don't have any room for that fruit; I ate too many donuts."

And then the little people simply moved from one sugar experience to another, as Sister had gingerbread houses to build, and they only fought a TINY BIT over who would be the Brick Layer.

Brick Layers, you see, are fully in charge of the bag of squirtable frosting. Being the Brick Layer in the construction of a gingerbread house is actually even better than being the King of the village, because the King never really stoops to manual labor.

Apparently manual labor, when it involves a bag filled with icing from the sugar cane plant, is the most fun you can have indoors.

After a Thanksgiving breakfast of powdered donuts, the kids did indeed dismantle the gingerbread house. They ripped chunks off of it faster than Hansel and Gretel could ever have hoped to do, and they inhaled it.

INHALED IT, PEOPLE.

I think they were all afraid that if they didn't ingest the gingerbread house and the decorative gumdrops quickly, some adult on a Food Pyramid Policing Policy would command them to drop the shingles. And the dry wall. And the gumdrop trees.

Eventually, we wrapped things up with my family, said our good-byes, gave out our hugs, and drove to Small Mountain Town, which is a speck on the map that is very close to Small Town. Hubs' parents live in Small Mountain Town, and we were on to Round Three, because this is the holiday of OVEREATING.

Hubs' mama had an impressive spread of food laid out on the dining room table, and we ate again, until Hubs announced, "I am giving up eating! I am actually not going to eat for the next week!"

I couldn't have agreed more.

With a diabetic coma settling in on all of us, Grammy and Hubs' sister (Aunt Pink) and I cleared off the dining room table and played a game called Squibblish with the kids. You had cards in the beginning, with phrases on them. You wrote your phrase on a slip of paper, which was threaded through a miniature plastic easel, and you passed it to someone else, who DREW your phrase. Then, you pushed the paper further through the plastic easel, so that your phrase was out of the line of vision, but your picture was still visible, and the next person had to decipher your drawing and write what they THOUGHT was happening. This went on and on and on, until FINALLY the kids were allowed to pull their giant rolls of paper all the way out, where they laughed until their sides hurt at all the funny pictures, and how the original phrase (much like in the game of Telephone) was lost and destroyed.

W was a pro at the game. (And yes, he has red eyes. And yes, I could fix that in Photo Shop, but THE TIME, PEOPLE! Work with me here. It's been a long weekend, and I have a head cold, and the red eyes are staying tonight.)

The boy and his cousin B weren't half bad themselves at the game.

R spent the entire game yelling out, "Whose handwriting is this? I can't read it AT ALL!"

Dear R, boys do not have the best handwriting in the world, but they know where bullets go in guns and they can parallel park. Love, Aunt Jedi Mama

Miss A was a fantastic artist, and when she drew a man eating a cookie, the boys decided that it was a monkey eating a pizza. There was some disgruntlement on Miss A's part that the spots on her circular cookie were CHOCOLATE CHIPS, and not pepperoni slices spread out on pizza dough. Miss A does not back down from boys, and she assured them that they all needed glasses, because chocolate chip cookies and pepperoni pizzas were LOADS DIFFERENT.

M giggled throughout the entire game, and insisted that sometimes chocolate chips look a whole lot like pepperoni slices, especially when HIS SISTER draws them.

On Thanksgiving night, Hubs and the boy and I waddled home, where we collapsed with Food Consumption Exhaustion, until the boy announced, "Well, I think I'll have another piece of that pumpkin pie Mam left for me." Clearly, our boy has learned to pace himself.

On Friday, the boy and I busted out some chores at home, while Hubs installed new computers in an office downtown. And then, we piled into the Suburban, because Santa Claus had come to town, and the boy had some requests to make!

We met Sister and L and K, along with Regs and her pack of cuties, and we stood in line for what seemed like eighteen years, but was really closer to just an hour. The kids swarmed around us, laughed their heads off, and only one of them spilled her hot cocoa all over our feet.

After our visit with Santa (during which the boy emphatically announced that he would love to have a chemistry set, and not just ANY chemistry set, but a DECENT chemistry set, which involves liquids that can explode, when mixed together), I went home with a stomach ache to beat the band, while Sister and Regs went out to eat. I felt perfectly awful, and swore that I would never eat three enormous meals, followed by massive quantities of leftovers, ever again.

At 7:00 on Friday night, while I was suffering from the Stomach Ailment and moaning softly to myself because I was missing dinner with Sister and Regs, Enzo called. His one request? "Can the boy spend the night at my house?"

Indeed he could. I helped him pack his bag, I shoved him out the door, and I collapsed in Hubs' recliner, smack in front of the big screen TV. Hubs was still working on computers across town, and I had, FOR WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST TIME IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS, the TV all to myself.

And the TV let me down!

I channel surfed for forty-five solid minutes, and found nothing to dedicate my time to, so I went to bed with my stomach ache and my book.

My book, which I borrowed from Cody. It's delicious. It's also 550 pages long, so I might as well have committed to reading War and Peace or even Moby Dick, for all the time it's taking me to get through this novel. (I fully blame old episodes of Arrested Development on the iPad at night, which has drastically cut into my reading time.)

On Saturday, we did nothing. The boy was still off at Enzo's house (where he had stayed up until 3:00 in the morning!), and Hubs and I were alone. We made coffee at home. We sat on the sofa. We sat on the other sofa. We sat on the first sofa again. I read a book. Hubs watched a recorded Colorado Avalanche game. I played nineteen consecutive games of Scrabble Blast on the computer.

People, I cannot even remember the last time we had a day like that.

Eventually, the boy and Enzo migrated in our direction, where they ended up playing video games in our basement, while they looked exactly like zombies. They had slept between the hours of 3 AM and 5 AM. The bags beneath their eyeballs could have been checked at any airport. Their pupils were glazed over.

And then, at precisely 6:30 PM, the Head Cold hit me. I had fully recovered from my stomach ache, and I simply said to Hubs, "You know, I feel like a cold is coming on." By 7:00, I was a victim. Head Cold '10 had fully settled upon me.

The boy had been asleep since before 7:00 (sleeping only two hours the night before will do that to a ten-year-old boy), so I found a bottle of NyQuil, and I did imbibe. It has been a long, long time since I used the NyQuil, and I was prepared to fight this cold from the get-go with the big guns.

I crawled into bed at 7:25.

Yes, at 7:25, on a Saturday night. Don't judge me. My dance card was empty, I had nothing to do, Hubs was invested in an Avalanche hockey game downstairs which involved a whole lot of cheering, and my book was calling me.

At 8:30, after having read for an hour and accomplishing some more of the 550 pages, I felt the NyQuil strike me down, and I went to sleep.

And listen, people. I always have the strangest dreams when I've taken the sauce. Or the cold medication. Last night, I dreamt that Hubs had found an old poster that advertised a brand of soup that was popular in the late 1800s in the trunk of his car. The poster was painted by some obscure artist, and the brand of soup was no longer around. I told Hubs that perhaps (PERHAPS!) the poster was worth some money, because it seemed to be in mint condition, and it was old, and it was fabulously painted. Hubs checked into it, and he announced to me, "This guy just gave me $1,300 for that poster! Can you believe it!" I was shocked, but then I told Hubs, "Maybe we should have researched its value more." And do you know what happened? The guy who bought it from Hubs to the tune of thirteen hundred clams put it on the auction block. Hubs and I went to this auction, and the opening bid was FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. The soup can poster eventually sold for SIX HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE MILLION AMERICAN DOLLARS, and I told Hubs, "Hmm. $1,300 doesn't seem so grand any more, does it?" I asked Hubs what he'd do if he had $625 million in REAL LIFE, and he said, "Well, I wouldn't be going in to work on Monday morning."

And then I woke up, because Cat 2 was destroying a plant that sits near our bathtub, and the noise of the plant's death woke me up. I jumped out of bed, toting my pillow behind me, and I swung that pillow at open air. Cat 2 was on one side of the bathtub, and I swung at the opposite side. I felt like I'd been hit with a tranquilizer dart, and I was terribly woozy, and then I remembered that I usually take HALF OF A DOSE of NyQuil, instead of the full dose that I'd taken Saturday night. I held onto the wall, stumbled back to bed, and blacked out, so Cat 2 lived to see another sunrise.

(If anyone would like to adopt Cat 2, I am now taking applications. Having her around is like having a raccoon in the house. A raccoon who destroys house plants.)

This morning, Hubs and the boy and I went to church. The boy ventured off with Mam and Pa for lunch, and Hubs and I ran some errands.

(Terribly exciting news, I know.)

Afterwards, the boy and I collected Enzo, and we went to see the movie Tangled, which is in 3D.

I have no depth perception. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Without depth perception, you cannot see 3D-ness. I have never had depth perception -- I was, in fact, born without it. It's so bad, I have to get a little letter from my eye doctor every time I renew my driver's license which says, "Jedi Mama will flunk the eye exam; however, her driving skills are superb, stupendous, and amazing. Please gift her with a license to operate a motorized vehicle."

While everyone else sat in the theater, ducking when arrows were shot straight at them, I sat their like a total dummy and took the shot to my head. I laughed as everyone kept swinging sideways to avoid things, and there I was, unable to see any of it pop out at me. 3D movies usually give me motion sickness, because all I see is GLORIFIED BLURRY.

The movie was fantastic! Enzo and the boy and I laughed until our sides hurt, and listen to this. Dory, from Finding Nemo, has always been my favorite cartoon character. Always. And then today, the horse named Maximus may have just bumped her to the Number Two Favorite. The horse alone is worth seeing that flick for!

And then A MIRACLE!

Right there, towards the end of the movie, the villagers releases thousands and thousands of floating, glowing lanters, and LISTEN, PEOPLE!

I TOTALLY SAW TWO LANTERNS COME RIGHT SMACK AT ME! I had to duck out of the way and everything, so that I wouldn't get smacked in the head by the floating lanterns! I almost wept with the miracle that was this miniscule episode of a 3D break through for me!

And then...nothing else.

I have seen my first piece of 3D-ness. One, lone piece. There may be hope for my vision yet.

And now, we are home.

And there's a veritable blizzard outside.

And my head cold is still raging.

And really? I think HALF a dose of NyQuil will suffice me tonight.

Happy Sunday evening, y'all.

Round One is Officially Under the Belts We Just Loosened

2010-11-24T21:32:00.003-07:00

I have waddled into the home office here, because Round One of the Thanksgiving Feast-a-thon has been completed.

Hubs and I had my parents, along with Sister and Sister's Husband and their kids, and our friends, Peggy and Jenna, over for dinner tonight. And really? It was a little bit more than dinner.

It was a buffet worthy of any cruise ship, laid out there in all its holy glory, right there on my kitchen island.

Hubs and I both had jobs to do today, in preparation for the enormous meal and gathering of our people.

My jobs were to vacuum the house, mop the house, scrub the bathrooms down, scrub the turkey juices and subsequent salmonella virus off my kitchen counters from ALL THE RAWNESS OF THE MEAT that was once there, throw in a couple loads of laundry, make some mashed potatoes and corn, and turn some boiled eggs into deviled egg delicacies.

Hubs' job was to yank a 22-pound turkey out of a five-gallon bucket of brine and put it on his Traeger grill. Then his job consisted of walking out onto the deck every twenty minutes or so and shouting out, "HOLY COW! THIS TURKEY IS GOING TO BE AMAZING! COME AND LOOK AT MY BIRD!" And then, the difficult part of Hubs' day was to run to the sporting goods store and purchase a GRILL THERMOMETER, where one part goes (where else?) inside the grill, and the other part (and this is the coolness factor!) clips onto your belt, so that you can TOTALLY CONTROL THE HEAT OF THE GRILL FROM THE COMFORTS OF YOUR BELT LOOPS, just so long as you're within 100 yards or so of the grill. Hubs walked around the house (while I was sweating and mopping, I might add), and announced, "I have a thermometer remote control clipped to my belt loop! I have the power to turn the temperature of the grill up or down and see how hot my bird is, while I'm sitting in the house!" And then, Hubs went back out to look at his turkey, where he exclaimed again, "HOLY COW! THIS TURKEY IS GOING TO BE AMAZING!"

Clearly, one of us had a little harder work to do than the other.

While Hubs was sprawled on the sofa, though, reading the instructions on his remote-controlled grill thermometer, I did walk by and let loose the Wife Sigh. (More on the Wife Sigh can be found here, on Cody's blog: http://fashion-momma.blogspot.com/2010/08/teach-your-children-well.html)

The Wife Sigh is a special super power, in which you sigh dramatically, but not too loudly. It's basically a quiet, poor me sigh, in which you inflate your lungs to their full oxygen-holding capacity, and then slowly release.

The Wife Sigh should never be abused or used too often, because then the recipient will become bored with it, and the power will be lost.

When Hubs heard the Wife Sigh, he quickly folded up the twelve-foot-square piece of paper that was the instructions to his thermometer, grabbed the tub of Clorox wipes, and totally scrubbed the master bathroom down.

Bless him.

I have put the Wife Sigh away for a while now, and I probably won't get it back out until mid-summer again, so that it's power remains solid.

When the house sparkled and the turkey had finished smoking, the people began to arrive.

Hubs and I were on our best behavior, too, because listen to this! College Town, of which I am an alumni and dues-paying supporter to this very day, is on a bit of a football losing streak. We are unranked. Teams made up of 3rd and 4th graders could probably beat College Town at this point. No matter. We continue to cheer for them and wear their colors on Saturdays, because we are crazy die-hards like that.

Sister's Husband went to College Land, which is a hop, skip and a jump, straight across the border, from College Town. College Town and College Land have a Border War going, and have for an endless string of years. I like College Land about as well as I like cottage cheese and Brussels sprouts.

Which is, you know, NOT AT ALL!

And Sister's Husband is a College Land alumni.

Ugh.

And on Saturday, College Town put the holy smack down on College Land!

A smack in the form of FORTY-FOUR TO ZERO, people.

I know! I was giddy with the happiness, and the fact that my very own College Town, who is almost completely unable to win a single football game this year, pulled it together and wiped their noses on the jerseys of the College Land players.

Did I mention FORTY-FOUR TO ZERO??!

Because yes! Forty-four points on our side of the scoreboard, and absolutely no points (zip, zilch, and zero!) on College Land's side of that same scoreboard.

And when I went to church on Sunday morning, I lost no time whatsoever seeking out Sister's Husband to mention the game, and then I managed to laugh with an insanity which is usually reserved for old Alfred Hitchcock movies.

Yes; yes, I did. Right there in the sanctuary of church.

And tonight, when Sister and Sister's Husband came over and joined us for dinner, I mentioned NOT A WORD of College Land's horrid upset. I am quite proud of the restraint which I demonstrated.

BECAUSE FORTY-FOUR TO ZERO IS A BIG DEAL!

As for the turkey, it turned out to be THE MOST AWESOME BIT OF COOKED POULTRY EVER TO GRACE A TABLE SINCE THE PILGRIMS STARTED THE TRADITION! Sweet mercy, but it was some very fine turkey goodness! I'm not sure that it could have turned out any more perfect than it did, so clearly all the work that Hubs invested into his continual every-twenty-minutes checks and shouting about how wonderful it looked paid off.

Hubs and his smoking abilities were golden today, y'all. Just golden.

We all sat around our big dining room table, and we talked and we cackled with laughter, and oh my! It was just so fun! The evening couldn't have gone any better.

Only it did get better, because eventually the cute neighbor boy migrated into our house, and he and the boy displayed their crazy mad magic skillz for the crowd of overly-stuffed people sitting around our kitchen and living room, and everyone applauded like mad for them.

David Copperfield, you have some competition!

And now, with Round One done, we will venture over to Hubs' parents' house tomorrow, where the eating (Round Two) will commence.

And, before I close out this blog post tonight, I just have to tell you of the sadness that was this morning. Hubs and I attended a funeral for an eighteen-year-old boy today, who was in my PE class for years when he was a tiny mite, and it was one of the hardest things I've been through. I wept with sheer grief as his family walked into the packed church, with their swollen, red eyes and broken hearts, and sat down in the packed sanctuary.

People, I cannot fathom the grief involved with losing a child, so on this Thanksgiving weekend, cuddle your kids close. Love them and tell them how much you adore them. Squeeze them with big, fat hugs; tickle them; pinch their cheeks; hold them close.

And be sure to remind your kids how thankful you are for them.

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend.

My Train of Thought Isn't Even on the Rails Tonight

2010-11-23T20:37:00.002-07:00

1. Hubs and I stayed up until well after 11:00 last night, watching the final episodes of Season 1 of Arrested Development. I know that 11:00 isn't late to some people. I know to some people, 11:00 is when you HEAD OUT for the evening. They call those people COLLEGE KIDS. Old people tend to take their fiber supplements and go to sleep by 8:30, so staying up until 11:00 can really throw their lives into a tailspin.

2. My life has been in a tailspin most of the day. I feel tired and worn down. I need a nap, and I need it to last for nine hours.

3. Plus, DRY CONTACTS. I would like to find a contact lens that can stay hydrated on my eyeballs until I'm ready for bed. So, you know, totally until 8:30 PM.

4. One of the most fantastic things happened today. I received a text message this morning which read, "Big batches of your cookies have been coming out of my oven all morning. Come over." People, I have some favorite foods in this world. My mom's cold spaghetti salad is one of them. I can put my face into the bowl and not come up for air until every last noodle has been slurped. Hubs' mama's biscuits and gravy make me feel the same way. They are sweet breakfast perfection. And then there are the chocolate cookies that Missi bakes. It was Missi who sent the text today, and I didn't waste a lot of time venturing out into the cold weather (BECAUSE, HOLY SNOT, BATMAN! COLD! COLD!) to go gobble some up. I have loved these cookies for a hundred years, and I refuse to let Missi give me the recipe, because...somehow...I think they taste best when she bakes them.

5. I am ashamed to admit it, but I ate six of those chocolate cookies today. I like to refer to it as Camel Behavior. You never know when the next batch of chocolate cookies will be made, so you just stuff yourself while you can, to tide you over through the desert times.

6. And this cold weather? This cold weather, in which today's high was FIVE? Well, it's been a long, hard winter this week, and I AM OVER IT. I am not a fan of being either too hot or too cold. I whine under both of those conditions. I told Hubs the other day, "Basically, I want to move to a place where the temperature never goes above 75 and never falls below 40." I need to sit down with a travel agency or Google, and discover this place that I am dreaming of and see what the real estate market looks like there.

7. This trio of boys? Oh, how I love them!

8. We hauled the trio of boys to the cinema today, so that they could take in Harry Potter Number Two Hundred and Twenty. Or maybe it was just Number Seven. I've lost count. Sort of like what happened with the Rocky movies. On the way to the theater, Kellen explained the game Truth or Dare to the boy and Enzo. Bless him for sharing this game and its rules, which he apparently learned from an older friend of his. We ended up playing it in the Suburban, and the topic quickly swung to, "Do you think So-and-So is pretty?" And also, "Would you kiss her?" Thankfully, there were very few yes answers to the first question, and absolutely zero yes answers to the second question. These three boys still consider kissing to be disgusting. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this feeling lasts, with all three of them, until middle age.

9. Listening to their innocent game of Truth or Dare tonight made my heart ache, because they are growing up. No longer are they simply talking about light sabers and Legos during their car rides. GIRLS have ventured into their conversations. My heart ached desperately tonight to slow their growing up down! The boy and Kellen met when they were three years old. They didn't talk about girls then. The boy met Enzo when he was seven. They didn't even talk about girls then! But now, tonight, at the age of ten, they did. And I know it's supposed to happen, but I am not ready for these boys to grow up at all. I became a little weepy, just thinking that, in a year and a half, the three of them will be in junior high!

10. My favorite quote of the evening came when I interrupted the Truth or Dare game and began throwing out the names of 4th grade girls who go to school with the boys, and asking them if they were considered cute. I tossed out a name of one little darling, and I asked, "Is she cute?" There was some snickering. Some hemming and hawing. And then, "Yes! She's cute! But she's way too tall! Walking with her is like Darth Vader walking with an Ewok!" I laughed until I wept. The boy and Enzo and Kellen are not known for their tallness, by any means.

11. For the record, Harry Potter #220 is long. And not too scary. The boys loved it. My ADD kicked in with 45 minutes left, and I became fidgety. I twisted. And I turned. And I flopped. And I wanted to go home. I think this is why I'm best suited for old episodes of Arrested Development. They're 30-minutes of TV syndication. On Netflix, without commercials, they're shrunk down to twenty-two minutes. My ADD can handle them.

Happy Tuesday night, people.

They Can Pull Lights Out of Their Ears and Rabbits Out of Their Hats

2010-11-22T19:16:00.003-07:00

On Saturday night, the boy and the cute neighbor boy put on a magic show for Hubs and me. They each took turns dazzling us, with trick after trick after trick.

I cannot even tell you how it warmed my heart! Because really? Is there anything better than watching your boy and his buddy display their raw, magical talent for you? Especially while they're dressed in a Miami basketball jersey and top hat, and a navy blue suit jacket that's two sizes too big? Hubs and I applauded like mad.

I know that the cinematography is exceptional, and the Academy has already called to inform me that I've been nominated for an Oscar. Although I was delighted with this, I really feel that I would be taking Oliver Stone's and James Cameron's chances of winning away from them, so I've declined the nomination. I'll just treasure the fact in my heart that the Academy was pleased with my mad skillz behind the camera.

And the other thing? The boy was so impressed with the cute neighbor boy's top hat that he shelled out twenty of his hard-earned dollars (Dollars earned by scooping dog poo for the neighbor!), so that he could purchase his own top hat online. Hubs and I rest peacefully at night, knowing that our boy will not be able to secure a date for himself while he's wearing his being-shipped-to-our-house-as-we-speak costume accessory.

(Because honestly? It wasn't Hubs' top hat that made me swoon. It was actually his bread machine, which I coveted. That bread machine alone was worth walking down the aisle for!)

Without further ado, may I present two of my very favorite boys around, as they perform (and assist!) a trick known as THE MAGICAL LIGHTS?

(And, for the record, this was not even their grand finale to the show. Nope. Hubs and I were so thoroughly impressed, we thought that surely -- SURELY! -- this was the magnificent finale, and when we commented on it, the boys looked at one another with concern in their eyes. And then the cute neighbor boy said, "If you'll excuse us, we're going to pause for a break now and consult my book of magic tricks, so that we can come up with a grand finale." And the boy added, "Yeah, we never even thought to have a great ending to this show!")

Change of Plans

2010-11-21T19:18:00.002-07:00

On Friday, I was supposed to leave Small Town, USA and go to this:

I was supposed to drive my Suburban, loaded down with girls and suitcases and hairdryers and make-up bags and Starbucks cups. We were supposed to join thousands of other women, sing our hearts out with Travis, gasp over Beth's sweet hair perfection, and get a Word.

A Word straight from Jesus, via Beth.

And then the roads iced over, because November + Small Town = Potential For Bad Roads.

(Dear Beth, this isn't Texas, honey. We love you; oh, how we do. However, events planned in this area of the United States might be better off happening in, say, September. When we don't have ice and snow and 12 degrees. Thank you, Beth.)

After spending two hours back and forth on the phone between Amy and Regs and everyone else, debating the black ice and the potential for snow, we finally committed to going. Whole hog. We were in. Roads be smacked. We. Were. Going.

And then, the school nurse called to say, "Um, that boy of yours? Yeah, well, he's fairly decently sick. And he needs to go home."

I zipped across town, and there was my boy, sitting on a little cot in the nurse's office, looking so tiny and so sick, and he had enormous tears running down his cheeks. The nurse told me, "It's all I could do not to grab him up, carry him down to the library, crawl into one of the rocking chairs with him, and just rock him!" And then she whispered, "If you ask me, my diagnosis is strep throat."

Yes. I could clearly see that. The Jedi Family doesn't mess around with Strep Throat. We get it, and we get it often. We know the signs. We know the symptoms. We know what to do.

I walked down to the boy's classroom, to collect his bag and schoolwork, and his teacher told me, "He looked so sad and sick this morning. Strep Throat is going around, and I was going to tell you that he seems to be showing some signs of it."

Yes. Yes, he did. I could see that.

So, instead of going to see Travis sing his heart out for Jesus and listening to Beth speak a Word, I stayed at home. While the rest of the girls went without me. In a different vehicle. And I got to look at all the pictures on my phone that they sent me. Over and over. Because those friends of mine sent A WHOLE LOT of snapshots of Travis and Beth and the dry interstate to my cell phone. Bless them.

Instead of setting off for Beth, I was busy working as one of these:

I took the boy in for a throat culture, and listen, people. NEGATIVE. He did not have strep throat, which surprised the snot plum out of me, because THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME WE'VE EVER HAD A NEGATIVE STREP TEST! When we get strep tests, it's because we know we have Strep Throat! The Jedi Family just doesn't DO negative strep tests.

So no Strep Throat. We came home, and the boy laid on the floor (His choice!). He was a wet noodle. He cried. He moaned. He was so grouchy, I was half tempted to paint him green and rename him Oscar.

And then HE FELL ASLEEP!

The boy has taken less than five naps since he gave them up just after his third birthday. The boy and naps never go together. Ever. If he falls asleep in the daylight hours, the boy is genuinely sick.

And, on Friday, he fell asleep in the daylight hours. In front of the TV. Later, I fed him soup, I rubbed his back, I pumped him full of Children's Tylenol, and I put his grumpy little body to bed.

Naturally, he slept in MY bed, because Hubs was still halfway across the United States.

It was a fantastic night, because Cat 2 decided to clean her claws while she sat on her special blanket on the end of our bed. I don't know how many of you have ever been present when a cat cleaned her claws, but all I can say is, "It's disturbing." It's a lot like someone popping their knuckles, only with a crunching sound, because Cat 2 actually bites her claws and chews the grit right out of them.

Naturally, I kicked her, which caused her to hiss. I didn't care. It was after midnight, and I didn't need to listen to the claw chomping.

I kicked her again.

At this point, I heard her say, "Listen, lady. I don't know who you are (Picture Dory, on Finding Nemo. Cat 2 has a significant short-term memory problem.), but this kicking has got to stop, or I will punch one of these pearly talons through your jugular. Don't think I won't. I will punch it right through!"

Of course, I kicked her again, and you know what they say. Third time's the charm.

She left her special blanket at the foot of the bed, and I went back to sleep.

And when we woke up on Saturday morning, the boy was cured. The boy was fine. The boy was healthy. The boy was refreshed after a full night's sleep. He was happy, full of giggles, and bouncing off the walls. He was hungry, and he must've said, "Dad comes home today!" about thirty-nine times.

Hubs did indeed came home. Of course, he was two and a half hours late, because he'd been sitting around DIA, waiting for some fog to clear so that he could board his last flight home. And then his bags were still in North Carolina, which is where Hubs made his first flight change.

And, people. It's good to have Hubs home. I'm not a fan of single-parenting. Plus, I tend to sleep with the dining room lights on while Hubs is away, which let's burglars know that YES! YES, HUBS IS GONE, BUT THE LIGHTS ARE ON, AND CAT 1 WILL SEE YOU COMING, IF YOU TRY TO BREAK IN AND ROB US BLIND. And Cat 1 doesn't take kindly to strangers.

Not at all.

Cat 1 likes to disembowel strangers. She's a rabid pit bull trapped in an eight-pound cat body.

Believe me, Hubs and I have commented, over and over, "It's a good thing she ONLY weighs eight pounds!" We cannot even imagine what her attitude, combined with some serious body weight, could accomplish. The words Saber Tooth Tiger come to mind.

Our guests would be nothing more than bloodied corpses.

This morning, we went to church. And then we went to the new pizza hot spot, which is becoming our go-to place for dining out. And then we came home, and we loafed around our house.

Although the weekend didn't pan out quite like I expected it to, it was still a good weekend.

And it's good to have all of my peeps back under one roof.

Welcome home, Hubs. And Little Boy, I'm glad you feel better.

Hush Little Baby; Please Go to Sleep!

2010-11-18T18:53:00.002-07:00

Hubs has been living the high life in Far, Far Away and learning the intricacies of some computer server's software, the likes of which no normal human being will ever begin to understand because WHAT PERCENTAGE OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION UNDERSTANDS THINGS LIKE BINARY AND HTML? And really? Binary and html are just the tips of the iceberg here, I'm afraid. There is so much more of that iceberg which is under the water and hidden to those who just push the ON button and expect the computer to boot up and work. Magically.

While he's been away, the boy has taken it upon himself to sleep on Hubs' side of the Sleep-By-Number bed.

It's been a joy, people.

First of all, you need to envision a fairy tale animal which is 33% ferret, 33% raccoon, 33% Jack Russell terrier, and 1% neurotic rabbit. That animal, however goofy it might look, would be the boy. In bed. At night.

He spends a great deal of time making a nest for himself. Pillows are shuffled and rearranged and stacked and unstacked, because his definition of cozy differs from mine. His cozy is my HOLY SNOT, BATMAN! I HAD NO IDEA WE EVEN HAD FOURTEEN EXTRA PILLOWS IN THIS HOUSE, LET ALONE THAT THEY'D ALL ACTUALLY FIT IN THIS BED. WITH US. He has also taken it upon himself to readjust his Personal Sleep Number every night, and it takes him twenty-six minutes to make a firm decision on which number is actually best for that evening. The first night, he wanted a firm 95. The second night, he threw caution to the wind and took it down to a big, fat 0, which made me feel like I was sleeping on the edge of the Grand Canyon because DROP OFF, PEOPLE! AT THE HALFWAY POINT IN THE MATTRESS, THE BOY'S SIDE JUST DROPPED OFF INTO THIN AIR. I had to practically holler at him from my lofty vantage point, as I said, "Put the remote control down and go to sleep, before I use both of my feet and kick your sixty-five pound body out and onto the floor."

(He had no idea that he was actually safe from being booted onto the floor, because I would have first had to DIG him out of the mattress canyon he'd made for himself.)

As if the PREPARATION TO SLEEP isn't enough, the actual sleeping part brings so much more to the table. The boy throws arms and legs in every direction. He sits up in bed, totally unconscious to the world around him, looks around, and then he turns. Sideways. So that he's using me as a pillow and hanging his feet off the edge.

Added to this is the simple fact that Cat 2 has taken to sitting like a vulture on my pillow at night, staring down at me as if to say, "I cannot sleep on my special blanket on the foot of this bed, because your new roommate keeps kicking me. If I'm going to be awake, I'm going to go prowl the house and find something to destroy. I thought you should know ahead of time."

People, I now know what stressful nights taste like.

But then, last night, with his little head on the pillow and his eyes drooping mightily while I was propped up reading my book, the boy whispered, "Mom, I sure do love you. And I sure do miss my dad; I want him to come home."

And my heart?

Well, it grew three sizes last night. And it was all mushy like oatmeal.

A Lot of Blah, Blah, Blah

2010-11-17T16:54:00.003-07:00

This afternoon, I picked the boy and Amy's little gal, Jenna, up from school, and we dashed across town, because the boy needed a haircut in the worst way.

The back of his hair was rivaling high school photos of Hubs, as far as Best Mullet goes.

While the boy was being lathered with shampoo and sitting in the twirly chair, seven-year-old Jenna and I sat together and gossiped like a couple of hens. I'm not entirely positive, but I think I could have been a fantastic mother to girls. They sit quietly in salons, they giggle cutely, and I UNDERSTAND them. Although I love and adore little boys, they do not sit quietly in salons when it's not their turn in the chair, they would rather burp and laugh uproariously over it than giggle politely, and I do not understand them at all.

Love them? Sweet mercy, yes! Understand them? Not quite yet.

Jenna informed me that she had to clean her room when she returned home this evening, and she announced, rather boldly, that she is a fantastic (JUST FANTASTIC!) bedroom cleaner. I told her that I would love to hire her and throw genuine, backed-with-gold, American dollars at her, if she'd come over and clean MY house. She enthusiastically agreed, and I replied, "Great. My toilets could use a good scrubbing!"

This is where things went a little South, because Jenna stuttered a bit, before announcing, "Um, I don't actually DO bathrooms. Bathrooms have toilets, and I don't clean toilets, because toilets are gross."

Well then.

Jenna went on to say, "Oh, and I don't clean kitchens, either, because kitchens always have a lot of work that needs to be done in them, and doing dishes is hard work, so I probably won't clean your kitchen for you, either. Mostly, I am just a bedroom cleaner, and I would love to come to your house and clean just your bedroom. Oh, and your living room, too. I clean bedrooms and living rooms."

I then bravely asked, "What about garages? Do you clean those?"

And Jenna answered by shouting out, "No way! BOYS clean garages! Girls NEVER clean garages!"

Although I am a little worried about Jenna's housekeeping skills as a married adult ("Listen, honey, the bedroom's clean, so don't make a mess in there, and I've got the living room all spotless, too. I went ahead and called a cleaning service to come load our dishwasher for us, and Mom's going to come scrub the toilets on Wednesday of next week."), I was thrilled (PLUM THRILLED! JUST TICKLED!) to hear that boys are responsible for cleaning garages! I cannot even put into words the way that this revelation boosted my day.

Hubs, honey? Can you just go ahead and take care of that garage of ours? Now that I know that girls never clean garages, I feel so much better. Almost weightless, in fact.

At any rate, the boy's hair has been trimmed up.

BEFORE:

AND AFTER:

This boy? I love him so much! He's a gem, and his mama adores him.

And when I said that I don't understand boys, it's because the things that they have to tell you don't always make sense.

Take this morning, for instance.

I had to make a stop at the garage where the magic of oil changes take place. The Suburban was due. My job at this garage is to get out of my Suburban, tell the man, "Just the usual, please," and enjoy some quiet time in the garage lobby while the oil change takes place. I have no other jobs there at the garage. None. Zip. Zilch. I certainly don't want to be bombarded with loads of information, which, ultimately, forces me into a decision-making process.

My dad always trained me to simply tell the garage employees no to everything except the oil. New air filter? No. Thank you. (I still must be polite.) New belt? No, thank you. New lug nuts? Nope. But thanks.

After marrying Hubs, he emphatically reinforced this training, and he has always told me, "Just say no!"

I am fully aware that Garage Men will tell girls that a vehicle needs umpteen-twenty-thousand-forty-eleven dollars' worth of extra accessories under the hood, when, in fact, all it needs is the oil changed.

For $29.95.

Today, as I was enjoying my lobby time with a newspaper from Bigger Town, USA, two of the men came in. One said, "Bob has something he'd like to tell you."

I prepared my speech. Rehearsed it silently in my head. No, no, no, and thank you.

Bob actually took a seat across from me in the lobby, and he said, "Your Suburban's blah blah blah transfer case blah blah blah leaking blah broken blah seal blah blah blah differential blah four wheel drive blah blah blah needs seen to blah blah blah or explosion."

I stared at Bob.

And I stared.

And Bob said, "So what would you like to do?"

This is where I cleared my throat and said, "Do you know what I heard just now? I heard the word Suburban. None of those other words even registered in my brain. Let me give you an example. Do you know the differences between black mascara, black-brown mascara or brown mascara? Do you know when you should use which color?"

And then Bob stared at me.

And Bob said, "What?"

And I said, "Exactly."

And the other fellow chuckled and said, "Bob is trying to tell you that you've got an oil leak."

And Bob, with HIS VOICE SHAKING, PEOPLE, like he was now nervous and all because WHAT KIND OF MAD MASCARA-SLINGING WOMAN WAS HE DEALING WITH, went on to tell me, "Suburban blah blah blah differential blah blah gears blah blah explosion."

I told Bob, "Um, I kind of need to drive my Suburban this weekend. When will the explosion actually take place? Can it wait to happen until, say, Monday?"

And Bob said, "No! Don't wait this long!"

I said, "Um, no." It was my prepared speech. The other fellow in the room said, "What you really need is a rear differential service. Your Suburban needs it badly. Very badly. I think Bob is asking if you'd like to have this service done."

"Will it delay the explosion until Monday?"

"Yes."

I gave my permission, and then I frantically texted Hubs, who remains in Far, Far Away. I told him these words: "Suburban, wrong oil, Mobil not Pennzoil, differential, broken, seal, leak, transfer case. Please advise."

Hubs texted back, "Mobil fine. JUST SAY NO TO EVERYTHING ELSE!!!"

That last part was in enormous letters, so that I would be sure to understand he was screaming this at me.

I texted back, "Too late, Hubs. I just said yes to the rear differential service. Whatever the heck THAT is! It will keep the Suburban from exploding until Monday."

Hubs texted back, "They lie!"

"What? Explosion will still happen before Monday?"

"No explosion. They lie! How much are they charging you?"

At this point, a THIRD guy was in the lobby with me. He was the cutest thing, really. About twelve years old, with the prettiest blue eyes since Hubs'. I asked him, "That rear differential service? Are you going to charge me $400 for that, because I have no idea what it is?"

He laughed and said, "Yes. And then Bob and I are going to Vegas with the extra dollars that we DON'T put into the cash register."

Finally. Honesty in the garage! I appreciated Guy Three's honest answer.

And then he said, "Actually, it's $39.99. And you needed it. And I can tell that you have no idea what either of those two hammerheads told you."

Was it really THAT obvious? And should you refer to your coworkers as hammerheads to the customers?

So blue-eyed, super young Guy Three went on to explain it all to me in a "See Dick run; see Jane run; see Spot run" sort of way. And I understood it, people! And I told Guy Three, "Listen. You should teach a class on small engine repair to women. I totally understood every word you said. I have no idea if I'll retain all this information tomorrow, but I understood it. For the moment."

And then I paid my extravagant bill, and I left.

And Hubs basically informed me that a Jedi I will never be. I had forgotten my training. My JUST SAY NO TO EVERYTHING AT THE GARAGE training.

I know; I'm a total disappointment to the Force.

And now I'll have to forage through the swamp and the foggy marsh, while packing a pointy-eared, green troll on my back, who is constantly yammering on about how I'm much too old to start the training while he twirls his light saber at me. I will relearn the training in this swamp. The troll will become too heavy for me to carry, and I will never want to be stranded in the mud and the muck with him again, so I will learn my lesson.

A Jedi, I will be.

I later texted Hubs and said, "I was just overwhelmed with it all in the oil garage. I saw bright lights and heard Led Zeppelin songs, and I was backed into a corner. I didn't want the Suburban to explode, and the Led Zeppelin song was driving me crazy. I caved. I said yes."

Boys.

I don't understand them at all. I don't understand the way they talk. I don't understand how words like differential and transfer case and transmission make sense to them.

But then, I imagine that Hubs didn't waste half of his day yesterday on the computer, sighing over the fact that PRINCE WILLIAM! AND KATE! ENGAGED! Because if there's one thing that makes my heart mushy, it's a royal wedding.

Because, while I don't understand differential and transfer case and transmission, I do understand GOWN and JEWELRY and TRAIN and BRIDE'S MAIDS.

I just hope that Prince William's wedding turns out as nice as Hubs' and mine did. You know, I hope they have a great potato salad on the buffet table, like we did.

And if they ever get news that their Suburban may turn into a fiery inferno due to a leak somewhere in the gear box because the seals are broken, I hope that they just buy a brand new one.

And I hope Kate keeps the bedroom and living room clean.

Happy Wednesday night, y'all.

Tomorrow I'll Be Wearing Polyester Pants in Some Pastel Color

2010-11-16T19:17:00.004-07:00

First of all, can you say POST THREE HUNDRED, people?!

Three hundred blog posts in just over a year. And this, my friends, comes from a girl whose adult-onset ADD is oftentimes so strong, she has difficulty remaining focused on things.

Like the wet load of laundry I am continually leaving in the washing machine, because I remember, right before I drift off to sleep in the late night hours, that MY WORD! THERE ARE CLOTHES IN THE WASHING MACHINE, WHICH NEVER MADE IT TO THE DRYER, AND NOW REWASHING WILL BE REQUIRED. This, people, happens almost weekly at the Jedi Manor.

The conservationists love me.

But really, I didn't start this blog post to talk about the fact that HELLO! THREE HUNDRED BLOG POSTS WRITTEN! What I really wanted to talk about is the inevitable fact that I think I'm getting older.

The crowning moment of my maturity came last night, when the carpenter Hubs and I have hired to finish the built-in bookcase at our house called at 5:30, to see if he could come over and work on them for a bit, and I heard myself say, "You know, could we do it another night? Because I'm really planning to shut the party down around here and be in bed by 7:00."

You know, right after I take my Metamucil and drop my teeth into a jar of water.

Granted, I'd been awake and upright and moving since 2:33 yesterday morning, due to the middle-of-the-night asthma attack. But still. I was as bad as any MeMaw I've ever met last night. I'm not sure anyone under the age of 25 would ever say, out loud, "I think the party's shutting down early, so that I can crawl into bed by 7:00." Especially when she'd been waiting for eons to get the bookcase built.

And the other thing?

A few weeks ago, I was reading through our options at the cinema, and I looked at Hubs and asked, point blank (and this is where you need to cover the eyes of those reading this blog who are under the age of fifteen), "What in the world is Jackass, and why would I want to see a donkey in 3D?"

So yeah.

There was that.

Hubs wanted to know if I get out much. He was surprised that I'd made it this long without having known about those movies.

Which are obviously not about donkeys at all, because they're all about stupid stunts and pranks. I know this, because I Wikipediaed them.

(I love turning nouns into verbs with an -ed ending.)

And we all know that Wikipedia never lies.

And I can't be that old if I have a full-on working knowledge of Wikipedia.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put my hearing aides in a drawer, park my Lincoln Continental in the garage, and go crochet a sweater vest.

The Longest Day Happened at the Wrong Solstice

2010-11-15T17:48:00.003-07:00

The boy stayed with Mam and Pa last night, so that he wouldn't have to get up in the pre-dawnness of the morning to take his daddy to the airport.

Or rather, the boy ATTEMPTED to stay with Mam and Pa last night.

Being kidless for an evening, Hubs and I ventured off to the cinema to catch one of the dorkiest comedies we've seen in eons.

(Naturally, we laughed until it hurt. That's how we roll.)

And then we came home, and we finished packing Hubs' bags, so that he could board a plan before the unholy hour of 6:00 this morning. He fiddled around, arranging the laptop and the iPad and the GPS and the smart phone just so in his bag.

I have no idea how the ancient settlers traveled by covered wagon across this great continent without electronics and gadgets.

The stars? For navigation purposes? Preposterous!

The bag was packed and ready to go, and we crawled into bed at 10 PM.

And then I was up at 10:45 PM, beating Cat 2, who had taken it upon herself to attack and utterly kill, maim and destroy yet another plant. Oh, poor Cat 2. She went into hiding, feeling the shame of her deeds and the pain of her swat, and we didn't hear from her again until this morning. The plant, I fear, will not be making it, and we'll be hosting a plant funeral in the next day or so, as I'm probably going to be forced to throw it out. Cat 2 did a really sweet number on this one.

By the time I finally fell asleep, it was after 11:00.

And then, just to make things interesting, Mam called at precisely 2:33 this morning. I was out of bed like a shot, grabbing the phone and shouting, "Is everything alright?" Because really? Mam tends not to call at 2:33 in the morning, when everything is fine, actually.

It was the boy. He was in the midst of his first-ever, full-on asthma attack.

We just recently found out that the boy has exercised-induced asthma. He runs and runs. He wheezes. His wheezing has always been very mild, and his pediatrician has had him on a daily inhaler that seems to control everything pretty well.

And then, apparently, there were many tears on the boy's part last night, because he was not at all interested in sending his dad off to Far, Far Away for a week-long class on software for servers. Oh, no. The boy was NOT game for this plan at all, so he sobbed good and proper last night. Broke our hearts, he did. The boy and Hubs are tight.

We're thinking that THIS is what set the asthma attack off...too much sobbing.

Thankfully, Dr. B had given us a rescue inhaler, so Mam and Pa brought the boy home at 2:45 this morning, and we pumped him full of inhaled airway openers, and presto.

He was immediately better.

In fact, he was SO BETTER, he decided to go back to Mam and Pa's house at 3:00 this morning. Since they were, in fact, still in our driveway, ready to return home, we shoved him into their car, and off he went.

HE went back to sleep for another three-and-a-half hours. No one else did. Not Mama. Not Daddy. Not Mam. Not Pa.

People, I have been up and awake since 2:33 this morning.

I had Hubs out of bed at 4:00, so that he could shower and dress. Hubs never fell back asleep after the asthma attack, but he tried to PRETEND to sleep and WILL HIMSELF to sleep, because he knew the alarm was set for 4 and that it was going to be a long day if he stayed awake.

And then we were in Starbucks' drive-thru at PRECISELY 5:01 this morning, people. Precisely. I thought that my favorite restaurant opened at 5:00 in the morning, and Hubs and I joked that our debit card would probably flip a red flag out, because HELLO! It had never been used that early in the morning before -- not ever; not once. Hubs and I were betting major dollars with one another that the bank would immediately freeze the transaction and shout, "Stolen card! The Jedi Family has never swiped their debit card before 8 AM in their entire lives!"

However, we'll never know WHAT our bank would say about an early transaction on the card, because listen, people, and listen good. Either Starbucks doesn't really open at 5:00, or we were snubbed, because the lights were on, and there were cars in the parking lot which screamed out EMPLOYEES ON GROUNDS!, but there was not a single soul to be seen who could make a hot beverage. Not one.

Dear Starbucks,
We are breaking up. It's you; not me. You let me down in my deepest hour of need, and I no longer feel as though I can trust you. If a girl cannot purchase a cup of caffeine at 5:01 in the morning, when she had already been awake and out of bed since 2:33 AM, then clearly she'll do what she has to do, which is to hit McDonald's across the street. Yes, Starbucks, we've had some really good times together, but this is personal.
Sincerely,
Jedi Mama

And don't believe for a single minute that I went over to McDonald's at 5:03 in the morning, because there is NO McChai Latte over there. It's a shame.

With no cups of Starbucks love in our hands, Hubs and I were at the airport at 5:08 this morning.

And we sat, and we sat, and we sat, and we tried to out-yawn one another, and we watched a couple across from us, as SHE kept trying to lick her hands and tame HIS wild bedhead. She was all put together and ready to fly; he had clearly rolled out of bed and pulled his sweatpants on, and I do believe his hair embarrassed her.

Heck, his hair embarrassed ME, and I wasn't even related to him. He looked like he'd combed his hair with a KitchenAide mixer.

Hubs eventually boarded his plane, and I came home at 6:15 this morning.

I was fully dressed. I was fully make-upped. And I was still boyless. So I threw in a load of laundry and hauled out the vacuum cleaner.

People, I scoured the house today.

Scoured.

By 10:00 this morning, I'd accomplished a level of cleaning that is normally equivalent to what some women like to call SPRING CLEANING, because I was afraid that if I stopped moving, I'd fall asleep standing up. The only break I took was the twenty minute excursion across town to deliver a semi-well-rested boy to school, as his asthma was well under control.

My laundry is done. All done. My floors shine, my sinks sparkle, my mirrors twinkle, my carpets are fluffed, and my countertops smell like lavender kitchen spray.

This evening, I felt like SURELY! SURELY IT WAS NEARING 9:30 PM AND TIME FOR THE BOY AND I TO HEAD TO BED! I looked at the clock. It was 4:50.

4:50 PM.

As in, the majority of America had not even eaten dinner yet.

I helped the boy study some vocabulary words, and then thought SURELY! SURELY IT WAS 9:30 AND TIME FOR US TO HIT THE HAY! I looked at the clock again. It was 5:40.

This is the day that will not end. I kind of think that Joshua must've been begging for some more light to fight a battle with, because I am beginning to suspect that the sun might have stood still for a while today.

And now, with my body feeling like it's quickly approaching midnight, I see that we're barely after 6:00 in real time.

My plan is to keep the boy from seeing a clock and convince him that it's bedtime. Wish me luck, people.

The Weekend is Ending, But the Broncos Won!

2010-11-14T17:56:00.002-07:00

Our weekend, people, has been fast.

I think that's the nature of weekends, though. The turn-around time of getting you home on Friday afternoons to settling you down on Sunday evenings is a little piece of time continuum magic.

Fast magic, that is.

Hubs and his partner in business-related crime, Ryan, have hired the boy to shred some papers for them. This sounds like a couple of nice guys giving a ten-year-old a chance to earn some money and learn that saving for college is a good thing, while buying more Lego sets may not be a wise move, but what it really boils down to is this: Hubs and Ryan have an antique paper shredder which can handle no more than two sheets of paper at a time. When you look at the antique shredder and then look at the three piled-high-with-papers boxes that are sitting at Hubs' office, you understand that it's really rather a stroke of genius.

Who has time to sit and grind 400,000 papers, two at a time, through a shredder which is guaranteed to jam on every twenty-second sheet?

Because of this, Hubs and Ryan employed a little of Tom Sawyer's fence-painting brilliance. They assured the boy that it was TONS OF FUN! JUST TONS AND TONS OF FUN! to cram papers through the shredder and watch them disintegrate into thin strips of confetti. The boy took the bait, and the two Tom Sawyers were off the hook, assuring everyone that paying the boy to do this task was worth every penny (namely, ten dollars per box) that they had to fork over to the 4th grader.

The first time the boy went to "work," he happily shoved papers, two by two, just like Noah, through the shredder.

On Friday afternoon, Hubs collected the boy from school, so that he could return to work and tackle the shredding.

I have it on good authority, however, that the boy has seen through Hubs and Ryan's ploy. The boy came home from Hubs' office on Friday evening and said, "I didn't feel like shredding papers, so I just watched some Scooby Doo on the iPad while I was at Dad's office."

I have offered to shred the papers for the big boys, but my fee is going to be a tiny bit steeper than $10 per box.

It's because I still have my eye on an incredible little chair that I saw last month at World Market, and $10 per box isn't going to make that chair a reality in my living room.

On Friday night, with no social life whatsoever, Hubs and I put the boy to bed early, and we did the same thing.

Only we retired to bed to watch six consecutive episodes of Arrested Development on the laptop, which caused us to giggle uncontrollably.

People, the episode in Season 1, where Michael Bluthe dates an apparently blind attorney made me howl until my sides split.

And really? Season 1 was so long ago, any of you who actually DO watch Arrested Development have more than likely long forgotten it.

On Saturday morning, Hubs staggered out of bed and asked me, "Do you want me to take you out to the big antique shop?"

I had to feel his forehead, people, just to see if he was feverish!

Yes! Yes, please! Let's go to the big antique shop!

Apparently every other person in Small Town, USA had the exact same plan, because TOTALLY OVERRUN WITH PEOPLE! Which, you know, meant that we saw eighty-seven girls that we knew, and we stopped to chat with all of them.

I ended up packing a big, wooden bowl around with me for a while, and I had two women (one, two!) stop me on two different occasions and say, "Hey! I was going to buy that bowl! You're not really planning on buying it, are you?" I was afraid that they were going to throw their purses to the ground and show me some fly-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-bee maneuvers right there in the middle of the crowded antique shop. Hubs whispered words of encouragement into my ear and said, "Take them! You can win, honey!"

Thankfully, I scored the big, wooden bowl and some other trinkets, and we escaped the shop without the sheriff being summoned.

Christmas shopping brings out the crazy in women, and sometimes that crazy business plum scares me!

After the antique shop, Hubs and I spent the day running errands and browsing the Main Street shops, with the boy in tow, and listen, people!

I grew up with a girl named Amanda. We met in the first grade, and we were fast friends, until Amanda skedaddled after high school graduation, and I never saw her again. She moved to Seattle, met a fellow there, and they high-tailed it to Alaska, which is a whole lot of miles away from Small Town, USA. Amanda has never met the boy, although she has seen pictures of him on my blog, because the Internet really narrows the globe down, and even though someone lives in Alaska, where the sun doesn't even come up until 10:00 in the mornings, she can still stay in touch.

So there Hubs and I were, in a little kitchen shop downtown, and this girl that I somewhat recognize, but somewhat DON'T, comes around the corner, with the boy in tow and says, "JEDI MAMA! I HAVE FOUND YOUR BOY!"

Not that the boy was really lost or anything. He'd been on the other side of a display, looking around.

The girl who had recognized my son turned out to be Amanda, and WOW! We had a little life reunion right there, smack in the middle of the kitchen shop. We talked and we talked and we talked; we hugged and hugged and hugged. Hubs said that the reunion of friendly estrogen was almost too overwhelming for him to endure!

But really? What are the odds of such a chance meeting?

And then, Hubs and I bought some knives, people.

Specifically, we bought two knives, because after buying some trinkets at the antique shop, two knives was all we could afford.

In buying those knives, Hubs and I had a revelation.

People, we have not really been cutting our food before last night. No, sir. I believe we were simply sawing our food, but we knew no better, because we had nothing to compare it to. Now, however, we have come to the full glorious revelation that we CAN SERIOUSLY CUT THINGS! The angels sang an extra round of hallelujahs last night.

Hubs, you see, smoked a brisket all afternoon in his Traeger grill, and it turned out to be nothing short of sweet perfection, because HELLO! NO THROWN BREAKERS! We understand the power of the Traeger now, and we respect it, and it, in turn, respects us now, too. When the brisket was done last night, we used the new knives to cut it, and it was like cuttin' butter, y'all!

Also?

Small Town High School did not fair well in the State Championship Game, which Hubs and I listened to on the radio. Our poor boys did not fair well at all, people. I could barely stand to listen to it, what with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, so I called Theresa in Rival Town, USA and spent ninety minutes chatting her up on the telephone. We laughed until we wept, as we spent half of our time talking about old boyfriends who we were CONVINCED we could never live without back in the '90s, and how God sometimes heroically saves us from those high school and college crushes who are entirely wrong for us. By the time Theresa and I hung up, I was still grinning from ear to ear, and Small Town High's second place finish wasn't even all that difficult for me to take.

This morning, Hubs got out of bed and said, "Small Town High lost the State Championship Game yesterday. And so did Gymnastics Land. And so did Really Close Tiny Town. And College Town lost their game. And then the Colorado Avalanche lost last night, too. By 2:00 this afternoon, when my Broncos play, it should be a weekend of perfect losses."

Hubs' hopes for Bronco glory were not very high this morning, as we shuffled off to church.

And church! Land sakes, but I could write an entire post on this morning's sermon, on account of TOUCHED ME DEEPLY and MADE ME THINK and SUMMED UP MY LIFE. So maybe when I've had time to process everything and wrap my pathetic little brain around it all, I'll share my learnings with y'all. Right now, though, I'm just going to treasure them to myself for a bit.

This afternoon, while the Broncos battled out a major VICTORY! VICTORY, PEOPLE! we bopped back and forth between watching them and picking up our deck furniture to store it for the winter, so that the elements do not ruin the metal chairs and table, because if there's one thing I won't tolerate during the summer months, it's UGLY WEATHER RUIN on my outdoor table set.

Hubs, naturally, was plum overwhelmed with happy hyperactivity because the Broncos have ditched their losing streak, people.

Way to go, Denver. You've made Hubs plum proud, and you've brought him back from his Avalanche and Small Town High-induced grief.

So now, things are really shaking down quickly tonight, because Hubs is catching a plane in the morning and flying far away. That's sad in itself, because Hubs, you know, is certainly fun to have around the house, and I'll miss him greatly, but the worst of it is that Hubs must be at the airport at five bells in the morning.

As in, pre-dawn.

Pre-rooster crowing.

Almost pre-Starbucks, but not quite.

So now I'm off to make sure that Hubs has packed the right things, because guys always UNDER pack, and I'm sure he'll fly to Far, Far Away missing half of what he really needed, because he was shooting for a three-pound weigh-in on his suitcase.

Always overshoot. That's my motto. If the suitcase will zip up when filled with fifty-two pounds of stuff, then, by all means, you can easily cram sixty pounds of essentials in there and still get it zipped, somewhat comfortably.

And also? The boy is not with us tonight, because we weren't sure he could function in polite society tomorrow if we woke him up in time to get Hubs to the airport, so he's off with Mam and Pa, getting himself spoiled rotten and eating Mam's homemade stew. Because we are childless tonight, Hubs just asked, "Hey! Want to catch a movie?" And listen, people, I think I do, so after the wife-approved packing of the suitcase, I think we're off to the cinema for a little date.

Happy Sunday night, people. Raise your hand if you want a wake-up call in the morning. Goodness knows, I'll be up.

Oh, He's Pretty Old...

2010-11-11T20:02:00.002-07:00

Every subdivision has them.

Or at least, the unlucky subdivisions do.

The subdivision that Sister and I grew up in had five horrendously bad ones, and a couple who were just borderline horrendous.

We called them BOYS.

These creatures threw snowballs at Sister and I during the winters while we were growing up. They shot pop bottle rockets at us in the summers. They hung over their deck railings with their binoculars while Sister and I sunbathed in our swimming suits in our backyard. They drove fast, they made obscene bodily noises, they laughed like hyenas, they cheated at board games, they were always quick to show us the snakes they caught, and they were, altogether, quite troublesome.

It was always us against them.

And then, after she graduated from high school, Sister began dating one of these boys. Of all the boys Sister could choose from, she settled on one of the worst troublemakers in our subdivision, because she thought he was dreamy.

(I may have just thrown up a little in my mouth there.)

Yes, Sister pretty much married the boy next door. I, on the other hand, was smart enough to marry OUTSIDE OF our subdivision, where the cute boys lived.

At any rate, today is Sister's Husband's birthday.

(Let's see. 2010 minus 1954...)

(Oh, did I say that out loud? Sister's Husband HATES when I reveal his real age! He still thinks he's young and wearing his old parachute pants and neon green T-shirt.)

This first snapshot is of Sister's Husband when he was still nice. And when he was still cute. He still threw snowballs at girls at this age, and he still piddled outside instead of using the potty indoors at this age.

And then the boy began to grow up, and he became decidedly UN-nice, and he thought it was clever to disguise his dog, Buck, as a reindeer.

Eventually, Sister married the punk. This photo was taken on one of our camping expeditions. Sister's Husband's mouth is full of scrambled eggs, which I cooked over a campfire. Sister's Husband is always eating SOMETHING, and some of his proudest moments are when he opens wide and shows you a mouthful of partially-chewed food. Sister thought he was funny. You can tell, because she's laughing. Don't encourage him, Sister!

Never mind the fish. Look at that MULLET!

The boys in our subdivision were always fond of catching snakes. Sister and I do not like snakes. For some reason, this just made the boys more apt to show us the snakes when they caught them.

Sister's Husband is also secure enough to play with pink Barbies.

He'll also eat anything. And by anything, I mean ANY...THING. He'll eat whatever the kids are stirring up in the kitchen. He has also eaten slugs, for 25 cents. And a worm, for 75 cents. He has eaten cow brains, tongue, intestines, and guts. And yet, the guy will not eat a raw tomato.

In addition to showing you the food he's chewed up, Sister's Husband is also fond of revealing the contents of his nose to you. Sometimes he has to dig a little to get stuff out, but this doesn't bother him in the least, as evidenced by this next photo. He is also not shy about sitting beside you and announcing, "I'm having some tummy troubles tonight." And then he likes to rather loudly release some of those tummy troubles right there, smack next to you, so that the air becomes putrid and your nose hairs burn off. Sister's Husband needs prayer, people.

Regardless of his flaws (and there are too many to count here on the blog tonight), Sister's Husband is...well...family. And we love him. Sort of.

Okay, we love him quite a bit, but don't tell him. It's because tonight when the boy called to wish him a happy birthday, Sister's Husband talked to him about fishing and The Lord of the Rings trilogy for forty-five minutes. Anyone who'll talk to a small boy for that long on the phone must be okay. Our boy ADORES Uncle Sister's Husband.

But I do recommend running if Sister's Husband tells you his stomach hurts.

Happy birthday, Big B. I won't tell anyone that you're 48 years old today!

Bwahahahahahah!!!!

Check, Please!

2010-11-10T16:07:00.003-07:00

It is Day 612 of the Lingering Chest Cold.

Or so it seems.

I actually lost track of the days somewhere after I hit 598.

I feel like I should be writing a journal, like some scientist on the polar ice cap.

Day 612, and I have nothing new to report, other than the fact that the nightly coughing is reaching epic proportions, and the little polar bear cubs keep following me. I know the mother bear is hiding, probably behind the snowman I built last month, and that she has an intricate plan laid out for catching me.

Last night, Hubs used his new Traeger birthday grill to whip up Teriyaki Rib Eyes With Blue Cheese Butter.

I know!

That's kind of a grown-up meal, isn't it?! Or at least it's a far cry from the titles of our usual dinners.

Tacos. Cold Cereal. Scrambled Eggs. Spaghetti. Shake 'N Bake Chicken. Smoked Rainbow Trout. Chicken and Broccoli Casserole. Lasagna.

Hubs and I claim that the more exotic a menu item sounds, the more grown-up it will taste.

Tube Steaks Served in Breading With Fresh Tomato Sauce and Ground Mustard. See? Even hot dogs on a bun can sound like something served at the poshest establishment.

(People, fasten your seatbelts. The cold medication has dulled my reflexes and heightened my senses this week, and I take no responsibility for whatever happens to end up on the blog post tonight. I'm simply shooting from the hip, under the influence of expectorants that make me jittery. I am having no problem whatsoever getting my crazy on these days.)

Seriously, though, Hubs grilled steaks last night, and he whipped up a blue cheese butter that was divine, if you happen to be a member of the tribe that actually likes blue cheese.

I am not a member of this tribe. Hence, I was not overly fond of the blue cheese butter, and I simply took Hubs' word for it that it was quite tasty and could very possibly be served at a sassy little clubhouse on the 9th green.

While Hubs was grilling away, I steamed some green beans, baked some potatoes, and threw a green salad together. Everything seemed to be ready at the same time, and Hubs yanked the aluminum foil off of the steaks, which had been resting.

(The fact that I know the appropriate kitchen term for keeping steaks under aluminum foil makes my heart burst with pride. I think I learned it on Julie and Julia. Who says that movies aren't educational?)

Hubs boldly announced, "Look at these chunks of beef perfection! There aren't even any spots of charred bits at all. I am a steak-grilling wonderment!"

(And also? Humble. Hubs is very humble.)

Hubs hacked into the first steak, cutting a piece off for the boy's plate. I happened to catch a glimpse of it, and I said, quite simply, "There is no way that I am going to eat that bit of meat. It's raw!"

Hubs insisted that burned Teriyaki Rib Eyes with Blue Cheese Butter were not going to be served on HIS shift. I insisted that THE WORMS! WE'D BE INVADED BY TAPEWORMS IF WE ATE WHAT HE WAS OFFERING US!

Indeed.

Hubs soon saw the error of his thinking and announced, "Wow. These steaks appear to be LESS THAN COOKED."

The steaks were returned to the grill, and Hubs moaned, "I don't understand! I grilled them exactly as long as I should have!"

Our family of three lingered around in the kitchen, staring at our plates of baked potatoes and green beans and salads. The boy kept complaining, "I'm starving!" We kept assuring him, "The steaks will be ready momentarily."

Hubs checked the grill on the deck again, and exclaimed with horror, "It's not cooking! Something is wrong! Something is seriously wrong!"

I sighed, and decided that going vegetarian for dinner was fine and wondered if the Traeger could be returned after we'd used it four times already, when Hubs burst through the deck doors and shouted out, "Apparently my Traeger grill is more of a manly grill than what I have been using in the past, because I have BLOWN A BREAKER, Sweetheart!"

That was the culprit. The Traeger popped a breaker, which was easily fixed, and Hubs grinned from ear to ear at THE UNCHALLENGED, MASCULINE POWER OF HIS NEW GRILL. The grill had to reheat itself. The steaks, which had never even had a chance to cook the first time around, what with the grill being kicked off with the blown fuse, began to SLOWLY DARKEN.

And when I say slowly, I mean very slowly.

(And I know that very isn't an incredibly descriptive word, but it is what it is tonight. It's like in the 4th grade, when the teacher says to the student, "Okay, so your story is good. I love the part where you describe running through the darkened forest, with the wicked witch chasing you. You said that you ran fast. HOW did you run? Let's be MORE DESCRIPTIVE!" And the 4th grader gives his teacher a deadpan stare and says, "I ran VERY fast??")

(I majored in English for my first two full years in college, people. Moments like the one described above is what made me switch my major, because I wasn't sure I could handle papers filled with a whole lot of verys.)

(Verys? Veries? Can you even misspell the pluralized form of a word, when pluralizing it makes it a NON-WORD?)

We continued to stand around the kitchen last night, waiting on our steaks and gazing upon our vegetables, when Hubs announced, "Let's just eat the salad and potatoes; the steaks will be done in a moment."

So we did. We sat down to dinner. Hubs proclaimed, "This is exactly like eating at a posh little restaurant, where the waiter brings your salads out first. Except, well, my waiter accidentally brought my potato and green beans out, too, and he seems to have forgotten the meat portion."

Service these days! Waiters just don't tend to your dining needs like they did in the '50s.

Eventually, when the salads and potatoes and green beans were gone, Hubs said, "I think I'll just go flag the waiter down and ask if he can check with the kitchen and see what the hold up on the steaks is..."

When he returned to the table, he quietly announced, "The chef said to just be patient, and he'll have the steaks out soon."

The boy declared, "Dad, I'm full."

Eventually, people, the kitchen help delivered steaks to our plates, which were slathered in fancy blue cheese butter (for some) and salt and pepper (for others).

And they were delicious.

Even though we had absolutely no idea what they'd look like sitting next to a baked potato and a pile of green beans!

At least we now know the full strength of Hubs' breaker-blowing Traeger.

This isn't your grandmother's grill, after all.

Oh, and we didn't leave a tip for the waiter last night. He tried. Bless him. But Hubs and I just didn't feel that his service was all that stellar, regardless of the fact that Hubs got a free refill on his Coke, since we had to wait so long for the steaks to cook.

Wait. That was ME who refilled Hubs' Coke!

I'm just going to go take the nightly dose of my second generation expectorant and color rainbows on some drawing paper with Crayons now.

And thinking of the expectorant reminds me of the joke which I've laughed about all week.

What's green and slides across the ice?

Peggy Phlegm, of course.

I am HER this week! Hear me roar.

Or cough.

Or whatever.

Happy Wednesday night, y'all.

Randomness With No GPS to Guide It Home

2010-11-09T16:21:00.003-07:00

I just have random things tonight, and they're the odd thoughts which really can't be held together by any type of glue so that they resemble a cohesive blog post.

So I'll just run with it.

Kind of like I'm going to run with that introductory sentence, which I feel needs a comma, but I am at a loss as to where, exactly, I should put it, because, grammatically speaking, it doesn't need one. Yet I FEEL that it needs one, and my proofreading feelings are usually right. I get proofreading feelings like arthritic old ladies know when storms are brewing.

1. First of all, let's talk about the Chest Cold Which Will Not Die. I caught it from Heather over the phone lines last Monday. As in MORE THAN A WEEK AGO. Heather called me last Monday and bemoaned the fact that she was down for the count on her sofa, with a blanket and the worst cold she's ever experienced. I laid the sympathy on her real thick-like and said, "You poor dear. Can I bring you anything?" Heather needed nothing. I hung up the phone, and six hours later, I had Chest Cold '10, otherwise known as the Chest Cold Which Will Not Die.

During the daytime hours, I simply sound like I've been slamming back seven packs a day for the last decade. Either that, or I sound like I ate a bowl of gravel for breakfast. When bedtime hits, though, and I lay down, the coughing starts, and it is keeping me awake.

And also? It is keeping Hubs awake, too, which is saying something, because Hubs can seldom hear anything, what with the headphones in his ears every single night, as he listens to talk-radio programs where people call in and report the fact that LO! I SAW THE MOTHER SHIP WHEN I WAS LIVING IN A TRAILER COURT IN NEVADA IN 1974, AND I EVEN HAVE A BOLT OFF OF THE LANDING GEAR IN A MAXWELL HOUSE CAN IN MY REFRIGERATOR!

(For the record, Hubs and I do not enjoy the same radio programs. At all.)

2. The cold medication that I've been using to combat the Chest Cold Which Will Not Die is wreaking havoc on my system at night.

On Saturday night, I dreamed that I was scalping people, but they had all volunteered for it. I had a salon, of sorts, and people would come into my salon, sit themselves down in the big twirly chair, and I would use a scalpel to remove all of their hair and most of the skin from the top of their heads. In my dream, I was terrified of seeing what was underneath the scalp, so I would tell every single one of my customers that HEY! I'LL MAKE THE BIG INCISION ALL THE WAY AROUND YOUR HEAD, BUT JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU LEAVE TO LIFT THE TOP OFF, PLEASE. Through each scalping, I made all kinds of small talk with my customers, while they sat motionless in the chairs, and they all happily chatted back to me. It didn't appear to hurt them much at all. However, at the end of one of my workdays, my boss came in and told me that I had plum forgotten to have all of my customers sign a waiver giving me their permission to permanently remove the top portions of their heads, thus exposing the bone beneath, and he wanted me to call every single one of them, so that they could all come back into the shop and sign said papers.

I told Hubs about my dream while we were getting ready for church on Sunday morning, and he simply said, "I'll be sleeping with the boy tonight. The boy and I are going to take shifts staying awake, so that we have a twenty-four-hour surveillance on you. Only one of us will sleep at a time, and the other one will act as a guard. Oh, and we'll be armed, just in case you were wondering."

Don't ask me where this dream came from. I blame the cold medicine entirely.

3. Then, last night, I dreamed that I went to a concert put on by librarians. The audience (of which I was a member of) all piled into a giant theater, and a group of librarians was on stage. The light show was fantastic in my dream, with strobes blinking like mad and a disco ball twirling somewhere. The librarians all took turns silently reading, and they took turns shelving the books on stage, and they took turns quietly checking books in and out on stage. There was no sound. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch.

When I told Hubs about this dream, he said, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. I assume you were alone in the audience."

I lied to Hubs and said, "No. You were there with me, sitting right next to me." He wasn't, people. Hubs was not in this dream, but I wanted to convince him that he'd attended the "dumbest thing ever."

Hubs replied, "Well, if I was there in your dream, then I wasn't enjoying it! And you must've threatened me with a scalping if I didn't attend the Librarian Concert."

I think the concert I attended was every audiologist's dream! No broken eardrums that result in continual ringing in the ears, which require grown boys to wear headphones all night long, just to shut the constant ringing out. And also? I think this is just a hopeful dream, as I am constantly surrounded by sound. I feel like the Grinch, as I'm always moaning, "NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!" The boy blasts Michael Jackson's songs all the time; Hubs has always got AC/DC or Waylon Jennings serenading us in the background, or Glenn Beck shouting from the TV screen. Sometimes, I long for silence.

Again. Cold medicine. But this time, maybe it was combined with my dream of just having a quiet moment to myself!

4. I wore pigtails today. I don't know why, other than the simple fact that I was suffering a bad hair day, in which the mop refused to cooperate, so I crammed it into two piggy tails, and off I went to Bible study. No one said a single word to me this morning.

After Bible study, I dashed off to teach PE, and THE HANDS! Every child in every PE class wanted to touch my pigtails and exclaim, "Miss Mama! You look so cute!" I was like an oddity who had stumbled onto a deserted island, where the natives had never seen pigtails before, and they all wanted to touch, and feel, and pull the pigtails.

In contrast, when I picked the boy up from school this afternoon, he simply said, "Nice pigtails, Mom. Are you trying out for The Wizard of Oz?"

Clearly, the boy will do just fine at winning girlfriends when he's in high school. He has the smooth talk down to an art. He can flatter the female heart with his words.

I blame his daddy.

5. We had tacos for dinner last night.

Do y'all have the perfect combination of taco ingredients, which, when piled together, create a taco worthy of the SWEET PERFECTION AWARD?

I do. And my concoction begins with a soft flour tortilla.

I bought a brand new package at the grocery store on Sunday, while Hubs and I were there for the major haul. I put the package of tortillas in with the bread, in our bread drawer, at home.

Where we always keep them.

Hubs, who was helping me put groceries away, asked "Can I throw the old bread heels out?"

Yes. Yes, that would be helpful. Toss those old, dried-up bread heels with the blue fuzz on them into the trash, and thank you, very much!

Last night, when I went to get my soft flour tortillas out of the bread drawer, there were none. I searched the pantry, I searched the fridge, I searched the cupboards. Hubs announced, "Well, I threw some away with the old bread heels. I just assumed they'd been in the drawer forever."

If by forever, you mean ninety stinking seconds, then yes, they'd been in the drawer for forever. Good-bye, brand new tortillas. Good-bye, perfect taco.

I had to eat a taco with a hard, crunchy shell last night, and this is not what floats my boat. Hubs and the boy insist that a crunchy corn shell on the outside is the perfect framework for a good taco, but I disagree.

Then, to add insult to injury, I had been all set on having avocado slices in my taco, too, and when I hacked into my avocado last night, it was so unripe, the pit was actually softer than the green, fleshy part. I couldn't eat it. It was horrible, and I threw it out.

Sweet Taco Perfection did not happen for me last night, and I was sorely disappointed.

6. Let's talk about Arrested Development. Why had I never heard of this TV show before? This weekend, Hubs and I were laying in bed with the laptop before us, surfing through Play-It-Now options on Netflix, and we saw Arrested Development. Neither of us had ever heard of it before, but it was a thirty-minute sitcom, which means it's only twenty-two minutes long without the commercial interruptions. My adult-onset ADD can certainly handle twenty-two minute chunks of television episodes, so we watched Season 1, Episode 1, and listen, people.

HOOKED.

Hooked huge!

Hubs and I laughed out loud, and, since Friday night, we've already covered HALF of Season 1, and we can hardly wait to watch the next few episodes tonight before my cold medication kicks in and sends me to Dreamland.

Clearly, this boldly announces on the World Wide Web that Hubs and I do not have refined tastes when it comes to TV entertainment. We are easily taken in by corny humor, and we laugh like untamed hyenas.

7. I know that I give Hubs a bad time on this blog, repeatedly, but listen, people. I love that fellow to pieces. He makes me laugh at least a hundred different times every day, and I adore him.

8. That's it, people. It's all I have tonight, and I know that it's not much, and that it's poorly written and rather boring, and I blame the chest cold.

The Chest Cold Which Continues To Linger and I are going to go enjoy a cup of piping hot Vitamin C juice now.

The New Kid on the Block

2010-11-08T19:19:00.005-07:00

I may have mentioned one or nineteen times that Hubs had a birthday this weekend.

One of his birthday gifts resulted in the Jedi Family gaining a new family member.

Behold!

Hubs emphatically declared that he's going to dress him in a hoodie and name him Josh.

Josh is going to sit beside Hubs while Hubs watches the Broncos play some football.

And if Hubs doesn't like what he sees on the TV screen, Josh is going to take a little rap to the noggin. Or maybe two raps to the noggin. Or maybe even sixteen.

Thankfully, the weighted sandbag in his bum makes him pop right back up.

Also?

Straight out of the box, Josh had a slight problem. It's called a MINOR HOLE, but that came as absolutely no surprise to us, because Denver's entire defense has a MINOR HOLE in it.

And really? If you must know, I laughed out loud at my friend Susan's joke today.

What do you call 47 millionaires sitting around a big screen TV, watching the Super Bowl?

Give up?

Why, the Denver Broncos, of course!

I'd better quit while I'm ahead. Hubs is loyal to the orange and blue, and I may be sleeping in the doghouse tonight.

Except we don't have a dog, which means we don't have a doghouse.

Just Keep Swimming...Just Keep Swimming...Or You'll Be in the Smoker!

2010-11-07T19:06:00.003-07:00

Birthday Weekend was pulled off rather swimmingly at the Jedi Manor.

Hubs, you see, turned old, and we celebrated in style by hauling our family of three to the football field, where we cheered out hearts out for our Small Town High boys. The stands were packed as fully as my garage continues to be, even though we have lived here, in this house, for two full years.

I try not to think about it.

We met Heather and Tyler, and Clint and Nancy, and the Pauls (two Pauls) at the game, and we wedged ourselves into the bleachers like germs in a kindergarten classroom. We were tight, people. My right knee served as a lumbar support for Clint's back all night long. If one of us stood up, we all had to stand up, because unwedging just one body wasn't possible. We rose as a unit to cheer when the Small Town boys broke free with the ball and made amazing runs.

And oh, people! Those Small Town High boys were so hot, they were sun spots on Friday night! They threw the ball, they ran the ball, they intercepted the ball, they kicked the ball. And when the smoke finally cleared, our side of the scoreboard was lit up with a big 46, while the opposing team only managed to score 12 measly points.

Can you say STATE PLAYOFF FINALISTS?? That's right! Small Town High School's football team is heading to State next weekend!

At one point, Hubs yelled over to me, "Keep your fingers off of your phone! No Pride Texting here tonight! I will break your fingers plum off if you fire off a text to someone from Opponentville and proclaim that your team is winning."

Well, then. Birthday or not, Hubs had laid down some Serious Ground Rules.

It's because I've managed to cause the Denver Broncos AND Small Town High School to lose football games, all because I've sent prideful text messages to someone before the end of the game, shouting out our apparent victories, and, both times, our apparent victories turned into terrifying losses.

I have learned my lesson, people.

By the time we walked out of the stands with our pack of friends, I was plum hoarse, partly from all the cheering, but mostly from all the talking I did with Nancy and Heather, while the big boys actually concentrated on the game.

On Saturday, Hubs and the boy and I had every intention of heading off to Bigger Town, USA so that we could watch a hockey game. It was Hubs' birthday weekend, and that's what he wanted to do. But then Ms. Buzz Killer, who was some stranger-woman wedged in against my left shoulder at the football game, made small talk with us during half-time on Friday night, and she announced the inevitable: Snow. It was coming.

Specifically, she emphatically announced that the weatherman was predicting snow on Tuesday, and that caused Hubs and I to pause and evaluate things.

You see, we live in the middle of Sherwood Forest, and we had the leaves of 4,783 trees sitting in our yard. With Hubs' birthday weekend promising glorious weather, we decided to be (gasp!) RESPONSIBLE HOMEOWNERS, which meant that we listened to the stranger in the football stands. We took advantage of Saturday's phenomenal weather, and we raked leaves.

And we blew leaves. And we raked leaves. And we blew leaves. And we raked leaves. And we scooped leaves. And we dumped leaves.

People, I love living smack in the center of Sherwood Forest in the summertime. The shade? Well, it's a glorious thing, especially since our deck is on the southern side of our house, which would normally make for some very sweltering evenings at the patio table. But the trees in back? Well, they shade that deck of ours quite nicely.

On Saturday, though, I decided to just trade the leaf blower in for a chainsaw. I was ready to cut the offending bark-covered plants down and start my own paper company. Dunder Mifflin wouldn't have been able to keep up.

By Saturday night, Hubs and I felt like we were 90 years old, and we wanted nothing more than a prune juice cocktail followed by an hour in front of The Lawrence Welk Show, so that we could clap over all the bubbles before we called it a night.

But, people! We moved our clocks back an hour on Saturday night, which is MY VERY MOST FAVORITE DAY OF THE YEAR!

It's better than my birthday! It's better than the first day of summer vacation! I love and adore the lone Saturday night each year, when we dance like crazy people at our house, pull all the clocks off of the walls, and move those clock hands BACKWARDS!

As we shuffled our aching bodies to bed on Saturday night, Hubs said, "Hey. It's your favorite day of the year."

Yes. Yes, it was. And Hubs remembered, because Hubs knows me very well.

And all the leaf-collecting ruined my favorite day of the year.

The boy DID NOT rake leaves on Saturday. Nope. The boy was spoiled rotten by Hubs' parents on Saturday morning, as we had Hubs' Post-Birthday Birthday Breakfast. Hubs got a new fancy grill as a gift, and we grilled bacon outside, and let me tell you this: The neighbors? Well, they sometimes knock on your door when you grill bacon outside, and they proclaim, "Goodness! Things are smelling quite wonderful at your place today!" Hubs' mama brought chocolate-iced donuts for the boy, and he thought he'd reached the pinnacle of Halloween week.

The boy ate two donuts in plain sight of us, and then he devoured a third donut when no one was looking. You have to watch ten-year-old boys. They'll eat the entire contents of your refrigerator, if you're not looking, and they'll just take the bag of sugar out of the pantry and sit down with it and a spoon.

After breakfast was when the leaf blowing and raking and blowing and raking and scooping and blowing and raking started, and the boy's wardens granted him an afternoon pass. Pa (my dad) came and collected the boy and his fishing pole, and they went in search of some worms.

When they returned (after all the blowing and raking and blowing and raking and scooping and blowing and raking had been accomplished), the boy had his finger hooked into the gills of an eighteen-inch-long Rainbow Trout. There are no words to describe the pride our boy felt over his first LET'S-KEEP-IT-AND-EAT-IT-BECAUSE-IT'S-BIGGER-THAN-WHAT-I'VE-EVER-MANAGED-TO-CATCH-BEFORE fish.

Since Hubs and I were busy blowing and raking leaves, we have no pictures of the boy at the exact moment when he reeled this gigantic swimmer in, but Mama took plenty of pictures when Pa brought him (and the fish!) home.

On Saturday night, Hubs taught the boy how to gut and clean a fish. The boy spent a substantial amount of time poking the dead creature's eyeballs, which made him laugh like he needed to be committed to a special place for people who...well...laugh over poking fish eyeballs.

The Y chromosome grosses me out a lot of the time.

And then, guess what? NEW TRAEGER BIRTHDAY BARBECUE! The trout was slathered in butter, sprinkled with salt and pepper, wrapped in foil, and Hubs and the boy SMOKED IT on the grill, while I made mashed potatoes and broccoli and cauliflower.

Throughout our entire dinner, the boy kept proclaiming, "Isn't this THE VERY BEST meal you've ever eaten, Mom? Dad, can you believe that this fish was just swimming in the pond this morning, and then I caught him, and I provided dinner for our family tonight?"

Hubs and I love that kid!

And really? It was probably the best Rainbow Trout Hubs and I had ever eaten. Hands down. And Hubs must've said, at least twelve dozen times, in his best Bruce voice from Finding Nemo, "I'M HAVING FISH TONIGHT!"

This morning, we went to church, and then, on November 7th, in Small Town, USA, Hubs and the boy and I went on a picnic at the park. The boy wore shorts. No one wore a jacket. This is the kind of weather usually reserved for November in Palm Springs. Small Town, USA is not a tropical hot spot. By November 7th, Small Town, USA is usually buried beneath snow, while the temperature hovers around the 35-degree mark. We could not believe the glorious weather!

And then, we ventured into Wal-Mart for THE BIG HAUL. As in, the HAUL IN WHICH WE NEEDED EVERYTHING THAT WAL-MART HAD TO SELL.

Except dog food.

Because we don't have a dog.

We filled our cart with groceries and groceries and more groceries. We added paper towels and laundry detergent and deodorant and toothpaste and dishwasher detergent and toilet bowl cleaner and boxes of garbage bags and hairspray.

The list?

It was lengthy, people.

The bill?

It was hefty, people.

And Hubs?

HE SURVIVED IT, PEOPLE!! Hubs and Wal-Mart on the weekend usually behave like oil and water. Unfriendlylike, if you will. But today, Hubs managed to get through the major shopping center, and he came out grinning.

Miracles, people. They're still performed by Jesus, in modern times.

And then, as the grand finale for Hubs' Birthday Weekend, we scooped up the boy's buddy, Bek, and we went to see Megamind at the theater.

Oh, people! I have but two words for y'all: Seriously and Funny. Hubs and I laughed just as hard as the boys did, and Hubs was in his happy place, because the soundtrack was plum full of songs by AC/DC, Ozzy, and Guns 'N Roses. For the first time ever, Hubs wants to buy the soundtrack to a CARTOON!

Plus, there were loads and loads of one-liners, which our little family of three will be laughing over for the next several weeks.

"Oh, crud. My spider bite is acting up again."

That's the line I intend to use the most. I think it may help reduce my sentence on the Leaf Collection Chain Gang.

So...you know...go! Go see Megamind. It's funny, and you will laugh and laugh and laugh. And it's got some fantastic messages aimed smack at everyone, like be yourself, and don't change your personality and what you like to make someone else happy. And even when you have everything, like wealth and material possessions, you can still be left feeling completely unhappy inside. And happiness comes through friends and family and relationships, and not from things. Yes, people. Solid. Life. Messages.

IN A FILM WHERE WILL FERRELL VOICES THE MAIN CHARACTER! I know! Amazing!

Kudos, Will.

And really? We'll even come with you to see Megamind, because I think I could probably laugh through it a second time!

And do y'all know what? Last night at this time, it was almost 9:00. Tonight, though, it's only 8:00, and that is a fantastic feeling.

Happy Sunday night.

He's Still Cute, After All of These Years

2010-11-04T16:56:00.004-06:00

Tomorrow (November 5th) is Hubs' birthday.

I'd throw some confetti into the air to help celebrate that little fact, but I do try to refrain from such spontaneous bouts of jubilee around here, because I usually remember that I'm the maid at the Jedi Manor, which means, in a nutshell, that it'll be ME who vacuums up the confetti.

And really? After working my two jobs all week, I seldom have any extra time left to pull the vacuum cleaner out of the closet.

Or buy groceries.

Those twenty working hours a week just eat up the time.

But tonight's blog post really isn't about the fact that I spend two afternoons a week surviving kindergarten PE or two days a week slamming my scarves into the photocopier at the church office.

Tonight's blog post is all about Hubs, because he's turning 42, which is a horrifically large number. Never in all of my high school career did I ever envision myself married to an old man. I just always imagined that my husband would be a young fellow, who wore acid washed jeans and Glacier sunglasses all of his life.

Clearly, things like this happen when you start sprouting inch-long gray hairs out of your chin. Overnight. It means you're old yourself. But really? If Hubs and I are forced to grow old and start listening to public radio and buying gallon-sized bottles of prune juice when they go on sale at the local market, then I want to grow old with him.

And really? I have about forty-two other reasons why I wouldn't mind growing old with Hubs.

1. Hubs looks really cute when he has his evening bath in the kitchen sink.

2. He can also pop off the cheesiest grins you'd ever imagine.

3. His attraction to open flames began at a relatively young age, and he's continually instructing the boy and I on fire safety. ("If you're going to use gasoline as an accelerant, never squirt it out of a squirt bottle once the fire has started. The flames may follow the spray back up inside the squirt bottle, and you'll end up holding an explosive device.")

4. Hubs' Christmas cheer is contagious, year after year.

5. He's also a guy who isn't afraid to be seen in his red cowboy boots in public.

6. Those blue eyes. They make me swoon. Enough said.

7. Hubs is never embarrassed about wearing shirts which advertise his current mood. His "I'm a Grouch" T-shirt is what he likes to wear after the Broncos have finished pretending to play football on Sunday afternoons.

8. Hubs is never afraid to just shimmy up a front door and perch there like a crazed cat.

9. He always keeps his bangs trimmed up nicely.

10. His favorite part in the movie A Christmas Story is where Ralphie's mother makes him try on the pink bunny costume. Hubs likes to reenact that scene with a hand-crocheted sweater vest made for him by his grandmother. Thankfully, Hubs' dad came to his rescue and said, "You look ridiculous. Take it off."

11. Regardless of the fact that Hubs pretends that he has no sense of fashion (Levis! T-shirts! Every! Single! Day!), he has always secretly known that vertical stripes make the body appear longer and slimmer. When Hubs was eight years old, he desperately needed the illusion of longer, as his three-year-old brother was almost as tall as he was, but I don't think that he needed the illusion of slimmer.

12. Hubs has always known the definition of Working Vacation. Because of this, he likes to throw a table saw into the vehicle, along with his suitcase, in case he runs across a house in Palm Springs that needs some baseboard put up before the family goes golfing.

13. Hubs isn't afraid to give that little sister of his a side-hug. (His secret, but ever-present, sense of fashion also knows that when you wear a plaid, one-piece short set, you'd better make sure you've got a solid shirt beneath it. Hubs knows that you never mix your patterns.)

14. Hubs has spent his time in homes with carpeting not approved by Martha Stewart, which is why he let us splurge when we built our house and install luxurious hardwood floors.

15. Even though Hubs was a bit stressed out when he and I both accidentally wore an orange-colored shirt to church one day this summer and everyone asked him if he was trying to be my twin, he's secretly not afraid to dress as a twin. Or as a triplet, for that matter. (And really? Isn't it sweet how Hubs is holding Brother Joel's hand, and how Brother Joel is holding little Brother's hand? I think this snapshot was taken right before they all sang a rousing rendition of Kum Bay Ya.)

16. Remember the boy's buddy Carter? And remember how he wore some nerdy glasses for his Halloween costume this year? I told you that Hubs had a pair on in his 5th grade school picture!

17. Hubs has some muscles. Even as a ten-year-old, he wasn't afraid to split the biggest stump in the wood pile.

18. Captain of the wrestling team. Hubba hubba.

19. Hubs never panics, either. He and I always joke that the boy's motto is No Need to Hit the Panic Button Just Yet. Hubs perfected that lifestyle for himself long before the boy inherited it.

20. In contrast, I have usually smacked the panic button an hour and a half early, and then, oftentimes, I just SIT on the panic button, so that I know it's forever deployed and activated. Hubs usually assures me that this isn't always beneficial to my health.

21. Hubs gets so excited about hockey every year, we sometimes have to make paper chains out of construction paper, so that he can rip a link off every night before bedtime to keep track of HOW MANY DAYS LEFT UNTIL THE AVALANCHE OPEN THEIR SEASON each October.

22. Hubs is a stick-with-it kind of guy. Take the Broncos, for instance. Even though Hubs grumbles every single Sunday evening that THE BRONCOS! THEY ARE DEAD TO ME, he's always on the Big Fan Train the following week to cheer them on.

23. Hubs will lay on the boy's bedroom floor for hours on end and build things out of Legos with him.

24. Hubs is never afraid to speak his mind. Once, when two elderly women with tightly-permed, blue hair had stopped to chat in Wal-Mart's parking lot, they set their two shopping bags on the back of Hubs' '68 Camaro, because that was the unfortunate point in the parking lot where they ran into one another. Hubs came out and said, "Hey! What do you think this is? A shelf?!"

25. Meat. It's what's for dinner, as far as Hubs is concerned. Vegetables are what his food eats, before it becomes his food.

26. Hubs never thinks that anything is hot enough for him, with the exception of one habanero pepper in 1996.

27. It was the habanero that made him sweat.

28. It was the habanero pepper that made him ask to be driven home so that he could writhe in agony without an audience.

29. Hubs has never given up his dream of becoming a Navy SEAL, even though he shot himself in the eye when he was sixteen, and the Navy decided that anyone who could actually shoot his own eyeball might not be someone they wanted to send on top secret missions.

30. Hubs announced the other day, "You know, next to AC/DC, I think I like Waylon Jennings best."

31. Hubs has been playing a whole lot of Waylon's songs lately.

32. Waylon's songs are officially on my very last nerve.

33. Hubs continues to have a problem with Coke. The kind that comes in the red cans. Four Cokes is considered a primer for Hubs, before the real drinking starts.

34. Hubs is also developing a slight problem with Mt. Dew.

35. Hubs may need to enter a twelve-step Soda Rehab program.

36. Hubs thinks that Velveeta is an ingredient in plastic.

37. Hubs also sleeps with headphones in his ears almost every single night, which are plugged into the radio, which is tuned to some obscure radio station that airs programs in which people look for UFOs. Hubs has a hard time sleeping without the headphones, because his ears ring constantly due to entirely too many loud Metallica concerts in the late '80s, and ringing ears keep him awake. However, he can sleep right through a static-filled radio program.

38. Hubs can also stay focused on the boy's questions for a whole lot longer than I can. The boy, you see, asks a LOT of questions. And there are days when I am all questioned-out and need to sit in a dark closet and rock back and forth, but Hubs never does. He keeps answering the questions.

39. Hubs is a risk-taker. He'll buy every single piece of property in the game of Monopoly. Every. Single. Property. He. Lands. On. He's also brave enough that he took the plunge this summer and started his own business. The boy and I are quite proud of him.

40. Hubs has a heart for Jesus that's simply huge.

41. And when I've sat on the panic button for hours on end, Hubs usually tells me how Jesus would handle things and talks me down off the ledge.

42. He's still, after all these years, a fantastic kisser.

Happy birthday, Hubs.

The boy and I...well...we think you're pretty dang cool.

Flatter Than a Pancake is Actually Achievable

2010-11-03T17:17:00.004-06:00

So a while back someone sent me an email which described, in vivid details, exercises that a girl could do in order to prepare for her first mammogram. Or even her second mammogram. Or her thirty-seventh.

Although I didn't dream up these exercises on my own by any means, I thought that I would share them with y'all.

EXERCISE ONE
Open your refrigerator door and insert one breast in door. Shut as hard as possible and lean on the door for good measure. Hold that position for five seconds. Repeat again, in case the first time wasn't effective enough.

EXERCISE TWO
Visit your garage at 3 AM, when the temperature of the concrete floor is just perfect. Take off all your clothes and lie comfortably on the floor, with one breast wedged under the rear tire of your Suburban. Ask a friend to slowly back your vehicle up, until your breast is sufficiently flattened and chilled. Turn over and repeat this with the other breast.

EXERCISE THREE
Freeze two metal bookends over night. Strip to the waist. Invite a stranger into the room. Press the bookends against one of your breasts. Smash the bookends together as hard as you can. Set up an appointment with the stranger to meet next year and do it again.

Oh, people! I laughed at these exercises several months ago, when I found them in my electronic IN BOX.

And then I lived it today, and I had to come home and frantically do a Google search for them, so that I could share them with y'all.

Apparently anyone who is old enough to grow a one-inch-long gray hair out of her chin OVERNIGHT is old enough to get her first mammogram, hearing aides, and her first pair of knee-high pantyhose, which will sag down around her ankles and scrunch themselves into her orthopedic shoes. I made the appointment a while back, thinking to myself that women survive this procedure all of the time, and I'd get through it with thrown confetti. I guessed that it would be a breeze.

Then, as November 3rd actually got closer and closer on the calendar, I had some nervousness start to settle in. I was a little worried on what I should expect, and about how badly it was going to hurt, and I experienced some adult-sized stress.

Amy told me yesterday, "Sister, we are meeting for coffee right before your appointment, so that I can encourage you about this and give you a hug before you go in."

God loves Amy. He truly does. She's always looking out for me.

At the little cafe table this morning, Amy told me, "Honey, I've already had my first mammogram, and I'm going to tell you this in love. The radiologist is going to manhandle your boobie and press it in a vice, so that it's the shape of a rectangle and as thick as a sheet of paper. I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you at all. You will gasp, you will curse the day you developed boobies, you will dribble in your pants, and you'll want to slap someone when it's all over with."

I thanked Amy for her vivid description and realized that my nervousness had increased, twofold.

And then, because we were slurping our caffeinated beverages in the cafe at the hospital, where the radiology department exists, we had a visitor walk by our table and say hello.

It was CB.

He lived in our subdivision while Sister and I were growing up. He threw snowballs at us in the winters. He stopped and said hello this morning, and he asked how Amy and I were doing, and then...

...blam!

CB's occupation hit me like a full-sized Chevy truck on the interstate.

The guy is a radiologist.

After CB left, Amy looked at me and said, "Oh mercy! Heather had to endure HER mammogram with CB! She actually wanted to slap THREE people when she left, just because...you know...AWKWARD!"

Eventually, Amy walked me to the reception area of the radiology center, squeezed me good-bye and said, "Call me, Baby!" And, with that, I was on my own.

I filled out the appropriate paperwork. I answered questions about my medical history. I showed my insurance card to the receptionist. And the entire time I kept wanting to say, "If CB comes to get me so that he can smash my boobies and take photos of them, I will scream a scream the likes of which y'all have never heard in this office before."

But I didn't.

I simply chanted in my head, over and over, "Please, Jesus, not CB; please, Jesus, not CB!"

And guess what? I totally got some lady technician today who manhandled me just fine.

My boobies were squashed down to the width of a sheet of paper, just like Amy predicted, and I gasped, also like she predicted. Just when I guessed that the dang things couldn't become any flatter, I was dead-on wrong. The gal would crank the handle on the vice, and we'd go MUCH FLATTER. I wanted to laugh, had I been able to, when she told me to hold my breath while she took the pictures, because I WAS COMPLETELY UNABLE TO BREATHE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

(Are any of my male readers even still with me here?)

I walked out of the radiology center this morning in desperate need of nothing more than an AA training bra, instead of my normal B.

And I gave them my phone number so that they could call me again next year, so that we could do the same thing over again.

Without CB, of course.

Halloween Ten

2010-11-01T17:12:00.006-06:00

Halloween '10 will go down in our history books as the year in which Halloween kicked us through a wall, circled around outside, and kicked us again while we were down, holding our sides and moaning about broken ribs and such.

I'm not even being overly dramatic when I say this. I am never overly dramatic.

Halloween '10 plum wore us out, and I'll tell you how I know this to be true.

Yesterday morning, the boy's alarm went off, and he simply smacked the snooze button. The boy never smacks the snooze button because THINGS TO DO! If the alarm has gone off, he embraces the day and gets up. After telling the bump under the quilt in the boy's bed that SCHOOL, IT WAITS FOR NO ONE, Hubs and I managed to get him up yesterday morning and propelled towards the shower in his bathroom.

The shower which went on and on and on, before it quite miraculously shut off. After numerous minutes all lined up in a row in which I heard no noises whatsoever coming from the bathroom, I went in to investigate, and our freshly-showered son was asleep in the tub, people. There he was, sopping wet and curled up on the floor of his shower, sound asleep.

Hello, Halloween Hangover!

I imagine that much of the holiday after effects can be blamed on our weekend diet, which consisted of nothing of any nutritional value. Our menu read like a genuine horror film, as our little family of three ate the following things between Friday morning and Sunday night: Hershey's miniatures, double cheeseburgers, Twix, Hershey's miniatures, chicken nuggets, Nestle Crunch, Coke, Hershey's miniature, french fries, Smarties, Twizzlers, Hershey's miniatures, chili, taco dip, witches' brew, olives (OH, WAIT! A HEALTHY ITEM!), deviled eggs, Hershey's miniatures, pumpkin cheesecake, chips, Chinese buffet items, curly fries, caramel apples (OH, WAIT! ANOTHER HEALTH FOOD THING!), cheese puffs, Doritos, more cheese puffs, sugar cookies, Hershey's miniatures, Milky Ways, and fast food roast beef sandwiches.

Yesterday morning, as I embraced the fact that we would be embarking on our Family Detox Diet, I handed a banana to the boy for breakfast. He looked at it and turned it around in his hands a bit before he asked, "Do we have any ice cream and chocolate syrup to go on top of this?"

I should have known that the weekend was going to bring about some issues, after I had a run in with The Office Strangler on Friday morning.

On Friday, I wore a sassy little scarf number to the church office, where I was working that day.

(It's always good to clarify WHERE I was working, on any given day, because HELLO! TWO JOBS! I like to use my two jobs to play on the sympathies of others. "I did NOT get the laundry done this week, because I have been slaving away at my two jobs!" Hubs likes to pull the magic carpet right out from underneath of me by claiming, "Yes. You have two jobs, and you work twenty hours a week!")

(Hubs went as a Buzz Killer for Halloween this year.)

My sassy scarf looked divine. People, I was CUTE on Friday! I'd used the hot rollers in the hair, which had all worked to my advantage, and I had the trendy scarf action going, and dog gone it! People liked me!

And then the photocopier ran out of paper, which is a task that I am PRACTICALLY OVERQUALIFIED TO HANDLE, so I yanked open the drawer, slammed a new ream of paper into it, smacked the door shut, and stood up.

And that is when The Office Strangler attacked.

I had managed to slam my scarf into the copier's drawer, and when I stood back up with gusto, the entire sassy little number acted as a noose. Later, after untangling myself from near death, I texted Hubs to let him know that he had almost gotten a big wad of large bills from my life insurance policy thrown at him. Hubs simply said, "It's a good thing you didn't smack the COPY button before you stood back up. Can you even imagine THAT ONE?"

I don't even want to go there, people.

Friday morning eventually gave way to Friday afternoon, and I hightailed it across town to the boy's school, where I watched as the kids in his classroom ingested large amounts of sugary cupcakes and witches' brew.

A brick of dry ice in a punch bowl is a party waiting to happen, all by itself.

The boy dressed up as Poseidon this year, and let me assure you of this factoid. Wigs and beards (MOST ESPECIALLY BEARDS!) are not my friends! The wig arrived at our front door in a cardboard box, ordered straight from the land of On-Line. It was snarled like a poetry major's dreadlocks at the university, and I had to invest some muscle into combing it out. When I finished, I told Hubs, "Look at all this gray hair in my brush!" He replied, "Is any of it from the wig, or is it all yours?"

But let's discuss the beard, shall we? There does not exist on this entire planet a substance which will adhere a cheap gray beard to a ten-year-old boy's chin. The double-sticky tape was our best bet, and it held the beard long enough for the photo opps before school on Friday morning.

(As a side note, when you DO NOT WANT A BEARD ON, you will wake up one Friday morning to discover an inch-long gray hair growing out of your chin, which certainly wasn't there on Thursday night, when you washed your face before bed. I have no explanation for how an inch-long gray hair sprouted out on my lower jaw last week, but sprout it did. I'm still trying to come to grips with this horrific fact.)

(I plucked it, by the way. Yanked it out by the roots with a pair of tweezers and did a thirty-minute evaluation in the magnifying mirror for anything else that needed to be plucked, tweezed, groomed or otherwise removed.)

Carter went to school dressed as a Fellow Who Was Too Nerdy To Play Football, and honestly? I think Hubs' 5th grade class picture was taken with a pair of glasses exactly like these.

The party really doesn't start until Cleopatra shows up bearing the dry ice.

The witches' brew did not last but six minutes in the bowl, as every small fry in the boy's class took their turns dipping into it.

Beetlejuice was especially fond of the witches' brew.

I know that, biologically speaking, the boy is fully mine, because when he tried to dip his punch out of the bowl, his crown fell off and landed smack IN the bowl.

Scarves. Crowns. Our family isn't very good with either one of them.

The boy and Kellen managed to ingest their weight in sugar-coated carbohydrates on Friday afternoon. (And would you just look at how RIPPED Poseidon is? Look at those pectoral muscles and biceps! I think that Tinkerbell and the cowgirl gasped!)

On Friday night, Small Town High had a home football game, which we were all geared up to enthusiastically attend, but alas...it was not to be. Hubs came home from work with the migraine's big brother, yet he emphatically declared that we could still venture off and cheer our boys to victory.

I don't know about y'all, but when the migraine's big brother knocks on MY door, I am rendered completely useless and attending a football game would guarantee that someone in the stands was puked upon.

Pretty? Not at all, people.

Hubs likes to say that this is the difference between testosterone and estrogen, and he claims that he's simply made of tougher stuff.

Eventually, Hubs began calling his headache The Circus Strong Man's Sledgehammer to the Brain, so I convinced him to stay at home, where we watched the game on the laptop, and listen, Small Town High School! Let's not wait until the final two minutes to win the game ever again, m'kay? Y'all make me nervous when you play like that!

On Saturday night, Kellen's parents hosted the Halloween Party to End All Halloween Parties, where the Jedi Family continued their bad eating habits and filled their plates and bowls with copious amounts of chili and taco dip and pumpkin-laced cheesecake.

And really? Is any party ever a genuine success until Beetlejuice has stood on a rooftop?

(Don't worry. The roof's pitch is almost nonexistent, and Beetlejuice was only above the hard deck for a few seconds.)

The party was filled with all kinds of kiddos, who decided to play capture the flag in the dark. I have it on good authority that Beetlejuice and Poseidon may have successfully captured the flag belonging to Harry Potter and the two Dementors, although the lady vampire cried foul and declared that MUCH CHEATING HAPPENED. The jury's still out on this one.

Because Halloween '10 was the holiday which just wouldn't die this year, we ventured over to Enzo's house on Sunday afternoon for a little more partying. The kids made caramel apples, and Enzo's dad (CHEF EXTRAORDINAIRE) laid out a feast of cheese puffs, orange-frosted sugar cookies, black olives (A HEALTH FOOD!), and Doritos. Everything was orange and black, and the boy ate his dinner standing up at their kitchen table.

Enzo went as Zeus, and he and his Greek brother, Poseidon, posed for a snapshot. I wish that Enzo wasn't so camera shy all the time.

Enzo's house was the meeting place for the crowd, and we all set out to knock on the doors of strangers and request chocolate. This was ONE-THIRD of the crew who ended up trick-or-treating with us. At one point, we had enough kids in our entourage of treat-gatherers to populate Southern China.

The boy's cousin, R, joined us, and I have to say that she's the cutest ladybug I've ever seen!

Carter modified his costume a little for Sunday night, and he went as a guy who was, indeed, tough enough to play football. The boys' friend, Bek, swiped the nerdy glasses for his costume. Although Carter and Bek and Enzo all looked fabulous half-way through our evening, Poseidon was looking a little rough. A little worse for the wear, if you will. The wig was missing. The trident was broken. The blue cape was falling off. The toga had been stepped upon. Repeatedly.

And Mama got to carry everything that the boy discarded. I had the camera. I had the wig. I had the beard. I had the crown, at times. Enzo's mom was equally as burdened, as his younger brother had completely disrobed out of his costume and given her everything to carry!

Annie and Molly joined us on Sunday night, too. And, if I am truthful on this blog, I will say that Hubs may have had Carter's nerdy glasses on in his 5th grade class photo, but I probably had Molly's red-polka-dotted bow on at some point in my junior year of high school. And I probably looked utterly hot with it in my hair, too. It probably balanced out the shoulder pads in my shirt, I'm thinking.

Stacy and Evelyn even smiled for the camera on Sunday night, although, at this point, I had so many COSTUME ACCESSORIES in my hands, I was completely incapable of focusing the camera properly, so these girls are more of a blur than anything, but that's how we all felt after walking the marathon which was Trick-or-Treating '10.

And, of course, we had more cousins on Halloween evening, as we joined up with Sister's kids, L and K.

So now, with Halloween '10 officially and completely behind us, the Jedi House is entering Food Rehab, and I really need to wrap things up here and go make a grocery list.

A grocery list which includes things like broccoli and chicken breasts and and asparagus spears and oatmeal. We're going to focus our attentions on the bottom of the food pyramid this week, and try to stay away from that crowning point of the pyramid glory, which houses all the Hershey's miniatures and delicious cheese puffs.

I'm sure it'll be hard work, but with any effort, we'll come out of this week as genuine victors.

We Did the Monster Mash...All Weekend Long!

2010-10-31T21:21:00.005-06:00

This...

...plus all this...

...equals this!

After three days of nonstop parties and a diet where the healthiest thing any of us ate was a deep-fat fried potato, the Jedi Manor is shutting Halloween down.

Throwback Thursday -- Halloween, 2005

2010-10-28T21:18:00.003-06:00

As Clairee Belcher so aptly stated in Steel Magnolias, "The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize."

And really? Sometimes a young fellow should look in the mirror before he walks out the door for pre-kindergarten and ask himself, "Does this outfit make me look like Willy Wonka?" And if the answer is an emphatic yes, then clearly he's headed for a good time.

Some Days I Run the Ball Straight Into the Uncomfort Zone

2010-10-27T20:41:00.002-06:00

A couple of nights ago, our friend John called and begged me to help him out with a little project.

I wasn't at all concerned with what the project would be, and I emphatically said, "Sure. What're you doing?"

And this is what he was doing, people: He was making phone calls to members of our political party here in Sector Whatever of Small Town, USA to remind them to get out and vote on Tuesday, November 2nd, and to tell them that their voting spot had been moved to a new location.

And John wanted me to take a list of names and call them.

Yes, people, he was asking me to call complete strangers. And a LOT of them!

So, you know, TOTALLY OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE.

And then John offered up the golden nugget of persuasion: A bag of homemade cookies from his wife, Ruthie.

People, Ruthie can get her cookie baking ON! We don't call her Mrs. Fields for nothing.

With a bag filled to the brim with giant gingersnaps sitting on my kitchen counter, I was pretty much powerless to say no, even though we make our children practice this all the time.

"Just say NO when someone asks you to do something that you're uncomfortable doing!"

"Just say NO when someone offers you a Ziploc baggie full of little, dried leaves!"

"Just say NO when John calls you and asks if you'll make phone calls to strangers and remind them to vote!"

Naturally, I turned right around, called Cody and said, "Listen. I'm bringing some Starbucks goodies to your house this morning, and you are going to help me call strangers!"

The poor girl didn't know what hit her.

So, with our cups of love from The Bucks in our hands, Cody and I sat at her kitchen table and ran the phone lines. We made call after call after call, and I'm not sure how I lucked out, but I seemed to hit all the answering machines this morning, while Cody got the live ones who wanted to engage her in meaningful conversations about politics, and turning this country around and bringing it back to what our forefathers intended for it to be.

I tried to work up a little sympathy for her, but I just couldn't. I was simply singing the praises because, time after time, I kept hearing the voice in my ear that said, "We're not at home right now; please leave a message after the beep."

The best one of the morning was this one, though: "I'm sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service or has been disconnected."

Total score!

I did end up with one gentleman on the line, and when I began my rehearsed (and VERY QUICK!) speech, he shouted out in his 100-year-old voice, "Save your breath, honey! I ALREADY VOTED ABSENTEE!"

Well then.

After calling enough strangers to populate Canada, Cody and I began to realize that maybe we were blessed with the gift of calling strangers (or strangers' answering machines, as my luck ran), and we began to wonder if we shouldn't maybe work the phone lines a little differently.

"We're calling to remind you to vote, and could you give $5 -- just five little dollars, which is barely the cost of a venti drink from Starbucks -- to the cause? Your $5 donation could help hire a landscaper for the Jedi Manor's backyard next spring. Pray about it; dig deep into your soul, and ask yourself if you couldn't part with some spare change."

This plan sounded rather grand to us, until we remembered the exact definition of the word extortion and began remembering such big cases as the Enron scandal.

But really? The thought of being confined to an 8-foot-by-8-foot cell all day with a book to read and plenty of time for a nap was a little on the attractive side to me, until I realized that there is no Starbucks in prison.

And that successfully snapped me out of my plans to extort money out of registered voters in order to fund my little landscaping project.

After Cody and I had successfully called our entire LONG list of names, I headed off to teach PE, which was relatively uneventful today.

No kindergarten drama.

No 4th graders being beamed in the head with a wildly-thrown dodgeball.

This evening, after sending the boy to youth group with Carter, Hubs and I scrambled down to the new pizzeria hot spot, where we met Tyler and Heather and the biggest meat-lover's pizza this side of the Mississippi. We all got salads, too, and when the four of us sat down at our table, we realized one thing.

My salad was substantially larger than the other three salads.

As in, I had a salad that looked like a meal for two adults in itself, while Hubs, Heather and Tyler had nice little dinner-sized salads.

I blame the lettuce. I simply started with entirely too much lettuce as the base for my salad sculpture, and, by the time I'd added green peas and black beans and red peppers and red onions and broccoli and carrots, I had a mountain of vegetables tall enough to satisfy an Easter Bunny on steroids.

It wasn't much of a shocker when the pizza was ready, and I was no longer hungry.

The little pizza parlor is turning into Small Town's hub for socialization, too. Tonight, we ran into five other families that we knew, so it was fun to see everyone. Plus, Hubs and I adore Heather and Tyler, and we laughed like hyenas packed full of caffeine, so, you know, GREAT FUN!

And then, as if I hadn't already crammed enough into my Wednesday, I picked the boy and Carter up from youth group this evening, and I had to come home, breathe into a paper sack in order to calm the nerves, and use the hot glue gun IN A CRAFTY SORT OF WAY to construct a crown for the boy's Halloween costume.

I may have mentioned once or eleventy-six times that the crafting and I are not particularly close friends, and I managed to successfully burn my right thumb with a dollop of hot glue tonight. This is why I have always shelled out major dollars for PURCHASED-ONLINE-AND-DELIVERED-RIGHT-TO-THE-COMFORT-OF-YOUR-FRONT-DOOR-WHILE-YOU-STAY-IN-YOUR-PAJAMAS costumes. No amount of money is too much to pay for some Halloween get-up, as long as Mama doesn't have to get her crafting on.

But the crown! Goodness, but King Solomon never had anything quite as grand as this! As if the silver spray paint that Hubs doused the crown in wasn't enough, the faux jewels and sequins that I laboriously glued to the front of it pushed it to the top of the CROWN JEWELS THAT TAKE OUR BREATH AWAY list.

The Hope Diamond had nothing on this baby!

Between the phone calls to strangers and all the glue-gun maneuvering, I feel like I'm plum worn out and in desperate need of a nerve pill or six tonight.

Thankfully, I think last night's episode of Glee on our DVR might be just the calm-down prescription I've been needing, especially since Glee tricked me last week and TOTALLY DIDN'T AIR AN EPISODE! I was all set to watch what my DVR had supposedly recorded, and then blam! Nothing! I had nothing recorded, because there was no Glee last week, and that certainly racked up a whole casserole dish of deep disappointment for me.

Happy Wednesday night, y'all.

Sometimes Boys Leave Me Speechless

2010-10-26T18:43:00.004-06:00

You should always look at the positive side of everything.

The positive side being that these two little boys are very much loved. And also? They are very secure with themselves and quite handsome, to boot.

Of course, they are also total nuts.

And they could both use a haircut!

But their mamas love them.

I Drove All Night with the Ponytail Because Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

2010-10-25T19:36:00.002-06:00

Embarrassing moments.

They happen.

One happened in 1989, when I was driving along a rather busy avenue in Small Town, USA. My hair was big. It was, after all, 1989, when a single can of Aqua Net often lasted only a few days. That morning, I had scraped all of my hair into a single ponytail, on the left side of my head. I had also adorned it with a hot pink scrunchy.

Dear 1989,
Side ponytails were something I adored. Why did you trick us all into believing that they were so awesome? I have vivid memories of achieving Side Ponytail Glory as well as Cyndi Lauper achieved it. Now...I cringe at the old photos, and I resent the fact that you lured us all into thinking we looked amazing...as amazing as all the guys with their mullets.
Sincerely,
Jedi Mama

With my enormous side ponytail ratted to a volume that would have made the members of KISS sit up and take notice, I headed out in my 1982 Honda Accord.

(As a side note, I shouted with utter delight this weekend, when Hubs and I passed a 1982 Honda Accord, which looked exactly like mine had looked! I yelled, "Look! I think that's my old car!" My heart actually fluttered with the hope that the Accord and I would, momentarily, be reunited for a split second. And Hubs replied by saying, "Honey, there's no way your old Honda is still on the streets. I'm sure it was squashed into a soup can years ago. It's probably faster as a soup can, too.")

(Hubs drove a 1968 Camaro that made a whole lot of noise. He fondly said, "Loud pipes save lives." Strangers were continually knocking on the front door of Hubs' house, asking him if he was interested in selling his car. Hubs would glare them down and assure them that he was keeping the beast. He liked to race me, too, and sometimes, when I shut the air conditioning off and the radio off, I could beat Hubs in my Accord. Don't tell him that I said that, though. His Camaro gets sad when it remembers how the 1982 Honda kicked it into high gear and left him behind. And also? No one ever knocked on my front door and asked me if I was interested in selling my little blue love car.)

But really? I was telling y'all the story of the Day of Embarrassment, and not a story about how much I loved my little car.

That day in 1989 was hot, and I rolled the window down. I was probably trying to pick up some speed on the straightaway, which would've meant that I'd shut the air conditioning down in order to give the engine a chance to gain a little more kick. But, as often happens with an open window on a car, the breezes came inside entirely too fast, and my Hair Perfection was in danger of being ruined, so I rolled the window up.

And I drove for quite some time.

And I passed many, many cars.

I even waved at a couple of people I knew, because I was very social in 1989, and I waved a lot.

(And that's different from 2010 how?!)

And then, I needed to switch over from the left lane to the right lane, so I did what every driver's ed instructor emphatically teaches you to do. I turned my head to look over my right shoulder, to make sure no one was in my blind spot.

And when I did that, my neck snapped with a violent jerk, and I was almost paralyzed from the resulting injury.

My enormously-ratted side ponytail, which was on the left side of my head, had been left OUTSIDE THE CAR, PEOPLE, when I rolled the window up. Clearly, I was driving down the busy street with my hair stuck out the window, flopping outside in the breeze. I had to roll the window down to release it, so that I could attempt to move my neck and regain some feeling in it.

And, as all teenage girls do at times like that, I burst into tears, because HOW MANY PEOPLE HAD SEEN MY PONYTAIL ROLLED UP IN THE WINDOW???

The incident is forever burned in my memory as the Day of Embarrassment.

And then there was today.

I picked the boy and Kellen up after school, and we had to stop at Home Depot to secure silver spray paint, because this is the time that mothers everywhere claw their eyeballs out with frustration over, while they are forced to make Halloween costumes.

I may have mentioned that I am completely UN-crafty. The big craft stores? Well, they send me into full-on panic attacks. I can operate a hot glue gun, and that is the extent of my craftiness.

So clearly, securing a can of spray paint at Home Depot so that we could achieve a silver cardboard crown made me smile with pleasure. The wind was blowing hard enough to push the Nina and the Santa Maria across the ocean in less than three days today, and I am not a fan of the wind.

Truly.

Huge gusts.

The boys, who are bottomless pits, insisted that they would both die of starvation, if I did not secure them some form of nourishment, so they each picked out a bag of beef jerky at the checkout counter.

The contents of our plastic sack were slim when we left the building. Two bags of beef jerky. One can of silver spray paint. The boys ran -- ran like the wind, which is saying something today! -- to the Suburban as soon as they broke free from the store.

And then a gust of wind that made Hurricane Katrina look like a spring breeze caught my plastic Home Depot sack, even though I was holding onto it quite tightly. The wind blew it up, and ripped it plum in half. The can of spray paint and the beef jerky hit the parking lot, and they blew.

They blew, and they blew, and they blew, and that can of spray paint was rolling across the asphalt at a speed that the 1968 Camaro could never have achieved.

That can of silver spray paint could have knocked Jeff Gordon out cold at Talladega.

(Don't even ask me how I know the name of a NASCAR track and driver. I blame Jodi and her NASCAR parties.)

Naturally, the spray paint and the beef jerky parted ways, and I actually spent a split second trying to decide which one I should chase after. The spray paint was what we needed the most, but the jerky had cost the most.

I determined that I'd catch all three of my items. I yelled for the boy like any decent white trash mother would do. It was more of a screech than a yell, but alas! The boy didn't hear me, because he and Kellen had already loaded themselves up into the Suburban to escape the wind.

So I ran after the can of silver spray paint by myself. And every time I thought I had it, the wind gusted and the can rolled out of my reach. I employed my lifelong soccer skills, and tried to trap the thing with my feet, and still, it continued to get away from me. In the meantime, I had managed to step soundly on one bag of beef jerky, so I had it in my hands. The other bag was quickly closing in on the can of spray paint, and I was flailing all over the parking lot, holding a plastic sack that had been ripped to shreds and a bag of jerky.

I'm pretty sure that I looked like someone having a seizure on Dancing with the Stars.

But really?

I eventually caught up to all of my items, even though I had to chase them for a quarter of a mile, trying to step on them and stop their forward progress every chance I got.

Cyndi Lauper, in all her ponytail glory, could never have achieved the dance moves that I demonstrated in the parking lot of Home Depot today.

I'm just grateful that I don't need to visit the chiropractor tomorrow because of it.

The Chili Was Hotter Than the Broncos

2010-10-24T18:09:00.005-06:00

I'm not sure what sort of time continuum craziness happens between Friday afternoons and Sunday evenings, but the clocks seem to race forward a whole lot faster in that time frame than they do the rest of the week.

I must've missed that lecture in Physics class.

It was probably because I was very busy banging my head on the desk during Physics, quietly moaning out, "This is too hard; this is too hard," and wishing that I'd taken something easier.

Something easier like Advanced Calculus and the Binary Logarithm.

The only really useful bit of information that I still have with me from Physics is this: If you put a bowling ball on one end of the scale and a tennis ball on the other end, the bowling ball will tip the scale down, resulting in the side with the tennis ball on it being raised. This is useful because I can totally change the variables. A tube of toothpaste on one end of the scale will lift the three cotton balls on the other end of the scale. A new tub of kitty litter will sink down, while the tomato on the opposing side will be lifted.

Weights? Oh, I totally got that in Physics.

No matter.

On Friday afternoon, the boy spent some quality time at Kellen's birthday party, painting a ceramic turtle at a little ceramic store downtown. I'm not sure what made Kellen's mama believe that she could bring nine boys and two girls into a ceramic shop and maintain her sanity, but she pulled it off gracefully, and we are celebrating the little victory that nothing was broken off of the display shelves, especially since four of the boys (one being the boy who lives at the Jedi Manor) took it upon themselves to swing giant sections of yarn with enormous yarn balls on the ends of them at one another. They resembled prehistoric weapons, and the boys were twirling the long stretches of yarn above their heads, which had once been wrapped securely around gifts, and bopping one another across the faces with the brightly-colored yarn balls still attached to the ends. Naturally, they also had to RUN AND JUMP AND DODGE AND FLAIL in the ceramic shop, in order to MISS BEING HIT by an on-coming yarn ball. Running and dodging and jumping and flailing are not activities that ceramic shop owners encourage.

Note to self: A ten-year-old's birthday party in a ceramic shop is a good idea, in theory. In reality, you will need to belly up to the bar afterwards and ask the bartender for the entire bottle of spirits to soothe your last nerve, which was wrecked beyond repair when the yarn balls started swinging.

The boys (and two girls!) had a fantastic time, though, and they even posed for a couple of quick snapshots.

We left the ceramic shop without having to pay for a single broken item BECAUSE, HELLO! We managed to have the luck on our side, and we broke NOTHING, regardless of all that running and dodging and jumping and flailing business! With many shouts of "Happy birthday" to Kellen, we left, and Hubs and the boy and I met our friends, Paul and Katie, at the new pizza hot spot downtown.

Oh, people! The pizza there? It is delicious business!

Apparently every other family in Small Town, USA also had the same idea that we had, because MUCH PACKED! We saw no fewer than ten other families that we know, so there was plenty of chatting going on. Plenty. And we sat at a table with Paul and Katie and their tribe of girls, and we laughed and we giggled, and we discussed the fact that Paul will probably never have season tickets for Bronco games.

And then, with our bellies filled with so much pizza we were forced to waddle out the door, we hightailed it up to the local football field, where we helped cheer Small Town High School on to an 18 to 17 victory.

Eighteen to seventeen, people!

Although I do understand the generalities of football, I seldom attend a game for the sole purpose of watching the game. I attend games to talk to people, and with Katie and Cody and Missi and our plethora of children surrounding us, there was MUCH CONVERSATION. Hubs and Paul and Dave and Jeffrey went to the game on Friday night to actually watch the game. Big boys can be quite boring sometimes.

Our Small Town team trailed the entire game, until, with four minutes left in the 4th quarter, I told Paul, "There's time! Our boys can still win this thing!" And Paul, bless his heart, said, "Yeah, I guess so."

He is a man of many deep thoughts, people.

I made a fist and yelled over the crowd to Paul, "KNUCKLES! Give me some knuckles! It'll seal things up for Small Town High!" So right there, with four minutes left in the game, Paul smacked my knuckles.

And FORTY-FIVE SECONDS LATER Small Town High scored a touchdown.

Two seconds after that, they went for a two-point conversion.

And that put the score at 18 to 17. Things were a little tense, as we screamed and screamed for the Small Town boys to put the Big Smack down on their opponents and keep them from scoring, and they did, people.

We totally won the game.

All because of some knuckles being slammed together. Or, more likely, we won because the Good Lord willed it to happen.

The best part, though, is that I was surrounded by darling little ladies at the game, while the boy was busy running amuck with his buddies.

Avery spent the greater portion of the game sitting in my lap, and I could have squeezed her for a month straight and never tired of it.

Did I say Avery? I totally meant Nicole Richie.

On Saturday morning, Hubs and the boy participated in Operation Leaf Pick-Up outside. They raked leaves and blew leaves and mowed the yard, while I was on a solo mission inside.

It was called Operation Laundry and Vacuuming.

By noon-thirty, things were looking halfway decent at the Jedi Manor, what with the yard being cleaned up and the house being cleaned up, so I took the boy to that adorable little G's birthday party at the roller rink.

The roller rink which has just barely escaped the Condemned Businesses List, because of all the grime.

The boy doesn't notice the grime and the grit and the perpetual haze in the roller rink. He is hypnotized by the giant disco ball spinning 'round and 'round. He is mesmerized by the strobe light blinking on and off. He is lured to the glass case filled with $3 trinket rings and $4 glow sticks. He is brought to a level of utter happiness by all the skating he can do. And even though he blew three hard-earned, backed-with-gold, American dollars on a cheap metal ring in the shape of a skull which makes him look like he's in a gang when he wears it, he had the very best time on Saturday.

Even if they did play Justin Bieber's songs instead of Michael Jackson's, which did not please the boy at all.

With the skating party drawing to a close, the boy and I hopped up the hill and picked up his buddy, Eli, who joined us at our house for some serious play time. The boy and Eli ran and ran and ran outside, until their faces were the color of vine-ripened tomatoes, and then they came inside, where they each devoured, with gusto, five tacos.

Yes. That's a simple mathematical problem.

Two boys. Five tacos each. Ten tacos between them.

How do mamas with multiple boys living at their houses and digging around in their refrigerators manage to feed them to the point of filling them up, without snapping their checkbooks plum in half? How? This escapes me. The last time that the boy had two buddies stay the night with us, the three of them got up the following morning and ate AN ENTIRE BOX OF CEREAL out of my pantry, followed by SIX APPLES. If you had three boys of your own, would they eat an entire box of cereal every single morning? And, if they did, how would you afford to keep up with that?!

Is that a Physics question? Or more of a Statistics question? Whichever one it is, it makes me want to bang my head against the desk.

This morning, Hubs and the boy and I went to church, where we got to sit with some of our favorite little girls. My friend, Missi, needed someone to keep an eye on eight-year-old Meg and six-year-old Ella, while she worked at the nursery desk, and Hubs and I were more than happy to do it. Meg and Ella are the cutest cupcakes in the bakery.

During one of the praise songs that we sang this morning, Ella was standing on her tiptoes, and she kept saying, "Where is the trumpet music coming from? I can hear it, but I can't see the trumpet!" I scooped that little kindergartner up and held her, so that she could see the trumpeter on stage. And, bless her heart, little Ella wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck, and she laid her head against the side of my neck, and I wanted to keep her forever and ever. With Ella in my arms, the boy snuggled up to one side of me, and Meg snuggled up on my other side, and their little voices were singing the songs, and my eyes literally and truly filled with tears BECAUSE OF ALL THE CUTENESS, PEOPLE! Oh, I wanted to run like the wind and steal Meg and Ella, and add them to the boy and have a house full of little voices to sing praise songs to Jesus with. It was the most perfect moment in church today, as we all snuggled together and sang.

And then, as the first praise song ended and the second one started, little Ella suddenly did not feel so little any more. In fact, the longer I held her, the more she felt like a burlap bag full of concrete cinder blocks.

And then it felt like I was holding a small import car.

My arms, they went numb, people! Clearly, kindergartners are meant to be held while you're standing for short bursts of time, and not for the entire praise time, so there was some hallelujahs on my part when our worship arts pastor finally said, "Please be seated." I dropped darling Ella like the sack of bricks she'd become, and we all snuggled together in the seats then.

While the muscles in my arms underwent multiple seizures and spasms.

After church, the boy snuck out with Mam and Pa, while Hubs and I hit the grocery store. Hubs was on a mission. He had discovered a recipe entitled Spicy Jalapeno Chili online, and he needed supplies to make it.

He told me that it was going to be a perfect day, because he couldn't wait to eat the chili and watch the Broncos throw the Raiders to the ground.

We made the chili. There was much chopping and dicing involved, so Hubs and I cranked up Blondie on the iPod, followed by a Def Leppard chaser, as we got down to the business of making dinner. The recipe called for two full pounds of spicy hot Italian sausage. To that we added eight jalapeno peppers, three of which we left the seeds in. Then Hubs threw in a plethora of spices that professional painters have been known to mix in water to peel wallpaper off with. We let it simmer all afternoon, and viola.

By the time it was ready to eat, we referred to it as The Colon Cleansing, Light Your Bowels on Fire Like a Griswold Christmas Tree Chili.

And then the Raiders stomped all over the Broncos so badly, Hubs basically burned a hole in our roof with his one-sided conversations with Josh McDaniels. And his one-sided conversations with the refs. And his one-sided conversations with the Broncos' defensive line. And the Broncos' offensive line. And the Raiders, in general.

And listen, people. It's all my fault that the Denver Broncos lost today, because, early this morning while Hubs and I were sitting in Starbucks before church started, I fired off a text to Cody, because her husband's favorite team is the Raiders. And I made some remarks about telling Jeffrey to get ready to see the Raiders lose. It was another Pride Text, I'm afraid.

Hubs told me this evening (and I quote), "The next time you fire off a Pride Text in regards to football, I will ring your neck and smile the entire time I'm doing it." End quote.

To top that quote off, Hubs just walked into our home office here two minutes ago and announced with a grimace, "I have massive heartburn. I am hurting like crazy."

Really? Why don't you just trot yourself over to Mamby Pamby Land, Hubs? You can't take a little heat in your chili?! Making it was YOUR idea!

Did I mention that I had a bowl of cereal for dinner, because I feared the chili that would light my colon on fire? And did I mention that I'm pretty sure neither Paul nor Hubs wants to own season tickets to the Broncos any longer? And did I mention that Hubs was really dissatisfied with the Broncos' game today? I never should have sent that Pride Text this morning to Cody, people. I should have smacked Hubs' knuckles during halftime of the Denver game. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Throwback Thursday

2010-10-21T19:48:00.003-06:00

I haven't done a Way Back Wednesday post for a long time, so I decided to do a Throwback Thursday post tonight.

Because it's my blog, and I can pretty much run the show here.

But really? The Throwback Thursday post is simply because the wrinkles in my brain have frozen themselves into a state of complete inactivity tonight, and WRITER'S BLOCK, PEOPLE!

(I'm beginning to think that Writer's Block is becoming a lifelong ailment that I can blame a whole lot of ridiculously boring blog posts on.)

(I'd also like to blame other things on it. As in, "Honey, my Writer's Block flared up today, so I didn't get any laundry done; I'm sorry that you don't have any clean Levi's to wear to work, but you know how I suffer when the Writer's Block is upon me. I think I'll just lay here on the sofa for a while, with a cold compress and the television turned to HGTV.")

These pictures were taken when the boy was five.

Back when he was a little darling and thought that helping me with the housework was fun. He had a plastic mop cart that Mam and Pa bought for him for Christmas when he was in preschool, which was loaded with all kinds of brooms and brushes and Clorox wipes, and he'd follow me around the house, sweeping all over and dusting everything. That boy of ours was USEFUL when he was five.

Now the boy's idea of cleaning involves taking all the discarded Pop Tart wrappers off of the desk in his bedroom and throwing them into his closet. Clearly, he is officially ready for college, because I think that this is how the nineteen-year-old male cleans a dorm room.

Regardless, this series of snapshots tickles my funny bone and makes me ache to squeeze that five-year-old boy again. The pictures were taken at exactly this time of year, when the leaves were falling like golden rain.

At the age of five, the boy was not only helpful with housework, he was also helpful with outdoor chores. He loved the rake, and he was actually quite good at raking leaves into piles. He would, in fact, rake for hours, because he thought it was FUN! Now days, if Hubs and I hand the kid a rake he looks at us and asks, "How many leaves do I have to rake to earn twenty bucks?"

Raking leaves is really hard work, though.

And any time that man thinks a job is too hard, he turns to a motorized invention that will speed things up and make the work load easier.

In this case, it was the leaf blower.

Sometimes, though, a leaf blower can be stuffed under your jacket and turned on High Power. If you do this, your jacket will poof out like the Michelin Tire guy!

It's actually pretty funny when your jacket fills up with air!

Unfortunately, you don't get a whole lot of leaves raked when you're busy inflating your Columbia jacket with air. No matter. Your parents will howl with laughter and take lots of pictures of you, and they'll probably forget all about the chores you were supposed to be doing, before you decided to be the family clown!

The Excitement Never Ends Around Here

2010-10-20T19:00:00.003-06:00

On Mondays, I don't work anywhere.

Except at home.

And by working at home, I mean that I get to vacuum and mop floors on Mondays. And do laundry. And scrub potties. And disinfect sinks. And dust. And scour the entire house.

I've always been an all-or-nothing sort of housekeeper. Either I clean it all, right now, today, or I don't clean it at all. That concept of just cleaning one room a night? Yeah. Totally lost on me.

Since I played all day Monday with my girlfriends, and sat around slurping hot beverages laced with caffeine and discussed important issues like the state of the union and unimportant issues like the proper way to REALLY tie a scarf (but wait -- scarf tying is actually classified as an important issue, I think), while we giggled like a pack of hens, I didn't get a lick of housework done that day.

Not. One. Lick.

As in my house was still trying to recover from the weekend on Monday evening.

And we had no clean jeans.

And our bathroom sink was laced with enough toothpaste splatters to make it resemble a crime scene.

Today, I had to pay the shoemaker. Or the piper. Or whichever fairy tale character needed the golden doubloons in exchange for the day that I sort of took off. Naturally, paying the shoemaker meant that I spent THIS MORNING doing things that I normally do on Mondays.

Oh, weekly schedule! Why do I even attempt to keep up with you?!

This morning I scrubbed the house down like Cinderella after she stole the Ritalin from the villagers' children.

And then I taught PE this afternoon.

And we had an incident in kindergarten PE, which shouldn't surprise you.

But it surprised me!

Primarily because it involved poo.

Poo and a small fry who did not make it into the bathroom on time, and who turned the biggest, saddest, bluest eyes upon me and whispered in a very tiny voice, "Please! Please will you help me go to the bathroom?"

What's a kindergarten PE teacher to do?

I called the school secretary, that's what I did. I issued an emergency Code Poo and said, "But the REST of the kindergartners are in the gym, and leaving them unattended is a hazard to all of our healths, because they will probably find a way to light the gymnasium on fire if I am missing as their PE chaperon."

Our secretary, bless her heart, is made of stronger stuff than I am, and she handled the poo while I handled kindergarten dodge ball. I told that wonderful secretary of ours that I would just sign my October paycheck over to her for her unselfish heroics this afternoon.

And then the 3rd and 4th graders piled into my gym, and we played a game where you have to jump to avoid being smacked in the sneakers by a pitched bean bag, and I learned that there are approximately 3,497 different ways to cheat at this game.

And do you know what? The 3rd and 4th graders know all 3,497 ways. And they employed them all today, until we had tears from the non-cheaters.

All three non-cheaters.

Have you ever fantasized about a cheating 4th grader taking a thrown bean bag to the face?

Yeah. Me neither.

After PE, I scooped the boy up from school, and we held our breath in the stinky pet store and secured a live dinner for Yoda Joe and Gru, so that Yoda Joe will stop the self-inflicted torture of banging his head against his tank at night.

I'm going to line up some counseling for that frog.

After rushing through homework, the boy and his friend, Carter, dashed off to youth group, and Hubs and I were left plum alone, so we skipped out the door to dinner. We went to an exotic little hot spot that boasts a flag in their parking lot that is roughly four times bigger than a king-sized bedspread. I had pancakes and Hubs had an omelet, and then we came home.

We live on the edge of excitement like that.

After dinner, we came home, and Hubs dumped the boy's entire 45-gallon tub of Legos onto the bedroom floor.

I don't know how many of y'all have actually seen a 45-gallon pile of Legos, but it is impressive enough to be a tourist attraction that Clark Griswold might load the family up in the giant station wagon to go see. I actually took a snapshot of it, so that I could post it on the blog tonight and show you what I deal with in my life, but Blogger is having some issues tonight. They have posted a big yellow banner which basically says, "We are doing maintenance on our website tonight, for two hours, and we are disabling the ability to upload pictures. If you try to upload a picture during this time, your computer will explode into microscopic fragments." They weren't lying either. I tried to sneak a photo by them, and they shut me down.

Hence, there's no snapshot, and I do apologize for that, because I'm sure that you were all sitting on the edge of your seats, wishing and hoping that you could get a secure mental picture of what a 45-gallon pile of Legos actually looks like when it is out of the 45-gallon Rubbermaid tub.

Hubs is not planning on building the Golden Gate Bridge with the Legos tonight. He is in search of a single, solitary piece that the boy has lost, and which we must recover, because HELLO! IT IS A PIECE THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO US!

Clearly, we like to lose things when we borrow them, which should make y'all think twice about loaning the Jedi Family anything.

We have our suspicions that the borrowed Lego brick fell into the 45-gallon tub. Hubs had been digging in the giant heap for about seven minutes when he shouted out loud enough for the neighbors to hear, "HEY!! I FOUND LEGO PRINCESS LEIA'S GOLDEN BIKINI!!!"

Hubs is up for adoption.

I mean it.

When the giant search for a single Lego brick has concluded tonight, Hubs and I are going to watch Tuesday's episode of Glee, because the DVR is a magical thing, and then I'm probably going to call it a night.

Pure Excitement.

We get it on over here at the Jedi Manor.

The Good Thing About Today is That the DJ Played "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on the Radio

2010-10-19T19:57:00.003-06:00

So I woke up last night (This morning?) at 2 AM, because I had heard a noise.

And noises, when you hear them in the middle of the night, are always a pleasant diversion from the sleeping, because you have to lay there and listen, just to decide what they are.

At our house, we usually assume that all noises made in the dark of the night can be blamed on Cats 1 and 2, but both kitties were curled up on the foot of our bed, sleeping, at 2:00 this morning, so you know, PANIC.

Because clearly I couldn't use them as noise scapegoats.

And then I heard it again. Knock. Pause. Pause. Knock. Pause. Pause. Knock.

Yoda Joe, frog extraordinaire, was banging on the side of his tank. At what point in a frog's life does he make the conscious decision that HEY! KNOCKING MY HEAD AGAINST THE SIDE OF MY PLASTIC TANK AT 2:00 IN THE MORNING MIGHT BE KIND OF FUN!

Of course, I had to get out of bed to investigate the noise, because REALLY? Was it Yoda Joe telling knock-knock jokes to his roommate, Gru, or was it Creepy Stalker Guy Dressed in Black Come to Rob Us Blind?

It was Yoda Joe.

And because I had gotten out of bed and actually vacated our bedroom, however momentarily, Cat 2 decided to JUST GET HERSELF UP, BECAUSE IT MUST BE MORNING, and that's something that Hubs and I try to avoid at all costs.

Do you want to know what it's like to have Cat 2 up at 2:00 in the morning?

Go out to the wilderness. Go on! Wear your camouflage and smear grease paint all over your face, just to get into character. Bring a metal cage to use as a live trap. Bait it with apples and shiny objects. And then, when you catch yourself a fat-bottomed raccoon, bring him home. And then wait until 2 AM to release him.

Release him into your house.

And then get back into bed.

And just wait. And also do some listening.

And the noises you hear? The noises that the chubby-bottomed raccoon is making in your house in the darkest part of the night? Well, those noises are exactly how Cat 2 sounds.

The fact that Cat 2 doesn't have a thumb is what saves her bacon. Or her cat fat. Or whatever. Without an opposable thumb, Cat 2 is usually unsuccessful at opening cabinet doors and drawers, which somewhat limits what she can get into. However, loose Legos that she finds on the floor and silver coins that the boy has stashed in his room are all fair game.

And if y'all haven't had the luxury of hearing a thirteen-pound cat carry a quarter into your bedroom and drop it onto your hardwood floor, right beside your bed at 2:00 in the morning, well, y'all aren't living life to the fullest extreme.

Hubs rolled over and mumbled to me, "Way to go. You woke Cat 2 up."

Cat 1 is our cat with the teenager attitude. She's grumpy. She's cranky. And she is entirely too interested in sleeping to get up and carry quarters and dimes around. Cat 2 is our cat with the baby attitude. Sometimes sleep is good. Sometimes she wants a bottle of milk in the middle of the night. And sometimes she just wants to get up and play. And make noise. And exhaust her bag of tricks to keep us awake.

At 3:00 this morning, Cat 2 had blessedly put herself back to bed. She had worn herself out running around the house, and she'd brought an old Pop Tart wrapper that the boy obviously had on his desk to our bedroom. And she left it beside our bed, to show us her official kill of the night.

Foil Pop Tart wrappers crinkle. Crinkle noises are almost as good as a quarter spinning aimlessly on hardwood.

At 3:15 this morning, as I was FINALLY drifting back to sleep, Hubs' laptop decided to beep. And ding. And do whatever laptops do in the darkest hour of the night. I told Hubs, "Listen. Your computer is making noises."

Hubs mumbled, "I can't listen. I'm sleeping. And if the laptop doesn't blow up, then it'll be fine."

And then...

...knock. Pause. Pause. Knock. Pause. Pause. Knock.

I told Hubs, "The frog is knocking his head on the side of the tank."

Hubs mumbled, "Yep. And I wouldn't be hearing it, if you'd quit waking me up with all your talking. Go to sleep."

And I finally did, somewhere close to 4:00 this morning.

Obviously, you'll understand if I just cut things short this evening and head off to bed.

Riding in Cars with Boys

2010-10-18T18:46:00.002-06:00

Today was (and still is, for that matter) the boy's little friend G's birthday.

Although G is a member of the feminine tribe, she has somehow been allowed entrance into the boy's group of friends. She is one of two girls that this batch of testosterone-sporting, long-hair-wearing, rock-throwing, sword-wielding, stick-loving, kickball-playing, tree-climbing group of boys will actually play with, because girls slow them down, and they don't understand Star Wars.

This morning, on the way to school, I told the boy, "You should call G and wish her a happy birthday." This was not unusual for me to say at all, because the boy calls most all of his buddies on their birthdays and shouts out a greeting to them over the phone lines.

The boy did just that. He grabbed my cell phone, and he dialed G's number, and this is exactly how his conversation with her panned out.

"Hi, G. Happy birthday. Yep. Well, I guess I'll see you at school then. See ya."

And then he handed me the phone without any other closing remarks to her.

I said, "Honey, you didn't even ask if G was having a good birthday."

"Mom, she sounded happy, and if a person sounds happy, then they must be having a good birthday, so I didn't even need to ask that question."

Clearly, we are all about conversation conservation. (Wow. Say that phrase five times fast!) Why waste verbal niceties, when you can just assume that all is well when someone sounds happy?! Where does the Y chromosome learn this?!

I added, "Well, honey, you didn't even ask her what she was wearing on her birthday, or what she was going to do on her birthday, or anything."

Clearly, these are all things that GIRLS ask one another.

I could feel the boy frowning at me from the back seat of the Suburban, and this is exactly what he said. Exactly. Word for word.

"Mom, I don't even care what -- GREEN SLUG BUG!!! GREEN SLUG BUG!!! IT'S MINE! NO SLUG BUG BACKS! I GOT THAT GREEN ONE!! -- what she wears. I don't care at all what G wears. Why would I even ask her what she's wearing? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of."

Ladies, I've tried with this boy, but, for some reason, his daddy's influence is overpowering my How to Grow Up to Be the Perfect Husband training.

And also? I'm suffering some hearing loss because of that green slug bug that drove by us this morning on our way to school.

The NON-Post

2010-10-17T19:47:00.002-06:00

This is an old picture of the boy.

You can tell, because he has short hair in this snapshot. It's because, back then, I had some say in how long he could grow it.

I love this photo because the boy looks so enthusiastic. Brimming with happiness and good cheer.

And also...boredom.

And I think this is exactly how I feel right now.

We've had a grand weekend, people, but the writer's block is so severe right now, I am drawing a total blank on how to type anything. I thought that playing six consecutive games of Scrabble Blast while I sat here at the computer would get the thought process flowing, but it didn't. All I did was lose drastically, because my mad gaming skills were at an all-time low today.

Sort of like the Broncos. (But don't tell Hubs that I said that.)

My game face looks exactly like this one right now:

I will spare you the horror of too many run-on sentences filled with nothing substantial tonight, because if I try to type anything, that's how it's going to turn out. And you and I will both regret it, because it'll be the worst piece of prose ever written. It'll be painful to read. And then y'all will tell me tomorrow, "Way to go with the blog! It was poo." And I'm not sure that my self-esteem can handle that.

Hence, this is the post where there was no post.

Happy Sunday, y'all.

Just Some Things, Lined Up Numerically. Sort of Like a List, You Know.

2010-10-14T21:05:00.004-06:00

I have some quick things tonight.

And I do mean quick, because my contacts are sucked onto my eyes, and I feel like I'm looking through a giant thumbprint on both sides, and I can hardly wait to take them out.

The contacts and I always seem to have the issues.

1. My mood? So. Much. Better. I can just leave old Reuben's wife behind now, because hello! I laughed my head off more than once today. It was probably because Susan brought me peanut M&Ms, which was a brilliant Mood Recovery Plan, or MRP. The boy is allergic to the peanuts, so they never show up at our house, because ALL THE SWELLING, AND THE HIVES, AND THE DIFFICULTY BREATHING? Yeah. Makes me kind of nervous, and I tend to get a bit of a tic just thinking about the Peanut Side Effects. Hence, we have banned the peanut products at Casa del Jedi, but I've been known to indulge outside of our house, when the boy is far, far away. And when Susan slipped me the peanut M&Ms today, the boy was clear across town getting his higher education in the 4th grade, and so I ate them. Of course I had to take the detox bath afterwards, which included brushing the teeth to remove the peanut smell and washing the hands, and remembering not to touch my cell phone with any traces of the peanut oil on my hands, because you never know when the boy might need to make a phone call to his agent or something, and goodness knows! We wouldn't want peanut residue on the phone. I felt like the poor monsters in Monsters, Inc., who had to be bathed and shaved after being contaminated by a child.

But really? Salty peanuts covered in chocolate panned out nicely for the mood today. Quite nicely indeed.

2. This morning I helped with school pictures at the boy's school, and listen to this one tale. (Because I am always full of tales which involve small children. I think it's because my life revolves around them most of the time.) I had brought one of the first grade classes in and lined them all up for their pictures, and I noticed the most darling first grade girl EVER. She had her hair all done in cute, curly pigtails, and she was dressed in a Gymboree outfit, from head to toe, and oh my lands! First Grade Perfection! That's what she was. I noticed just before it was her turn for a picture that...ahem!...she had a little bit of a booger showing from her nose. Just a tiny thing, really, but something that was in big need of a Kleenex, because no mama who spent the time dolling her little angel up for school pictures wants to get the photos back with a big booger, front and center. So I grabbed a Kleenex, and I whispered to her, "I'm just going to wipe your nose a bit here," and oh my word! I used the tissue to grab that teeny, tiny, minute little booger, but listen, people. It wasn't a booger. It was a COMET! And what do comets have? Well, they apparently have four-inch-long comet tails behind them, and THAT is what I pulled out of that adorable nose! What I thought was a speck of a booger turned out to be a speck of a booger with a four-inch tail.

I know.

Grrrooossss!

As soon as the entire nostril-clogging comet had been freed, I looked at her in surprise and said, "Well, then. Can you breathe any better?"

And then I used the librarian's entire bottle of Germ-X on my hands, because, cute or not, it was SOMEBODY ELSE'S BIG BOOGER, PEOPLE!!

3. So it was Family Night at the boy's youth group last night, and Hubs and I hightailed it over to the church for a spaghetti dinner with all the kids and an activity.

An activity which turned out to be LINE DANCING, and I cannot even tell you the joy it brought to my heart to see Hubs take one for the team and participate in the dancing in the line formation. He cringed as soon as he heard what activity was shaking down, and he looked at me and said, "I can fake a phone call at any time, and I will have to leave to go fix a fake computer virus emergency. I will not do the line dancing."

And yet, people, he did. With all the other parents. Even though he didn't want to. At all. And what we learned is this: Neither Hubs nor I will be competing in Dancing With the Stars any time soon, because, sweet mercy! We cannot even get the high kicks right.

Clearly, we need to take some lessons from Sally O'Malley, who's fifty (five-oh!), and who likes to kick and stretch.

Of course, it all just brought back a flood of memories of when Hubs and I took a ballroom dancing class together LONG ago, when we were barely old enough to drive. Of course, we were both already married by then, and our friends, Ted and Anna, talked us into this ridiculous eight-week series of dance lessons. Hubs and I could waltz like nobody's business! Oh, people! We looked like a grand duke and the duchess out there on the dance floor, waltzing away with grace.

And then we flunked the fox trot.

And we flunked the mambo.

And we flunked the rumba.

And we flunked the swing.

And the instructor told us, "May I suggest that you don't move on to my Ballroom Dancing II class, but that you actually take Ballroom Dancing I OVER again?"

People, the captain of the wrestling team doesn't dance. And because of that, Hubs drug us down in Ballroom Dancing I, while Ted and Anna soared to great heights and were welcomed into Ballroom Dancing II with much applause and fanfare and confetti-throwing and champagne flute clinking.

Hubs' and my dancing careers ended with that first class. We never went back. We simply cherish the waltz, deep down in our hearts, and we know, to this day, that we rocked that dance floor hard with the waltz.

And then last nigh we flunked line dancing, which was sort of like rubbing salt into some open wounds.

4. A friend of mine showed me a blog a couple of weeks ago, which has made me howl with the giggles. It's a blog about a faux couple, Gary and Elaine, and they live in catalog pictures. That's right! The blog's writer takes glossy photos of homes out of catalogs, and then he (but maybe it's a she!) tells you what Elaine and Gary (the fake couple) are up to. And I laugh and laugh and laugh.

And I'll just tell you this one thing: It's too good not to share. Since my friend shared it with me, I'll share it with you. It's quick and easy to read. One picture and one sentence, and blam! You're done with that day's post, and your sides will hurt from the laughing. (So truly? It's not at all wordy like MY blog is!)

And really? I think that Hubs and I might secretly BE Gary and Elaine, the fake catalog couple, and I am seriously considering calling Hubs Gary now.

http://catalogliving.net/

Truly, I have no idea who writes this blog. I just think it's funny, and Gary and Elaine make me very happy.

5. And that's it. Happy Thursday night, y'all.

Some Days Simply Call for the Pink Curlers

2010-10-13T16:15:00.004-06:00

Yesterday, as a small group of us moms was standing in front of the school, waiting for our short charges to come dashing out, clutching their backpacks and empty lunchboxes, one of my friends commented to the rest of us, "I did nothing this afternoon! Nothing! I didn't have my preschooler, because she was at a friend's house playing, and a person would think that I'd have been able to get scads of stuff done. But I didn't! I peed two full hours down my leg and accomplished absolutely nothing."

We all laughed.

And we all knew that we had, at one time or another, been there.

Oh, Scrabble Blast, you alone can gobble up thirty minute chunks of time like they were M&Ms.

As I loaded the boy into the Suburban, I was actually glad that I didn't feel that way yesterday. I'd been to Bible study yesterday morning, and I'd taught four back-to-back PE classes at school in the afternoon. And then, I went home, tossed a roast and potatoes and carrots into the oven, balanced the checkbook (To the penny! Naturally!), paid all the bills, helped the boy review his spelling words, diligently worked until a ketchup stain completely vanished out of one Mini Boden T-shirt, did a load of laundry, from start to folding and putting away, went through the boy's closet and had him try on exactly one thousand pairs of size 7 jeans, JUST TO MAKE SURE that they were too short (all but one pair were), and then I had him try on seven thousand shirts, so that we could weed out the 7's that are officially too small and some of the 6's. And really? The boy hasn't worn size 6 shirts for months. And months. Don't ask me why they were still in the closet! I don't know!

After that, we ate a late dinner (because the roast, people, took some time to cook last night), and then I scrubbed the kitchen down.

Although I went to bed with a decorating scheme that focused on enormous stacks sitting haphazardly on the dining room table and a K2 Mountain of discarded clothes folded neatly on the boy's closet floor, I still felt like I had accomplished much yesterday.

And then there was today.

I think my friend's statement after school yesterday was a premonition of what was to come.

I woke up this morning and met my friend, Peggy, for coffee, and we spent nearly two full hours catching up and warming our hands on our Starbucks drinks.

Afterwards, when all the chai was slurped down and the cup was long empty, I came home, with some hopes of loading all the clothes making up K2 into a box and delivering them to Sister's house, only it was about this time that I realized one thing.

I realized, people, that I was plum grouchy.

Oh, not from meeting with Peggy; don't think that. I had a wonderful time with Peggy, but then blam! I came home, I looked at the piles scattered hither and yon, from the ones that needed permits to climb them to the little molehills, and I was suddenly uber grouchy. The fact that I was craving a salt lick dipped in chocolate seemed to indicate that my problem may actually have been hormonal.

And really? I plum reminded myself of my landlord's wife from college.

My roommate and I shared an upstairs apartment in a rather large complex when we were juniors, and Reuben and his wife lived on the grounds. Actually, they lived in the apartment right below us, but one over. So clearly, not really the apartment RIGHT below us.

But below us. And then one over.

Reuben wore overalls every day of his life, or so we guessed. I never saw him in anything BUT overalls, with patches sewn on at awkward angles here and there, and he did a right fine job of wandering the grounds and making sure everyone had hot water.

His wife wore the pink plastic curlers in her hair every day of her life, and my roommate and I could never really decide if she ever took them out. The curlers were in at 9 AM; the curlers were in at 3 PM; the curlers were in at 7 PM. And she wore house dresses and orthopedic shoes, and I cannot, for the life of me, remember her name.

I think we just called her Reuben's wife.

But Reuben's wife could holler like no one's business, and she was never fully convinced that the entire apartment complex's population wasn't gathered together in one living room somewhere, listening to raunchy music and smoking dope.

Because that's what she always called it.

"Young kids today! All they ever do is smoke dope and listen to the evil music."

And also take curlers out of their hair. We did do THAT.

And really? I doubt anyone was really smoking the dope in our complex, but Reuben's wife was plum convinced of it. And she was going to have none of it. She made it known that she'd be the first one to dial the police and stand in the squad car's headlight's of fame, giving a graphic report on how you never paid your rent on time, and how she always did know that something wasn't quite right in that apartment, but renters have their rights, you know, so she couldn't just barge in there and discover the truth for herself a whole lot earlier.

I think Reuben's wife was pining for a spot on the ten o'clock news.

And my roommate and I always wondered if she would take her curlers out for her fifteen minutes of fame.

And again? I don't think a single soul was smoking the dope in our apartment building. Let's be clear about that!

Reuben's wife also smoked like a chimney. (Just the legal smoking stuff.) Or rather, she carried an unlit cigarette around most of the time, which perpetually clung to her bottom lip, permanently stuck in her 7:00-AM-coating of lipstick.

It was always the color of jellied cranberries that retained the shape of the can on the Thanksgiving table.

The lipstick, that is. Not the cigarette. Well, actually, the END of the cigarette was probably the color of cranberries, too. Clearly, 2 + 2 = 4. Cranberry Lipstick + White Cigarette = Discolored Camel.

Reuben's wife could talk a mile a minute, and that cigarette wouldn't drop from her lip, even though she never held it there with her hand. Ever. She could holler across the complex, and still, the unfiltered Camel remained right where she'd stuck it at 7:00 that morning.

She was also continually announcing that she couldn't be late for Supermarket Sweep on the television.

It was sort of along the lines of, "Uh oh! Eight minutes to Wapner!"

Without a doubt, Reuben's wife was a gem. She harrumphed every time we went up the stairs, as if she were hoping that we'd make too much noise and she could shout out at us that the youth of today had no respect for their elders, who knew how to walk upstairs quietly, and wouldn't have ever dreamed of slamming up the stairs like an elephant on steroids during Supermarket Sweep.

And today, I felt like Reuben's wife.

I paced around the house, examining my piles and knowing that I really should do something with them, and yet I was unmotivated to do so. I simply wished that I had a program to watch, but my memory suddenly reminded me that the daytime television and I have never been close friends.

Hence, no Supermarket Sweep. Or All My Children, for that matter.

So I simply snarled quietly to myself all morning, dug in the pantry to uncover any piece of chocolate candy left over from Halloween '09, and wished that I had some young children to yell at for a while, just to make myself feel better, and I accomplished nothing.

And that's when I remembered that I would soon have an entire gym filled with kids.

So I taught me some PE this afternoon, and wouldn't you know it? The kids were relatively mild-mannered and no one needed a good yelling-at today.

And then, we had a fire drill at precisely 1:30.

1:30 is plum-smack-dab-in-the-middlest-of-middles of kindergarten PE. There I was, feeling as grouchy as Reuben's wife, minus the dangling Camel and the pink curlers, and I had to line the kindergartners up and walk them safely to the far side of the playground, while they all covered their ears and yelled, "Make it stop!"

Loud Bells + Kindergartners = Significant Ear Covering By Tiny Hands.

Big Gym + Kindergartners = Significant Running and Screaming and Ear Covering By Teacher's Hands.

I did survive the fire drill with the kindergartners. Thank you for asking.

After school today, I stopped to talk to Missi on the sidewalk while we were picking up our kids, and I emphatically announced the obvious: "I am quite grouchy today!"

Missi replied, "Dude! So. Am. I. I wish someone would take my kids, and I'd just go home, crawl into bed, and have myself a long winter's nap."

I didn't even offer to take Missi's three cherubs, because really? Let's face it. I would have been sorely tempted to lock them in a cage and feed them chicken bones, while I went outside and used the hot glue gun to affix gumdrops and candy canes and gingerbread to my siding.

Only let's face it.

I doubt that I'm officially crafty enough to hot glue candy all over my house and have it look anywhere near decent, and my Type A personality couldn't take the crookedly-glued-on Lemon Heads, so I probably wouldn't even have started that little project in the first place.

If I need a project to work on while the kids were fattening up in the cage, I could clean the garage, because holy smokes! I may have mentioned once or eighteen times on this blog that our garage is just an episode of Hoarders waiting to be filmed. We're not proud, people. In fact, Hubs worked all weekend (again -- working until 1:30 in the mornings on the weekends is Hubs' new hobby), and Brother came over to borrow a ladder for something or other. The ladder which was in the garage, and I did emphatically start to say, "I WILL GET THE LADDER! REMAIN RIGHT HERE IN THE FAMILY ROOM AND DO NOT FOLLOW ME, OR YOU WILL SEE OUR DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF OUR HORRENDOUS GARAGE!"

However, Brother didn't even pause in his question of asking if I had a ladder or not. He simply threw open our garage door, in mid sentence, and barged in to haul the ladder out.

And then he said, "What I love about your garage is this: It makes me feel so much better about mine."

When Brother was done with the ladder, he returned it to our garage, bid me farewell, and said to his small fry, "Come on, B. We're going home to clean our garage! We can't be caught looking like these hillbillies!"

Immediately after Brother left, I met with our attorneys to have him completely written out of our will. Every penny that we were going to originally leave to Brother (and believe me, those pennies were few, even in the beginning), I have decided to invest in preserving the wildlife around Brother's property.

Namely, the deer who eat his trees and garden.

So clearly? I had some projects that I could have been working on today, if I didn't feel like running around the house in my pink rollers and shouting out encouragement to today's youth.

I'm not sure what tomorrow's forecast is for Mama's attitude, but for now, I'm content being as grouchy as Reuben's wife used to be, and really? I have no grounded reason for it.

It's the hormones, people!

Except, it's Family Night at the boy's youth group tonight, so I'd better get my Game Face on before we head over to the church and do my best imitation of a moderately well-adjusted mother who bakes cupcakes for bake sales, has a clean and organized garage, and never dreams of gluing gumdrops to her siding.

Wish me luck, people.

(Oh. And one more thing? One of the grandest girls who runs around in my group of girlfriends is pregnant! Oooh! That news was almost exciting enough to break me out of my Reuben's Wife Funk!)

Bees. It's What's For Dinner.

2010-10-12T22:09:00.002-06:00

This is why I love kindergarten PE so much.

"Hey, Teacher, do you know what my mom is making for dinner tonight at our house?"
"What?"
"BEES!"
"Beef?"
No! Not beef! BEES!"
"Bees? Or beef?"
"Bees, Teacher!"
"Honey, you can't eat bees for dinner! I bet your mom said 'beef,' and you just thought she was talking about bees."
"No, Teacher! My mom said we're having bees for dinner tonight, and I sure hope that my dad can cut the stingers off first, because I think I'd be scared to eat a bee, if he still had his stinger in his butt."

I think even I'D be scared to eat a bee who was still sporting the little poisoned dart on his tail end.

This, by the way, is the small fry who has two noids about tornadoes.

And then this is the other reason I love kindergarten PE.

"Teacher, I have to miss all of gym class today. All of it. I have to sit in a chair on the side of the gym, and I can't get up, because that's what my teacher told me."
"Why did she tell you that?"
"Well, because she said that I damaged school property, and my consequence is no gym class today, and she's going to call my mom, too, and I'm not very happy about that."
"Oh, that sounds bad."
"Well, Teacher, it was the clothesline in our classroom where we hang our projects. It was just in my way, and it kept dangling on my head, and I was sick of it. So I ripped it down. And I guess ripping that clothesline down is called damaging school property."
"Yes, I imagine that's what it is called. That's a bummer that you have to miss all of gym class today, because we were going to do something fun."
"Well, what do you call it if you rip up your friends' art work that was hanging on the clothesline in our classroom? Is that damaging school property, too? Because I ripped up two of my friends' pictures, because I was all mad about the clothesline being in my face. And, Teacher, do you know what? My mom is going to be really upset about that. I wish my teacher wouldn't call her, and I wish you'd make the other kids do something dumb in gym class today, so I wouldn't miss it."

Yes. The same boy. The boy who has a pair of noids about tornadoes.

He and I are becoming great buddies. And the little stinker kept waving to me from the chair on the side of the gym today. Oh, yes, he did! Throughout class, as the rest of us played a really fun game, every time I'd look over at him, he'd grin and wave at me.

It was almost enough to make me say, "Come play! You don't have to sit there for the ENTIRE gym class!"

But consequences are consequences.

And maybe when his mom got that phone call this afternoon, she told his dad not to take the stingers out of HIS dinner!

The Post in Which I am Too Tired to Invent a Catchy Title

2010-10-11T20:47:00.005-06:00

I actually considered skipping tonight's blog post and just going to bed.

On account of it's already 8:45 in the PM territory, and who was I kidding? I had absolutely no train of thought for a blog post tonight, which ultimately means one thing: COMPLETE TRAIN WRECK, at least as far as the written word goes.

Since the schools were plum shut down today, in honor of the fact that Columbus was brave enough to sail to the edge of the world and discover America in 1492 (And hey! He didn't fall off that edge!), Cody and I took our peeps to Bigger Town, USA to shop.

And let me just share this one thought with you.

Sometimes sitting smack in the middle of a den of rattlesnakes that has every granddaddy snake present and accounted for, to the ninth generation, is easier than shopping all day with the peeps.

I was after a new bedspread today, and hauling a ten-year-old boy through the bedding sections of major department stores is about as fun as having a lit sparkler shoved into your eye on the 4th of July.

But I did get a bedspread, after Cody talked me down from the Ledge of Indecision. This one? That one? This one? That one? Should I look at Store B? Can we come back, if I don't like Store B's options?

And then we hit the mall, because the boy needs wind pants for winter sports and PE class at school, because this weekend we put a pair on that have been in our drawer all summer, and I wanted to say, "Why don't you tell your socks to have a party and invite your pants down?"

And one pair after another from our drawer showed that our boy did some growing this summer, and every single pair of size 6/7 wind pants are now ankle-showers.

And what we learned in the dressing room at Gap Kids is this: Wind pants in a size 6/7 are entirely too short. Wind pants in a size 8 look like clown pants and could literally hold two boys in them at the same time. We need a size 7+, but clearly Gap Kids hasn't come up with that new sizing system yet.

So we scored no wind pants, and this may be the year that we don't own any, because clown pants were not something that the boy was interested in wearing.

And the other thing that we learned in the dressing room of Gap Kids? Little boys do not like to try clothes on. I've been there, done that, had an adult-sized meltdown, and survived it. And then I swore to myself that the boy and I would never venture into another dressing room together again, in order to save both of our sanity, and I broke my rule this afternoon.

This may be the season that the boy has no wind pants because the sizing is all messed up, and because I'm not sure I can endure a fitting room again.

Ever.

And then Cody took me to Hobby Lobby for the first time ever today. I know! How have I survived this long and not ventured in there? I'll tell you how. Whenever I heard the words "Hobby Lobby," I immediately envisioned rows and rows of yarn, hot glue guns, unpainted ceramics shaped like mermaids and dolphins, yards and yards of fabric, and endless aisles filled with spools of lace and thread.

I was ready to hyperventilate just THINKING about all the crafty hobbies that could be taken care of by shopping at a place called Hobby Lobby, but what I learned today is this, people: Hobby Lobby is MUCH MORE than a hot glue gun store. I was, in fact, overwhelmed with my decorating OPTIONS there (ALREADY FINISHED OPTIONS, WITH NO CRAFTING NECESSARY!) and Cody advised me to pace myself.

I was immediately drawn to a display of faux flowers in a beautiful, mustard yellow vase, which retailed for $109.99. Shocking! Who pays such extravagant fees for plastic green stems adorned with silk-like petals, which my cats will completely dismember and destroy in less than three hours? My flower arranging skills are completely nonexistent, and Cody assured me that she could create a custom-made arrangement for me that was considerably cheaper than $109.99.

We found a vase. We began looking at flowers. I suggested a fall arrangement, filled with oranges and yellows and browns and reds. Cody began pulling out stems of colors and combining them. And then I said, "Wait! What about an arrangement which can transition from one season to the other? Something brighter?" And I hauled her to the faux wildflower section. Cody began pulling stems filled with tiny yellow flowers and tiny purple flowers and tiny pink flowers and tiny blue flowers out, and she began putting them together in her hand, rearranging and discarding and adding, and then, blam!

It was all just too much for me, and I said, "You know what? Let's just scrap the faux flower arrangement altogether. I don't think I want to spend all this time creating a vase of fake flowers. Can we just stop? I'll do it some other time."

I blame my adult-onset ADD. Yes! I want an arrangement of flowers! I want fall colors! No! I want wildflower colors! I want pinks and blues and whites! Wait! I don't want any after all!

Not at all annoying.

And now, after much shopping, we are home, and Hubs is here, watching The Dukes of Hazard and an OLD hockey game, at the same time. He is flipping back and forth between a hockey game that was played a couple of nights ago and Bo and Luke Duke.

Because apparently if the Colorado Avalanche aren't playing a live game, an old game will work out just fine for Hubs.

Reruns of Avs games are golden, people. They tend to work out a lot better for Hubs, actually, because he ALREADY KNOWS whether the Avalanche have won it or not. And his blood pressure doesn't get worked up. And if the other team starts winning, then Hubs knows at which point he needs to just shut the TV down for the night.

Yes, it's true. I've seen Steel Magnolias 182 times, up until the point that Shelby dies. I have seen Steel Magnolias 2 times from the point where Shelby dies to the end, because MUCH SADNESS, so I skip it.

Avalanche hockey games are Hubs' Steel Magnolias. And he watches them, over and over, up until the point that his boys start to lose the game, because MUCH SADNESS.

Hubs and I are not all that different after all.

And I know. This blog post is sketchy, poorly-written, and it sort of wanders all over the page (computer screen?) like a bull moose with a clothesline stuck in his antlers.

I blame it on all the shopping I did for bedding with the boy in tow.

Please make a note, people: Ten-year-old boys are not fond of shopping for bedding, and forcing them to spend their day off from school doing so will make your eyeballs itch with frustration.

But I love my boy.

Both of them.

Hockey reruns, and tantrums in the dressing rooms, and all.

I'll Have a Triple Crown to Go, Please...

2010-10-10T19:29:00.003-06:00

I don't think that it's any secret that if I ever win the lottery (the lottery which I've never, ever played), I would buy myself a horse ranch in Kentucky and raise Derby winners.

I think it's because I was cut out to wear the big, floppy hats and the long white gloves and carry the sassy handbags and shout out sentences like, "You run your race, Horse!" and "We're just going to give it everything we've got and hope for the best in this race."

I can learn the cliches in the world of horse racing fairly quickly. I'm certain of it.

Where this dream actually came from is beyond me, because it was Sister who was always the horse girl in the family. She spent hours (Hundreds and hundreds of hours, people!) on her knees, clutching two empty soda cans in her hands, clomping around on our hard floors and making whinny noises. The soda cans? Well, they were horse hooves, of course, and they made a fantastically awesome clomping sound on all hard surfaces.

Sister never did have a single pair of pants that weren't blown out at the knees.

Not until junior high, at least.

Up until the time she was a 5th grader, if you asked Sister what she wanted to be when she grew up, she'd respond, "A horse!" every single time, even though I was plenty kind enough to yell at her for it and say, "You can't BE a horse, dummy!"

I did my best to help her see the flaw in her career goals. I think she finally caught on and understood her errors by the time she was eleven.

Thank goodness! Because really? Having a high-school-aged sister who went around proclaiming to the world that she was going to actually become a horse when she reached maturity would have been dreadfully embarrassing.

While Sister was busy living out her horse dreams with an empty Dr. Pepper can in one hand and an empty Pepsi can in the other, I was busy throwing a softball onto the roof of our house, so that I could practice catching pop flies.

Or I was busy kicking my soccer ball against the house, practicing for the time I debuted in the Olympics on the women's soccer team.

I had no dreams of becoming a horse, or owning a horse, or even being around a horse.

And then all of that changed as I grew up. Now days, I think I would make a rather grand horse owner. I like the idea of having immaculately white-washed horse stalls, with miles and miles of white fence surrounding our property. I'd have groomers and trainers outside all the time, doing the things that they do.

Namely, grooming. And training.

And I would wear my floppy hat and my white gloves to the races, and I would scream encouragement to my horses, who would naturally come from behind to win every single race. I would scream and scream until I was plum hoarse.

(Yes. I just went there with the pun! You're welcome.)

This afternoon, Cody and I took our peeps to see the new movie, Secretariat, at the cinema. I won't lie, people. There were times when it was very difficult for me not to stand up right there in the darkened theater and shout a vociferous "WHA HOO!" when Secretariat beat the odds and won the race.

Much like the two elderly women who sat in front of us did. Oh, people! The two little ladies with the blue-white hair made my heart glow, as they sat right there in their seats, clapping at every horse race Secretariat ran on the big screen.

The boy, unfortunately, did not share my love for the movie. He was a bit bored, and whispered to me at one time, "If anyone offered me $8 million for that horse, I would have sold it!"

That's the stick-with-it, follow-your-dreams sort of thing to do. But Penny Tweety didn't sell Secretariat for $8 million and look what happened.

Triple Crown, people!

And regardless of the fact that the boy was numb with boredom during the flick, I simply looked at him and whispered two words:

"Last. Airbender."

Which is otherwise known as the movie which almost did Mama in. And I endured. For the boy. He owed me this afternoon, people!

So the answer is yes.

Yes, run like the wind to see the movie Secretariat. Yes, it's worth it. Yes, I loved it.

And I'm going to buy myself some lottery tickets for the first time ever, and just see if I can't make this pipe dream come true!

So It Begins...

2010-10-07T20:25:00.002-06:00

Never mind the black shrouds hanging on all of our windows at the Jedi Manor tonight.

I put those up every year about this time.

The Colorado Avalanche are, as we speak, playing their season opener.

Hubs was home when I got home this afternoon, which is rare. The reason revealed itself soon enough, as I walked inside and found him passed out cold on the bed.

(It's not a drinking problem that causes him to pass out early, regardless of what the boy's teachers think. I promise!)

Hubs came home from work early with a migraine today. He was miserable. His vision was messed up. He was on the brink of delirium.

I whispered, "Okay, then. I won't cook dinner. The boy and I can eat cold cereal."

And Hubs whispered back, "Oh, I'll be hungry later. I'm going to beat this migraine. The Avalanche play tonight, honey! My boys will be on the ice later! Go ahead and make something for dinner. I'll try to eat a little bit to keep my strength up for the game."

With that said, Hubs got up, took two Excedrin Migraine tablets, chugged a Coke without stopping, and crawled into a hot bath.

While I slaved in the kitchen for hours on end, creating a culinary masterpiece that only gourmet chefs can handle.

We had Shake 'N Bake pork chops. And steamed potatoes. And a green salad.

In actuality, it probably took me thirteen entire minutes of prep work in the kitchen, and, forty-five minutes later, dinner was on the table.

I told Hubs that I'd just put his meal aside, and he could eat it later.

It wasn't to be. The man came bounding out of the bathroom, freshly scrubbed from a good migraine-beating soak in the tub and dressed in his most comfortable sweats and Colorado Avalanche T-shirt. He proceeded to eat his weight in Shake 'N Baked pork chops, steamed potatoes and salad, pronounced himself cured and in perfect health, and marched himself downstairs, where he has set up Base Camp 1 in front of the big screen.

He is grinning from ear to ear.

He said that tonight is even better than Christmas.

The migraine has been cured.

So begins the 2010/2011 NHL season.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the NHL season, but the Avalanche play 42 televised games per week, and the Broncos play one. This is a total of 43 professional games that Hubs will devote himself to in the course of seven days, over and over, and then he'll have to watch the pre-game predictions on ESPN, and the post-game highlights on Sports Center, and then he'll have a web page full of chatter and comments about the game pulled up on his laptop, so that he can READ about the game, too.

I will be available most evenings for outings with any of y'all from now until the Avalanche get booted out of the playoffs sometime in May.

Of course, Hubs will probably frown at me for saying that, and he'll emphatically declare, "They're going all the way this year, Baby! The Stanley Cup is coming back to Colorado in June!"

Call me, people.

And now, I have to wrap this up, because we have homemade apple pie at our house. Sister picked all the apples off of her tree, and she made apple pies.

Plural.

And she slipped into our house, when no one was home, and she left one on our counter, and if that isn't the grandest of gifts, I don't know what is.

I flat-out love when people stop by bearing food items.

(Hint. Big hint.)

Of course we have two apple trees in our side yard, too, which are brimming with apples as well, but listen, people. I don't have time to check Facebook. I don't have time to shave my legs. When am I going to pick all those apples, and peel all those apples, and sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and butter, and roll out pie crusts?

Unless, of course, I baked a pie during an Avalanche game.

Hmm. I might be on to something there...

Hubs, 1. Mama, 0.

2010-10-06T20:30:00.003-06:00

Last night, Hubs and the boy had a little clandestine meeting at the computer.

I was really too tired to pay much attention to their summit, because I was recovering from the possibility that a tornado could have totally struck the school's playground while we were outside having PE yesterday.

And we all know that tornadoes kill people dead and smash their houses.

(For the record, that little guy came into the gym for PE today and the very first words out of his mouth were, "Teacher, did you know that a tornado hit Bigger Town this summer? And did you know that we almost had a tornado here last night, but it just rained instead?" Clearly, he still had his two noids with him, even today. When it was sunny outside. With no dark clouds whatsoever.)

The meeting of the male minds at my house last night ended with the song, Smooth Criminal, being downloaded onto an iPod which does not belong to me.

It's because it was THE BOY'S iPod, and how on earth we managed to NOT have one of the musical genius' songs is beyond me. I thought that we had every song Michael Jackson ever recorded. On continuous rotation. On the Repeated Play List, which never ends.

Hmm. Remember the musical number called This Is the Song That Never Ends? Did y'all sing that one on the buses to summer camp? Maybe at Brownies? If you stuck with Brownies long enough to actually learn any songs, that is. Because when I found out we were going to learn to sew and sell cookies, and that we were NOT going to be building campfires that violated all fire restrictions and codes, I dropped out.

My career in the brown uniform was short-lived.

When I was just seven, my dad taught me how to light my own fires in a fifty-gallon drum, which we used to burn garbage in. Knowing how to start fires forever changed my life.

And for the record?

I still don't know how to sew. In fact (and I kid you not), the button on one of the boy's favorite capes came off tonight, while he was saving the universe from imminent peril at youth group with Carter. When Carter's parents dropped the boy off at our house, he marched inside and said, "The button on my favorite cape broke off tonight, so I gave it to Carter's dad, because he's really good at sewing patches on, and I told him that you couldn't sew at all, Mom. Aren't you happy that you don't even have to look at that button and try to decide who you're going to ask to sew it on this time?"

Mmm-hmm. That boy is a genuine blessing to me.

And now Carter's dad knows that I am completely incapable of sewing a button onto a cape.

But really? I can so sing the song that goes on forever, because I totally learned it at summer camp scads of years ago.

This is the song that never ends,
It goes on and on, my friends,
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue singing it forever just because
This is the song that never ends,
It goes on and on, my friends,
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue singing it forever just because
This is the song that never ends...

Had enough?

Where was I?

Smooth Criminal.

We totally have that song at our house now, and the boy got up earlier than normal today, because he was anxious to get his groove on and blow the speakers plum out of his iPod dock.

Hubs and I were in the bathroom, where I was unloading the hot rollers out of my hair. Apparently the beat of the music struck Hubs just the right way today, because he bobbed his neck in time with the music, and he did a little shoulder shrug at the end, and then the guy threw his arms up in the universal sign for TOUCHDOWN, grinned at me, and said these words:

"Look! My neck and back are still in place! I win!"

Out of the Mouths of Babes

2010-10-05T18:00:00.003-06:00

So Hubs did indeed work all weekend.

While the boy and I played all weekend.

I may have mentioned that.

But what I haven't mentioned is the funny comment that was a result of all the working that took place this weekend, because kids do indeed say the darnedest things!

All of the new computers and phone lines were officially installed and loaded and networked together shortly before midnight on Sunday. Poor Hubs. He went into Big Business' building (Love that alliteration!) at precisely 5:30 on Friday night, and, with the exception of a few hours' worth of sleep that he stole, he came out of Big Business' building at 11:45 on Sunday night.

If I tried to concentrate on something that long, my brain would simply start to smoke and deep-fry itself. I blame the adult-onset ADD.

And also? If I tried to suck a fifty-gallon drum of Mt. Dew through a straw over the course of a weekend like Hubs did, I would have keeled over from toxic overload. Clearly, mass consumption of Mt. Dew establishes who the hunters are, and who the gatherers are, and I'm happy just being a berry picker, thank you very much.

I have just recently started a Bible study that meets once a month, for the duration of the school year.

(As a side note, I big-puffy-heart-love that Bible study group! We are not afraid to show one another our snot, as we get down to the meat of our issues, and having friends who have seen you blubber into a Kleenex is a good thing. A blessing, if you will.)

The boy's music teacher from school is none other than my good friend, Stephie V., and she is in this Bible study group with me. Last night, she told me, "I have a great story for you about the boy."

And indeed she did.

Before school yesterday morning, I told the boy that I had Bible study that night, and that he would be at home with Hubs. And I assured him that Hubs was going to be fantasizing about the sleep after his weekend of nonstop work, and that Hubs would probably go to bed early. Which ultimately meant that the boy could just go to bed early, too.

Because really? Our boy is early to bed and early to rise, and staying up too late means that his little head will spin around in circles on his neck the next day. Going to bed early for the boy on a school night is a GOOD THING.

Apparently, Stephanie V. told the boy at school that she was going to see his mama that night. The boy asked, "Where?' And she said, "At Bible study." And then she went on to ask the boy what HE would be doing all night. The boy told her, "Well, I guess my dad and I are going to have a Man Night at home, but this time, I think I'll probably just be on my own, because Dad will probably be passed out on the sofa before 7:00."

Stephanie told me, "It sounded like that Hubs of yours was going to be taking a little nap brought on by mixing too much Captain Morgan in his Coke!"

Well then.

And apparently the boy went on to tell a couple other teachers at school that his dad would be passed out early on the sofa.

Yes, people. WE ARE THAT FAMILY! The family where Mama hightails it off to Bible study, while her baby's daddy is passed out at home on the sofa, leaving the small boy unattended.

Don't judge us!

Remarkably enough, Hubs was still wide awake and deep in the Bronco game, which he'd begged me to record for him on the DVR while he was immersed in installing new computers over the weekend, when I returned home last night. He said that he just couldn't sleep properly until he'd seen the Broncos win it huge.

And then...

...there's even more funny things said by children this week.

I took the kindergartners outside again for PE today, because I am an enormous glutton for punishment. The kindergartners are CONTAINED in the gym. There are walls and doors which keep them in one area, and the distractions are minimal. There's the big hamper full of volleyballs, and diving into them is about the only thing indoors which successfully manages to rip their attention away from me. Outdoors, I may have mentioned that we have trees! And leaves! And swings! And sand! And rocks! And sticks! And acres and acres to run in and get lost in!

Taking the kindergartners outside for PE clearly sets the hunters apart from the gatherers, and I am brave enough to just bring that brontosaurus down with a crudely-fashioned spear and my own cleverness. Such a task is not for the weak.

The weather was warm and beautiful today, and my other PE classes had very balmy weather while we were outdoors. By the time kindergarten PE rolled around, the clouds had started marching across the sky, and things were getting dark.

But still plenty warm enough to be outside.

One little fellow emphatically announced, "Teacher, those clouds are getting dark, and we NEED to get inside, because a storm is coming!"

I told him that the storm was indeed brewing, but that we had plenty of time to finish PE outside before it hit.

He told me, "Teacher, please! We have to go inside now, because I have two noids about tornadoes, and I just know that a tornado is going to come in that storm, just like it did in Bigger Town this summer, and do you know what tornadoes do, Teacher? They kill you dead and break your house all apart! I have two noids about this, and we have to go inside."

Two noids?

What'choo talkin' 'bout, Willis?

I asked him what two noids were. He told me that he had no idea, but that his mom always told him that he had two noids when it came to storms, because he didn't like tornadoes. He didn't like them at all!

Because tornadoes can kill you dead break your house all apart.

I asked him, "What are two noids like? What do they look like? Where do you have them?"

He assured me that he had no idea what two noids actually were, but his mom told him that he had them. And if his mama said he had them, then he did!

And because he had two noids, he wanted to go inside.

People, a tornado did indeed hit Bigger Town, USA over the summer, which is a substantial distance from us, and it did indeed destroy a rather large building, so I did understand the small child's fear. I just hugged him and assured him that we were safe, and that if I saw any tornado on the horizon, we would run for the safety of the school building.

In the meantime, we played our game, and I kept trying to figure out what two noids were.

And, during the entire PE class, this small fry kept insisting that we were all going to be killed dead by the up-coming tornado, and no amount of reassurance from me could calm his little heart.

And I wanted so badly to tell him, "Don't be so paranoid!"

Light bulb!!!

Halfway through that PE class, I finally got it!

Paranoid. Pair of noids. Two noids.

I asked the little guy, since he was snuggled right up to my side and refused to play the game, so that he would be THE! FIRST! CHILD! to know if we were going to make a mad run for the safety of the building, "Does your mom say that you're paranoid?"

And he said, "Yes! I told you that! My mom says I have a pair of noids about tornadoes coming, and I don't even know what two noids are! But, Teacher, tornadoes will kill you dead and smash your house!"

Do you want to hear more? Because, amazingly enough, I have even MORE that came out of the mouths of children today.

My friend, Amy, prays with her girls every morning before they head to school, and this morning she said that her five-year-old prayed out loud and said, "Dear Lord, I just want You to help Mikey (her best girlfriend) grow to be as tall as I am, and please help Mikey be able to color as well as I can, because she needs to be able to stay inside the lines."

Of course, when Amy told us this, we all burst out laughing, because only five-year-old Brynn would think to pray something like this!

Please help Mikey get taller, and please help Mikey become a better colorer. Amen.

I have actually giggled about this all day long, and then this afternoon, while I was sitting at the library, reading a book while the boy did some research for a project he's working on for one of his classes, I got to thinking about it even more.

In a spiritual sense.

(Hang on. We're about to head into Deep Thoughts.)

Brynnie loves Mikey. They're BFFs. They are two of the most adorable things ever. And Brynn was very concerned that Mikey wasn't growing tall enough and that she couldn't color well enough, so Brynn took matters into her own hands and decided to just ask God outright to help Mikey in these areas.

Because Brynnie loves Mikey dearly.

How many times do we, people, pray specifically for OUR FRIENDS who have needs without being asked to do so? Oh, friends ask all the time, "Please help me pray for such-and-such an issue, which I'm facing right now," and, of course, we do. We're happy to help out. But how often are we so in tune with our friends, that we see their needs ahead of time, and think about praying specifically for them before we are asked to do so? Or even when we're never asked to do so? What if we just prayed for God to bless certain friends, in very specific ways, exactly like Brynn did?

Mikey didn't ask to grow taller, and she didn't ask to be better at coloring. Brynn just saw a need that her friend apparently had, and she prayed for those needs.

And she prayed very specifically.

Without being asked to do so.

What a blessing she's going to be to her friends in this life.

So, even though that started out as just a funny comment made by a cute little girl, it's made me do some deeper thinking this afternoon, and I just want to be one who is aware of the needs of my friends enough that I would think to pray for them, before I was asked to do so. I want to become diligent about honestly praying for blessings for my friends.

And hopefully, in turn, I'll be blessed with a husband who isn't passed out on the sofa by 7:00 each night.

I actually have had two noids today about which teachers the boy told this to, because maybe they've raised an eyebrow up high over the goings-on at the Jedi Manor.

Because clearly, we are THAT family.

The Post Where Many Pictures and Just a Few Words Were Involved

2010-10-04T17:48:00.007-06:00

So if a photo is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn't have to type much tonight.

Because I have many snapshots to share with y'all.

Because really? I've had one of THOSE days today. You know the days. When Sister and Regs put the $5 Wal-Mart nails on you, and Sister manages to superglue her finger to your finger. Oh, Sister and I were tight there for a minute. Or four. True-blue, stuck-like-glue sisters, if you know what I mean. And now? Well, I have a big hole in the side of my finger, where some skin USED to be, and Sister has some extra skin dangling from the side of HER finger, and it's gonna be there for a while, on account of the powerful superglue just doesn't want to release it just yet.

And then? The boy came home with his mid-term grades this afternoon, and SWEET MERCY! Those grades warranted a trip to the Dairy Queen for some celebration, so off we went. I bought a vanilla cone, which was dipped in the butterscotch topping. (Yes, I love the cones rolled in artificially-flavored wax. Don't judge me.) As we were driving along in the Suburban, I took the first bite out of the top of the cone, and the butterscotch shell split in half. And that would have been okay, but what followed, while I was driving, was nothing short of a full-on, butterscotch avalanche, and I lost half of my cone (HALF, PEOPLE!). The half that didn't remain on my cone fell into my cup holder and landed on my phone. It turned into Greatest Mess While Driving '10.

Just one of those days.

So really? I thought I'd just skip the witty post altogether tonight and show y'all some snapshots that I've been working on TAKING and then EDITING in PhotoShop. And, for the record, I do NOT want to be a professional photographer; I just want to learn to take really good pictures of kids. So if any of y'all want to loan me your children for an afternoon, I'd be plum happy to practice my mad camera skillz by taking some blurry pictures of them.

Because honestly? Blurry pictures are what I'm best at.

The first two shots of the boy I can't claim. My friend, Nina, took them for me, and then I played around with them in PhotoShop, so they're only HALF mine. But I love them. Those blue eyes on that boy melt my heart in huge ways. But really? I did take all the other snapshots on here.

Nothing fancy. I have a whole lot to learn about the camera yet, because apertures and F-stops and shutter speeds still confuse me to pieces and make me want to crawl in a hole and curl up in the fetal position. It's just too overwhelming to try to learn it all.

But I try.