nobody-but-yourself

Last call!

2011-12-13T22:16:00.000-05:00

Here we are, late in the evening of the last night of my thirties. When I wake up (hopefully not before 6am like I have the past several days), I'll be 40. Egads. I wish I could come up with something pithy or reflective or remotely meaningful to share. I mean, I spent a bit of time reflecting on the past decade as I went about my errands and housework today. There certainly were some big highlights - becoming a mom; becoming an aunt (several times over); milestone wedding anniversaries (10th and 15th); the passing of my last remaining living grandparent; selling our first house, buying our second and moving; rejoining the workforce after spending most of the decade as a stay-at-home mom; heck, even being on Jeopardy - but right now? There's just one thing that is on my mind, and it is this:

I am fairly certain that we have a yeti living in our basement. I have proof. Proof in the vast expanses of greyish fur that amass in the collection canister of my vacuum cleaner every time I use it, like earlier this afternoon. I mean, it just seems obvious that such insane amounts of what is clearly animal fur would come from a gigantic, highly hirsute source like this:

than from something that's smaller than a breadbox (though admittedly pretty fuzzy) like this:

Yep, that's all I've got for this evening, my yeti-in-the-cellar theory. Clearly, old age has already begun fading away what few brain cells I have left. (Also, it's 10pm and I spiked my milk with mudslide mix at dinner, so there's that. Living la vida loca, for sure.) Before I toddle off to bed, I'd like to make one last plea:

Won't you please, pretty please, with sugar and sprinkles and a cherry on top, please help me make my fortieth birthday wish come true? You can read about it here. (I know I've been asking with every post lately, but the good news is that tomorrow is the last day I can bug you about it...) If you would please join me in doing 40 Good Things and leave me a comment letting me know what you did, I'll be the happiest 40 year old birthday girl ever tomorrow! Thanks!

A bird in the hand...

2011-11-26T16:57:00.004-05:00

Kiddo and I went with some friends to a nearby park this morning that has a trail frequented by wild birds as well as people. (How crazy is this weather - it was in the 50s here today! Outdoors in a light jacket in late November? Woohoo!) The reason we went to this particular trail was because we'd heard if you bring some bird seed with you, put some in your hand, hold your arm out and stay very still and quiet, you can be a human bird feeder!

Our friends had done this before, and told us if you try this in the winter, the chickadees positively swarm your hand to devour the seeds. Today's chickadees seemed pretty well-fed, as the trail was quite busy with human bird feeders. (We also saw cardinals, jays, woodpeckers and finches, but only the chickadees ventured onto our hands.) We weren't exactly swarmed, but we each had birds land on our hands a few times. We will definitely go back in the winter to feed the birds again!

(PS - Another plea as we're now just 17 days away from my birthday.... won't you please help me make my 40th birthday wish come true? Thanks so very much!!)

At least someone enjoys leaf management

2011-11-13T12:37:00.000-05:00

(Though I will say I am mighty happy to own a leafblower. It makes the chore a LOT easier.)

PS - Please consider checking out this post and helping make my upcoming 40th birthday wish come true! Only a month and a day until the big 4-0! (**gulp**) Thanks!

Next year, I'm coating our jack o'lantern with cayenne

2011-10-31T23:08:00.002-04:00

This past Saturday, we went to a local farm market to pick out this year's pumpkin.

We came home and Kiddo and Hubby promptly got to work carving said pumpkin into this year's chosen design. As we've long since established around this here blog, Heather does not do pumpkin guts. This was the first year that Kiddo did the majority of the carving work herself (under Hubby's supervision, while I popped in and out every so often for a quick picture but otherwise kept well out of arm and nose's reach of the goings-on).

Kiddo was well pleased with her kitty jack o'lantern when we set it out on the front porch and lit it up for a test run Saturday night.

Yesterday afternoon, Kiddo and I attended a Fall Fun event for our local Girl Scout troops. As we pulled into the driveway upon our return, I noticed something a bit off with her pumpkin......

Closer inspection revealed that some critter or critters had zombie-fied Kiddo's jack o'lantern by snacking on it quite thoroughly (they also removed and chewed on the tea light I'd left inside it overnight). I didn't catch any such critter redhanded (or orange-mouthed), but my strongest suspicion points in the direction of our multitude of neighborhood squirrels.

Kiddo was upset, naturally, and immediately clamoring for a return trip to the farm market to get a second pumpkin. This request was denied as we were now less than 6 hours away from Halloween (and last night was a school night to boot), the market was closed and, frankly, we weren't overly eager to drop some more green on another delectable squirrel treat. By this morning, the other parts of Halloween (costumes! parade! party! Trick or Treating with friends!) had mitigated her disappointment at the jack o'lantern mutilation somewhat, and off she went to school. I went out to clean up the pumpkin detritus around midmorning, and decided that there was, in fact, enough unspoiled pumpkin on the back half that technically someone could carve a second kitty face onto the other side.

I promptly looked around. Turns out the only someone who was home and available for such a project around 11 on a Monday was me. (Well, I mean, I could've asked the cat, but she lacks both the attention span and the opposable thumbs for such an undertaking, and then there's the extensive list of things she's managed to damage with her own sharp bits over the years - do I really want to be arming her with a pumpkin carver?)

Have I mentioned how much I detest pumpkin guts? I am not kidding when I say I have a pathological aversion to them. The smell and/or feel of the inside of a pumpkin can induce the urge to vomit in me more than actually being vomited upon by another human being. Seriously. (Pumpkin seeds, on the other hand - delish! So long as someone else has cleaned them off and toasted them up. Also, I love pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin muffins - as long as I don't have to touch or smell the raw ingredient in its most primal form.)

I feel that it is a pretty remarkable testament to my overwhelming love for my child that I sucked it up and did this:

and a pretty remarkable testament to my willpower that I neither threw up nor fainted at any point while doing it. (I kinda wanted to do both at a few points along the way.) (And as to Hubby's reply text when I sent him the above picture, yes, they had scooped out most of the pumpkin guts before the first carving. Most of them. The pumpkin was a far cry from pristine inside, and being out on the porch in the cold made it extra-clammy. Unless some of the clamminess came from squirrel spit, but really, does that make it better?)

That isn't to say that next year, I won't be sprinkling our jack o'lantern quite liberally with cayenne pepper before I set it on the porch. I may love the kid enough to suffer the trauma of raw pumpkin meeting my hands and nose once, but I have no intentions of there being a sequel. I'd rather have to deal with actual zombies on my front porch then try to repair a zombie-fied jack o'lantern again, thankyouverymuch.

(Oh, and I am tired and punchy enough right now to point out that when lit with the slightly-gnawed tea light tonight, in the pitch black darkness that is 7pm in our parts this time of year, the kitty cat was glowing mightily in its newly carved facial area, but also casting light out of the rather gaping hole in its backside. I believe there's an expression about blowing sunshine and one's posterior regions........)

Happy Halloween from me and mine to you and yours! (Kiddo, for the record, was one of several Hermione Grangers tromping the grounds of school in today's Halloween parade. She was the only one with a Crookshanks with her, however.)

Is this why I liked The Silence of the Lambs?

2011-10-22T18:34:00.000-04:00

My kid, at the advanced age of eight, no longer easily complies with hand-holding in public. Mind you, I only ever reach for her hand in specific situations - navigating a very crowded, public place where we might easily become separated (after all, she is the human version of Dug from Up: squirrel!), or crossing a heavily trafficked parking lot or street (where again, her distractability can be detrimental to her survival), that sort of thing. These days, she will squirm and squirm and squirm, along with whining and whining and whining, to get me to let go. As a compromise, she'll sometimes offer to hold on to my wrist or forearm or for me to hold her elbow or something.

On a recent such occasion, as I was desperately trying to grab hold of some part of Kiddo while she darted away into Certain Mortal Peril, a song from childhood popped into my head. I recalled it as being sung by Bert from Sesame Street, and I sang a snippet of it to the kid. I couldn't remember it as clearly as, say, C is for Cookie or I Love Trash, so a few days later, I looked it up on Youtube while Kiddo and I were waiting for the school bus to arrive. I found it right away, and we both watched; her for the first time ever and me for the first time in several decades....

Please take a moment and watch it if you didn't already. Do you remember watching it as a small child? Are you as unsettled as I was? I mean..........*shudder*, right? After all, this is SESAME STREET for crying out loud - how could it be so disturbing???

As I said, I remembered this from my own childhood. (Not sure it is too surprising that I never saw this clip re-aired during Kiddo's Sesame Street watching phase). (Also, my memory of it being sung by Bert was actually correct. Bert did the record album - remember record albums? - version and my sister and I had all the Sesame Street albums between the two of us, so score one for my rapidly aging brain cells for remembering that.) I do NOT remember being the slightest bit put off by this clip. I remember thinking it was, in fact, funny. My sister and I would act out this song with each other (and with props standing in for the body parts.) ACK - see? There's where I'm disturbed now. Body. Parts. Maurice the Muppet is REMOVING THE FEMALE MUPPET'S BODY PARTS, y'all.

!!!

I know that there are far more disturbing things on television these days. (Well, it seems like there are far more disturbing things everywhere these days.) I don't let Kiddo watch, say, Dexter or Supernatural or any of the CSIs or L&Os. But..... but...... this is SESAME STREET. Holy moly. Watching this now, as an almost-middle-aged woman, I found it way more disturbing than amusing. I was especially squicked out by the tooth (obviously required for the lyrics' rhymability) and the way he is fiddling nonchalantly with the pile of body parts he has just removed.

So, is it just me? Is this unsettling to anyone else? I wonder if this is where my great enjoyment of things like The Silence of the Lambs and Supernatural comes from..... At any rate, Kiddo wasn't put off by it one bit. As a matter of fact, a few days later, as we stood on the porch waiting for the bus to turn up our street, she asked me if we could watch it again. I declined, though she persisted. Until she saw a squirrel run across the yard, anyhow. (I wish I were kidding. I'm not.)

*****

In other news, stay tuned for a really awesome giveaway that I plan to do in the coming weeks. I can't give you the details yet, but I can show you a relevant trailer:

And in other other news, please do read the post and consider helping me out with my 40th birthday wish. I'd really appreciate it!

My 40th birthday wish

2011-09-30T17:31:00.000-04:00

As it so happens, I am now 39 and three quarters. (That is, if adults still said their age the way kids do, but that stopped being the in thing somewhere around age 13, didn't it.....) Suffice it to say, then, that I'm in the sunset of my 30s. Well, more like the mid-late evening of my 30s. If my 30s were a day, I'd be in bed already by now.

Now, in a perfect world, I'd be celebrating my 40th birthday by sitting in the front row, center seat of the theater for this. But, it isn't a perfect world, and that isn't going to happen. I mean, not only is my birthday during one of the craziest times of the year (11 days before Christmas), but this year, my birthday is on a Wednesday. Also? Broadway is about six hours away from my house by car, and nowadays, the cost of one ticket is more than it used to cost my entire family to see a Broadway show back when I was a kid. (Which, granted, was way back in the Olden Days, especially to hear Kiddo talk about it.) I don't even want to know how much a front row ticket would be. Probably way more than I spend on groceries for our family for an entire month.

So, clearly this is not a perfect world. (A fact which has been made abundantly clear over and over again in the past year, le sigh.) That's why I've come up with an alternate plan to celebrate my birth~~dayweek~~month. Best of all, it's something that YOU, dear reader, can help me with! So, win-win, right? I mean, I just know you were wondering what on earth you could get me for my big 4-0. Right? (Humor me and nod enthusiastically, if you don't mind. Thanks!)

Here's what I'm hoping we can do for my birthday: I want to have a worldwide celebration* of helping others. Paying it forward. Doing good deeds. If I can get 40 people to do 1 Good Thing between now and my actual 40th birthday, that would be just about the best present ever. (Or 20 people to do 2 Good Things. Or 10 to do 4. I'm not picky.)

It doesn't have to be a BIG Good Thing, either. I'm not asking y'all to turn into Mother Teresa/Ghandi/Ryan Gosling here. Just, you know, do something good. Spend an hour or two helping at a soup kitchen or food pantry. Pay the toll for the guy behind you on your way to work. Offer to watch the kids for that mom who never gets a night off. Stop by a nursing home and visit with someone who is lonely. Overtip the waitress at the diner. Mow your neighbor's lawn or rake their leaves or shovel their snow (hey, I live in upstate NY - we'll have snow before I'm 39 and 5/6ths). Send your mom some flowers. Make a point of looking everyone in the eye and smiling at them for one day. (Everyone - this is harder than you'd think. Believe me, I've tried.) You get my drift.

Now, I've been fighting a losing battle against the interwebz all day. So, I'm not going to attempt to do a Mr. Linky thingamabob because then I might just break the internet once and for all, and I don't want that on my record. Instead, if you do do a Good Thing in honor of me getting old (heh heh heh, I just said "do do") (what? I am getting old, not mature), please comment here, if you would, and let me know. I haven't broken my blog comment email notifications yet, so that'll work. If I get to 40 things by my big 4-0 on December 14th, I'll be beyond thrilled. And since it is my birthmonth, instead of my usual birthweek, I'd be beyond thrilled if we got to 40 good things by December 31. Like I said, I'm really not picky.

So, there you have it. What I'd really love to get for my 40th birthday. Please consider playing along - it would mean more than you know.

*(Worldwide could happen - my stat meter tells me of blog hits from all over the world! They aren't all from weirdos searching for the word "boobs" either. I know real, lovely people who live as far away as Australia who read my blog....)

2011-09-11T12:05:00.000-04:00

This is my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

May truth and freedom come to every nation;

may peace abound where strife has raged so long;

that each may seek to love and build together,

a world united, righting every wrong;

a world united in its love for freedom,

proclaiming peace together in one song.

So, I've been a real P.O.S. blogger...

2011-09-03T18:43:00.000-04:00

... but not the P.O.S. you might be thinking of - no, I mean a Prisoner of Summer, as coined by my friend Ash last year. I posted before Armageddon (and, btw, did you hear it's been rescheduled? Apparently now Armageddon is back on for sometime in October) and then poof, three months went by and here we are in September.

So, to do a recap for those who might be interested........

In May, we went to Walt Disney World for Kiddo's 8th birthday. Our trip coincided with Star Wars Weekends, which had two thirds of the Smith family extremely excited. As for me, I enjoy SW all right - I mean, I've seen all the movies more than once and have a good grasp of the fundamentals, but I still had to be corrected by my second grader - "No, Mom, that's not a Storm Trooper, that's a Clone Trooper. Sheesh." A girl after her Dad's own heart.....

(Immediately prior to this picture, Chewbacca gave me a hug. Following this picture, I spent the rest of the day plucking long, coarse Wookiee hairs out of the inch-thick layer of SPF 60 and sweat that coated my body after waiting in line for close to an hour in baking, steamy, central Florida sun. Seriously, Chewie sheds like crazy.)

The kid took part in the Jedi Training Academy, and managed to successfully battle Darth Maul. (She'd previously been very nervous about facing anyone other than Darth Vader, so when we found out her group was getting Darth Maul instead, I was giving even odds that she would bail. Her Jedi strength and courage stood her well, though, because she did it. Our home video of the duel has me cheering wildly and audibly from across the area from where Hubby was standing, which cracked me up when I heard it. It was just one time when I uttered my signature WOOHOO over the course of the trip.)

Other Star Wars fun included riding the new and improved, just reopened Star Tours several times (it is SO much cooler than it was before, though I did get a bit motion sick a couple of times) and waiting in line so the kid could meet-n-greet all sorts of SW characters.

(Several of the other women with whom Kiddo and I waited in line were gushing about how dreeeeeamy pre-Darthified Anakin Skywalker was. He spent a good four minutes chatting with Kiddo as they grumbled in line behind us - apparently the Force was stronger with the 8 year old than it was with the cougars......)

We did do other, non-nerdtastic sorts of things while we were there too, of course. Kiddo wore her official WDW "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY" pin for the entire week leading up to and then the days after her birthday, so she was fêted most lavishly everywhere from the restaurants to the parks to the birthday serenade by the Dapper Dans, the barbershop quartet that performs in the Magic Kingdom, right in front of Cinderella's castle. So, clearly she is a girl after her mother's heart as well, since we all know how much I love to celebrate my birthweek!

(Only eight more years until that driving picture becomes a reality - GULP. Kiddo most gleefully pointed out to me that she is "halfway to a driver's license" and I immediately felt twenty new silvery highlights sproing out on my scalp at the thought.)

The next picture was taken at Teppan Edo, which is the kid's favorite restaurant at Epcot. Towards the end of our (awesome) meal, the staff came in with this hat and did a whole birthday song and routine. (This happened at just about every restaurant we went to, but not with a complimentary chapeau.) We had to preserve the hat to bring home with us. Try going through security with one of these sometime...

(Poor Gramma, who came from Tampa for a few days. This was the first time she'd experienced the Mad Tea Party spinning teacup ride with us. She wisely opted out when I did after my traditional one turn, and we watched from solid, nonmoving ground as Hubby took Kiddo for a second whirl.)

The Padawan went pirate, thanks to Captain Jack Sparrow's pirate tutorial:

We always enjoy the scenery at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, and Kiddo spent quite a while sketching the critters on the savanna from her vantage point on our balcony -

For her actual birthday, which was the sixth day of our trip, we surprised Kiddo by taking her to the luau at the Polynesian. She got to go up on stage twice to do the hula (see if you can pick her out... she's the one in the Hawaiian print......) and also cross off one of her bucket list items: to drink a drink out of a coconut. Pretty good to have ticked off an item on her bucket list by the tender age of eight!

Since we did pull her out of school for four days, Kiddo had homework that she had to do each day in the hotel room -

So, that was Disney World. In June, Hubby and I decided it was time to let Kiddo dip her toe into the world of internet communication. To this end, he set up an account for her via a texting app on her iPod Touch that she can use to send and receive texts from a very elite group (Daddy, Mommy and one of her grandmothers at this point). She is further restricted by only being able to text where there is wifi, so though she'll text right up until the bus rolls up -

As soon as it does, she hands over the iPod and goes off to a texting-free day.

Also in June, I started my new job. It requires me to dress up -

but other than not being able to wear yoga pants and my Birks to work, it is an awesome gig. The people at the church are super nice, everyone has been very welcoming and seems happy to have me there, and I'm so glad I found this job. So, woohoo for being back in the working world!

The weekend after school got out, Kiddo and I went on our annual Smith Chicks Road Trip to NJ. We spent one day at my aunt and uncle's house, which is on Lake Hopatcong and included fishing, swimming, kayaking, picking water lilies, throwing balls for my aunt's and mom's dogs, and going for a ride on the lake with some of her cousins - my uncle even let the kids take a turn steering the boat. (Kiddo's turn was rather abbreviated, as she was an enthusiastic but dangerous driver.)

We also went down the shore for a day with my mom, both of my sisters and their kids, and while we didn't have a Snooki sighting, we did encounter a massive beaching of millions and millions of baby jellyfish. SO gross. (That's what Kiddo and my niece are holding up for the camera in that one shot.) I got stung a few times as I stood waist-deep in the water on boogie-boarding patrol, in which I was on the lookout for any child related to me coming off their board in the water and going under. After getting out of the water, I noticed what I first assumed was a splotchy sunburn on my calves, but turned out to be jellyfish stings. Um, OW.)

Other fun things we did this summer included dogsitting a few times for Barkley, aka the Fluffy Pup, playdates galore (note to self: the joy experienced by kids in the three minutes it takes them to throw the entire jumbo-sized laundry basket full of water balloons you've arduously spent the better part of an hour filling, covering yourself and the walls, floor and ceiling in a five foot radius around you with water as you did? NOT worth it), trips to the zoo, and the like...

(I thought I was taking the kid to walk the dog. Apparently, I was actually taking the cat for a walk with the dog.......)

In July, as we have since the very first movie opened a decade ago, my BFF and I saw the last Harry Potter movie. This time, in IMAX 3D, obviously. We got there early enough that we were the FIRST ones into the theater. Woohoo!!

Other momentous achievements included Kiddo learning how to blow proper bubbles with proper bubble gum (taught by her mom). Here's her first-ever actual bubble:

Kiddo also mastered her two-wheeler sans training wheels (though with much protective gear - at her insistence). Bubbles and the proper way to sing Bohemian Rhapsody may fall under my purview, but biking was all Dad. Well, up until the point when she was confident enough to go pedaling around the neighborhood, and I was forced to hop on my own bike and go pedaling along with her. Me on a bike? Yeah, not pretty. I haven't had a heart attack yet, though I was secretly a teensy bit relieved when Hubby came in from the garage one night and mentioned my front tire had gone completely flat. He has since repaired it though, so my reprieve is over.

Kiddo even got Grandpa to go for a spin with her when my folks came up from Jersey for a visit -

I have been extremely fortunate to have Kiddo's grandparents watch her for the majority of the summer when I was working, and friends who hosted her for playdates for the majority of the times when her grandparents weren't available. There was one day when I did wind up doing a "Take Your Daughter to Work Day", but as we were the only ones in the building, it wasn't a big deal (also - I had talked to my boss about it beforehand and she was cool with it). Sadly, the busy work type tasks I'd saved up for her, thinking they'd keep her occupied for a good hour-hour and a half, Kiddo knocked out in a cool 20 minutes. I wound up raiding the Sunday School classrooms for arts and crafts things to keep her occupied while I worked.

Kiddo was given her very first American Girl doll, whom she named Isabelle Hermione, by her godmother for her birthday -

We went on our first overnight camping trip with a group of people from our church to Stony Brook State Park. This is us midway through a hike of the insane gorge trails in the park -

and kiddo playing by one of the waterfalls we'd hiked our way down to:

The hike down wasn't nearly as bad as the hike back up the gorge. It is a 400 foot change in elevation, and several hundred helpful-yet-killer stairs. It's like going to San Fransisco, I'd imagine, but with less Golden Gate Bridge and fog and more sweat and mosquitoes. Overall, we had a good bit of fun - s'mores! playing in the stream! potluck campout supper! - but between the insane amount of noise overnight and general sleeping conditions in our campsite, the bathrooms that were so gross I refused to shower or to wash Kiddo off in them, and the horrific storm that was due to arrive overnight the second night, we opted to pack up and head for the comfort, cleanliness and quiet of our own home instead of sticking it out the second night and then trying to pack up in the downpour the last morning.

The not-so-fun part of summer hit us a few weeks ago, when Kiddo needed to have eye surgery again. This time, it was just one eye, which was good, but her post-surgery recovery period was a lot rougher. It took the doctors three escalations of her pain medicine before she was feeling well enough that we could take her home. By the next day, though, she was rallying from her sickbed on the family room couch -

(that's Domino, a get-well gift from one of the ladies at our church) and within a few days, she was feeling well enough to be chafing at the total movement and activity restrictions that she was under for the past two weeks. A rousing game of checkers was about the most excitement she was allowed.

(Side note: I got into an interesting discussion on Facebook about letting kids win. I don't, for the record, but Grandma apparently did because Kiddo complained quite loudly about how she always beats Grandma but never beats me. Hearing the news that I was the fourth grade checker champion back in the 70s didn't do much to mitigate her despair.)

As you might imagine, having a major sensory seeker-type SPD kiddo be forced to be utterly still for an extended period of time has led to one extremely disregulated kid. When the restrictions were lifted two days ago, Kiddo went nuts (and not entirely in a good way). She had a lengthy playdate this afternoon, and we're going to do some bike rides and running around the park with our canine house guest tomorrow and Monday (weather permitting...), and hopefully by the first day of school on Tuesday, she'll be closer to her normal. It sure doesn't make a terribly good first impression to have a kid who can't keep still and can't focus.....

So, that just about brings us up to speed. Whew. I'd say I'm looking forward to things quieting down now that school is starting in mere days, but then I think about what I'm doing this school year -

- co-Chair of the school PTSA

- class mom

- 3rd grade volunteer for several school programs and events

- Brownie troop leader

- working three mornings a week at my paid job (woohoo!)

- church choir member

- Sunday school teacher

and suddenly, it doesn't seem like the fall is going to bring me much more peace, quiet or free time after all!

But, I promise I'll be blogging more regularly now that I'm no longer a P.O.S. Hopefully there are still folks out there reading..................

Rapture, shmapture.

2011-05-20T22:52:00.001-04:00

So, there's been a lot of hubbub lately about the End of the World, specifically about how it will begin to end tomorrow. (Quick digression: is all this talk earworming songs into your head, too? I've had a persistent earworm-off between REM and Blondie for days now...)

While I do not doubt that there are some folks out there who believe this is it, I'm not one of them. I admit to being momentarily surprised to actually drive past one of those "End of the World 5/21/11" billboards a few miles from my house earlier today. (I guess I assumed this was more of a Bible Belt kind of thing.) I've chuckled at some of the Rapture-related jokes I've seen online (the Facebook event for the post-Rapture looting party, for example), and generally find myself firmly in the "tongue in cheek" camp about the topic.

To that end, when asked what my plans are for the start of the End of Days, I've responded "I'm going to Disney World!" Which is true, actually. We are heading to Disney World for Kiddo's eighth birthday. (Side note: how did eight years go by so fast?!?) We've got the house and cat sitters lined up, the bags packed, the boarding passes printed. So, if it turns out I'm wrong and the doomsday prophesiers are right, well, at least we'll be spending the last day in the Happiest Place on Earth!

And...... when we get back, I will be starting my new job!! I know, I haven't mentioned it yet - I wanted to wait for all the Is to be dotted and Ts crossed. Well, they are, as of earlier today, so it is now official and I can say that as of June 1st, I will end my career as solely a SAH mom and rejoin the paid workforce! I've taken a part time position as an administrative assistant for a church that is right around the corner from our house (not the one or even the denomination of the one to which we belong). I'm really excited to be earning some money, even if it isn't much (the job is just 3 mornings a week), and contributing to the household income again. The people I've met at the church so far have been really great, and I'm looking forward to starting..... once we're back from Disney and assuming the world hasn't ended, of course.

I have a spiffy iPhone app Hubby recommended that I'm testing now and hope to use to update my blog from the road. We'll see how that goes...

To sum up, it may be the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine!

Oh, that wascally wabbit!

2011-04-23T22:34:00.001-04:00

Look where the Easter Bunny hid Kiddo's basket this year:

The Easter Bunny is clearly employing the same strategy he used way back in the day, when my Easter basket was found after a lengthy search (and ultimately several "you're getting warmer/colder" type hints from my dad, who had located it already) neatly taped to the ceiling above the dining room chandelier. Yes, I walked around the dining room approximately 800 times that morning before I ever found it. It's a miracle we ever made it out the door to church that day, considering that back in the 70s we used to go to the sunrise service for Easter. (I asked my mother earlier this afternoon if she and Dad were planning on attending the sunrise service tomorrow. She laughed maniacally before informing me that no, they'll be going to the 10:30am service instead. Oh, how I would've loved a 10:30 church service back in my youth instead of the crack o' dawn!)

The butterfly in front of the basket is one Kiddo made and always hangs from that plant hook. This hook is located directly above the area where Kiddo currently has her Littlest Pet Shop/Star Wars/safari animal Empire spread out on the family room carpet. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how long it'll take her to look up and spot it? I reckon it will either be something she spots instantly when she comes down the stairs into the family room (she has heard the story of the year my basket was on the ceiling before) or she'll never spot it at all. I sent the picture to my parents and asked them how long they think it'll take her to find it. Dad's answer? "Fourth of July." Considering this is a kid who can't find her sneakers on the kitchen floor when she's looking right at them, Grandpa might be pretty accurate...

Stay tuned!

(And never fear, these

aren't in there yet. The Easter Bunny won't hide them until after church tomorrow, so they're still safely in the fridge, where they have been tempting both Hubby and Kiddo since yesterday afternoon. Easter is the only time of year I ever hard boil eggs. I do not fancy hard boiled eggs in any form - plain, deviled, saladed - so they each get six a year. Kiddo is already salivating in anticipation of Monday's lunch. Hard boiled eggs and a bologna and provolone sandwich - she'll be quite popular in the cafeteria, I'm sure. Heh.)

Where's the most creative place the Easter Bunny ever hid a basket in your house?

Now this is the life...

2011-04-14T20:07:00.001-04:00

That? Right there? The picture of contentment and the warmest, toastiest bit of belly fuzz you've ever scritched. Crazy Cat doesn't usually allow the belly of the beast to be exposed in such a manner, but she just could. not. resist! the magnetic pull of the afternoon sun. (Outside, it may only have been 49 degrees F but on her pillow with the sun beaming in, it was positively equatorial.) Note to self: if ever I take another spin on this globe, make sure I come back as a thoroughly spoiled house cat.

(Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to our Crazy Cat, who turns 9 years old tomorrow!)

Off to the Great Fishbowl in the Sky

2011-03-27T19:51:00.000-04:00

It is with a surprisingly heavy heart that I report the passing of Swimmy, Kiddo's pet goldfish. Swimmy's life came to an end at approximately 4:45 this afternoon. I can be that specific because we'd spent the day on Piscine Death Watch, keeping vigil over the tank in Kiddo's room.

I'd noticed Swimmy seemed a bit off a few days ago when I was in Kiddo's room putting away laundry. You see, Swimmy's typical response to catching sight of any movement in the room was to begin swimming frantically back and forth at the top of the tank in a bid to get fed (or, more accurately, fed again as Swimmy was indeed fed first thing every morning). The other morning, however, Swimmy ignored me, choosing to stare morosely at the bottom, back corner of the tank. I waved my hand in front of Swimmy's face, which would ordinarily elicit a response, but nothing. I mentioned this to Hubby but he said he wasn't worried because Swimmy had been swimming and splashing (did you know goldfish like to jump? True story!) as per usual when he was reading to Kiddo at bedtime.

When we got home from church this morning, Kiddo went up to her room to change and immediately came back downstairs to get us. "Something's wrong with Swimmy!!!" Uh oh. Sure enough, Swimmy was sideways and sort of hovering near the top of the tank. Swimmy did not look good. Kiddo was really upset, to say the least, and asked us if we could take Swimmy to the vet, which, um, no. Hubby did a 25% water change, removed all the decorative plants and vacuumed the gravel in the tank, which turned up a lot of uneaten fish flakes and led us to the conclusion that Swimmy had not been eating for at least a few days. Double uh oh. Hubby helped Kiddo add a dose of Stress Coat to the tank water, and then we waited and watched. I was hoping for a miracle but not holding my breath.

Since it seemed a foregone conclusion that Swimmy was not long for this world (and sure enough, the end came within hours), we were faced with helping Kiddo through one of life's Big Lessons. You see, we have been very fortunate in our family not to have experienced much death in recent years. Since Kiddo was born in 2003, our only losses have been her great-grandmother (my grandmother), who died when Kiddo was 18 months old, and our old cat, Katie, who died when Kiddo was just two and a half. She has no memories of those experiences, so in fact this pet goldfish (of no great significance in the grand scheme of things) was about to be her first true personal experience with death.

And this is why I am sad. Not because I will particularly miss the fish. I'm not especially fond of fish as pets (and after all, Swimmy did try to kill me) or really any pet smaller than, say, a guinea pig (and Hubby has put his foot down that we will emphatically *not* ever be getting a guinea pig). I prefer pets with which one can interact, ideally a cat or dog. No, I'm sad not because of Swimmy's passing, but because of Kiddo's devastation. I know it's the circle of life and all that, and it is a lesson she needs to learn (and she did understand the concept of death in theory prior to today), but man, it is just so hard to have to witness her heartbreak and grief, even over something as inconsequential as a goldfish.

Kiddo opted for a ground burial over an aquatic burial (which is a good thing considering Swimmy's size - I feared a burial at sea would wind up with a plumber's bill for a backed up sewage line due to his rather impressive corpse) and so Hubby dutifully dug a hole in the front garden, right by the house. Kiddo wrote a small memorial (and the tear splotches on the paper broke my heart anew):

and we tucked it into the grave with Swimmy. Once Hubby had finished filling the grave back in, we placed a special stone on top of it, given to us by Kiddo's beloved kindergarten teacher -

because it seemed fitting. I told Kiddo that we can buy a plant to put there too, once the planting season starts. She likes the idea of Swimmy having flowers.

And there you have it. Swimmy, the ginormous, carnival fish who scared large dogs and Mommies alike. From humble beginnings

to more elaborate digs

and with a brief moment of international fame when Swimmy was a finalist in a photo competition and thus was featured on the Simon's Cat website:

Swimmy made my kid happy for four years of her childhood, and that means a lot, even if Swimmy was just a fish.

(I should note that Kiddo is already asking for another goldfish. I mean, what she really wants is a dog, but unless the Invisible Fence Fairy pays a visit to our back yard and makes it possible to be able to let a dog out to do his/her business without requiring a human to get dressed, leash the dog up and take it out for a walk every single time it has to go, a puppy isn't happening this year. So, we've talked about it and have agreed we'll get another fish soon...)

Mostly Wordless Wednesday: "Spring" (<-- those are great, big, honking air quotes there)

2011-03-23T20:02:00.000-04:00

These were my crocuses as of Monday morning, the first morning of Spring, when I stepped out onto the porch to see Kiddo off to the school bus:

These were my crocuses as of *this* morning, the third morning of Spring, when I stepped out onto the porch to see Kiddo off to the school bus:

And these were my crocuses as of 4pm today, and I am really wishing that my computer had a function to adequately depict great, big, honking air quotes to put around the word Spring:

It is of small comfort when our local meteorologists cheerfully remind us that the official "snow season" (<-- more GBHAQ there) doesn't end for our area until June 1st. Or that there was snow last year on Mother's Day. Small, cold, white comfort indeed.

I might not have had Bob Ross's painting abilities, but I did have his hairstyle...

2011-03-13T20:00:00.003-04:00

Those of you who are of increasingly advanced age, as I am, may remember the artist Bob Ross from the back-in-the-day PBS show The Joy of Painting.

Bob used to talk in an extremely mellow and calm voice, all about the "happy clouds" and "happy trees" and how you didn't make a mistake, just a "happy little accident" and in the span of one half hour TV show, he managed to produce a pretty darn decent painting, usually a landscape, and make it look easy to boot.

Well, back in the day when the Husband was just the Boyfriend and we were poor college student types, we decided that we too could paint like Bob Ross. Well, "we" in this scenario was actually the Boyfriend, as I've never held the faintest illusion that I could actually paint (or draw, or sketch, or pastel, or sculpt or do anything artistic that involves me using my hands and brain to reproduce something that another human being can readily identify) and this is an opinion with which many unfortunate art teachers from the early 70s through the late 80s would wholeheartedly concur. I am most pathetically Artistically Ungifted, y'all. But, I was swept up in his enthusiasm and agreed that this would be a fun weekend activity, so we went to the art supply store and picked up some Bob Ross painting kits.

After doing an exhaustive internet search (read: fifteen seconds with my good friend Google and then five minutes of making Hubby stop the gargantuan computer project he's been working on all weekend to turn around and look at link after link as I hollered at him "Hey, do you think this is it? This must be it, right? Oh, no, wait, isn't this the one? What about this one?"), I'm fairly certain that this was the kit we bought, or it was from the same series at least, although the canvas that came with ours was much smaller (again, poor college students - we didn't have the cash to spend on a deluxe canvas set) and of "landscape" instead of "portrait" orientation. (Well, that's the way we painted them, anyhow.) We went back to ~~Hubby~~ Boyfriend's apartment and set up our project. We worked on our canvases intently and diligently for the better part of the afternoon, finally getting to step 10 (signing our paintings with pride!) and left them to dry. I'd like to tell you that our painting experience was as mellow and fluffy as Bob and his hair, but it wasn't. Not even the magic of Bob Ross could turn me into a decent artist. What should have been a glorious, snowcapped Mystic Mountain, rising up above a lake and river into a happy-little-cloud-speckled sky looked more like a hunk of moldy cheese, smoldering on a shiny salad plate. Oh well.

Shortly after our Wild Weekend of Art, the Boyfriend upgraded to the Fiancé and shortly after that, we began living together. I began the practice of proudly displaying our masterpieces side by side in our first apartment and kept the tradition up for many residences over the years, until the paintings got packed away for a move and lost to the set of Boxes One Never Actually Unpacks, but Still Moves from House to House Where They Reside in a Forgotten Corner of the Basement. Periodically, I'd think "Hmmm, I wonder what happened to those Bob Ross paintings we did?" and even attempt a search of the BONAU,bSMfHtHWTRinFCotB but no matter how many of those dang Mystery Boxes I would paw through, it was always in vain.

Until last month, that is, when I was helping Kiddo gather materials for school project and opened up the trunk in which I have stored copies of just about every photo we've ever taken of her in the past 7.75 years. This trunk also contains several other odds and ends in the "memento" realm, like the lock of hair from Kiddo's first haircut, copies of her birth announcements (along with approximately 200 extra prints of the photo we sent out with her birth announcement - um, what the heck were we thinking?) and many miscellaneous photos of ours taken well before Kiddo arrived on the scene. And there, in the trunk, I found them. The Bob Ross paintings. Both of them, tucked away in the bottom of the trunk (which, in hindsight, seems a perfectly logical repository for them, and one I should've therefore thought of instead of one of the basement boxes), in all their technicolor glory.

I haven't hung them up again, though I just might. I think I'd want to frame them first, which is something we couldn't afford to do back when they were created and something I never got around to in subsequent years. We'll see if they make it up onto the wall or if they languish on top of the scanner where they've been since last month when I unearthed them. In the meantime, however, I proudly present the Internet Unveiling of the Smiths' Mystic Mountains:

Mr. Smith's (not too bad, really):

and mine:

I'd like to remind you that theoretically, these should have looked identical to each other as well as pretty darn close to Bob's original:

But hey, if I never did quite match Bob's painting talent, at least I did once rock his hairstyle:

(image borrowed from the Bob Ross Wikipedia entry)

(me, circa 1987)

Last but not least, I'd like to dedicate this post to my dear Aunt Becky, because she hears Bob Ross's voice in her head (along with Billy Mays, but that's neither here nor there) and because I once promised her that if I ever found the paintings, I'd share them with her. So, this one's for you, AB!

Heather vs. Potted Plant: Possibly too close to call.

2011-02-27T19:14:00.000-05:00

So, back in the day when I was barely a grown-up, having just entered my very earliest 30s and all, I was a contestant on a little game show known as Jeopardy!. I became a contestant on the show because some of my coworkers, who knew me very well and spent lots of time with me on a daily basis, thought I was smart and had a crazily good memory. Which was, and I don't mean to brag, pretty much the truth................ back then. So, these coworkers of mine signed me up to try out for the show, I went down to NYC, passed the contestant exam, did the audition, and a few months later, got the call and flew out to LA for the taping.

But, now, many years later, I'm closing in on 40 in a matter of months and it's all turning to mush. My memory, that is. Oh, the long-term memory still seems relatively intact, but short term? Not so much. Also more mushy than back a decade or so ago? No, not my midsection, though yeah, that'd be accurate too, but I'm referring to my actual brain itself. I mean, it never really seems to have recovered 100% from those days of early parenthood when having a young infant in the house = perpetual sleep deprivation.

Case in point: Lately, I seem to lose my car. A lot. Like, in a parking spot, of my own choosing, where I parked it.

Take, for example, earlier today. I had to stop in at the grocery store after church to pick up a few things. I was inside the store for 10 minutes, tops. I came back out into the parking lot and............................

Dude, where's my car???

I did that thing that I'd like to think we all do every once in a while. That "aimlessly wandering with a simultaneously hopeful, sheepish and frustrated look" thing. I scanned the lanes for my vehicle. Granted, colors on automobiles are hard to see this time of year in my neck of the woods - they all turn the same shade of "road salt grayish white" - but still, I should've been able to find it in under 10 minutes. I mean, the parking lot isn't *that* big.

Now, I have strategies I use to combat this problem. I tend to have "my" spot in any parking lot I visit regularly. I choose an area and try to find a spot within a couple of spaces of that landmark (a cart return or light pole, for example). I've thought about getting one of those antenna toppers -

Or I could go more "thematic" -

Or even patriotic, while I'm at it..........

But I fear that short of a flashing, neon sign directly above my vehicle

I'd still be wandering around the parking lot with that expression on my face for hours. Okay, minutes, but enough minutes to feel like a thoroughly doddering fool. (Oh, and the fact that I was looking for my minivan when I'd actually driven Hubby's car to the store? Double bonus points for my brain, right?!)

Now, fine, perhaps we all get a little Ashton Kutcher and lose our cars temporarily in the parking lot every now and again. Heck, Seinfeld did a whole episode about losing a car in a parking garage and it was hilarious. I have further proof that my mind is more scrambled egg than spring chicken.

The week before last, I was browsing through a recipe website because I thought I'd make something new and different. I was bored of my go-to weekday menus using ground beef, which I had on hand and needed to cook. So, I came across this recipe for "pizza casserole" and thought "Ooooh, *that* sounds good!" and decided I'd make it for dinner.

Hubby gets home while I'm in the midst of browning the ground beef and boiling the pasta and asks what I'm making. "Pizza casserole!" I reply, "It's a new recipe!" He picks up the page I'd printed out and skims over it, and then says "Um, isn't this just baked ziti?"

.........Yes, yes it was. Baked ziti, that I make on a fairly regular basis. The only difference was that I was making it, as the "new" recipe instructed, in a deep casserole dish instead of my lasagna pan.

D'oh!

Want another example of how mushy my old gray matter is these days? Hubby and I recently got brand-spankin'-new iPhones. (Cue chorus of angels singing alleluias.) We'd been eagerly awaiting their release on Verizon for ages and were giddy with glee when they arrived. Shortly after my iPhone hit my hot, little hand, I texted my dear friend J something to the effect of "OMG This is my first ever text message on my new iPhone! It's so cool! Woot! Is this working??" because J is generally pretty quick with responding to texts. Sure enough, mere moments later, my iPhone dinged (side note: why do all the text notification sounds suck, why are they so long and why can't you do a customized text sound like you can ringtone? I want answers, Steve Jobs, answers!!) and lo and behold, there was her text:

I just got something in Arabic from you. Is that you being funny? I don't get it. LOL.

OH NOES! I promptly freaked out and sent her another text, which I intended to read "Wait, Arabic? Nooooooo!" but which the iPhone's autocorrect changed to "Wait, Arabic? Nippon!" and then immediately after that, "Is *this* in English?" after which my phone rang and it was J calling to gently point out that she was yanking my chain and that I was not, in fact, inadvertently texting in Arabic.

Double d'oh! Also, well played, J. She said her entire family were all doubled over in laughter because they were sure I'd realize that she was kidding. Only, I hadn't realized. Honestly, the thought never occurred to me.

In conclusion, if this is what life is going to be like as I head into middle age, I'd better get one of those Life Alert buzzer necklaces asap, because it can't be that much longer before I've fallen and I can't get up..............

In the meantime, you can now watch my episode of Jeopardy! on YouTube so you can get the reference I made to being smarter than a potted plant in the title up there. You see, Alex Trebek himself questioned which would be smarter, me or the plant. In my defense, I don't think my multivitamins have the same oomph as a good dose of Miracle Gro.

Part one of my episode is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFWneTg-VkI

and part two is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt2i7TCEeoU

Just please, pretend you're laughing with me and not at me, okay?

Call me Grace

2011-01-22T13:10:00.000-05:00

Remember how I posted recently about being nominated for a Major Award - an SPD Blogger Award in the Humorous Blog category? (If not, welcome to my world, and I'm glad to have company that probably, like me, gets in the car and drives directly to the grocery store for three things you need and then, upon entering the store, forgets at least two of those things. And yet, can still sing *every last word* of any number of pop songs from the 80s.... Also, check out the post preceding this one, 'cause that's the one I'm talking about.)

Well, I have tried to be, as Jane Lynch put it while accepting her own Major Award (that one being a mere Golden Globe, since she's not an SPD Blogger as far as I know), falsely humble, but as the clock winds down to the end of the voting period and I see my fellow nominees campaigning on Twitter and the like for their own blogs, I find myself reverting to true form.

That form being Grace. Of Will & Grace fame. Yes, I admit it. I have a teeny-tiny bit of a competitive streak in me. (It is also true that I once aspired to have a huge head of red, curly hair a la Debra Messing in W&G or, more accurately, a la Julia Roberts circa Mystic Pizza. But that is neither here nor there, as my painful, Wolverine Van Beethoven recent history and present "the heck with it, I give up"ish Mom 'do can attest.) (Also, that "teeny-tiny" qualifier is the same as saying I have a "teeny-tiny" crush on George Clooney and/or Hugh Jackman, or that I have a "teeny-tiny" love of popcorn and naps. And as longtime readers may recall, I once made a video of myself singing an ode to George in order to win a contest for an autographed picture of the man. Which, by the way, I won.)

I have always been competitive. It's not that I'm not a good loser, because I can be gracious in defeat. Really. I just hate to lose. Ever since I was a small child, I relished the opportunity to beat anyone, anytime, at any game. It started out with Candyland, Chutes & Ladders and my favorite - Missing Match-Ups. I particularly adored Missing Match-Ups. It was a "Memory" style game, with several different combinations available of several different boards. I, with the freakishly good memory powers of my youth, memorized all the possible combos of each board and became unbeatable. My parents (and any other grown-up unfortunate enough to cross my path or face me over a game board) quickly gave up the pretense of "letting the kid win" and would play all-out in an attempt to keep the game close. Didn't usually happen. (In fact, I was often admonished by my parents to let my younger siblings win sometimes, because I was that competitive. Didn't matter that my competition was still in Pampers, though I preferred to beat grown-ups over a drooling toddler....) By the age of 5, I had graduated from the kiddie games and was playing cribbage against my Dad. It had been one of his favorite games and he was happy to teach it to me. At first, anyhow. MWAH HA HA HA HA. Once I began playing crossword games like Scrabble, it was Good night, Irene for the vast majority of my opponents. Trivial Pursuit? Pictionary? Taboo? Scattergories? I killed in 'em. Games that revolved around words, like Balderdash? Oh yeah, right up my alley. When computers became commonplace in the home and the first, majorly pixelated Jeopardy* home game became available, I'd disappear for hours on Christmas day, parked at the PC up in my dad's office and waiting for new ~~victims~~ - erm, opponents - to take on. At work, we started a lunchtime Scrabble thing, where we'd play a round of 9-tile "speed" Scrabble (4 players using 9 tiles each can knock a game out pretty quickly - plenty of time to finish a game in one lunch break). For over a decade now, my own beloved Hubby refuses to play Scrabble with me except on my birthday, because I always win.

So, yeah, I'm competitive. And, as I feel the end of this Awards voting period drawing to a close, I'm starting to twitch. To panic. I didn't want to be one of those bloggers who begs and pleads for votes, really I didn't. But, now I am. Begging and pleading. Pretty, pretty, pretty please, wontcha hop on over and cast a vote or two (really, you can vote twice according to the rules - I like to win but I don't like to cheat) for me? Please?

Pretty please?

Okay, I'll stop begging now....

(That one's a vintage Kiddo shot)

So, for the last time, please click the conveeeeenient link below and vote for me!

I might even be convinced, should I win, to repost my Clooney song video for your entertainment.....

* PS - I once, back in the early '00s, appeared on the actual TV show.... My coworkers, they of the "we lose at Scrabble to Heather on a daily basis" variety, signed me up to try out for the show.

Sure, it really is an honor just to be nominated, et cetera and so forth...

2011-01-16T17:48:00.000-05:00

So, the ever-fantabulous Hartley, amazing author and tireless champion of parents with SPD/ASD/special needs kiddos, has a little awards shindig going on over at her blog. Nominations have been going on for the past few days, and I just received the news that my blog has been nominated for an SPD Blogger Award!! In the category for "Humorous Blog" no less! (I've checked out the competition and it is fierce, *gulp*!)

This is literally the first good thing to happen to me this year so far. Yes, I know we're not even 3 weeks into 2011 but so far? It has bitten the big one. We're in the midst of another major battle with the school district regarding Kiddo's current IEP and have further heard that it is 99.9999999999999% sure that Kiddo will not be granted an aide for next year (or ever again after this year) when her CSE meeting rolls around in March. Kiddo has now been examined by a pediatric pulmonologist, who confirmed what her pediatrician has been suspecting for several months now - Kiddo has asthma, and with the relatively "late" onset of symptoms, it is likely that she will have asthma for the rest of her life (as opposed to kids who have it as toddlers and then outgrow it). Have you ever seen a major sensory seeker on not one but two asthma meds simultaneously? Holy bouncing off the walls, Batman! We're working out an appropriate med regime that controls the inflammation with the least amount of disruption to her life, but the working out phase involves dealing with issues like difficulty falling asleep/restless sleep and other fun stuff like that. (If you think a major sensory seeker hopped up on two stimulant asthma meds is a scary enough sight, add to that a lack of adequate rest and we have a new horror movie franchise in the making.) On top of that, Kiddo has just been more challenging than usual behaviorally. I won't go into details, but she was Majorly Grounded for almost a week, which effectively killed our wedding anniversary date night out plans (and on top of that, it's never fun to have to be the Grounding Enforcer/Prison Warden anyhow). Last but not least, she's been sick for more days this January than not, so we're stuck inside with playdates and birthday parties falling by the wayside thanks to those evil, evil germies. (Side note: someone told me that the odd years are always more challenging than the even years. Six was pretty dang delightful around here, especially in light of how seven has been. I'm willing to believe that at this point, especially if it gives us a light at the end of a tunnel that will only go another 5 months... Anyone else ever hear that one?)

So, like I said, 2011? Not the best year so far. (Isn't this the big Mayan Apocalypse year? Are all these issues actually harbingers of the impending doom - and if so, where the heck are Dean and Sam and Castiel when I need them? Will I start dreaming of Phyllis Diller again? Did I mention that coming up in December, I turn the big 4-0? Isn't that bad enough for one year in and of itself?)

But... then I received the news from Hartley that I've been nominated for an SPD Blogger Award - and it's a MAJOR AWARD, you know. I'm hoping the prize looks something like this:

And yes, it's just an honor just to be nominated, especially since I didn't nominate myself - someone out there likes me! But then again, if you really do like me, please drop by the voting page starting tomorrow at 6am and help me stuff the ballot box, mmmmkay? I mean, George Clooney and Hugh Jackman have presented Oscars and Golden Globes before, so what if it's one of them presenting the SPD Blogger Awards? Do you want to be the one to make me miss out on that? Let's reverse the trend of craptastictude for 2011 by landing me a Major Award!

I promise I'll mention you in my acceptance speech - maybe even give you a shout-out from the red carpet when Ryan Seacrest stops me to find out who I'm wearing..... "Microfleece yoga pants from Target, Ryan, of course! Mind the sparks, now..."

Well, that was a harrowing start to the new year

2011-01-02T19:13:00.000-05:00

Only two days into 2011 and I almost didn't make it. I almost went down in flames - and I'm not talking figuratively, here, either - earlier this afternoon.

It all started when I decided to make a quick run to the grocery store. While I was really quite content to stay all cozy on the couch in my comfy clothes, tucked under a blanket with the copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that I'd been waiting months and months for on the hold list at the library, but it seemed that no matter how powerful my lounging magic was, it wasn't powerful enough to conjure up a bag of tortilla chips, and tortilla chips, in case you didn't know, are a key ingredient to Sunday Night Nachos. I'm fairly certain that had I attempted to make our Sunday Night Nachos out of the other snack food we had on hand - to wit, organic Cheez Doodles or sourdough pretzel nuggets - things wouldn't have gone well. So, despite the almost irresistible draw of stay here and read a while longer that was being exerted upon me by the general conditions of the couch in the family room, I dragged myself away from the world of sloth and out into the snow to get some more Tostitos.

Just because I was going out in public didn't mean I'd have to, you know, get dressed for it or anything though, I reasoned to myself. I mean, I did have a bra on (first time in '11 - woot) and was fully clothed, but I saw no reason to put on a pair of jeans when I was so cozily clad in a pair of these:

(Those, by the way, are not my legs, feet or abdomen. Have I mentioned Sunday Night Nachos? I don't think the model above has ever eaten Any Night Nachos. Nor would I pair microfleece pants with bare feet in kicky ballet flats. I don't own kicky ballet flats. Kicky ballet flats make Heather's Hobbity Hooves look particularly ginormous.)

Anyhow, I threw on a fleece jacket, some wool socks and clogs and off I went. I pulled on a pair of fleece gloves in the car because DANG it is cold again here in western NY. What I'm trying to say here is, I was Primed for Major Static Happenings, had I paused to think about it for just a second.

This wasn't my first time wearing these delightfully comfy, microfleece yoga pants out in public, by the way. Nope, I wore them all the way back from NJ to NY last weekend. They've traveled, is what I'm saying. Traveled with nary a hint of the horror that was to come my way as I trudged through the parking lot and into the store.

I noticed it first as I was briskly striding towards the entrance. My pant legs felt a bit... snug. I reached down and shook them out and kept going. After all, one of the best features to a pair of yoga pants is their roominess. Their embodiment of the exact antonymy of skintight.

By the time I'd gotten a cart and gone into the store proper, I realized that this was not just a momentary trouble. My legs were wrapped in what appeared to be microfleece leggings, not yoga pants. By the time I'd worked my way through the produce aisle and over to chips, my lower half was snap, crackle and popping as though my skin were made of Rice Krispies. Egads. I caught another shopper's gaze traveling up and down me as she approached me near the crackers. I was almost afraid to look down at myself, so I met her gaze with a jaunty "and???" look in response and kept on going. Once safely past her Judgy McJudgerson glare, I risked a glance downward. What had been comfy, microfleece yoga pants when I put them on at home were now Stage Five Clingers of highwater proportions. I'm talking microfleece capris here, y'all. It was not flattering. (I'm not sure if I was drawing more ireful looks for the noise of the static electricity or the sight of my shrinkwrapped-in-microfleece legs and rear. I'm pretty sure I was generating enough sparks to have a halo-effect of glow around me, though.)

There wasn't much I could do, besides shoplift a can of Static Guard from the shelves and make a break for the bathroom, but I was a bit worried that if I moved any more quickly, I'd actually burst into flames. By this point, my hands were getting shocked every time I moved them the slightest bit on the cart handle. I sounded as though I was hiding a popcorn popper in my undies. I quite probably could've powered my neighborhood, if not the whole town, with the amount of electricity I was generating with each and every step.

Finally, I made it to the checkout, through the checkout and back outside. Hoping that the falling snow would dampen the static, I walked as slowly as I dared back to the car. I stopped a few times to tug the bottoms of my pantlegs down somewhere closer to my ankles (in retrospect, not having shaved probably didn't help matters - the stubble on my legs was standing straight up and likely contributing to the statickyness of it all). I was so relieved to finally reach the safety of my vehicle where I could zap myself home in peace.

Can you imagine the headlines? Stay at home mom dies in New Year's yoga pants conflagration.... Needless to say, I'm not wearing those pants, comfy as they may be, out in public again unless I douse them liberally with Static Guard first.

And how was your opening weekend of 2011? Equally exciting but less combustible, I hope!

May the Force be with you. And also, bacon.

2010-12-24T15:16:00.000-05:00

Hubby got a Christmas present last weekend that he used for the first time when making breakfast this morning.

Star Wars pancake molds.

This led to many bad Yoda impressions during breakfast. "Eat my face, you will!" "No more ears I have!" "Pass the syrup, please you will?"

There was a tiny bit of batter left over at the end, so Hubby made one regular, round pancake. Oh wait, I mean, "the Death Star" - it's all in the marketing, of course.

It was a delightful Christmas Eve Day breakfast. Especially the bacon - erm, "light sabers" (as the kid called them). Of course bacon doesn't need the Force to be delicious......

How to age with dignity...

2010-12-21T12:13:00.002-05:00

I believe that the older one gets, the more dignified one must be. I mean, clearly one should aspire to be more like this:

than this (You really need to only watch the first 24 seconds of the following clip to get what I'm talking about...):

Now as it just so happens, we are currently wrapping up Heather's Birth~~day~~week*. Yes, last Tuesday, I officially entered the End of My Late Thirties by turning 39. Clearly, I needed to muster up all the dignity I could, now that my age has inexorably advanced another year. Fortunately, my family was ready and willing to pitch in and aid me in my quest to age with dignity.

First, I received a lovely, talking/musical birthday card specially selected for me by my darling daughter.......

(It talks - in Wookiee - and then plays the Star Wars theme. Très raffiné, non?)

Then, when opening my birthday present from Kiddo and Hubby with suitable decorum, I sliced a small chunk out of my thumb on the corner of the box. (Us elderly folk have thinner skin, you know. We're quite delicate. It wasn't that I was shrieking with glee as I tore into the packaging of my present, I swear. That would not have been dignified in the least.) Kiddo came to my rescue by providing this first aid:

(Confession: The above photo was a Dramatic Reenactment, as I've since recovered from my injury and am no longer in need of a stylish and dignified bandage for my thumb.)

I'm fairly certain I saw a similar bandage on the Queen of England's thumb in a photo a few months back...

Oh, and the present I got for my birthday? Rock Band 3 - with keytar.

(Hubby, while taking the above picture: "You're not really going to take a picture to post on the internet of you in your jammies, are you?" Me: "Of course I am!" Cinéma vérité - doesn't get any more dignified than that! Okay, maybe I should've opted for some soft focus vaseline-on-the-lens.... Also? That was my attempt to look both dignified and rock-n-roll! simultaneously.)

Now, I've been playing the piano since I was four years old. Four years old. That means that as of last Tuesday, when I hit my late thirties (okay, fine, my late-late thirties), I've been playing the piano for thirty-five years. I can read music. I can sightread music, even. I was sure I'd have the keytar locked down, is what I'm saying. Turns out? Not so much. I was only slightly more accurate playing the keytar parts than my cat would be. (Speaking of the cat........

.....she enjoys Cheesy Eddie's carrot birthday cake with cream cheese frosting as much as the rest of the family. But I digress...)

So, I tried to maintain my dignity whilst playing my new Rock Band 3 keytar, but I may have slipped with a colorful phrase or twelve while failing repeatedly to play the dang notes. That is neither here nor there, however.

For dinner, I chose to go to a local Japanese restaurant for some teppanyaki deliciousness.

True, the restaurant now occupies a building that was formerly a Hooters, then a Cheerleaders USA establishment, but it has been completely redone and reeks of classiness and elegance. They don't even serve any drinks inside giant Buddha statues, for Pete's sake. Being a teppanyaki style restaurant, the chef comes out and cooks the food right in front of you. This enables the patrons to take part in the preparation of the meal, mainly by means of catching rice balls in their mouths which are flung at them by the chef.

Now some people

may not look terribly dignified while doing this...

(see how Hubby is gloating? He was the only one at our table to succeed in actually catching the rice ball, rather than getting plonked in the face with a rice ball.)

Whereas I?

Dignified all the way, baby. Jackie O couldn't have done it better.

Once we got home from our dinner (we were the only diners in the teppanyaki section, what with the major snow event occurring outside ((that I preferred to think of as "Mother Nature throwing confetti in honor of my big day")) and all), Hubby and Kiddo presented me with my Cheesy Eddie's carrot birthday cake, politely lit with just 4 candles instead of ablaze with 39. (We more senior types can be lacking in proper lung capacity to blow out such a blaze, after all.)

This is how you blow out birthday candles with dignity:

I hope that you have learned a little something about growing old with grace and aging with dignity. You're welcome.

* I long ago decided that an event as momentous as my birthday couldn't truly be contained in just one day. Hence, Heather's BirthWEEK. I celebrate it as often and heartily as possible. In the past seven days, I have had three birthday lunches, one birthday brunch, one birthday coffee and two birthday dinners (well, one was a combo birthday-Christmas dinner, but such is the lot of the mid-late December baby). Also, my Facebook wall was flooded with birthday wishes, which I adored receiving. Seriously, I felt all Sally Field - "You like me! Right now, you like me!" It just added to the awesomeness of my day. Then even more messages came in over the course of the rest of my birthweek, which I'd gladly stretch out right up until Christmas, but remaining dignified really doesn't permit me to do. Until next year... My sincerest, most heartfelt thanks to all my family and friends who helped me celebrate this year. You're all fantabulous!!!

The Awesome List

2010-12-11T01:07:00.000-05:00

December is the time of year when folks compile Top Ten lists and Years in Review and Most Fascinating People and the like. Well, I have decided to do my very own such compilation, entitled The Awesome List. I am breaking it down into subcategories, because it's my blog and that's how I want to do it. Here goes......

People who are Awesome:

~ My friend J. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to J that I love December for its mail. Not just because December brings my birthday around which means the occasional birthday card, but mostly for the holiday card mail. I love holiday cards. Photos, letters, the whole nine yards. LOVE them. I do a happy dance at the mailbox when I open it to find those sorts of envelopes therein. (Seriously, pop by my street around 5pm any given day of the week that there's postal service and you will see me out there at the curb, shaking my groove thang. Assuming, that is, that said groove thang isn't frozen due to our lovely weather - record snowfall, anyone? - in which case the groove thang doesn't get shaken until it is ensconced, once again, indoors, in which case you'll have to peek through the front windows.) Well, J came up with a Most Awesome Plan, unbeknownst to me at the time. She filed away this little tidbit of info and when December 1st rolled around, a Christmas card showed up in the mail from J and her family. It was one of the first cards we received this year, in fact. Then, December 2nd brought another card from her. And the 3rd, and the 4th. A cryptic note on my Facebook wall on Sunday the 5th led me to trek out through the snow to the mailbox where indeed, another card from her was waiting. She's that good - able to get mail delivered even on the day that the Post Office doesn't do it! And so it has continued each day of December. Each card comes with a note in rhyme inside, no less - variations on the Twelve Days of Christmas. It. Is. AWESOME and so is she!

~ I am fortunate enough to regularly rub internet elbows with some very classy blogging type dames. Two in particular that I'd like to bring to your attention at the moment are Margaret from Nanny Goats in Panties and Anna from Life Just Keeps Getting Weirder. The reason I'd like to bring these fantabulous broads to your attention isn't because they're sidesplittingly hilarious (which they are) or because they're foxy as all get out (which, obviously - have you seen Anna's moustache?) but because these two are giving away animals on their blogs right now. For real - they've each partnered with Oxfam America to give away livestock (in Margaret's case, a goat, naturally, and in Anna's case, a sheep) to people who need it most. Since I'm not nearly as cool, hilarious or foxy as Margaret or Anna, I'm not doing any such giveaway myself here on my little corner o' the blogosphere, but please, please, please stop by their blogs and participate in their giveaways (linked above) and support an organization as awesome as Oxfam America. Charitable giving, especially of the sheep or goat sort, is AWESOME.

~ Another blogopshere goddess I adore is Aunt Becky of Mommy Wants Vodka fame. The reason I am listing Aunt Becky now isn't for her full-of-the-awesome MWV blog, but for another blog she founded and runs that is super-duper-full-of-the-awesome. This blog is called Band Back Together, and in Aunt Becky's words,

"Sometimes, you’re alone in the dark. You stumble around, breaking things, smashing your legs and arms into furniture and walls and crying because just minutes before you could see perfectly dammit! But there you are, alone in the dark.

Soon, though, your eyes adjust, and you begin to see vague outlines. Shapes emerge in the darkness, looming up around you. Everything is closing in around you. The walls have teeth. The darkness is omnipresent and it is terrifying.

Just then, as you feel the darkness overtaking you, a light is flipped on and you are bathed in it. You can feel the light all around you and it is warm and it is good. Your skin warms as you feel the darkness slipping away, inch by inch. Yes, there will always be a piece of that darkness inside you. You cannot go through hell without absorbing some darkness.

But the light will sustain you and carry you through."

Band Back Together is a place to be that light, give that light, soak up that light. It is open for anyone to share their story or to lend an ear, shoulder or words of support to someone else. I strongly urge you to check it out, because it is AWESOME.

Food that is Awesome:

~ December is the time of year when Perry's Ice Cream puts out their limited edition flavor, Peppermint Stick. Peppermint Stick ice cream, drizzled with a generous amount of chocolate syrup, is heaven in a bowl. I've tried other peppermint ice creams and none can compare to Perry's. I even have been known to pay full price for a carton of Perry's Peppermint Stick, and full price Perry's is ridonkulously expensive. That is how awesome it is. (And the fact that, per their website, Perry's Ice Cream is supporting The Make-A-Wish® Season of Wishes™ campaign by donating a portion of the proceeds from each package sold of popular Limited Edition Peppermint Stick ice cream to fund a child’s wish just makes it that much more awesome and makes paying the ridonkulously pricey price a little easier to swallow. Especially when drizzled with a generous amount of chocolate sauce....)

~ A month or two ago, a Boy Scout rang my doorbell with his popcorn sales materials in hand. Now, I am a fool for popcorn and a sucker for kids, so I said I'd buy something and scanned the offerings. Well, my eyebrows kept creeping higher and higher up my forehead as I perused the items for sale - I am used to the Girl Scout cookies at a (relatively) measly $3.50 a box, and MAN everything on the Boy Scouts' sheet was a LOT pricier! I finally found the cheapest thing on there, ordered it and forked over the $10. (Hey, don't judge - that'd be almost THREE boxes of Thin Mints, y'all.) I then found myself the proud owner of one three pound bag of popcorn kernels. I usually spend a dollar and change for a bag o' kernels. This was more than three times that.

Now, I love popcorn. I mean, love popcorn. Popcorn is to snacks what December is to months for getting mail. I bust out my air popper and make up a nice salty, buttery batch of freshly popped corn deliciousness several times a week. So, I knew I'd use this popcorn eventually. I will admit, though, that I was bitter. Resentful of this popcorn. "Gourmet popcorn?" I sneered to myself, the bag and to Hubby. "How flipping gourmet can a bunch of corn kernels be, for Pete's sake?" I refused to open up the new bag until I'd used up the bag I'd already had, and then the day came. Grudgingly, I got the bag out of the cabinet and opened it up, pouring the kernels into my popper.

I didn't want it to be good. I wanted to be able to scoff at and mock the overpriced popcorn, even if it meant calling myself out for the sucker that I was for buying it in the first place. I eyeballed my popper skeptically as it began to heat the kernels up. They began to rise up through the chamber of the popper and tumble fragrantly out into the bowl. They looked..... fluffy. Large. Fancy. Still dubious, I buttered and salted the bowl as usual and took a bite.

It. Was. AWESOME. Dagnabit.

Hubby asked me, a few days and bowls later, whether the fancy popcorn was in fact all that and a bag of chips (or whatever the hip-n-groovy youngsters are saying instead these days. The whippersnappers! Also: Hubby did not actually use the phrase all that and a bag of chips. That is merely my paraphrasing of his question. Hubby would not want me putting such, ahem, hip-n-groovy words in his mouth). I had to confess that YES, in fact this was the BEST popcorn I'd ever popped.

You can, therefore, imagine my great chagrin a few weeks later, when I wandered upstairs on a Saturday afternoon to take a little snooze while Hubby and Kiddo curled up on the couch to watch one of the Star Wars movies. (Yes, Hubby has created a pint sized Star Wars buff in his own image - Kiddo loves Star Wars. LOVES loves Star Wars. Kiddo wants to be addressed only as Teebo the Ewok now. The other day, she unironically quoted Yoda to me at the breakfast table. But I digress...) Well, I woke up a few hours later and came back downstairs to see the remnants of a popcorn snack in the sink. Hubby passed through the kitchen moments later and broke the news: he and Kiddo had finished off the Boy Scout Popcorn. That? SO NOT AWESOME. I was sad and resentful of my lot, stuck as I was now with the pitiful, lame, unfluffy, small, unfancy popcorn. I figured I'd reacclimate eventually to my usual popcorn, but I didn't, not for weeks now.

Fortunately, Kiddo's grandmother had the same exact situation at her house, as it turns out. A neighborhood Boy Scout rang her bell and she, being an equal sucker for kids, bought the cheapest thing she could find on his sheet..... the popcorn kernels! Better yet, Kiddo's grandparents don't eat popcorn! They don't even own a popper! So it was with great glee that I received their 3lb bag of awesome popcorn from them the other day and carried it home singing hosannas in four part harmony (no mean feat when there's just one of me, but I was that happy). I was briefly tempted to parcel out the popcorn, to make it last, but I just can't do it. No, I will enjoy bowlful after bowlful and then one day, a howl of misery shall ring out across the frozen, snowy tundra that is western, upstate New York for I will have finished off this second 3lb bag, too.

~ Cheesy Eddie's Carrot Cake. Amazing morsels of delicious awesomeness that I hope to be cramming down my rapidly aging gullet come Tuesday, after blowing out enough candles to be visible from outer space.

Media Things That Are Awesome:

(I will confess in this section that I am in fact a day or three late and at least a dollar fifty short when it comes to the Latest and Greatest happenings on Ye Olde Interwebz. Bear with me on that point, mmmkay?)

~ This one is in honor of my friend Andy, aka The Creative Junkie. Andy shares a dream with me, you see. No, not the Anderson Cooper covered in Nutella dream, that's hers alone as (a) I don't think Anderson plays for the correct team for this scenario and (b) I'm not really a Nutella fan. No, she shares the dream with me of some day being involved in a flash mob. She's blogged about it more than once, most recently right here.

Well, my dear Andy, this is for you: Improv Everywhere. Check out their missions - the musical in the grocery store or at the mall food court. The high fiving on the subway. The dude who got "lost" at the Knicks game. The Ghostbusters reenactment at the NY Public Library. I have never wanted to live in NYC more than I do now, so that I could be an Agent in one of their missions. A flash mob of one singing in the bulk foods aisle of Wegmans just doesn't have the same......... cachet. Panache. Verve. Sense.

~ Speaking of flash mobs, didja see the one Mitchell participated in on Modern Family? Because Modern Family is absolutely chock-full of AWESOME. It is as hilarious as it is full of heart. If you haven't watched Modern Family, or even if you have, take yourself over here to Hulu and watch the awesomeness. Just make sure you have a comfy chair because you won't want to get up until you've watched every last minute of every episode!

~ Since we can't spend our entire lives with our eyes glued to a screen, I'm also calling "AWESOME" on Pandora radio, specifically the holiday stations. I made my own holiday station by plugging in my favorite artists and have thus been spared having to hear the utter dreck known as The Christmas Shoes or the insidious earworm of Feliz Navidad ever again. Well, at least when my iPod is in range of the wifi. It has made for a very happy aural holiday season this year.

Well, that concludes The Awesome List right now. If I think of any more Things that are Awesome, I may do a Part Deux. In the meantime, anyone care to chime in with something Awesome from your world? How about holiday cards - love 'em, hate 'em, never send 'em, always send 'em? Ever seen a flash mob live? Ever been in one?

Gobble, gobble!

2010-11-25T12:25:00.002-05:00

(Above is this year's Kiddo and the Turkey photo. You can check out previous years' editions here.)

We were supposed to have my sister, brother-in-law and nephews with us for Thanksgiving this year. They were supposed to come up last year, too, but illness prevented them from making the trip (it was the dreaded swine flu, which had felled our house over Halloween). This year, my sister and I kept careful watch on the kids, and no one was appearing germy, so we thought we were good to go. A decently sized turkey and inordinate amounts of potatoes and broccoli were purchased and stored. Fixings for pies were gathered. The guest bed was unearthed from beneath the piles of clothes I'd been sorting upon it, beds were made up, the house was cleaned. On the other end, my sister was packing up clothes and dog gear, making sandwiches and loading the cooler.

You know where this is going, right? Yep. Late Tuesday afternoon, less than 18 hours before they were planning to leave, one of my nephews got sick. Not just a little sick, either, but majorly sick. Once again, the Thanksgiving trip had to be canceled. Many tears were shed by the cousins here and in Jersey, and much disappointment and sadness felt by the grown-ups, too, but what can you do? A sick kid is a sick kid and we all know you can't travel 6-8 hours with a really sick kid. At least we will see them in a month at Christmas...

In a "making lemons out of lemonade" - or, more accurately, a "uh-oh, how are we going to eat a 16 pound bird plus four pounds of potatoes, stuffing and broccoli apiece" moment - I called up some friends who were neither traveling or cooking Thanksgiving this year and invited them to join us. Happily, they agreed to spend their holiday with us here at Chez Smith, so I will not need to see if it is, in fact, physically possible to burst the drawstring on my yoga pants by sheer carbohydrate ingestion. (Oh, and did I mention the pies? I made two - apple and pecan. Even did the apple pie's crust from scratch. Go me!)

So, we will have a table full of friends and food in just a few short hours. Wherever and however you plan to spend the day, I hope it is likewise full of family, friends, food and fun. Also, if you have a pair of Thanksgiving pants, I am majorly jealous.

Gobble, gobble!

A truly remarkable woman

2010-11-10T20:07:00.000-05:00

Earlier this evening, a dear friend of mine, with whom I worked years ago, sent me a link to a newspaper article about a woman who had just passed away. She sent me this link because we knew this woman back when we worked together at Syracuse University. This woman, Kathy Urschel, was a graduate student at SU then, and worked in our office for a while as a graduate assistant. At the time (this was the early 90s), Kathy and I became friends. We'd have lunch together when schedules permitted and we'd certainly chat (I've always been a talker - and so was Kathy!) a lot whenever she was in the office as well. She was a hoot, funny and quick-witted and had a keen sense of observation that could leave me rolling in laughter in an instant.

Eventually, I left Syracuse, got married, moved around and lost touch with Kathy somewhere along the way. I still thought of her from time to time over the past 16 years, and at one point (still in the early days of the internet and email) exchanged letters with her to reconnect and catch up. Even with the passing of time since we last were in touch, I was greatly, greatly saddened to read this beautifully written article about my former friend when it arrived in my inbox tonight. You see, Kathy Urschel was, simply put, one of the most amazing people I've ever known. I found the following video clip that sums up her story, in her own words, better than I ever could:

The last time I saw Kathy was the summer before my wedding. We had lunch together, picking up sandwiches from the place next door to my office and eating them on a bench on SU's main quad. We basked in the sunshine of that midsummer day. We talked about wedding plans and she asked me all about my newly chosen wedding dress. It was the week before I was leaving Syracuse, and we promised each other we'd keep in touch. Tonight, I'm left wishing I had taken the time to track her down and catch up again, now that it is too late. Just a few months ago, I was telling my daughter about her and the thought crossed my mind to Google her and try to track her down. I added it to my mental list of things to do and never got around to it. Please, if you have a few minutes, read about Kathy's life and accomplishments. She was such a remarkable human being, and I'm proud to say that she once was my friend.

Rest in peace, Kath.

A little spy FYI

2010-11-08T21:48:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, I came across the following piece of paper, tucked amongst a pile of books and magazines on the family room coffee table:

Now you know that if you happen upon a person wearing funny glasses, fake paper mustaches and old costumes, they just might be a spy in disguise.

You're welcome.

My haunted apartment

2010-10-30T20:30:00.004-04:00

I moved into my first apartment back when I was in college. It was the summer after my sophomore year, and a really good friend of mine and I decided we'd had enough of the dorms and found an apartment together near campus for the following year. It was the first apartment for both of us, and I will admit I felt quite grown-up, signing a lease and paying rent and all. (I was all of 19 at the time.) We'd looked at several apartments, but with our budgetary constraints, most of the nice ones were well out of our reach. We settled on a two bedroom, one bath on the outskirts of what was considered the "University" neighborhood - more grad students than undergrads were found living that far away. The neighborhood was, how shall I put it? Bohemian. Artsy. Sketchy. The building was right off a street that was known for its shops, bars and theaters - all of the decidedly alternative variety. In short, had my parents driven up from Jersey to check out our proposed abode before we signed the lease, I don't think I would've signed the lease. I probably would've found myself living in a dorm for another year.

That's not to say that the apartment was a total dive, mind you. At least, I've seen worse. It was on the second floor of a three story building - an actual apartment building, not a converted house, as so many of the student rentals were in that town. The apartment's best feature was its HUGE living room with large windows and an interesting (albeit dingy with age) black-and-white tiled floor. We envisioned turning the apartment into a 20s Art Deco style showplace, though that didn't get any farther than buying some black and white sheets with which to cover the hideous couches and black and white plates and mugs for the kitchen.

Annnnnyhow, it was not a bad place, despite the .........colorful neighborhood, and we happily moved in and went about our lives. Thanks to Google Maps and my ridiculously good longterm memory, I can show you a picture of the building:

Now, this was an older building (as evidenced by the picture above). Having grown up in a very old farmhouse (as in: 1740s vintage), I was used to the quirks an old building can have. You know, the occasional creak or squeak or dripping faucet... None of that sort of thing fazed me in the least. After a few years of living with roommates, I was used to those sorts of quirks, as well - a light left on here, a door left ajar there, things taken out and not put back exactly where they had been before. No big whoop. So, a few weeks into the semester, my roommate and I attended a party at a home occupied by a bunch of grad students (friends of her boyfriend's) that was in the same neighborhood. In the course of chatting with some of these people, it came up that we lived just up the road. Someone asked us where, specifically, and when we told him, he said to us "Oh, the haunted building on the corner?"

Haunted building? Did he just say haunted building?

Yep, that's what he said. We tried to inquire further, but the noise level and his alcohol level made getting solid details mostly impossible. He and the group of people we were standing with all nodded vigorously in agreement that our building was most definitely said to be haunted, that much was clear. My roommate went off in search of her boyfriend at that point, and it wasn't until later when he was walking us home that I realized how upset she was over the news. I shrugged it off for the most part, chalking it up to a local urban legend at best.

Except all of a sudden, those creaks and squeaks and things that went bump in the night seemed a bit more.....ominous. The faucet that would start running in the bathroom or kitchen sinks wasn't as easily dismissed as "Oh, she must've left the water running." Ditto for the lights that we could've sworn we turned off at night before retiring to our respective bedrooms and then find on the next day. Neither of us were prone to sleepwalking, much less sleep-dishwashing or sleep-toothbrushing, so finding the tap running or a light on in the morning began becoming more and more disconcerting.

Then, it happened. I was home at the apartment alone one evening, my roommate having gone over to her boyfriend's place for dinner. Around 10pm, she called me to say that she was staying over there, so I could put the chain on the door, which I went and did as soon as I got off the phone. I decided to go to bed shortly thereafter, checking the lock and chain on the door, making sure all lights and taps and everything were off, and closing my bedroom door behind me.

Now, I am a sound sleeper. One might say I sleep like the dead, even. But that night, something woke me up around 3 am. I sat up in bed, trying to figure out what it had been. (Our upstairs neighbors favored loud, heavy metal music and seemed to have footwear solely composed of cement blocks.) As I came fully awake, I realized I could hear noise coming from the living room. I got up, turned on my bedroom light, opened the door and found the stereo was on. The stereo that I had not been listening to before going to bed - I'd had the TV on - was on and set to the radio (I'd been listening to a cassette earlier in the day, so the knob had not been set to "tuner" when I'd shut it off hours before.)

I chose not to think about how and why it was on and instead rushed across the room and shut it off, then ran back into my bedroom, shutting the door behind me, and got back in bed. Eventually, I fell asleep again. When I next woke up, it was a little after 7 in the morning. I got up, opened my door and............. the radio was on again. On and turned to a station that played jazz way down at the other end of the dial, far from any of the rock stations my roommate and I preferred. Also, the chairs that had been pushed in under the dining room table against the opposite wall were pulled out, away from the table, and set together a few feet into the living room, facing the windows. As though someone had wanted to sit and admire the view while listening to some jazz.

In the light of day, I didn't feel nearly as freaked out, so I bravely marched across the room, switched the radio back to our preferred station and then shut it off and moved the chairs back to where they belonged. I checked once again - all the windows were shut and locked (and besides, we were on a second floor apartment with no fire escapes or other easy means of reaching them), and the door was locked with the chain still on. At first I was convinced my roommate had come home, somehow gotten in to the apartment despite the chain and had been messing with me. This wasn't at all her style, but still. Just to be on the safe side, I called her up over at her boyfriend's apartment. Nope, she hadn't been home - in fact, I woke them up by calling. I explained to her what I'd discovered overnight and that morning, thoroughly freaking her out in the process. She never spent another night in our apartment the rest of the lease without her boyfriend sleeping over, and more nights than not she wound up spending at his place or going home to her parents' house, as they lived nearby. I, on the other hand, continued to live in the apartment with whatever (whomever?) else had been there before our lease. I'd even occasionally chastise them aloud for leaving a light on or the tap running, since the utility bills were only being split two ways. Other than trying to avoid the laundry facilities in the basement unless it was daylight (the basement was spooky in and of itself, haunted or otherwise), I had no major issues with our building's other tenants, human or ......? Throughout the remainder of the lease, lights would be turned on - usually in the bathroom or kitchen, and taps would be turned on in the sinks and occasionally the tub. Every now and again, a drawer or cabinet in the kitchen would be open. Things didn't always turn up where we thought we'd left them. A few times, small things went missing - loose change, pens, that sort of thing.

Did we have ghosts sharing the apartment with us? I couldn't say for sure. I will say that whatever dwelled there (beyond the death metal Neanderthals upstairs) was fairly benign. Nothing malicious or harmful ever transpired in the apartment, beyond the slightly higher utility bills. I never did find out the story behind the building's supposed haunting. I'm still curious, though... So, what about you? Do you believe in ghosts and hauntings? Have you ever shared a home with a poltergeist? Can you come up with a more rational explanation for the goings-on in our apartment that year?

And on that note, Happy Halloween to you and yours from me and mine! I'll leave you with our jack o'lantern for this year, carved by Hubby and Kiddo (I do NOT do pumpkin guts) earlier this afternoon:

One way to cure the blahs

2010-10-14T16:58:00.000-04:00

So, I've been having a bit of a blah day. It started out with not wanting to get out of my toasty, snuggly bed while it was still dark outside, but I had to get up and get Kiddo up and at 'em and off to school, so up I got, while Hubby rolled over and went back to sleep for a few more minutes. *grumble* While walking through the still-dark house to get to the living room light, I stepped in something cold, wet and oozy - cat hairball. *grumble grumble* Kiddo was spectacularly grouchy and griped about every. Single. Thing. From her breakfast to her clothes to her hair, she moaned and dragged, requiring me to have to prod and cajole and, okay, nag to get her rear in gear and out to the bus. *grumble grumble grumble* Then, due to my Man Hands With Sausage Fingers, I apparently had entered the wrong time on my iPod Touch (darn that little scrolly-wheel thingy!) when I got the email with the shift assignments and thus, showed up an hour late for my volunteer shift at class pictures, missing Kiddo's class's turn in the process. *grumble grumble grumble grumble* Top that all off with the weather, which is gray and rainy, and by midafternoon I was ready to just crawl back into bed and try for a do-over on today, or just sleep through until tomorrow, whichever occurred first. Seeing as how neither of those options were practical or possible, I went another route.

I did this:

and then, when Kiddo got home from school

I had this ready to go:

(Side note: Great Value brand marshmallows, which are Walmart's generic brand, are the only marshmallows I can find that do not contain artificial food coloring. Isn't that nuts? Seriously, every other white marshmallows, from store generic to fancy-pants brand, contain blue food dye.)

Once we had all the elements in place

we got to work -

and then partook of the deliciousness..........

And that? Cures the blahs just about as well as anything else I could think of (short of crawling back into bed and/or having Hugh Jackman and George Clooney show up on my doorstep to engage in a serenade duel while bearing flowers and chocolate) today. Plus, I've got a pot roast in the crock pot, so no fussing at the stove for dinner. I have to go to a PTSA meeting over at Kiddo's school tonight, but I won't think about heading out into the cold and wet again just yet. I think I'll toast myself just one more marshmallow first...

Sick Day

2010-10-04T11:35:00.000-04:00

This picture was taken about 20 minutes ago. This scene is a vast improvement over Saturday night-Sunday morning,, which began with the chilling words "I just threw up - in my sleep" called weakly and tearily down the stairs to where Hubby and I were sitting on the couch watching a movie. Hubby took the worse of the two clean-up tasks, taking care of her bed and its various casualties (there were several of the Stuffed Animal variety) while I took care of getting Kiddo cleaned up and tucked into bed in the guest room. Once everything was all squared away, we returned to our movie, though with a few more cases of Filmus Interruptus due to Vomitus Childus, I'm left wondering if I've judged Paul Blart, Mall Cop a bit unfairly...

The Vomitus Childus continued throughout the night, I think six times in all. A bleary-eyed call to the pediatrician Sunday morning confirmed that yes, there is a bad stomach bug going around, with the silver lining that it has been lasting no more than 24-36 hours. (I, of course, instantly suspected our old enemy, strep throat, as Kiddo has proven especially susceptible to strep over the years and for her, strep = major barfage.) We stayed in yesterday, watching Annie and E.T. while snuggled on the couch, and yes, I cried while watching E.T. as I always do. It's this scene that gets me every time:

(I'm a bit misty-eyed just looking at that still photo. Yeesh.)

So, here we are today, Kiddo home and tucked in on the couch, both in our jammies, with the fire crackling and a pile of books by our sides. My schedule for the day had to be rearranged - I had meetings to attend and errands I was intending to run - but such is life, right? I can think of worse ways to spend a dreary Monday, anyhow. Well, so long as we don't get another round of Vomitus Childus that is.......

Haiku: Almost perfect Saturday morning

2010-10-02T08:56:00.001-04:00

All slept in til eight.

First fire of the fall roaring.

Just need some bacon.

Should I cue up the Chicken Dance or hit publish?

2010-09-21T19:56:00.000-04:00

So as I mentioned in my previous post, something bad did happen while we were on vacation last month. I've been pondering whether I have the guts to post this, but now that I've actually been called out as a chicken by my friend Andy, who begged me to blog about this once she'd finished laughing her head off at me as I told her the story (really now, I share my deepest, darkest vacation horror story and she just flails about laughing. Not a dollop of sympathy for my plight), I feel that I have no choice.

I'm warning you up front, any men who might read my blog regularly, occasionally or who accidentally stumble upon this whilst doing some creepo pervy Google search: this is NOT what you want to be reading. Promise. If you have never owned your own set of ovaries, do yourself a favor and move on. Seriously.

Now that it's just us girls in here, I shall begin my Tale of Horror and Woe.

A few days before vacation, Kiddo, her grandma and I hit the outlet mall for some back to school shopping. This was necessary because Kiddo decided to outgrow the sneakers we'd gotten for her in April, going through just one size in a year apparently not being good enough for her. Annnnyhow, while we were there, I popped into the Jockey outlet, because I needed new undies and the outlet is my favorite (read: cheapest) place to get them. I've worn plain, cotton, Jockey for Her undies for years now. Decades, even. So, we ducked into the shop, Kiddo on the verge of totally losing her shizzle, all of us low on shopping energy and motivation and hungry for lunch and I just wanted to grab what I needed and go. I made my way back to the large display area where row after row of multipack Jockey for Hers can be found. I paused briefly, trying to remember exactly which style it is I prefer. (I once bought the wrong style and spent the next several months always feeling like the lower-riding-than-my-usual-kind-of-undies were falling down. Way uncomfortable.) My eye finally fell upon the kind I prefer, so I grabbed two boxes from the row with my size and headed to the register. The next day, Hubby did all the pre-trip laundry (yes, I have that awesome a husband, y'all - he does the laundry all the time!) and when I went to pack, I found my new undies (including some colored ones for a change of pace - red! Blue! Red and blue paisley!) neatly folded and awaiting me. I promptly packed those along with a couple other, older pairs out of my drawer and thought that was that.

Then I woke up that first morning of vacation in the hotel and grabbed a pair of my new undies out of the drawer. "Hmmmmm," I thought to myself, "these seem a big bigger than usual." I chalked it up to their being new and therefore not shrunken from being washed a thousand and ten times and hopped into the shower. When it came time to get dressed, I stepped into them. They were definitely...............roomier than I recalled. Uh-oh. I pulled on my shorts and discovered that once I'd fastened them, my new undies were showing above the waistband. Well, not so much showing as billowing above the waistband of my shorts. As in a few good inches of underwear material. Ack. I found myself tucking my underwear back into my shorts (because what is more comfortable in the heat of late summer Florida, not to mention more slimming, than having a few extra inches of fabric jammed about your midsection?) and trying to get on with my day.

Okay, menfolk, if you ignored me before and are still reading, seriously, you may want to check out for the rest of this. It's not for you. This is your last chance to bail out.

So, ladies, it turned out our trip coincided with that certain time of the month and as such, I had to utilize certain items in these voluminous drawers of mine. Now, I prefer the external, winged variety of such items. I had attempted to affix one of such items securely to the pertinent section of my, okay, I'm just gonna say it, my granny bloomers. Off we went to the parks for a day of fun and excitement. As we were walking from one thing to the next, I felt an odd sensation. As though something had............. shifted. Come unstuck, as it were. And it had. It had, I mean. Unfortunately, it only came unstuck for the briefest of moments before resticking itself, backwards.

I'm going to give you a moment here to envision exactly to what the resticking occurred. You with me? Yep, I'm going to guess you are.

I shifted about as discreetly as possible, but no amount of shifting was going to help and in fact any and all movement was further complicating the situation. I told Hubby I had to utilize the facilities, insisted on leaving Kiddo with him (as she normally accompanies me not only into the bathroom whenever we're out someplace in public, but also into the stall with me), and made my way as gingerly and speedily as I could to the nearest ladies' room. Yes, walking was trickier than usual in this situation. In the stall, I discovered that what I had suspected was correct. Egads. I proceeded to cowboy up (no need to put on my big girl panties - already had that taken care of, now didn't I?) and rectify the situation as quickly and quietly as possible.

You know how painful it is to wax your eyebrows, or perhaps your upper lip? This? A thousand times worse. If ever I had contemplated waxing anything below my chin (which I haven't, for the record), I am now soundly convinced not to, ever ever ever.

When we got home, I pulled out a pair of the same style undies and checked the tags. Turned out the granny bloomers I'd inadvertently bought were three sizes larger than my normal size.

(The black pair actually fit me. The paisleys? Not so much.)

Of course now that they'd been opened, washed and some worn, I can't exactly return them. So now I know I'll be all set if I ever want to, say, go hang gliding or parasailing or if Kiddo wants a new swing for the backyard... and thus concludes my Tale of Vacation Woe, also known as How to Achieve a Partial Brazilian While Wearing a Ginormous Pair of Drawers.

Vacation, all I ever wanted...

2010-09-13T23:24:00.001-04:00

So, a week ago yesterday we got home from our best family vacation yet. It was our annual End of Summer trip to Walt Disney World. (In case you weren't already aware, the entire Smith family *big, red, puffy hearts* Walt Disney World.) We really had a ridiculously spectacular time.

We had a totally awesome room with a view in Kidani Village at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge Resort....

We were chosen, out of the blue, to be the First Family of the Day one morning at Epcot:

Then, two days later, we got up slightly before the crack of dawn, put on our homemade, matching, bright yellow Disney shirts and headed out to the Magic Kingdom in the hopes of being chosen as First Family of the Day, but knowing that lightning doesn't often strike twice. We were the first people onto the first monorail of the day and then the first people in line at the turnstiles. We chatted with a lovely Cast Member (as all Disney employees are called) who worked at the turnstiles. We were chosen. It. Was. Amazing!!!

First, Kiddo was given her very own envelope of pixie dust. Then, we were taken on a tour through the Magic Kingdom in the antique fire truck, before the park opened. The Cast Member giving us the tour even let Kiddo get behind the wheel...

It was a good thing the park was empty at that point!

We were hanging out in front of Mickey's house in Toontown when all of a sudden, a whole gang of characters (and I mean characters) showed up:

After shmoozing with the gang for a bit, we all boarded the train together...

The train pulled out of Toontown and made its way to the front of the park. Alice in Wonderland and the White Rabbit were seated in the row directly behind us, and Princess Tiana and Prince Naveen (who, btw, *hubba hubba hubba* - total hottie!) and Chip & Dale were also in our car. Kiddo chatted with all of them, cracking up Alice, Tiana and Naveen several times, but she was mostly enthralled by her new BFF:

Before we knew it, we were approaching the train station at Main St. USA and rolling right into the middle of the morning opening show - a show we've seen countless times before (we're diehard Rope Droppers) and a show to which we know every note and word of the medley. It was surreal pulling in to the station and being part of the show instead of just a spectator singing along from down in the crowd. (Not that I did, you know, sing along or anything. Okay, fine, I did. I sang a few bars as we stepped onto the platform. But I didn't project or anything, nor did I engage in any dance moves.)

We were introduced to the crowd and got ready to officially open the park for the day by counting down with Mickey:

After we opened the park, we had a little more quality time with the big Cheese and one last photo op -

and then we had to say goodbye to Mickey because he had places to be and people to see. It was a somewhat bittersweet parting.

Being First Family of the Day at the Magic Kingdom was really a dream come true. It was so incredibly cool and fun and we wish we had a video recording of every single second of it. We did luck out in that a woman who belongs to a Disney-related message board that Hubby frequents happened to be in the crowd at Rope Drop that day and she sent us the video of the show portion, which was so awesome of her - a total stranger! - to do for us and we were so psyched to get.

Besides the Nothing Will Ever Top This Unless We Get to Have a Dinner with George Clooney and Hugh Jackman Instead of all the Princesses aspects of the trip, there was all the usual fun.

The traditional spin on the Flying Dumbos...

Kiddo and I also did our traditional self portrait while riding the boat across the lagoon to the World Showcase at Epcot -

We met lots of various characters, royal or otherwise:

We ate lots of fantabulous food -

Teppan Edo, one of our all-time favorite WDW restaurants

Hubby pretending he's eating all the table's bread pudding at 'Ohana

dessert at the 50s Prime Time Cafe

Hmmm, I seem to have mostly photographed desserts. We ate lots of great other food, too, including steak and shrimp and lots of fruits and veggies.

Of course, there were also the rides.............

This ride is the Astro Orbiter. Yes, it really is that high up. I refuse to ride this one anymore, and so was photographing with both feet safely on the (two stories up) platform.

Kiddo decided she was "big enough" and "brave enough" to ride some rides that in previous trips, she hasn't liked at all, namely Expedition Everest, the Tower of Terror and Dinosaur. Now, I was quite skeptical about this, since she had most recently tried EE and ToT just last summer, but Hubby thought it was great that she wanted to try them again and so, she did. And she hated each one. Again. (And yes, I might have unleashed an "I told you so!" or three, too. Le sigh.) One of her favorite rides at WDW, however, is Splash Mountain. (It's actually a family favorite!) Kiddo was clamoring to go on it the very afternoon we first arrived in Orlando, so we did. Hubby brought along our new waterproof video camera and aimed it back over his shoulder at Kiddo and me when we reached the summit and took the first plunge on Splash Mountain for this trip. Following, you will find a chronological series of stills taken from a maybe 5-6 second long segment of that video footage, starring Kiddo (and portions of my left boob):

Isn't that something, how Kiddo goes from giddy with joy to sheer terror back to giddy with joy again in a few second span? In the last two frames, she is actually complaining that she didn't get wet enough and was still so dry that she wanted to go again. So we did. Several more times over our trip, as it turns out, and we recorded a few other splashdowns in this same manner. Kiddo has the same gamut of emotions each time. (Taken out of context, of course, there are a few stills there that might be alarming, but when you look at them in context or see the video footage - which Hubby has yet to edit and convert or whatever it is he needs to do to render it playable on the interwebz - it isn't so much alarming as it is just hilarious. Even Kiddo cracks up watching it.)

As you can see from all the pictures above, for this pixie-dust sprinkled trip, there was sunshine the entire time. The pool was delightful, all the folks we were seated with at the different restaurants were good company, the crowds were light to nonexistent. There was nary a bad thing to be said for this particular vacation (besides the occasional blister from all that walking in sneakers while sweating profusely in the late summer, Central Florida heat). Well, okay, there was one bad thing, and I promised my friend Andy I'd blog about it, so here goes, for those of you who are still reading all the way to this point.

Kiddo was eaten by a shark.

No, really, she was - look:

Okay, okay, fine, she wasn't. I mean, she was, but it was just Bruce and he knows better, so he spit her back out pronto. She's a bony little toothpick, anyhow, hardly an appetizer for a big shark like him.

There was something else that happened, but it deserves its own post - or rather, my fantabulous and lengthy vacation recap post deserves to stand on its own and not have the Vacation Tale of Feminine Woe spadged on to the end of it. (In other words, yes, Andy, I'm chickening out. For now - I cut and pasted the VToFW into a draft and will do a separate post soon. I promise.)

So, for now, I will leave you with fireworks over the castle and an end to the recap of our best vacation, ever!

Mostly Wordless Wednesday - Back to School

2010-09-08T08:43:00.005-04:00

Here is our second grader in the traditional "First Day of School" pose with her customized backpack. (Customized in that I laboriously affixed that Disney Princesses patch to the front, along with a Tinkerbell patch on her lunch bag. Apparently I need to own more than one thimble; I poked enough holes in myself while wrestling the needle through the bag material that if I were a cartoon and I drank a glass of water, you'd see water come shooting out all over my thumb, sprinkler-style.)

Here's hoping it is another great year at school for everyone!

Call me Fred. Or Barry.

2010-08-27T23:05:00.000-04:00

This afternoon, I went out to tackle the green beast that is also known as our lawn in late summer. (This would be the second time this week I've had to mow, for those of you keeping score at home.) I geared up appropriately for the chore with my iPod and headphones and got to cutting. I did the front and side yards to the strains of my Leonard Cohen playlist, but by the time I got around to the back, I needed something a bit more.... peppy. Now, Kiddo has recently become enamored of a certain tune on Mommy's iPod, and it is a tune that is near and dear to Mommy's heart. I first heard it when I was her age or a little bit younger, and I loved it from the very first bongo thump. It's one that she has been requesting repeatedly for the past few weeks, so it instantly sprang to mind as I scrolled through my playlists. Perfect choice!

The song of which I speak, of course, is that 70s classic Copacabana by none other than Barry Manilow. I adored the song as a kid and still do now. As a child, I was instantly smitten by the drama of the song (not to mention those bongos) and choreographed a dance routine to go with it. Now, I'm teaching Kiddo the dance moves (and she is embellishing them with lots of added jazz hands. Kiddo is a big believer in jazz hands) and she and I belt it out when we're driving around town, sitting at the breakfast table, hanging out on the lanai... it's an all-occasion bit of groovy joy.

Anyhow, there I was in the back yard. Hubby had taken Kiddo up to the playground to burn off some energy, so I had the yard to myself (well, except for the squirrels and bunnies and jays and cardinals, oh and the bees - lots of bees). I dialed up the Copa and pulled the starter cord on the mower. (Incidentally, I always feel so.......... macho when I'm pulling the starter cord on the mower. Especially when it takes a couple of tries before the engine actually catches. Is that just me?) I began merrily cutting my way up and down the back .40 and when the disco violins soared above the bongos, I started singing too. Singing *and* dancing, actually. Air bongos are pretty much mandated with the Copa, and that dance routine I've been doing for over 30 years now lives in my very marrow (plus Kiddo's jazz hands - she really is right about how jazz hands make anything better). I think by now it is physically impossible for me to remain silent and still when the Copa is playing. I've sung and shimmied to it in any form, including Muzak. (I'm killer in an elevator - the acoustics are fantabulous, you know.)

So, there I was, just like Fred and his hat rack

See the whole routine right here!

except instead of a jaunty neckerchief with matching red belt and socks, I was wearing a paint-spattered, 10 year old t-shirt over a boob-squashing sports bra and grass-stained sneakers, and instead of a hat rack, I had an old and decrepit lawn mower. And jazz hands - Fred may've been a great dancer, but he really underutilized the jazz hands. But other than those tiny details, I was exactly like Fred Astaire.

Naturally, it wasn't until after the last refrain "Copa.....Copacabana" had faded into silence and I was left with naught but the sound of my mower that I happened to catch sight of one of our neighbors. Specifically, the lovely, older lady whose property backs up to ours, and who had apparently decided to take advantage of the cooler temperatures and breeze today to do a bit of gardening in her back flower beds. The ones that are right at the property line, which means she had a front row seat for Heather-Fred-Barry and my dance partner, the lawn mower. Totally busted. Yeek. I did what any self-respecting Fanilow would do in such a situation. I waited for the next song to cue up and then treated her to a little Bandstand Boogie. With plenty of jazz hands, of course.

In which the kid breaks the house

2010-08-22T15:10:00.004-04:00

Kiddo has been fortunate enough to have her own bathroom since we moved to this house. We've been fortunate in that regard as well; it is really, really nice to not have to share a shower/tub with eighty zillion dinosaurs, Barbies, rubber duckies and other assorted tub toys, especially given the issues such tub toys and my nearsightedness have had in the past.

Anyhow, in Kiddo's bathroom (which is also the one used by any overnighting guests), there are three towel bars. Two of them are on the walls in front of and next to the toilet and the third is in the tub area itself. All three towel bars are set fairly high on the walls - she has to reach up to touch them.

Kiddo decided, shortly after moving in and beginning to use her bathroom, that it would be a most brilliant plan indeed to hang on the towel bars and/or the end pieces between which the bar itself is held. Hubby and I both explained to her, on the several occasions in which we caught her in the act, that not only was this as far from a brilliant plan as possible, but it could cause serious damage to herself and the walls and she was (obviously) Strictly Forbidden from doing it, EVER.

Within the first year of living here, she managed to snap one towel bar - after several of the above warnings - and a second towel bar is now dangling loosely (of course she claimed no knowledge of how that happened) on the wall. Clearly, our Strict Forbidding was only working for those moments when we were actually, physically in the bathroom with her to glare admonishingly while she was reaching up for the bars. Hubby replaced the one bar and the second continues to dangle a bit precariously, while the third - the one in the tub itself - remained whole.

Around 5:45 yesterday evening (afternoon?), Kiddo went up to take a shower. I started it for her, made sure the liner part of the curtain was inside the tub and then came downstairs. Not one full minute later, there was a most tremendous crashing and clattering sound, followed immediately by "MOOOOOOOOOOM! I DIDN'T MEAN TO BUT I BROKE THE *incoherent sobbing*" that had Hubby and me racing upstairs.

Now, Hubby and I are lacking in the CSI type equipment with which to reconstruct the crime scene. We have none of the fancy lasers or the fingerprint dusting kits or the swabs and chemicals to test with, but I'm sure if we did they'd have been positive for shenanigans, along with second grader-sized fingerprints and DNA all over the place. Even without Grissom and his crew, we were able to deduce what had happened within the first few seconds. Kiddo had apparently decided (once again!) to hang off the towel bar in the tub. The towel bar that is made of the same substance as the tiles on the wall. The towel bar that was one, molded piece. The towel bar that was not just affixed to the wall, but actually into the wall. We were able to deduce this because we found Kiddo standing in the tub, covered in bits of broken tile, grout and drywall, screaming and crying her head off, the shower still on full blast with the liner now out of the tub so that water was spraying onto the floor, the towel bar in pieces on the tub floor and bathroom floor and several shattered tiles in the tub and on the floor as well. (Her living daylights, wits and bejezus, however, were nowhere to be found, because clearly she'd scared them completely out.) Where the towel bar once hung there was naught but a gaping hole, minus several of the goldenrod tiles that had been there mere moments before.

I immediately turned the shower off, grabbed a towel and picked Kiddo up out of the disaster area, carrying her into our bathroom while Hubby dealt with the disaster area itself. As I carefully picked bits of broken tile and drywall out of her hair and checked her over for injuries (none, thankfully), she began her Ultra-Super-Duper Symphony of Remorse, key of B♭ minor. Sample lyrics include

"I am so, so, so, so, so, so, soooo ashamed"
and its counterpoint
"I am so, so, so, so, so, so, soooo sorry" (repeat ad nauseum)

"I didn't mean to do it."

It was the "I didn't mean to do it" that helped me most to not just melt into a puddle of goo in the face of the full-on Remorse Symphony (complete with tear-filled, big brown eyes and quivering lower lip, not to mention an expression of abject sorry). Because, as Hubby and I both tried to explain to her, it wasn't so much that she didn't mean to do it, but rather that she didn't mean to get caught. She wasn't accidentally playing Nadia Comaneci using the towel bar while mid-shower. She wasn't standing under the spray, industriously shampooing when all of a sudden an unseen being propelled her hands up and onto the towel bar. She wasn't suddenly surrounded by prehistoric piranhas who came shooting out of the showerhead, forcing her to jump up and cling to the bar as her only means of escape.

Nope, she decided to disregard not only the many Strict Forbiddings and the historical precedent of Kiddo Swings/Flexed-Arm Hangs from Towel Bar, Towel Bar Breaks. She was hanging from the towel bar because she darn well wanted to, and the 45 year old towel bar decided it had had quite enough of *that* thankyouverymuch and came flying off the wall, shattering as it went.

By the time I'd gotten Kiddo taken care of and deposited her, sniffling and weeping and still singing the Remorse Symphony, into her bedroom, Hubby had cleaned up the mess in her bathroom, which included at least an inch of water on the floor. I fixed dinner for Kiddo and then put her to bed. I also levied the consequence of her actions upon her: No puppy next year. (Now, please note we hadn't actually ever said with 100% certainty that we were getting a puppy next year. All we'd said in the Puppy Quest matter - Kiddo's nearest and dearest, most fervent and passionate wish is to get a puppy and another kitten, but really, she'd make do with our current cat so long as there was a puppy on the scene - was that we wouldn't be getting one this year. Kiddo extrapolated in her extremely optimistic way that this meant we'd be getting the puppy next year for sure. We hadn't specifically disabused her of that notion, though in the back of the grown-ups' minds, a puppy was far from a sure thing next summer. Now, however, there is no doubt - there will be no puppy in 2011. This is by far the most serious and dire punishment we could give to Kiddo.) We had a talk about listening to one's parents and how Daddy and Mommy don't just arbitrarily make up rules because we can, but because we do, in fact, know what is best in terms of keeping Kiddo safe, sound, healthy and happy. (Okay, yeah, I know, sometimes we do just make up rules because we can, but hey, isn't that one of the hard-won perks of being a parent, to enact the Because I Said So! rule?)

Hubby did some research on the repair job our new hole in the wall is going to require. Now, the bathroom is on the (exhaustingly lengthy) list of Rooms to Be Renovated. However, it isn't next or even next-to-next on the list. So, we don't really have the energy, enthusiasm or budget for tackling a full-on renovation in there right now, which would include removing all the heinous, goldenrod tile and retiling both the tub/shower area and the floor, along with stripping the hideous, 60s-butterfly-n-sunflower wallpaper, replacing fixtures (which will likely involve a lot of rewiring as well) and replacing the faux-marble-with-gold-veins countertop with an actual vanity. We don't even have the energy or enthusiasm to just tackle the tub/shower portion of that project right now. So, Hubby is going to try to patch the hole in the wall (we can see clear through to the studs - yowza) and then put in replacement tiles (which won't actually match the goldenrod ones, but such is life - the new tiles will serve as a reminder to Kiddo of What She Did, I suppose) and regrout everything. It isn't like we could really make that bathroom any uglier, anyhow, and that way it will be functional (albeit minus one towel bar) again.

So, thus concludes the saga of how we became a real life Hole in the Wall Gang, courtesy of one relatively small seven year old breaking the house. I was heartened by the comments on my previous post, especially the one in which someone else's child broke their house. It's good to know that I'm not alone. I just hope this is the last time we are faced with a hole in the house that isn't one of our own, purposeful making!

Not exactly a bee in my bonnet

2010-08-14T11:56:00.001-04:00

So last night I had a Girls' Night Out with my BFF. We started the evening by swinging by Sugar Mountain Bakery Shoppe, where we had some delicious cupcakes as a pre-show snack. The show was Estrofest, which stars one of my dear friends (who also is the mom of Kiddo's BFF - we met at a Gymboree class when the girls were still in diapers) and which I'd somehow not ever seen before. The night concluded with a late dinner at The Winfield Grill with some of the cast and other assorted entourage members and then a drive home later than I've been out in aeons with a glimpse of a shooting star thanks to the Perseid Meteor Shower. All in all, a perfectly wonderful night. Good friends, good food and a lot of good laughs (seriously, if you're local enough to my corner of upstate NY, go to the Blackfriars Theatre and see Estrofest while you still can this summer, and then go see them again this winter. Hilarious, hilarious, hilarious! Norma Holland especially is a comedic wonder).

I could rave on and on about any or all of the above - the deliciousness that is an SMBS cupcake, the hilarity that is Estrofest, but none of that is the point of this post. What I actually want to share with you is this:

During the show's intermission, my BFF, my Estrofest friend's husband (who is also my friend) and I stepped outside as the lobby was quite crowded and warm. As we stood on the sidewalk chatting, I felt something land on my chest. Now, I'd gussied myself up a bit for my big GNO, putting on a "fancy" top I haven't worn in years (bought it a few years ago because it caught my eye in a shop; got it home and wore it once to church but then decided it made me look pregnant and thus, developed a complex about it and put it away for like three years before deciding that I didn't care if it makes me look pregnant and pulled it out and wore it last night) with some linen pants and higher-heeled sandals and even slapped on some eyeliner and tinted lip gloss. Now, wearing the fancy top meant putting on appropriate undergarments, in this case a Very Serious Bra. We're talking plunging and décolletage-enhancing cups, padding, major underwire. In this VSB, my bosoms are spectacular, if I do say so myself. (Let me also point out that I encase them in the VSB only once in a blue moon, because the very seriousness of it lends itself to a fair amount of discomfort in short order. This is no Playtex 18 hour comfy support type undergarment, to be sure.)

So, there the three of us stood chatting, out in the summer evening, when something landed on my chest, just north of the scoop-neck, low-cut (at least for me) neckline of my fancy top, dangerously close to my spectacular bosoms. I glanced down and swept a hand as discreetly as possible across my chest because, after all, one doesn't want to be seen out on a city sidewalk groping at one's own boob, spectacular as it may be. I didn't catch sight of whatever it was that had landed on me, but as we were standing under some trees, I figured it was a bit of twig or leaf or berry and left it at that. A few moments later, intermission ended and we filed back into the theater for the second half of the show. The lights dimmed, the cast returned, hilarity ensued and................ I felt something move on my chest. Well, not on my chest so much as inside my Very Serious Bra.

Eep!

I shifted a bit in my seat, thinking that the bit of twig or leaf or whatever had landed on me must've plunged into my plunging brassiere instead of being dislodged when I'd swept my hand across the shirt, and then whatever it was inside my bra moved. As in crawled. Inside my bra. Across my left boob.

Oh. My.

Here I was, in the middle of a row in a not terribly big theater, where they were picking volunteers from the audience for different things, with something crawling in my bra. I didn't want to get up, excuse-me-pardon-me-oh-sorry-was-that-your-foot-excuse-me my way down the row and out to the lobby and restroom because given the dimensions of the theater and my proximity to the stage (and the exit to the lobby's proximity to the stage), that seemed to be a dangerous and disruptive thing to do (not to mention that I'd be faced with the eternal dilemma - does one exit the row with one's derrière facing the other seated patrons at close range or facing out, which in this case would've meant one's derrière facing the rest of the theater and actors). I shifted about a bit and hoped that whatever it was would either crawl the heck out of my underthings or become fatally smothered between the padding and my skin. The movement, after a few, terrible seconds, stopped. Whew. And then, a few moments later, it began again. Crawling lower. The lights went down, briefly, at the end of the sketch. I took the opportunity to try to genteelly and discreetly swipe a hand into the edge of my top. Nope, whatever it was that was crawling in there was far to low for any polite public squashing or removal. Mind you, I'm not a Squasher of Living Things when they're crawling on the floor or wall or ceiling, much less when they're on my actual person. But desperate times and all that - the crawling paused and continued, paused and continued. Throughout the entire second act, I'd feel whatever it was crawling ever so slowly further south. Now, I was fairly certain that no matter what the critter, it wasn't going to get any lower than the Formidable Underwire that ran along the southern border of the VSB. However, I was also increasingly nervous that the critter might be of the burrowing or biting sort. So, while I was laughing my head off through the second act, a small part of my brain was conjuring up images of deer ticks or tiny, poisonous spiders milliseconds away from deciding the underside of my left bosom was the perfect place to grab a meal or dig in some fangs. I kept shifting and crossing my arms across my chest, trying to both be unobtrusive and get whatever it was that was crawling around my unmentionables to either evacuate or perish, with no such luck.

The second the show ended (conveniently enough with a standing ovation, so everyone was up out of their seats), I mumbled something about needing the rest room to my companions and took off for the lobby. I got into the ladies' room, locked the door and whipped my shirt up to take a look.

It was just a bug. A little, black, beetle-y bug. Innocuous and non-lethal, it was nestled there where it had become caught by the Underwire Border. I rescued it with a kleenex and then promptly smooshed it out of existence and inspected my chest for signs of trauma in the mirror. Finding none, I readjusted my spectacular bosoms in the VSB, made sure my fancy top was back in its proper place and then fake-flushed the toilet and washed my hands, then rejoined my friends in the lobby. (Side note: why did I feel compelled to pretend I'd been peeing when I hadn't? Because I did feel compelled. So strange.) When my BFF and I left the theater and were driving to the restaurant, I told her about the Bosoms-Bug Encounter and she was equal parts amused and horrified. So, of course I had to share it with you, my dear readers and whatever weirdos are googling the words "boobs" and "bra" or even stranger, "bosoms" ...

In conclusion, apparently you can dress me up, but you can't take me anywhere. At least I looked spectacular for the occasion, though.

In which I tell you of an awesome, "new" discovery

2010-08-06T21:00:00.000-04:00

Let me preface this by acknowledging up front that I tend to be a bit, how shall we put it? Late to the party when it comes to the hippest, most happening, latest things. (See? I just used the word hippest which I'm fairly sure is no longer hip.)

Well, one of the things that is a new discovery (to me) that I wanted to share with you is this little thing called Pandora Radio. Now, I apparently had already discovered Pandora's website once before, but it didn't take the first time. (I only know this because when I rediscovered it, it turned out I'd set up an account for myself at some previous juncture and then promptly abandoned and forgotten the website entirely.) I re-discovered Pandora as an iPod Touch app, and have become utterly smitten. Smitten, I tell you!

So for those of you who are as un-in-the-know as I, let me tell you what Pandora does - it is a radio station where you get to pick all the music and then it plays the songs you want for you. But more than that, it uses the info you've given to it about songs and artists you like and then comes up with other music that is similar and plays that for you, too. There's a thumbs-up/thumbs-down feature that helps it tailor the musical choices for your own personal stations as well.

It is so, so cool, y'all. I (re-)discovered Pandora a couple of months ago, when I was looking through music apps for my Touch while we were in the midst of The Great Renovation Project, Phase II - Stripping and Painting, and I immediately set up a few different stations. First, I made an 80s station. (Duh.) When Hubby got too sick of All 80s Music, All the Time, I obliged him by creating a Classic Rock station. It was really darn delightful because by putting in the names of artists I liked (and then dashing over to my iPod mid-paint-rolling to thumbs up or down a particular song), it played classic rock type songs I enjoyed (The Eagles, Steve Miller Band) and not ones I haaaaate (the Horse With No Name song, for example).

I've created a few other channels, like Old Time-y Country (the Oak Ridge Boys, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakum, Kenny Rogers, Alabama) and the "J.J. Cazh" station (as Hubby and I nicknamed it thanks to the various Andy Samberg bits on SNL) which plays Jack Johnson, my friend Tulpen's boyfriend, Five for Fighting, Dave Matthews, the Wallflowers, and so on in that vein.

And.

I made one more station - my Harry Connick, Jr. station. Because I love me some Harry Connick, Jr. Seriously love. Have been a fan for decades (which makes me sound old, but it's technically true, so there you go). As in, I've been a major fan since high school before When Harry Met Sally came out and he started getting really famous. I went to the opening night of his first run on Broadway way back in 1990. Actually, I was quite a Harry groupie in my younger years, and even met him several times. (Nothing remarkably groupie-like ever happened, I must admit, although he did accidentally drive a remote-control car over my foot one time outside his tour bus in Syracuse.) That was the same night he autographed this:

which I promptly had framed for an exorbitant amount of money (especially for a broke, college student, which I was at the time) and proudly hung on the walls of every college dorm room and apartment bedroom in which I lived from that moment forth until Hubby and I moved in together, when it was deemed no longer appropriate decor and thus has been living in the basement for the past 16 years. (Sorry, Harry... if it meant you'd come and visit us - and hey, we have a piano! - then I'd totally hang it back up right this minute!)

Annnnnyhow, of course I needed a Harry Station, so I set one up toot sweet. I added Michael Feinstein, Barry Manilow, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Frank Sinatra to that station as additional artists I like, and let her rip.

And do you know what I've learned since starting that station? What Pandora has taught me?

That I am a big Michael Bublé fan. Huge. Now, please note that prior to setting up my HCJr Pandora station, I only had the vaguest idea of who Michael Bublé was - he floated out there on the far periphery of my knowledge. I had seen him on SNL, where he was funny in that skit with Jon Hamm but as we were watching SNL off the DVR, as we do 99% of the time, we fast forwarded through the musical performances. I'd caught snippets of his songs during my daily "Five Minutes To Try and Stay Current and Hip" (dang it, should I not be saying "hip" so I sound more hip? How about "groovy" instead? "Fly" perhaps - or with a ph like phat? Phly?) in which, shortly after waking up in the morning, I start out watching one of the various iterations of MTV (thanks to which I have more than a mere inkling of who Lady Gaga is, for example) but within moments, I'm back on VH1 Classic where it is always 80s videos in the morning and odds are good that instead of seeing anything new and current, I'll find videos like Take on Me or The Reflex. Ahhhhhhhh, sweet, comfortable nostalgia. But I digress. My point is, every time a song I didn't immediately recognize (or, more to the point, I didn't recognize that particular rendition, since 99.9% of this station is standards), I'd look on my iPod and voila, it was Michael.

So there you go. Pandora is so awesome it gave me a new artist to lurrrrrve. I'm not saying it doesn't have its occasional misstep, like the time I was merrily making pad thai to the strains of my Old Time-y Country station, when sandwiched between the Gatlin Brothers and George Strait came.... I Don't Want To Miss a Thing by Aerosmith. ?!?!? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Aerosmith fan, but I don't want to hear a rock power ballad in the middle of my twangin' and pickin' and harmonizin' - not that I thumbsed them down. I mean, I couldn't do that to my beloved Aerosmith, even when they popped up on the wrong station. So, while Pandora isn't perfect, it's a pretty awesome discovery, at least for my groovy world.

Stay tuned for further "breaking news" of new discoveries I've made, like about the horseless carriage or the light bulb............

Why Tim Gunn will never, ever be my BFF

2010-07-25T20:23:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned in my previous few posts, I was visiting my family down in Jersey last week, and while I was there I went through several boxes of old photographs. As I looked through this collection of moments in my life, one thing became abundantly clear: I am, and always have been, woefully unfashionable.

These days, I tend to stick to what I've come to think of as my SAHM "uniform" - sweaters and jeans or cords with wool socks and clogs or boots in the winter, long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans or pants with clogs or boots in the spring and fall, short-sleeved t-shirts and capris or shorts with Birks or flip-flops in the summer. I wear appropriate clothing to church (skirts, dresses, sometimes even heels) and if the occasion demands it (social functions for Hubby's work, etc). I know I'm not trendy or hip, and I don't particularly care, since I'm not really trying to be "in" these days. I dress in what is comfortable and practical for my lifestyle, and it works for me.

Earlier in my life, however, I did care more about fashion. I tried very hard to be hip and trendy, to look hot and therefore be cool. Tried, and failed, it seems, for decades upon decades. Looking through the evidence of my lifetime of fashion don'ts, my overwhelming unpopularity among the cooler crowd is suddenly making sense.

Shall we have a photo retrospective to illustrate my point?

This is my third grade class picture. We had just moved to our new home in NJ and I started third grade a few weeks into the start of the year. I was a year younger than my classmates, from a small, upstate NY town that was light years behind the much "faster" and more mature culture of the tri-state area, and I was smart. Really smart, and bookish and talkative and without meaning to be, an instant teacher's favorite. I also was wearing glasses (though not all the time yet, just for distance things like reading the blackboard), and I lived on a working sheep farm in the middle of an increasingly developed, suburban community. Only one other kid in my grade lived on a farm, and he wasn't exactly the epitome of coolness either. My parents tended to fall on the conservative end of the spectrum, and furthermore didn't believe in the "importance" of having all the latest and greatest things. While I did have some teeth in my mouth again (the previous year, I'd had twelve pulled during an overnight stay in the hospital, including all my top and bottom front teeth. The hanging-down threads of the stitches were the only things protruding from my gums for a couple months there that year), the teeth I had were wonky and screaming out for orthodontic intervention, which they soon received in the form of every appliance known to modern dentistry as well as six years of braces. When you add all the above factors up and then look at my fashion choices, it is no wonder that I spent the next three years in abject, mostly friendless misery, followed by a junior high and senior high experience that definitely did not find me running with the "in" crowd or sitting at the "cool kids" table in the cafeteria.

You think I kid? Check out the following year:

This was my most favorite dress, ever as a child. I thought of it as my Laura Ingalls dress. I adored it and would wear it to school whenever my mother would let me. With knee socks and Mary Janes. This is the late 70s now, mind you, when tight designer jeans and long, feathered hair were in vogue. Not whatever I had going on on top of my head and the Little House on the Prairie look. This was the last year I only was a part-time Four Eyes, and I'm fairly certain I was holding my retainers in my other hand.

Speaking of the farm, here I am in a casual moment, sometime around 1980 or '81. While I'd like to give myself points for having a shirt with my name on it (if memory serves, my mom ironed the fuzzy letters on herself), I'm fairly certain the rainbow sneakers kill any chance of coolness the outfit might've had. Also, those were either Lee or Wranglers jeans, not Jordache or Sergio Valente.

Let's skip ahead into the formative teenage years now, shall we?

Here I am in high school. Freshman year, I think. This was taken at Christmas (at my aunt and uncle's house - my parents never had that color shag carpeting on the farm), and my outfit of choice? A red, polyester blouse with a red and black bowtie, black sweater vest with a white argyle-esque print, a white skirt (with pockets! that I used!) and oddly orange-toned pantyhose. (I believe those were my favored "suntan" color hose by No Nonsense, which was a sad case of me believing the marketing. I really should've stuck with the "nude" color.) Tell me, what 13 year old dresses like this voluntarily? I remember, once again, thinking I looked good.

It really was downhill throughout the 80s.

This is me on vacation with my family at Disney World, spring break of my sophomore year. I don't know where to begin here. The dark indigo Lee jeans poorly pegged at the ankle, the purple t-shirt under the pastel, striped, short-sleeved jacket, the hair, the earrings, the sunglasses, oh dear Lord, the sunglasses.

Seriously. WTH?!?!

The only good thing that can be said for this period was that I hadn't yet begun the Big Perm phase of my later teenage years (which was the sequel to my Big Perm tween years). That came the following year...........

This was a publicity shot for one of the shows I was in during high school. (What? Of course I was a theater geek, to go with the music geek and literary magazine geek and co-president of the Spanish Club......) My hair was too big to fit into the frame, y'all. (Also, that is a zit, not a Cindy Crawford wanna-be "beauty mark" there by my mouth, beautiful.) I remember being disappointed that I didn't have some of my larger earrings in that day, as we were all just grabbed when possible by the teacher who made up the cast board with the photos. What you're mercifully missing in this picture due to its lack of color is my eye makeup and lipstick, which were both always loud (remember that dayglo blue mascara? Owned it, wore it, LOVED it. Also dayglo green. With even louder, neon-er eye shadow and liner to match), and also my hair, which by that point I'd lightened to a strange sort of orangey-red by using chamomile soap. (Color photos of that color and further enlightenment as to my lifetime of being a fashion don't can be found here.) At least I was out of braces by then, so my teeth were no longer a wonky nightmare. The frosted, ice-pink lipstick I preferred in high school set them off so well...

Here's another one from high school. This appears to have been taken at my sister's Confirmation, which means she was in 8th grade and I was therefore a junior in high school. (Side note: the older gentleman to the right of the frame is my late grandfather, who lived with us following my grandmother's death until his own death a few years later. *sniff*) Please ignore the face I'm making as I'm about to inhale a piece of post-church service refreshments, and just let me point out the white pants with black pinstripes. I loved those pants. Loved them. Here's the thing: I wore those year-round because hey, they're white but they had black in them, too! Seriously - look:

See me there? That was taken in January. Yep, the same white, light cotton pants with a black turtleneck, white stockings and black shoes and I was good to go. At least when I was wearing them in church that day the previous summer, they were seasonally appropriate, even if the black belt didn't tie the outfit together quite as much as I thought, nor did it go with the white purse or heels. I had a particular fondness for that sweater, as it was one of only two Benetton clothing items I owned. I cringe to admit that I wore that sweater well into the 90s, too. Oh, if you look closely at the first photo, you'll see some of my favored collection of silver rings. I wore rings on every finger, including my thumbs. If you look really closely, you'll see the "spoon handle" ring on my one finger - it was made of two welded-together spoon handles and it was huge. It would pinch my hand when I played piano and leave me with some nasty blood blisters, as would a few of my (many) silver bracelets. (No, I would not take them off just to spare myself the wounds. You have to be willing to suffer for fashion, right?)

I could go on - sadly, there are hundreds more photo examples of why Tim Gunn will never, ever be my BFF - but I'll leave you with one, last picture to prove that I've always been fashionably hopeless:

'Nuff said.

Only in my dreams...

2010-07-24T23:24:00.000-04:00

I know I'm not the only person on Earth who has a recurring nightmare. Mine started shortly after my eighth birthday and I still dream it to this day. That's thirty years of the same, exact nightmare, for those of you keeping score at home. A darn long time to be haunted by the same dream.

Like I said, I'm not the only person on Earth who has a recurring nightmare, but I betcha I'm one of the only people on Earth who has a photograph of it. You see, on my visit to my childhood home this past week, I was going through old photographs that my parents have in boxes (and boxes, and boxes) in their house. I was looking for a few, specific pictures out of what must be tens of thousands of photographs, and I wasn't holding my breath that I would find those few for which I searched. (My father has been an avid photographer for my entire life, photographing just about everything right down to my very first diaper rash. I kid you not, though that wasn't the picture I was trying to find. I've inherited his shutterbug tendencies, and as such can rival Dad's collection of pictures already, though the vast majority of mine are digital and therefore just taking up space in the external hard drive, instead of haphazard piles in no particular order stuffed into cardboard boxes.) I found some of the ones I had hoped to find, along with many others that I set aside for future blog posts and/or blackmail (I've already sworn a solemn vow to one of my sisters that certain photos of her from our childhood will never be posted by me to Facebook...).

The one I didn't intend to find - one I didn't even realize existed at all - was the one that captured the moment of my recurring nightmare. Here it is:

It doesn't look too nightmarish, I know. What you're looking at is a photograph of an evening in December, 1979, when my parents took me, along with two friends, into New York City to celebrate my eighth birthday. We went to Rockefeller Center and saw the Christmas tree. We saw the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular. We saw the decorated windows at Macy's and along Fifth Avenue. We then went to the Trump Tower, which is where the picture above was taken. I am the girl in the bright orange hat with the pompom almost as big as my head on top.

If you aren't familiar with Trump Tower, the interior is gorgeous. Here's a shot I found online of the inside:

Coincidentally, it appears to be decorated for Christmas as it was on that night in December 1979. (There are other shots of the Trump Tower here and here, for those of you who aren't familiar.)

That night, as we went up the series of open escalators, I first felt the gripping fear that would become my biggest phobia - a fear of falling from a great height. (I do not have a fear of heights, per se, but only one of falling from a height. I feel perfectly fine on top of the Empire State Building, where falling over the edge accidentally is a virtual impossibility - falling on purpose from the top must take some serious effort, indeed! - but standing on a balcony just one or two stories up and looking over a railing freaks me out. I do not know if this technically is just acrophobia, or fear of heights, or if it is something separate.) I was looking down as we climbed the floors and my palms began to sweat, my heart began to pound, my skin became clammy. I shook it off at the time, but that was the beginning of the end of my previously phobia-free existence.

The nightmare, which I first had that night, is this: I am with my family at the Trump Tower at Christmastime. In my dream, I am of varying ages; sometimes I am a child, sometimes I am my actual age at the time. However, in my dream, my youngest sister - who would've been two at the time of the dream's onset - is always an infant, and for whatever reason, my mother has given her to me to hold. I am holding her, both of us bundled in our winter coats, scarves, mittens, and we're climbing the escalators. As we rise higher off the main floor, my sister moves suddenly in an attempt (I always think) to see the waterfall that cascades down the one interior wall and I lose my hold on her. She falls from my arms, plummeting over the side and then I wake up. She never gets rescued nor does she hit the floor before I am awake, panicked and sweaty, sometimes having screamed aloud.

That was the nightmare I had that first night, back in December '79, and it has been virtually the same since then. I do not dream it as often as I did as a child, and there doesn't seem to be any one, specific trigger for it, but I do still have it occasionally to this day. This is the only recurring nightmare I have. I had one other as a child, but that one (about a giant, floating eyeball, of all things) stopped when I was maybe 11 or 12. I just never realized there was a photograph to go with the dream. Freaky, huh?

(By the way, I have been to Trump Tower many times since that night. I've even ridden those same escalators, both as a child and an adult. It never did alleviate the nightmare.)

What about you? Am I the only one to have a recurring nightmare that began in childhood? Anyone else share my fear of falling from a height? Have I just outed myself as certifiably freaky?

Ah, the tortured angst of youth

2010-07-24T13:47:00.000-04:00

My brother-in-law has been reading the Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia with my six year old nephew. Specifically, he's been reading the boxed set that belonged first to my older cousins, then to me. I discovered them around age 9, on a shelf in my grandparents' house, and read the series through a few times over the next several years, leaving the books behind at my parents' house when I went off to college. Well, that set found its way to my sister's house, and thus, a new generation has begun to enjoy the stories.

One night, while reading one of the Narnia books to my nephew, my brother-in-law turned the page and out fell two sheets of paper. Technically, they're not paper paper, but computer punch cards for the NYSE, which came in books and which my grandparents had in abundant supply, as my grandfather was a vice president at the NYSE back in the day. The one side has lots of different boxes for bid size, ask size, sold, cash, close quote, etc, and the reverse was blank, that side being the one my family used for note pads.

Well, two such sheets fell out, and my brother-in-law immediately called for my sister, as he had no idea what in the heck he'd found. Turns out what he discovered was a poem that my sister quickly identified by the chicken-scratch handwriting as being a Heather original creation. She called me the following morning, giggling like a fiend, and told me of the discovery. She promised to send up the poem to me, but as life tends to get in the way of such things, she didn't have the chance to, until I saw her in person earlier this week while the kid and I were on our annual summer trek to New Jersey. (More on that later.) There we stood with our kids on a blindingly sunny, hot beach and she handed over to me this relic of my youth.

And what a tortured youth it was, apparently. Now, bear in mind that I've always fancied myself something of a writer and poet (also a lyricist and composer - oh, to have properly transcribed the melody lines of the songs I wrote as a teenager... alas, I have naught but the occasional fragment of verse and chord notations from which to recreate my attempts at emo 80s pop). Obviously, one is never more Angsty and Tormented than when one is going through the hell that is puberty and adolescence, and I was never one to suffer from a lack of an overactive imagination or delusions of grandeur. It was the pitfall of being a kid whose nose, more often than not, was stuck in a book and whose ears were typically covered with headphones through which music, that food of love, played on and on and on. What I'm trying to say, basically, is that I tended to the dramatic and the melodramatic. In my mind, I was Catherine on the moors, Scarlett in Atlanta, Anne in Avonlea and the leading lady of every Shakespearian drama, Eva Peron and Grizabella and Sally Bowles and Cosette, Katie in The Way We Were, the Baroness in Out of Africa, Etta Place hanging out with Butch and Sundance and Sophie with her horrific choice......

This is all a means to attempt to explain - justify? - what I'm about to transcribe. Yes, dear readers, I'm about to give a Lost Work of Staggering Genius its decades-belated, long overdue public debut. I'd save myself the transcription effort and scan them in, but my handwriting has never been beautiful and was even less so as a Tortured Teenage Artiste. Go ahead, laugh, I sure did. I think, reflecting back on this piece of what surely can only be rightfully termed dreck of the greatest magnitude, that it is eminently clear why I never became the Next Great American Writer, the female Jay McInerny, the 80s Sylvia Plath that I once aspired to be............

*deep breath* Here goes. The poem is untitled, and I honestly do not remember what traumatic event caused me to write this in response. More likely than not, it was some fight with my parents. Perhaps my mom had gone into my room (as she was wont to do) and gone through my belongings, finding something I didn't want her to find. I'm transcribing this verbatim, mightily resisting the urge to edit as I do:

Walking down a winding path

of darkness patched with silver

sewn into the shadow-filled

billowing

darkness by the

far off

distant moon

High above this forest-topped hill

Bravely gleaming all alone

for the host of stars are very faint

The ground below my feet dips and swerves

it is foreign to me, and evil

I yearn for a friendlier path

One through a meadow I have walked before

worn smooth over years of travel

But somehow

I have entered this

secluded wood

full of unknown dangers and challenges

I fear I am not

experienced enough a traveller

but now

I have no choice

Gone are the easy days, days

when the path was wide and clear

and home was waiting

at the end of the lane.

The wind blows

sharp and icy cold

The old door is barred. It stands welcoming

ajar

no more for me.

It is no longer the end

no longer my destination.

This path

leads not to what once was my Home

Now I must press forward, through the black,

the unknown

I must safely make my way,

alone and unguided

to a clearing in this strange, new wood

And with no background, no past

Nothing of old to call my own

I must build myself

a new Home

in the shadows of these trees

Send down my own roots, create

my own history

build up new walls, as these old crumble down

And protect myself from the past, from the future and its

unknown frights

Make my own hearth and lay my own fire

to warm myself by.

What I once thought was my own

is no more.

Now I am alone, to begin

here

in the darkness

When I do build my new Home

will you share it with me?

I'm suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to find a better example of my teenage writing, to prove I wasn't always as horrible a writer as this would lead you to think.......

You want fries with that?

2010-07-17T20:11:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, Kiddo and I went with some friends to the county fair. While perusing the various dining options, we saw many traditional fair foodstuffs, like funnel cake, fried dough, snow cones, etc. I mean, one doesn't go to a county fair for fine cuisine, after all. Then, we came upon this booth:

Holy moly. Now, I've eaten deep fried Oreos before and they're actually quite delicious. However, I just couldn't help but feel like this particular food emporium has gone a wee bit over the top with its listing of deep fried fare. Some things just shouldn't be deep fried, dontcha think? Like, say, pizza. That is just wrong! (And this is coming from someone who is currently in the throes of major PMS and who would gladly dive head first into a giant bag of Fritos, followed by a supersized order of fries from Mickey D's and finish off by finishing off a bag of Double Stuff Oreos. It isn't that I'm against junk food or grease or oil or deep frying, is what I'm saying, it's just that sometimes one can go too far.) The stand didn't seem to be lacking for customers, however, so maybe I'm in the minority here, thinking that not everything tastes better when it's been deep fried.

(Also, I'm trying reallllllly hard not to comment on the grammatical error right there at the top of the stand's sign. Reallllllllly hard.)

Not quite life handing one lemons and making lemonade, but...

2010-07-09T20:06:00.000-04:00

So, I had this bunch of bananas going steadily overripe in my fruit bowl on the kitchen counter. Actually, it was parts of two separate bunches; the original bunch I'd bought which started getting riper than the ripeness level Kiddo will willingly consume (she eats a banana each morning as part of her breakfast), and a second bunch I'd bought when the first bunch started getting too ripe so there'd be bananas for Kiddo to consume, with the assumption that Hubby, who isn't nearly as persnickety about what constitutes a too-ripe banana, would eat the remainder of the first bunch (he takes a banana in his lunch on days that he brings lunch to work). What wound up happening was that Hubby didn't eat enough of the first bunch and the second bunch ripened alarmingly quickly, being, as they were, in such close proximity to the first bunch, and before I knew it, I had half a dozen bananas that were all way too ripe for anyone in the house to want to eat. And by "anyone" I mean "Hubby or Kiddo" because I do not eat bananas. Not in their original form, anyhow. I have a thing about bananas dating back to when I was a child, and try as I may as an adult, I cannot overcome it and eat them plain and unadulterated.

I will, however, gladly eat them in an adulterated form, like, say, as banana bread. Of course, to eat them as banana bread requires making the banana bread, which is what I decided I'd do. I decided this right around when the insane heat wave started, though, as the bananas all had the unfortunate timing to edge perilously close to rotten just when the thermometer started racing up (and up, and up. Didn't the heat wave realize where it was? This is upstate New York, for Pete's sake! We prefer to buy plane tickets and make hotel reservations to experience those kind of temperatures. When we choose to, on purpose, paying good money to do so. We don't like to just be subjected all willy-nilly to upper 90s in our own hometown, sheesh!!) Who in their right mind wants to turn on an oven and bake things for an hour when it is freakishly hot outside? No one in their right mind, that's who, and not me, either. So, the bananas sat, going browner and browner, first in the fruit bowl and then in the fridge, until today when the heat finally dropped back down below 80 and turning the oven on didn't seem quite so laughable a thought.

I rescued my beloved, cobalt blue Kitchenaid stand mixer from its sad, temporary home in the bottom of my pantry, vowing to it once again that the moment our kitchen renovation is complete (neglecting to mention that the renovation won't even begin for another few years unless we win the lottery sooner than that), I will move it to a permanent place of honor, out on the countertop, so it will no longer have to languish behind the bag of dry cat food, nor will it have to practically give me a hernia every time I haul it out and up into the daylight to use. I dug out my go-to recipe for banana bread, took a deep breath, fired up the oven and got to mixin'.

Here's the thing about banana bread: it smells better than any other thing in the world when it is baking. Seriously. The smell wafts all throughout the house, permeating every nook and cranny with that delicious odor. Longer lasting than chocolate chip cookies, more powerful than brownies, less "have to be in the mood for it or it is icky" than bacon, there's just something about banana bread that makes it the best thing you can possibly bake in terms of making your entire house smell edible. Within 15 minutes of me popping the pans into the oven, Kiddo surfaced from the lanai, nose sniffing away. Hubby, downstairs in the office, noticed the wondrous smell as well. Both of them began asking me "When will it be ready? Is it ready yet?" By the time I pulled the loaves out, we were all salivating heavily.

I wish that there was a Scratch-n-Sniff plug-in for the internet, because that would make this:

so much better. Sadly, you'll either have to take my word for it, or hop in your car (or on a plane, depending on where you're reading this right now) and stop over for a slice of banana bread heaven. We've only got a loaf and a half left now, so you'd better stop by soon. Or, for a last option, buy too many bananas, let them get too ripe, and bake up a batch yourself:

Best Banana Bread in the World Recipe:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream together 2 sticks butter and 2.5 cups sugar. Add 6 overripe bananas, blend well. Add 4 well-beaten eggs, blend well again. In a separate bowl while the previous mixture is blending (I set my Kitchenaid around a 4 for this - medium/medium-low), sift together 3 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 3 teaspoons of baking soda. Add dry ingredients and (once again) blend well. Pour into two greased loaf pans (you know, the traditional size "loaf" pans, though I have several and no two are the exact, same size). Bake for about an hour - until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out cleanly. Depending on the oven I've been using, this can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes, so I generally start checking the loaves for doneness around the 45 minute mark, then every 5 minutes thereafter. Enjoy!!

Mostly Wordless Wednesday... the official portraits

2010-07-07T17:50:00.000-04:00

I finally got my act together and got Kiddo's professional portrait taken, as I've done every year around her birthday. "Around her birthday" used to mean within 3 days, max, back when she was younger. This year, "around her birthday" turned out to mean within 6 weeks, give or take a day. At any rate, it's done now, plus I had a coupon and I'll be able to save myself some mailing charges as we're heading to the motherland (aka Jersey) the week after next, so I can distribute the latest pictures in person to all the aunts, uncles and grandparents then.

Without further ado, Kiddo, age 7, the official portraits:

Hello, summer vacation!

2010-06-22T09:15:00.002-04:00

Here's Kiddo, ready for her last day of first grade:

I made her stand in the same place I had her stand for her first day of first grade:

(For the record, she's grown 2 inches and gained 3 pounds since last summer, and also lost another four teeth - all on top - and has a mouthful of new, gigantic, wonky, adult teeth coming in...)

She's excited about the upcoming summer vacation, with the trips and activities we have planned and the playdates that are already being lined up (seriously, the first one is this afternoon after school, and we have another one tomorrow!). She's also very sad that school is ending for the year. She was revved up something fierce this morning and went from tears in the bathroom while I was doing her hair to a giddy, spinning-spinning-spinning dance out in the driveway while waiting for the bus...

(Yes, that is a caribiner chock-full of Silly Bandz on a lanyard around her neck. This is apparently the preferred method of bringing one's Silly Bandz to school. Considering that some of them are small enough to be constricting on Kiddo's relatively toothpickesque arms, I was all for the carabiner-lanyard style of bracelet wearing.)

Last year at this time, I was a bit nervous as we were starting our first summer without any services. It was our first summer without OT, without PT. This year, I'm not quite as worried. I just have to be sure to stay on top of things with lots of daily, added sensory input as needed. We'll do lots of swimming, walking, biking, playing, gardening, running around. Also lots of lazing about, quiet, relaxing and settling down. I'll be picking up her pressure vest from the classroom today. We've got a deck of yoga cards (which are an admittedly poor substitute for the yoga that her amazing, incredible, words-cannot-adequately-describe-how-awesome-she-is aide has done with her every day at school this year), her BodySox and a container of Theraputty.

Bring it on, summer - I think I'm ready for you!

Operation Seven Candles

2010-06-07T07:17:00.006-04:00

We had Kiddo's birthday party here at the house on Saturday. Kiddo is a *huge* fan of Kim Possible (she's done all the Kim Possible missions at Epcot, which are a highlight for her of every trip we take to Walt Disney World), and after checking the pricing at just about every venue in the area from renting a lodge at a nearby park (as we did for the past two years) to doing the party someplace like Chuck E. Cheese or the zoo, we decided we'd host a Secret Agent themed party here at our house. This would not only save serious money (we couldn't justify spending upwards of $300 or even more on a child's birthday party lasting less than 2 hours in duration), but would enable Kiddo to invite as many friends as she wanted. She wanted to invite her entire class, plus her Daisy troop, plus a couple other friends who are neither classmates nor fellow Daisies.

The invitation looked like this:

(the code key was on the back of the sheet, so you're looking at the front and back of the invite side-by-side above) and they were delivered in plain, manila envelopes. 31 children were invited, 27 RSVPed that they'd be accepting the mission and 25 actually attended (had some last minute cancellations due to illness, as is par for the course when one is talking about an invite list full of ~~germmongers~~ kids...).

Kiddo was collected bright and early Saturday morning by her grandparents, who kept her occupied and away from the setting-up process so as not to spoil any of the activities. They delivered her home just in time to wash up and start greeting her guests. We totally lucked out with the weather, as the entire weekend's weather basically ranged from "steady downpour" to "torrential thunderstorm" with the exception of one, 10 hour window, that being, thankfully, Saturday from midmorning through evening, thereby giving us glorious sun and warm temperatures for the Operation.

The itinerary went as follows:

- Registration at Mission HQ: Give decoded password, sign Secret Agent photo ID card which I made ahead of time, using the Secret Agent Code Name the kids gave when RSVPing:

Kiddo and the girls all pretty much chose flower or animal names for their Code Names - Sunflower, Lilac, Pony, Sassy Cat. The boys went for comic book character or more scary type names - Spiderman, Hammerhead, Fear Ripper, Ghost. After checking in (and obtaining a phone number for each Agent's grown-up, just in case), the kids headed to the back yard, where Hubby had a CD of Secret Agent theme music playing on the lanai. (He'd made the CD using various songs - Mission Impossible theme, Kim Possible theme, James Bond theme, Dragnet theme, Hawaii 5-0 theme, Scooby Doo theme, etc....) Once all the Secret Agents had arrived, we split them up randomly into three teams.

- Secret Agent Training: Egg on spoon relay race, limbo pole. We were going to do a ring toss as well but scratched that at the last minute due to time constraints and lack of anything handy with which to pound in the ring toss stakes.

- Mission: Master of Disguise: A costume relay race. Each team had a disguise comprised of 4 elements: shirt (one of Hubby's old button-down, long sleeved shirts), pants (old gym shorts/pajama bottom shorts of Hubby's and mine), a lei (from Kiddo's rather extensive lei collection) and eyewear (sunglasses, pirate's eyepatch, novelty glasses). We would've done hats or other headwear, but there were issues with children catching/spreading head lice at birthday parties last fall that involved dressing up, so we opted to not take the risk of being the first head lice party of 2010 (I mean, we don't think any of the kids had lice; we were just erring on the side of caution). The first Secret Agent on each team had to put on the disguise, run down to the other end of the yard and back, then take off the disguise, which the next Secret Agent then had to put on, etc. This game was particularly hilarious to watch for us adults and the kids were all cracking up as well.

- Mission: Mystery Sounds: Hubby made a CD of mystery sounds (coins dropping, horse hooves galloping, siren wailing, paper being crumpled up, etc) and each Secret Agent was given a sheet to write down their answers as he played the sounds one by one. This was a good way to settle down a bit after all the running around and activity. We also went through the better part of a case of water and a case of Capri Sun juice pouches by this point, given the sun and heat. This led to a rather lengthy line for the bathroom, too...

- Mission: 7 Candles: The birthday cake. Given Kiddo's food intolerances and the food allergies of some of her friends, we've always baked her cake at home ourselves. Kiddo requested half chocolate, half vanilla for her cake, so Hubby baked one 9x13" chocolate cake and one 9x13" white cake, set them out side by side (trimmed to match in height) and frosted them together with white frosting. We ordered a cake topper from the same online company we've ordered her cake toppers from for the past 3 years, this year starring Kiddo's favorite, Kim Possible -

I wound up organizing a quick game of "Telephone" to keep the kids seated and quiet while Hubby was getting the cake set in the kitchen. It takes a surprisingly long time for 25 Secret Agents to pass along the message "the cake is chocolate and vanilla" which was helpful since they were all very, very excited about the upcoming sugar rush. (Yes, I know this was "Operation 7 Candles" but the cake had eight - one for good luck/to grow on, of course!) We used "trick sparkler" candles, which did relight twice but weren't very sparkler-y. It turned out to be okay that they only relit twice, because otherwise there might have been a riot. Cake was enthusiastically consumed and then we moved on to

- Mission: Prize Hunt: For goody bags/favors for the party, we found these spy kits online. We made three clues, the first printed backwards so it would need to be read in a mirror, the second in invisible ink, the third written in the same code used for the secret password on the invitation. Hubby, being the genius that he is, thought of hiding the clues in balloons (which he'd been blowing up at the time) so we did that, and I labeled them CLUE 1, 2 and 3 respectively. We explained to the Secret Agents that they'd need to hunt to find their favors, and handed each team one balloon. Once they'd all solved their clues, they put them together and learned that the favors were hidden down low, outside in the back yard. Out they went. It took them a surprisingly long time to find the large box containing the spy kits, given that it was hidden in mostly plain sight in the patio stairwell. We didn't actually distribute the spy kits right when they found them, though, because we had one more mission for the kids -

- Mission: Target Practice: The three teams lined up on the front lawn and were each given water balloons to try to toss into chalk circle targets drawn in the driveway. Amazingly enough, no children took the opportunity to hurl water balloons at each other, so the only person who got at all wet in this mission was me, by dint of standing on the other side of the driveway to take pictures and thereby having water balloons bursting about my ankles from time to time. (I was wearing my fantabulous, new Lands' End flip flops, so no harm, no foul.)

By this point in the party, the parents had begun arriving to collect their Secret Agents, so we then moved on to

- Awarding of Secret Agent Stars which were those star stickers your teacher had back in elementary school, affixed to their ID badge and handed to them along with their spy kit favors.

I'd love to share pictures of all the fun, but I haven't permission from any of the 25 Secret Agents' parents to do so online, so unless you're one of my Facebook friends (I've got an album up over there), I'm afraid you're out of luck at this point. I can and will, however, share with you a few shots of Kiddo and myself decked out in some of the mustaches from her spy kit:

We tried taking a family portrait using the timer on the camera as well, but it didn't come out that great as it turns out we were too far away from the camera -

So, there you have it. Operation Seven Candles - a smashing, Secret Agenty success! (Even if my plan didn't win the birthday party contest thrown by a group of organic food companies - yes, I'm still a tiny bit bitter since they included my idea as #3 on their list.) Now all that's left is for Kiddo to write eleventy million thank you notes..... I also owe a heartfelt THANK YOU to my friends Andy (aka The Creative Junkie - if you aren't a loyal reader of her blog already, you should be, she's fantabulous) and Freyda. Andy lent us four tables so that we didn't have to rent any, and Frey stayed for the duration of the party and helped out with ~~containing the chaos~~ managing the missions. Your assistance was most appreciated, ladies!