Why Tim Gunn will never, ever be my BFF

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...

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

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?

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...

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

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!

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

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!

Wordful Wednesday - some serious awesomeness for Heather's Hobbity Hooves

Last summer, I was shopping at our local Lands' End Inlet store and I happened upon a display of flip-flops.  As faithful readers may recall, I have feet issues.  To wit: unevenly sized, misshapen, Hobbity, rhino hoof feet issues.  The first thing I noticed was that these particular flip-flops didn't have the dreaded "between the toes thong" which automatically would rule them out for Heather's Hobbity Hooves.  WIth my feet being two different sizes, walking in flip-flops with the between-the-toes thong becomes an instant game of How Fast Will Heather Stumble and Fall? and as I barely can keep our house stocked with sufficient quantities of bandages for the kid's various boo-boos, adding the cost of bandages for Flip Flop Fumbles by me (with my considerably larger surface area for skinning-n-scraping) would be just too much.  I don't think banks loan money to folks for first aid supplies or general klutziness.

Anyhow, there I stood, perusing the display of non-between-the-toes-thonged flip-flops.  As I gazed and pondered, another shopper walked by, and she had a pair of the same flip-flops on her feet, so I asked her if she liked them (because, you know, I'm like that with the whole "randomly yet politely accost strangers in public and strike up a conversation" and all).  Her response was instantaneous and enthusiastic.  She loved them.  Lived in them.  Most comfortable flip-flops she'd ever owned.  Now, she wasn't some Skinny-Minnie, petite little thing, either.  She looked to be about my age and was taller than I am, so this wasn't a case of someone walking around in their size 4 shoes or anything.  We chatted a bit further as she kept extolling the virtues of these flip-flops above all others she had ever worn, and commiserated with me about the discomfort that comes with most other flip-flops out there in the world.

Well, I decided at this point that if there was a pair in my size, and being on sale at the Inlet as they were, it was Meant to Be for Heather's Hobbity Hooves to find themselves shod in a pair of these flip-flops.  I looked through the display, and lo and behold, there was one pair in my size.  Snatching them up, I slipped off my trusty Birks and tried them on.  They.  Were.  Heavenly.  I walked them right over to the register, paid and wore them out of the store.

One year later, they remain my most favorite flip-flops, ever.  They've worn well, held up to the torment that comes with shoeing my Hobbity Hooves, and have generally been a delight.  As such a delight, I wear them all the time now that the weather is warm enough to put away my ample supply of woolly socks and clogs.  I've even worn them to the grocery store - they're that comfy.  My Birks don't know what to do with themselves, with all this rest they've been getting.

I wear them so often that I hardly even notice they're on, which is exactly what happened one day last week when I busted out my roller and paint tray and got to painting the living room walls.  (We're just finishing up Paintathon 2010, more on that in another post.)  I have a pair of "painting shoes" - those being a pair of mint green bedroom slippers that I wear just when I'm on the drop cloth and painting, then kick off before stepping onto clean floors so as not to track paint everywhere.  (Have I mentioned I'm a klutz?  And that if there is wet paint within 100 yards of my body, I will find a way to get it all over my body and step in it, too?)  Well, on this particular morning, I waved goodbye to Kiddo as the bus pulled away, headed back inside, picked up my roller, poured a tray of paint and began rolling away to the musical accompaniment of my Pandora Radio 80s station.

It was several moments later (well, one White Wedding and a Reflex later, at least) that I went to roll a particularly spattery load of paint, and felt it splash all over me.  No big whoop, since I had.....................

whoops.

Oh.  No.

I hadn't.  I hadn't put on my painty slippers.  I was still wearing my flip-flops.  My beloved flip-flops, which now had a glob of paint right smack dab in the middle of the top strap.

Sob.


I immediately abandoned my roller and rushed to the laundry room to try to minimize the damage.  I scrubbed and I scrubbed and I Oxicleaned and scrubbed some more, but there still remained traces of Soft Linen paint in a satin finish on my flip-flop.  I was devastated.


So devastated that I immediately took to my computer to bemoan my idiocy to the world.  I tweeted about ruining my flip-flops by painting in them, I whined on Facebook.  After wrapping up my internet whinefest, I put on my painty slippers and got back to the task at hand.


A little while later, I was back at my computer and saw a tweet to me from someone at Lands' End.  They'd read my tweet (!) and tweeted back:

Your painting efforts impressed us – let us treat you to a new pair of soon to be your fave Lands’ End flip-flops!

 !!!!!

I exchanged a few tweets and then emails with a lovely woman at Lands' End with an equally lovely name (shout out to Raija - you rock!) and before you know it, Lands' End sent me these beauties which just arrived this evening, a week to the day of my painting mishap:

Aren't they fantabulous?  Yes, yes they are.  Fantabulous and comfy and definitely my favorite flip-flop footwear.

Here's one in action on a HHH:

(Yes, I know, it's not a pretty picture.  I clearly stated I have horrible feet.  The "scratched-til-it-bled" mosquito bite, half-assed attempt at a self-pedi to help hide my damaged big toenail and glimpse of pink flamingo-n-palm-tree jammies just add to the overall beauty, too, don't they?)

Now, I've been a loyal Lands' End customer and fan for years.  I've never had an issue with their customer service or returns on the very few occasions that I've had to return something.  I have contacted their customer service either online or by phone with questions about sizes, etc several times over the years and their customer service reps have always been friendly, helpful and professional.  I've always found the quality of their merchandise to be excellent (for example, despite her best efforts, Kiddo is unable to destroy any of their Super-Ts, be they long- or short-sleeved) and they have sales often enough that it is rare for me to ever have to pay full price for any of their stuff.  All that aside, how completely awesome is it that they sent me a free, new pair of flip-flops after I was scatterbrained and klutzy enough to spatter paint on a pair through my own sheer idiocy?
 
Lands' End, thanks!!!  I was already a fan, now I'm absolutely a fan for life!

I wonder what would happen if I tweeted about the scratches on my Sienna.............

Mostly Wordless Wednesday...Lucky Number Seven

May 2003:

May 2010:

Happy birthday, lovebug!