Month: September 2011

Hi.

How are you?

I’m fine. I’ve just finished looking through my new Pottery Barn catalog and am now sitting here feeling bad about myself. It made me want to put out my stylish mercury glass pumpkins and write a recipe for pumpkin soup on my rustic chalkboard adorned with twigs.

But then I remembered I don’t own mercury glass pumpkins or a rustic chalkboard and I wouldn’t know a good recipe for pumpkin soup if it jumped out of a cookbook and bit me. Because I don’t know that pumpkins and soup need to go together. I prefer my pumpkin in some bread.

I realize there are some people that are totally inspired by the latest Pottery Barn catalogs. They pore over the pages and think to themselves, “I COULD TOTALLY GET SOME SILVER PAINT AND RECREATE THAT DISPLAY USING ONLY PUMPKINS AND A SINGLE GOURD!”

However, I am not one of those people. I am a person who thinks how fun and quirky it would be to host a Halloween party and have some spooky skeleton hands to hold the punch dispenser.

But I know that all I will actually do is put out a couple of mums on the front porch that will be dead by November because I’ll forget to water them. And I’ll accentuate them with five pumpkins Caroline will talk me into buying at the pumpkin patch and leave them there to rot until it’s time to hang the Christmas lights.

I make Martha Stewart sad.

I’ve always told myself that I would really get into seasonal decor if I just had enough money to buy all the stuff and not have to resort to any type of craft. But now I realize that’s not true. I’d need to have enough money to buy all that stuff and then to pay someone to come put it all out for me in an artfully arranged display.

So what I’m saying is it looks like another year of dead mums and rotten pumpkins for our house. The neighbors will be so pleased.

In other news, I promised to fill you in on our weekend. I think it will speak volumes when I tell you that Caroline had a friend spend the night on Friday night and I made an enormous pallet for the girls in the middle of the living room floor and ended up leaving it there all weekend. Because you never know when you might not make it all the way to the couch and just fall face first into a nap-like state in the middle of the living room.

Friday night we took the girls to the high school football game. This is what they looked like as they walked in.

So big, yet so little. I love that they still hold hands when they walk together.

We cheered for our team, but sadly the game came down to a bad call by the refs which caused the Debbie Downer who’d been sitting behind us the whole game to announce repeatedly she knew THE WHOLE TIME that there was no way we could win. Thank you, Sunshine. You made our Friday night super special.

On Saturday morning Caroline had her first soccer game of the season so I was concerned when she and her friend woke up at the crack of 6 a.m. after being up so late the night before. But they had plenty of adrenaline to get them through and led The Stingers (the team formerly known as The Magic, formerly known as The Cheetah Girls, formerly known as The Rainbows) to a 2-0 victory over a group of fourth and fifth graders that were bigger than me.

I’m not sure why C is rocking the socks over the knees look, but she scored her first goal of the season so it must have worked for her.

After the game we came home and it began to rain (I forgot to mention that we woke up to rain on Friday morning and, I KID YOU NOT, didn’t know what we were hearing. I thought a pipe had burst.) so we all took showers, put on our pajamas and watched Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. It was the most delightful Saturday in recent memory.

Later that night we ate dinner with some friends, stayed up too late and then spent most of Sunday in our pajamas again.

It would have been the perfect time to put out our fall decor. Except I still have my dead summer plants in the urns on my front porch.

And my landscaper, also known as my husband, needs to buy me some mums.

But I’ll choose my own pumpkins. It’s important to pick just the right ones when you plan to keep them until Christmas.

Here’s a little guarantee for you.

If the world was ending and the end was being broadcast over all the various networks, you can believe that I would miss the whole thing because I’d be sitting on my couch next to P, watching two men dressed in camo perched on top of a mountain whispering, “Bob? Do you see that elk?”

“I see it, Bob. I see it!”

“That is one big elk, buddy. Wait until you have the right shot.”

The only way I’d find out that there was anything more pressing going on in the universe than Bob and his big elk would be because I’d check the Twitter where people would be tweeting furiously about the world’s end.

Because that’s exactly what happened last night when Friday Night Lights won the Emmy for best writing of a drama series and Kyle Chandler won for best actor. I missed it. BUT AT LEAST I GOT TO SEE BOB SHOOT HIS BIG ELK.

To add insult to injury, I thought I had recorded the Emmys on the DVR but we had big storms roll through the area (I’m not complaining. I will never complain again about rain in any form.) and our Dish Network lost its signal and the DVR missed Kyle Chandler’s speech. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

Unless your DVR quits working in a thunderstorm.

BUT I GOT TO SEE BOB SHOOT HIS BIG ELK.

And that’s what really matters.

I’ll be back with more about our weekend tomorrow. (OH IT WILL BE RIVETING.) but for today I have a really cool giveaway going on. The nice folks at Alexander Creative emailed me about a month ago and said they’d love to give away one of their Family Rules posters. I wasn’t sure what that looked like so I checked it out.

Yes. Love.

They come in a couple of different colors and if you win you can choose which color you’d like. And you can check out all their fun stuff right here.

To enter:

Leave a comment on this post. You can tell me what you did this weekend or just say hi.

I’ll leave comments open here until this Friday, September 23 and then choose a winner using random.org.

I’ll email the winner and they’ll get your poster to you.

That’s it.

Just wanted to clarify that I’m not being compensated for this giveaway, just thought it was cool and y’all might like it.

Have a great day. And if you know where I can watch Kyle Chandler’s acceptance speech in its entirety, please let me know.

In return, I’ll let you know where you can watch Bob shoot his elk.

I almost hate to admit this because I fear you will all be disappointed in me.

I didn’t make it to Target to look at the Missoni collection. I know. It’s like I don’t even know who I am right now.

The truth is that I had good intentions but we all know the road to owning inexpensive Missoni merchandise is paved with good Target intentions. But then Tuesday morning turned out to be busy for a multitude of reasons and by the time I thought about making the long journey to Target I could tell from all the buzz on Twitter that it might be like walking into sheer insanity or an elementary school cafeteria.

There were rumors of people piling their baskets full of everything Missoni they could get in their red plastic cart, the Target website crashing, and shoppers who bought only with the intention to resell it on Ebay. Which, honestly, raises some unshoppingmanship red flags with me. Whatever happened to just shopping for the love of zig-zag prints?

Anyway, I think all of the hoopla caught Target totally off-guard. I just hope the security assets protection division had this bad boy gassed up and ready to go.

Oh that the Lord would allow me to see it in action one day.

In other news, well, there’s not much other news. I took Caroline to the dentist yesterday morning and that was every bit as fascinating as what you’re imagining. And I did have a mini-celebration when the dentist announced her permanent teeth are coming in really straight and her bite looks good because I don’t know if y’all know this but orthodontia don’t come cheap. I know this because I had to have braces at the tender age of thirty-four years old. I refer to that time period as the two years I walked in extreme humility and lived in fear of shooting a rubberband from my mouth across a cocktail party.

So I treated her to a double-chocolatey chip frappucino to celebrate. It was my little way of saying “Hey Kid, way to have good teeth and potentially save your parents thousands of dollars. Here’s a four dollar drink in honor of the occasion”.

I really am at a loss for anything else to say. I feel a little “we could talk or not talk for hours” leaning heavily on the not talk side. But it’s just been one of those weeks filled with the pest control guy spraying the house and picking up dry-cleaning and thawing out hamburger meat and trying to make a bunch of stuff in my refrigerator magically turn into a good dinner.

(I just read that paragraph and it sounds like the pest control guy picked up my dry-cleaning. That is not the case.)

(Although how awesome would that be? Someone should do that.)

(I could edit that paragraph so that it reads better but that would take a lot of work.)

Speaking of a lot of work, I was driving Caroline to school on Tuesday morning and she was telling about some math test she had taken the day before.

She told me, “It didn’t make sense. The question asked if an armadillo’s head is six inches long and his tail is four inches long and his total length is eighteen inches, then how long is his body?”

(Word problems are of the devil. You’ll never convince me otherwise.)

But I responded, “Well, what didn’t make sense?”

She said, “How am I supposed to know how long an armadillo’s body is? I’ve only seen ONE in my whole life and he was running really fast.”

I think she makes an excellent point.

That’s why I’ve never liked math.

However, I do like Missoni. But not enough to fight a crowd at Target for it.