Author: Big Mama

Don’t mind me, I’m just sleeping off the Reeses peanut butter cups

I hope you all had a lovely Halloween. And I just have to say that I appreciate y’all so much for understanding my feelings on the Great Orange Incident of 2012. And also for singlehandedly bringing the term “jackwagon” back into my vocabulary.

And now, in lieu of words, a few pictures from our Halloween.

We carved pumpkins just in the nick of time. And with temps in the 80s I’m sure they’ll be melted on our front porch by tomorrow morning.

Caroline decided to be a ninja this year. But then opted to not wear her ninja mask. And, thus, became a spy instead. Except sometimes she was still a ninja, but without a mask.

And at school everyone apparently thought she was Katniss from The Hunger Games, which thrilled her to no end even though she hasn’t read or seen The Hunger Games. She just knows it’s cool.

Me and my spy/ninja/Katniss

A werewolf, a ninja and the Hulk walk into a bar…

And this one just because I needed y’all to see Will howl. He took the whole thing very seriously and was very concerned about his chest hair.

Caroline practicing her ninja skills on Bops. He never saw it coming.

Hope y’alls was fun and full of the good candy and not those fake Smarties.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Orange. Except not.

Wouldn’t it be great if I already had a picture of Caroline in her costume? That would be perfect since it’s, you know, Halloween and all. But today will be the first time she’s actually worn her costume because she’s officially reached the age where it’s not cool to wear your costume to the Pumpkin Patch and have pictures taken. And we didn’t do the neighborhood shopping center carnival because she had a soccer game on Saturday and probably wouldn’t have cared that much about it anyway.

Excuse me while I go have a nice cry.

Anyway, we had some drama here yesterday. And before you jump to conclusions, I want to let you know that Disney didn’t buy my film company for 4.05 billion dollars. Mainly because I don’t own a film company. Unless you count the occasional videos I take of Caroline with my iPhone. But I’m guessing those are probably only worth about four total dollars. Maybe $5.00 if I threw in one where she’s making a joke about poop.

So about a year and a half ago, P brought home a tiny little orange tree. He was planning to plant it down at the ranch but Caroline begged him to plant it in our front yard instead. And so he did. Because why would he deny his only daughter the dream of having fresh-squeezed orange juice made from oranges from her very own orange tree?

She helped him plant it in the front yard and over the last year and a half has been slightly obsessed with it, checking it at regular intervals to see if it had produced any fruit. And then it finally flowered this spring and P told her that meant that it would actually grow a few oranges this year. She was beside herself when she noticed about nine very small green oranges beginning to grow around April.

Over the last six months she has watered that tree and checked on her oranges and made big plans to drink homemade orange juice on Christmas morning. We noticed last week that the oranges were officially the size of, well, an orange. And the color was beginning to turn from green to slightly yellow. There was much excitement.

Then yesterday afternoon Caroline had an appointment to get her hair cut after school. And as we were coming back home from the beauty salon, I noticed there was a van parked in front of our house and a man in our front yard doing something. It took me a minute to figure out what it was before I realized he was hurriedly picking every single one of our oranges off our tree. Without even thinking, I rolled down my window and yelled, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? THOSE ARE OUR ORANGES. YOU CAN’T STEAL OUR ORANGES!”

P happened to be working in the driveway around back, heard me yelling, saw my car parked at a funny angle and thought I’d been in a wreck. I yelled to him, “THIS GUY IS STEALING OUR ORANGES”.

And so P quickly made his way to the front yard to confront the fruit thief. It turns out this guy was actually a contract employee for the Yellow Pages. He’d just delivered new Yellow Pages to our front door and then decided to help himself to all our oranges.

First of all, 1985 called and they want their Yellow Pages back. Does anyone even still use the Yellow Pages?

Secondly, who thinks they can just steal all the fruit from someone’s tree? Even worse, it wasn’t even ripe yet. He just ruined it.

Before you think I’m a little obsessed with my first world fruit thief problems, it’s not about the oranges. I realize it’s just a few oranges. In light of the hurricane on the East Coast and a million other things going on all over the world, this doesn’t even register. I need you to know that I know that.

But, like Gulley said, it was the anger at watching someone take something that my child had invested so much time in. He didn’t steal oranges, he stole her joy and sense of accomplishment.

And here’s the thing. If he had knocked on our door and asked for a glass of water or a piece of fruit or anything, we would have gladly given it to him. We try to live our lives with an open hand in recognition that everything we have belongs to God and not us anyway.

It was the stealing. It was the coming up in our front yard to deliver some lame Yellow Pages that we didn’t even want and then deciding he needed to take every single one of those oranges. Every single one. Seriously.

P made sure the guy knew how much those oranges meant to Caroline. And the guy offered to put them back. Except that doesn’t really work with unripe fruit from a tree. It’s basic science.

So I got on the Google and now we have our own little science fair experiment going with the unripe oranges (at least the ones he didn’t smash in the street) in a brown paper bag with some apples. Apparently the apples emit some sort of chemical that tells the oranges to ripen. You’re welcome for that free lesson.

We’ll see if it works.

As for Caroline, she finally settled down and we explained that it was just fruit and used it as a good lesson for why you should never take something that doesn’t belong to you. But she made sure to tell us later that she came in the house looking for a weapon to use on the thief and had decided her best bet was our metal toilet paper stand.

Because everyone knows it’s best to bring a toilet paper holder to a fruit fight.

Or something like that.

Hope y’all have a Happy Halloween.
For lack of originality, I’ll call this Tuesday’s post

You know the problem with waiting until Tuesday to tell you what we did over the weekend? It’s that I have a hard time remembering what we did.

It also doesn’t help that there wasn’t anything that exciting. Well, other than Caroline shooting her first deer of the season. But I believe we covered that yesterday.

On Friday morning I had a meeting scheduled with my pastor’s wife to talk about the upcoming Christmas celebration. And I was excited because the cold front had started to blow through and I put on a sweater and my leather boots since it was finally cool enough to guarantee I wouldn’t be a pool of sweat by noon. However, the weather forecasters were lying liars when the predicted only a 30% chance of rain and thunderstorms.

Because as soon as I got in my car and began to drive to my meeting, there came a monsoon. Like it-hailed- on-my-car type storm. And all I could think about was my leather boots. Here I’d just resolved to take better care of them by keeping bottles of wine in them and now they were about to get soaked. I debated the political incorrectness of running into Starbucks in just my socks.

Fortunately, I remembered that I’d left an umbrella in the back of my car so I climbed back there to get it. Then I waited for the rain to let up to something less than torrential and made a run for it. And my boots got wet. However, they seem to have recovered beautifully after being carefully hand-dried while I sang them a lullaby.

Anyway, I’d planned to run a bunch more errands and be super productive but, alas, I just went straight home and listened to the rain pour down the rest of the afternoon. And I also grieved that I’d missed a perfectly good opportunity to wear my rainboots that I’m always looking for an excuse to wear. This is what we call a first world fashion problem.

Friday night we went to go eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops and my sister and her family. My nephew, Luke, is almost three and he’d called me earlier in the day to practice his heavy-breathing skills. He’d made her believe he actually wanted to have a conversation with me, but I think he froze once he heard me on the phone and so I just listened to him breathe his cute three-year-old breath until my sister prompted him to say, “I love you, Aunt Mel. Bye.”

Listen. I’ll take what I can get.

Saturday morning was proof that God loves me because our soccer game had originally been scheduled for 8 a.m. but had been changed to 9:15 a.m. at the last minute which caused me to weep with joy. And I reveled in my joy and happiness until 8:45 a.m. Saturday morning when P’s mom called my cell phone to find out where we were because she’d been at the soccer fields since 8 a.m. and we weren’t there.

Dang.

Note to self: Always call your mother-in-law with scheduling changes. Especially ones that involve 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

But she made it to the 9:15 game along with Mimi and Bops. Caroline’s team lost, but she had a good game and we got out of there without frostbite so that felt like a win.

(Caroline told me after soccer practice tonight that she doesn’t feel like her team takes it as seriously as she does. And she needs them to take it seriously because “my whole soccer career replies on it”.)

(I think we all know she meant “relies”.)

(Also, she told her teacher last week that she didn’t need to work that hard in school because she is going to play soccer when she grows up. However, I think she still needs to “reply” on her academics in case she needs a Plan B.)

After the game was over, she and P headed to the ranch and Gulley and I took advantage of the free time to do a little shopping. I am currently on a self-imposed spending lockdown where clothing is concerned, but we found Gulley a few new pairs of jeans and some other stuff she needed. And I did find a gorgeous, long black wool coat marked down drastically at Nordstrom Rack that I’m still thinking about.

And then Saturday night I watched the Aggies beat Auburn. While it was nice to watch a game in a relaxed manner that didn’t require me to take a sedative after it was over, I have to admit it was a little boring after all the excitement of the last few weeks. But something tells me I’ll be back to needing a Xanax when we play Mississippi State this Saturday. I have a feeling it’s going to be a close one.

Sunday morning we slept in because Caroline and P didn’t get home until around midnight. That afternoon we went to the pumpkin patch to get a pumpkin so we could make a literary pumpkin for school. This isn’t a required assignment and I was desperately hoping we could skip it, but she wanted to do it. And so we made a pumpkin that started out as a character named Misty Gordon and has now become Junie B. Jones instead. I’m not sure how that happened, but whatever. I’m not going to look a gift pumpkin in the mouth.

I don’t even know what that means.

And that was our weekend.

Thoughts and prayers going out to any of you who are in the path of Sandy. Be safe.
The hunter

So this is what happened here this weekend.

Actually, it didn’t happen here so much as it happened about an hour south of here.

Either way, she’s thrilled.

And there will be deer steaks on the menu this week.
Fashion Friday: Edition maybe the weather is about to cooperate

There’s an alleged cool front that’s supposed to blow in and finally make it feel like fall around here. Sadly, it has chosen the Saturday morning that we have an early soccer game so I’m going to get to stand around and shiver bright and early this weekend.

But I’m not really complaining because I’ll take that over this summer weather any day.

And now I’m just going to get to it.

Here’s some cute things I’ve found this week.

1. tiered pointelle sweater dress

Sweater dresses are tricky. They can look really good on. Or they can look really bad. And since I haven’t tried this one on then I don’t know how it might turn out.

However, I like it in pictures. And I think it would look darling with boots. Not to mention that all sale stuff at Anthro is an extra 25% off right now.

2. forever remembered elephant print top

This would look great with jeans or even a skirt. And it has little elephants all over it so you could totally wear it on election day if you’re into theme dressing.

I really try to avoid theme dressing these days, but I still have to resist the urge to wear animal prints when I go to the zoo.

Fortunately, I can’t remember the last time I went to the zoo.

3. cut it out dress

I love this. And it comes in some great colors. It would look good on its own if you’re young and have the legs, but it would also look great with black leggings.

4. level up dress

This is pretty bright. But I like it.

5. boiled wool blend peacoat

I love this peacoat. It’s a great cut and it comes in several good colors. Bonus, it’s also 40% off.

6. fall draped bead necklace

This is the perfect statement necklace in fall colors.

7. softest sweater scarves

These scarves are so soft and come in some really pretty colors. The perfect accent for different outfits.

8. beaded draped chain necklace

Forever 21 is a great resource for inexpensive jewelry. And I really like this necklace because it can add just a little something to a plain outfit. Another good tip is to buy two necklaces and put them together for extra impact.

9. chelsea lace cocktail dress

I love a lace dress. And this one might look good on its own, but I also think it might look good over jeans or leggings with a jacket over it.

10. change of seasons wrap cardi

In honor of the cool weather, I present this sweater. It looks like fashion in a blanket form.

That’s it for today.

Y’all have a great Friday.
The right to vote and to not sing

Y’all.

I feel that this week it has become abundantly clear that there isn’t much going on here right now. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with that. It just makes for zero blog material that serves any purpose other than being a sleeping aid.

So I apologize for that.

Unless you’re over forty and prone to bouts of insomnia like I am. In which case, you’re welcome.

Part of the problem is I’ve just been so tired. I’ve been going to bed earlier than usual and I still wake up tired. Perhaps I should get my iron levels checked. Or maybe I have the West Nile.

Although when I suggested the West Nile theory to P the other day he totally blew me off because I may also have a touch of the hypochondriac.

Whatever.

Speaking of, this week is Red Ribbon Week at Caroline’s school.

(I’m pretty sure Red Ribbon Week is about saying no to drugs. I could tell you for sure if I’d paid attention to the flyer that came home. Also anything about saying no to drugs always reminds me of that episode of Diff’rent Strokes when Nancy Reagan guest starred and Arnold said, “Whatchu talkin”bout Mrs. Reagan?”)

And so every day is a different dress up day. On Monday the kids wore different colors in support of various causes. Tuesday was pajama day and I had no idea until Tuesday morning how many different variations on pajamas Caroline could concoct. It seemed to be directly proportional to how late she was about to be to school.

Wednesday, the kids wore their favorite team jersey and I’m proud to say Caroline not only wore her Aggie 12th Man jersey but also had me paint her face with an ATM. I feel that this little step of going the extra fan mile means there’s a better than 75% chance that she might eventually end up wearing a fake afro wig in team colors to a football game someday.

As we looked over the week’s dress-up days, I noticed that Thursday was designated as a day to dress up as what you want to be when you grow up. For the last few months, Caroline has mentioned several times that she wants to be an author and write books. So I asked, “Do you want to dress like someone who writes books?” while trying to figure out exactly what that would look like. Maybe a jacket with elbow patches? A pipe?

When P piped up, “They’ve already had pajama day.”

Well played, P. Well played.

Whatever the case, she’s decided she wants to be a professional soccer player this week. And so she’s going to wear her soccer uniform and I am eternally grateful because that’s easy. Especially since my version of an author outfit involved channeling C.S. Lewis.

In other non-interesting news, Caroline had a dentist appointment and didn’t have any cavities. The dentist mentioned she’s doing a good job of brushing her teeth which is good because I wasn’t sure if the twenty minutes she spends in the bathroom every night were actually spent brushing her teeth or just practicing all her different faces in the mirror while she dodges going to bed.

And then we left the dentist and I let her go with me to vote. I explained that voting was a privilege, that people have died for our freedom to choose our leaders, and that this is one of the most important elections I can remember. She said, “AND I get to miss the end of Music class”.

Yes, that too.

God bless America.