Author: Big Mama

I’m afraid we’ve reached the point in summer where each blog entry may read, “Today we woke up at 7:00 a.m. We went to swim practice. We came home. We watched fourteen episodes of River Monsters on T.V. The end.”

But I’ll try for more.

Yesterday we woke up at 7:00 a.m. We went to swim practice. We came home.

Oh. Wait.

Caroline has decided her new favorite thing after swim practice is to go to Starbucks for hot chocolate and then come home and put on her fleece footy pajamas until she warms up. But she doesn’t complain about being cold while she’s actually at practice so I guess I’ll consider that a victory.

Yesterday morning I think she was still exhausted from all the weekend activity and really didn’t move from the couch except for about an hour that we went to lunch with Mimi and Bops, made a quick trip to HEB and then ran by Gap because shorts are 30% off and she was in desperate need.

And then we watched more episodes of River Monsters and I will forevermore live in fear of encountering a snakehead fish.

(I also saw some type of stingray that was as big as my living room. Needless to say, I’m sticking to chlorinated water this summer.)

P came home around 4:00 and we were sitting in the kitchen catching up on the day when Caroline announced she thought someone had just knocked on the front door. I went to look to see if anyone was there and saw an older lady walking away down our front steps, so I opened the door and she immediately turned and came back up the steps with her arms outstretched as she exclaimed, “TAYLOR!!! THERE YOU ARE!!” and pulled me into a hug.

There were several problems with this scenario.

1. I had no idea who this lady was.
2. She appeared to know exactly who I was which made me wonder if I was supposed to know her.
3. My name isn’t Taylor.
4. I was being embraced by a woman I didn’t know.

And here’s the thing. I felt bad that I wasn’t Taylor. I desperately wanted to be Taylor just to save this woman the embarrassment of realizing I wasn’t Taylor. There was a small co-dependent part of me in the back of my mind that was wondering if I could just fake my way through an entire encounter of being Taylor. Taylor, who this woman felt comfortable enough to hug but yet doesn’t know well enough to know she’s hugging the wrong person.

Then she said, “Is the house ready? The clients are going to be here any minute to look!”

At the moment I realized I had one of two choices. I could hurriedly clean my house and let some total strangers look at it even though it’s not for sale or I could confess that I wasn’t Taylor.

So I said, “Ma’am? I think you have the wrong person.”

And she replied, “Is this not 440? Is your house not for sale?”

“No ma’am. It’s not.”

“Well, I wish it was. It’s just darling. Call me if you ever want to list it.”

In that moment I kind of wanted to let her list my house even though we’ve never talked about moving because she was just so nice and I loved the way she waved goodbye to me as if we were old friends and she’d dropped by on purpose. I appreciated her air of confidence and complete nonchalance in light of the fact she’d just hugged a strange woman, called her Taylor and asked if her house was clean.

That’s the kind of scenario that has the potential to send me to therapy or, at the very least, hours of self-loathing. But she embraced it.

I closed the front door and walked back inside. P asked, “Who was that?”

“I don’t know.”

P said, “You were hugging her.”

“I know. She thought I was Taylor and was trying to sell our house.”

“I’m so confused.”

“Well, not as confused as her.”

And that was pretty much the highlight of our day.

So school was out last Thursday and I feel the need to post the requisite first day of school and last day of school photos for posterity.

First day of third grade:

Last day of third grade:

Not pictured:

Me crying while singing Jim Croce’s Time In A Bottle because time is moving too fast and now I have a fourth grader who is only two years away from junior high.

(Does anyone remember when Mike Horton came back to Salem on Days of Our Lives and fell in love with Robin Jacobs and they got engaged but they broke up because of religious differences? I’m pretty sure that they did one of those heart-tugging montages of their romantic history set to Time In A Bottle and I loved it because even as a fourteen-year-old I preferred 70s soft rock to Prince. But I just spent five minutes googling it and can’t get confirmation.)

(Anyone?)

(I think they were trying to make them the next Bo and Hope because this was during a time when Bo and Hope were off the show. I think we were supposed to believe they had died but it turned out they had just been held hostage on a remote island by Stefano DiMera.)

(This would have been around 1985. Which begs two questions: Why was I so invested in a soap opera in eighth grade? and How bizarre is the human brain that I remember these kind of pointless details?)

Anyway, I believe I mentioned that there was a party at the pool after the last day of school. Gulley ended up meeting me there with her boys and we shut it down. Which makes it sound like we really partied when I’m just trying to say that we literally stayed at the pool until they shut it down and kicked us out.

And normally I would have been excited for the next morning and the first official sleep-in day of the summer, but Caroline had swim team practice at 7:45 a.m. Then we were home by 9:00 with a full day in front of us and no real plan. So we ended up going to eat lunch and then to Target with Gulley and her boys because nothing says BIG SUMMER FUN like a trip to Target.

Later that evening we were supposed to go eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops and my sister and her family, but Caroline started crying and said she was too tired which made me fear she was coming down with a severe illness because she has been too tired approximately three times ever in her whole life.

So I made sure she was in bed early since she had her first swim meet the next morning and we had to be at the meet at the unholy hour of 7:00 a.m. which meant we’d need to all wake up at the even more unholy hour of 5:30 a.m.

We were a little bleary-eyed the next morning with the exception of P who believes 5 a.m. is a perfectly acceptable time to be awake, but eventually got the car loaded with a pop-up tent, foldable chairs, a cooler full of drinks, sunscreen, and enough snacks to feed a small country because we weren’t sure how long the meet would last since we are swim team novices and equated a morning swim meet being akin to the Joad family packing up and heading west in Grapes of Wrath.

As it turned out, Caroline’s three events were all early in the meet. We were back in the car and headed home by 9:30 and never even had the chance to break out our cooler o’ snacks and drinks, although P and I did buy breakfast tacos at the concession stand. In the concession stand regard, swimming totally trumps soccer. Especially since there is no concession stand at the soccer fields.

Caroline loved the swim meet. She did really well in all three of her events and even came in first in her heat for the backstroke. Later that day she asked me if I knew that feeling when you get butterflies right before you race and I told her I did. Then she said, “And you get that feeling in your mouth like you’re about to throw up?”

I think that makes it official that she is a more intense competitor than her mother ever was. The only time I felt like I was going to throw up at a swim meet was when I ate too much candy between events.

And if all the racing wasn’t enough, there was the novelty that we were actually supposed to write on her leg in Sharpie marker. So for the second time in three days my child was covered in permanent marker.

After we got home from the meet I started feeling bad. I think it was a combination of allergies and getting up at 5:00 in the morning and the only cure was a nap. Caroline got on the couch with me and found some show on National Geographic channel called Python Hunters before moving on to Swamp Hunters which probably explains why I dreamed I was being chased by an alligator.

By 4:30 that afternoon I was showered and in my pajamas. We picked up burgers for dinner and then she and P sat on the couch and watched another show about people who live in a swamp and train alligators or something. I can’t keep track. There’s Swamp Monsters, Swamp People, Swamp Hunters, and Swamp Brothers.

Who knew there was such a huge T.V. market for people who live, hunt, and look for snakes in a swamp?

Not the girl who still has fond memories of Dr. Michael Horton and Dr. Robin Jacobs from 1985.

I’ve been sitting here for the last thirty minutes trying to figure out a way to make my day sound even remotely interesting and I can assure you it isn’t possible. But I’ll tell you about it anyway because when has that ever stopped me?

I woke up with a headache. I’m not entirely sure why but I think it was partly due to not drinking enough water the day before and partly because I knew I still had to pack a lunch that had a less than 50% chance of getting eaten.

And then Caroline decided it was a good morning to move at the speed of a glacier to get ready. I finally just instructed her to hurry up and go brush her teeth while I went into my closet to change clothes. And by change clothes, I mean that I threw on a pair of running shorts with the t-shirt I’d slept in the night before.

When I walked back into the kitchen, not only had Caroline not made any move to brush her teeth or put on her shoes, but decided to say, “That looks like something a teenager would wear. It’s so inappropriate.”

“I think you’re misusing the word inappropriate.”

(Caroline has this habit of using the most extreme word to describe a situation. Everything is “hideous” or “horrid” or “inappropriate” or “the worst thing that’s ever happened”.)

(I don’t know where she gets her tendency to exaggerate.)

I’m not sure when a t-shirt and shorts became inappropriate, especially since I wear it almost every day and was merely going to drop her off and not even get out of the car, but I think I may have snapped, “GO BRUSH YOUR TEETH RIGHT NOW AND QUIT WORRYING ABOUT WHAT I HAVE ON.”

After I dropped her off at school in my highly inappropriate running shorts and t-shirt, I came home and made a list of everything I need to get done with my last two days of total freedom. Which is why I immediately got on the couch to watch the season finale of Bethenny Ever After since it falls squarely into the category of things I can’t watch when Caroline is home.

I really wanted to watch The Bachelorette too because I have yet to watch an episode, but there just wasn’t time.

So I got off the couch and paid a bunch of bills online because P gets so cranky when they shut off our water. And then I tried to book a flight online using a Rapid Rewards voucher which proved to be harder than stopping that computer in War Games from declaring Thermonuclear Global War. I finally called Southwest Airlines customer service and discovered the reason I was having difficulty was due to the fact that the flights I wanted didn’t qualify for Rapid Rewards Vouchers. Who determines that? If you’re going to give me a free ticket as a reward, might I suggest that you allow me to travel on the day and time I actually want to travel?

Apparently that’s not a concept that appeals to the airlines. And I’d tell you how it all worked out except it hasn’t all worked out yet. It’s like a cliffhanger.

After that exercise in futility, I made a shopping list so I could make my last solo trip to the grocery store for the foreseeable future. Otherwise known as the last trip before it all starts to seem like a version of The Price is Right where contestants bid on items and might win the Showcase Showdown on the right day but might cause their mother to lose her mind in Aisle 7 on the wrong day by overbidding.

“PLEASE CAN I GET THESE DONETTES TOO? HOW ABOUT THESE SPICY CHEETOS? I’VE ALWAYS WANTED ONE OF THESE PLASTIC SNACK CUPS! CAN WE GET BEEF JERKY?”

Don’t forget to get your pets spayed and neutered.

I loaded up on necessary summer groceries like frozen pizzas and easy things to cook on the days we stay late at the pool which is basically every day until mid-July when the pool feels like bathwater because it’s 164 degrees outside.

My other errands were all related to last day of school business. Gift cards, party snacks, and tequila. Then I texted Caroline’s teacher because I needed to run up to the school to have the kids finish something for the teacher gift. I suggested that she go run an errand while I manned the classroom.

Have you ever seen twenty children on the second to last day of school? I would have been better off calling the zoo to see if they needed a new monkey trainer. The only difference is most third graders don’t throw poo.

As soon as she returned I gave her the biggest hug and maybe said “BLESS YOUR HEART” one too many times and then I mentally made a note to get her an even nicer teacher gift.

I left there and went to get my eyebrows waxed since I was already in pain. And to add insult to injury, they did that thing where they ask if I want my lip waxed too. Clearly they don’t watch Price is Right because they overbid in the form of damaging my already fragile self-esteem.

And then I picked up Caroline from school where I discovered she hadn’t just let her friends sign her yearbook. She let them sign her face. With Sharpie markers.

Yes. And my shorts are inappropriate.

I hope you all had a lovely Memorial Day weekend.

We did. Except for the fact that we have three days of school left which just seems nine kinds of wrong. Especially since every time I’ve asked Caroline what they’ve done at school for the last week the answer is “Helped pack up the classroom”. Let’s know when to cut our losses and move on. It’s time for Coppertone and swimming pools and lazy mornings that don’t involve packing a hot dog weiner wrapped in a tortilla and calling it lunch.

So the big event around here was the garage sale.

That’s right. It actually happened.

Gulley and I threw caution and common sense to the wind and went with it. On Thursday night P asked me how many tables we needed for the sale and said he’d drive out to the church and pick them up. I texted Gulley to ask her and she texted back, “Do we need tables?”

This should be your first clue that we walk around the majority of the time with no idea what we’re doing.

But on Friday we tried to pretend we were organized. I went to Office Max and bought the official Garage Sale Kit, complete with four garage sale signs and colored stickers for price tags. Gulley bought the garage sale permit and we got a huge container of Country Time Lemonade mix for the kids so they could have a lemonade stand.

And it all seemed pretty easy.

Until P and I began loading up his trailer at 5:15 on Friday afternoon with all the stuff we planned to sell so we could take it over to Gulley’s house.

You need to know that my car was also completely filled to the brim.

And that we heard the theme from Sanford and Son loud and clear.

I texted Gulley to let her know I wasn’t even sure it was all going to fit in her garage. And I was even less sure once we arrived at her house and I actually saw the garage filled with their stuff. But we spent the next few hours hauling stuff in and putting price tags on the essential items and trying to pretend that we had a plan.

And after a few slices of Papa John’s pizza and laughing about Nena’s proclamation that Gulley was probably going to buy all my old shoes, the garage looked like this.

I know.

We had no game plan. Unless you count waking up at 6:45 the next morning to drag everything out to the driveway a plan.

But P had taken care of his business. He’d picked up a few tables from the church and organized himself quite the boutique in a corner of the front yard and even put a nail in the tree so he could showcase the deer mount he planned to sell. It was like how they have those Kentucky Fried Chickens inside a gas station. Except instead of chicken he was selling miscellaneous gun parts, ammo, a deer mount, various off road lights and a game call.

(Those aren’t guns, by the way. They’re gun stocks. Even in Texas you can’t sell guns at a garage sale.)

Saturday morning dawned bright and early. Caroline and I had spent the night at Gulley’s house because that seemed easier and more fun. P showed up with Shipley’s donuts and kolaches and we all got to work trying to stage our merchandise and/or junk. But it’s hard to make four old backpacks, fifty-two stuffed animals and sixty-four pairs of shoes look all that appealing.

Gulley and I put up signs around the neighborhood and posted it on Craig’s List the night before, but P was concerned it was going to be a flop because only one person showed up before 8:00 a.m. And I was half afraid he was right.

But slowly and surely the customers showed up. And Caroline, Will, and Jackson accosted each and every one of them with plastic cups full of lemonade.

Over the course of the day we sold all the big stuff that we hoped to unload. An armoire, baby beds, strollers, rocking chairs, bicycles, a Barbie Mustang, and a couple of beds. Oh, and P sold the deer head, ammo and several other hunting related items.

We met a few possible hoarders, a man that informed us the United States will be in a civil war within six months and a guy that paid Will $1 to test drive the Barbie Mustang to ensure that it still worked.

(On a semi-related note, Gulley told me that when she was little her grandparents had a garage sale at their house and a man asked her grandfather if he could take her bike for a test drive. Granddaddy let the man ride the bike and the man rode away and never came back. What kind of soul-less person would do that?)

(Consider that your garage sale cautionary tale of the day.)

Gulley and I also pulled out a purse for Nena because Nena loves herself a purse from a garage sale.

And then around 2:00 p.m. we realized we’d been sitting around the table at P’s Boutique for an hour and hadn’t had any customers. So Gulley and I packed up everything that was left and dropped it off at Goodwill.

We all sat around and counted our earnings while the kids did the same and then divided their lemonade profits by three. They made $17 each which is a pretty good haul after a morning selling lemonade for fifty cents a cup. Of course it helped considerably that Mimi and Bops showed up and paid $5 for their cups of lemonade.

On the way home I told Caroline that they could have made even more money if they’d stayed out there longer, trying to drive home a point about working hard and being committed. The truth is that for all their early morning enthusiasm, they were over the lemonade business and jumping on the trampoline by 10:00 a.m.

But Caroline said, “I know. But we got bored. And some of those people just said no and there were a few people that were too picky.”

“What do you mean? What did they say?”

She replied in an exasperated tone, “Well, one man asked for more ice and another lady asked for a whole new cup just because there was a wee little hair in her lemonade.”

Yes. That is so picky. I can’t imagine why she wanted a new cup.

Personally, if it had been me, I’d be done with lemonade forever.

On Saturday night, after the longest, hottest shower of my life (think Silkwood), I fell into bed and didn’t move for nine hours. And when I finally got out of bed the next morning, every muscle in my body ached and I limped into the kitchen.

Which either means I’m really out of shape or offers insight into why Fred Sanford walked the way he did.

Selling junk is harder than it looks.