Author: Big Mama

You never know when something will turnip

I just finished playing ten rounds of Bejeweled Blitz.

I don’t know why I’m telling you that, but I guess I want to make you aware that I am at an all-time high level of procrastination. And, as part of the procrastination process, I decided to go brush my teeth and am now having a hard time focusing on writing anything because I had no idea my eyebrows were in such dire need of grooming and I really, really want to lock myself in the bathroom with my super-magnifying mirror and a pair of tweezers.

But I think we all know that would just lead to several weeks of me becoming best friends with my eyebrow pencil as we banded together to conceal my overzealous eyebrow plucking tendencies.

(If you think this post has started off without any real train of thought, JUST YOU WAIT.)

On Thursday night it started raining and continued to rain without ceasing until early Saturday morning. I am not the least bit ashamed to report that I spent that entire amount of time in my pajamas. At one point it looked like I might have to get dressed to pick Caroline up from school, but P saved the day.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression though. It’s not like I wasn’t very busy completing several different tasks around the house. For example, on Friday morning around 10:00 a.m., our junk drawer in the kitchen (don’t act like you don’t have one) looked like this.

All that clutter was making it so hard to find the glow sticks or the Santa Claus bubble gum or the bright orange polka dot ribbon when we needed it. And I’m so thankful that our spare hide-a-key is safely tucked away in the back of that drawer. That will come in super handy the next time I lock myself out of the house. Which happens more frequently than you might think.

After about thirty minutes of throwing away stuff while P wasn’t paying attention, I had that drawer all cleaned out. I don’t have any photographic evidence of the clean drawer. You’ll just have to take my word for it and believe that if my life is so lacking in excitement that I’m writing about cleaning out a drawer, I certainly wouldn’t be lying about it.

But wait. There’s more.

Last Saturday, P was at the ranch and Caroline and I found ourselves with nothing to do. I’d really been wanting to go into this antique store that I used to LOVE before I had a child and realized you don’t let a toddler loose in a store full of old, fragile things and, also, that we were spending all our disposable income on Pampers and Gerber Yogurt Melts.

So I asked Caroline if she wanted to go with me to the antique store and she said yes. Then, much to my delight, she LOVED the antique store. She declared it the BEST PLACE SHE’S EVER BEEN IN HER WHOLE LIFE (which kind of makes the money we spent on Sea World tickets last summer seem foolish) and I hugged her to me and said, “Mama has never loved you more than I do right now.”

We searched all over the store looking for various treasures and ultimately found a few things that I wanted to use to accessorize the living room, plus an old school desk that I wanted for Caroline’s room. I bargained with the owner and got all three pieces for A STEAL. A STEAL I SAY.

And I loaded up my car (cue the Sanford and Son theme music) and we headed home with our treasures.

All this to say that my other project while in my pajamas on Friday was to try to arrange my new pieces on top of the armoire in the living room and email pictures to Holly for approval.

My first attempt.

It was wrong, by the way.

Which led to my second attempt with Holly’s direction.

P came in to see what I was doing and I asked for his opinion. His opinion was that there was NO WAY we were getting a pet bird and then I had to explain that the bird cage was just for decoration and then he said he hoped I didn’t pay a lot of money for it and I told him it was A STEAL at just $15.00.

(Which is actually just an amount that I use to describe a lot of purchases.)

(But I was glad it was the amount I threw out because the look on his face seemed to indicate that he thought I paid $15.00 too much for it.)

After he picked Caroline up from school, she noticed I’d arranged the bird cage and said, “I wish we could get a real bird.”

“Well, we’re not going to. Maybe we could have an imaginary bird.”

(I didn’t feel like there was any need to launch into my semi-fear of birds.)

She didn’t seem to buy my whole “imaginary bird” suggestion, so I pushed it a little further and said we could name the imaginary bird “Babe” which was the name of the imaginary friend she had for several years but I haven’t heard her mention lately.

She said, “Oh Mama. Babe is gone. She grew up.”

And then I curled up in the fetal position and looked at her baby pictures for the next several hours with a box of Kleenex by my side.

On Saturday, she went to the ranch with P and shot a duck that she thought would look great in the bird cage.

I think I’ll pass.

Oh, and she also brought home some turnips that she found and thought might be DELICIOUS for dinner.

Which worked out so well because I’d just been wondering how to get more turnips into my diet. The turnip really is the cousin-your-mom-forced-you-to-ask-to be-a-bridesmaid vegetable of the vegetable world.

I told Caroline I had no idea how to cook turnips and she told me to “google it”.

And I did. Only to discover that the larger the turnip, the more “woody” the taste.

So, yeah. Since these are bigger than my child’s head, I’m thinking they’re best left uneaten.

Unless we decide to feed them to our imaginary bird.
Fashion Friday: edition help Haiti

I realize this isn’t my normal Fashion Friday post, but it just doesn’t seem right to put up a bunch of links to cute shoes and sweaters when there is such devastation in Haiti right now. I’m not going to get on a soapbox about how we could all give what we’d normally spend on all our little creature comforts this week, but just think how that money could help those without food or shelter right now.

So, yeah, that was a little bit of a soapbox.

But I’m done now.

Just in case you missed it yesterday, here are some ways you can help. And I’ve added a few new ones to the list.

1. Text “disaster” to 90999 to donate $10.00 to Compassion International.

2. Click HERE to donate directly to Compassion’s Haiti Earthquake Disaster Relief fund.

3. Text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10.00 to the Red Cross.

4. Click HERE to donate directly to the Red Cross.

5. Until noon today, Ree at The Pioneer Woman is donating $.10 for every comment she receives on a post where she is giving away two $500 donations to the Haitian-related charity of the winner’s choice.

6. Click HERE to donate to Samaritan’s Purse.

7. You can order a Help Haiti t-shirt for $25.00. 100% of all proceeds will be divided equally between Real Hope for Haiti and Heartline. To read more about the shirts, you can click HERE.

I know the needs seem overwhelming as we sit and watch the images coming in from Haiti, but if every person who reads this blog every day could give just $1.00, that would add up to be a lot of dollars.

And if every person who reads this blog could give $5.00, then that would be even more dollars.

And if some of you could give more than that, well, it would be even more dollars.

I’m very good at math.

That’s it for this week.

Y’all have a good Friday.
Hands and feet

Okay. So let’s not talk about how frivolous my last post was detailing my internet woes.

Yesterday morning I went over to my sister’s house to spend a few hours with my sweet little nephew while she went to the doctor’s office to get antibiotics for a sinus infection because being the mother of a newborn is very glamorous.

While she was gone, I watched all the news reports coming in from Haiti. The images and reports of devastation just broke my heart. Those of you who’ve been reading the blog over the last year or so may remember that I took a trip to the Dominican Republic with Compassion in November 2008.

During that trip we visited what’s known as a Batey community. These are communities in the Dominican Republic where Haitian refugees live. It’s a community where my Compassion child, Ana Angelica, lives.

And this sweet girl.

And these precious faces.

And I can’t help but think how the faces of the people suffering the after effects of the devastating earthquake in Haiti right now look just like these faces that I fell in love with that day in the Dominican Republic.

There are so many ways we can help right now. You can text “disaster” to 90999 to give $10 to Compassion’s disaster relief program. They will be working directly with the local churches who know where these families live and will provide immediate relief to them. You can also click HERE to donate.

If you’d prefer to give to the Red Cross, you can text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 or go directly to the Red Cross website to make a donation.

Another option is to donate through Samaritan’s Purse.

The needs are so massive right now and every little bit helps.

“I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:40
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen

There is nothing I would like more than to be able to completely recapture all the technological angst of the last five days. But honestly so much time and Valium have passed since then, I’m not sure I can remember all the details. However, I will do my best.

(You know this isn’t going to be brief.)

Last Friday started off like any normal day, except Caroline is in this new phase where she wants to bring her lunch to school and I had to start off my morning heating up Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup in the microwave (gag) while she repeatedly reminded me “DON’T FORGET TO CUT OUT THE BOX TOP! I NEED THE BOX TOP!” because we are in the midst of a box top obsession since the class with the most box tops gets a free pizza party. At this point I would just buy them a pizza if it meant I could get all the labels back on my canned goods and not waste any more time opening up Cream of Mushroom when what I wanted was Chicken and Stars.

Anyway, I spent most of the day at home since the temperatures were only in the twenties and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to don my white Michelin Man coat which is the only coat I own that is warm enough for that kind of weather because PMS + looking like a giant marshmallow = Insecurity. But I finally got a little stir crazy around noon and decided to venture to Hobby Lobby to look at some fabric Holly suggested for pillows.

While I was waiting in line at Hobby Lobby (I had to buy 1/2 yard of fabric to have enough to tell if it was going to work because the lady cut a sample for me that was smaller than my thumbnail) I checked Twitter and saw that someone tweeted that she couldn’t access my blog. And I thought, BLESS HER HEART something is wrong with that poor girl’s computer because my blog is working fine.

I was on my way to pick up Caroline from Brownies when Sophie called me and asked if I knew my blog was down. And, also, that it said ACCOUNT SUSPENDED DUE TO BILLING ISSUES. Like it wasn’t bad enough that the internet had unceremoniously dumped me, it was also trying to shame me.

I didn’t even know the internet and I were having problems.

Apparently the internet was afraid of confrontation and just decided to SHUT DOWN the blog instead of talking to me and explaining where it all went wrong. It was all very reminiscent of a break up I had in college, except that it didn’t end with me eating a one pound bag of M&M’s while I sang along with Sinead O’Connor as she sang “Nothing Compares 2 U”.

Although I did put a sizable dent in P’s inventory of Peppermint Bark.

Anyway, the short version of the technological side of things (as best I understand it) is that the flux capacitor got overloaded and caused the server to crash. Then the people in charge of my old server decided that I needed a different server. So I called the new people to find out about getting on a new server and they wanted to ask me questions about my bandwidth usage and the circumference of the moon and if Venus is in retrograde. And I don’t know any of those things because I went to high school back when we learned how to write DOS code and then majored in Speech Communications which isn’t really even a real thing because it’s just about talking. I majored in talking and made it through my FIVE YEARS of undergraduate work without ever having to turn on a computer, although I totally rocked at the Brother word processor. So don’t ask me about bandwidth and EPP codes because I DON’T KNOW.

By the time Monday morning rolled around, my frustration was at an all-time high. Then to make matters worse, I realized the new hosting company had attempted to send me several emails to update me on the situation and my personal email had blocked them all causing further delays. So now the internet had broken up with me, shamed me and is now just MOCKING me. Hateful.

On Monday afternoon I got off the phone with my new friend Larry from tech support and he’d just informed me that I may have to blah, blah, blah and that it might be another 72 hours to FIVE DAYS before things got up and running again. P walked in the kitchen and I started to cry. Like real tears. Because after three days, I’d reached my limit of not understanding one word that anyone was trying to say to me. I said, “It’s not even about the blog being broken. I’m just tired of dealing with it all.”

All of a sudden I heard Caroline say “OH MAMA, IS THE BLOG BROKEN?” as she started to cry. And poor P just stared at both of us and probably never wished more that he was sitting in a tripod somewhere, covered in doe urine and waiting for a buck to walk out.

The good news is that everything ultimately worked out okay. According to the tech support experts, the blog may still need to propagate for about twenty-four hours, but let’s not even pretend that I understand what that means. Basically, the internet and I have reunited and, if I may quote Peaches ‘N Herb, it feels so good.

And thanks for all the emails and the twitters and the emails to Sophie about my whereabouts. It made me feel a little warm and fuzzy to know that I was missed. I promise I will never just up and leave without telling you where I’m going because that would be rude. Do you hear me, internet? RUDE.

Also, if you’re ever trying to access this site and there seems to be a problem and you wonder if it’s you or if it’s me?

Always put your money on me.
Oh my word

I KNOW.

I woke up this morning and just discovered that the blog is finally back up.

It’s a long story that I’ll tell you later (lucky you!), but the short version is that I have been beaten like a rented circus monkey by the internet for the last five days.
Fashion Friday: Edition it’s on sale

It is so cold here right now. And I say that with the full realization that many of you laugh in the face of a nine degree wind chill. A nine degree wind chill is a little thing you refer to as balmy picnic weather. For me it means that I want to spend the day in flannel pajama bottoms, an A&M sweatshirt circa 1993, and a Snuggie.

Except I don’t own a Snuggie.

And I certainly wouldn’t go buy a Snuggie. But I secretly hoped that someone might give me one as a gag gift for Christmas. Then I could have all the comfort a Snuggie offers without the shame of knowing I paid $14.99 for some type of gimmicky blanket when I could get the same results by wearing my robe backwards.

Anyway, I decided to share a couple of things (or thirteen) that I’ve seen on sale. You know, just in case you have any Christmas money burning a hole in your pocket.

1. Sea Cliff Cluster Ring

I love big rings. I’d love them even more if I had long, slender fingers and they actually looked good on my hand. But you can’t always get what you want.

Just ask Texas fans.

Oh I kid because I love.

And because I’m a little bitter that the Aggies haven’t been good since last century.

If you’re like me and are long, slender finger impaired, then you might want to opt for a new statement necklace like the Soho Sparkle Necklace.

2. Crinkle Cascade Dress

I have nowhere to wear this dress but I think it’s so cute.

3. Short-sleeve Cable Knit Pullover

I’ve had my eye on this for a while. It’s the perfect thing to wear with jeans and boots on normal Texas winter days when the temps plummet to the low 60’s.

4. Crocheted Cowlneck

This sweater is just gorgeous. I love the cowlneck, the color, the length. All it needs is a cami or tank to wear under it because otherwise it makes a whole different kind of statement.

5. King’s Road Coat

You know I’m always on the lookout for a darling coat. And a darling coat on sale is even better.

6. Zella Reversible Favorite Pants

I figured I better throw in some yoga pants since I believe they are a wardrobe staple and, if you wear yours as much as I wear mine, there’s always a need for new pair sans bleach spills. Hypothetically speaking.

7. Calvin Klein Diamond Quilt Satin Coat

Because this is the winter that is proving global warming to be a big fat lie, I’ve discovered that I really don’t have a good winter coat. I have several mid-weight jackets and trench coats because I can’t resist their appeal. But when it comes to any kind of coat that offers real warmth, I am out of luck.

Well, except for this white puffy down jacket that I bought from J. Crew about a million years ago. It kept me warm as I slid on my bottom down ski slopes during the early years of my marriage when P and I routinely chaperoned ski trips full of high school students. Now it just makes me look like the Michelin Man.

Yet I have been desperate enough to wear it on more than one occasion.

8. Timberland Lexiss Tall Boots

I bought these boots for myself way back in the fall before they were ever on sale. And they have been worth every penny. I ADORE THEM.

They are comfortable, warm and even waterproof.

But these brown suede boots by Wanted are another great boot option.

9. Thin-striped Pajama Pants

These are actually on sale for about $8.00 in the store. I bought myself a pair and then went back the next day and bought another pair. I don’t know what kind of cotton they are made from but I think they are what heaven will feel like. Assuming heaven is like a pair of super comfortable pajama pants that you would wear in public if you weren’t in your late thirties.

(See how I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m no long approaching my late thirties?)

10. Embroidered Drape Wrap

I was originally looking to see if this Sigrid Embroidered Dress was on sale because I fell in love with it this fall but resisted due to a price tag that hurt my wallet’s feelings.

And yes it’s on sale.

But no they do not have my size.

However, I discovered the embroidered wrap and think it’s just beautiful.

11. Sprinkled Chiffon Top

There again, I really have nowhere to wear this. But SHINY! SPARKLY!

It would be the perfect thing to wear if you have any field trips planned with someone special.

12. Trunk Show Scarf

Scarves are my new best friend. And this year I’ve discovered that they aren’t just for fashion, but for function. Who knew?

13. Velvet Eden Blazer

I believe a velvet blazer is a good staple item for any closet. It can be dressed up or down, but it’s hard to find a good one at a great price. Get ’em while they’re hot.

(I don’t know why I just said that. It’s late. I’ve taken my prescription cough medicine. I apologize.)

There is no way to convey the sadness I feel over ending with the number thirteen, but I hate to delete anything and I don’t have the energy to look for anything else. So, thirteen it is!

Y’all have a great Friday.