Doodle

  • The art of forgiveness

    I’m a little concerned right now because the fan has been running continuously on my Mac for at least ten minutes. Is it about to blow up? Is it too much to have all these various tabs open so I can attempt to write a blog post, play Bejeweled, check Twitter, and answer email all at the same time? In the words of one of my favorite tech nerds, it may all be too processor intensive.

    I’m not even sure I’m using that phrase in the proper context. It just makes me happy to say it.

    Anyway, let’s all say a prayer for my computer because it kind of sounds like it’s circling the drain.

    Last night we were all sitting at the table eating dinner together. We were having chalupas. Which may sound boring and uninspired until I tell you that I made the chalupas from scratch. If you consider “by scratch” to mean that I deep fried the corn tortillas I bought at HEB because, come on, do I seem like someone who grinds her own corn to make tortillas?

    As we took turns talking about our day, Caroline began to tell us a story about a girl in her class who wasn’t very nice to a boy in their class and all the ways that this was very wrong. But as I listened to the story, the details started to sound very familiar to a story she’d told me a few weeks ago, so I asked, “Did this happen today?”

    “No. It happened about a few weeks ago.”

    At that point, P decided to seize the opportunity to impart a life lesson and said, “You know what? Sometimes people make mistakes and do things they shouldn’t do. And when that happens, we need to forgive them and quit bringing up something they did a long time ago. That’s what God does for us. He forgives us when we do something wrong and forgets about it, so we need to do that same thing for others.”

    She looked at him for a few seconds as she absorbed this bit of information and replied, “Yeah, but that’s not really working out for me right now.”

  • The writing on the wall

    Does anyone remember that I painted Caroline’s room at some point last summer?

    Yeah, me neither.

    I mean, I knew I painted the room but I couldn’t really remember when it actually happened. Fortunately I have a blog that has taken the place of my long term memory and I was able to find the post where I wrote about painting her room a delightful, if very bright, shade of dancing green.

    Too bad the blog couldn’t remind me that yesterday was school picture day before I sent her to school in a huge, oversized tie-dyed t-shirt that she made in Brownies. My little first grade hippy.

    Most of the room has been finished for some time now, but Caroline announced early on in the room redecorating process that she’d like to have her monogram painted over her bed. I think we all know that brought me much untold joy and made me wonder if it would be too much to have my own monogram painted over my bed.

    So last fall I told P that we needed to figure out how to paint Caroline’s monogram above her bed. I was envisioning some scenario that involved me needing to buy some stencils at Michaels and I was afraid. I was very afraid. But P looked at me and announced, “Shorty can do it”.

    I was a little skeptical. Shorty works for P in the landscaping business. You want some geraniums planted? Shorty’s your man. Have a fence that needs to be built? Shorty can do it. Monogramming? Seemed doubtful.

    But P pointed out that Shorty paints his name on all his jackets and hats. He doesn’t even own a pair of work gloves that don’t have a fancy “SHORTY” drawn out in some kind of calligraphy. And he spent some downtime on a job site last summer inscribing “El P Landscaping” on all of P’s work tools.

    So, yes, Shorty is an artist. Although I’m not sure he paints things as much as he tags things with his name. I felt there might be a 50/50 chance that her wall could end up with SHORTY scrawled across it. And while she is short right now, she’s only six and chances are good that she’ll continue to grow.

    I bought the Razzleberry paint I wanted to use for the monogram along with some paintbrushes and then had to wait another two months before Shorty finally had some time in his schedule to paint the wall. Finally, after months of anticipation, P called me in the middle of the day last week and asked, “Do you want Shorty to paint the wall tomorrow?”

    Well, yeah.

    Later that night, P and I talked about the monogram and I showed him the monogram on Caroline’s lunch box and explained that I wanted it to look JUST LIKE THIS. I should have known I was in trouble when I walked out the next morning and he was measuring the lunch box monogram with a ruler. So that it could be measured out on the wall. To scale.

    Heaven help me.

    I dropped Caroline off at school and came back home so we could measure it all out on the wall before Shorty began to paint and I knew I was in trouble when P began lamenting that he left his power leveler (I’m not sure that’s the right term) on the job site. But we pressed on. We marked where the center of the headboard was on the wall and he told me to measure out how tall I wanted the middle letter.

    So I did.

    But then he asked me how I determined that’s how tall the middle letter should be and I answered, “I don’t know. It just feels right.”

    The next ten minutes were filled with pencil marks and rulers and drawing straight lines across the wall. I didn’t like how small the C was going to be, but then he said it was to scale. So I wanted to change the whole thing and couldn’t really base my decision on anything more substantive than “because I want to”.

    It’s hard to remember exactly where it all went really south, but if memory serves it was sometime right after I was holding the measuring tape and he asked, “Does that look like it measures 32 5/8?”

    And I responded, “Let me answer that by asking you this, how long have we been married?”

    I am the same woman who has to ask him what 3/4 cups plus 3/4 cups equals when I’m doubling a recipe. Why on earth would I know anything about some 5/8? If the education system had really wanted me to hold on to a knowledge of fractions then they should have never thrown Geometry and Algebra II in the mix.

    P looked at me and questioned, “How is Shorty going to know how to paint this if it’s not measured out?”

    I just assumed he’d do it like I do all my home improvement projects. It’s a little method I like to call eyeballing it.

    But thanks to P, Shorty had some very specific parameters. Which was probably for the best. I showed him the lunch box to make sure that he knew what I wanted and then we left him as he went to work.

    Four hours later, I returned home to this.

    Seriously. How cute is that? I feel that Shorty is wasting his gift and should start a side business monogramming people’s fences and decks or something.

    I also have to add that the furniture in Caroline’s room belonged to my Me-Ma. Words really can’t express how happy I am that it’s in her room because it was such a part of my childhood. I just knew she must be rich to have such beautiful bedroom furniture.

    In fact, before it got delivered I was worried that the bedposts might be too tall for Caroline’s room and hit the ceiling fan. I had to laugh when it arrived and was so much smaller than what I remembered. Like so many memories of my grandparents, it was huge in my mind.

    Here’s another view of the room.

    I’d had those letters in her nursery when she was a baby, but I switched out the pale yellow ribbon in favor of the hot pink.

    And then this is my favorite piece of all.

    I spent hours as a little girl and an awkward adolescent and a college student sitting at that little chair looking in that mirror as I tried on all of Me-Ma’s jewelry and makeup while she sat with me and listened to all my stories. I never could have imagined a day that it would end up in my own little girl’s room while she looks in that mirror and tries on makeup and pretends she’s a princess.

    It makes me smile every time I think about it.

    You may also notice the bulletin board on the closet door. I found it at TJ Maxx and was so excited because it was the perfect shade of hot pink. However, when I went to hang it, I discovered that her closet door was too thin for me to hang it with nails so I asked P if we could just hang it with some of those 3M sticky hook things.

    I believe his exact words were “We can try it but if it doesn’t work and the bulletin board falls, it could be catastrophic.”

    Which caused me to laugh hysterically for the next fifteen minutes because catastrophic seemed like a stretch.

    But it served as confirmation that we really aren’t meant to do a lot of home improvement projects together. As if the whole “32 5/8” incident wasn’t reason enough.

    **Edited to add that the wall color is Dancing Green by Sherwin Williams and the monogram is Razzleberry by Benjamin Moore**

  • It was Polly in the living room with her shoe

    I’d planned to write a long post about our weekend, but then I realized that it was basically one long non-event and there’s only so much you can say about nothing. Although I tend to manage pretty well most days. But Little Women is on the Soap Channel right now and I’m powerless to resist the charm of Jo and Laurie. Best of all, P is already in bed so I don’t have to worry about him repeatedly asking why Jo and Ashley don’t just get married and then I have to explain that Ashley is from Gone With The Wind and tell him he means Laurie and then he continues to call him Ashley and ask if Beth has already died until I just hand him the remote and tell him to turn it back to Uncle Ted. Not that we’ve played out that exact scenario before.

    My point is that I may keep this brief so I can watch the end of Little Women for the 400th time. Or I may not keep it brief if I come up with something to say. I like to keep my options open.

    The bike rodeo was Friday. Caroline woke up a little stressed about the possibility that she might knock over a cone and so we had a big talk about how she just needed to do her best. She also decided to wear her favorite leggings with purple stars so she’d coordinate with her bike and her new helmet. As a woman who once wore a leopard print top to the zoo, I was so proud of her attention to detail.

    Is it just me or does that picture bring to mind the scene from The Rainbow Connection where Kermit the Frog is riding his bike through the swamp? I’m not sure when her legs got so long, but here’s hoping the warm weather gets here before I have to invest in more jeans that she’ll outgrow in two weeks.

    She completed the entire course without a mistake and never cracked a smile. She had the eye of the tiger, man. The eye of the tiger. So now it’s time to take off the training wheels and start preparing for next year. Just as soon as I find the sedatives.

    On Saturday, P took her to the ranch for the day which meant I found myself with an entire day to myself. I was giddy with the freedom and proceeded to spend the next five hours cleaning my house from top to bottom. That sentence would make my twenty-year-old self so sad for my thirty-eight-year-old self.

    I vacuumed and scrubbed and dusted and sustained a possible Tilex fumes chemical burn to my lungs and throat, but the house is spotless. Sadly, both my yoga pants and my vacuum sustained career-ending injuries. I’m still not sure exactly what happened to my yoga pants but they now have perfect tiger-striped bleach stains on both thighs. It’s a grievous loss because it’s a real struggle to find a good pair of yoga pants that fit both my circumference and my height. So maybe I’ll just wear them with their tiger stripes, call them weight-lifting pants and start working out at Gold’s Gym.

    As for the vacuum, I blame Polly Pockets and her diminutive shoes and handbags of evil. She killed the vacuum as plain as if she’d pulled out a tiny handgun and shot it.

    So by Saturday evening I needed a new pair of yoga pants and a vacuum. What is the point in trying to save money by not having a maid if it’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars in yoga pants and vacuum cleaners?

    That’s what I thought.

    So how was your weekend?

  • The bike rodeo

    One day last week there was a note in Caroline’s take home folder with detailed information about the upcoming Bike Rodeo. And I immediately put my head between my knees until I could catch my breath because February has been the month of school that wants me to die. It’s such a short month, yet so full of Valentine’s Day crafts and President’s Day book reports and 100 days of school projects. What about my time? How am I supposed to find time to study my eyebrows in the magnifying mirror when I’m constantly having to run to the store to buy more rubber cement?

    And I can’t even talk about last Thursday when I was supposed to send Caroline to school with a teddy bear since they were discussing Teddy Roosevelt and I totally forgot. It was a morning that had already started off wrong because I had the nerve to put her hair in a ponytail and she WANTED BRAIDS which caused her to collapse into tears. I honestly thought she must be getting sick because why else would she act so whiny and weepy. So I proceeded to question her about a possibility of a sore throat or ear pain, only to face the sad reality that her only real ailment was a bad case of DRAMA QUEEN.

    So I dropped her off at school, made myself a cup of hot choffee, and was contemplating if I wanted to ruin my morning with the 30 Day Shred when Caroline’s teacher called on my cell phone. “Melanie? We’re having a little bit of a meltdown situation here.”

    “Oh no. What’s wrong?” (See? She was sick. That’s why she was acting so whiny. She probably had developed a fever and everything.)

    “They were supposed to bring a teddy bear to school this morning and Caroline doesn’t have one.”

    Dang.

    I grabbed three teddy bears from the playroom (because nothing makes me overcompensate like some motherhood guilt) and drove up to the school where I made the walk of shame down the first grade hallway bearing (I’m so sorry) my three bears. Caroline was thrilled by my guest appearance at school and didn’t seem to be fazed by the fact that I was wearing my shameful purple velour sweatpants that make me look like Grimace. She chose one of the bears for herself and another one for a classmate whose mother had also forgotten the bear.

    And I realize the teddy bear incident is a small thing in the whole scheme of life and disappointments. In fact, I’m not even sure why I’m recounting it in such detail because the most disturbing point is that it was just further proof that my memory is swiftly fading. I don’t even know that Sudoku can help me now, especially because I don’t understand how to do Sudoku.

    We have some very dear friends who were expecting their second child last week. And we knew it. I’d even left a message on her Facebook wall that said, “Haven’t you had that baby yet? What’s the deal?” because people who haven’t been pregnant in almost seven years think that kind of thing is HILARIOUS. But yet, I received a text on Wednesday afternoon that read “4 centimeters dilated. Should be later today.” and I could not figure out who on earth would text me a message about labor. I nearly texted them back to say, “You have the wrong number, but good luck with the new baby!” before my brain slowly began to compute all the correct information.

    But none of that has anything to do with the Bike Rodeo and that’s where I was headed about six hundred words ago.

    Caroline got a new big girl bike for Christmas from Mimi and Bops. You may remember the following picture that would have been a precious memory if only my Dad’s head would have made the cut.

    However, since this has been a winter that would cause people in Seattle to feel depressed, we haven’t had the opportunity to really get her out on the bike. It also doesn’t help that we don’t really live in a bike-friendly neighborhood for the beginning cyclist. There are lots of hills and virtually no sidewalks which means that to ride the bike requires that we transport the bike to another location and see how it all starts to get too complicated when she is just as happy to ride her scooter which fits neatly in the trunk of my car?

    She made it abundantly clear that she must participate in the Bike Rodeo because everyone gets a ribbon and she has never been one to pass up an opportunity for an accolade of any sort. So I began to look at the Bike Rodeo checklist to see what we needed (a bell! a bike light! basic bike maintenance!) and realized that P needed to be in charge of the Bike Rodeo portion of the parenting journey.

    Yesterday after church, we drove up to an empty parking lot so she could practice riding her new big girl bike. And she fell. Twice. There were tears and drama and wringing of hands, not to mention that Caroline was pretty upset also.

    She decided she wanted to quit. She didn’t want to be in the Bike Rodeo after all. And I began to have newfound respect for all those mothers of Olympians because how did Shaun White’s mother handle it when he wiped out and vowed to be done with snowboarding? When do you let your kid quit and when do you make them keep on trying? Where’s the line between encouragement and being a Bike Rodeo stage mother?

    P whispered to me, “What do we do? Do we let her quit?” And I gathered up all my maternal stores of wisdom and replied, “I don’t know”.

    Ultimately, we told her she needed to ride for a few more minutes because we didn’t want to end on a bad note and then asked if she wanted to go visit the Bike Store and see if they had a bell and a bike light. She did and so we picked up a purple bell, a purple bike light and a new purple bike helmet.

    And she was so thrilled with her new bike accessories that she begged to stop on the way home so she could ride her bike some more. I’ve always believed that sometimes a girl just needs some new accessories to give her spirits a lift and it worked like a charm. She rode her bike over and over again with new enthusiasm, ringing her little bell as she went.

    Who knows? One of these days she might even let us take off the training wheels.

    But I’ll need to take a nerve pill first.

  • Dizzying heights of fun

    Several of you asked how I achieved the poof on the top of my new drapes. I promise I will do a photo tutorial tomorrow, but at the moment I am suffering from a touch of the vertigo after spending the afternoon at the Rodeo Carnival.

    Since the kids were out of school for President’s Day, Gulley and I decided it was the perfect day to take them to the rodeo. It was a little chilly, but the sun was shining so we headed out to the fairgrounds full of hope and optimism.

    The kids all agreed that our first stop needed to be the ferris wheel.

    That look on Will’s face is what he refers to as his “sweetest smile”.

    Gulley and I decided we’d join the kids on the ferris wheel.

    Holy Rachel Zoe. Were the stores out of the large sunglasses?

    After the ferris wheel we wandered around and let the kids ride a few more rides, including a worm in desperate need of some orthodontia, the bumper cars and the Pirate Ship.

    Finally, Gulley and I couldn’t stand it any longer and insisted that it was time to go where all the real carnival magic happens.

    We started with corndogs with a side of Texas Twisters, which are homemade potato chips that were gone before I was able to get photographic evidence that they ever existed.

    Then I was torn between the turkey leg or the gordita. Ultimately, the gordita won out because there is no gordita like a rodeo gordita.

    However, I am sad to report that the gordita was filled with beef fajita meat that had never met any kind of tenderizing treatment. I finally just threw the rest of it out because I felt conspicuous standing in the middle of the fairway re-enacting one of those scenes from Wild Kingdom where a lion is trying to choke down an elephant.

    I found some consolation in the arms of a funnel cake.

    Anyone who says that food is not love has obviously never enjoyed a funnel cake at the rodeo.

    The kids were impatient to get back to the rides, so we headed back in that direction and saw something that stopped us in our tracks.

    Chicken fried bacon.

    Oh my word.

    It’s served fresh from the fryer with a side of coronary bypass.

    Oh, and Caroline saw what she referred to as the “Pickle Bird” and wanted to get her picture made with him.

    We finally made it back to the rides and Caroline and Jackson announced that they wanted to ride that ride where you ride up to the top and then it drops you and you do a free fall for about ten seconds but it feels like a thousand lifetimes. I can’t remember what it was called but I will henceforth refer to it as the Tower of Doom.

    For some reason I decided that it would be fun to join them on the Tower of Doom. After all, I spent most of my childhood summers as a frequent patron of Astroworld where I regularly rode the Dexter Frebish (later renamed the Excalibur, but it will always be the Dexter Frebish to me) and the Cyclone and the Sky Screamer. I laughed in the face of danger. Give me some turkey legs and a Gravitron and get out of my way.

    (Seriously, just thinking about the days of yore at Astroworld makes me want to weep because it no longer exists and what kind of childhood will Caroline have if she can’t experience the Alpine Sleigh Ride?)

    So we waited in line, let the scary carnival worker belt us into our seats and lower the shoulder harnesses, and then panicked as we began to ascend hundreds of feet into the air only to plummet back to earth. I can still hear the screaming. Mainly because I was the one screaming.

    As we got off the ride, Jackson announced he wanted to go again and Caroline looked a little shell-shocked. Me? I was just trying to keep down my corndog.

    Because you know what doesn’t really mix as well as it did thirty years ago? Vast amounts of junk food and rides that defy the laws of physics and gravity.

    I never really recovered after that. I think it might have given me a case of vertigo.

    So Gulley had to take one for the team and ride this swirly, spinny thing with the kids. TWICE.

    After a big day of fun, we announced it was time to head home and everyone commenced with the wailing and the whining. Gulley and I were forced to join in the chorus of mothers who were saying “What you ought to be saying is THANK YOU for the great day, Mom, instead of whining about it being time to leave, FIVE HOURS LATER.”

    In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I think I pulled out the phrase, “Maybe you should examine your heart”.

    But by the time we made it back to the car, they all agreed that a good time was had by all.

    Even though it ended too soon.

    And I got the vertigo.

  • The tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth

    The night after we discovered Caroline’s first tooth was loose, I was helping her get dressed for bed when she asked me how long I thought it would be before the tooth next to her loose tooth became loose. I said, “Well, it probably won’t be too long because I can see the permanent teeth trying to come in. What usually happens is the permanent teeth push the baby teeth out of the way and that’s why they get loose. I bet that other tooth will be loose in no time.”

    “Wow, Mama. Did you used to be a dentist?”

    “No, I was never a dentist.”

    “Then I guess you don’t really know then, do you?”

    And she’s right. I had no idea what I was talking about or if any of it was even true. I just like to spout random pieces of trivia based on what sounds good. I’ve been doing it for years. It was a skill that served me very well throughout all the years I worked as a pharmaceutical rep. But my child totally called me on it.

    When I picked her up from school yesterday, she walked out of the building with a HUGE smile on her face. A smile that revealed a little gap where her tooth used to be.

    The Lost Tooth from Big Mama on Vimeo.

    I have to make a few comments:

    1. She is a fan of the extreme close up shot. We probably need to work on personal space.

    2. I’m not totally sure that it was the first tooth she ever “growed”, but she liked the symmetry of that story so I’m sticking to it.

    3. I know who Tilt is but I’m not sure when Caroline decided it was okay to drop the “Mrs.” from the name. Or if her name is even Tilt.

    4. I do know that she was DYING for Tilt to pull the tooth and had mentioned it several times. Apparently, Tilt is the Mr. Miyagi of tooth-pulling up at the school.

    5. I think she’s going to be disappointed to discover that her tooth fairy isn’t a high roller who throws around ten dollar bills like the tooth fairy at Trevor’s house. His tooth fairy probably drives a miniature Escalade and makes extra cash selling baby teeth on the black market.