Doodle

Career goals

Last night I was getting Caroline ready for bed when she announced that she was on the precipice of making a major decision regarding her future. She informed me that she is either going to be a singer or a veterinarian when she grows up.

(Given her gene pool, I wanted to suggest that she keep those grades up and hope for admission to vet school)

As she weighed the pros and cons of each occupation, she ultimately realized that she didn’t have to choose. She could take care of animals and sing. In fact, she told me that she planned to sing two or three times a week.

Then she announced, “But I want to be a mama too.”

“Well, baby, you can be a mama and a veterinarian and a singer.”

(And bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.)

“Yes, I want to be all of them.”

“Do you want to be a mama like me with the sweetest little girl ever?”

“Oh Mama” she said with the sigh that comes with stating the obvious, “There’ll never be another girl as sweet as me.”

I may be slightly biased, but I kind of think she’s right.
Sometimes life is full of rainbows and bad cotton candy

I had to drag Caroline out of bed yesterday morning and when I finally got her in the kitchen she informed me she was too tired to go to school. And I knew just how she felt because I would have loved nothing more than for us to get back under the covers and spend the entire day in our pajamas. However, I know her well enough to know that the tiredness would wear off eventually and she’d begin demanding things like food and forms of entertainment more involved than watching Phineas and Ferb. So I drove her to school.

The weekend was exhausting. P was hunting and I discovered that being the head soccer coach is much harder than it looks. There are just so many times that you can yell “THAT’S NOT OUR GOAL! KICK IT THE OTHER DIRECTION! KICK IT THE OTHER WAY!” before you’re ready to pop a Valium and call it a game.

Normally P handles most of the coaching responsibilities and I serve as what I have come to believe is a crucial element of the game, the sideline hostess. I open Gatorades, hand out snack items, take out earrings that have come loose, and fix ponytails. Occasionally I’ll pipe up with a rousing “Come on Rainbows! Follow the ball! Get the ball!” but then I go back to sorting grapes in preparation for half time.

But this week I was on my own. I recruited Bops to serve as sideline hostess but he’s not one to sit around and serve Gatorade while there is any type of competitive sport being played, although in terms of this game I’m using the words “competitive” and “sport” very loosely, so he helped me yell out helpful strategies from the sidelines such as “YOU HAVE TO KICK THE BALL!”

We only had five players which left us with just one substitute. By the second half the girls were all exhausted. One of them begin complaining that her leg hurt so I pulled her out. Then about that time Caroline fell and scraped her knee. Both of them were on the sidelines and neither wanted to go in so I launched into a passionate lecture about MENTAL TOUGHNESS while they searched the cooler for any remaining bottles of blue Gatorade.

When the game mercifully ended, I gathered the team around to give them a little inspirational pep talk and let them know how much I appreciated their efforts. I was halfway through my impassioned speech when one of the little girls looked at me and asked, “Where’s that guy that’s usually here?”

I think it’s safe to say that P and I made a lasting impression on the mighty Rainbows.

On the way home I drove through a Mexican restaurant (I didn’t actually drive through a restaurant although I would have been totally capable of it at that moment. To clarify, I went to a Mexican restaurant with a drive-through) and ordered some self-medication in the form of two breakfast tacos with beans, egg and bacon and extra green chile sauce. If you haven’t ever tried that combination then I feel bad for you. I first discovered it at La Popular (emphasis on lar) Bakery in Pearsall, Texas back in 1996 and my life has never been the same. Colors are brighter.

Caroline and I spent the next two hours lying on the couch until it was time for Jackson and Will to show up. Gulley and her husband had to drive to Dallas and back for a funeral on Saturday and since you never hear anyone say, “You know what’s a great time? A ten hour roundtrip road trip with two kids to attend a funeral!” I offered to keep the boys. They spent the morning with some other friends since they had soccer and football games, but came to my house around lunchtime.

I talked to Gulley a little after lunch and informed her that everyone was pretty tired. I believe my exact words where “I’m not sure if Caroline and Brother (Will) are going to be loving or hating today”. Because that’s what those two do. They are either in love or uninviting each other to their birthday parties. There’s no in between which is why we will forbid them from ever dating because the drama would kill us all.

But we made it through the day with only a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Late in the afternoon I told them we could go out to eat for dinner. When we arrived at the restaurant I told them we could sit outside. Will asked me if he could please sit at a table by himself and since we were the only ones there enjoying a 5:15 dinner on a Saturday night, I told him he was welcome to sit by himself.

So he did.

Will is his own person and every now and then he likes to be a loner. A rebel. A renegade on the loose with his orange Fanta.

Meanwhile, Jackson and Caroline were eating their dinner and contemplating the merits of an EZ’s milkshake for dessert vs. candy from the video store.

Sidenote: Caroline’s necklace is an original Caroline design made exclusively with the finest plastic beads that Target has to offer.

Ultimately, they all decided on candy from the video store. Will and Caroline insisted that they wanted that compressed synthetic cotton candy in a foil bag, but young Jackson chose wisely and picked Sweet Tarts. Once we arrived back at the house I got them all bathed and in their pjs, then they piled up in my bed with their cavities in a bag.

After a few minutes Will and Caroline regretted their cotton candy purchase (just like I warned them they would) and wanted to horn in on Jackson’s Sweet Tarts. I told them that Jackson made the better choice and they needed to live with their decision.

So I guess the theme for the day was MENTAL TOUGHNESS.

And I also may have slipped them each a few Gummie Sours LifeSavers because when it comes to choosing the wrong candy, mental toughness can be overrated.

Make sure to read Kelly’s post from today about their first visit to a Compassion Project in El Salvador. And don’t miss Keely’s amazing photos. If you don’t hear from me tomorrow it just means I’m on my way to El Salvador to see about adopting one of those beautiful faces.
I don’t know much

It’s a shame y’all don’t have any opinions about makeup.

All I can say is if you have an hour or two to spare, the comments on yesterday’s post are SOLID GOLD. I don’t even know where to begin but I adore all the input. If I were Estee Lauder I would invite you all to my home in the Hamptons so we could discuss the pros and cons of various products all weekend long. Of course since Estee has gone to that big cosmetics counter in the sky, I guess I’d prefer to be her granddaughter, Aerin. My only regret is that I didn’t ask everyone to state their skin type so I’d know all the various skin issues represented. Live and learn. As Max Factor used to say, “The beauty business is tricky”.

(I have no idea if there was actually ever anyone named Max Factor or if he said that, but it sounds good.)

Last night I took the time to read each and every comment. I made copious notes. I clicked on links. I ate three small bags of M&M’s from the Halloween candy bag. I read reviews on websites.

It turns out that many, MANY, of you are big fans of Bare Escentuals. It was the hands down winner for the most shout outs.

I actually used Bare Escentuals for about a year and liked it. The problem is that I have dry skin. The kind of skin that would make the Sahara desert feel like a tropical rainforest. I ultimately decided that the Bare Escentuals products weren’t the right fit for my skin, although they did provide great coverage and I loved that it felt as if I weren’t wearing any makeup at all.

The bottom line is I’m planning to spend most of my Friday morning at Sephora. It’s all in the name of research. Selfless research. I kind of have an idea about some of the products I’m interested in but I’ll provide a full report on Monday.

In other news, the mighty Rainbows have their last game on Saturday and I’ll be coaching solo since P has some hunting obligations to fulfill down in South Texas. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing until Caroline let me know her thoughts on the way to soccer practice yesterday.

Thoughts on Soccer from Big Mama on Vimeo.

I guess we’ve officially passed the stage where she thinks I know everything. If we ever went through that stage to begin with.

The important thing is I’ll be able to tell her all about the best products to have in your makeup bag and that’s SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT AND LIFE-CHANGING than the difference between a corner kick and a goal kick.

The winner of the Tiny Prints giveaway is posted over on my giveaway page. Make sure you click over and check it out. There’s also a special offer for those of you who entered and didn’t win. Oh I do love a consolation prize.
Night of the living scaredy cat

Honestly, I’m glad Halloween is over. It’s not that I don’t love the costumes, the candy, carving pumpkins, and the candy, but I am a pansy. You may wonder what that has to do with anything and I’ll tell you. All the scary movies that come on T.V. the week before Halloween are my nemesis. I cannot stand scary movies. I’ll be as bold to say they are worse than stirrup pants and pet guinea pigs.

There is nothing that ruins my television viewing experience like flipping through the channels and inadvertently stumbling upon Halloween 12: The Repeated Revenge of Michael Myers. The worst part is P loves a good scary movie because they don’t scare him at all. He enjoys dissecting the movie into all the different reasons it’s an implausible story line with the number one reason being that if there’s a deranged killer on the loose then why isn’t anyone carrying a gun? Says the man who plays pool while wearing a sidearm.

All I know is that he talked me into watching some terrible movie called Urban Legend a few years ago under the guise that it was so stupid that even I couldn’t be scared and I didn’t sleep for a week afterwards. Oh, and the time that we watched Sixth Sense and it freaked me out so bad that I put the DVD back in its case and put it outside. Because that’s normal.

I’m a pansy. I own it.

Nevertheless, we had a great Halloween filled with nothing much scarier than a southern belle who referred to herself as “Scarlett O’Harris” and a gladiator.

Unfortunately, I spent the rest of the weekend not feeling very well. I don’t want to say it was all the Reeses I ate, so I’ll blame the Butterfingers instead.
Happy Halloween

I’m not sure how we went from this:

to this:

But I’m pretty sure it happened when I blinked my eyes.

May your Halloween be filled with all manner of ducks, southern belles, and especially Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.

However, if you come to my house don’t have your heart set on the Reeses.

They were gone like the wind.
The Nina, the Pinta, and the clinically insane

I’ve been so busy over here trying to breathe and watching Youtube video demonstrations on the proper use of a neti pot that I’ve completely neglected to tell you about something that consumed the better part of my week last week.

(By the way, I’m totally lying about watching the neti pot demonstrations. There isn’t enough money in the world for me to watch someone do that.)

(Also, when Andy Warhol came up with the notion that we all have 15 minutes of fame, do you think he could have imagined a world where people would rinse their sinus cavities for all the world to see?)

Caroline had the day off school last Monday for Columbus Day. We celebrated in our usual way, which is to say that we decorated our Columbus Day tree and left cookies by the fireplace in the hopes that the ghost of Christopher Columbus would show up and hide eggs in our yard.

What? Is that not how you celebrate?

I’m glad that we commemorate Columbus Day because I appreciate that he took the time to load up some ships and head off in search of a new world. If not for him, there would be no Starbucks and who would want to endure that kind of existence?

When Caroline got home from school the following Tuesday, I opened her take home folder and discovered a note that said her homework assignment for the week was to create a replica of one of Christopher Columbus’s ships and include five things in the boat that they would have needed to survive the long voyage. The end of the note said that this was something fun to do with your child and to remember “the joy is in the journey, not in the destination”.

I’ll bet five dollars and a raging case of the scurvy that Christopher Columbus would beg to differ with that statement.

The note also suggested that we could use a shoe box or perhaps a can to construct our ship. Because, yeah, you want your kid to be that poor kid that shows up with an empty Spaghetti-O’s can with a paper sail attached to the top of it.

I asked Caroline if she knew what she wanted her ship to look like because I realize now that she is in first grade that I need to involve her in these high-level academic decisions. She looked at me blankly and replied, “I don’t know. How many Twizzlers can I eat before dinner?”

“Well, which ship do you want to make?”

“Maybe the Santita Marita”.

Perfect.

Fortunately, I was scheduled to volunteer at her school last Thursday and was able to do some ship reconnaissance and check out the ones that other classes had already made. If these ships were made by first graders, then Caroline is going to school with some future engineers. There were some sails made of rope material that would make Christopher Columbus weep at the beauty and structural integrity.

I went to Michael’s armed with my limited knowledge of faux ship building and decided that popsicle sticks were the way to go. I’m pretty sure the staff at Michael’s refer to me as “the crazy lady who comes in here once every six months with a desperate look about her and has no idea where anything is located”. However, I found the popsicle sticks, some brown paint and a few other ship-building necessities.

When I picked Caroline up from school that day it was a total score because she informed me that she wanted to make her ship out of popsicle sticks. We were totally simpatico. Unfortunately, about five minutes after I put her to work coloring popsicle sticks with a brown paint pen, she totally lost interest.

But that’s when P happened to come home. He was lured in by the sight of the shoe box and the popsicle sticks and apparently forgot for a moment that these types of projects bring out my particular brand of crazy. I was trying to configure the sticks in just the right way and he said, “I think they’d look better with straight ends. I’ll go get something to cut them with so it will be more symmetrical”.

I don’t know that I’ve ever loved him more.

Sadly, he ultimately decided that it was too difficult to cut every one of the approximately 112 sticks we’d need to complete the project but, for a brief shining moment that was my Camelot, I thought I’d finally brought him around to my level of OCD.

Caroline and I worked tirelessly on her float for the next few days. And by tirelessly, I mean that she watched several episodes of Phineas and Ferb while I tried to figure out how to make a sail out of foam and construct a ship’s wheel from parts from her old train set.

By Sunday afternoon, I knew I needed to reign it in a little bit when I heard P tell Caroline, “Be careful with that. You don’t want to mess up Mama’s ship.”

Is this what I’ve become? A neurotic Thomas Andrews wannabe?

But, you know, without the whole iceberg debacle.

So I handed the paintbrush and the glue to Caroline and she finished the rest of the ship. In fact, she even came up with the five items they would have needed to make the voyage after she rejected my suggestion of wine, toilet paper, and Pepto-Bismol. Our ship contained a barrel of apples, a wooden cow, some hay for the animals, rope and a compass.

Oh, and the piece de resistance was a pink rooster absconded from her old train set and glued to the top of one of the wooden things that holds up the sails. I want to call it the mast but I don’t know if that’s correct and I’m not about to look it up.

In the end, we looked at our replica of the Santita Marita and we were well pleased.

And still reasonably sane.