Doodle

I know it’s long but I have A LOT to say

I have to say that I was amazed at all the free time I had last week when I took my little blog vacation. I had time to organize my recipes, alphabetize my spice rack, learn how to crochet and paint the doorway of our master bathroom that’s needed to be painted since we moved back in our house after the renovation five years ago. Not that I actually did any of those things, but I could have.

Instead I spent my time watching old episodes of “Friday Night Lights” and deciding what color I should paint my toenails for Easter. Oh, and I was also witness to a miracle that I’ll have to tell you about later this week. It wasn’t anything akin to the parting of the Red Sea or a pair of jeans that fit great for less than $39.99, but it was a miracle nonetheless.

This is the problem with not blogging for a week, I don’t know where to begin. My life has become a series of Post-it notes with random scribblings of things I would normally write about, but instead had to remember for another week. Now I’m looking at them five days later and they say things like “Nightcream? MaMaw?” and “Water bottles-cheap”, and I have no idea what my original thought process entailed.

I also found a page torn out of my journal that read, “Milk, whipped cream, butter, half & half, bacon, one pound cheese” and was relieved when I realized it was just a grocery list and not the idea for a post entitled “How to Make Sure Your Cardiologist is Your New Best Friend”.

So since I don’t know where to start, I’m going to start with Easter. Everything else can wait a few days but if I wait a week to talk about Easter, then it kind of becomes pointless.

Much like this entire post so far.

This has been one of those weekends that I hate to see end. As Caroline looked through her Easter basket this morning, I got big tears in my eyes when I realized we probably don’t have too many Easters left where she thinks a bunny sneaks into our house in the middle of the night to eat carrots and leave a basketful of cheap gifts.

She asked me yesterday how the Easter bunny gets in and I mumbled some lame answer about magic, while P interrupted me to tell her that a rabbit is like a mouse or a rat and can make itself small enough to squeeze through any kind of hole to get in the house. Except I believe he actually said, “The Easter bunny is like a rodent…”

That’s exactly the type of tender childhood memory I’m always looking to instill.

Anyway, we had a busy weekend. Caroline spent the night with Mimi and Bops on Friday night, so P and I opted for an exciting night at home complete with pizza delivery. After we ate our pizza, he went out to the backhouse to admire all his weaponry and I watched “Friday Night Lights”. Twice.

It’s hard to sustain this level of glamour and glitz, but we manage somehow.

On Saturday, we helped our church get set up for the Easter service and then spent the rest of the afternoon engaged in various egg trivia and relays with relatives. Relatives that we actually had to introduce ourselves to using our first and last name.

Did you know there was such a thing as egg trivia? Neither did I.

When we were on the way home from the egg trivia, Caroline piped up from the backseat and said, “Mama, I’m carsick.”

“What? You’re carsick?! Are you going to throw up?!”

I was totally prepared to tell P to pull the car over or to use the Easter basket as a receptacle. Desperate times.

“No, I’m just sick of being in the car. Carsick.”

We need to work on our semantics.

Here’s the snack Caroline left out for the rodent who was going to crawl through a small hole to get in our house.

Please note the perfect formation of the carrots. She informed me that it was a “tally formation”. I do believe we have gotten our money’s worth out of Kindergarten.

Normally I only let her have one chocolate candy bar for breakfast, but yesterday she stuffed about three Reeses eggs in her mouth before I knew what happened.

And, in what may have been the highlight of my day, check out the pigtails and bows.

She totally shot down any mention of wearing white sandals, but those bows were my Everest.

After a great church service, we came back to the house for Easter brunch with my family. The highlight, other than my baked french toast casserole, was a plastic wind-up chicken that poops Hubba Bubba bubblegum. Because we are a sophisticated group of people.

Speaking of sophisticated and refined, P spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning out the backhouse while Caroline claimed any item that was headed for the giveaway/trash bin.

Here she is with a sweet new hat, a nasty old mop, a chalkboard, a rusty rainbow chair and assorted cardboard boxes.

At some point I couldn’t bear to watch so I went inside to make deviled eggs out of all the superfluous hard-boiled eggs we had on hand. When I looked outside about thirty minutes later, this is what I saw.

She made this all by herself and put the whole thing together with Scotch tape.

With this type of skill she may be well on her way to becoming an architect. Or perhaps a shrimp boat away from being completely equipped to live on a beach along the Texas coast.

I’m not sure which.

Let’s go with architect.
A tale of tails

From the moment the pregnancy test turned positive, I wanted to have a daughter. There were so many reasons I wanted a baby girl, not the least of which was styling her hair into pigtails everyday.

It wasn’t until her first birthday that the dream was realized. I combed and sprayed that baby fine hair into two sad little pigtails for her party because we were going to need something to hold that tiara in place.

It took a while to get them to resemble real pigtails.

But then the day came that they actually looked like a real hairstyle.

And from then on, I’d put her hair in pigtails any time she’d sit still long enough for me to get those Goody rubber bands in her hair.

I bought bows in sets of two in every color of the rainbow to ensure that we’d always have perfectly accessorized pigtails.

Because there just isn’t anything cuter than that.

Alas, the day came about a year ago when she started to resist the pigtails. She’d feel me run that comb down the middle of her head and say “NO PIGTAILS TODAY!”

So the singular ponytail became the style of choice, alternated with the occasional braid. I’ve mourned the pigtails because I felt like they were gone before I had a chance to say goodbye. I put a lot of my heart and hairspray into them over the course of four years and they just went away.

Yesterday morning, I went into Caroline’s room armed with a brush and some rubberbands and asked, “How do you want your hair today? A braid? A ponytail?”

Then just to mess with her, I said, “Pigtails?”

She said, “Yes. Pigtails.”

And I fell over.

I have never parted hair and secured it in pigtails faster than I did at that moment because I just knew she’d change her mind. When it was all finished, I looked at her and wanted to cry.

But instead, I just savored the pigtails.

Because it won’t be long before they’re gone for good.
Sea Monkeys, puppets and tortillas, otherwise known as a regular Friday night

Last Friday, I picked Caroline up from school a little early and we hit the open road to Houston. Well, first we stopped for a haircut and iced sugar cookies. But not at the same place. Although how awesome would that be to get your hair cut at a place that serves delicious iced cookies?

After Caroline got her hair cut and had acquired a box of sugar cookies for the road, we headed out on I-10 to Houston. It’s the roadway equivalent to watching paint dry. I knew we were in trouble about fifteen minutes into the three hour trip when Caroline started in with the whole “How much longer?” routine.

I’ll tell you how much longer. Long enough that Mama may stop in Schulenberg, Texas and put you on a Trailways bus.

Oh, you know I would never actually do that. I would totally let her go Greyhound.

It didn’t help matters that the portable DVD player decided to start acting wonky and shutting itself off. I was particularly irritated because I’d made a special trip to the Disney House of Crack prior to the trip to buy “Bolt” on DVD for a little in-car entertainment. It was a complete media fail.

It’s probably how the Ingalls family felt when they crossed the frontier in search of a prairie where they could build a little house.

I had to resort to the car game of my childhood, the Alphabet game. However, it proved a little difficult because cows grazing in pastures rarely hold up any type of signage.

Anyway, we finally arrived in Houston and checked in at the Summerfield Suites, otherwise known as the hotel for royalty. I hear it’s where Queen Elizabeth is staying next time she’s in the U.S. because she loves herself a good complimentary breakfast and a kitchenette with a mini-fridge. It reminds her of spending the summer at Balmoral Castle.

After a few jumps back and forth between the beds, we loaded back up in the car to meet some friends for dinner at a place called Lupey Tortilla. I had never heard of Lupey or her tortilla, but after experiencing it for myself I will tell you that Lupey doesn’t play around.

The tortillas are bigger than the human head.

In fact, the tortillas are bigger than Beth Moore’s hair. Look how I know.

That is a seriously anointed tortilla.

Caroline and I got to eat dinner with Amanda, Beth, and Annabeth (she doesn’t have her own blog yet) and just had the best time.

I will forever regret that I didn’t take the time to put on some lipstick before we took this picture. Between the Houston humidity and my apparent lack of makeup, I don’t know that I’ve ever looked worse. I should’ve followed Amanda’s lead and avoided the camera.

It was a great time, even though there were a few times that I felt like I was doing the “Chris Farley Show” with Beth.

“Remember that time you wrote that Bible study about Esther and she was a queen? Yeah, that was awesome.”

“Remember that time you talked about King David’s life? Did you come up with that? Oh, it’s in the Bible? Awesome.”

Idiot.

The highlight of the night (other than the fact that I’m pretty sure Z.Z. Top was sitting behind us) was when we walked out to the car and Beth told us she had something to show Caroline. She ran to her car and, about a minute later, I see a puppet pop up from behind a car. It was an Esther puppet that someone sent Beth.

Caroline adored the Esther puppet. She thought it was the greatest thing she’d ever seen, especially when Beth showed her how it could give hugs.

I think she was trying to open her eyes as wide as Esther’s in that picture. Not an easy task when you’re a human and competing with a puppet who has no biological need to blink.

Caroline and I went back to Amanda’s house for a while and visited. I always love spending time with Amanda because she is just so sweet and funny. We got to hold little Annabeth and it made my ovaries hurt more than a little.

Doesn’t Caroline look sweet holding that baby? (Wait, P! Come back! At least finish reading the post!)

But for Caroline, the best was yet to come. Amanda had a little gift for her.

Sea Monkeys.

And not just any sea monkeys, but sea monkeys that come with a friendship locket so you can wear them around your neck.

That is the gift that keeps on giving. At least until someone forgets to put the locket back on right and spills sea monkeys all over Mama’s rug.

Here’s hoping that scenario doesn’t play out for the sake of the sea monkeys and me.

Eventually we said goodbye to Esther the puppet, Amanda, and Annabeth, and headed back to our hotel that was made “for royalty!” to jump on the beds a few more times.

Too bad Queen Esther couldn’t come with us. She would have fit right in.
I believe I can fly

Caroline and I took a little road trip to Houston this weekend to attend Vicki Courtney’s “You and Your Girl” event for the Allaccess blog.

When we arrived at our hotel room on Friday afternoon, Caroline took in the grandeur of the Hyatt Summerfield Suites, sighed a deep, contented sigh, and said, “This place is like for ROYALTY!”

And that was even before she discovered that the double beds in our room were placed close enough for her to jump from bed to bed.

The whole weekend was an abundance of riches.

And I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow when I’m not so tired and can form coherent paragraphs and sentence structure.
Mama tried

As of 7:15 this morning, Spring Break is officially over. It’s back to the real world of a nutritious breakfast of Lucky Charms marshmallows, discussing the unfairness of life and how it relates to wearing leggings to school, and lovingly making a ham sandwich that will return to me almost entirely intact in a Cinderella lunchbox.

Oh, I l do love a routine.

I know there were some low points last week, specifically the day we resorted to taking pictures of the dog’s ear, but I’m actually a little sad it’s over.

The good news is that she and her daddy were able to finish off the week with another trip to the ranch.

The bad news for my washing machine and my formerly clean floors is that they share a love for finding new and improved ways to get muddy.

(The sound is a little off because Vimeo hates me right now.)

A Sunday Drive from Big Mama on Vimeo

I wonder if Merle Haggard’s mama made him wear leggings to school?
This post just put me to sleep while I wrote it

I watched the weather forecast on Tuesday night and listened to our local meteorologist as he predicted that rain and extremely cold temperatures would arrive around noon on Wednesday. So I went to bed with a master plan for Caroline and me to hit HEB before the front arrived. A trip to the grocery store wasn’t really part of our official Spring Break Agenda since I already went late last week, but P informed me that we were out of EVERYTHING.

If you’ve been reading here for any length of time then you know that by “EVERYTHING” what he meant was Nilla Wafers and Zantac 150. He suffers from acid reflux and a love of plain vanilla cookies.

Naturally, the weather man was wrong about the cold front’s noon arrival because it’s what weather men do. I don’t think they mean to lie; I think it’s just God’s way of letting them know they need to quit telling him his business. God’s in charge of the weather even if he doesn’t wear a cheap suit and point to a fancy computer satellite map.

By the time Caroline and I woke up, it was already windy, cold, and rainy. However, we went ahead and ventured out to HEB because what part of Zantac 150 and Nilla Wafer deprivation do you not understand? And, in all fairness, we were also out of Diet Coke and Sour Patch Kids. There was no way I was going to survive an entire day without either of those items. We’re not cavemen.

So we went to the store and then we came home.

Spring Break just keeps getting better and better.

I thought I’d share the rest of our day in pictures.

I cleaned out the refrigerator.

I cleaned this light fixture that hadn’t been cleaned since we installed it almost six years ago.

I cleaned the stove top until I could see my reflection.

In the meantime, Caroline tried on every outfit in her closet, including her Wonder Woman Costume.

She also spent a lot of time walking around with her new travel pillow around her neck.

And then at some point, she took the camera from me and took some pictures of her own.

This is Bruiser.

This is his ear.

And this is the picture I started to color.

I realized I was hanging on by a thin thread when she wanted to turn the page to do a connect-the-dots and I began complaining about how she never lets me finish my pictures.

And that pretty much sums up our day.

On the scale of Spring Break fun, it’s going to be pretty hard to top.

Any suggestions for something to do on a cold, rainy day besides play Sorry, otherwise known as the board game that is now dead to me?