Doodle

There are eleven days of school left.

I just thought you might want to know.

That means I have eleven more mornings where I have to cobble together whatever meager offerings are in my refrigerator for Caroline’s lunch box. I used my last Lunchable yesterday so there’s a good chance she’ll go to school tomorrow with an overripe tomato and a leftover cinnamon roll.

Oh I’m just kidding.

I’m going to eat that last cinnamon roll myself.

Several weeks ago, I promised our little friend Kate that I would pick her up from school and take her with me to pick up Caroline from “big girl school”.

(Hold on. P just interrupted my train of thought to ask where Albany, Texas is. Clearly this is much more important than the blog post I’m trying to write.)

(Albany is 135 miles west of Dallas.)

(Also, Kate is three years old. That’s what I meant by “little” friend. Just wanted to clarify that she isn’t abnormally small or anything.)

Time got away from me and I realized this is Kate’s last week of school so it was now or never. I made arrangements with her mom to pick Kate up from school, then gymnastics with Caroline and then, for the grand finale, Chick-fil-A for dinner. Let it never be said that I don’t know how to show a three year old a good time.

So yesterday I picked Kate up and spent the rest of the afternoon confirming that it’s probably for the best that I only have one child. Mainly because that seems to be all my brain is equipped to handle. Or maybe it’s just that I am so used to having only one fairly self-sufficient person to keep up with that I forgot small children don’t know how to buckle their own carseats or wipe their own bottoms or avoid traffic.

Anyway, I picked Kate up and lugged her 150 pound carseat across the parking lot and then spent about fifteen minutes in the blazing heat trying to remember how to secure it.

(Wait. Now P wanted the computer so he could look up a snake he saw yesterday. Very pressing matter.)

(He’s pretty sure it was a bull snake.)

(I didn’t ask him where he saw it because I’m afraid he’ll say our yard.)

(Having one computer is terribly convenient and enjoyable.)

After I sweated all my makeup off trying to get Kate in the car, we drove to “Big Girl School” to pick up Caroline. She had requested that Kate and I walk up to get her because I think she was hoping for the chance to impress Kate with an up close look at the big leagues of elementary school.

It totally worked. Kate was very impressed and even intimidated by all the big yellow school buses and screaming kids running to catch them.

We spent the rest of the afternoon getting ice cream, playing dress up, attempting to get dressed for gymnastics, changing hairstyles 843 times to match each other and then actually arriving at gymnastics ten minutes late. The girls went in to their classes while I sat in the waiting room and attempted to catch my breath and wipe the chocolate ice cream off my white shorts.

What I really wanted to do was lay down and take a nap.

But then my friend Julie came in with her kids and a shoebox. Initially I didn’t think much of the shoebox until she sat down next to me and I noticed part of the top of it was cut open. She had a baby bird in it. A baby bird she rescued from her dog’s mouth.

She has christened the baby bird Johnny Cash for reasons that are unclear other than maybe he was lost and now he’s found. I don’t know. She had to bring Johnny Cash to gymnastics because it was time for him to eat. And so we sat and visited while she fed Johnny Cash some sort of mix she bought at the pet store, like it was all perfectly normal and people bring in birds in shoeboxes to gymnastics every day.

You might be a redneck if you bring a bird named Johnny Cash in a shoebox to gymnastics. Or if you’re friends with a person that carries around a bird named Johnny Cash in a shoebox.

The girls finished with gymnastics and I attempted to corral Kate and Caroline toward the car but first Kate wanted to change out of her leotard and back into the nightgown she wore to school that day because it was pajama day. And so we did a quick wardrobe change and then headed to Chick-Fil-A.

Which is where our food arrived just in time for Kate to need to go to the bathroom while Caroline wanted to stay in the playplace and I just wanted to make sure our chicken nuggets didn’t get thrown away. And then Kate hurt her toe and Caroline didn’t like her chicken wrap and I self-diagnosed myself with strep throat or a migraine headache or something.

The bottom line is I SALUTE YOU MOTHERS OF MORE THAN ONE CHILD.

Especially my friend Julie because she not only has three kids but a bird in a box named Johnny Cash.

And, in all seriousness, I adored having Kate and can’t wait to do it again.

After I get some sleep.

Well, as it turns out, P was able to fix the power cord. I’m not sure exactly what he did, and I hate to bore you with all the highly complicated jargon, but it seemed to involve disconnecting the whozeewhatzit from the flux capacitor and, TA DA, let there be light. Or power to my computer.

Technically I should probably still take the power cord back to the Apple Store and get the whole thing checked out, but I’m going to Scarlett O’Hara it and think about it tomorrow. Or the next time it quits working at an inconvenient time and I curse myself for not just taking care of it in the first place.

So our weekend kind of started on Thursday night because we attended Caroline’s school musical. She gave a riveting performance as Wednesday Addams of The Addams Family. It basically consisted of her class singing the theme song while they all snapped on cue.

But she got to wear stage makeup and a pretty black dress and that was enough to make her supremely happy.

Even though she did experience some serious envy over the class who got to perform “Footloose”. And, let’s be honest, who can blame her?

After the performance, Caroline was ready for a star-studded after party but since it was already 8:30 all she got was the option to go home and go to bed because Friday was still a school day. Have I mentioned that I am so ready for this school year to be over? Because I am so ready for this school year to be over. Only twelve days left.

Not that I’m counting down the minutes until we can enjoy a big schedule full of nothing.

By Friday night I wasn’t feeling that great. Mimi and Bops called to invite Caroline out to eat with them but she told Bops, “Let me get back to you on that” and ultimately decided she’d rather stay home and eat the barbecue P had picked up for dinner since I wasn’t feeling so good.

About a month before, she’d watched the original Star Wars movie that’s now called something else because of the three newer Star Wars movies. I could tell you all their names but that would require two things of me:

1. Some internet research.

2. For me to actually care what they’re called.

So let’s just go with the original Star Wars movie. And then she’d watched the first part of The Empire Strikes Back after her Uncle Chris (who is slightly obsessed with all things Star Wars and may have named his son Luke just so he can say “Luke, I am your father”) loaned her his complete set of Star Wars DVDs.

But she’d never finished The Empire Strikes Back and decided Friday night was the ideal time to watch the whole thing. So she and P went back in the bedroom to watch it while I laid on the couch and read a book and thought about how much my throat was bothering me.

Two hours later they emerged from the bedroom. I could tell Caroline had been crying and still had tears in her eyes as she exclaimed, “MAMA! YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE THIS. DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER! AND THEY FOUGHT AND HE CUT OFF LUKE’S HAND EVEN THOUGH HE’S LUKE’S FATHER!”

It was the shock of her life.

Almost as much of a shock as it is to me that I have a daughter who is now obsessed with all things Star Wars. And who may have attempted to perform several Jedi mind tricks on me throughout the remainder of the weekend. Does this mean she might end up attending conferences where people dress like Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader?

Naturally, (or not, depending on your level of fanaticism) we spent Saturday night watching Return of The Jedi, only to discover that Princess Leia is Luke’s twin sister. Consider Caroline’s mind OFFICIALLY BLOWN.

I woke up about 5 a.m. Sunday morning with a cough that wouldn’t quit and ended up staying home from church because people at church are usually funny about someone in the seats behind them hacking like they’re on their last legs with a bad case of the tuberculosis. Caroline stayed home with me where we remained in bed and watched Return of the Jedi for the second time.

Later that day she tried to convince me she’d had a dream the night before about the neighborhood swimming pool and thought maybe God was trying to tell her that we should go to the pool. But I wasn’t buying into it because I knew the water would be too cold since our nights have been a little chilly (like 65 degrees but we are Texans) plus I am in desperate need of a new sun hat for the pool because my old hot pink one has totally lost all shape and, like I told Gulley, makes me look like Dumb Donald from Fat Albert.

I wish I were kidding.

Which begs the question, is it worse to attend conventions dressed like a Jedi Knight or to wear a hat that makes you look like a marginal character from a 1970’s cartoon?

I guess either way our family may have it covered.

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I have a new post up about the Real Women of Philadelphia Community and your chance to win $25,000. There’s also a recipe for jalapeno bacon-wrapped duck (or chicken) (or turkey). Click here to read more.

I so appreciate your understanding about my need to take the day off yesterday. Well, at least nine of you understood. The rest of you may have been all TO HECK WITH THIS I’M NEVER COMING BACK TO THIS LAME BLOG AGAIN. In which case you’re not reading this anyway.

It was such a fun weekend, but it was non-stop action and the introvert who lives inside me was all talked out. I just needed about three hours on my couch to sit and listen to the sound of nothing. That’s what I did yesterday after I dropped Caroline off at school. And then I cleaned our toilets. I bet somewhere Gwenyth Paltrow was doing the exact same thing.

I spent most of Friday recovering from my trip to Minneapolis because apparently it is very grueling for me to sit on an airplane and read InStyle. And then Friday night we went out to dinner with some friends and their daughter, Sadie, came home with us to spend the night with Caroline.

Naturally, the girls needed a pedicure. Second grade is rough. Sometimes a girl just needs a little downtime.

The sleepover was big fun until sometime after midnight when all of our personalities took a turn for the worse. Specifically, mine.

Thankfully, the girls seemed to realize I was minutes away from putting them out in the backyard for the night and went to sleep. But they were up bright and early the next morning, ready for homemade cinnamon rolls. If you consider cinnamon rolls that make a POP sound when you open the can to be homemade. And I do because those things don’t ice themselves.

Mimi and Bops picked up Caroline to take her to watch my niece, Sarah, play soccer while I dropped off Sadie and went to a baby shower for my sweet friend, Mary Emma, who was one of our high school students once upon a time when P worked for Campus Life. But now she is all grown up and expecting her first baby. And so I spent the morning catching up with some dear friends and passing around swaddling blankets and burp cloths and baby monitors.

The rest of the day was spent trying to not anger Caroline who was going on about six hours of sleep, which is about six less than she really needs to function as a delightful human being. When I went to pick her up from Mimi and Bops’s house, she got frustrated with me because I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me and finally said, “I AM TRYING SO HARD NOT TO LOSE MY TEMPER RIGHT NOW”. And then I think she may have spit some pea soup out of her mouth.

But she did hand me the sweetest thing ever late Saturday afternoon.

In case you can’t tell, it says “A spa for mother’s day after taco grosh 1:00 pm” which translates to “A spa for mother’s day after Taco Garage at 1:00 p.m.” As for the illustrations on the invitation, I’m not entirely sure. Originally I thought maybe she was planning to serve pepperoni pizza at her spa, but in hindsight I think it was a picture of a bowl full of water and bubbles.

After she handed me the invitation to her spa, she escorted me in her room to give me the tour.

First, she had provided a selection of jewelry for me to choose from.

Then she showed me the mani/pedi station.

I thought the overturned laundry hamper as a table was a nice touch, although I wondered what she’d done with all the dirty clothes that had been in there moments earlier.

Also, please note she’d already prepared various spa treatments in advance.

That would be a bowl of soap snowflakes that dissolve in water, some lotion and some green crystals that I wasn’t entirely sure about until she explained she just thought she’d use the green sugar we use to decorate Christmas cookies to do that “scrubbing thing” on my hands.

I hugged her and told her I was so excited about my big day at the spa for Mother’s Day and, honestly, I couldn’t believe the effort she’d put forth. I mean, there were a lot of dirty clothes for her to dump out of that hamper.

So after church on Sunday morning and lunch at Taco Grosh, we headed home to begin my day at the spa. She filled all her various bowls with warm water and then dumped in the sugar cookie crystals for maximum effect.

I was able to choose my jewelry, but the nail technician was a little bit of a color nazi and rejected my choice of nail color. She had something else in mind.

It’s a little bit brighter and more flamboyant than my normal style. Of course it may also be a little brighter and more flamboyant than Lady Gaga’s style.

I tried to take advantage of a teachable moment and told her, “Nail polish really works best when you wipe the excess polish off the brush and do a few light coats”. However, I’m not sure she really listened based on the way she let the polish drip from the brush onto my nails and then smeared it around while she announced, “It’s so much easier to just put a bunch on at once”.

After my nails were finished, she moved on to my pedicure.

It is every bit as colorful as my manicure, but with the addition of several flower stickers on each of my big toes. I’m sure to either be a hit or labeled as “a little off” at the upcoming PTO meeting.

This is the final product. I think my nine-year-old U.S. Olympics t-shirt really adds a nice touch.

Finally, my time at the spa was over. Largely because she wanted me to take her swimming at the neighborhood pool. I have that same problem at my local nail salon all the time.

But before the spa day was over, she told me there would be a special Mother’s Day performance. An innovative production called THE WATER CYCLE. Complete with paper stick figures.

I always like to blend my relaxation in with some scientific knowledge so this was perfect.

After a brief lecture on the water table, the show quickly deteriorated into the sun attacking the clouds for reasons that are unclear. Then I was told it was my job to clean up the spa while she put on her bathing suit. And that’s why I didn’t leave her a very big tip.

Not to mention that when I tucked her into bed Sunday night, I said, “Baby, you made my Mother’s Day so special. Thank you for everything that you did. It was the best one ever.”

And she replied, “Well, it was more work than I thought. How about you pay me five dollars?”

Hallmark would be so proud to know that capitalism is still alive and well on Mother’s Day.