Family

Christmas joy brought to you by Duracell

Wow.

Where do I even begin to recap all the Christmas festivities? So much has happened in the last few days and yet I think you will find approximately ZERO of it interesting in the least. I will confess, in spite of multiple trips to various retail establishments that sell Secret Flawless Invisible Solid with a delightful tropical smell, that I am still using P’s Degree COOL SPORT for men because I have developed some type of hygiene block when it comes to purchasing new deodorant. My mom even gave me a gift certificate to Sephora for Christmas, which means I could go buy some fancy deodorant made out of ground-up fairies wings if I were so inclined. And yet I continue to smell like a COOL SPORT.

Caroline and I spent most of Christmas Eve just like this. Even though this picture doesn’t even begin to accurately depict the mess that was my kitchen.

I decided to wait until Christmas Eve morning to roll out all my cinnamon roll dough because I wanted the rolls to be fresh for Christmas morning. (Yes, I consider “fresh” to be anything less than 24 hours old. Whatever.) The problem was that I failed to really think through my baking agenda (How self-righteous does that sound? A baking agenda?) and forgot that I also needed to make another batch of toffee and a pecan pie, in addition to baking fourteen pans of cinnamon rolls and putting together a breakfast casserole for the next morning. You know what else I needed? A shower before the Christmas Eve service at our church that started at 4:00.

Which meant we left our house at 3:00 because P was struggling with some Christmas Eve traffic paranoia.

And found us sitting all alone in the sanctuary for fifty minutes before the service actually began.

We left church and went straight to Mimi and Bops’ house to eat tamales and open presents. Caroline read The Christmas Story to all of us and my heart melted into a big puddle of figgy pudding.

And by, The Christmas Story, I mean the one about Jesus being born in a manger, not the one about Ralphie getting his eye shot out.

Just wanted to be clear.

Then it was time to open presents and it was hard to tell if Caroline was excited about the bike Mimi and Bops bought for her.

On a total side note that has nothing to do with anything, AJ was in town over Christmas and told me that I really needed to get a new camera. After looking at my Christmas pictures, I’m not sure the problem is with the equipment as much as it is the operator. Wouldn’t it have been a kick to actually get my dad’s head in that last picture?

We came back home and I made Caroline pose in front of the Christmas tree because we were so rushed getting out the door an HOUR EARLY for church that I forgot to take one before we left.

She opened up a new Christmas nightgown, set out some toffee for Santa and reindeer food for the reindeer, and went straight to bed. I waited about an hour to make sure she was really out for the night and then told Santa it was okay to get to work.

That’s when Santa discovered that the Chinese elves didn’t feel the need to include instructions in the Zhu Zhu Fun House or the Zhu Zhu Garage and Hamster Mobile. And you know what makes Santa feel panicky and angry and maybe like he (or she) needs a glass of extra-strong eggnog?

Being surrounded by cheap plastic parts that give no indication of how they are supposed to be put together.

If the whole thing was – as I most definitely suspect and have come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories to prove I am right – some sort of plot to determine the intelligence of the average American citizen, then I failed miserably. Of course something tells me I already failed that test when I paid more than retail price in a desperate attempt to secure a fake rat for my child.

The packaging just sat there and taunted me with its scary depiction of a clawed hamster until P finally helped me figure out how to get the whole thing assembled. I’m embarrassed to say it wasn’t really that hard.

Caroline woke up Christmas morning and walked in to see what Santa had left. It’s always surprised me that she doesn’t get overly animated about Santa considering how over the top she is in her reactions to almost everything else. For instance, we drove by Hollywood Video yesterday and she noticed it was permanently closed down and began to cry because IT WAS HER FAVORITE PLACE EVER. EVER!!!

Yet Christmas morning she just casually strolls out and kind of looks around. An array of Santa toys obviously can’t compare to the aisles of movies available at Hollywood Video.

She saw her new houseshoes and said, “Oh Mama, look! Santa must have stopped at Gap on his way into town!”

Of course he did. Who can resist all those signs in the window declaring up to 70% off already reduced merchandise? Santa is no fool.

And may have even bought a new sweater for his or her self.

Then Caroline finally noticed her Zhu Zhu Pet.

She let the Zhu Zhu, who is currently being called Ella as opposed to Chunk, go for a little spin in the hamster mobile.

I walked out of the bathroom and nearly tripped over a white rat driving a blue car. That hasn’t happened since I was in college.

We ate some homemade cinnamon rolls and breakfast casserole before we opened the rest of the presents. Caroline got a Fur Real Friend from my mom and was so excited about it.

She named her Pearl.

(Pearl arrived via Amazon and still needed to be gift wrapped. I cannot tell you how many years it took off my life when I went to wrap Pearl and she MEOWED at me. It was like I was trying to wrap one of the devil’s minions.)

I started to get a complex about my poor child getting all manner of battery-operated pets for Christmas. Will there come a day when she’ll sit around with her friends while they all tell stories of the Christmas they got a brand new puppy? And she’ll say, “I remember the Christmas I received a fake hamster and a fake cat! That was the best Christmas ever. My mom didn’t have to worry about cedar chips or a litter box!”

Although, in all fairness, Santa did bring her a real fish for Christmas several years ago. Which is almost like a puppy but without all the warmth and the cuddling.

I guess for now I’ll console myself with the fact that she seemed pretty satisfied with her battery-powered menagerie.

Look at P in the background. Putting together that Zhu Zhu Pet Funhouse without directions wiped him out.

Or maybe it was just a cinnamon roll coma.

Or the eggnog.

Or some combination therein.

Hope y’alls was merry.

Oh and don’t forget to enter the Hersheys $100 Gift Card Giveaway by clicking over here and leaving a comment if you haven’t already. You have until New Year’s Eve.
Little boy blue

I’m sitting here struggling to type out some words. This is largely due to the fact that I practically cut my index finger off while chopping up a tomato last night. P always warns me that I’m risking severe injury when I don’t sharpen my knives before I use them, but that requires a lot of effort and it’s so much easier to walk around in pain clutching my Neosporin-to-Go and a box of flexible Band-Aids while complaining about how bad my finger hurts.

Between you and me, I have no idea how I’m going to get the garland on my front porch now. The index finger is absolutely essential to that process. You wouldn’t think it would be, but you would be wrong. And, honestly, I think it serves me right for not getting our outdoor decorations up before now. I always try (and fail!) to convince P we need to put them up the weekend after Thanksgiving to get maximum seasonal enjoyment, but there is thing called HUNTING SEASON that trumps outdoor illumination.

But rumor has it that the lights are going up later today and I’ll do the best I can to decorate the front porch in spite of my compromised index finger. Rumor also has it that P is definitely working on his gift list and it will be ready on Friday.

My mom is in town so we made a trip back to the hospital to see Baby Luke yesterday. My sister (Not my twin, by the way. She’s four years younger.) is doing really well and when the nurse came in to ask her to rate her pain on that stupid pain chart with all the faces, she answered that she was a two. A two? A two still shows a smiley face. I thought everyone knew that you never answer lower than a five. Heck, I would rate my finger between a six and a seven, possibly even an eight if it weren’t for the anesthetic I sprayed on it earlier.

But no one really seemed that concerned about my finger. In fact, no one even asked me to rate my pain, which just seems wrong since it’s not like I got an epidural before I cut my finger.

While the nurse was tending to my sister, I took it upon myself to change Luke out of his hospital-issued attire and change him into something a little fancier. My poor brother-in-law didn’t grow up in a family of women, so he called out to my sister, “Melanie is playing dress up with our baby.” To which she replied, “OH GOOD!” because all those years we dressed up our dolls and cats totally prepared us for playing dress up with real live babies.

Of course part of my reason for wanting to dress him up was purely for the chance to unwrap him and look at his sweet fat baby legs. I gently laid him on the bed, unwrapped him and made the strategic error of checking his diaper. It was a very full diaper. All I wanted was to put him in a blue gown and instead I ended up having to wipe newborn tar off his bottom while he screamed at the injustice of life.

Just as I got him all cleaned up, I slipped a new diaper under his little bottom and he retaliated by peeing all over me. I forgot that boys come with a weapon. So then I had to start cleaning him up all over again while he voiced his opposition and I kept calling to my sister, “HE’S FINE! HE’S TOTALLY FINE!”

And he was. By the time she saw him again, he was in a pretty (handsome?) little gown, peacefully wrapped in his blue satin blankie with a sweet blue sweater cap on his head.

So of course we had to unwrap him and take some pictures. It’s what we do.

Bless his heart, he didn’t seem to mind.
Baby love

Well look who decided to show up.

Welcome to the world, Luke Christopher! All eight pounds and fifteen ounces of you.

(Oh my poor sister.)

We love you already.
The non-caped crusader

So we had a little excitement on Halloween that I failed to mention yesterday. And by failed to mention, I mean that I was coming down from my massive forty-eight hour sugar high and way too tired to find all the words. If you visit here on a regular basis then you know that finding the words isn’t usually much of an issue.

Whether or not they are words worthy of five minutes of your life is debatable.

Saturday morning started with yet another mighty Rainbows soccer game. As we near the end of the season we are so proud that our team has really come together and embraced all that is good and true about playing soccer, as evidenced by the fact that they are all highly concerned about whose mom is bringing snacks to the game and what the aforementioned snacks will be and when, OH WHEN, can they eat the snacks? How long, O Lord, until snack time? HOW LONG?

We came home after the game with big plans to spend the day doing absolutely nothing but resting up for a big night of trick-or-treating. It was a gorgeous fall day so I spread out a blanket in the backyard and prepared to spend a leisurely afternoon perusing the vast quantity of Christmas catalogs that arrived in the mail that day because heaven forbid we get even one day of rest between holidays before we are bombarded with reminders that time is running out to get ready for the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER.

While I looked at the catalogs, Caroline was busy serving fake tea to Scout and Bruiser and P was attempting to make a homemade windshield for his Polaris out of plexiglass.

On a side note, I do not have a good feeling about the stability of this homemade windshield and if I could ask Santa for just one thing this year it would be to witness the moment that the plexiglass windshield falls apart and the ensuing non-Sunday school words that will come out of P’s mouth as it shatters on a ranch road somewhere in South Texas. That may seem like a twisted wish, but even P knows that there is nothing that brings me more delight than seeing him on a tirade about any sort of mechanical failure. It’s a sickness.

I’d just stumbled upon a page in the Garnet Hill catalog that featured this darling Buckets of Joy Advent Calendar and decided that I would recreate that crafty idea all by myself. I was ready to declare it Christmas Project ’09. However, when I showed it to P so he could admire all its cuteness and my thriftiness in declaring it Christmas Project ’09 instead of just buying it from the catalog, he totally killed my Martha buzz by asking, “Where on earth do you think we have room to hang 25 buckets in our house?”

“They’re not buckets. They’re tiny pails.”

“Ok. Where do we have room to hang 25 tiny pails in our house?”

Christmas Project ’09 was dead on arrival. Probably much like a homemade plexiglass windshield.

Anyway, I’d just found the tiny pails of Christmas joy when the phone rang. It was my sister and I could tell when I heard her voice that something was wrong. She said, “I don’t want you to freak out, but Mimi and Bops were just in a wreck on the way to our house.” My heart stopped for about three minutes until I was able to get Bops on the phone and hear that everything seemed to be okay even though they were taking Mimi to the hospital just to be on the safe side.

Apparently, they were heading down the street and a car didn’t feel the need to yield to oncoming traffic so it swerved around the car in front of it that was yielding and hit the passenger side of my dad’s car. And then, AND THEN, tried to speed away from the scene of the accident.

But what Mr. Hit and Run didn’t realize was that he’d just rammed into the Texas roadway equivalent of Batman. My dad had the presence of mind to block the driver’s getaway attempt and force him to turn into the closest parking lot where he was trapped like a rat. A dirty rat.

Mimi and Bops actually made it to our house in time to do some trick-or-treating later that night and didn’t seem too much worse for the wear. Of course it probably helped that I poured them each a glass of wine in a plastic cup to drink as we walked door to door. It was purely for medicinal purposes.

Because nobody ever said it was easy to be Batman. Or his sidekick.

Even on Halloween.
I went to Port Aransas and all you get is this lousy post

Here’s something that most of y’all didn’t know, we’ve actually been on a little vacation at the coast for the last few days. However, due to our new and improved heightened state of paranoia, I haven’t mentioned that we’ve been out of town and am only mentioning it now because, by the time most of you read this, we’ll be back at home and any attempts to burglarize our house and steal my jewelry collection, full of quality pieces some of which cost upwards of $5.99, will be useless.

Although one time, several years ago, an evil-doer stole these fabulous Mexican-style pottery urns complete with blooming flowers right off my front steps in broad daylight while I sat on my living room couch glued to an episode of Alias. They’re lucky I didn’t hear them because otherwise I would have been forced to put down my bag of M&M’s, jump off the couch, fling open the front door and yell, “Hey! You! Why are you stealing my urns? Why would you do that? That’s just mean.”

I’m sure my line of intense questioning would have caused them to second guess their urn-stealing ways and place the urns promptly back on my front steps.

We’ve been looking forward to our week at the beach all summer long, even though we knew it would mean the first day of school is right around the corner. But we have carpe diemed the heck out of the last four days.

One of my requests this year was for P to provide me with some sort of shelter on the beach because Ma-Maw is too old to expose my fragile, age-spotted skin to the sun for long periods at a time. I can’t undo the sins of my Hawaiian Tropic SPF 4 past, but I can try to learn from my mistakes and the brown spot under my eyebrow that no Oil of Olay can erase.

When we got to the beach the first day, I reminded him that I needed some sort of shade tarp. In my mind I had envisioned one of those cool tent-like things with maybe a Texas flag on the side and some comfortable chairs.

P went all Survivor Season 1 on me, pulled a few things out of his toolbox, and this is what I got.

I’m just going to say that it’s not easy to have the most redneck makeshift shelter on a Texas beach, but I think we managed quite nicely.

Of course, in all fairness, it served its purpose even though I was a little concerned that the rusted rebar stakes might cause the trip to end with someone needing a tetanus shot. And really, we fit right in because right down the beach from us was this fine structure.

From a distance I thought it was some kind of memorial and a memorial on the beach can never serve as the harbinger of good news. If this was a memorial to someone who was the victim of a shark attack, then I don’t know that I want to be within in a thirty mile radius. On closer inspection, it does not appear to a memorial, but rather a white trash totem pole. I’m not sure if you can clearly see that there are some leopard-print underwear hanging from the top but I assure you that they are there, right above the empty cans of Lone Star Light.

The rest of the trip was spent doing all the normal things we do in Port Aransas.

Taking a picture in the mouth of the large shark outside a souvenir shop.

Trying on kicky fedoras.

Feeding a pound of fresh, dead shrimp to a flock of seagulls.

(And I ran, I ran so far away.) (Did you go there? Because I did the minute I typed it.)

The fresh, dead shrimp cost a little more than the old, dead shrimp, but we feel that they’re worth the investment.

Catching baby sharks which caused me to promptly vacate the water because if there’s a baby then there’s a baby mama somewhere nearby.

Be free, little one. Let your mama know we treated you well.

We ate snowcones thanks to the ice cream man that drove right down the beach.

We ate lots of chips thanks to a mama who went grocery shopping with PMS.

And we watched P do his best version of Captain Ahab because he hooked a four foot shark that got away and spent the rest of the trip trying to catch his nemesis. I don’t have a picture of his quest because did I mention the shark hunt was taking place past the second sandbar, also known as where you become part of the food chain?

But I did get a picture of this.

There’s really no other explanation than that’s an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree.

And they make me so happy.
Chuck E. Cheese, where a kid can be a kid or get a stomach virus

Yesterday was my sweet niece Sarah’s fourth birthday. It’s hard to believe that she’s already four years old because it seems like just a few days ago that I was sitting with my sister while she was in labor as she went on and on about how easy it was to give birth to a human being. I didn’t mention the fact that it wasn’t that easy for me because I had some crackpot of a labor nurse who kept telling me I wasn’t in labor until she realized I was ten centimeters dilated.

Yes, yes I am. That’s what all the screaming has been about. I wasn’t faking.

In reality, I’m sure I did remind my sister of my experience because I am just that petty and slightly bitter about the whole thing. Even so, I am thrilled for her that her particular birth experience was basically watching “Dancing with the Stars”, getting an epidural, and having a baby. We should all be so fortunate.

Sarah’s birthday party was at Chuck E. Cheese, largely because that rat is the reason she is potty-trained. It’s all about hitting them where they live and she was willing to do anything, even something as horrible as going to the bathroom on the actual toilet, to earn a trip to Chuck E. Cheese.

Caroline was so excited about a trip to Chuck E. Cheese because it’s generally a place I avoid like the plague that can be found on every single game located therein. In fact, she asked me why Sarah always gets to go to Chuck E. Cheese and she doesn’t. I didn’t know how to explain to her that her mama generally tries to avoid all kid-themed restaurants due to all the children that eat there and the tendency of the staff to dress up as animals, so I just told her she gets to have fun doing things Sarah doesn’t get to do, like killing betta fish with a diet of pet Sea Monkeys.

As soon as we made it into the restaurant, Caroline grabbed her cup of tokens and was off in the pursuit of big, germy fun. She fed tokens into one machine after another in the quest for tickets. Her eyes began to glaze over as she discovered the high of winning a long strand of tickets and I made a note to myself to keep her away from Vegas. Thanks to her great-grandfather, she has a bit of gambler in her gene pool and apparently it’s lurking just under the surface.

After a while it was time to eat pizza and participate in all the birthday festivities. The birthday girl got a little overwhelmed by all the hoopla, but I couldn’t blame her. If a big rat in a half t-shirt with no pants walked out of a back room to sing me happy birthday, I’d be freaked out too because it would be like my 21st birthday party all over again.

Once all the kids had gotten their second wind thanks to some pepperoni pizza and pink Barbie cake, they hit the floor again to use the rest of their tokens. I followed Caroline around like a video game waitress, holding her cup of tokens and storing her increasingly large stack of tickets in my pockets.

I wasn’t sad when I realized she was down to her last two tokens. I warned her that all the big fun was about to end and she would once again be just a normal kid whose mama doesn’t take her to Chuck E. Cheese on a regular basis. We took her pile of tickets to the ticket-eating machine, which is much more efficient than the days of my childhood where you’d just pile all your tickets up on a counter while some surly teenager begrudgingly counted them.

Her grand total of 181 tickets printed out on the receipt. We went up to the counter and I showed her what she could get with her winnings. And thus ensued the most arduous deliberation process I have ever witnessed. Seriously, the jurors in the O.J. trial came up with a verdict faster than it took her to decide between a fake bug and a piece of Laffy Taffy.

Just about the time my head was about to explode, she decided on a fake plastic ring, a bracelet, and a clip for her hair because everyone knows there are no finer accessories to be found than those at the Chuck E. Cheese prize counter.

The best part is it only cost about $10.00 in tokens to win prizes valued at thirty-five cents.

I think I smell a rat.

In a half t-shirt.

But, seriously, it was a great party and Caroline told me on the way home it was the BEST PLACE EVER.

Happy Birthday, Sarah! We love you and your fondness for Chuck E. Cheese.