Just Last Week...

Harrison got hold of the camera and took this cute cheesy shot of himself...

... and this one of Carter outside. I think you can tell it's Carter - just look for the cast.

Here we are at a local park for Family Home Evening. We played soccer and Frisbee and the kids played on the playground, then sat down and had our lesson and treat. Brennan brought his Ninja throwing stars to practice with (yes, I'm totally serious - he has throwing stars). Time for a haircut much?

Looking something up...

Dad and Rosalind...

Isabella and Harrison...

Me and half of Carter

Later that week, Bella caught Brennan napping and posed him this way with the TV remote. Niiiiiice.

Life: Check Your Brain at the Door

I've been here on earth for thirty-eight years now, and one thing I've noticed is that life is so much easier if you just don't think about any of it. Consider this advice from Fly the Mom Dog on Babe (I realize it's probably been a while since you saw it - just go with it for a minute): "We have to do dogs' work now. You're a pig. Your job is to stay here and eat your food." If you've seen the movie, you know that yes, Babe the Pig does much more with his life than "stay there and eat his food" - an important aspect of the pig-fattening-and-later-butchering process. It's great that Babe had so much ambition and talent and the opportunity to use them, and consequently... I won't spoil it for you. For those of us who are higher on the food chain, life is a bit more complicated and I have a hard time not stressing about every little detail. Money! I like it. How can I get more? Cable TV! I hate paying for it. How can I convince my husband it's not necessary? Children! I love them. How can I get them to make correct choices? etc. etc. It's enough to make you crazy if you think too hard about it. It's been a hard thing for me to deal with since I came home from Montana. Why that should be, I have no idea, but it finally got to be too much today. After a frightful episode with the bank, I called Bri and collapsed in a pool of tears. It was the kind of phone call every husband dreads getting, right after "I'm sorry, Charles, I know I promised to love you forever, but I'm looking for a black-tie guy and you're more of a barbecue person." (This was a real-life conversation between our friend Charles and the Pasty Waif/She-pire/Wire-Haired Man Goblin, aka Nicole, his now-ex-wife. But we didn't take sides or anything.) Now, what was I talking about? Oh yes - I think too much. I worry too much. I stress too much. I am the embodiment of the statement "stress causes belly fat" - that, and five C-sections will also do it. I've decided to go about my life, tell my brain I've moved, and not give it my new address.

"I'm standin' at the great abyss of love...

... and I'm teeterin'!"

I've had a pleasant vacation away from the blog, and it made me think, I could SO do without this. But every time I think, "That's it, I'm gonna simplify my life and not spend so much time online" (which always includes blog death, blog shelving, blog Roundup spray, blog gag, or blog straightjacket), something happens that makes me think, "OK, I can't quit yet." It's like getting a sign from above, and it's frustrating.

So how was your Mother's Day, now that you've had some time to recuperate from breakfast in bed? Mine was very nice - spent with my mother and grandmother, but away from my babies and my two little boys singing to me from the front of the chapel with the rest of the Primary kids. That was a bit sad, but Melanie graduated (with high honors) from her college and I thought, as long as I'm home for the rest of the Mother's Days, I can miss one to see something special happen to my sister. We are all very proud of her.

The rest of the trip was mostly good and very interesting. I realized how easily bloated I get without enough water or walking during the day; how much I miss being the able-bodied adult I usually am, complete with autonomy and decision-making ability; how cranky I am when I've gone without sleep and SOMEone wants to play three back-to-back games of Cranium; how hard it is to pantomime "Berlin Wall" so that my mother will guess what it is; and how hard it is to be without my husband for (among other things) venting purposes... how accustomed I am to, basically, running my own life without my family around and Hubby and I being able to do pretty much whatever we want, whenever we want.

On the upside, we laughed a lot and everyone got along surprisingly well. Sure, it's been almost twenty years since my parents' divorce, but with this group, you don't assume ANYTHING. Happily, there were no hospital visits, emotional blowups, people going hungry for any length of time, maimed or hurt animals, hysterical crying over the offer of a paid-for medical transcription course, or peed pants.

I'm ready to go home on the train tomorrow, I know where our tickets are, I have two Perkins restaurant muffins packed for the trip (we leave at 5:00 AM), and since I'm coming away with much more than I left home with, I'm about to go in the bedroom and see what kind of packing miracle I can work with my suitcases. Have a lovely evening.

Melanie's Graduation

Here we are in Missoula... Mel's big day!
In Mom's car here, just after we picked up her cap and gown... she had to try it on immediately. She didn't ever go through a high school graduation ceremony, so this was her first time and it was exciting.

Inside the big auditorium... graduates walking in. Mom said Mel was somewhere in the seventh row on the left side. I wished afterward that we'd doctored up her cap so we could spot her in the crowd - something to remember for next time someone graduates.

Demeter, Mom and Rosalind. I wish we'd all been able to sit together but we were all in such a hurry, we couldn't find each other before it started. Dad, Neenaw, Bill, Ernie, Jeremy and Mike sat somewhere else for the main ceremony but we were together for Melanie's smaller one.

Mel, Bill and Demeter, just after the main ceremony. She graduated with high honors (a 4.0 GPA), so she was given a gold cord to wear with her cap and gown. We were all so proud.

Here we are together, together, together... there's Ernie and Jeremy and Jeremy's friend Mike...

...and Demeter and Bill and Mom and Neenaw and Dad...

... and me and Rozzie...

...and me and Ernie... again...

I took my camera down to the main floor to take a video of Mel accepting her diploma, and took this picture of the group from below... they're the second row from the top. See if you can pick them out - it'll be fun, like Where's Waldo?.

My cute new Old Navy sandals bought on sale! yay!!!

The new graduate - such a proud girl - probably relieved too. What a lot of hard work!

Random shots of leaving the auditorium: Bill and Mom...

... Ernie, Jeremy and Mike.

After the small ceremony, we went to Melanie's building for the nurses' pinning ceremony and potluck dinner. Dad and me...

Mom, Ernie, Bill, Melanie, Dad, Mike
Roz and Mom

Mike, Jeremy, Neenaw, Mel's friend Ashley, Demeter, Mel's friend Jennifer, Dionysus

That cute little Ny Ny, he's such a funny little guy. We got to be pretty good friends. He and Roz downed the pop like nobody's business at this dinner...

Neenaw and Mel talking after dinner, and the top half of Bill's head

Jeremy was his usual serious composed self. We pretty much laughed our heads off together all weekend - it was great.

All My Bags Are Packed

I'm ready to go. 

Stalkers, Roz and I are taking Amtrak to a town east of here, then spending the night with Neenaw, then leaving tomorrow morning with Neenaw and Mom to go to Melanie's.  We'll probably stop in a town to eat lunch.  Aw yeah.

"I'm wearin' my Tuesdy panties, but you probably already knew that."

Trip to Missoula

Mom invited us to go with her for Melanie's graduation from University of Montana. Since the rest of the kids are still in school and we knew we'd be gone for a while, Hubby stayed home with the four oldest and I took Rosalind with me. On Wednesday night we took Amtrak and met Neenaw at the depot, which is always fun and interesting. Rozzie is a good little traveler if you keep her busy and away from the people who are trying to sleep - that little voice just carries. We usually spend most of the train ride in the lounge car, eating Amtrak's little tray of cheese and crackers.

After spending the night at Neenaw's, Mom picked us all up and we headed for Missoula. Things were going along swimmingly until we passed Connell and were met with this lovely traffic jam on the freeway:

We were stuck here for probably 30 minutes, which gave us time to bond with some of the other drivers. The guy in the white car was nice. He was brave enough to ask the state patrol what was going on up ahead - apparently a semi-truck had overturned on the side of the freeway and they were waiting for a tow truck. We all thought, "A tow truck for a semi?" but it worked - just goes to show what we civilians know about trucking.

The guy on the extreme right was in some kind of service truck. He was quite chatty and we spent some quality time discussing kids, hockey, job, his much-older girlfriend...

After a while we had quite the backup. A couple of people tried to do some creative "parking" and "bobbing and weaving" - one guy got in trouble for backing up and repositioning. I couldn't blame him - the whole place was a parking lot, so why not?

Eventually we were back on the road and discovered that the overturned semi had spilled its load of charcoal briquets, of all things. I hope they were cleaned up before someone decided to throw a lit cigarette out the window... I like these clouds that look like they're sitting on top of something. Some of these are through Mom's car windows - sorry.

The lovely city of Spokane, where great-great grandmother Hattie is buried (off to the left). Just squint real hard and you'll see her headstone. Yeah, it's just right off to the left. You can't see it?

Rosalind eating her McDonald's Happy Meal in the Subway across the street.

Mom (in blue) and Neenaw (in white) ordering. I could not believe the line at this restaurant... when we got there, it was all the way out the door and was still that way when we were done eating.

I made a mental note to never eat here again during lunch hour. Yikes.

All the other places we could have gone instead... I must be a "line snob" because I refuse to stand in that long of a line for substandard sandwiches. (OK, I'm a sandwich snob too. There you go.)

And oh yeah, there was snow in the mountains. :)

It was a beautiful day for this trip - not too cold either. We saw clouds in the mountains and wondered if we'd drive through any snow, and it did snow on us for a little bit at the summit of Lolo Pass, but other than that, it was perfect.

Sorry again about the window thing.

"Quick! Say Something Funny!"

But first: HAPPY BIRTHDAY HARRISON! He's the big 9 today!! :) Love you cute boy!

Have you ever watched the cartoon Caillou and thought to yourself, “Gosh, I wish that grandmother narrator would choke on her butterscotch”?

Because I have. She would be infinitely easier to listen to if she had, I don't know, a darker side...

“It made Caillou sad that Grandpa used the wrong fork at dinner. Caillou wondered why he was cursed with such an idiot for a grandfather and thought about spiking his brownies with horse laxative. Then he remembered he was four years old and couldn’t really drive himself to the vet’s office.”

“Caillou was happy about his new red balloon until it finally hit him: ‘What in the heck kinda girlified name is Caillou, anyway?’”

“Caillou loved his new imaginary friend, Evil Leprechaun. Evil Leprechaun told him very interesting things, like what a great rack Caillou’s mother had, and suggested great ideas for play, like ‘find the matches and rub them on rough surfaces.’ After that unfortunate kitchen fire incident, Caillou spent the next several years in therapy.”

“Caillou wondered why he was bald. He figured the cartoonist had Charlie Brown-envy. Then he saw his mother get out the Nair shampoo for his bath…”

OK, I’m going to try, really really hard, to stay away from the computer until I leave tomorrow afternoon. I’m not saying I’ll do it. I’m just saying, I’m trying hard. I want to catch up the laundry and do some other stuff and pack before Rosalind and I take off tomorrow afternoon. So… I might see you in a couple of days at Melanie’s, or… (sigh)… I might see you tomorrow.

May 2008

A few new pictures of us...

Cast #1

Carter's latest cast is black and orange striped. He'll have another new one this Thursday. It's sure different from when I was a kid and you had one cast until it was practically falling off and smelled to high heaven (not that his smells wonderful).

We gave him a silver Sharpie to have people sign his cast.

  

My two cute little boys. 
Apparently I need to figure out how to turn off the flash on the camera.

Sleepy little girl
 

Peekaboo! My hair's getting long. Carter took this one.

Things You Should Never Do

~ Say to a chubby girl, "It's chubby-girl cold out here today."

~ Take your dog for a walk in the cemetery and leave the leash at home.

~ Go to Cub Scout Day Camp and forget the suncreen, the hand sanitizer, or the Band-Aids.

~ Ask nosy questions or gossip (except to your husband, who doesn't care).

~ Let anyone - i.e., the gossip topic - find out you asked nosy questions and gossiped.

~ Say, "Is that funeral home humor?" when a funeral home employee cracks an innocent joke.  (They feel really bad when you do this.)

~ Eat things made out of honey when you know you're allergic to honey and don't like being itchy.

~ Cut your own hair in a fit of despondency or extreme giddiness, or because you looked at someone's hair and thought, "Good grief, I could do that."

~ Dry dust.

~ Stop kissing, hugging, or tickling the child just because he's fifteen.

~ Grab strange men's butts at the mall.

~ Go without a bra if you're well-endowed (and by "well-endowed" I mean "lop those things off, you'd be fifty pounds lighter")

~ Stop laughing.

That's How You Know...

... that you've watched Enchanted too many times in a row.

 We bought the movie Saturday and have probably watched it 25 times since then.  For the last two days in a row, at 4:30 AM, I've awakened with itchy allergy nose and "THAT'S HOW YOU KNOW (how does she know that you love her?)..." going through my head.  It does NOT do wonders for your sleeping habits. 

Other than that, I love everything about this movie.  I love the humor, I love Giselle sewing such fantastic clothes, I love the big dance numbers and AWESOME songs (except when they wake me up at night) and I love hating Susan Sarandon and her pathetic, Batman-villainesque lines ("It's time to take this tale to NEW HEIGHTS!"). 

I'm not a fan of Patrick Dempsey that much.  He will forever be the geeky kid in Can't Buy Me Love, a movie I - reining myself in here - really don't like.  But I love Amy Adams.  Where on earth did they find her?

Melanie and Demeter haven't seen it yet so I'm taking it with me when I visit next month.  Have you experienced the magic that is Enchanted ?

Got my DAR number today.

(But first: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM :))

Went to the "members only" page of the DAR website and logged in.

Found some new cousins/fellow members of DAR/descendants of Philip Proctor.

Traced one line, saw that they started in New York state and ended in Utah. So yeah, they were Mormons. 

Googled the family name and found an autobiography of a cousin that someone had put online... he was a polygamist in Utah.

One of his wives had "Pratt" as her maiden name.

As in, Parley P. Pratt... was her dad.

I'm related to Parley P. Pratt by marriage.

"...and the wisdom of a man"

Carter's doing fine and his arm, as far as I can see with my non-Superman non-X-ray vision, seems to be healing well.  He hasn't attended school since last Friday, and won't be going back until next Thursday (he gets his cast on Wednesday and I'm not sending him to school in a splint) - but like his teacher says, "It's kindergarten.  It won't kill him to miss some school."  I love her lack of self-importance.

I became an official member of the D.A.R. today, met another new cousin this week and wrote two genealogy posts (I know - boring).  Brian is super busy with soccer and his new position at work.  Brennan received his order for Ninja throwing stars in the mail - apparently, they are legal in this state - and practices throwing them every day after school.  Bella attended her very last Activity Day yesterday and is finishing everything for her Faith in God award - she turns twelve on the 30th.  Harrison and I went to Cub Scouts yesterday and mostly enjoyed it.  Rosalind took a big nap today and refuses to go to bed.

Carter Broke His Arm

On Saturday the 12th, Carter and Harrison were playing with their friend Nicky. Nicky's mom dropped them off here about 6:00 and they met Hubby outside. She and Hubby were talking and Carter went to play on our little play structure. In a few minutes Hubby heard crying and saw all the neighborhood kids gathered around Carter. Carter got up and walked over, holding his arm and crying. Hubby ran in, got the keys, and told me he was taking him to the hospital. Apparently Carter had been pushed down the slide, fallen off the side, and fell face down on the ground, putting out his arms to catch himself.

These pictures are kind of gross - sorry.

His hand is totally out of alignment with his arm.

 The doctor called it a "green stick" fracture - it didn't break totally apart, but was more like a bent tree branch. We all thought it looked like the scene in the Harry Potter movie, where Harry breaks his arm and the professor puts a spell on it and the bone disappears... ewwwwww.

Pretty gross looking.

Carter was so brave. He hardly cried, unless someone suggested they were going to touch his arm - then he would freak. Otherwise he was really big about it.

This is the first splint they gave him.

Ahhhhh....morphine.

He was feeling pretty good after they started his IV. They told him they were putting a "straw" in his arm so it could drink the medicine. Pretty smart.

Pretty sleepy.

They gave him the white bear in the X-ray department. Later, after his surgery, the nurse bandaged the bear's arm and put it in a little sling. It was so cute.

Hospital jammies

He ate so late in the day that they didn't want to wait the six hours and then set his arm at two in the morning, so they had us spend the night and set it around 8:00 AM on Sunday. Hubby and I both stayed with him.

After surgery.

Carter slept till around noon, then woke up and was ready to eat immediately. No throwing up, or anything - we were so glad. Pretty soon he was up and walking around, going to the bathroom, and taking oral pain medication, so we were able to go home. This picture was taken about the point that he was eating in bed, watching Meet the Robinsons on TV - the hospital has movies on demand - and just loving life. He even said, "This is fun." He cried when it was time to go home, he was having such a great time at the hospital... which I guess is good.

So far at home, he's been back to his normal self. He refuses to take the pain medication and hasn't complained about hurting, so he must have a much higher tolerance for pain than I have. I'm grateful for good doctors and nurses, hospitals, medicines, and care, and that everything went as well as it did.