It's Come Down to This

    My two youngest children absolutely love to remove the contents of any box, basket or drawer. Caelan is by far the worst (or most talented) at doing this. It's been a daily battle for months to keep all her clothes in her drawers. She is the fashion show queen and enjoys multiple changes a day. I, on the otherhand, have somewhere along the way lost my amusement with this pastime. This last Monday, Keith took one of her drawers out of her dresser and took it down to a restoration center. The dresser itself quite old and has keyholes in each drawer. And they had a key that fit the drawers! Ha! And the key fits all the other drawers, too. Ha, ha, ha!
   Tuesday morning, I heard the confused wail. "I can't open my drawers! It's stuuuuuck." I tried to hold back my smug grin, really I did. Every day since has been so nice. I've had less laundry, fewer minutes of my day spent picking clothes off the floor. I've been motivated to actually put her clothes in the drawers after they've been washed. This is great for me. Caelan still gets upset. I still happily go unlock her drawers and hand her the clothes. She is generally too busy to go to the bathroom when she should, but now that she's allotted one pair of panties, instances of wet ones have dwindled. It's awesome.
    She realized today that I had a key. "Can I see the key?" she asked, slyly. I laughed. Of course not! "But I just want to look at it." She will never touch this key as long as I stay a step ahead of her. "Well, can you just put it right here?" Here being on top of the dresser, well within reach. Hahaha. I am beyond thrilled. They knew what they were doing back in the day. Now I think all dressers should have keys. One of the greatest ideas ever.

The Unnecessary Freezing of Water

    I find myself at odds with the climatic substance known as snow. There wasn't much of it growing up in Texas and when I moved to the northeast, it was with great expectations of it. Snow appeals to my nostalgic ideals and also my enmity. I love it for the very same reasons I can't stand it. For weeks on end it conceals the ugliness of winter, that gray dead that washes out color for too many months. When the snow shimmers under a bright winter sun, it catches my breath. Literally, it does. For with the brilliance of snow and sun come the migraines. It's cruel, really. But then I love staying indoors next to a warm fire, comfortable in my sweaters and houseshoes; then it goes on for weeks. And then I get the bills for the necessity of staying warm. The realities of life quell the joy of snow that is once again fluttering past my windows. Blech.

    So to put a different spin on the snow, here are some things others have said about it.

1. A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. ~Carl Reiner

2. Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

3. I grew up thinking of snow as a luxury you visit. ~John Landis

4. Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. ~John Ruskin

5. When it snows, you have two choices: shovel or make snow angels.

6. The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show.

7. A year of snow, a year of plenty. ~Old French Proverb

8. Don't complain about the snow on your neighbor's roof when your own doorstep is unclean. ~Confucius

9. Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing. ~Phillis Diller

10. I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. ~Mae West (I know, it's not about snow, but it's Mae West!)

Happy Snow Day.



Sprightly Genes

    There have been many of you that have questioned me about my middle child's astounding capabilities and if you have followed this blog, then you are well aware of what she can do. I want to know, just as much as you do, where the heck this kid gets her craziness. So I've done a little research (i.e. talked to my Grandma). It would appear that Caelan does what she does because of genetics, the genes that she received from my side of the family. I was never like this child, so it must have skipped right passed me. And I'm serious about that gene not showing up in me. I've never broken any bones, never been to the ER for personal reasons and it wasn't until my first c-section that I got stitches (which, ironically was with Caelan). If the stories my Grandma told about herself and my Dad are any indication, we are in for many more 'fun' times. Wrap your head around these stories and see if you can't picure Caelan doing the same thing.

    My Grandma was quite young (probably about Caelan's age) when she went missing from the back yard. She had scaled the 6-8 foot fence that went around the yard and was down the street at her grandparents house. Another time she was found on top of a windmill. That explains oh, so much. My Grandma had a little friend that would cry every time my Grandma came around just because she could run faster and climb anything. My Grandma had three boys and a girl, and among the boys they all had their fair share of injuries from performing crazy stunts. My Dad was about Caelan's age when he fell off a picnic table and nearly cut the end of his nose off completely on a coffee can. My Dad had to wear a football helmet, prescribed by the doctor, because of all the self-inflicted injuries to his head. When my Dad and his brothers were older, there are stories about them 'parachuting' off the barn (it was a bust, literally), stories about trying to fly using a piece of plywood (which one of them was strapped to) tied to the back of a horse with a rope (apparently they only got enough speed up to flip the board over and get the wind knocked out of them). These are only a few of the stories. My Grandma apologized but said that she could vouch for me. When she visited last year, she looked up to see Caelan sitting on top of the elevator. 

    I have to say, though, that if Caelan grows up to be anything like my Grandma, she will be quite a spunky, energetic lady.

  

  The future is looking... full... if not sometimes questionable.

Memories Full Circle

    There's a place somewhere in my mind that holds all my happiest childhood memories. It's fluffy and warm there. I remember everything about those moments. Sometimes the memories come to me randomly and others by a tone, a look or a smell. The memories now come back to me in the form of my children. Right now, my two oldest girls have a glimpse of a memory that shaped many of my younger years. They are watching, for the first time, Anne of Green Gables.

   I remember the first time I saw it. The day was warm, maybe in April or May. In Texas, spring is well sprung by May and sometimes by late May, the temps have reached 100 degrees. I know it was warm and not cold or hot because I sat in my Grandma's kitchen. If it had been cold, I would have been curled up under a quilt in the living room, nearest the wood burning stove. If it had been hot, well, it would have been hot. My grandparents don't have air conditioning. They have a swamp cooler, a type of window unit that cools by forcing outside air over water to cool it before sending the cooler air into a room. On a hot day, it is cooler, but you sweat buckets in the humidity. The day I first watched Anne of Green Gables, I was just warm.

    I don't know what I ate, but being at Grandma's house, I would have had my favorites, namely a V8 or Texas grapefruit juice that came in a small can with a peel off tab, or black olives or pickled okra. I know, it's unusual, but these things were only found at Grandma's. It was during the good old days of VHS and the tapes had been made by a friend of my Grandma's from the recordings that were on PBS. The movie was broken up by some commercials and other short blips denoting the place where the recorder had been stopped for a commercial and then restarted moments before Anne Shirley's imagination filled Grandma's kitchen. There were several tapes and there was a rush to put the next one in before Anne's world slipped away.

   I remember doing this several times in my childhood, in what I would like to think was an annual basis. But the memory is so timeless and replayed so  many times, that it could have only happened once. I remember the tragical moments, the gossip, the bosom buddies, the life changes, the heartaches... And when I didn't have the movies, I had the books, now tattered, yellowed, the bindings of the paperbacks brittle, almost broken. One Christmas several years ago, my Grandma gave me Anne of Green Gables on VHS, not the TV recordings but the real thing with the green box casing, two VHS tapes. That's what my girls are watching now. I don't know if the memory will be as deep for them as it is for me, but I hope so. Anne was magical, my dream friend, a sweet part of childhood.