This is for all of you who didn’t make Pinterest-inspired Valentine’s Day cards for your children. No pictures of your kids with their fists held out, holding a blow pop, or Sweetheart boxes converted to iPods or iPhones, or Rolos made into dynamite.
My kids went to school today with store bought SpongeBob Valentines and EVERYONE SURVIVED.
You’re welcome.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Fifty times? A hundred? As dysfunctional and messed up as those women in the story were, I have always read with envy, about the lifelong friendship between Vivi, Teensy, Necie, and Caro. They share an intimacy that can only be found between people with a long history. I mean, they even have nicknames for one another.
I don’t have any friends like that. Sure, I have lots of wonderful friends, but none that I can claim a lifelong bond, filled with childhood stories, teenage angst, first phone calls to announce new babies. And I wish someone had given me a nickname, silly as that sounds.
We moved from one state to another when I was a child, and this trend continued as an adult. (Five moves in nine years, but who’s counting! Certainly not me!) I never really had the chance to create history with friends and I’ve found it so hard to maintain close relationships with those that live hours away in other states.
Thanks to Facebook, I still keep in touch with many of those friends I’ve made along the way. There’s always a burst of excitement and an exchange of chatty messages when you first reconnect, but then once you’ve exchanged years of marriage, number of kids, current city, and work situation, these friends just become another part of my newsfeed.
With my current set of friends, most of our interactions are through social media and text messages. We get together when we can, time carved between one son’s soccer practice and another’s husband’s work schedule. I don’t think I’ve ever been the one to initiate one of these get togethers, usually I just come along for the ride. My friends are basically my social secretaries, setting up our adult playdates.
Blooming Expressions Vase, courtesy of Hallmark
I’m not the best at reciprocating. I function under the assumption that my friends are telepathic and magically know how often I think about them-usually hours too late. I’m always forgetting birthdays, mammograms, and grandma’s surgery. I text when I should pick up the phone and call.
I’m much better at the face to face friendship, when my girlfriends are sitting right there in front of me. Need someone to listen or laugh at the ridiculous morning you just spent wrestling your two year old into her car seat? I’m totally your girl. Need someone to remember to call you and encourage you? I WISH I was that girl. It’s those behind the scenes friendship duties where I fail too often.
Life gets in the way. Responsibilities of motherhood and marriage, work commitments, and laundry get in the way of me making a real effort to be the kind of friend that I wish I was. All those things? They are petty excuses. It’s no wonder that I crave a deeper intimacy with my friends. I know I need to do better and nurture these friendships for them to grow and prosper.
I made that resolution this year-well, I made the same resolution the year before, too, if I’m being totally honest-to call and initiate more with my friends. There’s a million and one things I could do to be the kind of friend I want to be. Thoughtful gifts and cards, phone calls, lunch dates…I just have to DO those things.
Maybe one day I’ll end up with a cool nickname after all.
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All this talk about friendship is brought to you courtesy of Hallmark for their Life is a Special Occasion campaign. While Hallmark is compensating me for participation in this campaign, all opinions expressed are my own. They sent me the Blooming Expressions vase that I gave to a a very good friend of mine-who I actually called and invited to lunch. I KNOW!
You can sign up for Hallmark’s e-newsletter to get special offers and discounts.
We cleaned out the attic a few weeks ago and I found a Collector’s Tin of Crayola crayons that I’d kept from when I was a kid. It was something I’d forgotten all about, having received the tin as a gift when I was just a little too old to care about crayons anymore and so it was put away in a box and moved from apartment to apartment and house to house.
When I found it, I was sure that they’d all be melted since they’d been in a box in the attic for over a decade. Surprisingly when I opened the tin, the crayons were fine.
As a kid, one of my favorite things in the ENTIRE WORLD was a brand new box of crayons. Their smell! Their newness! All in tact, their paper unripped. We’ve survived on remnants of restaurant crayons for all these years, with the exception of the box of 16 crayons that was on Carson’s Kindergarten school supply list. My poor, deprived children.
Since Carson has recently started to be interested in drawing and coloring, I showed him what I found in the attic.
This box of 64 crayons, complete with built-in sharpener, and this kid! MAN! His mind was BLOWN! He couldn’t get over 64 CRAYONS! In ONE box! With a sharpener! He studied each and every crayon for a good half hour.
“Look, Mom! This one says, ‘sky blue,’ and this one says, ‘salmon!’ Have you ever even HEARD of that?!”
He doesn’t want his sister to even look in the direction of the crayons, with her bull-in-a-china-shop ways. He wants to avoid any risk of the 64 perfect crayons getting broken.
And when I was at the grocery store yesterday, I saw that they now sell boxes of 96 crayons. I guess they’ve been selling these boxes for awhile, but I just discovered their existence.
Guess what he’s getting for Valentine’s Day? He is going to FLIP OUT!
I’ve been fighting off a cold since the beginning of January. It started to set in the first week of January and again the 2nd week of January, but my body-the TEMPLE that it is-fought back valiantly. That is until it couldn’t fight it off anymore, so I’ve been hacking, coughing, blowing my nose, and generally feeling like my head is a sloshy mess for two weeks.
Tate and I had a date set up for last Friday night, so despite feeling like crud-o-la, we packed the kids off to the trusty Parent’s Night Out program at one of the local churches. This was the first time we’d been able to do this since August, Carson was actually sent off with the big, elementary age kids for the first time ever and Ella stayed with the other preschoolers. The church makes you take a card with your child’s information on it and it must be used to get your child back. No card-no kid. I guess they send those to the dungeon at the church if the parents don’t have their card at the end of the night. I don’t want to find out!
The older kids only get signed in, no card was given when Carson was dropped off, which made Tate very nervous. I’m protective of the kids, sure, but Tate is even more protective and he didn’t feel at all comfortable with the way it didn’t seem as secure for the older kids. I brushed it off and assured him that he was being a little anal and to relax because it DATE NIGHT WOO HOO! (Cough, snort, where’s my cold medicine?!?!)
We ate at one of those Brazilian restaurants where the men come by with hunks of meat that they carve off for you. Our date included three other couples- there was lots of laughing and wine sipping and general merriment. It’s all fun and games until the bill shows up, amirite?! HOLY $126 DINNER. I mean, it was fun to hang out with friends and eat a lot of carved meat, but it wasn’t $126 fun. This part of the post has nothing to do with anything-really it’s just a public service announcement: BEWARE OF BILLS AT BRAZILIAN STEAKHOUSES.
You’re welcome!
So if you’re one of those sleuth types, you may have already realized that when we went to pick up the kids, we learned that the night didn’t go so well for Carson. Somehow, not too long before we came to pick him up, Carson got separated from his class as they were leaving the movie room. He says that he went straight back to his classroom, but nobody was there. Somehow he managed to make it all the way upstairs, where a volunteer eventually found him sobbing.
I have no idea what the actual timeline of events really is, I have no idea if his teacher ever even knew he was missing. I’m confused how a child could get separated from his class and manage to make it past where I would have assumed adults would have been monitoring doors and up a set of stairs before he was found. I don’t want to be alarmist or make a mountain out of a molehill, but you know-when you trust people to watch your child-and that is basically their SOLE responsibility, it’s a bit disconcerting that something like this could happen.
I hardly slept that night, waffling between being utterly FURIOUS and grateful that he was smart enough not to go outside or get lost in the church. (It’s one of those mega churches with a school attached, so he could have easily gotten lost in the building.)
I should have called the director of the Parent’s Night Out Program, but I was afraid that I’d cry and sound either like a blubbering mom or a maniac. I did email the director, though, so that she’ll at least be aware that they LOST MY CHILD last Friday. Obviously they need to put into place a better system for keeping track of kids.
Unrelated to any of this, my cold is almost gone! So that’s good, right?
It all began with Blue’s Clues, Carson became a devoted clue finder as a toddler. His love for Blue extended into books and songs, and into his imaginative play. Then it was Thomas the Train and All About John Deere movies that led he and his sister to play for hours on end, chuffing, plowing, and absorbed in their elaborate play pretending to be engineers and farmers.
I know that watching too much TV is bad, but I also know that movies and shows have inspired their love for not only reenacting the stories, but extending the stories with their own imaginations into epic adventures.
Our Saturday mornings are usually devoted to pajamas, waffle consumption, and cartoons. I somehow slept through the waffle portion of the morning and awoke to find Carson and Ella absorbed in the pages of a Tintin comic book instead of staring at the TV screen. While Ella and I enjoyed a girls weekend away several weeks ago, Carson and Tate had a boys weekend complete with pizza and a trip to the movie theater to see The Adventures of Tintin-where Carson has found new source of inspiration.
After school last week, I could hear them in the other room playing, caught up in an elaborate scheme to find the clues while getting away from the bad guys.
“Come on,” Carson yelled to Ella, “we can hide in here.”
“Tintin!” Ella called to Carson, “the bad guy has me! Save me, Tintin!”
They went on like this, replaying scenes over and over, changing the details to include sword fights and capes. Running and hiding, they laughed and yelled and pretended to be in great distress. I stealthily peeked in on them and they immediately froze when they spotted me, too shy to continue their acting. I begged them to go on, to show me what it’s like to be the good guys.
But it’s not the same with someone watching, so I left them and listened around the corner as they picked up right where they left off in their Tintin adventure, defeating the bad guys with great gusto.
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I’m so excited to be partnering with Hallmark for their Life is a Special Occasion campaign this year. I will finally be forced to learn that there is only one “s” in “occasion!” Of course, I am also so excited for the chance to share the stories from our life.
Hallmark is compensating me for participation in this campaign. As always-all opinions expressed are my own.
How has it already been a week since I last posted?! Grand plans I had! There were so many times this week that I thought, I need to sit down and write about this. And yet.
I’ve just recently signed on with Hallmark as part of their Life is a Special Occasion campaign. I’m really excited because I will now have no excuse to not write here in this space and talk about the little, big, and everything in between events happening ’round these, here parts. I’m also excited because, well, it’s Hallmark!
Continuing with the theme of: Talking About Myself, here’s what I’ve been talking about on my Babble Voices blog, Southern By Proxy…(I’d be so honored if you’d visit me there. Yes, of course I realize that it’s a lot to ask. It’s just that, I miss you, my regular blog readers, and I feel like I’m fumbling around over there trying to find my voice and the type of post that “works.”)
* Carson has nightly homework in Kindergarten-yes, KINDERGARTEN-and I’m just trying to figure out what the point of busy work really is.
* I got grazed by the sleepover bullet and I’m hoping that I don’t get hit with it again any time soon.
* Don’t get your panties in a bunch, but I don’t really think it’s that horrible when someone says to you, “you sure have your hands full!”
And now to the more selfless portion of the program: I want to start a feature on either Thursdays or Fridays…or you know, whenever the mood strikes, to feature great posts I’ve read around the Internets. With the share function gone from Google Reader, I just feel like I never get to tell the world what they should be reading. It was one place I could be totally bossy and get away with it.
Jennie’s posts are always thoughtful and insightful, but I love this post-it’s romantic in a the very best of ways. Eight.
Having devoted a good portion of January to unsubscribing to EVERYTHING in an effort to manage my email better, this post by Marinka had me chuckling out loud (COL).
I love reading birth stories, I think in another life I’d like to be a doula, and I loved Emily’s birth story about her precious fourth baby, Paul Richard.
And that’s all I’ve got for now, folks. Any good news to share?
I tried to tell them.
“There’s not really enough snow for playing. It’s just a dusting. You can see most of the grass, for goodness sakes!”
“No, Mommy, see?” Carson pointed out the window. “There’s snow all over the driveway!”
Well, they did cancel school. I guess it wouldn’t have been a real snow day if we hadn’t:
1. Taken 45 minutes to find all the hats, mittens, and boots.
2. Taken another 45 minutes to get dressed in double layers.
3. Made a snow angel in what little snow there was
4. Played for two minutes outside before:
a. Someone needed to pee
b. Someone complained of being freezing cold
5. Came inside and undressed, leaving a pile of wet clothes in a heap on the floor
6. Had hot chocolate:
a. With marshmallows
Truth? I love these days as much as they do.
This here is my blog where I talk about my feeeeelings. I'm Mom to Carson, 6, and Ella, 4. I'm Jennifer and wife to Tate. I like to run and eat nachos. Not at the same time, though. Duh.
