Inspirations from cheese in a can. joey, kelly, danny, and charlie

Here are some pictures. You deserve them.

This is my baby, in a truck.

She can walk.

And drink. At the same time. More or less.

Enough cute? No? Okay.

I’ll leave you with this: my son on a seven-shirt day. Now if you’ll pardon me, I have laundry to do.

I will instead tell you about this one time I was in Hawaii, apparently in May of 2003. Joey and I were driving around the big island with our off-the-beaten-path type guidebook. We found a clothing-optional black sand beach. We kept our clothes on and just gawked like obnoxious tourists. The end.

Oh, y’all.  I don’t know what to say.  I have so much to say.  I say things to myself, and by the time I get around to telling someone else, it is all gone.  Vanished into the ether of my porous maternal brain.  Obliterated by a machine-gun-speed volley of needs.  Poof. So here’s what I’ll do:  I’ll just put these pictures up of some stuff we did.

Here we are with cousins at the zoo.  I’ve discovered a trick to maintaining sanity with a large number of children:  feed bags.  You get some plastic sandwich bags, and you just keep refilling them with food.

Some thoughts:  these two are more alike every day.  We really should have named him Joey, Jr.  He might look like me, but the rest is all Joey.  Also:  look, no glasses.  Joey’s trying contacts again, and it just might work for him this time.

With Charlie, the big story should be that she’s walking.  But my new mantra, coined by my mother and sister, is:  ”It is better to do a half-assed job than no job at all.”   So here’s Charlie choosing a sweetener at the Cracker Barrel.  I think she ended up going with 4 Splendas, 3 sugars, and a Sweet n Low.

Here she is at her one-year pediatrician visit.  Well, by the time I got her there, more like 13 months.  Who’s counting?

Here’s Danny at his first tennis lesson.  He feels it’s baseball.

And bowling.  We had custody of the only child-assisting-ramp-thingy in the bowling alley, but Danny felt that was for weaklings.  He just walked right up there and chucked his seven pound ball.

This is half of Danny’s playgroup.  The occasion was a farewell party for Audrey, the one on his left, coyly covering her mouth.  A little while before they posed for this picture, Audrey came up to me and said, “Miss Kelly, Danny ruined my life!”  I have no idea what he did, and I was way too busy laughing to find out.  I know he’ll miss ruining her life while she’s gone, though.

Our baby turned a year old last week.  I am flipping exhausted, as usual, and behind on about 50 things.  So here is another last-minute update so that the month of March, 2010 doesn’t get by me without some effort to acknowledge its existence.  I win!  Click on the picture to see the rest of the set.  These are some of the pictures that I used to make her a photo book for her birthday present.

I was awake at 4:30. My attempts to go back to sleep failed. Sometimes the sleep doesn’t go so well. Anyway, I eventually gave up and picked up the book I’m reading now. That reminded me, for the 300th time (today), that my beautiful life is screaming by, largely undocumented. I always assume that at some point I’ll get around to a systematic method of recording a fraction of it, at least with broad strokes, with a few details here and there. In absence of this mythical systematic method, however, I’ll just throw a few things together so maybe I can sleep (Could that be what’s keeping me awake? Hormones have become my go-to cause for any given behavior or ailment, but who knows).

Our son Danny is three. Everywhere he goes, he’s on the lookout for new friends. Today at the park, where he was already playing with two ladyfriends from his playgroup, a family arrived with young boys. He stood on the sidewalk and waited for them to get out of their vehicle, and then, as they made their way to the playground, he just fell in step with them, as if he were part of their family. Speaking of hormones, I am beginning to believe that even in very small children, they are present and working. Case in point: he flirts with, fights with, and teases his ladyfriends. His tousles with, wrestles with, and pals around with his male friends. And the difference is magnified if both ladyfriends and male friends are present. I guess this is just obvious to some, but it’s surprising to me.

Enough about hormones, though, because if you’re like me, if you think about them long enough, it inevitably becomes gross. What’s funnier is what happened the other day when Joey took him to a guitar store, where there was a large and prominent portrait of Jerry Garcia. Danny looked at it and said to his father, “That guy has a samwich on his face.” I don’t know if maybe there is a clue here somewhere as to why my child refuses to eat a sandwich, but I like the way he thinks. Which just reminded me, someone described my own thinking as “warped” when I was very young. I’m not saying it was my mother, but it could have been my mother. And I’m not saying she was right, but she could have been right. Now one day will Danny be telling the world about how his mother said his thinking was “warped”? For the record: I DID NOT SAY THAT.

My son, he of Toddler-Strength Opinions™, will be appearing with a long and urgent list of demands at any moment, so I’ll need to wrap this up. I’ll leave you with something with a low warp factor (and a high parenthetical factor): Yesterday on our way to a Superbowl party (where we broke my all-time personal record for lateness: two hours), we passed a sign advertising a kids’ movie featuring rodents (Why are rodents so popular with children and the grown people who make movies for children?) and he said, “Wook, I see Chickmups!” Maybe we were so late because I demanded that Joey pull the van over so I could consume my oldest child. (He was delicious, but he needs to take it easy on the giant garlicky hot dogs.)

See, she has feet. Also: a face, a fuzzy head, a big brother, and a busy, busy life filled with grilled cheese sandwich nubs and hats.

If you click on these precious striped legs, it will take you to a flickr set. Since I’m having so much trouble getting pictures to happen the old way, I think I’ll try a new way.

Here’s a reward for still visiting our blog, in the form of a long-ago circulated video of someone else’s baby dancing to someone else’s banjo. Charlie is just as cute, in this exact model of jumper. I just use it so I can take a shower, though, because we don’t own a banjo. A situation Joey is furiously working to correct, I have no doubt. Anyway, enjoy:

Lately I’m noticing that this time of year causes people to lose their minds a little bit.  Our already ridiculous to-do lists escalate to preposterous to-do lists.  When I hear the statistics that get dragged out every year about increased rates of depression, suicide, heart attack, and other dreadful things during the holiday season, I’m not even surprised anymore.  It makes sense.  I already feel like life is screaming by me anyway, but around Halloween, everything starts going so much faster.  Everyone starts adding to their lists of events, chores, parties, outings, decorations, gifts, etc.  There are lists of lists, for crying out loud.

Well, I don’t want to play anymore.  My list of things that I have to do this year is much shorter.  I’ll record it for you and posterity right here:

TO DO:
1.  Put my family first.
2.  Be where I am, at all times (not in my head, working on my lists).
3.  Be kind to everyone.

TO DO NOT:
1.  Do not take on so much that I am overwhelmed.
2.  Do not take it out on the people I love when I ignore #1.

If you look carefully, you’ll note that nowhere on my lists is there any mention of Christmas cards, gifts, or cookies.  No parties, decorations, or Santa photos.   Because I don’t have to do any of that stuff.  It’s supposed to be fun, not obligatory.  So I’ll do however much of the fun stuff that seems manageable, realizing that with two children under four, it may be less than in previous years.  Like maybe waaaay less.  And that’s fine.  But I won’t be screamed by this year.  And I won’t be miserable 90% of the time, trying desperately to look Rockwellianly peaceful when I see a camera.

And hey, speaking of Rockwellian peace and cameras, as soon as I figure out what the problem is with this blog and/or gallery and/or blahblahblah, I’m going to post some pictures from Thanksgiving.

My beloved Nana died on this past Sunday, November 15.  Yesterday we went to the funeral.  I was afraid that it would be so awkward and difficult, exhausting and painful.  It really wasn’t any of those things.  I thought that it would be hard to be around my Papa, a painfully recent widower, as he said goodbye to his wife of 52 years.  It wasn’t hard at all.  I’ve never seen him so open, so present, so available.  He accepted every hug, every touch, every kind word.  He cried generously and often.  It hadn’t occurred to me that of course he would want to make this a perfect day for her, which he absolutely did.

My Aunt Kelly  (we recycle names a lot in my family) put together a collection of photos of Nana that was displayed at the service.  I had not seen the majority of these photos.  I only knew my grandmother as just that….my grandmother.  I had no idea that she used to be young and gorgeous, carefree and vivacious.  She was Charlene Jennings, young bride and mother.  I didn’t know that my grandparents had had so much fun together.

After the service, back at my Papa’s house, I was talking to him about how beautiful she was, and how I just had never known.  He nodded and teared up and whispered, “Yeah, she was beautiful.  I have a picture of her in my medicine cabinet, that I see every morning.  She borrowed your mother’s bikini one day [fortysomething years ago] and tried it on and I took a picture.  She was beautiful.”  Of course I wasted no time sneaking into his bathroom to see my grandmother’s pin-up.  He was right; she was very beautiful.  She had a thousand-watt smile, and she looked good in a bikini.  But what was so touching was not the picture as much as the fact that he still saw her that way. That was the woman he fell in love with; that was the woman he still loved.  What I saw in him yesterday, more than sadness, more than anything else, was pride.  He was so proud to have had her as his wife.  He was so proud to show her off, one last time.