Category Archives: holidays

>Choose your own adventure — if you dare

Posted on by
9

>

Sometimes you can choose your own adventure. Sometimes those adventures just land on your doorstep — or your driveway.
Let’s work backwards. My daughter walked in the house one evening and announced calmly, with only a hint of a sheepish grin, “Mom, I owe you a new citronella candle.” What?! My cute blue bucket with polka dots, filled with citronella wax, recently purchased at Target to ward off nasty mosquitoes when I want to be outside? How could it already be used up?
It was Independence Day, July 4th, the one day out of the year that kids of all ages in the U.S. are encouraged to watch fireworks and even play with some of their own. My teenage daughter had a few friends over to do sparklers. As they finished with each sparkler, they looked for a safe place to put it. “Oh, let’s put them in here! We can set the bucket on the driveway, away from trees and grass and other things that burn.” These honor students (yes, talented and gifted students with outrageously high ACT scores) forgot one thing: candle wax is flammable.
Scene 1: Still-hot sparklers act as wicks, starting the bucket of wax on fire.


Scene 2: Husband runs in house for fire extinguisher. La Petite shouts, “No, dad, wait! I want to take a picture!”

Scene 3: After she takes her picture, he puts out the fire. (Note: he didn’t stop for shoes.)

Parenting: it’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.
(Thanks to La Petite for the photos — and the memories.)

This post was entered in Scribbit’s Write-Away Contest for July.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Daisy’s Top Ten List: #8 is (gulp) True! (so is #9)

Posted on by
1

>8. Whenever possible, I shop early for Christmas. In fact, I’ve already started.

This is not from uber-organization; it is necessity. Starting at the end of November, we have four birthdays and Christmas all within eight weeks. If I didn’t shop ahead/ year round, we’d go broke by February.
What did I buy already? Eat your heart out, family, I’m not telling.

9. I am older than my husband.
His birthday is exactly two weeks after mine. I am two weeks older than he is.
By the way, his mother tells me he was born about two weeks after his due date. Um, honey? About that problem you have with getting places on time? Is it, perhaps, a birth defect? Just kidding. He’s not really a chronic latecomer. 🙂

In between thunderstorms today, I settled in and read more of Harry Potter #5: The Order of the Phoenix. I plan to re-read the entire series before the new one comes out in July. I finished #4 over the weekend, returned it to the library (the only book in the series that I don’t own), and started on Harry’s adventures before going back to Hogwarts for his fifth year. Thunderstorms are great reading weather. That is, except for the little detail of the power going out before the coffeemaker was done brewing…darn it.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Daisy’ Top Ten List: #7 is True.

Posted on by
4

>7. I resist buying wrapping paper whenever possible.

It’s the green combined with the frugal in me. Wrapping paper seems so wasteful. Use it once, then throw it away. It can’t be recycled, it can’t be burned in the fireplace (too many chemicals), so it ends up in a landfill after one use. Does this make sense? Not to me.

My family gives me a hard time about this. I give in at Christmas, and I don’t complain if other family members buy wrapping paper (but it’d better be on sale!). But for birthdays, father’s day, and most other gift-giving occasions, I like to revive the first two Rs: reduce and re-use.

When I open my own presents, I carefully refold the paper for later. Smaller scraps will wrap stocking stuffers or combine with another coordinating wrap. Gift bags and tissue? Multiple uses. Small, attractive shopping bags? Again, multiple reuses. Bows? If possible, I set them aside to be part of another gift. Curling ribbon, well, I admit that’s hard to salvage.

But my favorite of the Green Wrapping techniques is this: last year’s cards become the next year’s tags. After Christmas (sometimes months later), I go through the holiday cards and cut them apart into gift tags. They’re unique and fun, and honestly — I haven’t bought gift tags in twenty years.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>200!! Woo-hoo!

Posted on by
Reply

>Yes, this is my two-hundredth blog post!! The family celebrated, too. The rabbits? They just napped. Full report at 10. I mean — pictures tomorrow. Now if I can get down off this block without tripping on the rubber chicken….

In case you’ve never been introduced to my lovely family, Husband and I (from left to right) are on top of the box, and Amigo and La Petite (from left to right) are on the floor. I mean, they’re in the foreground. My thanks to La Petite and Husband for helping set up and photograph the “party”. Amazing how they did that without opposable thumbs!

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>No Flarping during Jeopardy!

Posted on by
1

>It was a gift from the bus driver. It looked innocent: a small plastic container with a putty-like substance inside. Then we found out what it, um, did. With a finger or thumb inside, yanked out with a certain technique, Flarp makes (gulp) a farting noise.
Like a good big sister, La Petite showed her brother a few tips for making the noises more, uh, authentic. He practiced (practiced!) and they giggled and laughed and roared as the ‘quality’ of his Flarpiness improved.
I wasn’t so thrilled.
It seemed like whenever it was most irritating, Flarp made its presence known. Not constantly, but as if on cue, just often enough.
If I tried to read a book: Pbbth.
If I put up my feet in the recliner and relax: Pbxzth.
Whenever I finished a goal and took a break: Ppbbthxxb.
When the caffeine was low, and my eyes began to close: Ppbbththxxxbbpbth.
AARGH!!!
Eventually, I stashed it somewhere that Amigo could find it, but wouldn’t think of it very often. After that, he spent more time with his other gifts and the new bunny in the house.
Until my brother came to visit, and the kids taught him to Flarp, too. Darn musician; he has a talent for making the most, er, unique sounds possible. Do you think I’d stay on speaking terms with my sister-in-law if I sent the jar of Flarp home with him?

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Fun with gifts

Posted on by
6

>Amigo loves radio. He listens to it in the car, through his headphones, in his bedroom, and even on the Internet. Give him the name of a major U.S. city, and he can probably tell you the name, call letters, and frequency of at least one radio station there. On the rare occasion when we travel, he enjoys finding stations with local flavor, not just the national syndicates. He enjoys accents, weather that differs from ours, and all kinds of local news items. When we made our marathon trip to Missouri a year ago, Amigo amused himself by listening to the broadcast of a local high school tournament basketball game.
My brother tapped into this fascination by giving Amigo six radio t-shirts. Here comes the fun part: only one shirt has the location of the station. Amigo will have to do some research of his own to find out where they are. I will print out the call letters or other information in Braille for him, and then he will sit down at the computer and Google each one. Who knows — maybe he’ll find some of them also broadcast online!
That would be nice, because Amigo announced that after he finds out where the stations are located, we’ll have to travel there and listen to them.
You know, that might just be a fun excuse to travel next summer.
Here they are: if you know any of these, feel free to drop a comment with the location and any other information you might have. I thank you, and so does Amigo.

100.5 JACK FM: playing what we want (great slogan, by the way)
“Hot” 97.5, KVEG, Las Vegas (the only one identified by city)
AM 760, Progressive Talk
WBEE 92.5, Today’s Country
Mix 92.9: Today’s Best Variety
ESPN SportsCenter (Okay, we know where that shirt came from.)

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Every story, new or ancient

Posted on by
1

>Christmas is a time for family lore: remembering and recounting the stories of Christmas past. One of my favorites was Amigo’s first Christmas.
Amigo was 11 months old, just shy of one year, and a very happy baby most of the time. He was also a very noisy baby, full of babble and talkative baby noises.
The day after Christmas, Baby Amigo woke early. I fed him and changed him, and then wondered what on earth I was going to do with this noisy little one. You see, Husband had just gotten home from working an overnight shift and needed to sleep. La Petite had stayed up late for the holiday and needed to sleep in, too. At the time we lived in a small duplex with tiny rooms and thin walls. Happy baby noises would wake everyone. What to do?
Well, it was December 26th, after all. I dressed the baby and dressed myself and we headed out to the post-Christmas sales.
At that time in our lives we had very little money, so we bought next to nothing. But we had all kinds of mommy-baby fun just roaming the aisles, with little Amigo perched in the shopping cart babbling at me and smiling his adorable smile for the other shoppers. I think I bought a few bows and some cards for the next year, but that was all. And that was all we needed.
When we got home, La Petite was just starting to stir. Husband was sound asleep and not likely to be awakened. I fed Baby Amigo his morning snack and settled him in to nap, content in the feeling that all was well with the world.
Now, almost 15 years later, Amigo loves Christmas shopping. He doesn’t perch in the shopping cart anymore, thank goodness, but he grabs his white cane and sprints down the main corridors of the mall. And every year he enjoys hearing the tale of the fun we had at the post-Christmas sales when he was just a baby.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>The Day after Christmas

Posted on by
2

>Gradually, in baby steps, we are reclaiming the house from the chaos that is Christmas. Oodles of wrapping paper filled a big garbage bag. Tags have been recycled, bows stored for re-use. New clothes have been tried on and placed in the hampers so that they are soft for their first day of wear. Wrapping materials are making their way downstairs for storage (until Amigo’s birthday), and the extra table “wrapping station” has been taken down and stashed in its attic home. This could almost make a Clement C. Moore style verse, if I felt the urge to write it.
Husband is back at work. La Petite is sleeping, and Amigo is using his new HUGE remote control to watch TV while he waits for his new clock to “chime”. I am relaxing over a cup of Candy Cane flavored coffee, and feeling like life is good. I can catch up on reading Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue and feel important.
Gifts? Internet folks, a list of family gifts would bore you to tears, despite the uniqueness of our family’s shopping habits, so I’ll skip the gift list in favor of highlights.
Husband did some of his shopping at the Packer Pro Shop again. That’s what happens when he’s working at Lambeau a lot just before Christmas. He has to shop where and when it’s convenient. La Petite’s GBPacker blanket throw is so soft and warm that she spent most of yesterday wrapped up in it.
Amigo gained several new fidget tools/toys. He holds and manipulates these to keep himself focused. It started with the cool little Detroit RedWing bendable player. We set the hockey stick aside so it wouldn’t get lost. This was upstaged by a CocaCola ladle with a coke bottle shape on the handle, which was replaced later by a soft vinyl reindeer bank. Fidget tools provide pleasure for all of us, whether we’re the givers or the receiver.
The most unique student gift I received was a chalkboard mug. Yes, it is what it sounds like. It came with two pieces of chalk. The mug has a unique black finish that I can draw on and then erase again. This has potential!
The bunnies? They celebrated with a bunch of organic carrots complete with greens.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares