This past Friday night we were at Walmart (why? BECAUSE WE WERE BREATHING, THAT’S WHY), and Alex asked if he could have a little puzzle book of mazes. The child loves a good maze – always has – so I threw it in the cart and bought it, and he spent the entire ride home trying to catch little rays of traffic lights and street lights so that he could look at all the pages.

Once we got home he sat down at the kitchen table and made his way through every single maze – about 40 of them – and then he told me that as much as he loved the maze book, he was a little sad that he’d worked them all because it made him feel like he’d wasted them.

Oh, bless him.

Anyway, later that night I was relaying the whole maze adventure to Melanie on the phone, and she mentioned that she’d found a bunch of free connect-the-dots printables for Caroline on the internet, so maybe I could check the Google and see if there were some free maze printables as well.

And I was all, “FREE STUFF? ON THE INTERNET? WELL, I’VE NEVER!”

So the next morning I did a quick Google search, and sure enough: FREE MAZES GALORE. I downloaded and printed about 60, I think, and do you know that Saturday afternoon A and our neighbor B sat (relatively) still for over an hour while they plowed their way through one maze after another after another?

THEY DID.

And in the midst of all the maze-ing, I cleaned out my laundry room – which was a hot spot all its own – and even organized my storage shelves. It looks so much better now that I find myself walking in there just to look around and admire my neatly displayed paper products (the surplus is thanks to D’s last trip to Costco) and Pellegrino bottles and smile.

And yes, that last sentence is absolutely the lamest thing I’ve ever written.

MIDDLE AGE IS AWESOME.

This past Saturday we celebrated David’s 40th birthday. We ate lunch at our favorite Mexican place, browsed at a bookstore, stopped by our favorite bakery for some treats, lazed around the house and then enjoyed D’s favorite meal for supper (country fried steak, rice and gravy, lima beans, rolls, tres leches cake). We were all about the favorites. There were even a few presents. It was a good day.

I thought the birthday festivities were over, but today I got an email from D with a subject line that said, “WOW.” His birthday gift from Sister and her hubby had arrived, and he was so surprised and delighted by it that he actually sent me pictures.

Perhaps I should explain.

A few of y’all may remember that D has a theory about what he calls identifiable meat. His theory is this: guys don’t want meat hidden in some casserole. They don’t want to look at a serving dish and wonder what’s underneath all those noodles. They want the chicken, pork, beef, bacon, etc. and so on and so forth to be front and center. Easy to identify. No guesswork required.

So today, when he received this:

And opened it to find this:

Well, you can imagine his joy. It was an abundance of identifiable meat riches. In fact, the styrofoam cooler contained three things that never fail to make D’s heart skip a beat:

1) hamburger patties
2) steaks
3) dry ice (apparently dry ice enjoys a certain level of awesome among the people who have a Y chromosome…it’s not as awesome as, you know, FIRE, but it’s awesome nonetheless)

Also included? A package of the biggest hot dogs I’ve ever seen (for Alex, who saw the hot dogs, pumped his fist in the air and said “YES!”) and a whole bunch of stuffed potatoes. So basically Sister and Barry marked the milestone of D’s 40th by sending meat and carbs. Or as I like to call them: his love language.

And in case you’re wondering, here’s our revised supper line-up for the rest of the week.

Thursday night – identifiable meat
Friday night – identifiable meat
Saturday night – identifiable meat
Sunday night – identifiable meat

Plus taters, of course.

OF COURSE.

What’s not to love?

Edited to add a completely unrelated P.S. – I have a new post up (about beauty and our culture) over at AllAccess. I’m telling you this because about every four days I think about how I need to do a better job of linking to my AllAccess posts. But then I forget to link to them. Because, well, there is TV to watch and chicken to fry and BEJEWELED BLITZ ISN’T GOING TO PLAY ITSELF, NOW IS IT? Anyway. As you were.

Back when we were young and rested and wrinkle-free and living in Baton Rouge, we bought our first little house on a tree-lined street in the middle of town. The kitchen floor sloped, the hallway was about four inches wide and the living room walls were a deep, Pepto Bismol-ish mauve. But we loved it. That little house was mighty good to us.

We’d been living in our house for about nine months when David went home for lunch one day and found a very skinny, very pregnant dog lying in our neighbors’ flower bed. They said they didn’t know where she came from, but they did know that they had no interest in keeping her. D felt sorry for the puppy dog and fixed her some water and some food, and when I got home a few hours later, she had moved to the flower bed in front of our house. She was covered in fleas, so I took her inside and gave her a bath. She never made a sound.

We decided that night that we’d take care of her until her puppies arrived, and then we’d find her a good home. When the puppies arrived, we found people for all of them, but the dog – who we’d since christened Ally McBeal because, well, she looked like she could use a good steak dinner – showed no signs of wanting to leave. We talked about it and made a decision to keep her, but she was going to have to be an outside dog. Plain and simple. The end.

But then one night D was out of town, and it was raining, and I felt a little sorry for Ally the Skinny Dog who was in our backyard. So I put a towel on the floor of our bedroom, called her inside, and she curled up on that towel like it was the world’s finest dog bed. She never made a sound – but her sweet little eyes told me that she was grateful.

I think it took her about six months to bark in our presence, by the way.

So now it’s almost ten years later, and while we have no idea how old Ally was when she came to us, we tell ourselves that she was one. Because if she was, say, five or six, then that would make her a Really Old Dog at this point. And we don’t want for her to be a Really Old Dog. We want for her to stay with us forever. It’s where she belongs.

When our human child was born, Ally didn’t really know what to make of him. But now that he’s old enough to play with her and walk her and feed her and tell her 48 times a day that she’s “such a sweet girl,” she’s a devoted fan of the six year-old. And her favorite thing in the whole wide world – MORE THAN BACON, EVEN – is to go along for the ride when D takes Alex to school in the mornings. Even though Ally is 11 or 14 or 17 these days and spends a great deal of her time relaxing and also sleeping, nothing makes her shake a tailfeather like an invitation to ride in the truck.

She sits right next to A in the backseat and never makes a sound. She just wags her tail.

We’re so glad she found us.

And we love her a whole bunch.

But you’ve probably figured that out by now.

So for us the second round of Christmas really got cranked up this afternoon when Sister and her hubby rolled into town. They’ll be here for a couple of days, so that means lots of Xbox for the boys and lots of Steinmarts for the girls. And lots of Starbucks for all of us, of course.

Amen.

Alex had big fun during Christmas ’09, and he’s spent a chunk of the last three days playing with some new favorite toys.

I have no idea what the appeal of that iCoaster thing is, by the way, but he cannot watch the marbles roll down the track without jumping up and down and up and down and up and down.

The marbles! They’re very exciting! Apparently!

By the way, I pulled all of these pictures off of my daddy’s camera, and for some reason when I popped the memory card out of his camera and put it in my computer so that the pictures could download, I felt a wee bit like Sydney Bristow. And I wished for just a second that I was wearing a wig and some sort of funky cocktail dress. Because if memory serves, whenever Sydney Bristow used someone else’s memory card to download information, she always seemed to be wearing a wig and a funky cocktail dress. And I realize that I didn’t necessarily need a disguise in order to successfully download pictures from my daddy’s Kodak Easy Share camera, but still. It’s always fun to think of practical, everyday uses for the wig/funky cocktail dress combo.

Anyway.

Mama and Daddy have been here since Christmas afternoon, and we have loved having them here. Daddy actually offered to go to the grocery store this afternoon and pick up steaks for our supper tonight, and since our grill is currently a little temperamental, I cooked the steaks on the stove. I used Ree’s method with my cast iron grill pan, and I don’t think my range fan has ever gotten a bigger workout.

There was some sizzle in that pan.

But every single bit of the charred beef smoke was worth it, because the steaks were deeee-licious. Now the kitchen is all clean and splatter-free, and everybody has gone to bed except for Sister and me. She’s drinking her third or seventh cup of coffee while we watch the end of the Music City Bowl, and I’m waiting for a video to finish uploading. THE EXCITEMENT NEVER STOPS.

So that’s about all the Christmas news from our little neck of the woods. Lots of family fun in store. Plenty of football and basketball games on the horizon. A six year-old who’s convinced that this was the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER.

And a house that smells like Western Sizzlin’.

God bless us, everyone.