He’s Homesick As Can Be And Misses Us Terribly

18 June 2007 by

Yesterday, when D. and I left Mama and Daddy’s, Alex told us that he was going to stay at their house for two days.

Early this afternoon, when D. called to check on the little man, Alex announced that he was going to stay at their house for three days.

And a few hours ago, when I called to tell Alex good night, he informed me that he’s planning to stay at their house for four days.

At this rate, all I know to do is to pray that he decides to come home before he starts preschool in the fall.

By the way: did I mention that yesterday, after lunch, Alex grabbed my hand, looked in my eyes, and said, “Mama? Can you leave now, please?”

It was a tender moment. Oh yes it was.

Filed Under: Family Fun

When You Don’t Know How To Turn On The Email, Dictation Works Just As Well

14 June 2007 by

This just in:

S.,

Mother asked me to write and tell you she is very proud of the cake you baked, especially because you used butter instead of margarine, pure vanilla rather than imitation and regular flour rather than cake mix.

I love coconut cake. Yours looked very tasty.

Daddy

SUBTLE GIFT HINTS for Father’s Day, anyone?

Also, the subject line of the email was “BooMama Blog.”

Which tickled me to no end.

Because, you know, if they hadn’t specified “BooMama Blog,” I might have been confused about where exactly they had read about my recent cakebaking adventures.

Filed Under: Family Fun

Heritage

13 June 2007 by

Today, in the car, after running errands:

“Mama? MAMA? I don’t like summertime because the sun makes me hot.”

Oh, y’all.

It would seem that the overheated apple doesn’t fall far from the sun-scorched tree.

You can’t even imagine how much it makes me smile.

Filed Under: Family Fun

I Think We’ll Keep Him

12 June 2007 by

Yesterday morning was a rough one.

And it was no one’s fault but my own.

Well, and my DNA’s.

You see, my brother, sister and I all inherited a gene from my daddy that predisposes us to Nightowlism.

In case you are unfamiliar with this syndrome, symptoms of Nightowlism include – but are not limited to – drinking coffee late at night because you’ve convinced yourself that caffeine doesn’t affect you at all, watching an entire season of a television show between 8 pm and 4 am (if it’s an hour-long drama, you may have to have several Nightowlism flare-ups in a row), feeling completely unable to put down a book because you have to know how it ends and therefore rationalize that two hours of sleep is all you need, deciding around 11 pm that it’s high time you rearranged your living room – but only after you clean it thoroughly, and attempting to solve a real-life murder mystery using nothing but the internet and background information you’ve acquired via FoxNews or CNN.

And the thing about Nightowlism? It’s insidious. It sneaks up on you. You’re moving along with your regular post-supper activities, and next thing you know, it’s 2 in the morning and you have a paint brush in your hand because you’ve decided to touch up the trim in your kitchen. Or you’re sprawled out on the floor of your den because you thought you might watch old “Columbo” episodes starring Dick Van Dyke or Leslie Nielsen while you clean out the drawers in your china cabinet.

In my case, night before last, I found myself whiling away the late night / early morning hours watching season 2 of “Veronica Mars,” writing a blog post, clicking through Bloglines, and catching up on email. Until 3:30 in the morning.

Because apparently I think I’m still 19 and don’t require sleep.

Needless to say, rise and shine time was not very pretty yesterday.

And on top of having to pay the piper for my lack of GO TO BED, ALREADY discipline, I spent a couple of hours Monday morning feeling worried / frustrated about something I have no business feeling worried / frustrated about because it’s something I cannot control. But the lack of sleep skewed my perspective. I was a smidge preoccupied.

After lunch, I was sitting on the couch, trying to set up an appointment via email while Alex ran around screaming words I couldn’t understand and performing some sort of stomp / dance that involved lifting up his right leg while screaming “HAH! BOOGEYDA!”

It was an incredibly relaxing environment in which to think about life and ponder my future.

Apparently Alex noticed that I was a little bit down in the dumps, because he climbed up next to me, threw his arms around my neck, kissed my cheek and said, “Oh, Mama – you’re my favorite people in the WHOLE! WIDE! WORLD!”

I didn’t quibble with his use of the the plural; since my other six personalities were just as exhausted as I was, we were all absolutely delighted by Alex’s proclamation.

And we learned something.

As a lifelong Nightowlism sufferer, I’ve never known how to cope with the after-effects of staying up too late except to either push through the next day or pray for the opportunity to nap.

But as it turns out, there is a surefire cure-all: a spontaneous hug and kiss from a wound-up four year-old little boy whose hair is sticking straight up on his head and who has Goldfish crumbs all over his Mickey Mouse t-shirt. And who loves to scream “HAH! BOOGEYDA!”

I pepped up right away.

What did we ever do without him, y’all?

Filed Under: Family Fun

His Love Language Is High Definition

10 June 2007 by

When D. and I married and set up house for the first time, we each brought different items to the proverbial decorative table.

For example, I brought a couch, a wingback chair, a baker’s rack, a queen-sized bed, and some cheap, shiny Queen Anne-style sidetables.

D. brought a double bed, a dresser, a kitchen table, and more electronic equipment than any man had a right to own – conveniently encased in a lovely black entertainment center with smoky glass doors.

By the way, I still contend that if I had never entered the picture, everything in D.’s house would a) be made of black laminate and b) have the ability to recline.

And he would love the fire out of every single bit of it.

So after we were married, I quickly learned that, for D., the primary decorating question is Where Will We Put The TV? – followed closely by Once We Place The TV, May I Please Put My Chair Directly In Front Of It? I of course wanted everything to be pretty, and having a black laminate entertainment center with smoky doors as the focal point of my living room was not exactly a dream come true for me.

Eventually, though, we worked out a compromise. Black Laminate Smoky Doors stayed – albeit in a remote corner of the room. D.’s chair was too far away from the television for his taste, but I assured him that it couldn’t be good for his eyes to sit two feet away from a 32 inch screen.

In our next house, D. took over a spare bedroom and set up every single bit of his audio / video extravagana. There were components and cables and gaming systems and speakers (OH MY!); the only drawback was that he had to put it all on the aformentioned (girly, sage green) baker’s rack – because by that point I had quite literally kicked Black Laminate Smoky Doors to the curb. The bottom door kept falling off, and when we moved from our first house I took the opportunity to leave it next to the driveway.

Really, it was nothing but an act of completely selfless charity on my part.

Really.

Eventually, we finished out an office for D. in our basement. He was able to put speakers IN THE WALLS and place his recliner (or, as I like to call it: The Cap’n’s Chair) approximately eighteen inches from the TV screen. It seemed, at long last, that his eight year home theatre quest was complete.

But then, of course, we moved.

I’ll spare y’all the audiovisual saga we’ve been through since we moved into this house last December, but it’s been unsettling for D., to say the very least. He had high hopes of setting up a movie / game room in his office here – only to realize that, with Alex’s bedroom across the hall, he wasn’t going to be able to crank ‘er up sound-wise like he could in his basement room.

He talked about moving his TV (it has a flat screen; apparently that is very important to gadget-minded men) in the living room to replace the older model that had taken up residence there, but he gave up on that idea when I asked one too many questions about the size and placement of the speakers.

Keep in mind that, when we married in the late 90’s, I still had a console TV with a channel dial and no remote control BECAUSE I AM JUST THAT TECHNOLOGICALLY SAVVY, so it’s hard for me to understand how important things like speakers are to him.

I mean, if not for D., I’d still be carrying around a bag phone.

Anyway, for the last six months, my husband has been wandering through an audiovisual desert, wondering when or if he would be delivered into a high definition, all-digital promised land with premium, high-quality sound.

Last night, I’m proud to say, he arrived.

We may have to set up a memorial stone, y’all.

And I will have it carved in the shape of a big ole flat-screen television.

Because here’s what happened.

He moved the flat-screen into the living room, along with all necessary components and speakers. We have a pretty big built-in space for that kind of stuff, so it actually isn’t the least bit unsightly for the one of us who likes for things to look pretty (that would be me).

And then – AND THEN – he called our cable company and asked to upgrade to their high definition package. Since we already have an HD DVR (they gave it to us several months ago after we had worn them down with our 521 service calls), the upgrade took about three minutes. And only costs about $4 a month.

And when my husband saw the high-definition picture for the first time, I’m pretty sure that he wept. Quietly, of course. Discreetly. In the most manly of ways.

For a full thirty minutes after HDTV became a part of our lives, I listened to D. talk about HDMI cables and 780p and 1020i and HD channels and the amount of memory it takes to record HD shows on our DVR. It was a veritable verbal buffet of acronyms and abbreviations, and I had no idea what most of it meant. But I smiled and I nodded – because I love him.

After all, when he’s happy, I’m happy.

And as long as Black Laminate Smoky Doors never enter our audiovisual set-up again, I think we’ll be just fine.

Filed Under: Family Fun, Rambling

We’ll Root, Root, Root For The Home Team While The Heat Slowly Kills Us

8 June 2007 by

So here’s the thing: I am one of those annoying people who hates to be late. If you combine that quality with my fondness for wearing a clean pair of pajamas every single night, making sure the beds are made before we go out of town, and refusing to cross-pollinate detergent brands, you’ll begin to understand why I’ve started (jokingly) thinking of myself as THE FREAK OF THE INTERNET.

Really, y’all should get me some sort of crown.

And because I always like to be early, last night I suggested to D. that we should probably leave our house between 7 and 7:30 this morning in order to be in Starkville for an 11:00 baseball game.

Starkville, by the way, is about two hours from our house.

But I like a buffer, you see.

D., however, did not share my sense of urgency in regards to our departure time, and as a result we didn’t get on the road until about 8:20. At that point we were so far behind my ideal schedule that I twitched all the way to the Mississippi / Alabama state line.

We only stopped once – for some breakfast about halfway between here and MSU (DRIVE THRU! DRIVE THRU! GOING INSIDE A RESTAURANT WASTES VALUABLE TIME! CHOP CHOP, FAMILY!) – but we didn’t get to campus until about 10:30. I was not at all comfortable with our time frame, because we needed to park the car AND pick up tickets from Will Call AND find somewhere to sit – all within thirty minutes.

In a crowd of over TWELVE THOUSAND PEOPLE.

Alex and I took care of getting the tickets while D. looked for a parking place. Fortunately he found a spot about twenty four miles from the baseball stadium, and it was just a little bit of a dream come true for him when he got to hike all the way back to the ticket gate where Alex and I were waiting in the 139 degree heat.

You know, outdoor spaces would really be so much more enjoyable if they were air conditioned.

D. made it to the stadium surprisingly quickly, and since we hadn’t gotten the chairback seats we initially requested (because there was such a high demand for tickets), we started looking for three seats in the general admission bleachers on the first base side.

Y’all, I am not kidding: those bleachers were so packed that you couldn’t have wedged a butterbean between any two people sitting side by side. There was literally nowhere to sit, and for about ten minutes I thought we had driven two hours so that we could crane our necks to see over the fence, look at the field, talk about how pretty it is, and then turn around and go home.

D. suggested that we try the other end of the stadium, and I was happy to comply because it required that we walk underneath the stadium overhang – which meant we were in the shade. Since it was only 110 in the shade, the trip to the other bleachers was refreshing, really.

Once we got to the third base side, we spotted an empty space on the bleacher steps. It wasn’t ideal, but it was, you know, A PLACE TO SIT, and the people around us were kind enough to let us obstruct their path to the concession stand. We stayed there for about five minutes, and then! It was a baseball miracle!

The woman on the row next to where we were sitting had to leave the game unexpectedly – apparently an elderly family member in another section of the stadium was having an issue with her legs swelling, which really wasn’t a surprise to me because it was, after all, about 263 degrees outside.

And I don’t know what all the lady who was leaving had beside her on the bleachers – her purse, a small cooler, a queen sized mattress, a refrigerator – but by the time she picked up all her belongings and left the area she had commandeered for half of the first inning, there was plenty of room for the three of us.

And we were happy.

We made it to the third inning before Alex started to say things like, “I’m HOT, Mama” and “I want to go back to the car” and “I don’t love baseball.” By this point it was about 322 degrees, and I promise you that MY KNEES WERE SWEATING. I started to look around to see if other people’s knees were also sweating, and I couldn’t help but notice that the woman sitting in front of me – she was about 70, I’m guessing – was in absolute perfect form.

First of all, she had obviously been to the beauty parlor before the game. Second, she had on long pants WITH HER SHIRT TUCKED IN. Third, her make-up still looked flawless; for all intents and purposes she looked like she was sitting on the beach in 72 degree weather. She did not even so much as glisten, and right there in those bleachers I said a prayer to God that I will be just like her when I get older.

Because I would prefer not to be a grandmother WHOSE KNEES SWEAT when she attends public sporting events.

But here’s the best part: somehow, despite the heat and the sweating and the throngs of people, we had a really great day together. Alex and I shared a snowcone while we chatted with other State fans; D. carried Alex on his shoulders while they walked around Left Field Lounge. And after the heat got to be too much, the three of us watched the end of the game while we ate lunch at The Grill – one of my favorite college-day haunts – where Alex experienced the joy of cheering loudly for his team in a restaurant packed with rowdy fans.

Also: WE WON!

Just imagine the additional fun we could’ve had if we had only gotten there at 9:30 – as per my original plan.

Of course, that extra hour in the heat would’ve sent me straight to one of the first aid tents located conveniently behind the grandstand seats.

But it would have been a heat stroke caused by overly-obsessive promptness, and that is an ailment badge that any FREAK OF THE INTERNET can wear with pride.

Filed Under: Beloved Bulldogs, Family Fun, Rambling
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