the cry room

Things that were heard all at the same time during my time in the cry room today:

Father Bernie: grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom where you live for ever and ever.

Naughty child No. 1 to her brother: "Pass it to me!!! I'm open! I'm open!" (Note: brother obliged and threw smallish basketball)

Naughty child No.2: "Bark Bark Bark!, I'm a dog!"

Annabelle's friend: "A-bow! A-bow" (this mean Annabelle, Annabelle, and is cute)

Mother of naughty child No. 3: "no Annabelle, you can't drink that sippy, it's Cecelia's"

Crying baby No.1: "wwhhhhaaaaa!!!" + spit up and fidgeting

Crying baby No.2 "wwhhhhaaaaa!!!"

Naughty child No.4: actually this kid didn't say anything he was outside the cry room banging on the windows trying to get Annabelle's attention.

Later--
Father Bernie: The mass is over, go in peace.

Mother of Naughty child number 3: Thanks be to god!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mama said there'd be days like this

Do you ever have a day where you just don't wanna? Where you wish you could be 16 months old again and say "no" to everything, (technically it sounds more like "nnnaaaaaooooohhhh") and you just wake up and you feel not quite right, kind if like crying and you don't know why? Most days I feel pretty good, really good, actually, but not today. I didn't want to be a mom or a wife today. I didn't feel like doing anything. I lay in bed this morning trying to think about what possible scenario could make me feel better and I could only come up with sitting by an infiniti pool overlooking the beach in Mexico and having my 22 year old body back and drinking pina colodas that someone brought me along with some guacamole. In this scenario I would be completely alone. Since this could not happen I decided to face the day. I woke up to a crying baby, the worst possible sound ever before you get up to pee. And then I was a nasty, horrible, wretched person and said to my baby daughter "Annabelle, when you cry like that in the morning, you make my day terrible" I think that might trump not letting my sister sit with me at lunchtime when I was in the 8th grade and she was in the 6th as the meanest thing I have ever done. I also yelled at my mom today, you know, my mom, the CANCER PATIENT!!! What the hell is wrong with me? So I took Annabelle to mother's day out and decided to do what I do when I am in a funk, and that is a flurry of activity. I vacuumed and dusted and changed the AC filter. The AC filter was the turning point. It wasn't cooperating and I really layed into it. Screaming and yelling at it like a complete maniac. Went to the gym and cleaned some more. Then I felt better. But guilty, of course. I really hope she doesn't remember what I said. I told my dad about this and he said "don't beat yourself up over it, you are just having a bad day. " Okay, sniff, sniff. By the time I picked up my sweet child I felt completely healed and ready to go and be a mom again. And when Hyphen got home I was even ready to have him teach me how to stir-fry. It was delicious. It's all delicious.

Father's Day

My dad was born in the Texas Panhandle, on a farm near Petersburg. It was long, long ago-- there were no tvs, no i-phone, no i-phone 3.0, no facebook, let alone microwaves, home depot and HEB Central Market. They lived out on the South Plains in a little farmhouse where my granddaddy (in Texas this is pronounced grandaddy, just one d) grew cotton and my grandmother was a housewife, which meant she did everything else. Because childhood back then was not filled with play dates and baby einstein, my dad worked on the farm. He worked in the fields and drove the tractor and doctored the cows. Because families were not in this constant mad rush we all deal with filled with electronic baby sitters and televisions in every room and twitter, etc., he actually did stuff with his family. My granddaddy was a baseball nut (which he followed on the radio) and erected a backboard in his pasture. They had a farm team--other kids from nearby farms were team members, even the lone black family was recruited into the effort. When they played the team from Abernathy they were intimidated by their fancy town kid uniforms--farm kids played in their overalls-- and, unlike a tv movie, they got whipped. They had ice cream making parties with their relatives, where everyone took a turn cranking. His father was in a gospel quartet for which his mother played the piano. They were Baptist so there was no drinking and no dancing. The preacher would come over for Sunday dinner and once said the following prayer over my grandmother's delicious ham "God bless the food, pass the ham."

Because a lot of time there is nothing "fun" to do on a farm, my dad became pretty well rounded in the field of sports and, like his daddy, learned to play tennis, golf, box, basketball and of course, like every good Texan, football. He was the high school quarterback. He did all kinds of crazy stunts in high school and once told me "Our school was so small, we were all the good kids and the bad kids." He won the award for best all around athlete in school. It is a beautiful gold trophy cup. He has always told Audrey and I that if one of us could ever beat him swimming, we could have his trophy. It currently sits in his bookcase.

He grew up "farting around with tractors" so he learned to fix stuff. And because of working on those tractors he is really hard of hearing.

He grew up calling his parents "mother 'n daddy" and does so to this day.

He went to West Texas State University and then joined the Air Force and was transferred to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Growing up in the South plains, everyone looked pretty much like him, blond hair and blue eyes, and when he moved to San Antonio he noticed that he stuck out and people seemed to stare at him. He met my mom at the apartment complex they both lived at and after six months they were married. He didn't invite his parents to their wedding and my mom's dad refused to come, he was so angry that she married an anglo. Thirty years later my dad was his favorite son-in-law, the only one who could give him his shots and the only one who was allowed to touch his tools.

So what is he like? He is as big and sunny as the West Texas sky and his optimism and joy for life are just as endless. His mottoes are "if you can't fix it, get a bigger hammer." And if faced with trouble, well, "ain't no hill for a stepper"

When he worked at Brooks, he once saw two black men, back from Vietnam, missing some limbs and he thought to himself "you know, those men lost their arms fighting for my country." He told me that that sight cured just about any prejudice that he had ever considered having to begin with.

It was a world away from this life, during a war, in Vietnam,where my husband was born. A ten pound baby. The village freak because of his size and white skin. When Saigon fell, my father-in-law told my mother-in-law that they were having a practice drill and that they needed to get on the American's tanker. It was a lie, of course. There was no drill, but he knew if he told her the truth she would never leave. Hyphen, true to form almost died on the trip to the US (motion sickness even as a baby).

Hyphen grew up between two places. He has a nostalgic longing for a place he's only heard about and at the same time a love for Cowboys and Indians, the VFW and the Rotary club, and the family who has the preacher over for Sunday dinner. Neither of these places quite fits him.

I like to watch people and I've watched Hyphen grow up. I watched his face for clues when we played Spades in high school when our teacher was out sick, and I watched his face as our child came out of my body. I will never forget how he looked at Annabelle when they were cleaning her up, no matter what happens to me, to us, to anything, I will never forget that.

Although I make fun of Hyphen, because he is crazy, he is also a good man. People always tell me that because his goodness seeps out of him, despite his outward curmudgeon. He's the type of person that will hold the door open for a homeless person or give the clothes off of his back (he actually did this) to an employee who needed a dress shirt.

These are the men in my life. And it has been a great honor to be a part of theirs.

Happy Father's Day.

my mom and technology part II

Mom: (referring to my blog) "I wish I could respond and say something ugly."


Me: "you could if you knew how."



btw- my mom is follower F69u45F8uuzztdaSMBWlvPATDWWPizX7ueatLA

my mom and technology part I

My mom and I talk to each other several times a day. Most of our conversations go like the ones we had today:

First call at 8:30 a.m

Mom: "I figured out what twitter was."

Me: "Oh really, how?"

Mom: "I read it on Time. Anyway, it is like your blog. People follow it. And if they don't follow it, then you are talking to yourself. It is stupid. "I had a bowl of cereal." Who cares? "I took a dump, does anyone out there know about dumps?" These people are stupid. Get a life."

Second call at 3:30 p.m.

Mom: (really excited) "Oooh, guess what? I bought a purse at TJ Maxx and do you know what it has?

Me: "no, what?"

Mom: "a pocket for your cell."

Me: (laughing) "mom, all purses have a pocket for your cell."

Mom: "not just where you throw it in there silly, a real pocket, just for your cell."

Me: "I know."

Mom: (indignantly) "well my purses never had one."

vinaigrette?

So the other day I am outside puttering around, as I am want to do. I see a big huge wasp fly onto my windowsill and crawl into my bedroom and I think "hmmm, cool, how'd he do that?" And I go about watering my plants. We get home from vacation today and Annabelle and I run a few errands and I come home and find Hyphen perched on the couch, watching tv and tells me the following:

Hyphen: "Dude, don't go in the bedroom there is a big, huge wasp in there. It was huge, seriously. I shut the door. Seriously, don't open the door, I don't want Annabelle to get stung"

Now, genius that I am, I think to myself "ruh-roh, there is something rotten in Denmark, and it ain't all that cheese." So of course, I go into the bedroom pull up the blind and see that there are two of the little critters building a wasps' nest. Here is where marital teamwork comes into play. The last time I was stung by something I was in Matagorda State Park with my sister. We were dancing on the gazebo trying to imitate Leezel and her loser nazi boyfriend's routine in the sound of Music, you know, "I am sixteen going on 17, and yoouuu arre a Nazzziii." That one. Anyway, we were clowning around and somehow knocked loose a yellow jacket nest, who were living quite peacefully in the gazebo and did not enjoy our little dance blitzkrieg. I had one sting and my arm was so swollen it looked like my grandma's. Actually, it probably just looked the way it does now since it was 18 years and 40 pounds ago. So I have a self-diagnosed allergy to stings. Hyphen knows this, since at the time we were friends and he saw my arm. So he goes in with some wasp killing spray and gets the job done. When he come out he tells me that he killed two wasps, but they were not the wasps he saw because that was the big one. The Moby Dick of wasps. Again he closes the door and tells me not to go in. Now, I have to tell you, my husband is not closing the door because he is scared that I, the mother of his child, might go into anaphylatic shock. He is closing the door because he is scared of bugs, pure and simple. I am not scared of bugs, so back in I go, and sure enough, there was our great white whale-- buzzing about the window. I call for Hyphen who runs in with the spray tells me to get out and harpoons that son-of-a-gun. (mother-f-er would have been better there, but i am trying to curse less, see?) We are a lean-mean wasp killing machine. I find 'em, he kills 'em.

Oil and water make vinaigrette, who knew?

Strange child

Today Annabelle played with the following things;

1. bubbles which she spilled all over herself (standard)
2. The "sandbox" -- aka "pile of dirt," my idiot dog has created by digging where one of my roses is. I wanted to put some dog poop and cayenne there to cure her from digging, but it is one of Annabelle's favorite places to play, so that may not be such a good idea.

She got completely muddy from head to toe (also standard) so we stripped in the laundry room and went inside where the fun continued.

3. I have some magnets on my fridge that were my grandma's. When I was a kid and it was too hot to play outside I would arrange them on her fridge in different patterns and they were the only thing I asked for when she died. Annabelle took one and put it in a small igloo cooler I keep in the kitchen. Then she took it out. Then she put it in, and out and in and out and in and out. Then she moved the cooler and then in/out/in/out/in/out about 100 more times. Then I got bored and walked to the living room to talk to Hyphen, who is not exactly a cure for boredom but will do in a pinch. Then she pushed the cooler to the room with us and continued her fascinating game.

4. We went to the kitchen to cook dinner and she found a can of ham and lost interest in the magnet. Don't ask why I had a can of ham on the kitchen floor, because it is a semi-long boring story that involves hurricanes, slightly paranoid people and a bird flu/nuclear winter food stash that the paranoid people convinced me I needed.

So no toys for Christmas, okay? Just some canned meats, dirt, bubbles and magnets. You can get most of that from the Dollar General and for the dirt, you can borrow my dog. She'll find a nice soft spot in your yard, preferably where you just planted something.