05.31.07

Riddle me this.

Posted in Emma, Lily, Parenting at 11:56 am by Anne

So we were all together in the baby’s room this morning…just chilling and talking when suddenly…

Emma (shouting): Lily stuck her tongue out at me!
Me: Lily, we don’t stick our tongue out.
Lily: I didn’t stick my tongue out! Emma is lying!
Me: Lily, Emma wouldn’t just say that. Now, don’t you know that God is not happy when you lie? It’s not good to lie; it’s not the right thing to do, especially when you’ve done something wrong.
Emma: Daddy is God.
Me: What?
Emma: Daddy is God.
Me: No honey, Daddy is not God.
Emma (singing): God our Fa-ther, God our Fa-ther…Once again…once again…
Me: um…oh boy.

Of course I was wrong to invoke God into this minor transgression. It was a total cheap-out, I can admit that. Lily has been struggling lately, oh how she struggles (and by this I mean I STRUGGLE), with her desire to tell lies. Most of the time the lying is totally ridiculous, as in I want to shriek WHY WOULD YOU LIE ABOUT THAT but sometimes she actually has a valid reason as in, she’s wronged Emma somehow and doesn’t want to be punished. I know it is a phase; I’m just not sure on the best way to deal with it. How do you teach your kids to be honest other than by showing them?

PS Thanks fer all the birthday wishes, ya’ll, this day has been the best one yet!

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05.30.07

mum’s the word

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:05 pm by Anne

mum is the word

Originally uploaded by Dux

The chrysanthemums are blooming along with the daylilies and it is such a gift.

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Just so you know

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:58 pm by Anne

tomorrow is my birthday. Yes people, I am turning 34. I accept cash, checks, Visa and moneyorders, also baked goods and anything with sugar , either by itself or presented in it’s more elegant form, alcohol. And yes, I will forgive you if you forgot this year, just make it up to me. Hell, you have a little more than 24 hours so get busy.

Tonight my PIL are having a dinner for my nephew and I (The little bastard had THE NERVE to get hisself born on my birthday.), MIL is baking an italian cream cake (not my favorite but she does know her way around toasted pecans and a creamcheese frosting, plus, not everyone needs chocolate the way I do…those poor poor people.)

When I was a child I never understood how adult women seemed to scorn birthdays. That is because birthday parties used to be full of goodie bags and games and cake and presents. Oh yeah, and also, little kids don’t typically get gray hair or more wrinkles or flabbier asses with each passing year. Remember when we wanted to be older? When did that change? This year I am going to holler in the face of agedness by throwing myself my own damn party birthday party. With a few substitutions.

There will be no games and no goodie bags to hand out, instead there will be a lot of food (a real texas bbq) and drink. I don’t have to bake my own cake this year, because my sister volunteered to do it ( I knew there was a reason I wanted her to move back to Texas.) Bless her for that. I also won’t be in charge of cocktails since my husband is making good on his threat to create ‘trash can punch’. (Is it a good idea to put someone who doesn’t drink much in charge of suchan important thing? Time will tell.) Yes, you read it right. When was the last time you helped yourself to a heaping plastic cup filled to the brim with so toxic a concoction of hawaiin punch, vodka, and drunken fruit? After Saturday, I may realize why exactly is has been so long.

I can’t think of a nicer way to usher in more gray hair, can you?

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05.25.07

daisy

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:07 am by Anne

daisy

Originally uploaded by Dux

The following is a list of Emma activities, over this past week , which demonstrates our need to babyproof more:

1) Walking into the master bath with the exterminator and finding Emma had gotten into my mascara. Again. Don’t ask me why the child had drawn super eyebrows on her face.

2) Shan left homemade bread and butter sitting on the kitchen island while I was upstairs with Piper. He came back to the kitchen and Emma had blitzed through the laof of bread with a santoku 7 inch knife. She was trying to make ‘toast’.

3) Again with the knives, altho this time it was a paring knife. She snagged three bananas and a kiwifruit (innocent bystander) to the sink and jabbed the hell out of all of them. Something about ‘fruit salad’.

4) After listening to a chair being dragged to the pantry, I walk in to find Emma methodically going through a bag of hershey kisses she had reached on an upper shelf.

5) After dinner I ask her to get a cookie (meaning a fortune cookie leftover from our chinese supper) but she came back instead with the thin mint girl scout cookies instead, after climbing a cabinet to snag the box.

6) Going on a hunt for Emma after a lull in noise only to see her painting her entire FOOT with my special OPI polish. not cool. and rather smelly.

And the capper:

7) I walk into the kitchen where she is sitting on the countertop with bottles of cough syrup and gummi vitamin jars . Those child-proof lid people really know what they are doing and god bless them one and all.

Yes, we are implementing operation Keep Emma Out of Danger this evening.

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05.23.07

Meme and me

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:09 am by Anne

My pal Blondemom tagged me and here goes because God knows I love a meme.

INSTRUCTIONS: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot, like so.

1) A Lifetime
2) The Life & Times of a First Time Stay at Home Mom
3) Mom of 2 and Wife of 1
4) BlondeMomBlog
5) Bun in the Oven

Next select five people to tag:

Babs, Kelli, BJ , SJSFALTER , You da Mom. And let me also add that I would like ALL of you to do this…not just the ones I listed. So if you have a minute, try.

What were you doing 10 years ago?

This is a tricky one. I’m guessing we weren’t doing a lot of anything other than working. I’d have been at Alcatel Telecommunications, assuming the 45-50 minute commute each way, taking a few summer school classes at the community college, and probably just getting into the grind of gardening, since we’d have been in out first house for a little over a year by now. Don’t get excited, my initial foray into planting things was pretty disasterous.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

I’m pretty sure that around a year ago I very surprisedly discovered I was pregnant with my third girl Piper aka Pipes. Very surprised. As in not thrilled. A lot can change in a year though, thank GOD, and I am a mostly very pleased (when not losing it, that is) mom to three little smarties.

Five snacks you enjoy:
1). string cheese
2). smokehouse (ie carcinogenic) almonds
3). dried cherries
4). fresh blueberries
5). dark high cacao (65% or higher) chocolate and a glass of pinot grigio

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to:
1). It’s the End of the World as We Know it (and I feel fine) - REM
2). Zachias Was a Wee Little Man… (thanks to Lily)
3). Secure Yourself to Heaven - Indigo Girls
4). Man of Constant Sorrow -Soggy Bottom Boys
5). Rodeo Clown- Jack Johnson

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:
1). Pay off our mortgage
2). Buy a 24-70 mm lens for my camera
3). Payoff the girls college funds
4). Buy my Mom a house down here and pay for everything to get her here.
5). Set up a number of funds for various family members. (Yes Babs, you’d be in there too)

Five bad habits:
1). I get too pissed off with the girls sometimes and then blow my stack.
2). My closet is very disorganized, as are my cookbooks. oh, and my desk. and any cabinet affiliated with my possessions.
3). Overprotective of family and friends
4). I snap at Shan or misphrase things to him, thereby escalating a smallthing into something much larger.
5). I compare myself to others way too much.

Five things you like doing:
1). Taking photos
2). Having friends/family over for a party
3). making cocktails, sharing them and drinking them
4). swimming with the girls
5). cooking with Shan

Five things you would never wear again:
1). permed hair
2). strirrup pants
3). oversized shirts with a fat belt cinched at the waist to hide my flat chest
4). bathing suit: not unless i get over this freakish baby baggage
5). shorts: like my sister,i think i am done with shorts. bring on the capris

Five favorite toys:
1). video games that Lily can play
2). toys that occupy Emma for longer than 10 minutes
3). legos
4). the world wide web
5). any games we adults can play in a group

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05.21.07

Right on.

Posted in Lily, Parenting at 8:31 am by Anne

We had friends over for supper a few nights ago. One couple we’ve known and had over a jillion times, the other couple hadn’t been to our home before and we tried an evening of ‘let’s see if we can all play together nicely’. And it went better than well.

Except for the part when Lily volunteered to the husband, “My Mommy’s Nipples Hurt!”

Yes, it was time for more spiked punch.

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05.20.07

In lieu of a real post.

Posted in Uncategorized at 1:22 pm by Anne

Burial Rites
by Philip Levine

Everyone comes back here to die
as I will soon. The place feels right
since it’s half dead to begin with.
Even on a rare morning of rain,
like this morning, with the low sky
hoarding its riches except for
a few mock tears, the hard ground
accepts nothing. Six years ago
I buried my mother’s ashes
beside a young lilac that’s now
taller than I, and stuck the stub
of a rosebush into her dirt,
where like everything else not
human it thrives. The small blossoms
never unfurl; whatever they know
they keep to themselves until
a morning rain or a night wind
pares the petals down to nothing.
Even the neighbor cat who shits
daily on the paths and then hides
deep in the jungle of the weeds
refuses to purr. Whatever’s here
is just here, and nowhere else,
so it’s right to end up beside
the woman who bore me, to shovel
into the dirt whatever’s left
and leave only a name for some-
one who wants it. Think of it,
my name, no longer a portion
of me, no longer inflated
or bruised, no longer stewing
in a rich compost of memory
or the simpler one of bone shards,
dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes,
the roots of the eucalyptus
I planted in ’73,
a tiny me taking nothing,
giving nothing, and free at last.

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05.18.07

I must be an idiot.

Posted in Uncategorized at 8:52 am by Anne

That, or crazy. Maybe both. Here is the thing. I, for the life of me, cannot remember the actual date my Dad died. I always know around the start of May that it is coming up. I just feel different about nearly everything. This is the second time in two years that I had convinced myself the day was the 19th, when I was gently corrected by BJ since her husband passed on the same day as my Dad, which is the 20th. What the hell is wrong with me?
It must be some kind of creepy mind-block…I mean, how could I just forget a date like that?

Anyway, thank you BJ for setting me straight. I am making a mental note to remember from here on out. I wonder what my Dad would say about it? He would probably assume a philosophical expression and after taking a cleansing breath from his cigarette would proclaim, “Look Anne, just because you don’t know the exact day I died doesn’t mean you are a bad person. It just means you are an ASSHOLE!” Of course, he’d say that in a good way.

And he’d be right!

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05.17.07

daylily

Posted in Uncategorized at 8:48 am by Anne

daylily

Originally uploaded by Dux.

I take a lot of pictures of flowers. You know that. I know that. Sometimes I feel like an ass for taking so many pictures of the same old things, like, where is the creativity? This morning as I drove down the street, listening to Jack Johnson, the man I would have married if Shan hadn’t carried me away, and it occurred to me that I take pictures of the same flowers over and over again because I keep looking for the ideal. The ideal rose. The ideal lily. The ideal whatever.

And you know what? I think there must be quite a few.

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05.16.07

let’s see

Posted in Lily, Parenting at 9:26 am by Anne

Yesterday we attended the award ceremony at Lily’s class in preschool. Shan and I crowded into the small room with the kids and other parents and the teachers, and looked on as each child was called up and handed an award. They were congratulated for graduating from the three-year old class as the teachers got all mushy and sappy (in a good way) while the children tried to squirm away. Look, they obviously don’t ‘get’ the award ceremony yet but at least it was blessedly short. Well, kinda…Piper slept through it like a bored pro.

I think Lily got the best award. It wasn’t ‘most likely to win an oscar in the future’ or’ most lovable’ or any of the other petty girl awards…she was given’ future good samaritan’. And the boy awards weren’t much better: Future Dream date and Most GQ…The best boy award was given to her friend, and it was ‘most enthusiastic’. Which he is. I ask you, what is more important than being an entusiastic humanitarian?

Now I’m starting to get queasy about the upcoming summer of no preschool. Shan’s answer is glib: Just have projects for them. Yeah. He’s never struggled with getting paints/crayons/markers out, laying out the tablecloth as the children gibber impatiently, cleaning up before we even begin, trying to prevent fights, all while nursing or burping or changing the infant or maintaining the rest of the house. How to keep them occupied and happy while keeping the idiotbox turned off? I need some preschool teacher training and fast.

On a related note, does anyone know where I can order three little straightjackets?

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