Hi, me again.  Can you tell I’ve been catching up on my computer time this morning?  This may or may not correlate to my kids not feeling so hot and so being cuddled up on the couch, all three, watching a movie.  Also, I’m still in my jammies at 11:30.  Which is embarrassing to admit to you, a little, but was pretty much completely humiliating a moment ago when I answered the door.  And it was my sweet neighbor.  WHO WAS GIVING US A PIE.  WITH REAL WHIPPED CREAM.  I’m still in my jammies and my neighbor has already made a pie (WITH REAL WHIPPED CREAM) this morning.

AnyHOO, I’m getting caught up on my friends’ blogs.  I came across a real beauty when I checked in with my friend Katherine Center’s blog.  Katherine is a novelist who has her third book coming out soon.  The first two literally had me laughing through tears.  Smiling while crying is just SO DELICIOUS and she does it just right, so read her books.  Just do, and you can find info on them here on her other website.  Another fabulous thing about Katherine is this.  I saw her recently in Houston and in the middle of a very loud, very fun 40th birthday party for my friend Tracy and her husband, I told Katherine that I’d love to talk to her sometime about writing a book.  She has a family and lots of craziness going on in her life like all of us do and I wanted to just KNOW how she does it.  I mean, seriously, how DOES she do it?  And so she pulled me aside to a quieter part of the room and I asked her ALL SORTS of questions.  Questions about being inspired and imagining characters in my head and loving them or hating them or maybe just trying to understand them before ever even writing a single word about them.  And I asked her about knowing when the time was right and then somehow, if the time IS right, finding the time to make it happen.  And she gave me the MOST wonderful answers, answers that were wonderful because they were honest and from her heart and what is true and right for her, though it may not work for me.  Or then again it may, because I had a feeling, standing there listening to Katherine, that our creative process is remarkably similar, which I love.  It really is one of life’s loveliest moments, bonding with someone over creative things.

So click here to get just a glimpse into Katherine (and yes, that’s her narrating).

And by sharing her video with you, I mean nothing against men, you know I don’t.  I love men.  But the simple truth is that I love being a woman so much.  I love it with the strength and brightness of a thousand suns.  I also love being a girl.  I love it with the purity and sweetness of skirts, tights and mary-janes, all together in perfect harmony.  I just do.

As you prepare to deck the halls sometime soon, enjoy this gem from my dear-friend-that-I’ve-never-met-in-real-life-but-have-a-feeling-we’d-have-a-damn-fine-time-together, Beth.  I have her blog listed over there —-> on the right but here’s the link for you:

http://bethsits.blogspot.com/2009/11/surrender.html

The photo is SO GREAT but it’s Beth’s title of the post that makes it perfection.

Let’s talk about Kindergartners playing basketball, briefly (that “briefly” is sort of an inside joke for anyone who has, well, ever read my blog before. Briefly. That’s quite a chuckle).  Anyway . . .

Eli is on a basketball team with all his little buddies in Kindergarten . . . in our neighborhood league . . . just down the road . . . coached by a few of the dads . . . and, well, as you can see it’s all shaping up to be QUITE ADORABLE.

I’ve watched my kids now in lots of different kinds of team sports and this BY FAR takes the cake.  The other moms and I sit on the sidelines and have these huge, ridiculous smiles on our faces for the entire hour.  Also, there is a LOT of laughing (with the kids, not at them . . . mostly.)  The dads seem to prefer standing to sitting (insert your own comment here about manliness, etc).  Really the only problem I’ve faced is that for whatever reason, I haven’t been able to take any good pictures of the games.  Partly because they are inside a gym with lots of fluorescent lighting and partly because there is so much ambient stuff going on all over the place that the photos just don’t have a simplicity to them that I usually prefer.  And I definitely can’t use them on the blog because it’s also impossible to take a picture of your kid in a basketball game and not get a picture of all the other kids in the game (they tend to SWARM THE BALL).  I’ve crossed some lines in this blog but putting pictures of other peoples’ kids up without asking them hasn’t been one (yet).

The great thing about the league these kids are playing in is this:  Everyone has agreed that if we are going to have 5 and 6 year olds play basketball, we are NOT going to require them to do things that they just physically can’t do at that age.  For example, dribble.  I mean, yes, they can all dribble a basketball while they are standing there and even while they run down the court during practice.  They dribble quite well, really.  But there is something about the game starting, the other team pressing down on them, the crowd cheering on the sidelines, the adrenaline of it all . . . the dribbling immediately goes out the window.  They grab that ball and just run with it.  The coaches occasionally throw out a cheerful “Dribble that ball!” and the kid stops, dribbles the ball briefly, picks it back up and starts running with it again.  This, my friends, is ONE OF THE CUTEST THINGS IN KIDS’ SPORTS.  I think all of us moms watching will be a little bit heartbroken the day we go to one of their basketball games and they’re playing by all the rules.

The other thing about the games that keeps us laughing is what we will call THE SHOOTING OF THE BASKET.  After all the running and swarming and tripping over each other to get to the basket, some lucky boy has a chance to MAKE A SHOT.  The defensive team’s coach is saying “Get your hands up!” and the other team’s coach is saying “Take the shot, take the shot!”

And just like that, time freezes.  The boy with the ball is holding it close and looking at the basket.  Studying it, really.  The kids around him are looking at him, eyebrows raised and half-smiles on their faces.  The parents are holding their breaths.  Will he or won’t he?  Will he . . . or won’t he . . . ?

He will!  Time starts back up again and the crowd, OF COURSE, goes wild.  That’s the other thing about Pee-Wee Basketball, everyone cheers when ANY kid makes a basket, regardless of which team the kid is on.  And inevitably, the player who made the basket turns to the sidelines, searching out his mom in the crowd.  He makes eye-contact, she gives him the thumbs-up sign and he runs to catch up with the rest of the team, already down at the other end of the court, swarming THAT basket.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the fact that at several different points in the games, various players just spontaneously cartwheel on the court.  BECAUSE THEY ARE SIX YEAR OLDS AND SIX YEAR OLDS ARE COMPLETELY FANTASTIC.

So here is one photo I think I can get away with using since I’ve just cropped their heads right off.

There are several things I like about this photo.  The first is that the kid there on the far left is wearing old-school Chuck Taylors which I think are, like, the original shoe of basketball, so that’s just cool.  The second thing is that the last kid there on the right, who just happens to be my sweet Eli, was clearly just instructed to “Stand in a straight line.”  You can tell by the way he’s holding his arms.  LOVE THAT KID.  But my favorite part of the photo is that kid second from the left in the bright blue shorts.  I mean come on, people.  That wedgie wasn’t gonna pick itself.

Hi there, Happy Tuesday! Oh wait, it’s Wednesday.  Ah, well, it doesn’t matter because I have two, and only two, things to tell you about today.

The first is this little gem I photographed while I was running this morning.  PLEASE DO PARDON THE FOUL, FOUL LANGUAGE.  I didn’t write it and would be heartbroken if my kids read it.  Though, to be perfectly frank, I have been known to lob the f-bomb on occasion, despite my Tia Ruth’s wise, wise words when I was young: If you have to use a curse word, then your vocabulary simply isn’t large enough.  Which I agree with, most of the time.  But sometimes a good old fashioned bad word does just the trick, you know what I mean?  ANYWAY, here’s what I saw written on the 1st Street Bridge today:

So foul.  This, to say the least, is NOT gratiffiti.  What it IS, however, is proof that our world is not in danger any time soon of being taken over by complete and total idiots.  If I’d had a big red sharpie with me, I don’t know that I could’ve resisted correcting it, maybe even adding a little teacher-esque note at the bottom (“Please take time to check your work” or “This is what happens when you play hooky on the day we learn about the difference between the possessive form of a pronoun and compound contractions”).  These punks put this same message all over the trail; I saw it three other times on my run.  The first time I saw it, I thought to myself “Really?  We’re f—ed?  Are you going to beat us all down with bad grammar and poor spelling?”  By the second, third and fourth times, it seemed SO pathetic that I actually started to wonder if it was some uber-edgy attempt by some misguided activist to show how poorly our school systems are failing our kids (seriously, you truly never know in Austin).  Next thing you know, these little criminals will be mixing up affect and effect, or god forbid then and than.

*By the way, I am fully aware that my blog posts are FULL of what are technically considered grammatical errors.  These are all, I repeat ALL (okay, mostly all, I repeat MOSTLY ALL) intended.  And meant to contribute to the sometimes-annoying-but-hopefully-endearing-conversational tone of my blog.  Like see that last sentence?  Incomplete!  BUT CREATIVELY IMPORTANT (again, with the incomplete sentence, that’s a big one for me).  HOWEVER, please do alert me any time you see an error in my blog.  I will be eternally grateful even though I will most likely be somewhere where I cannot actually fix the error for the next, oh say, NINE HOURS.  So I will be the one twitching in the corner and looking all stabby until I can get home to my computer and edit the post.*

AND THE SECOND THING I want to tell you today, and the real reason I entitled this post Cynics need not read, is because I have found a blog that makes me smile every time I read it.  Every.  Time.  Check it out, unless you don’t need any more smiles in your day (in which case, whoa, who ARE you?).

1000 Awesome Things

Enjoy, friends.

Last Saturday, my husband and I were leaving for Houston for a birthday party.  My dear friend Tracy and her husband were both celebrating turning forty fabulous and we were all packed and ready to go.  On time.  ON TIME.  Do you know us personally?  If so, you know that us leaving on time for anything is . . . well, what’s the point of even discussing it because we never come out all that well in the end.  Just trust me on this, we were pretty pumped.  By gosh, we ZIPPED closed that suitcase in our bedroom, smiled smugly at one another and said something along the lines of Wow, I can’t believe we are leaving on time!

WHY?  WHY MUST I NEVER LEARN?

Right about then I heard this muffled little bark.  A Rosie bark, for sure, but not her usual one.  After a few minutes, we pinpointed the sound to be coming from under our back deck.  And by back deck, I mean a bunch of 2×4’s nailed together about a foot above the ground for the sole purpose, apparently, of housing the neighborhood raccoons and possums (and, for a brief time last summer, an armadillo).  There was no way to see her under there but we could hear her barking and shuffling around.  Because my husband is a man and I am a woman, our conversation went something like this:

Him:  She’ll be fine.  If she found her way under there, she can find her way out.

Me:  What if she’s stuck?  Or hurt?  WHOA, did you hear that?  I think it was a groan of pain.

Him:  She’s not stuck.  There’s probably a raccoon in there so she’s being stubborn and won’t come out.

Me:  But, but, but, but . . . we can’t just LEAVE her under there.  What if she’s bleeding or has a broken leg?  See now, she’s gone silent, maybe she’s in a state of shock from the pain of her broken limbs.

Him:  (sigh).  Okay.  We’ll get her out. (Goes into house to change out of his nice clothes and into something appropriate for getting a small dog out from under a very dirty, narrow space under a back deck).

By now the kids and our wonderful sitter BethAnn (I’ve told you about Melanie; just wait until I tell you about BethAnn . . . yes, we have TWO count them TWO amazing sitters, I hesitate to even admit it because I really do want you all to like me and not resent me for having TWO count them TWO amazing sitters) have come to the back deck to investigate.  Not surprisingly, they are on MY side in the should-we-or-should-we-not-get-Rosie-out-from-under-the-deck debate.  And so we begin.

On one side of the deck, my husband preps for, well, pulling the wood up from the deck.  Eli observes.

While on the other side of the deck, Zach prepares for “going in.”

Yes, he’s going to crawl in under the deck to see if he can see Rosie and tell us where she is.  This is to minimize, hopefully, the number of pieces of wood we have to pry up from the deck itself.  And no, I didn’t tell him to salute like that; he did it all on his own and IT IS WHY I LOVE HIM SO.

So here’s the entrance point:

Full disclosure here.  I totally balked at this but his dad said “No, no send him in.  It’s an adventure for him.”  And even though I felt very twitchy about it, I was all OH OKAY, crawl in under there with a bunch of bugs and rats and a hurt dog and quite possibly a very freaked-out mama raccoon with sharp claws.  Go on, have your adventure, I’ll just go lie in the closet in the fetal position until it’s over.

But I didn’t.  Instead I walked slowly along the deck above Zach, asking continually “Are you there?  Are you okay?  What do you see?  Do you want to come out?  If you want to come out, it’s okay, just tell me, you can come out.”  But he was just calmly describing stuff he saw down there (Hey, there’s a bunch of our wiffle balls down here, cool.) until eventually we heard his sweet little voice, all full of triumph, shout I see her!  I see Rosie!

Okay.  So now we knew where she was and could take out the right plank of wood to get to her.  Which my husband did (with a crowbar, which is the silver lining to the whole thing because what man doesn’t like an excuse to use a crowbar?  If I were him, I would have roared while I did it, or at least stood up and beat my chest or something).  Eli stood by with a net to catch the big, mean, raccoon that we were afraid would also jump out when we pried the wood up.  And there she was, our little Rosie, right where Zach described.  Can you see her little head there?

I know you can’t see Eli straight on, but you CAN tell he’s got a big smile on his face.  So we lifted that little dog out, really carefully, just in case she was hurt.

Okay, now here’s where it gets tricky.  And by tricky, I mean me having to admit that I was wrong.  And my husband was . . . right.  THERE, I’VE SAID IT.  I mean, we can’t know FOR SURE whether she was stuck or just didn’t WANT to come out, but what we do know is this.  She definitely was not hurt.  And the moment we pulled her oh-so-gently out of there, this was the expression she had on her face:

Now if that’s not an Oh-my-gosh-y’all-I-just-had-the-funnest-adventure-under-the-deck look, I don’t know what is.  I mean, she’s smiling.  Which is even more obvious when you see the way her face changed about three seconds later when I said to her “Well, it looks like it’s time for a bath.”

Also known as the “Will you make me have a bath even though I’ve been bred for thousands of years to have these pleading eyes that get me whatever I want?” expression.  But she must have had SO much fun under that deck, that she tolerated the bath pretty well.

And I think she downright ENJOYED the kids drying her off.

A few minutes later, we were in the car to Houston, Rosie was all clean and drying in the sun on the porch and the kids were doing crafts with BethAnn at the kitchen table.

And, apparently, a few minutes after THAT, Rosie was back under the deck.

In what can only be described as the HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK, my four-year-old daughter drew this:

Mermaids.  Two mermaids and a little baby mermaid, too.  Mermaids with sweet smiles and cute little tails, coming out of the ocean to say hello.  But we’d all be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the thing about this picture that makes it SO PALPABLY PERFECT that I could just cry (in fact I think I did, a little, when I first saw it).

The bikini tops.

Now I don’t want to attribute too much to one little drawing . . . but I have to say that those bikini tops singlehandedly make me believe in all things sweet and pure and magical in this world.  I cannot imagine a time in the future, no matter how low or rotten, that looking at those very bikini tops won’t make things better, even if just better enough to get me through the next few moments of whatever deep hole in which I happen to find myself on that given day.

And might I add that I am going to have to look at a photo of that drawing because Sophie gave it to our wonderful sitter Melanie to give to her friend KD for her birthday.  I have every hope and lots of faith that KD will find it as inspiring as I did, especially considering the fact that she knows my kids AND gave them free sno-cones all summer (in other words, SHE’S AWESOMELY FANTASTIC).

Meanwhile, on the floor of the dining room, Eli was working on his own creation.  Eli does his best creative work on the floor; the conventional table-and-chair limitations must stifle his artistry.  So he took a leaf from our yard and turned it into some sort of soldier or ninja or knight, just whatever kind of warrior uses a sword.  You can plainly see the sword in the belt of the man, er, leaf, er . . . leaf-man?

I know the hat looks cowboy-esque, but  . . . no.  At any rate, we can all agree that we are not gonna mess with this guy, what with his MAD EYEBROWS and SERIOUS STRAIGHT-LINE MOUTH.

As long as I’m discussing creative projects, I’ll let you know that Zach is writing a book.  Every day he reads me the new pages he’s written, complete with illustrations (OF COURSE).  The first day, I sat down to listen, thinking “Oh, how cute.”  And then he read something that made me laugh.  Really hard.  Then he did it again.  All of a sudden, I realized that it wasn’t just that he was reading me this book and oh-isn’t-it-cute.  It was that the book was good.  And funny.  And that reminded me of me reading things I wrote to my mom when I was little, which I just wrote about last week (here).

Have I mentioned that I love my kids? I love them so much that when I really, really, really think about how much I love them, I am filled with a lightness and warmth so pure and perfect that I just know I’m getting a glimpse right into Heaven.  Have I mentioned that these children, these three stunning creatures that started their lives inside of me, offer me the truest joy I’ll ever know, every single day that I wake up and see their little faces?

Well, if I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m pretty sure it’s been implied, right?

We have a little craft cabinet in the playroom where we keep all the coloring books and markers and stickers and gluesticks and pipecleaners and playdoh and WOW, no wonder that cabinet is always kind of a huge mess.  But a good, fun mess that SMELLS LIKE CRAYONS.  Mmmmm, nothing better than that.  The last time I was in a craft store, I was all stressed out about some job I was trying to get finished and I was hurrying past the kids’ section.  And I spied one of those 64-Crayon boxes, you know the ones . . . with the sharpener in the back.  So I stopped and walked over to it and opened it up.  I took a deep breath in, savoring that crayon smell, and things seemed a little better all of a sudden.  It’s not going to change the world or anything, smelling a new box of crayons, but it will help you stop for a second and collect yourself.

So anyway, the craft cabinet is great because we shove all our crafts in there.  Except lately, I’ve been leaving a box of markers and a coloring book out on the floor in my office.  When Zach is reading with his Daddy after dinner, Eli and Sophie have gotten in the habit of coming in here if I’m working and they just sit on the floor and color.  So I’m sitting here typing or printing or some other kind of cut-and-paste-sometimes-I’m-just-pretending-I’m-still-in-Kindergarten-type work and they are coloring their little coloring book, quiet as a pair of little mice.  It’s really nice, in that way it’s nice to be in the same room as someone else, both of you working in a companionable silence.  Even though there’s no talking or interaction, it’s nice to just have someone else there.  And for some of that time, I end up just stopping what I’m doing and watching them, all quiet and earnest in their project.  Watching them like that is some time very well-spent.  Here’s what I’m seeing right now when I look down:

By the way, I use that term “my office” very loosely here.  My office is the back half of our mudroom.  So I share it with the washer and dryer and all the coats and backpacks and, you know, mudroom stuff.  In fact, if we pull back from that prior photo just a little, you’ll see what kind of operation I’m really running over here, in my “office.”

Well, the dog’s gotta eat somewhere, right?

I’m taking a hip hop class.  So is my 8 year old son.  It’s not the same class, though it’s the same studio and the same teacher (Karin and she’s fantastic, FANTASTIC I say).

It started like this.  Zach and I started watching So You Think You Can Dance together two years ago (this is NOT Dancing With The Stars; it is a different show entirely).  We got TOTALLY into it and we’d talk about which dancers were the best and who should get kicked off and whether we agreed with the judges.  Zach’s favorite dance, to this day, was this group number where they were all dressed like zombies and were all bloody and creepy (I need to show him the Thriller video, right?).  And just like the rest of America, we also started to learn at least a TINY bit about the various dancing styles.  Hip hop was ALWAYS our favorite.  We’d rewind it and watch it again and again and we’d try the moves out and really it was all very bonding for us.

So I found out about the hip hop class for his age and asked him if he wanted to take it.  Oh THE SMILE on that kid’s face when I asked him that.  So we went in to sign him up and we were so palpably excited about it that the woman working there looked at me and said “Well you KNOW we have an adult hip hop class too, don’t you?”  Hot Diggety, we’re in business.

He goes Monday and I go Tuesday.  We both come out of class all giddy and happy.  We compare moves at home.  And I think, just maybe, that we’re even both getting a little better.  I’m telling you, IT IS CHOCK FULL OF FABULOSITY.

I felt kind of silly about signing up, seeing as how I’ve never taken a dance class in my life.  That and the fact that when I tell people I’m taking it, they laugh, like maybe I’m making a joke.  So I say “You should try it with me; it’s really, really fun.”  And they mumble something “mumble mumble mumble  . . . out of my comfort zone  . . . mumble mumble mumble.”

Here’s some big news.  Learning to dance hip hop at age 38 is not in MY comfort zone either, by any stretch of the imagination.  But isn’t that the point?  Just to at least GLANCE outside our comfort zone every so often?  It’s not like I’m committing to climbing Mt. Everest or something here.  Just a small reach outside the zone, that’s all that’s needed.  And that’s why this class was so perfect.  Karin told us in our first class that hip hop is challenging because it’s counter-intuitive to the way we are used to moving.  You move your body unnaturally and you shift your weight around to the opposite of what you are used to.  It messes with your balance.  So even for a person who actually has dance experience, hip hop is out of the comfort zone, making it the perfect class to start with.  Because at least initially, we were all lost.  But if you can get used to it and learn the moves, that’s why it LOOKS SO COOL, because it’s unexpected, the way the moves go.  And by the way, I don’t have it down or anything.  But Karin does and it looks amazing.

The other reason I get a kick out of it is because I feel like “I’m taking a hip hop class” could be the new “I’m taking a tap dance class.”  I seem to recall when I was growing up, there were moms who got all crazy and took tap dancing.  Wasn’t that, like, a thing?

But mainly, it’s an hour a week where I get some exercise, laugh a lot (and all at myself which really is SO good for us) AND give myself some great material for bonding with Zach.  And, really, anything to give me an excuse to listen to Timbaland.

6:00 – 9:00 a.m.:

Wake-up.  Sophie is next to me, her right leg somehow inside my pajama bottoms.  Untangle.  Start the day.

Start a load of laundry.  Let the dog out.  Start the coffee.  Ask kids to get dressed.

Coffee is setting in.  Ask kids to get dressed, but this time with feeling.  Check email.  Fish dirty jeans out of hamper for Zach to wear because it’s 48 degrees outside and even though he has 17 different kinds of shorts, he only has one pair of jeans that fits.  Tweet about it (but a funnier version).

Give Zach breakfast (Fruity Pebbles DON’T YOU JUDGE ME) then he’s out the door with Daddy for school.

Feed Sophie and Eli breakfast (yogurt, then Fruity Pebbles cereal SEE ABOVE), ask them repeatedly to please put on the clothes THAT I HAVE LAID OUT FOR THEM ON THEIR BEDS.

Put on running clothes (optimism!), brush teeth (it’s the small victories, really, that feel so good), answer emails that have started coming in about school stuff and board meetings and pee-wee basketball.  Stand at kitchen island and make appointments to have our carpets cleaned, my hair cut, the dog’s annual trip to the vet.  Beg the children to put on their clothes.

Put Sophie’s clothes on her.  Put Eli’s clothes on him.  Murmur things under my breath like ” . . .6 year old who won’t dress himself . . . where have I gone wrong . . . it’s all my fault, it really is . . . “

Take them to school.

9:00 a.m. – Noon:

GO RUNNING.  Does anyone really doubt that should be in all-caps?  Especially given the 60 degree weather with not one cloud in the sky?

Go get new cleats for the boys (cut to me, eleven hours later, with the one old, dirty cleat that I took in to determine sizes still in my purse).

Buy jeans for Zach.  Realize they all need clothes.  Buy them all clothing (huge sale this week at Old Navy, people!).

Other random and bothersome errands that didn’t involve fun or interest of any kind.

Noon-2:00p.m.:

Go pick up Sophie from school.  Make us lunch (vegetable soup, the alphabet kind but still, makes up just a BIT for the Fruity Pebbles).  Spell out our names with the letters in the soup; general merriment ensues.

Tell Sophie it’s time for ballet.  She flips out that she DOESN’T WANT TO GO TO BAWAY.  I HATE BAWAY.  PLEASE MOMMY PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO TO BAWAY.  I fold like a wet noodle, too tired to put up the fight today.  Maybe next week.  But probably not.

2:00 – 6:00 p.m.:

Go pick up Eli.  Take Eli and Sophie to my mom’s house for their weekly Yay We Get To Hang Out With Dammah time.  More general merriment ensues (today involved coloring, raspberry sorbet and cartoons . . . I mean, seriously, it’s a wonder they were willing to come back home at all).

Go pick up Zach.  Take him to Hip Hop Class.  During the class, go get a cup of tea next door.  Take my laptop in to work on a project due Wednesday.  Instead, sit there with my laptop closed, drinking my tea and looking out the window.  Almost fall asleep.

Go get Eli and Sophie.  Go pick up Zach from class.  Go home.  Zach does his homework without being asked.  Without being asked.  GOOD BOY.

Feed them dinner in roughly 7 minutes (hot dogs and apple slices, meh, it could be worse) while changing Eli for his first  basketball practice.  Pile them in the car, take them to basketball practice.  My husband meets us there.  Eli loves the practice.  LOVES it.

6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.:

Home.  Change laundry.  Fold laundry.  CURSE LAUNDRY.  Wonder why in the world I thought the kids needed any new clothes with all these OTHER clothes all over the place.  Start bath for kids.  My husband finishes their bath while I look through backpacks and decide which art from today to keep and which to ditch.  Pick up legos.

Read books to Sophie.  Fall asleep in the chair with her on my lap.  Take one of those annoying 17 minute naps.

SHOWER (really if that’s all I did today, it would have been a red-letter day).

All clean and cozy in my jammies.  Then I remember my promise to myself to blog more this week.

10:00 p.m.:

And so here I am.  And that was my day.  There was stuff I didn’t include, like calls to friends and sitting in carpool lines and chatting with my mom in her driveway and getting the mail and on and on and now you see why I was leaving some of this stuff out because then it’d be even longer and more boring than it is right now.

So it wasn’t glamorous.  It wasn’t easy.  And it wasn’t even one of my more busy days.  I had a to-do list for today and about 20% of it got done, though 20% is actually pretty good for knocking stuff off a to-do list.  It’s like batting averages.  Even the best guys don’t even come close to hitting the ball half the time.  What did happen was this:  Laughing with Sophie over vegetable soup letters, being so proud of Zach for doing his homework without being asked and watching Eli try a sport he’s never played before with confidence and a sense of joy.  Between those things and the 20% AND getting a shower?  C’mon! I’m pinching myself over here.

Meanwhile, my husband just walked in here and asked me if I ate any dinner.  After a long pause while I tried to remember, we figured I must not have.  Now I think I’m too sleepy to eat . . . though Fruity Pebbles sound pretty good.

How was YOUR day?  You know I’d love to hear about it.

Okay QUICK.  If I don’t post these Halloween pictures tonight, I’ve lost my chance. It already feels like it was lifetimes ago so if I wait until tomorrow everyone will be all HALLOWEEN? WHAT? I’M TOO BUSY DECORATING MY CHRISTMAS TREE TO BOTHER WITH HALLOWEEN PICTURES.

I dressed up as a kitty cat.  I want to add a disclaimer because I usually like to sort of go-all-out for Halloween and the “kitty cat” is always the lame-o costume some mom wears at the last minute by putting on all black and drawing on some whiskers (either that or it’s the SUPER-SEXY cat costume but firstly, I’m WAY past pulling that off and secondly, Halle Berry ruined it for any other woman, ever).  But anyway, Sophie decided SHE wanted to be a kitty cat and then she asked ME to be her kitty-cat-mommy.  The point is there is no possible way to say no to this:

And so it came to be that I was a kitty cat, too.  We also had a ninja and a biker.  Oh, and for a very brief time, a little dog also dressed as a biker.  But as you can see from the photo, she wasn’t too happy about it.

I’m gonna keep that photo around for the next time someone claims that dogs don’t have facial expressions.

The trick-or-treating was indescribably great.  Kids were laughing and running wild from house to house.  And all the parents would stand at the curb and watch the kids run up to the door, giggling with their friends, and yell “Trick or Treat!” and then run back and show us what they got.  You know what it was?  IT WAS REALLY FUN.

But the best part, the part my kids talk about for the entire month preceding Halloween, is coming back home.  We all sit on the front porch and the kids empty their bags to check out their haul.  And we eat candy.

We eat LOTS of candy.

Because here’s the thing.  We used to try to limit it and then parse out the bag piece by piece for, really, like several WEEKS until eventually we are getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving and I finally throw it out because I’m so sick of looking at those Halloween bags on the kitchen counter.  So now, we let them eat all the candy they want on Halloween night.  NO LIMIT.  Which is very freeing, actually.  All night long, the kids are asking Can I eat this? and We’re saying You sure can! So they gorge themselves until they pretty much pass out from exhaustion.  And then we keep the bags around for a few obligatory days, and after that, well, the candy just magically fades away . . .

So we had a GRAND time.  And I KNOW we had fun because we woke up this morning with wigs strewn about the house, a candy hangover and make-up still on our faces.  That’s remnants of a GOOD party, folks.

I hope y’all had a grand time as well!  And maybe got to relax just a little today because P.S. it is November 1st.  That officially means you have just enough time to take a few breaths and turn around twice before THANKSGIVINGCHRISTMASANDAHAPPYNEWYEAR is here.

Here’s the thing.  We write these entries, us bloggers, and even though we still sort of can’t believe anyone is reading them, we hit “publish” and send them out into the world.  And then we wait.  Or at least that’s what I do, I wait (while going about my life, of course. I don’t literally just sit here at my computer and WAIT, at least not all the time).  For what, you may ask?  Well, specifically, I am waiting for feedback in the form of tweets or emails or face-to-face or someone writing on my facebook wall or, of course, comments.  More generally, I’m waiting for . . . what, exactly?  I was going to write validation or approval, but that’s not quite right.  Too needy.  It’s more that I’m waiting for that connection, for someone to let me know that for a brief moment, the space between us was bridged.

It’s not that I wouldn’t write if no one was reading it because I would.  I’ve done that my whole life, just written things down.  It’s necessary.  And it’s rewarding all by itself.  But NOT as rewarding as someone reading it and having a truly authentic response to it.

The first person to have that kind of response to my writing was my mom.  When I was little, I’d write these stories and we’d sit on her bed and I would read them to her.  And she would have these very effusive reactions, like she’d applaud me and say “I loved it!  I want to hear more” or she’d have this big smile on her face and say “Fabulous.  It’s just fabulous.”  And she always did that for me.  I don’t remember a single time in my whole life that I wanted to read something to her that she didn’t stop whatever she was doing and listen to me.  These days, parenting books tell mommies and daddies to FOSTER THEIR KIDS’ CREATIVITY.  My mom knew that by instinct I guess because that’s definitely what she was doing.  She saw something that I loved to do (and was maybe even a little tiny bit good at doing) and she gave me lots of positive reinforcement for doing it.  AND BY GOLLY IT WORKED.

When I was in high school, I wrote a lot of poetry (hey, it was the 80’s; we all did things we regret).  My mom noticed that this local magazine was soliciting poets to send in their work for possible publication.  She showed me the magazine and encouraged me to send in some poems.  Well, that seemed CRAZY and SCARY but she ended up talking me into it.  We went through my poems and picked out a few together and I typed them out (on a typewriter, hello 1986) and mailed them in.  AND BY GOLLY THEY GOT PUBLISHED.

After that, when my mom would introduce me to people, at some point in the conversation she’d say “She’s a writer.”  And my heart would kind of pound and I would blush and feel like I was some kind of impostor, someone just pretending to be a writer.  Later I would say “Mom, why do you say that?  I’m not a writer.”  And she’d say “Oh, you’re a writer all right.”  AND BY GOLLY, I STARTED TO, JUST MAYBE, BELIEVE HER.

Maybe that’s why I love to write so much.  It’s definitely why I love getting feedback.  That feedback comes in many forms.  When I was in college, I was enrolled in a writing seminar where we had an assignment each week and on the day of class, we would sit around this big beautiful antique table in a room on campus that had stained glass windows.  The sun would pour in those windows and we’d go around the table and read what we had written.  Out loud.  It was terrifying.  And amazing.  We’d give each other feedback, some good and some not so good, but we’d all keep writing.  About two-thirds of the way through the semester, I read a piece I’d written that was very raw and honest and that I felt pretty vulnerable about reading aloud.  When I finished, everyone at the table was quiet.  After a while, one person looked at me and said “Yes.”  That is one Yes I won’t be forgetting.  Ever.

I guess this little essay would be more effective if it was in the liner notes of some best-selling novel and I was some outta-control-successful writer who was thanking everyone who ever believed in me.  As it is, I’m just another blogger trying to carve out my little slice of time to write, hoping to find some readers out there who might relate to something I have to say.

So, yeah, I still have trouble thinking of myself as a writer, despite all my mom’s hard work to the contrary.  And she’s working on it still; she calls or emails me anytime I’ve gone more than 2 days without blogging, wondering when the next installment is coming.  And I tell her, or at least I try to tell her, how much that means to me.  It authenticates me as a writer when she does that, when she lets me know that the first thing she does every morning when she turns on her computer is check to see if I’ve written anything new.  Because what does it mean to be a writer?  Does it mean you get paid to write?  God, I hope not.  That’s a pretty bright line and I fall on the non-writer side of it.

I don’t know how to define writer.  But I do know I love to do it.  Writing makes me feel whole and connected to the world.  It is a way to document my life, to write a sort of history for myself and my family.  Sometimes I imagine my kids’ kids’ kids’ kids reading this stuff and feeling connected to a great-great grandmother they never knew.  Even if the writing isn’t all that great (and is, as is usually the case, rather sappy and rambling), what if I am able, somehow, to give them a sense of our family and how we spent our days?  What if some great-great-great-great granddaughter reads something I wrote and feels, oh I don’t know, like a KINDRED SOUL.  You have to admit that’d be PRETTY DARN WONDROUS.

Well, this was a very long (and didn’t even have any pictures, though I have a feeling I’ll make up for that tomorrow with Halloween photos) way of saying two things.  One, thank you to my mom for all the times you called and said “Oh you need to help me write something, I know you can make it sound just right.”  And all the times you told me over the years when your birthday was coming up “Don’t buy me anything; just write me a letter or a story or a poem, just something written by you.”  Thank you, Mom, for the times when I handed you something to read, you read it in silence, then looked up at me and I could tell by the look in your eyes that I pegged it.

And secondly, thank-you to anyone who has gotten this far in this entry because MY GOSH, I DO GO ON AND ON.  But seriously, I look at my little stats page every morning to see how many times my blog was visited the day before.  And even though some of that number are people who accidently got sent to my blog by googling “King Julian” and “Ben 10″ and so probably click right off immediately, I know some of you read every post.  It just means more to me than I can even try to say.  I owe ya, I really do.