Morning at the museum

Lookie where we were today!

Is that the Oval Office?  Looks like it, but it’s actually a replica at the Clinton Presidential Center.  Liv, my mother, and I spent a couple of hours down there today.

The purpose of the trip was to see an exhibit of art made from Legos.  It was just one room, but there were a number of sculptures and accompanying photographs that included the sculptures somewhere within the scene.  They didn’t necessarily place the coordinating pieces side by side, so we had fun matching up the sculptures with the photographs.

Whenever I take Liv to see art, I ask her to tell me which piece is her favorite.  In order to answer my question, she has to look at every single piece in the gallery.  Sneaky mom.  I usually also ask her to tell me why it’s her favorite, which then gets her looking closer at color, form, etc.

Today, Liv’s favorite piece was an umbrella.  I asked her why, she said it was cool that you could make an umbrella out of Legos.  (Not a very detailed answer, but I had to agree – it IS cool that someone made an umbrella out of Legos.)

This dress was my mother’s favorite.  She liked the way that the artist showed the movement of the dress using the plastic bricks.

While we were there, we also checked out an exhibit of gifts made to the Clintons by heads of state from around the world.

After viewing the exhibits, we grabbed a bite to eat at 42, the museum restaurant.  It gets its name from the fact that Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States, and also the 42nd governor of Arkansas.  Liv felt all fancy drinking her water from a stemmed glass.

It’s a new year, y’all

Last night we said goodbye to 2012 and welcomed 2013 with open arms.  I have the typical wishes for a simpler lifestyle, a clean house, and a slimmer midsection.  I’ll try my darndest to make those happen, but the reality is that I’ll probably fall short and find myself 12 months from now wishing for those exact same things for the next year.  I’m okay with that.  Circle of life and fallen expectations and all of that.

But what I need more than anything out of coming year is a year without major sickness in our family.   Last year held a lot of good byes for me.  Our Christmas gift list was short three names.  Alzheimer’s and stage 4 cancer took my father away, body and mind. And then just a few months later, my grandmother was in the hospital, presumably for pneumonia.  She made it through and back home again, only to die suddenly from something unrelated.  And just a month before Christmas, Tony’s grandmother also died. I can make myself okay if I slip up and don’t get my house cleaned out or improving my exercise habits, but I absolutely need a year without hospitals or funerals.

I’m no longer dreaming of a white Christmas

It seems like forever since I’ve posted.  EEEK! I just checked and my last post was nearly a month ago!  Wow. 

So much has happened in that month.  It’s been a whirlwind of Christmas play practices, PTA projects, stuff going on at  Liv’s school.  And the cookie party.

The cookie party is an annual event at our house.  I bake up a jillion butter cookies and invite all of Liv’s friends to come over and decorate them.  Tony is the icing man, mixing and tinting icing for all the kids to use.  We decided that next year, Tony gets a theme song.  “Ice, Ice , Baby”  We’ll start rolling the dum-dum-dum dum-dum dum dum when we brings out the icing. 

Sometimes we have as many as 30 kids decorating cookies.  It’s a major undertaking getting ready for the party. This year I made 42 dozen rolled cookies in preparation.  That’s, like, over 500 cookies. 

But this year it got even more complicated when a friend called and asked if I could watch her two oldest kids for a couple of days while she was in the hospital.  The overstressed part of me was screaming, “Nooooo, not this week!” on the inside, but luckily the adult part of me was the one who told her that it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

I’m so glad I did.  But that’s another post.  That was such a heartbreaking but soul changing experience that I can’t do it justice in this quick recap.  I’m going to skip to Christmas.

Which was beautiful.  Liv was in a small Christmas play at church on the 23rd.  Then a candlight Christmas Eve service.  And then Santa came and left presents at our house.  And then we exchanged gifts.  Liv got tons of Lego Friends. Tony got a big ol’ popcorn maker.  I got tons of cheap costume jewelry from Forever 21. (My little girl knows what her mama likes…)

And then, Christmas evening, it snowed.

Like, a lot.

Like, 8-10 inches.

This is what my house looked like by about 6:00 that evening.

But before it snowed, we got a nice coating of ice on all the trees.  The heavy ice and then wet snow on the limbs, coupled with the strong winds, brought trees and power lines down all over the city.  We lost power at 9:00 that evening.  By the next morning, 70% of Little Rock was without electricity.

I don’t think there’s a single house in our neighborhood that doesn’t have at least one branch (or entire tree) down.  At our house, we lost a major branch on the oak tree out front, the tops of many of our beautiful azaleas are now snapped off, and a neighbor’s limb came down and punched a couple of holes in our carport roof.  I consider us to be lucky.  Our next door neighbor had a tree come down and rip the power lines off of her house, and then pulled part of the siding back.  She had a hole (and a broken, twisted window) on the back of her house.

And three houses down, another neighbor had a tree come down onto his house.  Another came down and blocked the road.  Here’s the scene at the back of his house. (Photo taken today, after most of the snow has melted.)

Needless to say, our white Christmas left a major mess all over town. 

As of today (the 29th), we still don’t have power on at our house.  We’re lucky enough to have a generator to keep some lights and the heat and the internet going, but it’s starting to wear thin.

Our dining room has been turned into a tiny efficiency apartment so we can take advantage of the heat from the fireplace.  (We turn the generator off at night and heat with an old-fashioned fire.) 

We moved the dining table out, and in its place we have the mattress from our bed, a small table, a loveseat, some TV trays, and a drying rack.  We have sheets hanging in all the doorways to keep the heat in the dining room as best we can during the night.  I don’t even want to tell you what the rest of the house looks like.  Between furniture we’ve moved out of the dining room and then all the extension cords snaking through the house and all the Christmas gifts not put up yet, it’s CRAZY messed up.  Tony has not gotten a full night sleep yet, as he has to get up several times during the night to stoke the fire or add another log.

We’re running low on firewood and I just found out it’s going to get down to 20 degrees tonight.  Think warm thoughts for us!

Next year, I don’t think I’ll be dreaming of a white Christmas.

This is why we can’t have nice things

Look what happened to my pretty Christmas table centerpiece.

Thank you, bad kitties.

Thankfully, nothing was breakable.  I just smoothed the tablecloth back out and righted the little tree.

I’m considering getting some of that no-slip drawer or cabinet lining and creating an underlayer for all of my tableclothes.  Maybe that will keep them from sliding off so easily.

My Thanksgiving blessing

We were in Orlando for Thanksgiving this year so there was no turkey, no dressing, no dining table filled to capacity with casserole dishes.  Our “let’s buy groceries as we need them” plan backfired, as we lost track of the days and didn’t realize until Thanksgiving evening that we had no yummy food to make for our meal.

So while I read friends’ Facebook posts of the homemade macaroni and cheese, pumpkin pies, and yeast rolls, my own dinner consisted of some slices of salami, cheese, and apples.  And then spoonfuls of peanut butter to supplement, since my belly was still empty.  Everyone else got Eggo waffles.

But even though we missed a bountiful Thanksgiving feast, I did get a Thanksgiving blessing a few days later.

It was on the drive back to Little Rock, when we stopped in at a hotel in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  The next morning, we all headed down to the lobby for the free breakfast.  I let the girls eat at a table by themselves while I drank my coffee and ate my cereal.

I was just about done when an older gentleman one table over looked over at me and said in a thick Mississippi drawl, “Children are a gift.  Tell them every day you love them.”  I nodded in agreement, thinking this was just casual grandpa talk.

The man continued.  He teared up and told me that his own son had died just 6 weeks earlier.  He was 39 and was killed in a motorcycle accident.  “You think they’re precious now.  Well, I gotta tell you, they get more precious each day.”  And he repeated his admonition to tell them every day that I love them.

He told me how he often clashed with his son, becoming frustrated with him when he wouldn’t tow the line and do things the way his father said.  “You know, I’m thinking, I’m the father.  He should just do what I say, right??”  And then he told me of some unsolicited advice he received years ago from an acquaintance, telling him to step back and allow his son to walk his own path.  He said he thought it was meddling at the time, but had come to see the wisdom of the words.

And then he repeated them to me as we sat in the hotel lobby, two strangers having met by chance on a Thanksgiving weekend.

“They might not always do things the way you think they ought to, but that don’t mean it’s not the right way.  There’s more than one right way.”

A beautiful Thanksgiving blessing.

Channeling my inner geezer

Last night I taught Olivia how to play dominoes.  She suggested dominoes as a family game to play, thinking we’d just take turns laying down dominoes with numbers matching the ones already on the table.  But I taught her the real way.

Keeping score with pluses instead of numbers.

Do you see how bad Tony smoked us?  It was shameful.  He did that in just three hands.  I started calling him Mr. 1 Percent Domino.

I laughed about how I was channeling my inner geezer, but really I was feeling all nostalgic about the times I sat around the table playing dominoes with my Granny and Papa.  I cannot count the number of times we all sat around the table at night and played this game until bedtime.  My Granny and Papa aren’t with us any more, but it felt good to bring Olivia into the tradition.

We’re ba-a-a-ack!!!

Somehow we survived a week in Orlando, along with a 2-day drive there and back.  We got back into town yesterday at about 3:00 and we have hardly moved since.

We took my daughter and her BFF from school.  I know… crazy, right?  We figured it would make an extra special birthday present AND it would make the parks easier on us if she had a friend to go on the rides with.

I’ve got about a million vacation photos to wade through.  Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with them here.  (Okay, maybe just a few of them…)  We got a coupon from our resort for a free Shutterfly book.  A day later, a friend emailed me to tell me she had received a coupon for a free Shutterfly book and asked if I wanted that one.  So now it looks like both girls will be getting Shutterfly vacation books.  Yay!!

On a totally unrelated note, I’m contemplating making a large craft-related purchase.  I’m about 95% there.  I dug through my stash of old Christmas and birthday cards and found enough money stuck in there to cover 70% of the $1,000 it will cost me.  All I have to do is just go on to Amazon and click ‘purchase’.  Intrigued yet?  I won’t say anything about what it is until it’s in my hot little hands.

Has it really been two weeks?

Looks like it has, and I’m just popping in to tell you I’m still alive.  In the past two weeks we’ve planned and executed THREE birthday parties for Olivia.  Gosh, that sounds so extreme.  One was a casual party for the family, just cupcakes and Happy Birthday and opening presents.  Then what we termed the “party party” that we invited all of her friends from school, church, and neighborhood to.  Then, the following night, the slumber party. It was our first ever time to host a slumber party.   We had planned on having a very limited guest list, but somehow we ended up with 11.  With Olivia it was 12.  Wow.  I may or may not blog in more detail about that later.

I also managed to bake and ice 96 pumpkin spice cupcakes (with cinnamon cream cheese icing) to take up to teachers and staff at Liv’s school as a thank you for helping out with the Fall Fest.  Gosh, that seems like ages ago.

Oh, and tomorrow morning we’re heading out for a trip to Orlando.  I have a feeling I won’t be finding time to blog again until we’re back.

I’m tired!!

 

Sneaking another one in at the last minute

As if stitching on the child’s costume until right before we walked out of the door to a pre-Halloween event wasn’t last minute enough, how about some Halloween pumpkin crafting – on Halloween itself?

Several weeks before, I bought a bag full of foam pumpkins and the supplies needed to glitter them up. $55 on pumpkins and glue and glitter.  And then Fall Fest happened.  And then I had to make a costume.  Halloween nearly came and went without us actually using the supplies I bought.

Tuesday night we spray painted a base coat on the pumpkins, and the Wednesday when Liv came home from school we made a big ole’ glittery mess on the kitchen floor.  One of her friends came over, and we let her make a pumpkin, too.  Just before heading out to trick or treat, we added these four pumpkins to our front porch.

They’re not as fancy or as polished as other pumpkin crafts I’ve seen out on Pinterest and on other people’s blogs, but they were SO. MUCH. FUN. to make.  It was a crazy crafting free-for-all.  It was a good exercise for me in giving up control, turning the little girl loose and seeing what she came up with.  (The dracula face in the top photo and the white stripe and blue polka dotted one in the bottom photo are both all hers.)  And it turns out that it was a good activity to fill the time between school and trick or treating.  I think we may have discovered a new Halloween tradition.

On a side note, this was the first time I’d used  Martha Stewart glitter and glitter glue.  As much as her pious perfectionist ways really get under my skin, I’ve got to give it to her that she makes good glittering stuff.  I’ll be buying her glitter and glitter glue from now on.

In the nick of time

The death march through the holidays continues.  Friday night was Fall Fest at Liv’s school, which is why this blog has been silent lately.  This was our first annual Fall Fest, and my job coordinating it kind of consumed my life.

In the middle of it all, I also had to pull together Liv’s Halloween costume.  She wore the same cat costume for three years in a row, but this year she finally decided to change it up and go as Hermione instead.

I found the uniform pieces from Justice.  (btw, I HATE that store!! All the flashy, cheaply made clothes that are ridiculously overpriced…)  I made the cape.  The Gryffindor patch was done on the fancy schmancy Bernina embroidery machine that I’m reviewing for Craft Gossip.The outer is black suiting, and it’s lined with burgundy fleece so it’s good and warm for cold weather trick or treating.   Because of the thick lining and the “won’t hold a crease” polyester suiting, I used strips of the suiting to bind the edges.

I was sewing the cape until the very last minute.  She wore it unhemmed to a party Sunday night.  It dragged the ground and collected leaves and all manner of dirt.  Yesterday I trimmed it up and hemmed it, handstitching until the minute we had to walk out of the house to go to Boo at the Zoo.

This morning I realized that we still have a pumpkin that we haven’t carved yet.  And we haven’t decorated any of the 7 foam pumpkins I bought from Michael’s.  The little girl is home sick with a tummy ache today, so maybe we’ll make decorating pumpkins a fun sick day activity.