Summer!!!!!

We did so very much. So. Very. Much. Haven't even edited pictures until today! We went to DisneyWorld, Las Vegas, and Disneyland, all within three weeks. Wowzers. Crappers. Gee willickers. And some other words that aren't appropriate for this here blog that my very own mother and grandmother read. Not going to be a lot of words. Just pictures. 'Cause I'm tired. That's why.

Oldest. Too cool. 

Youngest. A bit of a tyrant. 

A waterfall and shades. Ultimate cool. 

Son. Only son. Mother's only son. Poor guy. So many girls. So. Many. Girls. 

My own personal mother. DisneyWorld companion. Footer of bill.  

Pool at the resort. Kids favorite thing. Why did we go to the parks? 

Contemplative and sunburned by the pool. 

We love our Rebels. Suck it Dawgs. 

Precious second child. Only nice person in this whole house. 

Fly across the country. Disneyland. Wow. Anaheim is much nicer than Orlando. Plus also the weather is better. Plus also when spanking your kids in public in California prepare to defend your rights. Plus also no one owns guns. Plus also my dad carried like four with him in the car. Plus also at least he didn't experience major road rage. 

I love Disneyland a million times more than DisneyWorld. Sorry. 

Love a girl in a hat. 

Frontierland. Home of Big Thunder Mountain. Favorite ride of all time. The one in Disneyland is so much better than the one in DisneyWorld. Much more realistic bats and bombs. 

Big Thunder Mountain. I bow to your superiority in all matters roller coaster. 

Also Big Thunder Ranch had very delicious BBQ. I mean, good for Southern barbecue, to say nothing of it being in California. Those people eat a lot of tofu. And bean sprouts. And quinoa. I think that's a kind of duck but I'm not sure. 

Another girl in a hat. Same girl. Same hat. Different angle of pretty. 

Another girl in a hat. Different girl. Different hat. My hat. She took it. I was sad.  Cuter on her anyway.

Bridge at Tom Sawyer Island. Very sway-ie. Vewy scawy.

Simba made her feel safe on the giant ferris wheel. 

Adventureland!!!!! Love it so very much. Cars world.  

Oh, Tow Mater, how I love thee and thy rambunctious tractors. 

Paradise Pier. Grandest place on earth. A full pub underneath it, looking over the lake. Glorious.

A Wooden Spoon

Things Remembered, Things Forgot

My youngest daughter stuck a plastic sword through the cabinet pull tonight, declaring victory over her enemies,  and suddenly I remembered a wooden spoon. My grandmother’s kitchen was a tiny thing; even in my memory it is tiny. You know how things always seem bigger when you remember them than they actually were? Well, I remember her kitchen as tiny and pictures confirm that my memory is correct. In her tiny kitchen, the cabinets under the sink were held closed by a wooden spoon. I am not sure whether the spoon was there to keep her grandkids out from under the kitchen sink or whether the doors did not stay closed on their own. It matters not because in my memory, that spoon was vital to the workings of my grandmother’s kitchen. She no longer lives in the house where I visited her for the first half of my childhood; the only way I can remember it is to look at pictures. It was not until I was an adult with children of my own that I realized how important that house was to me. My parents and I would drive a grueling six hours from Slidell to Oxford; my dog and I would be crammed in the backseat next to golf clubs and suitcases. Our car was tiny back then; hatchbacks were all the rage and they were not designed for three people. The backseat was an afterthought, but it was just big enough for a little kid and a bunch of grown up people stuff. I suffered through those Friday night drives, content in the knowledge that one of my favorite people in the world would be waiting at the end for me, silhouetted by her porch light.

I’m not sure how she always knew right when we pulled in the drive; cell phones were not even thought of and we didn’t stop in town to call ahead. Nevertheless, there she would be, waving as our tires crunched on the gravel, pulling into the carport. We piled out of the car, my parents and I and the dog, and my grandmother was happy. Honestly, genuinely, truly happy to see us. I know as an adult how rare it is for someone to be really happy to see me; my grandmother was and she immediately began bustling about, before the bags were unloaded from our tiny car. She always had something hot waiting for us to eat: gumbo, chili, roasted chicken. And for me, since I did not like to eat grown up food, she had a hot dog or macaroni or a sandwich waiting. As I sat at her tiny breakfast table in the tiny eating nook attached to her even tinier kitchen, I would glance over to the cabinets under the sink and see the wooden spoon. All was well with the world; everything was in place and I knew I was home and loved.

As is often the case in life, the good times were not to last. My parents divorced and my grandparents moved away from their home to a different state. I, too, moved to a new town, and all the newness was almost too much for me to bear. The first time that I went to my grandparents’ new house, I was struck by how different it was. A flat, one-story house, it was ugly on the outside and inside. It was even fully furnished. Gone was my grandparents’ furniture that I had grown up seeing; my grandmother’s antiques were packed away and all the familiar pictures that hung in her old house were replaced by tacky beach scenes. As I got out of the car that first time, I resolved to hate their new house. I didn’t care that it was right on the bay and that it had a pier and a beach; it wasn’t their old house and I wasn’t the same girl that had visited them over the years at that beloved house. I was different, the house was different, and none of it was okay.

But then I walked into the kitchen. Tiny, dark, avocado green and harvest gold: I stiffened my resolve to despise the house even more. And then I saw it. The wooden spoon. Stuck through the door handles under the kitchen sink. My anger over all the changes in my life dimmed a bit as I looked at that spoon. I was not instantly happy, buoyed up by a familiar object in an unfamiliar place, but I felt a tiny spurt of happiness. Maybe even a little bit of brightness. I could perhaps be okay one day again. If that wooden spoon could make the change from its familiar kitchen cabinets where it had resided for more years than I had been alive, then maybe I could adapt to what was going on in my tumultuous life.

My grandmother was to move two more times; each time the wooden spoon went with her. Her current house has no need of a wooden spoon and so it does not lie comfortingly within the door handles under her kitchen sink. But she still has that spoon. I’ve seen it and asked her about it. She laughs and says she has no idea why she always had it stuck through the handles; I told her it was important to me as a child and she smiled. My grandmother was a stable person in my life growing up; nothing I did phased her and I knew that I could be just rotten and she would only brush off my terrible behavior or awful attitude and keep on going. She plied me with chocolate cake and coke, especially when I didn’t deserve it. I hope when my grandmother finally goes to her great reward she leaves me that wooden spoon. I will stick it through the door handles of my cabinets. Not to keep them closed or to keep my children out of something, but just to be there, a symbol, a reminder, of all that was good and fine in my life as a child.

Baby Baptism and Fambly!

A new baby! What better excuse for family to get together?!? I like baptisms for fambly get togethers much more than funerals or weddings. Funerals for obvious reasons and weddings because fambly members tend to visit the open bar a few too many times. Not that I'm objecting to that but we do tend to not have deep conversations at weddings. So without further ado, here's the newest baby!

Baby, Mama, Miss Moo 

Baby, Mama, Daddy: so well-rested and attractive! All of them! And yes, for those who are wondering, this is my cousin for whom I am often mistaken. We are basically twins. 

Baby: perfect. 

Miss Moo, grandmother to six, great grandmother to nine.  

Mom, son: my cousins. Love them. 

Cousin: precious angel. 

Baptism. Three babies baptized that day. The other two were not as cute. 

Actual sprinkling with water. Lots of baby hair to contend with. 

My aunt, whom I favor in looks so much, and her first granddaughter. 

My grandmother, getting on to me because I said a dirty word in church. 

Cousin and fambly. Very typical. One happy, one skeptical, one flailing and one just happy to still be alive. 

Love the famblyness. And the white teeth. Which I did not inherit. 

My children. I'm so proud. 

Very typical behavior. Why not do this in the church parking lot? 

Clearly cousins. Precious. 

Miss Moo and her boy.  

How we think we look. 

How we actually look.

Halloween. We don't normally look like this.

The Geek Family loves Halloween. Not because we have the awesomest costumes on the block, but because we love candy. Probably the entire family's favorite food. Candy. We put on the most basic costumes necessary and go to wherever a party is that is handing out candy. We collect the candy and eat the candy. Careful parsing out of the candy into modest piles is not for us. Stuff in face, consume, repeat. That's our mantra. Here we are dressed up for the Harvest Festival at our church/school. The Geek Family did very well in the candy department. Very well.

Mommy's Little Princess 

She had her heart set on being a Power Ranger. We got the costume, a face mask, a sword, everything. And ten minutes before we left, after she was already rigged up in her outfit, she decided to be a butterfly fairy and nothing, NOTHING would change her mind. I quickly painted a butterfly on her face, which she scrubbed off using her tights on the way to the party. When she realized her tights were dirty, she commenced to wailin' and flailin'. She only calmed down when I reminded her that we were about to go get tons of candy. 

This one was supposed to be Hermione Granger. But when it came down to the deciding point, her desire for lots of makeup won out over her desire to be a pretty witch. I guess she's a cross between Hermione and Lord Voldemort. Whatever. She did very well gathering candy for the family. 

And then, for some bizarre reason, there was Bonzo, the Wall-Eyed clown. He was horrifying. But you got a piece of candy if you braved sticking your head out of his mouth, so it was totally worth it. 

GG1 here decided to go all in and reach pleadingly for salvation as Bonzo painfully swallows her into his gullet, which is filled with the souls of naughty children. And candy. So again, totally worth it. 

Princess of the Dead here simply willed candy into her bag. No need to earn it by playing silly games. 

Bonzo was no match for GG2. See how his eyes are no longer wall-eyed with frenzy desire for souls? Instead, he is terrified, because he knows he is no match for Mommy's Little Princess. 

I didn't even have to tell MOS how to cheat at this game. He simply figured it out and scored nearly half a bag of candy before the teenager running it realized what was happening. Good job, son, in your nondescript superhero costume. Good job. 

And then there's this one. Put on just enough of a costume so that he would be considered appropriately outfitted for the party and could garner his own massive stash of candy. That's supposed to be a tear drop under his eye that he got in prison. I drew it on myownself with black eyeliner. 

We went on a hayride. MOS couldn't sit with us since I was the only adult in the back of the trailer with eight kids. He sat up front and had a much better time since he was too far away for me to stop him eating candy. 

Queen of the Damned. GG1 took this picture of me when we were on the hayride.  You know, 'cause the undead love hayrides.

Back to Mr. I Wish I Had Gone to Prison. He got a prison tattoo from the sweet little girl manning the face painting booth. Poor girl. He wanted his fraternity number and fraternity name. You know, for all those times when you need some street cred with the wait staff at Applebee's. You whip out your frat ID and they fall all over themselves bringing you chicken and waffles.

Hope you enjoyed our costumes, because we are going to wear the exact same ones next week when it's actually Halloween. Because trick or treating is where we score big. We might get enough candy to hold us until Thanksgiving. Maybe. If we come to your house, you better have some candy stashed away for us. We have been known to enter a domicile and forcibly take candy from its terrified residents. Be forewarned. The Geeks are hungry.