Good Time By All

When you are an eight-year-old boy, it is a guarantee that a good time will be had by all when the following occurs:

You run like your mama is chasing you:



You tackle like your mama isn't watching:



You quarterback a play by saying, "One 'ssippi, two 'ssippi , HUT!!" And all understand you.



You kick without worrying about nearby windows.




You smile in a way that convinces your parents to accept that it really is great to be eight.





For Chandler, there is no greater joy than gathering a few of his buddies for a game of flag football. Forget rented inflatables or hired entertainers or ponies that travel in an agonizingly slow circle. Nothing says celebration for him like a worn-out football, some freshly cut grass and a few of his favorite friends.





A penalty for excessive celebration caused this team to have to take it back to the trampoline. (Georgia fan anyone? Anyone? Hellooo....)



Halftime Show:


Stadium Fans:





It's true. The rumors circulating are correct. What you might have heard was accurate and right on the money: Eight really is great. And a good time was had by all.



Even by Chandler's mama.

Eight Is Great, But I’m Not So Good

Chandler turned eight today, with much fanfare and celebration, smiling from the moment he awakened, embracing with innocent awe the fantastic realization that he was a whole year older. Tall and lanky, kind-hearted and so loving, this middle child of mine has grown up faster than any reasonable calendar should allow.

Cherish your time because it goes by so fast, advice relayed to me repeatedly over the years from the wise, seasoned moms who have gone before me. Remember these days because they will soon pass by; counsel I eagerly acknowledged as though somehow my acceptance would make the timeframe with my children the rare exception.

“What?” he always asks me, when feeling the heaviness of my stare, not knowing that I am trying to commit his boyish face to memory because history would suggest that when I blink it changes. I watch him and want to remember the lopsided grin, the cheerful expression, and the eyes filled with so much affection.

“Did you need something?” he inquires, puzzled by the intensity of my gaze. I want to ask forgiveness for my rudeness, explaining in detail the desperation to imprint his sweet face in a safe place that promises not to fail me when I want to recall. “No, I just love you,” I will say instead, knowing there are not enough sane words to make him understand.

I believed them when they said it would go by too fast. I wholeheartedly responded when told to cherish and remember. I have been present, and intentional, and in the moment on all occasions, yet still the days rush by, leaving only a hazy memory in its wake, despite an exceptional willingness to comply with advice given not to forget.

So I continue to stare at him – at them – and memorize, all the while supporting and participating in the enthusiasm of yet another year and milestone. For Chandler - this momentous and very joyous day - turning eight is so great.

But the truth is, I’m not so good.

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The Princess and the Faux Pas

Mary Mac, our precocious, dramatic, five year old, was truly in her element while visiting the Magic Kingdom. Cinderella’s Castle beckoned to her in the same way Swiss Cake Rolls summon her to the kitchen pantry. The cast members at Walt Disney World furthered the delight by referring to our five year old as “Princess” at every interaction. With each greeting, I watched her stand a little taller, walking with her hands clasped delicately in front of her chest, even speaking sporadically with an English accent.

Several days into our trip, Mary Mac, with a contemplative look on her face, asked me if I thought that she might have been switched at the baby hospital, that perhaps Cinderella was raising a child that looked like me with dark hair, brown eyes, and freckles on her nose.

(If it hadn’t brought me such great and immediate joy, I might have been offended. Apparently, brunettes with excess freckles do not a princess make.)

I assured her that I was certain she belonged to me, even though our appearances were different.

“In fact,” I continued, “you look very much like your dad which is why I think you are so beautiful.”

“I guess so,” Mary responded, somewhat disappointed that royalty was not in her lineage or a royal court in her near future. “But he says I act just like you.”

(If it hadn’t brought me such great and immediate joy, I might have been offended for the second time that day. Apparently, this brunette with excess freckles ancestrally contributes to and is solely responsible for the monkey fits, mild histrionics and over the top dramatics occasionally demonstrated by our blond haired beauty.)

When booking our vacation months ago, I desperately tried to make a dining reservation with Cinderella. Evidently, Her Highness’ calendar was full at the Castle but she would be able to fit us in with all the other princesses in Norway at Epcot. It was very impressive that Cinderella could honor multiple commitments in multiple places. Clearly, she rocks it at carpool, baseball practices and school functions, a commonality we can finally share.

Our meeting with all of the Disney princesses occurred over breakfast. We were ushered into a makeshift photo studio to take pictures with the very glamorous Belle. The both of us were completely mesmerized- Mary Mac by her beauty and me by her ultra-white teeth. Oh, Crest White Strips, how you let me down.



After the photo shoot, a friendly fellow clad in velvet knickers and unusually pointy jazz shoes led us to our table. He swiftly pulled my chair away from the table with a theatrical swoop and grand bow, a movement so sudden and unexpected that it left me slightly unbalanced. With very little grace, I plopped – or fell - into the wooden chair, while Mary Mac daintily took her seat in a place she knew, with up most certainty, she rightfully belonged.

Minutes after our seating (or falling), the first princess arrived at our quaint table for two. With an abundance of red hair and green sequins, the lovely princess warmly embraced my little girl.



“Oh, Mary Mac, it’s your favorite princess MURIEL!” I exclaimed a little too eagerly.

Rolling her eyes in a way that could only be construed as true to her DNA, Mary Mac quickly corrected the first of two faux pas that would cause her great embarrassment. “Mom, this is ARIEL,” she said with great exaggeration and pronunciation of the mermaid’s name, sharing a knowing look with the princess.



For a moment, I had that same excluded feeling felt in grade school when friends were astonished at the lack of interest I showed in feeding their Baby Alives or changing the diapers of said babies which only made me want to vomit in my own mouth.

Quickly trying to cover the appellation blunder, I whipped out the camera to take pictures of the two beauties, all the while calling out ridiculous, yet encouraging, comments as I snapped away.

“Oh, that is so pretty ARIEL! Isn’t ARIEL a beautiful name, Mary Mac? In fact, I should have named you ARIEL, because I like it that much!” And on, and on, and on. Know that my behavior embarrasses even me.

With great relief, I was able to correctly identify the other princesses who visited our table. Cinderella:





And then Snow White:



But then the stumper came along. One would think that I had learned my lesson just minutes before with the incorrect misnomer used for all to hear, but the accurate recognition of Snow White and Cinderella unfortunately instilled a false sense of confidence.

“Mary Mac, here comes LENORA!” I enthusiastically announced.

This time, the princess corrected me.

In a high lilting voice that causes all small birds to sing and rejoice, the lady wearing pink, funky shoulder pads firmly responded, “My name is AURORA.”

Mary Mac looked at me and slowly shook her head, letting it be known that my princess skills were clearly lacking, and bounded out of her seat for a photo op with her long lost sister.



Later that day, Mary Mac recounted the excitement of meeting all of her royal kin with her Mimi (grandmother).

“And I met Cinderella and Snow White and Aurora and Ariel and Belle,” she said in one precious run-on sentence. “It was so much fun. But mommy had a little trouble with the names, because you know that she’s not a big fan of the princesses,” she added with hand gestures punctuating each declaration.

“But it’s okay,” she continued, with a smile in my direction that always melts my heart. “I’m still glad that mommy and I are just alike.”

And for that very reason, she will be receiving the coveted Baby Alive for Christmas.

Tuckered Out

It’s not as though I collapsed in an exhaustive heap on the sidewalk. Or succumbed to the heat with full dramatics that included the back of my hand resting delicately on my forehead, precipitating an elegant swoon to the ground. I didn’t make a nuisance of myself or draw attention to my somnolent status or in any way negatively effect the Energizer Bunny vigor of my offspring. I didn’t even bewilder those around me with any type of temper tantrum usually associated with and perpetuated by fatigue.

It was just a continued state of being I found myself in, a sustained frame of mind, an overall persistent feeling, that started with that first asphalt hill scaled at Magic Kingdom and ended six days later with the great mass of land explored at Epcot.

The irony of my weary condition is that I consider myself in reasonably good shape. I work out pretty consistently, and pay sensible attention to nutritional intake, minus the occasional scoop of ice cream or cup of caramel latte, both of which, I feel I must point out, contain enough calcium to count. It is important to look after your skeleton like that.

But the weariness that settled into my almost forty year old body that first day, which was only exacerbated by the addition of sixty more hours in the parks, surprised even me. The tiredness could be felt deep in the flexible tissue found in the hollow interior of my bones. My right leg was occasionally numb from all of the walking, and my left leg aggressively rebelled by lazily dragging behind the right. The hunchback of Notre Dame could not have done a better impression himself, inspiring my spouse to call me Quasimodo for the duration of our trip.

Thievery has never been a consideration before, but I reluctantly admit to occasionally eyeing the scooters of the elderly and of those infirmed, trying to figure a manner in which to momentarily “borrow” their transportation as it sat parked in all of its tempting glory. I managed to get close enough to one to observe that it had dual speed controls – an added delight for those wanting to outrun the double strollers – until the evil eye my husband shot in my direction caused me to reconsider my waywardness. Such a party pooper.

While there is not photo document proof of my exhaustion, I was able to succinctly summarize the way our bodies felt at the end of each day with the following photo tutorial. Each occasion brought us so much joy, allowing us to temporarily forget that we felt precisely the same way.

These pictures of Chandler were taken during a twenty minute bus ride from Animal Kingdom to our hotel.







Mary Mac decides that her legs no longer function. John ended up doing the same thing thirty minutes later:



This is sleep so sudden and so sound that Chase forgets to straighten his legs:


After a particularly long day that began at 7:00 am and then ended at 10:30 pm, Mary Mac sweetly asked her dad for the room key as we rode in the elevator of our hotel. The doors slowly opened, and our five year old used the last bit of energy left and hauled tail 35 yards down the hallway, opened the hotel door with the room key, dropped the key in the hallway for her family to use, and then entered the room. We arrived fifteen seconds later and found this:

Weary

I thought I understood weariness. Particularly as the mom of three children, having experienced and survived those first few terrifying weeks after each was born, I believed that I fully comprehended the meaning of tired.

I clearly remember being up with my firstborn in the middle of the night, in a neighborhood that was dark and silent and peacefully asleep, feeling the fatigue deep down in my incompetent bones and wondering if I would ever feel well rested again. That exhaustion mutated into inexplicable irritation with my husband, and on that night, as I rocked the infant that had rocked my world, I methodically divided up our shared belongings in my head, like the stingiest divorce lawyer during heated arbitration. My spouse could have the sofa, but I was taking the dining room table. The casual dinnerware I suppose would have to go with him because everyone knows that the woman gets the fine china.

And the crazy thing about this train of thought that kept me occupied until our fussy two week old finally, with God’s great mercy, closed his sweet little eyes, was that I felt completely justified in my aggravation. I didn’t know exactly why I was so angry at the man who could make me weak in the knees with just a look, but what I did know, without a hormonal doubt, was that somehow he was to blame.

After a few continuous hours of sleep later that night, I woke up and all was well in my unstable world. The hormone monster was back in his cage, and I was able to spend the daylight hours marveling how good God was to bless me with such a wonderful husband. John, however, regarded me with apprehensive and watchful eyes, wondering when the next mood would swing, knocking his head high in the air and over the right-field fence.

Those middle of the night cries would wake me each night, the sound transported shrilly through the sardonic baby monitor glowing like the worst kind of kryptonite, and in a sleepwalk stupor I would find my way to the nursery, to the same rocking chair, and begin once more the task of splitting our marital possessions as amicably as I thought reasonable.

This same cycle of existence during those tumultuous days of infancy occurred until the hours of uninterrupted sleep outnumbered the missed episodes of Friends. Eventually routine and rest and restoration of balanced hormones replaced the unwarranted annoyance towards my innocent significant other, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling of indescribable fatigue which transformed into various emotions that suggested that my head, at any given moment, might just spin off of my body.

For the past 5 years, this type of tiredness has only been a distant, hazy memory. That is, until our trip to Walt Disney World last week.

This was the third time our family has visited the theme park that curiously inspires grown men to don Mickey Mouse ears, Goofy themed t-shirts and fanny packs spilling over with fast passes and autograph books. It is a joyful place, complete with non-stop music and smiling staff (cast) members, ice cream cones and light-up toys sold at every street corner.

We knew this trip would be different than the others. Our plan (Can you hear God chuckling?) was to visit all four of the major theme parks, a task never attempted before because of the ages of our children and the mandatory naps weaved throughout previous stays. Four parks in six days didn’t seem inappropriately ambitious, especially considering the high levels of energy exhibited on a daily basis by our three offspring.

But it wasn’t the children we should have been worried about.....

(part two tomorrow )

Evil Virus

It presented like a virus.

Random, nonsensical images displayed on the screen of my i-phone like some kind of crazy, voo-doo message. The mean people of the world, with too much time on their evil, nerdy little hands, find great delight in wreaking havoc on the computers of the weak. I can picture them now, hunched over the keyboard in some place like Pakistan or in the province of Guangdong, laughing manically in their taped, black-framed eyeglasses as the newest form of corruption is produced that causes Microsoft Word to type in Cantonese.



Many times I miss out on important emails from friends because my pointy finger is too chicken to click on the incoming communication, hovering indecisively over vague subject boxes with titles like “you’re not gonna believe this” or “why did you miss our meeting?” or worse yet, “child’s forgotten lunch”. Attachments containing viruses provide the new hysteria of the technological world in the same manner “black ice” scares the britches off of those in the South.



So this morning, the arbitrary photos that seemed psychedelic in nature caused enough concern for further investigation. There were a total of forty-nine images brought on by the malevolence of the virus, necessitating that I go through each one to delete the wickedness that had infiltrated my phone.



At first, there didn’t seem to be a pattern to the blurry depictions on the screen. With trepidation, I slowly clicked the arrow button that took me to the next image, wondering in a way only an alarmist would understand if anyone had ever been physically injured by a freakazoid virus sent through an i-phone. My thought process may seem to some as pessimistic in disposition, but keep in mind that it is coming from someone who recently was bodily harmed while shopping for an oriental rug.



Suddenly, and quite surprisingly, I came upon an image I recognized. It looked like a picture of the Jonas Brothers. Those creepy computer geeks have reached an all-time low when they have to resort to sending their technology muck disguised as the cute, innocent boy band that brings my five year old daughter such joy.



The pictures became clearer, and my Encyclopedia Brown investigative skills kicked into overdrive, providing the answer to the puzzle fashioned by the forty-nine photos. Not to mention that I discovered this:



Well, that takes care of that. Mystery solved. Now I have to go and compose a letter of apology to the computer nerds in Pakistan and the province of Guangdong for the unnecessary profiling and assignment of blame for i-phone contamination.

I think I’ll write it in Cantonese.

Tailgates and Cornhole

I love Georgia football. My husband loves Georgia football. And we are teaching – brainwashing – our children to love Georgia football as well. It brings us much joy.

One of our first big purchases as a newly married couple was a season ticket that allowed us each to roast in one hundred degree heat at all of the home games in Sanford Stadium. Even as we attempted to furnish our first apartment together, those tickets were given a higher priority. Forget that we needed a sofa, or chairs to actually go with our kitchen table; college game day in our newlywed home was as necessary as the toothbrush holder that would prevent our toothbrushes from touching one another, a spousal surprise the preacher forgot to bring up in our pre-marital counseling sessions. Ewww.

For fourteen years, with long time friends Jon and Tricia, we have attended most of the home games, even travelling across the state line to cheer on our Dogs when we resided in South Carolina. Good friends Chas and Sabrina have been with us nearly as long, providing many good memories that have cemented our fondness for college football in the Fall. While we have been tailgating for many years now, and have witnessed the transition of different coaches and the graduation of various players, there are some truths about game day that never change:

- For just a day, you can pretend that you are a twenty-one year old student, relishing in the campus life and befriending others near your tailgating area that are “your same age”. That is until they call you Ma’am, and ask if you have a daughter attending the university.




-The first hour of tailgating involves setting up tents, grills, chairs and food, only to use the last hour taking it all down again. And it makes perfect sense to you and is considered time well spent.

-You are surrounded by the tomfoolery of university students who don’t look a day over twelve years old. You vow that your own children will be home schooled when they reach college age, further promising that you will be their chaperone at all home football games.

-Campus fashion gives insight into the trendiest clothing for the fall, providing good ideas of items to add to your own closet. The difficulty, however, will be finding the same pieces with an additional four inches in length, and tube tops adorned with straps and sleeves.

-Tossing a bean bag into a hole for hours on end (Cornhole) is deemed a good time by all, particularly when a shot causes you to yell, "woohoooo!" and display victory fingers.




-You never wear an apron at home when cooking, but somehow, on game day, it is acceptable, especially if it color coordinates with game day attire and tents.



-You get overly excited about spotting a student that is a member of your same sorority. While you eagerly relay the commonality to said student, it immediately becomes clear that the enthusiasm is not reciprocated.

Go Dogs.