Packing up
Posted: June 25, 2013 Filed under: kids | Tags: building a pool, childhood home, Duke University, first day of school, Fuqua School of Business, kids growing up, Little League, moving away, moving house, new house, Nomar, Nomar Garciaparra, starting kindergarten 9 CommentsIt’s out last week in our house.
Things have been pretty busy around here, hence the silence on the blog front. Hopefully that will change as we get settled in our temporary quarters and construction begins on our new house.
Among the purging, organizing, and packing that’s gone on lately, I thought it appropriate to take a moment and reflect back on the time spent in this house. When we moved in 9 years ago, Trevor had just graduated from Duke University with his MBA. Second from the left, he was all smiles. I was too, because we were leaving North Carolina — which was nice for a couple of years — and coming home to Texas. 
My favorite girl and my #1 son enjoyed graduation day, too. 
After a weekend house-hunting trip fraught with complications — including a case of pneumonia for my #1 son — we found a house. 
When we left Durham, my favorite girl was in the throes of the terrible two’s, and my #1 son had just turned 5. The days were long but the years were short. I’m pretty sure I was too tired to envision our life 9 years later, with a girl preparing for middle school and a boy — ahem, a teenager — getting ready to start high school, and yet here we are. 
Those busy, exhausting days continued in our new house. My favorite girl looked like this as she got settled in our new abode
and my #1 son headed off to kindergarten two months after we unpacked. Wearing his beloved Nomar jersey and light-up tennis shoes, that child looks like such a baby. His profile is the same nearly a decade later, as is his signature cowlick on the back of his head.
Those kiddos had some good times in our new house. Looking at those tiny hands and feet takes me back, yet I hardly recognize those little kids.
Dinnertime usually included a show; my favorite girl was the ringleader and my #1 son was along for the ride.
He drew the line at following her love of body paint, however. She was on her own for that.
This was a common scene as the little darlings splish-splashed in a shared tub (heavy on the bubbles, of course).
It was in this house that Mr P lost his two front teeth — on the same day
and learned to ride a bike (barefoot, of course, because that’s how he rolls).
He never did learn to love having his picture taken
but he did learn to be a good sport about it.
It was across the street from this house that he caught his first fish
and decided that the fishing was a lot more fun than the eating.
He enjoyed baseball more than fishing, and that first season of Little League seems like a million years ago. Baseball was so simple back then — they didn’t even wear cleats that first year!
We did graduate to cleats and batting gloves the next season, however.
but back then, the idea of a $400 bat would have made me laugh out loud. 
That investment paid off, though, and Mr P collected his bounty for this first home run. $20 and a beer was the going rate back then (although he made the same face when he tasted the beer as he did when he tasted the fish). 
Little League is a distant memory, and home-run bounties no longer exist. Fancy bats and the big fields are our current reality.
It was in this house that these kids saw snow in Houston — something they may never see again!
Not long after that, we embarked on a much more appropriate project for Texas: building a pool.
We had a very diligent foreman on the job.
She babied the gunite and ensured all was well with the plaster. 
That tiny foreman made it through preschool and headed off to kindergarten from these front steps. Her backpack was nearly as big as she was.
Now she’s sporting braces on her teeth and blue streaks in her hair.
We’ve seen a lot of changes in the last 9 years. This house has served us well as we navigated the twists and turns of life with two young kids. I can’t wait to see what adventures await us in the new house. 
Right now it’s a vacant lot, but before long there will be a foundation and walls and rooms to hold the next decade of memories.
Gettin’ back to nature
Posted: August 27, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: backyard landscaping, first day of school, getting back to nature, gratitude after cancer, gratitude journal, Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer, plumeria, Ralph Waldo Emerson, tropical plants 14 CommentsMarie’s gratitude challenge is spreading like wildfire. Several of my friends in the blog-o-sphere have taken up the challenge and are writing about nature. The other Nancy is focusing on trees, Jan is reminiscing about her koi pond, AnneMarie is watching butterflies, and Martine discovered a gorgeous flower while out for a walk. I’m jumping on that bandwagon. It would have been too easy and too predictable to use the first day of school as my gratitude du jour, so instead I spent a few minutes in my backyard after delivering my kids to their respective schools. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Earth laughs in flowers,” and there’s a lot of laughter in my backyard.
We’ve done a bit of landscaping since we moved into this house in May 2004. The corner garden pictured beyond my favorite girl and our favorite chocolate lab was the beginning of our efforts to fill our little patch of earth with all things green. A banana tree, a fan palm, and a few crepe myrtles went into the ground with hopes of fast growth. They were the anchors of what we hoped would turn into a lush backyard paradise.
A very rare snowstorm on our first Christmas in our new house gave me a good reason to snap a pic of our backyard. That corner garden is still working on becoming a lush screen from the houses behind us, and a pitiful patio table & chair set looks pretty lonely in that barren backyard. 
Two years later, when we decided to put in a pool, the corner garden had grown quite a bit and was getting some competition form a tulip tree on the right, a trio of oleanders on the left, and the stars of the show — 3 Italian cypress that carried the weight of really filling out the backyard. It’s looking decidedly less bare, but still a long way from the tropical haven I envisioned. 
A quick glimpse of that tulip tree during pool-building shows a little more growth, but there’s still a whole lotta fence showing through. I tried to mitigate the expanse of fence with a few old plates. Back in the day, I thought they looked cute hanging there. 
Today, I know better, and I’ve expanded on my quirky display. 
I love how the ray of sunlight snuck into this photo today. I’m not a great photographer and am too impatient to use anything other than my iPhone camera, and when I snapped these pics of my backyard this morning, I knew the light wasn’t going to be great. Little did I know, the light might not be great, but the sunbeams are!
Here comes the sun! 
The plumeria under the plate wall makes me smile, especially now that it’s blooming. It’s a fickle plant that craves more attention and TLC than I give it, but apparently it’s stubborn like me and decided to bloom anyway, despite its lack of care. 
Next to the plumeria is the ginger that grows under my bedroom window. Both of these plants scream “tropical” to me. Who needs to go to a resort when I have all this in my own backyard?
And that little corner garden? It’s all grown up now!
Slacker mom
Posted: August 23, 2011 Filed under: breast cancer, cancer fatigue, kids | Tags: back to school, Domo, first day of school, kids dealing with mom's cancer, moms of young kids with cancer, psychological effects of cancer, Red Sox, slacker mom, Tooth Fairy 7 CommentsThat’s me. I admit it.
Yesterday was the first day of school, yet did I take one photo of my kids before they descended into the joys of another school year? Nope. Not even with my iPhone camera. How lazy & shiftless is that?
It occurred to me at some point last night that this will be the first year on record without a back-to-school photo, and I suppose I could have hauled Macy out of bed and pried Payton away from ESPN long enough to recreate a photo. But it would have been dark on the front step, where we always take the photo, and Macy would have had to change out of her jammies and back into her school clothes, which were no doubt in a heap on her bedroom floor. I had to admit defeat and accept that it wasn’t going to happen this year. A second-day-of-school photo seems too lame to contemplate, so this will be the year with no back-to-school photo. Macy’s entre into 4th grade and Payton’s into 7th will go unchronicled for time immemorial.
And yet, I think we will survive.
I’ll throw in a classic back-to-school photo, from Macy’s kindergarten and Payton’s 3rd grade year. That’ll do, right?
Chalk it up to cancer fatigue, or to pre-surgery jitters, or to me being a slacker mom. Either one. The reason isn’t all that important, really. The kids don’t really care if we have a photo, and I’m pretty much over it as well. I will state for the record, however, that Payton did indeed wear a Red Sox shirt for the first day of school, as has been his tradition since kindergarten. Some things never change. 
If you thought I was done with my slacker mom antics and were ready to forgive me, hang on. True, it’s been a rough ride. It’s been a long year, full of medical drama and pain & suffering. I feel perfectly comfortable saying I deserve a free pass from juggling all the balls, getting everything right, and catering to everyone’s individual needs (ok, maybe that last one is going a bit far; I’m not much of a caterer).
However, life goes on and I’ve yet to find the slot into which I insert my free pass. I’m looking for something like the coupon slot at the grocery store self-checkout, but I haven’t found it. Also curiously absent is the “make it so” button — push the button and make it so, whatever “it” happens to be. In this case, it would be the back-to-school photo. I would push the “make it so button” and a photo would fall out of the sky, into my cupped hands. If only.
I certainly needed the “make it so” button last night, when Macy’s loose tooth came out just as she was getting into bed. She has been wiggling it for days, and it was hanging by a thread, or a root, or whatever loose teeth use to hang on. She emerged from her bedroom clutching a slightly bloody molar, grinning hugely and aquiver with anticipation about the upcoming visit from the Tooth Fairy.
Uh oh.
Slacker mom was not prepared for this. See, Macy and the Tooth Fairy have a “special bond” as she described through her tears this morning. The Tooth Fairy doesn’t just leave a few bucks or some loose change, like she does for most kids. Her Royal Dental Highness knows that Macy isn’t at all concerned with or motivated by money. She likes stuff. She’s funny and quirky and a bit outside of the box. And the Tooth Fairy is usually well-stocked. Lip gloss, a stuffed animal, a stationery set…things like that rock Macy’s world. The Tooth Fairy usually picks up such items throughout the year, as she’s running her errands and comes across something that she knows Macy would like. But the Tooth Fairy was ill-prepared this time. Even though she knew that tooth was loose, the light didn’t come on and make her think, hmmmm, I better make sure I have a nice prize for Macy when that tooth comes out.
So the Tooth Fairy was forced to resort to the lowest common denominator, and she left a $5 bill. Macy was not amused. See, she had written a note to the Tooth Fairy, which she always does, and asked for a unicorn Domo. I imagine the Tooth Fairy said WTF?? I know I did. I’m fairly certain that a unicorn Domo does not exist. Or it does, but only in Macy’s imagination. I guess it would be a cross-breed between a unicorn and Domo. Interesting. But not readily available, and certainly not at 9:30 at night. 
See my dilemma? I had no problem finding images of these guys on googleimages. I even found a t-shirt of Domo riding a unicorn, which I was all set to order pronto but it’s sold out online. Of course it is. Who wouldn’t want a t-shirt like this? 
If I find one for Macy, I may have to get one for me too.
I can see why the Tooth Fairy flubbed this one, big time. Some requests are too tricky and unique, even for the TF.
Macy wrote another note, which she expects the Tooth Fairy will collect tonight as she makes her rounds. The “special bond” between Macy and the Tooth Fairy is splintered, but not beyond repair. 
The Pink Underbelly 