Tell It To COACHIE

For the past six years, I have lived in sunny places. I’m sure the droughts of Kentucky, Virginia, and Delaware, were contributing factors, as was my sunny personality, but for years now I’ve had to declare my own Crash Davis-style rainouts in the spring and summer. After weeks and weeks of nonstop beautiful weather, I just got tired of the sunglasses, the squinting, the sunscreen, and finally decided that if Mother Nature wouldn’t provide a real rainy day, I’d provide an imaginary one. The rainouts usually involved a trip to the movies or an indoor playdate and an avoidance of sunlight and fresh air at all costs.

I think the colors I originally chose for this website were kind of a rainout of sorts for my eyes. After being outside in the bright sun all day everyday, I liked spending my evenings looking at the cool tones of muted blue everywhere. It made my eyes feel like they were sitting in the shade, where they didn’t have to work so hard or fight off the sharp glints of sunlight that assaulted them all day.

Yeah, as you may have gathered from recent posts, the unbroken weeks of sunny days are a distant memory. Today was rather sunny here, and almost warmish, with a blue sky and a breeze that didn’t feel like it might whip my head right from my shoulders or send a huge ice-weakened limb crashing down on my head. The sunshine was nice, but it also served as a reminder how rare sunny days have been. My sunglasses have resided in the bottom of my bag for the entire month of February. My eyes are perfectly well-rested - they no longer need to sit in the shade. So for now the bright colors that I cannot find in nature in Missouri will reside on the blog. I realize that I am not exactly a computer graphics whiz, but at least it’s a little more cheery right?

The nablopomo people (you know, the write a post every day for a month people) sent me an e-mail a few weeks ago that they were going monthly. Bloggers can choose any month to write everyday (or every month to write everyday) and I figured I’d sign up again, because each month will have a theme (this month it’s “lists”). Themes are good for me, and here’s why: I am the blogging Kara Saun.

Fools People who are not fans of Project Runway may not know her- she was one of the finalists of the first season. She kicked butt on every challenge, no matter what they asked her to do, she produced one of the best, if not the best design every single time. People (including me) figured she would probably win the whole thing, but when she was put out on her own to design her own line from her own ideas, suddenly she had no clue what to do. Her collection was basically the costumes from The Aviator, and she lost to a crazy person who at least had some vision and imagination.

So there it is. I may be a crazy person, but I don’t have a whole lot of vision or imagination. Hopefully with a theme to guide me, if I can’t come up with a post on my own, at least I can be a lame blogging version of Kara Saun.

Although I promise that I will not sit down to write in a pair of pantaloons.

And I won’t dress my posts up in free shoes and then be cheesy about it.

(At least Erin gets these jokes if no one else does).

The first time the kiddies slept in Erin’s basement, I randomly asked whether or not there was a carbon monoxide detector down there. This is the sort of safety question I probably should ask more often and usually don’t, because I’m sort of overly laid back that way. (And so far, absolutely nothing has happened, although I must admit I was a little uneasy when a neighbor told me she had gotten her husband a gun safe for Christmas. What a great gift! Where exactly are the guns now while the gun safe is under the tree?). The end result of my inquiry was that Erin and D’oh located a carbon monoxide detector and then we all lived through a great deal of rushing around, searching for batteries, numerous false alarms, beeping start up sequences and basically the children being spooked and up late rather than peacefully dozing in what eventual monitoring confirmed was a perfectly safe environment (apologies to Ms. Divine for the length of that sentence).

Anyhoo, we bought a carbon monoxide detector that sits in the kitchen and never goes off, and apparently the smoke detectors are also equipped with carbon monoxide detectors (hopefully with some sort of electric eye system because if the carbon monoxide has to pile up to the ceiling like smoke, we’ll all be too dead to hear the alarm). Although one smoke detector (that is hardwired to the house) regularly drains its backup battery and goes off, we’ve never had an alarm.

Yesterday, however, we were beginning to get slightly alarmed.

As I was in my room watching the end of the song and dance routine that Marty generally puts on while I dry my hair, the phone rang. It was Aislinn, calling from school to tell me that Daddy forgot to put her lunch in her lunchbox. I put her through a short interrogation (which her “gifted studies” teacher probably noted with a shaking head and furiously scratching pen) as to whether her lunch was in Lauren’s lunchbox, whether the meal at the cafeteria was something Daddy might have thought she would eat (chicken fried steak, not something anyone would expect anyone to eat in this house), how much longer did they have for lunch, etc. Eventually, I ascertained that some sort of mixup had occurred and told her I would bring her a lunch right away. As I was making her turkey sandwich, Lauren’s “gifted studies” teacher called to tell me that Lauren was crying and would not eat the cafeteria lunch (and I think under her breath said that the gifted program was convening an emergency meeting to see if our children should be removed from our care). I told her that I was on my way with a lunch and headed out with Marty.

Later I asked the HP, and he admitted that he had totally forgotten. He makes their lunch every morning, like clockwork, and while he may have once or twice forgotten to toss in a cheese stick, he’s never forgotten to make lunch altogether.

After school, I picked the girls up, rushed them into the house for a snack and then back out of the house to drive to guitar lessons. We live about 35 minutes from their teacher’s storefront, a drive that no one particularly enjoys (especially in the ice and dark), but they really like their teacher so I gave up on trying to find anything closer. We were chatting about their day, about dinner, about how they were going to tell Daddy that they were so hungry because they hadn’t eaten since breakfast and how funny that would be.

Then it hit me. I had sent the guitar books out to the car with Lauren, but I had left the guitars sitting in the dining room. We were 15 minutes into our trip, with no time to spare, so if we’d gone back for them, we would have missed the lessons altogether (and it was already paid for so we were going one way or another). So off we went for the music lessons, without, you know, the musical instruments. Fortunately their teacher has a bunch of computer programs that teach musical theory, note-reading, etc., which, truth be told, is some practice the girls could use. She went over some stuff with them and they enjoyed themselves and I felt like we got our money’s worth. Plus their teacher got a big kick out of my forgetfulness.

Today was better, but then again, nothing really was going on, so there wasn’t much to forget. And given the tendencies of our children, they will tell their father every morning until they leave for college, “Don’t forget to make lunch” and they will tell me every Tuesday until we leave Missouri, “Remember that time you forgot our guitars? Don’t do that again.”

Then again, if those two girls are so gifted, maybe its time we put them in charge of making our lunches and packing the car.

The ice started falling on Monday, February 11th, and it just stopped this morning. Even if I’d had a moment to have the computer (and maybe the 3 feet around the computer) all to myself, I would not have been able to string enough thoughts together to make a coherent post. (I would have said something like, why are ice and 100 degree weather both designated by pink on the Weather Channel. Is this some sort of Pavlovian experiment to make us hate baby girls? This seems rather passive aggressive given that the Weather Channel is chock full of both girls and babies.)

The girls school was opened long enough for the first grade to put on their rescheduled show, “A Year with Frog and Toad.” Frog and Toad were some of my absolute favorites growing up, and I still love the stories and pictures from those books. The little musical is also awesome. Since I can’t post part of the show here, I asked our little bumblebee to perform one of the songs in our living room. As you can see, solo performances are frowned upon in our family:

After viewing this, she got the video bug, and offered up this performance:

Yeah.

WE NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS HOUSE.

While Christmas shopping at the J. Crew outlet last December, I happened upon a huge section of “crew cuts” (J. Crew clothes for kids) that was 75% off. This meant that the boys pants were about $4 and the shirts were $2. Although Marty is definitely the best dressed person in our family, he has this annoying habit of growing regularly, so I decided I had to get him at least one outfit. In the huge rack of t-shirts, I found one that was the right size and almost the exact color of his eyes:

(uh, Shannon, couldn’t you have at least moved the mail out from under it before you took the picture?)

Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out what that picture was on the pocket. When I bought it I figured I just needed to look at it a little more closely. I showed it to my mom and at least one of my sisters, and none of us were sure what that picture was.

In the photo, the picture seemed a little clearer, but I still couldn’t figure it out. I showed it to the HP, and he didn’t know. I thought it might just be a silly drawing that the J. Crew people had put on the shirt, but that doesn’t really seem like the J. Crew sense of humor. I’m not sure they have one. Then I thought to myself, “Hey, their website always has detailed descriptions of the clothes, maybe the shirt is still up there and I can find out what this is!” (You can see from the exclamation point that I was very excited at my problem-solving strategy). Unfortunately, the shirt was nowhere to be found on the website.

Since it has been so frigging freezing here all winter, Marty hasn’t worn the shirt until today. But when he put in on, something just clicked with me, and I finally figured out what the picture was. Maybe my subconscious had been working on it all this time, maybe something about seeing it worn triggered an insight. Or maybe it was this:

In short, I bought the shirt on December 21, 2007, I photographed it on January 29, 2008, I looked it up on the J. Crew webpage on January 30, 2008, but only today, February 7, 2008, was I finally able to find out what it was. By turning the stupid thing over.

“Mommy, what is wrong with you?”

Our recent snow storm brought back a lot of childhood memories for me, which was a little strange because I don’t think we had a whole lot of snow when I was little. Maybe it was the break in the routine that made those days so memorable. That, and the fact that when you came in cold and all wet with snow, our house actually seemed like it had a functioning heating system.

I read an article once that said aside from technology, things have not really changed much since the 1940s. For instance, a housewife from the 1940s could be transported to the present time and have no trouble finding her way around a modern kitchen. I suppose the article could have easily said the same thing about dressing for the cold. After all, gloves, hats, scarves, coats, boots - they have not really been drastically redesigned since they were invented. But they have gotten so much better.

I vividly remember the feeling of a wool scarf across my mouth, how the wool would get all warm and wet from my breath, becoming more and more scratchy and uncomfortable until finally I pushed it away from my mouth. Then with the next breath, a blast of cold air would slam against my teeth and damp nose and chin, and I’d immediately pull the wet scratchy wool back into place, preferring to suffer in warmth than have happy skin exposed to the cold. My wool gloves, mittens, and hats were the same way, quick to get wet and slow to dry, itchy and uncomfortable, but better than nothing against the snow.

The kiddies have each accumulated several pairs of mittens and gloves, a number of hats and a few scarves.  Every one of them is immensely more comfortable to wear than the wool things I used to have.  The difference between a wool scarf (or glove or hat) and a soft fleece one that wicks away moisture is as stark as the difference between … analogies fail me. There is no comparison.

The warmest coats that people had when I was little were also the fattest coats. No polartec, no microfiber, no zip-out linings. Everything was made of nylon, stuffed with down (or polyester) and easily stained with dirt around the wrists that first time you wore it and stained everywhere else the first time you fell down. The kiddies have extremely warm lightweight jackets that can be snapped and zipped into so many configurations that I almost want to stunt their growth so that the coats will fit for one more year.

But the biggest difference in our house is the boots. When I was growing up, we all had rubber boots (mine were red), the kind that you pulled over your shoes like galoshes. To help our shoes slip in we would first put plastic bags on our feet, but since those were the days before plastic grocery bags, the only plastic bags we had were from loaves of Pepperidge Farm bread. My mom would save them up for the winter and keep them in the closet with the boots. We always tried (and failed) to keep track of the bread bags, because when the bags ran out, getting the boots on was almost impossible.  Other kids had huge boots with big buckles, that probably weighed as much as the fireman boots they resembled.

Our kiddies (well, two out of three of them) have regular snow boots with polartec lining that they can step in and out of and fasten with velcro. All five of us have “all-purpose mocs” that slip on in a second and keep your feet completely dry and warm in the snow (provided that you don’t step in a snow bank deeper than your ankles).  Life is so much better when your feet are warm and dry.

I’m not sure what the point of this little post is, except to wonder what the snow gear will look like 30 years from now.  Maybe there won’t even be any gear.  Maybe people will just carry a little device in their pockets that surrounds them with a bubble of warmth and evaporates every snowflake that tries to land on their faces.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should go invent that and sell it to L.L. Bean.