Memory Lane

It’s always great to go back to a place where you spent a lot of time as a child. Being an Air Force brat, I don’t often have the chance to do that since I moved to this area at 15. All my memories of this place are teenage-hood and beyond. I had the opportunity this past weekend to spend some time with a very dear friend and her family in the town that I lived in for about five years.

Since my friend’s surprise birthday party was ruined by her husband (do ALL men have big mouths?!), I worked with her mother and flew in to surprise her. I spent much of last week sending Shannon whiny emails about how sad I was to miss her party. I flew out on Friday and her mom picked me up from the airport. I’m still so tempted to call her Mrs. C when I see her. It’s work to remember to call her by her first name. We ran a few party errands, then she drove me by my old house. It doesn’t look warm and inviting like it used to… it looks old and unloved, so that was disappointing. But going back to Shannon’s parents house is always fun for me. I look around at all the changes they’ve made, the orange countertops are gone, the multi-colored shag carpet is gone, the little gold tree with dangly leaves is gone from the top of the piano. The house looks fabulous, up-to-date, but it still felt like the same place I remember from decades ago. I complemented her profusely on her beautiful home, but couldn’t stop myself from asking where that little gold tree had gone. Colleen put her hands on her hips, cocked her eyebrow and said, “I think I sold that thing at a yard sale!” Of course I have no use for a gold tree with dangly leaves, but if I ever saw one, I would buy it and put it in my house just because it’s a great childhood memory. I can remember looking at that tree thinking, “They’re rich!! They have a tree made of GOLD!!!”  

The party was in a private room of a local bar. The room looked fantastic and there wasn’t much to do but wait. I had a blast with Shannon’s parents and the waitstaff, talking about my connection to the party, etc. We talked about how Shannon’s parents used to both smoke unfiltered Lucky Strikes, so I told them, “You can rest assured we never stole your cigarettes.” Her dad looked at me real close and said, “How about the liquor cabinet?” Oh shit, um… did your Peach Schnapps ever taste watered down!?

Shannon arrived at the party and seemed truly stunned to see me. I am glad she didn’t cry, I would have been in trouble all night for ruining her make-up. I knew many of the other guests, so I had a great night catching up with people that I really enjoy. The party turned into a “Dueling Piano” show and everyone had a blast. The crowd requests songs and everyone sings along. Much fun to be had, much alcohol consumed (ouch!).

I got to spend the rest of the weekend getting to know Shannon’s kids. I hadn’t seen her son since he was seven. He’s now 14 and about 6’2, what a nice guy he’s grown up to be. She also has two daughters, one of whom is my goddaughter. I love her girls madly and it was great to see that ALL sisters fight the same way Sugar and Spice do. I hope to see those little girls again soon, before they’re too cool to hang with their mother’s old friend.

We spent a little time shopping. We got to eat Godfather’s Pizza, which was just as good as I remember it and we even had a six-pack of Coke in glass bottles. It was all the things I remember about hanging with my old pal. Except we didn’t set up elaborate Barbie houses, or read teen romance novels until 3 am… It was a wonderful weekend and I’m so glad I worked double time last week to be able to take time off from work and school to have this weekend with Shannon. I only lived near her for five years and I moved away well over 20 years ago. It’s amazing that we’ve kept in touch all these years and I still consider her one of the greatest people I know.

xoxo

Ice Princess 

Spice's Current FASScination

This summer EN was driving down the road with the girls in the car and they were singing along to one of their favorite Kid Rock songs, “Lowlife.” It was the time of year when many were out working in their yards and they happened by an older gentleman bent over with droopy drawers. EN made the mistake of singing out “I’m a buttcrack” rather than lowlife, and Spice’s love for the word “buttcrack” was born. It has been well over six months now and we still hear the word on a daily basis.

Her use of the word is imaginative and should be applauded in some instances. When we drive by the neighbors chickens, she flaps her wings and shouts out, “Brock brock BUTTCRACK.” She and Sugar have had endless debates as to whether animals have buttcracks. The conclusion on dogs is this: those with short hair definitely do not have buttcracks, but the fluffier dogs may be hiding buttcracks under their fur.

Buttcrack can be used in a variety of ways. She has asked for chicken buttcracks for breakfast and uses the word in place of others when she’s singing along to other songs. For example, she recently sang, “On the first day of Buttcrack my buttcrack gave to me…” I’m impressed that she always fills in a two syllable word with this new favorite. Not bad for a four year old.

In keeping with the buttcrack theme, this past weekend I introduced the girls to “Baby got Back” from the 1980’s. Their favorite line, of course, is “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” A proud mothering moment for me.

We know this is inappropriate behavior and language, but in the privacy of our own home, must we be proper all the time? The director of Spice’s preschool is aware of her love for the word and will occasionally taunt her with a “brock brock…” waiting for Spice to shout out “BUTTCRACK!!” As of today, my little cherub has not yet taken the bait and just looks at the director like she’s crazy.

After another night of homework hell with Sugar last night, she did something totally out of character for her. She is the proper, good girl, almost all the time. I was sitting on my bed with Spice, reading a story when Sugar came into the room, dropped her pants, bent over and shouted “BUTTCRACK!” We sat in stunned silence for a millisecond, then we shouted with laughter. It was totally unexpected, out of character, and just plain funny. We laughed together for a long time.

This morning as I was getting ready for work, Spice came into our bedroom, turned on the light and said, “Daddy, I have something to show you.” As he often pretends to look at whatever it is being shown, she persisted and waited until he had both eyes open and was looking at her. She dropped her pants, bent over and hollered “BUTTCRACK” loud enough for the universe to hear her.

EN rolled over, pulled the covers over his head and said, “Please don’t do that at school.”

xoxo

Ice Princess 

Terrible Tuesday

This post is a whiny one. I have had a shitty day. There may be an F Bomb, or three, in this post and I have no desire to clean up the language today. So if you have a delicate constitution, move along. I’m not in the mood to wipe any more ass.

I think I have said this before, I am not a morning person. I need my space. I need to shower and dress and have a minute or two to myself. I realize that it has been a whopping ten hours or so since anyone has had their head buried in my ass, but really people, give me space. There’s nothing you need in this bathroom, there are two others in this house. It annoys me endlessly when any one of the people that live here stand with their ear pressed to the door, and start knocking incessantly the moment they hear the shower turn off and the shower curtain open. There is another parent lying not ten feet from the bathroom door, he can take care of your needs until I am ready to face you, my adoring fans. The knocking began immediately and didn’t stop until I opened the door. This just starts the day on a bad note.

On the ride into work I pass two gas stations within a mile of my house. The first one looked busy, so I traveled on to the second one. Wouldn’t you know it, that stupid bitch I have to follow every single day pulls in too and she takes the pump on the other side of mine. Great. Then I discover that my pump isn’t working and all the others are full. I get back into the car and text EN to ask if there’s a convenient gas station in the town that he works in. He answered my multiple, shrieking texts two hours later. Thanks for the help buddy.

At work I decide today is the day I will put up the Christmas tree. One entire strand of lights is out, so I toss it. I don’t have the time or patience to fix shit. One of my buddies came along to string the lights, not a girls job after all. He did a fabulous job and the tree is nicely decorated. During the decorating, I receive emails from an employee in another office. I share that I’m putting up the tree and she sends a horrified, “we decorate NONDENOMONATIONALLY in this office.” Yeah? Well we do too. If you are Jewish, the fucking tree is a Hanukkah bush. If you practice Kwanzaa, it’s a Kwanzaa shrub. Shove your political correctness.

My mood is now lifted slightly, my three buddies are all in the office and all seem to be in a good mood. We laugh a little and a couple of us reminisce about the time I asked one if his wife knew he was wearing her blouse. Or the time he told me my shirt was too printy. We laugh uproariously and both admit to never wearing those articles of clothing again. Until late afternoon came around and I said something that would have been met with hysterical laughter even a few months ago. I got a curt “all right then” response. Those three words had the same impact that dropping the blade of the paper cutter onto my fingers would have had. There goes that. I stayed shut up until I left the building.

My sweet cherubs started fighting before they even got into the car. Now that Sugar no longer needs a booster seat, and Spice is legal to sit in one, they BOTH want to sit in it. Let the games begin. Thankfully, they played some good shit on our Christmas station and everyone forgot they were pissed off.

Homework was a delight tonight. If I ever meet the fucker that came up with the Everyday Math concept, I will rip his face off. That shit makes no sense and what makes even less sense is that they stop using it in middle school. So Sugar and I scream, yell and cry, but we get her math assignment done. During the process, I have ruined the child and her Everyday Math skills. I showed her how to multiply MY way, the way that makes sense. I used the same methods I use in college that have earned me an A in both Statistics and Finance. What the hell was I supposed to do? She “forgot” how to multiply and the lattice method of multiplication is like trying to read from right to left, it just isn’t right. Her teacher can have at it tomorrow and they can work together on relearning the dumb way of doing things.

Tomorrow can only get better. Right?

xoxo

Ice Princess

A Very Busy Weekend!

All of my Facebook friends started changing their profile pictures to reflect a favorite cartoon character from their childhood. I held out until this morning when I finally settled on Wonder Woman. After this insanely crazy weekend, I really feel like I channeled Wonder Woman to get it all done.

The shipment to Afghanistan is ready to go. I’m blogging tonight because I am trying to stay awake until EN gets home so we can add the letter and packing list to each of the twelve boxes, then tape and address them all. We were great planners and boxed all like items together as only two obsessive-compulsive people could… but we are low on ink in the home printer, so EN had to make copies of everything at work tonight. If he forgets everything and I have to write it all out twelve times, I may come unglued. We’ll see then how well my Wonder Woman bracelets work!

The weekend started off with a trip to Walmart to buy a few items that needed to be included in the shipment. I had enough money from my company’s donation (I hope-we’ll see how much shipping all this will cost tomorrow morning!) to buy a stack of iTunes cards for our soldier to hand out to her nearest and dearest. Then we came home, had dinner, baked one batch of cookies, a bit of homework.

Saturday was another rushed day. Another batch of cookies. A week’s worth of laundry. More homework. Coordinating with various friends as to drop off times and locations. Starting the packing process. Trying to keep the house from looking like something exploded in here. I realized today that I only had time to sit down and eat once yesterday, a hamburger that EN grilled for me. I really should be skinny!

Today, more craziness… Two batches of white chocolate peppermint bark, more laundry, more packing of boxes. And I took a whole hour to myself to run to Macy’s to buy a few needed items. Then of course, dinner at my parents. We even left early because I was scared to sit down for even a minute. I’m sure I would have fallen right to sleep. We didn’t get home until late, so then it was a mad rush to bathe and bed down the girls, finish an essay… and now here I sit.

Through it all, I remember that I live with some good peeps. EN goes along with my crazy plans to get donations and send everything out. The girls were in awe over the volume of the donations and behaved well, knowing that there was a lot going on. Sugar tried extra hard to get along with her little sister and keep her occupied. And Spice did her best to entertain, to keep things light. She walked around this morning in a winter hat, nightgown, too-small shoes from the summer, with a handful of dog kibble near her bum. She’d drop a few pieces every now and then and exclaim, “look at those tiny poops!”

Of all the things I accomplished this weekend, there wasn’t anything I HAD to do. All the things I did, I did because I wanted to. I don’t want to be thanked, praised or complimented. I do things like this because it makes my heart smile a little. It feels good to be Wonder Woman! 

xoxo

Ice Princess

A Taste of Home

Someone once told me that I should use my powers for good, not evil. I wasn’t aware that I had such powers, but maybe it’s true. I’ve been working for the last month on our annual (ok, so it’s only the second year) shipment to the soldiers. Our third adoptee through adoptaussoldier.org is currently stationed at a hospital in Afghanistan. Their needs are a little different than the soldier we shipped to last year. Since we are able to donate to patients and staff alike, we opened up the contributions from only home baked goods to include store bought items as well. I am completely stunned by the generosity of my friends.

I don’t do much on this, really. I send out a few emails, people tell me they want to participate and start bringing stuff that they want to ship. As you can see, my dining room table is piled with a variety of items… food and snacks, games, activity books, socks and gloves, sample sized toiletries. It is a breathtaking pile of loot. And there’s still more to come. Several people have contacted me to say they will be dropping off homemade items today and tomorrow morning… I am so lucky to know such great people.

What is especially great about these people is that they are everyday people with average incomes. None of us are wealthy, we all work for a living. Most of us don’t take an annual fabulous vacation and we live on a budget. That’s what makes these donations so great. People have worked hard for their money and made a donation out of the goodness and kindness of their hearts. And best of all, they are excited to be a part of this madness and actually thank ME for letting them contribute.

I never served in our armed forces, but I have lots of family members who have. I only imagine what it’s like for these young soldiers today to be so far away from home during the holidays. I hope that the little bit we are sending along shows them that their service is appreciated by a bunch of average people back home. And I hope they enjoy a little taste of home this Christmas.

xoxo

Ice Princess

Frivolity

Frivolity is a real word. I know this because I looked it up on dictionary.com. It means “the quality or state of being frivolous.” I am generally not a frivolous person: my clothes are old, I wear what I can squeeze my fat ass into. I use inexpensive make-up and I haven’t even bought many shoes since I had the girls. My weakness is Coach. I love my Coach bags and will buy myself one or two a year, always from the outlet and always with a coupon. I usually carry a big bag and my argument for this is that a large handbag diminishes the appearance of a fat ass.

When I buy gifts for others, I’m typically not frivolous then either. I’m practical. I buy EN clothes, tools and other ridiculous crap that he thinks he needs. I buy the same boring gifts (ok, gift cards) for everyone else on my list. It’s what they want, it’s what they need. I go a little crazy with the girls though, you just can’t buy only “practical” gifts for kids. Can you imagine them going back to school and talking about what they got for Christmas? “I got 37 pairs of underwear and 25 pairs of socks.” That borders on child abuse if you ask me. ;o)

I have, however, been frivolous for the past two Christmases. I’m not sure why I did this last year, I don’t know what prompted me… but I did it, so I felt I HAD to do it again this year.

In addition to hitting up my friends and family for donations to send to Iraq for Megan’s unit last year, the girls and I put together a littler “personal” package for Megan. We included standard, practical items… but I also bought her a hot pink Coach wristlet. I know, what’s a girl in Iraq going to do with a wristlet? And hot pink doesn’t exactly match Army camouflage, does it? I know I could have taken the money I spend on that little bag and put it towards more useful items, but I didn’t want to. I wanted her to have something pretty and girly. I wanted her to remember that she might be seeing much ugliness in the year of her deployment, but there’s still some “pretty” that a girl can appreciate. Most of all, I hoped that this would be an item that she would keep for a long time. Something that she might look at someday, when she’s financially secure, maybe with a family of her own… maybe that silly little bag would encourage her to do something nice, something frivolous for someone she doesn’t know.

Sugar and I hit the local Coach outlet store the day before Thanksgiving. We looked long and hard, and didn’t even consider anything that wasn’t hot pink. We bought Melissa, our third adopted soldier, a cute little bag and shipped it out earlier this week.

I guess sending hot pink Coach bags is my way of “paying it forward.” 

xoxo

Ice Princess

Nothing Gold Can Stay

I was blessed for so many years to work with a group of people that I loved, and that loved me. There were three, sometimes four of us that would go to lunch frequently, chat daily, email funny stuff back and forth, pick on each other… nothing was ever politically correct and I’ve never laughed harder or loved a bunch of coworkers as I did those three guys.

Besides working at the same place, the only thing we have in common is that we each have two daughters, all different ages, but none of us have boys, and none have more than two children. The basis for our friendship was probably nothing more than being coworkers, but we each have a great sense of humor and we can all dish it out as well as we can take it. There is a specific quality, quirk or habit that each of us gets grief for. Alliances are created and redrawn on a regular basis. I never knew what was going to happen next. But I always knew that sooner or later, we’d laugh our fool heads off over something ridiculous, whether it was Skippy wearing a shirt that we swore was his wife's (we even called it a blouse), or making fun of Fancypants for being such a snob... 

I’m trying to figure out when things changed, when we went from the laughing group of coworkers, to the four people that each sit in their own offices, not speaking, but the mood and the vibe is not good. Somedays it feels downright surly and the office has become a place that I don’t want to be.

I could think for days about when the change occurred, or why it happened. There are a few things that might have been the cause but figuring that out won’t make a damn bit of difference. There’s a smell of bitterness in the air, and an aura of indifference. I sit at my desk, alone, watching the others go off without me, wondering if they laugh that I’m left out, or if they miss my presence.

For a brief, shining moment, I got to be one of the cool kids.  Having that status taken away without knowing why hurts as bad today as I thought I would in high school. Only then no one ever let me be a cool kid.

xoxo

Ice Princess