Story Lady Blog

What’s My Deal?

February 22, 2011 by alicia · 8 Comments

The title of this post makes it sound like some kind of game show. I do wish I had some HUGE cash prizes for those of you (if any) who can answer the following questions:

#1) Why do I keep confusing my BLEACH SPRAY with my CARPET CLEANER? Their spray bottles are similar, yes. But the bleach spray bottle is dark yellow and the carpet cleaner bottle is dark red. Through some miracle, you can’t tell where I’ve sprayed bleach on my carpet, but this HAS TO STOP before it gets ugly.

#2) Why do I cut and collect coupons and then always forget to use them -whether it’s because I left them at home or because I simply forget they’re in my pocket/wallet (despite the fact that I’ve thought about using them while I was shopping)?

Filed Under: Uncategorized · Tagged With: bleach spray, carpet cleaner, coupons

Dating

February 21, 2011 by alicia · 1 Comment

I sort of off-handedly made a remark a few days ago to my daughter about going on a date. A GIRL date. I didn’t think much of it.

“We need a girl date, huh Lace?” I said and then thought about what to make for dinner.

She set immediately to making plans.

“I needa change!” She said, running into her room and rooting through her drawers for JUST the right outfit.

I had to explain to her that we weren’t going out right then, and she accepted that under the condition that we fix an actual date and time. So we did.

Denny’s. Friday afternoon. Pre-dinner cake.
We split one piece. I had originally planned on splitting a milkshake with her, but when she saw the big picture of the moist slice of chocolate cake… it was all over. It’s always been like that with chocolate and Lacy.
It’s hereditary, I think.
The next day, I found her on another date. I mean, I didn’t know it was a date. She had to tell me. But after she did… it was totally obvious. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.

She went all out. There’s even a BLANKET over the Lightening McQueen table.

Please don’t ask me to explain the tiny whisk in my son’s mouth.
I can’t.
But I can tell you this: that chocolate cake was delish.

Filed Under: Family, The Boy, The Girl ·

Glorious. Wonderful. Magnifico.

February 19, 2011 by alicia · 1 Comment

Yesterday was a really good day.

You know what I got? Do ya, do ya, do ya?

TWO letters. I got TWO REAL LETTERS in the mail! Can you believe it?! Not just ONE REAL LETTER. TWO REAL LETTERS! I literally bounded out of the post office with my two real letters in hand. I thought about bursting into song.

I’m walkin’ on sunshine…

But I didn’t. I just beelined it for my car instead. I drove home, ran inside, got comfortable on the couch and tore into what turned out to be two very delicious real letters. The first was from my bestie without, well… she knows….

First of all, can I just tell you how good it makes me feel that she saves newspaper clippings for me?
Second of all, can I just tell you how good those clippings make me feel because they are riotous? I mean, a woman whacking a 200 pound bear with a zucchini?! Heaven help me! It does NOT get better than that. Zucchinis have always served as a sort of weapon, driving away friends who refuse to accept any more from your over-abundant plant… but THIS? THIS?! This takes it to a new level. Everyone? Plant zucchini… your life just might depend on it.

My second letter rode tandem to (with? I’m not really sure what the right word is here…) a cookbook the likes of which I’ve never, ever seen and which I poured over for about two solid hours (during which I neglected to find a babysitter for our trip today, so the kids are coming along).

The letter is hiding the title of the cookbook. I did that on purpose. I wanted to riddle you suspense. Check it:

Contained in this precious gem are at least TWO recipes for beef tongue (to say nothing of the pork tongue recipes) and three recipes for rabbit meat. To answer your questions, yes I’ve eaten cow tongue. Yes, I liked it. No, I didn’t make it. Yes, I’m going to this summer. Yes, you can come over. Yes, it will SHMECK all to HECK.

In natural consequence of receiving two absolutely amazing pieces of sunshine in my unsuspecting mailbox, I’ll have you all know that I’m putting stationery on my list today.

Thanks be to the men and women of snail mail.
Thanks be to my great friends, who’s (whose? I really need help here…) letters arrived right when they were most needed.
Thanks be to the Mennonites.
Thanks be to the great feeling that comes with realness… real letters, real friends, real food, real stories of survival.

And to top it all off, my sister paid me a visit. I’m wishing today “good luck” in trying to measure up.

Filed Under: Family ·

Blame Game

February 18, 2011 by alicia · Leave a Comment

Two days ago I was resting on the couch when I heard a shattering sound. I looked up to find a small table lamp knocked over with my daughter, stick horse in hand, standing next to it. I couldn’t even get out a word before she hurriedly told me what happened.

“My horse just kicked it.”

Needless to say, we had a little talk about owning up to our mistakes.
A kicking stick horse. Ha. What does she take me for, a fool?

Filed Under: The Girl ·

iPods, According to the Four Year Old

February 17, 2011 by alicia · 2 Comments

…and you thought they were expensive.

Filed Under: The Girl ·

The Birds

February 16, 2011 by alicia · 4 Comments

One of the many reasons I heart Robert Frost so much is his ability to see so much in nature. I was born and bred in the country, and with that comes a love of nature. I’m not talking about the peace-sign wearin’, hairy armpit sportin’ love of nature. Um, my car doesn’t even have a bumper sticker -though I will note that I saw one a few weeks ago that I liked.

Live simply so others can simply live.

But back to regular programming… all my life, I’ve been able to look out of my windows and see for miles on end. The stars have always burned bright, except on cloudy nights, and most of my friends lived off of dirt roads (as I did). In fact, most of my friends still live off dirt roads. I’ve always had fresh air to breathe and I’ve always had my own personal wilderness at my disposal.

My husband and I have never owned a house. We’ve been renters. We don’t mind -we’ve never had the house itch, but I have gained a few preferences as the years have gone on. One of those is that I want a window above my sink. And if possible, can we please have the sink and window facing west? Nothing funny about it, I just love washing dishes while the sun sets in the west.

My daughter loves to help me do dishes (this we know) and one day I pointed out the sunset, asking her what colors she could see in it.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” I asked, “Mommy loves the sunsets.” From that day to this, she has consistently pointed out every sunset she’s seen to her mother. Valentine’s Day, we sat down to have a family dinner. Our Valentine Tradition is staying and fixing up a fancy-to-us Valentine dinner to share, just the four of us. This year, we grilled teriyaki chicken skewers and baked potatoes. I made a spinach salad, and then we ate our food off of paper plates because I was sick all weekend and behind on housework. As I washed a few dishes between baking potatoes and tossing a salad, my daughter tugged at my arm.

“Mom, LOOK!” She said. I’m ashamed to admit that my enthusiasm for looking wasn’t what it should have been. It was more like… *sighhhhhhh* “What is it?”

“THE SUNNNNN SET and ALL A ‘DOSE BIRDS!” I looked out of the window and saw an enormous flock of black birds flying in front of a golden sunset. The rich hues of purple and pink reached out around the sun and it literally took my breath away. I’ve been watching those black birds all season. They come around this time of year, and they are beautiful. I love watching them from my windows. Last week, I watched a calf play with them exactly as a kitten would play with a strand of yarn. I’d never seen a calf behave like that before, and it made my day. That’s what I love about this season: birds, calves, the feeling that the wretching cold is conquerable.

Yesterday I took a short stroll around my house just as the sun was fixing to set. I wanted to snap a picture of the birds, if I could. I knew any picture I might get wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful as the Valentine’s Day Flight in the Sunset, but at least it would serve to remind me of that day. Can you see all of those birds? Oh how I wish to Hades on evenings like yesterday that I was an equipped photographer! My children came totting behind me and found their uncle next to the barn. (Is totting a word? Because that’s really what they did.)The kids wanted nothing to do with the birds.But my little brother was nice enough to scare the birds out the tree.

It really is something to see -these pictures really don’t do the birds justice. They’re something to be seen and something to be heard. Their song isn’t squawky and screechy -it’s chaotic and distant. Chaotic and distant is much more enchanting than squawky and screechy. I’m off to google just what kind of birds they are, whistling “Bye, bye Blackbird” as I do. I wish you could come over and see them and the bird-chasing calves.

And would you mind keeping me company while I do my dishes by sunset?

Filed Under: Family · Tagged With: blackbirds, sunsets

Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2011 by alicia · 3 Comments

I started out my Valentine’s Day the way I believe everyone ought to start out their Valentine’s Day.

That is to say: I started out Valentine’s Day with my mother’s pancakes, dyed a lovely shade of pink -per tradition.

After mom graciously fed us all and handed out Valentine gifts to the grandkiddies, I snatched up my nieces and brought them home with me. Their mom went in for an ultrasound (it’s a BOY!). Instead of having preschool class, we had a preschool party. My one-year old niece is so dang cute that I can’t get enough of her. Three years ago when Lacy was one and she was dumping everything out of anything, it really chapped my cheeks. But watching my niece do it was downright adorable. What changed? I dunno. My attitude. The fact that I had another kid. The fact that this kid is irresistable and I enjoy watching her dump things.
I wish I had more for her to dump. And really -doesn’t that picture just make you smile? Laugh? Grin? Anything? I love it.
If that didn’t get you grinning, this Valentine, made by my four year old cousin will:
He later added three sequins under it -a nice touch, if you ask me. Come to find out, he was trying to write “L-I-E” which is the last three letters of his sister’s name. He just got a little mixed up. I’m so glad. I’ve pulled that picture about eleven million times today, just to laugh at it.
Just as the party was ending and parents were picking children up, a white truck pulled into my driveway. The fire chief got out of it. I knew he was coming -he was dropping off some paperwork for my husband.
That’s what fire chiefs specialize in -paperwork. Not that I would know, but it seemed reasonable. I bought it. I BOUGHT it.
Of course I bought it.
Because my husband bought me the purple flowers days before and THEY were my Valentine’s flowers, per tradition! I always got Valentine’s flowers the week before Valentine’s Day because we’ve always been too poor to afford something as dazzling as delivery. I don’t mean to say that we’re rich. We’re not. We are not. Financially, we are not. That’s why I got the purple flowers. That’s why my jaw hit the floor when the fire chief handed me a dozen red roses with a card attached from my husband. The thing is: the fire chief’s wife works at Pat’s.

These mean a great deal to me, and if you’re going to guffaw over flowers and chocolates and The Hoax That Is Valentine’s Day, please don’t stop reading. What I’m about to write really doesn’t concern all that directly. It mostly concerns my parents.
Every year on Valentine’s Day, my mother would get a bouquet DELIVERED to her. It was always beautiful. BEAUTIFUL. As a little girl, I used to watch the excitement on my mother’s face. The flowers always made her glow, and I loved knowing that something my dad gave to my mom made her feel that way. He always ordered the arrangements from the same place. Pat’s. I frequented Pat’s in high school, picking up my brother’s corsage orders and my orders for those, you know… flowers you pin on the boy that are called by a name I can’t spell… boutennieres. Buttonierres. Boo-tun-ears.
Anyway, the place smells fabulous.

I never, ever told my husband about my mother’s Valentine delivery flowers. All I ever DID tell him was that I appreciated what he got. I also must mention that I’m a fan of brightly-colored grocery store bouquets. I am not a fan of grocery store roses. Am I a snob?
Well, yeah. I see that now. It isn’t entirely my fault. It’s my Dad’s, really! And this isn’t the first time he’s done this to me. My first year away from home, it took me nearly 10 minutes to buy a bell pepper. One. Bell Pepper. I picked one after another up and scoffed. Nothing was good enough! I had no idea people LIVED like that, scraping by on scrawny wilted peppers. They looked nothing like the beauties my dad could turn out. I won’t even get into the time I paid $4 for one watery tomato.
And steaks. My Dad makes the best steaks I’ve ever had. I didn’t know they were the best at first. I just thought they were steaks. Steaks were steaks and steaks were great. And then one day, one fateful day, I ordered a steak… at a restaurant.
It was disgusting.
I couldn’t eat it! I could not eat it! I’ve never been a picky eater, and I considered sending it back to the cook with a post-it note: This isn’t steak. I don’t know what it is, but I know what it isn’t… steak.
I didn’t do that. I was a junior high kid on a field trip, so I didn’t do that. But I went home and hugged a package of my Dad’s fresh steak. Okay I didn’t do that either. At least, not until I was in college and home for a visit.

My husband has told me time and again how much he loves that he married a girl who isn’t high maintenance. Granted, I do insist on growing a garden, but that saves money! I do insist on buying and butchering a cow so we’ll have fresh beef, but in the long run that ALSO saves money (steak at roughly $1 a pound? Yes, please!) but now there’s this whole FLOWER mess that has me rethinking my very character!
I thought I was down to earth.
I thought I was reasonable.
I thought I didn’t need flowers.
Truths:
I’ve been spoiled.
I do need flowers, but only a certain type that make me feel exactly like my one year old cousin when she’s dumping stickers on the table… confident, a little reckless, and a lotta happy.
Happy Valentine’s Day to you.

PS: who wants to break the news to my husband that I’m expensive? I don’t. Oh, who am I kidding? He’s figured it out by now.

Filed Under: Family, The Husband ·

Talents

February 12, 2011 by alicia · 4 Comments

Talents are a funny thing.

I was watching a talented man sing yesterday. He had a beautiful voice, and wondered what it would be like to have a voice that resonated like that. I longed to get up from the couch (I’d been watching him on TV) and burst out into beautiful song. The only problem? My voice is croaky at best. It hasn’t been the same since I had Lacy, and to tell the truth, it wasn’t much before then. Some music major I am…

It didn’t take me long to come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t sing. I’d come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t sing so many time before that I had become rather used to it. It goes something like this:

I wish I could sing like that.

Wouldn’t life be great if I could sing like that?

I can’t sing like that.

No amount of voice lessons will correct the croak in my voice.

My life is great despite not being able to sing beautifully.

I wonder if we have all th stuff to make brownies?

And that’s it. Having the talent to sing would be great -amazing -awesome. But it’s OPTIONAL. If I can’t sing, it won’t drive me crazy. I’ll just go through life without auditioning for American Idol, a show I’ve never watched anyhow.

But what about cleaning house? I admitted to myself for the first time yesterday that I don’t have a talent for keeping my house clean. I keep telling myself that I can’t keep it clean because of this and that, but the bottom line is this: I’m not good at organizing. If my house my organized, I could keep it clean. If everything had a place, I’d be better off. MUCH better off. As it is, I spend much of my life cleaning. This gets me down. I want to have a clean house! So what do I do? Work harder, not smarter.

I read a woman’s online profile yesterday. Do you know what it said? I love cleaning my house and watching TV. I had to read it through a few times. She LOVES cleaning her house? I’m bafffled. I get satisfaction out of cleaning my house, but it all goes to pot when all the work I’ve done gets rapidly undone. I lose motivation, think ‘why bother?’ and go back to doing something that will STAY done, like making aprons (Incidentally, this is also why I sometimes go through phases where my legs remain unshaven for grossly long periods of time). Much to my despair, a singing talent is 100% optional but a cleaning talent is HIGHLY recommended for a woman in my position.

Yesterday, I decided to get the house as close to clean as I could before my husband came home from work. I must interject here that my house isn’t DIRTY. It’s cluttered. I put the iron away. I put the starch away. I picked up toys, and then SMACK in the middle of cleaning, I got an idea for an apron and straightway got the starch and iron back out. My husband walked through the door, I apologized profusely, he laughed at me, and I went on to relate to him my latest goal:

Make enough money selling aprons to hire someone to organize my house.

Ta. Da.

(PS: a few hours before my husband came home from work yesterday, I sent him a text asking if he wouldn’t mind taking the kids out of the house for a few hours so I could clean. A reply text came back almost instantly: “Are you okay?” He was seriously concerned about me.)

Filed Under: Family · Tagged With: cleaning, housewife, sewing aprons, talents

Reaching the Limit

February 11, 2011 by alicia · 4 Comments

I have mothering models -women I look to and try to emulate as I mother my own little gosling. One of those women is Sister Marjorie Pay Hinckley. Her mothering methods have always been so admirable. I read once that she made a point of never telling her children “no” when she might tell them “yes.” I’ve tried to keep up with that, but I know I’m nowhere near as great a mother as she.

My children, as I’ve mentioned before, are going through some tough stages -as individuals and as a couple. Ha. It seems more than hilarious to type that. “As a couple.” Ha ha. I won’t bore you with whining about it all, but I will tell you that I’m struggling. I find the word “no” escaping my lips more and more everyday.

I usually let my kids “help” with anything they want to help with. It’s important to me -not because I hope they’ll grow into teenagers who ADORE helping their mother (dream on) but because I want to build our relationship. Anyway, how do you turn down “help” when it comes to you with two matching aprons in her chubby little hand and says things like, “I could be like just you and do da dishes!”

Side note: I love the way she switches “just like” to “like just” and I never correct her. In fact, I switch it when I talk so she won’t know there’s a “right” way. Does that make me evil?

I also love being touched. I’ve been known to pay my children to scratch my back, play with my hair, rub my feet… I’m a kitten in a mom body.

But last night, I reached my limit. In a way, it’s good. I actually didn’t know I had a limit, but I guess all kittens do -especially as it concerns toddlers. After their constant fighting, their “help” with the dishes (which consisted of me re-washing 1/3 of all the dishes), and asking them repeatedly to PLEASE help me pick up their stuff or it was going in the garbage… I collapsed into a seated position on the floor in front of my computer, turned on netflix, and tried to escape into a movie -any movie at all. As it started, the kids started playing with a loud noise-making toy.

“No,” I said, taking it away and putting it in the toy box. Lacy pulled up a small chair next to me and began pushing her legs up against mine.

“No, no,” I said, inching away. Trent crawled onto my back.

“No,” I said, literally prying him off. Once off, he tried pulling at some cords connected to the computer.

“No!” I said, pulling him away.

Then I started the movie over because I had missed all of it up to that point. This continued throughout the movie, and I became aware of just how much I was saying “no.” The kids continued to clobber me, and I continued to beg them to stop. Stop touching mommy. Just for a minute. They seemed disinterested in the kitten’s wants. In fact, they were more interested in letting me know what THEY wanted.

“Mom! Mom! Mom!”

“Mommmmm!”

Finally, when my movie was over I did something bad motherish. I flipped on a default movie -one that was sure to captivate them completely. While they stared at the screen, I retreated to the couch and simply stared off into space and breathed. I realized I needed a break. Bedtime was coming up -I felt bedtime would suffice as a break.

I thought wrong.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a mother, as soon as she has retired the crib, will end up with a toddler in her bed every single night of her life. If not one, then two.

And so I woke up irritated, having not gotten a break of any sort. I hate feeling this way -it isn’t as if I’m getting some sort of satisfaction out of feeling this way. It isn’t like me at all! I maintain that I need a break. I maintain it. I don’t usually ask for or need breaks very often because I like being smothered and touched and needed. But surprise! I have a limit.

I think that’s fairly normal. I bet even Sister Hinckley had a limit. I woke up this morning and decided to pray about it. I got down on my knees and pled my case to my Father in Heaven.

“Please help me to find joy in my children today. I need some space, but I can’t have any right now. Help me to be more patient and happy…”

At this point, my son crawled on top of me and started bludgeoning my head.

“… See?” I said, and then ended my prayer before my head got beat off.

I then logged onto Mormon Messages for my morning devotional and watched this:

It lifted me up enough to face the morning. I’ll worry about lunchtime when it gets here.

Filed Under: Family ·

If Only

February 10, 2011 by alicia · 2 Comments

If I wanted to be fit as much as he wanted that sucker…
I’d be a regular Jillian Michaels.

Filed Under: The Boy · Tagged With: Jillian Michaels