Kinda Messy

Things occasionally got kind of messy, and it wasn't always pretty, but it sure was a lot of fun!

Morning Chat

In the car on the way to Jamie's. The fall air is crisp, and the sun is a big orange globe over the backwaters of the Mississippi River. Sam is telling me that he is excited about our upcoming trip to Milwaukee and then Florida. He is excited to see TT and Kelly tonight. He says he wants to sleep with Grandma and Auntie Ann and Zachary and Sarah when we get to Florida.

"Can we bring the pink bed?" he asks. This is the twin bed on the floor of my bedroom, the mattress fitted with a pink sheet from when it used to be in the baby's room.

"We don't need to," I tell him. "They have lots of beds there."

"I'm so excited."

"Me too," I say. "We're going to get to see all the people we love."

"But not Uncle Ron," he says. "He won't be there. I miss him. I wish we were going to see him at Thanksgiving."

And then we talk about Thanksgiving, how the Packers will play the Lions.

"Mommy, I wish we could be with Jack's daddy at Thanksgiving because then the Lions would win," he says. He is remembering my cousin John who is at Uncle Ron's every year. "I want the Lions to kick butt."

"No!!!!!" I tease and he laughs.

"Yah. The Lions are going to have 49 and the Packers are going to have zero! Would you like that, Mommy, if your team had zero and the lions had 49?"

He teases me with different combinations of teams, tells me the Cowboys are going to play the Scratchers, and he hopes the Cowboys beat the Scratchers. I tell him I don't want the Cowboys to win ever... unless they're playing the Vikings.

In the rear view mirror his bright eyes light up as he laughs. He is not wearing a coat, but his ski cap comes down over his forehead and he has a Toy Story bandaid on his cheek where he bumped it yesterday at school. He had placed it there last night when he got home, adamant he needed one and insistent that he could unwrap it and put in on himself.

"Sammy, you are so dang cute I could eat you up," I say.

"Don't eat me up!" he laughs.

"You would be yummy. You would taste like yogurt and applesauce and skittles."

"No I wouldn't. I would taste like blood."

The Slaughter

When Sarah texted me Saturday afternoon, Sammy and I were in the middle of slaughtering a pumpkin, gutting the cute little squash he’d brought home from pre-school. We had carried an old table from the garage into the kitchen and scrubbed it clean in anticipation of our ravioli-making playdate. Sam sat at the kitchen counter using knives and vegetable peelers and whatever tools he deemed necessary to extricate the meat from the inside of our little pumpkin. I stood near the stove chopping the pieces into a saucepan filled with melted butter and fresh garden sage and thyme. I had sent Sarah a text that we were making the pumpkin filling and she and the boys could come over any time. They didn’t need to wait.

I half expected her to call and tell me they weren’t coming, that they were too tired from their overbooked Saturday and they wouldn’t be coming after all. HALF expected. It seems everyone I know is overwhelmed and overscheduled and feeling the stress of the lack of sunlight and it is not an easy time of year to parent.

Last week on the way home from gymnastics on Tuesday, Sammy asked me what that triangle thing on the dash was. I glanced down at the emergency button just long enough for the car to go up and over something with a thud as we crossed one of the two bridges near the Hillside Fish House. We were going at least 60, and the car thudded and I just focused on keeping the car moving rather than trying to figure out what the tan shape that I saw for a split second out of the corner of my eye was. 7pm on the country roads away from town, the world outside our headlights was pitch black. For a moment my heart raced and I felt tears starting to build in my eyes. I tried to accelarate, imagining us stranded at the side of the road, me alone with an already whiny teething baby and a 3-and-½-year-old who hadn’t stopped reminding me that he’s thirsty for more than 30 seconds since we’d left Kidsport. Once I figured out that the car wasn’t accelerating because it had thrown itself into neutral, I moved the gear shift back to D and focused on just getting home. One mile at a time. Just get it home, I thought.

When I first graduated from college and went to work, I remember a guy I worked with telling me he hated November, he always got sick in November. And I’ve never really been a fan of it either… that cold gray month where nothing really happens except that the days get shorter and the temperatures get colder and everything turns gray. The best of fall is behind us and the beauty of winter hasn’t yet arrived. November is what I envision when I read about Dr. Seuss’s The Waiting Place. Nothing happening but a bunch of waiting.

And so when I read Sarah’s text, I was kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, the apology and request to reschedule, something I had experienced twice in the 24 hours before that. Twice that I’d had to explain to Sammy that something he had been excited about was not going to happen. Dear God, let Sarah and her boys come to make pasta. Please, Dear God.

It turned out Sarah’s text was just a note to tell us what time they’d arrive and that she was leaving her oldest at home. It would be just the mommies and the 4-year-olds. Well, and one very well-behaved one-year-old.









Many of the mommy blogs I read and a lot of friends on facebook seem to be doing gratitude journals these days… perhaps as a way of surviving The Waiting Place, a way of looking at what’s right in front of you and appreciating it rather than anticipating the end of the great wait. If I were keeping a gratitude journal for this past weekend, it would include a friend who comes through when you really need her, a baby that sits contentedly in her high chair while larger children smear the kitchen with egg and flour, homemade pumpkin ravioli with garlic cream sauce, a car that runs like a tank (knock on wood) and children who are still able to hug you and laugh after you have a mommy tantrum.

The 80's band that lives at our house

Sam's favorite red frisbee game

Drawing things that start with T

Dad Calling

Thanksgiving, early 70's

I owe a lot of the inspiration for my new post at The Next Family to my friend Kate whose own brave and honest and thought-provoking blog post (that asks questions like "What would happen to these dears if something were to happen to us? Would they remember how loved they were just from pictures?") inspired me to wake up in the middle of the night and write this:

Is He Calling?
By Barbara Matousek

Maybe it’s because the Packers are 7-0 for the first time since 1962, or maybe it’s because my sister and I will be together for Thanksgiving for the first time since a few years after Dad died, or maybe it’s because my son is attending a Catholic preschool and brings home things like “A Christian pumpkin,” or maybe it’s because I recently re-read my friend Katherine’s book about her battle with cancer, or maybe it’s because I watch my mother aging and realize how really tiny our family is, or maybe it’s because I’m developing a friendship with a woman who has complete faith in God the way my father did, or maybe it’s because I’m raising my children surrounded by families with good fathers. Maybe it’s all of these things, but I find myself missing my dad a lot lately.

Last night I had a dream. Dad and I were in a hotel room casually packing up the last of our things after having spent a few days traveling together. We were getting ready to re-enter our normal lives. The time and place of our adventure weren’t clear, but it was clear we were accustomed to traveling together and had been traveling for several days. We had our routine. I was going through the drawers, finding little things we’d left behind and shoving them into one of my smaller carry bags. Dad said he was going to make a trip down to the car with the big bags.

“Take your time,” he said. “I’ll meet you down there,” and he left. Just like that. Casual.

Read the rest here.

Kalamazoo, circa 1972


Snowshoeing during the winter I lived in Creede, Colorado (2004)


Hiking in Kauai

Watching the sunset from the south shore of Lake Superior

Swinging in November

This is what November looks like around here. And if there were sound attached to these pictures you would hear baby giggling, big boy story-telling, and the crunch of leaves under very fast moving feet. November... not bad so far.

A Power Ranger and a Duck

The sun hung just above the bluffs when we headed out from our driveway, and none of us really needed gloves or hats. With temps hovering above 50 it was a beautiful night for trick-or-treating, and both kids were content in the wagon as we headed up the hill to the part of the neighborhood we don't usually walk. We tackled a few driveways together before Sam started running up by himself... especially on the steep ones. At Mr. Jeff's we left the wagon at the bottom and climbed the steep drive together and before we got up and then back down, the neighborhood started filling with SUVs shuffling kids from door to door. We kept up with them for a while, everyone loading in and driving the 30 yards in between driveways while Sam ran and I pulled Eva in the wagon. But when we stopped to look at the scary spooky decorations at the back corner of the neighborhood while everyone raced to the next lighted driveway, we had the streets to ourselves as the sun finally set and darkness settled. A beautiful peaceful night.


Sam and I practiced making ghost sounds until Sam told me to shhhh, he heard something through the trees. We stopped and watched a lighted harvester clearing old corn from the farm beyond the development. Sam made up a story about a scary tractor and the guy who drives it, and it wasn't long before we caught up to the crowds again. A family with several princesses and a couple of scary monsters piled out of a minivan and collected their candy, and as they climbed back in a girl asked if she was cute. "Do I look cute, Mommy?" she asked three times before her mother heard her. By this time Sammy had slowed significantly, and I had to drag him up the driveway to meet our new neighbor Kate and her adorable 4-year-old witch daughter Claire. And then we got candy from another neighbor while a tiny dog named Sophie raced out the door behind us, and we climbed one last steep driveway up to "the motorcyle guy's house" before walking the closing stretch in complete darkness. It was almost 7 o'clock when we got home, and we had smashed up avocado with chips and some sliced turkey and grape tomatoes for dinner before Baby Eva went to bed without complaint and Sam laid in his bed for an hour twirling the glow sticks he'd gotten earlier in the day from Jamie. An almost perfect Halloween. I can't believe that it could ever be more fun. We are so blessed.

Look back at Halloween 2010 here.