That time you almost screw everything up...

14 years and a few weeks ago I was desperately trying to buy a plane ticket.  It was one of those Gift Of A Magi moments with the hair combs and watch chain where Jim was trying to fly to CA to surprise me, and I was trying to fly to Ohio to surprise Jim.  Our engagement story might have been a lot different if I'd been successful. 

Nineteen year old me was fantasizing about a Lord Of The Rings wedding where everyone dressed up as Elves and Hobbits and we passed out copies of the Silmarillion as favors. ... or a Gone With The Wind theme... or a  Monty Python Theme.  It's a miracle we didn't consider a Star Wars theme.   

Indubitably we have made it happily thus far due to our awesome tastes and the twin influences and patterns of both sets of our parents.  Not only did our parents' stay married, I think they actually legit were/are still super into each other.  I always took it for granted, but I don't now. May we see another 14x3 years of saying "Yes".   *clinks glass*

The kids were looking through our engagement photos (digital photos were so high quality back then) and they asked "who's the boy with mom?".  Of course Jim and I both took that as a compliment. lol 

The 80/20 Beauty Rule

You know what sounds like a fabulous idea?  Taking economics and turning it into a (likely untrue) hypothesis about how to stay beautiful.  

“The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity)[1] states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”

If I had a nickel for every time I heard “...the 80/20 rule…” in a podcast, I would have enough money to buy myself a bottle of gel polish (or half a sheet of jamberry).   So it was only a matter of time before the light bulb went on and I realized what a gold mine this term was.  Mostly in validating...exonerating (?) my extremely complicated beauty regime.  //cough cough//

So here goes…

Your beauty products should work for you, not vice versa.  

If you’re spending 45 min doing your hair, but you live in a climate where it takes less than 3 hours before it looks worse than when you started… then the 80/20 rule is here to save your life (or at the very least give your more time in your day).  Currently, the trending beauty wisdom revolves around specific tips, but everyone is different, so the 80/20 rule is a system wide perspective vs a detailed one.  Pick the hairstyles, hair colors, makeup etc based on the intersection between your personal values and effectiveness.  Your body knows this even if you don’t, so listen to it.  Also, if you find yourself always skipping over a certain eyeshadow or mascara or lipstick, but you keep thinking you’ll still wear it?  Toss it or put it in a separate bag reserved for costume parties and small children.  You’ll have fun scrubbing off of the walls at some future point.

I ignored this to my detriment last week when I spent an obscene amount of time beating my hair into submission for a family portrait session...at the beach.   Poseidon in all his fury wrecked havoc on my wanna-be Repunzelness in less than five minutes.  ...it may have been a record breaking 30 seconds, but I was in denial.  

Which leads me to my next point.  

It’s ok to have long hair that you only wear down when the President comes to town.

 Maybe this is dumb, but it was an epiphany to me.  It’s ok to have long hair you wear up 80% of the time.  Historically/anthropologically etc this wasn’t so unusual (You wouldn’t want to get suckered into weaving gold or anything because you forgot to put your cap on), but these days it seems like you need to defend long hair otherwise the temptation and pressure to cut it off gleams like shiny green grass on the other side of the fence.  So in case you needed an excuse for keeping your hair long even if you normally keep it in a ponytail or messy bun: It’s just the magic 80/20 rule at work.   
 

Only abuse your body occasionally

I love high heels, feel comfortable in high heels and would wear them all of the time if I didn’t live barefoot 80% of the time (are you catching a theme?).  I've noticed though, that feet tend to take on the shape of whatever shoe you force it to live in.  They’re like an old married couple where they gradually look and act so much like each other, they start to resemble each other. So don’t wear the same shoes all of the time unless you like pointy shaped feet with bunions.  Mix it up, go barefoot or wear something something structurally healthy.  And then wear killer high fashion whenever you feel like it...make that 20% count.  You win. Your feet win. Everybody wins. The same goes with your skin.  It's hard to keep your skin happy when you're constantly slathering it with dozens of products containing everything from ground wart hog eyelashes to the dw off the newborn skin of an endangered Colombian newt.  So you end up with the same dilemma: use organic makeup that costs twice as much (and you're pretty sure is just campfire soot mixed up with coconut oil) or feel guilty for ruining the environment and polluting your body's biggest organ (your SKIN! in case you missed the memo).  But feel guilty and stress out no longer.  With the 80/20 rule, feel free to go minimal and satiating most of the time and pull out the polyjuice potion for the 20%.  Ensure your face lasts a good 30 years longer.  Make your 20% work for you.   

(The 80/20 rule is one of those things you see everywhere once you know about it, so feel free to enlighten me.   I'm sure there are many more shortcuts to add.)    

Maybe being a medieval peasant wouldn't be so bad...

We just recently switched to a once a month grocery shopping budget and I feel a bit like a 17th century sea captain stocking a giant barquentine.  Granted my chicken these days comes pre-neck-wrung and sometimes even precooked by Squire Costco, but the modern trade off means I don’t spend my days tearing my hair out getting enough food for my family, instead I tear my hair out trying to make sure they’re literate and well educated.    

For kicks and giggles I added up our monthly food consumption:

58 lbs of Grains

186 lbs of Dairy

63 lbs of Meat

83 lbs Vegetables

61 lbs Fruit

9 lbs Fat

Total- 460 lbs of food

Which came out to be 2.5 lbs of food per person in our family (per day). That seemed like a tremendous amount of food to me, but according to the national health statistics the average American eats 4.5 lbs of food per day. However since we aren’t wasting away I have to assume we make up the rest in eating abroad. Also, that number is the mean average for our family, some of us consume far less...or more than others (Jamie...cough...Jamie).  

According to the FOA, the world average is 4 lbs/day, which is why America is a bit on the hefty size.  It’s intuitively obvious that height averages increase when there’s a max amount of minerals and nutrients being absorbed...but interestingly if you go too far over onto the obesity side of the graph, average height starts dropping again.   A lot of research suggests this is not because fat makes you short, but that the high processed diet making you fat, also makes it difficult for your gut to absorb any minerals and nutrients from your food.  

In further randomness, the average prosperous peasant in the Middle Ages ate 2-3 lbs of bread a day, 8 oz of meat/dairy and 3 pints of beer.   

I fully endorse this being the next new diet craze after the Paleo one dies out...in fact I may be already on it.    

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

We go through a gallon of yogurt a week.  Those cute little individual yogurts became a joke a long time ago and we switched to the grimmer “family size” pints that come in two awe inspiring flavors.  Strawberry and Vanilla.  My kids felt like this was the yogurt boneyard as there were no bouncing rabbits or superheros promising half sugar and healthy bones...but alas, my offspring punished me by consuming more yogurt, not less.  Our yogurt consumption got so out of hand I had a yogurt maker in my Amazon cart and was researching urban cows, when the ever classy Walmart answered all my yogurt dreams and started selling massive containers of the healthiest, plainest, fattiest, thickest yogurt I’d ever laid eyes on. I thought maybe my kids would turn up their delicate noses at it and I wouldn’t have to consider getting stock options in the dairy market, but instead they like it MORE.  (take that Mr. Rabbit)  

And this is what my gourmet cooking hobby has devolved into… freezer, crockpot, costco and hurling massive globs of soured milk at my children while I rotate long division, phonegrams and the principal parts of verbs (and that’s on a good day).

I lost the baby tonight. I was making dinner and thinking wispy nonsensical thoughts when it occurred to me I’m not usually allowed such luxury.  I was missing my stalwart sidekick. The (normally) naked one who dismantles the Tupperware cupboard and starts a rock band in the pots and pans… he wasn’t with any of his brothers and I checked the house twice before moving on to the backyard and garage.  I was telling myself not to panic and that he had to be around here somewhere when I was casually informed he’d gone out the front door “to look for dad”, which was a big problem considering dad wasn’t home.  After running up and down the street debating whether I should start hollering like a madwoman in hopes I could enlist some neighbors, I decided to check the house one more time.  Of course I found him… happily behind my bathroom door with a palette of last year's Halloween makeup which he was dutifully painting all over himself and everything else .  He jumped up and down with excitement flapping his arms and jabbering in what I could only translate as “Look Ma! I’m going to be the next Rembrandt!”.  

We’re reading “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll for book club, and I’m having a strong case of nostalgia.  That same feeling you get when you hear an old song, or smell something that reminds you of your great grandmother’s pot roast.  Unfortunately, my 2016 middle aged brain is a little horrified my seven year old self was in love with a book written by a creepy mathematician who was so obsessed with three little girls he wrote out the story he’d been telling them.  One of the questions for our book club is “ Do you consider this book to be an adult’s view of childhood, or a child’s view of adulthood?”  and the question contributed not a little to the aforementioned lost baby episode.

As an adult it seems surely the book had its origins at Burning Man or something, but I also distinctly remember consuming the book as a child and thinking it made perfect sense…. Which makes Mr. Author Man a bit more creepy, not less...hmm.   It has very little in the way of plot (like most Romantic Era books. cough cough), but lots of pretty words.   I still have the same, beautifully bound hardcover that captured my attention as a child, so I strategically left it out today for my own children (to see if it would capture their attention), but the only comment I got was, “Oooh, we can use that book to hold down the corner of our fort!”. And thus it went back on the shelf to continue its Velveteen Rabbit existence.  
 

...maybe in a few years I’ll give it and my cookbooks another shot?

Thoughts On Kids Starting School

If I got a nickel for every time someone stopped me in a store, surveyed my passel of man-cubs and told me to “enjoy this stage...it goes so fast”, I would be a wealthy woman.  But apparently unlike the rest of the interwebs, this phrase doesn’t bother me in the least. In fact I always thank the person while agreeing profusely and sometimes...when you know they’re of the race that knows Joseph...we see something in each other’s eyes and we nod.  It’s like a secret handshake.  We know.  

(this was just a year ago!)

What is it we know?  I have no clue.  But it’s all of those indescribable things that go into parenthood and can never be summed up no matter how many scarymommy or huffpo articles we all share.

I like to blame my parents (in a good way) for this.  As someone with siblings 16 years younger, I was a parent myself while my parents were (are) still parenting.  And while older sister status is definitely not the same as mom and dad status, it’s definitely a front row seat...on a roller coaster...in the splash zone.  And I would happily, happily add gnawing-limb-from-bear-trap to the usual getting up every night with a teething baby, a puking toddler and a nightmare ridden grade-schooler over dealing with some of the stuff my parents have.  Any day. In some ways, I’m sort of like a pre-loaded pessimist for teenagerdom and so please do stop me and tell me your best parenting advice because I love all of the thoughts and feedback from the women who have gone before me.  

But really I just wanted to say. I’m loving all of the back-to-school pictures, it’s one of my favorite seasons on social media. Your kids are all freaking adorable. And so I say this seriously and yet somewhat tongue-in-cheek… Enjoy this stage.  ;-)

13 Years Of Marriage, Tips And Thank You

The old adage “show don’t tell” is true about more than just writing books. In the crumbling basilicas that constitute modern marriage, it feels a bit counter intuitive to husband-brag since it’s no indication of merit or happiness...and in fact tends to be evidence towards the opposite.  

But if there is one day of the year you’re allowed to be sappy, it’s your anniversary, right?  So here’s me putting it out there: Jim is my rock, the better half and if I’m the family’s entertainment, he’s the king smiling benevolently from the head table. I know they say not to get married as young as we did (19 and 22), and perhaps our pocketbooks would be a bit more lined if we had taken the more culturally normal route, but from the comfortable perch of my 30’s I can’t help but think we really lucked out.  

(Bwahahahahaha...ahem) 

I also hope we’re less than a quarter of the way through our total number of anniversaries, but since 13 is such a nice unpropitious number… here are my unconventional top tips.  Ask me again in 13 years and I’ll probably be advocating striped socks knit from horny goat weed, and marriage counseling from a Jedi.

1. Get your husband a motorcycle.  

On a scale between Pararescue Officer in Afghanistan and Midwestern Dental Hygienist, motorcycles are just enough over on the dangerous side to be provocative.  Every time Jim is more than ten minutes late, I’m sure he’s dead on the side of the road somewhere.  It makes for some very heartfelt homecomings in what could otherwise be your standard corporate guy coming home to his stressed out wife.  Plus, it doesn’t hurt to be swept off your feet every day by a bearded man wearing black leather and big boots.

2. Go to bed angry

I’m pretty sure the whole “Never Go To Bed Angry” marriage advice was made up by a vindictive woman as a way of tormenting worn out men.   By all means “don’t let the sun go down on your wrath” but take that to mean, “deal with thyself” instead of dredging up every little thing wrong with your marriage at 11 pm.   Take a chill pill, realize you may in fact be perpetuating the problem and deal with it the next day if it’s still bothering you in the morning.

3. Don’t go on dates

...Or “date” your spouse or have weekly “date nights” or whatever the new soup du jour is (unless it’s one of those pay by the hour motels which would be far more worthwhile for the parents of small lock picking experts). Jim would probably disagree with me on this one, as he’s a big fan of dragging me out of the house for some one on one time, and maybe he’s right...but honestly the best “dates” are mindset adjustments and you can be anywhere for those.  Be fun, be attractive. Live, laugh and tease.  If however you find yourself on a date in a semi comatose state of exhaustion, I like The Book Of Questions or Battle of the Sexes as a way to resist the urge to full phone zombie.  

Do those three things and I promise you’ll have a long and fortuitous marriage….no money back guarantee.  ;-)

As I sit here though and reminisce about what we were doing 13 years ago (me chasing coyotes at 6am, Jim sleeping in and eating omelettes), I realize I made a huge mistake.  At 19 I was too young and ignorant to realize what monumental amounts of work and effort go into weddings.  For awhile I went through a stage of thinking weddings with all the foppery and accoutrements were a bunch of materialistic ridiculousness, but I’ve come full circle.  It’s not only beautiful and timeless, it’s also a testament to the sheer magnitude of biological and sociological proof of the importance of marriage.  

So thank you to the people who spent hours moving chairs, setting up tables and navigating logistics, and to the friends and sisters who stayed up into the wee hours weaving hemp necklaces and folding programs. Gratefulness to the mothers who coordinated vast amounts of family and food, and to cousins who captured visions and turned water, shears and stems into creations of beauty.   It makes me catch my breath to think how much work, love, time and sacrifice went into this day 13 years ago, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.  Truly. Thank you.  Hopefully I’ve returned the favor or will return the favor someday. :)  Cheers!

Texas Vacation Ramblings

I don’t always mean to, but I open my my mouth and *good natured* trash talk comes out when it comes to Texas and Texans (even though I’m descended from Texans so I really should be nicer to my grandparents/great grandparents).  But after spending a week there on vacation I’m loathe to admit Texas really is legit and their pride is not too terribly misplaced.  

But pretend I didn’t just type that…

It all started with Jim...or maybe Kevin (I’m not sure, but testosterone was definitely involved since no female thinks traveling across the country or hosting a big family is “vacation”).   I had no room to talk though since my summer was a magical unicorn of ease and fun with the two older kids in Ohio and an array of friends visiting, so if the powers that be wanted to conjoin two families in 106 degree Texas August for a week of seven little boys, one princess and an imminently due pregnant lady well then… there was nothing to do but load up the car and make it happen.  

Trepidations aside, I highly recommend it (although I wasn’t on the hosting side, so maybe you shouldn’t ask me).   I think every voter should be required to drive across the country.  There is nothing that gives more perspective than potato chips, red bull and an audio book at 85 mph as you speed through an Arizona desert and imagine wagon ruts and lizard flesh roasting over a fire of oxen dung.  Seriously.  

I know fancy credit cards with their flight points for shiny cylinder things that hurtle through the sky are the in-style way of traveling in the 21st century, but really I think I prefer going in a car.  Flying is stressful with kids.   Besides the offering up your firstborn to pay for it, and trying to smuggle your skinny toddler in with a fake birth certificate as a “lap child” (I kid, I kid),  you spend a tremendous amount of time a) getting ready to get to the airport on time b) getting to the airport four hours early for fear the regular two isn’t enough when you have to account for a child possibly smuggling in a weapon or setting off an alarm c) watching your children lick every international germ off of every square inch of the airport as you wait an extra few hours for your delayed flight d) the flight itself where you’re busy bribing your seatmates with alcohol and ear plugs.  When all's said and done, you have spent at least 24 hours getting to a destination that took only a few hours of actual air time.   

Which is why I prefer to hurtle down the interstate in a traveling circus tent of cray cray.   In the same 24 hour chunk you can a) let your children be as noisy as they want and you can play audio books at a decibel usually reserved for Grateful Dead concerts.  b) throwing food and toys at your fellow seatmates is not only allowed but encouraged for feeding an entertainment purposes. c) you have ample opportunities to be the pilot which means someone else has to deal with the unruly passengers.  d) The United States really is beautiful.  

As a side note: I have perfected the “don’t-arrive-sick-at-your-destination” game.  Don’t let anyone use the restroom.  Ever.   I’ll admit this plan works better when you have only penises in the car, but I’m sure it can be modified to work with girls too.   My hypothesis is this:  Your immune system works best against local germs...the ones within a biological being’s biome.  When you leave the evolutionary safety of your environment you expose yourself to all sorts of gas station viruses your body has no defense against.  Everyone knows it is structurally impossible to keep small children from touching things which is how you arrive at your destination with a lineup of small petri dishes growing all kinds of interesting germs.   I prefer the canine way of watering rocks and bushes at deserted but strategic intervals.  No one comes into contact with foreign organisms and at least your start out your vacation in good health (all bets are off after that, but that’s ok because what’s a vacation with kids without at least a little puke, right?)  

Texas was and is its own environmental biome of bigness, beauty and toughness...dampened only slightly over the years by obesity and air conditioning (sorry, I couldn’t resist!). To the rest of the world the United States may seem like one country, but Texas is its own country within a country (despite all of the Californians moving to Dallas...again, sorry!).  But I’m a bit extra fond of the place because of the people who live there.  

Also, I think I’ve eaten more beef in the last week than I have in the last three months together.   

Why Outrageous Election Memes Are Actually Good

Science magazine recently published a fascinating article about an enormous battle in the bronze age. It caught my wandering eye of Saruman because we doubt and do the parental “mmhmmm dear” when it comes to what the ancients wrote about themselves (I’m pretty sure Ancient Egypt’s “NFL” was called “WCETB” or “Who Can Exaggerate The Best”) so finding physical evidence to validate such claims is kind of a big deal. But what does this have to do with Trump vs. Hillary? It’s that people have been fighting for a very long time.  

To parents I'm sure this is obvious. This morning I optimistically checked the tide chart and threw everyone in the car for a spontaneous tide pool hike. I error intentionally on the side of not thinking through the ramifications of such actions so that I don’t talk myself out of it, but suffice it to say I was paying the consequences (willingly) when three hours later I ended up back at home with four soggy kids and a vehicle that’s slowly turning into its own ocean eco-system of sand, seaweed and something that smells suspiciously like rotting crab. Give it a few more weeks and our Mazda will be in contention for the world's smallest pacific island. As such, it is hard for me to differentiate one super special, one-of-a-kind, one-rock-to-rule-them-all from another. In the mayhem I misguidedly shut down one of my sweet angel children multiple times thinking he was asking for ice cream when he was really asking for anti-theft protection. His brothers capitalized on my distraction, joined forces and claimed power of the one true rock to rule them all.  

...And that’s how I ended up with my own Bronze Age battle on my back porch. You can’t shut someone down consistently without frustrations building up like a pressure cooker.

There are no perfect sides. Every opinion this side of heaven is a pie graph of partly true and partly flawed. I’m not even sure it’s a bad thing that we usually see the insanity of another person’s political opinions but not our own. Human brains can’t help but try to fix things, build things, and improve on things, so disagreeing is the biological chisel in the toolbox of modern thinking.  

But if it helps... next time you feel your blood pressure rising as you research other countries to move to if either one of the political candidates becomes president… remember that this is how history sorts itself out. Don’t try to shut down, police or parent the rhetoric war going on right now because discourse (even if it’s Nazi/Doltist/Fascist/Marxist/Imbecilic etc) is better than World War II. Ideas have to go through the gauntlet and stand on their own merit.  Embrace it! It’s a good thing and join it if your conscience dictates.  

...at the very least it might give future historians something to do.

ComiCon Here I Come

Living in the real world is tough cannolis.  Particularly if (like me) you were raised looking longingly at the world through a filter of T.H. White and Orson Scott Card.  While everyone else was out getting first kisses and going to Audio Adrenaline concerts with the youth group, I was changing, diapers, sewing long skirts out of fabric plastered with giant cherries and getting lost in every Star Wars fan book I could get a hold of (no shame!).   

Thus, it was with enormous awe and gravity that I finally procured Willy Wonka’s golden tickets and got to go to ComicCon for the first time last  year.  It would be a fateful homecoming.   I would finally be among the fellow outcasts of society, the type of people who can answer the question “What is Bilbo Baggin’s mother's name” instantly and with a straight face.   Turns out though, ComicCon is so huge and popular that it’s more like specialists in the medical field.   I only speak maybe two, three dialects of nerd, and there are at least seventy-seven...not counting Dr. Who which has at least three separate dialects within the dialect.   Also, the sheer awesomeness is a little overwhelming.  I mean, where else can you go and see Darth Vader and Sherlock Holmes standoff?  Especially when Darth Vader really is 6’ 8” and Sherlock is Benedict Cumberbatch’s doppelganger.  Last year there were zombies everywhere...almost tied with the number of naked Cersei’s with their Septa Unellas and shame bells.  (any bets one what the popular GOT costume will be this year?)  

I go again this Saturday and I can’t wait.  In some ways it's like those 4th of July parades as a kid where they throw out free candy...instead at ComicCon they throw out free books! And comics! ...and pretty much everything in between!  Besides meeting all of my favorite authors, I’m pretty sure nothing can top last year of getting to meet Jamie Fraser and Jonathan Randall right before tap dancing as an X-man in Xavier’s school of dance...but hey, I’m willing to take whatever comes my way.  I’m just thrilled I get to go again.