Nanowrimo Story- Chapter 2

When I was trying to come up with story ideas for Nanowrimo, I tried to pick things I thought I could write quickly and easily.  Since I recently read this book about Matilda of Flanders Queen Of The Conqueror (which I highly recommend) I thought I could fairly easily pull off 11th century France.  Boy was I wrong, but all of that to say.  The history in these chapters is as real and close to actual recorded history as possible.   And I'm leaning heavily on the historian mentioned above, and Kathleen Cushing's Reform and Papacy in the 11th Century.   

Enjoy and don't forget to vote for the next chapter! 

Chapter Two

There were sounds of human existence in the form of feminine laughter.  I sat up, trying to figure out why that was so important, why I should care if there were people around or not.  I lived in San Luis Obispo, a large college city that certainly didn’t lack the sounds of humanity twenty-four seven.  So why was my brain searching so intently for human contact?  My foot rested in a mud puddle.  A long narrow mud puddle that stretched off into the distance like a road and smelled strongly of animal excrement.  I couldn’t come to grips with any of it.  All of the possible hypothesis crowded in my brain too fast for me to think rationally.  I laid back down (more like fell) and squeezed my eyes shut.  I remembered a yoga class I went to with a groupon coupon where we were taught to take ten deep breaths and then let it out and hold still for thirty seconds.  It was the only useful thing I’d learned since I hadn’t had time to go to the second class, but the breathing trick persisted as my go to strategy whenever someone’s chart and symptoms erupted in a giant fustercluck. It never let me down.  So I counted my breaths and willed reality to come back.  I got to the tenth lungful of air and let it out, my eyes still squeezed shut.  I ticked off the seconds to thirty in my head, knowing that I was fully capable of handling whatever crisis was causing this delusion.  

But when I opened my eyes, I was still sitting in a overly green meadow swamp with my foot in a puddle of muddy cow poop.  Well crap.  Literally.  I could hear the sound of voices again, this time getting closer.  I struggled to my feet and found myself inextricable drawn to these sounds of people.  

They found me before I found them.  It was a group of women...really tiny women. The smallest one was in the middle. She was wearing a dress exactly like mine...except she had a long white shift underneath it, and there was gold embroidery on her red trumpet sleeves.  They all stopped and stared at me.  At five foot six, I felt like the Jolly Green Giant wearing a bikini.  Never had I been quite so shockingly aware of my bare knees and feet.   

“Emilie…Is that you?” The super small girl asked.  She was breathtakingly beautiful.  Like Rory Gilmore and Catherine Zeta Jones rolled into one.  Her voice though sounded like someone twice her size.  

“Ummm….no...I mean...I don’t know?” I said, unsure of what else to say. If I was unconscious, maybe it was better to go along with narrative in hopes my brain worked through it and woke up.  But if I was in a coma, maybe I should fight it and claw my way back. Or maybe it was a hallucination of some kind.  A coping mechanism for all of the stuff I didn’t want to think about.  “I’m Emilie Durand.”  I said, going for basic honesty in the end.  

“Your father sent word you were coming, but honestly I was expecting a little more ornatus I must say.”  The girl clapped her hands, and two of her handmaidens came forward to me and I had the sudden impression of a rabid dog in a corner and animal control cautiously approaching it with a dart gun.  I held up my hands.  “I’m sorry, I think there’s been some mistake, my father is dead and I really need to get home.”  Did you hear that brain?

“Well yes, we know that.” she said, not unsympathetically but definitely with a note of slow patronization in her voice.  “This is your home now, I’m Lady Matilda.”  When that didn’t get the reaction she was looking for, she added, “...my father is the Duke Of Flanders?”

Flanders...Flanders.  Where was Flanders?  The only thing I could think of was a picture of fields and fields of white crosses from the battle of Flanders in World War One.  Was that France?  Was I in France?  Impossible.

“Where is your chemise? And what happened to your kirtle?” I was surrounded by all of them now and they fingered the fabric of my tattered red costume with such shock and horror I felt like I’d been caught taking a baseball bat to a BMW convertible.   

“I will give her new fabric.” Matilda said with such authority, I was pretty sure she could command this whole episode to end.  A dozen head swiveled from her to me as if they were expecting me to say something.  


“Uh...thanks.” I said.  This clearly was not the right answer.  Their eyes bugged out in dismay, like I’d just ripped up a check for a million dollars.

 “...new fabric.”  One of them hissed at my elbow, like maybe I hadn’t heard properly.  

‘I am most grateful...my...lady?” I said, faltering and feeling like an idiot.  “...auribus teneo lupum” I muttered under my breath.  

Matilda’s voice pealed out with laughter.  “You speak latin?” She asked, seeming surprised.

“No” I assured her.  “Not unless you count all of the bones in the human body plus the impolite sayings we passed each other in anatomy and physiology.”  I said, not sure whether to be horrified or surprised she’d understood me.  

“You write!” She said, even more surprised by that, than my latin.  

“Well that depends on which professor you ask.” I said, but this didn’t seem to make any sense to her.  

“Professor,” She said, “a Magister?”  

“Nevermind.” I had decided it seemed much safer to go along with whatever she said.  If only because you couldn’t help but want to do what she commanded.  

“We were just on our way to Mass” She dropped her head in a small sign of respect, and I was impressed that at least she demurred to someone, even if that only person was God himself.

The nuns at the local church weren’t nearly as shy or polite as Matilda’s handmaidens who had all given me wide birth as we walked through what felt like miles and miles of dense forests and muddy swampy ground.  I’m sure I must have looked like a fish, with my mouth gaping open, super impressed I could even imagine stuff like this since it didn’t look like any part of the world I was familiar with.   Now I was in a stone room, with stone windows, stone towers and stone statues of bearded men stabbing goblins with spears.  To be honest, it felt cold and dark, and all one color.  Like the world had gone black and white in this inside world of rock.  

“We have Charlemagne to thank for that.” One of the nuns said noticing me staring at the garish artwork, as she yanked my hair into three sections and began to vigorously braid.  I was now wearing the proper amount of clothes, but if I’d thought the red dress was ratty, the chemise I was wearing looked like it had been patched out of three different rags.  But it was clean...sorta.  And I had leather booties on that had molded to someone else’s feet and were upset at having a new host, but those were small complaints compared to what my mind was beating at… trying to make sense of everything. I’d had lots of vivid dreams in my life and something about this did not feel dreamlike. For one, it was too ugly and too harsh.  The stones didn’t look like stones, they looked dusty and smelled like urine.  It was dark in the church, but not in a spooky, gothic way rather in a “this is totally normal” way that shouldn’t have felt normal to me.  

“Why His Grace would let one of his charges out in the countryside half nekkid is matter for Father Jacques if I haven’t ever heard so myself.”  The nun had crossed herself when she touched my bare leg.  ‘Merciful heavens, you’re as smooth as Sister Marie’s rose petals, you don’t practice the arts do ye?”  


I wasn’t sure what she meant by “arts” but intoned it wasn’t crayons and watercolors. Although I didn’t see what shaved legs had to do with God, I kept my mouth shut and prayed.  And then prayed some more when I found myself kneeling on a wooden bench at an altar with someone waving smoke above my head. I wondered if this was what it felt like for someone trying Dr. Pepper or pizza for the first time if they’d just popped out of the serengeti.  What was clearly normal to everyone around me, felt strange in an unnerving sort of way for me.  I noticed Matilda...The Lady Matilda as I’d been corrected twice now... was watching me closely.  I did my best to move my lips when everyone else did, and copy their movements as closely as possible, but I surprised myself (and apparently everyone around me) when I wholly unexpectedly burst into tears when we started singing the Gloria Patri.

“Don’t mind her.”  Matilda told the startled Father who did not look like a Jacques and looked more like a Nick or Ethan. “She is demens, the Duke will take care of her.”  

This soaked up the holiness of the moment like a dry piece of bread, my mind snapped back to the thornier problems in front of me.  What exactly did she mean by the Duke would take care of me? I had a strong suspicion everyone who’d met me thus far thought I was clinically insane, and I had to entertain the real idea they might be right.  What did they do with crazy people in...wherever I was...and whenever I was?  This was clearly an era long before modern accouterments  But it also seemed to be in an era where even lamps and carriages would have been dazzling technological advances.   The Middle Ages maybe?  But when? A wave of panic washed over me as I remembered the major medical traumas of that time period.  Was I before the Bubonic Plague or past it?  There was no way to tell!  And that was assuming I didn’t die of malnutrition, starvation, or some other infectious disease.  I doubted they even had clean water.  

 

That I was even considering all of this as a real possibility, just confirmed that yes...I was indeed dangerously past the line of pervasive psychosis.  I sank back onto the stone floor and brought my hands shakily in front of my face.  They looked pretty real and normal.  There was the hangnail I’d tried to bite off with my teeth, and the scab where I’d snagged my knuckle grating cheese a few days ago.  Something snapped inside of me, and I realized belatedly that I had to come to a self preservational conclusion.  I was going to have to stop freaking out and either lay down and wait for death or consciousness to come, or I was going to have to catch up as fast as possible and go with Matilda. I stood up, then got yanked back down with a hiss from the girl next to me.


“We’re praying.”  

Oh. Right.

 

Chapter Three  

To find out what happens next, vote in the poll and I'll get crackin' on the next chapter! (or you can vote on Facebook)

For other interesting tidbits, you can listen to the Gloria Patri here and an 11th century French melody Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour (both of which are still sung today).  

Here is a Romanesque style church that would have been popular in France in the 11th Century.  

Nanowrimo 2016- William The Conqueror/Outlander Story

It was a good thing I wasn't in charge of picking which story to write because they all looked enticingly fun to me and I would have probably tried to write all of them.  The Outlander-esque story won (which surprised me), and so without further ado here is chapter one.  

Prologue:

Time travel is one of those tricky things.  No one really believes in it except maybe the eccentrically intelligent or the imaginative young.  Of course, if it happens to you…

 

 

Chapter One:

I was afraid to touch it.  The red dress hung smashed behind racks of brightly colored feather boas and sequined glasses.  It looked dirty at first, then I realized it wasn’t dirt, it was just old...so old looking you didn’t need a microscope to see the edge of every little fiber.

“Come, on… pick the pink top hat and striped vest” my friend Natasha said laughing and pulling me towards the rest of our friends squished in front of the camera.   We’d been at the Sunset Savor festival since it opened this morning and it was way past lunch time.  I was starting to feel like I was running on the dregs of my coffee and the seemingly boundless energy of my friends.  We were all at one of those silly old fashioned photo booths where you put on costumes and tried to pretend to look very stern (which is nearly impossible in a group of four girls).  I reached for the outrageous pink hat and a handful of fake pearls.

“Gracious child, you can’t possibly think of wearing that.”

The photo booth proprietor took the hat away from me and steered me towards the rack I’d just left.  “Your complexion can’t handle that froofy pink at all… you’re much too... ”  She pursed her lips.  

Sallow? Dark headed? I almost expected her to tell me I was a “Winter” like my great aunt Janet always told me.  Which apparently meant I wasn’t allowed to wear “spring” colors.

“Aren’t the photographs black and white?”  I asked.  “It doesn’t really matter what color it is, does it?”  After four years in scrubs, I wasn’t perhaps the best decipherer of fashion choices, but I didn’t tell her that.  It seemed like she felt that was obvious as she pursed her lips and looked me up and down.  

“Yes” she said, almost to herself.  “The red kirtle is just the thing.”  

I definitely hadn’t been planning on wearing the old red dress which by some miracle of divine intervention managed to not fall apart as I was stuffed unceremoniously into it and laced up the sides with leather strips that more resembled beef jerky (and smelled like it too). To say it was awkward, would be putting it lightly.  It wasn’t flattering, it bulged in all of the wrong places, and I wasn’t used to people being all up and personal with my armpits.  The (I’m sure) lovely proprietor certainly had never encountered the meaning of the term “You really don’t have to do that.”  

“What in the world are you wearing?”  Natasha covered her mouth with her hand.  In shock or laughter I wasn’t sure.  Probably both.  

“Just shut up and let’s take the picture.”  

“You look like you’re dressed in a bible costume from the sixties.” She observed.  “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of dropping out of your internship and taking up being a hippie.”

“I think there’s a definite possibility a hippie died while wearing this.” I agreed “Or at the very least was intensely religious about not showering.” I wrinkled my nose just as the picture snapped.  Of course.  

Truth be told, all of this… the dress, the silly pictures, the festival (the theme of which I never did really understand...sunset savor?), was all an attempt to avoid the big elephant in the room (and by “room” I meant “my brain” since I’m not sure anyone else was trying to avoid talking about it except me.  I’d recently lost the last person related to me. My father. Worse, it had happened while I was pulling a double shift I’d volunteered for.  What was the saying? “Shoemakers wives go barefoot and medical students dad’s die sick at home while their children are busy taking care of others?”   

The festival was some much needed fresh air.  Vitamin D.  People. Oxygen going in. Serotonin levels going up.  I could almost feel my lab results getting better by the second.  Yup, definitely.   Natasha’s passion for funnel cake was what had led us on this particular adventure.  If I’d had my way I would have stayed home and researched whether or not strep infections were more likely to be present in C-diff mortalities or not.  We paid for our photos and thanked the old lady profusely.  I tried to not to make eye contact which was pathetic considering I’d been puked on twice yesterday and had to tell someone with a straight face that no they could not smoke pot in recovery.  

We meandered up and down a few more rows of cheap jewelry and miraculous mops before someone saw a sign that looked like seaweed salad and we all decided we needed to go drown out our deep fried stomach aches with green vegetables.

‘You should crash at my place.”  Natasha said, when she dropped me off home. Maybe I was projecting, but I think she was more worried about ghosts than me. I gathered my bags out of the back seat.  

“I’m fine.”  I assured her. “You know I don’t do well without my enormous coffee pot.”  It was a running joke.  I’d obsessively researched (like twenty tabs on three different browser windows kind of researched)  the perfect coffee maker and proudly showed off the results of my labors to my friends. A pour over. They’d all stared at me for a solid ten seconds as if they kept expecting something more impressive to jump out of my magnificently displayed amazon box.  But no, I really was quite proud of my little funnel shaped piece of coffee magic.  They hadn’t let me live it down.  

I waved good bye as she peeled off.  Every bone in my body hurt. Not from exertion, but from trying so hard to deal with grief in a world that didn’t really do grief.  I would have thought all the cells in my body would have been used to it by now.  I’d lost my mother to cancer when I was eight.  Never had any siblings.  My parents were Berkeley transplants and only children, so there truly was just me.  I shoved my shoulder into the front door to get the key to turn.  The locks probably needed to be replaced, and the door needed to be replaced.  Both were warped in oppositional defiance to each other.  In fact, the whole house needed to be replaced, but Dad hadn’t been up to it, and I’d been...well…yeah.  

It shouldn’t be too hard to sell. I thought, trying to be viciously pragmatic.  A real house on the California coast was more valuable than stones of gold during the Gold Rush... no matter how much it was falling apart. The paint may have been flaking off, and the windows begged for energy efficient justice, but at least it was meticulously clean.  My mother had taught me that, and there’s nothing like losing a parent a young age to make you OCD about everything that was important to them.  I put my bags and purse on the kitchen table and started emptying everything out.  Receipts got scanned and put on my phone, trash went in the trash can.  The postcards I bought of dogs saying sarcastically unhelpful things went into my stationery box.  I always carried an enormous purse no matter what the current style was.  And though my purse may have more resembled a small piece of luggage, no one argued it wasn’t useful.  I’d doled out sunblock and water bottles today like a general outfitting troops before a battle.  I reached in to grab my sweater to toss in the laundry...but pulled out… the ratty red dress from the photo booth?  An electric shock ran down my spine that had nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with sheer surprise.  How in the world did it get in my bag? Of course since I also had a perpetually guilty conscience I felt terrible!  Had I stolen it accidentally?  Maybe I’d thought I was picking up my sweater and had instead picked up the costume I’d just discarded?  

With trembling hands I carefully shook out the dress.  It didn’t look any better under my kitchen lights.  The stitches were long and uneven.  The fabric looked almost orange and faded in spots.  It didn’t seem worth enough monetary value to hunt down the photo booth owner.  I didn’t even know how I would find her.  Today was the last day of the festival, and who knew where all of the vendors scattered to.  Likely the old lady was halfway across Nevada by now, headed to the next venue...at least, that’s what I tried to tell myself even though I knew it was a hopeless justification. I would definitely be on the phone tomorrow with some liaison from the festival, trying to hunt down the proper owner.  Ugh. As I folded it carefully, I noticed there was a tag on it.  It stuck out because it looked at least a few decades newer than the dress itself.  It looked like a regular mass brand tag, that should say H&M or something like that. My eyes read, “Emilie Durand” and I dropped the dress.  

That was my mother’s name.  That was my name.

I cautiously picked it back up.  This had been my mother’s?  Maybe she’d been involved in theater and I hadn’t known it?  Maybe it really was hippie garb from the years before she’d met Dad?  I didn’t know, but now I really knew I had to find the old gypsie lady with the photo booth.  Had I really worn something my mother had worn before?  

I finished putting everything away and was seriously regretting my assurance to Natasha that I’d had no interest in her couch.  The dress and I were giving each other baleful looks (at least as baleful as an inanimate object can be).  People said I looked like my mother, I had her dark hair and stark features.  I couldn’t see it myself no matter how much I compared our pictures, but I got the sudden nostalgic longing to put on the dress and see if I could just catch a glimpse of her.  

It was silly of course.  And much harder in actuality.  But it’s much easier to do crazy things when you’re alone (at least for me).  On closer perusal the dress (if you could call it that) looked more like a cross between a Roman robe and something Guinevere would wear while kissing King Arthur. It only came to my knees though, and if it hadn't been so tattered, it would have actually looked cute with a pair of dark skinnies. My white knobby knees looked decidedly less flattering in it though and as I surveyed myself in the mirror I was disappointed and felt more than a little foolish when I didn't see my mother at all.  Just a twenty two year old medical student who may actually have been losing her grip on sanity.  

There was a thunderous crash outside that would have made me jump out of my already jumpy skin, if I hadn’t known exactly what it was.  

“Drat cat.” I muttered.  The neighbor, Mrs. Finch had a mammoth Bengal Shorthair who disdained organic liver from Whole Foods and preferred instead to rummage through our trash cans.  Kitty Poppins wasn’t allowed to roam outside for fear her dainty paws might be tarnished by alley cat life, so I opened the back door and tramped out like some sort of barefoot medieval witch.  But the trashcans were gone.  And there was no cat.  In fact I could swear I was standing in wagon ruts on a road that believed heavily in environmental preservation. All of this however was the least important of my unhelpful observations. My head was ringing and my stomach turned itself inside out as I emptied the contents of my stomach onto grass that should have been my pebbled backyard but was instead patchy grass. I thought vaguely that this was why one should never eat funnel cakes from a traveling kitchen. The corners started collapsing in on my vision, and I remembered with perfect clarity the paragraph on page eighty two of my first year functional medicine class. “Fainting (syncope) is a sudden loss of consciousness, usually temporary and typically caused by a lack of oxygen in the brain. The brain oxygen deprivation has many possible causes, including hypotens…

 

 

Chapter Two

 

To find out what happens next, please consider voting in my poll!  I'd really like to know too! 

https://poll.fbapp.io/nanowrimo-outlander-story-chapter-2

 

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.