Archives for June 2013

Throwback Thursday: A repost with added pictures to make it totally random

June 6, 2013 by Kelli

Between end of the year craziness (Yes, we’re still in school because apparently Florida hates children) and a tropical depression that has settled on top of us (it’s like a cruel joke to have to get up and out to school on a day when it’s dark and steadily raining – I think Mother Nature is mad at Florida…probably for hating kids), I just don’t have any decent blog posts in me.

But I have pictures and I have an old blog post that still makes me laugh…and cringe. Pictures first:

Remember when Landon looked like this?

Yesterday I went to his end of the year preschool program where they had those babies in caps and gowns and I almost died from the cute. This is my Landon now:

At one point the preschool director got up and started talking about how we only have 13 years left with these kids at home and how quickly that time will go and I briefly envisioned throwing a shoe at her, but I refrained because that would be inappropriate.

But for real.

To make this post just a little more random and to not tie it together at all, I’m going to leave you with a post that I originally published in October 2010. I wrote this after a rather unfortunate incident that occurred upon cleaning out my minivan.

Not hot.

______________________________________

Saturday night found Lee and I in the minivan, kids in tow, heading out to the mattress store to purchase two new mattresses. Never mind that the kids desperately needed them. Never mind that Tia’s mattress was so cheap that is was literally falling apart and becoming a potential hazard. Never mind that both mattresses had been peed on so many times they could be deemed a health code violation. Never mind any of those things. The fact is simply this:

I went out on Saturday evening to buy mattresses and thought it was fun.

Hi, my name is Kelli and I am a bona fide minivan mom.

Ah, but we haven’t even got to the best part of the story. What? Surely you know there would be more to this story than the fact that I had a hoot buying twin mattresses on a Saturday night, right? A hoot!

It was the incident that occurred when we returned home that sent my world aspinnin’. It started simple. We came home so Lee could drop the kids and I off and return to the mattress store to pick up our most exciting purchases. We had to remove the car seats and fold down the back seats and clean up a bit. And it was during this event that I began to question my entire identity.

The title of my blog is Minivans Are Hot. With the operative word being Hot. I know, I know…Minivan and Hot together in a sentence is an oxymoron. And most days I would beg to differ and would launch into a diatribe about how it’s sexy to be a mom and how minivan moms have it goin’ on and I would work my hardest to convince you that I was right. Until Saturday night…

What I found in the back seat of my minivan was anything but Hot. Let’s start with what I found under the seat, shall we? It was sticky…it was brown…it had flecks of leaves and dirt stuck to it. What was that?!

From there I removed the kids car seats to find enough dried, crumbled food to feed a small pack of wild baboons. It was sealed into the lining of the seat fabric and had to be scraped out with my fingernail. *heave* Don’t even get me started on what I found in their seats.

But the piece de resitance came when I crawled into the way back and looked inside the cup holder. It is here that I gasped, looked at my husband and exclaimed, “Gross! This is why minivans are NOT. HOT.” Then I clutched my chest with the gravity of my statement and fell in dramatic Disney Princess fashion onto the seat, the back of my hand against my forehead…

No I didn’t. That last part didn’t happen – mostly because I wouldn’t want to lay on those seats for $100. Maybe for $1000, though.

In the cup holder sat dried, crusted, molded bread. It appears my children are stock piling food in the back seat of our minivan in the event that a giant meteor should come crashing down to earth and we need to seek shelter inside the car for a significant amount of time. It also appears that they have eaten portions of a sandwich and then shoved the remaining portion in the cup holder and have, every day for who knows how long, been looking at this rotting sandwich and ignoring it.

It’s like I’m raising little cave people!

I promptly dug out the rot and marched to the trash can. My husband, sensing my impending melt down went dashing for the Shop Vac in the basement. Being the super hero that he is, he spent the next half hour sucking the muck out of our minivan while I went inside and lectured my children on the importance of throwing away rotten food. I also tried to talk myself out of changing my blog title from Minivans Are Hot to Minivans Are A Place Where Horrors grow Beneathe the Seats and in the Cupholders While You Yourself Obliviously Drive From Here to There Thinking You Are Looking Fine When Really You Are Controlling a Moving Science Experiment.

But in typical Hero fashion, my man came inside just as I was certain that my entire online identity was going to have to be realtered and yelled “Ta-Da!” I walked outside to see the seats clean (hey look! The fabric’s grey…) The cup holders clean…er. They still have a sticky substance that I can only assume will need to be chisled out at some point (probably just before we decide to sell the car). And it smelled much more pleasant too. It was actually quite nice in there.

I smiled at him and jumped into his arms. Small birds flitted about our heads as he spun me around and when we kissed little animated hearts floated up into the dusky sky.

Alright…that last part didn’t happen either. Sometimes I wish I lived in a cartoon.

Despite the cleanliness of my car, however, I couldn’t shake the fact that I had outwardly acknowledged the un-hotness of my minivan. And so I’m here to retrain my mind. And if any of you are having a hard time believeing that Minivans Are Hot like I am, then why don’t you join in with me as we repeat the mantra over and over.

Minivans are hot, minivans are hot, minivans are hot, minivans are not, minivans are not…

NONONONONO!!!!

Let’s try again.

Minivans are hot, minivans are hot, minivans are hot…

Do you believe it?

Filed Under: blast from the past, Family, Landon, Random Tagged With: Kids, Photos, Repost, Throwback Thursday

Practically the same…

June 4, 2013 by Kelli

It’s my 35th birthday and the day couldn’t be more crazy or indicative of what my life is these days. I have end of school awards, play dates, kindergarten registration (SOB!), laundry, dirty dishes and somewhere in there I think I’ll be allowed to breathe. It’s hectic and crazy and a skooch stressful, but altogether awesome because my life is bustling and full and rich. I wouldn’t change anything about it.

As I sat and thought about turning 35 and remembered back to the day when I thought that was SO OLD, I realized something. 35 and 21 are almost exactly alike! I mean, stand them up side by side and you can hardly tell the difference. To prove my point, I give you:

Ten Ways 35 Is Exactly Like 21

1. You are up at all hours of the night, only at, 35 you’re up involuntarily changing sheets, or doling out medicine or looking for lost lovies and on and on and SWEET MERCY I’M TIRED!

2. You eat Mac and Cheese for lunch. When you were 21 you did it because you were broke. Now you do it because making lunch for yourself takes effort and sooooo tiiiiirrrreeeeddddd…

3. An alcoholic beverage incites a bizarre amount of excitement, again for different reasons.

4. You look at a book and think of all the other fun things you could be doing instead of reading. Only when you were 21 the fun things you thought of involved less sleep, not more sleep.

5. You live in a pigsty and you don’t really care.

6. You have to clean up vomit periodically.

7. When you’re in the car, you crank the tunes. Of course, when you’re 35 the tunes are usually sung by Disney Channel teeny boppers and you turn it just loud enough to drown out the sound of arguing children….

8. You run outside to play in the rain just for the fun of it, only when you come in you now have an entire mountain of laundry to clean instead of just your own soggy clothing.

9. You enjoy a laid back movie night now and again, but instead of that creepy horror movie that allowed you to hide your face in the shoulder of the cute guy next to you, you’re watching a Disney movie with a scary bear in it while small people hide their faces in your shoulder.

10. You have high and lofty dreams of the future, but this time those dreams don’t center around you, but rather around those small people that you helped create….and you dream of a vacation where you’re allowed to do nothing but sleep.

So basically 35 is exactly like 21, only it’s better. Because I sure wouldn’t trade a single thing about where I am or who I’m with.

At 21, life was all about me – my future, my goals, my dreams, my accomplishments. Today I sat on the most uncomfortable chairs known to mankind in a room full of other thirty-five(ish) year olds and I watched my third grader walk up on stage to receive a school accomplishment award and I thought, “Huh. So this is what thirty-five year olds do.”

Afterward I walked out the the courtyard and he ran to me, throwing his long, lanky arms over my shoulders and leaning his head on my shoulder. I kissed the top of his head (because it won’t be long before I won’t be able to reach the top of his head anymore) and I decided 35 is kind of awesome. It’s awesome because of them:

The 21 year old me would have been shocked at this picture.

Heck, the 35 year old me still does a double take when I look at them.

I am blessed.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes everyone! It’s proving to be a good one.

(And if you can think of other ways that 35 is just like 21, share them in the comments. I dare you…)

Filed Under: Family, Kids, Life, Motherhood Tagged With: 35, Birthday, How 35 is just like 21, Life, Motherhood

Better than a t-shirt

June 3, 2013 by Kelli

For years (and by years I seriously mean Y-E-A-R-S) I’ve dropped subtle and not so subtle hints at my longing for a Mac laptop. I’ve casually slipped it into conversation.

“Hey, Babe, dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes. Checked out the new MacBook Air’s lately? Nice, huh?”

It was subtle, simple – understated.

I’ve passed by the Apple store in the mall and sighed longingly, not saying a word. Just sighing. I mean, I could have been thinking anything really, but I secretly hoped the true message would be interpreted correctly.

I’ve held up checks I receive in the mail and proudly declared that “this here $35.00 is going straight into my I-need-a-Mac fund. Now let’s see here, if I pull in $35.00/month, it should take me this long to save all I need. I am on my way, baby!”

I’ve watched one PC die to motherboard failure after just a year and a half and I calmly took over the other PC, which runs loudly and heatedly the second you open her as if she’s screaming for retirement. She was pushing two and a half years, which as we all know is 94 in PC years. I was waiting impatiently for her to kick the bucket so we would be without excuse given that a computer is necessary for me to work and all.

I mean that $35.00 a month isn’t going to earn itself, ya know?!

Lee took the kids out birthday shopping on Saturday. As I have with every other birthday and Christmas for the last four years, I held out a tiny, secret hope that they’d come home with the coveted Mac. But we were headed out to a dinner party that night and the Apple store is a solid 30 minutes drive from the house and by the time they left I knew they wouldn’t have time to drive to Apple and back home.

So I waited patiently for the shirt I was certain they’d buy me and I continued to scheme ways I could gather the funds needed to buy myself a new computer that didn’t sputter and hack each time I fired it up.

They walked in about an hour later, the kids all grins. Sloan held something behind his back and offered up some cock and bull story about all the stores being closed and no present for me and I played along, but inside I was all C’mon, just let me see my new t-shirt.

And then they pulled out a box that said MAC on the side and I had a small heart attack and dug myself out of the chair with a loud “THIS IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN A T-SHIRT!”

Everyone, meet my new computer. Her name is Penelope, but you can call her Penny for short. She very hipster. I feel like I should stock up on trendy glasses now and only drink Venti non-fat, extra-hot, extra-foam, no whip Starbucks lattes. I briefly considered tossing my yoga pants because I fear they would offend Penny, but then I decided, nah. Penny is a progressive and completely modern hipster. She’s totally jive with the yoga pants, but I should probably pair them with a trendy head wrap and a scarf…and possibly a ring on my thumb and pointer finger. I’ll probably throw on a pair of skinny jeans now and then, though. I don’t want to embarrass Penny or anything.

So I’m all Mac now and once you go Mac you never go back right?

Ah, Penny just giggled. I made her laugh…

Now, if Penny could kindly explain all her little gadgety functionability to me, it would be greatly appreciated. There are a couple of buttons I’m afraid to push because, you know, WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?! (I think one of them might control China. I’m not certain, but it seems entirely plausible.)

So I’m off to play around, push buttons (sorry China) and see if I can’t figure this thing out a bit. In the meantime, tell me – do you have a Mac? What is your favorite thing about it? What is the one thing you think I should know as I start to figure this all out?

Filed Under: Lee, Life, Random, writing Tagged With: Going Mac, Hipster gadgets, New computer