Away, Off We Go!

Adelaide had her winter vocal concert last night.  I can tell our kids are getting older, as the times of their activities are getting later and later in the evening.  Unfortunately, I am an old lady at heart, so my response almost always elicits an eye roll from Daughter.

"What?  You have to be there at 7:15?  This concert doesn't start until 7:30 PM?  But... but that's so late!  We probably won't get out of there until 8:30!"

*Adelaide rolls eyes, wrestles internally over whether or not she should dignify her mother's histrionics with a response*

*Her mother writes a blog post, shrewdly guessing at Daughter's internal monologue*

*Adelaide reads all this at school, gets yet another chance to roll her eyes at her mother*

And now you're up to the present.



But going back to last night, after Adelaide came downstairs, dressed and ready, Derek kept observing how grown up she looked.  He said this in an unemotional, here-is-a-fact kind of way; this did not stop me from growing increasingly emotional each time he said it until I wailed, "Stop!" because he was right.  She did look grown up.

I purposefully put the above photo at this point in the post, not just to brag about how good-looking my husband and daughter are, but also because Adelaide looks much younger when she's next to her father.  Maybe I should just hog-tie the two together.  (Note to self:  Google "How to hog-tie people together" ASAP.)


We arrived at the concert early, as Adelaide had given us very specific instructions on where she wanted us to sit, and if you want to be in the front two rows, you have to get ahead of a couple hundred people to secure your seats.  We sat right where she wanted us to, which turned out to be nice, as she saw us and we saw her and I got to take pictures of a bunch of my friends' kids to send to them.

There were cute little presentations between each song, and one of my favorites was two boys pretending to be reindeer telling each other really terrible jokes.

(There are heads in the foreground of every photo; we were in the second row, but there were people in the first row and I am not tall.  Just look past the black blobs, please.)

Two reasons these jokes were the best:  First, Daughter's face.

She is in the center, there, in the red.  She made this face every time a corny joke was told.  Everyone in the auditorium was chuckling.  Adelaide was wearing the expression she has when she feels one ought to know better than to do something, but don't worry, she'll just be embarrassed for you.

The other reason these jokes were the best is that for us in the second row, they were in stereo:  the family of one of the reindeer comedians was sitting right behind us, and apparently he had been practicing these jokes frequently in their home to prepare for the big night.  His little brother was directly behind me, and recited each joke, word perfect, along with his big brother up on the stage.  It was hysterical.  

Atticus did not share in his sister's reservations; he enjoyed every groan-worthy punch line.

Adelaide also had a small speaking role.

She performed it admirably, and looked so grown up!  *keens*

Our children are in three more winter concerts in the next two weeks.  By my calculations (meaning I've looked at all their song lists), we'll have heard large groups of children sing Over the River and Through the Woods four times by Christmas day.  If you find me wandering the aisles of our grocery store, repeatedly muttering, "The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh, the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh," while my left eye tic rages, don't worry, it's just because I have listened to these darlings of ours debate whether it's "over the river and through the wood," singular, or "over the river and through the woods," plural, ONE MILLION TIMES in the past month.  Happy holidays, indeed.

A List

• Have you guys seen this video?

Our kids are obsessed with this, and no wonder:  Michael Bublé (Caedmon's personal favorite), Idina Menzel (I can count on one hand the number of times our children have seen the movie Frozen, and yet they somehow know every word of the song Let It Go as performed by Menzel), and the whole video is lip-synced by kids?  With the added bonus of mildly altered lyrics to make Baby, It's Cold Outside 95% less Sexual Predator Anthem-ish?  I say YES.

• On our recent trip south, I forgot our camera.  I suppose it's better to forget the camera than all your kids' pajamas (been there) or shoes for your preschooler (done that) or shampoo (almost every time), but it sure felt like a tragedy.  And I'm not even a particularly talented photographer.  I just like to take too many photos of my nieces; is that so wrong?  

Thankfully, my mom graciously allowed us to use her camera and her phone to take photos while we were there.  And by "us," I mostly mean Atticus.  I think he snapped around 3/4 of the pictures during our time there, so most of them are blurry, and many feature his fingers in the corner, but it's interesting to see things from his perspective.

• I finally found a way to make Derek like homemade chicken noodle soup:  Add heavy cream and plenty of garlic.  This recipe for Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup was a winner with our family, which feels like a bit of a miracle; everyone but me in this house seems to be innately suspicious of soup, which makes no sense as we live in the kind of climate for which soup was surely created.

'Friends' Philosophy

One of the things Derek and I enjoy doing together is watching old episodes of Friends.  Working in television, Derek tends to take the whole experience to the next level, and while he thankfully spares me his thoughts on shot composition and lighting and blah blah blah, he does point out things I'd never notice, like how in one scene Mike's scarf goes from tied to untied about a dozen times each time the camera cuts away from him, or how one scene with Phoebe and Monica has some random dark haired girl standing in for Monica.  Once he pointed it out, I had no idea how I'd never noticed.  With me you get Friends 110, where I laugh at all the jokes I can recite by heart, and maybe even ruin it for you a bit by saying the punchline along with the character, which I'm sure isn't annoying at all.  With Derek you're taking the graduate level course because he's not as gentle as God- no, he will rip those scales from your eyes: "Hey, look, she's wearing a completely different outfit but it's still the same scene," and "Why is that guy in the background walking down the steps when a moment ago he was just entering the building?" and "Wow, that's not even Monica."  Somehow it's enjoyable, and will make you feel like you're now part of some kind of elite pool of Friends viewers, which is exactly as pathetic as it sounds.

In addition to Friends viewing, I find myself thinking about certain episodes way more than I should- such as the "There is no selfless good deed" episode.  In it, two of the characters argue over whether or not truly selfless good deeds exist.  One maintains they do, but can't think of any examples, and one says they don't, that there is a selfish component to every good deed, intentional or not.

I don't know why I think about that so much.  Perhaps because I do feel so good after doing so-called good deeds, which keeps them from being truly selfless.  I've agonized over this for years (seriously.  These still waters don't run so deep.), trying in vain to come up with a selfless good deed.

But finally, finally, I think I may have found one.


It was shortly before Christmas.  I had made it through the day, the children were finally in bed, Derek was at church helping with rehearsals for the Christmas program, and I had a nausea-inducing, crazy painful migraine.

I started getting migraines in my early twenties, and averaged about one a year for several years before having a glorious migraine-free streak that lasted around three years.  That streak was broken on this night, the night of the selfless good deed.

Now, when I have a migraine, I need utter darkness and total silence.  Basically I need an ibuprofen-stocked cave, but those are hard to come by, and pretty boring after awhile anyway.

So I was lying on the couch, my hands pressed hard on either side of my head (because sometimes that helps, too; someone needs to make a migraine vise), listening to Doctor Who; notwithstanding my need for silence and darkness, for some reason Doctor Who is comforting to me when I don't feel well.  I had my eyes closed and the volume was on low, but the blue light flickering through my eyelids was proving to be more than my head could handle, so I had just decided to turn it off and retreat to our bedroom when someone knocked on our front door.

Obviously it was the devil.  No one else has such impeccable timing.  (You didn't know the devil had great timing, did you?  Well he does.)

Shockingly, it was not the devil but a group of smiling tweens who promptly started screaming at me.  They did not stop for two full minutes.  And by "screaming" I mean "caroling."

That's right.  A group of well-meaning kids, led by two kind adults, had come to our house to sing one of my favorite Christmas songs, Oh Holy Night.

Being a native midwesterner- a species of beings whose niceness is rivaled only by Canadians, and who will stop at nothing to be as helpful and polite and kind to family and complete strangers alike, who, upon meeting someone from New Jersey who talked about his loud, raucous Italian family didn't believe him at first because she thought that stuff was made up for tv along with vegetarians and people who meditate- there was nothing to do but hope my painful grimace could pass for a grin and lean heavily on the front door for support.  I almost passed out.  Toward the end there was little silver confetti sprinkling itself across my vision; despite that, I managed what I hope was a genuine-sounding "Wow, thank you so much!  That was lovely!  Merry Christmas!"

Then I crawled upstairs and vomited.

A selfless good deed:  pretending to enjoy and be thankful for somebody else's good deed when in fact it makes you want to die.  I finally found one.  It was not worth it.

A List

• Isn't it strange how little things can evoke sudden and unexpected pangs of nostalgia?  There's a pastor at our church that occasionally preaches in the regular service, and more than once I've heard him pronounce the word "wolf" the same way my dad does: "woof," with no detectable 'L' sound.  I remember for a while Dad worked with a man named "Wolfgang" who went by the nickname "Wolf," or "Woof" in the case of my dad.  This was endlessly amusing to me, no doubt because word pronunciation was something I could understand, as opposed to talk of thermodynamics and the ever-present injection molding machines, which might just be the most boring topic of conversation in the entire world, unless of course you're a plastics engineer, in which case they're apparently fascinating.

• Derek and I got to go on a date the other day.  We went out for lunch, then did some last minute Christmas shopping, along with the rest of the population of central Iowa.  I was distracted half the time by the blaring music (why do so many places insist on blasting your eardrums with their poor choice of music?    I thought music played in restaurants and stores was supposed to be subtle, something to set a certain tone to your eating or shopping experience.  Am I just getting old and cranky?) of horrible- horrible- popular renditions of traditional Christmas music.  After listening to some talent-less pop star breathe her way through Let It Snow and some other current music flunky growl an almost incomprehensible, electric guitar studded version of Oh, Christmas Tree, I decided that unless your first name is Nat, Bing, Judy, Dean, Ella, Frank, or Harry, you should not be allowed to record Christmas music of any kind.  I can think of a few rare exceptions, and perhaps you can, too, but in the future any playing of those is going to need to be approved by me in advance, because my opinion is always the right one.  Obviously.

• It snowed last night.  And this morning.  In fact, it's still lightly snowing now.  Not a lot, we've accumulated somewhere in the four- to five-inch range, but enough to give us a white Christmas.  Oh!  And here's the forecast for tomorrow:

This is just fine with me, as I don't have to leave the house.  Derek does.  Poor Derek.  He also had to get up at 5:30 this morning before church to clear all that snow on our sidewalk and driveway.  He also took care of our neighbor's sidewalk.  Poor Derek.  Nice Derek.  

Another reason I don't mind that forecast is that I've finally learned how to layer!  In the past I thought "layering" meant wearing a long-sleeved shirt with maybe a short-sleeved shirt underneath.  Then I moved north.  Right now I'm wearing lined pants with long johns underneath, a sweater, a heavy cable-knit cardigan, thick socks with slippers, a scarf, and a knit hat.  I may look homeless, but I'm warm.  

• And finally, something that made me laugh and laugh and laugh.  It's very name is pure adorableness.  And yes, that's a word now, if only because of this video.  Be sure to turn your audio up before pressing play so you can force everyone around you to share in your joy.

          Adorable Talking Porcupine Loves Pumpkin