January 14, 2009 at 11:14 am (Family, life is short)
My first memories I have of my Grandmother are of her carpet. Green shag through the whole house, and it made a weird “woosh woosh” sound when the bedroom doors swung over it. It didn’t sound like anyone else’s house, that was uniquely a sound of Gramma & Grampa’s house. I didn’t know until I was older that they lived in a trailer, so the floor was hollow.
I remember Christmases there, and her prized little ceramic Christmas tree with tiny working lights. Her National Enquirer magazines that my Mom made her hide when we went over there. Her sewing projects. Her exercise wheel. Her forbidden china hutch full of Stuff That Must Not Be Touched, that every one of us grandkids would sneak into every chance we got. Most of the things inside were fragile things saved from her childhood. From her parents.
Her wig. I swear she wore the same wig from the early 70’s until she was gone.
Just Sunday. She was gone.
Half of my memories of her are with my Grandpa. Tied together. I never knew them apart until he died. Her china hutch was next to his desk with the brass tape dispenser. Their beds next to each other and their night time ritual before bedtime at night. Teeth brushed, pajamas on, wig on it’s rack, books read. Lights out.
They gave me the love of the road. Trips in the motor-home. Caswell. California to Utah, to Wyoming and back. Look at all those out of state license plates! Tab, and dramamine, Flaming Gorge and the Utah salt flats.
What I remember most, and will miss the most, is her laugh. I always knew it was her when she laughed. You could put her in a room with 500 other laughing people and I could find her with my eyes closed. I have no way to describe it, and no way to hear it again. Even the last few years when she was too deaf to talk much on the phone, or lost in her own world and not understanding what was happening around her, I always knew she was still there when she laughed. I can still hear it.
87 years old. My tiny Grandma. It seems so strange to know she’s not out there. Not waiting for a visit. Not complaining about the nurses, or the neighbor who stole her cat. Not calling the home shopping network for stuff she doesn’t need. Not collecting commemorative coins. She’s gone.
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June 3, 2007 at 10:45 am (Family, Kids)
Our pool is open.
The kids are old enough to go down there together without us and swim while the lifeguard watches.
12 and 13 year olds are not so much good at remembering sunscreen.
We have two very fried kiddos here. Salem’s shoulders have blisters bigger than quarters and she can’t lift her arms. Bryce’s back has tiny blisters all over and itches so badly that he just sobs every 5 minutes. I want to cry just watching him.
Aloe, Aveeno, Benadryl and Advil have all failed to help. I expect him soon to beg me to hit him over the head with a hammer to stop the mysery.
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March 4, 2007 at 12:02 pm (Family, Home, Houston, Kids)
What’s that you say? I should post something once in a while? Kiss my what?Actually, nothing was happening. Nothing to see here, nothing to write about. NOW, however… When it rains, it pours. Suddenly we have all started back to Tae Kwon Do. Salem finally reached her goal of two years and had enough money to purchase her very own laptop which showed up in the mail two days ago. She even had enough left over to buy herself her very first guitar (a very cool acoustic/electric combo). And, Kelly’s mother is here visiting from California.How’s that for busy. Weeks and weeks of not much happening, and BAM. Busy.Tae Kwon Do is really fun. We used to go to a studio in Reno that we really loved, but once the kids were born we had no time for it. We were finally able to go back again when we lived in California, but the school there wasn’t great. It was over crowded, had too many kids per class, and didn’t really give us the work out or the technique that we wanted. Plus, after 6 months, Kelly crashed the motorcycle and destroyed his knee and we all stopped going. Then we moved. Anyway, now that we know we’ll be here in Houston for a little while, we started looking around for a good studio and found this place. We love it! They really focus on technique, everyone is friendly, and there are at least 3 to 5 blackbelts teaching each class. We’ve been to 7 classes now and are feeling good. They work us hard over there, so maybe some of this ass will go away.Salem has been saving every dime of her allowance, birthday money, babysitting money and spare change found in the laundry room for two years. She has wanted her own laptop in a really bad way. Mostly because we are computer hogs ’round these parts and she wanted her turn! Well, she finally had enough cash in the bank (once we had the money from our jobs to catch her up on the allowance we owed her) to order the shiny new HP. It showed up in a box the day before yesterday and she could not be more excited. Unless it worked. That might make it more fun. It worked fine yesterday, but today the antenna seems to have gone missing and it won’t connect to the internet. When we called HP to see if they could walk us through a fix, Kel was first told to just buy a new, identical computer and then send this one back for a refund in a week. I’m sorry, but we don’t have over a thousand dollars sitting around to send for a second (fourth?) computer since they won’t refund our money for this one for almost two more weeks. After we nixed that idea they put him on hold for SEVENTY TWO minutes so he could talk to a customer service geek who might be able to help. He hung up.On the bright side I learned how to play the first 5 notes of “Blackbird” on Salem’s guitar while he was on hold. That little black guitar is very cool. A friend at work brought me a Guitar magazine, and a copy of directions on how to understand the tablature. It took me a few minutes to figure it out (because I’m musically retarded) but I think I’m gettin’ it. Kelly’s mother, who lives near Sacramento, is here for the next week. After a brief accidental tour of the airport, I picked her up on Wednesday evening. We’re really enjoying the visit. I love visits from nice family members who enjoy cleaning my house. Seriously, my dishes are done, my stairs are vacuumed, and my laundry room is clean. We have to tell her not to clean anymore or there won’t be anything left for my Mom to do when she comes to visit in two weeks.We spent the afternoon today at Forbidden Gardens. That was very cool. It was a very odd thing to find in the middle of the flat Texas plains, but they did a really good job presenting the story. I got some great pictures that I’ll put up when we finally get caught up on the website. Our tour guide was awesome and knew every single thing about China that anyone could possibly ask. Especially about how everybody died. The emperor who ordered the terra-cotta warriors to be made had a very strict zero tolerance policy about everything, and folks were droppin like flies around the man.Now, we’re about to sit down and watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith fall in love over bullets and blood. How romantic.
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January 27, 2007 at 12:14 pm (Family, Kids, life is short, teens)
As of 9:27 last night (Pacific time) I am the mother of a teenager.
Kel reminded me ever so nicely that in just over a year we’ll have two.
Wasn’t it nice of him to not use the smirk to rub it in. Not.
The Hell?
How did we get old enough for this? And who are these tall people calling themselves my kids?
We did have a good time yesterday to help ease the pain of it all. Grilled shrimp with mango salsa at Chili’s, then a good movie for the birthday girl. We laughed and talked all through dinner, and had a fun drive home afterwards too. I suppose if I have to be the mom of a teenager, I got lucky enough to get one like her. The boy’s not so bad either.
It could be worse. Since my brother’s son turned 13 the day before Salem did, my own mother is now the grandmother of Teens. Plural. See? Things aren’t so bad for me now.
Sorry, Mom.
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January 2, 2007 at 4:00 am (Family, Home, Houston)
We had a good New Year’s Eve. Any day that starts off with sleeping in can only be good.
We took the kids to see “Night at the Museum” in the IMAX theater in the Museum of Natural Science downtown. Larry and Chelsea came a long and we loved it! I had heard good things about the movie, and it lived up to all of it. Super funny and lots of adventure with a good ending. The only problem I had with it was that the museum in the movie was supposed to be the New York Natural History Museum, which we’ve been to, but it was filmed in the Chicago Natural History Museum. All of the outside shots and the story line were set in NYC, but when the movie switched to the interior of the museum I kept thinking, “Hey, that’s not what it looks like!” or “That’s not where the door is!” or “Hey, that T-Rex was in the back, not the lobby!”
Dick Van Dyke was awesome. He always reminds me so much of my Grandpa that I like him anyways, so there’s that. If you have time, watch the credits at the end and don’t miss his dancing! I haven’t seen better moves since Mary Poppins. Who knew he could shake it like that?
After the movie Larry and Kelly made a really good dinner at home. Steak, salmon, asparagus, cauliflower and potatoes au gratin. Yum. Grandpa donated some fireworks so we had fun blowing up stuff for about an hour after we ate.
Salem made some confetti for us, which we threw around the house at midnight. Was anyone else disgusted with the new year’s coverage on TV? We turned it on to watch the ball drop in New York and had to suffer through the commentary about entertainment’s sleaziest moments of the year. I’m sorry, but one day’s worth of hearing about Brittney’s lack of underpants or Nicole’s lack of body fat was more than enough when it happened. I don’t need a recap, thanks. Dick Clark, we missed you this year.
Oh, also, we met our new next-door neighbors when we got home, as they were just unloading the last of their stuff from the moving van. A young couple with two very small kids and a puppy named George. They’re very nice and we’re looking forward to having them around. So far we’ve been lucky with all our neighbors. Everyone waves and seems friendly except the one woman across the street. She sits in her garage smoking several times a day but won’t make eye contact or wave back when we say hi. Weird.
So, again, we slept in this morning and are enjoying the slow day. We may do a little more Christmas clean up, but that’s later. Already we have the ornaments off the tree, all the garland down, and the bells off all the doors. It’s looking a little sad. I’ll probably take the lights off the tree today, since it’s about 10 minutes away from spontaneous combustion anyway. No reason to take any further chance by having electricity wrapped around it.
Happy New Year to you all.
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December 30, 2006 at 2:23 pm (Family, Holidays, Home)
We had a really great Christmas. The kids scored big since we’re close to family this year. Bryce is happily putting together his Bionicle village, and Salem is watching her new Narnia movie as I write. Bryce, Josh and Chris are dying of impatience to cash in their gift certificates for their Discovery Flights. Since an adult gets to fly with each of them, we’re excited too! Now if we could just figure out how to un-give the airsoft guns, sheesh.
Our normal family tradition is a big turkey feast on Christmas Eve, but this year we had to alter the schedule a bit. Grandpa was cool enough to get us football tickets. Score! Larry, Kelly and I took Salem, Bryce, Andre and Chris to watch the Texans beat the Colts for the first time ever. The fact that the game was tied up until the last 3 seconds when the Texans made a winning field goal made up for the fact that our seats were in the very, extremely, totally top row. Once the nosebleeds cleared up we got out the binoculars and enjoyed the game. I’m not complaining though, it was a lot of fun and free tickets are never bad!
So the turkey (and prime rib) feast was on Christmas day instead. It was a full, long day since the kids woke us up at 6:30am and we didn’t finish with the clean up until almost midnight. Still, there was something great about having 4 kids in the house all excited about sharing the holiday together. Even the BB gun incident didn’t kill the good mood.
Kelly, as usual, made a fine dinner. He loves to cook for an audience, and he is very good at it. Even the white meat was good, and I hate white meat. For the low, low price of doing the dishes, I once again escaped the torture of preparing even the smallest portion of the meal. Believe me when I say everyone is happier that way.
Now we’re enjoying laying around while watching our Christmas tree dry out, enjoying our new books and toys. New year’s eve will be spent with the kids, and probably include an IMAX showing of “Night at the Museum”. Can’t wait for that!
We hope you all had as nice a holiday as we did. To our family and friends whom we didn’t get to see this year, we miss you, and are really looking forward to seeing as many of you as we can this coming year.
Love to all.
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October 4, 2006 at 9:59 am (Family, Kids)
Right now Bryce is upstairs reading “How Things Work”. Every few minutes he flies downstairs to tell me all about how jet engines work, or how water faucets or hydraulics or displacement work. He’s so excited, bouncing and spinning while he’s talking, or rather yelling about how cool it all is.
I remember how he was that last year of school. Second grade. Crying every morning and feeling sick because he had to go. Crying every night because he had to get through his homework. Feeling like there must be something wrong with himself because he couldn’t please his teacher.
I love his face today, when he’s smiling and excited about learning something new, and learning it on his own. I love that boy.
Run, Bryce, run.
Thanks, Vicki, for the song. I hope you don’t mind that I stole your video, but it’s so good I had to share.
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September 23, 2006 at 11:52 am (Family, Seeing the world, Travel)
How good is it to drive across beautiful, empty desert and arrive safely each night?
How good is it to cross the border into a new state that you have never seen before?
How good is it to get internet access and dinner at the same time?
How good is it to get the hell out of the friggin’ snow in Wyoming?
How good is it to get a flat tire right when you pull into the parking lot of a truck stop and have it changed for free?
How good is it to have a long, hot shower in the cleanest campground bathroom you’ve ever seen?
How good is it to be on the road with your family in the middle of B.F. Kansas, eating dinner, watching a funny movie with your kids and knowing there’s nowhere else you’d rather be?
Pretty damned good.
Oh, and Greg? Remember when you told us how east Texas was full of a whole lot of nothing? Let me tell ya. New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas are all full of a whole lot of nothing! And it’s all beautiful.
We miss Y’all.
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August 5, 2006 at 9:06 am (Family, Home, Houston, Kids, lies)
When Kelly and I first met, we spent our first year dating on a fairly small budget. One of our favorite things to do was to pick up Larry’s boys and take them out. We’d take them to the lake and feed the ducks, we’d take them to the park, we’d take them to our house and just play with them. Josh was 18 months old, and Chris was 6 months old the day I first met them. We loved them like they were our own, and always tried to spend as much time with them as we could.
When Larry moved here a year ago, it was because of the combined draw of being near family again for his boys, and a better job market. He also had the benefit of parents with extra room in their house so he could finally afford to save up and buy a house of his own. All of this for his boys. Both of them.
When we decided to come here a year ago, it was for many reasons, but the selling point was that Larry would be here with Josh and Chris. Salem and Bryce were over the moon about the thought of living near Josh and Chris again. They grew up with them for the first 4 and 5 years of their lives, and saw them many times a year in many different places after that. They have always loved the boys and missed them so much when we were not with them.
When Larry brought up the idea of sharing a house with us, it took us about 4 minutes to decide that it sounded like a really great idea. Besides the thought of the economic benefits, it was the kids shrieking and bouncing off the walls because they could actually live in the same house as Josh and Chris. They talked about it all the time, almost every day for the past year. Kelly and I were excited about it too. It felt like family and it felt right.
Because they would be staying with Grandma and Grandpa for the first year, and space would be tight. And because there are family issues that would make living there fairly un-fun for Chris, Larry agreed to Chris’ proposal that he go live in Washington with his Mom for that year. After that year was over, Chris would then come down here to Houston and we’d all live happily ever after in our big house. Josh would finish his last year of high school, and Chris would finish his last two years. Chris won his year, but only after he promised to come down here with no complaint once we got the house.
So. We got here 4 months ago, and we all kept talking about how we couldn’t wait for Chris to come. We got the house about a month ago. All of us were so excited to be back together, we only needed him here to complete the group. Salem and Bryce hold a special place in their hearts for him because he has always been kind and fun and funny with them. He never yelled at them, he always had cool things to share with them, he always told great stories and he always made time for them when he would visit. Chris is the one that always has a smile on his face. They look up to him so much and have been waiting for a year for him to get here.
We bought this house, which is really quite big and a little more money than we originally wanted to spend, because we wanted to make sure we had room for all the kids. We bought it a few months before we were really ready to because we needed a place for him to move in to before school started. We set aside his room for him because we thought it would be the one he liked the most. We also set aside room in our hearts for him and couldn’t wait for him to show up and fill it. We are all a family in this house, but it wasn’t complete until Chris came.
Bryce even delayed his birthday dinner at the Rainforest Cafe for 3 months just so Chris could be there with him.
I’m not sure if I’m saying it in a way that really gets the idea across, but I mean to tell you that we have been so, so happy that Chris was coming down here to live with all of us and have been impatient to have him here because we all love him so much.
He arrived last week on Monday night. Everyone has been so thrilled, and we’ve enjoyed him here as much as we thought. We were looking forward to taking him to Ikea to pick out his bedroom furniture, and curious to see how he’d decorate his room. Would it be anything like Josh’s dark blue and yellow walls? Would he put car posters up everywhere? Would he like the house?
It was so nice to be all together, all seven of us, getting along and having fun here. It was nice to look forward to coming home after work because we all get along and we’re all here.
Chris was here a week before he dropped it on us.
He’s not staying.
He knew he wasn’t staying for months before he even came.
He decided he wasn’t even going to give us a chance. And he lied to all of us, right to our faces as we told him how happy we were that he was finally here.
I guess we should have figured it out when he never even unpacked his suitcase, much less the boxes of his stuff in his room that Larry’s been saving for him. He wouldn’t talk about starting school. He wouldn’t do what he needed to to get his school transcripts for the transfer. He changed the subject when we asked him how the plan was going to ship his car down here.
We were just so happy to have him here that we didn’t really want to see it.
He leaves in 10 days.
His room will be empty.
We rushed into the house for nothing. We built on two additional walls and doors in the house for nothing. We bought a house bigger than we actually need for nothing. We looked forward to this time with all of us together for nothing.
When Bryce found out, he spent an hour in our room crying. He can’t understand why Chris wouldn’t even try staying here. He couldn’t understand why Chris didn’t tell him he wouldn’t be here when they talked about all the things Bryce wanted to do with him here. When we talked about dirt biking this fall when it’s cooler. When we talked about camping together at the end of September. When we talked about Christmas, or hurricane season, or going to the museum or just living here. Bryce especially is taking it very hard. He’s so disappointed and hurt. It could have been so much better if he had just known to begin with that this was a temporary visit.
I want to strangle Chris because he hurt my boy, and he hurt us.
I want to strange him because of what this is doing to Larry. However we feel about the situation, it’s 10 times worse for Larry.
But I can’t strangle him. We’ll try to make the most of his last days here, and we’ll tell him how much we’ll miss him when he goes. We’ll even hope that he has a great experience living up there.
Because we love the little bastard.
But we’re pissed off.
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May 29, 2006 at 8:25 am (Family, Travel, let me explain)
There was a new church built near our house in California several years ago. The kids begged me to take them when it was done, so I did. During the service at different times, usually when there was music, I remember watching a few people stand up and throw their arms out wide. They would stand there with their heads tipped back and a smile on their faces, hands turned up. I cried because it really bothered me that I didn’t get that feeling from church. I think I was jealous of their happiness. What must it feel like to have that kind of Arms Wide Open joy? Church was not my joy, even though there was a time that I wish it was.
Today in Austin, TX I have just spent the first two of five days with my family on a road trip in our little Moho. We spent those days with new friends. Two families who had that joy on their faces, not just for a little while, but all day long. They had that excitement about life, and family, and love that most people only have during special moments. We all talked for hours about our plans, and our lives, and our families in a way that almost never happens with strangers. We connected. We were feelin’ the love.
At dusk back at the campground, as I was walking back towards the Moho by myself, surrounded by warm air, oak trees and the glow of late sunset, thinking back about these two days, our new friends and looking forward to spending the evening with my family, I smiled and threw my head back and walked with my arms wide open.
This is my church.
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