Y'all Hush: November 2014

Friday, November 14, 2014

Unfiltered

Hey y'all -

Every once in a while, I remember that I have a phone with pictures on it...pictures like these that are a pretty good representation of our day-to-day life:

1) You guys are great buddies, even when Hagen is forced to cuddle against his will. He attends Laney's mandatory dance classes and her mandatory school lessons and her mandatory screenings of "Scooby Doo." Every once in a while, he'll push her away and say, "No, Yaynee!" Then we let him have a time out, not because he's in trouble, but because we understand he might enjoy some silence.

2) "This is a picture of me and Hagen and we're surprising you with a card and you're so excited and surprised, you have to cover your mouth."

3) So, here's everything that's wrong with your parents in one story:

When we moved into this house, we discovered that the freezer didn't freeze. We put a deep-freeze in the garage and treated the fridge's freezer like a fancy beer cooler and made do. Then, your dad called me while I was out running errands a few weeks ago and said, "You should stop by Home Depot! They have fridges on crazy clearance and we can get one for 70% off!" I asked your dad how wide the fridge could be. "36 inches." Now, your dad is the smartest dude I know, so I don't bother to ask him silly follow-up questions like, "36 inches? Are you sure?" Instead, I went to Home Depot and bought a fridge that was 36" wide and sent your dad to fetch it.

He came home with the fridge, and we realized that while he had measured from wall to wall, he hadn't taken into account the 2" of overhanging wood trim. This is when more reasonable people would have said, "That trim is really nice and the fridge is obviously a little too wide, and we should take it back." But we are not reasonable people. We are the kind of people who go into the garage and come back with a saw and start whacking off trim. We are also not the kind of people who cover the area surrounding our working power tools, because we are the kind of people who like the taste of sawdust in our coffee. Apparently.

When your dad was done removing the trim, he was just able to squeeeak the fridge into its new home. But since it was next to a wall, the door would only open at around a 43 degree angle. I lived with this for a week before it made me near-homicidal.

So your dad and Hagen got to ciphering and decided that the only solution (besides going back in time and returning the fridge to the store) would be to remove the lower kitchen cabinet and instead make two teensy 7" wide cabinets, one for each side of the fridge.

So that's what they did.

Even Hagen thought the whole thing was nuts. Get used to it, kid. We're Team Burbach, and when we make a mistake, we don't walk away from the table; we double down.

4) Laney had the only bike in the elementary school bike rack that still had its training wheels on, so she asked her dad to take them off. She got ready for her first grown-up ride by putting on a dress, sparkle shoes and plastic pearls. he helped her down to the end of the street and back. She cried. It hasn't been attempted since.

5) For years, my grandmother Granny Jack has been sending y'all an envelope every week with stickers and two dollars - one for Laney and one for Hagen. And for years, Laney has been pocketing Hagen's dollar. Granny Jack has started sending separate stickers for Hagen, which he seems to appreciate. He still hasn't seen a dollar, though Laney tells him one day they'll buy something nice...together.

6) Papa John's Pizza has a flash-based website where you can design your own pizza, dropping pictures of pepperoni or pineapple onto your virtual pizza. Then, they will deliver the pizza to the address you have on file, charging it to your saved credit card number. It's so easy, a five year old could do it. Let's not discuss how I know that.

7) Your dad and I competed in a scavenger hunt a few weekends ago with another Navy family we love. We raced around town in funny hats. We won, because the weird, competitive hard-headedness that leads people to destroy and rebuild their kitchen in the name of a clearance refrigerator is the same kind of can't-fail spirit that wins scavenger hunts.

8) We finally found something Hagen thinks is not cool: when his dad steals one of his french fries.

9) When Laney was in preschool, there was almost nothing we needed to do or remember - get her to school mostly dressed, and the school fed her lunch and snacks and kept up with her gloves and hats and scarves and every day was like the others. Not so with elementary school; we almost need an intern around here to keep up with special dress-up days and show and tell days and days when the school gets out early or late. If she earns enough "Bobcat Bucks" for being safe, responsible, kind, and respectful, she gets to wear her pajamas to school.

There was a "Red Ribbon" week, encouraging kids to say no to drugs (Laney: "What are drugs?" Me: Sigh...) and kids had to dress up in a different theme every day. This was Crazy Hair and Socks Day, where we went for a sort of Pat Benetar-meets-Punky Brewster look:

...and that's your behind-the-scenes look at the last few weeks at our house.

Love,

Mom

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

A Pirate's Life For Me

Hey y'all,

Here's how Halloween went down:

Last year, I was smart. I told Hagen he could wear Laney's old monkey costume, and I didn't buy Laney a costume at all. Instead, I took her dress-up box to a Halloween party and right before the party was supposed to start, I told her to go pick whatever she wanted to wear out of the box. Cost me nothing. Worked like a charm.

This year, because I'm probably down a few million brain cells as a result of my unfortunate neurological issue, I listened to Laney when she BEGGED me at Costco for that mermaid costume, swearing allegiance to that one and only costume idea. "I just want to be a mermaid so bad," she whimpered, with big, wet eyes. So I bought the damn $26 costume. Then we got home and discovered, after taking off the tags, that it didn't quite cover her belly. Laney said, "That's okay by me - I don't like it when things touch my belly, anyway." But no way in hell is any daughter of mine going to trick-or-treat dressed like a redneck mermaid (although I'm filing that idea away for a future costume idea for me). So I was in another $14 for a leotard.

With Hagen, we started asking about a month out: "What do you want to be for Halloween?" At first, it was "No tanks. 'Ont want to rick or reet." We figured he didn't mean it, so we kept asking. Then suddenly, it was "Wanna be a yellow duck." Then, "Wanna be spooky owl." Or "Chicken!" Since those are all feathered fowl, I didn't buy him a costume, figuring I'd wrap him up in all the boas from Laney's dress-up box at the last minute and call it a night.

Laney did the costume parade at her school as a mermaid, as planned.

Then, school was over and 5:30pm rolled around, and I figured I should start thinking about dressing Hagen. So I got out the dress-up trunk and started pitching him ideas. After a few minutes, he settled on, "WANNA BE A PIRATE!" Well, that wasn't really on our list of options, but okay, little dude, you got it. We threw together some of Laney's striped tights and a few pirate toys and some leftovers from Laney's 3rd birthday party, and voila! Insta-pirate. We only had one brief tantrum when Hagen said he didn't want to wear a shirt under the pirate vest - JUST DA VEST - and we tried to calmly explain to him that it was 40 degrees outside and you can't walk the neighborhood in just a vest, "because it's freezing out there and you'll look like a toddler Chippendale, that's why!" He finally came around at "Put on the shirt or you're not getting any candy."

Anyone with more than one child should be able to guess what happened next. Laney took one look at Hagen's fun, easy-to-walk-in pirate outfit and said, "I want to be a pirate, too." Well, fudge. So back into the dress-up trunk we dove, and added some accessories from my closet and some things my mother had left behind on previous trips. And that's how Laney ended up trick-or-treating in a kerchief from the Gap and a scarf from Talbot's and some Anne Klein clip-on earrings.

I told her if anyone asked, she should say she was dressed as "a businesswoman in pirate casual" or just "upscale pirate."

You both filled your little plastic pumpkins and had a great time and I am never ever buying another costume.

Love,

Mom

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The Big Easy

Hey y'all -

About six months ago, I was working double hours at my job. The money was better, but I was so stressed that I felt like my face was tingling all the time. Out of the blue, I got an e-mail from a friend that read, "I have a buy-one-get-one-free airline ticket on Alaska that I'm not going to use, but you have to be able to book your travel today." I was just stressed enough in that moment that the idea of planning an escape - even one that was half a year away - sounded like heaven. So I took her up on it and bought two plane tickets to New Orleans. Your dad and I had enough hotel reward points that we could each book two free hotel nights, and just like that, our vacation was planned and paid for.

And then I went back to work and mostly forgot about it.

Six months pass, and lo and behold there's a trip to New Orleans on our calendar.

Your dad and I never had a honeymoon; he was in the Masters program at UM when we got married. We said "I do" on a Saturday, and he was back in class on Monday. In fact, we had never been on a vacation together. This just seemed like the perfect combination of the honeymoon we never had, plus a celebration of our 6 year wedding anniversary, plus a great way to have fun on my 38th birthday.

True story: I once had this conversation with Peg Peg about New Orleans -

Peg Peg: I don't like New Orleans. There's nothing to do there but walk around and drink.

Me: You say that like it's a bad thing.

So Grandma Sue came home from Sweden, and the next day, we said, "Hate to drop the kids and run, but...bye."

Then we got on a plane and spent five fabulous days in The Big Easy.

We ate food that was ungodly good. We walked every street of the French Quarter. We took a tour of the oldest cemetery in the city. We went to the Hurricane Katrina exhibit, and I cried because I couldn't believe that as a country we couldn't do better. And we went to the WWII Museum, where I cried because I saw so many examples of America at its best. We ate our weight in deep-fried dough. We became masters of the public transportation system. We learned the location of every public restroom in a two mile radius. We enjoyed a beer with my cousin Reed and her new husband, Ned. And because we have been trained by five years of living in a house of little people, we went to bed before 11p every night, and got up by 7am. PAR-TAY.

If you asked me my favorite moment of the trip, it would be this:

On the night of my birthday, the Saints played a home game just a few blocks from the Quarter, so the place felt mostly deserted. I told your dad that what I really wanted to do was to take my camera and tripod for a walk, and maybe take some cool low-light pictures. Your dad carried my tripod for blocks and blocks, and even figured out how to shimmy its legs through the fence of Jackson Square so I could take a picture of St Louis Cathedral. He tipped the musicians I photographed and was an all-around A+ traveling companion.

On the last morning of our trip, we both woke up ready to go home. We passed playgrounds on our streetcar route, and sighed and both said how much we missed you guys.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, but it was also great to get back to the people who make our lives worth living.

Love,

Mom