Top 10 Most Loathesome Things

I know, I know, my last post waxed rhapsodical about the southland.  I stand by those statements and will make more in the future, but it's not all twelve layer caramel cakes and peaches.  When we were making the decision to move to Louisiana, I felt obliged to point out some of the negatives for Kris.  If there's one thing I believe in, it's preparing for the worst!  So here goes:

1) SLOW TALKERS. Here's something I can't reconcile about the South.  All y'all drop whole syllables like hot potatoes and yet somehow speak 80% slower than those of us who go ahead and finish our words.  How can this be? Tell you what, I'll finish your sentences and stories for you, just to save time.  Nope? Won't work.  Even after it is abundantly clear that I know what you're about to say, you're gonna say it anyway and take your sweet time.  Imonna try not to choke ya.


2) THE FUTILITY OF AN OPEN WINDOW. I think that about sums itself up.

3) SNAKES.  I occasionally feel stupid for my nearly paralyzing fear of snakes.  But in my defense, what isn't creepy about a set of sharp teeth attached to the end of little more than a writhing muscle?  Besides, if it's good enough to scare Indiana Jones, it's good enough for me.  There are seven venomous varieties in Louisiana.  Oh, goody.
  
4) STALE, STALE, ALL IS STALE. Flour, chips, crackers sitting out for half a day, cookies, bread, air.

5) BUGS-- With the sole exception of the whimsical firefly, what is really to be gained by so very many creepy crawlies of ridiculous size and prominence?  And palmetto bugs?  Please.  A roach by any other name...

6) FIRE ANTS.  This only seems redundant to item #5.  Trust me, though, an ant that causes open weeping sores that last weeks deserves its own item.  Death to the infidels!

7) SWEET TEA.  I don't drink it.  So sue me, Southern Lady, for not offering you any or accepting yours in return.  Mmkay?  Can we just bless my heart and agree to disagree here? 

8) THE CREATOR'S ONE BIG DESIGN FLAW.  Really?  I'm sorry but 536 feet does not a mountain make.  In moving to Louisiana I am eschewing the possibility of ever again seeing a sunset or a horizon of any distance, and forget about my life-long schema for navigation. Thanks.


9) THE OPPRESSIVE NATURE OF TREES.  Yeah, yeah, deforestation is an ecological nightmare, blah, blah, blah.  Look, I recycle, ok?  I even reuse, and yes, on occasion, reduce.  So can't I please have just a tiny little three thousand acre clear cut so I can see a little bit of what's around me and hear myself think?  I give so much to you, Mother Earth, when are you going to start giving a little back? 


10) CHIGGERS. I don't actually know if these are a big deal or not.  What I do know is that I spent nineteen months in Georgia avoiding the mere feel of grass, just in case.  No laying on my back with a grassy pillow to watch the clouds pass by.  No sir, not me! 

Pretty bad, huh?  Well though this post has likely offended all of my future friends and neighbors, some environmentalists, most ophiologists, God, and fire ants, you may well suppose that I'll redeem myself with a list of the best things about the South.  Coming soon...  

The South Will Rise Again

For several falls when I was a kid we had a deer hunter from Florida who tried his luck at the ranch. Curtis Turbeyville. His lasting legacy to my young mind was that the South is a place of woman-hating racists who dribble tobacco down their chins and speak as though their mouths are nearly hinged shut. This is true.  And it formed one half of the reason why I told everyone before my mission that although I was willing to serve anywhere, "God loves me, so I'm sure he wont send me to Georgia."  (The other half of my certainty involved a boy I had reluctantly sort-of-dated who was already serving there...May I just say to my friends who doubt the existence of a Supreme Being, God is funny.  Really, really funny.  And in order to be funny, one must exist.  Ergo, God exists.  The evidence?  Take a look at my life.)

So ten years ago in June I stepped off of a plane in Atlanta and began a long falling in love with the Dirty South.  I discovered that it is the place our Floridian Hunter exemplified.  Also the place unconquerable by hair straighteners and a world of so so so much roadkill.  Which is just one side of the coin.  Most of the people I knew in Georgia were thoughtful, intelligent, kind, wonderful people who knew the value of a glass of lemonade and praised Jesus for waking them up every morning.  People I still love.  They inhabit a world of fabulous food and family, of gorgeous rain storms and perfumed magnolia trees.

This June I'm headed back to the South with my best friend and the cutest little toddler ever.  I can't wait to help them love it the way I do.   

Surprise!

Kris was offered and we accepted a good promotion for his job.  In Louisiana.  The plan is to be there for three years and then come back West.  It will be hard to be so far from family, but we are  really excited for a little adventure.  We are also counting on having plenty of visitors, so consider yourselves invited.  Yes, kids, book your tickets now!             

Oh Cadre, My Cadre!

Are you ready for a little known fact about me?  As much as I hate to go giving away the bombshells of my future best-selling biography, here goes: I was once in a band.  The cleverly titled Mark and Sam Band.  We were pretty important to the indie-folk roots-rock scene at our University.  If this last sentence has you thinking, "Huh?"  I can only reply, "Exactly." We were that good.  Actually Mark really was that good (the man is a guitar wizard!), but I just provided a few wavering harmonies and occasional lead vocals for our covers of  Dylan, Old Crow Medicine Show, Emmylou, Woody Guthrie and even a few original tunes.  We practiced a lot, but sadly had to disband after a few months.  Our reason for parting?  We fell in love.  With different people.  And suddenly had other things to do with our time.  This turned out to be win/win as Mark's wife became one of my best friends and Kris (of course) became my husband.  Not a bad way to end a band, especially one that was destined to end in fame, wealth I couldn't handle, and a drug addiction-fueled series of broken relationships.  Ah the curse of the truly creative!

Mark (of the Band), his adorable wife Stephanie, and Little M

 

I bring up The M & S Band because I am now co-founder of a very prestigious book club that reminds me of it.  Why? Because the Wendy and Sam Book Club (can we call it that?  too much?) also sounds a lot grander than it is.  We're not just the charter members, we're the ONLY members. So can that really count as a book club?  Not sure.  But let me assure you of this: It is AWESOME!   Call it what you will, I'm going to look forward to our reading and chatting every single month.  We've only had one meeting so far, to discuss Bringing Up Bebe, by Pamela Drukerman.  I can't tell you how much I enjoyed having an excuse for an adult, analytical, academic conversation.  Such a breath of fresh air!  

      

I won't go into too many details about the book, but I'm glad we read it.  It seems to me that (from Druckerman's perspective) the point of American parenting is to avoid all potential stress for our children (stressing ourselves out completely in the process) while French parents tend to allow their children more small struggles and enjoy less stress themselves.  It's an interesting idea, and has definitely made me think more about letting Eden face a little more frustration in life so she can learn to overcome it.  The other big idea that stuck with me is the cadre, a French word for setting strict boundaries and allowing great freedom within them.  I love that plan.  I'm having a hard time figuring out what the boundaries should be.  For example Kris and I both remember that blowing bubbles in your milk with a straw was something of a cardinal childhood sin.  Why?  In the name of table manners, I suppose, but it seems to us like a hill not worth dying on.  Does that mean we are going to raise a spoiled brat child?  I just don't know!  Where do the boundaries start?  Or more importantly, where should they start?  Good things to ponder. 

In the meantime, long live the Wendy and Sam Book Club!              

Egg Hunt

We went to an egg hunt a couple of weeks ago, sponsored by Families Supporting Adoption.  Thankfully Eden's ambitions are pretty small still, so she was completely satisfied with the two-egg haul her larger and faster peers left to her. 

This morning she got to have her own hunt, and let me tell you, she was a machine!  I was so surprised and impressed to see Eden dart from egg to egg with precision focus.  She dutifully shook the first two to make sure her notion of this game was correct.  Ears registering the sound of candy within, Eden wasted no more time in locating and collecting every single egg in the back yard.  There was no stopping to open them or distraction from the birds cawing overhead.  Before her tiny hand had placed an egg in her bucket, her eyes were already focused on the next target. 

She conquered. 

Only then did Eden sit on her daddy's lap to examine the spoils.  She loved the candy, but was also pleased with the balloons, stickers, and little felt animals her eggs contained. 

May I say that I am dreading the next year of Eden's life?  I fear that in it she will complete the transition to child, and I am busy loving every moment of her toddlerhood.      

On TV, I Love Lucy, and Museum Life

The evolution of television was pretty slow on my parents' ranch.  It started with a ridiculously long cable that led from their cabin straight up the steep canyon wall to a booster on top of the rocky ledges. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a cable that long, so our picture was usually fuzzy if present at all. When I was in high school that gave way to a ginormous satellite dish that didn't really work depending on the changing weather (and also required some brave soul to take the broom to it repeatedly during snow storms). We watched a lot of shows with waving lines and static-snow and fantastically green people who flitted back and forth between lip-syncing and the most cacophonous noise.  

It's said that watching TV is a couch potato brain drain requiring no creativity.  Ha!  For us, watching television was an art.  You had to focus through distraction, block out the static, readjust the color in your mind, supply half of the dialogue, and run laps adjusting the dish.  Small wonder I became the svelte genius you know today!  Thank you, television. 

One of the absolute best shows to watch on our TV was I Love Lucy.  (Heck, that's maybe one of the best shows to watch on any TV.)  You didn't even have to hear Lucy shilling Vitameatavegamin to know that junk was funny.  

 

I have a friend who does not approve of I Love Lucy.  She can't get past the ways in which it is a product of its time (read, the 1950s attitudes toward women). I think quite the opposite.  A show depicting a multicultural marriage was quite progressive, for one thing.  For another, consider the irony.  Yes, Ricky is often derogatory toward Lucy and treats her like a child.  Yes (according to the script) Ricky is the famous, talented star to Lucy's inept, nobody housewife.  But that was the genius of the show.  Where Ricky was actually a decent musician and actor, Lucy was a brilliant comic.  The real star.  The one beloved.  The one subverting Ricky's misogynistic machinations, if not to her gain then at least to his downfall.  Pardon the English-majory digression. 

 

I bring up I Love Lucy because what I'm about to tell you next reminds me of the episode where Ricky puts Lucy on a schedule.  Why? you ask.  Simply because I am on a schedule.  A cleaning schedule.  I hasten to reassure my friend (you know who you are) that Kris did not devise, suggest, or in any other way force it upon poor female me.  It's just that I happen to be a tad bit of a perfectionist.  When I set out to be something (in this case a homemaker), I set out to BE it. 

 

Through my education and career, I developed a lot of great skills for process development, organization, goal setting, task analysis, reflection, and improvement.  I find that these skills have transferred very well to my new profession.  Thank goodness for that!  I wasn't exactly a terrible housekeeper before, but I did feel like I had limited time for cleaning.  (i.e. between work, infertility-induced depression, seemingly constant house guests, and traveling a lot for family events, my efforts to clean our house came down to sporadic bursts of the essentials with a lot of hiding things in the closet.)  Eden's newborn phase also lent itself to a lot of survivalist homemaking, but that too did pass.  So several months ago I sat down and really looked at what I wanted to do around the house and how often I wanted to do it.  After a couple of rough drafts and some experimentation, I'm pretty happy with the schedules I've developed (one for summer and one for winter).

 

Some of you are probably thinking, Duh!  I've been doing that forever.  Others may be more inclined to mention (as another friend of mine recently did) What, do you live in a museum or something? Well, here's the truth of it:  I do live in a museum, a museum dedicated to exhibits of modern toddler life.  I unabashedly admit that for about 12 hours a day, our house looks like this:

 

 

It's only during Eden's 12 sleeping hours that any part of it looks like this:

 

 

So what's the point of my cleaning schedule?  Peace of mind from a sense of order, accomplishment, and the knowledge that if you drop by to see me my living room will be a disaster (albeit free of dust), but the bathroom sink is sparkling and my refrigerator shouldn't make you gag.  I also like that if I miss a chore on a busy day or week, it's OK!  I know the last time it was cleaned and I know I'm coming back around to it again really soon.  Plus, when I sit down to read a book or write a blog post or work on a craft, I'm not hounded by guilt over dishes in the sink.  I can say to the specter of Better Womanhood, Stay Back!  I've done my checklist!  You have no hold over me now!  I find it quite empowering. 

 

So to sum it all up...TV was better back when it didn't work, Lucy is a gem, and cleaning makes me happy.  Boom.  Just like that.  All in one post.  How do you like me now?      

 

    

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!

And now to our family edition of Minute to Win It.  I'll apologize for the poor photo quality.  Although the mansion was superb in nearly every way, the lighting was dim at best. 

First up in the photos, the best aunt in the family (Sierra, of course) made super hero capes for the kiddos.  I neglected to get a picture of all three of them at the same time, but here is Eden rocking hers:

Sierra was also a fabulous master of ceremonies.  Here she is playing Pennyhose.

Next Kris used Vaseline on his nose to move cotton balls from one side of the table to the next.  Like a champ!

 

My sweet and steady little niece was a professional stacker of dice on a popsicle stick, with a small assist from her daddy. 

Then we both participated in dancing the ping-pong balls out of an empty tissue box.  That's right...I, Samantha Bell, was forced to dance.  It was not a pretty sight. 

My parents both participated in their own events, but this is my favorite picture of them.  Aren't they cute!

The hardest event, by far, was stacking the chapsticks with chopsticks.  Here my nephew gives it his best go, with a little assist from Dad. (A side note, Little G's original event was also dancing the balls out of the tissue box.  He danced so hard that his pants fell down!  I love him too much to post that photo.  Barely!  You are welcome, Future G!) In the end only Collin and Kris were able to stack all four chapsticks, and the tournament winner came down to who did it fastest...

It was Collin for the win!  Here his family takes their victory push-up... 

and receives the grand prize, complete with trophy.

The whole weekend was a blast.  Our digs were sweet and the entertainment was non-stop, but all of that just served as a background to one superb reminder that family is the most important thing in the world.  Love you guys!

President's Day 2013

It has long been tradition that my family gets together for a ski vacation every President's Day weekend.  Sometimes we have crashed at a family member's house.  Other times we've all crammed into a single hotel room.  This year my parents robbed a bank (kidding...I think...) and we stayed in a slope-side, multimillion dollar cabin.
 


No lie, this place was ridiculous!  In an effort to get Eden to sleep well, Kris and I claimed the suite most insulated from noise, wherein we had our own fireplace, couch, wet bar, balcony, laundry room, and fancy-shmancy bathroom.  Coming home on Monday was a little rough.

Eden spent her time giddy over the herd of turkeys that roosted in the trees barely beyond our balcony.  She loved to stare at them and make her best gobble-gobble noise. 

When we could pry ourselves from The Ritz, skiing together was a lot of fun.  My brother's kids are fearless and I would have been inclined to say that there was nothing cuter than my 5-year-old niece shouting "Girls Rule!" while blowing my doors off, or my 3-year-old nephew gleefully cruising on the end of the rope his daddy held to keep him from disaster.  But then this happened:

Eden's first ski run!  She was a little unsure what this strange new thing was all about, but I don't think I've ever seen my dad happier.  Besides, Eden was the cutest little snow bunny ever.  When she wasn't on skis, she was cruising around the base in her puffy coat, leggings, beanie and cowboy boots, waving to all of the people like she was the queen of the Peach Parade. 

 

The rest of us had a good time too.  My ever-so-sweet-and-generous mother recently found a great deal on some rad ski jackets and picked two up for my sister and I.  We couldn't resist...

 



Nerdy?  Yes.  But man did we have fun!  Stay tuned for a post about our Minute to Win It Adventures.