Long, long ago….like 700 gabillion years ago, I had  a friend in my life that I admired greatly.  She was artistic and talented, and she could sing, and she wore really hip clothes.  AND she had her very own pea green Maverick to drive around.  Her mother was a serious, major piece of work who made my friend’s life fairly difficult for a while.  So difficult, in fact, that my friend spent the last 6 weeks of high school living with me because her mom had kicked her out.  We graduated together and then each went on to college. Over time, I last track of my friend Ginny.

So, next week?  Next week while everyone is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon walk?  I’ll be celebrating my 40th birthday.  So yeah, big stuff for both NASA and me next week.  I spent half the morning trying to figure out why NPR was all about the lunar landing, while totally ignoring my impending anniversary.  Sort of rude, actually.

Imagine my surprise when I went down to get my mail today, and there was a big box with my name on it.  And it was from my lovely friend Ginny, who recently friended me on the newest time suck called Face Book.  Never one to believe one should actually wait when given a present, I opened that box right up.

And I haven’t stopped smiling since removing the contents.

A frame, full of photos from 1987.  The year’s highlights were all there:  prom, mud wrestling, tolo, graduation in purple cat eye sunglasses, and the ever popular Judas Priest lip sync.

Thanks Ginny!  This is the best!

My children are appalled.

I’ve been feeling somewhat overwhelmed this summer.  Especially in the late afternoons and evening, when certain individuals’ medications have worn off.  I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again…..single parenting is really, really hard and all of those people that are in that boat have my admiration.  I need small reminders that life is good, because it truly is good.

And thus, I’ve hit upon my simple new idea:  I’ll list the things that make me happy/smile/my heart explode, and then when 7PM rolls  around and I feel like letting the banshees take over the neighborhood while I  hide in my room, I can reference this list to reset my emotions.  And feel free, at any time, to share!  No sense in having a comment button if it’s never used.  Because non-mean comments always make me feel happy!  AND, AND what makes  you happy might be making me happy too!  And we can share….

So, today? 

• My chubby, wrinkly bulldog moans when I pet her.  Yep, moans.  She’s loving the love so much that it’s audible.  That’s good feedback right there.  Plus, grabbing all those wrinkles just feels good.
• I have finished 2 personal projects in 3 days!  Yeah for finishing!  Thanks to my artist friends Kiki and Kriss, I’m more inspired than ever to just make stuff.
• I took the kids to Sonic for treats last night; we sang along to the radio and discussed the merits/detriments of most items on the dessert menu.  It was decided that plain vanilla is HIGHLY underrated.
• Bowman.  Bowman LOVES everything, even when the rest of us are having a tough time with him.  Really, he’s quite amazing.
• Tallulah introduced me to my new summer favorite:  Basil Lime Martinis.  Crushed ice, Newman’s Limeade, chopped basil leaves, and a shot of vodka.  Shake vigorously, strain and serve.  This.  Is.  Heaven.  And actually, would be just as delicious without the alcohol.  It’s twice as nice coming out of my grandfather’s crystal and silver martini shaker that I recently inherited. 
• My garden is awesome!  And yesterday I found some plants I didn’t know I had.  Two were plants that I had put in and their neighbors had become, shall we say, overbearing.  The third was a free-be, brought by the birds or the wind, and identified by my lovely master-gardening friend Barbara.  I’ve got so many bees in my hyssop and coreopsis that I can hear them from yards away.  And butterflies.  And I even have gopher.  Leaving gopher mounds of nicely aerate soil (I’m looking on the bright side on this one).
• I’m helping Beth make 30 costumes for the Israelites.  Yep, Israelites.  Using the ever popular queen sized pillow case as a pattern, we turned one thrift store sheet into 7 tunics.  The children participating in “Goliath and The Rock Slinger” will be handsomely clad on Sunday.  I LOVE making costumes! 
• Davie-O’s coming home for a 3 day weekend on Friday.  We’re all looking forward to having him around.
• This.  I LOVE this:

What’s making you happy today?

Last night we were getting ready to head over to the community pool for an after dinner dip.  I was upstairs trying to locate my swimsuit, and the kids were all milling about on the front porch waiting for me.  A very high pitched, panicky scream was followed by the door slamming.

“Don’t touch it!  Don’t touch it!  DON’T TOUCH IT!”, combined with “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

Bowman runs into my bedroom looking like a dear in the headlights.  Cutter walks in holding Bowman’s new Stream Machine water gun, crying and wailing.  Cutter then screams:

“HE SUCKED UP MY BELLY BUTTON!  MY ENTIRE BELLY BUTTON!”

Ah.  That would explain why he was holding the squirt gun so it was pointing directly at the middle of his stomach. 

I calm Cutter down enough to get him to stop screaming.  I reassure him that I won’t hurt him, I just need to see what’s happened.  I talk him into letting me hold the squirt gun.  Lo and behold, his entire belly button is sucked up into the water hole of the gun.  I give it the smallest of tugs….. “OOOOOWWWWWW!”  Okay, so I’m not pulling it off.

Thankfully, it’s possible to unscrew the end of the gun.  Now I’m standing there looking at Cutter with a large black disk around his belly button, with the button itself sort of cauliflowering out of the center.

A number of things fly through my brain:

1.  Great.  They are going to laugh SO HARD at me at the emergency room.

2.  This actually is REALLY funny.  Ooops!  Don’t smile, kid is hurt and freaking out.

3.  Never thought I’d be doing this.

4.  How in the holy hell am I going to get this thing off of here without hurting him more?

5.  It would be bad to ask to take a picture, wouldn’t it?  Probably shouldn’t do that……

I look at Cutter and ask if he’s got any ideas.  He suggests liquid soap, the little smarty.  A couple of squirts of lavender hand soap, and although it was painful, he was able to free his belly button from captivity.  Whew!  Disaster and emergency room visit diverted.  We were late meeting our friends at the pool.  While I was explaining why we were late, my friend burst out laughing and suggests we contact the squirt gun manufacturer and have them add to the directions “DO NOT SUCK UP BELLY BOTTON”.  Oh lord, can you imagine that line drawing?

I am fond of saying “don’t cut toward yourself” and then telling the story of saying that exact thing to my father as I walked through the garage while he was sectioning out his dahlias with a scalpel.  Less than 5 minutes later, dad walked into the kitchen with the scalpel embedded between the two large tendons on the inside of his left wrist.  And lo, the irony of  that has never ceased  amusing me*; the man was a pathologist, spent years of his life wielding a scalpel, and let me know I shouldn’t cut toward myself every single time I even thought about picking up a knife as a child.

The other day I found myself saying to myself  “probably shouldn’t be doing this” as I was using a newly sharpened pair of kitchen shears to pry off the metal clasp on a bag of ice.  Of course, the shears slipped and ended firmly lodged into the knuckle of my thumb.  I am fully aware that a pair of pliers really would have been better suited for the job, I was simply too lazy to take the 20 steps to the garage to retrieve them.

And so, I offer this advice:  take the time to get the proper tool for the job, and please, don’t cut toward yourself.

*Note*:  Please note that I am not amused by his actual injury, but the irony of it. 

My kids will be better adults because of their dad.  For that I am grateful.

Happy Father’s Day to all you dad out there.

I remember being a teenager and eating A LOT of food.  For a few years I was swimming both before and after school, and that can make a girl a bit peckish.  Like walking in the door from practice and eating an entire meal’s worth of leftovers while waiting for dinner to be ready, and knowing, just knowing that I would indeed perish from hunger before dinner was done sort of peckish.  My mother yelled at me to close the refrigerator door.  Often.

We’ve reached the tip of this teenaged eating iceberg here at Chez Star.  Every time I see Mason, the kid is surfing the kitchen or pantry for something to eat.  And it doesn’t really seem to matter if he’s just eaten, he’s still hungry. 

Last weekend we made the mistake of taking the kid to run some errands, right after lunch, without packing snacks.  The trip suddenly became like dragging around a cranky, hungry 2 year old.  Only worse, because his verbal and reading skills are better than most 2 year olds.

So, as we drove around town, we got a running commentary about every restaurant, fast food drive thru and grocery store. A constant moaning about how hungry he was (close to death in his estimation) and how awesome and delicious each and every business would have been.

The best moment came when we passed the new Subway.  “Subway!  Are we stopping at Subway?  Aw, man.  I love Subway.  I could eat a Subway right now.  You know what would be awesome?  If mom owned a Subway.  That way, I’d get to eat free Subway all the time.  That’d be awesome!  Free Subway…….”  We were then treated to a few minutes of silence while Mason fantasized about free sandwiches.

There is some bird that hangs out behind my house in the morning, and it sings a lot.  This wouldn’t really register, except for the fact that this one bird sounds exactly like my phone.  At least twice every morning I get half way to the phone before I realize it’s that bird, singing happily in the wetlands.

I know I live in the desert, but I can’t help wanting this:  a marsh mallow plant.  I have a globe mallow, but I’m willing to overwater and keeps something sopping wet just so I can say I have a marsh mallow plant.  It makes me want to giggle.

I think I have a fairly well read 12 year old.  In the arenas where he won’t go wide, he goes fairly deep.   He loves to read, and reads a lot.  In fact, since school got out last week he’s had exactly one social interaction and spent the rest of his free time reading.

One of the things he loves to read is magazines.  Every month he reads National Geographic, Discover for Kids, Popular Mechanics, Cooks Illustrated, and Scientific American.  He also reads every single copy of the Solutions catalogue that comes to the house; he lights up like a light bulb when that one arrives.

The subscriptions to Popular Mechanics and Scientific American were Christmas gifts.  These are great presents because 1)you get something in the mail every month, which is cool when you’re 12 and 2)they get passed around the whole family and are educational for everyone, including the adults.  But, I have to say, I’m drawing the line.

I have put my foot down.

This happened yesterday when Mason, who is 12 years old, received an offer for The Economist.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  The Economist is a great magazine.  However, I am skeptical about sending a pre-teen an offer for a magazine that cost $174 for a year’s subscription.

I’m all about education, but he’ll have to go to the library for that one.

A family of six generates a shitload of paper.  Almost an entire paper grocery sack full every week.  And that doesn’t count all the junk mail I try to recycle at the post office.  Surely there is a better way.

Since it’s the last week of school, the amount of paper coming home has spiraled out of control.  Again, there has to be a better way.  Does everything they do in elementary school require a corresponding photocopied worksheet.  Couldn’t the 5th graders actually make up and write out sentences with the spelling words in them instead of filling in the blanks on a 6 page worksheet?

One good thing has come out of this landslide of end-of-year papers.  The kids are bringing home anything and everything with their name on it, and there are some real gems in there.

I found a story Bowman wrote on the computer as part of his typing tutor, entitled “Jimmy Bob, The Boy Who Loved The Dump”.  The story is as full of awesome as the title would lead you to believe.  Isabelle brought home a journal full of weekend recaps.  My favorite was from a few weeks ago and included this line, “I roasted a marshmellow and I put it on some choclate and a graham cracker and a smores was born.  It was most delishish!”

The very best thing, however, was a total accident.  Mason handed it over unintentionally when I made him empty his backpack, which hadn’t been done since Christmas vacation.  It was a list of meticulously kept grievances perpetrated by Bowman some night while Davie-O and I were gone, entitled “The Horrible Things Bowman Did While U Were Gone….”

I hope you enjoy this list as much as I did. I will copy it exactly and in it’s entirety.

• Put spit on his lips
• Argued with every word spoken
• Disobeyed
• Threatened to vandalism
• Called people names
• Gets mad and yells “I’m going to call Mom”
• So I put the phones in the grown up cabinet
• Refuses 2 get ready for bed
• Makes noise
• Jumps on bed
• Won’t go to sleep
• Sings
• Whistles
• Talks to me

I’m keeping this one!  Hopefully, one day when those two like each other more, it will be even funnier than it is now.