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St Patricks Day Glitter Graphics

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!  (and Happy b-day to me)

Brenn and Mickey were helping their daddy in the back yard today.  I thought I would share pictures.

My garden, Steve's new tiller, and Steve & kids with the tiller.

My birthday bench, Micky randomly and Mickey & Brenna on the birthday bench.

So... every year, my daughter raises money for the Jump Rope for Heart (a jump rope-athon to raise money for the American Heart Association).  They don't give us much time to raise the money... only two weeks. 

This year will be the first year Brenna did not even meet her own personal goal, because I was too busy trying to help get things ready for her science fair project (due Wednesday) and forget all about pimping it out to my friends. 

She's raised a whopping $25 this year... and the money is due in school tomorrow morning.   

This is a huge long shot in the dark, but if any of you have some spare cash and a sympathetic heart, check it out and give her a donation?. 

If not, I'll totally understand.  I dropped the ball on this one big time.

ETA: She hands in the donations this morning, and thanks to a couple of very generous friends over on LJ, she managed to raise $175.  Thank you so much, friends!

There is an empty lot for sale right across from the school my daughter attends.  The real estate agency in charge of the sale recently placed barricades and NO PARKING signed across the entrance because teachers and parents have been using it as a parking lot (and apparently that is not conductive to keeping in the kind of shape you might actually sell it in).

Today, as I was walking my daughter to school, I noticed that one of the boards had fallen off.  Not a small board, but an actually rather big, heavy board, and it had fallen into the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the path where the kids (mine included) need to walk each day to get to school.  Ahead of me, I saw two kids walking, not around, but over the board.  On it.  Kids will do that sort of thing.

As I get closer, I can see four nails sticking out of the board, two on each end. 

The farmer's daughter in my immediately noted that the mails were neither long enough nor thick enough to hold the weight of the board and -- hello, hazard waiting to happen! 

The mother in me immediately remembers the two kids walking over the fallen board and envisions all the others who might have thought of it.  and then I get visions of kids stepping on the nails, for -- this afternoon when they are racing home and not watching what they are doing, like they always are -- falling and taking a nail in the arm... leg... hand... eye. 

Hello lawsuit waiting to happen!

I borrowed my friend's cell phone to call the agent listed on the sign and got her voice mail.  Then I dutifully memorized the agency's phone number a well and called them as soon as I got home.  I also called the school, to let them know because I had seen kids walking on it and because the real estate agency could simply 'forget' to have someone look into it. 

My friend and I did try to move it ourselves, but it was somewhat on the heavy side and we both had kids in strollers and she had a baby in a sling on her chest, as well. 

Hopefully, someone from the agency will come and take care of it and also, hopefully, the school will address it with the kids. They don't need to getting hurt.

Or, one babe in particular.  *g*

We've been trying to teach Mickey (who, for those keep track, just turned 2) how to count.  This was the conversation this morning before the walk to school.

Me:  Mickey... one

Mickey:  two

Me:  three

Mickey:  free

Me:  four

Mickey:  why

We think that 'why' is how he's saying 'five' for right now, because he's said it that way before, but it's entirely possibly that by this time, he was fed up with counting and was just asking "why?"

Also, notice that he does not say 'one' or 'four' and jumps right to the next numbers in the sequence. 

(We're also attempting colors, but for now, the only color he accurately identifies is 'geen'.)

My father hates Christmas and has hated it ever since my grandfather passed away in 1997.  My father had always associated the season between Thanksgiving and New Years with his father on many levels and having him no longer there to share them with has made the whole season sour for him.  Already a 'surly' or 'prickly' man at the best of times, my father becomes down right unbearable and scrooge-like at Christmas time.  

While discussing it with him just two days before Christmas this year, I told him that he had the power to make Christmas whatever he wanted to make it, and that, instead of turning it into a sad or bitter occasion, he should take an example from the father he loved and make it a time of love.  Grandpa always made things fun for his grandchildren (my brother, sisters and myself) and that Dad could choose to do the  same for his his grandchildren, too.  

Or he could go on being a scrooge and making the holidays horrible for all of us.  

His choice, and I told him that he should choose love.

Flash forward by two days and I am sitting on the floor between my eight year old daughter and two year old son, helping to pass out presents and taking pictures.  

Brenna hands me one package, marked as 'To Debbie, From Santa.'  The 'Santa' in question is my mother and the package is medium-sized, soft and squishy.  I am hoping for socks, because new socks are one of the few unique joys in life that I call mine.  

Also, Mom always buys me socks, so I'm really looking forward to them.  It's the one present I have always been able to count on being under the tree.

When the packages are all passed out -- with the lion' share going to the kids, Steve and my mom -- I find myself sitting on the floor with … just that one present in front of me.  I open in, and the hoped-for socks turn out to be a pair of fleece jammies.  I don't often wear jammies because I don't like things on my legs when I sleep (they make my legs itch), and instead wear nightgowns or over-sized shirts.  

I'm sitting typing this and trying to put into words the emotions that were running through me yesterday while I was helping Mom clean up the wrapping paper and empty boxes.  I don't intend to sound selfish or childish or anything like that, and that is what makes it hard to say this.  I got one present, and it wasn't even one I necessarily will find joy in for more than 2 wearings (before I wash them and start making my legs itch, that would be).  

It's not really that fact that I only got present.  It's not even really the fact that it wasn't the socks I was hoping for (and largely expecting).  

It's the simply fact that the only present I got this year was from my mother and that there was nothing under the tree for me from my husband.  

Further, Christmas Day came and went without him saying thing about it.  No 'Merry Christmas' or even a Christmas card with an IOU taped to the inside.  

People, this is the same man who bought me a glass globe of the earth for our anniversary to symbolize him giving me the world.  He is not generally without resources, creativity or imagination.  
He could have done something and simply put, did not.

And for my part, most of the way through Christmas Day, my kept going back to that conversation I had with my father about making Christmas be about love and not 'just things' so I sucked it up and nothing even though there were times when I wanted to just crawl off somewhere and cry because the man I'd put months of energy and planning to finding the perfect gift for had not even gotten me a lousy Christmas card.  Because the kids were happy and we were getting ready to have my brother and his new fiancée over for Christmas dinner and it would not do to be glum on Christmas, right?

Right, so I don't say anything, until later that day, after dinner when Mom and I are doing dishes and she notices that I am not necessarily happy.  She asks what's wrong, so I tell and… get told that "he tried but couldn't find the gift he had wanted to get for me' so I should not be mad at him.  

(The gift in question… he had been trying to find me two movies I had asked for three weeks ago, which had been on sale at Walmart down home in VA at the time… and in stock aplenty.  He did not buy them there and no store up here in PA had them… so not buying able to find them anywhere, he gave and bought me… nothing.  And further compounded it by saying nothing or offering up an alternative and basically leaving me to feel like I had been forgotten or worse, an after thought.  But I am supposed to forgive that right?  Because he tried, or so mom says. )

Today, he's hunting with father in The Big Woods (it's flint lock season, yay!) and I'm at my parent's house with the kids, typing this when I should be cleaning the house before Mom gets home and still feeling pretty much like a selfish shit because getting gifts is not what the season should be about and I know it.  There are people in the world who are so much more worse off than I am who do not have the things and blessings that I have.  

This holiday season, I have been blessed with two healthy, happy children, my husband home safely from Afghanistan, and have been surrounded by family (my parents, brother and sisters, nieces and nephews).  

We are not homeless, jobless or poor, even though the economic crisis has pinched us, too.  

All in all, my family has a lot to be thankful for this year and I should be happy with that instead on dwelling on some … stuff… I did not get.   

Well, it's the day after Thanksgiving and I have so much to say and so much to be thankful for.

On Tuesday, November 25th,  my husband returned home from an overseas deployment in Some Places Where There is War.  We got to meet him in the airport terminal and Brenna & Mickey hugged on him and would not let go.  We have special spaghetti dinner with garlic bread and home made coffee cake.  

Wednesday, we packed up the car to drive home to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving.  During the nine hour drive from Norfolk to the farm, I polished off the last 2,700+ words to get over 50,000 words on my NaNowriMo novel.  This is the first year in all years I have done NaNoWriMo, that I have actually won. 

Nano_08_winner_large

My family keeps asking me "what did you win?" and I think they expected the prize to something substantial like money or having novel published when it was finished.  They seem really disappointed when I tell them "nothing"  or  "the satisfaction of knowing I did it."

Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I got to meet my brother's new woman, Robin.  I am not sure how I really feel about her.  It seems weird to have a strange woman calling my parents 'mom' and 'dad' (and she seriously sucks up to  my dad, so that is even more weird).  

Tonight, Steve and I are leaving the kids with Mom and Dad so we can have an "adult night" all to ourselves.  We almost ever do anything like this, but I think that after this past 11 months, we more than deserve one.  We are going out to dinner and maybe a movie and then spending the night in a hotel.  

Hope every one had a great Thanksgiving!

When I was a little girl, my mother used to sing me this song and I never knew where it came from, but I taught it to my daughter too. 

Today, very randomly, she asked me where I got it from and when I told her, from my mom, she said, "let's call gramma and find to where she got it from."  So we called mom and she said Gramma Gee sang it to her when she was a kid, and then added that it was a popular song from the 1940's.

So, I went to Google, and found this.

I just read this article and have been thinking about it. 

In the past, in our nation's history, before there were telephones, internet or emails, didn't presidents used to still write the people they knew, and even people they did not know so well (like heads of state from other countries)?  Aren't the annals of history filled with thick journals and long letters of correspondence, which not only discuss political but personal and global matters? 

I realize that email is insecure (but so are those long ago hand written letters, to be sure),but it is the world's fastest and most widely used form of communication and I am not sure if being isolated from it is the way to go. 

The article says that Dubbya chose to isolate himself from the instant correspondence of email rather than subject whatever wrote to the people who would use those words against him, to embarrass him.  But he did an even better job of embarrassing himself (and the US right along with him) by saying things that mad him look even more of a fool than anything he could written in an email... and further by doing things that showed a distinctive separation from the reality the rest of us face every day.  Hurricane Katrina, anyone? 

Could it be that when Bush isolated himself from email he also isolated himself from his people?  That perhaps a few emails back and forth from people who might actually say 'George, what were you thinking?  Go back and fix that!' candidly to him in an email might have humanized him more to the world rather than demonized him?

I'm not a Bush supporter and I'm ore than glad he'll be gone soon, but I am beginning to wonder. 

I hope Barack does not choose total isolation, because his strengths lie in his ability to understand and reach the people, and walk among them, not above them.