WWKW?

I stumbled onto this blog http://whatkatewore.com/ this morning and about gave myself a heart attack. 

I knew I had heard smidgens about the newlywed Duke and Duchess travelling to our continent, but not being much of a news or TV watcher, I really didn’t know quite the extent of the coverage.  Wow.  Apparently there was plenty.

I scrolled through the blog, sighing with great relief that no longer would I have to wonder just what would Kate wear?  Quickly, I found all the fashion news I have been missing.  For one, evidently pantyhose are selling off the shelves now, thanks to classy Miss Kate.  And I am not sure just how I feel about that.  It’s honestly been a nice break since, what, 1998-2000?  It may be hard to go back.

So, anywho, as I sat here with my un-brushed bed hair and non-pedicured feet in the same terry cloth “gown” that I slept in that is in actuality a swimming suit cover-up, I gazed upon this lovely thing with her smart dresses that I could so imagine myself wearing. 

I love this one  -----> 

and this one: 

and especially this, gorgeous and so summery! 

I will say I like her style.  It reminds me of how I used to dress back when I had a job that said thank you in the form of a pay check and necessitated more than sitting around in a terrycloth outfit. 

So about the heart attack part…Imagine my complete surprise when I find Kate and Will had been to the rodeo in Calgary and the talk was about her boots that at first glance made me realize I must truly be like Duchess material after all because Hello, me, Santa Fe Flea market?!!   Now won’t you please hand Gary his polo mallet and me my tiara? 

Obviously, I wear the same boots as the most talked about, photographed fashionable lady in the world right now.  All I could say is, brilliant!  No, make that smashing!

Right then I went to the closet to pull out my awesome boots and do the actual side-by-side comparison.  Upon closer inspection, I met with the realization that her boots are a little different from mine in both the stitching detail and the curve of the sole.  And, yeah, the squared toe and height and cut of the shaft.  You know, maybe the heel, too?

Ok, fine, hers look way more Duchessy than mine after all.

Bloody dangit.

Boys’ Room

I know the anticipation has been getting to you all and sorry for the delay.  I promised pictures of the boys room redo and that was awhile ago.  Well, I had to not only get Gary to put up the curtain rod hardware, I had to lug my camera up the stairs so you can understand.  It weighs over 5 ounces.  

And ta-da, here it is….

 

What set this room redo off was my discovering just how many baby down feathers had accumulated under their beds and in the carpet along the walls, all from their matching comforters.  I knew baby feathers were floating in the air anytime we put the ceiling fan on, but yikes!  Once I realized, I knew I had to get rid of those comforters pronto, poor kids, how could they even breathe?, and replace with new, down-like comforters.  Then that spun off to a new curtain, furniture rearrangement, etc. 

You’d thought from Grant’s reaction, and he reminded me just yesterday he still doesn’t like it, that I’d done something like this:

 

Now that might qualify as life-ruining.

But no, it’s still an all-boy room, just a little tidier.  Heaven forbid. 

Shootout at the JG Corral

Jack celebrated his 13th birthday with a real bang, except maybe actually it was more a ping.  He’s had an ongoing tradition of water gun battles with the boys as his birthday party for several years now.  Kinda perfect when you have a July birthday.

This year however, he decided to change it up and invite his friends over for a more-grown-up version of gun play called airsoft.  The bummer part is that his birthday is still in July (how many degrees Fahrenheit?) and you have to wear some layers of protection to have an airsoft battle or it hurts when you get shot. 

So we aimed for an evening party. 

Still, we had some sweaty kids.

Jack had spent a week or more getting the battle field ready.  Gary and I had recently cut branches along the pasture borders to make mowing a little less painful, so we mounded some of them up for a start to provide the warriors spots of cover in the wide open field.  He added junk from our neighbors’ house including lawn carts and rusty barrels.  He assembled huge cardboard stands as blinds and used any junk we had lying free, not limited to old patio furniture cushions and chaise lounges--basically anything that he could drag out and someone could use to hide behind.  He had turned my (finally) beautiful view from the kitchen sink into a junk yard.  I had to live with it for at least a week. 

Saturday finally came and kids started coming over around 6.  I fed them pizza and chips and they were in heaven it seemed with the unlimited access to icy cold Mountain Dew and Orange Crush. 

They had ice water out in the field but this represents the drinks consumed inside.  The angle of this picture doesn’t even begin to represent the sheer mass of the tower since you can’t tell the base alone was  16 cans.

After it was said and done, we’d gone through forty eight cans of soda.

 

Boys:  don’t do this can thing in college.

 

Quick quiz:  How many pizzas do you order for active, mostly-13 year olds?

Answer:  Six.  Plus, a whole big ice cream cake. 

 

After eating, they loosened up with a friendly, hold the friendly, game of tetherball and then it was time for war.

   

Yes, that’s an actual ghillie suit you see on Jack’s friend, Caleb, who you’ve met before. 

This, taken from Wiki:

A U.S. Army sniper wearing a ghillie suit

Safety considerations

Although highly effective, ghillie suits are impractical for many situations where camouflage is useful. They tend to be very heavy and hot. Even in moderate climates, the temperature inside of the ghillie suit can reach over 50 °C (120 °F).

 

Um, it was already practically 120 degrees just with the air temp.  See Jack’s shirt from before they even started really playing? 

 

So anywho, Caleb, what a trooper, wore his highly effective but probably impractical ghillie suit despite the heat and the others strapped on all their gear and they got right to the job at hand which was to, Team 1:  protect the President, and Team 2: Assassinate the President. 

I present to you, the President, aka Sauce’s brother, Ethan. 

So they headed out to the five-six? acre (point is…a lot of ground to cover) pasture to play and it appeared they had a good time.  Most importantly, the President survived.

They finally called it a night after midnight and this was the scene the next morning:

Guns and gear were everywhere, from the garage to the driveway to the screened porch,

Tents were at full capacity and yes, very helpful in keeping their stinky bodies out of my house,

If not the heap of shoes by the back door.

You only turn 13 once, right?  Anyway, fun party and Happy Birthday, Jack.  

Celebrations

 

Grant’s 11th birthday, friend party

(Look, it’s Sauce and his brothers!)

July 4th party at our neighbors’

Caroline made this shirt at Girl Scout camp.  So cool, huh?  Missing this girlie right now while she’s gone to Grandma and Grandpa’s, but she is having a great time, I know.

(holding down his water bottle so Jack does not use it as a photo shield)

   

 

Jack’s 13th birthday, family party

     

After multiple pictures with his eyes closed (intentionally), I told him he had to have his eyes open or else….

Smarty pants teenager.

This is immediately after Grant gave Jack an action figure and a birthday kiss.  Grant makes these parties fun, for sure.

Do you think maybe someone should have gotten Jack new socks? 

I gave him a new Illini t-shirt and he said, “I thought maybe this could finally be the year of no clothes.”  I think he meant, “Thanks, Mom.”

Jack was so totally happy with this gift he was more than willing to make a nice face and smile for the camera.  This pic goes with this scene below….and I’ll tell you more about that after tomorrow.  It’s gonna be fun!!

 

Imagine Your Future Determined at Age 13

I just dropped Jack off at band camp.  As he got out of the van, a group of girls walking by saw him and froze in their tracks, gleaming towards him with the biggest, bracesiest smiles I’ve seen in a long while.  Another girl then turned around and I could read her lips as she asked her frozen grinning friends, “That’s him?!”  Giggle, giggle.

I had fun watching the whole thing play out from the invisible driver’s seat of my mom van.  It made me smile, those goofy kids, and then as I drove away it hit me like a Mack truck.  Jack is the same age as I was when I was grinning and giggling at who was to become my husband for life. 

Lord, we were both Jack’s age.

Jack noticed the girls, ducked his head a little, wearing his own smirky grin, and carried on walking right past the girls with his trumpet case, on into the school building. 

I can’t say he inherited that smooth gene from his father.

Flashback, FHS 1981.  Gary, who I knew had been a  stinkin’ Lincoln kid, came up to talk to me, to meet me, in the Biology class we shared our Freshman year.  He was facing me, locking eager eyes with mine as I imagine he was formulating just what he was going to say and my heart was beating fast as I realized he was going to say something.  He, so suavely, backed up to sit up on the writing part of the desk in front of me, trying to make a good first impression I’m sure as we spoke for the first time. 

He definitely captured my full attention…..as he flipped the whole dang desk.  He and it both landed on the floor.  

That was thirty years ago.  1981.  Wow.  We were just kids.  Kids that had no idea at that time they would be together for forever but were kinda wishing they would or could.  Maybe?  I can’t really remember exactly what was in my mind, and honestly it was probably nothing past getting to the Dairy Queen at lunchtime, but I did know I liked a boy that could make me smile and laugh and I seemed to have found him right there at my feet.  I knew we must be friends from that day on. 

So we continued on as friends through high school (meaning getting teased and tricked with gags pulled on me on a daily basis and me acting fake-mad until I busted out laughing at his latest stunt), with an actual date our junior year.  We went to a movie.  We sat in the car in the driveway talking afterward.  I can’t remember which movie, but I do clearly remember I wrote with an ink pen on his feet.  Weird I know, but we’ve already established, kids are goofy, especially around someone they like. 

The next school year, our senior year, the attraction to be together as more than friends only grew.  Trouble was, I already had a boyfriend.  So Gary and I passed fun notes to each other in Comp. class and found whatever excuse we could to do more research so we could spend time together in the library.  By the last month of school, May, the attraction spiked supreme and I broke up with the other guy right before graduation. 

Gary and I finally had our long-awaited second date.  And that would be the night my grandma came out looking for me, worried to death since I hadn’t come back to her house by midnight as I was supposed to.  But that was the night, a really special night for us, Gary and me.  We were finally together and I had to tell the boy that I just got, that I was in love with, goodbye.  And I just couldn’t do it.  We finally said it at about three o’clock in the morning when we knew we just had to part; we had no choice.  He was leaving in a few hours for Florida were he was moving with his parents until he started the Naval Academy a few weeks later.  It felt like we would never see each other again.  

This was our song.  It was heartbreaking that whole summer every single time I heard it on the radio.  But I never did forget him.  Truthfully, I never really got over him.

And we did see each other again.  As winding and complicated as it was over the next ten years with moves and military and losing touch and college and other marriage proposals and engagements (gasp),  we were at last reunited for good, thank you baby Internet, and it worked out beautifully in the end. 

July 13, 1996

Today marks the anniversary of the date we were married.  From a flipped desk at age thirteen to a family of four kids on a farm and fifteen years of marriage, I can’t help but think it all was meant to be.

MovieMonday—The American

 

I do like me some George Clooney so I was pleased when Gary brought this movie home for us on the weekend.  Too bad I was so tired; I only made it through the first five minutes.  This morning I restarted it and watched and it was…ok, pretty good, not bad. 

Imagine Geo as Jack, an assassin in Italy that sometimes wears his Chuck Norris/Gary Gill black tank top, with a butterfly tattoo (I am so not even kidding!) on his back, with little in the way of George’s dreamy voice since the dialogue is pretty sparse.  But I will say he did a good job in communicating so much while saying so little which I guess you could say is the key to good acting. 

Gary said something about the Italian girl reminded him of me (I’m thinking that’s quite a generous stretch but thank you) and I definitely saw him in George’s character:  Mr. Salt and Pepper doing pull ups and yoga stretches with a strong interest in firearms.  I liked it.

MusicMonday—Hunger for the Great Light

Yesterday I mentioned listening to my latest favorite song like thirty times on repeat when I was driving home from Peoria on the weekend.  Since coming home, I’m still listening to it.

Gary had brought home several Dave Matthews Band cd’s for me from a yard sale earlier this summer.  He is not a fan (at all), but knows I like to listen. 

I threw a couple of the new ones (new to me anyway) into the van before I left on my long pleasure drive, but ended up actually playing one of the DMB cd’s I had already had, Stand Up from 2005, and sorta discovered a song that I hadn’t paid that much attention to before.  How does that happen?  I don’t know, but I like when it does.  It’s like getting new life out of something old.  I don’t know if it happens because something matches up with your life at that moment that wasn’t there before that now makes it significant to you.  Maybe there wasn’t that connection to something current before so that’s how you missed it the first time.  I don’t know, but think maybe that’s it. 

Here it is, if you’re interested.  Cool song, to me anyway.

They’re playing in Chicago this weekend.  Kinda wishing I was, too.  Get this!  This guy’s part of the DMB Caravan, also!  Seriously.

I should so be there.

My Kind of Day

I guess when you are a 43 year old mom that has been considered full-time stay-at-home now for eight years, it doesn’t take much to give her a thrill.

Saturday was one of the best, best days I have had in a long awhile.  I had wonderful days in Santa Fe in April with Gary, but for myself, by myself, yesterday was it.

I woke up in a tent, lying on the ground, waking to the unbelievably loud happy sounds of the morning birds.  I got up only because I felt like it.  I got dressed and brushed my teeth and that’s really all I had to do. 

I was about two hundred miles from home.  The youngest three kids were home, snug in their beds under the care of their wonderful grandma and grandpa. 

 

I had driven up to Ingersoll Boy Scout camp near London Mills, Illinois (beyond Peoria) for Family Day that previous day.  Jack and Gary had been gone all week to camp and that final night, there was a special ceremony in which they were chosen for a select recognition so it was good I was there.  It was a very cool night.  Definitely not cool in terms of temperature, it was blazing hot and so miserable actually, but super cool in what was going on. 

Any noise and photography was strongly discouraged, but I had to get some kind of picture of the impressive and almost eerie scene unfolding in front of me as I stood midway up a large, hilled clearing with the 350 or so scouts and leaders standing among smoking fires and flaming torches and drumming chanters below.  Running braves raced wildly around the huge half circle, choosing an elite group that were then individually announced by the Native American chief and hidden away in the two teepees.

It was dusk, but I turned off the camera flash to try to be less conspicuous and the pictures actually came out ok.

  

 

I was glad I was there to witness it, Jack and Gary’s being called out for Order of the Arrow, a sort of national honor society for scouting.  Jack knew it was a possibility he might be chosen.  Gary had no clue.      

I was standing there feeling so proud of both of my guys. 

So after their camp was packed up that next morning, we headed out.  I drove off on my own as Gary pulled one of the scout trailers in a caravan of other dads.

I spent the next few hours driving, stopping off whenever, wherever I felt like it.  I bought some of my favorite-ist candy (macaroons, caramels with cream centers, and maple nut goodies).  I played cd’s I hadn’t jammed to in years as loudly as I wanted.  I freely followed my urge to swing off the highway to check out a TJMaxx in Springfield.  I played my newest favorite song on repeat for probably thirty minutes straight.  I didn’t feel compelled to speed, I just cruised along comfortably.  I kept the a/c at the exact perfect temperature.  I was my own person that beautiful day.

None of that would have happened on a typical mom day with my usual grumpy passengers. 

All in all, it was a wonderful time and I am so grateful I was able to do it.  I got home to find the rest of the family doing great and soon after, Gary and Jack pulled in home safe and sound, just a little hot and tired.