Casey Bug turns Big 5

 After a not so good month of October, including boils and smoke alarms going off in the middle of the night…we have moved on into November, which is only just begun and is not stress free.

 

 On Halloween Casey and I went early in the morning to have the vampires take her blood, which as always was followed by a reward of powdered donuts!  She was a little late to school, but I told her that because it was Halloween she could tell everyone that she was attacked by vampires.  We ended up that evening going Trick or Treating with some friends from the ward, Little Ryan only lasted about 40 min before falling asleep, but overall a grand time was had by all!

 My Casey-Bug turned 5 years old on the 2^nd of November, and after having a good morning with her and laying Ryan down to sleep, I laid down myself to sleep a little before having to pick up Casey from school.  My phone rang…the pediatrician’s office…Casey’s blood work came back with an abnormality…there goes that nap!  They told me that they would get ahold of her specialist in Loma Linda to get instructions and then call me back.  We had a great birthday party for her; she requested a strawberry cake with Mario on it, and strawberry ice cream.  She got her requested “laptop”, which turned out to be made by Vtech, thank heavens!!  Uncle Matt came and gave her a chocolate bar as big as her head, and he is supposed to be a doctor!  She went to sleep in her new Spiderman PJ’s with her Lightning McQueen laptop, a happy girl. 

 I didn’t sleep, as is normal for me when something is not right with my Casey; I fear that after seeing her in the hospital with tubes coming out of her I will always worry more about her than I ever will about Ryan.  The next morning I called her Endocrinologist in Loma Linda, told them what I had been told, and by the end of the day there was a new prescription waiting at the pharmacy and paperwork in the mail for a new blood test in 3 weeks.  I love Dr Mace and am so grateful for his promptness and care of my baby girl.

 On a side note I have discovered that I am tired, not just physically tired that comes with being a mom, overall tired; tired of stress, tired of difficulty, and generally tired of life.  I am tired of having “life” ruin my days, weeks, months, and this whole freaking year!  I am looking forward to so many things, but because life has been so hard on us this year I am afraid to speak them for fear that Satan will just use them to beat me down some more.  Yes I know, fear comes from Satan…but right now I just can’t take anymore.  I have an overwhelming desire to lock the doors and windows of the house and just hide in my bed until the storm subsides.  The hailstones are beating me so bad that I am starting to bleed and the headache no longer goes away.  My daughter is off school the week of Thanksgiving, I think I will hide then, as there will be no need to leave the house at that point.

Grandparents

 As many of you are aware my children have the privilege of living in the same house as their grandparents…they are truly the luckiest kids in the world.  This presents situations that bring both joy and consternation into my life. 

 First there is what I call the “grandpa shuffle”.  The other day my son started getting Grandpa to chase him…this first started because he stole something of Grandpa’s off his bedside table and grandpa had to chase him down, because I won’t do it.  My rule is “if you leave it down, then you chase him down.”  And he is fast.  So now in order to get Grandpa to chase him he goes in when he is sitting at his desk and pokes him until he gets up and then runs away.  I was standing in the kitchen when Ryan came running around the corner, then I heard Grandpa saying “I’m gonna get you”, I look over to see Grandpa shuffle around the corner like a train because he has socks on and he doesn’t want to slip and fall on the kitchen floor.  I nearly fell on the floor laughing just watching this, and since then it has become a ritual…I see Ryan running and laughing by and shuffling after him is Grandpa.  This brings such joy into my life!

 Then there is Grandma, who is bound and determined to corrupt my children.  Grandma decides that the boy wants to go outside, so off they go and the next time I look outside the boy is naked and Grandma has turned on the hose.  Upon re-entering the house Grandma announces that the boy needs ice cream…so out to the garage she goes with the boy so close in tow that he might as well be tied to her apron strings.  Grandma has started making massive quantities of pancakes at Casey’s pleading, so now the boy does what she calls the red-haired, blue-eyed, pancake dance as he points at the stove…it kind of resembles a rain dance, only pancakes fall from the sky, not rain.  When he is hungry he gets Grandma who lets him play in the fridge.  All milk in the house has to be chocolate, because Grandma makes it that way.  The default to every unwanted answer is to ask Grandma!

 The worst part is that when I go in and ask them what they think they are doing or when I catch them in the act, they look up at me with wide eyes and tell me that they don’t know what I am talking about.  They try very hard to look like innocent old people who have done nothing to corrupt their grandchildren.  This morning as I was eating my toast and hot chocolate casually, my son climbs up on the table and sits in front of the butter container.  Grandma gets up and gets a spoon from the drawer, comes back to the table, opens the butter container, and gives my son the spoon.  She sits back down and goes back to eating…as I sit looking at her like any mother would.  She averts her eyes and tries to start a conversation about the weather, like this will somehow excuse the before mentioned behavior.  These old folks are exasperating me!

 Though I may talk about these things that would normally drive any mother to drink, I love them to death and can’t imagine my life without them in it.  The other night Ryane and I had to be gone for about an hour and my mom sat with the kids as they watched tv.  When we got home the kids ran into greet us and I asked Casey if they had fun, she said “YES, Grandma stayed with us!”  I said “well aren’t you lucky to have your Grandma and Grandpa living with you?”…to which she says to me, “yes, I love them!”

  YES!  I love them too, and despite the exasperating moments I love having them around for my children’s sake.  My children are so lucky, so much luckier than their parents were.  My grandfather died years before I was born, and both my grandmothers lived 4 hours away.  When Ryane actually got to see his grandparents they weren’t really all there anymore.  Neither of us had the joy of good times with our grandparents the same way our children do, and we are indeed grateful for the blessing that they are in our lives!  Here’s to grandparents everywhere, may you all have the joy of spending a great deal of time with your grand-babies! 

The Smurfs Need a Union

 Over the last several months my husband and I have discovered the joy that is Smurf’s Village…for those of you who don’t have an ipod, it is an app for the ipod touch or iphone.  In this game you build a Smurf village because the old one was invaded by Gargamel…and if you didn’t understand any of that, then look up Smurfs on Netflix and become educated to Pop Culture.  Anyway, you build a new village…and in order to do this you have to grow crops to earn money and experience to build more mushroom houses and get more smurfs and farming land to grow more crops and get more money.  This has been going on for months now, as growing crops and building houses takes time…REAL time!  To grow a watermelon for example, takes 12 hours…a good thing to plant while you sleep at night.  You can speed these things up using smurf-berries, but those cost REAL money.

Recently they did an update of this app and added a rather disconcerting feature; night-time.  In other words it keeps the lighting in the village like it is outside…according to the clock on your device.  So now when I have them plant golden corn at 11pm before I go to sleep, it is dark in the village.  My husband had to turn that feature off on his app as he was having great difficulty planting crops at night and making those poor smurfs work.  The other night as I was lying in bed playing this game, I thought to myself that the smurfs need a labor union…cause really what we are making them do is wrong somehow! 

I think that the United Brotherhood of Worker Smurfs is a fitting name for the union…because Papa Smurf never has to work, and neither does Smurfette, Grouchy, Clumsy, Marco, or Alchemist smurf.  The only smurfs who have to work their butts off day and night are smurfs who have no name.  Which, in considering it, are what labor unions do…give each worker a name and voice.  These poor smurfs get no breaks, no lunches, and no over-time!  I have never seen workers more in need of a union to scream at their employers for them. 

 This is not unheard of in video games; if you haven’t played Theme Park then you could experience this union aspect of a game.  If you play in sim mode then you have the pleasure of negotiating with a workers union…which is actually kind of funny the way it works.  There are these 2 hands that stretch across the screen and you gradually have to get them to meet in the middle…these are negotiations.  I am thinking this would be an interesting aspect to add to Smurf’s Village, only I wonder if there would have to be a union rep smurf that would come in to negotiate with Papa Smurf…and what would they make him look like?  I know!...Hoffa Smurf…or Teamster Smurf! 

I think that I may just turn to my husband’s philosophy; if it isn’t dark in Smurf’s Village, then I won’t feel guilty for making them work for 24 hours straight.  How I wish I could do that in real life…change the settings so that I don’t feel guilty about things…wouldn’t that be convenient for us?  I think the world would love to be able to turn off the “God feature”, then they could do whatever they want and not be responsible for it…and there would be no religious factions reminding them that they really are responsible for their actions.  Oh to live in the video game world and be able to turn off anything and everything that we don’t like…but alas we live in this world where reality rears its ugly head reminding us of the world we really live in.  May we come to be grateful for that, may we come to at least find joy in the good times, and may we come to learn from the hard times.  As that is really what life is about, doing the best we can with the cards that we are dealt, and trust me when I say that our cards don’t come with a settings menu!

Butterflies

I have drawn a lot of butterflies in my time, mostly for other people who have asked.  But butterflies have come to mean so many things to me over the years.  When I was a youth my parents were forced to leave our home and seek work in another state…and so at a tender age I went through what could only be described as culture shock.  From rural North Idaho to suburbia Southern California…at the age of 12, and I think it slowed a natural development in me.  During the years where all the “beautiful girls” of Orange County were developing into how to be a woman, I was suffering from depression and shock. 

I had a Bishop who told me often that I should remember that not only was I a child of God, I was a beautiful butterfly…but I just hadn’t learned to spread my wings yet and show off my beauty.  From that point on I wore a butterfly earring…and for many years it reminded me what he said, and how he saw me.  Where so many others could only see the mask that I put on for self- preservation, he and one other saw what was underneath.  I just attended the Memorial and graveside service for her, and her parting has left a pain that there is no pill to cover.  She was one of my young women leaders, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that she loved me despite my complete inability to even hope to become a butterfly.  She would enfold me in her loving butterfly wings that had an unspeakable beauty.  She was safe, she didn’t judge me, she didn’t tell me to change…she just loved me knowing that someday down the line it would come.  As Hiemlich said “someday I will be a beautiful butterfly, and then everything will be better!”  Hiemlich was a little late in his changing, and he was gorgeous as a caterpillar, but he couldn’t change until all the circumstances had been met, then it was sudden and breath-taking.

That is how it worked for me, I couldn’t become a butterfly until the circumstances had been met…though I never forgot what my bishop told me, I learned to be patient and wait for God to finish His polishing of me first.  I wore that butterfly earring or one just like it until it my husband replaced it with a diamond.  It was him who showed me that not only could I fly already, but that it was what God intended me to do.  He took a still unsure butterfly, gave her sparkles, and held up the mirror to show her how truly gorgeous she was! 

A few years ago my husband bought me a butterfly pendant that I wear quite frequently; on the back is engraved “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, She became a butterfly.”  It is a constant reminder for me of how and when my change came…when I thought my world was over. 

Butterflies are incredible insects, in chaos theory there is a belief that states that the creation of a hurricane is completely dependent on whether or not a butterfly had flapped its wings a great distance away.  In other words a small movement creates a massive change further away.  This theory was mentioned at the memorial service of my young women leader in conjunction with the way that she could change lives.  She just loved people into changing for the better…she had so much success with missionary work because she showed people how much she loved the gospel.  She showed me how to love the gospel while overlooking the people in it who only really love themselves and control.  She taught me that being LDS does not mean that you have to fit into anyone’s mold of what we should do, say, or look like.  She is one of the biggest reasons I continued to go to church, and one of the biggest reasons that I became converted to the gospel.  I pray that one day I will be able to say that I lived to be worthy of her, that she would be proud of me. 

May she be as persuasive in the spirit world as she was here, may she rest in peace, and may her family heal quickly.  Here’s to you Mickey, thank you for all you have given to the world, but more specifically to me! 

I Need a Raincoat!

It seems to be raining in our lives…and thinking about it, it has been raining for more than a year now.  I have determined that it is time that I get a raincoat as it doesn’t seem to be stopping.  We might get a short break from time to time, but never long enough for our clothes to dry.  The rain is so hard when it comes that it rips through our clothes and the hail bruises our bodies, it rips through our umbrellas and renders them useless.  Though I suppose that even with a raincoat we will still get wet, but not drenched…and it can provide some cushion from the hail of life beating us to death.  I wonder if I could get one fitted with football or hockey padding for added protection.

In this I am defining rain as stress and difficulty, and the hail stones as surprises that aren’t good surprises…like sudden deaths.  In January my brother in law was found dead…funeral #1 and the beginning of what would become an ongoing storm in our lives.  The contract between the union and the stores expired in March…and they just barely reached a tentative agreement this morning.  Talk about living on pins and needles for 6 months…every time my husband’s phone got a text every muscle in my body seized up, and I wanted to throw up.  Last week I drove to Orange County to attend the memorial and graveside service for a woman that I loved more than even I understood.  She loved me when I felt no one else did, she accepted me into her life and her loving arms when I was a misfit, and she loved me despite my own and sometimes other’s stupidity.  I feel her loss more than I can even speak…for several days all I did was cry.  This hailstone hurt me beyond reason, and I am fairly sure after this year that there should be a pain pill for this.  There must be some way to stop this hurt from over whelming a person when it comes.  But, like everything else in life…all we can really do is clean up after the pain has subsided and pray that the next hailstone doesn’t come soon.

As I was mourning the loss of my dear friend I was listening to one of my favorite artists:  Counting Crows.  The song that struck me is called “Raining in Baltimore”

This circus is falling down on its knees

The big top is crumbling down

It's raining in Baltimore fifty miles east

Where you should be, no one's around

I need a phone call

I need a raincoat

I need a big love

I need a phone call

These train conversations are passing me by

And I don't have nothing to say

You get what you pay for

But I just had no intention of living this way

I need a phone call

I need a plane ride

I need a sunburn

I need a raincoat

And I get no answers

And I don't get no change

It's raining in Baltimore, baby

But everything else is the same

There's things I remember and things I forget

I miss you I guess that I should

Three thousand five hundred miles away

But what would you change if you could?

I need a phone call Maybe I should buy a new car

I can always hear a freight train Baby, if I listen real hard

And I wish, I wish it was a small world

Because I'm lonely for the big towns

I'd like to hear a little guitar

I guess it's time to put the top down

I need a phone call

I need a raincoat

I really need a raincoat

I really really need a rain coat

I really really really need a rain coat

I really need a raincoat