Author: Snappshots

What it is

.Reading time 2 minutes.

I am about to go take my nightly nap. At this point, it isn’t really a night’s sleep. I rarely get to bed before 1…sometimes 2 a.m. I don’t have enough to show for it. Certainly my house isn’t clean. The book isn’t done, but it IS almost done. I think the kids are happy and I haven’t blown my stack or gone into any formal self-help facilities. I feel like that’s a success all its own.

My dad sent me an email tonight that made me laugh. It didn’t make me want to type LOL, though. I will avoid that like Tuberculosis. If I get his permission, I will share it. But I promised myself when I started this blog that I would never post about others against their will. Life’s too short to make any enemies.

This post is dedicated to my neti pot and the girl that introduced me to the neti pot. We’ll call her Pothead, because it’s fun. She won’t like that much, I don’t think. But, Pothead, you know who you are. Thanks for the neti pot. I have undergone sheer sinus torture over the last few days. Through some agonizing rinsing, I am much better. It was gross, though. The kids could hardly tolerate watching. I’m guessing they aren’t going to let me shove one of these apparatuses up their nostrils when they next get sick…

I saw The Help tonight. I read it a year ago. I have much to say about it that will get its own blog. I just can’t revisit it all right this moment. Sometimes I am ashamed of the South. But for the most part, people are getting better.In the meantime, though, sometimes there’s still drama. And that’s all I”m going to say about that until I’ve had a little nappy.

Gnite.

Live from Gooberville

.Reading time 8 minutes.
I must have napped for about four hours today. Several days’ worth of eskimo kisses and too much baby love has left me with a head full of congestion. It serves me right. I did nothing to prevent it. I felt bad for sleeping today, but there wasn’t much else I could do. I was shocked to rise from my cocoon to find that the house didn’t look nearly as bad as I expected. All four children were playing well with each other. It was sweet.

If I could just finish this book I’d get back to posting here. And I will. So much is going on. Todd is remodeling the place we’ll soon be moving to. If we run out of cash before we finish, I thought about pitching a “sponsorship” program on here. You send me $1000 and we’ll mount your name in the family room. Or the porch. Or the hallway. The Informinator says I have to post more than once every month to six weeks for this plan to work. Also, I have to be more likable. Oh well.

Because there wasn’t enough going on, I hopped over to see what was happening in CNN’s little bubble. What a depressing little crypt those writers must live in. Do you think we’d get out of the recession if we just didn’t talk about it so much and with such gloom? Everything is negative. The stock guys just sit in their sackcloth and ashes and wait for a phone call about jobs going bad. And then they all have a good cry together before deciding they should flush all their stocks down the swirlie. More waiting. More crying. More flushing. Then someone says, “It won’t get better for TWO YEARS!” like Paul Revere riding and shouting, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” So, of course, we should cry and moan and flush for two years before we wash our faces and get up and smile about what we DO have.

Sheesh-kabobs. It’s like staring at a really ugly wart and writing a 5-paragraph essay about it. It doesn’t make it go away. It doesn’t teach anyone anything. It’s just a 5-paragraph essay about a nasty wart. Now go do something else.

Overly simplistic, I know. I just can’t see that beating this dead horse over and over again is helping.  Here are the headlines I pasted in from today’s CNN frolic with my commentary. And following that are ten ways to have a good day in spite of it all. God bless!

LATEST NEWS

Missy’s Top Twelve Ways to Be Happy Even if 8 out of 10 people think we are recessed and depressed.

  1. Eat a warm donut.
  2. Bake something for someone. Unless you are like me and your baking skills stink. If you are like me, do not do this one. It will further depress you. You could tweak #1 and buy a warm donut for a friend.
  3. Find a big, ugly hat and wear it. Maybe it’s a Parksdale Farms old man baseball cap like Spemma tries and fails to rock. Maybe it’s a turkey headress. But wear it proudly. It will make you smile.
  4. Read Matthew 5. Let your light shine. You have one. We all do. Now go shine it.
  5. Jog. Even if you look like Hospice should be running with you, it will boost your mood. I’m pretty sure this is how I look when I run, but I don’t care.
  6. Play trash can basketball with a 3 year old. Then bean her with the ball a couple of times. If she doesn’t cry, your mood will soar! If she does cry, you shouldn’t do that beaning thing anymore. My daughter LOVED the dodgeball element of our game this morning and laughed like a maniac every time the ball hit her.
  7. Use a soft ball in #6. Definitely use a soft ball. (Not a softball, mind you. A soft ball.)
  8. Ruin a song with an operatic voice and sing it through to the end. This works better if your kids are present, subjected to the torture, and begging you to “knock it off.” It’s a mood lift regardless. But it’s better if your kids are ashamed of you as you do this. I’ve found KidzBop tunes to work perfectly for this. Also makes the kids twice as crabby to hear you ruin a perfectly good, already-ruined song. It’ll be another 15 years before they understand this. No matter. I can wait.
  9. Sing a hymn at the top of your lungs. Don’t ruin this one. That’s disrespectful.
  10. Sing Battle Hymn of the Republic while marching. I DARE you to feel sad after doing this one.
  11. Take a four hour nap on the couch. It works.
  12. Pray. This one isn’t really number 12. It’s all of them. Don’t forget this one. Sometimes I do.

Don’t believe everything CNN says if you happen to be dumb enough to follow their news (as I am). They don’t know. If they had a warm donut, a game of trash can bball, and a prayer life, they might be writing different stuff.

Final days of summer

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Fair warning: steam-of-consciousness is usually bad. The following is definitely stream-of-conscious writing.

It’s 12:19 a.m. and I’m sitting up drinking Diet Mountain Dew and trying to write the final three chapters of the book. I spent the first part of the summer turning out chapters like a machine. A MACHINE, I tell you. Just joking. But I was moving a heap faster than I am now. The turning point to inefficiency came when I walked out the door to begin the annual trek to Texas. Remind me to tell some stories about that one sometime. I owe Louisiana another “curse you” post. Louisiana owes me 5 gazillion dollars. And 14 years. Because that’s what it has taken off my life just in having to constantly drive through it to see the people I love. Sheeeeeesh-kabobs. But this isn’t about that.

Did you ever hear the Carly Simon song “You’re So Vain”? You’re so vain. I bet you think this song is about you. You’re so vain. I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you? As a kid, that song drove me NUTS. I would say to my dad, “But it IS about them! How dumb is that?” And he would always reply, “That’s the whole point.” But it ISN’T the point. No, it isn’t. Dear Louisiana, this post is not about you. So step off already and pay me my money and give me back my life.

Pheww.

So when I left for Texas, I could see the end of my summer ahead on the horizon. And I could see that I had done nothing but write to that point. I needed to get cracking on living a little. I needed to soak up the last of it. And we have. We spent 13 days traveling to and from Texas. We spent 7 days at the beach. And we’ve been swimming and laughing and ignoring the looming date of August 23, which is our first day of school. So now that I’m living large, I’m not writing so much. Balance has never been my gift.

It will always be the summer of Emma. Oh, the laughter. And it will be the summer of the book. And it’s the summer my sweet old Papa passeder from this side of Eternity to the real one, leaving us to turn a page and be an older generation in just a matter of hours. It’s the summer I did a few things wrong and a few things right. And the summer I learned more than I have in the last year. And the summer I was on a diet, but gained 5 pounds from sitting in a chair behind my computer. The summer of the house renovations. The summer of decisions. And change. And the sadness that comes along with change for me. And the hope of the changes being great ones.

It was a spectacular summer. I’ll never forget it. And tomorrow marks my final day of summer. Tomorrow I’m going with friends to the beach for a last flinging of ourselves into the sand and surf. And pizza. And the Candy Kitchen. We will stay until it gets dark and then we will return much too late considering what Saturday will be like.

Saturday will be the funeral of my Papa. He was a grand, godly gentleman. Handsome. Funny. Sweet. Endearing. 95 years old. We wanted him to go, because he was so, so tired. He was ready. But knowing he’s gone feels lonely. He can’t whack me on the back in his “too much love” kind of way anymore. No more big squeeze hugs or stories about World War II. But now he’s part of that great cloud of witnesses and I hope he’ll cheer me on as I keep doing some things wrong and hopefully a few more things right. I have no regrets with him. I don’t think he had many either. It’s a good way to go. My son, Mama’s Boy, told me that he wants to die the same way Papa did…except he’d rather be 92 and not 95. 95 is a little too old, he said. He lost a little bit of zip these last three years. Oh, Mama’s Boy. I wish I could stick around and watch him turn into an old man. What a funny grandfather he’ll be.

Yesterday I was reflecting on my grandfather and how blessed we are that my children will remember their great-grandfather. They still have 4 living grandparents and up to a year ago, had 2 great-grandfathers still alive. That’s pretty superb. Thank you, God, for that.

They say a picture is worth 1000 words. So it seems completely unnecessary that I smacked you around with 800 words before showing you some pictures. Sorry about that. A girl will do anything to avoid finishing the third to last chapter of her book.

Those are the words of my summer. And here are just a fraction of the images. There will be more. But a chapter is calling me…

Beloved Takes the Plunge

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

There are only 5 people who will care about this post. If you are not in that group and your day is busy, you might not want to stop here. But my mother would like to see video of her granddaughter swimming, so I’m posting it here.

I have been trying all summer to get the girl to put her face in the water. In 10 minutes, Grammy got her to do what I couldn’t do in 8 weeks.  Go figure.

Size nothing

.Reading time 3 minutes.

It’s funny to me what boys don’t know. They know plenty. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling them stupid and me smart. But there is, on occasion, a dividing line between banks of knowledge. On one side of that dividing line, there is me. I don’t know the difference between pawning and selling an item at a pawn shop. Actually, I understand selling perfectly. I just don’t get the pawning thing. Todd has tried on multiple occasions to explain. Please don’t fill up the comments with information on pawning. I really don’t care that much. On the other side of that dividing line, there is Todd. He doesn’t know girls’ sizes. Boys typically don’t.

Don’t ask me how this transpired, but last night Todd’s mom marched out of the back room carrying her prom dress. A baby blue, very well-preserved taffeta prom dress from 1965. Whoa-za. And with an episode of Pawn Stars playing in the background, we got to chatting about that dress.

Out of nowhere, Todd said, “Missy, go put on that dress.”
What?! No. NO.

“Seriously,” he said. “Go put it on. Just try it on.”

“Todd, have you SEEN pictures of your mom at that age? She was a waif. I cannot fit into her high school dress.” I was right about this. This one time, I was right. He held up the dress in the light.

“This was you in high school,” he argued, nicely.

“No, dear. This was me in 4th grade.” Again, truly. I was right.

This went on for awhile. I adamantly argued on the side of truth and logic. Todd adamantly argued on the side of “try on the dress.”

So I complied. For the sake of the blog, I complied.

I marched off to the bathroom to destroy a perfectly intact 45-year-old dress. As I suspected, and had already stated firmly, I could not zip it. Could barely even squish my arms into the sleeves. Then I wandered back into the main room, taking great care to keep my back away from the crowd…as it was exposed due to the lack of zippage and fittage. The result of this little experiment was raucous, out-of-control howling by all four adults in the house. Also resulting was the following photos. It’s a vision of loveliness, isn’t it.

That was fun.

I’m not as fat as this makes me appear. Really.

Now, Todd. Go  put on your dad’s wedding tux. And then come get in this picture…

Day 3 – Dark Circles

.Reading time 2 minutes.

I look like someone delivered bad news to me last night and then I spent the entire night wringing my hands over it. None of that occurred, except for the looks part. Not sure why I look so much like Halloween today. I thought I was sleeping okay.

At any rate, I have only high marks to give the Best Western Richmond in Baton Rouge. The breakfast was a Thanksgiving feast and there were only three people in there eating. For once, we weren’t annoying people. Well, we might have annoyed the three people already in the dining room, but there was enough room for them to move if they didn’t like us. One guy actually did. Whatever, dude.

We were on the road by 9 and I was challenging Louisiana to do its best. It had already thrown the pool in my face and I have a nasty, festering wound to take me through the rest of my vaca to remind me of the ongoing feud. It seems like Louisiana always wins. When we have an altercation, I come away with a speeding ticket, or a festering wound, or a suspended license. Why can’t I win? All I have is the sound of my own complaining and the support of the victimized masses.

Oh well.

We stopped at the big braggadocios welcome station as soon as we crossed into Texas. i felt hugged by it. It was as if they were saying, “Congratulations. You just survived Louisiana. We know how you feel…”

I’m just joking. I don’t know why I’m talking here. I shouldn’t be. I’ll try to come up with some better material for later, I promise.  I will also try to post pictures of the trip thus far, but I am in a valley and I cannot get the pictures to upload.

Have a great day!

 

Louisiana’s Revenge

.Reading time 8 minutes.

It is that time of year. The time of year when we climb into our minivan singing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and drive like mad dogs through Louisiana, hoping against all hope that we can gather enough momentum to combat the evil that lurks there under all that soupy marshland.

I told Todd in 1994 that I would never drive through Louisiana again. Ever. I said that I would ONLY fly over it and that I would spit toward the ground each time I did. What stupidity. Spitting toward the ground only hits the plane carpet or, if you are lucky, your own feet. I would be that lucky.

We had four kids.

I retracted my “I will never again” statement. And I am typing these words from a hotel in Baton Rouge. Louisiana. And I drove here. Voluntarily. And I did not spit a single time.

It was a long day, which began with a whopping 3.5 hours of sleep. I slept from 12:30ish until 4 a.m. That’s dumb. Really dumb. But with prayer and the most diligent efforts of my life, I didn’t have any sleeping or safety issues. Twelve long hours later, we pulled up to a very comfy hotel with lots of room to frolic and be inappropriately wild. Full kitchen (not that I need it. I don’t use the one I have in my actual house…), pull out couch in the living room, and a bedroom with two plush queen beds. The bathroom is also swanky-doodle.  There were issues, however. Most of them relate to SnuggleMonkey. She gets the Bull in a China Shop Award for the day.

It was all going pretty well until we stopped at the Dufuniak Springs exit get gas. We were still in FL at this point. It takes a good 6 months to get out of FL. After that, you actually feel like you are going somewhere. I pulled into the Raceway to get gas. If you are ever in Dufuniak Springs and are faced with the choice of BP or Raceway, just swallow that Gulf Oil Spill thing and go to BP. Trust me. In addition to all of the other unsavory things associated with this gas station, on this day, SnuggleMonkey fell out of the van and did a face plant on the concrete. Yikes. I’ve heard that sound before. You never get used to it either. Human head on concrete is just icky. She got over it before the drug lords walked out of the store to check on us. And off we went. Besides hours of kids bop, High School Musical 3, and some loud, uncalled-for noises from the back of the van, the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. It felt like we stopped 13 times while still in FL. But we made up for it by driving a solid 5 hours through AL, MS, and LA.

And then we arrived and checked into our temporary little Utopia. The plan was to eat Subway by the pool and let the kids burn off the last of their fumes and hit the sack early. It was going perfectly until the bathroom requests began pouring in. First it was the girls needing to go. Then Mama’s Boy. When Mama’s Boy needed to go, I stood up to take him and about the time I did that, SnuggleMonkey stepped off the stair and into a part of the pool where she can’t swim. I could see the panic on her face in slow motion. I dropped the towels in my hands, ran across the pool deck in 4 strides and leaped into the water, wearing a white t-shirt, black capris, and my keens. I am not the right person to go swimming in a white t-shirt. Few people are, truly. But definitely not me. That was awkward. Let’s just say I plan to  hit the sit ups harder this week…

Poor girl. She was screaming when I scooped her into my arms, but she wasn’t coughing up water. She had been holding her breath. I held her in the water, trying to comfort her and tell her she handled it well. AG had jumped in with me, but I was faster. He was right by my side, talking to his sister, making sure it was all okay.

We were impressive.

No, we weren’t.

While I was in the water, I was very aware that my leg was sort of adding to this whole conversation. I hit something when I went in. I don’t know if it was the side of the pool or one of the stairs. Whatever it was, I hit it hard. When SnuggleClumsy finally calmed down, I took a look at the complaining limb. I had a nasty goose egg and a bloody abrasion.

It was at this moment that I had my AHA moment. I am in Louisiana. Of COURSE it would happen around a peaceful pool with Subway on the table. Think you can catch me unawares, do you? Think I’m not onto your slimy aggressions? Well, I am. You won’t water log us today.

We slopped back to the hotel room, with my squeaking shoes, and we talked the whole way up the stairs about what a person would or would not do to save another person. My kids asked me, “Would you jump in after us if you were wearing a fancy watch?”

I don’t own a fancy watch, but yeah. For sure. FOR SURE.

Would you jump in after us if you were wearing church clothes?

I would jump in after you if I were wearing a wedding dress, I said.

Would you, could you, with a fox?

Maybe, Baby, with a fox. In a tree, with a flea. You and me.

And because I know tomorrow’s 17 mile bridge will take me 16 hours to cross and I will have to merge 46 times in 2 hours, I am going to bed. Also because if I don’t, I will pass out.

I know this is not my best work. But it’s all I have today. Hope you are all blessed in other states of the union.

LIfe is funny sometimes

.Reading time 8 minutes.

My van is in the shop.

Not because it broke down, but because I decided to go much sooner than the Expedition in front of me at a stop light 3 weeks ago. I was tired. Spacing. Always an effective way to drive, I find. In my tired spaciness I saw the light turn green. Then I noted that the people directly on either side of me were moving on. I moved on, too.

Unfortunately, the guy in front of me went nowhere. I crunched into him. Then I spoke to myself harshly on the matter, though I tried very hard to use “green words” as I did so. I will admit that yellow and red words are much more impactful in a situation like this one. Saying, “You idiot!” to yourself as you pull over to inspect the damage is much more natural and effective than saying something like “You daft person! You person of low intellect and navigation skills!” But whatever. I don’t remember what I said. I just know I was pretty stressed out at that point. The girls both began screaming, though I’m not really sure why. I wasn’t screaming. It certainly added to the ambiance to have screaming children in the car.

Also adding to the ambiance was the fact that hardly a word of English could be found in the other car. I actually had the thought, “where is Spemma when I need her? I need SPANISH EMMA.” She was at work, not rear-ending people.  I cast my mind quickly back to the garage sale, to the ladies trying to force a return on a working flashlight. Over and over again, Emma said, “Lo siento.” This morphed into our “no returno, no exchango” policy. But lo siento was legit and I knew it meant “I’m sorry.” That seemed like a perfectly reasonable phrase to use, so I used it. About 15 times. As my luck would have it, there was no damage to the other vehicle. The wife looked grumpy, but everyone else was really nice. The kids were very sweet, probably about the age of my 10 year old. The husband was so adorable I would have invited him to live with us. But that seemed highly inappropriate, especially in light of the fact that I just smashed into him and all.

With a few more lo sientos, I was on my way again. Sigh. I knew from looking at my car that I was in a mess. You can swipe a kleenex against your car hard and end up doing $300 damage. I knew what I’d done was going to be a heap o’ money, or as they say in Mexico, “dinero.” I did not realize HOW MUCH a heap really was. Ouch.

But it’s being fixed now and should come back to me tomorrow. And for some reason I am telling you this story. Maybe because I think it’s funny? No. It’s not that. Because when you flush that much money down the car toilet, it’s not so funny.

Yeah, I don’t know. My van is in the shop. You can have this story for free. Unless you want to send donations to the van fund.

I know now why I drive a van, though. When you cram 4 kids into a sedan, the mom wants to punch people. Every noise is 1000x louder and for some reason all of the children are exponentially more noisy. If Mighty Beanz could yell and live inside your ear canal, that’s what driving in a sedan with my 4 is like. Just like that.

I still don’t remember why I started the van story. It certainly doesn’t paint me in a good light.

Well, anyway.

When I arrived home this afternoon from a free lunch at the Cheesecake Factory (I’m pausing to allow you a few moments to be angry and jealous. If you get too angry or sinfully envious, just remember my van is in the shop and you’ll feel better about being you and not being me. It’s really, really hard to be me.), I saw a package from Amazon.com. Oh, how I love to see a book on my front stoop. I ordered a book called How They Croaked: The Awful Deaths of the Awfully Famous. Doesn’t that sound fun? I think it does.

And after I got really excited about the book, I checked my email. There was an email from Google Voice. I don’t really understand how all of this works, but we’ve switched our landline basically off. We can still receive calls to it, but they go straight to Google Voicemail. This can get very interesting, because a software program is trying to listen to the person talking and translate for me in an email message. Let me leave you with two examples that I find funny. If voice recognition software is this advanced, when my van finally dies for the final time, I will probably be able to trade it in for a time machine.

Google Voice:

Hi. This is Justin’s ministry confirming interest appointment for tomorrow, Thursday, June 23rd at 9:30. Also for ensure nothing to eat or drink 2 hours prior. Thank you.

“Justin’s Ministry” is actually Children’s Dentistry. Interest is my oldest boy’s name, and I shall hereafter call him Interest.

Hey, it’s me. Yes, my teacher Gone, and I would, give my two friends need to talk to you You know that I would leave me a a bit awkward looking. Love you guys.

I have no idea what all of that was supposed to be. “You know that I would leave me a bit awkward looking” is quite intriguing, though. I shall attempt to call this one back.

And still, at the end of all of this, I have no idea why I spilled the guts on the van thing.

Chopping Block

.Reading time 4 minutes.

I shouldn’t read CNN.com. It’s my version of a soap opera. Apparently I don’t think my own life of tripping over tea parties and wiping up disgusting things is exciting enough. So I borrow trouble. The news is trouble. It either leaves me empty and desperately sad, as in the case of the father who fell to his death at a Texas Rangers game last week while his son watched (I don’t know if I’ll ever get over this one) or it leaves me furious, as in the case of poor Juror #12 in the Casey Anthony trial.

It’s a mistake to talk about the Casey Anthony trial. I know it is. People are hot as fire over this. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone is right. Except the jurors. And according to most people, they are as dumb as bricks or as evil as Jezebel. Mostly they are dumb as bricks. I don’t think that. I think they followed the rules of our court system.

They listened to the information. It looked bad for Casey Anthony. I mean, come ON, she waited 31 days to report her daughter as a missing person? Partying like it’s 1999. Stinky trunk. Oddly content behavior. No mention to anyone of her fears or worries.

Do I think she did it? Yep.

Do I know for sure? Nope.

She knows. God knows. I’m not sure anyone else does.

The jury couldn’t prove a cause of death in the child. If you can’t prove cause of death, it’s pretty difficult to paint a clear image of a crime scene and place a person there as the murderer. And they couldn’t find any real DNA to prove Anthony was there.

So the jury listened to every last detail. And they probably wanted to believe she did it and put her away for the stupid looks on her face. But at the end of the road, they weren’t sure. Because the American justice system that we’re so proud of says that if there’s a reasonable doubt, you have to acquit. And no proof of how this child died leaves a decent gap for a reasonable doubt to walk through.

But that’s not good enough for America. No, they have to take their opinions and write them down in death threats and send them to Juror #12, a 60 year old wife, mother, and grandmother who never wanted to be on a murder trial jury. She just wants to go back to her job at Publix. But she can’t do that now, because it isn’t safe to. So she has gone into hiding with her husband, stating that she’d rather go to jail than be on a jury like this one again. In ways, she is in jail. She can’t go home. She can’t live her life.

We like our freedoms. And, by Sister Sassyfras, we’re entitled to them all. Those freedoms are protected by a justice system, among many other things. This jury gave up weeks of their lives to sit and listen and discern the facts of this case. When they didn’t return the verdict that we were certain was the right one, a whole bunch of people began making death threats.  That makes  a heap of sense, doesn’t it?

That’s not the justice system. That’s a lynch mob.

To Juror #12, on behalf of America, I am very sorry.

When Tiny Towns Parade…

.Reading time 5 minutes.

There is an age at which reverse psychology ceases to have any effect on a child. That age is not 3, as is evidenced by the following two photos. In this first one, my SnuggleMonkey made the face she wanted to.

For the second photo, I stood behind camera and used a very dorky tone and said, “Do not smile at me. No. Don’t. Whatever you do, do NOT smile for the camera.” And the result was the following:

So I took a short break to praise her and snarfle her sweaty little neck (she DOES sweat a LOT for a tiny girl…). And then I moved on to another child of mine. And while 3 is not the age of failed reverse psychology, and 5 is also not the age, I believe that 7 is that age. I turned the camera on Mama’s Boy and said, “Boy, don’t smile normal. Do NOT smile normal for me.” And I got this.

The usual. Sigh.

SnuggleMonkey tried to wrestle him over that.

I turned to a few more normal people to see what I could get. Don’t you know George and Martha would be proud of the USA headgear that has come out now?

Well, those went pretty well, so I’ll go back to my own kids again and see what I can shoot.

Yeah, no. That’s just a little bit severe. Well, I’ll isolate the almost 5-year-old and try that.

Nope.  Back to Mama’s Boy. Looking for ONE.GOOD.SHOT.

I hope that wasn’t a real attempt.

Stop it, boy, or I will go get the milk of magnesia out of the car.

Brother.

About this time, the parade started. It was 900 degrees and sunny. I was sweating like an Olympic wrestler. Every year the kids sit on the curb with their bags for the candy. And each year the candy gets more and more sparse with the “floats” becoming more like Jeb and Daisy just driving their leased Dodge Ram slowly through the parade route.

The above photo is a typical scene from our small-town parade. There are no vehicles in the picture. There are no kids looking, because there is simply nothing to look at. And my Beloved is staring with disgust into her empty candy bag.

Ah, the faces of childhood joy. Positively giddy, they are. Way up at the top of this photo, you can see a golf cart. That was cool. Still no candy. Or anything, really.

A few things started happening, so they stood up. They were poised and ready. For something.

You might notice in the above photo that my daughter is waving to a generic brown truck. Nothing decorated about it and no candy to be seen. SnuggleMonkey appears to be crying, which happened on occasion that day. Her sweet sister gave her more than  half of her own candy, which I loved watching. Even if she only got one piece thrown to her, she’d drop it in her sister’s bag.

And while the parade seems to be declining in quality a great deal, the fireworks on the golf course are not.

They put on an awesome show for a dinky little town. The only drawback I could see was having to answer ‘no’ to the question “was that the grand finale?” more than 67 times in the 30 minute show. I’m not sure I ever got to answer yes to that question, because when the grand finale actually lit up the sky, they didn’t ask.

This is a final shot of the non-camp-attending cousins. I did not dress SnuggleMonkey in a bathing suit like a mother who doesn’t care at ALL. She wet herself. And THAT was the grand finale.

P.S. We do not actually keep Milk of Magnesia in the car. Nobody does that. Nobody.