My friend Diana (you may remember her from all the times I’ve referred to her as “BFF”) came out from Maryland to visit last week. Saturday she came over and hung out all day… and then spent the night. Yes, we had an adult sleepover. I’m not sure if that’s a weird thing or not… but there it is. It was first time that I’d seen her in a year, and yet I took no pictures. Yeah, seriously… no pictures. I’m a moron. So instead, I have illustrated the whole event with Barbies. You’re just going to have to use your imaginations…
The afternoon started out with us sitting around talking. And that’s actually pretty much what we did for the entire afternoon. Diana and I are talkers. Oh, not really individually… when you put us together, though, there is lots of talking. Hurried, excited, giggly talking. With frenzied hand gestures. We sat in the kitchen and chatted. Zoe sat under the table with a camera, video taping our legs and the carpet while capturing the audio of our conversations.
As you can see, Zoe was wearing a wedding dress for the afternoon. I had on a lovely pink stole, and Diana wore a red ballerina outfit. Diana also did my hair in a glamorous up-do. You may notice the cake. There was cake. My mom recently got me the Pampered Chef microwave rice cooker… which is the coolest invention. Because you can cook a cake in it! In the microwave! In 8 minutes! And it comes out frosted! I couldn’t help but be all excited to show Diana… and force her to eat half of it. The poor woman…
That evening we went to dinner together while Jon watched Jachin and Zoe. Diana and I took Deacon with us.
Yay! A tired baby at a restaurant!
As you can see, Deacon was dressed as a Storm Trooper for the evening. Perhaps that is why he insisted on screaming and throwing things on the floor the entire time we were there. We finally got boxes and took our food to go.
Next we got in pajamas and watched a movie. It was The Fall, one of my favorites. Have you still not seen this movie?? Diana hadn’t either, even though I have been singing its praises for a year now. So I made her watch it.
I loved watching it with her, because it’s the kind of movie that has things like imagery and symbolism… and yet you can still eat Twizzlers and chocolate while you watch it.
She loved it. I knew that she would. You need to watch it, too. Right now. Go.
After the movie, we went to bed. Because it was late… it was, like, 10pm. (Diana doesn’t really do late.)
Diana wears an orthodontic retainer device at night, which I had never seen before. But when you have adult sleepovers, you get to see all kinds of neat stuff.
Because of her neck issues, she couldn’t sleep on the couch or the floor or anything. (Like I would make her sleep on the floor…) Instead, she slept on Zoe’s bed.
Zoe’s bed was a bit small, but the mattress is seriously comfortable.
(Incidentally, we made Zoe sleep in the backyard in a tent.)
(Not really.)
The next day Diana had to leave for Colorado to visit her parents. I waved from the front porch, managing to smile, but then as her car drove out of sight, I cried. Zoe did, too.
I miss Diana and her ballerina outfit and her night-time orthodontic retainer.
Some people are born blond; others of us are born to be blond.
I am one of the latter. I love me some bleach. My sis-in-law, Jenn, is my stylist. She keeps me looking sunny and ditsy… and appearing to have more fun.
This morning Jachin informed me that I’m due for a touch up.
“Have you noticed that your hair is blond on this side, and blond on this side, with a black stripe right down here?” he said, karate chopping me on my part.
“Yes, those are called ‘roots’,” I said. “Jenn is doing my hair tomorrow.”
“What? You don’t like it like that?”
“Umm, no.”
“I think it’s awesome. You look like a super-hero.”
I’m off to buy a cape and some tights. Fish-nets… y’know, to go with the bleach.
I took the kids to the BYU Museum of Art yesterday. They have a Walter Wick exhibit set up now that is amazing. After going through all of the I Spy sets and optical illusion photographs, we wandered the museum looking at other things.
We came upon Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe print:
“Do you know who that is… without looking at the name?” I asked Jachin.
Zoe bumped her tooth two days ago. Now, if this had happened to any other person on the planet, it would not be a blog-worthy event. But the fact that Zoe has a phobia about her teeth falling out, coupled with the fact that she has a flair for the dramatic, makes it blog-worthy, indeed. (Truth be told, if it were up to Zoe none of her teeth would ever fall out, even with the tooth fairy dropping some coin. If it were up to Zoe, she would just keep her baby teeth and grow in her big teeth behind them… in rows… like a shark… a really, really dramatic shark.)
So she bumped her tooth. I’m not even sure how it happened, exactly. I know that she was in the kitchen, but that doesn’t give us much to go on as far as reconstructing the event. It was a baby tooth. On the bottom. One that had been a little loose anyway. But once she spotted a drop of blood — mixed with an ounce of spit, which, when combined, ends up looking like a gallon of blood — she completely freaked and ran into the bathroom to look in the mirror. Then she repeatedly screamed for help. I went in and applied a tissue and showed her that it was not a gallon of blood, but rather a drop of blood. Mostly it was just harmless spit. But her loose tooth had been knocked a little askew and was now even more loose, and possibly on the verge of falling out some time before Christmas. She continued to freak out… only now with her mouth closed, as she was afraid that if she screamed with her mouth open, the force of the expelled air from her screams would cause the tooth to fly out of its socket.
Have you ever heard someone scream with their mouth closed? It’s an interesting sound.
So now she was afraid to open her mouth. Which meant she couldn’t talk. She carried around a pencil and wrote on things when she wanted to talk. She wrote things like, “I am afraid my tongue will touch my tooth and it will fall out” and “I really want a drink, but I can’t open my mouth”. Also, her friend came over to play. Zoe mostly just lounged on the couch, writing updates on her condition to her friend while her friend watched movies.
Other than opening her mouth, she was also afraid to swallow… because what if the split-second before she swallowed, her tooth came out and then when she swallowed, her tooth went down her throat with her spit!?! So her closed mouth kept filling up with spit. Between writing notes to everyone, she would periodically go out on the deck and spit. Well, not really spit (she’s too lady-like to know how to spit)… she would hang her upper body way out over her toes and kind of drool while shaking her head back and forth violently, trying to break the spit string.
Soon she and her friend got an idea. They came up and asked — well, Zoe’s friend asked, Zoe only nodded and made hand gestures — if they could go visit Karen, one of the neighbors on the next street.
“Why do you want to see Karen?” I asked.
“Because,” Zoe’s friend said, “she’s good at helping when you get hurt.”
Karen, for the record, works for the Boy Scouts of America office. While I’m sure she is up on her first aid certificiation, I’m not sure there was a whole lot she could do to un-loosen a baby tooth. But finally I agreed to let them go over and ask Karen for dental advice, half expecting Zoe to come home with her tooth splinted with a small twig and some twine. But a few minutes later the girls came back looking forlorn, as Karen wasn’t home. They had run out of options.
Zoe didn’t eat lunch or dinner that day. She wrote notes about how hungry and thirsty she was. I tried to give her some cucumber slices. She took a slice and broke it into quarters. Then she took the tiny cucumber wedge and nibbled it like a hamster on the “good” side of her mouth. Then she frowned and threw the wedge onto the plate, as the cucumber was too hard to nibble, and would no doubt loosen her tooth more if she were to eat it.
She ran to her bed and cried. With her mouth closed.
I wish I were kidding about any of this, but it’s all true.
The next morning she woke up, found that her tooth had “re-hardened” a little, and she started talking. She said that her stomach hurt because she was so starving. And she was soooo thirsty. I took her some water. She drank a ton of it. Then she threw up water all over her bed.
All because she bumped her tooth.
Luckily, by my estimation, she only has about 12 baby teeth left to lose.
Hi. I’m on the couch. I’m sleeping here tonight. My husband has been “flushing out his body” for the last 24 hours.
I believe it is swine flu.
Because several people at his office had swine flu. And 14 out of the 2,736,424 people in the state of Utah have died from swine flu. So, naturally, when he starts getting sick, it must be swine flu!
(nevermind that he had Taco Bell for dinner last night, an obvious culprit of food poisoning… because, swine flu!)
So I call my mom and I’m all swine flu! And she’s all food poisoning?And I’m all no, woman, you don’t listen! swine flu!
And then I go into the bathroom and I look at my poor hubby hugging the toilet bowl and I’m all swine flu?? And he’s all bbllllaaahhhhkkkk…
And then I text my friend, Heidi, and I’m allOMG Jon is brf-ing. SWN FLU! And she’s all w/e ur coming to work out tues morn anyway… because she is a hard core trainer/friend that way.
And then I call my in-laws and I’m all swine flu! And then my mother-in-law is all *thunk* because she has passed out and dropped the phone. And I’m starting to think that maybe I should reel it in a little with all of the swine flu!
And now Jon is sleeping peacefully, after 24 hours of barfing. Which is exactly how long a 24-hour stomach bug lasts. Or almost exactly how long food poisoning would last from, say, a tainted, nasty-licious Crunch Wrap Supreme.
But still, I’m sleeping on the couch tonight. Just in case, you know…
So you know how you’ve always thought that I’m perfect? Like, I’ve totally got my act together… perfect wife, mother, and friend? (Why are you laughing? Shut up.) Well this, dear friends of the internets, is my one giant flaw… the one thing that my husband would leave me over:
…my complete inability to keep the kitchen desk clean. It’s not so much a desk as it is a solid wood, hand crafted trash can amassed with piles of garbage, and bills, and ads, and pictures, and bags of craft stuff, and “$20 Off” coupons to Famous Footwear… okay, the coupon is a cool thing.
Yes, if my husband were to leave me, it would be for a person who could keep her piles of crap in check. She could be a total dog. A hag. In fact she could be a he… I think as long as the house was kept junk-pile-free, my hubby would be happy.
So today it is my mission. You are my witness. I will post another picture tomorrow, and the desk WILL NOT look like it does now. It will be pristine, organized, and you will be able to tell that it is, indeed, made of wood.
Did you see the picture on the desk? The one of Jachin and Zoe… from, like, five years ago? Take a closer look:
Yeah, they don’t look like that anymore. But the last time I cleaned off the desk, they did look like that… or nearly.
Tomorrow, people. Meet back here. Maybe I will have uncovered the picture of me riding the mechanical bull (yeah, that picture is in there somewhere…) That alone should be enough to get you back here…
This was the best picture out of the bunch. And by “best” I mean Jachin had his eyes open, his pizza was hidden, Deacon wasn’t crying, and Zoe wasn’t making a goofy face.
In other words, not like these:
This year for the 4th of July we went to Stadium of Fire. (Being that we also went last year, you could almost say it’s a tradition… but it isn’t really. They just happened to have two headlining acts two years in a row that weren’t country… or members of the Osmond family.) This year the top act was the OMGI’mtotallyswooningtheyaresototallydreamyJonasBrothers. Yes, I sang along. Yes, I knew most of the words to most of the songs. Yes, I said that we were going because Zoe loves them. No, Zoe doesn’t know most of the words to most of the songs.
/sigh I’m a dork.
We ended up with 4 extra tickets, so we let each of the kids invite a friend, and then we also took along my grandma and her sister… giving us one of the most hilarious pictures I’ve seen this calendar year:
This is what two women in their 70’s partying at a Jonas Brother’s concert looks like. We got both crazy chicks to wear glow sticks, but that was mostly so we wouldn’t lose sight of them as we were finding our way back to the car. My grandma (bless her sweet heart) spent most of the evening looking over to see if Deacon seemed bothered by the loudness of the festivities. She kept giving me the “oh, that poor child’s ears” look. But we had it covered:
He kept in the earplugs for a while, but ended up pulling them out and throwing them on the ground.
I took lots of video of the Jonas Brothers, but I can’t show any of it to you. I realized after watching them that I am singing loudly and terribly in the background of all of them. Seriously. But I did take some video of the fire dancers that were part of the Stadium of Fire show. The following video shows that fire dancing has a sleepy, hypnotic effect on children. Only Zoe wasn’t affected by the dazzling juju.
Also, Zoe took some amazingly sweet video of me trying to Ripstick before we left for the stadium. Also in this video: Deacon smiles, Jon sings “Wiggle It”, and Jachin’s friend eats a hotdog. It’s footage not to be missed.
