Date with Mama

 The kids and I spent the morning at the zoo last Saturday. It was chilly, but fun. The cheetahs were incredibly interested in my furry hatted child...

 who spent most of the day running away from me...

…but frankly is so stinking cute I just can't handle it.

Headshots

Two local professionals asked for me to take their head shots recently, and my only hope was to do it on a Wednesday when I have Tucker with me all day. So, after their approval, I brought him with me. Of course, I had to do a light check on him and took these two shots. 

Love.

Stormy Weather

And I quote, "It is clouds and a poop storm and fog and then green grass."

(...and Josh wonders why Tucker is my current favorite child…)

Popcorn.

This is a blog about popcorn. I tell this so that you may leave this website immediately because you suddenly don't care what I could possibly say about popcorn.

Popcorn is a common thread of my time here on Earth. I have loved eating it my entire life. My Geeky taught me how to cook great popcorn and eventually gave me the perfect electric skillet in which to make it. I lived on a farm that grew Orville Reddenbacher popcorn in the fields which surrounded it. Within the first 24 hours in my first alone apartment, I had defined the "House Popcorn Bowl". As I have gotten married and now had kids the size of my "House Popcorn Bowl" has grown. First we had the Purdue enamel one right after we got married. Then after Hudson was a popcorn eater, it became this larger glass bowl. Tucker eats as much popcorn as me, therefore, our popcorn bowl is HUGE. Now with him, we have a trough on wheels-sized bowl so we can feed the popcorn addiction of the 4 members of this house.

My grandparents are moving. And downsizing and this weekend I spent a day helping them pack, sort, purge, and condense their lives down to a reduced amount of material things. Your whole life you collect stuff and then there is the day when those that you gave life to, start to take it all away. I reiterated to myself from this recent trip to help that I am such a huge sap. I'm way too nostalgic for my own good! While trying to pick out which 5 plates (of 800) I was selecting for the new apartment, I would find myself getting all weepy about what to do about the fate of those other 795.

I actually cried over what to do with a pre-1974 sippy cup. My sippy cup which I used when I was a baby and then each and every one of my 7 cousins-siblings used after me. No one needs it anymore. Grandma can't host thanksgiving in an apartment made for 2.Was it time to give it to Goodwill? And then-- to know they might not want it-- and someone --would throw it in the trash.






I don't want downsize my House Popcorn Bowl! Thankfully I don't have to. And for today, I will relish in the fact that I *may or may not* have a pile of dirty dishes which reach to the kitchen ceiling. But among them is the biggest blue plastic popcorn bowl you have ever seen.

P.S. For the record, I would contemplate throwing the sippy cup in my car… (however I left it for someone else to decide.)

$1500 Security System

I write this for posterity although I question whether I will ever be able to forget it.

For most of Tucker's life, he has had random occurrences of blueish colored lips. Probably because he is my second born and probably because it was so inconsistent, I paid little attention. I attributed it to some type of underdeveloped circulatory system issue and did not stress.

Blue lips even though I corrected some of it in Photoshop.

As previously mentioned, Tucker has Occupational Therapy once a week and twice she brought his blue lips after having his morning milk to my attention. Most recently she said something before his 30 month appointment, so I planned on saying something to the doctor. Like all people of this day in age, I had an extra 30 seconds, so I threw out my "blue lips in toddlers" search to Dr. Google moments prior to the appointment. Top result: cardiac distress, congenital heart disease, heart defect.

Suddenly I felt like the shittiest mother in the universe.

There is not another phrase which can cause "cardiac distress" in a mother like reading the words "cardiac distress" on a condition which you believe your child has. So begins my high blood pressure…

Tucker, by his doctor, was diagnosed with a condition called cynanosis which can be a symptom of a heart condition. In order to rule out said possible heart condition, it was suggested we have an echocardiogram.

I appreciate the way she said "suggestion" in hindsight, but I don't really think you can say words like "cardiac" and "heart condition" and "rule out" and NOT think the mother is going to say, "SIGN. ME. UP."

Tucker's echocardiogram came back normal. And now $1500 later, I sleep again.

Backing up

The worst part of my job is I am my own IT department. I really hate the logistics of hooking up computers to printers to WiFi to my phone to my calendar to push this and airdrop that. I also despise backing up. Unfortunately these are not just things I have to do once in a blue moon; they are job tasks on my calendar so I don't lose people's precious sessions and my hard work.

 This weekend a back up was scheduled. So, thankfully the best part of my job is not getting in trouble with anyone when I goof off for an hour looking at old pictures of my kids. These four pictures were taken during this week back in 2012.

Shorts one day, snowsuit the next? That seems about the same. The faces of the littles are nearly the same too. Goodness though! This definitely feels more like yesterday than two er TWO 2 zwei  YEARS ago! Yikes.

I even found a video of when the kids actually got along! Okay--that took multiple hours. But it was on my own dime!

Window Seat

Perfect star alignment allowed for Josh and I to recently have conferences in Las Vegas at the exact. same. time. So, Monday we went off for a (very) short adventure in the city that never sleeps (although we really did).

Las Vegas (Lost Wages) ahhhh….suck in your stale cigarette air while you can. (You can still smoke there everywhere and it is SO WEIRD. Your walking around a MALL and people are smoking. I was like a Communist dictator wagging my finger at them.) On this trip, I had a great opportunity to be by myself for quite a spell of time while "working" there. I had the chance to spend an afternoon walking around the largest photography expo in the US (read: kid in a candy store) and then to walk the entire strip. I was in Vegas 10 years ago (bachelorette party) and 10 years before that (immediately after college) and it was very interesting for me to allow myself to reflect on the changes in those different span of years.

What a crazy girl I was to jot off to places like Vegas for just a couple days. Unlike now where I preplan every detail, those trips were a backpack and the right pair of shoes. I didn't have an iPhone to tell me if I was turning on the wrong road, I just figured it out.

All this thinking, with its intense inner dialogue, the outward, intense focus on my work, and missing my littles so much (after just 48 hours away) really took a toll on my brain and heart. I got on to the plane a bit drained and somehow deflated.

Thanks to Southwest's "cattle call" seating, I got a spot for my ride home in the middle of two others. Awkward as it was, I could stop leaning over the grandmotherly type sitting next to me holding the window seat. She was nice and polite, but never took her eyes off her Sudoku puzzle, then book, then the magazine in front of her. I was partially annoyed and partially confused. Here was the sun setting in the most glorious way on the Sierra Nevadas just out her little porthole to the world, and she never stopped busying herself with stupid tasks in her hands.

I thought back to the 60 minutes before I left to catch my plane to Vegas and how I furiously was trying to get some photography albums done and sent instead of just sitting on the floor with the kids. I thought about how I have been so consumed with all this work for church (finding our new preacher) that I definitely have let things slide around the house. I thought about how I get way to caught up on social media to just look outside more.

And I realized that I had changed a lot from the Heathers who had been to Vegas 10 and 20 years ago. While the more mature and sedate side of me had viewed those trips as impetuous and daring, they were definitely examples of the Heather who was living in the moment, who was looking outside the window, and not the Heather who was way too busy with just the tasks in front of her. For the past couple years I have been very busy, but mostly surviving. Motherhood does that to you, but we also do it to ourselves.

Things are about to get crazy around here. I am moving into the window seat.