But, I admit it. I am scared of looking at my investments. I have not even peeked at them this month. I am an ostrich, head in the sand. Just the thought of it makes me feel weak in the knees, and sick to my stomach.
Have you looked at yours? What was your reaction?
Dear Tiller,
Yesterday, you turned three years old. Yes, I was too busy to write this on your birthday, but don’t think for a minute that throughout the day i wasn’t constantly reminded that it was three years to the day that you had come into our lives.
It is hard to look back on a year and remember all of the things that have changed in your life and ours in just one year. A lot has happened to us this year – We have lost your Meemaw, and Pop is in Assisted Living. That is very different. I am so glad that they have been a part of your life. I never knew a one of my great-grandparents. We moved this year, from the house in East Atlanta, where you came home and danced and sang your way into our lives. And boy do you dance and sing. You make up songs about any and everything, and sometimes I am amazed at the lyrics you come up with. You have discovered princesses. The damn Disney crap. (And yes, your mama cusses, too.) Princess dresses, tiaras, little plastic heels, and jewelry. You also love babies – You carry two or three around at a time, and we all pretend to take care of them, and your face just lights up when you realize we are playing along. This is the year that the dog and cats have realized that they like you – they are no longer scared of you, and the cats will sit next to you when you watch tv. Let’s see – Shows you like are still Dora, and Franklin, and Max and Ruby. You like Rollie’s Speed Racer cartoons on DVD. We have started making you watch Sesame Street in the mornings, just because we wanted you to learn to recognize letters when you see them. We also let you play the ABCs on starfall.com. I am amazed that you picked up using the touchpad on the laptop so quickly; I think you are better at it than your grandma.
You sleep so well, and go right to sleep at night. Well, sometimes you sing yourself to sleep, but you do not fight us when we put you down. You and Daddy and Rollie get up in our bed and read at night, and this year, Daddy started reading The Tale of Despereaux to you, and you wiggle and don’t really get any of it, but i think it is pretty neato the way y’all pile up every night. I still sing the medley to you some nights. Some nights you want me to make your bear talk to you, so I do that instead. But i still love singing Bitsy, Sunshine, and Twinkle to you. I will be sad one day when I realize it is the last time I sang it to you.
We moved out of the old house in February, and we didn’t have the new house yet, so we lived at the lake for a month. It was very strange living there, but you and Rollie and I explored middle Georgia, and went on lots of “adventures” where you learned about nature, and got dirty, and threw rocks at trees, and found bugs. I was glad, because I worry that you and Rollie have nature deprivation sometimes.
You have a cute room in our new house, green and pink. You are in a big girl bed, with one of the twin beds that came from the lake when Dad bought the iron queen bed for up there. Rollie has the other one in his room, but someday I’d like for you to have them both for sleepovers. Dad says that Grandma and Pop got those twins out of an old house in Macon, but I don’t think they are that old.
You started a new preschool this year at a local church. You love it. You go three days/week, and are one of the oldest in your class, which means that you are a lot bigger than some of them. Last year, you called the little ones in your class “my babies,” but you don’t do that this year. I miss that.
One big thing that happened this year is that you learned to go potty. You wear big girl undies and once you got started, you really took off with it. It makes my life so much easier, but sometimes I miss the closeness that comes with having to change someone’s diaper. I know that sounds crazy, but it is true. You and Rollie just don’t need me that way anymore. It is a milestone, albeit a strange one.
Another huge thing that happened this year is that you learned to swim! You are my little fish girl, and can hold your breath underwater. I was so proud of you.
We had a birthday party for you on Sunday. it was a costume party, and you were a princess. You changed your mind about five times about what you wanted to be. A rat, a dog, a princess, dora. We had black and orange cupcakes. You ate two. Guests at the party were your Johnson grandma and papaw, Lyle and Denise, Lisa, mark, and Dash. Grandma and Papaw palmer were at a family reunion. Jason and Elle came – she was a princess, too. As was Trisha. Her brother Nolan was Boba Fett. Leah and Sydney came, too. I think Sydney was Luke Skywalker, and Leah was Dorothy Gale. Charla and Julianne were fairies. Scarlett was Batgirl. Her mama was a kitty cat! It was much, much fun. We decorated the backyard and had the party out there, because the weather was so nice. We ordered a pizza later, and stayed up way too late for a school night, but it was fun. Last night was your birthday, and so we made your meal request: Mac and cheese, oranges, and green grapes. They had to be green. We had chocolate cake for dessert. You blew out the candle like a flash.
One day, if you are a mother, you will understand that women are like salmon and their bodies remember and their minds go back yearly to the days their offspring entered the world. Ten or twenty times day before yesterday, I thought, “oh, this is about the time I called Todd, because I just felt a little off,” or “funny that I am in the car at six p.m. tonight. I remember leaving Rollie with Lisa and going out to the cul-de-sac and getting in the red tiger wagon to go to the hospital.” It was a Friday, rush hour in Atlanta (doesn’t that just figure) and your father put on a CD he had made with mellow songs on it. The song was “The Scarlet Tide” from the Cold Mountain soundtrack. Yes, I have probably written that to you before, but it still makes me laugh, and i promised your father I would never let him live it down; He put a song on about blood and death and carnage as he drove me to the hospital in labor. I remember thinking before I went to bed that it was about the time they gave me the benedryl and told me to get some sleep, that it would be four or five hours til you were ready to come out. It was only almost two, and i was so tired when they woke me up. I remember thinking, “just a few more minutes of sleep.” I had done this before. I knew i would get no sleep for a long time. We had to shake your daddy to wake him up. It was five til midnight when they readied everything for you, and Ruth said if we hurried, we could have a baby on the 7th, and if we took our time, on the 8th. You came on the eighth, but just barely.
Your birth was a blessing and it was the way I imagined birth should be, and I am so grateful that you gave that to me in your coming into the world. Rollie’s birth I sometimes go over in my head like a car wreck, like i do the accident that your Daddy and I had one Memorial Day, when I hit my head and can’t remember a huge chunk of time. I go back to that over and over, trying to find those lost moments, and never can. I go over Rollie’s birth and try to remember when it started going wrong, and how it felt, worrying it like a little hole in a blanket. But not yours, yours is just a succession of happy thoughts: Laughing with your father before you came out, the funny deer-in-headlights look on his face when I brought up changing your name at the last minute, holding you right when you came out and no one worriedly waiting to whisk you away from me, and the first time you latched on, right away, like we were made for each other.
Knowing that you were my Matilda, my daughter, just like I am Virginia’s Annie, born in that very same hospital, and mama was Vivian’s Baby, born in Chattanooga, and that one day my grandma was her mother Ida’s baby, come into the world in Lee County, NC. I remember thinking that we are a chain, unbroken, but each a charm, dangling and flashing in the sunlight, and in the darkness, too.
Tiller from two to three years, on my Flickr.
Tiller discusses one of her birthday gifts, twin Cabbage Patch kids.
So, i know some of you are waiting for pictures from the costume party, but it is just gonna have to wait. I have a little something to get off my chest. It’s called, “What the fuck is wrong with you, you sack of shit parents?”
I guess I should start at the beginning. I should mention first that I was not present for the event in question, Rollie’s soccer game. It took place Saturday afternoon. His father took him to the game, while I readied our home for being descended upon by eleven costumed children on Sunday.
Rollie is my oldest, so this is my first experience with parenting a child in organized sports leagues. I played sports growing up, and really credit the experiences for giving me much of my self-confidence, and my sense of sportsmanship. I played tee ball, baseball, softball, soccer, swimming, and tennis, and even recreational basketball, at which i was pretty terrible. I am competitive and love to win, but I have never been a sore loser, and am always a gracious winner, except in drinking games, or games played while drinking (beer pong, pool, darts) where “talking shit” is acceptable, and even encouraged, and where it would never set a poor example in front of a child. I have looked forward to my kids playing sports and learning about teamwork, good sportsmanship, doing one’s best, and self-confidence.
So, Rollie is playing soccer for the first time this year. He is in a co-ed, under six league. The kids range in age from 3-6 (a huge age difference actually), and they don’t keep score. There are no referees, just the two coaches out on the field with the kids, giving them pointers and running the game. It is all about learning the skills, the rules of the game, and sportsmanship. Or so i thought.
Rollie definitely got a competitive streak from me. he likes to win, and we have been working with him on things like, “it is okay if you lose, as long as you give it your best” and “you can’t win them all,” and teamwork. One problem we have had so far this year is that not only does he want to take the ball away from the opponent, he also will go after the ball if his own teammate has it, and we are trying to teach him that he needs to work with his team, not against them.
Other than that though, we had so far had no real problems. So, Todd takes him to his game on Saturday. None of the kids on Rollie’s team have played before, and there is a kid on the other team that is playing circles around the others. He also played pretty rough, throwing elbows, pulling on shirts and pants, etc. I have never seen any unsportsmanlike behavior called at these games. Either the coaches did not see this stuff, or they just let it go. So, Rollie is pretty competitive and started getting mad, and from what I can tell from what Todd said, he kind of did the same stuff, and told the kid to “stop it.” Well, this kid said to Rollie, loud enough for Todd to hear, although it seems that other parents and the coaches did not hear it, “Y’all suck.”
Now, as I said, Rollie is my oldest, and it doesn’t take long after sending your eldest child to school to realize that they are in for quite an education. While they are learning the ABCs and 123s (or not, but that is a whole ‘nother post), they are also learning a ton of really neat sayings and behaviors from the kids in their class who are not the oldest; these kids have older brothers and sisters and just aren’t as innocent as the eldest siblings. They use words and phrases like, “You suck.” “I’m going to kill you.” And lots of stuff about shooting and guns. It is frightening the way that influences on your child are suddenly out of your control.
Back the game: This kid says this stuff, plus the other team is scoring a bunch of goals, and Rollie’s team, not so much. And the team is getting pretty discouraged. Which is fine. In my opinion, it is just as important to learn how to lose gracefully as it is to win. But then Todd takes Rollie to school this morning, and one of the kids in his class was on the other team. He is a nice kid, and Rollie and he are friends. Well, his mom asks if Rollie had recovered from the drama of the game and it seems that Rollie was snarky with his friend on Saturday. (I guess out of frustration at losing, not that frustration is in any way an excuse for bad behavior.) She then proceeds to tell Todd some further stuff about the “Y’all suck” kid’s behavior on Saturday. Seems as he was substituted out of the game, he came out and loudly proclaimed, either to the parents or in front of the parents, that he was “going to kick that kid’s ass.” We assume he was referring to Rollie. Apparently, no one said anything. At least this one parent heard the comment. Todd did not. We do not know if any one else heard it, but according to this mother, it was loud enough to hear.
I know what I would do in this situation. What would you do? Would you have said something? As a parent, do you rely on a coach to deal with these things? Is it really best to ignore it? What reason would his parents have for not reprimanding him for this behavior? Would you reprimand someone else’s child for saying something like this? And what kind of a household is this child living in that he remotely thinks it is acceptable to say something like that, much less in front of a group of adults?
Am I being over-protective and raising a complete wuss of a child? Is it really so wrong to want my child to learn about respect for others, respect for adults, etc?
Most of all, what kind of a child talks like this at age six or under?
I am fuming and just mad I wasn’t there to say something to the sorry excuse for parents that poor kid must have. And if I had, would i be labeled a troublemaker or a rabble rouser? And if I was, would i give a shit?
Yesterday afternoon, Todd called me out to look at some yard work he was doing. Turns out that one of the shrubs we’ve been basically ignoring until it is cool enough to prune is actually a really huge fall-blooming Camellia. It has about a kajillion buds on it, and just a few blooms yet.
We spent two years at the old house, not wanting to do too much work on the place since it was for sale, but my whole being was aching to dig in the dirt. And now we are here, and we haven’t done a ton to the outside yet. (Well, i haven’t. I just did a small garden this spring for tomatoes; Todd did a HUGE job clearing out the ivy in the back third of the yard. No small undertaking.)
It is really fun to go through a whole year’s cycle and have surprises pop up. We came in April. Since then, we’ve had a surprise Weigela (sp?), some shrub with a form similar to the weigela or a Forsythia, but with little white flowers on it that bees LOVE. A number of old daylilies that obviously need to be divided, but that i was just ultra-excited were there. Some kind of spring-blooming fruit tree. A cherry, maybe? Awesomely huge tulip poplars that remind me of the old Saddle Creek house. Tons of Azaleas and Hostas. Probably 6-8 Dogwoods. (Dogwood Girl’s natural habitat!) We also have two birdbaths that just came with the house. And a windchime. Anyway, i was v. excited to come across the Camellia and the Pyracantha (I think that’s what it is) and I am really looking forward to seeing what the winter garden presents me with – I foresee a lot of Holly and Nandina. There is a lot to be said for buying an older home and it’s established garden.
Oh, and because THEY deserve equal facetime, here are my kitty cats, watching birds and chipmunks out the window today.
And a few pictures of something else i’ve been growing, my ultra-cute* kids. I really couldn’t pick just one of these shots.
*They beat the crap out of each other in a wrestling match seconds after I snapped these shots.
So, Opel is on the blogwagon now, too. He is one of my favorite people – self-deprecating, fun-loving, quirky, a dog lover, and . . . well, Opel is one of the dirtiest people i have ever met.
And now he has The Athens Blawg. Read it.
Paraphrased book summaries, based on banned titles. Of Mice and Men, Harry Potter, and James Joyce’s Ulysses are particularly funny to me.
Thanks to Baby Got Books (great blog!) for the link.
So, just when I think that my very own packrattage cannot get any worse, and that Todd will probably throw me out on my derriere, God sends me this little gem. . . .
When we were selling our house in East Atanta, we put a ton of stuff in storage, just to clean it up and “stage” it so as to sell faster. (Yeah, right!) Anyway, Todd cleaned out the storage yesterday and brought it all home. We went through it, deciding what to keep and what to give away. That’s when we found Todd’s collection. Now, we have been carting Todd’s collection around with us since we moved from the first house in EAV to the second house in EAV, and now on to the latest abode. He started this collection years ago, before we met. It is very dear to his heart, but he never shared it with me until i found it when we were cleaning out the master bedroom on Newton to paint it. Remember, Todd is colorblind and then imagine what a colorblind bachelor might do to his own bedroom, and how a girlfriend or wife might have to correct that upon entering a living arrangement with him. I digress. . .
I found it on an upper shelf of the closet, like a buried treasure, much sought after, a Holy Grail of glass(es). I give to you the Burger King Smurf glasses collection.
Yes, he has kept these since childhood. Because they are so valuable. Here is a picture of the proud collector with a fine item from the treasure trove.
Lazy Smurf. We also have Gargamel, Smurfette, and a host of others. Unfortunately, we do not own all 13.
So, I cleared out my summer garden yesterday, which involved pulling out the old plants, and reaping the last of the tomatoes, all of them still green. Tiller took this picture of Quint, who just doesn’t get enough facetime on Dogwood Girl, considering he is always right there with us, no matter what we are doing around the house.
While i was working, Tiller and i found an awesomely huge spider web and spider.
The spider was not too happy when his web was messed up in the pulling of the old plants, but he was relocated into a nice boxwood and will be up and spinning in no time, I am sure.
And then there is the frying. If there is one thing I know, it is that there is a God. I know this because how else can we explain the majesty and awesomeness that is fried green tomatoes? They are a gift from God. This probably looks like fried okra to those of you in the know. . . however, they are tomatoes. That’s right, i took the last of my patio tomatoes and fried them. I am sure my mom will read this and shake her head in disgust, because that’s just not how it’s done. But they were damn good. And I had realized that this was the first summer since i started eating solid food that i had not had any fried green tomatoes! A travesty!
Even Rollie and Tiller ate a few. Which is good, because I’m pretty sure you lose your Dunstan card if you don’t like fried everything.
I don’t know why i kept all this stuff. (Todd probably wonders why, too.) I am glad I did now.
This was maybe 91 or 92. Smashing Pumpkins, Gish tour. Five bucks!
Ah, the glory days. I think i saw this with Brantley and da Crease.
Just thought i’d share, so my packrattedness has some purpose in the world. This cool chick who lives out west somewhere wanted me to add some pics of mine a way back to a group she adminsters on Flickr called Generation X. We are contacts and I love her kooky photographs of her dogs. Like this one. Seriously. That picture just makes me laugh whenever I look at it. Without fail.
Anyway, just made me think i should blog about this.
