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I am blessed/cursed with a heavy case of skepticism. I rarely share anything on Facebook, Snopes is a way of life for me.  I always want primary sources listed.  I'd like to think it was because I was classically educated in logic and rhetoric- but, I wasn't and I'm not.  I realized today it is because I was the youngest sibling.  Youngest siblings are lied to constantly.

Oldest siblings, admit it- you know what I mean.

Thanks to my lovely older sisters I was afraid, for years, to pull my hair back in a proper pony tail because of bats.  Yes, you know...  Bats will swoop down and bite any girl-exposed ears.

I had not properly realized the origin to my skepticism until today on the way to the hospital for routine lab work for two of my boys.  Our hospital has funky blue tube shaped architectural elements whose meaning and purpose is evidently the stuff of legends.

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Some mornings before my eyes open and before my feet hit the ground my brain begins flipping through a mental calender of the tasks ahead while in the background Psalm 100 sings.

Some mornings before my eyes open my brain begins to flip through a mental and weighty tome entitled, "All the Times I Have Fallen Short."  It's sequel, "Personal Parenting Failures," is even weightier.  They both have exceptional indexes for easier mental referencing.

This morning, after being unable to decide which genre of mental book to flip through, I started thinking about the Abominable Snowman and his song, "Put one foot in front of the other."  Which is remarkable similar to Lao-tzu's much quoted "A journey of thousand miles starts with one step."  Imagining which martial art the Abominable Snowman would practice is enough to get anyone out of bed.

The night before I had realized I've been doing my karate back-stance incorrectly so I tried practicing it correctly, in the dark and with my eyes closed, on the way to the bathroom.  "Ah," I thought, "This is a great way to practice it, I can really sense now why it should be done this way."  And feeling quite ninja-like I tripped over a tub of legos put inexplicably in the middle of my bedroom floor.

All of which got me back to Psalm 100.  Somedays the "I will" means I will because my feet are already dancing towards the new day and the Lord of Heaven and Earth.  Somedays the "I will" means  I will, because I will keep on trying- in sort of  The Little Train That Could fashion.

Today I will :

"Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.  For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations."
-Psalm 100:4

and I will watch out for Legos.



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Yesterday morning I pulled on my running clothes in expectation of a sunshiny run.  Instead I took my 12 year old son to Starbucks where we did math and he scored a free large frappucino made "incorrectly" for some other picky patron.  The free frap was after the hot cocoa I bought him... his math was done in a glow of sugared caffeine.  Best    math   class   ever.  Think of the espresso scene from The Iron Giant.

I still hoped to run so I didn't change.  The sunshine glowed, my arthritis glowed brighter.  I've been eating all the wrong foods and the more I do the more I crave them until the party's over when my arthritis flares.  It's anecdotal at best but since I lack the clones to do a triple blind study on what flares my arthritis I generally go with what I know...  and lots of sugar and flour makes my body ache.

At an impasse with my body I didn't  change out of my running clothes... or go running.  

I ended up going to bed still wearing my running top.  You know, the type of running top that's so constrictive it makes every woman look like a 10 year old boy.  I think it did some kind of brain damage.   I woke up in the night singing, "The Story of My Life" so loudly in my brain that the neighbor's dog was barking in protest.  This happened all night long.  I couldn't shake the song.

I'm singing a boy band song?!?  A parody of a boy band?!?

Lucky thing I'm going on a date tonight to hear Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. I'm so excited I can barely contain myself.  I won't even wear the running shirt.  In fact I might wear grown up clothes and make-up.  I might * gasp* do my hair.  

Of course, then my husband might feel guilty for going on a date with a woman he doesn't recognize but that's o.k. because I'll be so cranky from going cold turkey off of sugar that he probably won't like me very much.

This is the first version I ever heard of The Story of My Life- thanks to one of my teens.  I think it's the best.  Except at 2 a.m.





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In case anyone was wondering- filling out financial forms for your college student is just like running through a field of daisies bathed in beautiful sunshine while wearing a twirly-swirly dress and eating chocolate.

Oh, wait- no, I was thinking of something else.  Financial forms are whatever is the exact opposite of the above.  Add in the whole privacy issue- where a parent has to have magical incantations performed on a night with a full moon before being allowed access to the records for which they are financial responsible- and your head starts to gently throb.

Last week I received an official  letter informing my daughter that she would not be eligible in 2014-2015 for their scholarship.  My daughter has a boatload of scholarships, I scrambled trying to figure out the issue- trying to figure out which scholarship this was and how much a money loss it meant.  The acronym listed on the letter rang no bells and made no sense.

I re-updated our FAFSA.  I re-checked and re-checked FAFSA.

Finally, today I reached someone who transferred me several places and reached a human woman willing to discuss my daughter's accounts and scholarships but only after I did a rain dance in my living room and answered her questions with the name Rumplestiltskins.

The answer?  The notice was for a scholarship my daughter had, in fact, never been awarded in the first place.

A sort of scholarship Naaa Na Na Naaa Naaa?



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I make our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with my wedding silver.  I put aside my cheap flatware years ago because I wanted beauty in our daily life.  I wanted my family to be my special guests at meals and I didn't want to have closets and cupboards full of baggage that never saw the light of day.

It was a mindset- intentional motherhood complete with a tiny bit of arrogance, as all good intentions tend to be.

This weekend I was cleaning out my bedroom closet and found this little book.



This book was the bread and butter of my earliest cozy childhood bedtime memories.  After my mother died my siblings and I discovered that the book had disappeared.  A sister moved heaven and earth looking for the publisher based on only her memory of the story and 10 years ago surprised us all with our own copies.  I immediately vowed to myself that I would share the book and thus share the grandmother with my children that they had never had the chance to meet.

And I did- for a while, until this happened.



and so I put the book away... just until my kiddos were a little older. Except now my 7 year old has almost finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix to himself.  My youngest, my 6 year old, still loves picture books but he's too old to develop that visceral feeling of love and comfort linked to a single bedtime story.

I've missed my window...

and that's what grandchildren are for.




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