Mother of Dragons

I am the mother of boys.

I have very little experience with girls—other than my own distant memory as a girl of being told to pull up my knee socks and to comb my hair. SPOILER ALERT—as an adult I solved those two problems by no longer wearing knee socks and... come to think of it, I still need to comb my hair, but that is not my point.

My point is that put in my time in the Boy Trenches of parenthood—where prom dresses and princess hair weren’t really a thing we did. We did lots of mud and motorbikes and rolling around on the ground. Eventually, my boys have all grown up to be men, realized that girls don’t actually have cooties and have fallen in love.

 I really enjoying having these girls—women-- in my life. And while we don’t go prom dress shopping together—apparently there aren’t a lot of Adult Proms—they have each graciously invited me to go bridal gown shopping.

Bridal gown shopping is THE BEST SHOPPING. And I’m not just saying that because of the mimosas. Although mimosas are delightful, I’m not gonna lie. Bridal gown shopping always entails brunch and the entire reason for brunch is not to have a mix of breakfast and lunch foods as I once believed, but to have a boozy breakfast/lunch with out the “is it five o’clock somewhere” guilts. Add a wee splash of juice to champagne, call the meal “brunch,” and celebrate at will. Being a girl is awesome! Who knew?

After brunch we head to the first of two bridal shops—always conveniently located within walking distance. So consistently convenient that I wonder-- which came first, the bridal shop or the brunch spot? “Gee, I’d really like to open a Bridal Boutique on this block but there are no brunch places nearby. Sad.”

Without fail, we never find The Dress at the first shop. It is entirely possible that we are only at this first shop to kill time while we sober up before driving to the next shop where we will find The Dress of her Dreams.

Circle of Life: Aiden

On the third day of February, in the year of our Lord 2020, The Sume Family welcomed its newest member. Aiden Allen Sume, seven pounds, 15 plus ounces—just shy of being the full eight-pounder—and a whopping 19.5 inches “tall.”

Aiden seems to be a perfect unicorn of a baby—born with an impressive head of hair, he smiles all the time and sleeps a LOT—something I am unfamiliar with. In my experience,

Do you think they'll keep him?

Sume babies think sleep is for sissies.

He has the hands of an NBA baller, and the most perfect little baby toes. His parents, and his fur-siblings, are properly smitten. And his arrival now gives us SUME COUSINS—hooray!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a baby to hold—one so fresh he still has that new baby smell of heaven on him.

For Devin

I wrote this a couple of years ago for my middle son...
On Monday, February 3--he became a parent.
I love you, Devin.

To Do List, DONE

I’ve crossed my fingers and put all my energies into hoping for an early spring. Should that wish be granted, I’ll have a lot of tasks that need to be completed, ASAP. The best way I’ve found to accomplish that is to make a To Do List.

Some early spring chores I recommend doing now are: 1) Apply chicken poo to your flower beds. The fertilizer will make all your plants happy and vigorous-- applying it now means your neighbors will be that much less likely to share in the aromatherapy. 2) Give your motorized gardening equipment a tune up so all will be ready and operational when mowing season rolls around.

I can check Task Number Two off of my to do list already, as I accidently accomplished it last fall. My mower made the trip in to see the Mower Doctor because the spinnyroundythingy that drives the blades wouldn’t spinnyroundy unless you first shoved a stick in there and made it engage. Full confession: I did that a couple of times so I could finish mowing, but eventually that was too redneck, even for me, and I gave in and sent my mower Out Town to be repaired. And while they had it, might as well give the old girl the full spa treatment. Lawnmower tune-up: CHECK.

I’ve learned one key trick to having a To Do List full of TahDONE items—backfill your list. I will often have a to do list that at the beginning of the day looks like this: 1) Pay Bills on-line. 2) Fold laundry. 3) Clean cat box.

With backfilling my list at the end of the day, it looks more like this: 1) Pay bills on line. CHECK. 1A-infinity) Read All of Twitter. CHECK. 2) Fold Laundry. 2A) Reorganize sock drawer. CHECK. 2B) Discard old socks. CHECK. 2C) Retrieve old socks from garbage. CHECK.  2D) Make cat toy utilizing old sock, catnip, and dryer lint. CHECK. 2E) Play rousing game of WHEN SOCKS ATTACK with cats. CHECK. 2F) take catnap. CHECK. 3) Clean cat box. Not checked. Who has time for that? Look at all the OTHER STUFF I accomplished today! 4) Clean dryer lint trap. CHECK!

Backfilled properly, even the laziest of To Do lists and give you quite the sense of accomplishment.

To Do List

The rains came, the flood didn’t, the snow went away. I can scratch off “shovel driveway” from my To Do list. Hooray! And I didn’t even have to shovel to achieve it!

 Every year, when the snow melts, I start hoping for an early spring. Look! I see snow drops! Daffodils can’t be far behind...oh.

 Right. I still have half a bag of unplanted daffodils sitting on my steps, waiting for the next ground thaw so I can poke them in the dirt. “Plant Daffodils” was on my to do list at one time---way back in October. Then I got the flu, topped it off with pneumonia, which cumulated in a trip to the ER, a whopping, big bill and an additional two weeks of recovery time.

By then it was Thanksgiving, and my to do list was full of mashed potato making/eating/reheating/eating more. All thoughts of daffodils were long gone.

At some point between Christmas and New Year’s, daffodils made it back on to my list. The sun warmed the ground enough in a few spots that I was able to stick some daffs in the diggable earth. It sure will be interesting to see where those spots were.

Wherever they were, there wasn’t enough of them to plant ALL of the daffodils, so back on the front steps the bag went—a location guaranteed to guilt me into finishing the job. Or not—because there they still sit, growing either mushier by the day or trying to grow right there in the bag.

Last week I was confessing this to my co-workers, and one—who shall remain nameless, but whose name rhymes with “AzzelHanna”—suggested I could just wait until the survivors had little green tops and then carefully tuck them, already growing, into pots. That’s genius, really. I’ll put it on my list.

Next week: Part 2 of To Do List. Probably. If I remember to put “Finish To Do List” on my to do list.

S'now Fair

It has been brought to my attention that not everything about snow is awful.

 Fine. Here then is the definitive list of positive snow attributes: 

1) Snow Pack equals more runoff/less fire danger. 

2) Snow in the mountains means happy skiers, healthy local economy. 

3) Snow fall is beautiful.

That’s it. That’s the list. End column.

 P.S. All those things would still be accomplished without the snow falling IN MY DRIVEWAY. Just sayin’.

And then my grandson came to play in the snow at Nana Sugar’s house...

We went sledding on the piles of snow my shoveling had created. We rolled snowballs and shook snow from tree limbs. We ate snow, and left funny footprints, and stomped in the slush—huzzah! We even watched his mama demonstrate how to make the perfect snow angel. 

I had forgotten that snow can be—dare I say—FUN?

Snow fun

John-Boy Shane made the snow fun again. Perhaps shoveling can be fun as well? In the interest of science, I decided to conduct an experiment to prove the theory.

Someone call CPS!

   

Turns out my grandson takes after me. Shoveling snow sucks.  He was not at all amused by my Tom Sawyer attempts to convince him otherwise. He questioned my judgement. He doubted my honesty. He even lamented the fact that it is difficult to contact people concerned with child labor laws on the weekend. He only shoveled two scoops and then he was done.

Serious side-eye

Maybe next time, I’ll bribe him with hot chocolate and a nap...

Snow Thoughts

S-Word, S-Word, S-Word!

I have some thoughts on snow, would you like to hear them?

1)      “Snow” is the original “S” word. 2) Snow in the mountains is good. 3) Snow in my driveway is not good. 4) Snow has my reaction built right into it—NO. Although, to be honest, my reaction would be spelled more like this: sNONONONONONONOw. Except that the end of the word would somehow look less like “now” and more like “never after December 25.”

2)       

I survived The Snowpocalypse Power Outage of 2019—but only because of my inner MacGyver, my hoarder’s supply of candles, and my next-door neighbor’s tractor. I vowed I would I would buy both a generator and a snowblower. I even made myself and action-item list and posted it on my fridge—that’s how serious I was about my War on Snow.

Then spring came, and I started fiddling with my lawnmower, and building a fence, and playing with my flowers and before you know it—it was August.

In August, Costco sent me a notification that snowblowers were now on sale. “Sale” is probably my favorite four-letter “S” word. I read the specs, I read the reviews, I was suitably impressed. Look, electric start! Heated handle bar! Repositionable thingamajig! A cup holder! All for the low, low price of $$YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME$$$.

Still—a snowblower would make my snow shovel obsolete...and perhaps a snowblower in my garage would function along the same principle of bringing an umbrella to a Little League game? You know the principle, the bigger the umbrella you bring, the less likely it is you will have to use it.  I added the snowblower to my shopping cart and thought about it.

I thought about it so thoroughly that by the time I decided to pull the trigger and buy the dang thing the sale was over and the item was no longer available.

Fast forward to 2020—four days of snowfall, one broken snow shovel later...bet you’ll never guess which four-letter “S” word I’m thinking of now.