Braces and Brothers

Litkia got her braces today. She was very brave and didn't do a lot of complaining until a few hours after the visit to the orthodontist. Luckily, we were told that this would be the case and the Advil was handy. She pointed to the place in her mouth that was most uncomfortable and told me that she thought the bracket on that particular tooth was too low. I told her that I felt like the orthodontist knew what he was doing when he put it there. She apparently thought about it for a while and came back to tell me that maybe I was right and possibly the bracket was low for a reason. She explained her revelation like this:

You know when you're pushing somebody in a swing and you push them by the head, they just fall out on the ground? But when you push them lower their whole body moves with the swing. They are probably just trying to get my whole tooth to move instead of making it just fall over.

This was good logic, but I seriously had a hard time getting past the part about her pushing somebody out of a swing by their head. How does she know the physics of toppling someone out of a swing by their head unless she's done it herself? Well, the obvious answer to that question is that someone has done it to her. I'll give you three guesses who might have done such a thing. Better yet, I'll just tell you it was Pateriko. He denies it vehemently but I don't believe him for one second.

It takes quite a bit of badgering to get Litkia to react. If she ever really yells, I know that whatever has been happening has gone way past the point of good natured pestering. I keep thinking it's a good thing she doesn't hold a grudge easily or the piles and piles of wrongs that have been done to her by her brother would have long ago come around to haunt him. But, having said that, I won't be surprised when it does. (Nor will I let it bother me in the least.)

Things that I haven't forgotten

Today I present a list of things that grownups said or directly told me when I was younger, that have somehow stuck in my brain. I'm not saying they were important things, or even helpful things. I'm just saying I remember them.

1. "When your grandfather and I owned a grocery store early in our marriage, I used to steal half dollars from the register and put them in my shoes so I'd have spending money. Your grandfather was stingy with his money." Paternal grandmother

2. "If you swallow watermelon seeds you'll grow watermelons out your ears." Maternal grandfather

3. "One day you'll learn." "One day you'll understand." and other variations on this same theme. Daddy (and he was right).

4. "Girls do NOT call boys". Guess who said that.

5. "I couldn't see the words", was my paternal grandfather's response, when my Daddy asked him why he wasn't singing the hymns in church. It made me very sad because I was the one holding the hymnal too low.

6. My maternal grandmother reacted to everything with the words, "Dear Gussy". My older sister says that all the time now. Makes me smile.

7. "If you haven't seen a little slip by now, it's high time you did." High school choral director, speaking to a male member of the choir who was pointing out that someone's slip was showing to another male member of the choir.

8. "This is the tiniest record player in the word (holds up thumb and index finger together and rubs them together) playing 'my heart bleeds peanut butter for you'." Ronnie McCall

9. "My Aunt Minnie, she died last night. She died a right way and she died a wrong way." This is a very long story and I never DID figure out this stupid game that Jay Hollowell was trying to play with me.

10. "We're healing". Overheard because the adult that said it knew I was within earshot and wanted me to hear it and to take it back to my parents (more than likely)...which I did.

11. "I don't mind giving shots, but I won't let anybody give me one. That scares me to death." This was said by the nurse who just given me a vaccination. Ruth Ruffin.

12. "Feel these!" Aunt Betty after having reconstructive breast surgery due to a mastectomy for breast cancer. I was horrified.

13. "I'll tell you when it's time to worry." Mother told me this all the time. Apparently I was a worry-wart. She only told me that it was time to worry ONCE. She was right about that.

14. "Will you bring me a lock of your hair the next time you get it cut?" I had no idea at the time how creepy that was coming from the Dad of a friend of mine. I was a child. I did it. I found out recently that he still has it. Ick.

15. "THREE LICKS" Said to me by my junior high principal as he stuck out three fingers toward me. He saw me toss a pencil to the person sitting in the desk behind me and used me as an example for the class. I didn't get the licks, but he sufficiently scared me into never throwing ANYTHING again.

I know this was pretty random. But hey, it's me. That's what I do.

That is all.

All Hallows Eve

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in a land called Mississippi State University, there was a group of kids who decided to have a haunted house at their dorm. The Beej was part of this group and she thoroughly enjoyed being involved in such an undertaking, and took her part very seriously.

Okay, no more third person stuff. Too hard.

So, I was ready for this haunted house, because I had always been the type of kid who would put on a sheet and make my face look horrible and pale (-er than usual) and scare the kids in the neighborhood who came by to trick-or-treat. When I was in grade school, I had a friend with an older brother who scared the devil out of me EVERY STINKING Halloween, by sitting on the porch, very still, dressed as scarecrow. As soon as I got close to the door, he would jump up and run toward me in an effort to KILL ME DEAD and I would run away screaming and begging for my life. I never forgot that and decided that every kid in my neighborhood should suffer the same fate. I was just passing along the joy, you know?

Anyway, this particular Halloween at MSU was no different than usual, except that I was getting to try to scare people on a larger scale. (This part of the story doesn't have a good ending by the way.) I remember vividly, getting ready for the festivities that night, looking in the mirror and painting my face to look like a skeleton, when the phone rang. It was my Daddy. I was still looking at my ghoulish face in the mirror when he told me that my Grandfather, his Dad, had just died. I will never forget the feeling of looking at myself in that moment, playing around with the idea of death, and suddenly realizing how very NOT FUN it was. I went on with my part in the haunted house, but that was a very hard night for me.

I never wanted to deprive my kids of Halloween, but I would never let them dress as anything scary. Luckily, they never really wanted to. I'm glad I didn't eschew it completely like I thought I would that night, but I can promise you I never looked at it the same way again. This year, Litkia will be some strange version of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland and Pateriko will help his grandmother man a booth at the church's fall festival with the sleeves that make him look like his arm is tattooed. I'm good with that.

As always...click the pics for a bigger version!

Phood Phor thot

Since yesterday was a holiday, my kids didn't have to go to school. That's always a happy time, especially when it's pouring rain outside (not that my children enjoy the great outdoors all that much, but you know...). There is usually quite a lot of whining about being bored and bugging me as I sit at my desk, working away and trying to tune them out. It can be exhausting.

I'm sure it can't be a reflection of me as a mother that I forget to feed them when they're here. I think it's just more of a habit. I'm in the habit of not feeding them lunch during the week because they aren't here. So when they're here, I sort of forget that I should see about getting them some lunch. Pateriko is pretty good about fending for himself. That doesn't help the situation. I just assume somewhere internally that all is well. However, yesterday, around 1:00 PM, a paper airplane landed on my desk. I turned around, but nobody was there. Upon further inspection, I found that the plane carried a message written in Litkia's handwriting and in her normal incorrect spelling. The plane said:


I would like to pause here to say that hungery should be a word. If adding a 'y' to the end of a word means 'having', then why can't we say hungery? That would mean having hunger. It's legit. She is as brilliant as her mother. And while I'm on that train of thought, I think that there are many hundreds, nay thousands of words that should be considered legit that we mock and say are incorrect. I also think that if we can say PH makes the same sound as F or that the letter E or the letter A can make 74 different sounds based on what's around them, we can do whatever we want. I've often thought that English is just a mixed up mess anyhow.

So anyway, the kids got fed and all was well. Again, I don't think it's a reflection on my status as a good mother that I had Pateriko make a box of mac and cheese to feed himself and his sister. I think it's just good parenting that I'm teaching him to cook....only I wasn't in there. Still counts.

I think.

For shame, for shame...

If you pass by my house on foot or on your bike, or if you drive into my driveway in your car and check my meter, or if you come to my front door to visit, there's a very real possibility that my dog, who will be in the back yard, may start talking to you. And of course by talking to you, I mean barking incessantly and in the very most obnoxious way until you want to throw something at him. I'm not sure what he'll be telling you. It could be any number of things. For example "Hello person! I don't think I've made your acquaintance. How are you today? Do you have a tennis ball handy?" or maybe "Please go away kind sir, you do not belong here and I may have to do you bodily harm if you get any closer." I have no idea what he's saying because he is a dog and I do not speak dog. When the mailman comes, I'm pretty sure he's saying "Mail's here! Mail's here! Mail's here!" and when he sees a squirrel, I think he's saying "It's a squirrel! Squirrel! Hey! A squirrel!" Those are the only two that I think I understand for sure. At any rate, my promise to you, friend, is that he will bark.


What my dog will NOT do, however, is jump on you. If you are walking on the street, my dog will not come racing out to you and try to eat you because he will be locked up behind a gate. I have been frightened by too many dogs to ever allow my dog to scare you or your children when you're out for a walk or a bike ride. If I invite you into my home, my dog will not jump up on you and try to lick your face off due to extreme happiness at your presence because he will either be shut up in the laundry room or again, in the back yard, safely behind a closed door. If you venture into the back yard, I can't help you there. I will however, warn you of the dangers of dirty dog paws on your good pants if you choose to go out there, but I will STILL do my dead level best to keep him away from you.


I know you think your dog is sweet and would never hurt a fly and that he's only a puppy (even though he seems a lot like a horse to me) and that he would never bite (even if his bark sounds pretty harsh). The problem is that I am completely unaware of any of those things about your dog, and when he comes flying off your front porch at me growling, showing his teeth and acting like I'm lunch, it scares me. Heck, when he comes flying off the porch towards me and doesn't bark or show his teeth it scares me. Shame on you for letting him scare me. Shame on you for letting him run the neighborhood chasing me on my bike while I scream and worry about him nipping my ankles. Do you know how stupid I look when that happens? It's humiliating. Shame on you for making it difficult for me to have fun with my family in my own neighborhood. Shame on you for not honoring the leash laws of this city.


What you do in your own home is your own concern. If you let your dogs jump on the company, that's completely up to you. It's your house. I can't make you do any different, and if I don't like it I suppose I can steer clear. But please, let me be outside minding my own business without your dog interfering. Kthx.

A Little Princess

You may already know that I got a spiffy new iPhone not too long ago. I have since downloaded and deleted many interesting applications for said phone. One of the happier ones that managed to withstand my furious deletion was BeamItDown iFLOW Reader. The version I got was free and the books that came with it were all children's classics. Of course, there are plenty of books to buy, which I'm sure I'll never do, but in the meantime, I'm reading all these children's books while I wait to see the doctor or wait in the car for the kids to come out of wherever they are. I've finished "The Secret Garden" and "Aesop's Fables". Last night I finished "A Little Princess". I have to admit that it smacked a lot of "The Secret Garden", but they were both written by the same person, so maybe that's why.



At any rate, I just need to talk about it. That sweet little precious love of a girl behaved so beautifully through her adversity that it made my heart twist up in a knot. She was so strong and kind and amazingly in control of her little emotions. I am fully aware that her behavior was the key to everything working out in the end. However, I just have to admit that I kept hoping that she'd just haul off and kick that horrible old Miss Minchin right in the shin. I really wanted her to eat ALL SIX of the hot buns instead of giving FIVE of them to one hungry, little, dirty member of the populace, leaving only ONE for her own starving self. I wished for her to smack that hateful Lavinia right in the mouth for once, but she never did. I know the author was trying to make a point. I get it. But sheesh. Thank heavens this book was written for children and these lessons were lessons that children should apply to their lives. I figure if she wanted somebody as old as me to learn something she would have named it "A BIG Princess".

Comforting Cornbread

Let’s talk about cornbread.

I love cornbread. Alottabit. Cornbread is one of those things that I can cook and actually cook well. When I make cornbread, the smoke alarm never goes off like when I make cookies, because somehow, cornbread is more important than cookies. I very rarely ever get it wrong anymore. It’s crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, but firm enough to stay together with no obnoxious crumbling. Cornbread is great for crumbling in your soup, but YOU should be the crumbler. It shouldn't do that on its own accord.

My mother taught me how to make cornbread, just as her mother taught her. She tells the story of her brother stealing the good crispy outside of the whole skillet of bread by stretching out his long fingers over the top and giving it a good twist. Up it came in a big circle and then he’d run away with it. He ran because he knew my grandmother would be directly behind him, mad as a hornet about his bad behavior. It was always too late for her to do anything about it. He was too fast and the damage was already done. That is a BIG, BIG no-no around here. Everybody should get their fair share of the top layer. Of course it’s not even the top layer, it’s the bottom layer. When you take the skillet out of the oven, you turn it over to get it out so, the top becomes the bottom. If you don’t know cornbread, there’s a good chance you don’t even know what I’m talking about and that just makes me very sad for you. This picture is a close representation of what cornbread SHOULD look like, only it's obviously a little crumblier than I like and has some peppers or something in it. People really shouldn't mess up good cornbread with extraneous stuff.

If you live anywhere North of Tennessee or have only eaten cornbread in a restaurant, I’m willing to bet you are one of the deprived. Cornbread should NOT be bright yellow. Jiffy has a corn muffin mix, which should never, no never, be confused with cornbread. Jiffy is for the weak. Jiffy leaves a bad taste in my mouth. No, I’m serious. It really does. It’s a pasty bitter aftertaste. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.

Cornbread is best when served with soup or pot liquor. Cornbread was meant for soaking up the juice left in the peas or the turnip greens. My grandmother believed that cornbread crumbled in buttermilk and eaten with a spoon was the cat’s pj’s. My eldest sister does the same thing, only with milk. Those wouldn’t be my favorite uses for cornbread, but I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Field peas and fresh tomatoes with hot cornbread…sigh. Comfort food is what that is. Just comforting.

Lies that Daddies Tell

I firmly believe that you can't be a truly GREAT dad unless you can master the art of lying to your children. A lie, by definition is an incorrect or false statement and doesn't necessarily have to have a negative impact. I'm not talking about lying maliciously with intent to harm or anything, I'm talking about telling your 14-year-old daughter that Roses is closed on Saturday at 2:00 in the afternoon, or telling her that it's against the law to ride in the car at night with the overhead lights on like my own father did. Another prime example would be telling your children that you train dragonflies to land in your spare time or that you picked their mother up from a dumpster somewhere but she just doesn't remember it.

I think one of the biggest jobs of a Dad is to make the eyes of their daughters roll up in their sockets and to make their sons shake their heads in disbelief. It's a gift and a right and an obligation. A dad should be able to tell these lies with a perfectly straight face and be able to stick to their story, even when closely questioned. When a dad is asked a question about something and he is unsure of the answer, he should quickly be able to make something up off the cuff and spout off an answer as if it were God's truth. He should be so believable in his lies that he has them truly convinced that the scar on his leg was from a shark bite he got while snorkeling in Belize.

Here's a good, true life example of a daddy lie:

Dirty Larry: Kids, do you know about dinosaurs that are herbivores?

Kids: Yes, they only eat plants.

Dirty Larry: Good! What about a carnivore?

Kids: A dinosaur that eats meat!

Dirty Larry: Great! Now...what is a reservoir?

Kids: Um....*silence*

Dirty Larry: That's a dinosaur that only eats at restaurants.

Litkia: Oh!

Pateriko: *silence...shakes head*

You know, if I were completely honest, I'm still not sure if it's actually against the law to drive barefoot or not.

I think maybe psycho

There's tenderhearted and then there's psycho. I'm trying to determine which of these labels best fits my son.

This is the child who at 4, would burst into tears watching his Disney Sing-A-Long Video that had the song "Somewhere Out There" on it. (see blog song) The song was next to last on the video and I had to be sure that if he watched that video, I made it into the den in plenty of time to remove it from the player before that song came on, otherwise I'd have a blubbering mess on my hands. I can't say how many times I looked up from what I was doing and realized that it was too late because I could hear the sad strains of that song coming from the other room. I would have to go running in there, just moments too late and wipe his crying, pathetic little self off the floor.

This is the same child who at 5, came to me crying because he felt so sorry for Porky Pig. You realize that Porky Pig has a stutter, yes? Well, Pateriko grieved for him and wished him the gift of correct speech. It didn't matter to him that Porky was a big star or that Porky didn't seem to be too upset by his handicap. He just mourned for him.

This child watched 20/20 without my permission when he was in the 2nd grade and came to me so upset to learn that there were people in the world who had a disease that kept them from ever sleeping. Oh how he fretted over that one!

Through the years, there have been so many things that made me label him as tenderhearted and maybe a little melancholy, but he has been so much better these last couple of years. That is, until these past couple of weeks. I saw him, once again, become emotionally unwound over something that didn't deserve that much attention. This time, it was a lizard. A lizard, riding on the windshield of the car, down the highway, hanging on for his dear, lizard life. Pateriko was visibly upset. He couldn't bear to watch this little green reptile flung to his death. So, being the good and patient mother that I am, I stopped the car at the next convenient spot and he got out and flicked the little fellow to safety. He got back in the car, most obviously relieved. It was a solid week later when the same thing happened, but this time it was a praying mantis. A bug mind you. An evil bug at that. But this creature had to be rescued from a certain death on the windshield of the jeep as well. I did ask him what size an animal had to be before he would just allow it to be blown off to it's unknown destiny and his response was that he shouldn't be able to see it's face.

So, armed with all this information, how is it that this same child can play a video game where he is given two paths to follow (good versus evil) and he inevitably picks evil? He chooses to become the killer of his peers and seems to enjoy the carnage he leaves in his wake. WHAT is UP with THAT?

I had no idea.

It doesn’t normally occur to me to wonder what my husband is doing when he’s not in my presence, but I was told something shocking today by my children. Dirty Larry actually revealed one the secrets of his daily life to them that even I wasn’t privy to. He told them that sometimes he didn’t go to work. He said that sometimes, he just spends his day training dragonflies to land on tall skinny things like car antennas and gladiolas. He told the kids that if they are adult dragonflies it can take only a day but the newborns require more like a week to learn how to light correctly. When I confronted him about it today, he acknowledged his participation in this activity but corrected me by telling me that it was dragonflies AND butterflies. Then I asked him if he got paid to do this or if he just did it for God for free. He shook his head “no” to say that there was no money involved and then said, “It makes me happy”.

Seriously. No idea.