Wise Beyond My Years

Another year, another year older... or as those of us in the ripe old thirties like to say, another year wiser. Since I couldn't invite you all over for cake and ice cream, I thought I'd share some of my hard-earned wisdom with you. You might want to take notes.

* Sock sorting is not a job for the Attention Deficit. I have 27 socks in all lengths, colors and thicknesses who have no mate. It may have something to do with the washing machine and dryer eating them and it may have something to do with the fact that I am bored and distracted by the time I get around to the socks.

* 11 p.m. is a late night. A really late night. If you're going to plan a nice big party (with handtowels please) Aunty Evil, I need to be home by 10 p.m. at the latest. Otherwise I'll be snoring face first in whatever delicious dessert you've prepared for me, the guest of honor.

* Don't try to convince the "I'm not flying unless it's a medical emergency" husband that a trip to Alaska next summer is a good idea. Aside from the whole flying thing... trying to contain Abby on a non-Disney cruise to a whole lot of history rich/kid activity poor destinations seems like a bad idea. So I think trying to convince him that flying to Australia in the pressurized cylinder of death over shark infested waters is not up for a vote right now either.

* Fingernail polish with glitter will NOT come off! It cannot be scraped off, peeled off or chemically disengaged from the fingernail under any circumstance known to man. Or to woman. Or to this woman anyway.

* Those little diet meals in the frozen food section are filling.... for about 30 minutes. Eating 5 cookies for dessert negates the benefit of the healthy meal. Unless one subscribes to the "I could have had fettucine alfredo AND the cookies" theory. Luckily, I practically invented that theory. I call it "The Diet Coke Principle." Diet coke cancels out candy bar because I could have the candy bar and a regular coke. So technically, I saved myself 200 calories.

* No matter how old one gets, if one is "the baby" in the family, one will always be referred to as "the baby".

* You can make your best friend's husband turn really, really white and speechless by announcing that you've seen that video of him doing the Wiifit hula hoop... and it's all over youtube! Even if you haven't and it isn't.

* A cake, some friends and a couple of presents is all it takes to make a 9 year old boy exclaim "This was the best birthday ever!"

* No matter how stringently one enforces the "no eating outside of the kitchen" rule, one will find cheese cracker crumbs and ice cream spoons in bedrooms, under the couch cushions and even in the bathroom (?!).

So go on. Take this sage advice and live a better, more fulfilled life starting right now! Oh, I have another one about playing chicken with a squirrel, but I'll save that for later. The long and short of it is, if he'd had a bigger brain, he would have darted right and not left. You know, away from the car and it's giant wheels of death.

Daddy

I love my daddy. I don't talk about him often enough in this space. He's a stubborn, hard-headed, soft-hearted, penguin-walking, mathematical/engineering whiz with a love of ramblin wrecks, sweet and sour pickles, WWII history, and trains. He gave us his time, money, support and love... and still does.

He has sold cokes and cooked hot dogs at the football concession stand to support his band geek children. Travelled to football games near and far to cheer on the son whose first punt went farther up than out, but who developed into a great tackler and could get the fool out of the football by the end of the season. He has used his trusty pocket knife to relieve feet of splinters and entertained us by proving that someone with a lot of muscle mass cannot float and will instead sink to the bottom of the pool. He not-so-patiently taught us how to drive both a manual and an automatic car, even though it is probably responsible for the lack of hair on his head and the gray in the few that remain. You can still find him taxi-ing grandchildren around and his spaghetti is spicy deliciousness.

"Sit" and "still" are not in his vocabulary.The last movie he sat through was The Fugitive in 1993 and he loves my mother so much he took her to see Gone With the Wind (all four hours of it) when they were dating. If you need him, he's probably in the shop making something or repairing something or hanging out with the dog.

He taught us THE best fight song EVER:



Doctor is a concept that ranks right up there with educated idiots and liverwurst for my Dad. So it wasn't a terrible shock to any of us that the way we found out he'd been having chest pains for a while, was when he experienced dizziness and left-arm pain at the hardware store and ended up in the ICU hooked up to a cardiac monitor for a couple of days. He has an appointment with the cardiologist next Friday and needs to watch his sugar intake and was prescribed something for cholesterol. We're grateful we get to love him a lot longer and that we can still ask him for advice and opinions for many years to come.

Brrrrr!

The cold has descended to even the deepest parts of the south. The Everglades are under a freeze warning! We're talking mid-40's for the high and low 20's for the overnight low. For thin-blooded southerners, that is practically arctic cold. Thank goodness for hot chocolate and fuzzy blankets.