They Take STL By Storm

Dear Colin:

 

Not all who meet on-line are an ax murders.

(despite that evil gleam in my eye)  

 

So our story goes.

 

When you come to my town you are taught the two most important things to know as a transplant - how to answer the question, "where did you go to school?" and the definition and how to use the word hoosier.  Then I gift you with Saint Louis's best salad dressing: Zia's  On The Hill and you end an evening of talk and laughs taking a photo in front of the Soulard edition of the STL 250th Anniversary cake with your pal Lin.  

 

Dear Lin:

 

This is what you need to make that salad dressing gift do it's thing

 

1 large head romaine lettuce torn into bite size pieces

1 large head iceberg lettuce torn into bite size pieces

14 oz can artichoke hearts drained and quartered

1 cup thinly sliced red onion

4 oz jar pimentos drained

2/3 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

1 bottle of dressing--add to taste

 

Toss all ingredients in a bowl, add dressing and serve. Serves 6

 

Till we meet again!

 

“When you play, never mind who listens to you.” - Robert Schumann

D is home for the summer and music is abound in our abode.  There is the constant out of an aria in every imaginable language--she'll practice singing while walk through the grocery store.  Voice lessons once a week.  Master classes in the Central West End.  And piano.

Yes piano.  

D is in near constant practice to master the entire sound track of Pride and Prejudice with the utmost perfection.  She plays without a care as to who is listening...just as long as you go about your own business. Who doesn't love the theme song "Dawn?"  Who doesn't love Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet? 

Before M returned to school, I heard M walk over to D as she was playing "Dawn" yesterday and whisper to her, "if Mom is every mad at you just play the piano and that will make everything okay."  Haha!  Well, maybe it will ease my madness.  I am in love with my D's talents.

 

I have two months to fill my soul with her talents...then she'll go away again. 

 

Savoring the moments.  Aaaahhhhh.  

They Bond: Father and Daughter

M had a project in mind...something she saw on her BF's phone background.  She has been buying twenty dollar wooden baseball bats for the last nine months or so.  Every time she had a coupon she bought a bat-- six in all. 

Our M has been home for a week break from school and her job working for the Springfield Cardinals - the minor league team to our beloved STL Cardinals.  She could think of no better way to bond with her daddy than in the garage, with power tools and spray paints.  They got to work--King Ralph lining up exact measurements to splice a bat right down the center...M spray painting with precision strokes for that no paint runs perfection. 

 

 

When it was all said and done M has created a gift for her guy that screams both

 'Merica and baseball. 

 

 

There is nothing that Maddi loves more than her 'Merica! 

 

 

Just in time for Memorial Day!

 

and

 

Just in time for her to return to her second home.

 

I'm starting to miss her already. 

 

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

 

Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like

 

When D was a little girl learning to ride her bike--she became a complete and total crash dummy.  King Ralph would hold onto the back of her bike seat balancing her just so, while I ran along side cheering her on.  When King Ralph let go of D's seat, setting her sailing unassisted down the sidewalk...losing her balance meant she would literally jump off her bike, diving into the grassy easement.  She always got back up, no tears, scraped and bruised, but back on that bike--because she had a mission to master.

 

Last Sunday King Ralph, Princess A, D and I loaded our bicycles on the bike rack for an hour long car ride till we arrived at the Weldon Springs Trailhead.  We rode eleven miles of The Katy Trail, stopping along the way to enjoy the views and entertainment along the trail. 

 

We enjoyed the Missouri River.

D, in her beautiful operatic voice stood at the river's edge and sang the song Oh Shenandoah.

Because...well...it's what she does!

 

We rode on to the eleven mile mark, stopping like all the other trail riders

 

at the

 

I shared a nice shandy with King Ralph, while Princess A had an IPA (her favorite), as we listened to a local artist sing James Taylor hits...we sang along with him.

 

Then hiked our bikes around the corner and up the steep hill to the Mount Pleasant Winery...

 

sipped samples of reds - taking the final sample to the patio deck, where a band was playing Beattles tunes...that many of us sang along too.

 

After several hours of enjoying the beautiful day we started back the eleven miles back to the car.

 

 

Like we always do--a cam timer family picture to mark our adventure.

 

(On this family adventure we are missing our M)

 

It was a great day!  A great family day!!

 

Which brings me to why I told the tale of D's learning to ride a bike.

 

Six miles from the end of our twenty-two mile round trip ride, an old man with a bicycle bell, ringing it like a wild man and riding up on my tail quickly, ran me off the trail.  I tried to get over as fast as I could, only to clip the back of King Ralph's tire.  Down I went!  Legs into the gravel trail.  Face into the gravel trail.  Just like D I got up. Bruised. Scraped. But I got up to wear the marks showing I took one for the team.  I got  right back on that bike and rode the last six miles. 

If you worried about falling off your bike, you'd never get on

- Lance Armstrong

 

Still I say...a GREAT family day!!!

If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

Lance Armstrong

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/bike.html#PqoMslYPseduMoM9.99

If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

Lance Armstrong

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/bike.html#PqoMslYPseduMoM9.99

I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.

Countdown Clocks

I'm whipped!  Completely and totally exhausted!!  I went from my usual Monday and Friday Starbucks skinny vanilla latte, to adding in Wednesday.  When an appreciative teacher showed up with a latte in her on Wednesday for me, and I had one in my hand--I gladly accepted.  Double fisting lattes is totally acceptable!

I got a call from my contact at the district's central office yesterday afternoon telling me that she's gotten more emails from me in the last two weeks than she's gotten all year.  I've stayed late almost every night for the last two weeks just keep pace with my work while I (and my coworkers) fill in the job of another absent co-worker.  I ask--why can't kids get along, be nice, behave, be respectful?  Is it the added days to the school year due to that harsh winter?  Or would it have been this way regardless?

I'm completely ready for my summer hall pass.

A break from bad choices.

Eight more work days.  Although my countdown includes the weekends.

I can do this! 

I think I can. I think I can. I think I can!

Always Hydrate for Mother's Day Weekend!

My Mother's Day weekend was spent with just Princess A--ye who made me a mother...the other two are deep in the throws of finals.  Princess A made it a great weekend for her melancholy momma--my first mothers day with one child...well since she was my only child.

I present to you my weekend celebration in photo form.

Saturday Happy Hour:

 

Saturday Shopping:

Sunday Brunch:

Sunday sunning on the deck:

The thing that made me cry:

Thank You For Making Me A Mother

Instead of spending the day thanking me for being your mom...I want to thank you for making me a mom.  It is because of you, each of you, that I wake with purpose. 

Without you, I would just be--Jodi. 

You each make my heart sing for different reason. 

For this I glad to be called, your mom!

XOXO

On The Mend

I'm on the mend. 

 Little by little I am dropping one pill a day and a few breathing treatments off my medication list and decreasing dosages of the pills I am still sucking down each day. 

 Being sick, just plain stinks!

 

I did manage to get myself to the point, on Sunday, that I took a ride to SEMO to listen to D sing and perform a rather saucy monologue.

 Princess A took to "Driving Miss Daisy"....cause she loves her momma--so that I could listen to the sweet opera sounds from my baby's voice, and the comedy of opera--most don't realize is in an opera.

 

    

 

 

D had several school obligations post her performance.  Our time was brief but we captured a few pictures on the windy River Campus to mark the day.

It meant the world to D that her biggest sister made the journey to watch her performance.

 

While it warms my heart that I got see D perform, my heart is breaking that I will spend my first Mother's Day in her nineteen years without her, to hug and kiss in the morning.  It's the first Mother's Day I will be down two of my girlies, that is hard! 

 

I do have a sweet recording she gave me last year as a gift (that made me cry then and now) of her signing Never Far From Home.  It's a realization to how much she has grown vocally in college, and that she is ever closer to coming home for the summer. 

 

And.

 

So.

 

I listen once again to my D sing to me. 

 

Aaaaaahhhhhh!

The Difference A Week Can Make...Not For The Good

Last week work was insane!  Well maybe not so much the work as the kids--weather and the impending end of a school year makes for a mixture of silliness, also known as unfortunate choices. 

That's when you take to your favorite watering hole for wings and wine...or buckets of beer, with the girls and the spousal units--lotta wine, and lotta beers--alfresco.  It is observed how most of us pull out our reading glasses to scan the menu and to help each other add new apps to our phones.  We then wondered when the time will come that we will begin talking about our failed digestive systems.  Laughter ensues.    

 

 We toast to surviving a week in public education. Great friends. Good times. Good Friday night!

 

Then Monday night comes around, I start feeling like crap.  Tuesday I feel like total crap. Wednesday I feel like absolute crap and bond a new friendship at my desk with Ms. Kleenex and Mr. Sore Throat Lozenges just to make it till 3:30pm.  Which turns out was a fail because I bolted at 3pm for a nap at home.

Thursday was a repeat of Wednesday and Friday...$75 of get well pharmaceuticals. (not to mention the usual lecture from the doctor about how people with asthma die.)

Pneomonia!

 

 I stopped and got a half price Starbucks Frappuccino on my way home from work (yes, it's true, after I got this drug store of goods I went back to my desk to finish out the day) and took to the peace pipe.

 

King Ralph picked up a pill bottle, read the label, looked at me and said "aaaahhhh steroids. Glad I'm going fishing."  Meanie! 

 

Let the truth be told the only reasons I even fancied the idea of a doctor visit was

A. I couldn't breathe this morning and had to jack myself up on every inhaler I could find in my bathroom drawer and

B. D has an opera scenes performance at SEMO on Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't miss hearing her voice for all the tea in China.

 

So here's hoping 48 hours can turn this Friday into feeling like last Friday!

Hidden Treasure

Making a few minor changes around the abode this past weekend, and still today.  In moving a piece of furniture drawers needed to be ridded of what turned out to hold a hidden treasure--evidence of a punishment, a reflection on poor behavior by our D, an 8th grader at the time.  Oh how I remember this phase.  I survived it by telling myself: this too shall pass.  It did.  This thumb print of history remains as a reminder. 

I will let page one of two of the treasure speak for itself. 

King Ralph and I would like to think of this as "parenting at it's finest." 

Sweet Memories.  Hidden. But found. Leaving lasting laughs.

Everything But the Easter Bonnet

What a perfect weekend--the exact kind of weekend I needed to revive my spirit!  I've got that end of the school year burnout and I am longing for the summer to begin.  I'm longing for slow starts to my morning, coffee (or tea) and a novel on the deck and the early morning sun kissing and bronzing my skin.  So Easter was just the awakening my soul was beckoning for.

On Maundy Thursday Alee and I went to church for a beautiful service celebrating the Last Supper.  Kevin drove to SEMO to attend a senior recital of a fellow music composition major classmate.  Demi sang several of his original pieces of music. 

On Good Friday we finished cleaning the house and then headed to the niece's house for a fish fry.

 King Ralph and my niece's spousal equivalent prepared and fried the cat fish and crappie.

  The platter heaped full of arty clogging yum. 

 

The girls sat on the deck gazing out at the niece's thirteen acres of land,

sipping wine in fancy wine tervis-like cups. 

 

 A wine, that was tasty, but chosen solely for the fact that the label bared a rabbit--an Easter Bunny

 (looks like I needed to charge my phone hehehe)

 

It isn't family fun till the cousins act silly. 

No one can blame it on the wine and beer because two of these crazies are under twenty-one -

 that's just their regular ole' selves. Let us not talk about the Duck Dynasty wanna-be cousin.  Someone please explain this beard craze that is over taking the country?! 

I DO NOT understand it...there is no beauty in it!  

 

Saturday was left to yard work.  No matter how many times we raked in the fall and winter we still managed to fill three bags of leaves and yard clippings.  Dam never-leaf-ending-pin-oak. 

 Watching the Blues game...sorry my Blackhawk friends. Another overtime win!  

And our handsome, officer, Air Force pilot nephew arrived for a steak dinner and a slumber party. 

 

Easter.

 

Beautiful. New life. Easter.

 

Baskets of Easter goodness for those home and away.

 

Next there was church. 

 

Then there was the traditional missing cousin picture. A sign baring that MIA cousin's name.

For years it was

Major C.  So imagine the joy he feels when it isn't his name on the sign.

(top: first cousins, bottom:second cousins)

 

Countered by an M photo--of I'm not missing, you all are missing 

(sadly baseball knows no holiday)

 

We ate and ate. There were Mai Thais with umbrellas (Lin you like that?)

 

Dessert.

 

 Lots and lots of yard games--washer, ladder golf and bocce ball.

 

 There was the bunny mask that makes an appearance every Easter

 

To end the day...

We had a mini family concert--Aunt Linda on the piano, Princess A dug out her flute, and D and Alyssa sang...this song

That my friends is how we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. 

 

How Did I Do It?

I had this crazy day at work on Friday.  Kids meeting their fate in the principal's office, one right after the other.  I was buried in manila folders.  It was a two martini kind of day.  Except I was baby sitting that night for an old co-worker, turned good friend's kids.  Oh how I miss those old co-workers.  They were the ones that made work feel like family and made it worth getting up and going to work.  Now I go because it's a paycheck.  I'm digressing.  Sorry. 

No Friday cocktails for me!

I am not scared by three kids.  It was my (still is) life. Their needs are just of a different type now.

On a beautiful spring evening I played "get out of math jail" with pre-school-boy-genius Kyle.  One must perform an addition or subtraction problem in their head in order to earn the right to slide down the slide.  That's right, five year old Kyle can spit out the answers to problems like: 9+7 and 20-10 and down the slide he came, problem after problem.  Allen saddle backed his big brother and whipped down that slide attached to him.  Little Addie Mae was happy and all smiles in her swing.  The dog, yes the dog, even got in the action--may end up being the blame for the Tommy John surgery I will be needing after hours of fetch the plastic golf ball. 

All was perfect till bedtime.  Addie: head down, cuddle blankie, eyes closed, zonked out.  Kyle: book time, head down, zonked out.  Allen: book time, head down, CRIES FOR "MOMMMM-ME".  How ever does Kyle share a room with his brother is all I could think!  I ignored the cry like any good mother (babysitter) would and let the little guy cry himself to sleep.  Then I took to the couch for a night time nap.   At 10:30pm I hear this screaming cry, "mommm-me, mommm-me, mommm-me" and out walks a half asleep Allen.  I sprung from the couch, scooped him up in my arms and reminded him of the magic powers he had--close your eyes, sleep and when you wake your mommy will appear.  He could have given two cents about magic powers!  

Like a phone-obsessed human I grabbed my phone and captured a Snap Chat to send to my girls

 
Still screams of "mommmm-me" carried on...till finally I tossed him in his mommy's bed.  Eventually he calmed and quieted.  Oh the joy of night terrors. NOT!  I wondered how I use to do that myself...and I didn't even work full time.  

Which brought me to my thoughts this morning.

This morning I was late to church for Palm Sunday service after I got lipstick on my shirt and had to change my clothes seconds before walking out the door.     

However did I manage to get three little girls ready for church all on my own, every Sunday morning and out the door at 9am?

How?!

King Ralph was either on day shift or was sleeping after a midnight shift; which left me to tend to our girlies single handedly.  I guess when it is your life and you are in the moment, you know no different.  I just rolled with it.  The girls always had slicked back ponies, pigtails or sponge rolled
hair, pressed dresses and shined shoes.  How did I do it? 

As I sit back and reflect on the motherhood I can imagine no greater pleasure than the joy of pure and utter exhaustion.  Would I do it again? Sure! Because in the end the pay off is greater than all the years of perpetual tiredness I experienced.