Thursday, June 30, 2011

Time To Wake Up.

After a flurry of email exchanges over the past few weeks, the soccer club's board meeting finally took place Tuesday night.

In my dreams, the board members would have recognized the board president for who he is and what he's done.

In my dreams, the board president would have listened intently with an objective ear to my grievances.

In my dreams, the board president would have offered up an apology for his actions of his own accord, or at least because I pressed him for one.

In my dream of dreams, the board president would have been relieved of his duties, never to serve again.



But back to reality. None of this happened.

What happened instead is that he continued to refuse to answer my questions. Even after I pointed out to him that the club has disclosed this information in the past, and he admitted to no policy change, he still refused to answer my questions.

He sat there and told me (but wouldn't look at my dtr who was seated right beside me) that my daughter was cut from the team because of her slow times on the 35 yard dash at tryouts. Hello, she's been in the goal box for the last 4 years for this team, of course she's going to have the slowest times on the dash. She's not on this team because of her speed, she's on this team because she's one hell of a goalie. Never mind her body of work as goalie for the team, let's just look at some arbitrary times taken at a tryout. I'm not sure when she would ever have to dash 35 yards as goalie, but OK. And let's remember that her speed was never in question in years past, only this year, after this guy decided he has it out for me.

Also told me she was cut because the evaluator overheard her comment to a team member that she would only want to play for the team if they would allow the former coach to resume coaching.

They cut her from the team because they overheard something a 13 year old girl said to her teammate?

He said that showed she had a bad attitude.

I had to ask him four times before he would answer me, if he had ever gotten word of this girl having an attitude problem over the past four years.

He finally, begrudgingly, answered that he had not.



But at least we're being honest now. She was cut for a slow tryout stat that has nothing to do with the position she plays, even though it has never been an issue in the past.
She was cut for a comment not directed at the coach, but overheard by the coach.

Makes so much sense to me now.















Hello, Mr. Newspaper Reporter? I have a story I'd like to share.....










Pump your fist in the air for the man. Then click on this brown button.
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!


Thank you Google Images.....
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSaoDqkxyRxlaDcaN3IvdRw4O-XOPzHlIi25StRC_078I5sUXZX4Q8o3

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Wordless Wednesday


This is something James drew for me a year or so ago.

I thought it was pretty.




















Stop to smell the roses.
Stop to click the button.
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Question of the Day


So if some random guy asks me when I am due, should I be:



indignant that he thought me preggers



or



flattered that he thought me young enough to conceive?







Pregnant? Chubby? Old? Young? It matters not. Click the button regardless....
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Monday, June 27, 2011

Mirth Monday















Find the brown button to click and vote.

Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Here it is.





Thank you Google images
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSpFBUO51c-m48N5teKskSzVA-DtZ0KlLS-Sb9IFmf-NiidTEPiNZV1NR-Ueg

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Grandparents are Great


My kids don't get to see their grandparents a whole heck of a lot.

My Mom lives a couple hours away. Fred's parents, sadly, are dead. My Dad and stepmother live like, 11 hours away.

Fortunately for us, the latter just paid us a visit. They made the long drive out and spent some good quality time with us'ns. Quality time including:

Gifting, and then playing, lots of that lawn ladder game (ladder ball? ladder toss?).
Playing a couple of awesome family board games.
Taking the kids out for pizza.
Helping out with chauffering to dentist appointments, dropping my car off to the mechanics, running out for groceries, picking up eggs from the farm down the road.
Going for walks.
Slippin' the kids all some cash.
Heaping compliments on us all.
Taking some of the kids on a fun local tour.
Watching the kids while Fred and I went out for our anniversary.




For me, it was great not only to spend time with them, but to be afforded some new perspective. Sometimes in the thick of our chaotic lives, I fail to notice the positives. But with their visit, I got to see my children through their eyes.

I got to hear that they saw leaps-and-bounds improvements in James' behavior and melding with the family. Got to beam with pride as they gushed over the delicious dinner the children made when Fred and I went out. I was honored to see how impressed they were with some of the intelligent and creative answers the kids came up with during the board games.

So PawPaw and Granny Caggy, I thank you. For your help, for your perspective, for your fun and games. And the lots of love and laughs.







Click on the brown button below if you love grandparents!
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Saturday, June 25, 2011

History of a Romance


Year 1 Love at first sight. Well. Since we had been in classes together for six years, and had worked side by side for several months at the movie theatre, perhaps not "at first sight". But instantaneous, light-switch-flipped love, how 'bout that? As we gazed at each other over the shoulders of our respective prom dates.

Year 2 Adjust to the whole long distance romance thing. We attended colleges several hours apart from each other.

Year 3 "Will you marry me?" Maybe not on bended knee on a mountaintop with a 4kt diamond, but a simple college student's ring presented without fanfare in my college dorm.





Year 4 The love letters continued to pile up as we wrote to each other several times a week. In the days before the myriad options for how you wanted to contact a person, we were relegated to love letters and Friday phone calls. We saw each other only a handful of times during the school year, but made up for it during the summers.

Year 5 First comes love, then comes marriage. We finally tied the knot five years and a month from when we began going together. I had at long last finished college and he had both finished college and gotten through his first year of med school.




Year 6 Time to play grownups with our first apt, a one bedroom 2nd floor unit in East Brunswick, NJ. Mr., Mrs, dog and cat.

Year 7 I worked at my job, plus a little moonlighting, while he continued his studies at medical school, practicing his stitches on our hand-me-down couch.


Year 8 Medical school cap and gown time! And we loaded up the truck and we moved to Delaware.

Year 9 Fred started his residency, I started my new job, and our friends moved in with us. Our friends, plus their two little children, their newborn baby, and their Great Dane. Good times, good times.....

Year 10 We never found out what our landlord was doing with the rent money we paid him, but it wasn't paying the mortgage. Came home to a sheriff's auction sign in the front yard and so we moved again, to an old farmhouse in MD.

Year 11 An old farmhouse needs a horse to go along with it, and I was happy to oblige.

Year 12 Our first child, our son Patrick, was born. We were spanked hard as we entered the world of parenthood.

Year 13 Fred graduated his residency program as chief resident, and began his fellowship in Trauma and Critical Care.

Year 14 When he was all done being a good fellow, he took a job with the hospital where he did his residency. No moving required.



Year 15 We moved into our first boughten house just weeks before our 2nd child, our daughter Rosie, was born.

Year 16 Marked our 10 year anniversary. "Ten years and never had a fight".


Year 17 Two wasn't enough. One girl, one boy wasn't enough. We had our third child, our son Daniel. We were officailly outnumbered.

Year 18 This boughten house I mentioned? It was a 250 year old farmhouse on 11 1/2 acres. We (meaning I) continued to pour animals into the house, the barn, the fields. We (meaning I) added goats, sheep, ponies, and a pig to the property. For ambience.

Year 19 Kept busy fixing up the old house, mending fences, caring for critters, burying old pets.

Year 20 Kept busy wiping noses, wiping bottoms, changing diapers, cutting sandwiches into fun shapes, arranging playdates, tending boo-boos, nursing babies, learning to function on a 1/2 hour of sleep, and cleaning up after Hurricane Children on a daily basis.

Year 21 Apparently three wasn't enough. Two boys and one girl wasn't enough. We adopted Bella, who turned six one month after arriving in America from Kazakhstan.

Year 22 Apparently four wasn't enough either. We began hosting exchange students. Enter Milly from Taiwan, who spent her junior year in high school living with our crazy family. She also got to move with us as we loaded up the trucks again and moved to our bigger house on a smaller property. Fred laughed nervously and said, "You're not planning on filling up those extra bedrooms, are you?"


Year 23 Exit Milly, enter Eun Hae and Felice, from South Korea and Hong Kong, respectively.

Year 24 Took a year off from adding students to our family, but worked on building up the animal headcount once again.

Year 25 Oh what the heck, I'll take another. Enter Nadya from Germany.


Year 26 Two empty bedrooms means two more kids. We adopted James and Julie, also from Kazakhstan, and when they came home to us they were 10 and nearly 14.

Year 27 OK, no more exchange students. But let's host a Fresh Air Fund kid. A little boy from the inner city to stay with us for a week in the summer.

Year 28 Has it really been 28 years together and 23 years of marriage? Looking back I can see that since we started this romance we've lived in six places, starting in Fred's Dad's attic and ending in our current seven bedroom home. We have cared for countless critters and have 42 currently. We have hosted four exchange students and one Fresh Air Fund child. We have added three kids to our family by birth and three by adoption. We have weathered the deaths of beloved pets. The births and adoptions of our children. We have lived through times with no money and times of comfort. We have attended the funerals of grandparents, of siblings, of parents.

We have sometimes faced adversity head on, rowing our lifeboat sitting shoulder to shoulder, but there were also times we sat at opposite ends of the lifeboat, scarcely looking at each other as we weathered the storm.
But through it all we've grown stronger, closer, more in tune with each other than we ever would have thought possible when we were first gazing at each other over the shoulders of our prom dates that night so many, many years ago.











Vote for me if you believe in love!
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Friday, June 24, 2011

Farm Friday - Baby Bunnies

We have a new critter here at the farm.

Couple days ago, we saw our cat Punkin running by the pond with something in her mouth.

Rosie chased her down and got her to drop it. A baby bunny. Sadly, it died moments later, most likely from internal injuries. Sniff.

Clearly, that is not our new critter.


Few minutes later, Punkin was off and running with another small furry creature in her jaws of death. Rosie got her to drop it again. Another bunny. This one looked OK at first. We were hopeful he would make it. Then we learned it had a spinal cord injury, rendering it a paraplegic. Not too much longer, tragically, he passed on. Possibly he drowned in tears rather than dying from his injuries. Either way, he was buried under the cherry tree with his brother, with heartfelt eulogies cried into the falling dusk.

Clearly , that is not our new critter.

However. Yesterday afternoon. Julie fetched me and expressed with great urgency that I needed to run with her to the dining room.
Great, I thought. The puppy pooped.
And truthfully, when I looked in the corner Julie was gesturing to, that's what I thought the little pile of brown was at first. But as my eyes adjusted, I came to realize it was not a pile of poo, but a pile of bunny. Cute, alive, adorable baby bunny. Healthy, even.



What to do, what to do...?

To put it back outside was to put it straight back into Punk's jaws. This was the third bunny that we knew of in the last couple days that she had caught. Plus a mouse.

Couldn't keep it as a pet. I had heard that wild rabbits, even when raised in captivity from babies, make for lousy pets when grown.

So we compromised. Decided to raise it to maturity and then release it. It will have a better chance than if we release it now. And it's not like it will lose out on skills training by being raised in captivity. They don't forage. They don't hunt. They eat grass. How hard can it be?

After losing the nest of bunnies by the pool, after losing the two that Punk injured, we're hoping this one might have a chance.

But jeesh. I think it's high time I start distributing little tiny rabbit condoms around the pastures so I can put an end to all this nonsense.















Hop hop. Click click.
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!
PS: Thanks for restoring my number back on my button. 23 today. Heaps better than stinky 26. Now let's get me back into the teens, shall we?

Thursday, June 23, 2011

The Breakup

Glancing at the headlines last night, I saw one which made all others melt right off the page.


Actor George Clooney and Elisabetta Canalis split
From: NewsCore
June 23, 2011


That's right,ladies, George is single.

All the pieces of my plan are falling into place. George is free for the picking, and I've lost 12 lbs so far on my Clooney diet.

Twelve pounds! The other day? I thought I saw my toes. But the lighting was poor and I only saw them for a brief moment. It was like was like one of those elusive Bigfoot sightings. Only I didn't have my camera with me. Damn!

So. George is single. My Clooney diet is working. There's just the whole me being married thing in my way at this point.

I'll have to see what I can do about that.....


Now I'm off to find some scissors and a gluestick so I can cut her pretty, sad face out of that picture and glue mine in its place.












What's missing from the brown button today? A number. Why? Because they only put your number in the brown juggling lady button when you're in the top 25. And guess what. I am no longer in the top 25. Sniff. I am number 26. Not even on the first page anymore. Is that the saddest thing you've ever heard or what? That's sadder than when my sweet little goat Houdini dies last week. That's right, I am not above invoking the names of dead pets if it heightens sympathetic feelings for me and gets you to vote. And people? I will devote a whole post to this whole voting thing if I don't see my numbers higher tomorrow morning. I'll do it, I will. You don't want that. I don't want that. But I'll do it, so help me....
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Wordless Wednesday


Rosie took this picture a few weeks ago. I like the heart shape.
I think I have a "budding" photographer on my hands, if you'll excuse the pun....







Snap. Click.

Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

First Day of School, First Day of Summer

The kids finished school last Thursday, so yesterday was the first Monday of summer break.

And since Bella takes summer school (now fancily called "extended school year"), today was her first day heading back to school. Poor thing, her backpack didn't even need dusting off.

But she has a great attitude about school and she marched merrily off.

The rest of the day, the beginning of our first full week of summer, didn't feel a whole heck of a lot different.

I still had a kitchen to clean up, tasks and chores to assign and supervise, grocery shopping, running the kids to dentist appts and friend's houses, weeds to pull, flowers to plant, mulch to spread, laundry to do, kids to yell at.




I also discovered a recipe for iced coffee from PW that looks mouth-wateringly delightful. So I started that last night and it steeped all night and this morning I'm going to strain it and chill it and I'm all ashiver with giddy anticipation for the finished product.


I'll let you know how it turns out. But I probably won't share.

Unless maybe you help me pull some weeds ....












Know what? I will give you free yummy PW iced coffee. But only if you vote for me. My ranking is slip slidin' away. I'm in the stinkin' 20s, gross! Please help me move back up by voting every day. Please? Thank you. Slurp.
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!



Thank you Google images ....
http://images.wikia.com/coffee/images/e/e1/Iced-coffee.jpg

Monday, June 20, 2011

Mirth Monday - in Honor of Fathers

Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected. ~ Red Buttons

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.
~ Bill Cosby

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories. ~John Wilmot

It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge. ~Phyllis Diller

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

The quickest way for a parent to get a child's attention is to sit down and look comfortable. ~Lane Olinghouse

I love to play hide and seek with my kid, but some days my goal is to find a hiding place where he can't find me until after high school. ~Author Unknown

A young lady is a female child who has just done something dreadful. ~Judith Martin

Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell, the name will carry. ~Bill Cosby

Setting a good example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age. ~William Feather, The Business of Life, 1949

Parents are not interested in justice; they are interested in quiet. ~Bill Cosby






ROTFCTB (Rolling On The Floor Clicking The Button)
Top Mommy Blogs - Click To Vote!

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...