My dad is in the parade today in the town I grew up in. He's not marching - this year he gets to ride on the float. And he's with the Rotary Club, not the Veterans.
But if he chose, he could march with the WWII vets.
He enlisted in the Navy when he was underage because he didn't want to get drafted and have someone else decide how he should serve.
I've seen pictures of him on the ships - tall, skinny kid, dark hair, shirt off, with his buddies, his smile typically modest, even then.
The boys on my son's baseball team range far and wide in everything from age, to height, to ability. Some of the boys have played t-ball prior to this, others haven't. For some, this is their second or third year in this league, others played t-ball last year and are working their way up the little league ladder.
There are several boys around Alex's height and build. One in particular, a kid I'll call Tall Boy II, is so similar to Alex that when then they're in uniform, and you see them from a distance, and you don't see the number on the backs of their jerseys, and they're wearing their caps, not helmets, and when the brim of the cap casts their little faces in shadow, and they both have relatively short hair...sometimes it's easy to mistake one for the other for a moment.
The past two days have been blazing hot. 80s and 90s. Humid. Hot. Ugh.
I'm not a heat-loving chick, in case you didn't know. I can deal with it, mostly, but too much and I wilt.
I was okay these past two days because of several things. For one thing, according to the weather forecasts, there was an end in sight. So I just had to hold on. I figured I could get a LOT of laundry done in such hot weather, and you know, cranking out laundry (and drying it outside on the line) is my raison d'etre. Of course it is.
So there was that.
Before I begin, here's a link to Julia's cake last year. Alex's cake is in that post as well, but I haven't done this year's cake yet - that'll be next month's production.
Anyway, up until a week or two ago, Julia wanted a cake very similar to last year's, only instead of the elephants wearing ballerina garb, she requested that they be gymnasts. So I played with that idea in my mind for a while...what color costumes the elephants would wear, and which pieces of equipment they'd be performing on...Julia is partial to the uneven bars herself (or "unbeeven bars" as she used to say it), so I'd have to include those...maybe the balance beam and trampolene as well. And the costumes kept appearing in red, white and blue in my mind, so that's where I was headed in that regard....
I can't get enough of them.
Where to start?
I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning either baking or cooking or cleaning in preparation for the party we had for Julia on Sunday. Someday when I'm rich (hahahahaha) I would like to pay someone else to clean for me. I don't like cleaning. I don't mind laundry, or all the cooking and baking. But vacuuming? Ugh.
Anyway.
Oh - and this will be random thoughts because I no longer remember the order of everything. I suppose I could consult my lists, but they're in the other room and I prefer sitting in this chair to getting up right now.
My peonies are starting to bloom! See them here.
As I indicated in my last post, Julia had a birthday coming up. In addition to a party at our house, I'd also planned to make something for her to bring in and share with her class.
When it was Alex's birthday in kindergarten, he asked me to make brownies. I asked Julia what she wanted, and she said she'd like cupcakes. White cupcakes with pink frosting. I suggested we have a couple of colors of frosting (thinking of the boys in the class), and she agreed with that. So all set. A batch of cupcakes, some frosting and some food coloring and I'd be all set.
And then I happened to be talking to another mom with a daughter whose birthday is soon, and we moved onto the topic of bringing in goodies for the class. I told her I was making cupcakes, and she said "Um, you might want to check on that."
I am a sucker.
I am a sucker for soppy Hallmark and Kodak commercials, violins playing, "Sunrise, Sunset," tiny handprints on laminated sheets of paper alongside poems that begin something like "I know right now my hands are small/and it drives you crazy when you see handprints on the wall/but one day soon I'll be big and tall/and you'll wish you'd driven me to the mall/when I asked nicely/when I was five."
You know how when you start learning how to do something new, you feel completely inept at the beginning? Despite your best intentions, you still find yourself flailing around, flinging whey all over the place and hoping that you haven't contaminated anything, because if you have, you won't find out about it for another couple of months at least, and it would really be awful if you spent all this time and milk for nothing. Or your carefully but precariously constructed "cheese press" thing slips off-balance and crashes to the floor. Twice. But then...somehow...when you are going through all of this insanity again, suddenly things seem to be working better, and you almost feel worried that that's a BAD sign, because maybe it means that the next glitch will be even BIGGER.
That's about the stage I'm at.