Reasons Why I Love This Child...

Some of you may remember that this is my youngest child...Mr. Funny.

You can clearly see why I call him Mr. Funny...he didn't get his resemblance to Groucho Marx from me.

I decided to do a little post about each one of my children, because I haven't posted about them recently and I miss them due to the fact that I see them for about 30 min a day now.

So here is my Top 5 Reasons that: I LOVE MR. FUNNY

5. He "pants" his 12 yr brother on the playground today and when I asked him why he did it he said, "Because the girls told me to...You have to do what girls tell you to Mom".

4. He can recite almost every commercial he has ever seen and finds a way to insert them into almost every conversation he has...today's commercial was for mouthwash. As he breathed onto his father's face to prove that he had indeed brushed his teeth before bed, he says "Freshens your breath while it kills germs!"

3. Last week we broke in the new fire pit by having a weenie roast for dinner. Mr. Funny slaughtered everyone else with the number of weenie jokes he came up with(it was an obscene amount of weenie jokes overall)...and covered his mouth and giggled at every-single-one-of them.

2. Every Sunday morning when I emerge from my bedroom after getting ready for church he gasps loudly and says "You are beautiful, Mama!"

and the #1 reason why I love Mr. Funny:
...every time I look at him my heart swells and I get a lump in my chest that makes me want to stop time right now while he's still small enough to crawl up in my lap and keep him like this forever :)

More Random Savannah

There were pirate flags everywhere in Savannah. Apparently there is an extensive pirate history in Savannah. I had no idea. We passed by a restaurant called the Pirate House that boasts that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the first two chapters of "Treasure Island" inside while sitting and listening to the old pirates' stories.

This is Mecca for Paula Deen lovers. The Lady and Sons Restaurant. It was good, fattening food and we didn't have to wait forever. We just asked for a seating, they told us to come back at a certain time and we waited about 10 minutes. Very crowded, but very good service...and yummy "home" food. If I weren't from the south I would have been blown away, but since I am I can say it was just good Soul Food!

There were tons of these bronze statues around downtown. This is the one I liked the best.

These rubber boots were hilarious. Very chic. I wanted to go inside and try some on but the store was closed :(

This sign cracked me up for various reasons. I think it was a Candy Kitchen or a Bakery, but fortunately the smells were good! If this sign hung at my house I couldn't make the same guarantee.

This sign hung at a restaurant called Five Guys. Some of you may have heard of it, but it is a burger joint. They have, I swear, the best hamburgers I have ever tasted.

It sort of had a "Happy Days" diner vibe going on.

You only order ONE order of fries at this place. The picture above is only one order, they were so freakin' awesome and yes that is Hubby's arm next to the giant paper bag of fries!

So these are just some random pics of Savannah I had lying around. Hope you enjoyed them!

Sad trips down memory lane and other relevant things.

www.historicalstockphotos.com

I remember learning that my grandmother had 3 dead children. The thought was horrible. I asked so many questions of my father, who was telling the story at time. He never met any of these siblings before they passed. They were all from earlier in his own mother’s life. One little girl, named Eva (pronouced with a short e, “eh-vah”) died of pneumonia at the age of two. Another little girl, named Dorothy, died at the age of three of dysenteric diarrhea in an age when diarrhea alone would kill you. My father swore till his dying day that the diarrhea was from eating an orange after the first frost….we weren’t allowed to even go near an orange tree in the winter. I’ve just now thought to myself that maybe I have mixed the girls up and Eva was three and Dorothy was two, and maybe what they died of respectively too, but either way those were their names and they each died of one of those causes.

My grandmother had another child die, but that child was never talked about. My mother told me once that the child was born dead. She said it was a boy and he was a mongloid. A water-head baby, she said. I didn’t know what that meant. Did the head look like a water balloon? Then she told me that my grandfather had delivered the baby next to the furnace and upon seeing the dead baby’s appearance he covered it and wouldn’t let my grandmother see him. Mom said that after my grandmother was done birthing the placenta and was resting he took the baby into the back yard and buried it. To this day, no one knows where that baby lies.

As a small child the story was gross at best, scary at worst. Now that I am a mother I cannot comprehend it. The fact alone that she lost not one but three children is devastating, but to add to it that she never laid eyes on one of them is ….too much. Later in my life I would walk around my grandmother’s back yard and think of that baby. Everyone has heard about how rough life was during the Depression, about how little people had, how hard work was to come by, but now I think about it from a woman’s perspective. Being a mother under those circumstances…my grandmother’s circumstances. Pregnant, with one or two small children under foot, in the rural Central Florida swamps (Florida was nothing but swamps before Walt Disney came along), living in a makeshift two room house that my railroad-working husband built with one saved-up-for board at a time with no midwife to deliver my child. Laboring for an unknown amount of time in the heat of that furnace while my husband did the best he could until the baby finally came, and then…silence, I’m sure. No cry, no wiggle. I wonder what my grandmother said, if she tried to reach out for him. I wonder what my grandfather did, what made him immediately decide to hide it, or what facial expression he had.

After being married for a little while myself, I know that husband and wife have a language all their own. Expressions, body language, exchanged looks. I do wonder if he had to say anything at all. As a woman, maybe she knew. Maybe she knew before the labor even started. Women are incredibly in tune to the movements of their babies, maybe he stopped moving at some point and she expected the outcome. Neither of my grandparents had better than a 3^rd or 4^th grade education, so I’m not real sure what exactly was wrong with the baby except that obviously it was dead and disfigured. Now it is buried in the back yard. My grandmother had a large flower garden and I often wondered if it was close to the grave in some tributary way. My aunt lives there now. The flower garden is gone. Time passes, stories are sometimes all that it left.

Nostalgia Run Amok

Well, on top of all the "new house" hysteria - or near hysteria on my part- other developments this week are bringing a different kind of drama to my life. For some dumb reason, known only to people who have gone before me, I decided to rifle through the internet and look up old friends and classmates. Sounds harmless right? Well, not so much. I found quite a few friends actually, thanks to the fact that I belong to a young generation of techies, everyone is on the internet these days. So a few key strokes here and there and I find most of my high school classmates and a few faces I knew but didn't go to school with. The drama is purely internal and ensues because I was a different person back then. The me that they remember was wild and rebellious. I had a foul mouth, purple hair, black fingernail polish, listened to heavy metal, mutilated my body with razor blades, did drugs, got pregnant in the 10th grade and was asked to leave the school. I somewhat expected that times have probably changed and that we've all grown up. Well, we have all grown up and most of us are even married and have children, but they for the most part are the same people. They all still do have wild hair color, like heavy metal, have tons of tattoo and piercings, etc.
The website profiles that they have for themselves are covered with metal band ads, tattoo pictures and graffiti art. I have been brave enough to talk to some old friends and they are doing fabulous. They have done and seen some awesome things. They have really made a life for themselves. Yet, they retain the rebellion and hard core tastes of their youth. "Why?", I ask myself. How can they be normal sounding, well-adjusted and successful when they still flout the rebellious and hard core images from high school? I am baffled. For me, some things had to go the moment I became a mother. Other habits and preferences just faded away with time, and I assumed, maturity. I believed that the transition I made from Hard core to Betty Crocker was a natural progression that came with age, wisdom and responsibility. What if it isn't? What if I became what I thought I should look like to the outside world? Did I sell out? We used to use this word to describe someone who gave up their individuality for the acceptance of others. I feel like a sell out. Why? Because I still think that all the stuff I see on their websites is cool. So, I ask myself, "If you like tattoos and hard music and wild hair styles and funky clothes so much why don't you have any of them?" If I had to be honest, every answer boils down to someone else's opinion either expressed to me or assumed. My husband once told me years ago that tattoos were trashy. Years have passed since then and he even has a tattoo now. Do I think he would tell me no if I wanted one bad enough? No, I don't think so, but just knowing that he used to feel this way stops me cold in my tracks from wanting one. I secretly listen to heavy metal when my kids and husband aren't in the car. Why? Because as a Christian I worry that the references in the lyrics are too strong for my children and my husband might disapprove of it. I even worry that the fact that I still like it means in some way that I'm not a good enough Christian. I admire edgy haircuts, hair colors and funky clothes but I don't have the nerve to indulge in them myself. Why? Because I'm afraid that someone will look at me and say "isn't she too old for that?", or just the opposite, "How could someone that young have a teenager?" The last one has been something I have faced discrimination over for 15 years. I have a severe complex about the fact that I was only 15 when I gave birth to my oldest son. I have spent years trying to appear older so as not to be judged. Also, I'm afraid if I act too much like I feel inside - which is very young - or dress in things I admire that I will embarrass my son. Now that I've made it into my 30's I sort of, well, really miss those young days. So my basic question is this: Did I change because I wanted the changes or did I sell out? Another question is this: Would it be a step backwards to my faith to admit these things? How do I dig through the years and find me...the real me...the me that is authentic. Most of the "hard core" me was wrapped up in pain and bondage that I've since been released from, and most of the Suzy Homemaker me is wrapped up in wanting to please other people...so where is the real me? Is there a middle ground between Goth Tramp and Homeschool Mother of Three with a Mortgage? All I want is to know that when I say "I like that" that its based on truth, not a desire to belong to one group of people or another. How? How am I going to be able to do this? I think the only thing I can do at this point is to ask myself a series of questions when I make decisions from now on. Like that haircut? What is it that makes you not want it? Like this song? Why wouldn't you listen to it in front of the kids? Are these invalid excuses or intelligent points? My thought process is going to have to slow down but maybe in time I will have the confidence in myself to make decisions based on what I truly want. I am notorious for not being able to make up my mind...maybe once I have one I can make decisions with it. I hope that this doesn't take too long though, I've got paint colors and interior design to decide on and Lord knows I'm going to need all the help I can get!