Jeremy: Jackson, say what I say… Video?

Jack: video…

Jeremy: …Killed…

Jack: killed…

Jeremy: …the Radio…

Jack: the radio…

Jeremy: …Star.

Jack: star!

Jeremy: Now say it all together…

You may applaud my parenting skills whenever.

So here’s what happened last night, from around 1:15 until 4:20 a.m.

A major thunderstorm woke up both of us out of what seemed to be a heavy sleep. For me to wake in the middle of the night is not unusual, for I have been blessed with the Treadway Insomnia. Chuck, on the other hand, could sleep through circus clowns doing cartwheels down the hallway at midnight. But that’s another blog entry.

There we were, at 1:15 a.m., remarking to one another about how loud the thunder and lightning was. Then – poof – out goes the electricity.

Naturally, Chuck goes back to sleep while I mull over all of the possibilities of the next day. How does one pack lunches with spoiled food from a warm refrigerator? How would one get her car out of the garage if the automatic opener won’t work? How could one hope for a frizz-free hair day without the use of a hair dryer? I toss and turn for the next hour. My impatience and worry grow from lack of electricity to having not received the immunization affidavits from the State yet to nationalized health care to trying to remember what time my interview is today with the manager of the oldest cemetery in town…

Chuck re-wakes around 2 a.m. and I burden him with my thoughts. At this point I can’t decide if he’s truly worried about our lack of electricity or if he’s excusing himself from the bed and, subsequently, my ramblings, but at any rate, he goes to the living room to call the electric company. He returns to bed saying the automated lady on the other end of the line is fully aware of our outage and will have it repaired by 2:42 a.m.

At 2:38, the automated lady calls Chuck’s phone to say the power won’t be restored until 6:34 a.m. This is when I full-on panic. What if Miss Automatic has no clue what she’s talking about and calls back at 6:15 to say it won’t be back on until tomorrow? The secondary reason for my panic was that Chuck was leaving for a trip, and I’m not a girl who can work a generator.

Because neither of us can sleep, he gets up to secure the house. We decide to pull down coolers and pack meat and dairy on ice for as long as we can (survival mode apparently comes with panic). Chuck rigs the generator to the garage door opener so he could pull both vehicles out. (I supervised.) We discuss options for getting out of the house and securing it without electricity, and I wonder how long I could manage my life without electricity. At one point I wandered back to bed, but without the white noise of my humidifier I couldn’t fall asleep. I tossed and turned, mulling over all of my worries and welcoming back that right eyebrow twitch that went away for half a day. I get back up and walk to the garage and scare Chuck half to death with my silent onlooking.

“Geez, you scared me,” he said, putting the generator back in the garage. “I’m gonna go get ice. You want my flashlight?”

Feeling confident, I say, “Nope. My ninja skills help me see in the dark.”

“Okay then. Lock the door behind me. I’ll be right back.” He leaves through the back gate, I lock the side garage door, and walk back into the kitchen. On my way back to the bedroom in total darkness, at 3:14 a.m., I catch the corner of his suitcase – which is lying on the kitchen floor – and fall flat on my face.

Scratch that – I fell flat on my left knee, the same knee that I iced four times Sunday afternoon post-run.

I resist the urge to scream so I don’t wake the boys, but it occurs to me that if the thunder and generator didn’t wake them, my whimpers wouldn’t. So I screamed. And cried. And sent an angry text message with profanity.

“I JUST TRIPPED AND FELL OVER YOUR &#*@^ SUITCASE!!!”

He writes back, “Who’s the ninja now?” which completely cracks me up, even though my knee cap is swelling like a marble.

“A ninja, I am not.” I reply.

He had to traipse all over the city for two bags of ice at 3:30 in the morning, and I just WENT FOR IT and opened the freezer so I could get an ice pack for my knee. I positioned myself on the couch with my leg iced and elevated, wondering if this was a sign that I should drop out of the race. Twenty minutes later, Chuck walks in with the ice and two little jugs of milk, because in an emergency, you can never have enough milk.

He inquires about my knee and I lecture him about suitcase placement, and no sooner does the man put the ice in the coolers and lights a candle so we can see each other’s face in the dark living room, that – poof – the electricity comes on.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he says.

I burst into side-stitching laughter. It’s 4:10 a.m. We have ice in a cooler, I have a swollen knee, and Chuck’s alarm clock will be going off in an hour. In a situation like this, all you can do it laugh.

“Alright, Ninja,” he scolds me. “I can’t believe this…” and he, too, bursts into laughter.

I went to bed within minutes, once I made sure my computer and laptop worked. (The router is questionable.) I don’t know what happened to Chuck because my humidifier quickly sung me to sleep. I imagine he left on time and in one piece, as I don’t see his suitcase in the middle of the floor anymore.

Trust me, I looked.

We’ve started posting behind-the-scenes photos from interviews and shoots, so I wanted to link the first mini-album for you non-Facebook folks. Enjoy.

Crabs feel pain.

In other news, we’re all home today because of a one-day blizzard. It was 65 and sunny yesterday and it should be in the mid-40s tomorrow (and back in the 60s by Sunday). For today, at least, we shall blizzard.

It was so vivid that I remember the details of her bedroom, or whosever bedroom we were chatting in. She was lying stomach down on the bed propped up by her elbows, intently listening to me as I sat on the carpet in front of her.

“So Jeremy’s been asking about being baptized,” she starts.

“Yes, on a regular basis,” I tell the First Lady. “We’re answering his questions, but we’re waiting until he really understands.”

“Yes, that’s wise,” she counsels me. “You know, when Malia was baptized…”

I don’t hear her answer because I heard the door open in the adjacent sitting room. It’s the President. He’s in a navy suit, white shirt and blue tie, carrying his jacket over to an arm chair to set it down. He’s oblivious to me and doesn’t even look our way, even though I’m discussing my child’s eternal salvation with his wife.

I turn back to Michelle and she’s staring at me like it’s my turn to speak. I don’t know the last thing she said to me so I say nothing.

Then my alarm goes off.

I quickly analyzed my dream because it seemed real, as if I actually lived in those few minutes. I have no proof that I was actually her assistant, but that’s what it felt like. While this dream was odd on many levels, the ironic thing is that my actual boss’s name is, in fact, Michele.

And I’m not talkin’ politics. I got a job.

(I’ll pause here for shock and awe.)

It’s a long story, but the cliff notes version is that I submitted my resume and clips to Amarillo Uptown Magazine while still living in Chattanooga. My goal was to find freelance work but after meeting three editors and the publisher I was offered a full time writing position. Actually, I use “full time” loosely, as this isn’t a 40 hour a week job, but it’s certainly enough to warrant putting Jeremy in full time school and Jackson in a part-time day care/preschool. Again, this wasn’t my intention, but when something great lands in your lap you don’t toss it out. I’ll spend tomorrow working out the details of child care and hope to start the job by Wednesday.

When I told Jeremy he would be staying at school full time instead of part time, he leapt for joy. (He even squealed a little.) He’s been asking to go full time since his second day but there was no need since I stayed home. As for Jack, I got a few recommendations from the parents in our sunday school class and have already made a few calls to the day cares/preschools I’m interested in. This will be the hardest part for me, but Chuck and I have talked about it at length and agree that these are blessings not to be missed.

The icing on the cake was when Chuck said, “Guess you get to go clothes shopping now, huh?”

Yes. Yes, I do.

This is my final column which ran last Sunday. I wrote for the Times Free Press for over 8 years and while there were times I dreaded the deadline, I’m going to miss it. Perhaps I’ll find somewhere else to write… Anyway, enjoy. And Merry Christmas.
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Two weeks ago, in the midst of packing up the apartment for our move to Texas, I saw a commercial that made me pause. The voiceover began, “Remember when Christmas was magical? Let’s get back to that.”

Packing tape in hand, my brain immediately went back to Christmas 1986 when I got a Barbie moped for my dolls. We had just moved to West Germany, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and were living in guest quarters, or a gasthaus, on the Army base. We were uprooted sometime in the fall, as I remember being introduced to my new third grade class mid-semester. It was a strange new world but one I immediately enjoyed for the winter snow was abundant and my classmates were kind.

Christmas morning had come and our tree had birthed a bounty of presents. My sister and I, in our matching pajamas, sat on the floor in the dining room where our tree stood next to the fireplace, across from the kitchen and adjacent to the living room. To my recall, we had never lived in such a large palace, though I knew it was temporary, and by the following Christmas we had settled into a cottage in the German town just a couple of miles from the base.

Our parents watched as we tore open one gift after another, and while I don’t remember everything Bugs Bunny or the family dog gave me (my mother had a sense of humor when it came to writing the gift tags), I have never forgotten the feeling of pure elation when I unwrapped my new Barbie moped. The wheels clicked when I scooted it along the floor, filling the room with a plastic motor sound that probably annoyed everyone over the age of eight. I played with that moped for the rest of the day.

Like most people, I have a rolodex of Christmas memories in my mind ranging from early childhood to newly married, most of them more meaningful than the one with the moped. However, I thought it was interesting that my brain selected the one Christmas that so closely followed a big transition in my childhood.

Now that sequence is being repeated in my own family. Never in a million years did I imagine our world would be turned upside down at Christmastime, that we would be moving across the country the week before my favorite holiday.

If this were any other year, our Christmas tree would be up, along with coordinating holiday décor throughout the house. The boys would have their own mini-tree in their room and every day would be filled with the sounds of Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald. We would’ve have had a Christmas party with our friends and spent Christmas Eve with our extended family.

That isn’t he case this year. Naturally, it’s been hard to capture the Christmas spirit when I’m distracted by the stacks of moving boxes in the living room. This is wrong, I think to myself. There should be a fully decorated Christmas tree standing in the window frame, not a leaning tower of copy paper boxes filled with books, trinkets and under-used kitchen utensils.

It isn’t that my spirit it gone; rather, it’s on hold. We should arrive at our new house a full eight days prior to Christmas Eve. If I time it right, if I keep my momentum, if I coordinate the unpacking of every box, there’s a good chance I can have a fully decorated, fully unpacked and organized house by bedtime, December 24th.

My enthusiasm is one third excitement, one third obsessive-compulsive disorder, and one third the result long-term insomnia, which is why the plan sounds a little crazy to some and perfectly logical to me. The more I remember that magical Christmas morning over twenty years ago, the more I want this Christmas to be magical for my children. We, too, had just moved, and suddenly we were an ocean away from everything that was familiar. We were living a transitional life and my parents still managed to create the perfect holiday for their daughters filled with tradition and wonder. My little boys have been living in organized chaos for the last five months with their father nine hours away and their mother worn ragged from flying solo. Now that we’re back together and uprooting to Texas, I would be remiss if I didn’t christen our new life with a magical Christmas morning.

Whether it was a makeshift Christmas my mother threw together the night before or one she worked on diligently for months, I don’t want to know. Christmas 1986 was just how Christmas should always be, filled with happy moments, family tradition and laughter. Perhaps, in the midst of our move, my boys will capture a few moments in their hearts this week that will give them magical memories for years.

Merry Christmas, Chattanooga. And farewell.

Me: Jeremy, what sounds good for dinner tonight?
Jeremy: Um, peanut butter and jelly sam-wich sounds good.
Me: Really? Why?
Jeremy: Cause that’s all I could fink of.
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Me: Jeremy, why do you think God gave us such cute and wonderful boys?
Jeremy: Cause He knew you would like us.
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Jeremy: Why do you kiss Daddy so much?
Me: Because I love him and that’s what husbands and wives do.
Jeremy: I don’t want to kiss a girl.
Me: Good. You don’t need to for a long time.
Jeremy: But why do you need to?
Me: That’s how we show that we love each other.
Jeremy: But why?
Me: Cause we do.
Jeremy: Well I fink you do too much kissing.
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Jeremy, eyeballing my glass of Diet Cranberry Sierra Mist: What are you drinking?
Me: My drink.
Jeremy: But what is it?
Me: Mine.
Jeremy: sigh No, Mom. What is IN your cup?
Me: Cranberry Mist.
Jeremy: Like two cranberries are playing tag and one cranberry missed the other cranberry?
Me: Yes, exactly.

Seeing this picture today made me happy. Therefore, I had to post it.

The boys and I went to South Carolina over the weekend to visit my cousin, Paul, and his family. The drive was long and the visit was short, but it was worth it since we probably won’t see them for a long time. My boys played famously with their boys, which is always a sweet thing to see. I took some pictures but considering I came home SICK, I won’t be uploading and editing for a while. That’s right – I drove home with a low-grade fever that spiked last night. I’m not well and I’m praying Jackson goes with the flow today. I don’t plan on moving very much. Perhaps he can reheat his own mac ‘n cheese for lunch.

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