Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson
Dan and I got all decked out for a costume party this weekend. Low-tech, low-budget, low-wow-factor, but also low-stress.
The party was held at Nacho and Encarnación’s house. The two of them went all out. Dan and I like to stick with t-shirts.
When I was pregnant with Laylee, before I had a digital camera, I wore a black turtle neck with a white circle and an 8 on the stomach and Dan wore a green shirt with 6 pockets.
What are your favorite couples’ costume ideas?
Yeah. That guy’s pretty much a freak show.
From age 13 when my friend Erin’s family saved pennies in a jar to go to The Phantom of the Opera, I’ve dreamed of seeing the Broadway show. The more I found out about the plot of the musical however, the less I cared about the actual story and the more I wanted to see it simply for the music and the spectacle. Okay, let me be honest. I wanted to pay $50 just to watch the dramatic chandelier drop.
So today Dan and I paid the pennies from our jar and we watched the chandelier fall… in slow motion supported by super-thick wires. The way I remember hearing about it, the chandelier came crashing down on the audience, barely missing people’s heads and falling so fast that everyone screamed in delighted terror. There was no unscripted screaming in the theatre today as we listened to the hydraulics lowering the giant prop smoothly to the stage. No terror at all.
I would have walked out right then and there if it had been intermission and taken a long disappointed potty break out of spite if it weren’t for the fact that the music was so beautiful it made me cry. Now to be honest, I should put the tears in context.
I also cried when I saw Reba in concert… and Dave Matthews… and Dido. I cried at the So You Think You Can Dance live show and last week I cried at the gym when a muted commercial for The Biggest Loser: Family Edition came on one of the monitors.
But still, the music was gorgeous despite the egregious lack of diction from the chorus (we could not understand a word they were singing) and the pathetically un-near-deathness of the chandelier crash. And I got to wear some hot shoes and hold Dan’s hand (mostly because of the love and only partly because of the spiky hotness of the shoes).
The sets and costumes were gorgeous, making me want to light a thousand candles, buy a smoke machine and sew a velvet cloak with a hood to wear whenever Dan and I are cavorting around in underground tunnels bursting into song. I mean, Christine wears a hooded velvet cloak and “strange angel” psychopaths are swarming her practically all the time. What’s not to love about that?
The one question that haunted me as I left the theatre was — what did “keeping your hand at the level of your eyes” have to do with the price of eggs? Would shielding his eyes really have kept Raoul from the noose? Honestly?
Coming soon: The Phantom Experience — According to Dan
Magoo’s decided that all motorcyclists have escaped from some sort of parade and that their main role in this world is to smile and wave at him sweetly like Miss Latina Puget Sound sitting on the back of her white Cadillac on the 4th of July. He waves and smiles and yells, “Hi MOTORCYCLE GUY!!!” and waits for the confetti to drop. It never does, but if one of them waves back, he gasps and regales me with the details of their interchange. “Mom. MOTORCYCLE GUY said HI TO ME!!” Ah yes, his life has been touched by the hand of Motorcycle Guy more than once and he may never be the same.
Honestly, I kind of hope he always stays exactly the same as he is now, with his fat little hand waving frantically at the bandana-clad tattoo-happy Harley rider as though the biker were a one-man float in the Macey’s Parade.
That’s me in the hall. way. sending my daughter to kindergarten.
This week Laylee has a kindergarten “soft start.” Today she met with her teacher one-on-one for 20 minutes to discuss important matters like the sounds a “G” makes and whether or not she knows her own phone number.
From what I’ve heard, the teacher is an angel of heavenly joy and ever-lovin’ beauty blessedness. I’ve been hearing her name for 2 years, usually accompanied by sighs and gasps and mumbles about wonderfulness… absolutely amazingosity… and… freakin’ sainthood. I had more than one person tell me, “You have GOT to make sure Laylee gets in Mrs. Sweetsie’s class.” And I’d say, “Oh yeah? How do I make sure she gets in there?” And then they’d say, “Oh. You can’t. You can’t request a specific teacher but you’d better hope she gets in that class. Mrs. Sweetsie is an altruistic alchemist of magical teaching genius who belches fairy dust and has celestial light streaming from her fingertips. Having Timmy in her class has been the single best experience of my life. Good luck.”
So, needless to say although I’m going to say it anyway, I was more than pleased to find out Laylee had been put in her class. And she does seem like a keeper from the 20 minutes I spent with her today… er Laylee spent with her today while I filled out paperwork in the hallway outside the door and cried my eyes out because Laylee’s growing up so fast and for the love why did I ever stop breastfeeding her. If she were still on the teat, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t make me send her off into the world.
Not that anyone’s making me. I know I could homeschool but this feels like the right decision at the moment, even if it’s tearing my heart out through my left nostril. I sat in the hall filling out forms.
How many hours per day would you like to volunteer?
What bus will Laylee be taking home from school?
How many siblings does she have?
What are some of Laylee’s personality quirks or issues?
What is your biggest dream for her this school year?
And then I lost it. My dream for her? My dream for her? I have a dream. I have many actually. I dream that she will learn to stop calling me really loudly from the backseat of the car, only to mumble in an incoherent whisper once she has my attention. I dream that she will grow to love broccoli. I dream that she will ever begin a sentence to me without using the word “MOM!” at the front of it. I dream that she will learn things that thrill her and cause HER to dream big. I dream that she will grow in self esteem this year and have good friends who help her be better. I dream that she will always know how special she is and how much I love her.
I cried as I wrote down a couple of my dreams for her, none of which have anything to do with academics or book knowledge and then quickly wiped the tears away. I didn’t want to be THAT mom, although I’m pretty sure that nearly every first time kindergarten mom is THAT mom. It’s a special sorority of puddlehood that binds us all together.
And then I overheard Laylee and Mrs. Sweetsie talking in the next room.
Mrs S: So, what does your dad do for his job?
Laylee: He does all kinds of hilarious stuff and goes to parties.
*Mrs S: He just does fun things at work all day?
Laylee: Yeah. Oh man. This one time they took his boss and shoved his face in a BOWL OF WHIP CREAM!
Mrs S: And what does your mom do for work? Does she stay home with you or go somewhere else?
Laylee: Well sometimes for work she does gardening or just watches us kids and sometimes for work she types things on the computer so people will pay her money so she can buy us stuff.
I actually think she got my job pretty dead-on, minus the Cinderella triumvirate of the mending and the sewing and the laundry, and of course the Dr. Mario and the eating of the bonbons. It’s obvious who brings home the bacon in this family. While Dan’s off doing “hilarious stuff” and partying with whipped cream, I’m slaving away at home to make a few bucks. Sad!
Here’s a video of a work party a while back where Dan’s co-workers paid their boss $50 to let them dunk him in the creamy white goodness. Dan showed it to the kids and apparently it made quite an impression, erasing Laylee’s every memory of visiting him at MegaCorp, hearing about how he writes code all day and fixes bugs. No. Whipped cream is all-encompassing now. Not a bad job if you can get it.
*I’m not sure exactly what Mrs S replied. I was too busy listening for Laylee’s next enlightening tidbit of information to be added to our permanent file. I really think all teachers should write books about all the fascinating things their young students tell them about their home lives.
In March I got the best haircut ever from a woman named Karina who my sister-in-law introduced me to in Utah. Although I’d never met her before, I instantly trusted her and she picked a new hair color for me and gave me bangs. And I loved them. And I was highly attractive. And I knew it.
And then a week or two passed and the bangs grew out and I was back in Seattle so I tried to cut them myself and then I put them up in a clip indefinitely. And then a couple of months passed and it appeared that the roots of my hair had not gotten the memo. They started to grow in this revolting dishwater blond color. Random.
So I’ve been limping along, dying my own hair all kinds of colors and stopping at random salons hoping for a good cut and being disappointed.
Then I went to visit my parents in Montana. On Saturday night I was begging my sister to take a whack at my bangs. To give her the courage to proceed, I decided to tell her all about how Karina is the only one who ever cuts my hair successfully and about how no one else could possibly measure up. She did not seem encouraged but she promised to try.
The next day was Sunday and I found myself sitting in my mom’s church congregation with all 5 of my siblings pretending to pay attention while we passed our children back and forth across the pews. And then I saw her. Several rows up in the center section of the chapel was KARINA THE HAIRDRESSER FROM UTAH. Seriously. I drove down from Seattle only to find my favorite Utah hair dresser in my parent’s church.
I leaned over to my sister Heather and whispered, “That’s HER. My hairdresser from Utah I’ve only met once and haven’t seen in 6 months. We will stop her after the meeting and ask her to tell you the secret of how she did my awesome bangs.”
So I did stop her and, dragging Heather along behind, I tore her away from the family she was visiting, re-introduced myself, introduced my sister and asked her to do an impromptu hair lesson. Although a bit taken aback at first, she was too rad not to help and started tugging at my hair and explaining to Heather how to make a proper line. Then she stopped.
“Oh, just go to the library and get a pair of scissors.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I’ll meet you back here.”
So I went to the library and asked the cute ladies for the sharpest pair of scissors they had. They went through the drawer testing each set. “What are you gonna do, stab someone?”
“No… Um… I just need to cut something very precisely.”
I whisked Karina off to the bathroom where she cut my bangs with paper scissors while the rest of my family headed off to Sunday School. Heather stayed with me and stood in the bathroom with her hands cupped under my chin to catch the hair clippings as they fell.
Either she didn’t catch them all or I sprouted a unibrow in a way-too-short period of time. Luckily I was able to brush it away and my bangs looked fab and I flitted off to my next meeting.
I think next Sunday I’ll stop by the children’s nursery and see if anyone’s willing to minister to me in the form of a mani-pedi.
I have been thinking about it for a while now and have come to the conclusion that Facebook = one of the best things ever.
This afternoon I had lunch with a friend of mine from junior high band. She lives in Canada with her husband. We haven’t spoken for 15 years. We found each other on Facebook, she happened to be coming to Seattle on vacation and voila, there I was in a gelato shop downtown with my whiny kids, telling junior high band stories.
For some reason my kids thought the stories were boring and for some reason Laylee resented being toted all over town with an ear infection. After 10 days of home-bound sickness, 3 doctor’s visits and the start of a second round of antibiotics, I decided that we just had to all become portable again. Not sure it was the wisest decision but it was so good to see my friend again and meet her awesome husband.
There are people you were sure would do great things with their lives and it’s so much fun to find out that they actually did. It’s especially fun when your 3-year-old son falls in love with your friend’s husband and refuses to let go of his hand while your normally gregarious daughter spends the whole time you’re together scowling and refusing to talk to anyone unless it’s to tell them how boring they are.
On Sunday I found myself talking on the phone with one of my best friends from high school who I hadn’t heard from in years. Where did I find out he was still alive? That’s right. Facebook.
I’ve also used it to hook up with friends from film school, 6th grade frenemies who have miraculously turned into unbeastly adult-type people who will talk to me now even if I don’t have an ESPRIT school bag, and old coworkers.
It’s like an online matchmaking service for your past, a high school reunion without the awkward moments, bad dancing or drunkishness.
What’s the most unlikely relationship you’ve resurrected on Facebook?
I have a lot of useless junk in my house and I want to have money to buy new better junk that won’t become useless for at least another 5 minutes. I enjoy sorting through my junk multiple times and then sitting around all day trying to convince strangers that it has great worth to them even though to me personally it is, alas, junk. I especially love to haggle over a fiddy-cent price difference.
So my neighbors and I decided to host a garage-sale-ic event later this summer. I’ve been piling all garbage that is not compostable or recyclable up in my garage in the hopes that someone will want to give me money for it. I’ve scoured the house from top to bottom looking for any little thing that might not be enriching my health and happiness fully or that might be slowly poisoning me or my children to death with its questionably toxic toxicity. Phthalates in plastic, lead in paint, parabens in beauty products, mysterious things that clean really well in cleaning products and must therefore be carcinogenic.
So the Magic Date Ball, the too-short shirts, the old nail polish, and the stacking rings all had to go. I was going to wait until September to do a sale with my whole street but a friend asked me to bring a few things over to bulk up her garage sale this weekend and I decided to consider it a practice run.
I learned from my previous mistakes and decided not to dress up like a millionaire prom queen for the sale. A couple of weekends ago I went garage-saleing dressed in my nicest possible mom clothes and no one had any pity or mercy on me when it came to haggling. They gave me that look that said, “If you can dress like that, then you don’t need to get a deal from me.” I tried to give them a look that said, “But I got it at Ross! On clearance! And I just want my husband to think I’m hot for the day!” But it didn’t translate well. I was like a character on the show What Not To Wear — Garage Sale Edition, where all the rules are the exact opposite of the conventional show. So this weekend I wore ripped worn-out cords, an old t-shirt, no makeup and no jewelry.
Besides the toys and household items I was selling, I pulled together all the non-natural cleaning products and personal hygiene items I’d been planning to toss, marked them 50 cents or a dollar each and tossed them in big Tupperwares, not expecting anyone to buy them.
Surprise surprise! They were my biggest sellers. Seriously. People were all over my lightly used lotions, cleaners and nail polishes. Sweet.
In fact my favorite customer was an elderly woman with an Eastern European accent, which I will exaggerate slightly in the following dialogue to give you a feel for the way she talked and for added comic effect, who had her eye on my box of cleaners. There were 15-20 bottles in the Tupperware, marked at 50 cents each. She stood there for a while inspecting each one. Pinesol, softscrub with bleach, windex, stainless steel cleaner. She looked thoughtful.
“I give you two dollars for whole box,” she offered.
“Sure,” I said, glad to avoid a trip to the dump. “Let me help you with these.” I started to pull the bottles out of their case.
“No!” she said sternly. “I want the box.”
“Oh. Well. The box doesn’t come with them.”
“WHAT?! NO BOX!? I only wanted them because uff the box. This is horrible.”
“It’s my kids’ toy box. It’s worth more than 2 dollars.”
“Well this is horrible! I don’t want it now.” She started walking away and then called out over her shoulder, “Unless you give me all uff them for $1.50.”
“Um. Sure.”
“I luff you! You are vunderful girls!”
As she continued to shop through our junk, she would periodically call out how vunderful we were… because we gave her a 50 cent discount and because she LUFFED us.
As you can tell, I am a master bargainer/negotiator and saleswoman. I worked the sale hard, although not as hard as my friend’s cute 12-year-old son who walked past people muttering under his breath about Xbox games being the best thing ever and why didn’t anyone want his Xbox games? Didn’t people play Xbox games anymore? Wasn’t it great that we had Xbox games available at this very garage sale?
Can you guess who would get the money if any of his games sold? Yep. I almost had mercy and bought one from him. Almost, but not quite. The last thing we need is one more electronic game in this house. With Dan and his Call of Duty addiction and me with my love of the Wii, it’s a shock we ever speak to each other anymore.
Last night I created a Mii that looks like a demonic butt-ugly mutant and Laylee has named her Floraburr. Whenever I think of or see her, I laugh until my guts liquefy and drain out the corners of my eyes as hysterical funny-farm-worthy tears. Aaaahhh, the joy of my own electronical hilarity.
And the blogging is slim. There’s just so much going on around here. Who can find the time to record it? Therefore I will offer you a photographic essay to explain my absence from the sphere of blogism.
The kids have started swimming lessons and they’re in a class together, although we’ve had to skip twice this week due to the near-death plague ravaging their bodies. This is probably for the best since at the last lesson Magoo’s face nearly exploded and it’s such a cute face, I’d like to keep it intact.
We’ve been cavorting with pirates.
Running all around.
Eating more than we should.
Bonding as a family.
And going on late night walks around our neighborhood in the perfect Puget Sound summer weather.
I’ll totally have more time for blogging when the school year starts and I’m teaching the youth at church, serving as the co-communications board member for the PTA, teaching at Magoo’s co-op preschool, running SeattleMomBlogs.com, and working on my other writing projects.
When we arrived at the Long Beach airport in May for our family’s Disneyland vacation, our plane had to sit on the runway for an hour and a half waiting for one of the three parking spots to open up so we could exit the vehichle. We were cramped, hot, annoyed and tired by the time we made our way down the ramp and picked up our luggage.
I called the airport shuttle we’d booked and paid for and was told that they’d given our van away to someone else because our flight status had said “ARRIVED” for the past two hours and they assumed we’d made other arrangements. No we had not. It was 11pm, we were exhausted, out $50 and stranded at the Long Beach Airport.
I’m not ashamed to say that a few choice words and a few tears escaped my face before I calmed down and we decided to head over and pay another $50 for a cab to the hotel. At that time of night in that dust speck of an airport, cabs arrived about every 10 minutes and we stood in a line waiting our turn and whining to anyone who would listen.
The senior couple ahead of us in line took pity on our small pathetic band of sticky travelers and offered us their cab. The woman was so very kind and I was so very done that I didn’t even fight her. I didn’t say, “You’re old and you were here first and you’re probably on the verge of an arthritic fit. You take the cab and we’ll wait a few more minutes for our chariot to Mickeyville.” All I could say was, “Thank you,” as we slipped into the grimy leather seats and headed off, my arms serving as human carseats. Both kids fell asleep as we sped along.
Then yesterday, a month after our trip, I walked into the kids’ bedroom and found Laylee standing upright, staring straight ahead with a strange expression on her face. Noticing me, she looked up and said, “Oh mom. I had to stop cleaning. I was just thinking about that lady who gave us her taxi at Disneyland and I was so happy because we got to drive there and so sad because she’s still there waiting and my eyes are red like I’m gonna cry but my mouth can’t stop smiling. I’m just so medium right now, I don’t know if I’m happy or sad.”
Maybe I should tell her that it’s likely the lady is not still stranded on the curb of the airport. But maybe not. It makes a better story that way. So much more medium.