Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Holidays

90s Country Music

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I love 90s country songs, specifically those with three verses, plays on words, and a twist at the end. These are the Hallmark Christmas movies of popular music, predictable, cheesy, romantic, and sometimes they make me cry, even though (a little bit) I think they’re dumb.

I’m talking about “Please Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw. I’m talking about “Love, Me” by Colin Ray. And I’m for sure talking about “One Boy, One Girl” by Colin Ray. “Congratulations… TWINS!!!”

When we moved to Texas in 1994, I was thrust into the world of country music and I pretty much embraced it. I tried on boots. I said, “Y’all.” I attended rodeos with boys who wore large hats. I bought giant earrings to compensate for my egregious lack of appropriate belt buckle.

Fun fact. When my grandpa passed away in 1994, my sister and I BEGGED our parents to let us sing a super cringe-worthy duet version of “Love, Me” at his funeral. They declined and we felt the injustice keenly. Good times. For the record – we sounded terrible and we could NOT get through a single verse without ugly-crying. It was also a cheesy country song, I don’t think my grandpa liked country music, and we wanted to cry/sing it in a somber religious service where “How Great Thou Art” would have been considered an up-tempo number.

26 years later, I’ve convinced my 11-year-old that these songs are awesome. The circle of life is real and one day I’ll write a song about it. The first verse will be about a kid drawing a life cycle in a 2nd grade science class with his female best friend. The second verse will be about him as a young man getting stuck in a busy traffic circle in the big city for the first time while on a date with his girlfriend (THE SAME GIRL FROM SCIENCE CLASS!). In the final verse, everyone will die.

Presidents Day and Jeff the Canadian

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In honor of Presidents Day on Monday we fled the country. We live a couple of hours from the Canadian border and poutine seemed like a good idea. It turned out that they also had a national holiday on Monday, Family Day, and we think families are worth celebrating.

Heading to Canada also gave us several opportunities to talk about the President on Presidents Day because, and I’m not exaggerating, every single person we spoke to for more than 30 seconds brought up President Trump.

***SPOILER ALERT***

They do not like him.

Everyone we talked to basically expressed condolences, like our uncle had died. Or, I guess, like a crazy uncle had taken over our house. One of those things. We did the best we could. And we luckily live in a place where I’m allowed to type this post on the internet and where we the people get to overthrow the government every four years without shedding any more blood than might be caused by a papercut from a mail-in ballot.

We ended up taking a detour down a side road and stumbled across this gem. It lives up to it’s name.

We stopped by the temple even though it was closed. It was gorgeous and the kids thought the angel statue on top looked extra huge because the temple was so small. #FamiliesAreForeverDay

From there we went in search of poutine. This was rough because we actually favor the poutine at the Costco food court, but they were closed for the holiday. Apparently, Costco employees have families too.

A friend recommended a little French-Canadian poutine place in downtown Vancouver so we headed there. They… seemed surprised to have customers. And not a good surprise, like your grandmother taking you to The Care Bear Movie for your 8th birthday. It was more like, “Why are there dirty socks in the cheese drawer?!”

There was a sign as we entered that said, “Please wait to be seated,” but then they seemed annoyed that we didn’t just find our own seat.

Curling was on TV. Thumbs up.

Line cook with an Oilers hat on. Thumbs way down.

Growing up in Calgary, it was important part of my culture to have an irrational and fervent dislike of Edmondton, Oilers, and anything tainted by Wayne Gretsky.

I can’t totally describe it. It was just a funny place. It looked super sketchy from the outside and then the inside was just sort of crammed with stuff. People, tables, multiple full-sized traffic lights, nude paintings, some with lift-the-flaps to see the most exciting parts, portraits of drag queens, hockey memorabilia.

The employees were hilariously crusty, like we were being punked, and I did not see one table get the food they ordered on the first try. We sat at our table eating poutine and laughing as over and over the servers apologized for the mistake in a tone that said, “I’m sorry you suck,” and then went back to the kitchen window and yelled for something to be changed.

Our order came missing Laylee’s poutine and Magoo and Wanda’s hotdogs. Throughout the meal, the server kept yelling at the line cook for the two hot dogs. (What can you expect? He was an Oilers fan.) They didn’t come and they didn’t come. All our other food was done and still no hot dogs.

“I NEED THOSE TWO HOT DOGS,” he yelled, “WITH MUSTARD AND RELISH!!”

Wanda was crestfallen. She and Magoo had asked for mustard and KETCHUP. We told her to cut her losses. Then when the food showed up, the hot dogs came with ketchup and relish. Nice.

Wanda samples relish for the first time and it is a hit!

But the poutine was decent and if it hadn’t taken 15 years to get our food and two more decades to get our check, I wouldn’t have met the super interesting people at the table next to us, a very chatty older French-Canadian man and his friends who had strong feelings about the president, were very passionate about Dan and I taking our kids to Science World, and were giving Laylee the hard sell about choosing a Canadian university.

We tried our hand at 5-pin bowling. It’s something I grew up doing but when I mentioned it to Dan and the kids, they thought I was kidding.

I wasn’t. It’s real.

And it has inexplicable rules. Each pin is worth a different amount of points. Usually you get to roll the ball 3 times but sometimes you get to roll 4 times and you never know why.

The ball is so small that I think it blows around in the wind because it never went where I expected or desired it to go.

Laylee took advantage of the confusion and emerged victorious. She is apparently a Can-natural and I would like to have her try other Canadian sports, curling, bobsled, badminton pronounced correctly.

We rounded out the trip with some sightseeing in Vancouver. It was a city like most other cities but it felt special because we needed passports to go there and because of donuts.

Wanda purchased a stuffed bear-monkey who she named Jeff The Canadian because he “looked like a Jeff” and he is obviously Canadian.

We raided the grocery store shelves for chocolate and ketchup chips and ichiban noodles. And that’s what we eat for breakfast now because we are middle school boys and our name is Magoo.

Snow Problem At All

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My kids and I are Canadians real bad and we crave the snow. We’re not Canadians enough to, you know, actually live in Canada or even to have watched a complete hockey game in the past six months. But we are Canadian enough to eat poutine, to wear toques, and to think we know how to drive in the snow.

Except for Wanda.

She is nine and her snow-driving skills are sub-par.

But we live in the Pacific Northwest, where our closeness to salty water and mountains strands us in a sea of grey almost-snow all winter long. Some years we get nary a flake. And we mourn so hard.

This year the Farmer’s Almanac predicted a wet and mild winter and we made peace with our snowlessness. But then the weather channel app started messing with us.

10% chance of frozen joy sprinkles.

30% chance.

JK rain.

And then:

100% CHANCE OF SNOW!!!

But we didn’t believe it. They’ve burned us before. When it finally fell, we were so excited.

We expected an inch or two and that was enough to make us crazy with joy.

 We got snow. We got more snow. We got freezing temperatures.

Over TWO FEET of snow fell in about a week in a place where school will be canceled if a rumor circulates that half an inch of snow sent Seattle a spam email once.

School was canceled.

We didn’t get in any driving practice for Laylee’s impending driver’s test. She didn’t feel up to practicing her parallel parking.

We played a Catan mega game and no one even cried.

We drank hot chocolate by the gallon and made cinnamon rolls and did puzzles and burned half an Ent in our fireplace.

The kids made snow men and snow poffs.

Our power went out Monday night and Dan and I got up at 4am to start the generator. And restore heat and refrigerator power. When he went to pull the cord, this happened.

We spent over an hour repairing the pull cord multiple times (it kept breaking) and trying again and again to start the generator. Then we said a prayer. And tried again. And it worked on the first pull!

So we had heat and refrigeration and Minecraft. We were hooked up! And the snow kept falling, even as the temperatures warmed up.

At one point our two-story vaulted metal roof got melty enough that it roof-alanched all of its snow in one massive 5-foot-tall hard-packed mound at the side of the house.

So, of course, they sculpted a sled ramp that ran from the side of the house all the way down and through the forest owned by our neighbor.

There are benefits that come from allowing your fence to be reclaimed by the moss and slugs of the pacific northwest. Those benefits include turning your yard into a deer highway and having easy access to sled-trespass on your neighbor’s property during Snowmageddon.

A couple other Snowpocalypse highlights were:

Dan working from home

hauling wood for the fire using the kids’ sleds in the middle of the night

watching Dan zoom out of our driveway to go help a friend and leave an 11-inch-deep tire tread in the snow

eating “snow” cones at our awesome neighbor’s house next to a driveway campfire

using my thermal cooker when the power was out

reading by the fire as a family

There will be consequences for this week. The kids have already missed five days of school and had one late start and they’re still home until more of the snow melts. Those days will have to be made up at the end of the year. This is going to wreak havoc with summer plans and youth conference schedules.

The trampoline looks unnaturally stretched and the back deck is suffering under the weight of several inches of unmelted snow.

These are just the consequences for our family and they’re pretty minor. I know other people have suffered much more being stuck and cold and injured on the roads and hungry. I feel terrible for them and we’ve prayed every night that people would be safe and we’ve offered to help where we could.

But, there is nothing our being stressed or anxious or mad will do to change the snow or keep people safe or make the school year any shorter. It will just make us miserable.

So, we choose to celebrate it. It’s been a fat party for a week and a half and we have made amazing memories. Thank you, Mother Elsa. We have LOVED the freeze!

The Birthday Bird and Other Gifts of Love

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Last week we celebrated the day Dan’s mom went to great pains to bring him into the world. His birthday’s always close to Mother’s Day so I always think of his mother. Bearing and raising kids is no joke. Raising good ones is miraculous.

He’s a good one.

And thusly do the peasants rejoice.

We rejoice with songs and cakings and trappings of all kinds. This year I gave the kids complete freedom in their gift giving. Well, with one exception. I did point Magoo in the direction of the T-Rex salt and pepper shakers and he was more than happy to ride that train to the last stop.

They were a perfect gift because Dan loves salt and pepper and he wears bowtie and… T-REX! Appropriately these came from Magoo, Magoo for whom Dan composed and performed a special dad song, entitled, “There’s a Big T-Rex Coming Down the Mountain to Eat Me,” nearly every night of his young life.

Wanda’s gifts were not song-related, unless you’re referring to bird song. She gave Dan this.

If you guessed that it’s a motion-activated singing plastic bird in mini real estate fashioned from reclaimed barn wood, you are correct. We found it at a craft fair. Bird $12. Bird WITH real estate? $15 A no-brainer, really.

But the bird + house was not quite enough for Wanda so we stepped into a local gift shop where she saw this and her eyes lit up.

“You know, how sometimes in church, you want to say something to someone on another bench but you’re not supposed to talk? This would be perfect! We should get it for him.”

And so we did. And a shiny rock from a shiny rock bin. The rock is not pictured here, as I was unable to locate it. Most likely Dan has spirited it away to his collection of very special things and it is therefore beyond my reach.

Dan wrote the current note on the sign to wave at recent dinner guests as they left, as to avoid verbal communication. Wanda thought it was for when you “aren’t supposed to.” Dan prefers to use it when he’d “rather not.”

And finally, Laylee Practicing-Is-Lame Thompson came up with the idea for this awesome gift.

He loves Laylee. He loves hearing her play. He loves jamming and talking music with her. So, she with her tenor saxophone and he with his alto, can duet the night away in dad and teenage daughter musical bliss.

Seriously though, how thoughtful is that? I could not think of a better gift idea. The girl has skills. For reals.

We’re glad he’s alive. He’s probably the best one that I know of.

And now any time he or anyone else steps on our front porch, they hear this:

Drops of Awesome – Mother’s Day Sale – Now Closed

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***This Deal is now over, but feel free to order from the sites below. Thank you for the overwhelming response!!***

Who doesn’t want to tell their mom how Awesome she is or encourage her to record her life story?

It’s time.

Have you started shopping for Mother’s Day yet?

This week, I’m slimming down my personal author stash by offering my books at a discount for the holiday. You can get Drops of Awesome, 523 Ways to Be Awesome, or Bucket of Awesome for $10 each or the set of three for $25. I’m happy to sign them for you. Local delivery in the Snoqualmie Valley is free. This is mainly for my local friends and readers. However, if anyone wants them shipped within the US, I’ll just charge you for media mail shipping. I’ll have them at this price until my stock gets low. Let me know what you’d like and I’ll give you a shipping quote.

Of course, all titles are available still on Amazon and Familius. Familius has great discounts for bulk orders if you’re doing a Drops of Awesome event with your group.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. This means I may receive a small commission if you choose to purchase something from a link I post. Don’t worry, it costs you nothing. Thank you for supporting my website!

A Stranger Things Birthday Party for Laylee – BARB IS ALIVE!!

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A couple of weeks ago my friend’s husband came to pick my kids up for church youth night. He is also my friend but this story feels more dramatic if I refer to him as “my friend’s husband.” While he was waiting for them to get ready, he asked me a question.

“Does this Saturday work for Laylee’s birthday party or would you rather do it next week?”

I had no response to this.

A. I’ve never had one of my friends’ husbands approach me about the timing of my teenage daughter’s birthday party.

B. I had momentarily forgotten that she had a birthday.

“I mean,” he continued, “We’ll want to have it fairly close to her actual birthday. We could do it at my house, but I’d rather do it at yours.”

What.

This only made it worse. I mean, he’s a good friend, but. What?

It turns out that, as he was driving the jazz band carpool, he had been talking to Laylee about the “locked room” party craze. He’s super creative  and wanted to plan an elaborate puzzle like that. And so they hatched a plot. Mike would spend hours creating a locked room/puzzle birthday party for Laylee and her friends, one of whom was his daughter.

It was just that no one had told me about it. So. The confused face.

Once I was up to speed, we got to work. Mike did all the mad genius stuff and I set the mood.

The mood?

Retro 1980s Horror Show That Half of Laylee’s Friends Aren’t Allowed to Watch Because it’s Practically too Scary for Me. Perfect. Here’s how it went down.

The girls arrived at our 80s abode and we fed them dinner. Eggos. 80s dance music was playing.

As they were finishing dinner, I knocked at the front door, dressed as Joyce Byers. This was convenient because I just recycled my Halloween costume.

Joyce was crying as usual and told them to come out on the front porch. It was an EMERGENCY! You see, she believed that Barb was ALIIIIIIIIIVE!

While we were out on the porch, Dan and Mike threw grey thrift store sheets over everything to make it Upside-Downy and then dimmed the lights and flipped on some blue ones.

Joyce told the girls they had to go into the Upside Down and save Barb.

Back inside, Chief Hopper awaited to tell them how the puzzle worked. Everything they needed to unlock the secret door under the stairs and save Barb was on one specific book shelf and table. Then he gave them a walkie talkie and told them to contact him if they needed assistance.

The way Mike set up the puzzle, there were three numbers they needed to find that corresponded with three stickers next to a padlock.

The first riddle involved them sorting books by height. Each book had a letter on it. When sorted properly, the letters spelled Tolkien. When they looked in the Lord of the Rings books, they found a clue to another detailed puzzle. Once solved, that puzzle gave them the quote “rings for mortal men.” There are 9 rings for mortal men in LOTR, so the number was nine.

The second riddle involved an unfolded cootie catcher. Remember those little paper folded fortune tellers from when we were kids? When they folded it and held the points together, it contained a musical staff with a line of music. When they played the song on the piano, it was the theme from Star Wars.

In the Star Wars VHS tape on the shelf was an oddly cut out piece of paper. There was another piece of paper with similar markings on the table. They had to hold up the cutout paper a foot above the table paper with a flashlight shining through it.

The combination of the projected light from the first paper and the symbols on the second paper spelled out the word “quinze”, which means 15 in Portuguese. Good thing there was an English/Portuguese dictionary on the table. The second number was 15.

For the third and final clue, there was an 80s Troll puzzle half-assembled on the table. They had to put it together, squish it between two cookie sheets, flip it over, and read the message on the back. The message contained 4 quotes they recognized from Harry Potter books. Now, I know Harry Potter is not 80s appropriate, but we needed to pick books the girls would all be familiar with and time is irrelevant in the Upside Down.

They found the correct books and in their pages were the pieces to a brightly colored Sudoku puzzle. The colors matched the colors of M&Ms in a jar on the shelf. They had to solve the Sudoku puzzle, count the number of M&Ms and then do a math problem with those numbers, giving them the final number for the code.

They unlocked the door.

And found this VHS video from Barb inside.

She was ALIVE!!! And she’d left them some rad treats. Scrunchies, Coke glasses, hot pink nail polish, and makeup bags with Nerds inside.

Here is a picture of the girls watching Barb’s message. I love the older kids’ delight contrasted with Wanda’s horror. Eaten by monsters? Gross.

And I let them eat cake.

And monsters ate no one.

Happy Valentims

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After child one and child two comes child three. In some ways child three is spoiled because she has two parents AND two older siblings. In other ways, she is not spoiled because people forget that Valentine’s Day is still a thing in first grade.

Last night I had an “Oh CRAP!” moment when I remembered that, “Oh, she probably wants to hand out Valentines at her class party tomorrow.” It’s not like I’d thought of nothing. Laylee and Magoo had been making chocolate lollipops to sell to earn money for a school trip. And whenever one looked slightly weird, we’d save it for Wanda to hand out to her friends.

The plan was to give them each one of the bargain basement lollipops… attached to a Valentine’s card. I hadn’t planned to be super creative, or even Pinteresty. I had planned to buy some NKOTB or Smurf cards at the grocery store, as I was raised to do, and call it good. But I forgot.

So, I came to Wanda. “Oh man. I totally forgot about Valentine’s cards for your class.”

“Oh. It’s fine. I made these!”

She proceeded to pull out 25 lined 3×5 notecards on which she had written the names of every student in her class. She was in the process of writing a note to each one, most of which said, “You are an awsome freind. Happy valentims day. Love, Wanda.”

And she was  fiercely proud of her Valentines.

“Do you want to look at the list your teacher sent home with the names of kids in your class?” I asked.

“Mom!” she looked affronted, “I’ve been in the same class with these kids for MONTHS! I know their names.”

“Just in case you forget someone?”

“MOM!”

“Well maybe look at it to make sure you spelled all their names correctly.”

“MOM! I’ve been looking at their names for MONTHS!”

“Okay.”

Now, to be honest, some of the name spellings on her cards look pretty funky. I didn’t check them against the list but it is totally possible that some of the parents just chose to spell their kids names funny. If you do this, I want to know why. Seriously, answers are in order. For her entire life, your kid will have to say, “No. I spell Lucy L-O-O-X-I-E.” What is the net positive there?

I asked Wanda, “Do you want me to print some Valentiney things off the internet so you can glue them onto the backs of the cards?”

She did. But they couldn’t say anything about kissing. RE: Gross.

And she worked on them all night, with the help of her siblings during the assembly phase, in what Dan referred to as a “Valentims Sweatshop.”

And they’re kind of perfect.

If those kids ever need to cram for a test about how awsome of a freind they are, they are totally set with flash cards.

Happy Groundhog Day

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It is. The Day of the Groundhog. And our favorite furry prognosticator has forseen a continuation of winter. Some mourn. I must confess I’d like another flake or two of snow.

But friends are posting hateful #notmygroundhog posts on social media. It is their right to protest and my right to pray for snow.

Last weekend, in anticipation of today’s festivities, and actually AS today’s festivities a couple of days early, we watched Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. It’s a classic and I love it and, minus one scene, it’s fairly family friendly.

And it makes me want to make the most of every day I have. And love people. And find joy in small things. And listen to Sonny and Cher.

So, last night I purchased the MP3 of “I Got You Babe” and edited it to start at the same place where it starts on the alarm clock on the movie. I set it as my phone alarm for this morning, a feat for which I didn’t get nearly enough hilarity points from tired Dan.

Then I took the phone into Laylee and Magoo’s rooms and played the song to wake them up for middle school at 6:15am. Laylee gave me a small smile. Magoo begged me to turn it off. It was super festive. And will be repeated yearly until such time as said offspring remove themselves from my home.

Enjoy your extra six weeks of winter. #zacklymygroundhog

Halloween and Bible Videos

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This post was originally written a couple of days after Halloween 2016 but I guess I was too tired to post it because I never did. I just found it on my hard drive so I thought I might as well “throw it up” on the blog. No pun intended…

Wanda slept on Dan’s face Tuesday night.

He did not like it.

She had stayed home from school with a cough on Monday, one of those annoying coughs that probably sounds worse than it is. And it sounds plenty worse. So you keep your kid home so people won’t hate you and your stupid offspring.

Generally, and specifically actually, we have a rule that you can’t go out and do activities in the evening if you stayed home sick during the day. Too sick to go to school? Too sick to go to moonlight pony camp. But, being Halloween, I broke down and told her she could trick-or-treat as long as she didn’t cough on anyone.

The good thing about letting her trick-or-treat when she was sick was that she tired out before too long and we got to call it a night, not because I hate fun and love bedtime, but because she was done. I had to respect her wishes.

The bad thing about letting her trick-or-treat when she was sick was that she stocked up on candy. Candy suppresses your immune system. Candy, in overabundance, makes you sick to your stomach. And let’s be honest. We might as well rename it, “Overabundanceween,” because it’s a day dedicated to too much. Also, excessive sugar can spike anxiety.

We didn’t let her eat any on Halloween night and the next day she seemed well enough to go to school. That afternoon, she made up for lost time, consuming every sugary chocolate morsel she could shove into her candy hatch. Her capacity is high.

By dinner time, she was all filled up. By bedtime, she was vibrating. Aaaand… she didn’t “feel so well.”

I laid with her in her bed. I laid with her in my bed. I sat next to the toilet with her while she said repeatedly for an hour, “I’m gonna do it. I know I’m gonna do it! It’s HAPPENING!!”

It didn’t happen.

And eventually I sedated her with bible videos.

We laid in my bed with the iPad and some little kids explaining baptism. Good times. As each video ended, she’d say, “I think I’m gonna barf!” and I’d hit play on the next one.

Dan joined us in bed, and Wanda, lulled into submission by the flickering screen of doctrine and the midnight hour eventually fell asleep. On his face.

Maybe next year we’ll just skip the trick-or-treating and go straight to the bible videos. I bet that would go over well.

Save Lunch Time and More – Great Deals from Familius

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I’m not sure how much longer the mega sale is going to be running at Familius. 50-70% of some of their bestselling titles. For example, they’re selling both of my books for cheaper than I can buy them with my author wholesale discount ($6 each!).

There are also a ton of other great books, fun, quirky, useful, interesting, well-designed books that would make great Christmas gifts.

I have no affiliate link with Familius. Hey, wait, why don’t I have an affiliate link with Familius? Not that it would do me much good with this sale that’s going on because they’re practically giving the books away for free.

Here are a few I purchased that I recommend:

Unplug and Play – 50 Original Group Games that Don’t Need Charging ($8) – With family coming in for the holiday this is a great resource for fun, original activities to do with all kinds of groups.

Mix and Match Lunchbox ($12) – This is probably my favorite. It’s divided up into cards that you can mix and match, a protein, a whole grain, and a fruit/veggie course for thousands of creative lunch combinations.

Shakespeare for Kids boxed set ($8) – My kids had a great time at the Shakespeare Festival last summer and this is an awesome way to help them learn the storylines of some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.

The Stevia Solution Cookbook ($5) – We are so sugar addicted. I love this moderate approach to replacing some of the sugar in your diet with a natural alternative. To be honest, I’m just digging in and haven’t tried the recipes yet, but I like what I’ve seen so far.

Happy shopping!