Hurricane Tankersley

It all started out innocently.  Jack had a very small Birthday party and the children brought him lovely gifts.  I told him if he wanted to continue to have Birthday parties, he should write thank you notes to said children.

I have some blank notecards that lend themselves to making a picture on the front and writing a note on the inside.  Jack drew a couple of rainbows and some thank yous to his friends.  Then I ran out of notecards.  I folded up a piece of paper from my printer into a card shape and handed it to him.

It all started out very innocently.

Then, he asked if he could color the back as well.  Sure!

Some more sun, an airplane, it’s cool.

Then he writes his “thank you” on the inside of the card.

When I questioned him, he said this was him saying “yes”, and his friend (to whom he is writing the thank you note to) is saying “no”.  They are “arguing”.

Lovely.

I tell him that probably isn’t the nicest thing to depict in a thank you card.  Never fear.  He’s going to right that wrong.

Because the argument ended with a “Jackson, you’re right”.

I couldn’t even make this stuff up.

28.

I have 28 Christmas mugs.

How embarrassing.

I now have 25 Christmas mugs.  Thanks for playing!  AND I’m sending you something special to go with your new mugs, Stacey, Tracey, and Lori.  But that’s just because I love you.

Lori, am I that predictable?!  You were only one off!

So, as you know, I hauled TEN crates from my attic and decorated for Christmas on Saturday.  I had to totally revamp my plates / cups situation to accomodate my Christmas Ware.  As I maniacally cleaned my appliances that sit on open shelves (what is WRONG with me?!) I came to my beautiful pink Kitchen Aid Food Processor that did not make the move from Florida.  When I unpacked the food processor, everything looked fine, but I tried and tried it.  It never would turn on.  I didn’t have the heart to throw it away.  It’s been sitting on my shelf so I could long for its better days for over a year now.  I just couldn’t give up on it.  I decided to plug it in, you know, just to see.  My food processor turned on.

My food processor totally came back to life.

Don’t even think that I didn’t whip up some hummus within 20 minutes!

Best hummus ever.

I drug the Christmas gear out of the attic today.  And put it all up.  It’s November 13th.  Shameful, it is.

What is more shameful is the number of Christmas coffee mugs I own.  I had to store all of our regular mugs.  And actually, well, all of our glasses to fit the Christmas mugs.  I don’t even collect Christmas mugs.  I’m not sure how this happened except we’ve probably drank WAY too much gluhwein at one too many Christmas markets and NOT returned the mugs (don’t worry, that’s not stealing… you pay a deposit).

Soooooo, if you can guess how many I own, I’ll SEND YOU ONE!  I might send you one if you just take a guess and I like you.  Or if you don’t guess at all.  Guess what you’re getting for Christmas this year???!!!!

I really do want this bike more that words can say…. AND if I link to the Madsen site, I might win one.  Do me a solid and click on it!  Alot.  How cute would I look on this bike?  With the hoodlums in the back?

I wish I made more time to write, I really do.  Because there is alway something really wierd going on.  Rather than regale you with how much poop I had to clean up today because my daughter decided that pooping is rather NOT for potties, I’ll show you what is sitting in front of my house.

I came home the other day and I couldn’t get to my house because my street was blocked off and a carousel was being built in, well, basically my front yard.  Today food booths are popping up, and I can hear the oompa loompa music being tested.  There is a big kid’s festival tomorrow.  I guess these are the advantages, or downfalls of living directly in the middle of town.  Advantages being, well, it’s kinda fun to have a carnival in your front yard.  Disadvantages are I HAVE to now take my kids and then they’ll get a taste of 2 Euro a pop carnival rides and beg to go on said rides all day.  All day, the rides will torment them, and me.  Ahhhh, maybe I’m being pessimistic.  It’ll probably be awesome.

We’ve lived in our house in Otterberg for a while now, and we have a small garden area that frankly has looked pitiful since we moved here.  It has needed some TLC that brown-thumb here probably won’t be able to provide.  It’s so sad, I really love beautiful things and beautiful gardens, but I don’t seem to have the skills associated with having said things.

Imagine my surprise when my garden magically appeared this month.

I have no idea where they came from, but thank you!

We went to Disneyland Paris this weekend.

I had the great idea to take a trip that was fun for the kids before Randy leaves for a couple of months.  Randy also booked our trip by telling Disney we were French.  Um, can you say 40% cheaper?

We stayed at the “New York Hotel”.  It was walking distance from the parks which was awesome.  We were able to enjoy a couple of decent meals this way… of peanut butter avec jelly a la Mommy.   The view from our room was nice.  It was also right on top of the ice skating rink.  Yes, I said ice skating rink.  That sounds cool, right?  No!  That’s weird in April.

So, we did the Disney thing.  We fought the crowds and we waited.

and waited

and waited

We also had a ton of fun.

at least Randy and I had fun?

Just joking.  Everyone had a great time even if they dislike taking pictures.  Lula LOVES rides.

I was hesitant going in.  In graduate school, or at least in my graduate school, we really didn’t have textbooks, but rather large volumes of “case studies”.  Case studies are involved write ups of real life companies in real life scenarios.  They’ll give you more information than you could possibly use and as a student, you decipher what went wrong, or went went right, or where to go in the future.  There are a host of places you could go with a case study and in a multitude of disciplines.  Well, Eurodisney was such a disastrous example of “what NOT to do” in business that I am quite positive I have read every case study ever written on it.  Seriously.  So, it was fun to see if the problems had been fixed first hand.  I already knew the name had changed to Disneyland Paris!

If you are now waiting for my opinion… well, it ISN’T Disney World, that’s for sure.  I mean, how could it be?  It’s in FRANCE!  Have you been to France?!  I was pleased to see Disneyland Paris wasn’t TOO clean.  There were more than acceptable numbers of smokers everywhere and plenty of cigarette butts on the ground.  We even were greeted with room service plates and cups outside of our room and they stayed for TWO days.  The staff were acceptably disgruntled, but not full-out rude.  I mean, Disney World is really a weird place when it comes to perfection and cleanliness and HAPPY CAST MEMBERS!!!!  Even by American standards.  These things have no place 20 minutes from Paris.  Really.  We really loved the shows at Walt Disney Studios, but it was just painful to watch these French people try to put on the wildly enthusiastic song and dance routine.  Randy and I kept on catching each others’ eyes as we had to look away.

In the end, here’s what got me.  The food.  The food was so incredibly bad.  Expensive I can handle, but bad food in France is just unacceptable.  It was all really, really, really bad.

We were so excited they had special menus for those with allergies.  Here is what they brought my poor five-year-old to eat for dinner:

The best part was it all came out with the plastic still on top.  All you had to do was peel and enjoy!  I felt terrible for Jack.  What kind of parents feed this to their kids at Disney?!  I think it is pureed carrots, pureed meat, pureed apples and something else we weren’t sure about?

Thank goodness I brought peanut butter and jelly and fruit, but the provisions didn’t last in this hostile environment.  This morning we had one more day in the parks.  Randy and I didn’t even need to discuss it.  We just packed up and left for greener pastures without lines.  We felt we had really done all we came to do.  We decided en route to explore around the Champagne region.  We picked an exit and…..

We didn’t know what we would find open on a Sunday, but we drifted onto the “Champagne Road” and it was really beautiful.  We stopped in a tiny village and were looking around when I see Randy talking to some lady at her door.  Then he’s gone.  After a while I look in the doorway I saw him at and he’s sitting in this lady’s living room drinking Champagne.  He motions me in and the lady pours me a glass and there is another couple inside with their baby.  They are from Paris.  The champagne is delicious, but the kids are getting rowdy and Randy goes outside with the kids so they don’t destroy the place.  In the meantime, I’m alone in this house now and I DON’T SPEAK FRENCH by the way.  I can say the following:  bibliothèque, discothèque, pamplemousse, croissant, assiette de frites, jus d’orange, poulet rôti, un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, Oui, Merci, and Merci beaucoup!  Oh, and Champagne.

These words don’t get you so far in conversation.

I pretended to be really in love with the baby while I waited for Randy to come back and rescue me.  Randy came back and asked where a bank machine was (we had no money… went ahead and announced THAT to the lady pouring me a second glass of Champagne, heh heh).  We found out there was no money machine in town, we’d have to go to the next village.  Randy said he’d be back shortly.  OH NO!!!! I’ll go WITH you!  I didn’t even know why I was sitting in some lady’s living room drinking champagne yet!  So, we leave and I find out he had just peeked in because there was a sticker on her door that said seller of Champagnes somehow and she invited him in and asked if he’d like to try some.  He said, sure!

So, we set off in search of money and a decent lunch.  We found both.  And we went back to that lady’s house after lunch and bought some of her Champagne.  She was doing laundry and her husband was watching the game.  It was really really weird and really really funny.  PRETTY sure Smej-Vely Champagne is only found in a few places, including our wine cellar, but it’s delicious!

You know that feeling you get when your personal Earth shifts?  Maybe you were just broken up with or found out about an infidelity or someone close to you dies.  You look around and people are still driving their cars and going to work and laughing and basically going about their lives.  The world looks really weird from broken eyes.  The scene doesn’t line up with your reality.

We knew Ed, Randy’s Stepfather, wasn’t doing well.  In the late Fall, he was diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis after a year of constant coughing and very quickly went downhill.  We got a call last month that Ed was in the hospital.  He was struggling to breathe and there was nothing the Doctors could do except breathe for him.  He made the informed decision to go on a ventilator for five days.  Enough time for us all to come home.

We bought tickets around midnight and left for Texas at 4:30 am the next morning.  We spent the next few days in the hospital.  We sat in Ed’s room and we talked to him though he couldn’t answer back with words, and we visited with each other.  And when I say “we” I mean to say there were enough family and friends in and out that we had to actually organize the chaos.

The staff at Brooks Army Medical Center never said a word about how many people we had in their ICU and they were kind and loving and they prayed with us, and every one of our nurses from that week cried when he died and so did Ed’s Doctor when he came in to confirm that Ed had indeed passed.  Most of the staff at the hospital never knew Ed when he could speak.  They just listened to us all week and they saw the constant stream of visitors and they felt the love, and they couldn’t help but love him (and us) too.

That’s the funny thing that I’ve been contemplating these past few weeks.  It didn’t happen the way I thought it might.

I was so weepy when I knew Ed would not be with us forever, when he got his diagnosis and went into the hospital for the first time.  But when we got to San Antonio, when it was time to be sad, it felt different (to me).  I know there are a lot of reasons why this happened, mainly there were probably a thousand prayers of comfort upon his family.  Ed knew where he was going, he was happy to be rid of his “earth suit”, and I think that regardless of any past problems, everyone knew he loved them.

One day Bev, Randy’s Mom, stopped what she was doing and looked at me with horror, like she had forgotten her purse in a restaurant.  ”You know how much Ed loves you, don’t you???”.  Of course I did.  And I didn’t assume it.  He told me.  Never held back a compliment, and when he told you, you knew he meant it.

Here’s what’s awesome.  Ed wasn’t perfect.  He just wasn’t.  He was as imperfect as any of us.  But he loved a lot of people wholeheartedly, and in return he was dearly loved back.  There were hundreds and hundreds of people at the funeral.

The world did actually stop that week.  At least through my own eyes.  And cried along with us.

And I’ve been pondering that question.  Thinking, who do I matter to?  Who loves me?  What have I done?  Will I be remembered?  Because times like these make you wonder.

And now I’m really thinking, who do I love?  Who do I serve?  I wonder to myself if I can freely give love like that, and why I don’t?  Because I really like to receive it.

I think of Ed and of all of the people I know who will probably fill a stadium at their death.  What do they have in common?  They serve others, and they love others unabashedly.  Others’ accomplishments and happiness bring them only joy, never jealously, and others’ sorrows are their own.

I’m working on living that kind of life.

I will miss your tacos, your backup turkeys, your 3-meat-course dinners, your bible and large stack of devotionals never beyond arm’s reach, your smile that showed joy in your heart, your constant praise of my Mothering skills, and your love of our children.  Jack’s wondering if you are watching some really awesome TV shows in Heaven?