Dreaming and Self-Reflection: Boys in Dresses

I have a few firmly-held fashion beliefs, which I refuse to relinquish even when the fashion tides have turned against me. For example, I believe that madras never goes out of style. Case in point:



Just ignore that grimace -- Casey was thrilled to be at church in madras. I bought his father a fine looking pair of madras shorts for his birthday in August and he has yet to wear them. He says he's waiting for the perfect opportunity (what finer opportunity than church?).


I also believe that men look great in pink. Which is why Pink Shirt Friday at our firm is such a huge success:






But last among my firmly held fashion beliefs is that little boys look fabulously adorable in one piece jumpers, especially one piece jumpers from Bailey Boys that have cute little embroidery items on them:

Work it, Mace! Does it get any cuter than that? No. It does not. Not ever. Not any cuter at all. Ever.

Mace's father disagrees with me and does his best to sabotage my efforts to dress my wee one in adorable clothes. The picture above was taken of Mace on Halloween weekend, last week. Joe was playing the drums at church last weekend, so he had to be at church early and I dressed Mace. This weekend, however, Joe was in charge of dressing Mace because I had to be at church early. I laid out the clothes for Mace to wear, including the correct socks, and instructed Joe to make sure he found Mace's white tennis shoes because those were the only appropriate shoes for him to wear. I had laid out another adorable Bailey Boys jumper with navy and white checks and three trees on the front. Totally cute. Nothing girlie about it.

Now in case you are wondering why I went all "Kate" on Joe (Mom -- that's a reference to Kate on "Jon & Kate Plus 8," a show on TLC; Kate's a control freak) in telling him exactly what shoes to put on Mace as if he weren't a grown man and couldn't pick decent shoes out himself, I must tell you that once or twice before, my children have shown up for church in ill-fitting, mismatched clothes when Joe has been responsible for dressing them. I'm not saying he is incapable of dressing the children appropriately, I'm saying he does it on purpose, just so we're clear -- it's the difference between bumbling ineptitude (which Joe has none of) and incredibly crafty passive aggressiveism (which Joe may be guilty of from time to time).

So as I am hanging around before the first service, I see Joe and the kids walking toward me and of course I'm going through the checklist in my head, and I'm nervous. Casey looks good, he's got the jeans on that I laid out, the shirt I laid out, and really, the underwear is irrelevant unless his pants fall down and then I can always say he dressed himself. Mace looks okay -- he's got the cute Bailey Boys jumper on and the navy henley underneath; he's got the navy socks on and he's got shoes on, but they are not the tennis shoes I laid out for him. Mace is wearing water sandals with pictures of shells and fish -- with his navy socks. And his jumper wasn't actually snapped all the way up, so he was kind of flapping in the breeze. Even if I had a picture of this I would not post it. It's too humiliating.

When I asked Joe why he didn't put Mace in the white tennis shoes I had specifically requested he find, Joe said (listen very very carefully and you might detect the craftiness): "I didn't have time to look for the shoes because I was too busy trying to get Mace into his dress." Did you hear it? Did you?

But that is not the end of this story.

Many years ago, I had to write a thesis for my master's degree at Boise State, so I chose my favorite author and came up with a topic. The title of my thesis was Dreaming and Self-Reflection: a Jungian Analysis of Gail Godwin's A Southern Family and Father Melancholy's Daughter. For two years I studied Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and learned lots of dream theory so that I could apply it to the dreams of the characters in Gail Godwin's novels. If you missed reading it (don't know how, it was on Oprah's book list), my parents might have a copy and you can borrow it from them. I learned things like: any time you dream you are wandering around in a house, you are really either delving deeper into your subconcious (if you're walking down stairs into a basement) or you are dealing with your superficial life (if you're climbing up into an attic).

Last night, Sunday night, the night following the humiliating child-wearing-flapping-jumper-with-water-shoes incident, I dreamed that I dressed Casey, my oldest, in an actual dress. A real dress -- a strappy little number with smocking on the front in the sweetest shade of blue. No one said anything to me, or pointed out, for example, that the child is 5 and well, a boy. So in my dream, Casey and I left the house and once we were outside I realized that maybe he shouldn't be in a dress and I matter-of-factly changed his clothes into something more appropriate. And then I realized we were in the middle of a nuclear war and I was integral in ensuring the safety of all mankind and suddenly my dream became a video game.

My interpretation of that dream: if my husband dares to tell me again that I have put a "dress" on his son, he will be facing all-out war, of the nuclear variety.

Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever

We hosted a party at our house last night for the Church at the Bay Worship Arts and Tech Team. I don't have any pictures of the party itself because I was too busy yakking, and then every 15 minutes I would realize I hadn't seen Mace in 15 minutes so I would jump up and wander through the house and around the porch until I found him --usually being watched by some other very nice mommy who was probably wondering why I was letting my 19 month old wander about in a crowd unsupervised (in my defense, they were all church people and we had baby gates keeping all the children from wandering down the porch steps to the water and up the stairs to the bedrooms -- just in case you were thinking of calling DCF).

Anyway, some of you had heard me talk about the Pioneer Woman blog. It's listed over there to the right with my favorite blogs. The Pioneer Woman posts recipes in one section of her blog and a while back she posted the "Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever." It's very simple to make but it's real. You know -- there's no box mix involved or can of icing -- it's just you, cocoa, butter, sugar, flour and vanilla -- and don't forget the powdered sugar.

So yesterday for the party, my friend Dez and I made the Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever. Dez is a little bit "measuring challenged," shall we say, but we muddled through and then we called in the Zippidee Doo Dah Cleaning Crew for the clean up:

Mace is either about to fall over in a sugar seizure or is in such rapture he can't bear to open his eyes all the way.

Mace chased his chocolate with some bug spray, which you would think would help him out today when he got stung by bees, but apparently drinking bug spray does not have the same bug-repelling effect as spraying it on you does (do not call DCF -- I don't let my kids drink bug spray).

I was going to show you a picture of what the Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever looks like, but by the time I got the camera out, this was what was left:

I told you it was good. And I ate that little sliver up there in the left hand corner last night before I went to bed, so don't even ask.

Joe fixed the Scooter

So I have to type really really quiet because Joe is already snoring beside me and I don't want to wake him up until I'm ready to go to sleep myself; which is when I will wiggle the bed just enough to wake him a little, but not enough for him to sit straight up and yell, "WHAT?" But it's really best that he's asleep because if he weren't, he might prevent me from posting the following pictures:



Hey -- who's that coming down the driveway on that flashy scooter that we ended up with because it was unfixable and would keep Grandpa "distracted" from bugging us all to buy him a scooter because gas was soooo expensive that he was spending an extra 80 cents whenever he drove the mile and a half to Dennys? Is that Joe? Did he get that scooter running? Where's he been? To the mall? To the scooter store to get some flashy scooter accessories?




Wow -- that thing's running like a dream -- listen to it purr. Wonder where he's been? Hey Mace, come see what your daddy did -- he got that scooter running. Mace? Mace? Casey -- have you seen Mace?

No. That's not right -- that is not my 19 month old on a scooter, out with his daddy for a little ride. My husband would never do such a thing. Surely that is some other child he picked up at Northern Tool. He knows I would have a conniption fit if he came scooting in the driveway with my son riding on the scooter.




Someone is going to call DCF on us one of these days and I will have absolutely no defense.

Pink Shirt Friday

Heeey -- it's pink shirt Friday at TBPLS! You can tell who really buys into the unwritten lawyer dress code the most (dress better than your client so they won't mind paying you lots of money) and who buys into it the least (but I'm a bankruptcy lawyer). Brian, on the left, is actually dressed down. I, on the other hand, am dressed up. But most important, we are all wearing pink shirts -- look how happy we are in our pink shirts. Happy happy lawyers.
(Don't be too hard on Brian -- every time a FedEx, UPS or DHL guy comes into the office with a package, no matter how small, Brian asks, "Is that my BowFlex?")

Here's the view from our master bathroom toilet. That's an osprey in that dead tree. Some mornings you can sit on the toilet and watch him eat a fish for breakfast up in that tree.

I woke up this morning to find that aliens had visited our backyard and had left this message encrypted in the grass. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with Obama being the anti-Christ, or maybe it's saying that Oprah is the anti-Christ. Aliens would be much more effective communicators if they would just spell it out. Regardless, I'm keeping the windows closed tonight.

Indian Names

I grew up going to a girls' camp every summer in the mountains of North Carolina. All of our villages had indian names: Chippewa, Chickasaw, Cheyenne, you get the idea. Our "brother camp" over on the other side of the interstate was much more into the indian thing (and still is). They didn't have girlie villages, they had tribes. And they didn't have a sissy "Council of Progress" every week, they had "Council Ring" where the great Wokonda (Wukunda? Wakunda? you know who I mean -- the big chief in the sky) brought fire down and started the huge fire with no human assistance. And when you reached a particular age and level at Council Ring, you could be tapped out for an all-night test, and if you passed, you became a Little Chief. And once you became a Little Chief, you got an indian name.

As a girl, the only way you could get an indian name was to be on staff at boys' camp. The hard thing about indian names at camp is that they usually revealed what the rest of the staff (or at least the select few who get to come up with the names) thought about you. They could basically come up with an animal and a charachter trait and peg you with a label that, so long as you worked at that camp, would haunt you forever. Some people got great names: Playful Possum, Curly Catfish, Affable Azinger, Hiccuping Hyena.

When I was in college, I worked at a similar camp for boys for three or four summers, and I got an indian name: Frolicking Flamingo. I was "frolicking" because my first summer at camp, I dated at least four different staffers in the 9 weeks we were there (can you blame me? 35 guys to 5 girls really cuts down on the competition for a girl with a hook nose!). I was "flamingo" because, well, I had that hook nose (fixed a year later, thanks to the marvel of rhinoplasty). So the naming committee pretty much saw me as a flirt with a big nose. Hmm.

So when I was naming this Blog, I had to pick a name and it may come as no surprise to you that all the ones I wanted were taken: Note to Self, Hope Springs Eternal, Derfwad Manor (okay I knew that one was taken, but it's a good name) . . . you know, names that make me seem smart, witty, or like someone who has a mildly sarcastic, yet positive outlook on life. Once I ran out of those names, I started thinking about how other people would describe me and the only name that popped into my mind at that point was a name I don't think describes me at all, at least anymore -- but there are days in my life as an adult when I wish I was still a 19 year old "Frolicking Flamingo." Please, most days I wish I had half a frolick left in me -- seems like I need to recapture a sense of frolick. That, and it's a fun word: frolick frolick frolick. Not used much in everyday speech. We should all try to use it tomorrow at work.

Let the frolicking begin.