Why?

The weekend traveling with three boys could have been a nightmare, but it went surprisingly well. There was a lot of sleeping on the plane, which is always a shocking development, and everyone was relatively low-key. But let’s not discuss the fact that Southwest chewed up our car seat and spit it out and let’s definitely not discuss the hateful man who “helped” us deal with the problem. No, let’s not(!).

On the way home we were all exhausted, having spent so much time grieving our family’s loss and also reconnecting with distant loved ones. One of the most tiring aspects of the weekend was attempting to explain death and loss to our boys. How do you tell them where, exactly, the deceased went off to? We say heaven, but where is that? My almost 5 year old suggested that the way to heaven was through the “chute” where they put Greatma’s casket into the mausoleum wall. It was a fun and daunting task to explain that it was only her body, and that her spirit is somewhere else. His eyes were wide as he tried to wrap his brain around that little nugget.

Another interesting question he asked was “how does someone die?”. It seemed to have a simple answer at first, people die from sickness, old age, accidents. But how do they die from those things? Well, their heart is old and stops working. But what makes it stop? Or rather, who?

The more we thought about it, we realized that just as much as life is a miracle, so is death. The thing that triggers a heart to stop is purely supernatural. Even if you see a heart monitor showing a heartbeat fluttering faster and faster, there’s still no explanation as to why it suddenly stops. There’s also no explanation when it starts back up again. Sure, you can talk about electrical currents, but there’s still the why to deal with.

In the end, we simply said that God decides when its our time to go, and that answer will have to do for now. The true answer is one of those unknowns that won’t be known until we can ask God some day. Along with, do aliens exist?, what’s the point of thunder?, who really killed JFK? and what’s the deal with giant squid?. Seriously, giant squid?

Wordless Wednesday: Courage

Throwback Thursday: Remembering

Thanks A Bunch!

I’m sure you’ve received one of these. A note left on your car, on your door, even inside your own home (if you’ve ever lived with roommates), asking you oh so politely to stop doing what the writer has decided is unacceptable(!!). It could be those letters in the office kitchen saying your “mama don’t live here”, or in my case a neighbor leaving a note on my sister’s car (which I was borrowing one day) that “NO VISITORS are allowed to park in the driveway!!! You know the rules and we will be forced to call the landlord if “this” does not stop!!!” (said letter was the first ever received, and there had been no prior complaints, or violations, for that matter).

No matter how rude and petty these passive aggressive letters get, they often end with “thanks a bunch!” or a smiley face or a heart. They often contain erroneous use of capital letters and inappropriate use of quotations. The really crazy ones even have underlining and red font. These harmless little notes leave me wanting to scream, laugh, cry, puke, you name it.

Roommate and neighbor grief is the worst, and I’ve certainly had my share of living next to The Crazy. I had one neighbor who let her chihuaua poop all over the front yard in mass amounts (which was a common area), and left cigarrette butts and empty beer bottles all over the place, but then sent a letter complaining that I left MY dog’s poop out front one morning and didn’t clean it up until later that day. She claimed the smell was “floating into her windows all day”. Never mind all the things I had ignored, like her chain smoking outside our living room windows all day every day, her rude daughters peering into our windows every day yelling at us through our screens “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” and her constantly screaming at her kids in Spanish late at night. If I had sent an extra special letter it would have looked something like this:

Dear Crazy Beeyotch Who Never Talks To Me But Sent Mean Letters I Ignored Until Today And Then Cussed Me Out On My Front Lawn This Morning In Front Of My Children,

Pleas refrain from smoking outside my windows every day, using the laundry facilities 24/7 and calling us “dirty dirty people” for no reason we are aware of. You may want to kill yourself with cancer someday, but me, I’d like to put that off. Plus, I like to have my windows open since we don’t have air conditioning and its about 95 degrees inside when we have to keep the windows shut. You have perfectly fine windows you can go smoke in front of. You know the ones, they are covered in the ugliest fabric I’ve ever seen aka your drapes. Go ahead and give it a try.

And you know that dog poop you complained about? That you “had it up to here! TO HERE!” about? It wasn’t even MY dog’s poop. Apparently there are other people in the neighborhood who are as gross as you are, and leave that kind of crap all over the place regularly. I bet it took you a long time to clean up all of your dog’s poop before you wrote your precious little letter, since you had to do that before accusing me. And the fact that it was on Hello Kitty paper? Awesome.

If you don’t stop doing these things, I will be forced to call the landlord. Oh wait, I already did and he said you drove off countless other tenants with the same bat-poo crazy stuff, and he can’t do anything about it. Sweet. Too bad we weren’t told about your keen sense of neighborly love prior to moving in.

Thanks a bunch! :)

We are so grateful to be moved away and no longer living next to The Crazy. I found a hilarious site to commiserate with, and it posts actual notes left by The Crazy from around the world. A couple of my favorites:

I agree that this um…problem…is gross, but who writes notes like this? Seriously?

And this one:

Again, most people might not appreciate that behavior, but leaving notes? These people can’t just TALK to each other like normal humans?

There’s loads more, and the comments on the posts sometimes get as crazy as the posts themselves. I wish we had kept these nutball letters (instead of balling them up and throwing them at our neighbors house, before feeling guilty and picking them up and throwing them away) we received, so we could send them in.

So far, none of our new neighbors are complainers (thought they’ve ever so sweetly offered to us the use of their lawnmower!). At least, not to our face or in a totally not strongly worded letter.

Do you have any stories about The Crazy?

Perseverance

I just saw this and had to share it right this second. Watch here.

Oh that we all would have that kind of “never quit” attitude!

Wordless Wednesday: Outnumbered

*inspired by Steph

So Wild.

One of my husband’s and my favorite shows right now is “Man Vs. Wild” on The Discovery Channel. If you haven’t yet seen this awesome show and its courageous host, you are truly missing out. The premise of the show is that the host (Bear Grylls) is dropped (literally, usually out of a plane) into any and all of the most inhospitable areas in the world, and he has to survive and make his way to civilization in 5 days or less with only a water bottle, a knife, a flint and the clothes on his back (though sometimes he only has his clothes).The best part is that its not just about surviving, its about extreme surviving. Bear has a passion for teaching people what to do in the event they find themselves in a live or die situation, so he will re-create these situations and put himself through holy heck to show viewers how its done. We are constantly watching with our jaws hanging open as he willingly flings himself into a freezing lake in the Arctic to teach you how to get out and not die, as he climbs down a waterfall without plunging to his death, and as he eats almost anything and everything (termites, frogs, fish, grubs, rabbit, and most things are eaten raw when he can’t make a fire). He is the Steve Irwin of the survival world.

Here’s a short list of Bear’s to do’s:

Take your clothes off in the Alaskan tundra then “dry off” with snow? Check.
Fashion a bow and arrow out of trees and then use it to spear piranhas? Check.
Pee on your shirt then wrap it around your head to keep yourself cool? Check.

You haven’t really lived until you’ve uttered Bear’s famous line: “The only thing I can do is drink my own pee”. And he does. Oh yes. He does.

I started wondering what makes Bear tick. Why is he so hard core? As I was researching him, I discovered that he’s more than just a pretty face with a British accent. He has overcome some pretty hard core things in life (broke his back in three places during a parachute jump gone wrong), and he’s also a family man (married with two sons). Oh and he also hold the Guinness world record as the youngest climber to reach the summit of Everest and return alive. Not too shabby.

Learning about Bear’s life and philosophies (see pics and videos on his website here) has made the show that much more enjoyable. I can’t wait to see what Bear will do next!

All Four One.

Steph tagged me for another meme, the chain letters of blogging that I hate to love and love to hate. Its going to be hard to make this one interesting, but I’ll try.

Here goes…

Four jobs I’ve held:
1. Worked at the information booth at my school (Northern Arizona University) and watched cute boys walk by all day. They never noticed me. Not once.
2. Salesperson at Express in the mall (I was 15 and not cute or skinny enough to really work there, so they literally had me in the back doing inventory at every shift. I wish I was kidding.).
3. EMT, worked at an Emergency Room (it paid more than working on an ambulance, but it was way less cool).
4. Paralegal (so boring I wanted to stab my eyes with hot forks just to have something interesting happen).

Four movies I can watch over and over again:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean (all of them)
2. Little Miss Sunshine
3. Top Gun (Take my breath away…)
4. Goonies (”This one right here. This one’s mine. And I’m taking it back.”)

Four places I have lived:
1. Minneapolis
2. Phoenix
3. Los Angeles
4. Chicago-land

Four tv shows I watch:
1. The Office
2. The Amazing Race
3. Ghost Whisperer (don’t judge me!)
4. Man Vs. Wild

Four places I’ve been on vacation:
1. NYC, NY
2. Tuscany, Italy
3. Buenos Aires, Argentina
4. San Fransisco, CA

Four favorite foods:
1. grilled salmon (add some capers to make me weak in the knees)
2. strawberries
3. my mom’s hamburgers and salad
4. Potatoes. With a capital P. Any kind, any time, any where.

Four websites I visit:
1. Design*Sponge (this is my aesthetic)
2. Apartment Therapy: Nursery (this is my baby/child aesthetic)
3. Strollerderby
4. Creed Thoughts

I’m writing a post about one of the tv shows I listed…if you think you are brave or cool, you aren’t. Unless you are Bear Grylls. Then you OWN brave and cool.

Butterflies, Baby.

Today my baby, my last baby, is a whopping 2 months old. Time has really sped past me at the speed of light this time around. It seems like it was just yesterday we picked him up out of the water and held his little peaceful face to my chest. He was in full-on marsupial mode, and his legs wrapped around hubby’s arm like a monkey (which is not a marsupial at all, is it?).

Nowadays baby and I spend our days together kickin it in the sling, nursing or just staring at each other. He is my happiest baby yet, smiling gigantic grins that could melt glaciers. When I see his smiles, see his one dimple and see the look in his eyes when he sees me, I get massive butterflies. Every. Time. Even thinking about it makes my heart grow another size bigger.

The way God has made little tiny babies to be so giving with their love, amazes me. Its not all just instinct, its the kind of love that is only spiritual. No matter what you believe, babies are absolute miracles.

Happy 2nd month-day, baby Jonah!

**Also a miracle? How babies can go from happy as a clam, to lip-sticking-out hysterically crying, in under 2 seconds flat.

Tag. I’m it.

I was tagged by Katja at Skimbaco to try and find 8 interesting things about myself. I have a love hate relationship with meme’s, but since Katja said I’m funny, I’ll give this one a go.

Here are the rules:

A. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.

B. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.

C. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Are you ready? Can you smell what the Rock is cookin?

1. I’ve birthed 2 of my 3 boys at home in the water and loved it.

2. Everywhere I go, people that I don’t know talk to me. They will ask me to reach things for them, which greeting card I think they should buy their wife, which outfit they should buy themselves, or they just take a second to tell me their life story. I don’t know why this happens, since I work hard to not make eye contact and I try to give off that “I don’t like people” vibe. What can I do? The people. They think I care.

3. I moved from Los Angeles to Chicago-land last fall, and still feel like I was dropped onto a different planet. A very serene, beautiful planet that is full of nice people who don’t hate you first, and ask questions later, but still…a different planet.

4. I say “dude” all the time. Its my go-to word. I say it to men, women and children. I use it as an exclamation, as a way to express sympathy, as a name for my kids when they do stupid stuff, and as a name for my kids when they do awesome stuff. I noticed no one else here in my new town says this word at all, much less says it as often as I do. I hope no one breaks me of this decidedly “L.A.” habit, however I have begun to pick up that midwest accent (heaven help me).

5. I’m the oldest of 4 kids, and I boss them around and I’m always right. (ha!) They don’t visit my blog, but I’m sure they’d agree with half of that statement.

6. I’m really into interior design and almost started my own business flipping houses. I might still do that some day when I get some sleep and can remember to call each of my children by their correct name.

7. I’ve been with my husband since I was 15, except for a brief 2 month period during our engagement when I broke up with him and chucked the ring at his head. I spent those two months sowing my wild oats, and when we got back together we kept the same wedding date (my parents never canceled the chapel or the country club where we had booked the wedding).

8. I used to be an EMT and worked in an ER until I couldn’t bear the emotional toll any longer. I like not having to crack ribs while administering chest compressions (CPR) or having to hear families wail after breaking them the news that their loved one didn’t make it. After that profession I was a paralegal before I finally found my dream job (full time mommy).

**two bonus items because you can’t end a list at 8!**

9. In college I was a nursing major and seriously considered becoming a Navy nurse. Thank God my mom talked me out of that one!

10. I’m not afraid to look silly to make people laugh, so I’m a big hit at weddings.

**one more bonus item, so I can include the pic**

11. I have a ridiculous crush on Johnny Depp. Don’t try and talk me out of it. The man is 40+ and still looks fine.

Ok, so the poor souls I’m tagging are
(apologies in advance if any of you ladies have already done this one):

Steph at Adventures in Babywearing
Ashlee at Mama’s Nest
Cara at Mama C-ta
Jaymi at The FlipFlop Mama
Carol who blogs here

Basically, all the Mama Speaks gals. Ha! I’m not tagging 8 people, sorry. I basically didn’t follow the rules at all, but hey, that’s why you love me.