Yesterday we decorated for Christmas. It’s not officially December but the last of the mashed potatoes and stuffing were gone and it seemed like something I could do with a clean conscience and only moderate disapproval from my mother. She’s a December 1st hardliner. I prefer to sort of go with the flow, like the one time in college when my roommates and I decorated for Christmas on Halloween night. When we figured we wouldn’t get any more tick-or-treaters, the pumpkins came down and the Christmas palace went up. It was a good couple of months. I think Delilah would approve.

When we got through all the boxes of green and red green-and-red-ness this year, I realized that the one thing missing was my favorite decoration in all the world, a garland of tiny mittens I’d made shortly after Dan and I were married. I copied the design from a Pottery Barn catalog, sewing the tiny mittens out of fleece one by one and then loosely embroidering Christmas designs on them, snowflakes, Christmas trees and such. I love them and they are gone. I frantically searched every box, only to realize that I’d gotten rid of a box of unwanted decorations the week before.

D.I. (sort of a Mormon Goodwill) keeps a trailer outside our church building for donations to be dropped into. Last week I took a load of several boxes, including the old Christmas decorations, and dropped them off in the back of the nearly empty trailer. So at church today, I opened the trailer to look for my long lost teeny weeny mitten garland, only to find the thing brimming full of junk. The trailer was about 20 feet long and completely filled with bicycles, dishes, electronics, clothes, beds, board games, and actual garbage.

Oh ye who put the pee-stained 80-year-old pillow in the trailer – REALLY?! That’s a “donation”? I’d like to donate something to you sometime.

But I really wanted the mittens so as my family headed into church, I pulled off my high-heeled boots and began making my way cat-like through the rubble of useless goods, over desks and through piles of suspect garbage bags. After sifting through boxes for 15 minutes, I gave up and made my way back out to the parking lot, defeated and drowning my sorrows in hand sanitizer.

During our church meeting Laylee sat quietly drawing pictures of each of us, Wanda with her little lips, huge cheeks and Mohawk, Dan with his pointy pin-head and glasses, Magoo with his fat head and me with my gorgeous eye-lashes, ravishing smile and meticulously placed zits. She was all about accuracy, studying my face carefully and then adding dots one at a time in the correct constellations on my forehead, nose and cheeks.

When I told the teenage girls I teach about my lost garland, one of them sincerely offered to go back into the D.I. trailer abyss and dig for me. I thanked her but told her it was hopeless. When Dan offered after church, I caved and accepted his willingness to gallantly risk his life for my handy-crafts. It takes a real man to dig through other people’s garbage in a church parking lot, while his friends and neighbors walk by giving him odd looks. I’m sure more than a few of them were wondering whether things had gotten so bad that we had stooped to stealing from the donations trailer. I stood guard while he navigated his way through the junk. No dice. I mean, there probably were dice in there somewhere, but no tiny mittens.

All I can do now is hope we find them somewhere in our garage, a location that somewhat resembles the D.I. trailer at this point, except all the donations have come directly from me and my rabble.

I already tweeted this and put it on Facebook but I really think it needs to go on the blog. Dan is a lover of Call of Duty and I am a lover of how well he fulfills his ultimate call of duty as a dad. This picture combining the two is priceless to me. I love how his big fat gamer headphones are practically as big as the baby in his pouch.

Maybe it’s just in the air. It’s definitely all around us and through us and it’s fun and LOUD and festive and at times obnoxious.

My mom always used to say that what she really wanted for Mother’s Day was well-behaved kids who were obedient and didn’t spend the whole day fighting. But what about these delicious red bath oil beads?! Surely they’re enough of a bribe that I can spend the rest of the day making annoying mouth noises and poking my sister in the arm until she begs for mercy.

Ah. I understand her so much better now. The kids were very excited and excitable, cute and AAAHHHHHH!!!!!

Dan is a good Mother’s Day husband. He’s actually quite passable year round but on Mother’s Day he knows how to bring it. All I want from him is a flower, a meal or two, something to unwrap, and the assurance that I don’t have to do anything resembling work for the day. Sure, I’ll read the kids a story or brush their hair, but only the fun parts of motherhood, not the ones that involve cleaning or bodily fluids.

Totally off topic but speaking of bodily fluids, Laylee’s current favorite song at church is called How Firm a Foundation and the last line of the first verse says, “What more can he say than to you he hath said, who unto the Savior for refuge hath fled?” She picks this song every time it’s her turn to pick a song and she sings it with gusto. I recently discovered why. She was sitting next to Magoo at our family night and finished, “…who unto the Savior for refuse hath fled. Hey, pst. Magoo. Refuse means poop and pee and stuff. Giggle.”

Um yeah. Upon further investigation, it seemed that she really did think those were the words to the song and hilarious words they were. She was so disappointed to find out what it actually said. Ah, the bitter realities of gaining greater knowledge.

Anyway. I did nothing today in a very deliberate sort of way. There were beautiful flowers purchased on Saturday and placed in the middle of the kitchen table with strict orders from Magoo not to look at them. He burst into my room this morning with a “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! Now you can look at your flowers!”

Dan got everyone ready for church while I slept in and he made my new breakfast obsession, steel cut oats, cooked to perfection.

The talks at church were upbeat and motivating and made me want to be a better mom… tomorrow… when I’m done laying about the house celebrating the fact that I am one.

Dan coached the kids well on buying me fun and thoughtful gifts and even put them in gift bags. He gave me a card with Michael Scott’s wisdom on parenting. He made dinner, did the hard part of bedtime, and cleaned the kitchen.

I feel refreshed and a bit spoiled and useless. I slept too much, parented too little, received too many presents and didn’t do enough for my own mothers. It was a good day but not a great day. I wish I’d played a game with the kids or spent some time talking with Dan while he slaved in the kitchen. Absolute slovenliness doesn’t really sit comfortably with me. In a way it was a good reminder that all these sick fat pregnant days when I feel useless at the end of the day, like I have nothing to show for myself, I’ve done more than I give myself credit for. In the future, I’ll just tell myself, “At least I got more done today than on Mother’s Day ’09. That was a doozey!”

It’s weird too because I got more praise, love and outpourings of support than on most other days of the year and it was the day I felt least deserving of it. Strange thing, this day of mothers.

Dan and I have been dating a lot lately. It’s like being back in high school but I go out with the same guy every time and at the end of the night, he watches me brush my teeth and put on my muumuu. If he’s lucky, I also brush my teeth before the date and don’t put on the muumuu until after.

Dinner and/or a movie has been working well for us for months but we’re read to branch out and I’d love your suggestions. What are some fun date activities you enjoy with your shmoop?

I’ll give a couple.

Go to an arcade and play like you were little kids. Chuck E Cheese would even work for this. Sometimes it’s fun to go to places you normally take your kids but without them. You can actually enjoy yourself instead of following them around taking pictures and watching them have fun. That can be good too but sometimes it’s fun to enjoy yourself without worrying about who that weird creepy adult guy is crawling around in the tunnel maze with your 3-year-old.

Spend some time at a bookstore, browsing new sections and reading together. Dan and I had to stop reading a particular book last time we did this because we were laughing so hard we were worried we’d get kicked out and Dan was embarrassed by his own laughing man-tears.

Go kayaking in the Puget Sound… or other substandard body of water closer to where you live. We’ve done this once and it was a blast. Hopefully when the kids are older we’ll have the time and money to do this more often.

Okay, now you go. Tell me what we should do for our next night (or day) out.

I was lounging around on Sunday, napping upstairs in my room when Dan went downstairs to help the kids with something. An hour later, I wandered downstairs and found them like this:

Playing the eternal game that makes everyone cry but then beg for more.

The apron is because he had washed all the dishes before starting the game.

While he washed the dishes, he had them clean up their toys, using a game of Sorry as incentive.

I’m really starting to like this guy.

Laylee’s been talking smack. She’s learned how to hold a chopstick recently. Now, I’m not saying she’s learned how to hold chopsticks or even A chopstick correctly. No. Not so much. She has opposable thumbs and she can use them along with her other phalanges to keep a chopstick from falling out of her hand.

She thinks this is really something. Every once in a while, she successfully stabs something with a chopstick and manages to zip it into her mouth before it falls off. She’s even been known to use both sticks together to awkwardly pick up a lump of rice and shovel it in.

Now normally, I’d say, “Cute. She’s learning,” and I’d encourage her and try to teach her better technique ala Mr. Miyagi. But when I offered to help her, she told me she’s already too good. Yep. She informed me that she’s better than me, she’s better than Dan, she’s better than that one Chinese guy who works at your local Chinese restaurant and patiently teaches lame white people how to maneuver a pair, while laughing at them on the inside. She slaughters that guy at chopsticks.

Finally, sick of Laylee getting all up in his grill, Dan challenged her to a chopstick-off. The challenge involved ¼ cup of peas for each of them, meticulously measured by an impartial judge named Me. We set a timer. They were off.

Did she remember that Dan served a mission in China Town in New York City? Did she remember that he can speak both Cantonese and Mandarin while using those chopsticks? Did she remember that he has a will of steel and refuses to lose to anyone, a trait which I find simultaneously sexy and frustrating?

He mopped the floor with her six-year-old butt, consuming peas at a rate of 4:1. She didn’t stand a chance. It’s not that she wasn’t focused. Because she was. She didn’t look to the left or to the right. She stared at the peas and even in her pathetic loss, I felt that she was a contender. And she held her head high.

“I will win one day. When he’s old, like as old as great great great grandpa who’s dead was, like right before he died? That’s when I’ll win.”

Okay. So she’s already planning to beat down the helpless 98-year-old vegetable with a pair of chopsticks? Nice.

Dan is a digital security freak. I cannot overemphasize the security measures he puts in place electronically to make sure our data is safe, backups, double, triple, quadruple backups, kept in different cities on various servers.

The most amazing though are his passwords. Dan loves beautiful rock-solid passwords. Passwords with letters don’t even qualify as passwords. Passwords with letters and numbers are for sissies, losers, amateurs and people who enjoy having their identity stolen. No. Dan’s passwords use letters, numbers and symbols in ways that are incomprehensible to me.

Sometimes when he sets me up for a new account of some kind, he’ll hand me a password that looks like this: g3Tg0!nG@NddAn$5

“How am I supposed to remember that?” I’ll ask incredulously because I know that writing it down on a sticky note next to the computer is not a viable option.

“It says ”˜get going and dance 5.’” Like, duh!

I nod and smile. Yeees. Yeees of course. The dancing. I’ll totally remember it now.

So we were in Costco the other day when Dan went to pay for the groceries with his debit card. I looked over as he entered his pin and my mouth dropped open in surprise.

“That’s seriously your PIN?! Really?!”

Time sort of froze.

Dan looked up embarrassed, an uneasy smile frozen on his face.

The cashier and the cart-loader tried unsuccessfully to stop their giggles.

And I just stared at him. “Really?!”

“What?” He asked sheepishly.

“Did they assign you that PIN or did you seriously come up with that yourself?! Honestly?”

Then I noticed the eyes watching us and I decided it would be best to talk to him later alone away from the giggling school girl Costco employees.

Outside, I started up again, “How could someone like you pick 7777 as his PIN NUMBER?!”

“That’s not my PIN,” he smiled sheepishly.

“I saw you do it.”

“No. I wiggle my fingers around to mask what I’m really typing when I enter my PIN. I can’t believe it actually worked. Awesome.”

Yes. Awesome indeed. Don’t you feel safer just reading the blog of someone whose husband is such a master of trickery and security? I wish I’d been right, though. He never would have lived that one down.

Thank you so much for all of your kindness as I’ve been going through this rough time. It’s not hard to be open about my struggles when I get such a gracious and loving response.

It’s amazing how fast the hard times come and how quickly they begin to recede with faith, prayers, friends, good medical care and prescriptions, and a weekend spent sitting on an island watching the sunset with your main schmoop and zero small people.

Dan and I had planned a getaway for this past weekend months before my brain glitch last month happened. It’s the first time we’ve gone away for a weekend without the kids in the nearly six years since Laylee was born and I feel sure that all the planning and timing were no accident. Someone knew I’d need some extra relaxation to help get over the worst of my panic and anxiety.

Now we’re getting back into our routine and it seems strange that just days ago I was swallowed up in so much fear and panic. I’ve been sleeping in, grateful to be sleeping well again and we were a bit tardy getting Laylee to kindergarten this morning. I apologized and she sensed the stress in my voice.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m late for school Mom. It just matters that I’m alive. Come on, man!”

Yeah, yeah. Peace, love and all that jazz. I’d still like to avoid excessive and habitual late slips. But I enjoyed the sentiment. There is wisdom in our young ones. Upon arriving back home, Laylee’s favorite song “I Know Karate” (see embed below) was playing on the cd player and Magoo begged me not to go inside until it had finished.

So we stayed in the car as I unleashed the artistic fury of my funky greatness. Rolling fists, flashing jazz hands and bobbing my head like a skanking Rastafarian. Hey. My car dancing moves are limited because my mobility is restricted but I can still bust a move in a manner pleasing to children under the age of six. Magoo parroted my every motion and when the song finished he exclaimed, “I did it. I could do all of it!”

And his moves were passable. I hope they serve him well in his life. Maybe he’ll report back to me about how they’re working for him. Perhaps in junior high sometime. Maybe his peers will report back even more emphatically.

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

And the award for My Favorite Husband Mother’s Day 2008 goes to… SLASH THOMPSON!!!!

This is a picture of us dressed up to play Rock Band this weekend with some crazy friends. Dan went all out with the nose ring and wig this time. He even painted on a gold tooth. No one can ever say that man’s not fly because he is.

Not only is he fly but he’s also the recipient of the MFHMD2008 award and I will tell you why. This year for Mother’s Day Dan asked me for a few gift ideas. I typed out a wish list, complete with links to websites, and then gave it to him way too late for him to order anything on the list in time for Mother’s Day. So he improvised.

I’m trying to consume less after following one of my reader’s advice to watch this video. When I do need something, I’ve been trying to buy more things second hand or from companies that follow fair trade practices.

On my wish list I’d asked for a fairly-made recycled glass pitcher, glass because it’s free of the toxins commonly found in plastic. (Yes I’m being assimilated by the granola-ites.)

So Dan took the kids to a giant antique shop where he spent over an hour walking them through the entire maze of breakable treasures looking for the exact right pitcher for me. He said he passed up several along the way, wanting to make sure he found one he knew I’d like. Be still my heart, it’s perfect! “Recycled” in the truest sense of the word, BPA-free and lovely. He couldn’t get me exactly what I wanted in time for Mother’s Day so he paid attention to the REASONS behind what I was asking for and got me something better.

At the store he let Laylee pick through every piece of jewelry she could find, advising her on my tastes. “Yes that IS pretty, but mom doesn’t really like to wear heart-shaped jewelry.” Heaven bless him for guiding her to a pretty bracelet I will actually WEAR! On the way home from the antique shop, they stopped for flowers.

I slept in late this morning and woke to find Laylee had created an avalanche of drawings for me, all on the theme of love, moms, mudders and LOVE. Dan made scrambled eggs with extra cheese.

From Magoo I got new non-slip potholders that match my KitchenAid perfectly and to top it off, I was presented with the final season of the West Wing so I can discover again whether Matt Santos, Latino for President, beats Allen Alda to become the next leader of these United States in Imaginary Political World Where I’m a Staunch Democrat.

And they were nice to me all day. And they made me breakfast. And I got to eat off the special plate. And Magoo magically fell asleep in the car on the way home from church and let me carry him inside and rock him like a baby for the better part of an hour, something he hasn’t let me do for months. It was a great day to be a mom and a great day to be married to Dan. How was your Mother’s Day? Was it a great day to be married to Dan for you too?