Photo by Brooke Anderson.

First, apologies for my absence of late!  Out on a pole some distance from my house, a cable box fried rendering my television, telephone, and internet access disabled.  While I could live without the phone, the absence of tv and internet connectivity left me feeling distraught!

Happily, the box in disrepair was fixed this evening, so hooray!  How does a family survive without TV and internet in this day and age?  We had dinner together.  We talked.  I gave the dogs a bath.  I took a nap (sleep, sweet sleep!).

And I gave away a lot of money to my daughter for homecoming week.  T-shirts painted with the friends.  Carnival rides at school.  Game money.  Food money.

Do kids ever pay their parents back?

I did enjoy the time off the grid.  But I’m glad to be back online!

… you find yourself watching the clock at 8:00pm and wondering if it’s too early to go to bed.

That’s my biggest one lately, anyway. Kelcey at Mama Bird Diaries shares some of her own “you know you’re a mother when” items,

Because my 4-year-old gave me that manicure FOUR days ago and I’m still walking around like that.

First of all, I have temporarily lost the nail polish remover in our rental house.

Second, how can I give priority to my nails, when my long suffering eyebrows haven’t been tweezed in several months.

Ha. Eyebrows?  Mine go up now because they’re trained that way from how I sleep on them. I’ve wet them down, put hair stuff on them, tweezed.  Yet still they stick straight up.  I think perhaps it’s not from being a Mom so much as it is being a dork.  I embrace that!

Thought I’d tell you about our pageant experience over the weekend.  Baby girl came in dead last.  Or “fifth runner up” as we like to say in pageant mom lingo.  A part of me – the Mom part who thinks her baby crow is the blackest – wonders if the judges were blind or jealous or both.

However, Erin had fun.  She said it was an awesome, happy night.  When they called her out first (as fifth runner up), she completely hammed it up.  She was waiting for the other girls to be announced and threw her flowers on the stage.  There was a gasp in the audience and then she started laughing.  Everyone else laughed then, too.

One of the judges told me he was surprised she was not the winner (apparently he gave her top scores).  Shockingly, I was okay with her not winning. I am even okay with her last place finish.  Why?  Because SHE was happy with it.  She was happy for the other girls.  She had a good time.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Everyone has their own story of the events of September 11, 2001.  It was a horrifying day not just for the people of the U.S., but also for sympathizers from around the world.  I have deep sympathy for the families who lost loved ones that day.  Their loss is highly personal, yet how hard it must be for an entire nation to be almost equally affected by the sadness.

Today I want to thank these very special people for their bravery.  While you are an inspiration, in my heart I wish you did not have to be.  I wish today you were with your lost son or daughter, with your husband or girlfriend grilling burgers or shopping or going to a movie.

I wish you peace.

Who wants Kermit the Frog shoes?  I do!  I do!  Check out this awesome by Adidas.

LOVE!

I am not afraid to tell my daughter’s friends to pull up their pants when I see them sagging.  But this works too…

I love funny street signs.  We’re thinking about adding a welcome sign to my city that says, “Welcome! Home of 32,000 happy people and a few sore heads!”

I thought when Erin left baton just over a year ago we were done with pageants.  We were.  Until my city decided to hold pageants for the kids of the community for the first time in… well in recent memory.  We know there used to be pageants hosted by school PTA organizations, but never a city wide pageant.

My baby girl has entered a pageant – and she’s going toe-to-toe with some of the city’s most competitive girls.  I am a nervous wreck and it’s still two-and-a-half days away!  We have her dress.  Tonight we got her shoes and jewelry (thank you Claire’s for the $20 necklace/earring set).

Erin has been practicing her walk again.  We’ve made arrangements for a dear friend to do her hair.  Erin will do her own nails since she’s taking cosmetology and has learned how to do it well.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Never forget that play is as important as work! Happy Labor Day!

Photo by First Baptist Nashville.

Alleged weapon.

Call it criminal schadenfreude if you will!  But now that school has started and you have all kind of free time (hahaha, right?!), here’s something you can do to kill a few hours.

The time waster game allows you to match mug shots with various things like:

1.  Crime committed.

2.  Occupation of criminal.

3.  Weapon used during crime.

4.  Reported alias.

And much more much!  Sometimes a little bit of schadenfreude really is fun.