Lilypie Kids Birthday tickers

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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Almost done

BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER


It's not all the way done.
We still need to put the baseboard on
and I didn't finish the cupboard doors.
BUT I'D SAY PETER DID A FANTASTIC JOB!
This is the only chance I have to show it off before we get our furniture in.
Moving day is Friday
Wish us luck.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

THE ART....

OF ARM WRESTLING.

WHAT ARE GOOD PAPA'S FOR IF THEY DON'T TEACH YOU TO ARM WRESTLE.










Happy Fathers Day


I told Peter he needed to take the day off today. We have been so busy and haven't taken any time to enjoy eachothers company. I must give a shout out to the daddy living under my roof because laying floors in a house we do not own was my idea. My parents were planning to change out the carpet no matter who the would be renters were. It was my plan to price laminate flooring and see if it was comparable if we laid it ourselves. Turns out it was a hair cheaper so I volunteered my husband to lay floors. Well really I said we but I guess in all reality I meant him. I would like to tell you he happily volunteered to do the task, he is a super hero most days but, this day he showed to be human. His eyes got really big and he said you did what? Maybe there should be a few more of these there??????? for emphasis. After I worked a bit of my charm he bacame his super hero self and went to work. Not much of a complaint he worked 10 hour days on his weekends and then he went there after work all because I wanted the house I moved into to be purdy. And that pretty much speaks to my husband and to Lily's daddy. He does a lot just to make us happy. Not only are we happy but we are in love with that guy. I certainly hope we can give him a nice restful whatever he wants to do kind of day!


Friday, June 18, 2010

EXHAUSTED

.... is an understatement.
You can also add selfish to the list.
There is so much to do.
I feel very very unorganized.
Should I pack...
Should I clean...
Should I go paint cupboards...
Should I go buy baseboards...
Perhaps I should start to drive the boxes I have packed to the new house...
So I feel instead of accomplishing 1 task I am doing a little of each.
And then nothing is actually done.
Can you hear my SIGH!
Moving is a pain in my arse.
Why selfish you ask?
Well my mom has called each day and offered to take Lily with her.
Each day I've told her no thank you.
Why?
When Lily is having to entertain herself and not getting much attention would I do that?
Because this is what I hear each and every day.
Mommy I want to live at Nonnie's house?
You can't live at Nonnie's house Lily?
Why?
Because I'm Your mommy and little boys and girls live with their mommies.
But, Chuggie and Footie (my moms dogs) get to live there.
I know but your not a dog.
Yes I am. My names Spot.
Now I understand the draw...
Really look at what is at Nonnie's house



....But, I went to college to become a teacher

Precisely so I could spend summers with my children.

Having children hit many bumps

all in a way to find the perfect daughter.

Life didn't turn out like I planned

The only thing that really turned out as planned is

SUMMER VACATION!

So.....

Like it or not your spendin the summer with yo mama kid.

(Just as a disclaimer she will be spending today and the whole night at Nonnies house so Peter and I can work on the house. She is over the top excited.)

Monday, June 14, 2010

Help me decide


I have been wanting to get a tattoo for quite sometime.
I have two tattoo's already.

I do not like either of them wish I could easily rid my body of them.
The first is on my hip it is two dolphins I got it when I was 18.
It so speaks to my teen years when I thought I'd be a marine biologist and work at Marine World. Very funny.



The second was a silly college decision it is supposed to be some buddhist symbol.
No I am not a buddhist (still like there fundamental teachings of peace though)
but anyways back to the tattoo it did not turn out correct it is the star of david in the middle of my back lower back.



It turns out to be okay to have the star of david tattooed on my back cause Peters half jewish. We laugh that it was some cosmic sign that we were meant to be together.
I don't think that my placement of the tattoo had been lovingly termed a tramp stamp quite yet back in those days. Or perhaps I was just not hip enough to know.



Anyhoo back to my need for another even though I have two I'd rather not have. I have been thinking about this tattoo for two years now and am pretty sure that when I'm 50 the meaning will still be held close to my heart. So I'm asking for advice. I am not sure where to place the tattoo. I am thinking maybe the top of my foot. Peter's suggesstion is the top of my middle back between my shoulder blades. I am a teacher so it has to be in a sort of modest placement. Like it can't be on my chest or my arm. There are no rules against it but I think I need to be able to cover it if need be. Like if I were to be laid off or something.
So here is what I want:


A Tiger Lily cause I live with one of those and she is the most precious litlle person around. Here it is in orange.

Here it is in pink. I'm leaning towards orange.

I would like this yellow butterfly to be flying just above it. The butterfly is in honor of my daughter Luci who we lost in our second trimester two years ago. I'm leaning towards the orange Tiger Lily because I think the yellow butterfly will compliment it.


So please take some time to weigh in on what you think. Where should it go and if you live in the sacramento area. Who is a really good artist?
Oh and just to be clear these pictures are big think small dainty and feminine.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Renovations~1

This is Lily's idea of helping us pack.
Although it is super cute it is rather unhelpful.

We started floors this weekend. I took pictures of the first day, but not the second so things are much farther along. The flooring is not what I originally chose, the one I chose first was much lighter but it was going out of stock so we changed our minds. I think the dark was a better decision.



It turns out that I am rather useless when it comes to laying floors. I found myself helplessly staring at Peter while he worked up a sweat so I decided to paint. Those cabinets in the above picture are turning into a beautiful white. I can't wait to reveal them.

While I was painting my niece stopped by. She said why are you painting everything white. White is boring. I said what color would you paint them. She stopped and thought real hard and said rainbow. I could see the appeal but a little more work than I'm willing to do :)
And I'll leave with one cute Lily story. Lily spent the day with her Auntie Monica. She hasn't stayed with Auntie Monica since she was about 18 months or so. So I talked to her about the possibility of spending the day with her. Lily thought real hard and then said I sink it will be okay with me. This morning she awoke and told me she didn't want to go by herself. I did some reassuring and we were back on track. Monica's boyfriend Rain was home and Lily asked him if he knew her when she was a baby. Rain said that he did. Lily said I was such a cute baby! Damn right you were baby girl. She had fun with her Auntie they went to the farmers market and bought fruit for homemade muffins. Stopped by and bought fish for a fish tank and even stopped at McDonalds and had some chicken nuggets. They topped off the day by making those homemade muffins and eating quite a few. On the way home she fell into a deep sleep complete with snoring and drool. Gotta call that a good day.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Arizona


There is something about the Arizona law that really bothers me. The below article by Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head. I know racism exists. I know my daughter at some time will have to deal with some idiot whom carries hate in his/her heart. So this is what bothers me about the law. All those people whom carry this in their heart for the most part know that it is not socially acceptable to air these feelings in public. Our country has evolved enough to make it uncool to be racist, but as the mural at the elementary school has shown the law gave those people whom carry those feelings of hate, the right to spew it out at children no less. I was told by a family member that it is okay to have a difference of opinion. I think he is right it is okay to disagree with me, that is our right as Americans to have our own opinion. I am a liberal the hardcore kind he is the polar opposite of me. He has his reasons for liking the law he isn't looking at the law from my eyes as the mother to a precious little one whom may have to carry papers in her car if this law spreads to other states. Doesn't that really take away her freedom as an American. It allows people to look at her as an outsider instead of part of the team for no other reason than her brown skin. This deeply saddens me.


I am not against finding a solution to securing our borders. I am just against that solution being a promotion of racial profiling. Senator Robert Menendez has a solution. He wants to revamp our social security cards and make them more like our drivers liscense with a picture and a bar code. Every employer would have to scan the social security card of every future employee and employee's could only be hired if they were citizens of this country. That seems pretty all inclusive to me. His law came with a path to citizenship as well as fines for employers that hired people in this country illegally. If this was not the land of opportunity then we wouldn't have the problem of so many trying to get here and make a better life for themselves. For some reason Senator Menendez's law is not well supported.
I'm off my soapbox I promise and we will be back to our regular scheduled programming of cuteness shortly.

If your interested here is the article that spured this post:


How would I feel if I were a brown student at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, Arizona? A mural was created to depict some of the actual students in the school.
Let's say I was one of the lucky ones. The mural took shape, and as my face became recognizable, I took some kidding from my classmates and a smile from a pretty girl I liked.
My parents even came over one day to have a look and take some photos to e-mail to the family. The mural was shown on TV, and everybody could see that it was me.
Then a City Councilman named Steve Blair went on his local radio talk show and made some comments about the mural. I didn't hear him, but I can guess what he said. My dad says it's open season on brown people in this state. Anyway, for two months white people drove past in their cars and screamed angry words out the window before hurrying away. And the artists got back up on their scaffold and started making my face whiter.
We went over to my grandparent's house, and my grandmother cried and told me, "I prayed that was ending in my lifetime." Then there was more news: The City Councilman was fired from his radio show, the Superintendent of Schools climbed up on the scaffold with a bullhorn and apologized for the bad decision, and I guess the artists went back up and started making my skin darker again, but I didn't go to see, because I never wanted to go near that bullshit mural again.

I am not that American child. I am an American who was born before the schools were integrated in the South. I am an Midwesterner who went with his mother on a trip to Washington, D.C., and my cousin's company driver showed us the sights, but when we stopped for lunch at Howard Johnson's he explained he couldn't go inside because they didn't serve colored people. "But you're with us!" I said. "I know," he said, smiling over my head at my mother, "but they don't know who you are." Inside, I asked my mother why they wouldn't serve him. "They have their own nice places to eat," she said. I don't believe she was particularly upset on his behalf.
The first time I noticed that people had different colors of skin I was a very small boy. Our family laundry was done by a colored women on Champaign's North Side. She was our "warsher woman." Downstate you pronounced an invisible "R," so we lived on Warshington Street. I sat down on the floor to play with her son, who was about my age, and he showed me his palm and said it was as white as my palm. I noticed for the first time that the rest of him wasn't.
In Catholic grade school, there was a colored boy in my class--that was the word we used, "colored," although Negro was more formal. I remember the class being informed by a nun that he was "just as precious as the rest of you in the eyes of God." I believed most of what the nuns told us, and I believed that. It made sense. Some years later it occurred to me to wonder how he felt felt when he was singled out.

There were Negro students at Urbana High School, and I knew the athletes because I covered sports for the local newspaper. I didn't know them, you understand, in the sense of going to their homes or hanging out at the Steak n Shake, and I don't recall any of them at the Tigers' Den, the city's teen hangout in downtown Urbana. They did attend our school dances. There was a kid who wasn't an athlete, who I liked, and we talked and kidded around, but in those days, well, that was about that.
Strangely, during this time the "idea" of Negroes was on a wholly different track in my mind. I read incessantly during high school, and I met them in the novels of Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. I read Richard Wright's Black Boy and Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. So I had this concept shaping in my mind that bore no relationship to what was going on in my life. It was theoretical.This is not a record of my reading but of my understanding. I don't know if you can understand what it was like in those days. Racism was ingrained in daily life. It wasn't the overt racism of the South, but more like the pervading background against which which we lived. We were here and they were there and, well, we wished them well, but that was how it was. At this time it was becoming clear to me that I was not merely a Democrat, as I had been raised, but a liberal. When Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Arkansas, I defended him against some who said the federal government had no right interfering. So that was my political position. But where were my feelings centered? Theory will only take you so far.

In college, my understanding shifted. I attended the National Student Congress every summer, and during the one held at Ohio State, two things happened. I gave a dollar to Tom Hayden and he handed me my membership card in Students for a Democratic Society. And one night during a party at Rosa Luxembourg House, I met a Negro girl and we went outside and sat in the back seat of a car and we talked and kissed and she was sweet and gentle and she smelled of Ivory Soap. We feel asleep in each other's arms. We met again in maybe 10 years later in New York City, recognizing each other on the street, and had a drink and talked about how young we had been. In my inner development, I had been younger than she knew.
Those were the days of the Civil Rights Movement. We linked hands and sang "We Shall Overcome." We protested. We demonstrated. Among the students I met at those Student Congresses were Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond--and, for that matter, Barney Frank. They were born to be who they became. I was still in a process of change. My emotional life was catching up to my intellectual or political life.
Later in the 1960s Negros became Blacks. As a movie critic, I sort of watched that happening. The new usage first appears in my reviews around 1967 or 1968. Afros. Angela Davis. Black exploitation movies. Black is beautiful. Long interviews with Ossie Davis, Brock Peters, Sidney Poitier, Abbey Lincoln, Yaphet Kotto. What point am I making? None. It's not as if I sat at their feet and learned about race. It's more that the whole climate was changing, growing more free and open, and the movies were changing, too.

At some time during the years after the day I sat on the floor and looked at that little boy's palm, something happened inside me and I saw black people differently--and brown people and Asians as well. I made friends, I dated, I worked with them, I drank with them, we cooked, we partied, we laughed, sometimes we loved. This is as it should have been from the start of my life, but I was born into a different America and was a child of my times until I learned enough to grow up. I do not propose myself as an example, because I was carried along with my society as it awkwardly felt and fought its way out of racism.
When I proposed marriage to Chaz, it was because of the best possible reason: I wanted to be married to this woman. Howard Stern asked me on the radio one day if I thought of Chaz as being black every time I looked at her. I didn't resent the question. Howard Stern's gift is the nerve to ask personal questions. I told him, honestly, that when I looked at her I saw Chaz. Chaz. A fact. A person of enormous importance to me. Chaz. A history. Memories. Love. Passion. Laughter. Her Chaz-ness filled my field of vision. Yes, I see that she is black, and she sees that I am white, but how sad it would be if that were in the foreground. Now, with so many of my own family dead, her family gives me a family, an emotional home I need. Before our first trip out of town, she took me home to meet her mother.

I believe at some point in the development of healthy people there must come a time when we instinctively try to understand how others feel. We may not succeed. There are many people in this world today who remain enigmas to me, and some who are offensive. But that is not because of their race. It is usually because of their beliefs.
That brings me back around to the story of the school mural. I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life? Were you raised as a racist, or become one on your own? Yes, there was racism involved as my mother let the driver wait outside in the car, but my mother had not evolved past that point at that time. The hard-won social struggles of the 1960s and before have fundamentally altered the feelings most of us breathe, and we have evolved, and that is how America will survive. We are all in this together.
But what about the people in those cars? They don't breathe that air. They don't think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don't like those kids in the school. It's not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever "they" are.

Not along ago I read this observation by Clint Eastwood: "The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice." Do the drive-by haters feel insecure? How are they threatened? What have they talked themselves into? Who benefits by feeding off their fear? We have a black man in the White House, and I suspect they don't like that very much. They don't want to accept the reality that other races live here right along with them, and are doing just fine and making a contribution and the same sun rises and sets on us all. Do they fear their own adequacy? Do they grasp for assurance that they're "better"--which means, not worse? Those poor people. It must be agony to live with such hate, and to seek the company of others so damaged.
One day in high school study hall, a Negro girl walked in who had dyed her hair a lighter brown. Laughter spread through the room. We had never, ever, seen that done before. It was unexpected, a surprise, and our laughter was partly an expression of nervousness and uncertainty. I don't think we wanted to be cruel. But we had our ideas about Negroes, and her hair didn't fit.
Think of her. She wanted to try her hair a lighter brown, and perhaps her mother and sisters helped her, and she was told she looked pretty, and then she went to school and we laughed at her. I wonder if she has ever forgotten that day. God damn it, how did we make her feel? We have to make this country a place where no one needs to feel that way.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Project

Changes are afoot with my family. For 2 years we have been renting a beautiful home. It is perfect in every way I love this house, but it is not mine. So each month I pay rent and my landlord has been spotty at best about paying his mortgage. Twice in the last 2 years I have been greeted with unsettling news. Once the telltale paperwork has been posted on our door stating that the house was going into forecloser and once Lily was home sick and I got a knock on the door. The nice man at the door was there to inform me that our rental home was to be sold the next day at auction. YIKES. So lets just say that this beautiful home has been a bit stressful to live in.

My parents recently bought a new home and so their old home is going to be a rental. Peter and I decided we would move in. I am excited to move in we are going to be able to pay off some bills and save some money and hopefully in the future become home owners again!!!! Exciting!!!! With the excitement is also some sadness. My parents old home is in the neighborhood we used to own a home in. We left there thinking we were moving on to better things. It is a bit of a blow to ones ego to be moving back. The neighborhood is quiet, but it is not the best. When we bought that home it was to be a starter home to get us moving on to bigger and better things. We didn't forsee the crash of the housing market. It is not the neighborhood that I want Lily attending school in. That problem will be easy enough to fix though.

There is always a silver lining. On top of saving money we get to make it like our own. I won't be wondering if someone is paying the mortgage because it is people I trust who own it. With this knowledge I get to decorate. I will get to plant and paint and spruce it up to my own liking. I am super excited about that. The move should also be super easy on Lily as this has been her second home since coming home from Guatemala. We started the process of making it our home today. We ripped out the flooring and are getting ready to lay some laminate flooring. I'll be posting pictures of our progress as we make this our own little oasis.

Before the demolition.




30 minutes and no carpet.


Removing the tile took some elbow grease.
I did the sweeping during this part of the destruction.


And A little reward after the work was done.


Good form.

A little splash I give that a 9.


One last tid bit our frogs were ready for release. I was given quite the tongue lashing about how I was not to let her frogs go and if I did I would recieve a time out by myself in my room. The biggest punishment there is around here. When the time came to let them go she hid behind my leg and peeked around me. I guess out of their plastic cage they are very scary creatures. They sure do look menacing don't they. She was so relieved to see them pop away that I recieved no consequence for my actions.

Friday, June 4, 2010

FFF ~ summer kick off

Oh how fitting the theme is this week. Today was my last day of work! Ladies and gentlemen let the summer festivities begin.
I'm just a tad bit excited !!!