I had written this post a week or so ago and never got around to posting it... SO here it is!
So, two year olds never cease to amaze me.
George’s new thing is listening to and telling stories, which has just come about overnight.Apparently, the teachers read fairytales to them at daycare (which is one of the few goods things they do at daycare), and George has been eating it up.
Well, we were at Lowe’s last night looking at Christmas trees, and passed a row of rocking chairs sitting right across from the tree display, when he stops, tells me I am to “sit in dat chair right there, momma!” and wait for him.
“OK,” I thought, “this might be interesting and entertaining, or at least make me look like the crazy woman who lets her toddler run wild around the home improvement store?”
I figured I’d done worse, so I’d just go with it.
George proceeds to run and hide behind a tree, just to turn around and walk right back out to the chair.And by walk, I mean sprint as fast as his two year old legs would carry him, almost knocking over a nice elderly couple tree shopping nearby.
“I da BIG BAD WOLF Momma, I gonna huff and blow your house down!” he yelled mid-run.He almost launches himself into my lap but stops short, bends over, and blows as hard as he could on the armrest of the rocker.Then takes off giggling like only a two year old can and sprints back behind the display tree.
Since I thought it was hilarious and pretty harmless encourage creative and inventive play, I let him pretend he was the big bad wolf and run around in that corner of the store for at least ten minutes.I figured since we weren’t destroying anything, and since Jar is a former employee of that very store, that we were ok doing an impromptu 3 Little Pigs reenactment…
Once we got home, I asked George if he wanted me to tell him stories, to which he gave a very enthusiastic YES!So, I did my best pig and wolf impressions, and we acted out the Three Little Pigs.When I asked him what he wanted to do next, he said “DA TREE LITTLE BEARS!!!”
So, I fumbled my way through that one (and realized I really needed to brush up on my fairytales, I’m pretty sure I added some details that weren’t in the original story, but I got the basics of it).
When I asked Levi what story he wanted to hear next, his response got me a little choked up.
“Tell me about the Tree Little Big Jar’s, Mommy!Da one’s in Iwack!”
*Sigh*
Since before Jar left, we’ve been telling George he’s going to Iraq with lots of camels, sand and haji.So, I told him a happy story about 3 Big Little Jar’s that played with camels, sand and haji.I’m glad he’s too young to understand everything now, but I’m happy he remembers Jar.We talk about Jar a lot, and George will always bring him up at the strangest times, but it always makes me smile!
Also, for your reading pleasure, I think I’m going to start writing children’s books.Here is the cover art for the first one!; )
Today, I am thankful for a perfect love in an imperfect world.
When I sit and think about all the other things I am thankful for, they all stem from this one thing. Like branches off of a tree trunk, stemming out unto leaves and thorns, into the blessings and trials of life. The beautiful thing about the tree of thanks is that it is ever changing and growing, shedding its leaves in the fall, raking them up, tossing them away, and beginning anew in the spring.
It is nice to lay underneath that tree of thanksgiving; to look up at the sky and see just how blessed I really am. To be reminded of how much I've taken for granted. To be reminded of how far I've come and how far is yet to go.
So I hope today that you will take a second to stop and look to the sky, and be thankful.
Well, there's not a lot new going on here. I just figured since I had the night to myself, I would take a little time and blog about things. I've been pretty good here lately, and Jar seems so too. We have a routine now. It works. We're happy, we talk a lot, we miss each other and blah blah blah, but things are good.
I still have my "panic" moments, though. For example, Jar informed me one day that he would be going on a mission soon, and I about had a nervous breakdown trying to make sure we got to Skype before he left. Once we were finally able to Skype, all I could say was "well, why are YOU going on this mission, why couldn't they send someone else?" And as soon as we hung up I felt like the world's biggest turd. The good news? I don't think I cried. But I would have much rather cried than felt like the douche that I did after that conversation!
And, I still do cry, about anything it seems. I cry when I see Hallmark commercials. When I see anything related to any type of soldier homecoming. I was actually visiting with a new friend over the weekend, whose husband is also deployed, and embarassed myself with a sporadic weeping moment. She had just found out that her husband might be losing internet service and that day might be the last time they'd get to Skype. Once they had finished talking, she was completely ok, and I was sitting there about to boohoo imagining how I'd feel if I found out the same news about Jar.
I have said more than once to Jar that I think this deployment is making me bipolar. Or possibly I was bipolar the entire time but was just able to hide it better! In reality, I'm dealing with things that I have been postponing for a long time. It's not always pretty, and that's ok. And things are starting to stabilize, the roller coaster ride I've been on has downgraded from being on "The Beast" to the Tilt-a-Whirl.
In my infinite dork-ness, I was thinking one day about the ups and downs of a deployment, and I think I've come up with a good visual representation of my mood so far. So have any of you heard of a damped oscillator? Well, if you haven't, don't worry, you're completely normal, and I'm getting ready to tell ya about them.
Imagine a pendulum on a grandfather clock. Well, a broken grandfather clock that isn't currently ticking. Imagine if you grabbed the bottom of the pendulum, pulled it as far as it would go to one side, and let it swing. When you first let it go, it's going to swing to the other side almost as high as you had pulled it back in the first place, but as time goes on and it swings back and forth a few times, it will swing up less and less, until it finally stops.
Somewhere in history, one of my fellow dorks determined that you could graph exactly how far that pendulum would swing each time, and exactly how long it would take it to stop (that is, if you theoretically knew all the external forces being applied to the pendulum i.e. gravity, drag from the air, and you knew the starting height of the pendulum before you let it go). This graph also describes my mood over the last few months.
If you didn't quite grasp this impromptu physics lesson, then don't fret. All I was trying to say is that, as time goes on (in the case of this graph, towards the little t), my mood swings have dropped off (the red line going back and forth). The unfortunate thing is, even though I "know" all of the external forces being applied to me, I have no idea how I will react to them. I'm working to try and understand that, and like I've mentioned before, give up my need to feel I am in control. As I work towards that, I can handle a few crazy tears here and there! :)
Disclaimer:
This post has nothing to do with anything deployment related. It is a response to an article written
about the latest campaign by PETA.
The article can be found here:
You might want to read or at
least glance over the article to understand what in the world I’m talking
about. You also may need to know a
little bit about Super Mario Bros. to completely understand, but if you don’t,
I’m pretty sure you’ll get my point.
Finally, please understand I apparently took my sarcasm pill this
morning. If you aren’t a fan of
sarcasm, or are a fan of PETA, then don’t waste your time reading this!
Dear PETA:
I am writing to address some concerns I was recently made
aware of concerning the alleged animal abuse by Super Mario. This information is both alarming and
concerning, and I regret to have to be the one to inform you, that Mario has
more than likely been abusing animals for years, if not decades.
File photo of alleged
animal abuser “Super” Mario
The earliest allegations of abuse stem from the early
1980’s, when Mario was believed to illegally own a large gorilla named Donkey
Kong, somewhere in the slums of Japan.
I am not exactly sure what led Mario, an Italian plumber, to the streets
of Japan; perhaps he was moonlighting as a plumber, when he was really deeply
involved in illicit monkey trafficking, but that I have no proof of.
It seems, after years of being mistreated, Donkey Kong
managed to escape his deplorable living conditions. After his escape, he went on a rampage through the streets
of Japan, climbing ladders and throwing barrels at innocent bystanders, and
destroying portions of the Japanese city he once inhabited. The destruction was so bad the
inhabitants of the city still cringe at the mention of Donkey’s name.
Outdated file photo
of Donkey Kong during destructive rampage
To escape prosecution stemming from that event, Mario left
Japan. No one is exactly sure of
his whereabouts over the next few years, but what is known is that he fell into
bad company and hard times. During
this time, he gained a group of dedicated followers. His closest accomplices were:
His brother Luigi
(also a plumber)
A midget who was fond
of magic mushrooms, who went by the alias of “Toad”
And his girlfriend “Princess”
Toadstool aka “Peach”
At some point, Mario’s girlfriend was kidnapped by a drug
lord named Bowser (aka “King Koopa”), who was miffed over the amount of drug
money owed to him by Toad. It was
during Mario’s attempts to rescue Princess Toadstool that evidence of far more
terrible abuses came to light.
It started with Mario smashing turtles and small beetles
with his feet. Mario believed that
these poor defenseless animals were being sent to attack him, and were being
controlled by his arch enemy Bowser.
He would even skin the helpless turtles and hurl their shells at other
animals, knocking them unconscious and leaving them at his mercy.
It then escalated to burning animals with a powerful
chemical accelerant, believed to be made from a rare flower. This chemical was so powerful, it
allowed Mario to hurl fireballs long distances, and coupled with the effects of
the mushroom drugs Mario was so fond of, led to even more maniacal behaviors.
Sometime after this, the first evidence appeared of Mario
wearing the tails of what appeared to be raccoons. In his drug induced state, Mario believed that wearing these
animal pelts would make him fly.
Skinning animals quickly turned into an obsession for
Mario. In fact, a quick internet
search yields multiple pictures of Mario wearing the skins of various animals,
such as frogs, bears, and even penguins.
(Though I think the bigger question here is, where in the world did he
find a frog large enough for a full grown man to fit inside?)
PETA, I know that you want to teach the children of America
to not follow in the footsteps of this crazy animal skinner, but I am afraid
that you are already too late. The
children in our country have also been skinning poor helpless animals for many
years, specifically around the end of October. In fact, my own son is guilty of this atrocity.
It started before he was even a year old. I thought I had sheltered my son from
the influence of Mario and his hoards of animal skinners, but in hindsight, I
was wrong. This picture is from
October of that year, when I caught him dressed in the skin of a very small
(and I’m sure equally helpless) baby giraffe.
He doesn’t even look remorseful there, but does look
surprised he got caught with the skin…
The next year, once again without my knowledge, my son was
able to skin an even more elusive animal, the dangerous wild Elmo. That year, he wore the skin proudly,
and even had the nerve to go around and ask people for candy while he was
wearing it.
I thought that I could forgive his actions from those two
years. The first year, he was so
young, he didn’t know any better.
And I could completely understand him skinning Elmo the next year, that
thing was kind of creepy anyways, and kept asking for you to tickle it. If he hadn’t have skinned him, I would
have.
But this year, his skinning got out of hand. You see, I’m pretty sure my son skinned
a member of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. This blurry picture is the only
evidence I have, so I can’t be completely sure.
Not only that, but I think he has convinced his friends to
join in with the skinning. That or
they too have fallen victim to the sordid tales of Mario. I’m afraid one of his friends even
skinned a local handyman named Manny and paraded around with my son at a local
church collecting candy.
So I agree PETA, we must stop
the wayward influences of Mario and his gang of animal killing/skinning
followers, before their influence spreads and further infects our children with
its venom….
Ok PETA, in all seriousness and without all the (well, most
of the) sarcasm, I have this one plea.
PETA, please get a life.
Or at least get a hobby, take up knitting or something, sit
down, have a big steak and a beer, and relax for a second. I completely agree that animals
don’t deserve a lot of the cruel things that happen to them. I even like (most) animals! I think puppies and kittens are
cute! For a long time, I thought
veal were poor baby calves stripped from their mothers at birth, and forced to
live in tiny, dark cages where they couldn’t move until the day they were slaughtered,
and I thought that was horrible. I
still have a very hard time eating lamb because I can’t get the picture of a
tiny baby sheep with big ol’ baby sheep eyes about to shed a tear staring up at
me from my plate out of my head.
You know, I hit a cat on my way home from work the other
day, and I really felt bad! Did I
stop to check on the cat I hit?
No, I’m pretty sure it didn’t stand a chance against my 3,000 lb Chevy
Malibu barreling towards it a 60 mph.
(And had it been a dog, or had the hit-and-run occured in front of someone's house not out in the middle of nowhere on a little two lane road, I would have stopped.) Did I swerve to try and miss the cat? No, I wasn’t about to endanger my life or the lives of other
humans because of a kitty cat.
I’ll chalk that one up to natural selection, and move on. But I digress…
So anywho PETA, this isn’t about your mission to save
animals. What this is about is the
fact that with the amount of time, money and effort you put into this “Campaign
to Stop the Youths of America from Turning into Maniacal Raccoon Skinners,” you
could have done a lot of good things instead. You could have fed lots of needy children. Imagine, providing them all Thanksgiving
dinner, complete with Tofurky and 1000% certified organic green beans and vegan
pumpkin pie, their little eyes smiling up at you at the sight of such a
bountiful meal.
*Yummm…..*
(* denotes use of
sarcasm again)
Or you could have provided toys and clothes to needy
children at Christmas, and you could have made sure that none of it was tested
on animals or contained any animal byproducts. You could have bought equipment to provide people in third
world countries with fresh drinking water, unless you think it is wrong to kill
the dysentery causing microorganisms in the water or something. In that case you could have provided
mosquito friendly mosquito nets to help prevent malaria in underdeveloped places
instead.
You could
have used your money and time to promote the ethical and humane treatment of
animals in a positive and caring fashion, while at the same time helping the
fellow HUMANS around you. But your
response was to start some off the wall, gory, scary campaign about how
horrible it is for a cartoon character to dress up like a raccoon (or what you
call a Tanuki or “Raccoon dog”. If
I saw a thing that was a cross between a dog and raccoon, it’d probably scare
me so much I’d kill it too), and in the process, you made your group look like a
bunch of crazy dingbats once again.
The last time I checked, there are still many, many atrocities happening
to humans all around us, and until that ceases, I have to say I have little
sympathy for the horrors little tanuki dog-things go through from day to
day.
Plus, I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Mario creators
were after however many years ago when they first gave Mario a little raccoon
tail and the ability to fly.
Sincerely,
Your meat eating, milk drinking, cat running-over-friend
Les
*Final Disclaimer*
I do not claim rights to any of the pictures or ideas
associated with Super Mario. Those
belong to Nintendo or whoever owns that name now. I also in no way believe Mario promotes harming or skinning
animals. In fact, I was a huge fan
of Mario as a child (ask my sister, she’ll tell ya) and I think he’s a heck of
a lot better than all these gory shoot-em-up games from the present! That is all.
Well folks, Avajar was able to attend a football game this past weekend! And not just any game, but a full fledged, sold out, NCAA Division I in-conference match up! It was, unfortunately, for the "wrong" team, as it was for a University of Louisville Cardinals game, cross state rivals of my alma mater (and Jar's favorite team) the UK Wildcats! But I figured little AJ wouldn't mind. After all, it's the thought that counts, right? Here are some pictures from the day!
Flat Marcus enjoying the game...
And just in case you were wondering, I had to do a little something to prove that underneath it all, I was really a UK fan (even though I'm pretty sure my senior year girl's powderpuff football team could beat UK's football team this year)!
I have some other pictures that I will add to this post eventually!
On Veteran's Day, Avajar raises his glass to all those serving and who have served our country. Because I'm pretty sure that's what Jar would be doing if he was here. That, and eating a steak, playing choo choo's with George, and giving me lots of hugs!
We love you Jar! Your hard work and dedication to our family and our country still amaze me. Thank you for all that you do, and for just being you!
Let me start off by saying, I am much better now. It is amazing the difference a few days can make. A few prayers, a few notes from friends and the one you love, and a few hard conversations with yourself can make a huge difference in the way you feel about something. I had time to reflect and calm down, and am back to normal, finally.
Even though I have been much calmer these past few days, I came across something tonight that really pushed my buttons. I normally do not read the local paper, especially the "Letters to the Editor" section, because they tend to publish inflammatory material and things to get a rise out of people. Well, on this occasion, they succeeded!
I went to pick up a pizza at a local pizza place this evening, and while I was waiting for it, picked up the front page section of today's edition of the Danville Advocate Messenger. I was thumbing through it, when a letter on the last page caught my attention, entitled "Always Support Troops, Not War." Hmmm. That hits a little close to home, so I decided to see what they had to say. The link to the letter follows.
These letters outrage me, even more today as the significant other of a member of the Armed Forces. I am not here to criticize the decisions of this President or the ones who came before him, but regardless of whether sending forces to the Middle East was right or wrong, openly questioning the legitimacy of this war undermines the sacrifices of ALL of our troops, both past and current, and their families supporting them at home. Saying this war is unjustifiable and pointless while at the same time saying you "Support Our Troops" is the same as saying that you follow a certain religon but don't always find it necessary to adhere to all of it's teachings. In the end, we are ALL Americans, and we all have stake in this war whether we like it or not.
"Whether one agreed with the Iraq war or not, we all own it now. That's how our country works. Every single brave man and woman who wore the uniform overseas went over there wearing the American flag, representing us and our nation's ideals. Now, the time has finally come for all of them to return home on December 31, 2011. And a new front awaits back here.
One president began the Iraq war. Another ended it. But it was yet another commander-in-chief, President Lincoln, who said, "Let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan. That work isn't done. And until it is, I won't consider the Iraq war over."
This quote comes from an article written by a veteran of the war in Iraq named Paul Rieckhoff. (http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/28/opinion/rieckhoff-iraq-war/index.html?hpt=hp_t2) I read this opinion piece a few days prior to reading the one that inflamed me so, and I could not agree with him more. We all own this war, as we all own this country. We should support this country and those who support it, instead of relying on this country to support us. The men and women of our Armed Forces swear to defend our Country, and to do that they agree to take orders handed down to them by our country's Commander in Chief. Who we "collectively" elected, by the way!
So all I am asking is to use a little consideration before you go slinging around the words "pointless" and "stupid." I am just as unhappy as you are about our troops being there, and pray for the day they will all come home. (Which, on a sidenote and in case you missed it, isn't necessarily happening with this drawdown. See this article which specifically refers to "My" soldier http://www.wkyt.com/home/headlines/KY_Soldiers_may_find_new_mission_after_Iraq_132351383.html :)
So whatever happens, whether Jar and his buddies come home sooner than expected, or are left to fight an even more dangerous war in the aftermath of an "unoccupied" Iraq, I will support them. As I will support, though not always agree with, this President and this Great Nation, Under God. With Liberty and Justice for ALL.
