Friday - Wii party with my sister's family - you should see Sammy do the Hula hoop. Laugh for days...
Saturday - Literal running in circles
Sunday - our week's pot o' oatmeal
Monday - Am I the only one who thinks this is a, um, completely inappropriately looking shirt? Just me??
Tuesday - Sammy retelling his dream to me. It was odd, as most of his dreams are. However...notice the hands in pockets? Kills me!
Wednesday - backing up my hard drive...WAAAAYYYYY too many friends have lost everything lately.
Thursday - Sammy wrote his first book. Can I just say how proud I am? My favorite parts are the title page, complete with exclamation mark and self portrait and the repeated Sammys and the "The End" horribly misspelled because "I don't really know the right letters". Hee!
Title Page:
Story:
(by the way...that is the big one eyed monster robot space ship from Monsters Vs Aliens...which I think came out quite nicely.)
I hope you've all enjoyed Paul Weller week on the blog. We should all have Paul Weller weeks. Regularly. Mandated. Because he is awesome. So these are the Top 5. Today. Because picking a top 5 Paul Weller of ALL TIME? So never going to happen. Way too difficult.
1. I Didn't Mean To Hurt You (live) - This was my introduction to Weller. Well, my formal one. I knew of him before, but this started the love affair. And remains one of my very favorite songs ever.
See: HERE. I really hate not being able to embed...
2. Headstart for Happiness: technically a Style Council song, but I love his later 'solo' versions. Like this (and DUDE. have I mentioned how smokin' hot he is?):
3. Out of the Sinking: If I WERE to pick an all time top 5, this may very well be on it. Maybe. Probably. Possibly. I really do love it.
4. Brand New Start - I have nothing pithy. I just love this song.
5. Has My Fire Really Gone Out? - This is a pretty typical representation of what you'll find us dancing to most days...
Bonus: you do something to me with Adele: There are a lot of SCARY covers of this song out there. S-H-U-D-D-E-R. Just a quick PSA? Duffy should have just walked slowly away...
And, newer Weller that's worming its way into my heart. Have You Made Up Your Mind:
Last fall, I read and passed along to Isaac, an article about buying experiences versus gifts. It made a lot of sense to me, considering our recent foray into living this more simple kind of life. Isaac and I tend to buy anything we want when we want it anyway, so gift giving was becoming more difficult and just something to do instead of something heartfelt. Isaac's birthday was our first event to test out this concept. Everyone had a lovely time, we were doing something we loved surrounded by family and friends. I would totally count that a "win". In the very traditional sense of the word. Not the co-opted, Charlie Sheen sense. Because that would just be ewww. We also got Isaac's racquetball racket restrung for his weekly game. Which I think counts toward experiences since it's a tool FOR an experience and was made new instead of just getting a new one. Win! (Now I'm just mocking poor Charlie...) And, while gifts won't be completely done away with, I think we'll have a good time coming up with these experiences for our family.
HOWEVER...I've never really been in the "experience as gifts" realm. So I'm at a loss and need some help. What are some great ideas of experiences over gifts you would like to give your family? I have a friend who has given theater tickets (season passes?) to her married kids. That sounds like a great idea. Built in date nights! I would LOVE concert tickets. Even if the concert was far off. But. After that, I'm not sure where to go. Especially where Isaac is concerned. So, please. Any ideas, if you have any. Isaac mentioned how pleased he was about his birthday party. That he would definitely remember his 35th, but was hard pressed to remember what he received last year. I want more of the "I remember that" rather than the "what did we get...?"s. Help?
I give my parents a lot of grief over the music we were raised on. A lot of Jim Reeves (my mom's favorite) and Statler Brothers and Conway Twitty. Old country, as it were, as well as the "new" stuff. Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, etc. That whole early '90s revival. We didn't get a lot of radio stations in our town and the choices were country, several Spanish stations and one "Top 40 UGH" station. So...not so much with the choices. And country always won out, of course. I really, really hated it. But at least we WERE raised on music. There was always music around. EVERY DAY. Even if it wasn't music I approved of.
I realize that I am biased with my utter love when it comes to music, but I don't understand NOT living with music constantly around. If I'm in the kitchen? iPod going. If I'm in the family room during the day? iPod going. Car? Yup. iPod going. I've HEARD of people who drive in silence. Granted, I don't really know any of these people *lalalalalalalalalala...I can't hear you!*, but I think that they exist. Somewhere. And people who have silence in their homes, when the t.v. isn't on. But I am not one of those. It's all about the music in our house.
I've said before that I can link every memory I have with a song. Music is so powerful that I can tell my entire life story through lyrics. Childhood, high school, college, my first marriage, meeting Isaac, each of our homes, the birth of Sammy: all of them have songs tied to them, for better or worse. For those who don't listen to music, what are the memories tied to? It's something I think about a lot. And I have to say? I do not understand it at all, the lack of music in some peoples lives. How else do you signal spring, but with a return of Jack Johnson on the car playlist?
So I will have my memories of my dad trying to get us to dance on any random Saturday afternoon to awful country playing on the record player and marry them with the memories of Sammy and I dancing through the kitchen to Paul Weller and Jack Johnson and Crowded House and hope that this is one legacy that Sammy not only embraces, but embraces so whole-heartedly that he'll one day pull his own daughter up from the couch on a random Saturday afternoon and try to get her to dance.
*My apologies for the title...I used to be obsessed with Wings and I sometimes channel Thomas Hayden Church.
We (well...everyone else, anyway) read Alice I Have Been this month for book club. I am still struggling through it, bound and determined to finish, but...wow. It's slow. And disturbing in some ways. And complicated in the "is this real? is this not?" sort of way. And, gotta be honest, not making me any more a fan of Alice in Wonderland. What can I say? Some months the book comes easily, sometimes not so much. Which is true of the restaurants we frequent, as well, apparently.
Not to put too fine a point on it (totally laughing should you be singing They Might Be Giants the rest of the day!), but IHop? Not the greatest of book clubbing destinations. Well. At least not the local one. It's full of workers who CLEARLY don't want to be there...thank heavens we had choices to restaurant hop!
In other news...Sammy was accepted to our first choice Charter School for next year. Thursday morning, early, I ran over to the Health Department to fill out an immunization exemption form so we could get him registered for Kindergarten (!) on Friday. For some reason, an exemption form is $15. I don't really get that. But, ANYWAY...I ran back home and gathered the myriad of paperwork required to send my only born out into the cold, cruel world. In the midst of that, the phone rang. It was the director of our first choice Charter School...apparently Sammy was number 12-ish on the wait list and, against all KINDS of odds, his number came up. The spot for next year was ours if we wanted it. And instead of JUMPING at the chance, I did what I do best. I started second guessing. I asked for the weekend to think about it and she answered questions and I started wondering if maybe a traditional elementary school was really better. I put out an email to a friend who had a child in both schools and after her answer, I started wondering even more and really didn't know what to do. If we had gotten this in the first round of the lottery, I would have jumped at the chance, you know? So I was flummoxed at why I was having such a difficult time.
We visited the school on Friday and we were really put at ease. It's a K-8, one class per grade school, classes capped at 20 students. There are some areas that are lacking, but there are areas that are just what I want for him. I don't know that it was the absolute most correct decision, but I don't know that either decision was the absolute most correct decision. And, if it really isn't everything I've seen or heard, we pull him out next year. I think it's just tripping me up that we've selected the school my child will be attending for the next eight years of his life. *shudder* I AM very grateful for the at least 13 people who declined before us. I really didn't think that we had a shot of attending, so this is just...beyond. And I'm hopeful. Especially since Sammy ran right into the Kindergarten room and started playing and exploring and then declared, on the way to the car, "Can I come back tomorrow?". He LOVED it. So very much. And I should be really grateful for that.
For our third topic: Sammy has been sick (just a virus, according to the doctor, even though I really thought he might have something REALLY loud and scary camped out in his chest...) so we've been cooped up this past week. I'm going INSANE. Huh. I think that's about all I have to say about that. Except this. Saturday night, Isaac and I both woke up in the middle of the night at the same time. Horrid stomach ache, both CERTAIN puking was on deck. Twenty very horrible flu ridden minutes ensued. And then it went away. It was so very weird. Especially since we hadn't eaten the same thing since Wednesday night, so...not so much "bad food" related. But seems to wrap up my week in a "yeah, that's about right" kind of way.
How soon is spring?
(paul weller...my ever changing moods - this seems to be footage from concerts the same year we saw him in LA. It was an AMAZING concert. One I would love to repeat sometime.)
