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Singer and Dancer

July 14, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

Younger son loved camp.  The only problem he faced was that he was not a “good singer and dancer”.  Thus he sat out of some of the activities.  He loved everything about the camp.  His counselor, the bunk beds, the friends he made, the crafts, the food!  He said the pancakes even rivaled Daddy’s pancakes.

He brought his blanket and two special stuffed animals, but he had me quickly hide them under his sleeping bag.  My guess is they didn’t have to stay there for long.

I know it was only four days. I know there were only two actual days that I didn’t see him, but he looks older.  The confidence and independence my sons have gained at camp is a wonderful thing.  Younger son is handling himself with more control and is managing older son more easily.  There is more patience in my son’s soul.

I am so proud of younger son for going to camp with an open heart and mind and really giving it a try.  He fell in love with the camp, just as older son has, and we are very blessed to have this wonderful camp to send our sons to for learning.

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Time can move so slowly

July 13, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

Younger son went to camp on Wednesday night.  We left him at camp around 7:45 that evening and he was crying.  Older son and I were crying too.  Yesterday was tolerable.  I only got misty-eyed a few times, but held it together pretty well.  Today was a different story.

Last  night I cuddled a pair of his footed pajamas.  I didn’t sleep well.  I woke up every few hours.  I didn’t really have bad dreams or anything, just kept waking up.  Didn’t sleep soundly.

This morning I cried a lot.  Couldn’t get myself to stop.  I kept myself busy and tried not to think about it on my way home from the lovely half-day Friday.  Filled my afternoon with busy work.  It was good because it was purposeful work.  But I was still thinking about him.

Tonight I put in Sweeney Todd and figured that would fill the evening but it was only 10:30 when it was over.  I can’t bear this.  If I go to sleep this early I know I won’t sleep well.  I wish it were already Saturday morning.

I know it’s only two days of not seeing him, and I know others in the world have had to deal with far more dire circumstances.  Still it hurts my heart to know my baby isn’t in our home.  Tomorrow morning.  Only an hour and a half away.  Then I’ll see my baby.  Still, it’s only 10:52…

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Marvel’s The Avengers

July 11, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

Fine.  We may have come late to the party, but Marvel’s The Avengers was awesome.

Chris Hemsworth is simply beautiful and I love Thor.

The man knows how work a cape.  I have not been keeping up to date on my Marvel movies (still have yet to see either Iron Man or Captain America), but The Avengers was scripted so that it didn’t matter that I tend to be more of a DC gal.

There is nothing I could write about the movie that has not probably already been written.  Samuel L. Jackson-fabulous.  Robert Downey, Jr.-been a fan since 1985.  All of the heroes were phenomenal as they should be.  That was expected.  My favorite part was watching my sons.

Younger son was fighting sleep the whole time but never lost the look of awe that was on his face.  It was an experience of the magic of movies.  I watched as his eyes widened and he reacted with pure joy at so many moments.  He laughed, giggled, and said whoa almost as frequently as Joey Lawrence.

Older son was showing off how much he was in the know.  One of the heroes would do some amazing feat and he would quietly say “classic Hulk” or “classic Iron Man”.  His confidence in being familiar with these characters showed how much he has grown from the days of Nick Jr.

My sons have joined the ranks of millions who turn to these superheroes for continuity and symbolism in their lives.  Very patriotic as well, and not just Captain America.  All of the superheroes always bring out the feeling of Americana in me.  Stan Lee made his cameo, funny one-liners abounded, and all was right in the world.

While vengeance is a tricky line to walk in real life, in the movies, it’s simple.  You avenge a wrongdoing.  The Avengers sparked the imaginations of my sons.  Just as Superman did back in 1978 for me.

 

Hulk, smash.

 

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My Lunch with Indiana Jones

July 8, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

“We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and X never, ever marks the spot.”  Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  Indy is speaking about enjoying the journey because if you only follow the map and only pay attention to the stuff that is right in front of you, you’ll miss something.  He likes getting another perspective and this is often when pieces of the adventure fall into place.

This continues to be a struggle for me.  Enjoying the journey and not worrying so much about the destination is not my strong suit.  Perhaps because I have ended up in some strange places in my life.  Pretty normal places, really, but places I never expected myself to end up because it wasn’t “in the plan”.  I watch others sometimes and they seem so very content and do not demonstrate an obvious map to their lives.  The cliche of the grass is always greener comes to mind, and I fear, gentle reader, this post will may more cliches to follow.

I have a very nice life.  Why do I clutter it by worrying about silly stuff?  By seeking more than what I have already?  When will I come to realize that I am there…that very nice spot to sit and tarry a while?

Perhaps because I still feel a drive to do more within this world.  Hubby gave me two books for our anniversary (yep…I’m a nerd…books are a really good gift on all occasions and smart hubby picked up on this early in our 12 years together!).  One of them was about the butterfly effect and how every action you do has an impact somewhere, even if you don’t see it.  Makes sense he would give me a book about the butterfly effect.  First, he knows I’m grappling eternally with purpose in life and, as part of the chaos theory, the butterfly effect fits into our way of life.

I then wonder what butterfly effects could I be having?  Are they positive for the world, or I am sending out dismal influences that will haunt folks for generations to come?  By nature I am a worst case scenario-ist.  I have to go through all the worst possible end results to feel comfortable with a situation.  If I explore this idea of sending out the dismal stuff, I’ll work my way back to a more centered reality.

During this lunch, in which I hope there are no truly exotic foods, like in Temple of Doom, Indy and I would  talk about the digs, rights of the modern countries to archeological finds, and his uncanny ability to enjoy the journey.  Not only does he enjoy the journey, he does it with great style and in his own way.  One never really realizes how much you can learn about life from Indiana.  Ah, Dr. Jones, you chose wisely.

      Each day I hope I don’t choose poorly.

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My Lunch with the Doc or A Night at the Opera

July 8, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

My lunch with the doc is also known as late night dinner with my hubby or a night at the opera.  We went to see (and listen) to an opera.  It was beautiful but had to end at intermission because of the storm.  The power was knocked out so they performed the first act in a combination of the church lights and the emergency lights.  The pianist, who was fabulous, was playing by flashlight and tap light.  Our friend was playing the role of Julius Caesar and his voice is heavenly.  Everyone in the cast did an amazing job especially with no air conditioning!  They decided to end it after act one since the building was getting darker and there were no lights in the restrooms.

That’s a hard call to make but the founder of Opera Modo made the correct choice.  As we were driving home we encountered several trees that had fallen and two lanes on a major road blocked off due to fallen power lines.  She was concerned with safety and liability.  She made the right choice.

So hubby and I had time to enjoy a late night supper and made our way to a classic Jersey diner.  If you are not from Jersey, you do not have a full appreciation for diners.  Next time you come to Jersey, you need to go to a diner.  Not a fancy one, not a “theme” one, just a diner on the side of a highway or maybe even a little off the beaten path.  Good food, good service, good prices.  And lots of good conversation.

Hubby and I were able to finish complete thoughts on the first attempt!  We also had our third date night in a month’s time.  How awesome is that?  We talked about politics, education, food, opera, performing, and our sons.  We sat in silence and ate yummy food.  He stole some of my chocolate milkshake.

So my tip to you is to have a night at the opera.

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Time to do…

July 5, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

whatever I’d like to do.  It’s odd.  I’ve haven’t had this much on my hands in years.  I do not want to fritter it away however, so I need to focus myself and find something purposeful to do with all this time.

Hubby and I have begun discussing sprucing up the laundry room.  We need to clean and then seal the walls, finish the top half of the walls, and do something with the floor.  Then the fun part is painting it.  I think I’ll pick a very funky color for the room.  It’s one of the rooms you can have a lot of fun in because one has to make laundry fun and exciting.  While we’re at, we can seal the lower half of the walls in the family room and lay down the new floor boards.  The frame of the floor is fine, it just has terrible floorboards.

I also want to paint the upstairs.  Not the boys’ rooms, they’ve been painted several times.  The bathroom’s been done twice too.  I want to paint our bedroom.  And the hallway, living room, dining room, and stairway walls.  This means of course I get to pick COLORS!!!!!

I have no clue about any of the rooms yet except our bedroom.  I’m planning a lovely jewel-tone in the blue family.  I’ve already found the new bedding to go with it.  I have some paint chips and will narrow down the choices.  Then once that’s done, we’ll figure out the rest of the upstairs.  By we, of course I mean me with some mice.

I need to choose carefully about the living room because very soon we will have to replace the furniture.  I’m thinking I’ll pick something in the espresso family because in theory that could hide the boys’ messes.  I keep thinking of spices for the living/dining room colors and then a bright vibrant color for the hallway.

I need to make these choices and then make my timeline so I don’t fritter away my time to do whatever I want to do with my family.  Some home improvement projects are always a good idea.

Happily it’s been too hot to weed!

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My Lunch with Superman

July 4, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

I spent the day watching the Superman marathon on Encore Action.  Superman II is playing right now.  I love these movies.  Watching Superman earlier today I was sent back to my childhood and all the joys of super heroes.  It was neat to remember how much Superman meant to me.  It helps me to realize how important Spiderman and Thor and all the super heroes are to my sons right now.

I remembered how much I wished I could meet Superman.  I thought his planet was so cool and then the “home away from home” in the north was awesome.  Talk about a cool fort!  The crystals were so beautiful and seemed to possess such strength.  I don’t care that the movies today have CGI and better special effects.  These were groundbreaking when they came out.  The movies have great moments of humor.  I love in the first movie as Clark Kent is looking for a telephone booth and he comes upon one of those half-booths without a door.  The look on his face is classic.

To spend the day revisiting my childhood was a blast and to have my sons watching son of Jor-El with me made it a great way to celebrate the 4th.

We did take a break from Superman at one point because as you probably know there is a federal law that one must watch Jaws on the 4th of July.  In honor of that film I will quickly list some favorite lines:

You’re gonna need a bigger boat.

That’s some bad hat, Harry.

Blow up…blow up…blow up…smile you son of a bitch (BANG)!

As you know Amity means friendship.

I love that my sons sing along to “Show Me the Way to Go Home”.

There is a part of me that feels sad when watching Superman.  I miss Christopher Reeve.  If you haven’t seen Superman in a while, sit down and watch it again.  Watch Somewhere in Time, Deathtrap, and Noises Off and you’ll have a wonderful time courtesy of the amazing talents of Christopher Reeve.

Gene Hackman, Valerie Perrine, Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve all have some great comedic moments.  The moments are so good because of the sincerity in the characters.  Reeve has some great looks he gives with some of the tongue in cheek moments.  Plus that piece of hair on his forehead with the cute little curl.  Younger son used to have curls and he usually had one just like Superman’s curl.  We’d call him son of Jor-El.

Superman…truth, justice, and the American way.

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My Own Mr. Holland’s Opus

July 1, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

I am fortunate to have actual Mr. Holland moments through my work and my pirates always make me proud.  I do enjoy watching their growth and discoveries.  If I have even the tiniest bit to do with their successes, it makes me smile, a smile that goes all the way through my soul.

Still I came to realize that my opus needed to be told that they are my opus.  I sat down with each of my sons and told them that they are my opus.  They are the greatest part of my life.  I explained to them, explicitly, that my priorities go as follows:

My relationship with God.

My relationship with my hubby.

My relationship with my sons.

…my family.

…my friends.

…my job.

…my hobbies.

Granted, my job may read this (not my immediate boss, but the concept of employer) and think, why her priorities are not in the right order.

But they are.  If my relationship is not right with God, if I don’t maintain that one, I’m of little to no use to anyone else.   Particularly, I’m of little to no use to my hubby or sons.  Hubby and I have a type of short hand that we can use with each other, but we also know how important it is to nurture our relationship.  And even if all we get is 15 minutes to hold a conversation, because we share a brain, we are able to cover a lot of ground.  This was a banner month-two date nights in one month!

But I remembered that my sons are still young.  They won’t be for long, but at this moment I remembered, or realized, I needed to be EXPLICIT with them.  There are two lullabies I sing to them.  One I made up and the other is “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon.  Mr. Holland (played beautifully by Richard “I did Jaws, I don’t need this” Dreyfuss)  sang this song to his son in the movie.  So I related the idea of the the boys’ importance in my life to the movie.  I told them they are my opus, the most wonderful piece of my life, my efforts,  my dreams and hopes.

While I am not perfect and never will be, I told them that everything I do and say and show to them is to help them when I’m not with them.  To help them make good choices and to know they are loved.  I said if we were independently wealthy, I would be at home waiting for them when they got home from school.  I also pointed out how lucky they are to come to their father.  Not a lot of boys get to spend so much time with their dads.

I love the subtle shifts I’ve seen in my sons.  They are talking more, sharing more about their fears, worries, hopes, and dreams.  They are slowing down their pace and taking the moments to explore what they are feeling.  Then they are trying to express it with more clarity.  I know this change  isn’t simply due to me telling them they are my opus.  This is because they are my opus and hubby and I have been working on this opus since the day we found out we were having babies.  It is so neat to see it starting to click for our sons.  It is so cool to watch them as they grow and develop, gain new confidences, and try new adventures.

My opus will not bring me fame and fortune, just as Mr. Holland’s didn’t bring those things to him.  But it’s not the fame and fortune.  It’s the moments.  It’s hearing “I love you , Mom.”  It’s the hugs.  The kisses.  The cuddles.  The wee bits of embarrassments that are starting to rear their ugly heads.  My opus is filled with cacophonous sounds and they are a beautiful noise.                                                                                                          

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The Peace in the Chaos

June 25, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

Well, well, well, gentle readers.  I had a wonderful weekend.  We did so many things together yet nothing with a stringent schedule.  We just were together and doing things that made us happy.  Friday night Hubby and I went to a wedding and had good times, good times with family and friends.  The boys had their yard sale on Saturday morning.  Most of the money they made was because people thought it was sweet that young boys were having their own yard sale.  We put up the screen-gazebo and bought some new chairs for enjoying the outside with-happily they were even made in America.

We played air hockey, we went to church, we went to the baseball picnic.  We cuddled, we talked, we shared dreams.  The peace of the weekend was lovely.

Topic of the sermon on Sunday was about the idea of peace and being still.  As I wrote a few posts ago, peace comes in chaos.  Focus has been given to finding those moments of peace and it makes each day happier.  Humor also helps each day and this evening we were having fun with grammar.  My kind of fun!

I did throw my back out.  In my 41 and a half years I have never thrown my back out.  I attribute that to going to the chiropractor since I was 12.  Irony is oozing over this situation for me since I just celebrated ten years of marriage to my chiropractor.  Hubby was rubbing my feet last night and I fell asleep on the couch.  When I woke up at 5am to the joyful strains of the Brady Bunch, I got up to go to bed.  I grabbed the hand towels, the last bit of laundry in one of the baskets, and headed toward the bathroom.  I opened the door to the linen closet and bent slightly to place the towels on the shelf and out went my back.  The towels were the straw that threw out the camel’s back.

We had put up the gazebo, rearranged the family room, did multiple loads of laundry, and made several trips up and down the attic stairs.  My back said enough.  It hurt on the way to work, all day at work, and then on the ride home from work too.  Hubby worked on it and I’ll be taking some Advil PM.  I’ll stick some ice packs on it as I drift away to slumber land.

The moment of peace in this?  My sons making a date with me for tomorrow night to watch the newest Adventure Time on demand.  Youngest son asked me for the date and he acquiesced to letting oldest son join us.  Slumber land will be filled with sweet dreams of peaceful summer evenings.

                                                 

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My Lunch with Neil Diamond for 30 Years

June 20, 2012 by pinkpigrulz

The man was rocking last night.  You can’t even add the qualifier, for a man in his 70s, because it don’t matter what his age, Neil Diamond was rocking.  I think he’s lowered the key for some of his songs, but he always had a deep voice.  It was a great show, just as great as the shows I’ve seen over the past 30 years.

30 years.  How did that happen?  In looking back through those 30 years, looking at it from how many Neil concerts I attended, puts an interesting perspective on where I am in my life.  He’s been a constant in my relationship with my mom.  Mothers and daughters all have ups and downs, shifts in the normal of their relationships as each role changes over the years.  But through all of the shifts my mom and I have gone through, we have always had Neil Diamond and the concerts as a touchstone.

The song I love the most is “Beautiful Noise”.  It just makes me smile and think about the good things in life.  During our lunch I would try to explain to Neil that the lyrics in the song remind me of so many stages of life.  I also love the rhythm to the song.

“Like the clickety-clack of a train on the tracks.”

“What a beautiful noise coming up from the park.  It’s the song of the kids and it plays until dark.”

My family is my beautiful noise.  The sound of us eating dinner at the dining room table.  The sound of the boys playing in their room or at the park or in the backyard.  That beautiful noise is one I try to keep floating around in my head to remind me of where my energies belong.  I need, want, to spend my energy on my family.  I don’t want to waste any of it on petty situations that arise in my life.  I try to remember that this too shall pass, whatever “this” I’m facing in a day.

Life is full of many beautiful noises if I don’t fill my ears with idle chatter and clatter.  This photo is a visual representation of a beautiful noise for me.  It is Neil in there, you just have to look at it from the abstract.

I enjoyed savoring the music last night, the energy of the crowd that had come together to enjoy the many decades of beautiful noises created by Neil Diamond.

                               

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