A Fall Sneak Peek

Could this be an Awkward Family Photo or what?

We've had a lovely fall preview this weekend, and Ben and the kids and I crammed in all of our favorite fall activities before the temperature climbs back up again. I got a Pumpkin Spice latte-- my first of the season-- to welcome the first day of the Fall semester.

We enjoyed a breeze while swinging at the park (and went home right after this picture when jack darted in front of the swing and Harry flattened him. Jack has bad swing etiquette and some sort of desire to be concussed because this happens all the time).

I made a delicious vegetable beef soup, substituting squash for potatoes to make it more fall-y and using the entire expiring contents of my vegetable drawer (and then Ben texted me like 4 minutes after it was done to tell me he'd be working until the kids went to bed. Grrrr) and some fantastic chocolate chip banana bread.

We went to our nephew Max's birthday party, which is something we do at the beginning of each fall season, and Jack got joyfully naked, or, as he says "nay nay." Jack likes to get nay nay and sing to his "enis." Good times.


We had breakfast with my parents and my brother, which is not especially fall-like but was fun anyway


We played outside, and it was chilly and bugless for the first time in forever. Much joy in Mudville.









We went to our favorite apple orchard to do some picking and even went on a hayride (Jack was not a big fan. Every time the farmer would stop the tractor and tell us cool stuff about the farm, he'd yell "All done! All done that man!"



We bought the kids some silly pumpkin hats (but the cute little gift shop was out of cider AND cider donuts!! The horror!)


Mostly we picked apples



Posed for some pictures




And came home to make this:

I'm glad to have a few more days of balmy weather ahead, but this weekend made me excited for the fall around the corner.

October's bright blue weather, you know.

Fiction Friday

Once again, I am linking up to The Red Dress Club's fiction meme Red Writing Hood. This week's prompt: "write a short piece of prose (or a poem if you so choose) from the perspective of a broken inanimate object."

From Barbie to Rambo, With Scorn

If I tell you I used to be beautiful, will you believe me?

It's all right, dahling. I wouldn't believe me.

My left eye has been gone since 1984. What do you mean what do I mean? It's gone. Rubbed off. Washed away. I'm not a fucking bath toy, you know.

Don't waste my time with such a ridiculous question. You know who I am. I'm an icon. An ICON. You know, dahling. A legend, a star, someone to emulate.

Emulate, dahling. To copy, to try to be. They all want to be me, you know. Jem and her friends used to try. Those swollen-headed Bratz girls. Even Dora, since she's started exploring adolescence. So many copies, Rainbow.

Oh, sorry, dahling. Rambo.

Tell me, you shirtless, painted-on-pants man, were you an icon?

What? Yes. Yes that is a hole in my hand. I used to have a ring. A ring. You know, a RING. Oh, you don't know. It's a bauble, dahling. An accessory. Did you have any accessories? Besides that headband, I mean.

AK-40 what? Oh. No, dahling. I've never seen anything like that. Packing? Certainly, Ken could pack. We had the most adorable pop-up camper. We'd pull it behind our pink van and get away, just the two of us, when Midge and Tracy and Skipper and the Dream House just became too much to-- What's that, dear? Heat? No, dahling, I don't think Ken packed that. The only bag he owned was from a "Rocking' Gym-Wear" line. It was racket-sized, really.

What about you? You're a well-built little figure. Did anyone copy you?

Oh, G.I.Joe. I met him once. He was on leave. Took him for a ride in my Corvette. A small man, but not at all small, dahling, if you know what I mean.

Well then, never mind. I'm certainly not going to explain it to you. That's not important anyway, dahlng. I think you're better equipped than Joe, but I do like thinking about him. About those days. I had my eyes and my original hair and the attic? I never though I'd even visit, much less take up residence.

What? Oh, no, dahling. This mess? It didn't used to look like this. I didn't come with spikes. In my box, I had waves that cascaded over my shoulders. That sounds cliche, doesn't it?

Cliche. You know, expected, unoriginal, tired. Like that streak of painted-on blood in the center of your cheek. Like my cornsilk hair and sky blue eyes. Like my name. Peaches and Cream. After my complexion and the chiffon ruffles of my ballgown. My god, I even had sparkly plastic slippers, you know, reminiscent of Cinderella.

Cinderella, dahling. The scullery-maid turned princess that all the little girls dreamed about. Even my little girl. She's not so little anymore, I bet.

Did you have a boy, Rambot-- sorry, Rambo?

Ah, that's a lovely name. What was he like?

You know, dahling, you can really tell a story, especially for a tough guy.

I'm sorry if my voice sounds dusty, dear. It's just-- I can picture him in my eye, the way you describe him, and when I see him, I see her, too. My little girl. The one who made me so ugly and always thought I was beautiful.

No, honey. I don't mean to smile.

My own private archive

The other day in the shower I started FREAKING out about the class I am teaching this fall. The class that has been prepped and ready to go since June.

I asked Ben if he thought I was going to be okay teaching it and he was all, "Dude, that's what your PhD is in. Chill out."

So I did. Sort of. I decided I'd feel even more okay if I could find my old class notes on the subject, so I scoured my desk. I only found one notebook tucked away in a drawer that I must have moved from my old grad student office to my new office. It was from my last semester of coursework when I took a really cool history of sexuality class and read a bunch of fantastic books. I found some short papers I wrote for the course in the pocket of the notebook, and I read them in amazement. I used to be so smart. Wha' happened?

Today, this guy

Helped me go downstairs and clean off our entire rickety shelving unit in the laundry room so I cold access my precious, precious files and FIND THOSE NOTES.
But first, he needed to wear his bat boots.

After I got all the crap off of my shelves and found my giant stack of files, I realized they contained no notes or syllabi, just a thousand journal articles.

Then my helper, who noticed the Tupperware of snacks I keep on the shelves so I can grab something quickly if the kids are hungry as we head out, said he was too tired from looking at things and needed to eat some Teddy Grahams in front of the tube.

Even though I lost my helper I found some great memories

Including my prelims answers, which represent the time in my life when I was the smartest I could ever possibly be. Seriously, when a PhD candidate finishes coursework and sits for their qualifying exams, that's it-- the pinnacle of smartness. Sure, as an academic career progresses, you might become a renowned expert in your field, but you will NEVER be as smart as you were when you took your qualifying exams-- the breadth of knowledge alone is incredible.

Also, my shelves looked better when I was done.

At this point, I started to freak out AGAIN because I thought I tossed my grad school notes. I have grown up on the cusp of the internet-- not quite young enough to have had it always in my life, but not old enough to be a total luddite. I took my notes on PAPER with a PEN, for goodness sake. Who does that?? Seriously, our wedding pictures were not even digital, but everyone I know who got married after us had digital pics-- we are at the very edge of relevant.

Lucky for me, I checked our storage area and found more file boxes

And these boxes had the goods-- notebooks, syllabi, old Sims games

Even the box from my VERY FIRST iPOD!

Good thing it was not the norm to bring laptops to class in 2003. I would have Facebooked my way through school.

I also found my very first folder of Planned Parenthood pamphlets, the papers that started my obsession

In the end, I left the downstairs armed with notes, syllabi, old exams, and old response papers-- in other words, I am golden.

I was surprised how orderly all the boxes were, especially my notes and essays. It's like I am preserving my papers for future archiving, which Margaret Sanger totally did YEARS before she died-- I always liked that about her.

Harry and Jack and I went to campus so I could have my picture taken for the department website, which I have been putting off for YEARS (and rightly so--in the picture from today I have 3,000 chins and am very shiny), and we took a rainy walk.

They're totally worth the lost brain cells, by the way.

Where the heck are all the 2T jeans? Also, the Z-O-O!

One final note about the great Purge of Fall 2010. We cleaned out the kids' closet which entails not only stacking up all the games and puzzles and finding stray Cootie heads and dice but also making sure each boy has clothes in his size for the upcoming season.

This is quite the freaking process. First I go through all jack's clothes on the top bar and decide what's too small (these clothes are packed away in to huge bags in our storage room or into the Tupperware box on the very top shelf of their closet) and what's too stained (these clothes are either tossed or donated, depending on the location and severity of the stain. Next, I shove all of Harry' clothes to the back and reach the hidden bar behind his clothes, which has all of his recently outgrown clothes that can be worn again (the unwearables are either tossed or donated). I move the ones in Jack's size up to Jack's top bar. Finally, I sort Harry's clothes and move the too-small stuff to the back, to wait for Jack's next season.

As a "special treat," I got to hang up a few shopping bags of new clothes on each boy's bar, too. Mainly Harry's. I have been buying them stuff here and there for the upcoming school year, and I needed to unpack it and make a list of items needed to fill in any holes in their wardrobes, which I was sure would be a short list. Ha!

(On a side note: we went to a giant shoe store in a town near us and the boys picked out new Crocs, Pumas, and wellies. THE SAME ones. So if these shoes last, Jack will be wearing Buzz and Woody Crocs, yellow and blue Pumas, and Batman boots for the next 2 or 3 years. But seriously, this store was amazing-- every brand of kid shoes you could possibly want, from Birkenstocks to Uggs to Stride Rite to New Balance to Merrel, all in the same spot-- a dream store. Like Zappos in real life. And because it's Wisconsin, they were grilling brats out back for $1).

I have bought Jack only one pair of jeans (gray skinny jeans-- ha!) because I assumed he would have a ton of 2T hand me downs in the back of Harry's half of the closet. Um, not so much. 2 pairs of jeans and some khakis from Gap with little bulldogs on them. WTH? 2 sweaters and a few button downs. THAT'S IT. Everything else back there is 3T, which is waaaaaaay too big. Did Harry skip that size or ruin it all?

Meanwhile, I apparently stocked up on the 4T at the very end of last season, which is the size jeans Harry still wears and the size I have been blithely buying for weeks. So he has 11 pairs. And a half dozen pairs of khakis. Oops.

SO. Fall shopping. It's on my list.

Something that has been on our list for awhile now is a trip to the Milwaukee Zoo, which is way better than our little free zoo and has hippos and elephants. Also wolves, which both kids were inexplicably excited about. Jack even got a stuffed wolf in the gift shop that he carries under his arm along with Pooh Bear and calls Pooh Wolf.

Not sure what we were all looking at here, but I bet it was a person. There were some serious fashion FAILS walking around (but I am wearing my camera bag across my body like an effed up purse, so who am I to talk?)

Okay, so there is this animatronic dinosaur exhibit at the zoo right now, and it was...odd.

BTW, Ben fell asleep watching some screwy survivor show on Discovery, and I was just about to change the channel when The Last Day of the Dinosaurs came on, and I could not look away. It was horrifying, especially for someone prone to catastrophic thinking and panic attacks. And now I can't stop thinking about 2012 and I never knew that triceratops could CRY.

I am cool with endangered animals at the zoo (even at our tiny zoo which can look a little grim and where animals might be better off taking their chances in their wild), but robotic (and probably wildly inaccurate) extinct animals? More like museum territory, huh?

The highlight of Harry's day might have been the Sponge Bob popsicle with the gumball eyes.

Or drinking milk and slushy simultaneously to replicate the Dannon yogurt concoction he sees on TV that his mean hippy yuppy parents won't buy him because it is not organic and has red dye and HFCS (which he calls high franklin corn cream) (all nutritional bets are off at the zoo cafe, in case you couldn't tell).

I love that peafowl roam free at this zoo.

PONY RIDES!


Jack was wiped out. This is him before we left the parking lot.

Purge

The other night after the kids went to sleep, I ran to the mall to look for fall clothes. In the 40-ish minutes I had before the place closed, all I could find was a pair of leopard-print stilettos, a filmy black blouse with a ruffled collar, and a black and white pinstripe blazer.

I liked plenty of other things, but for some reason, I couldn't imagine them living in my closet.

This morning, I almost cried reading the real estate section-- and not just because houses in our complex are about $50k less than they were when we bought ours. I was just so JEALOUS of all the houses with spare bedrooms and unfinished basements and you know-- room for STUFF. We have run out of stuff room.

After breakfast, Ben and I both cleaned out the covered baskets of crap that sit on our dressers. Inspired, I also cleaned out the two baskets that sit on my bookshelf/desk combo. On a whim, I opened the cabinet under my desk, the dusty place where my copies of Planned Parenthood's archive from 1942-1973 lives along with boxes and boxes of Walgreens photo orders that I place and pick up every week but can;t put in albums because I don't have any ROOM for albums.

Until the moment I opened the cabinet door, we planned to throw on some clothes and head out for some grocery shopping, maybe a walk by the lake and some lunch before cleaning the house from top to bottom, like we always do on Sundays. Instead, I started making piles of is-this-trash-or-treasure? and Ben swore under his breath, went downstairs to retrieve a box of garbage bags, and flung open the boys' super hero toybox.

We can never plan a whole-house purge because if we did, we'd never, ever do it because it sucks and is awful.

Harry and Jack were super good, milling around piles, watching TV, and finally going swimming with my brother for a few hours in the late afternoon.

Ben and I? Were AMAZING! Like, 3 carloads of donations amazing and a whole carload of trash that Ben took to my brother's apartment complex dumpster.

Look! You can actually walk in our closet again:

And I hung up all my scarves, which made me notice that they are all pink and purple. Now I have a specific item on my fall shopping list-- NOT pink or purple scarves

There's room again in the suer hero toy box AND in the stuffed animal toy box, which means we are finally able to build! more! bears!


Ben hung drywall hangers to reinforce the hooks in the kids' toy closet, and now we can hang their heavy stuff again

And he cleaned out and sorted all the tiny toys in the basket organizer thingy


We even have an empty toy shelf! We NEVER have empty toy shelves

We were so inspired by our upstairs success that we did the unthinkable and purged our garage and storage room, too.

Our laundry room is still a mess of discarded baby gear and shelves, but we can actually WALK INTO our storage room, and if we need to seek shelter in the event of a storm, we don't have to throw a bunch of shit into the laundry room first (which is good because all that flying debris would not be safe, probably)

I do feel guilty for wasting a gorgeous day inside when I could have been at the pool, but my closets are so clean I almost don't regret it. And now maybe I can binge on some fall clothes.

Dude! You guys! We found our tribe!

Our douche bag hippy, yuppy tribe!

At preschool orientation for the kids' new school, where all of the moms appeared to have come from work, everyone was our age, all the dads came, too, and everyone's child is the most special snowflake ever to grace the whole world. The school serves milk and water at lunch, and one dad wanted to know if the milk was organic. Upon hearing that is wasn't (which? BULLSHIT! Tuition is about the same as Bradley-- the milk should be organic), he asked for instructions for bringing and labeling his own milk. One of the moms wanted to know what BRAND of sunscreen the school puts on kids before outside time (because she was worried it was Coppertone-- she might be my Skin Deep soul sister) and she needed to know the DEET content of the bug spray. I love her already. (The sunscreen is Blue Lizard. It's no Badger, but what are you going to do?) (You are going to bring the Badger and put it in your kids' cubbyholes, that's what.) (Kidding.) (Maybe.)


Then a loudspeaker announcement came on and told all the classrooms to meet the yoga instructor on the back hill.

COULD THIS PLACE BE MORE PERFECT? (did I mention the chef?)

Wonder what I did this weekend?

No.

Oh.

Well, let me tell you anyway.

BOTH OF MY KIDS ARE SICK. Puking sick. Multiple-loads-of-puke-laundry-sick.

So, use your imagination.

Also, their timing is im-freaking-pecable because SCHOOL STARTED TODAY for me. They still have 2 more weeks. OF PUKING. (hopefully not).