Welcome to Our New Wall

I found a little paint that Santa left here when he finished our bathroom.  I sat on my idea of what to do with the paint for a few days, then deluded myself into thinking I had time to paint a wall of our TV room.  Once I was sufficiently deluded, that wall started to look more and more offensive until, finally, I shoved the furniture out of the way and brandished my brush at it.  Three hours and numerous interruptions later, the wall was yellow.  I meant to have the whole thing looking peachy (yellow cling) by the time Scott got home, but sadly, he walked in just as I was rolling on the last coat, staving off curious kids with a well-placed grand battement derriere here and there.  Needless to say, everything was in a shambles.  Welcome home, honey!

The focus of this area, in case you didn't know I was going to go with a "theme," is New York.  I have always felt a certain pull towards NYC.  I know I have ancestors who spent time there, and some that came through Ellis Island, but I think it's just the whole New York vibe that I love.  Bloomington, Indiana, is only 12 hours away from NYC.  I made the drive more times that I should have during my four years of college.  I had first gotten addicted to the energy of the city when I was 13.  My parents took me at Christmastime, and I was breathless with excitement the whole time.  In fact, I passed out in Saks Fifth Avenue, lending new meaning to the term, "Shop 'til you drop."

Scott and I went to New York together the year we got married, once on our way to Europe and once on our way home, two months later.  On the return trip, we had tickets to see Rent, but our flight was delayed when we inexplicably had to land in Ireland to refuel.  It's probably better that we don't know all the reasons for that detour, but we arrived in New York about 30 minutes too late to see Rent, which was the hot ticket in 1996.

Funny story:  I was always bummed that we never saw Rent, so when it came to Salt Lake, I went to it myself.  Scott was over it by then.  The funny part is that I had literally JUST taken a pregnancy test and found out I was expecting our 7th child, through some sort of divine intervention.  I hadn't told Scott;  I was too stunned, and I didn't have time before the play.  My veins were coursing with otherworldly joy, and my brain kept shouting variations of, "Do you know what this means!?!?"  So I sat through Rent at Pioneer Theater and didn't absorb one word or note.  It all washed completely over me as my body zinged with possibilities, worries and anticipation.  So we definitely missed our window to enjoy THAT musical!

Santa Claus, with his jolly sense of humor, left this mural of the Brooklyn Bridge and attached a photo of Scott crawling across it in his green pants. (Click for story) I think we should make that a tradition!

Two pillows made by the wonderfully talented Michelle Fitzgerald.  The green one, she made out of a Geiger sweater I bought in Austria when I was 15 and didn't want to part with after it became horribly out of style and was attacked by moths.

This is the first painting Opa ever did, according to Nana.  It's a paint by numbers.  As always, DeBrys, my policy is that any of you can have anything I have of Opa's.  I only have these things because I happened to be there at the right time, on a day when Nana was cleaning out, and I wouldn't want anyone to feel like they don't have anything of Opa's.  You are welcome to anything I have, just say the word.

I love Ellis Island. I could go there over and over, and actually, I have.  I bought this book there.  You can't look through it without crying.  I love how the little Dopp family Tiffany made mirrors the group of immigrants on the cover of my treasured book.

A piece of pottery we found at Imperial Beach that says "New York."  And some new candles Tricia and Jim gave us for our anniversary.  Thanks!

The cutest scrapbook Golda made, documenting the Golda-Ruby-Scott trip to New York last summer, on top our family copy of the Book of Mormon, which, admittedly, has lost out to digital versions.

Trajan just gave us this black-and-white photo of Manhattan, taken in the 1950's.  It's interesting and cool, but also gives your eye a place to rest, unless you want to study out the different neighborhoods and see how the city has changed.  This photo was taken before the rise and fall of the twin towers.

My mom's desk, illuminated by a little lamp Scott and I got on our honeymoon in Cannon Beach, Oregon.  On the wall, it says, "The secret to having it all, is knowing you already do."  It's so true.  You can never really have it all unless you appreciate what you have, including the memories you have accumulated.  Our house will never look like a model home, but it will always be changing and it will always reflect where we've come from...

...and where we're going.

The Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry

It's Thanksgiving Break and we're so happy here!  We've been to a cello lesson and now we're home, setting up tables and breaking fan belts by vacuuming up necklaces.  A whole troupe of happy homemakers is what we are!  Actually, Tizzy and I may be the only happy ones.  The rest are in thinly disguised agony, which is exactly how I have it planned.  See, I don't do chore lists.  I've never said, "Here's a list of chores, and when it's done, you can play."  I don't know why.

OK, I know why.  It's because I am a control freak.  I don't want the kids to decide how long it will take them to do the chores.  I don't want them to have the option of not doing the chores because they don't care about playing.  I don't want to give consequences;  that's just extra creativity that I don't have.  I've tried that.  "If you don't take out this garbage...oh never mind.  Just take out this garbage!"  Also, I don't want to keep having to remind them about the list.  Plus, a whole list of jobs for a tiny person with the attention span of a pink poodle in a Milk-Bone factory is, well, soul-crushing.

Instead, I take a slightly less soul-crushing approach, which I now realize is the exact approach my mom used when I was a pink poodle in a Milk-Bone factory.  It goes like this:  I wake up on a Saturday morning, wander bleary-eyed into the kitchen and hear noises.  Outside, my mom is in the garage.  Oh, HECK no!  I down some Cheerios and trudge outside because I know it's what's expected of me.  My mom has been seized by some Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry, and she wants to share her zeal.

"Ciiiiirceeeeee!" she chirps.  "Help me move this trunk.  Now, we'll just move it right over here, but first we have to go through these boxes of books and rake up these leaves and put all the tools on this corkboard where I've drawn tool shapes and untangle the Christmas lights and hang this ladder on these ingenious hooks I have just installed and then alphabetize the bikes according to model names, and then we'll just sweep up and then we can go see Aunt Pat!!"

Even if I only heard the part about the sweeping, I know it's bad.  The sweeping part is when I usually have an asthma attack and can't breathe, and nobody notices because the Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry has cast a blinding spell which makes my mother unable to see any affliction, however deadly, that will hamper the completion of our project.  I know not to push the "dying of asthma" thing too far because if I get really serious about dying, I get the Evil Flutter Eye from my mom, which is just a more virulent form of the Evil Eye.

"Can't....breathe..."  I'd fall on the ground clutching my throat and my mom would look down, giving me the briefest Evil Flutter Eye, then step over me, musing, "Hmmm.  We just have to figure out a system for storing the sports equipment."  A minute later, I'd be trying to corral baseballs and basketballs into a big cardboard box that had been labeled with a thick marker, "SPORTS."

My brothers are there, too, all of us silently, miserably carrying out orders, knowing that by the time the job is done, all the good Saturday morning cartoons will be over.  We'll be lucky if we catch the last ten minutes of Fat Albert by the time we have hauled ten bags of old clothes, an outdated Vita-Mix and a broken Big Wheel to the curb.

Later, when the garage is organized and spotless, we do go visit the cousins.  Mom and Aunt Pat lie on the floor "perfecting the art of doing nothing," as they call it, while the cousins compare notes on who had it worse from the Demon of Cheerfulness and Industry that morning.  Pat's kids have likely been silk-screening hundreds of tote bags for their parents' business and rearranging all the furniture in their house, creating a new bedroom out of a storage closet.

So my plan, modeled after my mother's, is to get several good chores out of each kid by cheerfully, aggressively barking out orders, one after another, and if you fall behind, you get more orders, until one by one, each older child begs to be granted a reprieve.  "Yes," I say.  "You can go to Coco's and perfect the art of doing nothing, IF!...you take one little kid with you."

"Yes!  Yes," they cry.  Before too long, the heavy lifting ("We can TOO move this table, now push!") is done, the big chores are complete, and I am left in Pine-Sol-scented solitude to set the tables and garnish the room with Thanksgiving's finishing touches.  Which is what I'm going to do right now...