Smokey and the Bandit

Today was my sweetie’s 30th high school reunion. We got the invitation about a month ago and he was absolutely adamant that we weren’t going to go. Last weekend I erased the reminder from our calendar. Then during a vulnerable moment I decided to give it one last try. When he showed some signs of giving in, I quickly made the phone calls and got us committed.

The reunion dinner started at 7:00, but Sport’s football game was at 3:00 so we figured there would be plenty of time to enjoy the game, drive to Grandma’s and drop off the kids, and still back-track five miles to the reunion. We were so wrong!

The football game was half an hour late getting started. We were playing the only other team (besides us) in the league that was undefeated. Sport was nervous, but he kept his cool. All the boys held it together right through the final defensive play in the 4th quarter. We beat them 12 to 6. After much celebrating and Sport earning one of the two MVPs for the game (yay!), we piled in the van and headed south.

Now you know where Curly's curls come from!

We were expecting to have time to grab the kids a bite to eat and still change our clothes at Grandma’s before we headed back to Fairview. As we raced toward the freeway, we realized this plan was not going to work. Construction in Utah County was terrible although traffic was moving. (Northbound was pretty much at a standstill…) We decided we could stop at the MacDonald’s in Spanish Fork and change in the restrooms while the Drama Queen took the kids through the drive up. We stopped right before the speaker and my sweetie and I and three other kids (who had to use the bathroom) all rolled out. It seems that in Utah County it is impossible to get out of the construction! Even the MacDonald’s was redoing the stucco on the outside of their building.

As we walked passed the two porta-potties, my sweetie commented that they must be for the workers and we would just go inside and change there. Wrong! The restrooms were totally out-of-order, so anyone needing to use the facilities had to step out to the parking lot and head for the porta-potty. There was definitely not enough room to change in there!

picture credit

Frustrated, we climbed back in the van and headed further south. It wasn’t long before my sweetie was suggesting that we just turn around and go back home. He figured we wouldn’t get there in time, so why bother. That’s when I opened the bag and decided on a “Smokey and the Bandit” change. You remember when Sally Field changes in the back seat of that black sports car? Well, I changed in the front seat of a 15-passenger van with most of my kids riding in the backseat!

My sweetie was impressed and after about 5 more miles down the road, he decided that he could do the same. So we pulled over and quickly changed seats. Soon we were both ready for the reunion. The kids thought we were crazy (they were right!), but it was fun and actually gave us a chance to blow off a little steam since we were stressing over the fact that in 30 years we had aged….oh, about 30 years.

Since this is getting a bit long, I’ll give you more details on the reunion tomorrow. To prepare you might want to turn on a little Journey and break out the Burt Reynolds movies. Oh, and rat your hair up a little. It was the 80s after all.

My Tupperware Obsession - part 1

 I’ll be the first to admit that I was a rather weird child. Maybe it’s because I had a bunch of brothers and sisters, or maybe because I worked many long hours as a babysitter (again, another story for another time), whatever the reason, I was rather obsessed with getting married, having my own home, and becoming a mom. When I was eight or nine, I learned to embroider and that’s when I started making/collecting things for my future home. Grandma taught me to quilt and crochet so that helped me add even more handmade items to my “hope chest.”

Not my set, but the exact same one!

When I was around 14, I attended my first Tupperware party. I was absolutely astounded that I could just pester people until they purchased something and then I could get whatever I wanted from Tupperware for free. I signed up to host my first Tupperware party and I earned the “Hostess Gift Special” which happened to be a picnic basket filled with you guessed it…Tupperware! I was hooked. I hosted about a dozen parties through my high school years and the super-overachiever part of me helped me earn tons of free stuff. One of my first real interactions with my sweetie was convincing him to buy a Shape-O ball for his niece. I know it was way more than he wanted to spend, but I could be pretty persuasive…

So after we were married, we were dirt poor. Besides workstudy and being a full-time student at Snow College, my first job as a married person was to be a Tupperware lady. I was pregnant with Bossy and my sweetie and I were living once again in my hometown. That made it pretty easy to find people to host parties and buy products. If you remember, the day Bossy was born I had two Tupperware parties scheduled. You can read a little about that here. Those Tupperware days lasted for about 2 years and then we moved and my contacts fizzled until I eventually quit altogether.

Until I was pregnant with the Drama Queen…I attended a party and it wasn’t long before I was signing the paperwork to be a consultant again (we called them “dealers” then, but I guess they didn’t like the negative connotations). It was 1989 and yes, I still had big hair. Our business took off rapidly and it wasn’t long before we had a couple of recruits and formed our own unit. We won all kinds of awards (once my super-overachiever genes kicked in) Top New Unit in Sales, Top New Unit in Recruits, and occasionally we even won Top Sales. We were rapidly moving up the ladder and consistently placed in the top five units in our distributorship. We were given a van to drive and it wasn’t long before we had upwards of 50 consultants working as part of our team. Tupperware was fun and I was good at it!

The Drama Queen turned one during a trip we took to Long Island for our first Tupperware Convention. Teach actually found some pics for you. I am not the one with the cute legs (she is wearing a swimming suit, btw), but if you look for the one with the big hair… That’s the Gym Rat sitting on my lap. Once again, we received top recruiting and sales honors in our region. It was a crazy time, but I was working a full time job as a technical writer, a full time job as a Tupperware manager, and a part-time job teaching two nights a week. That didn’t count the fact that I had three little ones still at home…something had to break.

Mommy Bumps

I asked Bossy to help me locate some pictures of me when I was pregnant so we could link up with Shell's little "bump" game. Bossy thought it would be great fun to totally humiliate me with pics from my first little ones rather than the last...that means big hair and the 80s.  Ok, Teach was born in 1991, but I never was at the height of fashion. This is me being pregnant with her.

This one shows me being pregnant with Bossy, and yes I was a teenage mom, but barely. She was born in November and I turned 20 in January. Don't you just love the plaid? It's back in style again...I must be old.

Sadly, I kept my bump after each and every child...this is Bossy just a few days old in 1984. But she is so cute, she was worth every pound.

One last one for you to giggle over. This is me pregnant (and annoyed at the camera) with the Gym Rat in early 1987. Don't you love that red couch? I guess I'll have to search through and find more pics for you of some of the other babies that were born in THIS century! I've aged quite a bit since then...but that's not necessarily a bad thing...

...if you're cheese!

**Editor's Note: As you can tell Mom doesn't like the camera. I wasn't trying to be mean, but most of the photos of her are post-bump with newborns. She really doesn't do the bump documentation. Also my (slow going) digital archiving project, is a mountain of pictures that are all of the older kids because after 2005 Mom had a digital camera. In fairness I was going to allow her to post a truly big bump picture of me. But I can't find my copy and she wouldn't email me hers. 

We are still looking for photos and I will keep adding as we find them.  Here are the latest discoveries. See me working on the room for Grandpa? This was about six weeks before Baby Doll was born in 2010.

I told you I look like a cow when I am pregnant.  Here is me one month before Curly was born - July 2008. Isn't Scout cute?

All dressed up for Cow Appreciation Day!

The Tangled Web

Last night I was ready for bed at 11:30 which is kind of a record for me, but I hadn’t been feeling well the night before so I was a bit sleep-deprived. I promised my sweetie that I would finish my blog and head to bed as quickly as possible. Besides, this thing with Sport’s arm had me really stressed and worried (I took him to the doc, btw and she put him on oral antibiotics. The swelling is now 10 inches long and 6 ½ inches wide. If the swelling isn’t down by tomorrow it will be another trip to Primary’s). I had just finished reading my last bloggy friend post, gathered the baby, and turned to head upstairs. That’s when the Prima Donna showed up. But she didn’t look much like a Prima Donna. She looked like something from an 80s monster flick. "Mom," she whined. "Can you help me with this?" She had wrapped the entire front part of her hair around a curling iron brush! The handle and the cord swung loosely toward the floor, but most of the bristles were totally wrapped in her long brown locks.

"What did you do?" My voice raised a little too high for the late hour, but I was exhausted and my patience was wearing thin. "I just wanted to see how this curling iron worked," she stated matter-of-factly. I reached for the rod. It was cold. "Did you even plug it in?" I asked. "No, I was going to figure out how to wrap it first," she said. I rolled my eyes and began tugging at her hair. The hair barely moved. This was not going to be an easy task. I handed the baby off to the Dog Walker and began tugging with a vengeance. This was so not fair! It was my night to get to bed before midnight.

Fifteen minutes later the hair had budged very little. "How did this get so bad?" I wanted to scream in frustration. "Well," she said, "When I couldn’t get it right out, I tried to brush it out…I think that made it worse," she trailed off. "Ya’ think?!" I was ready to get out the scissors, so I sent her over to have the Drama Queen give it a try. Less than five minutes later she was back. The Drama Queen suggested baby oil and some scissors.

Good riddance!

The Prima Donna had an even sillier suggestion, "Do you think if we plug it in it might help?" "Yeah," I answered sarcastically, "Then I’ll burn my fingers trying to do an impossible task." After another 20 minutes, I reached for the scissors. I know I’m the meanest mom on earth, but I started snipping. "You’re cutting my hair?" she wailed. I didn’t answer right away, because I thought she deserved to suffer a little. I was actually snipping all the little black balls from the ends of the curling iron brush. I was thinking that without them I might be able to slide the hair down and off the end.

"Do you think maybe a bobby pin would help?" questioned the Prima Donna hopefully. The Drama Queen was watching and offered, "Yeah, then you’d just have a bobby pin stuck too!" I snipped a few more balls. "You aren’t cutting my hair, are you?" Prima Donna asked accusingly. "How do you know?" I snipped some more. "’Cause little black balls are falling all over me," she said. I tugged harder. After a total of 72 minutes, I finally slid the last of the hair from the end of the devastated curling iron. As I dangled its sad and broken body over the garbage can, I bid it a grateful farewell.

It took the Prima Donna another 20 minutes to comb out the rat’s nest (littered with little black balls) that it left in her hair. She sent me a picture text just before I turned off my light. I glanced at the clock…1:00 AM. My sweetie would be unhappy. Oh the tangled web we weave…well, somebody did something with a tangled web...I'm just too tired to know who!

The Hair Stylist

My oldest sister is five years older than I am. Like Bossy, she suffers from the oldest-child-syndrome. Now I don’t want to go into the particulars of oldest-child-syndrome because you either are one or you have one. Let’s just say that as a younger child, it’s advisable to keep the older sibling happy.

My sister graduated from high school in 1978. She was an incredibly smart, valedictorian-type. In 1978 I was a dumpy little eight grader (ok, actually I was kind of cute). One day when I was feeling particularly defiant I went to a friend’s house and had her sister cut my bangs in the Farrah Fawcett style. My mom had a fit! I’ve told you before about her long beautiful hair. She didn’t wear bangs and she didn’t want any of us to have bangs either. But there wasn’t much she could do about it at that point so after a couple of weeks she started talking to me again…

My mother's beautiful silver hair and a pose I am sure I frequently caused.

Anyway, as any good rebel will tell you, it’s important to coerce others to follow your lead. It wasn’t long before my older sister decided she wanted her bangs cut too. My mom had been in the habit of pulling my sister’s long hair into a ponytail every night and then wrapping small strands of it into scratchy black rollers. When my sis decided she wanted to cut her bangs like her naughty little sister my mom didn’t know how to make her bangs look good with curlers. So I was quickly recruited to curl her bangs with the curling iron each and every morning.

Me, senior year

This resulted in a couple of things…ok three things and two of them were large burns in my carpet. (My mom wasn’t very happy about that.) The third thing was that my sister looked absolutely fabulous every morning when she headed off to school. Except for the morning that she didn’t. For some reason, I couldn’t get her hair to go quite right. She was getting nervous and the bus was coming for the second time. (We had two opportunities to get on the bus because the bus driver lived across the road from us. So we could get on at the beginning of the route or somewhere in the middle when he came through again). She ended up yelling at me and stomping out the door.

I felt so bad…I was getting up half an hour earlier each and every morning to be her personal hair stylist (for free I might add) and I was being abused because her hair happened to have one stubborn morning! I spent the rest of the school day having my own pity party, vowing that when morning came I wouldn’t get out of bed until it was time to get myself ready. When I got home I tossed my books on the couch and stomped my way up the stairs to the bedroom. Maybe a nap would help my rotten mood. That’s when I saw them. Three beautiful fresh flowers wrapped in florist’s tissue paper and arranged on my pillow with a note of apology and appreciation from my older sister. Yeah…the next morning I was up again, bright and early…

Big Sis and me at my wedding
(but she did her own hair).

Twenty Years Younger

My sweetie has been stressing over the fact that twelve kids are starting to turn his hair a little gray. He had even gone so far as to suggest maybe getting one of those men’s coloring kits that takes out all the gray. I’ve teased that maybe he should try that guy on TV’s idea…you know the one…it looks like a can of black spray paint and he sprays the back of his head so it looks like he has hair? 

So on Sunday morning my sweetie asked me to cut his hair and give him a new look. As I started snipping away, I noticed that the more I cut, the more the gray disappeared. After consulting together, we decided to take it short and add bangs. Now we’ve been married for almost 28 years and with his curly hair, he has never worn bangs. But I have to tell you his new look took off 20 years! 

We cleaned up and headed off to church. Baby Doll was asleep when we arrived so we uncharacteristically carried her into the building in her car seat. My sweetie likes the back row in the corner, as far away from the pulpit as possible (I think he is secretly worried that someone might call him out of the audience to speak…). As much as I’d like to sit by him, there are always at least 8 kids sitting between us. For some reason, known only to himself, the Dog Walker set the baby down by my sweetie and I ended up on the "boy end" of the row. 

After the first speaker, Curly climbed onto my lap. We snuggled for a bit, but he was restless so I started whispering in his ear. "What color is my hair?" I asked. He looked back at me and pulled a strand through his fingers. "Brown," he whispered. "What color is Scout’s hair?" She was lying on the floor in front of us, coloring a picture. "Brown," whispered Curly again. I slid my fingers through his blond curls. "What color is your hair?" I asked. "Pretty!" he said immediately. "That’s not a color," I whispered. "What color is Burrito’s hair?" I asked. "Black," he said. This kid really knows his colors! 

"What color is Dad’s hair?" I asked. He peered all the way down the row, leaning forward so far he almost fell off my lap. Then he looked at me and didn’t answer. I tried again, "What color is the Dog Walker’s hair?" He took a peek. "Brown," he said. Smart boy! "What color is your hair?" I asked again. This time he said, "Curly." "Silly, it’s white," I whispered back. "What about Princess?" I asked. He thought for a minute. "It looks like Tangled," he said. (I presume he meant the movie, not that she needed to go out in the hall and comb her hair.) I tried one more time, "What color is Dad’s hair?" He snuggled back against my shoulder and let out a sigh as if I were just plain annoying. "Brown…" he finally answered. See Sweetie, the haircut worked!

Friday Freebies: Haircuts

I started cutting my sweetie’s hair before we were married and I’m happy to say that no one has cut his hair since. He seems very happy with my services, but my kids…not so much. When Bossy was little she actually wanted a mullet. (Although she is in denial about this fact and says she remembers something about the Gym Rat spitting gum in her hair?)  Billy Ray Cyrus was in his heyday and both boys and girls wanted to copy that style. 

Billy Ray and Bossy

Once when the Gym Rat was about 8 years old I tried to get the shaved look on the back of his neck without a razor. What a disaster! He went to school that day (of course, he couldn’t see the back of his neck) and he came home in tears. Some of the kids had laughed at his goofy haircut. So even on our very tight budget, I scraped up some grocery money and took him somewhere to get it fixed. 

My girls were laughing about a Family Home Evening we had when Bossy was about 15 where I "taught" the kids to cut each other’s hair. I’m not recommending this activity unless you have plenty of money to take them all to the salon to get them fixed. Oh yeah, and make sure it’s summer so they don’t have school the next day. (Actually it wasn’t that bad…my kids were very careful because they knew that they were next in line.) So they all breathed a sigh of relief when we started getting these amazingly cool e-mails from the Supercuts training studio every couple of weeks. They invite us over for free haircuts! By now you know me well enough to know that I have a hard time turning down anything that’s free. 

So every couple of months I gather up the kids and we drive for about 20 minutes and then entertain ourselves in the waiting room until it is time for us to get that free makeover. We have been attending this class for about ten years now and we are hardly ever disappointed with the results. It seems that Supercuts retrains every new stylist that joins their company even if they have 20 years in the business, and they do these classes all over the US. 

One Thursday night, Princess and Prima Donna were playing quietly in their room. Princess was about six and Prima Donna around four. The fact that they were so quiet should have given me a clue, but I was helping the older kids with homework and completely oblivious. Eventually the two girls presented themselves. Princess was carrying a pair of scissors, and Prima Donna was sporting a new haircut. She was totally chopped! I don’t think a single hair on her head was longer than an inch and a half. Not that they were uniform by any stretch. I tried not to come unglued but I was losing it fast. The only thing that kept me sane at all was the fact that we had already planned to attend free haircuts the following day. 

When we showed up at the studio, Melissa, the lady in charge, started laughing. "Who did it?" she chuckled. Our very quiet and shy Princess was not about to confess, but she did blush a nice shade of pink. "We’ll do our best, but no promises," Melissa added. "This is going to take months to grow out." Princess watched rather anxiously as they carefully trimmed Prima Donna’s hair to a more uniform length. They didn’t want to take off much because she was nearly bald in some places already. Prima Donna took it all in stride…what was a little hair? It would grow back. After they had finished shaping her hair into an extremely short pixie cut, I did something that was either totally brilliant or extremely mean; I’m still not sure which. I had them put Princess in the chair and give her the exact same haircut.

Masks added to protect the "innocent."

Bon Jovi

Image by Christian Frarey

You already know I’m old and I wear bifocals, so it shouldn’t surprise you when I say that I remember when MTV began! I didn’t see the original broadcast of "Video Killed the Radio Star" in 1981, but by 1985 my sweetie and I were fans (for a few years anyway). 

I graduated from high school in 1983 and married that same year, so I was still very young and very much a fan of rock ‘n roll music. When Bossy was born in 1984, Jon Bon Jovi was working really hard to promote his new band. In 1986 they released the album "Slippery When Wet." Bossy was 2 years old and absolutely smitten with Jon. She wanted to be just like him when she grew up! MTV was different then. It was the equivalent of watching the Wiggles or Yo Gabba Gabba or maybe even PBS. Most videos were pretty wholesome with the bands performing their songs or a story made from the song. Even the costuming was pretty tame. 

It was like YouTube except that you couldn’t just pick whatever song you wanted to hear at any given moment. We didn’t own a VCR because we were in school and they cost about $400.00. Most people still rented them from the video store along with the movies they wanted to watch. So MTV was amazing, but you had to hang around and wait for your song to play. And when it did, Bossy would come running! 

Her favorite song was "Livin’ on a Prayer." She had worn out jeans with holes in the knees, cowboy boots, and big hair just like Jon’s. If you’ve never seen that video, take four minutes for a guilty 80s pleasure:

Did you like how they strap harnesses on the band members and they fly out over the audience while they are singing? Well, Bossy didn’t have a harness, but she had a Daddy! He would fly her all over the living room with both of them singing, "Whoa-oh livin’ on a prayer…!" at the tops of their lungs. (She was a lot smaller then…) That was almost 25 years ago and my kids still love this song! 

I’m about to shamelessly promote a fun music video on YouTube that reminded me of those early days of MTV. I’ve been told that these movies have been created in hopes of winning free tickets to the upcoming Bon Jovi concert. Please take a minute and click on this link and support these kids. Maybe it will drag you back to the 80s too. You might just feel an insane desire to rat out your hair and rip out the knees in your jeans. Just remember; Jon Bon Jovi has plenty of money to replace his!