I’ve seen this before, but it’s worth revisiting. I think we do okay on whole foods–we do eat some packaged foods, but not junk food–but we could do better on fruits and vegetables in our house.
Bio Girl has a post about the father-daughter weekend her dad requested for his birthday. It sounds like a great weekend–and a wonderful birthday gift.
I did something similar, although it wasn’t for a birthday. Mr. Sandwich and I dated long-distance for our entire dating relationship–he lived in L.A., and I lived in New Jersey. When we got married, we figured that people were going to have to travel no matter where we held the ceremony.
So we held it in San Antonio, where my dad lived. My dad was our wedding planner (much of his career was spent in project management, and he spent 30 years in the Army, so this meant that he had a budget, a schedule, a goal, and protocol–it was a natural fit). He and I have very similar taste, so it was easy for me to delegate, well, pretty much everything, particularly since I was halfway across the country.
The bikes were my idea, but he’s the one who painted one of them red.
But there’s always more to do, and I had to move across the country anyhow, so I gave notice at work for a date one month prior to the wedding and moved home.
The movers emptied my New Jersey apartment, and I spent a day cleaning. The next day, I went to the airport and picked up my dad. The two of us spent several days (3 or 4, maybe?) on a father-daughter road trip, driving back to San Antonio. While our overall goal was to cover miles, we also took one “detour” each day–such as when we passed through Maryland and swung by the house that he and my mom had bought after I was born.
Honestly, I don’t remember the route we took south of Richmond–did we take I-85 because it was more direct, or I-95 because we were less likely to encounter snow? (Although it did snow at one point in Virginia and/or North Carolina.) What I do remember is the moment when my father, a lifelong objector to any kind of “potty humor,” suddenly started singing “The Diarrhea Song.” It felt like a crazy, tacit acknowledgement of my adult status–he could now be silly and crass without having to worry about the example he might be setting. At other points we recounted family stories and debated political issues. (Clearly, we have range.)
Once back in San Antonio, we began the final days of wedding planning in earnest–fittings, printing the programs for the church and the table cards for the reception, ordering the custom dark chocolate wedding favors (the chocolatier was another retired Army officer, so let’s all agree to lay down our stereotypes and go home), and more. My dad pointed out that it would be very easy to get overwhelmed by planning, so every day we rented a movie that had nothing to do with weddings. It was a great month, and I’m so glad that I spent it that way. Even then, I said, “I’m never going to look back and say, ‘Wow, I really wish I’d worked a few more weeks.’”
So when Bio Girl says, “You never outgrow your parents,” I know exactly what she means. And I totally agree.
And to start with, “hate” applies to the mental energy it requires, not to the process or results. In other words, I enjoy creating scrapbooks. I just don’t enjoy thinking about them.
My mother used to make yearly scrapbooks for our family. I’ve always enjoyed flipping through them, and at some point we started working on them together, because she had such a backlog. We didn’t get very far, though; the last family scrapbook covered the year 1978, and I’m pretty sure we were at least 10 years behind.
Mr. Sandwich and I were married in 2004; we bought a photography package that provided us with all the negatives and digital files, and a full set of prints. I have yet to make a wedding album from them.
I also inherited all the archival family photos. And by “archival,” I mean that they go back to the late 1800s. A stunning number survived WWII in the Philippines. I’ve gotten my mother’s side of the family up to the 1950s, but have yet to start on my father’s.
What holds me up, regardless of which set we’re talking about, is the thought of the physical process: identifying and sorting photos so that I know what goes where, and who is in them. And it’s not just photos. There are ticket stubs, theater programs, newspaper articles, and brochures from places we went.
And then there are papers and stickers and colored pens and any manner of embellishments that (apparently) everyone but me can use to create a scrapbook page that is a work of art. Seriously, I’m good with the funny captions, but I have the design capabilities of an untrained capybara.
The pressure! It’s too much!
But then I took another look at the scrapbooks I love from my childhood. They were mostly photos and captions. My mother didn’t use themed paper with coordinating accessories–those simply weren’t available to her. And not once have I looked at her scrapbooks and thought, “This page of photos from my Girl Scout camping trip would be better if it had a sticker of a tent.”
So I’ve stopped worrying about that. I’ll use the materials I have, but I’m not going to buy any more. I don’t need the anxiety or the expense. For more recent digital photos, I’ll create photo books on Shutterfly.com (although that method comes with its own lengthy selection process, because WOW do we have a lot of digital pictures).
And those archival family photos? I’ll scan them to share with the rest of the family. I think we should all have them.
I wonder if the sequel is “Norman Cuts the Red Wire and Saves Civilization,” because the more I watch this video, the more I think Norman is up to just about anything that’s put in front of him.
I’m pretty confident none of our wedding photos will wind up in this kind of slideshow–but I do feel bad for people who clearly are just victims of their era.
First, just don’t do it. We just got back from a Thanksgiving visit to family in San Jose, and it was wonderful to see all of them. But the process of getting there and back again was truly exhausting. Here are a few realizations:
1) We need a hotel with a mini-fridge. It’s great that we were able to borrow a cooler from my dad, but we didn’t know we needed it until we checked in.
2) We need a hotel with wireless internet. If nothing else, it would be easier to find the local channel for Sprout.
3) Breakfast bars can keep your child from starving. So can bananas.
4) We may need to split this trip into two days, rather than trying to cover the entire distance in one day.
And, finally–although this isn’t specifically a travel tip–pan-fried noodles may make your child go crazy. I don’t know if it was MSG or something else, but after we drove away from the restaurant, Baguette began chirping and babbling on what was apparently an endless loop. It was highly entertaining, but very out of character.
Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com fame ran the New York Marathon this weekend (congratulations, Heather!) and broke her foot (feel better, Heather!). Her post about the reactions she’s encountered reminded me of the six months I spent wearing something like this:
Yes, I partially tore my ACL in a college fencing bout, and due to scheduling issues (my vacations, cross-referenced with the invasion of Panama, which if you do some very basic math will also tell you something about my age), I spent the better part of my senior year of college on crutches. Because I went to school out of state, I traveled a lot–even in the knee immobilizer. I became very familiar with bulkhead seats and the need to argue that, yes, it was unreasonable to expect me to go all the way to the back of the plane instead of violating the sanctity of the first/business class lavatory. (I remember saying to one flight attendant, “Seriously, I am willing to ask every person in first class if they really have a problem with this. Do you want me to do that? Because I’m happy to.” She acquiesced; if any of those passengers had did have a problem, they never hinted at it.)
In the course of those flights, and the wheelchair escorts to and from each gate, I seemed to meet every person traveling, each of whom wanted to talk about my knee. Which is why I later started reading true crime on airplanes, but that’s a story for a different post. Maybe.
Eventually I was able to jettison the knee immobilizer and just use the crutches. And I was struck by the looks I got from gate agents who seemed to think I was faking (because riding a wheelchair through the airport when you don’t need one is, apparently, cool enough to cause people to fake injuries). Heather’s post reminded me of that. It seems crutches aren’t enough.
So that was my senior year in college: a short fencing career, months on crutches, arthroscopy over Spring Break (woo hoo!), physical therapy, and arguing with airline staff. Which doesn’t even touch on this exchange as I waited for my surgery:
Surgeon: So how’s the knee feeling?
Me: You know, I really haven’t noticed it since I had the appendectomy.
Surgeon: [slightly alarmed] And when was this?
Me: Two weeks ago.
Surgeon: Uh huh. When did they say you could go back to normal activity?
Me: Well, I’m not supposed to lift anything for a few more weeks, but what do you mean by normal?
Surgeon: When did they say you could drive?
Me: Oh. You know, they didn’t say. But I’ve been driving for a week.
And then in the recovery room, I got hypothermia. Good times. Spring Break! Woo hoo!
In a sitcom, this reveal would come in the series finale. And it would probably be a disappointment to many viewers, because of course the earlier episodes would have featured increasingly complex concoctions with discordant and occasionally obscure ingredients.
When I started second grade, my mother said, “What do you want for lunch tomorrow?” I paused–because it had never before occurred to me that I might have a say in the matter–and replied, “I don’t care, as long as it’s not bologna.”
Every morning in high school, my mother would say, “What do you want for lunch?” And every morning I would give her the same answer, which finally led me to say, “Peanut butter and jelly, and I’ll let you know when I’m tired of it.” (Yes, my mother made my lunch in high school. I think she felt guilty because I was up in the morning before she was, and her vision of the “perfect mother” was someone who was up early and made her kids’ lunches, even if they were old enough to manage that themselves. Hopefully we can all get past this shocking revelation.)
PB&J and “not bologna” are still very high on my list. But my real favorite sandwich can be traced back to a trip to the UK that we made when I was 10. In the course of traveling through England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, we had a few high teas. At one of those teas, I discovered a wonder: the tomato sandwich.
This is a delightfully simple sandwich: sliced tomato between two slices of bread that have been brushed with mayonnaise. (Do not tell me that mayonnaise is “gross.” I’m telling you what I like, not making you eat it.) I’m sure that at the long-ago teas, the sandwiches were made with white bread. We don’t have white bread, so I make mine on Roman Meal. To a lot of people I know, that’s practically white bread. For the mayonnaise, I used Best (Hellman’s to you East Coast readers). For the tomatoes?
Ah, that’s where the magic comes in. The tomatoes are from our garden, which was dug, planted, and harvested by Mr. Sandwich. Last year the raccoons got all of the tomatoes (or, at least, part of each tomato), but this year he’s actually been able to find some that are both ripe and untouched by vermin hands.
So last night I sliced up the tomato, put it on the mayonnaise-y bread, sprinkled just a little salt on it, and ate. Delicious.
