father's day card

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May 29, 2011

I wore a gawd-awful dress with huge puffy sleeves and a long train with lace and beading.  I got it off the clearance rack for $200.  My hair was badly perm'd and my eye brows touched each other in the middle and my cheek bones on each side.

Josh had a clean shaven face and his shoulder length hair pulled back into a gel-slicked pony tail.

Katie had to shoo the cat off the tables because he was hopping from table to table eating (or at least licking?) the cheese platters.

Everyone looks so young in the pictures, especially me and Josh.  I was 9 years older than Timothy is now.  Elisabeth was barely 18.

I think of that day often, and the night before playing 3-man in the Boxborough Host Hotel when the police had to come because a neighbor complained that we were rolling the dice too loud.  Groomsman Tim answered the door because, well, I was in no condition.

Not-yet-Uncle Jeff, in his dress clothes, shoveled ice from the hotel container into a kiddie pool in the back of my mom's truck and drove it back to Cobleigh Rd, forever sealing his place in my heart.  Upon arriving home he placed the pool next to my sister's awesome sign: "The Brew Lagoon" and started unpacking the beer.

My mom made the cake ahead and time and Aunt Mary Beth arrived a day early to decorate it.  Then they decorated the arch with lilacs donated from 2 states worth of friends and family.

I sat with my sisters and my friend Kerrie on the front steps and made bouquets from loose flowers purchased at Idylwilde.  We purchased boutonnieres but I forgot about them and found them in the fridge the next day.

My grandmother loaned me her pearl necklace and earrings for my "something borrowed."  Last April, before she died, they became no longer borrowed.

My grandfather had died 4 years earlier.  I tied his military tag to my blue garter, which later became the something borrowed/blue for my sisters.

The JP was very old and we weren't sure he'd make it through the ceremony.

Mandy sang an original song during the ceremony that I still hum to myself when I think of the day.

After we said "I do", the guests on the end seats released helium balloons with our wedding announcements tied to them.  The balloons promptly flew into the trees and got stuck for several years.

My mom got a dance floor on loan from the hotel and we ruined the grass in front of the porch, where the tape player and speakers were turned out to face it.  I had invited my friend Sam only the day before and he happened to bring some mix tapes.

The kid down the street video taped the day and then edited it after school in the AV room at the high school.

The day was perfect.

We didn't know what we were in for then.  We didn't know we'd become experts at cleaning puke off any given surface at 2am.  We didn't know we'd have screaming matches and throw things at each other across the house.  We didn't know we'd agree that 7:30pm is the perfect bedtime until age 12, that our kids really don't contribute enough to get an allowance, or that maintaining a clean car is simply not worth it.

We didn't know we'd raise a child with autism, and that merely saying the phrase "Morgan has autism" would take years of practice before we could even do it out loud.  We didn't know that after 2 kids and in the middle of trying for a 3rd, I'd lose my job just as a daytime gambling habit had max'd out our many credit cards.  We didn't know we'd both gain and lose so much weight over and over.

We didn't know that we would sit on the couch together and watch a baby fall asleep nursing.  We didn't know that we would cry at preschool graduations and school concerts.  We didn't know that we'd learn to cherish sleeping in until 8am, uninterrupted by little fingers poking us in the eyes, because we didn't know those days would be so rare.  

We thought we knew we'd love each other forever, but we didn't really.  I think it was enough that we knew we wanted to.

We didn't know any of those things.  We were young and stupid and happy, and now we're old and stupid and happy.

And still now, we don't know much more.  We know the past, but we have no idea what will happen next or how we will deal with it.  

Today we know the one exact thing that we knew 15 years ago - that whatever to come, whatever to happen, whatever life brings - we face it together.

And that we love each other today.

And that that's enough.

May 23, 2011

We got the Fisher Price catalog this weekend, which means Jesse spent most of yesterday go through it with a pen and circling pretty much every toy in it, including a basketball hoop that is clearly superior to ours because he'd be able to dunk on it (like the kid in the picture).  When I informed him that I would not be purchasing every toy in the catalog, he was not simply disappointed, but more completely incredulous that I would deprive him like this.  There were tears involved.  I told him it was a lot of money to buy all those toys.  He informed me that daddy has a credit card.

So I told him that he would have to spend his own money to get what he's decided is the one toy he simply cannot live without, a skateboard with a scooter conversion thingy.  He has $10 and the skateboard is $40.  He asked how on earth he was supposed to get so much money (more tears).  I said he had to ask Daddy for some jobs to do, and then he had to do them, and if he was very good Daddy would give him $1 at the end of the day.  Yeah, I know this goes against my new management training of not using carrots as a reward system.  I hope it doesn't scar him too badly.

So today when I got home, Josh said that Jesse had hustled so much today that he had earned $2!  I was so proud of him that I said I'd pay for half the skateboard and he just has to save up $20.  I was further explaining that this is what I do, I go to work each day so I can get money to buy food and clothes and pay for hot water.

"Really?" he said, "do you get a lot of money?  Like 30?"

So we'll see how he does over the next couple weeks.  Jocelyn wants the same skateboard (only in pink) and Josh made her the same offer, but she wasn't so much into working.  When she was informed that she would not be paid for the day, she had quite a list of people at fault for her poor showing, none of which included her. Oh dear dear dear.

May 8, 2011

I think I wil skip the sentimental tear jerker today since I'm more than halfway through Bossypants and want to finish it.  Instead, I forward for your pleasure a story by Jocelyn:

Ons a pana tam thar was a mrma.  She loved hrsalf so mach.  I love he siad hr frand Mand.  She sand a sang. Mand lovedid hr sag so the mrmad loved hr sang. The And.

Now, for those of you that don't read kindergartener, here's the translation:

Once upon a time there was a mermaid.  She loved herself so much.  "I love her," said her friend Mandy.  She sang a song.  Mandy loved her song so the mermaid loved her song.  The End.

The story is in the pad of paper she got at Passover with the blank space at the top for drawing and lines on the bottom and it's full of stories of princess-types that love themselves and everything around them. 

Happy Mother's Day,
Rhonda

May 1, 2011

Things I forgot yesterday:

Jocelyn says Nicholas is her BFFN - boyfriend for now.

The majority of the fights between Jocelyn and Jesse are about who is yelling at whom.

Morgan said to me this morning: "Hi Elmo - great to see you!"

I leave the house so infrequently that I just ordered nail files off cvs.com.

This morning Timothy told me there was something wrong with his eye, so I said "maybe you have pink eye", and he stomped out of the room.

Jocelyn could have easily had her picture taken all day today.  Every time she hears the camera click she then switches to a different pose.

April 30, 2011

Jesse just came tearing across the livingroom with a plastic grocery bag in his hand, climbed high up on the couch, held said grocery bag over his head, and jumped. When he landed, he looked at the bag with a somewhat disappointed face, then looked at me and said, "can you make me fly?"

On the subject of Jesse, we got this note from his teacher this week:

Jesse is such an awesome kid!  I'm so glad you're giving me an extra year with him next year!  He is happy, energetic, polite, kind, and is also very bright!  Just love him!

Ok, now he has TWO plastic grocery bags, one in each hand, and is spinning around and around in front of me.  I think he might be trying to take off helicopter-style.

I worked at home on Friday and was on what I'm pretty sure qualifies as my most useless meeting of the week (a tough standard to hit), so I spent some time taking pictures of a chipmunk that lives in the garden under my office window.  I need to get the pictures downloaded to see if I got any good ones.