My friend and fellow anglophile, Steph, recommended seeing Miss Potter, the movie about the life of Beatrix Potter, English author and illustrator of Peter Rabbit and Friends. Gather your Beatrix Potter collection, you'll want to read about Benjamin Bunny and Jemima Puddle Duck again. This is a great summer family movie. Like Peter Pan author E.M. Barrie, it's sweetly reminiscent of Finding Neverland, without the pedophilia undertones.

It's rated PG, for mild language. Either I'm really jaded and didn't notice, or it was an English slur I didn't understand. Either way, it's a delightful movie, or as the movie jacket says, enchanting. Enchanting indeed. You'll want to speak with your finest British accent the rest of the day.

Also an added bonus; I had forgotten about the lesser popular book Hunka Munka. I found this to be a perfectly fitting nickname for my husband, which I'm delighted to use on the hour.

Rock of Ages

NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! Inhale. Breathe. NNNOOOOOO!!! NO. N. no?

It came in the mail today. My certificate of aging. The written verification of my deteriorating state. I'm in vehement denial, despite the written form. Kevin is very nonchalant about the whole process, but he's bald, therefore his opinion doesn't count.

What was this piece of small death on parchment? Jackson's junior high class schedule. There it was, written out in block schedule, his first step onto academia's turf. My first born baby is going to be in junior high school. In six months he will be 13 years old. I will have a TEENAGER!

How is that possible? I myself feel barely over 25. I suppose in West Virginia that's possible, but again, I reference Deliverance. I don't feel older. I don't feel like a real parent. I still like rock music, I still like to shop, I would probably still watch MTV if they played music videos. My old college roommates are still having babies, how can I have a TEEN????

src="PICTURE2" /> Just a couple of months ago, I was standing over this kid's crib, crying because he was crying and neither Kevin nor I could figure out how to make him stop. Now girls call him.

Life has suddenly taken a predictably terrifying shift. Yet, I guess, in some ways I'm looking forward to what the future has to offer, provided I don't have to keep getting any older.

Mini Van Disgrace Part Two

There’s a moral to this story somewhere. I despise mini vans and now I drive one. That’s pretty much the story.

Except it’s not just any mini van. It’s the one my in-laws gave us, which is a very kind gesture. It was in immaculate shape when we got it, just 10 years old.

Fast forward a year and a half. Only two doors still work. The sliding side door no longer works because the tracking for the door rusted and caused some sort of something. Then someone accidentally pulled too hard on the door and the whole thing fell plumb off. With some tricky hammer work and lots of hip checking, the door was returned to its rightful place. So, from then on we’ve disallowed the use of the sliding door for fear that once opened we will never get it back on again.

Consequently this means all five children have to enter and exit through the front two doors. Remember, this van is old; it doesn’t have dual sliding doors. When my niece once tried to exit the van, she kept grasping at the door on the left side, behind the driver seat. “Why doesn’t this door have a handle?” she asked.

“Because that’s not a door. There’s only one side door in this van” I explained to the younger generation. She looked puzzled. You should’ve seen her face when I told her couldn’t use the sliding door on the right side either. As if it was a perfectly normal thing to do, she followed everyone else out through the front seat.

If you’re a passenger in the van, you’re fine. However, if you’re the driver in bad weather, the drive can be a bit temperamental. The driver’s side door refuses to close tightly. There’s always a little draft or something that comes through the open crack. Consequently, during the winter, the left side of your body will develop slight frostbite. Or, if it’s raining, your left cheek will get a little damp.

So anyway, we were about to leave school around 5:30 p.m. I was still in my classroom packing up, when, much like a security breech, one child has been dispatched to tell me that the sliding door has been opened. It’s stuck. Great.

There’s not another car in the parking lot, just our forlorn looking beast of burden. I spend about 20 minutes vainly trying to jiggle the door free without unhinging it.

Meanwhile, it begins to rain. And thunder. And lightning. The school is now locked. The van door is wide open. I give it one more yank to get it to budge. It budged alright. All but one hinge budged right off the door. There I am, soaking wet, holding a van door. They’re heavy.

I let the door land lopsided, half on the asphalt, half still hanging onto the van for dear life. It’s no use getting electrocuted over, so I hop back in, highly irritated. Inside the van, chaos reigns and the interrogation begins.

“Maybe you should fix the door.”
“Why aren’t we leaving?”
“Where’s dad?”

Gum chewing. Who is chewing their gum like that?

Kids are hungry. My head is pounding, people are crying. Thunder is scary. Rain is wet, especially on the left cheek and now the entire side of the van.

Ethan, our whimpering 6 year old, suddenly breaks into song except he’s crying simultaneously escalating into a full scale wail. He sounds like a Yiddish woman at a funeral.

“It’s the eeeend of the wooorld as we knooooow it. I feeeel fiiiiiaaaaaane.”

I have no idea where he learned the song and why he thought it was appropriate just then, but it was stinkin’ funny.

In an instant the mood changed to goofiness. While waiting for backup to arrive in the form of a hammer and hip check, I ordered a pizza and had it delivered to the only van sitting in the vacated parking lot. I tipped big.

It was still a downpour, but pizza makes everything better. The perspective brightened and the joking started. The kids will remember this for quite awhile. I’m just glad I was there to enjoy it with them. Every now and then, someone would drive slowly by, visually assess the situation and ask if we needed help.

We laughed. No, not yet, we’re still enjoying our dinner.

Shift Happens

Did you see that Tammy Faye Bakker Messner died? Wow, that brings back memories. I remember watching the last half hour of their televangelist show every day after I got off the school bus. It came on right before my favorite show, Kidd Video. Watching Kidd Video was the only way for me to hear the devil inspired rock music I was banned from hearing. At the end of each episode, they would play almost an entire rock song, which usually meant something by Genesis.

The only other time I heard rock music was when I'd sneak the radio into the bathroom and scan for every Michael Jackson song I could find. Being the product of Christian conservative parents, rock music was thought to be the demise of moral mankind. Proof of this is when Satan himself left messages in the music, backwards. So if you played the record backwards, you could hear a voice say, "OOOWWWWWWWWOUDRINKBEEROOURAAGH." Of course, promising to only listen to music in the forward position was not enough to grant me musical freedom. Forget the public school, television or my naughty neighbor, access to subliminally immoral messages would be quashed. That highway to hell was closed. Did anyone really listen to music backwards???

Anyway, I digress. Tammy Faye. I was enamored with her eyelashes, even though my mother wrought my admiration with doubt with her logical ripostes, insisting they were fake. I refused to believe it. Anyway, I always caught the end of the show where Tammy Faye was usually crying and singing at the same time and Jim was announcing how much money was needed for Prayerland or Bibleworld, or whatever the name of his amusement park was going to be. Why does God need a roller coaster, I'd wonder.

It is pretty sad, when you consider that she was only 65 years old. What started out as a great life took some pretty sinister turns for her. I'm sure she never thought she'd end up the butt of late night jokes or her makeup application would spawn t-shirt logos.

Weird how life shifts, both imperceptibly and tragically. She probably lived the life of an upstanding citizen, wife and mother, completely unsuspecting of her tumultuous future. Then again, maybe she listened to rock music.

The Big O

I’m getting ready to road trip with my eight year old daughter to Virginia. I'm going to be driving some volleyball players to a team camp there and I thought it would be fun to take Evangeline. It should only be about a seven hour drive, however, having just seen Deliverance I'm refusing to drive through the state of West Virginia, so it's going to be much longer.

Such an event calls for audio books. Our county library is so lame it left me agonizing between The Life and Times of Rodney Dangerfield or The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. Both are as about appealing as being a Soul Train dancer. I picked up the Obama book after a fierce competition of rock, paper, scissors with myself.

Then I remembered that I heard on the news earlier that Oprah plans to help raise campaign funds for Obama.

So I started wondering what it would be like if Obama and Oprah hooked up, got married and began a one name empire. Just think of the ridiculous media barrage we’d be subjected to if that came to fruition. Egad, the fourth vowel would be raised to almost biblical proportions. The letter itself would achieve sainthood, but only the long sound, not the short sound.



Even their initials together point to some hidden agenda. B.O.O.W. BOOW. BOW. Bown down and worship the great O's. They will not be treated as mere mortals but god-like in all their televised greatness.

He could use her billions and she would become the first lady of the United States. She would, of course, have to slum it in the White House. Her decorating friend Nate would be called upon to fix the feng shui from the previous administration.

And then what if instead of having a poet laureate, she hired Bob Greene and we the people were subjected to diet and fitness tips for the whole term.

And then Oprah's Book Club would reach universal popularity. Even Kim Jong Il would come on to the show to discuss The Secret, except he would be asked to leave because as soon as anyone disagreed with him, he would squint through his fiberglass lenses while making death threats in Korean.

Of course, First lady Oprah could find cave dweller Osama bin Laden and coax him onto the show where Dr. Phil would be waiting. I bet in a forty five minute segment, she could start world peace.

And then, I thought, what if, for her cause, she eschewed the cliquish topics like world hunger, and instead chose to bring Botox breaks to the workplace. She could make it mandatory that employers offer Botox injections during employee breaks and that would be really cool. I’d vote for that.

You can see how one could get carried away with the possibilities. Although Rodney Dangerfield looked tempting, in the end, I opted for La Traviata, if nothing more than to make me look smart.

Hmmmph. I see I haven't written since July 3. To be honest, I haven't felt like communicating with the English speaking world lately. As Holly Golightly would say, I have a case of the mean reds.

I don't know what it is, a combination of things, I suppose. My summer shorts are too tight, the kids will be going back to school soon, 3-ply toilet paper is a scam, I've encountered one of the most bizarre families I've ever met and they keep popping up like a Plantar's wart, but more on that later, and I don't know what else. I'm just blah, blah, blah.

I will finish my mini van story. It's positively humiliating, which might be cathartic and cheer me up.

Why buy toys when household objects will do?

I told them to pack the cooler, but I didn't mean with their brother. I don't know what it is that draws kids to climb into small containers, but, thankfully, we all grow out of it before adulthood. At least most of us.

Pride Goes Before a Fall, part one

Wow. I haven’t been able to enjoy this summer on account of I’ve been spending every waking moment eating my body weight in graduation cake. On Saturday alone we went to a total of 10 high school graduation open houses. Yep. I didn't fix a meal all day. I even encouraged the kids to stuff some extras in their pockets for the next day.

I love talking to the graduating seniors, seeing the look on their faces of relief, freedom, excitement and the universal right to call a teacher by their first name. Little do they know that what they are about to experience is more freedom but it’s disguising the path which will lead them closer and closer to a mortgage and mini van. Poor unfortunate souls.

Speaking of mini van…I have a story to tell equal in its ridiculousness only to the "What did Paris eat when she got of jail" story. But first, a little background on my mini-van past...I wrote this awhile ago but the pain refuses to subside.

Here it is...The Fall from grace...

Yep. We did it. We drive a mini van. We’ve actually had it for awhile now but it’s taken me this long to acknowledge it in writing. Before my other friends had even turned 30, (the minimum age requirement for purchase) they were ecstatic about their mini vans. They flaunted their dual sliding doors, ample trunk space, and little gadgets that made riding long distances with kids guaranteed delightful.

Not me. Oh no. I was not about to buy a mini van, the beacon of mid-life mediocrity. I scoffed, scorned and sneered at their lemming like willingness to drive what looks like a burp on wheels. I would not go down with out a fight. I would buy an SUV, to my utter delight.

It was beautiful. Bright, cherry red with chrome wheels. I’m not supposed to mention the make and model but it rhymes with “lodged mango.” It was art on wheels and I was still cool. Then came the twins.

With three kids, there was plenty of room in our defiantly purchased automobile. However, when you add two more babies, and their required seating arrangements, the ample room shrinks considerably. The flip down seat which allows entrance to the third seat invariably flips down on an appendage. I can’t squeeze all these kids in without thrusting someone head first over the middle seat. Usually someone gets kicked in the head, but with any luck, it won’t leave a mark. I jam all five kids in and then quickly close the door, much like one does with an over packed suitcase.

Once, when we were on vacation, we stopped at a gas station. I watched the lady parked next to us gawk inconsiderately as I unleashed the dam of children. I told the three older kids to sneak around to other side of the car and get back in. When it was all said and done, it looked as if there were 12 children streaming from the car. The look of disgust on her face was priceless. My husband said that was mean, but I say people shouldn’t stare.

Can we talk about the amount of space in the third seat? When the boys were five, there was plenty of room. However, as the kids got bigger, I realized that the only way to have leg room in that third seat is to a) not have legs or b) be of Lilliputian descent.

To avoid future visits from children’s services, we acquiesced to the voice of reason and released our SUV to a happy place where it could roam free. And we are the owners of a blue mini-van.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When our kids saw the minivan, they whooped and hollered and carried on with such glee. Silly me, I thought they’d be disappointed to give up the SUV. They love the gadgets, plus, they get to leave the van without a minor head injury.

The other day, on the way to somewhere, a bright, red Hummer whizzed by us but not before I caught a snickering glimpse from the well coiffed woman in the passenger seat.

Oh well, my kids think I’m cool