Which is C? Which is L?

A little Pop quiz for the readers....do you know which is L? What about C? Take a guess.

Answer: Chloe was six months in the top picture with the white dress on and in the picture below that Chloe was around five months. The bottom picture is Libby, taken recently, and she's four months. (I couldn't decide which picture to put up of Chloe so I did both.) They really do favor quite a bit- even more than these pictures show- Our little Twinkies.

I haven't been blogging recently because we've been busy with house guests and enjoying the summer weather. We're headed off to Washington D.C. tomorrow and I haven't packed a thing yet. I plan to get back to blogging regularly after this little trip to D.C. We're going to stay three nights and we'll celebrate our seventh wedding anniversary there. Which means just going out to eat - but I heard they have some stellar restaurants in the city so that's a plus. They also have some great museums and a zoo close to our hotel so maybe I'll try to brave it alone with the girls while hubby is in his conference and go to the zoo and stuff with the girls. Off to pack!

Our Little Line Leader: Shucking and Jiving

Shuck and Jive used to mean eating sea food, having drinks, watching my sister pass out from too many Jagermeister shots and dancing to Trash Disco into the wee hours of the morning.

Now it means watching Chloe shuck the corn, very competently, mind you. And dancing to Blue Grass. That's her favorite type of music these days; she's exposed to various genres, but always enthusiastically requests,

"I want to dance to Blue Grass, Mommy."

She shuffles her feet as fast as she can, but with direction, almost as if she's performing a very precisely choreographed river dance while intermittently throwing in the occasional hand stand and toe touch. Mr. Bojangles has nothing on her.

She's also very recently taken on the responsibility of shucking corn (when we have it), setting the table, and tossing the salad before dinner. Her preferred 'cooking' activity is definitely shucking the corn.

Chloe went to Summer camp last week; just a day camp for three hours a day. She swam, ran, and jumped a lot. And made like car loads of crafts. I've never seen so much construction paper, stickers, and legumes in the short span of just one week.

She was up at 3 o'clock in the morning the night before the first day of camp asking if it was morning yet. The little cutie was so excited she couldn't sleep. It was reminiscent of her first Christmas. She was so incredibly excited (more like over-stimulated) that she didn't' sleep Christmas night because she knew she had a room full of new toys just waiting to be played with.

Chloe seems to be, naturally, very assertive and a leader. The girl just knows what she wants. As an infant, she would call me (by using a rhythmic grunt and it even sounded like 'momma' sometimes) if I were in the other room. And three years later - she still does the same but with very clear, very loud, and very emphatic diction. She's a little jabber box and has been since day one.  Can't wait to see what she'll become and what she chooses as a career/job someday.

For now, she'll continue to bring prideful smiles to Mommy and Daddy's faces when she shows us the imperfect craft she made at School/Summer Camp. She makes us laugh until our eyes tear-up these days with her 'potty humor' and her Mr. Bojangles jigs. Plain and Simple, she's ADORABLE.

Maybe a third isn't out of the question after all.

Who said that?

Slow Southern Drawl

We went over to our neighbor's house for dinner last night. No, not the Jersey nightmares, they're moving this weekend. Barn animals and all.

It took us awhile to figure out if they were moving because they were using a 'borrowed' ice cream truck (How very mall bang-esque of them) and were throwing in open boxes of shiny, chipped porcelain figurines and old stacks of playboy magazines, somewhat scattered and loose at the foot of the truck. I thought they were gathering junk for a bonfire until I saw them moving load after load and lugging out their stained mattresses and dusty trailer park couches. Moving day!

Yes, I'm endlessly nosy but I saw this display as I was walking over to have dinner at the other neighbor's house. I had come home to grab a bottle of white wine as they were serving yummy king crab. And I had to pass by their moving truck-thingy.

I thought I could slip by unseen and stealth-like. After all, I'd always imagined that I could easily be a Clandestine Agent. If not a sahm (stay at home mom), surely a CIA Agent. A covert op? Cake. I was ready to kick some ass if need be -And I don't mean your standard hair-pulling cat-fight kind of kick ass. I mean, La Femme Nikita round house kick to the side of the head, have enough time to re-apply my lip-gloss and look down at my chipped nail ( my brow dropping in anger because my nails were freshly painted and perfect) and because you don't mess with a girl's nails, lay a non-merciful, deadly karate-chop to the nose kind of kick ass. Yeah, the kind that elicits proud applause from Valerie Plame. And all of this with a full-face of make-up on, lip-gloss still in place, bottle of wine in hand and high heel sandals in tact and unscathed.

And afterwards muttering [from the movie- The Point of No Return] nonchalantly and very ladylike in my best Dolly Parton voice,

"I never did mind about the little things."

After all, I've seen my fair share of Alias episodes and taught my fair share of Kick-boxing classes. But as I was just adjacent to the rear of the truck - (Pamela Anderson's breasts -circa 1988- were screaming out from the once shiny but now 'water-damaged' front cover as if her implants had leaked again and onto the front cover. Yeah, that was probably it.) Mall bangs lady's husband hops out of the truck and says hi very friendly, overly so. This was a shocker because he's rarely made eye-contact, much less uttered a word or sentence to me. And certainly never displayed enthusiasm. I actually thought he was born without a tongue. It was like he had visited Oz and had finally received his brain.

Then I thought to myself - 'he must be excited about moving.' But, no. Who'd be excited about down-sizing to a teeny-tiny apartment? And with all of that junk? Was he being flirty? Ewe.

Just as I was almost past the truck-thingy, I felt the ground vibrate and noticed a humongous presence in the open doorway of their townhouse. It was mall bangs lady and I, being polite and southern and all, said

"hi, ya'll," matching the enthusiasm of her husband but with a slow southern drawl.

[And instantly, wondering why I hadn't noticed how southern I sounded before? Must be the contrast effect. And I use way more terms of endearment in public and 'ya'lls' than I had previously realized. How very southern-esque of me.]

I don't know if it was me or Pammy. But at once, after reluctantly saying hi, her nostrils flared and she looked like a mix of Roseanne from She Devil, a Sasquatch and a Woolly Mammoth that was about to charge. Let's put it this way, if they had hot dogs to move, I know where they would've packed them.... in her nostrils! (1)

I strutted off, unaffected, and heard 'staying alive' playing in my head; one of my staple power songs. (that and 'what a fool believes' by Michael McDonald. I know, nerd-ville!)

Don't get me wrong, I wish mall bangs lady and her family well and I hope they're happy in their ice cream truck-thingy down by the Jersey river. To them I say, Buh-bye now.

As I skipped happily into the other neighbor's house after getting the wine, my power song quickly stopped [the sound of a record scratching] as I heard a burst of laughter while walking in the front door. Then a pause.

"What's going on?", I thought.

Then, I heard my husband, the intellect, joking using a popular catch-phrase.

Referring to grilling the salmon, "Get 'er done!"

Laughter.

Let me tell you, what a crowd pleaser because these people were cracking-up.

I'm thinking 'Can we say, easily amused?'

Whatever works, I guess.

Yet, more laughter.

[Albeit, mono-toned and lacking the familiar southern charisma I'm accustomed to, there were long bouts of guttural- laughter coming from the small crowd gathered around the grill.]

Ears open and waiting.

My husband, in his best Texas trailer park voice and even louder this time,

"Get 'er done!!!"

nice.

[my eyes rolling as I start to uncork the wine]

His slow southern drawl filling the air.



1.) Too mean? No. These people are not nice and purposely disruptive. Besides, she does look this way and it's my duty, as a blogger, to keep it real. And even if she looked exactly like Claudia Shiffer or Angelina Jolie her ugly side would still shine through b/c she's a miserable person, I guess, and in turn mean to others. And loud. And yes, I do feel sorry for her. And yes, I've been very nice to her since we've lived here. I didn't ever turn in the log thing - I did the log for myself to see just how disruptive they are and it was pretty bad. I did talk to her about it again, nicely. Remember, I'm southern. They apparently were already planning to move - so we lucked out. Maybe that's why they were being so loud in spite of everyone b/c they knew they were moving and wouldn't see us again. Mean. Remember, we have a newborn. Anyway, we now have nice, normal noised neighbors. From Jersey, mind you. So it's all good and I'll stop complaining now.