Annabelle Speaks

Family Weekend

My parents visited last weekend, and I know it isn't "cool" of me, but GOD I wish they lived closer.  We have so much fun whenever we're together.  I mean, even just doing something as simple as riding the bus.

The matching outfits really make the picture.

My Mom in particular has boundless energy, to the point that she wore out all three of our cats on a daily basis.  I can't wait until she can do this to some grandchildren.

We also took a trip to the Museum of Science and industry where I found my new favorite hat in the gift shop.  It had a handle on the top for special portability.

Also at the museum my mom found her very own Fairy Castle.  For those who don't know her, my Mom's name is Colleen, and her maiden name is Moore, thus why this is HER fairy castle.

It was just an all around spectacular weekend.  I love my parents to pieces, and I cherish every moment we get to spend together, whether we are doing big things, or little things.  I can't wait to see them again at the end of the month when I get to visit Minnesota for Labor Day weekend.

The Beginning of Happily Ever After

This weekend was a crazy, non-stop party of BUSY with family in town visiting, a surprise party for my friend Jenn, an unexpected visit from someone I've known on-line since 2003 but never met (she lives in the Netherlands), and, most importantly, my little sister's ENGAGEMENT.

You guys!  My baby!

That kid is one of my favorite people on the planet, and has been since I met her when she was about 14 months old.  She's not actually my sister, but a neighbor.  For all intents and purposes our families have merged though, so it totally counts.  I've known her almost her entire life, and her brother for his entire life, and they are just the sun and moon to me.  So it was with much excitement and a lot of happy tears that I helped Heather's now-fiancé John pick out the hotel, restaurant, and other assorted plans for the Big Weekend.

John assigned me a "super secret spy name" in his phone so if Heather saw his caller ID at any point she wouldn't know it was me and get suspicious.  He named me Veronica, declaring that it was a perfect sexy-sophisticated Russian Spy name for me (Teryn has since named herself Betty, and now we will never have proper names in John's phone EVER).

After a baseball game and dinner at a fancy restaurant, Heather and John headed to Navy Pier to see the fireworks.  Thanks to under-the-table texting I was able to catch sight of them coming in and follow them all secret like to get photos of the proposal.

She didn't know I was there until after the fact, when John pointed me out and she started crying again.  She hugged me tight and cried and told me how happy she was and said that it meant the world to her that I was there for that moment and my heart just about exploded from happiness for her.  I didn't think it was possible for me to get any more emotional about the evening until she called her mom on the phone to tell her and only managed to choke out "Mommy!" once before bursting into happy-sobbing-tears again.

The next day Heather's mom emailed me and thanked me for being there for Heather and for "loving [her] daughter as much as [she] does".  I told Teryn about the email and she said it best with her response, "How could you NOT?"  I know, right?

Congratulations, Heather and John.  I couldn't be happier for you if I tried.  John, welcome to the family.  I love you both to pieces.

Family Lexicon

Every family has their own special lexicon.  Those words or phrases that make sense ONLY to you.  Inside jokes or television/movie quotes turned into everyday language.  Often I don't even know there is a reference to pop culture at all until I've been using a particular phrase for years.  I was well into my 20s before I learned that Bedtime For Bonzo was a movie and not just something you say to kids to let them know it is time to get ready for bed. 

 

A lot of my family lexicon comes from Monty Python.  We can blame my dad for that one.  My dad, along with most of his ten siblings, is very, very good at imitating voices and accents.  I am still occasionally startled when I hear my dad's voice come out of the TV if Monty Python is on.  Oh, but it is wafer thin!  We already got one!  I'm not dead yet!

 

I'm pretty sure we have a fair amount of Star Trek in there, too, though the only one that comes to mind at the moment is the ever-popular "Damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a _____!"

 

Other sayings just come from family history.  I'm sure my dad will correct me on the particulars of this, but sometime during my dad's childhood there was a boy in the neighborhood who had a sister named Emma.  He was around on and off to play with some sibling or other (there are eleven in my dad's family spanning 20 years in age).  I believe the boy may have had a disability of some sort.  Emma was in charge of him at any rate, and when Emma said it was time to go home, it was time to go home.  His response to her was always the same.

 

"Oh-tay, Emma."

 

It sort of melted into a one-word response, ohtayemma.  I grew up hearing and saying this all the time in place of a simple "okay" or "got it" or "will do".  I didn't realize it until recently, but my wife has started to pick up on this saying, too.  I remember pointing it out to my dad.  T is really family now!  She can do Fisher-speak!

 

Yesterday I learned that my iPhone is a member of the family, too.  (What?  IT IS.  Shut up.)  iPhones, like most cell phones I suppose, have predictive-spelling built in that learns what words you type often as a sort of built-in spell check or shortcut.  Yesterday I was texting T and when I typed in "Oh", the predictive spelling filled in "Ohtayemma".  Aww.  It's like warm-fuzzy family memories wrapped up in my phone.

 

I probably shouldn't point out that the predictive spelling has also learned "crackwhore" and "strippers".  Awesome.

 

Do you have any good bits of family lexicon to share?

I'm not kidding about the FART shirts

Hey look, pictures!  Pay no attention to the spectacular lack of text and the non-spectacular iPhone quality of the photos.  I'm working on a tight time budget between family reunion weekend and family graduation party weekend.

This past weekend was the 24th annual family reunion for my Dad's side of the family.  Because the family is so huge (there were 11 kids in his family, all of whom had kids and many of whom now have grandkids) we rent a chunk of a campground in Wisconsin for our little shindig.

To make sure other campers know to leave us alone we make sure to decorate our campsites in the classiest way possible.  As if the large group of tall people wearing colorful top-hats and blue shirts that say FART on them isn't frightening enough.  (Yes, really.  No, you shouldn't ask.)

I spent much of the weekend playing with my cousins' kids, since I don't yet have my own children to torture.  I spent most of Friday carrying this one around, flipping her upside down, and throwing her up in the air.  She is possibly the cutest baby our family has ever had (and we have a lot of cute babies).  No one could say know to her sweet little "up-phease", except for her parents who have to hear it 9,345 times per day.

Saturday I spent in the lake, letting this dear one test my ability to tread water.  With her lifejacket on she could swim waaaaaay out into the lake (as long as I was with her), and wow are my arms getting tired just remembering that much swimming.  At least it finally got the mud off of her from the mud adventure pictured above.

And in case anyone was wondering where all my anal retentive OCD-ness comes from, take a look at my Dad's awesomely symmetrical breakfast and you'll understand.

Inspired By True Events

Family weekends always seem to be too full of stories to wrap up in an entry of any reasonable length.  I try to make notes to write about later, but my lists end up being far more entertaining than any recount of the actual stories could be.  This is my list from Friday afternoon/evening:

1.  Headphones – tune out unwanted spousal rumination
2. T making Meth
3. Claymation play-dough colors
4. CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
5. Lexicon, phone charger, nostrils
6. Flower sound-effects

What it boils down to is that weekends with my family are more fun than anything else I do, ever, yet they make poor blog entries.  They are completely unintelligible to people who weren't ther, not to mention half the people who were there.  Picture my parents and I laughing so hard we are all but falling out of our chairs, gasping out words that seem to make no sense (CHEEEEEP!  Pork chops!  Weather Channel!), tears streaming down our faces as we gesture wildly with our hands and add in strange sound effects for no apparent purpose; that'll give you a general idea of what my weekend looked like.

Oh, we also had a metric ton of bread on hand, just in case. 

(Not pictured: the TEN BOXES of dairy digestive supplement living on the window shelf by my mom’s carnival glass.  When did my parents start aging?  I call full stop on that, thanks.)

The massive amounts of bread were accompanied by massive amounts of all sorts of food, as this weekend was the (high school) graduation party for one of my cousins.  We’ve moved into the land of family graduations where I start to feel old.  I look at my baby cousins and their friends and baffle at the fact that they somehow turned into teenagers when I wasn’t looking.  I remember how grown up and adult I felt when I graduated high school, and I just want to run over and hug those kids and shield them from the real adulthood that is barreling down on them faster than any of them realize. 

Nearly all of my cousin’s graduating class was there, joking and play volleyball and basketball and generally horsing around.  My dad leaned over and said if I was bored I should go and explain to the lot of them that they were going to spend the next ten years trying very hard to avoid most of the people they were clinging to today; that most of them have nothing in common with each other besides the small town they grew up in.  Likely most of them will look back on 2009 with a mixture of nostalgia and horror, the same way I look back on my days in high school.  But at least they were still enjoying each other this weekend, before they all move onto the next stage in life and try very hard to be more than they are in their yearbooks: “class clown”, “best eyes”, “most likely to save the world”.

And in closing, before I wander off to page through my high school yearbooks and cringe and shudder at the pegged jeans and other dubious fashion choices, I bring you some poor quality pictures of me from high school, just because.

See, pegged jeans.  Paired with high-tops, just to complete the look I was going for.  You thought I was kidding.

 I am particularly fond of the silver high-tops in this picture.  From the background I would suspect that this dance had a theme of “space” or some such thing, but still…silver high-tops.

And to top it off, we have awkward teenager cheerleader Anne.  I can’t even look at this picture without cringing inside at what it felt like to be fifteen.  Man, you couldn’t pay me enough to do that again.

Go Bears!

Home Sweet Home

I was part of a conversation the other day about what makes a place "home".  T is of the opinion that our apartment is "home" and anywhere else (our parents' houses, for example) is not home.  I on the other hand refer to both our apartment and my parents' house as "home", and I suspect I will continue to do so until my parents downsize houses and move into a house I haven't lived.

 

When I moved to Chicago I remember getting on the airplane and having exactly one key on my key chain.  I had turned in my old apartment keys, office keys, and had given my car keys to my parents (who were keeping the car for the first four months I was living in Chicago).  I hadn't yet gotten the keys to our new apartment, so for the few hours between when my parents and I tearfully parted at the airport in Minneapolis and when I met up with T just as tearfully in Chicago I had only one key with me, the key to my parents' house.  The one place that would always be home.

 

We didn't move into that house until I was nine, but there are so many memories wrapped up in that house, in that neighborhood, that I'm pretty sure it will always be home, even after my parents move away.  There isn't another neighborhood where I would go on long nighttime walks with my parents in the cool spring air, or middle of the night walks by myself in the heat of summer.  There is only one apple tree I leaned against with my friend Dana, talking about school and boys and parents as we ate popcorn out of greasy brown paper lunch bags.  I watched the street grow up around me as new houses were built.  I knew the layout of every house before the new neighbors ever moved in by exploring the construction sites.  We had neighborhood bonfires in the empty lots until the last house filled up our street.  I remember how neighbors would gather on lawn chairs to watch my Dad and a couple of the older neighbor boys set off fireworks on the fourth of July.  Many summer afternoons were spent on my knees with sidewalk chalk, drawing elaborate roads and houses in the cul-de-sac - creating a "Heather Town" for the neighbor kids to play in (named after the neighbor girl for whom I made the first Heather Town).  Two of those neighbor kids were in my wedding last fall; they are as much my family as my parents are.  Three sets of neighbors traveled to Chicago for the wedding, one family I hadn't seen in a good eight years (they had moved out of the neighborhood a while back).  But they came, and it meant the world to me.

 

Certainly not every moment of my childhood was quite so shiny and clean, and we all had our share of darkness hidden beneath the colorized-fifties sitcom version of my neighborhood that I'm remembering today.  Everyone has those types of stories, I think.  But not everyone had Heather Towns, and cul-de-sac fireworks, and apple trees, and popcorn, and bonfires, and neighborhood parties, and hide-and-seek in half built houses.  I think everyone would be a bit happier if they could find their own Heather Town to visit from time to time, if only in their memories.  Anyone would be lucky to call such a place "home".