Little Red Boots

Ava loves her latest consignment store purchase!

Lucy and Ethel in the ATL

Girls Weekend!

Art imitating life? Or...

Life imitating art?...

The High Museum where we saw the "History Remixed" exhibit, which is a compilation of photography documenting the Civil Rights Movement.

Me and Monique

Botanical Gardens with city view

Isn't this just a lovely plant?

She's always been one of those deep thinker types : )

There was this really cool art piece right in the middle of the gardens. It was made of what appeared to be a marble table-top with large ceramic balls rolling about the top. The fencing around the perimeter was made from some type of elastic material and caused the balls to bounce off the sides. The cool part was this...when the balls stopped moving viewers were asked to clap loudly in order to start the balls moving again. So we stood for a moment and contemplated just how this whole thing worked. Very interesting. : )

My girls would have died over these turtles. So cute!

The Anthropologie window display...pretty cool, huh?

Pottery Barn, in person, ahhhh.

I probably spent at least two hours walking and retracing my footsteps in Crate & Barrel and Pottery Barn. It was a living magazine for me. Loved it!

I didn't have to work very hard to envision this dining table back at my place. Unfortunately, it was too hard to block out the vision of a giant hole in my checking account. Alas... : )

Back in 2000 I worked with a woman, BG, whose husband had been in the Marines for twenty-eight years. Chad and I had only been married a year and we were living in D.C. while he went to The Basic School. BG was a wealth of knowledge and taught me a lot about the Marine Corps through a wife's eyes. She told me I would meet some great friends along the way, but I would meet one friend who would be a friend for life. A Lucy and Ethel type. Someone who was a kindred spirit.

Monique and I met at a Marine Corps party because our husbands worked together. There were many things that struck me about Monique: she was fabulously witty, confident and yet humble, could hold her own with the guy talk (and there's a lot of that in the Marine Corps), super smart, polite yet throws in some shock and awe for good measure, and well, just all together terrific. I liked her instantly. The four of us became good friends over the next years.

Today, both of our husbands are out of the Marine Corps and we live hundreds of miles from each other. We try to write and talk as often as we can. Recently we were able to spend a weekend together in Atlanta where we took in some culture, some botanical gardens, some terrific Greek tappas, a lovely glass of white wine, politics talk, theology talk, "Christmas morning breakfast", and window shopping. Oh. It did the soul good. : )

I have an "open door policy"

Yesterday, I received this nice email from my friend Dallas.

"ok, jenn, because you opened the door...to your spelling gaffes, i did notice another one. in the "about me" section on your blog, you wrote "breath" when you meant "breathe." i did notice the "kudzu" mistake before, but i didn't want to say anything because people can get quite offended if you point out spelling errors. ;-) "

Let me first point out, I never knew what great editors I had in my friends. : ) I mean, if I ever draft a book I will publish it here first because I think you guys would do a TERRIFIC job. : )

Dallas was right about a couple things. The first one being the "e" in breathe. The second one being how offended people get if you point out spelling errors, or any error for that matter. A spelling error is a spelling error, if you ask me. It's not an indictment. And even though I make a zillion spelling and grammatical errors each year, alas, I still wake up breathing. There are bigger fish to fry.

As I read her email, I pondered this thought: It seems so often we are embarrassed for things we shouldn't be. Like being caught without make-up (gasp) or having someone stop by when your house isn't clean (ah!) or forgetting to make something for the pot-luck (insolent fool)or wearing the same dress as another mom! (The horror. The complete and utter horror.)

Then, there's all the stuff that should completely unnerve us, but it doesn't. Like:

• Like paying $698 for one of these. Or...
• Gossiping about our friends and family and people we care about most. Or...
• Taking our children to the park and talking on the cell phone the entire time we're there. Or...
• Using the word "retarded." Or...
• Four hours on facebook. Or...
• Getting drunk...(or more specifically the things one does and says when drunk) Or...
• Being Pro-Choice and never directly supporting the choice "to have a child." Or...
• Being Pro-Life and never directly supporting a woman who is choosing "to have a child." Or...
• Putting down the stay-at-home-mom for "going-crazy" at home and "not reaching for her full potential" and "throwing her college education down the toilet" Or...
• Putting down the working mom for "putting herself first" or "not caring about her kids" Or...
• Putting down the homeschooling mother for "raising weird kids" or "being too overprotective" Or...
• Putting down mothers who send their kids to "the evil public school system" Or...
• Not letting the other mother with a screaming kid get in front of you at the grocery store because, hey, you were there first. Or...
• Listening to Jessica Simpson. ; ) Or...
• When you are running for President and your grandma poses for a photo holding a chicken. (Forgive me, I couldn't help myself. And besides, I never promised you a bi-partisan blog. ; )

I mean, if I'm going to go through that icky stomach feeling, possible hives, light-headedness...you know, true symptoms of embarrassment. Please let it be for something worthy.

Going forward. Please feel free to correct my misspellings, the spinach in my front teeth, and if I use the words "foie gras" when I mean "faux pas." No worries. More importantly though, help me live an honorable life by not letting me really embarrass myself. Don't let me be a hypocrite to my code of beliefs. It's my spirit that wants to be refined, much more than my vocabulary. Do this with your kind and direct words. And do this with your actions. Let your actions remind me that we're in this together as women and mothers. So at the end of the day our only worries can be the extra "t" in bitten and my flagrant abuse of ellipses. ; )

Letter to Red Fox

I really appreciated a letter I just received from one of my dear friends (Red Fox). She is a fabulous girl and I just love her to pieces. She very kindly pointed out how I had misspelled "kudzu." Thanks a lot all you losers out there that let me misspell kudzu for...oh...the past year! Just kidding. I love you guys. : )

Anyhow...this won't be the first or last time I misspell a word. So. With that in mind. I am currently having a wholelotta fun coming up with new and fun ways to spell the word "kudzu" before I resign myself to spelling it correctly henceforth. This week we are using "sioux" to pay homage to Chad's ancestry. : )

To sum it up, this post is written to indicate how badly I feel about leading you poor lost souls in the misspelling of a truly annoying and prolific southern weed. It's also to state how good I feel that Red Fox is (quite possibly for the first time) reaping the benefits of her very pricey VTech Forestry degree. Ooooo. That was off sides Red! Thankfully Red is really good natured (and lives several states away). ; )

My Big Girl (quotes from Jules during the last couple months)

"This is just a beautiful movie. It's really just fabulous." (describing Barbie: Diamond Castle)


"That rarely happens."
(said to me when I asked her not to wrestle with Ava because "that's when people get hurt.")


"Moved away? Cinderella got married to the Prince and moved away? But...she will really miss her dad if she moves away. And he will really miss her. He will be so sad. (Jules is quiet for a moment) She just can't move away."
(said to me in a very concerned tone after I told her the Cinderella story before she went to sleep. How sweet is that?)

"The grass looks really nice Dad." (said as she danced around in the grass just after Chad mowed)

"Ava, you're too cute for your own good." : )

"Forty eight, forty nine...Fifty!" (over heard for the first time, Jules independently counting to fifty, by herself, in her room...I now have it documented in case it never happens again. ; )

"My name is not Julianna anymore. It's 'Lucy.' And she is not Ava. Her name is 'Snowflake.'"

Then as I give Ava's name at the pharmacy drive thru, I hear a voice screaming from the backseat, "Her name isn't Ava! IT'S SNOWFLAKE!"

"Tell me the story about Uncle Mike when he...

...put lipstick all over your favorite doll when he was supposed to be sleeping...

or

...used to climb on the roof of the house in Kentucky...

or

...when he took the canoe out into the lake when you lived in Florida and there were alligators in that lake...

or

....when he took a bite out of the big piece of cheese, threw it in your lap, and told you to go put it away...and that made you mad mommy...

or

...how Uncle Mike liked to dress as whatever character he was playing...like a fireman, or ninja turtle, or Johnny Appleseed...

or

...just tell me any of those Uncle Mike stories..." : )

(and I said to her, "How much time do you have?" : )

For Maddie, Isaiah & Lainey Grace

For Grandma