Married Christmas

The season is upon us and I am knee deep in the gift buying/planning phase of the rat race that is Christmastime. I've pinned gifts, written ideas on scraps of paper, scoured sale ads, and just about everything else that you can think of. I'm on top of the gift finding. Now, if money would magically appear in my bank account I could buy my bestie and I matching Hunter boots!

...BofA isn't showing any sudden surplus of money. It must not work that way. Well shoot.

Anyhoo, while making my annual Christmas list for Santa, it dawned on me that everyone who gets married laments the fact that they don't get as many gifts from their parents Santa. Why does this happen? What scrooge made this a rule? Does this mean that my fireside plaid skirt from J. Crew will not be under the tree? Do I not get to pick my favorite things and have them magically show up after I order them myself with someone else's card? What about my stocking? Will it be empty? Am I loved less because I'm married?

I couldn't let those questions go unanswered, so this morning when I dropped off Polly, I had a talk with Santa. It went like this.

Me:"We need to talk. Just because I'm married now and I don't live here anymore doesn't mean that Santa doesn't have to keep up his annual tradition. I figure I'm costing you less, therefore you should have more to give!"

Santa: "Well what do you want baby?"

Me: "Can I get back to you on that one? I need to check Pinterest."

Whew! Thank Bob! I will get my skirt and A will get whatever I tell Santa he needs! All is right with the world!

I write this to restore hope to married girls everywhere. Don't settle for the "Married Christmas" gifts. Tell your mom and dad Santa that you're still their his favorite little girl! Milk it ladies!

Happy Pinning and List Making!

Love,
a VERY good girl

So Thankful

A number of my Facebook friends have been posting what they are thankful for each day of November.

"What a great idea!" I thought as I first saw it. "I should do that," I also thought. But, you know me, I'm lazy so  I didn't.

Today it struck me that I have so much to be grateful for. I will probably write a few of these posts when I'm feeling nostalgic, but this one is dedicated to my favorite dynamic duo.

 I didn't have a traditional two-parent upbringing and I literally had a village raise me. The chiefs being Granny and Papa, of course. Today, and every day, I am thankful for them.

Here are some, not all, of the reasons why:

-They are consistent. I always know that they're going to be at church on Sunday and when I come over in the mornings I know that they'll be having coffee in the sun room.

-They are predictable. I always know what to expect- good or bad- and that is worth more than gold.

-They love me. So much that I can't even comprehend it. They know everything about me, and they still love me.

-They tell me to be nice when I don't want to be. Sometimes I listen to them.
-They tell me to calm down when I get upset at them for telling me to be nice.

-They show me every day what it is to live for Christ and to love eachother unconditionally.

-They babysit Polly while I'm at work. I mean, who has ever heard of this nonsense?!

-They are addicted to sweets and they hide them from eachother.*Ok, so it's just Granny hiding her dumdums in her sewing room, but Papa eats ice cream straight out of the gallon container!

-They are an endless source of entertainment.

-They are always there. They've never missed an important event in my life. Ever.

-They tell me every single time that I see them how much they love me. Come on, put a price on THAT.

Anyway, I 've got snot running out of my nose and my eye make-up is wrecked. I'm such an embarrassment to myself.

What are you thankful for today? If it's a person, call them up and tell them. It just might make their day!

Over and Out,
Sunny

Nailed

I am uncharacteristically awake at this hour on this night.

I drank milk before I got into bed, watched non-exciting TV shows and said my prayers.

And then I just laid here. And tossed. And turned. I finally wound up on my side staring at the wall that I like to call “The Shrine of Sunny.”

The shrine isn’t my fault and I don’t particularly understand it. It is a collection of Sunny themed things that I’ve gathered over the years. Ok so it used to be just two things but now there are three of them. 

Watching over me as I sleep.

Oh, what’s that? You want to know what these things are and how they got there? And why they are there in the first place?

Item one is a charcoal portrait I had done my senior year in high school when I was lucky enough to travel to New York City with Helper’s dear mother and a friend of hers.

Aside from the 14-block trek to the Sex Museum, it was a lovely trip. A very educational trip, too.

I also commissioned an Asian man to write my name in fancy Asian letters while I was visiting Central Park.  I had instant buyers remorse, but what are you going to do with a painting that says “Sunny” in letters of birds and butterflies?

I brought both pieces of “art” back with me, fully aware that I had no intentions of hanging them up or doing anything special with them. I had simply bought them in the heat of the moment. It was NYC, after all. 

Once I returned home with said articles, I put them in my closet and didn’t think much about them.

Time out. Remember the time that Papa took all of the decorative pillows off of my bed because he said that if he were to ever want to go and lie down on my bed to take a nap, he didn’t want to have to move the pillows out of the way? In essence, the decorative pillows were blocking his potential napping spot.

You never heard that story before? Well it happened. He put all 8 of my pillows in the utility closet on the other end of the house.

We have lived in this house for five years and I have lived with them for thirteen. He has never laid his head anywhere except the sofa or his bed. Or the recliner.

Back to the shrine. Granny found the portrait and had it matted and framed. She also found a frame for the awkward name drawing/painting. An arduous task it was, but she was unrelenting in her quest. 

I shall interject here to say that Granny and Papa don’t put a lot of thought into artwork placement. If there is a nail in the general vicinity of where they want something to hang, then they stick it on that nail and call it a day.

Exhibit A: I purchased a large oil impressionist painting and hung it in my bedroom beside my bed. It took a few tries but I finally got it just right. Papa always hated it so he took it down and left a few nails in its place.

Enter, Granny. The portrait currently hangs at about 6’ and the name is directly below it, centered perfectly. Somewhere along the way another random nail entered the picture. It now holds a family portrait of Granny, Papa and I that we had done back when I was still a blonde.  It’s an interesting collage to say the least. The Moaner thinks it’s hilarious.

Exhibit B: When we first moved into our house, I had three pictures flanking each side of my bed. They were level and symmetrically spaced. Once I decided that I no longer wanted pictures of dresses in my room, I took them down but the nails remained.

Currently, on the right side of my bed there are two pictures occupying two of three nails. One is of a friend from high school and another of Papa and his favorite dog, Susie. The pictures are 5x7 and 8x10. Nowhere near large enough to hang. Did I mention that they’re hanging at about 6 foot?

On the left side there is a picture that I had framed while I was in college of a couple dancing. It is more to scale, but the color scheme doesn’t exactly “go.”

The moral of this rambling story is this: it doesn’t matter how many beautiful things I buy or how many times I move my pillows back into my bedroom. If Papa doesn’t like it, it goes. That, and if there’s a nail somewhere, Granny will hang something on it.

**Granny, please do not take down my artwork. I’ve grown to love it and would be very sad if I came home tomorrow to find the shrine gone and my picture of Papa and Susie in a drawer somewhere. I love my yard sale room!

Love,

Me

Ps. Once I decide to stop being lazy, I'll take pics so stay tuned for an update to this post!

Impaired

I love my Granny. She is a woman of many talents. She can cook like nobody's business. She can bake a caramel cake that will make you cry. She irons her pillow cases and top sheets. Her hardwood floors are spotless at all times. And she's beautiful, too.

However, there is one arena that escapes her: Technology.

The woman is impaired. She can't for the life of her get past the mental hurdle that is figuring out computers, remote controls, and cell phones.

It's not uncommon for me to hear a knock on my door around midnight. 

"Hello? Granny is that you?"

I hear a giggle followed by, "We rolled on the remote again and the screen is in another language."

Don't even get me started on her working the computer. I'm sure you all can relate. 

Well, this morning took the cake. 

Granny came into my room informing me that her cell phone is broken. It won't work. Yesterday it died for the first time ever and and even though she charged it over night it's still dead and won't work. She brought it in to me and I looked at it. It was off, so I turned it on. 

"Granny, did you even turn it on?"

"Yes. I turned it on and it died again and it's not working and Liz couldn't get in touch with me and I have GOT to have my phone."

She was getting really frustrated with me because she thought I was insinuating that she didn't know what she was talking about. (She doesn't know what she's talking about.) I figured she needed a new battery so I sent her on her way.

She leaves to go pay the insurance man and I go about my business. Thirty minutes later she calls me exclaming that her phone is now fully operational. 

"It didn't die again?"

"No! Kim just called me and it worked!"

"Granny, did you even turn your phone on yesterday after it finished charging?"

*Crickets*

"You know that you have to turn it "On" after it has died to be able to use the phone don't you?"

"Uhhhh... You do?"

I'll never win.

Guilt

I read a lot of books. Mostly mindless ones that involve lots of things I can't talk about here. My favorite series is the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich. So far, there are 15 and I've read every single one; some more than once. Stephanie is from New Jersey and has a devout Catholic mother who is forever crossing herself. And drinking. In every book, she references the guilt trips her mom puts on her and somehow ties it to her Catholic faith. Usually, she'll bribe her with food to get Stephanie to do what she wants, but when food fails, guilt comes through.

My granny is a Southern Baptist and the woman can lay on the guilt like she's icing a three layer cake with a gallon of buttercream. Granny's weapon of choice is sickness.

Two years ago, The Colonel (as papa and I refer to her) fell deathly ill and was hospitalized. She had double pneumonia, a ruptured spleen she suffered from falling off the bed, and was in kidney failure. Before that, she had diverticulitis- which is a condition in which your intestines get in a hot mess and you risk rupture, massive infection, and sometimes death. To put it mildly, when she gets sick, she is in bad shape. Not once during this entire time did she ask me to come home. She would just say that she was really not feeling well and for me to keep my mind on schoolwork. I always learned of the severity of her problems after she had recovered.

Two weeks ago I was going on a girl's dinner date when I decided to call granny up and see how things were. As she does at some point during every conversation, she asked me when I was coming home. When I told her that it might be two weeks before I made it home again, she broke out the buttercream and trowel. "Oh... ok. I've just not been feeling too good. I think it might be because of the diverticulitis." The diverticulitis? The case of it that she had a year and a half ago? Didn't the doctor say she was fully recovered? As the wheels turned in my mind, a smile crept onto my face. She's at it again. Guilt tripping me into going home. A novice at this game would have rushed home, knowing the severity of the condition, but I had recently discovered her guise and had armed my defenses.

Around the time that the pollen struck this spring, Granny came down with a cold. She called me one day and I could barely recognize her voice. "Hey baby, when you coming home?" I told her it would be another week or so before I came home. "Oh. Okay. I think I'm going to see Dan today. This stuff might turn into pneumonia if I don't." See a pattern here? See what she does? She likes to use past serious illnesses to get me home. I told her that I'd be coming home two weekends in a row, for 3 days each time beginning the weekend after next. Presto. Her voice was a clear as a bell and she sounded so gleeful I expected her to break out into song. No more cold. You see, when she finally gets her way, these sicknesses magically disappear. She tells me that I am the only thing that makes her feel better. Does it get any thicker?

As I grow older, I find myself more and more like The Colonel. I use my ailments to my advantage, and if I think throwing a guilt trip out there will get me my way, I'll do it in a heartbeat. Even my friends are catching on and turning the tables on me. Sometimes I wish I could tell Stephanie Plum to eat her cake, take her grandma to the weekly viewings at the funeral home, or just have kids already. Whatever guilt trip her mom lays on her is nothing compared to the stunts granny can pull. Those Baptists really know how it's done.

Socks

When I was little, I used to wear rubber bands around my wrist like they were bangles. For a time, my papa's mother, Granny Mary, lived with us. She was a woman so set in her ways, a hurricane couldn't blow her off course. She would always grab my wrist and take the rubber bands off. She'd say, "You're going to cord your wrist and cut off circulation! Your hand will fall off!" She would cut a slit in her socks right at the top so that they didn't "cord her ankles" and her socks would just slouch around her skinny little ankles. Then, she would complain that her socks were too big.

Fast forward 15 years and I'm still wearing rubberbands around my wrists. It's more a matter of fuction over fashion now, though. Granny Mary has passed on since, but she passed down her sock cutting habit to her son. You see, my papa has chicken legs. There's no way around it. When I was about 12 years old, I remember him putting on some denim bermuda shorts he had cut off back in the 70's to come out to the pool with us. His legs were so white they were blinding. And skinny! He always says some nonsense about his legs being in peak physical condition, but they're all bone. I say that to say this, there is absolutely no way that a sock is going to cord his leg to the point that it needs to be amputated. Regardless of this, he cuts his socks just the way his mother did. In his sock drawer are countless pairs of socks, all neatly folded and in their places, with a little "v" notch cut out at the top. Granny and I always laugh and talk about it when we come across them in the laundry.

It seems that the older he gets, the more he becomes like Granny Mary. Let's just hope he doesn't start hiding his money around the house!

Granny and Papa

Meet Granny, beautiful inside and out... Just don't cross her!

And Papa... I can't say his name without smiling.

Through many twists and turns, I came to live with my grandparents: Granny and Papa. Granny is a matriarch to say the least and Papa is as cool as a cucumber- even under pressure. They will be the source of most of my stories. These two are beyond hilarious. You'll love them as much as I do in no time. They'll have their own section here, so check them out anytime you need a good laugh. I've got stories for days.