Woe is me, all summer long I was happy and free.

If you don't jump in and finish the song from the opening credits of Grease 2, you really should question whether you belong here. I can get at least three more post titles out of that song on this topic.

My kids go back to school in fifteen days. This is paralyzing news. How can it be here already? I mean, I'm ready to get in the new routine. I'm ecstatic to not be driving two hours a day every day to educate my kids. We are almost done with the clothes. Haircuts and new shoes are next weekend. I'm running on track with this handy back-to-school checklist.

The boys saw the psychologist yesterday, who says they are still doing great. Landen is very excited about the new school and Jake is nervous and excited. Landen is going to start flag football at the end of August, with games every Saturday until Halloween. (And so it begins. I now recognize the point in my childhood when my mother gave up her social life.) Jake is going to start karate around the same time. Jake really got into karate the three times he went last summer, but you may recall that Landen laid down in the floor and refused to get up, so no one went back. Landen does not have the option of returning to karate this year. Corey is wondering why I think Landen will take to football when karate, an indoor sport, was too exhausting for him. "Because I said so" seems an appropriate response here. Anyway, martial arts are a highly recommended activity for kids with ADHD. Flag football will be a highly-entertaining experience for the blog. Everybody wins.

I asked the boys the other day if they wanted to be Boy Scouts this year. Both of them responded with a "YES" that only comes from children who have been waiting their whole lives for you to ask them to do that. I was surprised, because neither of them had ever mentioned it to me. I asked them why they had not asked to be in Scouts before, because their old school had it. They responded at the same time, Jake with "no one ever asked us if we wanted to," and Landen with a more specific "because YOU did not go to the school to sign the form." I like Jake's answer better. He always fairly spreads the blame around to all his parents. Landen targets me.

I was telling co-workers yesterday a funny Landen story, funny because regardless of your stature in life, if you need telling that you've got it all wrong, Landen Allbritton will oblige you. Usually without asking.  Often unceremoiously. My co-workers, who have all known me for years, allege this may be something he picked up from ME! 

Corey is going to have to have a man-to-man with Landen before school starts. There is some sort of high turnover with Landen's friends that we did not experience with Jake, nor do Corey and I recall experiencing them ourselves at eight years old. It would seem that Landen's friends decide with some regularity that they do not care to be his friend any more. It happened repeatedly last year with several kids in his class. It happened with the friends he pledged his eternal devotion to at summer camp. We ask about a friend by name and they have shunned Landen and no longer wish to associate with him. It's very sad. I think that may be why he is excited about a new school. He did not end the school year with very many friends from his old school. 

We suspect that Landen's friends get much of the same lip treatment Landen's parents do, and probably much worse. He is not a malicious kid. He's a terrific, adorable, wickedly smart and funny kid, and therein lies the problem. If you need correcting, he absolutely cannot help but to correct you. The problem is that he's not always right. He will argue with me about whether the car he just saw was a Mazda or a Nissan. If you remind him in a restaurant that we do not play with our food at the table, he will point out to you that this is not "our" table. We've worked with him all summer on not being an interrupter. If he thinks he knows better than you, he cannot wait for you to finish your sentence to tell you so. So now his dad has to help him understand how to keep friends by NOT doing all of that really annoying shit, and then some.

Jake faces a different set of challenges. The psychologist is going to write a letter to the new school, now that they've let him in and accepted our fortune, explaining the delicacy and unpredictability of Jake's condition - the ADHD combined with the anxiety. We have some requests that we can make for the school to accommodate him: seat him at the front of the class, assign a homework buddy to help ensure he brings all his materials home, give him extra time on timed tests...We understand what we need to do at home to keep the outburts at a minimum and have him on a medicine regimen that improves his performance. We believe we will have a better spirit of cooperation with the school if we do not leave them to be surprised.

I cannot wait to post pictures of them on their first day of school in their new uniforms, which look almost exactly like the old uniforms, with a different logo and broader options for footwear. Indulge me while I share some pictures Corey had of tiny school-bound Allbrittons boys, often in uniform.

Landen to daycare, Jake to St. Theresa for Pre-K

Landen to daycare in Gonzales

Jake at the Pre-K he attended in New Orleans briefly
before the hurricane displaced them.

Landen at his Kindergarten graduation

Jake on a field trip to the museum

Thank you for allowing me to get those off my chest. That was weighing on me heavily. Oh, today is my loverly husband's birthday. He's 33, officially in his mid-thirties. I delight. He despises. If you haven't already, please flood his Facebook wall with birthday wishes. We're celebrating with poboys and chocolate cake!

Welcome to the Jungle (or The First Blog Corey Has Ever Been Excited About)

No boys this weekend. Idle hands....

Apparently, home ownership is not just about the glamorous stuff like couches and curtains. You get to retain a level of ignorance about landscaping and yard maintenance when you rent apartments and townhouses. When the dog shits in the carport because the grass is too long in the yard, you're derelict on your homeowner duties.

When we bought the house, all the beds were covered in a red mulch. We have slowly but surely eliminated that unsightly and useless crap. Not-so-slowly, the weeds have started to take over the beds and the sides of the house, until one day you leave your back door after a night of hard rain and are greeted by sights like these.

This bed is to the left of my backdoor. That's my obese azalea that has two
different color flowers.

The is the area between the house and the carport where Bertha, the
air conditioner lives with her mate, the Giant Elephant Ear. Those little
 pots are my seester's biology project and have since met their permanent
 home in the trash can.

I'm not sure if you're aware that it's 114-degrees outside. Saturday morning we got up and hit the Home Depot for some weed mat and some rocks. (And a edger, because Tuesday is Corey Daniel's 33rd birthday and he wanted an edger. That's a different project.) Despite my fear of critters that live in dirt, I put on my gloves and weeded the azalea bed and leveled it with a dirt rake. Five bags of calico rocks and several cuts of weed mat later, we have this. I had a vision. I pursued it. I won.

Does anyone know how to trim an azalea?

We have big plans for Bertha's habitat. I am really terrified of messing with that area too much because Bertha has been living and working happily right there for twenty-six years. I do not want her to get angry that I changed her room and stop working. Recently, Corey had to pull vines out that were growing in her, so I think we need to make some changes to get a couple more safe years out of her. We're going to put pavers down. Just take the little patio area and stretch it to the fence at my neighbor's property line. Won't take much stone. Won't take much time. We have to consider what to do with the Elephant Ear. And we're going to wait until it's cooler.

The second project we had on the list this weekend was the removal of the black metal fence. The back yard was accessorized with a black metal fence and gate that are ideal if you have dogs who need to be penned during the day. But Murphy does not stay outside, so the fence was unnecessary. Plus, the gate opened out near the carport, and Corey would white-knuckle it when I would swing into the carport. He's long been convinced I was going to hit the gate.

So Corey disassembled it, and now it's leaning against the neighbor's house waiting on trash pickup on Thursday. And after he broke out the birthday edger, the back of the house now looks more open. Not that any of the children who live in this house go into the back yard. "There's nothing to do out there."

Y'all know Murphy has that thing where he has to be in all the pictures.

Speaking of Murphy, he's not so great a helper. He spent most of the day going in and out. His hair is too long for this heat. He does not care for machinery. But here's a picture of his ass and his face, which is something I bet you can't do adorably.

I should note that one section of the fence was harder than the rest to remove. It had been recently repaired and reinforced by our handyman after I backed into the fence with my car and knocked it off the post. That section took twice the effort to remove, and I almost did not remind him why, but honesty is our best policy. I am not the one who backed into the electric gate post and knocked the mirror off my car.

Removing the fence meant there were bolts sticking out of the concrete. I would say "giant" but probably only in this picture.

Out of safety concerns that the boys would go running into the backyard with excitement over the "nothing" there is to do back there and hurt themselves on those bolts, we had to add a power tool to our purchasing list this weekend. I allege 80/20 safety concern/tools make men feel tough behind the purchase of our very own grinder.

It turns out that soldiering supplies can be handy multi-purpose items, like these flame retardant gloves that keep one's hands protected from the sparks of stone cutting metal. And who needs to buy safety goggles when these patriotic sunglasses can protect the eye just as capably? I don't want to be one of those women who always asks people to tell her how cute her husband is, but ain't he darling?

Now that they've cooled, we have blunt, almost flush pegs where giant bolts used to be!

May that stone grinder wheel rest in peace, though. Birthday Boy ground that sucker down to almost nothing.

Next weekend, the boys are back in Beaumont and we're taking a road trip to FORT POLK to buy a Men's Dress Uniform.

Go Corey. It's your birthday.

Who can make the bookstore fun?

First let me start this post by formally introducing you to The Hair. It's really growing on us, and I think that we've committed to it fully. When school starts, it cannot touch his collar (it doesn't), his eyebrows (it does) or his ears (it covers the top of them), so I think we'll adapt the length for school time. He has some swagger to him with this haircut.

Landen's less-than-pleased face is attributed to my demand for his face to point at the camera costing him a round of training the horse on Poptropica, a game website they used at their school last year.

Yesterday afternoon I took the boys to the bookstore, not-coincidentally at the same location not near our house at the same time that Governor Edwards would be signing books. You had to buy the book to get the autograph, not that I already have a copy, and the line was about fifty people long. With everybody visiting and taking pictures and getting an eighty-year-old man to sign your book, we would've waited two hours in line. Two hours for Landen's feet to hurt, for them not to be able to stand still, for them to occupy their time by bothering the shit out of each other and me having to constantly correct their behavior. Plus, I was not convinced that Landen would not walk up to the man and ask him what he ate in prison.



What we did was walk up to the press area, about fifteen feet from him. I did not tell the boys why we were going to that bookstore, so when we walked up, I asked them if they recognized that man. Landen said "not at all." Jake said "Is that the Governor?!" I told him it used to be, but it was the Governor whose picture was hanging on the wall in their dining room. Jake wanted to wait in line for a picture. He wanted to meet him. Landen wanted to go to Jason's deli. He declared this not before observing, in full earshot of his staff and the press, that he did not look like a man who went to jail. Told you.

We went upstairs so they could look down on him. EWE is a former governor, felon, humorist, savvy, charming political mastermind who can still charm a crowd and, apparently despite being in the twilight of his life, very young blonde women in their early thirties. That's his new fiancè on his right. 

I drew the heart because I adore him. I already have a picture,
but I am not above waiting hours in line to get a book signed
at his next event.

The boys on the second floor of Barnes and Noble watching
Governor Edwards greet his mass of fans.

My single friends should avert their eyes now, lest the read something they find offensive. On Saturday nights, we usually take the boys to dinner and then we make a family trip to SuperTarget. I have issued a decree that I will not be purchasing any more toys until Christmas. They start getting an allowance on August 1st, so they can buy their own. We remind the boys to bring their wallets full of birthday and First Communion money. Jake knew exactly what he was going to get - a Deluxe Clu (from the Tron movie). Landen is less decisive but usually spends most of his time considering several different Transformers options. It's adorable and hilarious to watch them choose a toy, and even more hilarity ensues at the checkout, as they hand over card after card with $4 balances remaining to pay off their $12 purchase. Landen asked me if I could give him a "two" because his toy was $12 and he only had cash and didn't want to break a five.

Today we got up and watched Deathly Hallows, Part 1  before going to pray at the altar of Harry Potter in IMAX 3-D. It was a tremendous movie, a deserving ending and Jake and I cried and cried. I could hear the sniffles of men around me. I think Corey was sorry we were sitting together, but I cared not. I deserved to have my feelings about Harry Potter. I cried from the depths of my soul about seven times. Jake got at least four. Landen made a sad face, but did not cry.

Jake wore his Horcrux locket and brought his Elder Wand.
Landen brought his apetite. Homeboy loves him some popcorn.

Sunday night is the only night of the week I don't have to fix quick dinners. Tonight I'm rocking Pat and Gina Neely's Buttermilk Oven-Fried Chicken. My kids keep telling me how much they love fried chicken, but I don't fry. I set the stovetop on fire frying chicken in Corey's apartment when I was eighteen, and I haven't attempted to fry chicken since! I'm also doing Ree Drummond's Potato Skins, which my kids may or may not eat and that's too damn bad. (Cook's [that's me] note: It says to coat the potatoes in oil before you bake them. The step before that is cooking bacon, which I do in the oven. I offer to you that if you are not overly concerned with your caloric intake, which you clearly are not if you are making these, take it one step further my coating the potatoes in your fresh bacon grease prior to baking. Trust.) There will also be broccoli, no recipe. Boil it, stop the cooking by giving it a bath in ice water, then toss it with olive oil and salt over low heat until warm again. For dessert, which I only make on Sundays? Martha Stewart's French Silk Pie. I've been promising the boys a homemade chocolate pie for a while now, and this is my favorite recipe. French silk = the thrill of an affair that will not get you divorced and will probably get a whole lot of chores out of your husband. I intend to try and get some out of mine.

A Perk of the Office

So the best thing about working from home days are that the work day starts at the same time, but you don't have to get up the 2.5 hours earlier to get dressed and commute. All you have to do is roll out of bed, tinkle and commence working. In theory. In reality, I have to get up a half hour before I need to tinkle so that I can send the boys off to camp.

This morning at 7:30, I was still in do-do land when I was pulled from my loverly slumber by the sounds of whispering. This is a relatively new phenomenon I developed while Corey was deployed - the inability to sleep through anything but the sound of my children moving. Their bathroom is above my bedroom and I wake up on Saturday mornings when I hear their toilet flush. Or when the gate at the bottom of the stairs opens. Or the floor above me creaks. Or I hear them whispering. I sleep straight through Corey's alarm going off right next to me, but the slightest indication that Jake and Landen are on the move wakes me.

So I laid in my bed in a fog, my sleeping mask still shielding my eyes, trying to listen to what the hell they were whispering about and where the hell they were. Soon they were in the door in their pajamas/boxer briefs (how their dad convinces them they should be sleeping in the summer) asking to get in the bed with me. In they climbed, and we giggled and talked about how much we all love my huge comfy bed and pretended to fall asleep on each other. Ever the routine-keeper, I commanded all of us out of bed to get dressed, eat breakfast and pack up for camp.

But not before I dropped the third boy in the bed and took some photos of my princes lolling about.

Oy. Managing a ten-to-twelve hour day is hard work, at home or abroad. I told Corey that I am trying to minimize how like shit I feel about it, because it's my second week, but I feel like the cart is dragging me, when I should be out in front of it. I do not have the presence in my house that I did with the last job. When I'm here I'm starting dinner later and when I'm coming home late I'm also going to bed earlier. My body has not adjusted to this yet, so I'm slow and zapped of energy. But I'm also very happy, and reinforced by my boys, who are very proud of me. Thankfully I made this change with plenty of time to get myself into a new, harmonious home-work balance before school starts. The boys have been troopers about it. And when I come home from my commuter nights, my kids are fed and clean and the dishwasher is running, so I have many blessings to count.

Governor Edwin Edwards is signing books at Barnes and Noble on Saturday. I heart him. He fascinates me. I interviewed him for a paper in college and he was so nice to me. We have an art print of him hanging in our dining room, and the boys know he used to be Governor of the state and went to jail. Judging by how impressed they are that the Mayor of New Orleans knows who they are, I'm thinking they would get a kick out of seeing the guy in person they've been looking at on the wall for four years. So we may make a trip to the bookstore, which always puts spring in Jake's step, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Governor. If I have to buy his book to get a picture of him with my boys, I should do that. I'm just going to pray to God and their mama that Landen does not ask the man why he did that bad thing that sent him to jail.

Like the new blog? It was my birthday present to myself! In July. It hasn't been updated since 2009 and I'm so happy with it. We have several more elements we want to add to it. I finally showed it to the boys, who now think fame and fortune is right around the corner because they are on the "internets." They each answered questions for the "About Me" section. They answered them. All I did was type them. Mighty hilarious. Check them out.

Let's talk about "that s-word," baby. And some other stuff.

What a week! It was my first commuter week, and from the time I turned "on" for my first day Tuesday morning, I did not turn "off" until about 7:30 on Friday night. It was very fast and very intense and feels like being home. Tuesday I got home around 8:30, kissed on my boys whom I had not seen for sixteen days, had dinner, cried because Corey was procrastinating loading the dishwasher, ate a red velvet cupcake and went to bed. Wednesday night I had decided to stay in New Orleans, so Corey and the boys came down for pizza at Slice on St. Charles and we holed up in the Hampton Inn that night. Thursday night I got home around 9:15. Friday I worked from home and turned the computer off at a little after 7. Next week Corey goes back to work and the boys start swimming lessons and go back to camp, and we begin our new routine.

Watching "Wild Hogs" in the Hampton Inn. Great hotel, but no pay-per-view.

This is what happened during the commercial breaks.

We had promised the boys that they could grow their hair out this summer. Catholic schools require that hair be an inch above the eyebrows and not touch the ears or the collar, so school year hair is pretty short. Landen had long hair when I met him, and Jake dreams of a long hairstyle with lots of fringe - more than we could do in a summer. BUT, they were shockingly shaggy when they came home from their two week vacation with their grandparents. It was almost the first thing we noticed when we laid eyes upon their beaming faces.



Landen's ears are not even visible through all this har. Jake's sideburns are an homage to the seventies. For a guy who's had his head in a very short fade for thirteen years, this is tortuous for their dad.

Jake hates getting haircuts. We have had a throwdown in the salon before. His dad and I can take him together to get his hair cut, and he will still stare at me like I've murdered babies for the duration of the haircut and not speak to me afterward. It's like telling him he'll never fight crime. I was supposed to take them to get haircuts after I was done working Friday evening, but that didn't happen at a workable hour. So today we made a family trip to the mall for some lunch and some haircuts at Regis.

Jake says that this was his first time to get his hair shampooed in the bowl. I have obviously done a serious disservice to my children, since that is the best part. His body language indicates to me that he favored the treatment.

Landen only remembers having his head washed in a bowl once. He had a definite swagger when he left the salon.



I would not let the stylist take any length from the front, just asked her to clean up the sides and back and blend it with the top. She may be our permanent hair girl. It was parted and styled when he got out of the chair, but he could not stop playing with it.



This is my boy Jake, who does not hate me today because you almost cannot tell that he got his hair cut. I cut a little off the back myself when he got out of the shower. The point is that he doesn't have sideburns like Wolverine anymore and it's not as tall. His dad is no happier with this, but Jake appreciated my understanding of his Hair Dreams.

There you go. My children were gone for two weeks and I had very little to say. Now that I'm giving you what you asked for, all I have to report on is that my children got mid-summer hair trims today.

Actually, last night we had to have the birds and the bees talk with the boys. We've been doing this incrementally over the last year. They learned first where babies were made and then learned how babies came out. We had been planning to tell them how babies got in there before they started school next month, lest they would be learning it on the school bus, which is where Corey got his sex education. You have to get in front of the story in order to control it, they told me in public relations school. This became necessary during the devolution of another parent-child conversation about husband-wife relationships, so we had to make the hasty decision to explain "Doing It" on a Friday night.

So on a Friday night, when all my single friends were having cocktails with their single friends to wind down from the work week, I was using tinker toys to animate (not really) how a man and a woman make a baby. I didn't simulate the action with the tinker toys, but my book my mother used compared men and women to puzzle pieces, and that has always stuck with me. I did not have a puzzle handy, so I used two tinker toys to show how man parts and woman parts fit together. I've ruined tinker toys for them for life. I know this because I hate puzzles.

We stuck to the very most basic explanation we could think of and talked about "that s-word" (as Landen now refers to it) as Jesus wants us to do it - after marrying someone they want to be with when they're ninety of whom I also approve. It was important to Corey that they understand that you do not have to be married or in love to do "that s-word" and make a baby, but it was the way Jesus and their parents would hope for them to do it. He did assure them that more detailed conversations with them about the functions of their personal reproductive organs would follow in a couple years, without me in the room. We all agreed that moms really do not care to hear about what their sons are doing with their business. We call it "the business" at our house.

I have relatives who comment that they want to see what goes on in the Allbritton house just based on the hilarity of what Nell and Corey post on their Facebook walls. This was one of the nights I guarandamntee someone who was not my children would have really enjoyed a stiff drink and a big, big laugh. If you are Jake and Landen, however, the memory of your mom waving a blue stick tinker toy stuck into a yellow disc tinker toy in your face while telling you that Jesus wants you to be in love and married first will give them at least three months of therapy as adults.

And I'm making an appointment soon, because I understood looking at their faces while they were learning this that the MOST we're going to be able to hope for is that they wait for a girl they love. Have I mentioned how much I dread teenagers?

And do not try to get my children to explain "that s-word" to you when you see them, no matter that this would be The Funniest Shit Ever, because they are forbidden from speaking about it outside this house under pain of shaved heads.

.....