Proof of a life well-lived, Instagram-style

If you have an iPhone and you have not downloaded the Instagram app, you are light years behind your peers and missing a way to waste a significant amount of time that also makes you feel like an artist. So these are some of my favorites, most of which have shown up before in some social medium, but here they are again, sometimes cleverly captioned. 



My Aunt Marilyn took this picture of Corey and me dancing at my cousin Ainsley's wedding in Bunkie. My family knows how to throw a frigging party. Be jealous if you're reading this and not related to my mother.



Sometimes Dixie Girl comes and stays with us on the weekends. Or when her mama has to work late. This is Murphy's best cousin.

So by now it's no secret that when you get a conduct mark at school, you write lines. For me. Not for St. Jude. I keep them in a drawer in my office upstairs.

Jake keeps pulling his teeth. He's also tugging on a section of the front of his hair so much that he's giving himself a bald spot there. We keep telling him that we're going to have to shave all his long luxurious hair off. In reality, shorter hair would only show the bald spot more, and that's not something I'm willing to torture my fifth grader with.

This is Murphy stealing the Throne of the Man of the House. I do not know what I did with myself before I had this dog. He's the only person in this house who sits still while I give him 500 kisses in the same spot on his face.

When Dixie Girl stays on Saturdays, she does not sleep on the pull out with the boys. She's smart and sleeps in the hole in the bed that Corey leaves. On nights that she sleeps over when there is no slumber party, she sleeps in the bed with me and Uncle Corey. She makes me sleep in the middle.

This is one of my favorite pictures in life.

I'm pretty sure that Landen and I had gotten in a fight this night and he came down after his bath to make up with me. Murphy does not let a child near me without him being present to supervise, so here I am with a child, a dog and a computer in my chair with me.

Jake goes to football practice every week to climb trees at LSU. I want to have a whole bunch of these to show him if he decides to break my heart and not go there one day.

I took this picture of them waiting, waiting to be picked up by their grandparents for a Beaumont weekend. We're all friends here, people, so I can tell you that we were sick and tired of being around each other and they were as ready to leave us as we were not to have to get up and feed anyone the next morning.

This is Daisy. She lives with my parents but Corey and I got her when I was seventeen years old. Usually when we go to Jena we bring Murphy, so we do not see her much. We ran away from everyone this particular weekend and she spent the entire time laying on our heads.

There are very few things that make me want to abandon city life for country living. The sky is one of them. We do not have an empty skyline for great sunsets in Baton Rouge. We also rarely see stars.

Corey never met my friend Maggie's husband Trane, but I've talked about them enough to keep Corey inspired. He wears a KIA bracelet for Trane. You can read about Trane here. He was a big deal as a human being.

My sister is obsessed with Trombone Shorty. A few weeks ago she had to take the boys to school for me, and she tried to make them believers. Landen does not have my taste in music.

I hope that whenever he's a devastatingly handsome teenager, he does not realize how good looking he is. There'll be no living with him after that.

The reason I know (not always feel) that Corey and I are doing a good job with these boys is because every night they sleep like this - soundly and securely - with the peace that only comes from knowing what the next day will be.  We're not 100% sure we have that for ourselves as adults, so it's a smashing success that we are able to give it to the boys.

Cookie Monsters

These days we are very busy with things like this

He's getting good y'all! He's been past the goal line carrying the ball two of the three games.

And this

I'm hoping he'll stick with this long enough for the uniform to fit.

And two nights a week the sky looks like this before I'm leaving Orleans parish

But this post is not about any of that. This post is to tell you all about how I got my kids to forget how much I fuss at them for leaving the toilet seat up, making wild noises in my car, not liking to read, singing to the dog at dinner, leaving their books at school, "forgetting" to follow the rules, bringing home notes from the teacher about how they do not follow directions and still having to be reminded to brush their teeth before we come upstairs to tuck them in and cheer for me being a loving genius.

Both of my boys love mint chocolate chip ice cream. I found a recipe for Mint Chocolate Chip cookies on Pinterest and pinned it because I know that I could make them on a day when I am feeling shitty about my parenting styles and be the hero for the hour.

But I did not bake those cookies, because as talented as I am in the kitchen (cooking not cleaning) and as wonderful a cake and pie baker as I am, I cannot bake cookies. They always are hard on the outside and raw in the middle.

My cousin Katie, who was born exactly five years to the day before me and whom I love like my big sister and whose baby I was obsessed with for the first three years of his life, used to make me cookies made of boxed cake mixes. They are the only cookies I can make. So I adjusted them to include the flavors and coloring necessary to make them Mint Chocolate Chip and fed them to my children, who jumped with glee around my kitchen and told me I was wonderful.

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cookies

1 box vanilla cake mix

2 eggs

1/2 cup cooking oil

1/2 to 1 whole teaspoon peppermint extract

Green food coloring

1/2 cup milk chocolate chips

1/2 cup Andes peppermint chocolate chips

A note about the cake mix you select: Do not get a butter recipe. Your cookies will not rise. You can also use Funfetti without the sprinkles.

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees. Spray two baking sheets with non-stick cooking spray.

In a large bowl, mix together the 2 eggs, 1/2 cup cooking oil, 1 teaspoon peppermint extract and green food coloring. Because of the kind I bought (pastel) I had to use about 30 drops. You should start with eight if you are using regular coloring and then add until you get the green that looks like the mint chocolate chip ice cream that you buy. Mixing those wet ingredients will help you not get Tennis Elbow when you try to mix the extract and food coloring evenly in the very thick cookie batter. If you have a husband/boyfriend with nice biceps who likes cookies and you, you can mix it in whatever order you like and then ask him to stir it for you, but my husband was reading and he only comes in the kitchen to feed himself and clean it. So I did it the Wussy-Wet-Ingredients-First way. When the wet ingredients are mixed, add the cake mix and make your very thick batter. Then add your chocolate chips.

I used to roll my cake mix cookies in little one-inch balls, but today I just used this small melon baller/ice cream scoop that it looks like my sister paid a lot of money for, left over here and is never getting back. Worked like a charm. Drop them on the cookie sheet about two inches apart and bake for eight minutes. They will be puffy when you take them out of the oven, but will flatten slightly when you put them on a cooling rack to cool.

It makes about forty cookies.

WARNING: If you do not want your children to make faces at you like this

It's supposed to be his "sexy, food is good" face, but he missed the mark.

Or like this

you should not make these for them.

Put on the damn helmet!

There's a comedian who does a routine about how the five threat levels do not make any sense to him, and he always gets confused calls from his mother, who does not understand what she is supposed to do when the terror threat level goes from yellow to orange. He tells her that no one does. He then proposes his own terror threat alert levels, and there are two: get a helmet, and put on the damn helmet. 

People, I am deep in the throes of hell joy of raising boys. I guess our threat level went officially from yellow to orange with the Duel of the Fates - a day that will live in St. Jude infamy. I may or may not have mentioned that Landen is going through his pestering phase. He knows more than you and he cannot wait until you finish a sentence, so excited is he to point out your idiocy. You're doing it all wrong, and he would love to oblige you and point out how. It is safe to assume that no one feels the red hot coals of this more than Jake, who has held on to his patience like a champ all summer. We've been telling Landen for six months that if he keeps being a pushy know-it-all or a jokester to his friends, some kid is going to lay him out. He did not heed the warning though.

Picture it: Thursday before last in the bus line at St. Jude. Tens of children waiting in line to catch bus 1717, mine included. Landen reaches over and yanks on the handle of Jake's backpack while he's wearing it. Jake declares "I have had enough of this shit!" by turning around and smacking Landen in the face. Landen returns with a punch in the face. Smacks were laid. Punches were thrown. Karate chops were hi-yahhed. It took three teachers to break up the fight, and my oldest came home with a busted lip. The principal said she's never seen a fight like that in her years at St. Jude.

Go big or go home, we teach here. I'm not going into the visit to the principal, the punishments, the crying, the sobbing on the phone with the psychologist they had seen the day before. We move on. Except the television that used to live in their room. It moved out and is being earned back with good behavior. 

I promise that I always go into weekends without Corey with a good attitude. I even let the boys sleep in the bed with me Friday night. They wanted to because we took the TV out of their room, but they said it was because they like sleeping in my bed with me. I like us all in the same room because if some events requires that I save their lives, it's easier if they are next to me, or just in the same room. 

It does not take long before my pleasing personality folds to the challenges of BOYS.

One of them made a Number Two in his bathroom in the dark. This made him completely oblivious to the giant mess he left on the toilet. I really cannot get any more specific than that. Mutiny of the Toilet. I made him clean it with Clorox spray and then rubbing alcohol. Fast forward two days, to my finding a bloodied undershirt AND a bloodied uniform shirt in the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper. Fast forward at warp speed past my flipping out about that.

I mean, I have a hard time believing that you violated a toilet to that degree and did not take note of it, even in the dark. By all measures of intellect, I would assume you have the ability to recognize that such a mess on THE FRONT OF YOUR CLOTHES would surely leave a scene in the restroom. But then to not mention the two? Because you FORGOT?! I responded by #1 asking him 372 questions about all his bathroom expeditions in recent memory, which is obviously faulty information #2 declaring that his father or I (mostly me) would be inspecting all of them in the coming days to make sure his colon is not trying to escape his body and #3 demanded $25 of him to pay for the replacement of the uniform shirt, which I would have been able to  save AT THE TIME but is bound for the garbage with two days of dried mutiny on it.

I have a family member who tells a hilarious story of driving lessons with her mother, who asked after a particularly intense lesson if she was a f**king R-word? Because she is a now well-rounded, sensible and grown individual, I come dangerously near tinkling in my pants when she tells the story, although I'm sure it was not hilarious at the time it occurred. While I am in no way encouraging calling your child a f**king anything (because I certainly do not, out loud), much less the R-word, I completely sympathize with how a parent can be so tried by the apparent brain damage of their children that they lose the head-mouth filter. When angry, I try to stay further away from them than I can reach with my arm, and count to three (sometimes ten depending on the level of rage) before speaking to them.

Corey has given Jake and Landen detailed instructions on how to clean their ears by using their fingertips and the suds from their hair on numerous occasions. It makes no sense then, why it took me EIGHT cotton swabs (both sides) to clean one set of ears on Friday night. And they do not give a rat's ass about having clean teeth.

I really feel like they are both too old for me to sit on the other side of the shower curtain doing call-and-response to ensure they are completing all the requirements of cleaning themselves. Or to watch them brush their teeth or dry their bodies. I'm definitely certain that they both know that blood and vomit are irregular activities that should be reported immediately, not concealed to be found out later.

I caught one of them in the parking lot of the YMCA yesterday with an open car door that did not belong to him. When I asked "What the f**k are you doing Why are you holding someone's car door open?!" he responded that he was just seeing if people were locking their doors.

Yesterday there was gum-chewing, which there will never be in my presence again. Why, you ask? Because the offending child asked me to roll down the car window so the gum could be discarded, which I obliged. Thirty minutes later, as we are returning to the car in the heat of midday, I noticed the wad of about six chewed pieces of gum sitting on the side of my car. When the boy tried to remove it, it turned into a giant, melted, sliding mess on his finger, clothes and door of my car, which Corey the Hero later removed with gasoline.

When I called Corey in a blind rage and crying to express my awe, disgust and anger, all he said was "They're boys, Nell. We're stupid. Put on the damn helmet, baby. That's all I can tell you." 

Tuesday Evening: A Photo Essay

This is a completely gratuitous post about my children climbing trees and "playing" football. I was hormonal and feeling sentimental about The New Normal Life of Jake and Landen.

So, Tuesdays are not fun. The boys come through the door a little before four. This is usually the time of my work day that is the most productive, for various reasons. They grab a snack. We spread out across the dining table to do their homework, continue my workwork. Landen has football practice on Tuesday evenings at the LSU parade grounds. This was the last day I will sit in my car for 90 minutes while Landen practices and Jake climbs trees. I intend for Corey to come straight to practice from work on Tuesdays, so that I can come home and get ready to feed everyone before 8 PM.

It was so beautiful outside Tuesday evening though. I was able to sit in my car with the windows rolled down, watching the tree-climbing and football-practicing of my boys.

Yes, that is a real honest-to-God Army PT shirt, complete with reflective letters, that Jake is wearing. They both have shorts to match, but they are a little short for public outings. This is what happens when he dresses himself. He wears a heather gray t-shirt and a pair of grey on grey houndstooth cargo shorts that do not really fit him.

I can already tell that football is going to be a riot. Their coach keeps asking them to cut down on the "silliness" at practice. There is one kid who dances all the time. I've already been informed by Landen that he is not wearing the correct practice clothes, so I dispatched Corey to buy him some mesh shorts, and now he wants to wear them 24/7. These picturs are pre-cool shorts.

This is my favorite picture. He made it through all those kids too. I have no idea what they are going to have him playing on Saturday. He's not the slowest runner, but he's not the fastest runner. The fastest runner is this teensy-tinsy kid who I'm starting to call The Flash. He's spritely.

Jake perches in various trees to get the bird's eye view of the practice. At one point Landen had the whole team distracted from football to stare at Jake and then all turn to me and tell me my child is stuck in the tree. He's not stuck. He got himself up there. He makes sure he can get himself down. LSU students walk by him and ask if he needs help, and he politely declines. Please note how many feet are between the bottoms of his feet and the tops of the SUVs parked below him.

Sports trivia: You are not allowed to touch the other players with your hands in flag football, unless it is to reach out and grab their flag. Is this YMCA rules? Anyway, the kids practice blocking with their hands behind their backs.

And mine in particular would rather use his hands to pick up pieces of grass and put them in his mouth like he's seen cowboys and ranch hands do on TV.

This is going to make a mighty fine framed photo for a female admirer one day. For my first Valentine's day with a boy ever, in third grade, he gave me a framed photo of himself leaning against a tree in a red turtleneck. I know exactly where in my parents' house that framed photo lives.

Right now I will not make you bored or uncomfortable by talking about how cute Landen's little tush is, and how I know when he gets in high school all the girls are going to go crazy for how fiiiiiiiine his butt looks when he dresses up and wears khaki pants to dances and band concerts....because that's what I did when I first saw his dad when I was fourteen years old.

Seriously, son? Do you really need to DROP out of a tree like that?

The first game is Saturday at noon. Baby Jesus loves me because he's not making me set an alarm or wake up early for flag football this year, knowing that my Saturday sleep-lates are precious to me. We also have to get haircuts this weekend, because this school does not let you get away with shit and they are going to send me a uniform violation notice for these kids any day now. We're off to see Grace at the mall after Saturday vigil mass tomorrow night. Corey has drill all weekend, so it's just me handling everything by myself as a punishment for not being home two nights a week us.

Oh, and then he's out of town Tuesday through Friday. I sent Cydney the Dates She Would Be Living At My House a month ago, so she could clear her schedule. This is a two-adult household. We're accepting applications for a permanent stand-in adult.