The Inaugural "High Five For Friday" Post

If you read my blog and have not yet aquainted yourself with my best friend Emily who is still my high school bestie, you are remiss. And if you want to BE pretty or STAY pretty, you need to read it regularly, because she tells you how to do it at your house if you cannot get yourself to Richmond to see her in person. She told me this week that she had started doing these "High Five for Friday" posts that she was turned on to by this lifestyle blog she reads called From My Grey Desk. Now, I do not read too many lifestyle blogs. Mostly because my lifestyle falls by the wayside while I read blogs about How to Make My House LOOK 'Spensive and How to Not Be One of Those Parents Who Hates Their Children. But the premise of this is that every Friday, we write about our five favorite things of the past week. Go read Emily's, and then come back and read mine.

1. The Reverend of Rock

On Saturday, we watched my husband, the licensed minister who is not at all spiritual, perform a wedding ceremony. His roommate from Iraq got married and because he and his now-wife are truly people who must want to push my husband to Be All That He Can Be, they asked him to officiate. He did a wonderful job, but I could not tell you a thing he said, except for the two jokes I wrote. Because I sat in the back with the boys. And because I cannot really listen to anything he says when I get to look at him in his fancy uniform. I really would not mind if he became the go-to minister for soldier weddings, because I do love a wedding. Though my dates to these shindigs hate sitting still. All three of them. But one of them loves cake and was the first person in line for the groom's cake, actually eating the piece the groom should have cut for himself. The other one dances with wild abandon, even when he knows no one.

2. Landen makes it to second.

Saturday was Landen's first baseball game since 2010. My kids are growing up YMCA kids, between sports and summer camp. My idea of a great way to start a Saturday is not going and sitting in the grass or hot bleachers in the mid-morning sun, but my baby not only hit the ball, he got to second base. He also looks tremendous in baseball pants, because he has the best hiney on the YMCA Cubs machine-pitch baseball team. It's great for his confidence, because he is not the worst one on the team. He also has quite the arm, though apparently no aim. He can throw it over anybody. My second favorite part of the first game was when all the boys were throwing sticks and balls at a lizard at the top of the dugout and my monkey Landen climbed right up to the top of the fence (not this one in the picture) and ushered that lizard to safety.

3. Our bookcase got some style. 

I do not really like bookcases as a piece of furniture. I prefer built-in shelving. My husband loves books, like, they are His Precious. Even though he has a Kindle, he still buys hardcover books. We often get admonish for not caring for our books appropriately. And not only do we not have built-in shelving anywhere but the linen closet upstairs, we are sans funds to install them custom built to my specifications. So, we have stand alone bookcases. Which have, up until this week, been disastrous. When I posted pictures of the new bedroom, my design-savvy aunt in California commented on the sad, unstyled, unstylish state of the bookshelf in my bedroom. So I threw away all the book jackets and did some organization, and now it looks like this. I am almost convinced that the back of this particular piece of furniture needs to be painted, so I'll likely add that to my list. Everything without jackets and arranged by color makes me hawt, and we are steadily chugging along to improve the chic factor in our bedroom.

4. Jake is diagnosed.

On Tuesday, Jake was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome. This is neurological, genetic, and you do not have to scream obscenities to be diagnosed with it. Jake currently has three motor tics and two vocal tics, neither of which involve words. It's very rare for children to outgrow Tourette's completely, so we are stuck with this particular condition for the rest of our lives. We are still trying to absorb everything that this means and will then move into the stage where we kick Tourette's ass and let it have a very minimal affect on Jake's life and our family. We are now warriors. It happened to all of us overnight.

So how, then, does something like this end up on a list of favorites? First of all, there is nothing we can do to make this go away, and accepting helplessness can be very empowering. We will never be able to make Jake a Child Who Does Not Have Tourette's Syndrome, but we will teach him, and ourselves, to accept, to improve and to believe. Second, hearing that my child has Tourette's removed many of the notions I had about things that I could teach Jake to do better, and his inability to succeed at those things was very frustrating and made me very impatient. In just a few minutes, with just a few words, I became more patient. With both of my children.

5. KG is back on TV.

I have been waiting months for Kathy Griffin to get back on television regularly. Tonight, she came back to Bravo with a weekly late night TV show. Our family already has a lot of TV to watch, but this is EXACTLY the thing I need to record for Saturday mornings, before anybody else wakes up and before my cooking shows start. She's snarky. She's smart. She has no shame. She's my kind of people.

Photo from Bravo's Kathy website.

This concludes our inaugural H54F. I really enjoyed the recap. I love me a numbered list. I like the assignment to capture my favorite things in photos as they are happening to me so that I can tell you all about them later. I managed to do (almost) an entire blog post of great things without posting another picture of my dog. What the hell. Just try to resist sharing THIS with the world: