Ain't No Thing But a Chicken Wing

When Liam, our middle son, was 3 years old, he started watching a TV show called Lazy Town. This show had a positive premise that emphasized eating healthy foods, saving sweet treats for special occasions, and exercising daily. Now, I'm sure every other kid that watched this show understood the message of developing a healthy lifestyle, but what Liam took from the show was that if you eat anything, you're going to get fat. So what did Liam do? He stopped eating most of his food. Liam started losing weight--weight that he didn't have to lose. So, we said goodbye to Lazy Town and the pediatrician put him back on whole milk. She also wanted me to add cream cheese and heavy cream to his diet where I could. Liam's weight got back on track but George and I were a little worse for wear as we were eating things like mashed potatoes made with cream cheese, French toast made with heavy cream, and for good measure (or not so good measure depending upon how you look at it), we added sour cream to everything. I am convinced that this is when Liam's love affair with food began.

About the time Liam turned 5, George introduced us to one of his favorite food finds, phở, Vietnamese noodle soup.  Phở comes in a variety flavors but Liam's favorite is the seafood. When I say seafood, I don't mean lobster. I'm talking about a noodle soup full of squid, scallops, crab, shrimp, and mussels....you know, just the kind of soup every 5 year old loves. The first time Liam had the seafood  phở, we were at a local  Vietnamese restaurant. He ate that soup with such slurpy fervor that the patrons at 3 different tables couldn't help but notice. By the time Liam's face resurfaced from his giant bowl of noodles and suction cups, several of the observers had  started laughing. I was indeed a proud mama as I watched him eat every last bit of the soup, finishing it off with the last tentacle slurping it's way through his little pursed lips.

Liam is a messy and noisy eater who is also quite the carnivore. This combination of messy, noisy and meat don't sit too well with my mother, who is a borderline vegetarian. She won't sit near the boy if he eats seafood  phở or chicken on the bone. In all my life, I have never seen a human suck the meat clean off a chicken bone the way Liam does. When he gets done eating a drumstick, all that's left is the gray bone and the shiny white cartilage. 

One night, George had made hot wings, a family favorite. Liam was sitting next to me at the dinner table. That kid had sauce spread from ear to ear across his face, and amidst all the greasy orange color, I couldn't help but notice that his very first loose tooth was getting ripe for the picking. As Liam was sucking the last little bit of meat from his 5th hot wing, I saw that his little tooth was gone. I said, "Oh Liam, did your tooth fall out onto your plate?" Much to my surprise, he said, "No. I'm pretty sure I swallowed it."

Now, you'll be hard pressed to find a bigger sentimental sap than me, but when my grandmother suggested I hunt for his tooth, I knew right away that I'd be okay with just leaving a note and a chicken wing for the Tooth Fairy. 

Good Goobity Goo

When George and I were just two college kids crazy in love, we worked in one of the dining halls on campus. I know it sounds odd, but if you needed a grunt job to help pay your way through school, the dining hall was a surprisingly fun place to work. It was a great place to meet people with a wide range of backgrounds (we actually worked with a guy who had been at the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests). George and I were friends with most of our coworkers and all of the dining halls on campus combined to form quite the social network. There were intramural teams formed, picnics with sand volleyball games, great parties, and lots of couples falling in and out of love.

It was during a shift at the dining hall that I became aware of George's protective nature over me. Some weaselly newbie at the dining hall got physically inappropriate with me. Trust me, he unquestionably crossed personal boundaries. George's immediate response was to grab the guy, pin him against the wall, and  threaten to dot the guy's eye (okay, George's words were probably a little more colorful). Suffice it to say, 2 things happened in that moment: 1) The aforementioned guy never so much as even looked at me again, and 2) I discovered that I had a man who (channeling my best Darla from The Little Rascals voice complete with sigh) was my hero and who would  always do his best to protect me.

It was right around this time that George had been looking for a house near campus to rent . He knew a guy who was planning to renovate a house that even in it's heyday was probably best described as a pea green crack house. This house had long been abandoned and left sitting wide open. Yellowed wallpaper was all that was holding plaster on the walls, that is, where the plaster was still on the walls. Windows were broken out and door locks had been stolen. Refuse and filthy garments peppered the worn wood floors. Lead paint was peeling off the trim work and a  thick musty odor filled the place, but George, being a man of vision, saw only  the potential for a newly remodeled low rent house with lots of room within walking distance to his classes. So late one afternoon, George decided to take me on a tour of the house, and since there were no locks on the door, we didn't need the landlord to let us in the place. As we were walking from room to room, George was detailing the builder's plans for the much needed improvements. With George behind me, we started down a narrow hallway. I was struggling to imagine the place all spruced up with new walls and floors but I was also trying not to touch anything as I was pretty certain it had been too long since my last tetanus shot. Noticing a door ajar, I gently used my foot to kick it open. George, seeing the door swing open but not realizing I had opened it, immediately jumped 3 feet off the floor, allegedly (as we have since discussed this moment at great length) tried to grab my arm,  and yelled "GOOD GOOBITY GOO!" Seriously, those were his exact words..."Good goobity goo." Within a flash, he was gone. George was out of that house before I could even process what happened. As he was running, I  turned to see what had startled him so badly and I caught a peripheral glimpse of my long brown hair as it swung over my shoulder. Thinking my hair was a mouse scurrying across the floor, I too decided to run screaming from the house only to find George waiting for me in the middle of the yard. He was panting so hard that he could scarcely ask, "What was that? What was that? What was that?!" To which I responded, "What was WHAT?" Apparently, (now say it with me just like Darla) "my hero" thought someone of ill repute had been standing on the other side of the door and it was that someone who had opened the door.

Needless to say, we had quite the laugh at the misunderstanding, and George told me next time he yells, "RUN!" (which apparently is the English translation of  good goobity goo), I better run. I learned a valuable lesson that day in that a man's protection comes in many forms. Sometimes, you need to stand back and let your man fight the good fight and other times, you just need to be ready to good goobity goo with him.

Life Lessons From A Paranoid Mother

From a fairly young age, my mother instilled in me a healthy sense of paranoia. She is a long time fan of Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King so it's only natural that she is one to look over her shoulder, and because she is a good mother who loves her children, she taught us the same survival skills. For example, I don't walk alone in isolated areas. I don't take rides from strangers or eat or drink anything they give me. I don't pick up hitchhikers. I never park next to cargo vans, especially the kind that don't have any windows. I don't fear clowns to the extent that my mother would like, but I will admit, they are creepy and I don't trust them. When I sleep at night, the closet door must be completely closed. When I shower, I always always always leave the curtain half open. You just never know when a psychopath with mommy issues is going to attack.

I'm sure at this point, you're probably thinking that this is all common sense and for the most part, you're right, but if you didn't grow up with my mom teaching you everything she has learned from suspense novels and horror movies you might not recognize all the dangers that lay before you. My mom had a movie for every situation. The night before my first babysitting job, she rented When A Stranger Calls. Now if you've seen this, you know (spoiler alert) that if someone you don't know calls while you are babysitting and asks if you have checked the children, your only response should be to run screaming from that house. Don't feel guilty for not going upstairs to get the children, because they've been dead for hours. You just need to run!

The week before I left for college, my mother rented Looking For Mr. Goodbar. She made me and my best friend watch the movie with her so that at the end, in case we missed the lifesaving message, she could point out to us the dangers of meeting guys in bars. In case you haven't seen the movie, it ends with Diane Keaton being murdered by some guy she met in a bar. After the movie, I asked, "You couldn't just tell us that?" To which she replied, "I didn't want you to forget. I wanted to leave you with a lasting impression."

Lucky for me, I graduated with honors from Mom's Paranoia Prep School for Girls. All those years of training really paid off when I found my first dead body. Now up until that point, the only movie I'd seen about finding a dead body was Stand By Me. Well, when I found a dead body, I wasn't a 12-year old boy in the '50s and I wasn't on a coming of age journey with my closest friends. Trust me, Jerry O'Connell was nowhere to be found. I was in my very early 20s,  newly married, and finishing up my degree. George and I were living close to campus in the nicest dump that we could afford. I was walking home from class one afternoon, and as I cut through a parking lot behind a local diner, I caught a glimpse of a  man's fairly new shoe near the top of the heap in the dumpster. As I neared the trash, I noticed the shoe had a sock in it, and I found it odd that someone would discard a shoe with a sock in it like that. As my eyes went from the shoe to the sock, I noticed skin and hair and there it was, a leg buried in the trash in the dumpster behind the local diner just a few blocks away from my nice dump. I took one quick glance over my shoulder just to make sure no one was behind me. There was a small group of college kids eating lunch on the patio of the diner but no one else was in sight. I had been pretty casual about my discovery, not wanting to draw any attention to myself because I didn't know who put this body in the dumpster. It was obvious that he hadn't been there very long and I had learned from my mother's tutelage that you never can be sure who the bad guy is or who all may be involved. I pretended not to notice the body and I kept walking. With each step, my pace quickened until I was all but running to my door. By the time I got inside, I was crying and all I could think to do was to call my mom and tell her what I saw. This call served two purposes: 1) I needed someone I trusted to know I had found this body just in case those involved, in what I was certain was foul play, were following me, and 2) I needed my mom's clear head to tell me what to do next, which was, obviously, to call the police.

Oh how I wish I had the recording of that 911 call. I was so calm when the operator answered the phone, but by the time the words "dead body" passed over my lips I went racing into hysterics. The operator assured me that an officer would arrive at the dumpster in question momentarily and then she ended the call. As I began to regain my composure, there was a knock on my door. It was a pretty firm and loud knock. My heart started to pound. Had someone followed me home after all? I crept over to the door and peeked through the peep hole. When I saw that it was a police officer, I opened the door expecting him to ask me to show him where the body was. He was quick to inform me that he had already discovered the body....well, it wasn't exactly a whole body. He found the leg....well, it wasn't exactly a leg but a very realistic prosthetic. I questioned him, "Are you sure? It had hair and skin." Apparently, prosthetics are very realistic. Let me preface this by saying, I am so glad no one was harmed in the making of this momentous occasion in my life (it's not everyday I find a dead body...okay, it's not any day), but I was a little disappointed that I had gotten all worked up over this just to find myself crying so hysterically on the 911 call that the police officer wanted to let me know face to face that the prosthetic leg was going to be just fine. Looking back, maybe that was  a young Ashton Kutcher and his buds eating lunch on the patio outside the local diner. In any case, that was just a drill. I'll be ready the next time I find a dead body in the dumpster.

The Shocking Side of Boys

By the time I was in high school, most of my friends were boys. Oh, I had a best girl friend and a few other go to girls, but most of my closest friends were boys. Between my brother,  my stepbrothers, my cousins, and my buds, I spent a lot of time around boys. Generally speaking, it's easy to be friends with boys. They don't crave drama (Heck, they don't even like it!), they don't hold grudges, they don't need to make you feel fat to make themselves feel pretty, and they almost never try to steal your boyfriend.

When I was in the 4th grade, I had my first real best friend. She and I were inseparable. We had sleepovers, talked for hours on the phone, explored every inch of the woods behind her house, and took countless trips to the mall. For 2 years, I told her all of my secrets and she told me hers. It was a beautiful friendship until for some reason I will never know, she dropped me. Just like that. No fight, no note, no words at all. She suddenly just didn't want to be my friend, so she pretended not to even know me. When I say there were no words, I mean literally, she never spoke to me again. I eventually moved to another town, for different reasons, where I met another girl who did the exact same thing. That's when I really started to recognize the ease of hanging out with boys, but I will say, I eventually made a few trustworthy girl friends.

All in all, boys are great, but they are not perfect (well, except for Jesus, though I often wonder what He was like as a boy). Boys like to blow up stuff, melt stuff, wreck stuff, shoot stuff, and shock stuff. I may never understand, and therefore, never truly appreciate this destructive and death defying side of boys, but I'm not convinced that it doesn't serve a purpose. It is, after all, the source of some major male bonding.

My husband, George, has many a hair-raising tale he has shared with me over the years. Some involve trespassing, speeding motorcycles, bicycle shenanigans, dark country cemeteries, and pellet guns; but there is one story George loves to share with our boys, much to my chagrin, about a game that he and his younger brother, Donovan used to play. You see, for some oddball reason, they had a stun gun, and they would put this stun gun in the center of the room. Each boy (I use the word boy here loosely because in all actuality, they were old enough to know better) would go to opposite corners of  the room and then, they would race to see who could get to the stun gun first. Can you guess what happened next? Well obviously the boy who won the race to the stun gun got to shock the poop out of the other one. Suffice it to say, we don't have any stun guns in our home.

In spite of all the daredevil mayhem that ensues in a boy's life, I'll take the honest curiosity of boys any day over the mean girl hi jinx that run rampant in middle schools and high schools. Boys, you gotta love them and all their mischief. As the mother of 3 boys, I 'd love to tell you that they outgrow all of the foolishness, but as you can see from the recent video of my wonderful George playing with a bark collar, some things never change. As the mother of a girl, I will tell her that not all girls are mean and while boys make great friends, there are those amazing girl friendships that can last a lifetime and will bless her beyond measure.

I Was a Blue Collar African American Man

Today is my brother's birthday. I won't say how old Tad is, but I will say that he is only 19 months older than I am. Because we are so close in age, we were the best of friends right up until Tad started school and discovered that he might have more in common with the rough and tumble boys on the playground than he did with a whiny, tattle-telling little girl. Those preschool years hold some precious memories for me and I relish any opportunity to remind Tad how much fun we had.

Our favorite game was Bud and John. I was Bud and Tad was John. Bud (I) was an African American man with some sort of a blue collar job. I always imagined Bud wearing one of those blue mechanic's shirts with the name patch sewn on the left side. John (Tad) was Bud's best friend who was also a blue collar worker but he was a white guy. I don't know how we started playing this and other than the fact the we both knew John (Tad) was white and Bud (I) was African American, race never played a role in our pretend play. Each of our characters had an imaginary wife who we would kiss goodbye at the door as she handed us our lunch pails. For some reason, Bud's wife was only about 6 inches tall so I would have to bend way over to kiss her goodbye, which always made Tad laugh and he would usually ask, "Why is your wife so short?"

When I was 4, Tad taught me how to tie my shoes, not because he was sweet like that, but because he was tired of our mom making him tie my shoes for me. When he started school, he brought home his Letter A reader and taught me how to read. Yes, my brother is that smart that even at 6, he could teach a 4 year old how to read.

When we were both in elementary school, our days of Bud and John long gone, our relationship started to change. We fought more and aggravated each other but Tad proved he always had my back. One day after school (I was in first grade and Tad was in third), the biggest kid in third grade tripped me and sat on my head. I squirmed and kicked and tried to scream for help, but there was no moving that kid. Suddenly, looking just like Luke Duke with his dark wavy hair, sherpa lined tan corduroy jacket, and belt buckle the size of a coke can, Tad came to my rescue. His words still ring in my ears..."Chris, you best get off my sister!"

I followed Tad to college where we shared friends and some good times. He got me a grunt job in the dining hall where he worked. For my first few weeks during my freshman year, he called my dorm every night to check in on me. We were both broke college kids, but when a good friend of mine from high school died in a car accident, Tad gave me the money to fly home for the funeral.

So today is Tad's birthday and it's been almost a year since we last saw each other. Miles and busy schedules seem to get in our way more than I like. Still, on this glorious day, I raise my glass and toast my brother. To John, may you think of Bud often and know that no matter how far apart we may be, there is a blue collar African American man who will always have your back.

Confessions of a Pie Eater

I love sweet little old ladies. I always have. Thanks to Bible studies, ladies' luncheons, and mentoring programs at my church, I have managed to find a bevy of wonderful little old ladies who graciously allow me soak up the wisdom they inevitably spout. It was at a Bible study that one of my sweet little old ladies said something so simple yet so wonderful that it has now become one of the mantras by which I live. "It's just as easy to make two pies as it is to make one."

It just so happens that my 91-year old grandmother, another one of my little old ladies, is in town for the summer. Notice that I did not refer to her as sweet as she is, indeed, one of those precious old ladies who somewhere along the way lost her filter, though I'm not convinced she ever had one. God bless her. My grandmother, thanks to all of her years she spent baking, instilled in me a love of pies and other assorted desserts. She used to make the most wonderful coconut cream pie. If I close my eyes, I can almost taste that creamy vanilla coconut goodness. Well, of course seeing my grandmother this summer has brought back those same coconut cream pie dreams to my mother who loves to tell (ad nauseam) the story of how I ate a whole coconut cream pie all by myself like a thief in the night while my parents were dreaming about coconut cream pie for breakfast. In my defense, I was 15, and I had a much greater appetite and a much faster metabolism. I didn't intend to eat the whole pie. I merely wanted one slice but it was so good that I went back for another and another until there really wasn't enough for my mom and dad to share, so I, in an effort to spare them just a tease of a piece, finished off the pie. Yes, I ate the whole pie while they slept and it was delightful. My only regret is that there wasn't yet another pie for me to eat.

So I decided that since my grandmother is no longer able to bake, I need to carry on the tradition. I have mastered peach cobbler, chocolate chip cookies, buttermilk pie, and pumpkin pie, but I have yet to even attempt to duplicate her almost famous coconut cream pie...that is, until today. So I dug out the recipe, my rolling pin, and set out to make my grandmother's coconut cream pie, whose exact secret recipe somehow ended up in my Better Homes and Gardens red and white cookbook. Hmmm. Because it's just as easy to make two pies as it is to make one, I made two; and because all these years later, I still owe my folks a pie, I have invited them over to dinner tonight. Maybe this will finally put that woeful tale of the night of coconut cream pie gluttony to rest.

I only wish that I had the metabolism of a 15-year old and a third pie.

The First

Welcome to my blog! According to George, my husband and personal computer geek, this blog has been a long time coming. For the past several years, George has been encouraging (and by encouraging, I mean nagging) me to start a blog and I, like any other self-respecting technologically resistant person have been dragging my feet. Well, he has finally convinced me to join the legions of bloggers out in cyberworld. Who knows? George is probably right in that I will actually enjoy it--it is really just another medium for writing. Afterall, he was right about texting being a convenient form of communication and the English language has not completely deteriorated into abbreviations. (I just recently started texting. I fought it off as long as I could but when your oldest starts middle school *sigh*, it helps to get on board the texting bandwagon.)

There is also another reason to text and blog and it is one that feeds into my world of delusions. I realized that if I am going to successfully continue to lie about my age, I need to stay a little more current than I have in previous years. If texting and blogging can make me seem younger or at least make me think I appear younger then I will text and by golly, I will blog! Yes, lying about my age is becoming increasingly more challenging. I am making the transition from just out right lying about my age to just not sharing my age when asked. My mother, in all her wisdom, pointed out that should I continue to tell people I am 26, they are going to think I have lived a hard life. I certainly don't want people to mutter things like, "That Allison really looks rough for her age." So texting, blogging and omission are now the way to go.

Thanks for visiting. Feel free to join me as I muddle my way through  this blog.