Random Acts of Sweetness!

A lot of times we think that nobody is paying attention to us.  We get discouraged when it seems as though all that we do is ignored or dismissed.  It's not that we ever intend to ignore anyone, it just happens.  I think that women, especially, as they become wives and mothers, lose track of some threads of the relationships they cherish.  It's difficult to pay attention to everything, so we have to let go to focus on our families.  It's not wrong, it just is, but the relationships that women form with other women are important, too.  We just need to make time for them, and show that we are paying attention with our actions.  Random acts of sweetness/kindness to each other goes a long way.    

My husband came into the house the other day with a package.  He was talking, but the manilla color of the package distracted me.  A package!!!   Here I am, an adult, and I still get a bit excited when there is a package in the mail, even if I know what it is.  It was all I could do not to jump out of my chair and grab the Precious. 

Finally, Larry handed me the package.  It was addressed to me...and to Zane!  I called him over and showed him his name on the outside of the package.  He was very excited, and could barely wait for me to reveal the contents.  We opened the package to find something that was EXACTLY what we had been looking for!

We had been looking for the White Ninja, who goes by the name of...Zane, for awhile.  We didn't think that the boy would be interested in the Ninjago series on television.  We were wrong.  Unfortunately for us, everyone else in our immediate area likes the series too. Everywhere we looked, the shelves were empty.  We even looked for the White Ninja at the Lego Discovery Center, only to be disappointed. 

Until my wonderful friend Andrea over at Maybe It's Just Me, who is one of the sweetest people on planet Earth, sent us this package.  Her son, who is an expert in Legos, helped her find it.  I was floored by their generosity.  It's been a long time since someone has been so sweet to me and my family, and I have been smiling randomly about it ever since. 

My son, just a beginner at Lego collecting, was beside himself with happiness.  We had to immediately open the box and put everything together.

I managed to snag this photo before the whole thing was whisked away for playing purposes.  Cries of "NINJAGO!" filled the air until bedtime, to be continued the next morning.  Zane holds his White Ninja and spins himself around until he is dizzy or runs into furniture, and he loves it.  I love it as well, at least after I moved a few potentially bumpy items out of the way.  

Andrea, you and your son rock.  THANK YOU for this wonderful, thoughtful gift.  You brought joy to our formerly ninja-less home, and that is priceless.  


***Andrea also sent me a little something for me as well, knowing my love of Lego mini-figures.

Okay, so I use my coffee maker as a pedestal for pictures! Don't hate me!

 She sent me Thor!  The God of Thunder and Avengers fame.  I plan to take him to work so he can smite all the paperwork off of my desk.   At least I hope he can do that.  It's a lot of paperwork. 


What random acts of sweetness have made your day?  Do tell in the comments so we can all smile!

Lego Love

At the end of our vacation, we had a treat for Zane.  It was stupendous.  It was colossal.  It was...The Lego Discovery Center! 

Yes, they have one of these places in Grapevine, and apparently it is Nerdvana for children and men alike.  We had to wait in line, because the joint was slammed with people.  In the first portion of the visit, they discuss how they make the lego bricks, and each child gets a commemorative brick for "helping" to make some legos.  Then the children are let loose, and a frenzy ensues.  Okay, maybe not a frenzy.

These legos were HUGE, and soft.  I wish that they sold these, because I could totally build a nice castle in my bedroom using these bricks! 

I wasn't the only adult thinking of playing with these bricks--there were a couple of adults IN the pit building a tower with these legos.  They originally showed up with a child, but I'm pretty sure that they bricked her up in the tower, which ended up being well over six feet high. 

There were lots of cool things made out of lego bricks, too.  I admire the patience of people who spend hours and hours and hours doing nothing but putting legos together to form buildings or mountains or whatever.  I am also sure that many of these people do not date. Ever. When would they have the time?

This is downtown Dallas, Texas.

I am not really sure what this is, but I thought that it looked cool.

This is the gigantic Ferris wheel that shows up at the State Fair.

This is an airport, and an airplane built out of legos. It may actually fly.

Zane and his father had a blast, and I had a blast watching them have a blast, so it was all good.  Zane is currently into Ninjago, and there's a ninja named Zane that we were trying to find, with no luck this time. 

That's it for our wonderful, kid-friendly vacation.  We had fun, got sweaty, and slept in hotels for a week, but it is time to go back home and do laundry and upload pictures and all those wonderful things that make a house a home.  I will be glad to pet my cats and see if my houseplants survived.  School will be starting up soon, but I'm not going to think about that! 

Father's Day Musings

Being a father requires strength, selflessness and sacrifice.  It requires the strength to turn off that football game, even when it's the playoffs, to go and read a bedtime story.  It requires the selflessness to buy a toy that your child will enjoy instead of the video game you've been wanting to buy for months.  And it requires the sacrifice of never being able to have spontaneous sex in your own house for many years.  It is just a fact of life that not everyone is meant to be a father.  Oh, we are all biologically programmed to want to pass on our genes, but that doesn't mean that you automatically get the 'parent' gene.  Just because a man fathers a child doesn't mean that he has the capacity to be an actual dad. 

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Larry exhibits extraordinary patience with our son.  I am not a patient person.  It's something that I will always be working to improve, but I'm definitely not there yet. I am a 'get to the point' person, and children often take many detours to get to their point.   I don't like to repeat myself, and repetition is really the heart of all conversations with young children.  So I become frustrated easily.  Not my husband.  He will patiently explain, then re-explain three or four more times, what he is trying to say to our son.  He will sit patiently, listening to Zane tell a story, even if that story lasts longer than twenty minutes and he repeats the same sentence fourteen times.  I admire this, and I aspire to have the same patience.

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Zane wanted to play soccer, so my relatively sedentary husband became involved in soccer, and is going to be pursuing his coaching license, just so he can make sure that his son's sports experience is as positive as possible.  My husband doesn't handle the heat very well since his chemo, and he gets very sweaty, but he is out there, kicking the ball around and cheering for his son. Not many dads would do that for their kid.

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They built the Lego Millenium Falcon together, with Larry pointing out where some pieces went and Zane pushing them together.  It was a genuine father-son effort, but it was definitely a father moment when they finished, and Zane decided that he wanted to actually "play" with the ship instead of just looking at it. My husband is a geek, and geeks put things like Legos together so that item can be placed on display and admired by other geeks.  They don't actually "play" with said items!  Yet Larry did the fatherly thing and let Zane take the Millenium Falcon out for a spin, knowing that four-year-old boys tend to drop toys, and knowing that Legos don't tend to stay put together under that sort of stress.  Not many dads could do this. I am sure that he winced and cringed every single time Han Solo's ship came crashing unceremoniously to the carpet, but he never said a word. 

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The NICU nurses allowed Larry to take a picture of our son before they whisked him off, he told me, but they had their jobs to do.  Later, after I had been stabilized and settled into my own ICU bed, Larry went to see our son, in his little incubator.  My husband told me that Zane's little hand had grabbed one of his fingers.  Zane had opened his eyes and looked right at his father.  That look, however brief, had a profound impact on Larry.  It was in that moment that Larry became a dad, when he realized what being a dad was going to be, when he embraced that ideal with both hands. He's never looked back.  

A Day in Random

I am glad that hurricane season is finally here. Not that I want the death and destruction that comes with a hurricane. I just want the rain. Lots and lots of steady rain. We are still in a drought here, and the summer heat will pull even more moisture from the air.  I'm not worried about the cacti. It's all the other plants and trees that I don't want to lose.  Not to mention all the critters that will come looking for water and scare the bejeebers out of my husband. 

The San Antonio Spurs are my favorite basketball team, let's just get that out of the way.  I am not a huge basketball fanatic.  But I like the Spurs.   They don't talk smack.  People talk smack about them, and they don't respond, or they just laugh.  The Spurs don't deliberately hurt other players.  Even Dennis Rodman made a Herculean effort to behave himself when he was a Spur.  The Spurs are just nice people.  Oh, and they also play some killer b-ball. 

My husband likes to go to Wal-mart.  Not for any actual shopping, mind you.  He was looking for this particular spider:

What he was actually asked to go to the store for was milk.   Do other husbands hit the store for one thing and come home with something completely different?  I want to know!   But the older Lego kids often remain closed until their owner reaches the appropriate age, so I'll be looking at the spider for awhile.

Am I the only person who noticed that the Lady Antebellum song "Need You Now"  is actually a booty call?  Yep, it's after 1am, and I'm drunk, so get your butt over here NOW for some lovin'!   So romantic, these kids today!   I suppose it keeps them off the street.  

WKRP in Cincinnati was one of the funniest shows on television, back in the day.  Sometimes I miss Herb Tarlek.  And Venus Flytrap.  And Les Nesman.  Occasionally I will get tape, and in his honor, make myself a door for my cubicle.  That always makes me smile. 

And now, from the random child files:  "Frogs are naked!"  Yes, indeed they are naked.  As God intended.  We would probably freak if they started wearing clothing.  Frogs would probably be snappy dressers.