Not an Ordinary Turkey, by May

Dressed to Impress

1. When you work out as early in the morning as I do these days, you get dressed in the dark.  You have a 50% chance each time of putting on your clothes right side out.  Conversely, you have a 50% chance each time of putting on your clothes inside out.  It's always fun when I get to the gym and look in the mirrors to see how lucky I got.  By the looks of it though, you would think that somehow I would have a 10% chance of right side out and 90% chance of inside out.

Only in Vegas #2 (Christmas Edition)

Only in Vegas does Santa Claus dance around in the middle of the mall with a harem of dancing show girl elves.

Only In Vegas

Welcome to the newest feature of this blog called "Only in Vegas."

This installment was brought to you by my SIL Sarah, sent to me via text:

"You know you're in Vegas when you find a sparkly purple bikini top in the bushes outside the gym."

I Can Do Gum

Me: Olive, what do you want for Christmas?

Olive: Hmmmm.  I know!  A Barbie!  That talks!  And is alive!

Me:  Huh.  Interesting.  What else?

Olive: Hmmmm. A roller coaster!  That I can put in my room!  And that I can ride on!

Me:  Mmmmm...all right.  What else?

Olive:  Gum!

Well, at least she'll be getting at least one thing she wants for Christmas.  I admire her imagination though, and her childlike disconnect from the harsh realities that adulthood can bring, such as knowing that a roller coaster would in no way fit in her room, and that alive Barbies who talk actually do exist but we try to avoid their kind, as to lessen any amount of violent thoughts we may have towards them and their perfect everythings.  As for me, I'm still waiting on that metal detector.

Farty Pants

Olive can't pronounce the "sm" sound correctly. Instead, she inserts an "f" sound.  This has provided some much-needed comic relief 'round these parts lately.

P.S. - Speaking of comic relief, are you reading my aunt's blog?  You totally should be.

New York in List Form

Highlights:

-Being with Go without the responsibilities of children.  I love my kids but sometimes a break is exactly what a woman needs to feel human again. 

-Jimmy Fallon.  I met him.  And talked to him, like a full on conversation.  And I may or may not have done jazz hands during one point of the conversation.  I had met him once in the green room when we were hanging out with ID (that's when the alleged jazz hands may or may not have occurred) and then we got to talk to him again after the show, we were in the studio off to the side; he came over and thanked us for coming.  Just as he was turning to leave, Go caught him by the arm and pulled him back over, saying "My wife is your biggest fan," and then he proceeded to tell Jimmy just what a big huge geeker I am, how I saw more of Jimmy than I saw of him during his residency and how when he would come home at night, I'd show him the funny clips from the show, how I'd seen everything Jimmy had ever done, etc etc etc and that's when Jimmy shook my hand for the fourth time saying "You're so awesome!  Thanks pal!" and then he turned to Go as he was leaving, patted him on the shoulder and said "You're a good man."  Yes.  He is.  A very good man.  

-Seeing ID play in such weird circumstances, in front of only a hand full of people and zero people up in the stands for the audience.  They still killed it.  

-Here are a few pictures I managed to snap while at Jimmy Fallon:

The dancing ET was hilarious and is one of the writers.   I wanted to get a picture with Jimmy but there's something in me that won't let me ask celebrities for photos.  I just want to let them be.  Since these guys are writers, they're quasi-celebrities, the kind that get stoked when randoms ask for their picture.

Here are some pictures I took during sound check. The studio is way smaller than it looks on TV, I could hardly believe it.  These pics are big time contraband, by the way.  I wasn't suppose to be taking any photos whatsoever and a security guard came over to the girlfriend of one of the band members while she was taking pictures with her phone and made her delete them.  I was super uncharacteristically stealth.

Because of the hurricane, Jimmy only had about half of an audience and due to safety reasons as well, he sent them home, wanting no one in the audience so he could do the whole bit, so this is were Go, I and the band watched the show, next door in the green room.

-Being in NYC when chaos ensues.  I just happened to be there for 9/11 so I felt right at home.  Disaster is so my jam.  This is Go and I on Times Square one night.  We were two of maybe twenty people out on the street.  Bizarre.

-Hanging with two of my BILs for a week.  I love my in-law family.  They are one of the hugest sources of joy in my life.

-Seeing Newsies on Broadway--my first Broadway show.  We won really cheap lottery tickets.  It was thrilling to hear my name called.  I never win anything!

-Just being there in the city. I really do love it.

-The Guggenheim--the only museum I hadn't visited.  The exhibit was so-so.  The building was AMAZING.

(photo credit)

-We were supposed to leave back to Vegas Tuesday morning, but because of the storm, we left Thursday morning.  What was supposed to be a short not-quite-4-day trip turned into almost a week affair.  We missed Halloween, which was a bummer for our kids, but my SIL sent me some pictures.  

-As of Monday night, our hotel at limited running water and no power.  Fun times!  Luckily my BILs' hotel, which was much nicer and more north, out of the path of the power outage, had power and water so we charged our cell phones and showered at their place.

We had a great time.  A trip that will go down in (my own personal) history for sure.

Coming To You Live From the Minneapolis Airport in Minneapolis, Minnesota, iiiiiiit's Annnnnnie Reyyyyyyynolds!

Thank you Higgins.

So after a series of some very unfortunate events, Go and I were unable to go on tour to San Francisco/San Diego/OC a couple of weeks ago, as I had mentioned we were going to do, in a previous post, with my BIL's band, Imagine Dragons, which from here on out will be referred to as ID. It was a big bummer but suddenly when the trip rolled around, I had much bigger things to worry about other than not getting to live out my "Almost Famous" dream as Penny Lane. Nope. No singing Elton John songs of healing friendship in a tour bus for me. Just when those series of unfortunate events started winding down and things were seemingly getting back to almost-baseline we had cancelled our flights to San Francisco and canned the whole idea, which was fine because I was craving some normalcy. But then. BUT THEN, I was told ID would be on Jimmy Fallon, and that yearning for normalcy vanished. It's Jimmy, people. MY JIMMY. And Go and I could probably meet him. And be in the green room. And then the studio audience. At that moment Julie Andrews whispered to me, saying "When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window," and that window was Studio 6B of Rockefeller Center.

So here I am at 2:30 in the morning in the not-quiet-enough Minneapolis airport, unable to sleep during this, our 7 hour layover. (These plane tickets were cheap for a reason folks.) I can hardly sleep in a super dark, super silent, super comfy bed at night, so don't ask me WHY I thought I'd be able to sleep, no problem!, on a cold hard industrial carpeted ground, in a brightly lit room with piped in music that never stops, that smells faintly of coffee and vomit, along with a handful of other people who are also lining the walls, one of whom looks like Precious, and is wearing a do-rag on her wigged head and is on her cell phone, saying good night to someone she apparently hates. Twenty feet further is a man who sounds like he is not eating from, but wrestling a package of Fig Newtons. This is the same person who sat in front of Go on the way here and who Go suspects was the one who was passing gas the entire flight, almost rendering us unconscious.

I took not one but two melatonin but they're not touching me. I'm wired. It might have something to do with this weird pan flute music that's playing or the stream of obscenities Precious is yell-whispering into her phone or the mad crinkling of Fig Newton packaging. Or maybe it's the excitement of knowing that in less than 48 hours, I could be shaking the hand of just about the only celebrity I'm at risk of totally geeking out over, resulting in making a complete fool out of myself in front of. I can't wait. Good night moon. Good night Precious. Good night whomever Precious is assaulting via cellphone. Good night Mr. Farty Fig Newton man. Good night Mr. Farty Fig Newton men everywhere.

* below are the following pics:

-Our place of unrest. Or rather, MY place of unrest, Go's place of rest. The man could sleep standing up. And has, I'm sure of it.

-Precious.

-Go and I getting ready to board. Shown here is the orange bell pepper skin stuck to my gum that I didn't realize was there until after the picture was taken. Hello Mr. Fallon.

Nutty Nutty Nutcrackers

Yesterday I found myself at Target perusing the aisles when I came upon these beauties:

Here we have some novelty nutcrackers, just in time for the not-even-Halloween-yet season.  Shown here, we have a basket ball player nutcracker, a rock star nutcracker, a boy hockey player nut cracker, and a girl hockey player nutcracker. I applaud them on trying to to exercise some gender equality but a girl hockey player...really?  How many girls do you know that actually play hockey?  And are so passionate about it, that they would want this in their house?  I predict that this here girl hockey player nutcracker will be on clearance for $3.49 on December 26th, along with just about every other one that was made and distributed to every Target around the country.

Not shown here are also fishermen nutcrackers, both male and female (for aaaaaallllllll those women out there who just relish getting up at 4:30 in the morning, sticking rusty hooks into big, fat, wiggly worms, sitting in a leaky boat while getting bitten by mosquitoes, staring at the water while they wait for a fish to bite, just so they can reel it in, cut it open and take all the slimy guts out), soccer players and golfers, pirates - both male and female mind you, Army, Navy, Marine nutcrackers, a female shopaholic nutcracker, a chef, a baker, a male baseball player, fireman, policeman, a light skinned princess nutcracker, a dark skinned princess nutcracker...Man, would I  have loved to sit in on this board meeting.

"Hey, I know! Let's sell nutcrackers that appeal to everyone!"

"Yes! Even demographics that hardly exist!  Like female fishermen nutcrackers!  And female hockey player nutcrackers!"

"What other non-existent demographics are there?"

"How about female sumo wrestler nutcrackers?"

"We'd have to up the price since those will take a lot more wood to make."

"True.  Ok, what else do we got?  Have we filled our racial equality quota by having both light and dark skinned princesses?"

"Hmmm...I don't think so.  We're leaving out a lot of nationalities here.  What do we think of a Native American nutcracker?  They could wear a traditional head dress and be holding a peace pipe.  We could also do an Eskimo nutcracker.  They could be holding a dead harp seal!  And what about an Asian nutcracker?  Would it be racist to have them hold a bag of rice?"

"Or perhaps a calculator?"

"Yes, that would be generalizing, and therefore extremely racist."

"But what if we offered an All-American Nutcracker as well?  And it was chubby and holding a Big Mac and a coke?"

"Still racist."

"Allright.  Well, what about an Amish nutcracker?  We could sell a little buggy as an accessory."

"Why would we do that?  Who would we be selling that to?  The Amish don't shop at Target.  They don't shop anywhere."

"But what if they happen to be on their Rumspringa?  This could fall into the category of a barely-there demographic."

"Perfect!  Done!"

"Wait.  Can't they whittle their own nutcrackers?"

"Hmmm...we'll table that one."

"Ok.  Hey, have we thought about nutcrackers with disabilities?  I mean, we might as well cover all of our bases here."

"A nutcracker in a wheel chair would cost too much to make.  Hmmm...what about a nutcracker that just uses crutches?  Or maybe a cane?"

"Or a nutcracker with autism?  How about one with Type 1 Diabetes?  A nutcracker with a speech impediment?  What about a color blind nutcracker?"

"I know! How about a nutcracker with a peanut allergy?"

"Yes!  A nutcracker with a severe intolerance to all tree nuts!  Perfect!"

Personally, I think they should make a color blind chubby Asian nutcracker on crutches holding a harp seal with a lisp.  I'd buy it.  I'd also buy it's buggy accessory.  

Let's Try This Again

I'm going to start blogging regularly again and you have this woman, my auntie Mary, one of the funniest women I know, to blame.  We made an agreement this weekend, her and I, that we'd both start blogging again if the other one would as well.  So here I am, sticking my big fat pedicured-because-my-brother-got-married toe back into the blogging ocean.

Like my previous post stated, I have a lot I could blog about.  I have even more now after coming back from my brother's wedding this weekend.  I will blog about it eventually but for now it's still too fresh, meaning I haven't had time to photoshop my Relief Society Arms out of all the pictures.  Squish.

Instead, we'll just start out with my life here in Vegas.  A typical morning at the Reynolds Hotel: Down in the kitchen, Ruby and May, who are supposed to be eating their breakfast and packing their lunches, are instead walking each other around the kitchen on leashes and rewarding each other with Corn Chex for tricks such as barking, rolling over, and playing dead.  My suspender-clad father-in-law is eating cereal while telling Olive what all of his pills are for.  "And this one is aspirin to help my heart stay healthy.  This one is just a multi-vitamin.  And this one is shark oil to...I don't know why, your Grandmother just tells me to take them and so I do." There's a thump of the bass from the music coming from the water aerobic class my mother in law is teaching in the backyard pool which is filled with women in their 60's.  "Work it, ladies!"  Inside, the phone is ringing but no one is answering it.  My husband is coming down the stairs donning a ponytail and talking on his cell to his sister, our office manager.  I yell something to him to pass along to her, something very important that may or may not have to do with either our bathroom habits.  The bug man is at the door.  I am text messaging a different sister-in-law about how many at their house are currently sick, adding to The Great Reynolds Virus Spread of 2012. The other tenants of the household-hotel, a set of brother-and-sister in-laws, along with a sister-in-law and her baby are both thanking the heavens for ear plugs and trying to go back to sleep.  My day goes on with scooting the girls out the door to school, observing Olive's crazy outfit choice and preventing Juni from drinking poison, crawling up the stairs, falling down the stairs,  eating things off the ground, getting stuck underneath the family room desk, getting tangled up in the computer cords, dumping out the trashcans, pulling down the books, pulling off the leaves of the peace lily in the living room, eating the leaves of the peace lily in the living room, etc etc etc.  I hang with my sister-in-law and we talk about every thing under the sun, moon and stars.  I do loads of laundry which are alternated in between everyone else's.  I work out sometimes in the earlyearlyearly mornings, sometimes in the late mornings, sometimes in evenings.  I cook dinner three times a week for the household, which usually consists of like...11 or 12 people.  We have people with digestive issues, Diabetes, Celiac disease, lactose intolerance, vegetarianism, and a tomato allergy to work around which sounds like a chore to work out but it's sort of a fun challenge.  I get to hear about Go's day after he comes home from work, hear how the business is slowly progressing.  Over dinner we discuss my brother-in-law's band most recent success.  I banish Olive from the table.  I allow her to return to the table.  We do dishes.  We clean the kitchen.  We put the girls to bed.  We sit around at sift through Netflix.  We watch a movie, or we turn on X Factor and criticize everyone, but mostly Britney Spears.  We go to bed and do it all again the next day.  I like it here.

A Bevy

I don't know why I don't want to blog lately. The task seems daunting even though most of what I could write about is really good and positive. And for some reason, I've had the desire to live more privately. Between those two reasons, the urge to update is pretty nonexistent. If I were to blog, here are some possible subjects:
-Olive and the weirdo that she is
-Juni whistles and is close to walking
-my two school girls
-having Go around
-Our stay at the Reynolds Hotel and the other guests who are currently abiding there as well
-Vegas in general
-family fun things we've done: cousin art camp, the art camp exhibit, Family Top Chef Night, family book club, the family art session that will happen soon
-My brother getting married in 2 weeks and the lovely girl he's marrying
-Plans to take the girls to BYU when we're in UT for the wedding, already anticipating the weird, twisty nostalgia that will come with it (first time in over 10 years I've been back)
-the Reynolds Plastic Surgery venture
-our trip to the cabin which we're currently at right now (can't sleep) and our day at Zion's National Park which I'm expecting to be a great one
-going on tour with Imagine Dragons soon in their fancy, fancy tour bus: San Francisco, San Diego, Orange County
-SO EXCITED FOR SAN FRANCISCO, my favorite place
-struggling to lose the baby weight...still
-struggling to sell our place in PA...still
-recent reads
-recent hopes and dreams
-recent recipes tried out
-recent pictures taken
-the crazy months of June and July
-date nights
-next summer's plans
-new artists I'm into
-creative plans/projects in the works, currently all in the incubation stage

Well, that wasn't so bad.

Poopoo Prize

Guess who hit a wall and decided she was DONE changing big stinky BMs? Me. Guess who was terrified to poo in the toilet? Olive. Guess who had a change of heart once she feasted her eyes on this little get-up? Rapunzel.

The Big Girls Go to School

Monday morning's motto was "Be brave."  I didn't intend it to become that way but I think ended up saying that sentence about 20 times.  They were scared--scared to go to a new school, scared that they didn't know anyone, scared to have teachers they knew nothing about, scared about not knowing where things were or their way around, etc.  In typical Ruby fashion, she started to cry but only after she had turned and thought I couldn't see her, and even turned around to try to smile through tears, wanting to protect me, not wanting to have me worry about her.  It ripped my heart out, almost more than May, who was sobbing.  I had to pry her off my legs.  It was really, really rough.  I cried all the way back to the car, back home and while I told my mother-in-law about the whole scene.  Ugh.  But Ruby's teacher was nice, her school "nurse" (health helper lady) is awesome (thrilled!) and May's teacher is SO great, so at the end of the day, everyone was all smiles. This picture was taken before school during Juni's nap, before the drama hit.

 

My Girl Got Hitched

The Smile-Sneer

She also whistles. True story.

Friday Photo: Amid the Chaos

In Vegas: Goobies

Today Olive walked in my room where I was down on the ground playing with Juni. She walked right over to me and stuck her hand down my shirt, which is something she use to do when she was a baby. "I can feel your goobies, Mama." After I extracted her hand from down my shirt, she exclaimed "Mama, Juni's all grown up now! She doesn't drink milk from your goobies anymore!"

I think here in Vegas between the myriads of billboards displaying many a goobie, and her father's new practice, goobies might end up being a reoccurring theme with her.

In Vegas: Our Room

As I've mentioned before, we're living at my in-laws house, which by the way, even though there are hard things about it for everyone, we are having a great time.  There's no set date of departure; there's a lot of moving parts: the sale of our house in Pennsylvania (PLEASE BLESS IT SELLS SOON), Go's practice doing well enough to support either rent or a mortgage, and some other things, blahblahblah.  So for now, Go and I are staying in his childhood bedroom. The girls are staying in other rooms and I couldn't care less what they look like, but where I'm staying, I like to be able to tolerate the way it looks.  The walls are a light blue, which is fine.  It gets a lot of light--too much light, in fact.  I've had to make a poster board covering for it, otherwise the sun comes blazing in with a vengeance and ferocity of a honey badger.  The walls were always covered with various things from his adolescence, which because we always stayed in this room for no more than a week at a time, I had always tolerated.  But with no departure time in sight, the first things I did to Go's room before even unpacking my suitcases were the following, and in this order:

1. Remove the civil war look-alike sword hanging above the closet.
2. Remove the picture of he and his older brother's xeroxed faces, xeroxed circa 1991.
3. Remove a lithograph print, something with palm trees on it, some words in bubble writing, one of them being "BOYZ."
4. Remove a floppy oil painting of a cowboy trying to wrangle a wild horse.
5. Carefully check for the whereabouts of an infamous plastic bag containing his baby teeth in the frame of said floppy oil painting.
6. Remove a framed poster he made in seminary circa 1997.  The poster is of a labeled map of the middle east with a cartoon character of someone from the Old Testament, complete with a dingy robe, a gold headband worn across the forehead, huge feet sporting Birkenstock-like sandals, and a shepherds crook: the standard uniform of old.
7. Remove all old high school dance pictures from the premises. Laugh at the hair styles, the amount of hair gel used, and choice of outfits, especially the girl-ask-guy ones where they are for some reason, wearing the same outfit.  Example of one such outfit: jean Gap overalls worn over large, cotton, button-
down, long sleeved two-toned striped shirts with white collars, white tube socks with Tevas.

He's come a long way, folks.

In Vegas: Friends with Senior Citizen Benefits

I've had a couple of people ask if I've made friends yet.  This is apart from my pre-existing Vegas friends and family--you guys don't count.  Ha!  So have I made friends? The answer is no.  I haven't made friends--plural.  But I have made "a" friend--singular...and she's rad...and she's about 65+ years old.  My MIL teaches water aerobics in her pool several times a week, and women of all ages come to work out. After the class is over, some of the mothers stay and "swim their kids", as the term goes here in Vegas.  Most of the time I go out and swim my kids as well.  One day a couple of weeks ago, only my girls and I were out there, along with an older woman and her grandson.  We hit it off, this woman and I.  We totally clicked....and we have a play date scheduled at the Children's Musuem.  She can get me in for free with her AARP card.  Just kidding.  She can get me in with her museum membership, which has nothing to do with her age...but she is a senior citizen...and she is my new friend...and I totally dig her.

In Vegas: Yoga

I've started doing yoga once a week with my SIL Sarah.  I am 5'6" and shaped like a pear. She is 5'10" and shaped like...I don't know what.  Something long and skinny.  A straw.  A pencil.  A super model.  Obviously, I am a glutton for punishment.  And what's worse, while we're both horrible, I'm the worse one out of the two of us.  I am so bad. Like, SO, SOOOOO bad.  A couple of years ago, I even had a yoga instructor laugh at me.  Namaste indeed, ya jerk.  The odd thing is, even though I'm terrible and have no business even attempting to do it next to a long and skinny straw pencil super model, I really love yoga.  In general, I've come to find a weird enjoyment in doing things that are outside of my comfort zone.  I think it's good for the soul to do things you're not good at and enjoy it anyway, mostly because it's a hard level of mentality to achieve.

Also, there's this lady in our class who always farts when we're doing down-dogs and it's never not hilarious.