Chocolate Covered Peeps and Mississippi Tornadoes

I was surprised yesterday by a package from my best friend (YOU ROCK LULU!)--A huge box of dark chocolate covered peeps! What could be better than cheap marshmallow goodness made stale by sitting it on the counter for a few days? Adding chocolate, of course! Stale peeps have been my guilty pleasure for about 15 years now, and my true Giuli friends indulge my passion by buying them on sale after Easter and passing them on. My habit has been aided by living in the dry climate of Arizona. One year in Mississippi, I slashed the packages open and put them on top of the fridge. I waited and waited for them to get stale, and 6 months later they were still moist and soft--yuck! Here in Zonie land, it only takes a couple of days for them to get to their peak state of chewiness. On a similar subject, has anyone noticed that bread gets moldy very quickly in the South, but only gets very hard in more arid climates? Except good old bunny bread, which has some sort of unmentionable chemical that keeps it "fresh" for about a month.

On a more somber note, I'm a little slow on the national news because Jack and I don't have TV, but as soon as I heard about the twisters in my beloved Mississippi, I ran to school and looked it up on the Internet. I read dozens of stories and watched the videos, and almost cried when it showed all of the homes and roads devastated. My goodness, it looked just like Hattiesburg after Katrina!!!!! I can still smell the chainsaws cutting through the pine trees so that we could get out of our neighborhood. The troopers of Yazoo City have a tough road ahead of them, but in true Southern fashion, the residents and volunteers are rolling up their sleeves and gettin it done. One of the neatest things about the storm aftermath in Mississippi was attending the block "pot lucks", where everyone cleaned out their freezer and cooked it up on the gas grills for friends and neighbors. Some of the fare that we ate one night was barbecued pork, steaks, fish, and hot dogs. Once the streets were clear, everyone on my block cleaned up limbs in surrounding yards, tarped roofs, and surrounded battery powered TVs to get the latest news updates. Our good ol' neighbor, Bob, spurred by homemade moonshine, mowed the yards of the entire street in a fit of good humor one day. It was surely the most scary experience of my life to be at the mercy of Nature, but the love and support of family and friends made it bittersweet. I absolutely ADORE the wonderful people of Mississippi, and I will love them until the day I die. Please keep these folks in your prayers, and share the love-Mississippi style-with your neighbors.

Louisa May Alcott was a genius!

First of all, I'd like to share with you my random teacher's lounge tear off calender quote of the week:

While faith makes all things possible, it is love that makes all things easy.

Isn't that just stinkin profound? It has been a boring, AIMS state testing week experience. I've had hallway duty. Oh, don't gasp with excitement! For 12 hours this week I've been guarding the hallway--not from intruders or masked ninjas--but from noise causing 4th and 5th graders getting rowdy while on potty break. The bad news is, I discovered that the hallway stays a frigid 60 degrees, the good news is that I've read two good books!!!!! In desperation yesterday morning I realized that I hadn't picked a new one, and grabbed an ancient one from the bookshelf that I probably haven't looked at in 17 years--"Little Men" by Alcott. It is strange how motherhood (and especially being a mother to a raggedy toddler boy) changes your perception of classic novels. I was at times rolling with laughter at the playful antics of Jo's boys, and then at other times brushing away tears as Alcott describes the search for Jo's little son Rob, who gets lost in the woods picking blackberries for his mommy. When Jo and the search party discover him, he is fast asleep in the woods, with a berry stained mouth and sweaty red face. He only eats just a few berries, despite his fearful hunger, because he was saving them for his "Marmar". After clutching him to her, Robby says "I knew that you would come!", and then proceeds to shove the berries into her mouth. Reading this novel reminds me of the sweaty dirt-stained hands that wrap so tightly around his Momma's neck and the incessant goodnight kisses bestowed upon me by my Max. I admit that I indulge him with caresses and loves and kindnesses a lot, but I don't think that he will ever fault me for not loving him enough. I am ever realizing that he is more of a miracle than I ever supposed. That unique little body and stout mind were meant to come to us, and I pray that we can grow him into a fruitful tree before long.

Max was playing beauty parlor

My sister is just going to scream when she reads this email. I have only let two people in my life brush my hair when it's dry--Jack, and now Max. (They're my men, what can you say?) I was lounging on the couch last weekend when Max approaches me with a bristle brush. "Accchhh" by inner self is saying, because bristle brush + curly hair = carnage. He just looked too coy, however, and I relented. "Brush, Mama" he was saying, and for the next 30 minutes or so he proceeded to turn my hair into a rat's nest. After every stroke, he grabbed my face in his hands and said, "Pretty!" and even occasionally inserted a kiss. I was enraptured, laughing uncontrollably, and Jack was capturing the blackmail photos. I promise to share the said photos soon. Promise not to use them for evil? Love you all.

Is Max as adorable as I think he is?

I need some constructive criticism. I was reading in the Parenting magazine yesterday at a doctor's appointment that Regis and Kelly are having a contest for the cutest baby/toddler with scholarships awarded to the winner. Can you believe that I'm actually considering it??? I've always hated those Jon Bonet-type mothers that try to get their child into modeling at a young age. I happened to be biased, too (He is the cutest boy in the world, right?). Wouldn't it be really neat for a child with handicaps to be honored as incredibly adorable? Maybe he could be the first kid with microcephaly to win a beauty contest? Jack doesn't seem to care one way or the other (or Max for that matter) but I'm pondering it. Tell me what you think!

More Witches (uh pictures!)

More images to delight the eye!

Finally, she posts pictures!!!!!!

I have promised to post pictures of my adorable son and family, etc. So here they are. By the way, you can probably tell from the pictures that we went to the Grand Canyon during Christmas break. It is beyond words.

When the weather outside is frightful . . .

Right at this very moment, my kiddos are getting shipped home on the bus early from school because there is SNOW outside!!!!! Yayyyyy!!!!! Deep inside this raised Southern girl is a great excitement of snow. As a child, snow meant: no school, mom's hot cocoa, making snow angels outside until your undies were frozen, then stripping and getting in warm flannel PJ's, trying (usually unsuccessfully) to make a snow man, everyone freaking out and going to the store to buy milk and bread, and one of my most humorous memories--the Blizzard of '93. In 1993 I was 11 and it was three days before the first day of spring when a freak Blizzard, and I do mean Blizzard hit Atlanta. Lily and I went to play outside in it, and the snow was blowing so hard that we couldn't even see each other only a few feet away. Mom made us come inside when she saw on the news that little children were getting lost right outside the back door and freezing to death. Bummer! All of those snow memories are surfacing, and I realize that little Max is making some snow memories of his own. Which reminds me that I've been a slacker blogger and haven't posted pictures of Max playing in our first snowstorm of the year, the week of Halloween. I'll just whet your appitite for said pictures by saying that he's running around the back yard in "Yellow" (the new sweater that Mom made him) trying to stomp all of the powder into submission and yelling "Now, Now, Now!!!!" (as in Snow, snow snow--without the S). Love you all. I promise to post them soon, or you can take my first born child (for the night, so I can sleep).