Happy Valentine's Day!

I hi-jacked their valentine's for school again this year.  Can't help myself.  Hey, at least this year, I let them pick what they wanted to do and say.  And they turned out SO fun!
 
With pop-rocks candy...
 




With a bag of chips...



With a chocolate heart...


I have arrived at grown-up-ness, because we spent VDay cleaning the house and working on job stuff on our laptops.  Now we are headed to the neighbors to let the kids play while we warm our insides with beverages and conversation.  And my heart is oh so full.

Happy heart day one and all!

laugh stack

Here's the stack...in hopes of taking everything a lot less seriously...


Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs...author of Running with Scissors...So far very very funny and highly irreverent, yet still so poignant.  Incidentally, I never noticed that that there are 6 fingers on the hand on the cover til a friend pointed it out.

Adultery by Paulo Coelho....he also wrote The Alchemist.  Speaking of, have you read that yet?  Please please do.  It doesn't matter what the topic is, his insights are incredible. This book won't be funny, it will be heavy, but it will be by Coelho so its truths will feed me.  And I better hurry...the inter-library-loan chipmunks want it back asap.

Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky.....he visited a bunch of hotels and talked to their staff and has the inside scoop on everything.  I already used his trick last weekend to not have to pay for a movie that I bought and only watched part of.  That's $19 more I spent at Ikea later.  Woot-woot!

Shit my Dad Says by Justin Halpern...NY Times bestseller.  Supposed to be hilarious.  I cant identify because my Dad doesn't really say shit (just in case he still reads my blog!!)

Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan....Another 921, because that's my section and I can't help it.  Also its supposed to be funny.

Some Assembly Required by Anne Lamott.....Because, Lamott.

grumpies be gone


I have been taking myself waaaaay too seriously lately.  Which makes me irritable and grumpy and sleepy.  Which makes normally no-big-things make me feel like life is all going to shit. Shut down your bank accounts and sandbag your houses, the universe will implode in the next hour.  Maybe two.

I blame this insanely horrible winter, even though I've been hyggy-ing my hiney off.

Its just sooooooo  blaaaaahhhhh everrrrrrrywherrrrrre, Mommmmmmmmmmmmm.  Ugh.

My kids are whining it inside their little hearts and outside in their swinging fists.  And so am I, which leaves me very much wondering when the grown-ups are going to show up and take us to the pool or give us a licorice rope to make everything better.

There's legitimate little hiccups in life to blame, like getting strep throat and realizing I'm now geriatric enough that it takes seven times as long to get over things.  Similar to the way a snicker's candybar - a single stinking candybar! - affects my hips now that I'm in my fourth decade. 

But really its all truly no-big-things.  Which, in light of the fact that laughter is carbonated holiness (says Lammott), if I were in a better frame of mind, they could be just that - hiccups.

So...I'm doing little happy things like this:
 

And this:


And this:


Thank God for this little lady, who seems to sense the desperate need for laughter within these four walls and is pulling antics like this...


To be totally honest, I'm just plain saying Fuck It when Serious knocks at the door.  You know what I mean, don't you?  Its a mindset.

I have this condition inherited from my dad where I can't fake anything no matter how hard I try because my facial expressions betray me.  What I think is, for better or for worse, written on my face.  So here's what I want to look like...


"I plan to arrive at the end of this roller coaster with a firecracker in one hand and your hand in the other, head thrown back, yelling
'Whooo-hoooo that was one hell of a ride!'"