When October Goes

Yes, I'm out of the closet about my affinity to Barry Manilow and his music. In fact, I have been for a long time. In double fact, if you know me, you probably know that I am the proud owner of a quadruple CD set of his called "The Complete Collection and Then Some" that Graywhale actually paid me to walk out the door with some ten years ago or so. I have owned vinyl, audio cassettes, CD's and recently an mP3 of his music spanning from seventh grade to the present. But I digress.

{Photo: Quoth the Brahmie, "Nevermore."}

October is my favorite month of the year hands down. And this year in particular has been the most brilliant fall I can remember since moving to this neighborhood. The weather has been warm all month (except for the day of the pumpkin festival but that's a tradition so it doesn't count) which makes it seem like fall has lasted longer this year. Not the calendar fall, the beautiful leaves and sunny afternoon fall. Barry Manilow, Tony Bennet, Paula Cole and others have sung down the end of the season in my home this month with songs like "The Autumn Leaves", "Indian Summer" and the title of this entry, "When October Goes". Johnny Mercer wrote the music to that tune but never finished it with words. Manilow approached Mercer's widow for permission to add lyrics and make a recording. Permission was granted and the result is a wistful tune that enunciates the end of a warm, colorful season and laments the beginning of a cold and gray one. Sigh. Double sigh.

So today is the last day of the month. We went to Oliver's Halloween party at school this morning and are now washing the dishes from lunch and cleaning up for tonight's festivities. My sister Vicki and her husband come down every year to trick-or-treat around the neighborhood with us around the neighborhood. Before we head out we grab a bite to eat of the traditional "Cheesy Beef Hideaways" and fresh-pressed "apple slider" as Oliver has called it since he could talk. Then it's back to the house to examine and plunder the loot, of course. I make my anal attempts to buy off their candy with trans fats and HFCS in it then we settle in around the fire and try to stay awake as long as we possibly can before November 1st inevitable arrives.

{Photo: Here lies the body
Oliver Croft Briggs
he sucks his white fingers
like ghostly-sweet twigs.}

Wise As Serpents

Since Brooks and I moved out of the house, we've been eating breakfast together every morning as a family. We all have to leave the house at the same time to get to school, work, etc., and so it just works out that way. We find this to be a convenient time to read scriptures with the boys since they can't talk while their mouths are chewing or get up and run around with a hand stuck to a spoon. So far it's working.

A few weeks ago we started in on some of the war chapters in Alma to make sure and hook them in good and strong.

That's working, too.

One day back at our house, I hear some squawking in the back yard and decide to investigate. Going out the back door, I'm nearly bowled over by Oliver who zooms past me into the house with Brahm in hot pursuit.

"Mom!", he yells, running up to me. "Oliver's not following the rules! He was shooting me with his squirt gun when I didn't even have mine loaded yet!"

He's not just annoyed, he's mad. What's worse, Oliver has taken cover before Brahm can exact his revenge. He's frustrated as am I when they fight. We both stand there not knowing what to do.

Suddenly, the Holy Ghost descends on me like a dove.

"Hey," I begin nonchalantly. "Do you remember when we were reading the other morning about Moroni and Teancum? They wanted to get the city of Mulek back from the Lamanites but to do it, they first had to come up with a way to lure the Lamanites out. Do you remember how they did it?"

The clouds begin to clear from his face and I watch as his plan of action takes form.

"Yeah...", he says slowly, a smile curling up the corners of his mouth. "They came up with a decoy."

What happened next was nothing short of genius on the boy's part. Preying on his little brother's weakness for sweets, he runs out the side gate, hides behind the fence and begins to make the sounds of an ice cream truck.

"Do do dooo dah de dee, dah de dee dum.", he croons to "The Yellow Rose of Texas".

And I'll be a monkey's uncle if it wasn't Oliver's knotty little head that pokes itself around the corner of the back door not two seconds later. Bam! Bam! Bam! With impeccable timing, Brahm jumps out from behind the gate and soaks the little bugger from head to toe, sending him screaming into yonder parts of the neighborhood.

I don't recall seeing a look of satisfaction like that on Brahm's face for quite some time. I must have had a similar expression on my face, too, judging by the way I felt. Justice had been served and a lesson learned - maybe two. It would probably be a while before Oliver came up against his brother again and as for Brahm, maybe he would never have to ask the question, "But what does all this have to do with my life?"

Elections 2008 Brinkel-style

This is for Brandi who says I need to update my blog.


From the backseat in the car on the way to school last month, Brahm pipes up, "Mom, you know who I'm voting for for president? Obama." I'm surprised and amused, not by his choice per se but by the fact that he's given it any thought.

"You know who I'm voting for?", Oliver chimes in, removing his sucking fingers from his mouth only long enough to say the words. "John McCain."

This amuses me even more. I am imagining our '96 Subaru wagon rattling down the street with a McCain bumper sticker on Oliver's side and an Obama on Brahm's.

It's Brahm who interrupts my thoughts. "You know why I'm voting for Obama? It's because we've never had a black president before and I think it would be good if we could have one."

There's an audible pause and then this from the little brother: "Obama's black?"

"Yep." I confirm, "He's black."

"Is John McCain white?"

"Dear child, they don't come any whiter."

Another pause and then,"Well then I'm voting for Obama, too." I raise my eyebrows and glance in the rearview mirror to see if I can interpret his face for a reason behind the change. I can only tell that he's thinking.

"Why don't you want to vote for McCain anymore?" I finally ask.

"Well, if you put a black crayon on a piece of white paper and color it, the black will always win."

Aaaah. Now I see. No, I don't pretend to understand the logic behind the decision but with Oliver, it's all about winning, whatever the context, whatever the reasoning. Therefore, come November 5th, may the best crayon win.

Greetings from the South Pacific

Aaaaaah. Do you hear that? Neither do I. I'm on my second day of vacation from my day job - Brahm and Oliver. Brooks took them down to his parents' house for the weekend and I am all by myself. All I can hear is the soft hum of the box fan and even though I'm here in Sandy, as far as I'm concerned I may as well be lying on the beach somewhere warm and tropical. Now that I think about it, I really need to renegotiate my contract and build this kind of vacation clause in for three or four times a year at least.

Down at grandma and grandpa's, Brahm and Oliver are doing the same thing.

Things I have done since they left:

•stayed up late watching TV with all my neglected pedicure supplies laid out in front of me
•went for a bike ride without a trailer attached
•slept in
•sat through stake conference this morning without having to break up a fight
•didn't make lunch
•was the first to take a nap after church
•read for as long as I wanted without hiding in a closet
•took another nap
•read some more
•slept some more
•called a friend without having to schedule it on the family calendar
•nothing in general, and lots of it

The other side of the coin is that their absence allows me to see just what the little anklebiters add to my life. This isn't mom-guilt that compels me to include this piece of info, either - it's actually with a certain amount of surprise that I do. It will be nice, for a change, to actually feel delight when I see them again tomorrow. I guess that what vacation is for.

But I won't have to think about that for another seventeen and a half hours...

The Parable of the Three Blue Mugs

Yesterday my sister Lindsey came over and we hosted a joint garage sale together. She had lots of enticing vintage glassware items for sale which inevitably drew Oliver in. With some of the quarters he made from hocking a few toys, he soon became the proud owner of three glass mugs. "They're for my mom," he explained to Lindsey. I'm sure he was aware somehow that this was the only way he could make her consent to selling such sparkly forbiddens to a minor. When I came back out of the house, he presented his gift to me.

[Withhold judgment here]: Preoccupied with trying to get rid of all our stuff, the blazing heat of the afternoon, and wondering what we were going to scrape up for lunch, I offered a paltry, "Oh, that's beautiful, Oliver," in one of those irritating, phony-mom voices. I had no idea what had gone on while I was in the house and wasn't sure of what he was really doing or saying. When I finally understood that he had purchased them for me, I was secretly irritated that he was accumulating more stuff while I was trying to get rid of it. Ughh. Yes - low moment.

There's more. I asked him to take the mugs into the house so they wouldn't get broken. Wait, let me help you up the stairs... "No, I can do it myself, Mom." and one fell and broke its handle. "It's OK, Mom.", he reassured me. "We can drop the other ones so they all break their handles, and then they'll be the same!"

A few lessons here:
1) I was so absorbed into myself that I missed what was really happening in those moments as they happened and so they passed me by
2) I couldn't see that I was placing more value on an object than on my son's delight
3) Children live in the moment. In fact, they are experts at it.
4) There's more than on way to interpret an event. To me, the broken handle was a misfortune that could have been prevented. To Oliver, it was an opportunity for transformation.
5) It wasn't too late to turn my mistake around

This afternoon I called Oliver into the kitchen. While some berries and yogurt were mixing in the ice-cream maker, we washed the two remaining mugs together then filled them with the frozen yogurt when it was done. "I know just the place to eat these, Mom", he said with his knowing look. "The porch swing!"

And he was right.

Incubation Speculation

Day ten of twenty-one.

So our little incubator is jerry-rigged out of a Styrofoam cooler, some mini-loaf pans, a dish scrubber,a string of garden lights and a meat thermometer (the latter two items were both gifts on separate occasions from our neighbor Randy. How fitting since he and his wife Colleen are our chicken-sitters whenever we go out of town...). The "instructions" say to turn the eggs up to five times a day, keep the temperature at 102F with the relative humidity somewhere around something percent so that the eggs don't dry out (hence the dish sponge which we keep wet all the time). How do you know if the eggs are incubating? After the passing of Chicker, I suppose the next worse thing after all of the anticipation is to realize we didn't so it right and that the eggs won't hatch. Hmmm. Is it possible to stage a hatching?? Broken eggshells and three fluffy chicks from the IFA suddenly appear in the incubator one morning. "Brahm, Oliver! Come see what happened last night!"

Happy Anniversary!

It's been nine years today and we celebrated first thing in the morning by removing the toilet from our upstairs bathroom (photo courtesy of Brahm). The toilet was the only thing allowing us to stay in our house during the remodel (who needs a shower?) and so now that the only modern plumbing convenience remaining is the kitchen sink, it seems we must go. (Brooks' aunt and uncle in South Jordan have graciously agreed to take us in.)

They say if your marriage can survive building or remodeling a home, it can survive anything. How fitting that we should mark the occasion in this fashion.

Other things we have survived since July 14, 1999:

•Y2k
•moving to Historic Sandy from Provo
•Provo
•three job changes for Brooks
•9/11
•two live childbirths for Jenny
•the gain and loss of one hundred pounds directly associated with those childbirths
•transition from a sedan to a station wagon (yikes!). No minivan in sight.
•two first days of pre-school and one of kindergarten
•three trips to the ER and one appendectomy for Jenny; a tonsillectomy for Brahm
•(almost) two Bush terms
•the ascension of Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie in popular culture