The Ramblings of Jen: 10/1/11

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

It takes a real man to carve a fairy

My husband not only tolerates living in a houseful of women...he embraces it. Indeed, despite his legitimate right to claim some man-time among this pool of estrogen that he calls home, he almost always puts our needs above his own. Case in point? Chris loves to carve pumpkins, and this year he had glorious visions of creating something spooky and scary and fierce. But the girls had other plans. Instead of complaining, he got to work...and painstakingly carved the fairy Silvermist.

He's currently watching the first game of the World Series while us chicks marvel at his craftsmanship. (Remember, I said he almost always puts our needs above his own. When the Cardinals are in the World Series, all bets are off. And I say...enjoy, darling. You've earned it.)

He's pretty awesome. Methinks we will keep him.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Pop Dancing

A new dancing video! Happy Friday, and enjoy.

One Viewing Note: the video fades out right about the time Emma starts hitting herself on the head, and then fades back in just before Chris and I begin ~~begging for~~ gently encouraging the grand finale. In between were an additional FIVE MINUTES of dancing that I left on the cutting room floor. Allow me to sum up what you missed: stomping, mugging, bizarre hand movements, beating of one's own body, giggling, desperate copying of one's older sister, and excessive posing.

Okay, you may commence viewing now.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

A pumpkin ate my finger!

This was the best I could manage with a sawed-off Qtip. If anyone knows where we can get inexpensive polish pens for design stuff like this, let me know. (Nail painting is one of my secret weapons - it keeps the girls occupied, happy and still for at least a half hour or so, and it's actually kinda fun to do.)

Happy Halloweeeeeeeeeen!

Monday, October 10, 2011

Indigo Girls...You Complete Me (And My Daughters?)

For those of you who skip the ramblings on this blog and go straight for the cute stuff, I'll reveal up front that there is a video of the girls singing at the end of this post. Now you can just scroll down and click, if you so choose, instead of wading through my long-winded love letter to the Indigo Girls.

I have been an Indigo Girls fan for almost 20 years. Our one-sided love affair began when I was a freshman in college. (Good lord, has it seriously been NINETEEN YEARS since I first went off to college?!? I feel sweaty even thinking about it. Or maybe I'm just having a hot flash. But I digress.) My roommate, Rebecca, brought this weird contraption called a CD player. Now, CD players weren't all that new back in 1992 - I'm not that old. But I grew up in a super-awesome-but-financially-strapped-family, so CD players were certainly new to me. (In fact, going from a town of 500 people to a campus with over 30,000 students, many things were new to me at college...but that's a post for another day.)

Rebecca taught me many things during our four month stint as roommates, before I drove her across campus to another dorm for fear she'd commit murder if she lived with me another day. (No worries...we ended up great friends. Life is strange, no?) Here's just a brief list of some of the life lessons I learned while sharing space with Reba:

The power of a good hug.
The joy of executing the perfect prank.
The exhilarating release of throwing rotten fruit and watching it explode into a zillion pieces.
When you hear a vacuum running and Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" playing on repeat, it means you will not be sleeping in your own bed for awhile.
Not everyone is a TV person.
You can love someone and still want to strangle them.

But the best thing Rebecca brought into my life was the Indigo Girls. I still remember the very first time she played me "Ghost" off of Rites of Passage. No other song, before or since, has ever reached into my heart and squeezed. I lost myself in the haunting music and lyrics. It was almost as if I was in a trance. I know it sounds dramatic, but I knew at that moment I'd found something special that would stay with me for the rest of my life. And I was right.

Simply put, I fell head over heels in love that day. And over the last two decades, my love has only grown stronger. To say that the Indigo Girls is my favorite music group is a bit of an understatement. I own almost everything they've ever produced - including several rare discs that were only released overseas. I've seen them in concert at least 20 times. (At this point, I"ve seriously lost count.) "Power of Two" was my wedding song. If and when I ever get up the nerve to get that first tattoo I've been fantasizing about for years, it will be a quote from one of their songs. And on one perfect day in 2004, I even pulled a few strings at my PR job (which is a nice way of saying that I begged lots and lots of people) and was able to actually meet my idols. I spoke to them, shook their hands, and then watched them perform in front of me, close enough to touch, in a tiny radio studio with only ten people present. A framed picture of us from that day hangs in my bedroom, and a glance at it is still enough to bring tears to my eyes.

I brought my friend Bonnie with me, basically so I had someone to hold my hand and keep me from passing out, and then she almost edges me out of the picture! Amy and I are like, "Sorry to intrude Bon and Emily, but can we be in this photo too?"

People throw around the word "genius" way too often, I know. But truly - as musicians, lyricists, poets, singers, and performers - Emily Saliers and Amy Ray are GENIUSES in their field.

So...uh...yeah. I love them. And I've loved introducing them to my daughters. The girls don't dig a lot of their music. It's hard to fight the power of what's on the radio, like Kesha (I refuse to spell her name with a dollar sign - I REFUSE) and Lady Gaga, particularly with my seven-year-old. But a few songs have stuck. Hands down, their favorite is "Galileo." We sing it as a lullaby almost every night, and my three-year-old is especially enamored with the song. I've tried for months to get video of them singing it together, but as is the case with kids, the minute they sense you really want them to do something, they won't do it. So, despite Grade A begging/bribing/manipulating on my part, they have steadfastly refused to do the performing monkey thing for the camera.

But the other night we had guests over, and suddenly the girls decided to show off. I actually got a video of them singing "Galileo." They skipped a verse and spaced on a few words, but they nailed most of the song.

I cannot adequately emphasize in writing how much joy this video brings me, so I'm not even going to try. Just...enjoy.