Today was a good day here at the Carnacki house.
The youngest Carnacki turns 2 on Sunday. We marked her birthday early so aunts and cousins could be here.
Some of you might remember the youngest Carnacki from her work last year with the Kerry-Edwards campaign.
Trust me when I tell you she’s one of the strongest believers in individual liberties and freedoms you’ll ever meet.
Really.
I mean that.
She believes she should have the freedom to climb up on top of the sofa and jump, the law of gravity be damned.
Or when she’s told she can’t do something. She folds her arms and hunches up her shoulders and lowers her head while at the same time looking up with a serious frown, and says, “Moooooommmmm.” Like she has to take her mother or father or sisters to task for infringing upon her God-given right to turn on the television or to decide her bedtime.
She’s really an angel though.
Almost all the time when asked to do anything or asked her opinion of whether she likes something and she responds with a “Yeah!” like she’s with you wholeheartedly.
When she plays with her older sisters, almost 8 and almost 5, she dives into the action. NFL linebackers could learn from the way she throws herself into tackles against much larger opponents. And her sisters fall laughing. I always take a tumble like I’ve been walloped by Mean Joe Greene and she laughs and jumps on top of me. When she runs with the football, it’s almost as big as her, but she carries it proudly.
She often sits quietly and plays with her Fischer Price figures for hours on end. I can seldom make out the words, but obviously there are deep stories being acted out. Her imagination is as deep as the universe is wide.
She’s my happy story tonight. Your happy story might be anything you want to share.
My son who is also 2, has been refusing to eat at dinner. Well tonight, he decided to put on the best show ever at the table tonight. He would sit there and stare at you until he got your attention, and then scrunch up his face to get you to laugh. We had all kinds of chair dancing and loud cries of “Hi there!” all just to get our attention. The kid cracks me up I swear…I never can be that stern faced mom…hard to discipline when you are giggling. 😉
Great post.
When I was a kid, my mom had this nutty ex-priest cousin (he’d run off from some up east seminary school with one of the would-be nuns and they married and ran an antique shop) who came to visit us in Florida. We took him shrimping on an unseasonably cold night, and as fate would have it, there was just one lonely little shrimp’s number coming up that night, because that’s all we caught. Unbeknownst to us, my mom’s nutty cousin pocketed the shrimp.
At the end of the visit, a week or so later, the nutty cousin presented a velvet ring box to my mom like a thank you gift. Upon seeing such a fine box, she was so touched she almost started crying. You all know where this is going. The box of course contained the shrimp. The nutty cousin and I both thought this was hilarious (I was about 8 or 9), and after some wine, my mom found the funny in it, too. She stuck the ring box in the freezer so she could pull it out and do variations of the same gag on her friends, which, because they were generally uptight yuppies, was always equally as hilarious.
We had that shrimp for years. I kept forgetting it was in the freezer, but then I’d have a new friend over, and while I was in the bathroom or taking my Atari turn they’d wander into the kitchen looking for snacks. They’d open the freezer, poke around, find a hideous looking several year old frozen singular shrimp in a velvet ring box, and scream bloody murder. Man, that never stopped being funny.
Happy Birthday, Littlest Carnacki!
Gosh, you’re always reminding me of stories from the early days.
When I was 21 and had just given birth to my first son, I lived next door to a woman who was 31 and had 3 kids. She was also the sister in law of my sister. Figure that one out. Anyway she told me that when her first baby’s umbilical cord stump finally shriveled up and fell off, she placed it on top of her sister’s plate of spaghetti and the sister didn’t notice it and would have forked it into her mouth if Amy hadn’t started laughing maniacally, thereby tipping the sister off that something evil was afoot. This was not nearly the grossest thing she told me while we were next door neighbors.
Wow, that’s…the look on my face right now is very…Don Knotts-esque. And please warn me before you tell me the grossest thing she ever told you, k? 😉
Hmmmm. The thought of grossing you out sans warning is oddly appealing to me. That’s my happy story.
I hope she never invited you over for dinner…ecchh..
I concur. Although great prank.
My happy story was when my daughter was seven and had to have her tonsils out. The whole family was in the waiting room and the recovery nurse come out and said she wants her Daddy. Needless to say my heart was bursting at that moment. I went in and stayed with her until she fell asleep again – the whole time telling her what a brave girls she was and how proud I was of her. I still get misty thinking about it.
They grow up too fast.
Thursday is my granddaughter’s birthday – she will be 9! A couple of days earlier and we would have shared one…
Just a picture…because it’s worth a thousand words in a happy story.
How sweet! Look how protective she is of the baby.
SallyCat, what beautiful children!
Happy story = I got a job today < wipes brow >
Unhappy story = My iPod just froze up. Damn.
Some of you may have seen my post in the Are you a Racist thread about the recent trouble my daughter has faced with race relations. Suffice it to say, she has been despondent about being hated in her school and feels strongly that race had something to do with it. After much build up of emotions (she is 11 going on 16), she broke down in school today. She cried and told people that she wanted to kill herself because everyone hated her.
A bunch of girls pulled her into the girls’ bathroom and proceeded to tell her how much they cared about her. Girls that she thought hated her, while and African-American alike.
In the end, I think a lot of kids really thought about race relations and Cypress got the encouragement she deperately needed from her peers. It was tough, but very cathartic and educational for all involved.
My favorite “kid” quote from Cypress is “You’re not Satan, you’re Mommy”.
Note to self: Spell Check and preview are your friends. while=white.
It hurts to watch our children hurt…it’s good that Cypress got the support she needed…
A happy story – very true!
Someday your daughter is going to be one of the most awesome women on the entire planet.
Wow. IndyLib, you just made our day. I was so taken by your comment, that I read it to Cypress three times. She cried (again). Thank you so much. Your comment made her even more determined and more sure of herself than just about anything I could have said. Thank you.
And to Sally, it is hard seeing our kids hurt. I just wish it was skinned knees…you know, something I could kiss and make all better!
It’s not just that she sounds like an awesome kid, which she totally does, but it’s the things you post about the way you mother her and the way the two of you relate. You obviously believe in her, and that’s a beautiful thing to see. Thanks for sharing it.
Last weekend, I went to the Darkover Grand Council Meeting — a science fiction convention, originally organized around the novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley (Darkover is the name of the planet). It’s been part of my Thanksgiving tradition for twenty years. It’s not a very big con as these things go — only about 300 or so people — but it’s laid back and cozy, a gathering of friends (and as you can guess, a predominantly liberal crowd).
Part of the Darkover tradition is the concert on Saturday night by Clam Chowder, a local group who have been singing at cons for as long as I’ve been attending them (we’re all older than we like to admit). They sing everything from sea chanties to Sacred Harp to calypso to folk. And every year, they have the B.O.G.S. Fundraiser. This is a long-standing conspiracy to get Kathy, the soprano, to sing a really, really bawdy song (click on the link for the name), as it seems she started feeling self-conscious about such enjoying such low revelry once she became a mother. However, she can be bribed…. and so every year, the members of the convention take up a collection for Children’s Hospital in DC during intermission, and she relents and sings the song. They’ve added special things over the years to encourage folks to ante up — they auction off the “comfy chairs” in the front row, albums (this year, there was a DVD), a chance to sing karaoke-style with the group on the song of the winner’s choice. This year they added the opportunity to smash a bottle (stage prop variety) over a lawyer’s head (Ed volunteered — he’s also Kathy’s husband). Bidding was fast and furious on that one — Kathy even bid a few times…
Each year, we raise more than the year before — this year, the goal was $3500. We surpassed it — the total was $5,245, for which we will get matching funds from the (county or state, I’m not sure) Public Defenders’ office where Ed works. Which from a crowd of just over 300 people, was pretty damned amazing.
And afterwards, we did our other traditional thing, singing the Hallelujah Chorus standing around the pool in the hotel lobby, about 100 voices in four-part harmony, to officially usher in the Christmas season.
And that’s my Happy Story…