This is the way I look when I wake up. When I haven't showered, or combed my hair. When I still smell a little like me and a little like my husband. There's no coffee in my veins and no food in my belly. I haven't shaved or brushed my teeth. This is me how God made me and how cheese cake and vanilla cream lattes rounded out his image for me.
Tomorrow The Sgt.'s shop (unit) is having a summer BBQ. It's low key and comfortable. Children will be playing and food will be served. I'm going to make cookies and a cucumber salad.
The military is all about first impressions. In the military you almost always only get one. I don't do well with first impressions. I'm like a fine wine really. A wine that a first taste can come on a little strong and you aren't completely sure what it goes with or how to serve it. So you have to sip on me for a little while and maybe your a little bit drunk or maybe your a little more relaxed but that wine starts to grow on you and you find that you kind of like that wine and you may even want to serve it at your next get together. I'm that wine.
See at 6am in all my glory with no make up on or false details implied, I am completely understandable.
I am a very literal thinker and sometimes jokes don't make that much sense to me and in that I tend not to laugh when you should and this comes off rude. Other times I find that I will laugh at all the wrong times and that comes off rude. Or perhaps without thinking I will correct a person on a statement they have made and this comes of rude. Or maybe I will loose interest and turn my attention somewhere else and this comes off rude. Or maybe, well you see where this is going. For me a conversation should be easy. If someone says "Do I look fat in this dress?" and the answer is "Yes you do." than for me the correct answer should be "Yes, you do."
I do not do well with first impressions. It is the second and the third that I seem to be better at and it really isn't until perhaps the seventh or eighth that I really start to shine and somewhere around the fifteenth to twentieth people really start to love me.
So see while this portrait at 6am show me as God made me and cheese cake and vanilla cream rounded me out there is still a very large part of this portrait that is missing, and I'm a little nervous about how to present it.

There are only three and a half more weeks of summer vacation. School will start and we will go back to the world of everyday things that we need to do. But until then we've missed...

GG's summer musical. This year they did Footloose........I MISSED FOOTLOOSE

Papa Randy started Chemo. It's been harder on him then he thought it would be. Harder than he wants to admit. Harder then one person should have to do on their own.

Uncle Andy's Pirate Party. Always a must go event.

Miss Syd is turning 21. It's the one birthday that matters after sixteen and before 40.

All of these event I am truly sad I am missing. All of these events will go down in my book under the chapter Things I should have been there for. But none of them hurt as much as the fact that I missed

Baby B going poop in the potty. I'm so very proud of you Little Man.

SOOC(phone) by Little Bird

Living here in the N D has been the first time that Little Bird has had to sleep in her own room, in her own bed, all alone. It has not been easy for her and to be honest it has not been easy for me. I know as a parent that I need to make her sleep in her own bed but as a mama I also know she needs me and there is this small part of me that enjoys having her close to me. Curled up into my arms at night. A moment where it is just her and I. Where all her attention in on me and all my attention can be on her. She will wrap her arms around my neck and curl her chin under mine and this is how we will fall asleep. Then each morning as The Sgt. leaves for the day we lay in bed together and talk. We giggle and play.

SOOC(phone) by Little Bird

She'll play with my phone and asked to take pictures. We'll take a couple videos and then laugh at the silliness we have caught on tape. Big Bird will stop by to say hi. To ask for breakfast and maybe a few pictures and some loves but at some point she gets bored with and head back to her own morning routine she has established. The mornings are meant for us. No interruption or interference. I cherish these moments for they wont last long.

Having a dog means having a child. You have to care for it everyday. You have to teach it every day. You have to be patient, and kind, but still strong and firm. Dogs are not on auto-pilot. I have met so many people who get a dog thinking that it will sit, stay, roll over and beg all on it's own. I have met people who think they can get a dog and keep the dog outside all day and then let it in one day and it will know just on its own how to behave indoors. But dogs are work. Lots and Lots and lots of fucking work.
And this dog. This Monster of a Dog keeps the work coming.
Callie as her birth certificate reads is for the most part a very calm, loving dog, but she is after all a Labrador retriever. A dog bred for long hikes up mountains, fast running, and an intense desire to learn....ie she needs to be able to run. Dogs, like children, need to be constantly stimulated or they will act out. Now your kid might throw a tantrum in the mall. Where your dog will poop in your favorite pair of shoes. The two are really the same. After all either way your still walking through shit.
So we knew moving into this house with no fence that it would mean having to build a fence. We also knew that having to build a fence would mean having to learn how to build a fence as we were building a fence. Lucky for us we both grew up in a small enough town where this way of learning on your toes was acceptable. The fence building itself was not the hard part. The hard part was doing it with tools we had to invent because the military shop that said they had all the tool needed must have never build a fence because they had NONE of the tools we needed. But we made do with what we had and it didn't hurt that my father is down right awesome sometimes and was willing to ship some of the tools to us and he'll take them pack home when he visit in September...Thank you Dad.
So we got the tool thing worked out. done.
checked off our list and ready to move on to more important things....like building the actual fence.
What we didn't think about, and perhaps should have been the more obvious of things was the fact that it was an over-cast day. As a photographer I should know that an overcast does can be deceiving. One might see this day and think to themselves "Ugh there no light." but really the light is abundant. It's like when you're driving down the road and you feel like you want to squint your eyes because the light so bright but at the same time you can't put sun glasses on because it's too "dark" to wear them. That is happening because the world has become it's own little light box and the light is coming at you from all angles and it's coming at you nice and strong. An overcast day is a day for sun screen and garden hats, however it is the one type of day we most doubt the need for such things. I know this. I have known this for many years. This should have been tattooed on my ass because this is something that I KNOW so well. But we did not wear sun screen. We did not wear sun hats, and we did not wear long sleeve shirts.
With that wonderful fence building finished and out of the way we filled our glasses up with ice cold water, sat back and took a deep long breath......and then we cried. We cried because our once powder sugar white skin had now turned the lovely color of apple red. It hurts to the touch.
It is filled with painful, awful mind numbingly, tear inducing, agony.
But the fence is done. The dog has freedom. My job as her parent and pack leader is still intact.
Now I need aloe, an ice pack, and a martini....stat.

have you ever read a really good book? A book so good that you never wanted it to end. A book where you would sit down and consume yourself with its pages every chance you got. You would find excuses to not do laundry because you just had to get to the next chapter, at which you would swear to yourself that you would stop for the day and do something other than read. You would consume yourself with this book if you could but at some point life get in the way. The children start to fight, the phone rings. Maybe even a knock at the door and the book get set down and forgotten. Too much time has passed and you feel like you should go back and read a few pages over again to refresh your memory but you know you can't. Then slowly you start to reach the end of that book and it has been such a good book that you're almost sad to have it end because if it ends there may never be a book as good as that book right there in your hands. So you may start to read a little slower hoping to drag it out a few more days but you know that at some point no matter how much you try that book has to end. There is always an ending. You also know that no matter how much you don't want the book to end, you also don't want to stop reading. And at some point though you have tried desperately to make it last, you reach the last page and the story is over. The book is over. The end.



Today I woke up early. Too early.  In fact between the waking up in the middle of the night and the waking up early I think it's fair to say I didn't really sleep at all. I don't like going to bed and waking up with the sense that something isn't right. I sat in my chair breathed in a nice deep breath of lavender and told myself that everything was how it should be. But that isn't how I feel about today. Something feels off today.
I don't like days that feel off. It tends to mean something is off and I just haven't figured it out yet.

When I was in the second grade I had the meanest teachers ever invented by mean teachers. She hated me so deeply and with so much passion that the other kids in my glass had nightmares that she killed me. When their parents started to call my mom it was the last straw and she pulled me out, but it was too late. School was officially ruined for me.
One time the mean second grade teacher yelled at me because I colored outside the lines of our math assignment. It wasn't that I had scribbled or colored the square marked 5 meant for red, yellow. No, it was because behind the picture of the large butterfly we were meant to color was a large openness of white, and I, having finished my butterfly earlier than the other children decided that I would color in a large field of wild flowers with a blue sky and bright yellow sun, because of course in my mind butterflies do not fly though large openness of white, they fly through large fields of beautiful wild flowers.
We the mean second grade teacher had reached my desk she stop and quickly swiped the paper out from under my hands leaving a small paper cut on my pinky.....I can remember how it sort of burned.
She then proceeded to ask the class to look up at her when their heads all turned up to meet hers she  used my field of wild flowers as an example of what "unfocused children" do with their time.
I cried.
She threw my paper in the garbage and told me that I had done it wrong and there for have failed.  If her goal in that moment was to teach me to follow directions completely as they are given then she very much succeeded. However if in that moment her goal was to teach me to draw on my own time she failed. I never colored outside the lines again. not once.
Even as I grew up and I started to paint it was never a freeing relaxing thing for me to do. I would stress, tense up and finally cry that it was not good enough. Until one day when I stopped trying all together.
I've always wanted to be a "real" painter. I've always wanted to somehow paint the images in my head but I find myself always settling for painting the furniture instead.

On every single base we have ever lived we have never been blessed to get one of the houses that had a fence. This little fact has sucked apples. On most military bases if a fence is not already on the property than you are more then welcome to build one yourself. As long as you use the bases materials and you build it to the specs the base deems correct and in most cases their pretty normal. Once the fence is built it has become part of the home and must remain with the home. You did the grunt work but you didn't have to pay for the materials....there for fency no yours.
Except for this base and perhaps others I have yet to visit. You can build a fence here, you must still follow all the rules and guidelines given to you by the housing officer however you much pick out and pay for your own materals. You must then build it yourself....or higher them to build it for you...that's new. BUT if when you move you'd like to take the fence with you than you may do so..........
yeah I had nothing to say about that because it's so ridiculous that it's almost funny.

I of course am cheap, and the guidelines to have a wooden fence were so misconstrued that to have one you would really have to have them build it for you (their evil plan I'm convinced) so the only way that equation can work out is to just go with a chain link fence. Which is what most houses here have. Which seems weird to me because to be honest it sort of makes the houses look.....well, crappy.......but still those are the rules. You can see now why living on a military base is not something I enjoy to do but that I still at times must do.
Having decided that we were going to build it ourselves and having chosen to build a chain link it was time for all the real work to start. And I would have you know that these are the only photos I have of the whole event because my dear readers I was out there helping. YES!!! Your's truly helped pound in 2 inch pipe, 24 inches into the ground. I have the deep penetrating sun burn to prove it. which only goes to answer that long wondered question that, YES I DO STILL BURN.

This weekend we laid the pipe and that was all that we did. Not because it took forever, because it in fact only took about 2 hours and not because it was so hard that we were dying afterwards...although we totally were. No we could only go as far as laying the pipe because all of the other tools needed were MIA. See someone had rented the tools from the base shop but no one had returned the tools from the base shop...which was awesome. So now I get to enjoy doing more fence building this weekend....which I'm kind of okay with

because it means I get to look at this man and this man's arms all day again. And there are no real words to tell you how good it is to look at this man when he's workin his arms like this......no words at all.

Okay have you ever had that moment as a parent where you say to yourself "This is so not going to end well." yeah me too. In fact I think I watch my kids play and I almost always say that to myself. There's nothing like a child's imagination to get them into trouble. To get them hurt. But there's also this line as a parent we shouldn't cross. That line called life. Knowing when to step in and when to let things be is the hardest one I think any parent has to face and so often I think we get it wrong. Sometimes very wrong. For me unless I see the out come about to be death I try to stay out of it. They have to grow, learn, and explore all on their own. I know this. That doesn't make it any easier of course. This weekend was filled with moments of dumb-ass-ity, moments where I may perhaps of wanted to shake my kids and say "What were you thinking." and then I have to remember; they weren't.
And somehow I'm okay with that.

I live in an ordinary house, drive an ordinary car. Watch ordinary movies and enjoy nice cold ordinary beer. My dog doesn't do any special tricks and my children aren't writing any life changing novels, all while our paycheck reads nice ordinary numbers.

how is it that somewhere I believe that all of you would like to read about my ordinary life is completely beyond me. yet still I sit here every day and write away wondering what am I writing for? Does anyone read?

I have a constant need to compare myself to others out there in the written world.  And in fact I think I might spend way too much time comparing myself to others in the real world too. It's like this constant monkey on my back pulling at my hair and he's yelling into my ear. "Are you good enough? Did you try hard enough? You have to do more?"
and somewhere in all the bullshit I start wonder ; Am I?

The self doubt I persona can fill their head with is both ridiculous and fascinating all at the same time.  And I as one person am constantly wondering if I am the only one who feels it, and if so where did it come from?

Then sit back in my ordinary lawn chair and watch my ordinary children ride their ordinary bikes and I start to think to myself;  maybe I'm okay being just ordinary.