52 New Things -- Week 30 -- Cara Box

Forget Christmas in July -- it's like Christmas every day for the woman who lives across the hall from us. I was home every day in the month of June, taking a class over the internet, and the UPS guy seriously came at least three times a week. Do you have any idea how torturous it is to think, "Hey! The UPS guy just came . . . and I can hear him coming up the stairs! Maybe it's for me!" . . . and then he knocks on the door across the hall? Every time.

While I realize I should not be jealous of what is clearly an addiction to the Home Shopping Network (one quick peek makes it very clear that she is not working from home but indeed ordering, ordering, ordering stuff from QVC), I wanted a delivery, too, darn it.

A few months back, I bookmarked a blog about doing a Cara Box Exchange; basically you get matched up with other bloggers and exchange a boxes of fun goodies. After being envious of my neighbor all of June, I signed up for the Cara Box exchange for July (not realizing it was about to turn into the craziest month of my life).

It was fun to read the blogs of the two young women I was matched with. I put together several items for a girl named Sam at The Samantha Daily. She's a cute & bubbly college girl who made me smile every time I read one of her cute postings. She keeps a book of wedding ideas, so I sent her a Bride magazine. She also blogged about how she wished she were more flexible, so I ordered a flexibility DVD off of Amazon for her. Neither of those really fit the "nautical" theme we were supposed to be shooting for, but I couldn't find much of anything -- a couple of rubber ducks, an ocean-scented candle, and red and blue nail polish were the best I could come up with. Oh, and you were supposed to try to make something, too; I scoured Pinterest but couldn't find much of anything that matched my craftiness level -- LOW SKILL. I ended up making her a sugar scrub . . . it was bluish. Like the ocean. Which is kinda nautical, right? Ugh. I hope she wasn't horribly disappointed.

I got a box from Cait over at My Life As A Long. She's spunky and fun and way more crafty than I could ever hope to be. She's also working hard at getting fit and looking great . . . which kind of makes me feel bad about myself, to be honest. I need to follow her lead! Anyway, she sent me a fab package and stuck to the nautical theme way better than I did. I got a Scentsy satchel, red nail polish, fun straws, cool hair ties, and then -- putting my Cara Box to shame -- a personalized beach towel. For real. It's awesome. I love it. But I feel like a crappy Cara Box partner after seeing it!

The whole Christmas in July part was awesome -- I just hope Sam wasn't bummed to get a box from Miss Lack-of-Crafty-Craftiness!

52 New Things -- Week 29 -- Bedwetting

I want to write about camp, okay? And no, it's not a new thing -- I worked there the whole summer in 2010 -- but I had to change some sheets for the first time ever, so we're gonna go with that as the new thing so I can write about what I want to write about. ;)

Can I just say Paul Newman was a stud? And not in the blue-eyed-movie-star sense, but in the leave-the-world-a-better-place sense. Thousands of kids with cancer, sickle cell disease, metabolic issues, HIV, and other illnesses get to spend a week or a weekend at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp every year to forget about hospitals and (in Newman's words) raise a little hell. For a short amount of time, they get to be like any other kid. I wish more of the rich and famous would follow his lead; twenty-five years after founding the camp and five years after his death, camper after camper after camper reaps the benefit of the legacy he left behind.

I drove out Friday and Saturday and the kids arrived Sunday. We had an absolutely fabulous week fishing, riding horses, swimming, singing, dancing, and more. There were six little girls in our cabin, all with sickle cell disease. Before I worked at camp, I didn't know anything about sickle, like the fact that kids with sickle often get cold . . . which means kids with sickle rarely go swimming in the summer because pool water is too cold. The Hole in the Wall's pool? A toasty 89 degrees. The kids were in heaven.

The second to last night at camp was rough. I'd already been woken up twice by two girls needing help; I finally drifted back to sleep and was dreaming the girls were up at 5:30am and I was instructing them to go back to sleep when a little hand patted my shoulder.

"Do you know where my cheetah print shorts are?" a little voice asked.

"Go back to sleep, honey," I mumbled. "We'll find them in the morning."

I heard her rustling around in her trunk, then creep out of the room toward the bathroom. Only then did I groggily realize she'd probably wet the bed. I hurried after her and found her getting out a washcloth and a bar of soap.

"Did you have an accident?" I asked. When she nodded, I told her to go ahead and clean herself up while I put new sheets on the bed. I managed to get the bed changed and her back into it without waking up any of the other girls.

I will be a horrible mother someday. They will puke, pee, wail . . . and I will sleep through it all.

All six of our girls were great, and the boys in the cabin next door were a mix of adorable and hellish. It's the kind of thing where you're super excited at the start of the week, exhausted and unsure you can finish strong toward the end of the week, and sad to see them go on the last day.

My overall feeling all week was gratefulness . . . gratefulness for a place where kids feel safe and loved and normal and awesome for a brief moment . . . gratefulness for the college-kid counselors who choose low pay and lots of love over internships . . . gratefulness for people with money who contribute the millions of dollars it takes to let every kid experience camp absolutely free . . . and gratefulness that I get to be a part of it.

Here's a quick three-minute slideshow that gives you a glimpse into a week in the life of a camper -- totally fun!! And no, I'm not in it . . . but when you see a feisty-looking little guy blasting someone with a super-soaker in the pool, guess who was on the receiving end? This girl. And I couldn't be more grateful.

52 New Things -- Week 28 -- Publish!!

Did you know you can publish anything on Amazon? You can. Well, unless it's a terrorist manifesto. They don't like that. But anything else you've written they will happily turn into a book for you.

It's kind of a lot of work, though. And you're pretty much on your own. I mean, when I was writing the book and wasn't sure where to put a comma or how to spell something, I just thought, "No biggie . . . an editor will fix that." Nope. When you self-publish, you're on your own. (Well, for a few hundred, Amazon will take care of that for you . . . or design a cover for a few more hundred . . . they'll do about anything for a big chunk of money.)

But when you're only going to make $2 per copy and you add up how many friends you have who want to read this book, you realize dropping a few hundred here and a few hundred there would make this a losing venture real fast . . . so you do it yourself.

I still think it's better than the old way of doing it though -- I was afraid I'd have to pay someone thousands of dollars and then have boxes upon boxes of books in my garage, collecting dust. Mailing individual books to a hundred people? That does not sound like a fun venture. I'm glad Amazon does the print-on-demand thing and all the shipping for me.

Another perk about the print-on-demand system? If you see a mistake, you can tell me, I can change it, and the next book that gets printed is error-free. So yeah, if you see a whoopsie in there somewhere, let me know!

I thought I'd get to set a release date . . . maybe come up with a marketing plan of some sort . . . but all the sudden, there it was, live and ready to order! So my week has kind of been a mess . . . I had to write seven papers and send a portfolio by four today to finish up my ELL endorsement, so that's kind of a mess and not exactly my best work . . . I'm leaving for a week of camp on Friday, so my guest bedroom is a mess, covered in everything I want to pack . . . I'm three weeks behind on my blog and trying to catch up on that while doing a hundred other things . . . I'm trying to put together a flier for some book signings I'm going to be doing, which I hope will be less of a mess, since other people will have a hand in it . . . and I'm generally ignoring the poor man I searched through all fifty states for. Luckily he still loves me . . . primarily because he hopes I'm going to make us rich with my $2/book profits! (I did cook for him several times this week and leave leftovers individually packed in the fridge so he won't starve while I'm gone, so I'm trying, friends.)

I had to laugh Tuesday night when the book became available on Amazon . . . I posted it on Facebook, and all of you lovely people blew up my comments and likes and made me feel so loved. And then I made dinner. And emptied the dishwasher. And reloaded the dishwasher. And cleaned the kitchen. So yeah, that "oh my gosh -- I just published a book and people are buying it!" glow lasted for approximately seven minutes before reality sucked me back. :)

Anyway . . . thanks friends, for making me feel loved. It was an amazing time of my life, and I'm excited for you to read about it. Some parts are depressing, since I was pretty bummed for a while, but mostly it's pretty humorous. I'd hop in the car and do in all again . . . minus the dating . . . because this time, the hubs would be in the passenger seat . . . sound asleep and snoring. We live a pretty exciting life. :)

(Just in case you missed it, you can click here to order!)

52 New Things -- Week 27 -- Marching Band Competition

What a hottie, right? Actually, the wool uniform WAS very hot . . .

Here's what marching band looked like in my high school: At half-time of the football game, we'd line up down by the goal posts and march onto the field to a drum cadence. Once we got to the middle of the field, we would face the audience and play a song. Then, to the drum cadence again, we'd form a pinwheel and march a while, then turn around and reverse the pinwheel. It was a pretty big deal. Then we'd march ourselves into a new formation, AC-T (for Albert City-Truesdale, our school name), and play the school song. Once it was over, we'd march ourselves right off the field, again to the drum cadence.

Did you catch the subtle omission there? We never marched and played our instruments at the same time.

I remember seeing a commercial on TV, about the same time as I was marching in our not-so-great marching band, for a marching band competition. It looked pretty cool, but everything looks cool in commercials, right?

Well, fifteen years later, I finally went to a marching drum competition in Colorado Springs that some of my youth group kids were in.

Wow. Those kids were amazing!

And Friday night, I saw it taken to the next level. Wow again. I'm just gonna put a video clip here and let you take a little looksie for yourself:

This is the team that won Friday night at a show earlier in the summer.

Let me just point out a couple of things:
1) Not only do they march and play at the same time, but in some cases, they are RUNNING and playing at the same time.
2) Besides marching and running and playing all at once, but they are also dodging flags and fake guns and helicopter blades and praying one of those flag boys doesn't lose control and smack 'em in the head. Yikes!

So, long story short: impressed.
(And also a little bit bummed, because one of my old youth group kids was supposed to be marching with that group but had bronchitis and had to sit out.)  :( 

But I got to spend time with old Ascension friends who drove all the way from Colorado Springs to see their son (not) march, so that was fun.

Some other observations:

Most interesting prop? The giant blue ball in a mesh bag that a boy dragged all over the field. I think it was supposed to be the earth? That doesn't explain the dragging . . . or what appeared to be a giant UPC symbol on the bottom of it. (Y'all know by "most interesting" I'm politely saying "weirdo," right?) But great job, kids!

Cutest costumes? The little 50's girls that I unfortunately did not get a great picture of. Let's just say that a lot of those flag kids were running around in eeek-inducing outfits, but this gang got lucky.

Most unwelcome visitor of the evening? Fish flies! Ugh! I hate those things! They hatch in the Mississippi River (this competition was in Dubuque) and then swarm around lights . . . and . . . well . . . at a stadium, you've got a lot of wattage . . . so by the end of the competition, everyone in the crowd was getting dive-bombed. I hope they didn't swoop down onto the field and that none of the kids competing had clogged horns afterwards. Yuck.

But overall? Pretty wowza.

Kinda makes me feel bad I didn't practice the baritone more . . .

52 New Things -- Week 26 -- Migrant Summer School

I pretty much gave up on the idea of a relaxing summer vacation weeks ago. I took a class all of June, the last class I needed to get endorsed to teach English language learners. (They used to call it ESL -- English as a Second Language -- but then they realized lots of kids were showing up in American schools knowing more than just one language, so the title didn't really fit.)

Before I can wrap the whole thing up, I have to do a thirty-hour practicum. It's kind of like a very brief student teaching experience. I thought I might be up a creek, trying to find summer school in July, but I found a school about twenty miles down the road from our new town that has a summer school program for children of migrant families. Monsanto hires lots of laborers for the summer months to detassle and do other field work, so an influx of Mexican-Americans from Texas arrive in this mostly white Iowa town every summer. The kids are required to go to this summer program so they're not sitting around the camps unsupervised.

I'm matched up with the reading teacher for 7th and 8th graders, and they're awesome. We're reading a book called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It's about a freshman boy who decides to go to an all-white school twenty miles away from his reservation in hopes of getting a better education and having a better life. After talking about stereotypes of Native Americans, we asked the kids if there were any stereotypes they felt people had about them as children of migrant laborers.

Wow.

They had a lot to say about that. Here's a little of what they shared:

1. We are not illegal. We were born in Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana. We're as American as you.

2. We can speak English. We speak Spanish at home sometimes because our grandparents speak Spanish, and sometimes we speak Spanish when we don't want people to know what we're saying, but we can understand everything you say about us.

3. We're not poor. We come to Iowa in the summer because the jobs pay better than the jobs in Texas, but our parents work in Texas, too. We come up here because we're smart about money, not because we're desperate.

4. We listen to the same music you do. Justin Timberlake, Maroon 5 . . . whatever's on the radio.

5. We eat foods other than tacos and burritos. We like pizza and "American" food. But Taco Bell is awful and nothing like what our mom makes.

6. No one in our family owns a sombrero.

7. We don't do drugs and we don't help people cross the border illegally.

8. We don't have ten families living in one house. We do often live on the same block, though. Why would you want to drive three hours to see your grandma? We love our families, so we live close together. We don't just get together on holidays or once or twice a year -- it's more like, hey, it's Thursday and we're grilling, so come on over.

In other words, no one likes to be sterotyped . . . and if you'd just get to know us, you'd realize we're a lot like you. :)

52 New Things -- Week 25 -- Kids, Kids, Kids

For not being a parent yet, this past week was certainly all about children. They're so darn cute (most of the time). Here are some highlights:

My dad and his two youngest grandsons. Freaking adorable.

Des Moines Zoo -- I'm not a huge fan of zoos (I just want to unlock all the cages and let the animals run free, but that would cause mass chaos, etc., etc.), but I had the chance to meet up with my fam for a couple of hours at the zoo. There was an "Australia" section with wild wallabies hoppin' all over the place, right there with no fences between us! Craziness. All three of my nephews loved it. I was shocked by how much energy and money you lose when you take your children to the zoo. I mean, there was the entrance fee to get in, but then you had to pay more to feed the parakeets, more to ride the train, more to feed the fish, more to ride the camel, more to feed the goats . . . geez Louise, it's like you've gotta win the lottery before you can take your family on vacation. And do these kids understand how great it is to just sit on a nice bench underneath a shade tree once in a while? Nope. Go, go, go. I was exhausted after two hours. Thank goodness they're all someone else's children or they might have gotten eaten by a rhinoceros or fallen into the sea lion tank under my tutelage.

Baseball -- Our friend's son was playing in the championship game of the little league tournament Wednesday night. I don't think there was such a thing as a tournament game when I was in little league. They got trophies at the end and everything. It was a big deal. I just felt so bad for every kid that got out, though. I kept wincing, and I know everyone around me thought I was a dork, but I just wanted them all to have fun and enjoy being together without the pressure of having to win. I wanted to kick one old guy, he made me so mad. A little boy struck out, and the guy (I'm guessing it was his grandpa) yelled, "You can't just stand there watching it!" as he walked back to the dugout. I know the kid heard it, because he looked right at the man, and -- here comes the bad part -- the old man looked disgusted and just shook his head at the boy. The poor kid's head dropped to his chest as he shrank down onto the bench. I thought grandparents were supposed to be all about the unconditional love? Come on, spectators . . . kids have lots of years left to feel horrible about themselves. Can't we just let them have fun for a little bit longer?

I married into a pretty cool clan. ;)

The Sound of Music -- We headed up to Willmar, MN, for the weekend to see Kevin's brother's family. His two neices were in the local community theater production of The Sound of Music. Emma, going into fourth grade, helped with props, and Caitlynn, going into second grade, played Gretl, the youngest of the Von Trapp children. We had fun with the whole family on Saturday, hitting the local pool and playing bags in the front yard after dinner. Sunday was the big show and both girls did an awesome job . . . but in reason #432 as to why I should maybe not be a parent, when Caitlynn sang "the sun has gone to bed and so must I" . . . I started to cry. Seriously. Freaking mess, sitting there dabbing the tears so no one would see. If I'm that proud of a little girl I've officially been the aunt of for only one year, what the heck would I be like if I were a mother? I'd be bawl-babying over every little thing. But then again, I suppose you parents see a lot of not-so-adorable stuff that balances out the uber-adorable, huh? Maybe I could handle it.

So to wrap this up, my big a-ha of the week: parenting looks hard. You go, guys. I'm wiped out after just a few days with the chillins, so I don't know how the heck you do it. Carry on. I'm cheering for you.

52 New Things -- Week 24 -- Our First Anniversary

I think we could pass for 32. 34? Fine. We were 37!

We got started kind of late in life. When I told someone recently that we were celebrating our first anniversary, her response was, "Oh, is this your second marriage?" Nope. Just took us a while to find each other.

Our first anniversary was pretty low-key. Kevin hates the pressure of having to buy "the perfect gift" for holidays and special occasions. He flat out begged me to tell him what to get me for our anniversary, so I said, "A hot air balloon ride." I mean, that would be awesome right? I've been wanting to go on a hot air balloon ride for years. I was kind of hoping some guy would take me on a hot air balloon ride during my 50 Dates in 50 States adventure, but no such luck.

My hubby is so cute and sweet that he tried to make it happen. He called from work one day and asked what time we'd be back home on our anniversary after my class reunion the night before. He wanted to make dinner reservations, he said.

When he came home that night, I could see disappointment on his face. He'd been using the dinner reservations as a cover up -- he'd been about to book a hot air balloon ride for the night of our anniversary . . . but in the time it took to call me and see if we could make it on time, they sold the night's flight to someone else.

"There's another company that can do it for $650. The one I was going to book was $450," he explained. "Do you want to do the $650 one?"

"Holy crap!" I replied in disbelief. I had no idea hot air balloon rides where so pricey! I love this man and wanted to celebrate our first anniversary in a memorable way, but geez . . . that's three times what I paid for my wedding dress. No thanks!

A test of how well you know me: guess which one I got.

We had a quiet dinner in a funky little place in downtown Iowa City instead, and Kevin had flowers delivered to the restaurant before we got there. He's a keeper. We ordered one of each entree and tried each other's food . . . and anyone who knows my germ issues will see how much I've grown, being married. A few years ago, if anyone tried to eat off my plate, I would have stabbed them with my fork. Marriage has been good for me in more ways than one!

When we got home, we ate our little first anniversary cake. The bakery that made our wedding cake bakes fresh little one-year cakes for their couples, which is awesome. I like the tradition of eating your top layer on your first anniversary, but not the idea of it taking up space in my freezer for a year.

Cake and roses. What more does a girl need?

We kicked back on the couch with cake and milk and watched our wedding video for the first time ever. It was taken from the balcony up front and shows our faces, but it also captures the entire congregation!! If you laughed during the ceremony, we saw it! You yawners? Busted!! It was fun to watch and to remember . . . we each have different memories of the best parts of the day, but we agree that it was beautiful and we loved being surrounded by friends and family.

So . . . onto another year of bliss!! I joke around a lot, and poor Kevin has to endure my over-sharing on his behalf sometimes, but I really do love this man. We laugh together so much, and I think that's what makes us click. We're two big dorks, and when you find someone as dorky as you are, you best just hold on for the ride. He really is a gift from God. I often wish God would have given him some stronger gifts in the cleaning-up-after-yourself department before gifting him to me, but hey, I've got quirks that sometimes make me hard to live with, too. As long as we keep laughing, I think we'll be okay.