Heartfelt Thankfuls

Quick Ten Things on this stormy Sunday evening:

I found this little heart in my bag of peanut M&Ms.

The severe storms that have plagued our area for the past few days only delivered rain to us and no tornado activity.

My friend Nikki and I got up EARLY Saturday morning to go to a warehouse sale of our very favorite accessories, Erimish bracelets. We both wear them every day, so it only makes sense to buy them on sale when we can!

I was "helping" Nikki make a decision between two bracelet sets by using Conscious Discipline on her when I heard my name and looked up to see the mom of one of my preschoolers, along with her daughter. The mom was laughing, as she not only recognized my voice, but she recognized the CD language I was using, because her daughter uses it at home, too! Double thankful here!

My husband and I stopped by an estate auction on Saturday and had an awful lot of fun. We hadn't been to one in several years, and we had never been to one without my dad with us. We missed having him there, but we still enjoyed ourselves and look forward to telling him about it next weekend.

The auctioneer, the crowd, and an 
unfortunate angle of a woman as
she's looking at auction item

I enjoyed quite the belly laugh at the auction when my husband tried to put his bidding card in the pocket of his tshirt and found he had put his shirt on inside-out that morning. I didn't notice it because the shirt was black, there was no tag, and I also wasn't paying attention.

We had breakfast this morning at my favorite place. There is no experience quite like eating at the counter at the White Grill and watching the line cook turning out food. It's magical.

A half Mess. Imagine a full-sized one....

I changed my nose ring last weekend for the very first time since I got the piercing in September. I am NOT thankful that getting the first ring out of my nose took me 45 minutes and was stupidly painful and continued to be so for six long days, but on the 7th day, NO PAIN! Yay!

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X is for X-tra Melancholy

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

My husband and I met cute: over the phone through work. He was in Los Angeles, I was in Nashville, but we were both from the same part of Missouri, at one time, living only an hour from each other. After meeting in person two weeks after our first phone conversation, we dated long distance, then married thirteen months later (me in discontinued shoes). I moved to LA, where we both had careers in the music industry. We bought our first house, had our first baby, and then realized how important it was to us that our children grow up around their grandparents, and we moved to southwest Missouri. Our son had just turned two.

The plan when we moved back was that my husband would work at his family's mortuary, which required him to go back to school for a degree in mortuary science. He then spent the next year living in a sketchy apartment above a mortuary in Leavenworth, Kansas, and attending college (again) in Kansas City, Kansas. Weekends, he alternated between working for the mortuary where he was living and driving three hours to Joplin to work for his dad. All of this, which included giving up his dream job in LA, he did so we could live our best lives, and I do not take that lightly.

Meanwhile, as my husband was sacrificing time with his family FOR his family, two year old Kyle and I were living the life of Riley with my parents, including going with them to the lake house on the weekends my husband had to work in Leavenworth. Kyle and I moved into the upstairs of my parents' house in Nevada, Missouri, but Kyle quickly made himself at home alllll over the place. There were toy baskets in the dining room and sippy cups on the coffee table (with a coaster, of course). My mom's tastefully decorated and neat as a pin home soon sported dinosaurs on the end tables and stuffed animals in the chairs and books everywhere. My mom couldn't have been happier than she was while we were living there.

We bought a house in Joplin soon after my husband finished school, and no more living separately! It was hard on Kyle at first; he was used to cuddling on his grandma's lap every morning, drinking orange juice and watching "Blue's Clues" and visiting his grandpa at his farm supply store and watching westerns with him. Little by little, we moved most of the dinosaurs, the stuffed animals, and the other toys to our new home, but some of his toys and other items remained at my parents' house (a year later, baby dolls and hair accessories and more stuffed animals were added to the collection when our daughter Emma Kate was born). Eventually, the kids' toys were relocated to the bedrooms upstairs, and there they remained for the next 25 or so years.

Now I'm sorting through everything in the house, deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to donate. Going through my childhood items has been a trip down Memory Lane; occasionally bittersweet, but more often fun and, occasionally, cringey. The baskets and drawers with toys and items that belonged to my kids? They get me right in the heart.

I was cleaning out the upstairs bathroom vanity, pulled open a drawer, and found these, and I got a huge lump in my throat:

It may not seem like much; inexpensive bath tub entertainment made of fun foam. But Kyle loved his bedtime ritual of a bath (where he would have stayed for an hour at least if we had let him), books in the living room (which would have gone on for an hour if we had let him), followed by three songs (because this, too, would have gone on an hour if we had let him) after he was tucked into bed with his blankie, his binkie, and his Boo kitty. That full year he and I lived in that house with my parents was a golden time that I cherish. 

You know what really got me when I found those letters?

The little teeth marks. Some were Kyle's. Some were Emma Kate's. All are precious.

W is for Whoops!

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

Some of the treasures I've been writing about finding at my parents' house are not necessarily from my childhood, but they've been in a closet for a good long time, like the quilt block my mom started and never finished. I think they qualify for this theme, and my blog, my rules, so there you go.

A shoebox has sat on the top shelf of a closet at my parents' house that has not been touched since it was put there over 30 years ago. I know it has been over 30 years, because when I removed the lid, expecting to find an assortment of odds and ends, I instead found my wedding shoes.

I loved my wedding shoes! They went well with the style of my wedding dress, had just enough of a heel to keep me from walking like a duck but not so much as to make me taller than my husband (tall girl problems), and while not exactly comfortable, they weren't murderous to my feet. 

I bought my dress in Nashville, where I lived, but I didn't get the shoes until just a couple of weeks before the wedding, and I bought them with my mom at a bridal store on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. It was the most money I had ever spent on a pair of shoes in my entire life.

Look what was in the shoe box!

Obviously, there hasn't been a big demand for me to wear these shoes, since they are very obviously wedding shoes and I've only worn a wedding gown the one time. The taps on the heels have deteriorated, the bows are wonky because of being in a box for over 30 years, and there is discoloration on them, so letting them go to the landfill wasn't a hard decision to make, but I got a last laugh when I turned them over and saw something I had completely forgotten about:

Oops

It's a good thing that kneeling at the altar wasn't a thing in my wedding, or the entire congregation would have gotten a chuckle out of the writing on the bottoms of my shoes, as well as the price tag that I never took off.* 

Here's a photo from my wedding that shows the toes of the shoes peeping out from under my dress. Our photographer snapped this candid when I was adjusting the falsies that were trying to escape from where I had stuck them in my bra in a futile attempt to fill out the top of the dress, if you know what I mean. And no, it never occurred to me that I could have had the dress altered, since the rest of the dress fit me perfectly. And also no, I did not have nearly enough stuffing in my bra to make a difference, such was the discrepancy between me and the bust size that dress was capable of enveloping.

Only four of us were aware of my wardrobe malfunction; me, my mom, my husband,
and the photographer, who may or may not have been drunk

Side note: I also found my wedding dress (or what I THINK is my wedding dress) in a very large box and buried deep within a closet that always harbored brown recluse spiders and a lot of my junk. I never saw it again after I took it off the day of my wedding. My mom took it to a dry cleaners to be cleaned and "preserved." I'd like to look at it, but it's purportedly sealed in this box and I'm afraid of opening the box and finding out (a) that the fabric will immediately yellow and deteriorate when exposed to the air and/or (b) it's not even my dress in there but some other random person's, and because it was presented to my mom sealed inside the box, she would have had no way to check and see.

*I have always been cavalier about removing price tags, and my mother used to call me Minnie Pearl because of it.

V is for Vampire Blood

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

The source of most of my dolls and toys and novelties growing up was my two great aunts, Edith (or Ecie as she was called) and Daisy. They pretty much raised my mom from the age of 7 when her parents moved from town to the family farm and where my mom would have had to attend a one-room school. Her older brother, my Uncle Bradley, was going to be living with their aunts in town in order to attend high school, and my mom threw such a fit that she was allowed to live there, too. These great aunts were like grandparents to me and my brother, as their brother, my grandfather, died when I was three weeks old, and my grandmother died when I was seven (she is the one I wrote about in R is for Readin', 'Ritin', and 'Rithmetic). They thoroughly spoiled us and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

I don't remember the exact details surrounding the purchase of this fun novelty, but I do know that I had to have been the one to pick it out while on an outing with my great aunts, because they might have bought me a doll that they thought I would like when I wasn't with them, but I can assure you they never would have picked up this little gem without me begging for it:

 

I found the tube of Vampire Blood in a sack of odds and ends in my cedar chest. Oddly enough, it was empty, yet there was no sign of it leaking onto anything else in the bag. In its day, it was fairly realistic fake blood in a 4" tube. I can't find a lot of information on the internet about it, but as best I can tell, it was a Halloween novelty that came out in 1971, when I was in 6th grade. I probably saw it at the dime store and wanted it, and since I was spoiled rotten when it came to my great aunts, I got it. The only thing I remember using it for was when my Barbie family had a car accident in their Barbie case turned station wagon, and there were many serious injuries, including a broken leg for Skipper. 

I got a new friend in my life the year before when Abbie moved to our neighborhood and was in my class at school. Her family also attended our church, and we became fast friends. Abbie had a sense of style even as young as 5th grade, and she was the only person I knew who haunted the local Goodwill thrift store while in high school for clothing finds (she was ahead of her time on that one). Abbie's mom was a wonderful seamstress and made a lot of Abbie's clothes, and they were always so cool. 

Abbie and I spent the night at each other's house on many occasions, and Abbie always had fun ideas of things to do. She even taught me a game to play at church! During junior high, we would sit together near the front of the sanctuary and play Rat Fuck. Ever play that? Whoever started the game would very softly whisper "rat fuck." The other person had to say it a little louder, and it would continue until someone (me) chickened out. We usually did it during a hymn. We had matching bracelets that we bought at Bagnell Dam when we went on a youth group retreat in 9th grade. I wore mine for a number of years until it literally broke in half. She was and still is a dear friend.

Back to the vampire blood. Abbie was spending the night at my house one night when we were in 6th grade. My parents had friends over that night as well, and the adults spent the evening playing Bridge at the kitchen table while Abbie and I hung out in my room, and that's when we found the tube of vampire blood in a drawer and an idea was born.

Abbie had a knack for being able to fake cry on command, so I squeezed vampire blood on her wrist and hand, Abbie worked up some tears, and we walked into the kitchen. My mom was standing at the kitchen sink as we came in, Abbie holding her bleeding arm, me hovering nearby, and with a trembling, tearful voice, Abbie said, "Mrs. Vinyard, I cut myself and it really hurts."

My mom turned towards us, took one look at the "blood" pouring out of Abbie's arm, and said, "Oh, Abbie, what am I going to tell your mother?!" The bridge players at the kitchen table jumped up with my mom's words, and I was suppressing laughter. Of course, I ruined the whole thing by not being able to hold back my giggles any longer, and when my mom realized she had been duped, she just said, "Ohhhhh!!!" My mom, thankfully, was always a good sport, and she loved Abbie and her sense of humor (she did not know about Rat Fuck). It became one of her favorite stories to tell over the years. "Oh, that Abbie!" she would say. "She was always a corker!"

She still is.

Me, Dana, and Abbie in Las Vegas in 2010.
Abb - we need an updated photo!

U is for Unrelated, Miscellaneous Finds

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

I was quite the little packrat! And as if the collection of items I have shared here so far weren't diverse enough, this post is devoted to some of my more eclectic finds.

First up is my first pair of glasses, which I got while I was in the 7th grade. They are the epitome of 1972 eyeglass fashion, and all my friends with glasses had either this shape or ones with octagonal lenses.

Growing up in Kansas City, we were all about our Hallmark products. Betsy Clark products were a favorite of mine. This is a button, about 3 inches across. I also had a keychain with a Betsy Clark character on it that was a good 4 inches in diameter. All my friends had them, too, with a house key on it that we seldom needed, because our moms were almost always at home.

I took my very first plane ride when I was 13 and I flew from Kansas City to St. Louis. My Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Bradley picked me up there, along with my aunt's niece Judy, who flew in from New Jersey. Judy and I spent a week at their home in southern Illinois and had a grand time! This was the tag from my checked suitcase. RIP Ozark Airlines. 

I had my tonsils removed in 1967, right after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. I wrote about it here if you would like to read the story. I have some vivid memories of the hospital experience as a patient and as a child spending the night in a hospital in the inner city when rioting broke out. 

I had completely forgotten about this tiny doll! I don't remember when or where I got her, but someone had crocheted the dress and hat AND teeny, tiny underpants. Quarter for scale. Side note: I was carefully setting up this photo to get as much detail as possible while my cat Nora looked on. The moment I had the doll arranged and lifted up my phone to take the photo, Nora would reach out a paw and swoop the doll towards her. Then I would make a grab for the doll, and she would take the quarter. This went on several times before I was finally quicker than she was.

Crown Center, developed and built by Hallmark near downtown Kansas City, opened in 1973 and included a high rise hotel with upscale restaurants, one of the first food courts in the area, and boutiques and gift shops, as well as office buildings and an outdoor area for festivals in the summer and ice skating in the winter. It was a real treat to get to go there, and a visit on February 15, 1974 garnered me this little prize that I bought at a terrific gift shop called Maudie's. They are sugar cubes, decorated with royal icing flowers. I loved eating sugar cubes when we visited my grandpa's store (don't pretend like YOU never ate sugar cubes if they were available and no grown ups were watching you, and I'd do it again RIGHT NOW if presented with the opportunity), so I HAD to have these! But then, they were so beautiful that I couldn't bring myself to eat them. I kept them in a drawer in my bedside table for years, then they were moved with all my other stuff when my parents moved. I did not eat the 50 year old sugar cubes, only because I figured they'd taste like what I imagine dust mites might taste like, but you have to admit they sure held up!

This is my student ID and activity card from spring semester of my sophomore year in college. If you look really closely, you will see that my tuition for the semester is printed on that activity card. Go ahead and look. I'll wait.... RIGHT?! $180.00, and that was for 12-17 hours. More or less than that was adjusted by the credit hour. Tuition at that same university now is $4,512 a semester based on 14 hours or $279 per credit hour. PER CREDIT HOUR.

And my last entry is something I found in my cedar chest, along with Archie comic books, Tiger Beat magazines, my Missouri notebook from 4th grade, and dozens of scripts from the days in high school theater. It's my Raggedy Ann and Andy paper dolls! These are also the last picture I took tonight in my poorly lit bedroom (poorly lit if you are trying to take photographs, that is; otherwise, it's very pleasant and warm lighting). I took this right after I fought with Nora over the tiny doll and the quarter, and I didn't have any fight left. She won. Notice how she's guarding them with her paw from her brother Finn. If I'd been faster on the draw, you would have gotten an action shot of Nora smacking Finn for getting too close.

Unbelievable that I still have all this!

T is for Time To Bring These Beauties Out Of The Closet....

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

I have a friend who has been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since I posted the link for "C is for Communication, 70s Style" on my Facebook page. She made this innocent comment:

I shall call this friend (and former roommate) Regina Flange. This is a photo essay showing what happens when:

a) you are really bad at blackjack

b) you are really bad at drinking games

c) you are really bad at drinking at all

d) the others playing the drinking game are aware of all of the above and cheat while you are in the bathroom with your cards unprotected, causing you to take yet another drink

A word about the room pictured. This was a furnished, two-bedroom apartment that we had recently moved into after moving out of the dorm. It had bright green variegated shag carpet (unfortunately not pictured) that totally clashed with absolutely anything else in the universe looked fab with the plaid tweed sofa in shades of brown. We moved in as the frat boys who lived there previously were moving out (and yes, that means it didn't get cleaned before we moved in), and as the guys were carrying out the last of their stuff, one of them said, "Whoever gets the bedroom on the right, just wanted to let you know the bed squeaks." Then he laughed himself out of the apartment. We did have fun living there (we lasted 6 months before finding better digs). We tried to cook, only setting fire to the kitchen once. We got scared when we had a mouse and had to run to the landlord's apartment to save us from whatever we thought a mouse was going to do to us. We temporarily adopted a stray cat who my parents then adopted and enjoyed for many years. We played lots of gin rummy. One of us spilled red nail polish on the bright green shag carpet, so when we moved, we put a chair over it and never had to pay for the damage. And we had exactly one evening of wild partying (it was soooo not wild).

These were taken B.B. (before blackjack)

D.B. (during blackjack and I was fake drinking)

D.B. real drinking

 

A.B. Guess which one of us lost the drinking game?

Oh, to be 18 again and in your first apartment!

S is for Secrets

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

Have I mentioned before I had a lot of dolls? I had a lot of dolls. 

This is Baby Secret. She has had a wonky left arm since I can remember. Her hair used to be in a ponytail, but I took it down and tried to make her wear it other ways. Note to doll manufacturers: don't make a doll whose hair can only go in ONE style. Baby Secret is mostly bald except for the hair around her hairline and a weird strip around the middle to make the pony tail. That was very disturbing to me then, and it's still disturbing to me now.

This is the back of her head with pony tail
 down and it's just wrong

Baby Secret was released by Mattel in 1965. I probably got mine in 1966. She whispered when you pulled a string AND HER MOUTH MOVED. I never thought of it as creepy, but in retrospect, yeah, I guess it was. Here's the commercial from 1966 to prove it (fun fact: the little girl is none other than Eve Plumb, aka Jan Brady!):

 

I didn't play with Baby Secret like I did with my doll Cindy. She wasn't a baby doll to me but more of a novelty. Most of the time, she was relegated to being a member of my doll classroom, but that's not all she was good for! I liked pulling her string and holding her against someone's face (usually my poor, patient mom's) and squealing with glee as Baby Secret chewed their cheek. I also liked sticking the end of my finger in her mouth after pulling the string and feeling her gumming it. It was also loads of fun to follow our cat around while pulling Baby Secret's string. Cats LOVE that....

Somehow, Baby Secret survived all this, plus a move to a new town while I was in college. She also survived the great basement flood, which got her relocated to my bedroom, and she survived my kids playing with her and is no worse for wear than anything I ever put her through. Sit back and enjoy a few words from her....

Tell me YOUR secrets! I'll never tell....