The One With the Post-Partum Amnesia

Today is Wendy’s birthday. Wendy is my sister. My closest sister in age, with whom I shared a room until I was a senior in high school. She is the one that I loved the most, hated the most, hit the most, and missed the most when I left. This is a pretty bad picture of her. I should have a good one... we collected pictures last summer for a slideshow. But Wendy was at Girls’ Camp and left her husband in charge of sending the pictures. In the one he sent of the two of them, Wendy seemed to be wearing something that looked a little Texas polygamy compound. So instead you get this one. There are four of us girls in the family. DK likes to make trouble, by saying that there is a pretty one, a smart one, a talented one and one that married well. Believe me when I say there is no virtue in trying to figure out which is which. Anyway, back to Wendy. She has it all. Even the marrying well part, sort of… last summer when we all got together for a little family reunion, one of my boys said, “Mom, wasn’t it good of Aunt Wendy to marry Uncle Joe?” Um, yeah, I guess… “She really had to take one for the team, and we appreciate it.”

This isn’t really Wendy’s birthday. We celebrated June 10th as her birthday for the first fifteen years of her life. And then the time came for Wendy to apply for a social security card so she could get her first job. She came home one day around her 16th birthday, a little bewildered. “Mom, my birth certificate says my birthday is June 9th. How can my birth certificate be wrong?” At which point my Grandma Hamblin chimed in… “I told you she was born on the 9th! I told you that for years…” Grandma wasn’t usually an “I told you so” kind of person. But that one was just too good.

Happy Birthday, Wend! Hope you milked it for all it was worth both days. Tuna fish tuna fish tuna fish! (sorry...inside joke involving vomit)



Here are the sisters... The one with the glasses is my sister-in-law, Carolyn. There is something hanging down from the top that must be some sort of medieval torture device. Clearly I was feeling tortured.

The One Where She Fit in Perfectly

Today is Jessica’s birthday. Jessi is my perfect daughter-in-law. She really is perfect… I am not kidding! She loves animals, and worked her way through college working at her family’s pet stores. She loves people more, which I think is the way it really ought to work. But she loves Josh...and more recently, Jif, most of all. She waited for Josh while he served his mission in Argentina. During that time she took care of Tyler his freshman year at BYU. She helped him study and took him to have his wisdom teeth pulled. She even managed to talk them into letting her watch. You have to love a girl who isn’t squeamish!

Josh and Jes were married two years ago this June...and then got busy. Jessi graduated from BYU alongside Josh, and she is a Registered Nurse working in pediatrics at Timpanogos Hospital. In January she managed to give birth to a 10 lb., 1 oz. baby boy (my cute grandbaby Jif)… without a c-section… and she is an amazing mother. And she even makes stunning wedding cakes in her spare time!

I wasn’t sure what it would be like to have a daughter-in-law. But not to worry... we got the best one. It seems there was a little place missing in our family, that she fills up perfectly. This was a trip we took to Yellowstone a couple of months after the wedding…and for once Cambria had a sister along. The best part was, she was like a real sister…except maybe for the fighting. Well, and the stealing clothes... and the sibling rivalry. How did we get so lucky? Happy 23rd, Jes!

The One Where He Jumped the Gun

Last night I was doing dishes and wiping counters (I know... right??? *wink*), and DK said, Cupcake, you need to stop what you’re doing, wash your hands and come sit and relax for five minutes. I told him I needed to finish first, and he said, no, you need to come now. I could tell there was some surprise arriving… and sure enough, I turned around, and there was Tyler! Home for the weekend, and today is his 22nd birthday! (photo is of Tyler and Josh at about 2 and 3 years old)

…which gives me the perfect opportunity to tell one of my favorite Tyler stories. Eight years ago, DK and all the kids participated in the Florence Griffith Joyner Memorial 5k, at Saddleback Hospital in Laguna Hills. It was probably about the third year in a row that it had been the early-morning kick-off of our Memorial Day. 3,000 participants warmed up in the parking lot of the Laguna Hills Mall at about 6:15 a.m., and I was trying to keep an eye on four-year-old Cambria and still see the beginning of the race. As soon as the gun went off, Cambria and I jumped in the car and drove to the finish so that we could cheer for each of them as they ran the final quarter-mile.

Josh came in at around seventeen minutes. He was on varsity cross country, and he was pretty competitive. Next DK rolled in at right around 20:00. Not bad for a dad. He and Josh were pretty pleased with their times…although I had to be honest and tell them that they were both beat by Old Guy Who Runs Barefoot and Boy With No Legs. (no shame in that…those guys are FAST). Then Casey crossed the finish. Ethan. Dillon. The minutes rolled on. Thirty minutes had passed, and Tyler still hadn’t finished the race. I was beginning to worry. He was 14 years old, and despite his tendency to take it pretty easy, he should have finished much earlier.

There were many familiar faces in the crowd…friends and neighbors who had also run in the race, and we began to ask around to find out if anyone had seen him. No one had since before the race. It had now been an hour, and during that next little while, we noticed a new set of finishers crossing the line…for the Half Marathon. You don’t suppose…that Tyler ran in the Half Marathon instead of the 5k? Merlin Corbin, one of our friends from church finished the Half Marathon, and we asked him if he had seen Tyler. Yes! He had seen him at about Mile 5. WHAT???

We found out later that the Half Marathon had started 15 minutes before the 5k, and when the gun went off for that earlier race, Tyler couldn’t see his dad or brothers…but people were running, so he took off with them. At that point we had to wonder, what was Tyler doing? There were policemen and race volunteers all along the route who could have brought him to the finish so that he didn’t have to continue, once he had realized his error. Would he run the whole thirteen miles? Josh was so excited that he began to run back through the course from the finish to find Tyler…which he did, about a mile out. Tyler was much less excited than Josh, as the race had been a lot more than he bargained for. He did, however, finish third in his age group, and after he had recovered somewhat, enjoyed a pancake breakfast with the family.



Once his sense of humor had returned, we asked him: Tyler, at what point did you realize you weren’t in the 5k? He replied, I don’t know…I guess about Mile 9?



Happy birthday, Tyler!

The One With My Little Birthday Present

For about the last 22 years, I have thought of this as my birthday present. It’s a little tradition called Fathers and Sons Campout. And for whatever reason…maybe proximity to Mother’s Day…it always falls on my birthday week, or as it does this Saturday, on my birthday. From the time Josh was two, DK has packed up the tents, the s’mores, the hot dog roasters, and any of the boys who met the minimum requirements (more on that later) and left me at home to enjoy a few blissful hours alone in my own house. Well…until after five boys, I had a daughter. But that is okay…we still observe the tradition of making this night all about what I want to do.

I don’t even know how this came about, but DK told the little boys that “they can’t go if they don’t count.” Yes, a little play on words, which he meant quite literally: they had to be able to count to ten aloud in order to go. I used to start in about January, coaching the little ones on their counting. You can do it! One…two…three... I even got a couple of them counting to ten long before they were out of diapers, and fortunately DK was a good sport and took them anyway. It is probably a mark of bad parenting that I even wanted them to go, which you would probably know if you had ever seen a Fathers and Sons Campout. Dads, gotta love ‘em, spend most of their time chewing the fat by the food table, while the little ones are playing in the fire, poking snakes with sticks, peeing in the fire, wandering in the woods, jumping over the fire…yeah, pretty much anything to do with fire. But listen, I had five little boys under eight years old (That is not for the faint of heart...see the photo...it captures those days perfectly). Don’t judge me for sacrificing a toddler or two for my mental health. In fact, contrary to causing them harm, I should probably take credit for their amazing math prowess...it was undoubtedly due to my early number coaching.

With four boys gone, DK is down to two sons with which to enjoy this bonding activity. One of them is so excited that he’s practically hyperventilating. Can you guess which? No? But hey! It’s not about them, anyway. It’s about me! What shall I do? Take Cambria to dinner and a movie? Shopping? DK will take me to Star Trek Saturday night for my birthday, so maybe not the movie? I have to admit, I’m not good at this girl stuff, so help me out here!

By the way, don’t you just adore the pic of DK with the five oldest? Almost makes me wish...

The One With Old MacDonald (Or Things That Go Oink in the Night)

All afternoon and evening I kept hearing music. I couldn't exactly place what I was hearing, but I ruled out angel voices pretty early on. It was definitely not inspiration...whispering a new song for me to write. You know how crazy you sound when you look someone in the eye and ask, "Do you hear that?" That was me all afternoon. As evening wore on, I decided it was someone in a neighboring home having a Christmas party, and I got a little grumpy thinking that it was going to keep me awake when I went to bed.

So as the poem goes, I in my kerchief, and DK in his cap, had just settled down for a long winters' nap, when out on the balcony there arose such a clatter... oh no! The sound was coming from my master bedroom balcony. It turns out that we were the bad neighbors keeping everyone for houses around awake. I rose up from my bed to see what was the matter, and there it was: Skippy's Fisher Price Old MacDonald's Farm. Yes, there was music. (Sing it with me... E-I-E-I-O!) But that was not all... no. Every time it played Old MacDonald, every animal on the farm was chiming in. There were pigs, horses, cows, chickens... it was awesome. It seems that Skippy had been playing with his toy there and left it. Yesterday we got about four inches of rain, and it brought Old MacDonald to life as though it was on the Island of Misfit toys. So DK brought the farmer and his animals inside and set them in the bathtub. End of story? NOT. It puts me in mind of the Happy Birthday incident...(Insert Flashback/Dream Sequence Here)

About 15 years ago, DK/KH got a birthday card, which we thought at the time was pretty revolutionary... when you opened it, it played "Happy Birthday to You!" We thought it was fun and inventive. Until one of the kids removed the small player from the card. Without the card to close, there was nothing pressing the little trigger that kept it from playing. So it played all the time. In the bottom of a toybox, where it would take half an hour to find. In someone's bed. Under your own bed in the middle of the night. I threw it away so many times, I can't even count. But to my horror, somehow it always found its way back into the possession of my children. Until one day, when one of them flushed it down the boys' bathroom toilet. That should have been the end of the story, at least for me. Happy Birthday should have been entertaining the rats and alligators. But no. Somehow the music box from Hades managed to get stuck in the toilet. I tried everything I could to reach it, but it played at random times for weeks and weeks. When it finally died, it was not a peaceful death...the kind where you just fall asleep and don't wake up. Oh, no. Instead, the music began sounding more and more as though it was being sung by one of the drunken sailors in the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disneyland. "Happy Birthday to You." It was never a great song. But I would not mind if I never had to hear it again.

So, back to 2008. Bedtime. DK assured me that it must have been one of the kids making the farm music play, because look... there it is in the bathtub, all innocent, not playing at all. So we settled back in for the aforementioned nap, and had no sooner closed our eyes, when the barnyard went crazy. It was like a hoedown in my bathtub, what with all the music and animal noises. DK scrambled to remove the batteries, only to find that they were housed behind a panel attached by screws. The really tiny kind that you need a special screwdriver to open. It took a few minutes and a couple of different toolkits, but DK managed to open it. I was standing by with a really big hammer, just in case. Because we will never have a repeat of the Happy Birthday incident. And with an oink-oink here and moo-moo there... I was tucked back into bed, with visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. So Happy Christmas to all... and to all a Good Night!