The One With the Lance Corporal and the Half Birthday

So tomorrow is Ethan’s half birthday. What did you do on the day you were 18 and a half? Well, Ethan is being promoted to Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps. Wish I had a better photo, but, well… he is in Virginia and I am in Cali. So this will have to do.

Ethan is stationed at the Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, located in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He attends the Navy School of Music, also referred to as the Armed Services School of Music. I wish Ethan could tell you about what he does there, because I am sure to get it wrong. But I am going to try, since his life is definitely more interesting than anything going on around my house.

His music education there consists of three parts: ear training, theory and mastery of his instrument, which is the French horn. He is a McDaniel, and therefore rocks everyone at the ear training part. The theory he has also flown through, since it is an academic venture that he tackles at the computer, and although he has never had theory, it mostly consists of principles he already grasps, but didn’t know the names for. The sticky part is the mastery of the French horn. He trains side-by-side with musicians with greatly varying experience, including many who are college graduates in music. Ethan has never even had private lessons, and although he is extremely musical, just being musical does not give him the technique he needs. He has to practice a minimum of ten hours a week, and sometimes much more in order to improve as rapidly as he wants.

It is Ethan’s plan to graduate from the music school in January. At that time he will be assigned to a Marine Band. There are twelve Marine Bands. I believe that one is in Japan, one in Hawaii, and the rest are in the continental U.S. Ethan will have the opportunity to submit his top three choices of location. In the meantime, he fills his days with P.T., marching practice, and hours and hours of French horn practice.

If anyone would like to drop him a note, he would love it, and so would I. He may be a Lance Corporal, but he is still an 18 and a half-year-old clear across the country from home. Here is his address:

School of Music, Marine Detachment
LCpl Ethan McDaniel
1420 Gator Blvd.
Norfolk, VA 23521

The One With the Marine Graduation

This has been a fascinating week. It has been three months since Ethan left for the MCRD in San Diego. We arrived at MCRD Thursday morning for family day. The MPs made us all get out and stand in front of the car while they went through the car, including under the hood, and looked through each of our bags, and had dogs sniff all over the place. We passed the inspection and soon we were wandering through the Marine Command Museum on the base, along with a few hundred others who were waiting to see their new Marines. After being yelled at by some drill instructors for awhile, we were directed to stand in the parking lot to await our first glimpse of our Marines… just returning from the Moto (motivational) Run. Ethan’s platoon is that first one you can see running in.



The Marines were released for their first Liberty in thirteen weeks. We were warned to help them keep their uniforms spotless, not to remove their uniforms (apparently there were girlfriends in the crowd), and not to leave the base. So we enjoyed Liberty on the base for about five hours. It was strange to see Ethan, who is now Private First Class, in his new uniform, with a very different bearing. He is rightfully very proud of his accomplishment. The first thing we did was go to a luncheon on the base, sponsored by the church he has been attending. There were ten new Marines from his company that were all LDS, and they attended with their families. The highlight of that luncheon was the cutting of the cake with a Marine saber, by one of the church leaders there, who had been a Marine for over 40 years. The tradition was that he fed a bite of the cake to the oldest “new Marine,” who in this case was a 26-year-old private, and he in turn fed a bite to the youngest, who was Ethan (he turned 18 during basic training). If they pronounced it edible, then everyone else could partake.




We went from there to meet Ethan’s drill instructors. Do they look scary? They should. They told us some very interesting things about Ethan and what he did to serve during basic training. He was the company scribe, and was in charge of many of the day-to-day operations of the company. Ethan told us as we walked away that they had never told him any of that (it was too complimentary, apparently) and that that was the first time he had seen them smile. I found that observation interesting, since I never detected anything that resembled a smile. Like I said, scary.



Skippy took the next four photos. It is interesting to see things from his perspective. The red and yellow emblem above the chest pocket denotes military service in time of war. The hand positioning behind the back was something that Skippy worked to perfect all weekend.






The cherry on top was meeting a member of the San Diego Marine Corp. Band, who very kindly gave us a 30-minute tour of the band building and answered every question Ethan had about his upcoming experience in music school. The nice young Marine happened to be the Drum Major the next day for graduation:



Graduation was a very imposing sight with all the new Marines in their “Bravo” uniforms, made even more so by the amazing sky that morning:



The badge on his chest is for being a “Rifle Sharpshooter.” (As always, you can click on any of the photos to view them at full size)



Yesterday was Ethan’s first day of actual “Boot Leave.” He has ten days. It has been interesting, as the stories come out little by little of what it was actually like. Ethan told us what he thought was the hardest thing about bootcamp. He said he loved the Obstacle Course. He didn’t mind the food. Even the legendary “Crucible” was just fine. He said he actually ran up the last hill. But the hardest thing of all was not swearing. It is so much a part of the culture, that it was a constant and ongoing struggle to maintain clean language. There were items of clothing and gear that were called after profanity. He had to either refrain from referring to them, or point! I have to say… this is a unique path that he has chosen.

The One Where You Can Actually Tell Them Apart

Hmm... seems like this may turn into Video Week.

This week Ethan faces his final challenge of United States Marine Corps. Recruit Training, which is called the Crucible. After that 72-hour test, he will be a Marine. Today they posted this video. It is just footage from their platoon photo shoot, but the photographer runs by each of the recruits, and this time it is easy to pick Ethan out. Cambria says, “Oh yeah, he is the one with the serious expression and the big ears!” I’m sure Ethan will appreciate that recognition. It doesn’t exactly narrow it down. He is actually on the third row down, and as they pan from the right, he is the eighth one in; seventh when they pan from the left. (Yeah, the one with the serious expression and the big ears.)

The One Where They All Look the Same to Me; or Vic On Her Soapbox

So Ethan is in his 9th week of Basic Training. We get letters a couple of times a week. Usually on little tiny notebook paper… random thoughts, etc. I have have had missionaries out in the field continuously for so long, now, that I don’t really think about this time as being particularly long. Yes, I worry about him when I hear that he has had pneumonia for two weeks. Or that he had his wisdom teeth out during one of the harder weeks. Or that he has a foot injury that might keep him from graduating on time. But all in all, I just try to write him frequently and pray for him to be strong enough to do it.

But today I went onto the message boards at a website for the families of recruits, and found that many of them (the mothers, that is) are following every single move these men make at Basic Training. They know, practically to the hour, what they are doing on any given day. They are already ordering banners and T-shirts for graduation, and planning rallies, and all sorts of things that completely baffle my brain.

This is not a new story for me. It goes back to when I was a new missionary mom. I signed up to be on an e-mail group for the missionary moms of my son’s mission. While I gained some valuable information every now and again, I also began to be annoyed, and even concerned by many of the e-mails. While it was helpful to know that a particular day was a national holiday in Argentina, and I should not expect my weekly e-mail that day, I found that many of the moms wanted to share other things. They wanted to take up a petition to send to the mission president complaining about his mail policy. Or they wanted to commiserate about how traumatic it was to drop their sons off at the Missionary Training Center. (Some changed the M.T.C. acronym to say “Mothers Torture Chamber!”) Some of the moms were hoping for sightings of their sons by church members in the area. One mother told how she had taken to crying herself to sleep in her missing son’s bedroom! WHAT? When I suggested to one of those (how can I put this kindly?) less-than-stable mothers that one way I cope with the loss of sending a son out was to provide service to the missionaries stationed in my own area (you know, like letting them live with me?), I was informed in a very public group e-mail that I could not understand what she was going through, and needed to mind my own business.

I realized some time ago that while it is not always easy to send my boys off, that they were bravely going to provide a service that no one else could perform, and that they were called to do so, and in the long run that had very little to do with me, and everything to do with the boy and his personal relationship with God. It occurred to me that every time I even considered complaining, I should remember the mother whose son was not well enough to serve. The one whose son had unresolved moral issues that made it impossible for him to go. The heartbreaking challenges of those boys who wanted and tried to go, but had health or emotional issues that forced them home early. The mother whose son chose worldly pursuits over church or military service... or, heaven forbid...last year, a boy Casey’s age was killed in a car accident while he was preparing to serve. And even beyond those circumstances, there is the fact that when these boys return home, they are no longer boys, but rather men, and they are not mine to keep anymore… if they ever were. I removed myself from those e-mail lists a long time ago, and have never looked back.

Often I have observed that my stoicism is interpreted as a lack of caring. Let me just be clear here. Just because I don’t share Casey’s mission exploits or Ethan’s derring-do in every other post, or to every person I meet, does not mean that I am one iota less proud of them, or love them one teensy bit less than the other moms love their boys. I am, in fact, trying to do my boys a favor, by giving them the gift of independence, rather than tying them down with the thought that their mother is home languishing in grief because of their absence. Am I making any sense here, people? You will have to give me your opinions on this subject, because it is one that I have faced for the last few years.

Which rant (sorry about the soapbox) leads me back to the story about Ethan. One of the Recruit moms hid on the base after a graduation at MCRD last week… behind the bleachers set up for graduation… in order to snap a few pictures of Ethan’s platoon. All I am saying is, that is probably not something I would have considered. But since she did, and shared the photos, I get to post a couple here for you to enjoy. I have been puzzling over them for two days, now… because I can’t tell which one is Ethan. While eliminating a couple of recruits for obvious ethnic reasons, I seriously can’t tell the rest of them apart!

The April Fool’s One

This is me (as a child), 18 years ago...today is Ethan’s 18th birthday. Yes, April Fool’s! I was having labor induced anyway, so I asked the doc, please, can’t we just do it on March 31st? (This was my fourth son...surely he could cut me some slack) Um, no…that’s Easter. Okay, fine. But you do realize it will be April Fool’s Day, right? Dr. C: You’re not superstitious, are you? *Insert eye rolling here*

So April 1 in the morning, they started the pitocin, and by about 10 a.m. when the doctor rolled in to check my progress, things were moving along well. He checked me, looked very serious all of a sudden, and called for an ultrasound machine. April Fool’s! Baby had turned entirely breech since he had last checked me at 8:00. He successfully performed an external version, which is a lot less fun that it sounds, and then headed back across the street to his office.

At noon when he came back, he checked me again. I was waiting to hear, congratulations, you’re fully dilated; let’s have a baby. But no… April Fools! Ethan had turned breech again. Another external version. This time nurses giving fundal pressure, and doc breaking my water…attaching a scalp monitor to the baby, and then taping that around my thigh so many times, it seemed that he thought he might be able to lasso the baby so that he couldn’t turn again. (That probably wouldn’t work, by the way)

Well, Victoria, for this baby to turn breech twice during labor, he must be a lot smaller than we thought…maybe in the 5-6 pound range. April Fool’s! Eight and a half pounds. Oh, and I know you’re really sore down there right now, but you’ll feel much better tomorrow. April Fool’s! You actually fractured your tailbone during the delivery, and you won’t be sitting straight for a few months. I didn't know you could even do that.

Tell me again…what was wrong with having an Easter baby? I guess the real joke is, today is his birthday…but he gets to spend it having his butt kicked at Marine boot camp… April Fool’s, Ethan!

The One Where He Was Annoyingly Independent

Since “Glass” left for MCRD, I thought it would be fitting to tell some of my best Ethan stories. Ethan was an interesting baby. He had eczema head to toe...tubes in his ears, casts on his feet, and shingles twice before he was a year old. He had to wear the casts for almost a year. They went from his toes almost up to his knees, and the orthopedist would change them every six weeks. He would lie in his crib and bash them against the bars of the crib until the plaster became soft and pliable.

He was annoyingly independent from a very young age. One early evening when the sun was still out, he asked if we could go to the park. He was three, and had just started preschool. I told him it was almost nighttime, and he said he would go play in his room. Not ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door. It was Miss Cindy, his preschool teacher. She had Ethan by the hand. She said she saw him playing by himself at the park. The park was only a couple of blocks away, but he had to cross a pretty big street to get there.

When Ethan was four, he was run over by a mini-van. It was noon, and Ethan was riding his Big Wheel out front. I was inside with Dillon, who was only two, and I had the front door open so I could hear Ethan playing. Being the middle of the day, there were only a handful of people home on the street. Suddenly I heard a scream and a screech. The scream was my neighbor, who had observed a mini-van backing over Ethan, and the screech was the mini-van stopping abruptly with a crunch. The lady who backed over him was in hysterics. She was a young mother of three little girls…a school teacher who came home for lunch to see her daughters. She was backing out of her driveway, and stopped to check her makeup in her rearview mirror. Ethan had stopped to wait for her to back out, but when she stopped, he thought that meant it was okay for him to go. So he did, and then she did…right on top of him and the Big Wheel.

Ethan was talking to us. I asked him if he was okay. He cheerfully replied, yup, I’m okay. He said he wasn’t hurt, but he was stuck and couldn’t come out. We couldn’t see him or touch him in any way, so the paramedics came within about five minutes to lift the van off of Ethan. I was not crying. Ethan told me he was fine, and I believed him. The mini-van driver kept telling me, “I killed your baby!” and was crying hysterically. They lifted up the van, and out Ethan came, without a single scratch, despite the fact that the big wheel was completely mangled beyond recognition, and Ethan had been tangled in it to the point that he was unable to move until they freed him. The paramedics could not believe it.

Ethan has disappeared on me many more times over the years, even up into junior high school, when once I almost called the police because he never came home from school for hours and hours. He had gone to a band concert for another school without telling me. He ended up doing that to me so many times that I actually got used to it. He was always so surprised to find I had worried. I was fine, mom.

I’m not gonna lie…there is part of me that is relieved that it is someone else’s turn to worry about where he is all the time.

The One Where She Got Hacked In Retaliation

So, my mom thinks that I can be overly dramatic. She's right. She also thinks that I don't have the competitive drive to win that she does. Not so at all. Also, her password was incredibly easy to break, hahaha.

So this is retaliation.

If you're reading this, go to the link below and help me win my mom's crazy little competition.

Also, if any of you are wondering if this really is my mom pretending to be me, it's me. Ethan. Glass. Whatever. Anyways, I'm changing her password as we speak. When I get to the MCRD (Marine Corps Recruiting Depot) then maybe I will write her with her password. Unless I forget.

glassmannequin.blogspot.com

Ugh... LAME. I can't get blogger to not allow my mom to retrieve/make a new password. Short of deleting my own blog, that is, and that would be throwing in the towel in a whole different way. Then again, that would be something she'd do. Sacrificing her blog so mine would wither and die... Hmm... Not worth it. Oh well... I suppose I'll have to be satisfied knowing that I have four times as many followers as she does... *sigh*

And while I'm complaining, I might as well point out that I've sung for my mom so many times I can't remember but does she ever record me? No. Apparently I'm good enough to thunk out a new song with on the piano, but these other shmucks have to learn a song I already know and my mom records them and plays them in the car 80 thousand times and then makes fun of me because I'm putting in lower harmonies when, OF COURSE, they would sound better in a higher, girlier voice. Geethanks, mom. Man, I've got to work on that gratitude thing... I'll clean the kitchen now to show her I'm not spiteful.

The One With Me Vs. the Glass Mannequin

Okay, I will admit it. I am just the teensiest bit competitive. Even with my own kids sometimes. I really enjoy beating Dillon at a game of HORSE. I like beating Skippy at being the first to buckle my seatbelt when we get in the car. And I really, really like to get more blog hits than Ethan. As in all the other cases where I am inappropriately competitive, Ethan informs me all the time that it is not a competition. But those hits show up right next to each other in my stat counter, so how can that not be a competition?

In February, I had 849, and Ethan had 785. But there were a few days there, where it was touch and go…I haven’t had a computer very much for a couple of weeks, and the hits naturally decline when I don’t write anything. I am under a distinct disadvantage, too, because I do not have a following of over 50 teenage girls… nor can I muster the same drama as Ethan’s tortured 17-year-old soul.

I mean, I write a post about picking Skippy up from school. Ethan writes a post entitled “Prince of Hell.” I write about emoticons, which is sadly, one of my more exciting topics, and Ethan counters with “Comprehension of Damnation” and “The Essence of Hell” (oh, and by the way, Ethan, Axe called, and they want to use that name for their new body spray). Me: “The One With the Kitty Backpack.” Ethan: “Melancholy,” and “What’s a Boy Got to Do For a Tip?” Do you see my problem? This kid generates so much teen angst that Romeo and Juliet would blush. Even the blog title is telling. I am “The Welcome Mat,” and Ethan is “Glass Mannequin.” What does that even mean?

Oh, and in the course of writing this post, I noticed that I have been removed as a follower of Ethan’s blog. Maybe I was bringing up the median age…but it was probably just one too many snarky comments. I’ve been known to leave such a scathing remark as to cause him to delete the entire post. He also un-friended me on Facebook for the same reason. But not to worry on that count…we use the same computer. He doesn’t very often forget to log out of Facebook, but on those rare occasions when he does, I change his status to say something like, “Ethan takes himself way too seriously,” or “Ethan apologizes for all his overly dramatic status updates.” All of that extra effort I expend…and I don’t think he even appreciates it. In fact, the other day, he was describing someone, and he said, “They are mean, but in a nice sort of way. Kind of like you, Mom.” I take exception to that. I consider myself to be nice. But in a mean sort of way. Anyone who knows me, will attest that I am far more sarcastic and sharp-tongued in person than I am in my blog. Do you see? I’m taking one for the team, here, by suppressing my gift of cruel wit, and Ethan doesn’t suppress anything. If he feels it, thinks it, or maybe even notices it lying by the side of the road, it is going right out there on his blog.

But, as I mentioned, despite his loyal young female following, the score in our “non-contest” was 849-785 for February. Okay, so Ethan had even less time to post than I did. He was working 30 hours a week, graduating early from high school and finishing his eagle scout, so that he can report to Marine Basic Training in two weeks, where he has been accepted into the Marine Band, playing French horn. And in the interest of full disclosure, he is edging me out for March. But hey, the month is young. All I need are about 40 more adoring followers who hang on my every word, and who think I am going to look fabulous and brave, yet tortured, in a uniform.