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Lifelong Friends

Tonight I introduced Dean to Cheer Bear, my beloved Care Bear from childhood.  I got her when I was 6, the age he is now.  I'll never forget getting in the car in my pj's with my mom, my Mim, and a box of Apple Jacks, and waiting in the Howard Brothers store parking lot.  Once the store opened, we ran straight back to the toys and grabbed the exact Care Bear I wanted. Cheer Bear is the pink bear with the rainbow on her belly.  I slept with her pretty much every night until I got married.  She's lived in the top of my closet since we moved here. I didn't want toddler Dean to find her and risk damage, so she stayed tucked away.  Tonight, we were reading Corduroy at bedtime. If you don't know that book, it's the story of a little bear who lives in a department store. In the end, a little girl buys him and he finds a loving home and a lifelong friend.  I make it to the next-to-last page before crying most of the time. When we finished the book, Dean said, "Corduroy is like Stu to that girl."  Stu is his monkey, really just a blanket with a head. We got him as a shower gift when I was pregnant and Dean has been snuggling with him all his life.  When he made that observation, it seemed like the right time for him to meet Cheer Bear. 

I ran and got her out of my closet and showed her to him. I told him her name and how I came to have her and that I had gotten her when I was exactly his age.  He carefully inspected her, feeling her fur, poking her rainbow on her belly. "Her nose is hard." He giggled at the heart on her backside and smoothed her formerly curly hair, now stiff with age.  "I think Stu and I could cuddle with her."  I let him take her from me, marveling at his gentleness.  After a few curious squeezes, he carefully handed her back to me, and I returned her to the top of the closet.

When I went back into his room, he had Stu wrapped around the back of his neck, which is how he's always held him at bed time.  He thought for a second, then said, "Mom, I don't think Cheer Bear should play with my Angry Bird plush.  They might be too rough.  She's kinda old."

Good call, Dean.

Friday 5: Top 5 Favorite Shows From Childhood

This week's Friday 5 is a total copycat of Alissa's post, but I really, really liked her list.

Here are my top 5 favorite TV shows from childhood:

Punky Brewster.  I wanted to be her. I looked  a lot like her and even dressed like her from time to time to amuse my elementary school friends.

Knots Landing.  Yes. I watched Knots Landing as a child. I loved that show. LOVED.  My parents let me stay up late on Thursdays to watch it.  They are good parents.

The Cosby Show.  Good, clean fun, hilarity, good lessons. I loved growing up with their kids. One of my favorite episodes is the one where Theo and his friends are listening to the record of MACBETH. Too, too funny.

The Wonder Years.  Kevin was in the same grade as me throughout the series. This was a show I always watched with my family and it's still one of my dad's favorites. We quote it a lot in our family.

The Price Is Right.  My mom and I used to joke that if I'd been home-schooled, the only thing we'd have gotten done would have been watching the Price Is Right. I really liked being home in the summertime and on holidays to watch.  I lived for days when they played Plinko.

Head over to Clever Compass and play along!

 

Treasure and Trash

We've been cleaning out my grandparents' attic this week.  We had no idea what we'd find.  We found some very sentimental things, like a giant cross-stitch magnoia my grandma made, countless boxes of photos and letters, and the ceramic lambs that decorated my nursery.  Among the things that surprised us were:

4 stadium seasts

A 40-year-old ice cream maker

2 rusted handsaws

6 baskets of silk flowers

2 boxes of love notes from my high school boyfriend, complete with bad poems (why, yes, we read them aloud!)

A box of toys none of us remembers

Some personalized storybooks from my childhood, which Dean has been enjoying

And my personal favorite...

A paint scraper masking-taped to a stick. (???????)

 

We spent yesterday afternoon combing through boxes of letters, photos and mementos.  I found several shots of my grandma on her honeymoon, lots of pics of my grandpa's retirement party and even some family photos I'd never seen.  I also came across a whole pile of letters congratulating my grandpa for passing the Bar in 1971.  So many of these things are important to our family's history.  Since Dean never knew my grandfather and may not remember Mim, I hope to go through these things with him some day to help him piece together who we are and where we got our start.

 

Have you ever found any unique family treasures?

Rockin' The Baby

Shell over at Things I Can't Say is hosting a fun link-up called Rockin' The Baby.  I went through my photos and selected a few of my favorites from Dean's baby days to share with all of you.

Here we see Dean in an adorable hat made especially for him by my friend Angelina:

 
Don't you wish you could sleep like that?

Or this?

 
How 'bout that hat?  Marcus insisted that Dean wear a hat at all times when we brought him home from the hospital. Sure it was January, but our apartment was about 400 degrees, hence the short-sleeved onesie.  This hat earned him the nickname "Gangsta Dean."

Speaking of Marcus, he just glanced over and asked why I'd chosen 2 pictures of Dean sleeping, since, honestly, these may be the only moments Dean slept somewhere other than on one of us during his first 4 months of life. Touche', Marcus Lane, touche'.

Here's one of him in an adorable onesie that reads "Everyone's Favorite."

 
Tiny muffin.

And finally, what very well may be the all-time greatest baby picture ever taken:

 
CHUBBEH!  On the left is my nephew, Adam, who was about 16 months at the time; on the right is Dean, 4 months.  Everyone in our family has framed copies of this shot, and we lovingly call them the Buddah Babies.

Got any cute pictures of your babies?  Link up at Shell's blog!

 

 

Why I Didn't Have Cellulite Til I Was 23

I went to a magnet school for middle school.  My parents assumed, as did I, that I would continue on and go to the magnet high school.  Then I went to a Zachary High School football game.  The boy I liked was in the band and my family was super-close friends with his family, so we all went  to watch him march and play the bassoon or the drums or whatever he played. (I think it was the drums.  It would be very awkward to march while playing the bassoon.)  I enjoyed the crowd, as I always did at sporting events, but when I saw the dance team, my life changed. It sounds dramatic because it WAS. 8th grade Jen saw the Bronco Belles (catchy name, huh?) take to the field in their shiny leotards, fringy gloves and velvet capes and a dream was born.  After  many entries about them in my diary, Roxie (What, you don't name your diaries?), I dropped the bomb on my parents:  I was going to ZHS and trying out for Bronco Belles.

This posed many issues, the first and foremost being that we did not live in the Zachary school district.  I'm fairly sure I had already registered at the magnet high school, but that was easy enough to fix:  my mom called and told them  I wasn't coming.  The geography thing, however, posed a problem.  After much dilliberation, my  parents decided to put the house on the market  and try to move to Zachary.  When this did not happen quickly, they did the only other thing they could think of:  They gave legal custody of me, their only child, to a couple at our church who lived just a few miles from good ol' ZHS.  (My mother is now telling me that they just switched the people's water bill into my dad's name so they could show it to the school board, but my version's better, so let's stick with the idea that they handed me over to Susan and Gil, ok? Great.)

Anyway, long story short, I went to ZHS, tried out for and made the Bronco Belles and was happy as a clam.  We practiced from 1-4pm every single day, sometimes longer if we had a really difficult routine.  In the summer months, we practiced early in the morning outside our school, preparing for dance camp and competitions. I was over-the-moon happy to wear my uniform and be a part of the team.  When I look back on those years, I know my experiences with the Belles taught me time-management, self-discipline and dedication, things that are so very important in my career.

Ok, enough waxing philosophical...who wants to see pictures!?!? I thought so.

 
In case you couldn't tell, that's me, second from the left, and some of my teammates gathered outside the school at some ungodly hour of the morning carrying way too much luggage to go to a competition or some such. Dig the plastic shorts. And the matching hair bows. And the  "modern" dancer on our shirts, bags,and pretty much every other item we owned. Speaking of which,there was another Jennifer N. on the team. That's when I officially became Jen. But the other Jennifer liked to go by Jen sometimes, too, so I became Jen :). For real. There was a smiley face embroidered on every Bronco Belle item that was mine.  We were hard core, yo.

Here we are at a Disney dance competition wearing the ugliest outfits we could find and enough makeup to make a hooker do a double-take:

 
That's me absolutely dead-center.  Check out the toe point.  I always got really good scores for my toe points.

Here we are doing our home routine for the judges at camp:

 
See how innovative we were?  We made an arrow!  One time for a field routine, we tried to  spell "GO," but we practiced it backwards in the gym, so when we got to the football field to practice with the band, it said, "OG." I'm honestly not sure which one's me in this picture. I purposely didn't crop  it so you could admire the guy  in the bottom left corner's  awesome video camera. 

I poke fun, but those were seriously some of the best years of my life. I'll  post some more pictures soon, along with the magical story of my very first football game as a Bronco  Belle.