Time Has Wings

Can someone cut time's wings?  It is going by super fast.

Evan Esar once said, "[It] changes with time: in youth, time marches on; in middle age, time flies; and in old age, time runs out."

Ain't that the truth?

When the girls were still very young, people would give me all sorts of advice.  Some advice was quite helpful, while others, not so much.  The one I remember the most is, "Savor and enjoy this time while they are young.  It goes by way too fast."   In the midst of 3am feedings, stubborn toddlers, and potty training, I could have smacked that person offering their so-called words of wisdom.  I couldn't wait until they were a bit older.  If I could just get through the teething.  If I could just get through the potty training.  If I could just get through the tantrums...  And a myriad of other things that I just hunkered down to just get through.

Yet now, as I look back at when my girls were tiny, I miss those stages.  Now, when I remember the struggles of raising toddlers, I don't remember the struggles as much as I remember the fun times.   The squishy hugs, the wet kisses, the crooked smiles, the hand drawn pictures, the giggles inside blanket forts, seeing the look wonderment in their eyes as they experience things for the first time, and so many other beautiful things that only the really young can bring.  That time flew by so fast.  I understand now what people were talking about.  They weren't stupid, they were speaking from experience.

I feel that this must be why grandparents are better at parenting - they have been there, done that, and miss it.  They don't mind the little messes the young ones create.  It brings to mind all the memories of a happy time that they didn't get to fully appreciate or fully experience due to the daily demands of life.

My mom once said she would take a roomful of 2 year olds than a room full of teenagers.  I now understand.  Don't get me wrong, I love my teenaged kids with all my heart.  They bring me joy beyond imagination.  Yet during the troubling teenage angst of my kids, I can't help but long for simpler times: Which Blues Clues video to watch? Which baby food to try today?   Yet even still, I will try my best not to let the moments now go by too quickly.  Soon enough, they will have grown up, moved out, and start their own families.

Time does fly.  We cannot clip its wings.  We just hang on for the ride and try not to miss the little moments in the now, for those will be big memories in the future.

On Mother's Day...

I was thinking about some things about my mom today that have helped me become the person I am today. Today I am thinking about my love of cooking. My mother was very supportive of my desire to always make stuff in the kitchen.

Even though we never really had a lot of money when I was growing up, she still bought stuff to bake with. I remember experimenting with cooking at a young age. When I was about 9 years old, I remember grabbing stuff in the cupboard and mixing it all together into a concoction of goop. I remember reading the labels of stuff I was adding and smelling them. I will never forget the first (and last) swig of my goop. It was awful. I remember only two things I put into it: paprika and nutmeg.

Around this same time in my life, I remember being in the kitchen trying to make myself a cup of chocolate milk. We usually had the powder mix. So one day, I was craving some chocolate milk and reached up into the cupboard, found what I thought was the mix, and scooped heaps of chocolaty powder into my milk. I stirred and stirred. Little clumps of powder wouldn't mix and that was my favorite part of drinking it. Bottoms up! Hacking cough and spews of what was not chocolate milk mix but baking cocoa was all over the kitchen. I will never, ever make that mistake again.

Those last two experiences happened when we lived in Marina, CA at the first house. When we were in the second house, I had an unforgettable experience. I got home from school, starving. One of my favorite things to eat then was scrambled eggs. I left the light in the kitchen off and heated up butter in the frying pan. I cracked three eggs into the pan, salted and peppered them, and stirred until done. It smelled a little funny, but I was hungry and didn't care. I scooped it out onto my plate, grabbed a fork, and went to watch TV. After getting all comfy on the couch, looked down to eat my eggs and noticed there were little black things cooking into my eggs. On closer inspection, I realized they weren't pepper specks but ants. That's right, ANTS! It has been over 20 years and I still don't look at scrambled eggs the same way.

When I was 15, I was living with my aunt and uncle for a few months. I loved to make cookies for them. I made a variety of kinds, but the two that stand out the most in my mind: the sand ball cookies and the potato chip cookies. The sand ball cookies are like Russian Tea Cake cookies and don't spread out. My cousins teased me because they thought it was supposed to look like regular cookies. So I decided I would get back at them by making a bizarre cookie without telling them what was in it before they ate them. They liked the cookies and so I told them the secret ingredient. :)

When I was 16ish, I was living in Lake Elsinore. I remember making a white layer cake with kiwi and frosted it with white frosting. I loved it. My mom, not so much. I didn't know that she was allergic to kiwis - at least it makes her tongue itch.

I started experimenting with making stuff lower fat as I got closer to age 18. I have always loved crumb cakes or coffee cakes. So I made one that was fat-free. Ohhhh man, sooo good. If you want the recipe, let me know and I will post it.

Now that I am a mom, I have had to improvise dinners. I learned from my mom how to throw things together that will taste well. I have a love of cooking that I learned from my mother. I love her very much.

Thank you mom. MORE MORE MORE! :)

My Purple Sweat Pants

Purple Sweat Pants

I am terrified of spiders. It goes back to when I was nine years old and lived in Marina, California. Every night, without fail, I would lay awake staring at the ceiling as little black things scurried around. How could I sleep knowing that there were spiders crawling on the ceiling over my head? I would call my parents in to kill the eight-legged beasts. We only lived in that particular house for about a year. That was long enough for me to develop a hatred and fear of spiders.

When I was fifteen years old, my family moved to Lake Elsinore, California. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the new place we moved into. Our home was on two-and-a-half acres and had a small mountain range behind the property line. There were tall trees; some of them were pepper trees and often the yard smelled of pepper. All around the house were weeds – tall weeds – just brimming with bug life. I just knew that one day I would come face to face (or foot to eight-legged foot) with a spider. I avoided the weeds with cautiousness.

One day, when I was seventeen years old, I came home from my church’s youth group. I was ready to unwind. My day at school had been a long one with all my teachers spouting off ridiculous amounts of homework. I spent a couple hours doing that homework and was excited to go to youth group – thinking I could have fun and unwind there. That was a joke. I spent two hours with kids my age that were too immature. To make matters worse, I was starving.

The first thing I always do when I get home from anywhere is kick off my shoes, strip off my jeans and pull on sweat pants. I don’t function well at home in jeans. I can go all day in jeans just fine, but the moment I step through the threshold of my home, it becomes as unbearable as a broken air conditioner in the middle of August.

“Mom, I’m home!” I shouted as I stepped through the backdoor and into the dimly lit laundry room.

“Ok. I’m in the shower,” my mom hollered to me from the back of the house. From my mom’s bathroom, I could hear I heard the pitter patter rhythm of water hitting the shower door.

“Alright,” I replied as I automatically stripped off my jeans right there in the laundry room. I looked down and saw my purple sweat pants strewn on the floor in front of the washing machine. I had tossed them there before I left for the youth group. Relieved to see my fleecy friend, I reached out, picked up my sweats and flung the jeans where the sweat pants had been.

A fleeting thought entered my mind that I should shake out my sweat pants before I put them on. Spiders seemed to call our home their own, as if the two-and-a-half acres outside wasn’t enough for them. As quick as the thought came, it left. My stomach growled and all I could think about was hurrying so I could eat something. I didn’t hesitate and hauled up my sweats.

I felt the cold linoleum under my feet as I hurried to the kitchen pantry. I glanced at the clock on the microwave – 8:55 PM. Perusing the pantry’s contents and feeling as if I would pass out from hunger, I decided on something quick and easy: a can of vegetable beef soup. I dug through the pan cupboard, clanking around until I found the small saucepan.

Click. Click. Click. Whoosh. The burner ignited. As I carefully poured the soup in the pan, I felt a tickling sensation on my left leg. It felt like my stubbly leg hair was catching like Velcro on the inner fuzzies of the sweat pants. Without thinking, I automatically swatted at my leg with my right foot trying to unhook any stuck bristles of my leg hair. The tickling stop; I thought I was successful. I continued stirring the bits of potato, carrots, and other vegetables in the brown broth. I breathed deep. Mmmmm, it smelled good.

“Dang it,” I said to myself. I felt the tickling again. “Man, I should have shaved today.”

I smacked my left leg with my right foot again. The tickling stopped.

My stomach sent up irritated gurgles in protest to food not being fed to it sooner; I wanted the soup to hurry and heat up. Like a tar pit, bubbles slowly started breaking the surface of the soup. I smiled, happy that the soup was almost ready.

I heard the shower turn off. I looked over to the clock – 9:00 PM. I felt the tickling yet again. I sighed, irritated at myself again for not shaving. I nonchalantly rubbed my right foot on my left leg as I continued stirring the soup. This time the tickling didn’t stop. Then it hit me: something was in my pants!

“Oh no! It is probably a spider!” I thought to myself in a panic. Visions of spiders on the ceiling when I was nine years old came flooding into my brain.

I gasped, dropping the mixing spoon into the soup. Bits of broth went splashing all over the stove top like brown globs of paint flung recklessly on a canvas. I quickly reached down and grabbed the elastic at my ankle. I vigorously shook my leg back and forth like my life depended on it and prayed the spider would fall out soon.

It didn’t take much shaking for the bug to plummet out. I looked down and to my horror it wasn’t an eight-legged creature – it was a centipede! That had ninety-two more legs! And not just any regular centipede, but the biggest I had ever seen! It must have been at least five inches long.

“AHHHHHHH!” I screamed at the top of my lungs like a little girl – loud and high pitched. I instinctively leapt with an almost superhero bound from the side of the kitchen where the stove was to the complete opposite end near the living room in one swift motion. My chest burned from fear and from the screaming.

“What’s wrong, Celeste?” my mom asked in alarm as she came rushing in wearing nothing but her underwear and a towel on her head.

Breathless from screaming and from sheer panic, I just pointed in the direction of the centipede which was flipping and flopping all over the place like a fish out of water. My mom stared at the centipede for a moment, and then looked at me in what can only be described as skepticism that her seventeen year old daughter was freaking out about a centipede.

“Mom,” I gasped, “that thing was in my pants!”

Shock registered in my mom’s sapphire eyes. “We need to catch it,” she exclaimed.

I looked dumbfounded at her. I didn’t want to do it. Before I could express my fear, she ran into the kitchen, grabbed a large mouth mason jar and trapped the hundred-legged creature just in the nick of time: the centipede had just regained its bearings and was ready to scurry off.

“So now what do we do?” I asked my mom as I watched the centipede’s creepy-crawly legs flail all about as it ran around its glass prison, trying to find a means of escape.

“We kill it. Go grab me that paper,” my mom spoke. I obeyed my mom and got the paper.

“Here,” I said as I cautiously walked near her next to the centipede.

“Slide it underneath,” my mom ordered. I gingerly slid the paper under the mouth of the mason jar. The centipede wasn’t happy about the foreign object being slipped underneath him. In remonstration, he started going berserk and began scrambling every which way he could, even tried to crawl up the walls of the jar.

I shuddered, “Mom, that thing just spent five minutes roaming freely in my pants!”

“What?” my mom’s eyes met mine and her eyebrows rose in disbelief. “Five minutes in your pants? How did that happen?”

As the centipede skittered around in the mason jar, I told her what happened.

“You didn’t shake your pants out?” she inquired of me.

“No. I thought about it but was so hungry I just didn’t,” I explained sheepishly.

In the midst of everything, my stomach’s feelings were forgotten and it was just then when I realized that the soup was still on the stove cooking. I looked over. The soup was rapidly boiling and showering brown broth onto anything in its reach. I ran over to the stove and turned off the burner. My mom carefully turned the mason jar right-side up, making sure to not move or loosen the paper. The centipede wasn’t happy about being jostled around so in protest it scuttled around angrily at the bottom of the jar. It was obviously having a hard night – it wasn’t about to get any easier for it either.

“So, how should we kill it?” I asked my mom.

“We can flush it down the toilet,” she suggested. My mind was filled with scary images of too many movies growing up where things came out of toilets. I could just see centipedes spilling out of the toilet while I was sitting on top of it.

“Uh…” I began.

She seemed to sense my apprehension and suggested we lift the paper of quickly and fill the jar partway with hot water. That way it would drown and then we could flush it. Neither one of us fancied the idea of stomping on it. The idea of having to hear the squishing and crunching sounds that would come from stepping on it, made us too nauseous to consider that method of death.

We went to the sink and turned the faucet to hot. After a moment, the water was hot enough to cook a centipede. The hot water splashed inside the jar and completely took the centipede by surprise. It attempted to swim and crawl up the side of the glass at the same time. We couldn’t bear to watch so we put a plate on top of the jar, placed it on the counter and walked away.

I went to the computer and got online. My fingers raced over the keys with a clickety-clack as I searched the web to find out about centipedes. I came to a page that had big pictures of centipedes. To me, it was grotesque and I started getting the willies just looking at them. I scrolled down to the part where it talked about centipede characteristics. My eyes widened and I gasped.

“They’re poisonous!” I cried out to my mom, who was back in her room putting clothes on.

“Oh my goodness! Good thing it didn’t bite you!” she shouted out for me to hear.

I sat there with a creepy-crawly feeling. “It was in my pants for five minutes,” I thought to myself and shook my head from side to side like I was watching a fast paced tennis game.

Later that night, after the centipede had died in its watery grave, I gladly flushed it down the toilet and watched it swirl and swish until it was out of sight.

It has been thirteen years since my run-in with that centipede. I can sit here and rationally tell myself that I wouldn’t have died from a centipede bite, and the cliché of it being more scared of me than I am of it. But upon seeing a centipede and its one hundred legs flailing about, I can actually feel its legs crawling on my skin. That is when my rationale flees and I instinctively shudder, feeling compelled to kill it. This makes me realize that my fear of spiders has taken a backseat to my fear centipedes. After all, a centipede has ninety-two more legs than a spider – much more appendages to skitter across my skin.

Lesson from my Mom

This morning I was thinking of my mom and all the many things she has taught me. I truly believe I wouldn't be half the person I am today without her loving guidance.

I think back to when I was about 14 or 15 and my family was living in Corona, CA. My friends and I used to go roller skating all the time. We hung out with the 'regulars' when we went. There was one in particular named Glenn. He was 30 and single. Now as naive young teens, my friends and I thought nothing of it. We would jump in his car and go to Del Taco or where ever. I always got the front seat while all the rest of the kids were crammed in the back seat like a clown car. Once in a while I would share my front seat throne with one of them. Most times it was just me. I felt extra special. I thought that Glenn was a nice friend.

My brother and I even went to his house for a New Year's Eve party. That is where I tried my first Oreo dipped in salsa. Yes, it tastes just as gross as it sounds. We had a blast over there. His house was the cool house - we could throw a ball in the house if we wanted. There weren't the regular rules at his house that most people had at theirs.

Things were going seamlessly great. That is until my mom found out that our friend Glenn wasn't our age or anywhere near it. She laid down the lay: we were not allowed to hang out with Glenn or talk to him on the phone. I was furious that she wouldn't let me talk or hang out with him. I told her she was crazy. I probably said a few choice words to her as well. Nothing shook her determination to let me see him. She stood firm and I was angry. She was the meanest and dumbest mom on the planet.

She wouldn't let me go to the skating rink anymore because he might be there. How dare she keep me from my friends! Not long after, I moved out of state to live with my aunt's family for a while. It was hard saying goodbye to all my friends but we promised to keep in touch. "Keeping in touch" rarely sticks. People drift apart and life gets in the way. Sometimes years go by before you see or talk to that person again, if at all.

Thankfully one of my good friends, Rachel, and I did keep in partial contact. We would talk on the phone together. She would update me on all the happenings of our friends and such.

One of the times we spoke, she told me of an experience that happened with her, Dianna, and Glenn. I remember hearing her speak the words but my brain's jaw dropped. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Even later after I hung up the phone, the details were still foggy because of the shock factor. From what I recall, somehow Rachel, Dianna, and Glenn ended up in Las Vegas in a hotel room! Dianna and Rachel had to call the cops on Glenn. Rachel was either crying or very emotional in her tone of voice that I couldn't understand the rest of the details.

Even though that is all I can remember, the thought that it could have been ME in a hotel room with a 30 year old man scares me half to death! My mom was right when she was suspicious of a 30 year old single male hanging around a bunch of teenagers at a teen hangout.

I am truly grateful for my mom caring about me and standing her ground. Even though I was very mad at her when she did it, I am very relieved that she made me cut all ties to that man. She was trying to protect me and I am glad she did. She taught me that did have best interest at heart.