Taylor the fish

We had a pretty low-key weekend at the Famous Amys house, and I’m totally fine with that. In fact, we were thrilled to be total bums for the past few days. All of the sudden August snuck up on us and summer is almost over, which means we have a countdown running on our time left at the swimming pool this season. I cannot express enough what a blessing the pool has been for us this year. Our normal daily routine follows something like this – Wake up, work out, do laundry, take a nap and then hit the pool. Yep, GTL - Gym, Tan, Laundry. Meaning I have more in common with those Jersey Shore morons than I’d like to admit.

And Taylor has just progressed light-years in the water the past few months. When we first started going in June, she wouldn’t release her kung-fu grip on me the entire time we were there. And now she’s jumping, swimming and pretty much invincible with those water wings on.

And when she’s tired of performing, she’ll stomp onto the concrete and announce, I need a break! Which is code for snack-attack time.

Yep, we’re loving life at the pool. And if you’re wondering why my posts are few and far between this next month, it’s because we are too busy soaking up this summer’s final rays and exhausting our daughter in the water. And also training for the upcoming half-marathon and washing clothes. GTL, baby. G. T. L.

Daddy's little helper

Our anti-Bele Chere weekend

This weekend the city of Asheville blocked off it’s downtown to celebrate our annual Bele Chere street festival, which brings in live music, local artists, lots of fried, carnival food and tens of thousands of mountain tourists eager to stroll around our eclectic city and marvel at all the culture and wierdness we possess. It’s three days of southern rock, tasty, sinful food and the best people-watching on this side of the Mississippi – Which is pretty much my Mother’s Disney World.

And you would think that all of these wonderful things would result in a fabulous, fun-loving weekend, but did I mention that Asheville annually throws this giant Bele Chere party on the hottest, muggiest weekend of the summer? Yep. The most uncomfortable weekend of the year, with the heat-index reaching numbers where people are generally encouraged to stay inside in the AC and out of the sun. So while the majority of the cards are dealt for you to have a fantastic time, the ending hand is just a bunch of sweaty, drunk rednecks eating meat on a stick and rubbing up against each other. Which is both my and my Mother’s vision of Hell.

And because this is now the seventh Bele Chere we’ve experienced as southerners, we pretty much planned our weekend around avoiding the downtown and all of the hot-mess it was offering. Well, except for my obligatory corndog luncheon I attend every year with my old Kimmel-crew. The festival officially begins Friday at noon, and my old colleagues and I are the first one’s in line and already have our fried food devoured by 12.15. As much trash as I talk about Bele Chere, nothing beats a hot corndog, fried potato chips and a freshly-squeezed lemonade for lunch. Heavenly.

And after making it home relatively unscathed, the rest of our weekend was spent enjoying ourselves away from the craziness. Friday night we took Miss Taylor to her very first movie in the theatre. We figured that since the majority of Asheville was fighting crowds downtown, it was the perfect opportunity to see if T could behave herself at a big-girl movie. And it actually worked out perfectly, as there were only about ten other people in the theatre and Taylor was safe to get up and walk around a little bit during the movie. We saw Toy Story 3, and she was beyond thrilled to have Woody and Buzz up on the big screen. But I think she was more jazzed about the popcorn than the actual movie.

On Saturday we jumped at the chance to escape Asheville and spend the day at Lake James with the Bound family. If you are going to spend six hours in the sun and heat, the only place to do that is on a boat or in the water. And we were able to do both. Many thanks to Jamie, LeAnn and their crew for letting us tag along!

And today we are spending our day regrouping in the confines of our air conditioned house, eating the left-over snacks we brought home from the lake, reading my current gossip-magazines and taking long naps. We may or may not get out of pajamas at some point. Now tell me how walking through the crowded, steamy streets of downtown could be anywhere close to as lovely as my weekend was. Granted we don’t have funnel cakes at our house, but we definitely have more smiles and giggles here than there are at Bele Chere. And more cute, pinchable cheeks.

Snapshot of spring break 2028

The other day I was sifting through the massive amounts of stuff I have crammed into boxes in our crawlspace. Things that I have held onto over the years – Unused wedding gifts, books I will probably never read, creative writing stories and poems from college and tons and tons of photographs. That’s right, kids, PHOTOGRAPHS. Actual pictures in albums that you can pick up and turn the pages of. And because I went to school in the 90s – Wow, that makes me sound OLD! – before the dawn of digital pictures, all of my college snapshots are now shoved in a box in the back of my crawlspace.

And this is something interesting I’m gonna have to explain to Taylor about at some point. That when Momma was in school, she and her friends would take anywhere from 12-to-24-to-36 pictures at a time and then take the FILM from that camera into the drugstore at the mall and then have to wait at least one hour to see the photos. And then when you did get to see the images, only a handful were worth keeping, the others generally blurry, dark or just used for blackmail later on. And if there was an actual picture on that roll that you wanted other people to see, you had to take that film back to the mall, have copies made and then either hand deliver or mail them out. Do you know how ancient that is going to sound to Taylor? It already sounds like something cavemen did.

And part of me is totally fine with all of these memories stuck in box in my basement, because in the digital age EVERYONE manages to see your pictures. Which I’m cool with now, considering the majority of my photos are of my adorable daughter, but I would have been pretty embarrassed about if some of those images from my college days were splashed online. You know which pictures I’m talking about... The dreaded party-pics. The ones where you’ve had one too many margaritas and are dancing on top of the bar, or the ones where your shoving an order full of Pokey Sticks in your mouth at three in the morning. Yes, some of my finer moments that I’m thrilled were photographed with a cardboard, disposable camera and not something that could flash the image up on facebook within a second of it happening.

But as much as I cringe at these photos, they also make me laugh out loud. Especially the group shots. The ones of me and all of my friends du jour lined up in a dorm or apartment hallway, dressed to the nines with faces full of makeup, generally already buzzed with squinty-eyes and full opened-mouth smiles. Just think how much hotter those snapshots could have been if we had been able to look at the image right after it was taken, critique it and then hand it back to the photographer to take another shot where we suck in our guts, elongate our necks and smile with our eyes.

Oh, the pictures from the college days are just so embarrassingly fantastic and bring back a lot of fun memories. The parties, the friends, the absolute enjoyment of living in the moment. And I really would love to share some of them with you, but I don’t have a scanner to run them through to make digital. But they look something like this:

Splashville

Last night Paige, Beth and I brought the girls downtown to check out Asheville’s newest attraction: Splashville. For the past few years the city has been renovating the area between Pack Square and the courthouse, installing a fountain area where people can run through and get soaked by the random streams of water shooting out from the ground. I had been hearing a lot of great things about it from friends, and was eager for Taylor, Elliot and Rayn have some splashing good fun in it. And they most definitely did.

Taylor, tempting the fountain:

Each of the girls got at least one good splash of water to the face:

And, y’all, if you could have only heard the girls shrieking and squealing as they ran around the fountain trying to catch the water, you would have understood the amount of fun we had. But I think this picture of my little peanut sums it up perfectly:

Pure happiness. Thank you, Asheville.

In which the apple didn't fall far from the tree

And about five minutes after recording this, yours truly put down her camera, hopped on top of the raft and attempted to show her daughter how easy it was to jump off. Which resulted in everyone getting an entertaining show of my amazon-length arms and legs flailing around the raft until I belly flopped into the water. Ouch!

27 months old

This past weekend, somewhere between our lake adventure and daily pool-time, Taylor turned 27 months old. And taking a moment to reflect on this past month, the mental images of the past weeks are mostly of my daughter in a swimsuit and water-wings. The beach, the lake, the pool... We’ve logged more hours in the water than on dry land recently. Meaning our naps have gotten longer and our baths have become less frequent. Yep, we’ve got one worn-out, chlorine-smelling toddler on our hands. But at least she’s a cute little stinker.

She is getting so much more comfortable in the water. A month ago, she had a death-grip on me as we walked through the pool, and now she’ll just jump in by herself and tread water for hours. She doesn’t have any swimming-skills per say, but she can kick her legs and move herself around in all directions. She even likes to put her head all the way under now, which results in that adorable, dunked-under-water face, so when she comes up she has her mouth wide open and her eyes blinking at turbo-speed. And then she wipes the water off her face and immediately says, AGAIN! AGAIN!

And as fast as she’s adapting to the water, the more she regressing on the potty. For some reason we’re in a rut when it comes to potty training this past month. I keep repeatedly asking her all day, Taylor, Do you need to go potty? And she’ll look at me and say, No. I go potty tomorrow. And I’ll whine, Well, how about now? Let’s go NOW. And she’ll deadpan back, No. Tomorrow. And because I don’t really feel like wrestling her out of her clothes and physically forcing her on the froggy potty, I just sigh and shrug my shoulders. And also continue to spend the majority of Chris’s paycheck on pull-ups and swim diapers.

She continues to amaze me on a daily basis with the things that come out of her mouth. She is speaking so well, and recognizing and repeating words in the correct, read ADORABLE, context. The other night while we were brushing her teeth, she grabbed her mouth and said, My teeth hurt! Which makes sense because her two-year molars are taking forever to pop all the way through. And after working through the pain, we finished up brushing her teeth and she reached her fingers inside my mouth and asked, Momma’s teeth hurt? And I said, Nope. And she got a big smile on her face and said, Momma’s teeth HAPPY? And I nodded and replied, Yes, Momma’s teeth are very happy. And then I immediately dove in and kissed her cheeks for the millionth time that day while she squealed with delight.

And those precious moments and stolen smooches are what I keep reminding myself about when she does have a Terrible Two episode. She has been testing her limits on so much, and the Time Outs and threats of Time Outs have become more and more frequent. And as easy as it would be to forgo the melt-downs and eventual punishment, and just give her what she wants, let her do whatever and tell her what she wants to hear, I know that it would only be a short-term fix to the problem. And I don’t want a spoiled brat for a child. And then I remember two years ago, when my only job as a mother was to clean, feed and keep this little baby alive. And I thought THAT was hard. And now I need to do all of that stuff AND make sure she grows up to be a balanced, respectful, loving human being? Yep, this job is tough. But it’s the best job in the world. And my daughter makes it the greatest, most rewarding job ever.