30 April 2012

on falling down...

the girlies two had lacrosse all weekend. i am utterly exhausted from watching them run up and down the fields with their gorgeous young legs and swinging hair and also from keeping my stomach muscles clenched for every single minute of every single game. 

it's hard to let your babies play hard.



grae's finger may be busted but is probably just jammed and cut from a slashing stick. she doesn't mind at all because it makes her look thug-lite and plus she scored a goal. poor lill was laid out so darn hard in her sunday game that her coach came on the field. i've never seen a crash like that, so much so that i can't think of another word for it. {her coach called it an assault, but that seems a leetle sinister. even though i wanted to press charges.}

anyway. we took them out to dinner to celebrate that they were both still alive, and the waiter asked if they'd just had a game. they smiled and said yes, and he asked if they'd won.



grae answered yes quickly, then thought about it for a second and changed it to no. when he walked away, she laughed and said something like but i kind of won. she got a cool injury and a goal. she did win.

i don't even look at the score. i look at how they get back up after being down. i honestly thought they'd have to carry lillie off the field and that i would have to kill someone, but she sprang right up and got right back into it. 

i look at how grae started yelling straight-away from the sidelines at the refs in her inside voice that they should yellow-card the girl who plowed down her lillie. you should know that grae's inside voice is the bad one that she only uses inside our house. it's so disdainful, you'd cringe. but she was fighting for someone she loves even more than she realizes, so pat and i let it go.



sometimes all the time i feel like i brag about these girls of mine. i know i do. i just look at these small versions of the someday women they'll become, and i see shades of...i don't know what. but it's beautiful. and thrilling. and disappointing. and worrisome. and exhausting. but mostly thrilling and beautiful. 

babies, man. they'll break your heart seventy times harder than you ever thought you could survive, but then you'll see them get back up and fight and you take this breath and maybe your chin does that i'm going to cry tremble and it's all back together again. 

i live for those moments when it's all back together again.

everything pretty found on you only live this life once.

20 April 2012

balaclava


if you'd like, you can see two-thirds of of the girlies hairchops on instagram - i'm mackinink, i think. - but don't even try looking for the grae ghost. it's not that she's shy. i mean, she just sang her poem at her school's poetry slam, for god's sake, and it was ABOUT POTATOES! she doesn't even like potatoes. but i guess it was better than the llamas at walmart limerick.

anyway. lill got kickass fringe halfway covering her eyes. a few rude boys at school called her a dog. grae restrained herself from giving them rabies, while lillie really socked it to them in the insult department. i mean, talk about cutting. brutal. don't save the worst for last, kid.

she said. ahem. "AT LEAST I COME FROM A HAPPY FAMILY!"

i don't know why, but i have been laughing my head off about that uncontrollably. back in the day, i called bullies things like buck-toothed buttfaces, fatbutts, and every other insult with the word butt in it {don't you remember how sweary you used to feel when you used the word butt?!}. maybe even threw out an "I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I?" which was way better than the little chips of chewed-up gum i threw in their hair during social studies. i was not nice. i've told you this.

i guess i'm just a little giddy that, even in the face of shite comments and petite stress...she knows what's important. and she's proud of it.

p.s. when i told pat this story, he shook his head in {hopefully} fake bewilderment. "we're a happy family?" rude.

balaclava found on double dark, which makes me like those twins even more.

17 April 2012

because pour porter told me to...

esmé and i stood out in the cold and waited for the discovery shuttle to fly over us. shivering because she was in sequined tap pants and the thinnest canyouseemyhoobieboobies sweater and because i was made for eighty-five and above. temp, not age.

why do we have to stay out here and see this? she grumbled.



and i thought about it and then dumbed it down to this: because that shuttle carried us to amazing places, and we owe him a proper goodbye.

she smiled hard and bit the inside of her cheeks and asked if i was crying.

no, i answered.

me, too, she said.

in case you'd like to see what we saw, here...




pretty badass, yes?

p.s. the girlies three are getting haircuts tonight...kind of major ones. remember the kind of hair appointment where you took in a beautiful photo of some model or actress or someone who looks strikingly like peter pan {or wait. is that just esmé?} and you expected to leave the hairdresser looking exactly like that picture? i think this is that kind of a haircut. makes me nervous. i'm keeping my fingers crossed for these little women of mine. xoxo