Word To The Ys

First of all, a warm and hearty welcome to all new visitors who may have popped by from Around the World in 80 Blogs, the brainchild of Everyday Stranger.  The idea was to write about where we live (in my case, St. Paul, MN, USA) and what our day looks like over here.  Please feel free to stick around if you like your blogs to have a heaping dose of crazy.  Because, well…it sure gets crazy around these parts.

I need only explain that I am mother to three boys…ages 6.5, 4, and 15 months…and you probably get a pretty vivid and accurate picture of what my everyday life is like.  Between them and my husband Joe I am surrounded…nay, inundated…by the Y chromosome.  I am currently a stay-at-home mom who does desktop publishing for my church to make a little moola and to keep me from being sent to the funny farm.  I dream of being a writer, and use this space to both document the life of my young family and fine-tune my craft.  And also to spread joy to the world by posting ridiculous pictures like this right here!  On the internet!

I’m writing this slice of my life post on a Sunday evening, about my Sunday-day.  Which was both typical and not…we started off our day with Max, the eldest Y child, waking us up wanting to play video games.  Sorry, bud…it’s Sunday, church this morning.  “Ah, man!” is the response.  We go about the incredibly lengthy and painful process of actually getting out the door.  Here in Minnesota it was about 10 degrees outside, which means boots, coats, hats, mittens.  The baby has to be zipped into a head-to-toe battlements.  I always say trying to direct our three little guys is akin to herding cats.  It’s nearly impossible.

We arrive at our church, a mid-sized Episcopal congregation in a small-sized package; progressive theologically, it is also steeped in tradition.  We find as always the place is bursting with activity.  Children are EVERYWHERE.  Our two older Ys are ushered into Christmas Pageant rehearsal.  Our youngest Y goes to the nursery.  Joe divides his time checking to make sure the sound equipment is good to go and making sure Oliver, 4-year-old Y-guy, is not setting the scenery on fire.  I spend a blissful half-hour rehearsing with the choir.  I robe up and sing with them for service this morning, and my priest gives a ”call to action” sermon wherein she tells us all we must respond to John the Baptist’s directive in the gospel this morning (have two coats? Give one away to someone who has none) by bringing a coat to service next week.  164 people in church, and she expects 164 coats to be donated next Sunday morning.  Not to get too evangelical, but you can listen to a podcast here if you want to know what the heck I’m talking about. We are a church committed to justice & peace initiatives, which has always been attractive to me and my family.

After the service, the most awesome thing ever happens.  I have these old college friends, Sarah and Charlie, and I somehow got lucky and convinced them and their families to come to my church, too.  For several years (6? 7?) we have passed around a particular white elephant gift amongst the three of us and our spouses.  It is a 1,000 piece puzzle of “The Men of Days of Our Lives” circa 1995 or so.  Every Christmas or birthday someone would get snuck that darn box in their present pile.  Once it was gifted to Max (when he was about 2 or 3 years old) and I remember him opening it and looking at us like, “What the HECK?!?”  Anyway, these friends came toward me with a huge, flat package this morning and wanted me to open it.  As I ripped back the festive paper, I could see tiny puzzles fissures, and ripping more I discovered they had assembled the puzzle.  A 1,000 piece puzzle.  Then they glued it on a piece of plywood, cut to the perfect size, and wrote a message to me on the back to profess their love for me.  As if the fact they’d assembled that thing weren’t proof enough! 

While the final product is, um, NOT going to be hung above my sofa or anything, just the thought of them spending all that time, and as Sarah said, “thinking of [me] as [they] laid each piece” was so strangely touching.  I love you guys more than my Uggs, which is really saying something.  My feet get cold!

After all that, I was in a pretty good mood.  We drove home in the cold sunshine

 to our warm and lovely home,

which will get warmer and lovelier starting tomorrow when our new windows get installed.  My brother comes by shortly thereafter.  Here’s the punk now:

 

He’s the best uncle in the universe. 

And that’s why we have no reservations leaving him at our house with our handful of offspring to head out for a few hours.  What do two hip, fun-loving lovebirds like Joe and I do when we get an afternoon off?  Step one: Culver’s.  Eggnog milkshake.  This is quintessential midwestern indulgence right here.

Step two: drive to the middle of noplace to pick up  the bed we had built for our four-year-old’s birthday.  Aren’t we wild’n'crazy?

But this is part of what I love about living in St. Paul, MN.  You drive about 45 minutes north (or any direction, really) and it’s farmland.  Prairie.  Wide-open expanses, groves of trees.  We have all the benefits of big-city life (including a thriving arts scene, world-class museums of science and art, and did I mention the first-ever Target store?) and easy access to water, big skies…it’s wonderful.

And cold.

On our Sunday drive-date, the funniest thing ever happened: Joe was laughing so hard at a joke I made in a recent blog post that his mirthfulness sent his head bumping against the steering wheel ever-so briefly, eliciting this tiny “beep!” from the horn, which only made us laugh even harder.  We had to consider pulling over as the tears were streaming and the lungs were begging for mercy.  I think my sides still ache.

We somehow squeeze an extra-long twin bed into a car-sized van.  It’s shorter than a minivan by about 4 feet.  My husband with the engineer-like mind figures out how to do it.  Here’s what the rear view is for the whole 1.5-hour ride home:

 

Yikes.  We see loads of hilarious billboards but the slow camera on Joe’s Droid phone will not snap pictures quickly enough to capture them here.  Let’s just say the juxtaposition of hunting ads, pro-life baby-photo billboards, heavy machinery, and snow drifts was everything that rural MN conjures in my mind.  We scurry on home to our kids, relieve my brother from wrestling duty, and settle in for an average evening of dinner, clean-up, pajama-donning and story-reading.  Once all the kids are in bed Joe plays Wii games with a neighbor friend who has been forced by a broken washer to swing by with a load of laundry, and I sit down at my computer for a rousing evening of desktop publishing for Christmas services.  Yippee!  You can see we really know how to live around here.  We turn in for the night ourselves and this is where the narrative ends, as I do have *some* limits as to what I write about here.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed a peek at a Sunday in my life here in Minnesota.  I am now realising it isn’t so typical of my everyday life, which usually has a lot more diaper changing and referree-ing and mopping up of messes, but maybe you should just consider yourselves lucky that you didn’t have a play-by-play of all that.  Thanks for coming by; come on back to visit anytime!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Joe, Mostly Me, Other Ys of Note. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.