Elves and Gingerbread Men

I'll state right here: I can't see myself ever doing Elf on a Shelf. Not because I think it's wrong to motivate children by having Santa spy on them, not because I think everyone should just chill out--basically, I'm too unorganized, and I know I'll be lucky if I can even get an advent calendar going and actually stick to it.

But as I was looking at someone's Elf on a Shelf post the other day, I was reminded of a Christmas tradition that we had in my family growing up. Like Elf on a Shelf, we had a little friend who would mysteriously appear at the scene of random occurrences; he was seemingly inanimate, and yet managed to do so much.

We had Gracious George, the Gingerbread Man.

Our George was made of dark brown felt, with rickrack and buttons for decoration. He had a pocket on his back that was just big enough to fit a tootsie roll or a quarter. And Gracious George always heralded good things.

It started with a Family Home Evening lesson on a Monday night. We would tell the story of Gracious George, using flannel board pictures, I believe. It was similar to the regular story of the Gingerbread man, but before he would run from anyone, he would do an act of service for them--for example, he cleaned the old woman's dishes, and weeded the old man's garden. Things like that. He ran and ran, shouting the classic epithet,

Run, run, run, as fast as you can!

You can't catch me, 

I'm Gracious George the Gingerbread Man! 

Okay, so maybe it differed a little from the classic.

Either way, he ran until he came to . . . our house! There he continued his acts of service, but always trying not to be caught. 

Mom and dad would then take George and put everything away, but sometime that night or the next day, he would appear on a newly-folded bed, or bearing a treat, or on a straightened bookshelf. And then it would be the recipient's turn to give an act of service, leaving Gracious George as the only sign of who had done it.

We loved being ultra-sneaky and seeing what kinds of acts of service we could pull off under each others' noses. And the best part? My mom didn't have to clean up any messes George made, or figure out something new to do with him every day. She left that to us--unless it was her turn, of course.

Remembering Gracious George brought back a lot of nostalgia, and I realized that it's about time for me to start some of these types of Christmas  traditions with my girls. I'm thinking that next year will be the year that Gracious George puts in his first appearance at our house.

What's your favorite Christmas tradition? What age do you remember these  traditions being most important to you?

Answers to the Movie Game

Alright, folks. Here they are, in all their glory: the titles to the movies those wonderful quotations came from. Each of these movies made an impact on my life in some way. Most I've seen too many times to count, but #8 I've only seen once; the line just stuck with me and I've been using it for several years.

1. "Don't make me beat you with this leg of mine that no longer works!"
• This comes from the fantastically amazing movie Surf Ninjas. Don't believe the star-rating; it's awesome... if you're watching with the right people, and just want the hilarious dialogue.
2. "You gentlemen mind if I take this little 'ol jug of mountain water with me?"
• Hot Lead and Cold Feet. Jim Dale (frequently known in the U.S. as the narrator for the Harry Potter audiobooks) triple-stars in this movie as old Jasper Bloodshy and his twin sons.
3. "You know, Joe Jr.'s still single."--"Shocker."
• While You Were Sleeping. I've used this movie to convince guys that chick flicks are awesome. Also, I feel like I married into this family. Family dinners are awesome. (And the paper boy who accidentally eats it is one of the best moments in film history.)
4. "Wise man say, 'Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza.'"
• Please tell me someone other than me recognized this one? I thought this one was a classic! This one's from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
5. "The mouse? He's left our house! To ease the pain... he's down the drain!"
• Ladyhawke. This one is a little more obscure, but well worth the time to find. It's the first movie I remember my mom ever buying on DVD.
6. "I've been using fruity soaps, Maggie."
• Waking Ned Devine. Watch this one when you're in the mood for British humor, and when you have people with you who will laugh at British humor.
7. "Girl or not, I can still whip you!"
• Ever After. In my opinion, one of the best Cinderella movies out there.
8. "But the talking mice told me it was the wrong girl!"
• Cinderella 3: A Twist in Time. This one I've only seen once, and don't really feel any need to watch again. Watching it with my college roommates was really entertaining, though, and this part of the movie had us falling off our seats with laughter. I've been quoting the line ever since.
9. "Llama face!"
• If you didn't get this one, we may not be able to be friends anymore. The Emperor's New Groove.
10. "Don't just stand there, do something!"--"What for? There's only three little ones."
• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. This is one of the first movies I ever remember watching; this and Singin' in the Rain. 
11. "The hospital is fine except for this wicked nurse. She's got the face of a dragon's butt."
• Alright, so there are three ninja movies on this list--my family was really into karate; what can I say? This one is from 3 Ninjas Kick Back.
12. Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars. (We rarely bothered quoting the new ones.)

"Inconceivable!" And Other Well-Loved Favorites

This morning I woke up with movie quotations running through my head. It happens a lot considering I don't watch very many movies.

My brothers were always the better quoters. They could watch a funny movie once and have most of the dialogue memorized; twice and they were pretty much golden. It usually took me 3 times and a movie I really loved before I'd have it memorized, but I could usually jump in on their quoting games. It got to the point that I once had a friend tell me that my family had "a quote and a song for any situation."

I've also realized, however, that some of the movies I know and love are rather obscure. Not all are as easily named as the one I quoted in the title of this post. So here are a few lines, some easy to guess, some not, which I've found myself quoting more than once over the years. How many can you correctly identify? (Without googling--that's just cheating.) Check back in Monday for the answers.

1. "Don't make me beat you with this leg of mine that no longer works!"
2. "You gentlemen mind if I take this little 'ol jug of mountain water with me?"
3. "You know, Joe Jr.'s still single."--"Shocker."
4. "Wise man say, 'Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza.'"
5. "The mouse? He's left our house! To ease the pain... he's down the drain!"
6. "I've been using fruity soaps, Maggie."
7. "Girl or not, I can still whip you!"
8. "But the talking mice told me it was the wrong girl!"
9. "Llama face!"
10. "Don't just stand there, do something!"--"What for? There's only three little ones."
11. "The hospital is fine except for this wicked nurse. She's got the face of a dragon's butt."
12. [Insert any Star Wars quote here.]

Learning to See

Cim's "pet" spider wrapping up lunch.

I sat and watched an Orb Weaver spider make its web the other night. One long strand stretched up to the power line above us. Another connected to a bush at my head-height, and a third stabilizing thread connected to the grass at my feet. The web shone in the light from the streetlamp above as the spider made her way around and around. Her orange-and-brown-striped legs moved tirelessly, reach, pull, attach, cross, reach, pull...

I might not have stopped to watch, except that my daughters' fascination with spiders has rubbed off since we've come to Georgia. It's not just spiders that hold our attention, though.

One day Cim and I sat and watched the dirt in the flowerbed shift and ripple, little crumbs rolling down the sides of new mountains as a worm crawled just beneath the surface. We caught some of the worms and watched them wiggle, then let them work their way back into the dirt, seeing how they exploited tiny cracks and air pockets in the soil.

Another day we caught tan and green grasshoppers and little black-and-red beetles. We watched their antennae move, and watched the grasshoppers spring on their powerful hind legs. We counted their legs. We watched the little beetles fly away right before we could catch them.

The semester or two after I graduated college, I watched through Facebook as most of my English Major friends and classmates applied for graduate school, accepted student teaching or undergraduate teaching positions, or otherwise pursued their writing/literature studies in obvious and laudable ways. And sometimes, I got a little sad. I knew I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom (I graduated in December of 2010 with one baby in my arms, and got pregnant with baby #2 in April), but sometimes I wondered if all the time I'd spent in college was a waste, and if all the things I'd learned about writing and literature would just fade away until I someday sat down to try to re-learn them after my kids were grown.

I've come to peace with this several times in different ways, but only recently have I noticed that I'm in my ideal writing program right now.

Several times in college I read the essay "Learning to See" by Samuel H. Scudder, in which his mentor makes him look at the same fish over and over again for days, trying to see new things about it. Amazingly enough, he finds that no matter how much he's already seen, there's more yet to describe. As writers, we then did exercises like taking one small leaf and writing descriptions of it for fifteen minutes. Once we used a sour gummy worm; I've never forgotten the little lavender line on mine where the pink and blue merged, or the way the sugar crystals sparkled. These exercises helped us remember to look beyond (and hopefully write beyond) the obvious appearance of things, to get at the details that would bring our writing alive.

And now, with my toddlers for tutors, I'm being taught to see once again.

They're also busy teaching me how to imagine. Somewhere over the years, I mostly quit daydreaming. My imagination expressed itself when I wrote, but it sometimes felt squeaky, rusty. It was also reluctant to fire up unless I was actually sitting in front of the computer or a piece of paper, ready to write.

These days, at my three-year-old's direction, I'm a ninja running around the yard fighting monsters with my stick-sword. (Those weeds never knew what hit them.) I'm the mommy dinosaur/tiger/kitty/platypus. I'm a school teacher. I'm a dancer.

And emotion--another key part of writing? Got it covered. Have you ever watched a one-and-a-half-year-old try to analyze why she's crying? Have you ever seen a three-year-old's level of excitement when handed a bucket and told to say 'trick-or-treat'? What about sibling rivalries, feelings of betrayal when mom has to help the "other" child, and anger, which always has some other underlying cause? Oh yes, with two toddler girls, we run the gamut of emotion every ten minutes or so.

Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I'm too busy with the dishes, or whatever it may be, and I don't come when I hear, "Mom, come here, you have GOT to see this!"

But sometimes I do. And my little tutors get to work.

Someday I'll get to the point where I turn my focus to publishing (after a lot of consideration and prayer, I've decided that time's not now), and where I'm finishing as many projects as I have beginnings for in my head. Maybe by then I'll have learned how to live, to see, to imagine, and to feel. And with that, maybe I'll be able to write books worth reading.

Halloween

I know, it's been awhile since I've written a good, in-depth post. There are reasons (a.k.a. excuses), but I promise I'll get one up soon. In the meantime, enjoy these pictures of what I did with that crazy pile of crafting supplies.

Cim wanted to be a princess...

Mari wanted to be a dinosaur...

And we knew they'd each want whatever the other had.

So they got to be dinosaur princesses.

I didn't want to be left out!

And neither did Dad (though I didn't get his tutu made in time--that red tulle will have to be put to use elsewhere).

And who doesn't like having a family of t-rexes stomping around the neighborhood?

Happy Halloween!

Homemade Horror

Mari was asleep in her bed. Cim was asleep in my bed... or so I thought.

Because she kept waking up her sister, Cim has been relegated to my bed for naptime. She's gotten in trouble several times for touching things on our headboard shelves, but she hadn't done it in awhile, and everything was oh-so-quiet... which would normally be a warning sign, but this time I thought it meant sleep, so I was busily working away on Halloween costumes.

Then Ryan came home, and at the sound of his voice, I suddenly heard sounds from the bedroom as well. We opened the door to find this.

All that's missing from this classic horror scene is the weapon.

Or maybe this white marble Chinese Medicine ball is the culprit? It carries fingerprints, at least.

What made this massive mess, you ask?

The contents of this little container. It's wax-based red ink we brought back from China, meant for use with Ryan's "chop," a stamp of his name cut from a piece of marble. I hadn't even realized it was in our room.

But I have a permanent reminder now.

Cim went straight to the tub of course...

Where we discovered she'd pulled her jeans up and painted herself a pair of red knee-highs.

Dawn dish soap helped some.

The tub, a spot on the counter (she climbed out of the tub and grabbed the white counter before we could catch her), the mattress, and several spots on the carpet are still bleeding waxy substance, no matter how hard we try to wipe them up (dry cloths work better than wet, due to the wax, but our stain removers are proving totally ineffectual). 

We tried really hard not to let her see us laughing when we first opened the door, but the more we got into the clean-up, the more we were holding in yells instead. This stuff is so bad. Because it won't just dry out and stain like a marker or something, if we step on a spot on the carpet, we spread it, and if we put new sheets on our bed, they'll pick it up from the mattress.

Chalk another one up for life experience. This day has won. We're exhausted.

Costume Time!

Halloween is coming.

You don't say...?

Good thing I had coupons,

Because I was feeling ambitious.

And now slightly overwhelmed.

(But still very excited. This will be awesome.)

The Bubbles

I decided it was time for me to post something humorous, so here's an embarrassing moment from my past. Enjoy.

Was this what a tension headache was?  I guess I’d never had a real one before.  We’d just taken Mandi to the airport.  The glorious cross-country trip we’d planned together was over.  Finally. Apparently tacking a trip like that onto the end of a semester was bad for me.

“Why don’t you go take a bath?  They have a hot tub, you know,” my mom suggested.

“Yeah,” chimed in our friend Paralee, at whose home we were spending the night, “make it a bubble bath.  There’s nothing more relaxing.”

At this point I was ready to try anything.  With some help, I found a towel, and Paralee showed me how to work the hot tub and pointed out where the bottle of bubble bath solution sat.  I was ready.

I played with the temperature, making it just hot enough that when I started to climb in I had to ease myself in slowly.  I watched as the water level rose up the side of the tub.  Now it was at the bottom of the jets.  Now the middle.  Now they were covered; time to relax between the pounding streams of air and bubbling water.  Wait, bubbles!  Paralee had said I should use bubbles, and I hadn’t had a bubble bath since I was a little kid.  Gleefully, I poured a small stream of lavender-scented bubble mixture into the steaming water.  Then, thoughtlessly, I pushed the button to turn on the hot tub jets.

Think back to the last time you took a bubble bath.  Remember the thick clouds of foam, which you stuck to your chin for a beard and put in your hair so you could be Santa Clause?  Remember how when your mom poured in the bubble liquid, you beat your arms and legs spastically in the water to make the bubbles as big as possible?

Within five seconds, the bubbles were up to my chin.  In ten, I was fighting them away from my mouth and nose, trying to get them off my face while at the same time trying to hold the growing mountain from spilling out of the tub.  I pictured the headlines: “19-year-old girl smothered by lavender bubble-bath.”  Frantically, I turned off the hot-tub jets and began shoving bubbles under the water, trying to drown them. 

After about five minutes, I managed to reduce the pile to a size which allowed me to breathe without threat of suffocation.  I sat back in the water and contemplated the remaining bubbles.  I lifted my hand under a two-inch pile, bringing it toward my face and studying the way the bubbles clung to one another.  Then I clenched my fist around the pile and thrust the bubbles under the water, watching them fizzle into nothing.

Five minutes later I had managed to subdue the remaining bubbles.  Looking at the water, I gloried in my total triumph over my foe.  Then, stupidly, I reached once more for the button which would activate the hot-tub jets.

When I stumbled from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, shaking and on the verge of tears, my mom and Paralee stared at me.

“What happened?” my mom finally asked.

“The bubbles ate me.”  I shuddered, and, without further explanation, retreated to the cushion on the floor on the corner—my bed—and curled up in the fetal position, where I stayed until dinner.

On Dreams

I began this post June 14, 2012. I even posted it for a few hours, then took it back down because I hadn't followed my thoughts through to a satisfying point; I had started to explore it, then dropped off with a cheap ending.

Let's give it another try.

I have a poster my mom made for me a couple years ago. It features the above picture, and below that the quotation,

Hold fast to dreams,

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

that cannot fly...

...Langston Hughes t.

This poster sat in the box it was shipped in for three years, because I couldn't face it. I was fighting the demons of my dance dreams, and all I could think when I saw the poster was, "How am I supposed to hold fast to dreams if they contradict what I know I'm supposed to be doing with my life?" I felt quite literally like the broken-winged bird--I had been used to flying through the air in gravity-defying dance lifts, and now I was grounded. 

I've shed a lot of tears over those dreams. I once even wrote melodramatic poetry about my dreams talking to me as I tried to kill them. (Not very good poetry, in case you wondered.)

I always knew that my ultimate dream of being a mother superseded all my dance dreams, or all my educational or literary dreams, or all my craft dreams--yet, when I finally achieved motherhood, I struggled to accept the world-altering commitment of all my time and resources to one thing and one thing only. And I didn't understand why I was struggling.

I still don't understand all of it, but I'm starting to put some of the pieces together. In the movie "Tangled," there's a part where Rapunzel asks what to do if something actually is "everything [she] dreamed it would be." Flynn replies that she'll get to "find a new dream."

That resonated with me, but it still seemed to only partially apply, because I hadn't fulfilled my old dreams--they were just sitting there, still hoping to be pulled back out, and it was hard to reach for new dreams when I was so tempted to reach for the old ones.

Then I read a wonderful little novel called "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making." (Yes, it actually manages to live up to the title.) There's a part where the main character has to be bathed before entering a city, and one thing that gets washed is her dreams. The person bathing her explains that sometimes people don't recognize when they should launder their dreams, and so they hang on to old dusty, grimy dreams. That felt like exactly what I'd been doing, and it made sense to me that dreams, like everything else, might need to be "washed," or re-examined and reworked sometimes.

But I didn't know how to do it.

Three weeks after writing the above post, I wrote this:

I don't know how to wrap words around what dancing means to me.

Two weeks ago I went to a beginner's Salsa class. My mom told me I needed to go dancing while she was here, and that was what was available that week.

The steps were simple, less complicated than the classes I taught when I was 14. But it was a studio. The floor, the mirrors, the music--it shook me straight to my center. I danced that evening, and then I cried the whole way home.

When I pulled into the garage, I turned off the car and sat, sobbing, not wanting to go in and face my mom, my husband, my children. I looked upward, and through my tears, announced, "I can't not dance anymore."

And over those next few weeks, I learned an important lesson: I could be a mom and still dance. Not all the time, and not to the level I had in college, but I could, thanks to a loving, supportive, trusting husband, go to a Friday-night class and party and dance for two or three hours.

This seems so obvious to me now, but it was an epiphany at the time. Here I had two little girls, one almost two years old and one five months old, and I had done almost nothing but mother since I had graduated from college a year and a half earlier.

And there was nothing wrong with that.

The problem was when I started to feel like a martyr instead of understanding the period of life I was currently in. When I first made the decision to get pregnant, I chose to cut ties with my dreams of dancing at Nationals, or getting on a team that year--but more than that, I somehow adopted the idea that choosing to be a mom meant letting go of everything that made me "Shannon" instead of "Mom." This idea grew as I muddled my way through the early stages of baby-raising--because honestly, chasing one baby while pregnant with the next really was all I could handle for awhile. And then, when I found myself with two babies within 18 months, I was even more overwhelmed. People told me it was just part of the "baby" phase, and that I'd have more time for projects later on, but my struggles were so in my face at that point that I honestly thought it would never end.

But when my girls got a little older and I hit that emotional wall mentioned above, I started dancing again. And as they've gotten even older, they can suddenly play on their own sometimes, or entertain each other now and then. And over the last few months I've gradually realized that my choice to sacrifice certain dreams at one point in order to choose motherhood does not mean I have to, martyr-like, forever give up my right to dream.

Of course, then we get into the mysteries of balancing motherhood with personal goals. I still miss being able to dance the way I used to, and sometimes I get nervous about pursuing new dreams--nervous that I'll let them take time away from what really matters, because I value my family above all else. But with the help of perspective granted by a little more time in the mothering zone, as well as a supportive husband--who has even told me we'll hire a part-time housekeeper if necessary so that I don't feel guilty for using my free time writing novels--I'm working on both finding new dreams and washing the old ones. And I must be making progress, because it's no longer painful for me to look at the poster my mom gave me.

In fact, I bought it a frame.

"Awakening" by Christy Dorrity -- Blog Tour

(I've read this book twice now, and you can check out my review for it on Goodreads.)

About the Book

. . . because some Celtic stories won’t be contained in myth.

A little magic has always run in sixteen-year-old McKayla McCleery's family—at least that’s what she’s been told. McKayla’s eccentric Aunt Avril travels the world as a psychic for the FBI, and her mother can make amazing delicacies out of the most basic of ingredients. But McKayla doesn't think for a second that the magic is real—it’s just good storytelling. Besides, McKayla doesn’t need magic. She recently moved to beautiful Star Valley, Wyoming, and already she has a best friend, a solo in her upcoming ballet recital—and the gorgeous guy in her physics class keeps looking her way.


When an unexpected fascination with Irish dance leads McKayla to seek instruction from the mute, crippled janitor at her high school, she learns that her family is not the only one with unexplained abilities. After Aunt Avril comes to Star Valley in pursuit of a supernatural killer, people begin disappearing, and the lives of those McKayla holds most dear are threatened.

When the janitor reveals that an ancient curse, known as a geis, has awakened deadly powers that defy explanation, McKayla is forced to come to terms with what is real and what is fantasy. A thrilling debut novel based in Celtic mythology, Awakening is a gripping young adult fantasy rife with magic, romance, and mystery.

Praise for Awakening

"AWAKENING is a wonder and a delight. Christy Dorrity is a talent to watch."
~David Farland, New York Times bestselling author of Nightingale


"I thoroughly enjoyed AWAKENING, a captivating and unique debut novel that creatively integrates Irish dance."
~ CHRIS NAISH, Riverdance member and Creative Director of Fusion Fighters Irish dancers.

About the Author

Christy Dorrity lives in the mountains with her husband, five children, and a cocker spaniel. She grew up on a trout ranch in Star Valley, Wyoming, and is the author of The Geis series for young adults, and The Book Blogger’s Cookbooks. Christy is a champion Irish dancer and when she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably trying out a new recipe in the kitchen.

Purchase Awakening by Christy Dorrity: