Scrapbooking can be hazardous

We narrowly averted some drama on Wednesday. I knew when I made the scrapbook page several years ago that it was risky. I felt like the story should be told though. The whole family knew it already but I wanted it preserved somewhere for historical purposes just in case I got hit by a bus.

I thought maybe I should hide the page away somewhere until Amanda was a bit older because my hope was that she’d be flipping through her books and reading these stories whenever she felt like it and I was already picturing the exact embarassing scenario that almost happened this week.

But knowing how un-sentimental my husband is, if I did actually get hit by a bus, any pages not permanently affixed to the scrapbook would certainly be lost in the Everything Must Go! sale that would be held while the funeral home was still trying to figure out how to disguise the tire marks on my forehead.

So I made the page and put it in her scrapbook and from time to time Amanda pulls the book off the shelf and asks me to read her the stories. I thought I’d only given her the very PG edited version of this particular story, but apparently she knew the specific detail I didn’t want her to know.

So as we were getting ready for school I suddenly remembered, “Oh, today’s your sharing day. Do you have something to share?” They called it show-and-tell when I was a kid, now it’s just “Sharing.” And before they reveal the item they give three clues about it and let their classmates guess what it might be.

Amanda pulled the hot pink stuffed frog out of her backpack to show me and said, “Yeah, I’m taking this and I already know my clues!”

I was only slightly nervous when I said, “Okay, let’s hear ‘em.”

She said, "Okay, 1) It’s pink. 2) It’s really soft. And 3) When I was little I couldn’t say its name right so I really embarrassed my mom in the middle of the store because I yelled out,
“Fok, Fok, FOKKKKKKKKK!!!”

"Umm, we're going to have to rethink that third one. Your principal seems like a nice guy but I don't really want to get a phone call from him today."

Crisis averted this time but there are years worth of opportunities for humiliation ahead of us. I don’t think it would have been as bad as the time the son of a distant relative announced to his classmates during show-and-tell that, “My mommy was wounded in battle!” and then pulled out a pair of his mommy’s bloody panties as evidence.

(In case you missed it, the original fokking story can be found toward the bottom of this post.)

Just hangin' around

Some kid on the jungle gym told me that if I just hang here like this for an hour a day, I'll grow up to be a
6-foot tall supermodel and I'll be able to buy sparkly shoes in every color of the rainbow.

A few quotes

"I don't wanna drink Amanda's water. It has Amanda's spit in it. I want my own water with my own spit in it to drink." - Alyssa

"I thought school was going to be exciting, like a theme park. It wasn't." Amanda, an old one I stumbled across from August 2008

My favorite phone call of the week happened after we repeatedly ignored calls from the same 800 number. Finally Scott answered, putting the call on speaker phone. It went something like this...

Telemarketer: Is Scott T*** available?

Scott: Why yes, I do happen to be available.

Telemarketer: Great, well this is some random person calling from some big credit card company and the purpose of this call is, first of all, to thank you for being such a loyal customer. We also want to let you know that we have noticed a continued rise in the crime of identity theft and we would like to let you know about some of the things we would like to do in order to protect you...

Scott: Okay but how do you know that I really am Scott T***?

Telemarketer: (long pause) Because you said you are.

Scott: Well that would be your first mistake. And I'm supposed to believe you're going to protect me from identity theft?

Telemarketer: Thank you. (CLICK!)

January and February 12 on the 12th

Okay so the goal here today was to just POST SOMETHING. So here it is.

In January I saw a post on Cara's blog about a photo project that she and some of her friends are doing. They're planning to take 12 photos on the 12th day of the month for the whole year. I have a hard time resisting photo projects so I just had to play too. Unfortunately the 12th of January had already passed and the thought of only 11 months worth of 12 on the 12th really bothered the insane little perfectionist that resides somewhere deep inside me.

Luckily a quick check of my photo archive revealed I'd taken plenty of photos on January 12th. That's when the insane little perfectionist completely took over and decided I would eventually want to turn the project into a photobook so she made the two layouts below. Nobody mention the typos to her. I'm sure she'll fix them eventually, but for now she's off duty. You should be able to click on the photos to get a bigger view.