Wednesday, July 27, 2016

this is 40


a few months ago i read an article in the wall street journal about an annoying trend of people who have month long, multi event birthday celebration extravaganzas with multiple outfit changes and different activities for different tiers of friends. what the what? first of all, tiers of friends? like friends with all their teeth and friends who are dentally challenged? what do that mean? how do you have tiers of friends? how do you even decide that? if you're sitting around making lists of tiers of friends, perhaps you have enough time to do genealogy or emergency preparedness. for the record, i prefer genealogy over the term family history any day. my blog, my choice!
i digress.


thomas turned 40 last saturday. it was the most low-key, chill birthday of all time. no tiers of friends whatsoever and only one outfit change because he had to go to the DMV. and both outfits included his sporty arm sling because he had a pretty bad bike accident last week when his handlebars slipped off his bike and he took a pretty bad fall. add insult to injury, he was just up the street from the house going down a rather steep hill and the bike tire was so damaged that he had to drag that bike home behind him. in the dark. it turns out all his whining and crying is a sprained shoulder and a broken collarbone. this is 40! it was pretty horrific and i gagged a lot when i saw the injury and he didn't like it very much either.

our typical birthday breakfast with gift opening. thomas likes surprises but he also likes looking at the bank account multiple times a day so that makes surprises difficult. my gem of a friend, paula, was willing to purchase all gifts and hid them at her house and i wrote her a check. thomas was ACTUALLY SURPRISED! especially since he had already bought a couple gifts for himself that i didn't know about. 


new lawyerly wingtips for work. this is 40.

 classic reagan line, "oh look, dad, there're two in the box!"



 thomas is nice enough to let his kids help him open his presents. i am never that nice, or that injured. it helps that he's practically an invalid these days. hope i don't have to shoot him.

my piece de resistance birthday gift, a replica of the original herschel walker UGA jersey. i was hoping he would wear it to the DMV for his picture, but he was afraid that he would get mobbed by people thinking he was the actual herschel walker. 




another surprise was jack stack barbecue, shipped from kansas city. divine.
"put this food in my mouth!!!!!!"- thomas simpson, 40 years old

his other birthday gifts included buying a used weight bench from our neighbor. i also bought him chocolate milk and doritos, because i normally make a point of not buying those things. 

i took this investigative journalistic secret photograph of thomas lovingly putting his birthday grill cover on his grill. this is 40.


 later, he took his top tier kids to the movie theater to see "finding dory". this is 40. it was a gift to me too as i was alone with hersch for the afternoon and he took a nap. i made pie and explored new musical groups on youtube. this is 36.

the party continued. 

athena blythe's popcorn bowls


strawberry pie and singing after church on sunday.

and gross store bought cupcakes for the less discerning palate. 
the end

Thursday, July 21, 2016

son of a beach


it already seems like it was too long ago! my extended family had reunion in destin, florida over the last week of june. this is YUGE for a few reasons:

1. the beck family i grew up in did not take beach trips. we did educational trips(civil war sites and washington DC), spiritual trips (LDS church history sites from independence to kirtland to nauvoo to upstate new york) or educational/spiritual/family reunion trips(yellowstone, bear lake) on the way to utah to solidify our desire to go to BYU. all great trips, i do feel like there was also a desire for a family trip to the beach. once we stopped at the beach at lake erie and thought we had died and gone to heaven. same for the afternoon we spent at virginia beach during our washington dc trip. 

2. the beck family i grew up in did not stay in "fancy" places. one thing i admire about my parents is their desire to never overspend but that also meant a lot of interesting vacation accommodations. if you feel so inclined, google camp meade in middlesex, vermont. that place is legendary in my family. the beck kids are by no means snobs. 

when my mom said she wanted to rent a house on the beach in destin, florida, i knew that the end of days must be nigh! it was such a wonderful trip. destin is a jewel of a beach. very few activities were actually planned and instead we were simply able to reacquaint ourselves as a family, all while wearing swimsuits and shaking sand out of personal crevasses. it's no small feat for us to get together as so many of us live in far flung locales, 3 families in utah, 1 in in north dakota, 1 in florida and our family here in georgia. 

day 1. thomas had some last minute work assignments pop up, so i drove the bulk of the family and luggage down to the beach house. 

this is how reagan spent the majority of the drive down. under a blanket watching his favorite movies, including home alone, in his "movie theater". kind of makes me want to barf, be he was 100% fine with it.

we stopped for lunch at a quaint local place featuring local fare in opelika, alabama.

my windshield has been cracked for years. at this point i had been telling the kids we were about to stop for a bathroom for about an hour. it only took another hour for that to be true.

after arrival, the ladies in the group headed over to walmart, with EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON in destin and grabbed groceries for the week. i think we ended up with 7 heads of romaine lettuce. 



thomas arrived around midnight that night and got up early the next morning for a conference call. have i talked you out of law school yet? 


the next several days was mostly various stages of undress at the beach. 




probably the undisputed highlight for my sister heather and myself was the fact that all our kids got up at 6am on the dot. EACH DAY! once it was 5am! we all stayed in bottom floor of the beach house(the happening autism floor, as all three families downstairs has a child with autism! cue the fire alarms!) then we had to appease everyone until the upstairs floor of the beach house unlocked their door so that we could bother them. even 6am at the beach looks amazing!

in the evening, we had different adult activities. heather and i put together a game reminiscing our childhood in blue springs, missouri, called memory memory. we tried to include as many wacky, crazy, funny things that we experienced growing up. we truly grew up in a neighborhood and church ward with some of the most extraordinarily strange and incredibly wonderful people. we laughed and cried and told ridiculous stories and probably alienated our in laws with our delightfully imaginatively weird childhood.



we celebrated scarlett's birthday again with a subpar ice cream cake. she still has young, underdeveloped taste buds so she was okay with it.

one of the best parts of my childhood, sandy shakes, or milkshakes made by mom. she does it just right. no mixer, just a spoon, some milk and a splash of vanilla. i had 2 and i'm closeted lactose intolerant.

babe of the whole beach.





our view each day.


a few of us went parasailing. this poor guy must be in a thousand family photo albums doing this same lame joke.


thomas and i had our turn. turns out parasailing is kind of like marriage, one big push off the boat and then smooth sailing for the rest of the ride. hahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahhahahahaha.

twins


family pictures went off without a hitch! naturally!







reagan did another performance of his fire safety puppet show. we limited it to 10 minutes and 8 songs. 

some of the audience had seen it a few times and a few newbies got to experience it for the first time. i bet they can't get the ditty, "don't play with ma-ah-tches" out of their heads.

grandma sandy passed out family awards. i don't appreciate my award because can only be so pleasant in the morning on so little sleep. nobody else knows the troubles i've seen. 

more exquisite views.



 thomas had $12 that he felt like burning or throwing in the garbage but instead he used this money to buy this hat and he wore it all day every day. 


on our last night FUNcle dan took us all our ghost crabbing. it was so fun to chase these scary little skittering creepy crabs around. 




the next morning heather and i ran around like crazy people trying to pack up our stuff while everyone else was cool as a cucumber. why is this? i was wiping sweat off my face every 5 minutes. i'm a professional mom and have been for 11 years now and i've still not mastered the art of the chill. scarlett and cousin whitney were doing a pathetic job on deflating an inflatable so i had to get down and dirty and show them how to use leverage and body weight to force the air out. i guess those little girls don't have enough "leverage" like i do. 


my dear sweet mother was chasing down each car that was leaving to make sure we had enough leftovers from the fridge for the drive home. those 3 heads of lettuce went to good use.



the only shot of our reunion t shirt that i got. "are we out of the driveway yet?" and a station wagon. just like old times.

we ate at longhorn steakhouse on the way out of town. for most of this summer, i've eschewed wearing makeup and i love it. that is until the end of day and i look in the mirror and wonder who this tired and sweaty lady is.


gas station in florida, full selection of jorts, or jean shorts, for the whole family. 


this darling boy was a dream on the drive home.


thomas was a champ and was a great bathroom supervisor. 

finally, this is how my dad would wear his sunglasses or regular glasses at the end of a long day. and now i do it too. hail to the dad. 

thanks to my wonderful mother for making this happen. it was incredible to be with family. when you don't live by family, get togethers are extra special. 

the end.