One of the many (many, many, many) traditions tied to the girls’ soccer program at the high school is that when the girls become seniors, their families sport a gigantic sign of their daughter’s face as a baby at the official Senior Night game. It’s rather a pain in the neck to get these made, especially when they’re usually only used for one night, so this year they’ve cleverly decided to make the Baby Heads early so we parents can hoist our cutey-patooties above the bleachers all throughout the season.
Which means that Cute W and M have been sifting through old photos in search of possible favorite baby heads. Competition’s pretty stiff, but these were some finalists:
I believe that the highlighted one is going to be the winner. Anyway, you can already tell that this whole year is going to be one huge Nostalgia Roller Coaster. I mean, we’ve already had her pose in her cap and gown and now I will soon be the proud owner of my very own Baby Head sign? Just contemplating this got me a little verklempt. I am excited for her and her future, but also? I will be really, really sad to see her high school soccer career end. Heck, I was in mourning last year when the season ended. It feels like just yesterday that I was driving my middle schooler to go cheer on the varsity team at Senior Night, and I’d see these Baby Heads bobbing above the crowd and it seemed impossibly far away. And now here we are.
Along with finding baby photos, we’ve been busy this weekend recovering from yet another colossal rain storm. Years back, for Hurricane Irene, our power was knocked out and then the rainwater got dangerously high while the sump pump was out of commission. We lucked out and the power came back on for just long enough for the sump pump to fend off a flooded basement before we lost power again. Then we got a generator so that we’d be able to run the sump pump and maybe give the fridge a little juice if this happened again. Then, when the exact same situation occurred yesterday, the generator did not want to work. Since then, Cute W has spent a considerable amount of time sweating and cursing as he tries to fix the generator in the garage while I’ve been moving all sorts of things out of our flooded basement storage areas. It has not been awesome.
However, it’s caused me to do a bit of organizing that I would otherwise be able to ignore, so I guess that’s good, right? Well, it doesn’t feel all that great to me, but it worked out well for J.
That’s because one of the many things I’ve neglected to organize was a cardboard box full of packing slips and shipping bags that I’ve ignored since Christmas. You know what it’s like before Christmas: you’re rushing around, doing last minute shopping and cooking and baking and socializing and traveling. These days, my kids often put clothing on their gift lists, and usually I’m ordering it online, and often the packages arrive while the kids are in the house, and so I grab the merchandise and whisk it away into one hidey-hole or another. I open stuff up to make sure it’s not completely wrong, but then I don’t even sort through the extra packaging because it’s low on the priority list. But I also don’t want to throw away the packaging, because we might need to return something. So I squirrel it away somewhere in case of a return and I tell myself that I will get it organized as soon as everyone’s back in school in January. And then if I’m fortunate and nothing’s so wrong that we need to exchange it, I forget all about the stuff for, hmm, it’s been about 9 months now. Which is appropriate, because, through the painful labor of clearing out a half-flooded basement, I was able to produce something small and adorable:
A headband! One that J had specifically requested back in November, one that’s she’d pined for, which I somehow missed in my mad rush to unload the huge pile of stuff from American Eagle, and which has been lying safe and dormant in its packaging ever since. I’d felt really bad at Christmas because I knew she wanted the headband, and I could have sworn that I purchased the headband, but I couldn’t find it, and then it was out of stock. So J got a little bit of Christmas in August today.
She was psyched.
