I thought you sent it

Basketball season is finally over, at least for my boys. And my husband.

For the past few months, Tim has coached the twins' rec league team, which means I acted as coach's assistant.

Recreational sports leagues are always in need of coaches, and now I know why. It takes the entire family to coach a kid's team.

We didn't really plan for Tim to coach. We just thought the older boys would be playing on a team together. But it ended up that most of the boys from the last team they played on moved to a different team, and my boys weren't invited.

Mason didn't really like that, so he started organizing his own team in the school cafeteria. I was just so excited that he was taking the initiative and organizing it all on his own that I didn't even really hear him when he casually mentioned that they would need a coach. Then my husband laid down some big boy challenge about how he'd coach if Mason brought him a complete roster.

So Mason did. The roster had 11 boys on it, which, if you know even a little bit about basketball, you know means Tim would have to work really hard to be sure everyone got playing time.

But it's the administrative side of coaching that does him in every time. In these modern times, coaches don't have to call each parent anymore. You can just do everything by e-mail, which is my preference anyway. At our house, however, the creation of our bball team coincided with the acquisition of my new laptop. So our e-mail communications suffered.

I'll just admit it. We never set up a basketball group, so every time I'd need to e-mail the team, I'd have to reinvent the wheel, searching my sent file or my deleted file for an previous e-mail we'd sent to the team. EVERY SINGLE TIME. A couple of times early in the season, we'd use a jump drive and travel from laptop to the old desktop to e-mail or print stuff. Total nightmare.

This wouldn't be so bad if we had joined the YMCA league, but we were playing in the West Nashville Sports League, which is huge and comprises hundreds of teams from all around Middle Tennessee. It also is operated pretty much at the discretion of its boss, so e-mails from him about game time or location changes are many and often.

In the end, it worked out fine. They boys played and had fun. We all adapted, and no one was out of the loop, despite our e-mail slackery.

Still, I'm betting it'll be a while before Tim volunteers to coach again.

Gender confusion

For the first time ever, I walked into a store and mistook men's clothes for women's clothes.

Yes, it's true. I don't shop very often. But I didn't think I was that out of practice!

I had gone to my local Stein Mart to exchange something. As I walked over to the customer service counter, I thought they had rearranged the store and put women's clothes where the men's department used to be.

The corner display featured Lucky jeans and shirts with pretty embroidery on the cuffs and pastel paisley prints. I honestly did not realize they were for men.

I tried really hard to find a photo of the Malibu Cowboy shirts so I could post it here and say, "Am I right?!" "And you'd go, "Yep. I'd pick that for a woman." The best I could find was this Lucky Brand shirt that is quite representative of the shirts in question.

It's really no big deal, I know. Even though I live in a very creative town and see so-called "music-industry types" with chunky, highlighted haircuts and contrast-stitched jeans, I'm married to a man who thinks turquoise blue is a very flamboyant color. So there are men around here who get haircuts that cost more than mine and wear boots with heels higher than mine. I just never actually found myself this ... confused.

I need to get out more often.

Christmas Eve Eve freakout

I was so worried about getting to Kroger early to beat the crowds that I left the house without my list. Those who know me know that I am helpless at Kroger without my list. I will just wander aimlessly throwing kumquats and garlic bread in my buggy.

I was NOT going to drive back home, so I had to call home and get one of my 13-year-olds to read the list over the phone to me. This was no ordinary list but a list that covered Christmas dinner plus regular meals for five people for four other days.

The kid translates fine except for my weird abbreviations: He really gets hung up on "crm of chkn."

I also happened to forget my Honeybaked Ham reservation number, but he read that to me too. After all was bought and done, I felt pretty blessed to walk out carrying a $50 ham for Christmas dinner.

And I did get back home by 10 a.m.

If it's on the counter, it's fair game

We have not reached the point in our family where I am responsible for cooking the entire Thanksgiving meal, but I do make some items to take the pressure off my mom.

Yesterday I made green beans from my Memphis Junior League cookbook, macaroni and cheese, and a tarte tatin for dessert. I'd swear that almost every time Mason, my hungry child, would walk through the kitchen, he'd point to something and say, "What is that? Can I eat it?"

Plain macaroni noodles? Sure. Cheese? Yes. Almond sliver? Go ahead. Sugar? Mm-hmm.

Phyllo dough out of the box? WAIT!

My Spell-Check is gonna hate this one

I have this weird fascination with how people choose their children's names. It had been a latent obsession until I saw the show Toddlers and Tiaras on TLC and noticed the high percentage of kid pageant contestants who have "misspelled" names.
How can someone's name be misspelled?, you ask. It's their name; can't it be spelled however their mama chooses? Yes, of course, but most of these names are just otherwise normal names that have been spelled almost phonetically, which, to me, is misspelling.
A pageant mom probably won't name her daughter "Brittany." She'll name her "Bryttanee." A most recent example straight from a T&T episode is Sparkal Queenz. I swear, I did not make that up. And I am not the only one who has noticed this. One person who really dislikes this trend has a blog called "I Hate Your Kid's Name." It is hi-larious, but it does not tippy-toe around the subject.
Another way odd names have popped into my life is on school worksheets. I remember when the twins were still in elementary school, the politically correct compulsion to use as many multicultural names as possible got out of hand. Just trying to fill in the blanks on a vocabulary sheet was like trying to read a chapter in the Old Testament. The boys would get tripped up by these out-of-the-blue names like, "If Akbar has two apples and he gives one to Elodie, how many does he have left?" Dick and Jane must be too old school.
I doubt Japanese students who are kicking our butts in math are reading worksheets that say, “Madisyn has five shelves that can hold eight paint cans each. How many cans do the shelves hold in all?”
In full disclosure, I must admit that in second grade I tried to change the spelling of my name and signed all my school papers, "Jyll."

Worlds Collide

On the Fourth of July I was trying to remember what we had done on the last major patriotic holiday, Memorial Day. Ah, yes! We celebrated it by finally attending the Tennessee Renaissance Festival.
I say finally because we’ve been avoiding it for the past 14 years or so. It is heavily advertised each May, and with Owen’s obsessive interest in weaponry and uniforms and his increasing ability to understand TV commercials, we were not getting out of it. It didn’t help that the twins kept singing the Free Credit Report.com renaissance fair jingle.
Two obstacles loomed: the ticket price and Tim’s lingering opposition to people in costumes yelling at him in fake accents.
Ticket price was a concern because adult admission was $18 each. That’s more than I want to spend on something I’m not sure I’ll enjoy. It’s a little easier to expand your cultural boundaries if you’re only going to invest a few dollars. Our family would have had to lay out more than $40, but we persisted. It was the event’s last weekend, and we were drawn in by the promise of a royal jousting tournament.
So here’s my suburban mom summary of the renaissance festival. If you do both the castle tour and the jousting tournament, it’s worth it. It’s not worth it just to laugh at the people in costumes because that gets a bit creepy after a while. It’s one thing when the players are in authentic renaissance-era garb. For some reason, though, the “come dressed as your favorite renaissance character” guidelines must have loosened to include any heavy-set woman who wants to put on a corset and those who wish they were pirates.
You have to deal with the corset crowd first because they do not care that the corsets push up not only cleavage but also back fat. I also doubt the Renaissance corset designers had to deal with this much body ink. The only place you’ll see more tattoos on women is Nashville Shores.
There are lots of guys who probably work at Subway during the week who come dressed like Robin Hood. Apparently, however, the pirate people have become such an issue at the renaissance festival that they now have an area called Pirate’s Cove, where they don’t seem so out of place. See, Captain Jack Sparrow did not live during the Renaissance, but that doesn’t deter them.
They do have some fun games like an ax throw, which is much harder than it seems, and cool booths that sell weapons, corsets and fairy stuff. ??
At any rate, we skipped the castle tour. I very much wanted to see it because Mr. Freeman built it himself, but I didn’t want to see it badly enough to wait in that hot line to ride an un-air-conditioned school bus/shuttle.
Trust me when I say that the jousting tournament made it all worthwhile. We all sat agog as world champion jousters (did you know they had those?!) really went at it. But I’m certain we said fare-the-well to the renaissance festival and won’t be going back anon.

I may frame it

During a recent game of Pictionary at my parents' house, this is what Owen drew to show "angry."