31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #20—The Inaugural Summer Nelson's Frozen Custard

Chocolate & chopped almond concrete. The best.

Last year's Thing #9 was the Inaugural Summer Snowcone, a tradition we have been planning to carry on everyday this week. And it is officially hot in Lubbock again, with temperatures reaching 101 degrees. Each time we've tried for snow cones, however, our efforts have been thwarted by a lack of time and the more urgent need to get Hollie fed, bathed, and put to bed. Yesterday proved no better, but we were determined to at least get to Hobby Lobby in order to stock up on future Awesome Thing crafts (top secret crafts! I'm giving out no secrets here!). Yesterday Holls came down with a cold that has left her extra fussy and sniffly, so there was that, too.

Hollie playing peek-a-boo while waiting for Dave.

Regardless, Hollie and I picked David up from school at 5:30 (dangerously close to dinner time for babies), and we decided to live life on the wild side by taking the sick and hungry baby with us to the craft store.

As it turns out, sick and hungry babies LOVE Hobby Lobby, so David chased her through the aisles of cheap but very breakable (and dangerously overcrowded) displays of kitsch while I gathered some necessary supplies for one of the above-mentioned top secret crafts. Then Dave and I swapped roles (one of our many family mottoes is "We Take Turns.") and I chased Hollie around while David gathered the necessary supplies for the other top secret craft. It was easy to find each other because Holls couldn't stop squealing with glee as she charged down the aisles pointing at shiny things.

Anyway, we would have hit up Bahamabucks for some snow cones at that point, but Target was our next stop and Nelson's Frozen Custard was on the way. Inaugural frozen custard it is!

So we charged through the drive thru, ate our ice cream in the car on the way to Target, and quickly snapped some photos of ourselves doing Awesome Things fast-and-furious style. There was no lovely sitting around at the park gazing into each others' eyes like last year, but hey: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't decide to eat frozen custard in the car every once in a while, you might miss eating frozen custard at all. (And yes, that is my terrible bastardization of a Ferris Bueller quotation.)

Dave said, "Quick, let's take pictures of us getting ice cream," but I didn't have my ice cream yet. So this is my "I don't have ice cream yet and you do" face.

This is David's "I have my ice cream already but you don't" face. He likes to get the cupcake-in-a-concrete one where a whole cupcake gets tossed into the mix. He's always disappointed that there's not more cakey bites, though.

Hollie refused to eat any frozen custard, so we bought her some sandals at Target for her "treat." Poor little sick baby. What she really needs is some good food and some good sleep, but this baby hates to eat and sleep when she is sick. I'm currently listening to her unsuccessfully falling asleep in the next room. It's breaking my heart. I hate feeling so helpless.

Hollie with her new shoes. She's not really interested in picture-taking when she's feeling sick.

She is, however, very interested in having little flowers on her sandals. 

Bonus picture: Hollie likes to play with the Photo Booth on my computer, so we were taking pictures to send to David during his class yesterday (payback for all the cute pictures they always send me when I'm stuck at school), and Hollie burped midway through the photo shoot. We've taught her to cover her mouth and say "excuse me" after burping (which she thinks is a super hilarious concept), so this is her post-burp. Poor little sniffling polite baby.

Quilt update: Three more rows sewn and no curse words! David gave me the brilliant idea of just sewing straight through each block and tying up the ends rather than trying to reverse stitch (which is what causes all the clogs and bent needles). I'm using a slightly less heavy thread this time, too. 

I also started reading (for my qualifying exams) Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies about some women putting together a quilt only to find that their box of materials is actually a box of fragmented manuscripts. So they end up sewing together a bunch of little stories (that are actually quite terrifying and gruesome—at least the ones I've read so far). I'll finish it tonight. It's one of those texts that no one has thought to publish since the eighteenth century, so I have to read it online (with those long s's that look like f's. I love those). Anyway, it's been a nice accompaniment to my actual patch-working during my reading breaks.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go see about rocking a sick and angry baby to sleep.

David was going to blog this up, but I gave him the night off again to do more real work. We'll make him blog next.

Thing #20: Welcoming in the first real summer heat wave with a frozen treat = ACCOMPLISHED.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #19—Revisit the Denim Quilt Project

Note the book I should be reading (Daniel Defoe's Roxana—it's scandalous! It's also delightfully shorter than most of the novels I have to read before July 9th) waiting for me on the arm of the sofa and the next episode of Arrested Development waiting for us on the television.

Last year our Awesome Thing #26 was A Quiet Evening At Home, in which I cut out denim squares for a quilt, and David and I watched Sleepless in Seattle. Since then, I have finished cutting squares, but I haven't done anything with them yet. So even though last night I didn't necessarily finish my quilt, I at least revisited the project and made enough progress to inspire me to keep working on it. If you are like us at the Grover house and have a million projects that get started but never quite get completed, then you will know just how awesome it feels to open up that cold case, as it were, and bring the project to life again.

David helped me lay out the fabric squares while we worked our way through another couple of episodes of Arrested Development. I should add here, and I hope this is not a spoiler for anyone planning to watch this latest season who are somehow even further behind than David and me, that before we watched the third (fourth?) episode, I told David that I hoped both Scott Baio and Andy Richter would make appearances at some point in the new season. That very episode not only did Baio and Richter show up, but Conan O'Brien was in it, too. Triple win with a bonus!

Unfortunately, I was all downhill from there. David and I worked together to get the sewing machine back in working order. It's lovely to marry a man who already owns denim sewing needles. We had some really thick blue thread that we thought would be nice and strong, too. It was just a step or two down from fishing line, to be honest, and the sewing machine hated it. After the fifth knot or so, I reached my rage point and starting cussing, and finally sent David downstairs to work on the online class he is teaching (in addition to everything else on his plate this summer).

David was obedient (he knows how insanely unreasonable I get when I hit my rage point), and I spent the following two hours acting like the father from A Christmas Story when he is trying to fix the heater vent.

I should mention here that I really don't like swearing. I usually regret it, and I don't like hearing other people swear. And there are definitely more swears that I choose not to say out loud than swears I do say out loud. I tried to keep most of the words in my head, but the poor sewing machine was an unfortunate recipient of all kinds of terrible curses, both real and made-up. David could hear me in the room over and wisely chose to stay quiet for fear of directing my attention toward himself.

I recalled the passage in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath when Tom Joad narrates the sensitive touch of the jalopy they were driving across the country, and how the whole car would fall to pieces if he didn't give the gas pedal the exact pressure at the exact angle or if he shifted his weight too far to one side or the other. You had to learn your jalopy, master it, break it like a horse, and then it could do your bidding. I felt the same way sewing these denim patches with that ridiculous blue fishing line. After two hours and a huge ball of thrown away string later, I had sewn two rows of my quilt. Only ten to go (and then I'll sew all the strips together, and then I'll have to, you know, actually make the &$@# quilt).

In the time it took me to cuss up a gust and sew two measly rows of quilt, David put together an incredible narrated PowerPoint (with elegant and useful animations) for his online students—a remarkable feat with almost no fanfare, and I don't even have a picture of it to show here next to my @#%$ quilt.

You would think that hearing your wife cuss like a cabin boy while she is supposed to be experiencing the joy of 31 Awesome Things would put a husband in a similarly foul mood. Instead, he came to bed while I was fuming over Defoe's Roxana (who really is a terrible, terrible heroine with zero morals—this was also making me want to cuss), kissed me on the forehead, told me he loved me, and said goodnight. It was hard to fume after that. Perhaps tonight I'll try kissing the sewing machine on its forehead (which I figure is somewhere in between the Reverse button and the bobbin threader) and see if that brings me any better results.

All that cussing, and only two rows sewn. Perhaps tonight I will fare better, now that I know what I'm up against.

In any case, Thing #19: Revisit the Denim Quilt Project = officially ACCOMPLISHED (well, the revisiting part anyway—we still have a ways to go on it)

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #18—Make Memorial Day Memorable

On Memorial Day we ran a charity 5K and ate Indian food with professors and friends that evening. David blogs about it here.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #17—Go "Stargazing"

David looking slightly maniacal in front of a sunset that was much more beautiful in person. Taking pictures of sunsets is so futile, at least with my camera lens.

Today was quite awesome. Dave had his weekly Sunday morning meeting at church from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m., then he came home and picked up Hollie and me for church from 10:00 to 1:00, after which we rushed home, heated up a frozen pizza, and David left for his summer seminar class from 1:30 to 5:30. He came home just as Hollie and I were getting bored of each other, and we headed to the kitchen as a family to make delicious Sunday evening Spam breakfast sandwiches (it was a Gilliland tradition for my dad to make Spam sandwiches every Sunday afternoon, so the dish was in honor of him, slightly improved with English muffins and scrambled eggs).

Next, we bathed Hollie, watched an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba with her, sent her off to bed, and watched an episode of the new season of Arrested Development on Netflix. Our friend Jo came to babysit a sleeping Hollie as the credits rolled, and that's when our actual official awesome Thing #17 began—stargazing at the Lubbock Lake Landmark.

Standing in front of the mastodon statue. This is how I posed after David told me, "Try not to look so pregnant."

Lubbock Lake isn't so much a lake anymore as it is a big empty dirt hole filled with cactus and jackrabbits. The Graduate Student Council had put together a night of stargazing with all-you-can-eat free popcorn, organic suckers, and watery pink lemonade.

We were promised the chance to see "Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury performing an intricate dance," but the sky was nearly completely overcast, so we ended up standing around, chatting, running into old friends, and looking at helicopters through our binoculars.

Can you see the two rabbits?

Anyone know what these squash are that look like baseballs or giant eggs? This plant was growing everywhere and was one of the only plants that didn't have a corresponding plaque to identify them. They have to be some kind of gourd, but what kind?

While walking around the dirt-pit-that-was-Lubbock-Lake, we ran into some good friends, Amelia and Kellyanne.

Then, even more randomly, we ran into more of our good friends, the Bludorns, who just happened to visit the Lubbock Lake Landmark on a whim (having never been there before), and who had no idea that anything special was happening there that night. These two are opening up a Pie Bar in Provo this summer, so my Utah friends should take note. We tried some of their wares—it's mighty good.

In spite of not seeing the planets dance, we did see the Gemini Twins peeking through a small opening in the clouds, and we also spotted one of those stars that flicker different colors. And it was great to serendipitously run into random friends.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have fifty more pages of a 900-page novel to finish up before going to sleep. We have a 5k in the morning that I plan to waddle through, so going to bed before midnight is in my best interest.

Thing #17—Gaze at stars and see a few of them = ACCOMPLISHED.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #16—Feed Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches to the Mormon Missionaries

Jeni's ice cream will change your life forever.

Today we made homemade ice cream from the ice cream maker Davey gave me for my birthday. We pulled the recipe for Lemon Cream Ice Cream from a Jeni's Ice Cream cookbook that Dave included as part of my birthday present. 

Here's a little something you need to know about Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream:

As a Masters student at Ohio University in Athens, David used to visit a Jeni's ice cream shoppe in Columbus, Ohio (which is where their business got started), and quickly found out how incredibly good ice cream can truly be incredibly good, in spite of his own quasi-lactose-intolerance. He used to tell me about how someday he would take me there and purchase all kinds of exotic ice creams for me—flavors like Brambleberry Crisp, Pistachio and Honey, Wildberry Lavender, Goat Cheese with Red Cherries, Savannah Buttermint, Black Currant Vanilla, and Salty Caramel. Just talking about the flavors makes you feel poetic.

When David and I got engaged, he found out that the vague specifications I had given him for the ring I really wanted (emeralds—small; nothing raised up...nothing that could snag on a sweater or keep me from climbing a tree; you know, simple) gave him some leftover money that he wanted to blow on me somehow. He decided if he couldn't spoil me with diamond rings, he would spoil me with ice cream. The week after we got engaged in my hometown in Utah, David had to go back to Athens to graduate and I had to go back to Rexburg to teach classes. It was a crummy separation, but we were sort of used to it considering our entire courtship was a primarily epistolatory one (interspersed with the most exciting travel weekends of my young life). It was hard driving back to southeastern Idaho alone, even with my glittery green friend keeping me company on my finger. So it was ultra lovely to be surprised with an entire case with a half-pint of every current Jeni's flavor on my doorstep, in a package filled with super science-y dried ice packaging technology that kept the ice cream safe from its travels from Columbus, OH, to Rigby, ID.

The ice cream lasted me until David and I were reunited again. I had a spoonful of each flavor everyday, like a countdown calendar for when we could actually live in the same town together for the rest of our lives.

The ice cream maker = my new best friend.

Anyway, the ice cream means something. And Jeni of Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream is lovely enough to sell a book with all her secret recipes. And let me tell you—her lemon cream ice cream is killer good. Almost too good to share.

Thick, creamy, cool, lemony, and delicious. 

Our adorable elders, as chipper and goofy as they come. Ah, it makes me envious (except I remember how much work missionaries do all day, and that makes me tired, too. Tired and envious).

But we did share it—with the above two Latter-day Saint missionaries, or elders, who are serving in our area. David is the ward mission leader for our congregation, meaning that he meets with the missionaries once a week and finds out who they are teaching so we can get church members to reach out and make these investigators feel welcome when they visit church (or, even better, to find church members who can come to the missionary lessons and help answer questions. 18- and 19-year-old missionaries work very hard to know their stuff, stay close to God, and keep themselves worthy of doing good and being good, but it is still nice to be able to ask questions to local members with a few more years of life experience under their belts, too).

We love our missionaries, especially for their goofiness (they're still primarily between the ages of 18–23, after all), their optimism, their devotion, their humility, and their desire to live for two years for everyone else but themselves. David and I both served LDS missions, too—Dave served in South Korea and I served in Japan. We both know how hard, how taxing, how exciting, how exhilarating, how loud and quiet and sad and happy and frustrated and glowing and homesick and adventurous and clear and muddy and up and down it can be. We both have had recurring dreams of being back on our missions again, and wake to a sense of responsibility and duty that sort of throws our day off when we realize just how selfish our lives have become in comparison.

Much of the world's picture of Mormon missionaries is nothing more than suits and bike helmets, cheery smiles and endless copies of the Book of Mormon in their backpacks. What most people don't see is the amount of time each companionship spends on their knees, praying for people they genuinely love—people they most certainly would never have met without a responsibility to open their mouths and meet people in every conceivable place and way.

Companionships live on their own, and there is never much money or time to make treats. It is therefore always completely satisfying to feed the elders or sisters good food. Tonight we fed our missionaries homemade lemon cream ice cream with homemade ginger molasses cookies. If there is one thing about missionaries, they love to express their gratitude for everything. So I don't know whether we shared these cookies with the elders because we are nice folk, or if we just really wanted to hear how awesome and "sick" we were for making such ridiculous delicious foods. I gave them a second helping just to hear them praise my master skills some more.

Feast your eyes, folks: Chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies with Lemon Cream Ice Cream. Boo-yeah, as Dave would say.

Seriously, though. I remember a time when I was a sister missionary, on a day that had been very hard. My companionship and the local male companionship had met with our own Ward Mission Leader that morning, and the friction that had risen between myself and the senior companion of the male companionship over English classes we had been co-teaching (as a local free service that also happened to introduce the community to our church building) made itself painfully apparent. Our mission leader noticed and suggested that in order to be worthy of God's guidance, we needed to make things right between ourselves. At that point, the elder I was fighting with said something that set me off and I burst into tears, completely embarrassing myself and frustrating myself. If there was ever a sister missionary I didn't want to be, it was a crying one. The meeting ran out of time before the issues could be resolved, and I left feeling hurt, frustrated, ashamed, and crummy.

My biggest fear was that I had lost the trust of my mission leader, whom I really admired. (It's funny to remember how wizened and mature I found him, as I am surely older now myself than this mission leader was at the time I served in his community.) I didn't want him to think of me as a weak girl or—even worse—a bad missionary. I certainly felt like a weak missionary that day. I felt like if I were worthier or worked harder, I wouldn't have reason to doubt myself or struggle at all.

That evening, my companion and I were planning out the next day's lessons and discussing our different investigators' various questions and challenges, when there was a knock at the door. It is ironic, maybe, that for as many doors missionaries knock on during the course of a single day, they almost never get any visitors to their own apartments. Perplexed, we went to the door and were amazed to see my mission leader and his family standing on our very narrow front stoop. In my mission leader's hands was an entire beautiful strawberry cream cake, and the saran wrap was covered in heart-shaped cards that he and his family had made for us, telling us how much they loved us and were grateful for us. (To understand how incredible this was, keep in mind that most Japanese houses do not have ovens. They almost surely had to bake this cake at the church with ingredients extra expensive in Japan.)

I still have the cards they made (well, half of them. My companion took some, too, I think. I hope). We had them taped to our wall until I finally transferred to a different area in Japan. I remember weeping that night over thick slices of strawberry cream cake, this time with tears of incredible gratitude and fellowship.

If you want to know the truth about me and church, you should know that one of the reasons I believe in Christ's Atonement is that I have no other explanation for that incredible clean, bright, warm, heart-burning feeling that comes from being a part of communities of people that genuinely love and care for each other. Being Christ-like, to me, is realizing that it is worth it to make a strawberry cream cake for two sister missionaries who will likely only live in your city for six weeks anyway, because you love them and you saw that they had had a rough day. It's about seeing people and then seeing yourself and your own potential for being a friend.

I'm mostly crummy at it, especially with qualifying exams breathing down my throat. But hopefully these ice cream sandwiches and the conversations we had over them with these two elders serving very far from their homes are at least a step toward becoming the kind of person that made me feel loved as a sister missionary.

In any case, Thing #16: Feed missionaries some homemade ice cream sandwiches = ACCOMPLISHED.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #15—Mend a Grover

Hollie with her Grover, me with my Grover.

So, here's the thing:

When I was a kid, my stuffed animal of choice was my Grover doll. But it went beyond "favorite toy." An attempt at saying the word "Grover" was one of my first attempts at speaking, period, and it came out something like "Goh-dee-goh." When I got older, I was pretty much 96% sure that my doll was alive. I worried that Grover couldn't eat on his own, so I would smash soft foods against his lips and give him sips of water (to the point that his head would sometimes be completely waterlogged). You can still see faint stains on his lips from chocolate pudding. 

I took Grover with me everywhere—on trips, to Grandma's house, to the store. I took him to college with me. I took him with me on my LDS mission to Tokyo, Japan. I didn't take him on my honeymoon, but he certainly had his place in our first apartment, and in every place we've lived in since. When I told my family I was seriously dating a man named Grover, my sister joked, "So, do you call him Goh-dee-goh?"

It is true how bizarrely unlikely and random it is that I would end up marrying the namesake of my first true love, and perhaps Dave's last name did give me that extra nudge of encouragement to send him a semi-cautious-flirtatious email after our first meeting each other, in spite of the fact that he was living in Ohio and I in Utah, with zero plans to ever happen to run into each other again. I'm so glad I did send that email, and I'm so glad that Dave was just as risky and adventurous in terms of long-distance love as I was. And that is maybe how the muppets brought us together?

(Side note: David once told me that he feels an extra special kinship to Grover because the two of them both have sort of sad, sleepy, droopy eyes. It is one of my favorite things about David, and I know I will watch for the same droopy eyes in our children.)

Dave's droopy Grover eyes, circa the time I first met him. What a mane, am I right? If it wasn't his surname that first got my attention, it was definitely all those gorgeous curls.

My Grover doll, 30 years of wear and tear later, still finding himself cuddled up next to a toddler in a crib on occasion.

Anyone with favorite dolls or toys will likely empathize with me about having these favorite friends undergo "surgeries" when a limb or an eye falls off, or a dog chews it up, etc. For my Grover doll, the result of so much love and so many washes (after getting peed on so many times) was that he would sometimes lose the pupils to his eyes. They would rub right off until his pupils were nothing more than a few black residue spots of paint. I remember periodically taking my Grover to my mom and asking her to draw his eyes back on so he could see again. All she would do was take a magic marker and freehand black pupils onto the white plastic eye disks, but to me it was legitimate healer's work.

Hollie's first injured toy—a ripped seam down her own Grover's back.

Last week, Hollie's Grover also got hurt. I'm not sure how it happened, but a seam popped in his back and all his poor little back stuffing started to come out. I found Hollie in a room with her little brush trying to brush the cotton off a few days later. I kept trying to hide Grover until I got around to sewing him back up, but Hollie always managed to find out where he was hidden and demand him back. In fact, seeing her Grover doll out of reach made her want him around even more, and the back gash expanded in the following days.

Tonight was the night I decided that Grover should finally undergo surgery. I inherited the sacred title of Master Mom Healer. I will make this doll whole again. And that is at least awesome enough to be Thing #15, in my opinion.

The surgery (avert your eyes, my squeamish muppet readers!).

A complete recovery is expected, after Hollie can cuddle some love back into him tomorrow morning.

My little patient acting brave for the camera.

Sometimes I don't really feel like a mom—I feel more like a kid who lives with her best friend and made a baby with him that we play with all day and makes sure she eats and sleeps and bathes. I know that that technically makes me a mom, but that doesn't mean I feel like a mom. When I remember how I saw my mom as a kid, I remember how invincible, brilliant, smart, wise, witty, safe, helpful, and all-knowing she was (and often still is). My mom could solve any problem. She made me feel safe and at home. I completely trusted her to draw eyes back on my magical living stuffed animals. She always knew what to buy at the store, she always knew how to fix us when we got sick or bruised up, and she was there for every nightmare, bad day at school, and hurt feeling. (She was much more than this, too, but when you're a kid you have a very limited perspective of life and the people in it.)

Anyway, I don't feel like that kind of person at all. When Hollie had a fever last month, David and I looked at each other in sheer helplessness. Taking her temperature was a joke. Watching her eyes weep in utter agony over how crummy she felt was heart-melting. Also, I never go to the store (Davey does all the shopping). I feel like I follow a different time schedule every day, and I often have no idea what to feed Hollie for lunch and end up foraging with her on cheese cubes, grapes, peas, and ripped up sandwich meat. Sometimes I am terrified that Holls's safety lies in my own imperfect and frequently clumsy hands. I don't feel at all like what I thought moms feel like.

But I admit: Sewing up Grover's back tonight made me feel like there is hope for me yet. Mending a favorite toy (using a needle and thread, no less—the very icon of domesticity!) at least makes me feel useful, even if it doesn't make me feel invincible.

So Thing #15: Mend a Grover = ACCOMPLISHED.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #14—Paint Each Others' Toenails

Is anyone else besides me super jealous of Dave's tan lines?

David mentioned in one of his recent blogs how busy we've been so far this summer. In fact, the Houston trip has really been our only respite (and even that trip was full of studying for qualifying exams, grading final essays, and wrapping up final projects). We really want our 31 Awesome Things challenge to push us out of our comfort zones, preferably in ways that make us more useful, generous, and better friends/neighbors/people. There are so many opportunities to do good, and we feel so blessed beyond our capacity to even appreciate all the good things we have in our lives.

This Thing, however, is not one of those do-goodery Things. It is completely self-centered around our own beauty and hygiene—namely, the beautification of our toes.

Yesterday got swept away in dentist's and doctor's appointments, and today we had to tackle our ant/mouse problem in the kitchen, plus David has that daily four-hour summer seminar (which entails working with the local weather station at the Science Spectrum, so he had the full scoop on all nearby tornado warnings today). Holls and I picked up David from school just as the latest dust storm/haboob rolled in, and we made our way through the grit and sand (think Tatooine) to Target to buy some new pajamas for Hollie and some nail polish for our Awesome Thing #14—Painting each others' toenails.

I'm getting too pregnant to reach my feet very easily, so Dave and I took turns painting each others' toes while listening to the thunderstorm outside and watching Drop Dead Fred on Netflix (more on that in a minute).

A few secrets about the Grover family ought to be revealed in the telling of this story, and I have numbered them below:

1. David always used to paint his toenails in high school, usually a bright pastel or one of those color-changing paints (he immediately looked for those this afternoon, and I had to break it to him that, as far as I know, those went out with color-changing shirts back in the '90s). He wanted to go with a bright lavender (his favorite color), but thought that maybe as a 31-year-old male college professor he had better opt for a more muted purple. (I have some bright lavender polish on hand in case he changes his mind later this week.)
2. I never used to paint my toenails, and I can count on my fingers how many jars of nail polish I've owned throughout my lifetime. I've always been a bit ashamed of my feet, and I never wanted to call too much attention to them. Those kind of fears seem silly now that I'm 31. I realize now that people have better things to do than judge me for my feet. (And that's how David and I had completely opposite awakenings today about what it means to be 31.)
3. Yes, you are seeing clearly—David has webbed toes. It's why he can swim so much better than me (that, and I only know how to doggy-paddle). And I have gimpy midget pinky toes. Imagine poor David trying to paint those gimpy little shy pinky toes. It's practically impossible.

And people, I have to tell you something: it was awesome to paint my husband's toenails and have him paint mine. I had never paid all that close attention to David's toenails before, and it was surprisingly intimate to paint them purple with my tongue sticking out to keep from messing them up. It was even more fun watching him stick his tongue out to keep from messing up my toes (for the record, he painted my toenails way better than I ever paint my own). Maybe this is why some married couples massage each others' feet. I don't know. I think I prefer painting Davey's toes. To each their own.

As for Drop Dead Fred, it was an awful film that I never need to see again that I loved watching tonight. It was such a good bad film. Everything about it was unbalanced and bizarre, but Drop Dead Fred was disgustingly, weirdly attractive, and the main character girl was delightful. And who doesn't love Carrie Fisher playing everybody's best friend in the '90s? Nobody, that's who. The film was like a bad knock-off of Tim Burton, with special effects that were reminiscent of Beetlejuice, only worse and more disgusting. It also played on that old late-'80s/early-'90s plot device of the maniacal problem child.  And Jim Carrey's costume designer clearly took tips from Fred's red hair and green tux for the Riddler in Batman Forever. David and I both remember seeing bits of the film as kids and being unnerved at how much it seemed like a movie for kids but definitely wasn't a movie for kids. And I think it shares a soundtrack with another number of awful, disturbing films in the same era and genre—you know, stuff like Robin Williams' Jack and Martin Short's Clifford. What were you thinking, early '90s? Seriously.

In other words, it was the perfect ridiculous film for a perfect ridiculous Awesome Thing.

Thing #14—Celebrate the bonds of marriage by painting each others' toes = ACCOMPLISHED.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #13—Beat a Video Game

Read the full scoop on David's blog.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #12—Defeat a Migraine

David blogs about this one here. Check it out!

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #11—Attend a Suddenly Rescheduled Shindig

David blogs about this here. Check it out.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #10—Express Gratitude Through Cookies

Classic Molly. I wish I had the lips to pull off that pout.

Coming home to Lubbock was a bit dismal. Small black ants had moved into our kitchen while we were gone, and the mouse that David and I had guided out of our house a week earlier (David wielding a Swiffer and myself, a broom) had also returned, in spite of the trap we left for it (maybe it doesn't like peanut butter?). We have tried to just grin and bear it, but our trip to Houston was so fun that it is hard to face all the obligations and responsibilities we took a week off from.

We were also exhausted today. Hollie woke early—and cranky—and Dave and I took turns watching her and taking naps until she finally fell asleep herself right about the time we would be heading to church. We decided to let her sleep and went back to sleep ourselves. We spent the rest of the day sleeping, cleaning, and watching Disney's Robin Hood. It wasn't a bad day, but it also wasn't really "awesome."

This evening David went to an extra meeting at church about missionary work (Dave's current responsibility or "calling" in our local congregation is to work with the full-time "elders" or Mormon missionaries in our area. It is a lot of fun, but also a sort of heavy responsibility, and we're always wishing we could put aside more time to do a better job). While he was gone, I put Hollie to bed. David and I had talked about how the most awesome thing we could do today is just start saying thank you to all the good people of Lubbock who have helped us out recently (the list is long, and we are terrible at putting off thank you cards, mostly because we always want to thank people in epic ways and then never have time for "epic").

So I turned on Pretty in Pink and made some cookies for a family who have really gone above and beyond for us in recent weeks, and who even drove out to the airport when we returned home last night so Dave could return our rental car and we could forgo having to put Hollie back in her carseat after our nine-hour car ride earlier in the day. Plus, they turned on our sprinkler for us while we were gone, and the weeds growing in the backyard would certainly have died otherwise.

When Dave got home, I sent him off again with cookies, and then we ate the remaining ones and finished Pretty in Pink. Here are three things I have to say about that film:

1. Duckie is seriously the better catch than Blaine. That lip sync in the record store is hot. Most of my friends know my feelings about this and agree with me, but it can't be said enough. You should have stuck with Duckie at the prom that night, Molly! You just should have!
2. James Spader—also hot, in a terrible, terrible way. And how lovely to have the androgynous name of "Stef" only to be dating the equally sexy and terrible "Bennie," who is female. It's just perfect casting and perfect names. Furthermore, how can you take Stargate seriously if you've seen Pretty in Pink? James Spader is such a doof in Stargate. Don't tell my mom or my husband, but I hate that film.
3. Annie Potts will always make me want to watch Ghostbusters. I love her.
4. Okay, I actually have four things to say. I will watch and love anything with Molly Ringwald in it, and I wish wish wish wish wish there was a way that I could dress up as her for Halloween some year, but I just don't have the lips or the hair for it. I really want to dress as Molly Ringwald from The Breakfast Club and have David dress up as Judd Nelson, but I clearly would only be able to pull off an Ally Sheedy. Which is fine. But I'd rather be Ringwald.

Anyway, we have awesome friends and awesome family, and I'm glad that our night consisted of bringing cookies to the cookie-less in addition to disinfecting our kitchen floors with vinegar and Lysol.

To end, here is a video I took in Houston of Jon getting Hollie to dance by making her baby dance (not unlike a tiny voodoo doll, to be completely honest). If I were a real technological genius, I would have edited out my awful voice and cackle but I am no such genius. Hopefully my family will appreciate this video, though. It should be noted that this dancing went on for probably 30 minutes straight. Holls is lucky to have such great aunts and uncles.

31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #9—Host a Teetotaler's Drinking Party

The spread. The watermelon and pineapple were perfectly ripe—super delicious. 

Well, we made it back from our Houston trip. The drive was much faster coming home, somehow. Maybe it was the stuffed animal kitty that Momma Grover let Holls take home with her (whenever she would wake up prematurely from a nap on the ride home, she would start to cry, see her kitty, kiss it, shout, "MEOW!" and then fall back asleep. She slept for maybe four of the nine hours we drove home), or maybe it was just that David and I made efficient stops and chatted for most of the drive. In any case, we are home safe and sound, though missing Houston terribly. Our trip was very, very fun.

For the first time in Hollie's life, the trip was not only stress-free, but a stress-reliever. We remembered the last time we drove to Houston, making pit stops every three hours for Holls to nurse, and trying to keep her from having those diaper blowouts so prevalent during the first six months of babydom. She hated her car seat, had no interest in looking out the windows (not that she could see anything except the back of the seat), and then slept horribly once we made it to her grandparents' house. This time, she slept in a pack-'n'-play with almost zero fuss, and she actually took longer naps than she typically takes at home. She learned to climb up and down the stairs leading to toy room on the second level, and she learned to run around barefoot outside with the big kids.

It is nice to be home, but lonely, too.

Anyway, to avoid dwelling too much on how crummy it is to be planted directly in-between and too-far-away-from both of our families, here are some pictures of our Mocktail Party that designated the end of this particular Houston adventure. This was a reprise of our Thing #24 from last year, and I think it is quite likely that a Teetotaler's Mocktail Party is pretty much a Grover Family Summer Tradition at this point.

Dave's sisters brought the necessary crunchy-munchies and delicious home-made dips and cookies to complement the mocktails. And no Grover family get-together would be complete without a stack of board games, even if only half of us end up playing them.

Mixing some cocktails. The rules were that everyone had to (1) name their invented cocktail and (2) write down their ingredients so the recipe could be documented for our posterity. Unfortunately, the lovely people (for whom I am very grateful) who cleaned up after our huge mess (while I was blogging it up in the bedroom about the Palladium) accidentally threw away the stack of these ingredient lists with the rest of the trash.  

Jon sipping his "Fuzzy Memory." Jon, do you remember what you put in this? I'm assuming the "fuzzy" is peach juice? Leave what you remember in the comments and I'll edit this post from there. 

Whittney's "Something Sparkly," a citrusy mocktail with, I believe, an orange juice base, white grape juice, and either Ginger Ale or Sprite. Am I off, Whittney? I feel like there was a little more to it.

Angelo and his pineapple-inspired concoction. Does anyone remember what he called it?

Miss Mary, what was your drink name? It looks very cranberry. What did you put in that thing?

Claire's I remember—a Chocolate Fizz. Chocolate sauce, milk, and something else—what was that final ingredient? It made all the fizzy difference as I recall. I wish I had those recipe sheets! 

Charlotte's "Something Awesome." The list of ingredients was admirably complex, but the part I remember the most was the final touch of a syrupy hibiscus blossom which added a hint of the Hawaiian tropics to this fruity drink.

Jen's "Garden of Eden." A blissfully sinful mixture that, knowing Jen, almost surely had its base in Coca-Cola.

Liz showing off "Yo Granddad's Clothes." The process for this drink was lengthy and very scientific. A lot of fruits were soaked in this drink only to be removed and replaced with new fruits for a complex medley of nuanced flavors that together really packed a punch. Or something. What all did you put in Yo Granddad's Clothes, Liz?

Aw, geez. David is two rooms away but I am too lazy right now to go find out what this shot was called and what it consisted of. I'll edit this post tomorrow after church. It's midnight and I wanna go to bed.

This is mine—the "Muddy Surfer." I remember giving it a Coke and orange juice base, with a little cranberry and little more pineapple. It was a dirty tropical masterpiece. I'd drink it again. Sure.

Gabe going after the maraschino cherries.

Sarah and her "Watermelon Crawl." She mashed up watermelon for the base of this delicious drink. It really was delicious. She made everybody drink some, and we really were literally impressed. In fact, I think next year we should start making everyone submit a thimbleful of their drink for an Official Drink-Tasting Contest, complete with glittery prizes. Sarah's "Watermelon Crawl" would have been a competitor for sure. Jamba Juice would sell the junk out of that drink.

Gabe's "Sine," which I take it is a calculus reference/joke? What are you all teaching this young man, Jen and Andy?

David's second drink, complete with sugar rim. It was good. Too sweet for David. Not too sweet for me.

Little Andrew and his "Your Mommy," which is somehow too endearing of a title to be insulting.  I wish I could see what ingredients he had listed on the back of that card!  

Luke drinking somebody else's drink that he found, haha.

Cute Claire's second, and more fruity attempt: "Watermelon Awesomeness."

This one threw up at our drinking party last year while eating watermelon before really getting that whole solid food thing down. This year, she ate the crap out of watermelon, and then downed an entire chocolate chip cookie singlehandedly. She seems so petite next to the other kids, I have wild and crazy desires to just beef up those little ankles and thighs as fast as I can!

That's all, folks. If anyone can remember what they put in their drinks, let me know and I'll edit accordingly. 

Also, I've got a video of Jon making Hollie dance like a maniac that I'll post tomorrow. I'm beat. To our Houston family: thanks for a super fun week, and for taking turns watching Hollie for us. We miss you all already. 

Thing #9: Host a Teetotaler's Drinking Party, again = ACCOMPLISHED.