Redneck Thanksgiving

I had such a relaxing Thanksgiving that I took only one photo the whole weekend.  And actually, I didn't even take the photo.  I merely handed my camera to someone and had them take it.  So for this Thanksgiving post I had to scrounge photos off my friends Facebook pages.  But I figured that since they tagged me in their Thanksgiving photos, it was fair play to grab them for my blog post.

For a long time our Thanksgiving celebrations were basically like the scene from Norman Rockwell's famous painting, minus me sporting a frilly white apron.  Clean white linens, Wedgwood dishes, and expertly folded napkins have slowly vanished from our Thanksgiving repertoire.  I confess it's rather shocking how easily my culinary passions were thrown aside for such an unlikely alternative.

  

These days, Thanksgiving dinner means gathering around plastic folding tables and eating from paper plates printed with fall motifs.  In fact, I don't even remember putting out napkins this year! (I'm suddenly a little alarmed.)

For several Novembers we've traded in the home-front for the beach-front and tried to camp out at the same spot each year in what's become known among our little Quad Squad as "Thanksgiving Point".

To pull this sort of Thanksgiving caper off there's some serious logistics and maneuvering involved.  The first stop is pulling our trucks and trailers into the parking lot near the beach where we air down our tires.  We purposely give ourselves flat tires.  Apparently this gives you more traction.  And traction is definitely what you need to get out of the parking lot and into our campsite.

Now that we've got 10 flat tires we're ready to make a run at "Thanksgiving Point".  This is when you stomp your foot down on your vehicle's accelerator and attempt to tow both the truck and trailer through the sand--all while maintaining a light enough approach to keep the contents inside the trailer's cupboards from flying off the shelves.

The goal is to reach "Thanksgiving Point" in hopes of setting up the perfect camp site right there on the sand.  In years past we've hauled our trailers in to find our little jewel of a campsite either flooded or taken by some other campers who caught wind of our totally secluded campsite, but this year it was all ours!

All four trailers look neatly parked in this photo but it really takes some doing to get everyone parked, leveled, and unpacked.  But once we're in, we're home for the weekend.  You'll know we've successfully set up camp when you here us fire up the generators, gas up the quads, and get our motorcycle gear on.  Miles and miles of dunes await. This is basically what we do for the rest of our stay...we ride...

This year Connor did some smooth talking and got Severin's parents to let him come out with us.  Here's the one picture I mustered up enough ambition to have taken.  I thought a picture of Sev looking ready to roll on a family ride would be a nice touch to send to his family on Thanksgiving...and to help document that their son hadn't broken any bones so far.

And the whole group enjoying a little welcome sunshine.

But for most of the weekend it rained--no make that poured, so we didn't ride as much as we normally do.  But I was content to sit back and read and watch movies all weekend and prepare for a grand Thanksgiving meal.

It was about this time I noticed a peculiar pattern has emerged at our Dunesgiving:  We've been getting more and more lax about our meal preparations.  Everything used to be homemade.  Last year I skipped making fresh rolls and just got the expensive store bought kind to save me some time.  This year I was even more lazy.  I made boxed mashed potatoes and another family served up stove-top stuffing.  A serious decline.  But really, not so bad when I realized how little time I spent this year cooking and how much time I spent reading.

The one tradition I haven't slacked on is my quirky need to bring a little civility to the dunes.  Seriously, when you find yourself setting out your Thanksgiving buffet table on a talegate, there's been a serious decline in your life.

Because I have this fear that Campouts and tailgates might begin to creep into ALL our other holidays I live with a small degree of panic that suddenly you'll find the Skillmans selling the family dinner table in order to buy more camp chairs just in time for Christmas or Easter!  So, in order to keep from crossing that fine line between camping out for one little holiday to living full-time in a trailer and eating EVERY meal on paper plates (can you picture us with mullets?), I have decided that there must be some small gesture at our little Thanksgiving feast that reminds us of the finer things.

This is why I bring my garden shears to the dunes each year.  I grab a motorcycle boot and fill it full of flora and fauna.  Everyone in camp thinks I'm crazy but I believe we're all just a few paper plates and plastic forks away from becoming Wal-Mart greeters.  So as long as I'm camping out on a holiday, there will be a little decorum.

So another Thanksgiving celebrated. This one more relaxing than ever. I hardly cooked, hardly cleaned, hardly rode quads even.  I just sat around all weekend and flipped through InStyle Magazine catching up on, of all things, the latest fashions--all while I was wearing my motorcycle gear (there's a conflict of interest for you).

And while I don't think Norman Rockwell would have based any of his paintings on our little holiday tradition, it sure has become the stuff great memories are made of.

Don't Leave a Message

The other night we found ourselves with a house full teenagers.  They announced it had been waaay too long since we'd gotten around the table and played any games so they decided that's exactly what they wanted to do.  Which was fine with us, since their usual pastime is raiding the fridge.

But instead of the usual repertoire of games we play, one of the kids said he had a new game for us to try and sent us to go get a bunch of scraps of paper and some pencils.

This little game night came with one very large consequence.  Instead of this game being fun recreation, it was more like a ghastly revelation. Low and behold we were publicly outed. Everyone there uncovered an awful truth about the Skillmans:

We stink at conveying a message.

I'm not sure what the game is called, you may have played it before but it's basically like playing "Telephone" except instead of passing a message on by whispering in someones ear, this game is played with paper and pencils.

It starts by writing down a quote or saying and then, at our house anyway, things quickly go down hill from there.  People take turns drawing what they read and then writing what they think got drawn.

Here's a sampling of three games we played:

Game One:

Mitchell wrote:

Mark drew:

I wrote:

(and not too shabby, eh!)

Peter drew:

Nick wrote:

Connor drew:

Chloe wrote:

Game Two:

Nick wrote:

Connor drew:

Chloe wrote:

Mitchell drew:

Mark wrote:

I drew:

Peter wrote:

and Game Three...

Connor wrote:

Mitchell drew:

Mark wrote:

I drew:

Peter wrote:

Nick drew:

Chloe wrote:

All fun aside, one thing is pretty clear:

If you call the house and whomever you wanted to speak to isn't home, DON'T LEAVE A MESSAGE, because chances are...the message we write down, is not likely to be the actual message you intended to leave.  

Do yourself and us a big favor...call back later.

Times Up!

I was picking up my nieces the other day at their house and came across these:

Apparently Chloe gave her two cousins Janelle and Madeline official membership cards to a Cousin Club.  My sister-in-law Wendy had already seen them and pointed out something I had missed at first glance, she said, "Did you notice that both of the cards have an expiration date?"

Hmmmm.  Very funny if you think about it.  On January 2nd 2011, Chloe's actual cousins won't officially belong to the Cousin Club anymore.  Times up!  That's it!

Wendy and I got a little carried away thinking about how much fun it might be to issue these types of cards to all our family members.  We wondered just who we'd give lifetime memberships to and just who, dun-dun-dun, would get cards with looming expiration dates on them.

The thought put a devious smirk on our faces.

Pint-Sized Plagiarizers

Parent Teacher Conferences are always an eye opener.  These little meetings are always a surprise.  Kinda like a parole board hearing, you're never really sure how it's gonna go.  With certain children in the house I go into these meetings fairly confident and with some of the other kids, well, I must admit I pre-medicate with  Alieve (that all-day strong stuff) just in case things take an unexpected turn.

These conferences are not unlike having your palm read.  There's a large amount of uncertainty that comes with the territory.  Almost always, there's at least one teacher who drops some sort of curious revelation about your kid that you just didn't know.  But this year it was not the teacher but my own kid that filled me in on his own scholastic scandal.

It was AFTER a middle school teacher conference, that was going really really well I might add, that I learned of a sneeky misdeed.  As I left  the classroom, intoxicated with relief, I made my way out into the hallway where my son pointed out HIS OWN misdeed.

He said, "Hey mom, see my math project there on the wall?"  He was pointing to the math project in RED:

He went on, "That's Sev's right next to mine in green.  He got a better grade than me and mine even had more detail than his."

"That happens sometimes," I reassured him.

"No mom.  Look at them closer," he said.

So I looked at Connor's...

Then I looked at Sev's...

"Uhhh, Sev sure writes a lot like you do," I say.

"Yeah, well, that's cause I wrote his for him."

Huh??

He sheepishly shrugged his shoulders, "Mom, I was at his house and he had to get all his homework done before we could go outside.  So I told him I'd do his math project for him so we could get done faster."

I was still staring at my son.

"Mom, that's not the bad part," the little  charlatan insisted.  "The bad part is that I put more work and details in mine and Sev got a better grade than me!  Isn't that crazy?"

I just shook my head.  The kid may not be a full blown plagiarizer just yet but from the looks of things he's teetering on the slippery slope between flippant forgery and fraud.

I may need another Alieve.

And to think, Teacher Conference had gone really well up until that point.

10 Minute Pioneers

Our neighborhood had a little power outage the other day.  It lasted all day.  Actually, all night too.  And my guess would be that if you asked any of our kids or any of their friends who were at our house during the whole ordeal, they would probably not call 12 hours without power a "little" outage.

Long ago Mark and I used to live on a ranch way out of town and back in those days, the first snowfall often brought several feet of heavy snow and along with it, a power outage that would last days and sometimes an entire week.  So a half a day without power is hardly noticeable.  We quickly learned how to prepare for any power outage in grand style.

Now that we live right outside the city limits and power outages are rare, we're a bit out of practice but nonetheless prepared with all our old stuff.  No sooner does the power go out, everyone in the Skillman household quickly springs into action.  We head directly to the flashlight cupboard and take out a battery operated lantern.  With that, we then head to our pantry and set flame to our plethora of kerosene lanterns and then go out to the garage and get "The Box".  Within minutes you can hardly tell there's been an electrical interruption.  And soon neighbors begin to call wondering why our house is so full of lights and why our power isn't out like everyone else's.

During our latest outage, the boys got all excited and prepared to brave an evening without things that plug in.  This time, Connor's friend Severin was over and he couldn't have been more ecstatic.  He pronounced with giddy excitement that he loved power outages because he always wanted to be a pioneer.

They all began to make plans on how much fun they were about to have braving a black-out; read some books, pitch a tent indoors, cook on the BBQ...But after about ten minutes Severin is wondering if the phone works so he can call home and see if the power's out at his house too.  He's decided if it isn't, he just might want to go home, taking Connor with him, so they can resume gaming.

Mitchell checked the phones, then suddenly he gets an idea and heads strait for the garage to rummage more thoroughly through "The Box".  Soon, he comes back with a hand-crankable TV that could have only of come from some sort of Armageddon catalog.  Mitch winds the thing up and a smile spreads across the faces of all my stalwart pioneers.

Soon, the kids (including Mark) abandon their frontier fantasies and gather around the TV set...happy to be spared from an annoying lack of power.

Apparently, pioneering had lost its pizzaz...

Crying Over Spilled Milk

The milk spilling was the last straw.  Seriously. I may have to be medicated.

Last year I bought a new car.  The purchase was meant to offset "The Beast" --the huge Ford Excursion that I haul my kids and their friends around town with.  But once the kids were all in school full time, it began to be just me driving solo in this massive vehicle. It was a lot of extra work and gas just to run errands, especially since I live in a town where that new-fangled "Prius" reigns supreme, making it far easier to recycle a fridge full of freon than to force  "The Beast"  into the teensy-weensy parking spots that my eco-friendly town insists on providing.  So I bought a second car.

I bought a plain ol' Camry--nothing fancy--and yes, it's the one that got recalled shortly after I bought it.  This should have been some sort of odious sign of things to come but my inner oracle is a little rusty and I did not pick up on this classic foreshadowing.  I guess I was distracted by the car's ability to zip here and there, park anywhere, and that it cost just $40 to fill up.

What I didn't realize at the time is that the recall was just the freakish beginning of its repertoire of ruin.  Apparently one of the extra features it came with was a giant invisible bulls-eye that courts calamity. In the short year I've owned it, the darn thing has taken a beating over FIVE times...no, wait, make that SIX...as of yesterday.

First was the Cart Caper. [Passenger's Side]

The darn thing was just barely two weeks old when it was bludgeoned by a shopping cart full of food.  Whomever did it must have been illiterate because they didn't leave a note.  It caved in the entire passenger's side door with a GIANT unmistakeable imprint which included an exact impression of the cart's metal crosshatching and the grocery store's logo. Before the local body shop could replace the entire door altogether, I had to drive my new car around with "Albertson's" stamped unmistakably on the side.

Next was the Wedding Wipeout. [Right Front]

Fast forward a few months later when a certain child, in the throws of pre-wedding jitters, the night before her big day, smashed the right front end into my garage during a hasty jaunt into town.  Not wanting to upset her parents the night before her big day (a smart move on her part),  she conspired with a few accomplices until she was safely away on her honeymoon.  These accomplices, like many young drivers, were shrewd and clever at kicking dents out of cars just enough to ambush a parental keen eye.  They came and banged it back into place sufficiently enough conceal the crime so I wouldn't notice for a few days.  Just enough time to get the bride safely out of town.

Then there was the Great Garage Gouge. [Rear]

That would be when one of the younger kids prematurely shut the garage door on the poor car before it had been parked all the way inside.  It completely gouged the back bumper (perhaps this is why people laden their cars with bumper stickers--a ruse for a vehicular band-aid). This is when I decided that the motion detectors designed to keep the garage door from shutting on pets and small children is a highly misguided safety feature.  What it really should be protecting is the car!  I have plans to raise the sensors to bumper height and let the pets and children fend for themselves.

Sadly, next was the Double Door Ding.  [Driver's Side]

Which occurred when an unnamed child (uh, I'm trying to be discreet here but really, there's only one underage driver left at home--yes, the one that's not too keen on being blogged about) hit an icy patch on the driveway and came to a stop by lightly T-boning my car--which was mysteriously NOT parked in the the garage (I've got a re-parking bandit on the loose).  Despite the low-speed collision, it still dinged up the driver's side right smack on the seam of both doors.  Back to the body shop where I was now customer of the month-three months in a row.

Then the Deer in the Headlight.  [Left Front]

Which happened on the way to nearby town.  In which the same unnamed driver hit a deer, though the poor kid insists the deer hit him.  Naturally the deer had to wipe out the only place on the car that had thus far gone unmolested--the front left side including the headlight. This officially made my new Camry completely and entirely banged up on every side of the car.  And despite having most dents removed, I can't help but remember that underneath the shiny exterior of my once-new car is a whole lotta Bondo and buff work. This leaves me with the only thing I have left of a shiny new car...the inside.  It still smells new from the inside. Until...

The episode that sent me Crying Over Spilled Milk

This sad debaucle was NOT detected until waaaaaaay past the expiration date of a long lost gallon of milk.  Making this crime the most offensive and longest lingering of all the tragedies suffered so far.  There is no amount of bondo that can make this problem go away.

One of the things I like about the Camry was that it offered a cavernous trunk, turns out to be not such a great feature after all. It's so big that things can get lost in there.  Important things, like the kind of stuff that have expiration dates on them.

Somehow when I sent the children out to unload a trunkful of groceries (that may have been my first mistake given their criminal rap sheet in regards to my car) they completely overlooked a gallon of milk.  As days passed and curvy roads were traveled, this little rolling renegade found sanctuary behind a toolbox I keep hidden in my trunk in a vain attempt to keep tools away from the small kleptomaniac hands that live inside the house.  What I didn't realize was that my little stashed away toolbox is just the right height and weight to provide sanctuary for a runaway gallon of milk. There it harbored it for weeks until the fateful day--long past it's expiration date, some speed-induced car maneuver must have finally and fatefully dislodged the lactose time-bomb from it's shadowed concealment and sent it rolling to the opposite corner of the trunk where it finally burst in all it's rancid glory.

And now, presently, I am the sad owner of a smelly banged up car. So if you happen to see me running errands around town and I'm all by myself in "The Beast", you'll know it's because my master plan for getting a second car to ease my troubles...stinks.

Anyone wanna buy a used Camry with only 20,000 miles on it?

Prison Pants or Pajamas?

Mitchell is enjoying his senior year of high school and all the perks that go with it.  However, by the time a kid's taken all the required classes to graduate, there's always holes in their schedule they have to fill up in order to acquire the exact amount of class hours they need to have. That's when a high-schooler ends up taking whatever class is easy and available.  In Mitchell's case, he's now taking a sewing class.

His latest class assignment was to sew pajamas.  The kid had to actually drive himself to a fabric shop and buy all the stuff for his project.  I can just imagine the conversation he had with his buddies when they asked if they could hang out after school and he had to tell them he couldn't because he was headed to JoAnn's Fabrics for some thread and flannel.

And here's what happens when you combine a pajama project with Mitchell's favorite color orange...

Prison Pants!

You'll notice he didn't exactly volunteer for this photo.  In fact he's been complaining that kids and adults often make remarks about blog posts he tragically gets to star in.  He says it's like living with paparazzi in his own house.  That's when I explained to him that some kids have mothers that badger them, others have mothers that blog them.  It's just pitfalls of not being able to pick your parents.

Recently I've been trying to get him to go out and weed-wack along the roadway of our property in his new pajamas.  I think he looks like those inmates you see along our Oregon highways cleaning, mowing, and weed-wacking.  I think it would add a little intrigue to have our neighbors think we've hired out our yard work to a criminal.  Keep the neighbors guessing.  So far, no amount of money seems to lure him into actually doing it.

Mitchell on the other hand just wants to get through this sewing class, graduate, and move far far away from his mother's blog.

I Am Not Smarter Than a 3rd Grader

My sister-in-law left town and gave me another crack at being a homeschool sub for my two nieces Madi and Janelle.  I was relieved to know she hadn't revoked my substitute teaching privileges after my last attempts.  I always go into this serious assignment totally committed to being on my very best behavior.  Absolutely no shenanigans, all work, no play,  roll up my sleeves, put on a pair of "mom jeans", and get down to the serious business of homeschooling.

This time my resolve lasted about twenty minutes.  Quite frankly, when it comes to my nieces and nephews, I'm just not the stern    nun-wielding-a-ruler type.

What happened was that I opened this math book of Madi's and it put me in a silly mood...

 This is what I saw inside...

This "issued to" box on the inside cover of her textbook looks ordinary but let me break it down for you.  Danielle, the first person to be "issued" this new math book, she is the oldest of my nieces and nephews and the first child my sister-in-law homeschooled.  Sheralyn would be Danielle's younger sister, Tanner just younger than Sheralyn, and Madi the next child to follow.

I just started laughing that a bunch of homeschoolers found it necessary to fill this section of the book out, as if, by some chance, someone was to damage the book beyond repair which would requrie an extensive man-hunt for the culprit.  A Campus-wide search for the book vandal at the Shumway Home School.  (I think Tanner may have caught on to this since he didn't even bother to note the book's condition.)

After that silly discovery I completely lost my resolve to be serious. That's when I noticed that they needed a little PE help, so I add a few PE items down at the bottom for both days:

Next, I got to correct Janelle's 3rd grade math fact sheet.  Piece of cake.  Except I realized that I never did memorize and get ALL of my own math facts down pat.  This is when I sadly had to acknowledge that I am not smarter than a 3rd Grader.  I totally couldn't tell you from memory the answer to 7x7.  I always hated that one.  And, quite frankly, as a kid I just figured I'd never really NEED to have that one memorized for any serious upcoming life event--like being a homeschool substitute--boy was I wrong!  Poor Janelle was really counting on me to correct her paper because she really wanted to do a good job on it.  That's when I decided to come clean and just let her know I couldn't remember if her answer to 7x7 was right or not...

Next I helped them memorize the 13 Colonies.  Luckily, Janelle only had to memorize just 7 of them.  But Madi had to get all 13.  So I made up a couple of acronymic sentences to help them remember their states.  But we got a little goofy about it and I think it will definitely get me fired from my homeschool subbing job.

Janelle's sentence for her 7 states was:
Good Shumways Never Volunteer to Make Mormons Coffee.

Madi used that one, then for the last 6 states, we decided on:
Polish Danielle's Nails Now! Please! Now!

By the time we had all our states memorized I was exhausted.  How does my sister-in-law do it everyday?  That's when I got distracted.  I decided the girls could work on matching skills.  So I opened up my laptop and got into my photos and had them use the face recognition program in my iphoto program and sort out faces.

This was my kind of school work.  They get to practice matching, I get my computer updated, my yard weeded for PE, and NO MORE MATH PROBLEMS!

...And should I get in trouble for getting distracted from the real work, I'm just gonna tell my sister-in-law that you can't expect a substitute to stay on task when she's not smarter than even a third grader.