TwoHundredTwenty1

Holy mother of GAWD.
How did this happen?!?
Enter-any-expletive-that-comes-to-mind-because-it-fits.
This is bad.
Very bad.

I stepped on a scale yesterday evening. Yeah. That dusty piece of blue-tinted reflective glass with the digital display on top that might as well just have a big middle finger sticking up with the sound of laughter, but instead it was a number: 221. Two HUNDRED and TWENTY ONE pounds of the fabulousness that is NoDak Kelli. This is unacceptable. I must have gained a good twenty pounds this year. That’s what I thought at least. I set my alarm for 5:30AM…tomorrow: I’m going to work out.

Fast forward to 6:15AM the next morning when I actually crawled out of bed, I turn on my phone to see my Facebook memories. Ahhhh memories! Oh I wrote a blog a year ago titled “183”. You see as an accountability measure last year, I’d enter my weight as the title of my blog. Oh so clever semi-obese Kelli was…

That means: oh no, no, no, no, NO!!! I am 38 pounds heavier that I was a year ago today. That’s more than either of my children weigh and I complain about carrying them around because they are “too heavy”. Well guess what??? Momma is TOO HEAVY.

What happened to that optimistic, good choice making NoDaker blogger? Oh that’s right: I ate her. I ate her, the nachos, the sandwiches, my feelings and whatever else was in my path. It isn’t that I eat a ridiculously large amount of food, but I have a pretty lethargic lifestyle: generally I’m shackled to my cubicle 8-9 hours a day, when the girls go to bed, mommy and daddy drink our coping mechanisms and sometimes that comes with a side of salty snacks. We don’t do this every day, maybe two or three times a week…every week. That weekend activity one or two days a week just isn’t compensating for the lack of activity the rest of the time.

Holy crap I have sabotaged myself! I am flirting within 15 pounds of the heaviest that I have ever(knowingly) been. Why??? Why on Earth would I share this with the ones or twos of people who read my blog????? Welp because as far as I can tell, I can’t be the only one who’s taken a giant candy-coated step backwards in life, so don’t feel bad and now when you are assessing your own situation, you can say: Hey, at LEAST I didn’t gain the equivalent of a 5-gallon bottle of water this past year!

You’re welcome.
Where’s that dang cauliflower…

 

FULAX

This past weekend I was retelling a harrowing tale from our family vacation this past May and was told “You should write a blog about it!”  That being said, this is the tale of flying with my family through LAX…

This past May Hubby, Miss A, Miss E and myself went to Alaska.  Before you let your mind wander to murky waters of thinking my family is loaded and living champagne wishes and caviar dreams, I have to break it to you: we flew there for $30.  Miss A was one at the time, so she was my “infant in arms”, which means that spacious 24 cubic inches I’m alotted on the circulated-air metal tube hurtling through space was both mine and Miss A’s to share.  I had just enough skymiles to get three discount tickets, so the whole family flew for the price of taxes.

This also means I got to choose from the less than desirable flights. On the way there, we ended up flying Fargo to Minneapolis to Portland to Anchorage.  On the way home, we flew Anchorage to Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis to Fargo…and our flight out of Anchorage left at 11:50PM.

So let me set the scene: a five year old, an almost two year old and their parents hop a red-eye after a week-long vacation. Nerves are raw, people are tired, children are cranky and we are flying to North Dakota from Alaska by way of…California???

When we land at LAX we have exactly one hour before our connection to Minnesota departs.  When we get into the terminal, there’s no sign, there’s no direction, we are just in the middle of a giant airport…without boarding passes. You see when we departed the great white north the person at our airline’s desk said she couldn’t print our boarding passes for any of our flights but the first one because we were changing airlines. (This was odd since it hadn’t been a problem when the roles were reversed heading out, but okay)

I find an airport employee and ask where we go to find the flight information for the airline taking us to the Midwest. She says we need to leave the terminal, get on the train and take it to the end of the line to get to the correct terminal. Inside my head I’m guesstimating how long this will take and she adds “and you’re going to have to go through security.”

Crap, Crap, CRAP I think to myself, but it’s 6AM and my family is holding it together so I put on a happy face to cover my panic and we find the tram.  I have Miss A half asleep in my arms as we take the tram 47 miles across the airport.

We get to the new terminal, printed boarding passes, and head for security. The line has more people in it than the last two towns we lived in combined. There’s NO way.  I flag over a TSA agent(they love that) and explain our predicament. He looks at me and says: “There’s no way you’re going to make that flight.”

I don’t know if it was the sleep deprivation, extra 30 pounds of Human I’m holding, my 5-year old looking up at me because she just wants to sleep or that Hubby is obviously fuming, but I lose it.  Tears fill my eyes and the older TSA agent takes pity on me with his only suggestion: “You can ask people if you can cut in line”?

That’s what I did. This desperate, borderline-nervous-breakdown-looking NoDaker tapped strangers on the shoulder one by one and pleaded to go ahead.  I was like Moses and the other travelers were the Red Sea: they all moved.

Eureka!! Because of the kids, they sent us to the metal detector instead of the scanner. The metal detector  was having issues…wait, wait, wait…5 minutes until take off. We get through security–and we RUN!

We get to the desk and not a soul is there. My perplexed and defeated look explained it all and the lady behind the desk said: “You need to go down these stairs and the shuttle will take you to your plane.”

We are within moments of our plane taking off and we are now on a bus rumbling across the tarmac towards a plane that has our number on it.  Hubby says “There’s our plane!” but I won’t allow myself to feel relief because we aren’t ON IT yet.  I tell Miss E: “When the bus stops, hang onto my hand and RUN!”

We jump off the bus, scurry to the escalator, run up the stairs and into the gate…we are 15 minutes late.

People were sitting all over and it took me a minute to realize, they hadn’t even BOARDED yet. There was a mechanical problem! Hooray!! I sat down on the plastic bench as the gate agent came over the loudspeaker to say the plane is now ready to board.

I’d never been so excited to share 24 cubic inches of space and thankful for a mechanical problem in my life!

It was SO good to be back in NoDak!…until we found out our bags and children’s car seats did not make the harrowing trip across the airport to our plane.  A gazillion miles, 17 hours and two loaner-car seats later-we made it home!

Jail Birds

This summer my family is diving into the delicious art of poultry-raising, which I haven’t been involved in since I was a kid.  Now adult Kelli is trying to reach back and get tips from preteen-Kelli and sometimes seemingly important facts slip through the cracks: like guineas fly.

Every night around dusk after the girls have gone to bed, Hubby and I go outside and survey our yard, listen to the birds, watch the stars come out and congratulate ourselves on making it through another day trying to look like semi-responsible adults. During this time, I’ve made a habit of checking the chickens, who I now call “The Girls”(even though there are males in the flock, they’ll have to deal with the identity crisis), and making sure their water and food is stocked for the night.

I had noticed the past few nights that The Girls are getting more and more brave. They’ve decided roosting on the ladder is fun and each night they are a little farther up.  We have a ladder inside to climb up and pop open the hatch in the ceiling for ventilation.  The Girls’ coop is actually an old granary.

Then the last night when Hubby and I went out for our nightly check of the yard, we could hear the guinea keets…as soon as we stepped out of the house. We both commented that they sound exceptionally loud this evening. As we made our way toward the coop, we see them: two guinea keets are on the roof of the coop, looking down through the grain door-hatch to their poultry sisters. I’m not sure if the guineas were telling the chickens to jump for freedom or if the guineas were telling the chickens that they didn’t have the guts to freefall back into their coop of safety.

Either way: there was squawking.

As Hubby and I approached, one guinea went for it. She jumped off the roof and flew into the tippy-top of a neighboring tree.  I asked Hubby if he had a fishing net readily accessible. He did.  Hubby climbed the adjacent grain bin, net in-hand, hoping to snag guinea 2.  She jumped and soared even farther. She was in the top of the trees that surround the farm.

We turned our attention back to Guinea 1. We coaxed her out of the tree by chucking sticks and shaking the bottom of the tree branches. She flew to the top of a grain bin. Guineas do NOT have very good traction, so as she slid towards the bottom of the bin’s roof, she too flew into the top of the tree line that surrounds our farm.

They were gone.

Hubby immediately took some small-holed wire mesh and his staple gun into the coop and covered the air vents in the roof to prevent other escapes.

Ever since the Girls have decided to roost on the highest beam in the coop.  It’s probably 8 feet off the ground. I’m not sure how they all get up there, but I haven’t put it past them that they probably fly.

If you see two confused and fast young guineas flying or running around your area, don’t bother trying to catch them, those sons of bitches are fast…and they can fly.

Wake Up on Vacation

Sometimes timing is important with parenting, for example if your napless child falls asleep within 5 miles of home, that’s a problem…or it can be.

Yesterday after going to Fargo to run errands and buy groceries, not only did Miss A, who’s 2 and regularly takes an afternoon nap, but also Miss E, fell asleep just short of our driveway.  Hubby and I pulled into our yard, unloaded the car, put away groceries, and both girls slept in the running air-conditioned car.  We discussed how we wanted to go do something “fun” tomorrow so we decided, let’s start today! We fed and watered all of the critters, threw together an overnight bag, grabbed the swimming gear, the stroller and took off. We headed down the road for a summertime adventure.

We drove to Wahpeton, which has Chahinkapa zoo and the girls woke up in time to eat the lunch packed in a cooler before arriving at the zoo. We wandered around and saw the tigers, bears, kangaroos, lemurs and the rest of the animals. Miss E was sad that the zebra barn was locked for the night but we fed the ducks and pet the farm animals.

Then we went to a hotel, ordered some dinner from a local joint called Hart’s Hub that had PHENOMENAL sandwiches and went swimming.  Today we took the long way home. We went through Lisbon, grabbed lunch at I Scream You Scream(also great), and then drove through Sheyenne State Forest.  All in all for less than $150 we had a fun impromptu mini-vacation and successfully had some summer NoDak fun.

The funny thing about timing is that you can choose to call it bad and wreck your day or you can change your plan and make the timing work for you.  Take a day trip and see where you can explore in the not-so-far from home.  If you live in North Dakota, there’s no telling what you can find!