Aunt Tiffany Is So Proud

"Babies are such a nice way to start people." ~Don Herold

I'm not a huge kid person. I wouldn't say I dislike kids, but I'm not one of those girls that is dying to have one anytime soon either. My biological clock is certainly not ticking. However, Aunt Tiffany spent lots of baby time the last couple of weekends with my favorite kiddos.

Eli James (Little Linebacker) and Madilyn Rose (Little Princess)

and Landon (Little Yao Ming).

Little Linebacker is my SoulMateFriend's baby. I feel a special connection to him because I was the first person to know that SoulMateFriend was pregnant. Her husband was at a band concert, so she picked up the phone and gave me the exciting news! We spent the next hour googling "false positive pregnancy tests" just to be sure we were not getting excited about nothing. As soon as I was convinced (thank you, Web MD) I rushed to the bookstore to pick up a book on pregnancy (Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy) and to the store to get some cute baby stuff!
Nine months later, Little Linebacker was here! He's the cutest little thing ever--and he is so built to be an athlete. His little legs are all muscle and I swear, I swear, we were talking about football and when I said Notre Dame, he smiled and laughed. YES!


Little Princess is the first baby for my group of college friends we'll call Animal House. I'm not bragging, but the group earned the name--we're talking college classic stuff here. These guys were a part of most of my best college memories, and I can't believe that any of them are actually having babies! One of these boys, the Governor married a girl who hung out with the group, FavoriteWife. (Not because he has moe than one wife, but because of all the friends' wives, she's my favorite!)They started our group off by getting married first and now having the first baby. She is honestly the prettiest baby girl I've ever seen in my whole life. Most newborns are red and wrinkly--not Little Princess, she was beautiful when Aunt Tiffany met her 18 hours after she arrived. She's only the second baby I've ever actually met in the hospital, but she's set the bar pretty high for the ones to come!

Little Yao Ming is my first Asian nephew. :) His mom, Canoe Friend, and I worked together when I spent the summer in San Francisco. We hit it off right away and have stayed in touch for the last two years. I call her Canoe Friend because if you remember my canoeing blog, she and her husband were the nice couple in the canoe who was so kind and supportive when they got stuck in the tree branches.

I was so lucky that they were able to meet me in San Francisco last weekend so I could meet Little Yao Ming for the first time. And FYI--he's in the 95% for height. These may not just be crazy Aunt Tiff dreams of NBA fame and fortune here! He is such a happy, adorable little baby!

I can't wait to watch these three little ones grow up.

And a special note to two of my dear friends who are both really struggling to get pregnant---I have complete faith that soon, I'll be blogging about your beautiful little ones!

I am so lucky to be able to live vicariously through my amazing friends.....and lucky that they have to change the diapers instead of me!

Bay to Breakers 2010: One of Those Days

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” ~Joseph Campbell

You know how when you are really excited for an event and you think about how great it will be and what it'll be like and then, once it actually happens, it's not as good as you planned? Well....Bay to Breakers Weekend in San Francisco was one of those times that was a TOTAL EXCEPTION! College Roomie deemed it "the perfect day" and I think she might have been right. Once we got in the starting corral, the chaos began. The traditional "tortilla toss" began and there were corn tortillas flying everywhere. College Roomie took one in the head. The energy there was amazing. There were 33,000 registered runners and a total of 80,000 spectators and people who joined in the race along the route. It was amazing and everyone was just having a great time! Somehow, our friend Nomad found us in the crowd of people and started the race with us. He is actually a runner and finished like 20 minutes ahead of us, but hey, at least we got our pre-race group photo!
And then we were off!
There are so many great costumes at Bay to Breakers, we tried our best to capture a few before the race started and along the way.

There were also a lot of people who chose to forego costumes, or any other clothing. I'll spare you any photographs, but one of my favorite exchanges of the weekend occurred at about the half mile mark:

Tiffany: OMG, College Roomie--ugly naked guy!!
College Roomie: Get a picture!
Tiffany: He's running too fast!
College Roomie: Go faster---I'll catch you! GO GO GO!
Little did we know by the time the race was over, we didn't think twice about seeing ugly naked guys running around!

The most challenging portion of the race is the Hayes Street Hill. If you've been to San Francisco, you know that hills are no joke! People had suggested that we walk the hill because it would just be too difficult to run. Well, it might be for some, but not for the hard core girls who train at high elevations. We ran that hill like champs (and quickly looked for the water station near the top!)

TONS of people come out to watch the race. Many bring cow bells, signs and air horns to cheer you on. My favorite spectator, of whom I have no picture, saw a guy running along who had decided not to wear a costume (if you get my drift) and yelled, "Eww! Gross. Dude, put that thing away!" I love San Francisco!

Those who live there have Bay to Breakers parties and cheer on the racers. This party looked the most fun to us and, had we not been responsible adults with jobs to get back to, we might have found that house after we were done running!

We decided to document the race by photographing ourselves every mile and crossing the finish line. Here are those shots for your enjoyment.

In the end, we did better than we had hoped! We ran the whole race (including the Hayes Street hill) and finished in the top 10,000 runners (top 9,000 to be more exact)! Nomad was in the top 3,000. Woo hoo! Just think how fast we could have been had we hadn't have been taking all of of the pictures necessary for the blog!

We found a random dude to be our "U" for OSU....his photographer friend got me all confused and didn't tell me the S was backwards. That's why I'm usually the "U"!

Anyway, Bay to Breakers was an incredible experience. College Roomie is already talking about next year's race and Nomad deemed it "one of the top 5 things he's done in his life." Hard to argue with that. Another Bucketlist checkmark down: Run Bay to Breakers

24 Frogs

"It's not 'Sometimes you have to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince.' Really it should be 'Sometime you have to throw a few frogs violently against a wall in order to find a prince' but I have a feeling that phrase wouldn't catch on." ~ Unknown angry girl on another blog


For those of you expecting a Bay to Breakers/San Francisco update....they are coming. And trust me...they will be worth the wait! Stay tuned for tomorrow when I'm less exhausted and (hopefully) less sore!

I hate frogs. Always have. When I was a kid there was a pond on our land where irrigation water would drain. In the summer, you would hear hundreds of frogs at night down by the pond. A statistic I heard today gave me a nightmarish flashback to that.



The average American woman dates 24 men before she finds Mr. Right...#25. I'm just saying, that's a lot of frogs to kiss before finding the prince! And think, that's the average--meaning that theoretically half of the women in America had to date MORE than 25 to get the right one.


Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I want to get married tomorrow, but for crying out loud....if I have to date 24 of them between now and the rock on my finger, this could be a problem. I talked to one of my Oklahoma Girls about this.....we fear that we are very behind! We better start dating up a storm in order to have enough frogs out of the way when the prince comes along! So if you know of a good frog, you may need to send him my way....


So, blog readers, what do you think about this? Can this statistic accurate?

Bay To Breakers Bound!!

"There are many public runs across the world, but none matches this nearly century-old 12K through one of the world's most beautiful cities for sheer spectacle. As many as 80,000 runners compete in all manner of costume -- and sometimes, no clothes at all. This is San Francisco, after all." ~ A Sports Fan's Checklist

College Roomie and I are off to Bay to Breakers!

We'll be spending a couple of days in San Francisco catching up with my friends from my summer living there first, meeting up with Nomad,....and eating our way through the city!

Then, on Sunday, the moment of truth will arrive! We will be running in the 99th Annual Bay to Breakers. You've read about the race before....

I'll have a full report next week! Keep your fingers crossed!

Miss Independent

“A woman is like a tea bag, you can not tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” ~Nancy Reagan


I like to think of myself as being a pretty independent girl. I'm a single twenty-something living on my own, paying my own bills, making my own money, and making my own decisions. There's not a lot of things I feel like I can't handle.


I had a moment last weekend with my dryer that made me wonder.....Why is it when a home maintainence issue arises, the first thing I think of is "I need a boyfriend for things like this." That's a problem!


So, as part of my Happiness Project (there will be plenty to report when May is over!), I was cleaning out my laundry room. Once I dug back to the back, I find that the little tube thing (yes, that's the technical term) that takes the lent and whatever else from the dryer out of the house had come loose from the wall. Lent had been sprayed ALL OVER the walls and floor. On top of that, I had two bottles of distilled water that had somehow gotten holes in them and were leaking everywhere.

I threw my hands up, and went to my boyfriend thought. Then, I went to my, I at least need the Animal House boys from college to live closer to come fix these things. I racked my brain through my law school guy friends and decided that I am pretty sure I'm more mechanical than they are. I called my dad to complain.


After all of this nonsense.....I put my big girl pants on and went to work. I fixed the hose and the clamp. I hauled all of the boxed andshelves out of the room. I cleaned and moved and organized everything. And you know what? There wasn't a boy in sight.


Even when we think of ourselves as being independent girls, sometimes we revert right to the damsel in distress feeling. There's something good about a little reminder from the world that we can do things ourselves!

5 Year Plan

“May the dreams of your past be the reality of your future.” ~Unknown

Twice this week the issue of "where do you want to be in five years" has come up in my life. I figure it's a sign I need to blog about it! :)

First off, I found paper I apparently wrote five years ago when I was in school at OSU all about where I'd be today. Here's a little portion:

There is very little that I know for sure about five years from today. I will definitely be a month shy of turning 26 years old. And I will probably not be doing anything that I have pictured in my mind now. If the curves in my life have taught me one lesson, it is that no matter what life throws at me, I can make it. Maybe life has bigger plans for me than I have for myself. There is only one prediction that I am willing to make about my life five years from now: I will be okay, wherever I am.

Second was a random occurance where I was tagged a blog posted by my friend who we'll refer to as Miss Canada asking me to list what I was doing five years ago and what I want to be doing five years from now. So here we go...

What were you doing five years ago?

~Finishing my junior year at OSU and preparing to take the LSAT to apply to law school
~Loving life in Stillwater living in Casa Mia with College Roomie
~Getting ready to spend the summer working in Oklahoma and trying to learn to golf from BFF
~Trying to get up the courage to tell this one boy how I really felt

~Making fun of people who had facebook because I thought it was stupid. :) And I had never even heard of a blog.

What will you be doing five years from now?

~Hopefully still working as an attorney (yes, I still have the "please don't fire me!" thought every day!)
~Happily dating Mr. Right (who will, by that point, be un-lost from whatever forest he's circling now!)
~Volunteering for a cause that is imporant to me
~Traveling all over the world to see my favorite people and places
~Buying some land for my expanded cattle and sheep herds
So, from this I take the following: Wow....I was a pretty darn smart 21 year old! I'm not sure I've gotten any smarter in the five years since I wrote that paper. I still don't have a clue where my life will go. Plans change, bumps occur and we have to keep moving. I could honestly look ahead and see several different paths that my life could take....and I could see myself being completely happy in every one of them. I think that may be the curse of being a happy person--you genuinely don't know what it is you want because you can see so many different things could be good.

No matter how many of my list of 5 goals actually come true, I think I'll stick with my conclusion from 2005--maybe life has bigger plans for me than I have for myself. No matter where I am or what I'm doing: I'll be okay! Bring it on 2015!

Mom...Don't Be Mad.....

"This is California. Blondes are like the state flower or something." ~ Beverly Hills 90210

This is probably not the blog title that my mom wanted to see the day after Mother's Day. Let's all hope she doesn't drive to my house and kill me! Anyway, this weekend I checked off another bucket list item. Since we've already learned I am a nice person on Sundays, it was a fitting day for this one.

DONATE MY HAIR TO LOCKS OF LOVE.

You may have heard of Locks of Love before. They are a non-profit organization that takes hair donations and makes wigs for children who have lost their hair due to medical conditions, such as cancer. I've been wanting to donate for years and I finally grew my hair out long enough to do it.

Here is me last week so you can get an idea of how long it was fixed.

And here is the "Before" picture today.

My hair stylist, Chad, assured me that it would be okay and it was still long enough that I wouldn't look terrible even after I cut it. Chad has hair about as long as mine, so I trust him to understand the trauma of chopping it all off. He put the hair in two 10" braids and.......snip!

At this point, I was pretty much freaking out and trying not to have a panic attack. I'm not one of those primpy girls----I rarely wear make up, don't worry too much about clothes, so my hair is really the only thing I have that I sort of take some pride in. Chad said he was glad I wasn't a crier because apparently he gets some of those.

Anyway, after he finished styling a little bit and we let the Chi do its magic.....I don't hate the new do. I don't love it either. :) I keep trying to remember the whole "I'm doing a good thing for mankind" aspect of the situation. And I figure that at least I just have short hair, as compared to those Locks of Love kiddos who have no hair at all.
I hope it's true that people see inner beauty, because I feel much better on the inside about the chop than I do on the outside right now. Sorry Mom.....

Family Farm Friday # 17: Picking Peas

"In my Father's house there are many mansions..." ~ John 14:2


A great song by Andy Griggs is one of my favorite ideas of what Heaven is like.

If heaven was an hour, it would be twilight
When the fireflies start their dancin on the lawn
And suppers on the stove and mammas laughin
And everybodys workin day is done

If heaven was a town it would be my town
On a summer day in 1985
And everything I wanted was out there waiting
And everyone I loved was still alive

I don't know what Heaven will be like really, but I think it's pretty interesting to think about what it would be like if this song is accurate.


I've had lots of great chapters in my life--it might surprise you that my Heaven-song idea is not the OSU football staduim covered in orange t-shirts. It's not a boat cruise in San Francisco. It's not touring Europe (although the countryside in Switzerland is probably a close second!). Nope....instead, my Heaven-song idea is a black eyed pea field just up the road. I've said before growing up on a family farm shaped me, apparently that included shaping my idea of Heaven.


When I was a kid, my grandma lived next door. Gran, Little Brother and I were like the Three Amigos. We would go check cows, drink windmill water, and visit the neighbors constantly. Gran always kept a little pickup for us to take around on our adventures. Gran had lots of friends we would visit--Ralph and Faye would have great stories and were the best at helping with science projects, Sandy and Lee were always happy to buy whatever cookies or fruit or whatever else us kids were selling, and Wanda always had candy for us when we went trick-or-treating.


But I think Gran's best friend was Aunt Jean. She wasn't actually my aunt, but she was always Aunt Jean to us. She lived right up the road from our house and always had the best snacks when we went to visit. Homeade cakes and candy....and what I've always called "Aunt Jean candies" (the little mini hershey bars--you know with mini Mr. Goodbars and Rice Crips and what not). No matter how long we'd been there, she'd always say, without fail, "I sure wish ya'll wouldn't rush off." She also had a great orchard and two fields--one of black eyed peas and one of corn. This is where my Heaven idea comes from.


Of all of my childhood memories, for some reason, this is probably the most vivid. We were there, in our shorts and irrigation boots, picking peas in the sun. Gran had her big straw hat and Aunt Jean was wearing her apron. Things were simple and easy and we were just picking peas.


I don't know what Heaven will be like, but I sort of hope Andy Griggs is onto something.

Throwback Thursday #21: Excuse My Rant....

"What is love, it could be a river; love's a single drop of rain, but to her love is forever...." ~Cross Canadian Ragweed, "Johnny's Song"


This week I'm taking a brief detour from re-living the summer of my life in San Francisco. Instead, we're flashbacking to my college days in the happiest place on earth, Stillwater Oklahoma!


This weekend I went back for Calf Fry (as you have read about once or twice) and I'm sad to say, I was greatly disappointed with the people in attendance. At the risk of sounding like someone's grandma here--back in my day, Calf Fry was better.


When I was in school, Calf Fry was an institution--a national holiday of sorts for Stillwater. One of my friends might have described it best when she called it "Red dirt in an open field." It was hours of great music, good friends, and a great time. Everyone had fun, everyone seemed to get along, and aside from the occasional drunk passed out by the gate, things were on the controlled side of wild. In typical Stillwater fashion, we welcomed everyone into town, were friendly to all the visitors, and many of us (at least College Roomie and I) left our doors unlocked for friends and more than once woke up with people we didn't know crashing on our floor (see one group below).


I don't know what changed this year. It was a train wreck disaster. On Friday night, Cross Canadian Ragweed performed. Mind you, these guys are FROM Stillwater. The hometown heroes come back to play for the crowd. What happens? Lead singer Cody Canada gets drilled in the side of the head when someone throws a So Co bottle at him. 24 stitches and a concussion later, the band had to cancel its show the next night in Kansas City. On Saturday night, Someone throws a pitcher onto the stage while Miranda Lambert is playing (she didn't get hit) and then later some idiot snuck onto the stage and tapped her right on the shoulder. He wound up mobbed by security guards and Miranda screamed "I should have kicked his [you know what]!" (Where were the security guards before the dude got on stage?!?)


I'm going to choose to believe that it could not have been OSU students who were involved in this mess. I just don't want to believe that people at my alma mater, who are having the same amazing opportunites and experiences that I had would act like this. But, the reality is I have no idea who it was acting like morons.


So listen up OSU students and anyone else who comes to our town. Put a smile on, say hello to the guy standing next to you, have (don't throw) a drink, and enjoy some awesome red dirt music. Who cares if you've ever met him or not? Take a note from my friend, Dr. TPB and just say hello!

Don't ruin a great thing for everyone by acting like an idiot.