Has Anyone Ever Told You That You Look JUST Like…

As far as I can tell, everybody looks like SOMEBODY. If you’ve never been stopped by a complete stranger or a new acquaintance for them to ask “Has anyone ever told you that you look JUST like…?”, then you must be the most uniquely featured person on the planet.

And I mean that in a good way, of course.

I really think that most of the time when people say that, they are just picking up on one or two key features that remind them of other people. In fact, it used to drive me crazy that people would say "Ali looks JUST LIKE Chris!!", when really she had all of my features but one - his very characteristic (and beautiful) eye shape.

I have heard fairly regularly that I look like four different people, although some comparisons are not so appreciated as others.

So, for review, here I am:

And now, people that “they” say I look like:

1. The one that I WISH “they” were right about:

Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls, Tuck Everlasting, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). I would LOVE to look like her, but alas, I don’t think they remember quite how stunningly gorgeous she is:

Ha. Not even close. But I wish.

2. The one old enough to be my Grandmother:

Ali MacGraw (Love Story). A lot of people thought I looked like her when I was a young teenager (probably before Mom taught me how to mow pluck my eyebrows), so Mom rented “Love Story” for me to see.

Unfortunately for her, she forgot how unbelievably foul-mouthed Ali MacGraw was in that movie, so I didn’t get to see the horribly sad ending. Darn.

3. The one that if you agree with, I will never speak to you again:

Gretchen Wilson (Country Singer). Seriously – I am not IN THE LEAST desirous of looking like the self-proclaimed epitome of the Redneck Woman. Please, PLEASE no.

4. The only one I ever agreed with "them" about:

Meg White from The White Stripes (Rock band). It's not quite as obvious in these pictures, but when I saw their music video Seven Nation Army, I would have totally believed it was me if I knew how to play drums..

So…which one DO I look like, if any? Just don't say Gretchen Wilson. Unless that you want me to tell you that YOU look JUST like Jocelyne Wildenstein:

I'm sorry- I didn't mean to make you throw up your thanksgiving leftovers. I promise - you look NOTHING like Mrs. W. Just don't have twenty-eleven plastic surgeries and I think you'll be just fine.

But more importantly, who DO you get told that you look just like?

When a Two Year Old Cooks Thanksgiving Dinner…

As we were hosting Thanksgiving dinner at our house, I put Ali to work using her new cooking skills.

Cooking with a toddler creates many opportunities for great conversations.

Ali: “What are you doing?”

Me: “Peeling the onion so I can chop it.”

Ali: “You’re peeling off the chocolate?!?!?!?”

(a minute later…)

Me: “Ohhh…the onions are making me cry!!”

Ali: “Don’t cry! There’s no need to be scared!!”

It didn’t take long for her new chef self to become a very opinionated chef self. For instance, she apparently thought that we needed to add more Ginger to our spice cake:She HAD been telling me she wanted to make Gingerbread cookies…I guess I should have listened.

After we finished our first round of cooking, we went outside to check on Chris’ progress with the Christmas lights.

I’m pretty sure that this is the longest that he’s ever held off on decorating the house for Christmas, and it's all Alabama Football’s fault.

He loves Christmas. It cheers him up tremendously. And so, he uses decorating the house as therapy after a really bad football game.

In years past, Alabama would lose a game sometime in early November, dashing all of Chris’ hopes and dreams for a championship season. So he would drive straight home from the game, barely speaking a word, then walk outside and feverishly festivate our house.

And then he’d come in, a happy husband once again.

But since Alabama is having a good season (until right this second while I’m writing this blog and they’re losing to Auburn and he’s feverishly decorating the INSIDE of the house while pacing and sighing), he actually waited until almost an appropriate time to decorate.

Anyway, back to the story. We went out to check on Daddy’s progress, and Ali was thrilled.

So as he strung lights,

We swung and watched:

And gave supervisory opinions on where the lights should go.

With all of that inactivity, we got cold.

(Now you can’t ever say I didn’t post a picture of myself without makeup.)

Chris told me that he was planning a National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation-esque house-lighting, where he would wait until after Thanksgiving dinner, and then make the whole family go out on the lawn, freezing to death, while he dramatically plugged the lights in and the Angels On High sang “AAAAAAAHHHH”

I told him reenacting that scene would just be BEGGING for our neighbor’s septic tank to start leaking and running down the road à la Cousin Eddie’s RV, but he didn’t care.. .

But when it came down to it, he couldn’t wait that long. Luckily for the family, the house was pre-lit upon their arrival:

Finally, we served dinner:

And then it was Tessa’s turn to watch and supervise:
When dessert came out, everyone kept commenting on how gingery the cake tasted…and how much they liked it. I guess Ali is trading in her Project Runway career aspirations to be on Top Chef instead.

Shopping For Sweet Dreams

We finally manned up as parents and decided that it is time to take our ALMOST THREE YEAR OLD out of her crib.

(Pause to let the gasps of horror echo dramatically.)

I know, I know – we should have done it long ago. But:

a) she LOVES her crib – so why rock the boat?

b) We have hardwood stairs, so we wanted to make sure to wait until we didn’t have to worry about her going down them if she got up in the middle of the night, and

c) there hasn’t been a younger sibling to kick her out of the crib, which is pretty much the default reason that everyone I know transitions their kids to beds.

So. Ali and I went shopping for Big Girl Beds yesterday.

But I’m afraid taking her with me on this shopping excursion might have set me up to be quite the disappointment as a big-girl-bed-providing-mother.

Because her attention went straight for beds like the enchanted pumpkin carriage bed:

(Her argument, of course, was that if she slept in the magical pumpkin which took Cinderella to the dreamy ball in her pretty blue dress which "The prince didn't tear off of her, did he, Momma?", she’d most definitely quit having those recurring nightmares* about the sisters tearing Cinderella’s pretty PINK dress off. I MEAN – how could you have bad dreams in THIS bed, Mom?!?!)

My argument, however, is that no sixteen year old girl still wants to be sleeping in a carriage bed, so it seems rather impractical to buy, despite the potential bad dream removal.

*And yes, she’s STILL dreaming about all that. She woke up screaming a few times the other night, and then the next day, she informed my friend Nikki, “We’re NOT going to talk about Cinderella at lunch today.”

Anyway. Back to the beds that my daughter will never get.

She especially liked the playhouse-with-a-slide bed:

Seriously – what kid would actually SLEEP when they had a slide hooked up to their bed?!?!

And just about as sleep-inducing of a bed named by Ali as “The House Bed”:

I WOULD say that they make these beds for older kids that would still lay down and go to sleep responsibly even when faced with endless entertainment (ha), but the tunnel on this one is barely big enough for Ali to squeeze through, so apparently, some toddler somewhere will actually REST in a bed like this.

Or not, and some Mom somewhere is beating her head against the wall, saying “Why oh WHY DID I BUY THEM A BED THAT THEY CAN PLAY IN!?!?!??!”

Of course, if Daddy had been with us, he’d have tried to talk Ali into this bed:I know – ONLY in Alabama could football passions run so deeply. Yeesh.

At any rate, I am afraid that I have set Ali up to think of this when I say “Big Girl Bed”,
And she’s going to be sorely disappointed when she gets something more along the lines of this:

Unless her Daddy reads this post. At which point he will melt in all of his Daddy-wrapped-around-his-little-girl’s-finger softness, and will go buy her that crazily impractical carriage bed.

Chefiature.

I’ve been hearing about how Ali has become quite the chef at Gramamma and Pop’s house, apparently earning the title as an expert biscuit maker and cookie cutter.

So, I decided to test out these mad skillz myself at home. I needed to make a Danish, so I enlisted her help.

And I was surprised at how helpful she was - she helped roll out the dough, stir the filling, smooth the filling over the dough, and, of course, was a black belt at cleaning up afterward:

Ooh – I gotta pretend I’m cooking again!

Eh, who am I fooling.

Almost as sweet as the Danish filling….

….or not.

I swear we’re not unfit parents!! I just caught that photo-un-op right after this finger lickin’ moment…

Phew. Now that I’m exonerated, check out everyone else’s Wordless Wednesdays at 5 Minutes for Mom!

...Also on 5 Minutes for Mom is a review/giveaway that I wrote for a baking product that Ali and I have been testing out lately in our cooking adventures - it is a TON of fun - be sure to enter to win one!

Trend Alert! Buy Stock in Carter’s and Gerber Post-Haste!

Chris and I had the American Music Awards on in the background Sunday night while we busied ourselves with other tasks. But despite the fact that we were hardly paying it any attention, there was an overarching trend that was inescapable of our notice:

Onesies.

Apparently, they are all the rage.

Gone are the days of singers wearing such short skirts that you think you’re ABOUT to see their crotch. No, they have discarded the skirt all together and just resorted to the outfit of a 6 month old.

Fergie started the night out in her very poofy onesie – I guess to give it the true infant-with-a-diaper-inside-my-onesie look:

Then Shakira and all of her backup dancers were sure to draw attention to the fact that they were NOT missing out on this fad by checking out each other’s onesies:

J.Lo sported the Gladiator onesie:

Lady Gaga went with the medical supply Onesie - made out of ace bandages and a headpiece of cotton swabs:

Rihanna stole her onesie idea from a girl we saw at Dragon*Con:

And even sweet little Carrie Underwood couldn’t resist the Onesie trend, and invented the “Good” little Country Girl Onesie:

Of course, onesies weren’t the only statements made at the AMAs.

Jermaine Jackson had to show that the best naming strategy for your kids is to take the first syllable of your name and put it before the most ridiculous of terms. Freaky Scientist kid in the back’s name: Jermajesty.

And Kate Hudson tried to bring to style the man-chest look with the super long straps on her dress and lack of undergarmentage, all of which don't exactly give off a very feminine look: I guess if you're going to insist on showing that much skin, at least make it TOTALLY UNATTRACTIVE to the male mind because it just looks like one of their running buddies in a tank top.

And I couldn’t COUNT the number of times she adjusted that top while on stage for a whole minute and a half. Nervous much, Kate?

And yes, we did, unfortunately, see Adam Lambert's performance. And no, I will not be blogging about it for fear that I will have to re-immerse myself into boiling water in the attempt to cleanse my mind from that horridness.

But the bottom line is, babies everywhere should rejoice – because the onesie look that they pioneered most definitely took first place at the AMAs.

Then again, maybe they should just be disturbed.

Blogwebs, Cobwebs.

So my mind is apparently already on a Thanksgiving break. I am seriously having trouble putting sentences together…

Maybe I’ll actually take a day or two off as a bloggy break for Thanksgiving – something I’ve actually never done.

I know, I'm too obsessive to COMPLETELY break. If I do, I’ll leave you with old reruns or maybe some unpublished posts out of my drafts folder.

Or maybe my brain will arrive back on the scene and I’ll get re-invigorated.

In the meantime, I'll just share a few things from our weekend.

(Oh yeah - that's what a blog is for - right?)

My favorite pic of the weekend first: Ali and AJ, playing Princess Turnover:
Ali is STILL on track with her new, err, skills, and after her THIRD achievement IN A ROW, we got something extra special for her reward – Yogurt Mountain. Partially because I’d been wanting to try it myself, and partially because I didn’t have any Princess Gummies with me.

I never knew how much kid’s treats were actually determined by what the PARENT wanted until I became one.

Yogurt Mountain is a self-serve Frozen Yogurt shop where you pick from dozens of flavors of Frozen Yogurt and bazillions of toppings to make your own creation (at the very reasonable price of $0.45/ounce, I might say). We followed Ali’s typical Goldilocks Formula in the creation of our masterpieces:

…although I’m not sure if Ali’s was really "just right". It WAS rather huge:

But it served it’s purpose and furthered the propoganda that pooping in the potty is VERY! VERY! REWARDING!
Saturday was the last Alabama home game – the weather was perfect, the opponent was lousy, and the game time was early – it was the ideal game to let Ali have another stadium experience. So we headed to Tuscaloosa, where Ali showed her wisdom in making sure that she carried the biggest stick:

And, although she seemed to take special joy in the brutality of sword fighting, her friend Briley was QUITE disturbed by her malicious fighting aggression:

At any rate, we finally pried the sword from her Inigo Montoya-esque grip and headed into the stadium:
Where I saw one last football fashion disaster, for those who can’t decide if they want to wear small, medium, or large printed houndstooth: My advice: even if you’re not sure which would look best on you, please PICK ONE - ANY of them would look better than ALL.

We got to also catch the “Dancing Girls” practicing their act again, where Ali tried to lead them in a new routine:

And pointed out, “Look Mommy, they’re all wearing bras like you!”

Yes, baby, but mine isn't on the OUTSIDE.