Jammie J's Quest

Birthday Boy.

The newly turned teenager was living his best life this morning, hanging out with two of his closest friends. It was mostly quiet, except for some sort of male-type communications while they gamed together. The door to the master bedroom opened with an abrupt click, and a loud popping noise announced the arrival of a thousand pieces of confetti shot into the air over their heads, accompanied by a triumphant, manly-man yell from the teenager’s father: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” One of William’s friends jumped like someone poked him in his armpit, there was a pause of quiet, and the other friend announced, “You almost gave me a heart attack!” Yep, if you are in this house the morning of our son’s birthday, you best be prepared for some sort of alarming event.

This year, as he moves further into his journey of becoming a man, I find myself searching his face for that little boy who was, literally, just right here walking into my elbows. Now I have to look up to meet his eyes and his giant man feet walk his toes into our furniture. I wonder frequently if his toes will make it successfully into his adulthood.

He is 6′ tall, weighs 136 pounds and wears men’s size 13W shoes.

William loves spending time with his friends and family. He loves vacations, road trips, monster trucks, theme parks, riding his bike and hoverboard, Dave & Buster’s, snuggling with cats and pretty much any animal. He does not, however, like spiders. He loves listening to audiobooks, making videos for his YouTube channel, playing Minecraft and a few other video games and it’s especially special if he can raise his friends to play video games with him.

We love this young man so much and are so thankful he is ours.

Happy 13th birthday to our sweet William.

From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving!

We went to visit Big Tex last night. With a tag line of “the most Texan place on earth” we figured we should go see what all the fuss is about.

Now, mind you, we’ve been to the Orange County Fair and the Del Mar Fair, but this is our first time rollin’ through the Texas State Fair. We know fairs are usually crowded (people watching is the real deal), the food lines are long (everyone wants dinner-on-a-stick) and usually during the hottest part of the year. So, we figured a Thursday night somewhere toward the latter part of the fair days, with a cold spell to boot, would avoid all that.

Belatedly, we figured out that we had likely made a tactical error, because we think it was fall break in the schools and pretty much everyone in the Dallas area was there last night.

At one point, we were shoulder to shoulder with people and a dude bumped into me pretty hard and he profusely apologized. I laughed and said, “I think my weeble and your wobble was off balance.” Dude wobbled off into the crowd chuckling about that. And it was true, if you looked, everyone was just shuffling along weeble this way, wobble that way. Heh.

Visibility was limited and at one point we went to throw some trash in the can, and to head up toward Big Tex. Suddenly, a Security man waved his hand and shouted, “Get behind the yellow line.” Everyone stopped, and 2 seconds later a parade swished around the corner right in front of us and there we were right by the trash can with front row viewing. I couldn’t go forward (parade) and couldn’t go backward (crowd) so I stood there, awed by viewing the most Texan parade ever, with Big Tex in the background, in macro viewing mode.

By the end of the night, we had found our Fletchers Corny Dogs and I found my Darn Good Corn. We took the Skyway back to our entrance gate, and after a pass through the Dinosaur path, we called it a night.

As we hurried back to our truck, we watched the transit train load up with people until it was so overly full that the barely closed doors looked like a tightly laced corset. So many people!

Anyone know, when did fair stands stop taking cash and start taking “coupons” only? Or is that just a Texas State Fair thing?

Poppy’s superpower is not snuggling. So when she decided to hang out on my lap and then put her head in my hand, I asked the Husband to take a picture of it. That way when she is a complete turd tomorrow and wants nothing to do with me, I can look at these pictures and remember the 5 minutes of sweetness she gave me today.