Monthly Archives: May 2018

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They Crawl

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Yesterday was a big event in the Mole house as Allyson flew to California all by herself. All year she had been saying she wanted to spend the summer with Emily and for most of the year it was going to work out where Allyson could drive back with Emily when she was here getting her car inspected. However due to Fox calling school off a couple of times for bad weather that never happened the last day of school got pushed off and Emily was leaving the day Allyson had finals. Emily was starting her next job and could not delay her leave date. So I scoured the internet for flights and finally found the cheapest one. It meant she had a layover in Phoenix but I found one with only sixty-six minutes. This made me nervous and relieved at the same time. Nervous because if flight one was late and she missed flight two, it would be a bit of a nightmare getting her on another flight without me being there. A relief in that it was way less time for her to be sitting around the airport with creeps. I watch way too much Discovery ID. I was also glad her final destination was San Luis Obispo and not LAX. Emily was too as Los Angeles is a four-hour drive from her house and San Luis Obispo is only an hour.

I waited for her to get through airport security before I left for home. She didn’t even turn around and wave or anything. But she did text me the minute she made it to the gate. Prior to this we reviewed how to look at the monitors to find out what gate her next flight was at. She said don’t worry mom, if I can’t figure it out I’ll ask someone. And so the wait was on for her to arrive in Phoenix. I was getting a bit nervous but she made it and this was our texting after she landed.

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I was cracking up over the “they crawl” comment. She did say they were crawling up and down the aisle of the airplane. She was in the middle seat and the second flight the aisle. I said great because if the window gets blown out, you won’t get sucked out of the plane. The only way to deal with stress is ridiculous humor. She landed safely and is with Emily for the summer.

Mole Moral ~ I am so thankful my kids don’t have my anxiety about not knowing where they are going and needing to know the rules for everything. I don’t think I would have ever flown by myself in high school.

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Finster Graduates

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It was August of 1999 and we were patiently awaiting the arrival of our niece. Brian’s birthday is the fourteenth and he just knew she would be born on his birthday. However, Sierra Chloe would make her arrival on the eighteenth instead. My sister had went into labor the night before and Andre’ came picked me up to go to the hospital. We stopped at the QT across from Hobby Lobby (it was Schnucks grocery store in 1999) to get coffee. When we came out Karen was pacing around the car during contractions. Sierra was born at 10:34 in the morning weighing in at five pounds and eleven ounces. Karen’s first comment was that she was so little and Dr. McCaffery offered to put her back for a week or two. I stayed until after they gave Sierra her bath in Karen’s room and then Andre’ took me home and went back to the hospital. It has been well said that Sierra looked like a monkey when she was born.

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To live in our family, you have to be tough. We can be quite brutal at times. However Sierra would soon grow out of the ugly newborn into a beautiful young lady.

By the time Sierra was born, we had cable in our house and had stopped watching channel nine and were watching Nickelodeon. One of our favorite shows was The Rugrats. Sierra was well under a year old when she earned her nickname from Brian. He started calling her Finster for Chuckie Finster. Chuckie was a worry wart and a scaredy cat two features which Sierra exhibits to this day. If Kayla wanted to aggravate her she would start talking about tornadoes and pretending to hear the sirens. Sierra would go into a panic and Kayla would just laugh.

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Sierra had reddish hair when she was younger and although she did not wear glasses she seemed to be afraid of everything including being outside. Beverly who lives down the street watched not only my girls but Sierra as well. I will never forget the day I drove by when she was sitting on a blanket crying her head off because she was outside. Beverly said she never stopped crying until they went inside and did this day after day. On Andre’s first fathers day I gave him a picture frame engraved with Daddy’s Girl and a picture of Chuckie Finster in it. After this she was stuck with the name forever.

Last week I went through old pictures looking for ones for this blog. I’m posting a few of my favorites.

It’s hard to believe that almost nineteen years have passed and Sierra has now graduated from high school. Even though Brian aggravates her constantly she still insists on hanging out our house. (After all he is the one touching her face with a fish, in the above picture.) She has been a joy to watch grow up. Her future plans are to attend South East Missouri State and study nursing.

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Mole Moral ~ If you have a nickname from the Moles (no matter how ridiculous it may seem) it means we love you very very much. We love you Sierra and know you will do great things!

 

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A Birth and Furry story

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It was seventeen years ago today that I called Brian at the lake and told him I was in labor. He had decided even though I was going to be induced at midnight on my birthday (May 8) that it was totally safe to go to the Lake of the Ozarks with his best friend Johnny. I mean cause it’s only a three and a half hour trip anyway. So I got up and showered but refused to run to the hospital yet and just be at a big ONE centimeter dilated so when Target opened up my sister and I walked around in there for a good hour. By this time it is ten in the morning and Brian still has not returned from the lake. So she takes me to the hospital and my water had broken and I was FOUR centimeters dilated. Yay for me. It just so happened that one of my burn unit buddies was working that day and was my nurse. Now you are probably wondering how this is possible. Tina was a labor and delivery nurse and one or two deliveries away from being a midwife when she decided to go to CRNA school. To get into that program you must have ICU experience so she worked with us for a while. She also knew that I wanted to try to go natural. Around 11:30 Brian is still not at the hopsital (apparently he and Johnny decided false alarm and went back to sleep for a while. Johnny is not one that rushes for anything and this day was no different.) I was shaking all over and Karen called Tina and said what is wrong with her. The answer was simple I was hyperventilating and shaking all over. Lamaze breathing had been long forgotten but I started working on that. However I was like I need an epidural. So she called for one and then after it was placed checked me and said I knew you were at ten by the way you were acting, but I didn’t check first because your husband would have missed the delivery. He showed up just as the epidural was placed. I then received so much epidural I couldn’t push for two hours so we all sat around joking and laughing until pushing time came. And because my uterus did most of the work, three pushes and she was out. I had a different doctor this time and the experience was so much nicer. Brian got to cut the cord and Teresa captured pictures of this. Because my nurse did midwife first, she placed Allyson on my stomach for a while. It was really cool. When the doctor asked delivery time she looked at me like “well damn, I didn’t look at the clock” so she said 2:20 which in my head I said score that is super easy to remember. So the last mole girl was born without any issues and was discharged home on my birthday. May 6 also happens to be Florence Nightingale’s birthday and nurses day. I was often told she was a beautiful newborn.

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As she grew it became obvious she didn’t care what others thought or did. She certainly hasn’t been one to follow the crowd or even conform. I tried not to have a heart attack her freshman year when she decided to cut all of her hair off. I reminded myself it’s just hair and it will grow back.

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I even let her add color to it because Hollie (who does our hair) is awesome and I trusted Hollie to do this for us. Currently Allyson has grown out of all the color and is back to growing it long again. See it’s just hair and it does indeed grow back.

She is very artistic and creative. In middle school she became interested in Fursuits (not to be confused with Yiffers, as Yiffers have sex in their costumes and the Fursuits do not like them as they give Fursuits a bad reputation.) She created her first character whom she named Prototype. He was so big and bulky she has since dismantled him and is currently reworking him. Her second character was Wolzey and she performed in the middle school talent show and received a standing ovation. I was not allowed to attend but when I told the secretary she made it herself, she almost fell out of her chair. IMG_7789 (1)

As you are looking at the picture the unfinished one is Wilson , the guy in the middle is Wolzey and the end one with the glasses is the now defunct prototype. She finished Wilson and here he is. Please excuse my messy house as I always tell my husband on my deathbed I will not say I wish I kept the house cleaner. I will say I wish I helped more people and made even more things for them.

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After she finished him she put Fursuit to rest for a year or so and then she got a job. She has been working since October and has made quite a bit of money as a bus girl. She has another OC (original character) which she created. His real name is Robbie but he goes by Prince and happens to be Wolzey’s father. (Yes Wolzey is also an Allyson OC.) Here he is in 2D form.

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So since Allyson makes way more money than is needed to run her star wars server she decided to commission The GoldenMaw to make this character for her. This is this girls full-time job and a legitimate business. I would have never known such a thing existed. I believe she sent the girl some drawings and then she received pictures of progress on the head. I was amazed that she did it the exact same way Allyson made hers. I got the duh mom how else did you think it was done. Oh I don’t know with a real pattern and sewing machine. Not duct tape to get the shape and cut the fur out. Anyway the head arrived last week and it is freaking fantastic. It came with instructions on how to care for it, including how to pet it. He has a special brush for his fur. This thing is legit.

 

Of course cheap Mole thinks she spent way too much money. Yet when I have done t-shirt quilts he thinks I should charge more. It’s funny how that works. I say she got what she paid for which is true awesomeness. So it looks like we will be taking another trip to Midwest FurFest this year.

Now back to her birthday, she has requested to go to dinner at the place where she works. They “have the best food ever” and she thinks she can get a free brownie desert because it’s her birthday. So we will celebrate her in just a little and can only imagine what her future holds. I say she needs to work for Pixar and she flat-out refuses and tells me that’s not a job its a hobby and its my dream not hers. I love this kid!

 

Mole Moral ~  What one person thinks is money well spent another person thinks is a total waste. However, when it’s your hard-earned money you can spend it how you choose.

 

 

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Pokemon Go Raid Bus

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For those of you that missed the Pokemon Go game release, I thought I had better start from the beginning. It is a game that came out almost two years ago as an app. It was designed to get people out of the house and out walking in the communities. It started off huge and then died down fairly quickly. However there are always die hard’s that stick with it. I downloaded the game about a week after its release when my daughters boyfriend at the time got pulled over at the Arnold Water tower by the cops and asked what he was doing. He and his friends showed the cop the game and they were let go. I honestly knew nothing about Pokemon. My girls never had much of an interest in it and I never played the game back in the Game Boy days. So when I first started my goal was to only catch one of everything.

About six months later on New Years Day my nephew showed me how to evolve Pokémon but I felt that was cheating if I didn’t catch them so I just continued looking for ones I didn’t have and hatching eggs. There are 2K, 5K and 10K eggs so when you walk that distance one hatches. The eggs remind me of Christmas presents because when one hatches, you never know what you are going to get. I then came down with the massive headache in February of 2017. During this time Emily’s boyfriend at the time was a Pokemon person and knew all about it and he started her playing. Now this made it way more fun because I’m super competitive. When Emily moved home in March for her last clinical we had a lot of fun playing together. Generation 2 was released at the time she started playing so I was now evolving and catching things for candy. I also learned how to walk with a pokemon to get needed candy.

Sometime after Emily moved back, I was at the gas station getting coffee with Pokemon running on the screen. One of the kids (anyone under 30 now qualifies as a kid to me) told me about the Pokemon Go Facebook groups. So I joined and Emily joined. This group was a lot of fun and I learned a lot of stuff about the game that I would have never had a clue about. So a guy named Tony decided to do a fundraiser walk to try to get Porygon. He received non stop grief in the group about not having one and took it like a champ. I got out of my comfort zone and did the walk and had a lot of fun.

This past February Tony decided to do a raid bus in which a group of people jumped on a party bus and drove around looking for raids. Now a raid occurs at a gym that you can only see on your phone. It takes a group of people to take the boss (Pokemon) down. I had never done them because I don’t know what I am doing. Most of these people know which Pokémon is stronger than others and who to fight who with. I am still in the I just want one of everyone. However the only way to get the Legendary’s is through raiding. I finally decided to go on the raid bus in March. The only person I knew was Tony and I told myself sitting next to a stranger would be no more stressful than the bus to Big Stuf. And on Tony’s bus we don’t have to play get to know your bus neighbor game. That game stresses me out every year because I have to talk to so many people I don’t know and try not to just stare at each them. Anyway a kid jumped on board and asked if he could sit with me. I looked at him and said “you have a 12 pack of beer, you better believe you can sit right here.” He offered me one but I said no thanks I would never stop talking. He showed me a trick about how to search for Pokemon by name instead of scrolling through the entire index. I will forever be in debt to him. So imagine thirty-nine adults and one kid driving up and down Manchester stopping at invisible gyms and everyone tapping on their phones.L

I am sure it looks crazy but it is a lot of fun. I caught my first legendary that day.

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Of course the minute seats opened for the April bus I signed up for that as well. Although it’s called a party bus, it’s not like a bachelorette or bachelor party bus. People drink a little but everyone is fun and respectful of each other. Tony was trying to take a picture in front of the bus and getting Mew (a special Pokemon that required a bunch of stuff to do before you could catch him) in the picture. He was spinning around in circles and we were all cracking up. The guy had an android and he handed him the phone and said make this thing go back, I don’t do Androids.  I am not sure if he ever got the Mew in the guys picture for him or not but we sure had fun while he was trying. Here is what it looks like if one looks at a legendary in the real world versus Pokemon virtual world.

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If you look carefully you can spot me. Especially if you know what my favorite color is. This game sounds as ridiculous as trying to explain soap operas if you never watched them. However, I enjoyed soap operas back in the day and I really enjoy this game. It is nice riding around with fellow players who both understand and love the game. The same bus driver has done all three events and she was telling us when she tells other groups about us they are shocked it is not kids but adults. This makes me think of Facebook in which the adults took over. The bus driver had never played the game but now when we would stop for a raid she would remind us to throw out a lucky egg for double XP. She even downloaded the game at the end of the trip. She is a blast.

 

Mole Moral ~ Once again stepping out of my comfort zone has led me to meet a lot of super nice people and have a really great time. And yes I have already signed up for the May raid bus. Don’t knock it till you try it.