My youngest sister got some awesome DNA that I somehow missed out on, because I doubt I’ll produce children as beautiful as hers. Here’s Asher, Tayden and Dax on or near Easter 2007. They’re wearing orange, and they’re still stunning.
Congratulations to my cousin Bailey and her husband unit, Nick, who welcomed a baby boy into the world at 5:53 a.m. this morning. Liam Alexander Michael Ferguson Fitzpatrick (aka most Irish baby on the planet) weighs 10 pounds and measures 22.5 inches. His was a home birth attended by Bailey’s sister Kim, a midwife.
Plan A
Plan B
*I kept telling people that Kim was going to “deliver a baby, then come down to the hotel and eat Chinese and have cocktails with me.” Everyone was horrified. I didn’t realize they thought she was giving birth to the baby rather than catching the baby.
This is my cousin Kim and her family.
Kim used to have this fabulous life wherein she had an Extremely Wealthy Boyfriend whose parents footed the bill for everything: extended ski holidays, posh apartments, expensive dinners. She was always glammed up and looked spectacular.
At some point Kim and the E.W. Boyfriend were trapped in an apartment in Denver during a blizzard with this guy named Nathan and his girlfriend. By the time the snow cleared, Nathan and Kim were an item.
Now Kim is a wife, mother and midwife. She has this fabulous life wherein she gets to help bring babies into the world and then go home and hang out with her family. She’s always dressed comfortably and looks spectacular.
Nathan, the Husband Unit, is a carpenter and an artist. My favorite story featuring Nathan is about his Mormon mission trip we he got kind of, um, sidetracked. They found him living in a tent in the woods with a giant beer can pyramid. You know, now that I think about it, it’s possible that he told me that story and that it was about one of his friends on a Mormon mission trip. Either way, it’s a good story. Nathan is also a fabulous artist, and someday I hope he will paint something just for me.
Their daughter is Antigone, a very thoughtful and sincere girl who always seems to want to “mother” everyone, but not in that bossy way that some little girls have. Tig seems to genuinely want to take care of other people. Her brother Simon is hilarious, although I see very little of him when he visits because he usually locks himself in a room and watches Cartoon Network non-stop. Poor kid is television-deprived because his parents make him play outside and read books and create things and have conversations. I mean, what kind of person are they trying to turn him into?
The last time I saw Jordan, we had the following conversation while sitting on the couch watching Total Recall:
Me: If I’m ever on a trip and my plane or car or boat disappears, don’t let them declare me dead unless they find a body. Because I might still be alive.
Jordan: Okay.
Me: I’m serious. If they don’t find a body, I’m not dead.
Jordan: All right. I can handle that.
Which is why I made him the beneficiary on my life insurance policy.
Just think! I could support the band from beyond the grave!
I was teaching school (the day job) and coaching the quiz bowl team (the fun, non-paying job). It was my second year coaching the BKHS team, and we were coming off a banner year. My team had flipped from three male starters with one lone female to its mirror image, thanks to pesky things like graduation.
That second year, we won more than one game because we had three devastatingly attractive young women as starters who looked like they had just stepped out of a Seventeen spread. (Do they even print Seventeen anymore? Hmm. I had subscriptions to YM and Sassy, myself.) It was enough to stop most (predominantly male, as is the norm) quiz bowl teams in their tracks. And that, of course, allowed our team to lay the smack down and take an early lead while dazzling the opposition with our deadly beauty and brains combo. (I’m trying so hard right now not to use the phrase “girl power,” because I suspect the young women to whom I’m referring would probably find it unseemly and inappropriate.)
We faced the Benton High School team several times at invitational tournaments early on in that competitive cycle, and they whipped us every time. Now, this was a team that was physically our opposite: three boys and one girl. I once saw this team throw a bonus round in which it was called upon to identify four members of the Backstreet Boys on “the principle of the thing” (Read: quiz bowl cred. And yes, there is such a thing. Shut up.) despite the fact that the team actually had all the information needed to take a significant lead going into the third quarter of a close game.
The Benton team was something of a thorn in our side. They were good. They were solid. They had been playing since elementary. And they were from a much larger school with a much larger intellectual pool from which to draw. My team captain and her second-in-command, meanwhile, had been recruited at the beginning of their senior year. And to complicate matters, my literature guru and the Benton captain had started making eyes at each other.
Things got tense. I don’t care how many episodes of Friday Night Lights you see, you will never witness competition among high school students so highly charged as among quiz bowlers. We’re talking challenge upon challenge upon challenge, and all of it is copyrighted, documented, and known beyond a shadow of a doubt by someone who’s still a minor. But academic competition is both cut-throat and commiserative. Teams fight to the death in a match, and then they meet up in the echoing hallways of schools that should be barren on Saturday afternoons so they can clue one another in on helpful hints for the next match, like the Heloise’s of academia.
At any rate, my lit gal started long-distance dating the star player of the Benton team. One day her frustration at our lack of measurable improvement and her desire to be 80 miles away with her boyfriend was palpable. I don’t remember exactly what happened. We probably forgot who invented Coke (Pemberton) or what number potassium is on the periodic table (19) or who wrote Silent Spring (Rachel Carson) for the millionth time. It ended in a mini kersplosion. “God,” she muttered. “I wish I was on the Benton team.”
Our captain was dumbfounded. She was straight-laced, focused, and didn’t find much of anything funny. But her academic indignance and acumen emerged and she spat, “You’d never make it on the Benton team! You’d just be an innocent bystander!”
I don’t know why, but it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. A few years later, “Innocent Bystander” was the name I chose for this (mostly crappy) blog.
*****
See, this is why I don’t write stories or tell jokes. I can do a great set up, but the ending/punchline always sucks. Stupid inverted pyramid.
Edited to add that this post refers to the old blog called Innocent Bystander.
My sister’s. All three of them, actually. My God, she makes beautiful babies.
… but it turns out she’s just making a funny face. And my goodness, she’s just far too cute for words.
Apparently, I have to give my sister some credit. I think her little girl is just as pretty as can be. Which is why it startles me every time someone talks about how much the little girl looks like her mother. (Where’s that raised eyebrow icon from the WD when you need it?) I guess you just don’t recall your siblings being very eye-pleasing when they’re whining and crying and pooping and holding you at bay with golf clubs and knives.
Yeah, I’m talking about you, Kyli.
Because that’s what the boss does!
I’ve been fairly busy since I returned from Atlanta, but I feel like a heel for not updating in a timely manner. Here are the highlights of the trip:
