Behind the Scenes

Bear with me, because who knows how this will turn out! I think one of my favorite things about old pictures is looking at all the stuff in the background & piecing together all the memories. (i.e. "I remember that Michael Jackson poster!" "Look at our huge console TV!")

I took a picture of Robbie cleaning up after lunch today. When he eats something especially messy (mashed potatoes today) I'll take his shirt off, and I'll let him play in the leftover bubbles from doing the dishes (makes cleaning him up easier).

So when I uploaded the photo, I was looking at the details. I think I'll ramble about some of them! In no particular order...

1. Window open, partially dressed kid, November 12! Arizona is awesome.

2. I like my purple kitchen. It looks dark in this picture, but it's pretty bright. I painted it before Erin was one. Above the window, I have vinyl lettering that says "Many have eaten here, few have died".

3. By Robbie's head are some glass vegetables. The tomato's stem is the perfect home for my wedding ring when I'm washing dishes or doing messy kitchen stuff. There is a bell pepper, a carrot, and a chili in a copper bowl behind the tomato. When I was working for Phelps Dodge (now Freeport MacMoRan) in their old Tempe office, I would meet my parents for lunch pretty often at Casa Reynoso on Mill Ave & Southern. Sometimes my mom and I would look around in a dollar store that used to be in the same strip mall - that's where the glass vegetables came from. I just liked the bright colors.

Casa Reynoso! For my Arizonan friends, if you like the Mexican food in Globe-Miami, this is it. It's the same family that runs Chalo's in Globe. For anyone else heading to Tempe, you can't go wrong with the red chili or bean burros, and the gollo burro is my favorite (green chili, whole beans, pork... mmmmm) It's also a good place to run into people from home.

Back to the kitchen.

4. I see Robbie's underwear band peeking out from his shorts. Completely potty trained for a month. Yay!

5. He's standing on one of our dining room chairs. My parents bought the table and chairs for us when we got married. From Smitty's, even! Before they were all Fry's. We furnished our first apartment pretty well from family. Our living room furniture and our bed all came from members of Rob's family, and I still have the dresser I used since I was a little kid.

6. The phone (sticking up behind Robbie's head) was a wedding gift from my friend Brian. My EAC friends will remember him! Unfortunately, we've been out of touch except for occasional e-mails or running in to each other. He's the drummer for The Cremains - although I haven't seen them play for almost 10 years! Nice guy, super smart.

7. The copper bowl holding the glass vegetables... I have two of them. The other one is always full of M&M's on the counter. One year my mom and my friend Cyndi from work both got me the same exact bowl for my birthday. They both knew I love copper stuff, and I was glad to have two! It was great. I always kind of keep my eye out for stuff to add to the copper collection in my kitchen.

8. The day we moved into our house, our cat got stuck in the corner of the cabinets just behind where Robbie's standing. I opened the lower cabinets to let her check everything out (you know how weird cats are in new environments). Well, she disappeared. We thought she got outside somehow, and I felt terrible because we hadn't updated the tag on her collar with our new phone number yet. I was imagining this poor kitty wandering an unfamiliar neighborhood & being eaten by dogs or run over or just being scared. It stunk! Later that night when Rob and I came home from one of many trips to Home Depot, we finally heard her meowing & after about a half hour, Rob figured out where she was. There was a gap in the side of the cabinet's interior that led to a no-man's land between the two banks of cabinets. She's not the sharpest crayon in the box.

And now I think I've exhausted every detail I can possibly talk about in the picture. :) Maybe one of you will post a mundane picture & ramble on about what's going on behind the scenes!