Boxing Emily

As parents, Kerry and I have done a lot of crazy things we never could have dreamed up before we had children. We've also have said a lot of crazy things (don't hit your sister in the head with a helicopter!) It's been so fun being parents for nearly 3 decades, 6 children - 3 boys and 3 girls, we've pretty much had the full experience. While there have been plenty of days when life just goes by and things go as planned, those are not the days you blog about I guess. This past day was not one of those well-planned days. It was one of the other kind. It involves a large black box.

For at least 2 months we have known we needed to come up with a box, a cheerleading box for Emily to stand on at football games. What we haven't known were the specifications of this box, and there seemed to be no way to find out. The other freshman cheerleaders had older sisters who were also cheerleaders, so they had boxes to copy. We just kept waiting for official word from the cheerleading advisor on how to proceed, but no official word was forthcoming. So we did what we do best, we procrastinated finding out this info until the last minute, though I did prod Emily a few times to try to find out from the other cheerleaders, and I myself had tried to call her advisor, who had recently resigned, but she didn't return my call.

Labor Day weekend might have been a good time to build a box.


The Tuesday after Labor Day, she came home from school and said, "18x30." That was the word she got from the other cheerleaders when she finally asked them. Great, we will build that box now, in time for Thursday afternoon, we had 48 hours.

Wednesday Kerry cut out the wood at his Dad's house during his lunch hour. We didn't have time to assemble it that evening because it was his sister's retirement party in Idaho Falls, so we were going to do that just as soon as we got back. We left home about 5 pm, and ended up staying at the party til about 9, helping carry flowers, gifts, and dozens of helium balloons home from the Red Lion. We stopped at Home Depot, Emily extricating herself from the back seat completely full of balloons, me from the front seat full of roses, and found some glue to hold the box together, and a drill. We were a little ways away from Home Depot, when Kerry decided he wanted the other drill afterall, so we went back. It's getting late, and it was after 10 pm when we got home. BUT we needed to run over and drop some things off at his parent's house, like the flowers, and things for his sister who was having a cast put on her foot the next day, and by the way, we had loaned the truck to Thomas and Caley when we saw them at the Retirement party, so they could move this weekend.

So, finally we started building the box, 10:30 pm on the night before it was to be used. We stood in the dark, in the garage/drive way all three of us, til midnight, holding sides of this wood together with glue until it finally formed a very large, very heavy box. Kerry used the new drill to screw the sides to the 2x4's he had cut to stabilize it, and it was a sturdy thing of beauty. I then attempted to use the 94 cent black spray paint, 2 cans, I had bought at Walmart to try and make it black, but guess what? Cheap paint, not turning very black, still looks kind of wood colored. Went to bed, about 1:30 am, got up at about 6:30 to spray on another coat. Still not super black, but a little blacker.

There wasn't going to be time to paint on her name or cute symbols, so at school I hurriedly used the Cricut and some white vinyl I got late last night to cut out the letters to spell her name, and one cute banner, but no time to do anything else, and barely time to do that. It was a very busy day trying to score all sorts of tests and get all sorts of numbers and reports to all sorts of teachers very quickly. Kerry was working from home so that he could pick Emily up, (early-release day for the fair) and take her back (cheerleaders get ready at 3:15) and also buy more paint (Krylon this time, better coverage, quicker drying, costs $3, next time get that.)

I came home just in time to slap the vinyl letters on, by now it's raining pretty hard, and we need to get the box to the field before the start of the game. Oh yeah, no truck! Will it fit in the trunk? Not really, back seat? Nope. Trunk it is, we use a tie-down that is really a net hammock, because we are hurrying and that's all we can find that is large enough to go around the trunk and the box hanging from it.

Drive across town, through the rain, past all of the State Fair traffic, hoping the big black box won't fall out of the trunk every time we go over a bump or railroad tracks, the lid of the trunk clunking loudly with every bump in the road. Hoping nobody we know sees us, Kerry driving while on his I-phone having a meeting with people in California because these are still his work hours, trying to keep it on "mute", nearly succeeding....just as we pull into the parking lot with our ungainly load, 15 minutes before the start of the game, relieved that we have made it in the nick of time...Emily texts us "we aren't using boxes today."