things i managed to accomplish today...

1. telling my mother i would NOT help her with her christmas decorating.
2. telling her again.
3. and then one more time because 2 solid NOs are never, ever enough for my mama.
4. ordered my Christmas cards
5. re-ordered family pics because I grossly underestimated their cuteness.
6. tackled laundry- actually washed, dried, and put away most of it. Most of it.
7. looked at cowboy ass.
8. wished I was born in OOOOOOklahoma (where the winds come sweeping down the plains) (and there are cowboys aplenty)
9. took picture retake money to my first born at school.
10. could not curse first born for forgetting to take it with him today, since the reason he needed retakes on said pictures is because his ever-lovin' mama forgot to put his picture envelope in his backpack the first time around.
11. ****sigh**** cowboys. Just once more. Or twice. But not a third time. Well maybe a third. Or fourth. But that's all!!
12. stripped the sheets on the girl child's bed. Hoping this helps kill the flu bug that is following her around these days.
13. noticed grimy toilets.
14. did nothing but ignore them and put them off for another day.

Can you say excitement? I know my life lacks passion on most days. Not today, though! Did I mention the cowboys??

bringing crazy back...

that about sums up what this weekend has been. I had in mind a nice relaxing weekend. Silly me. Matt was off work Wed. thru Sun. so I thought we'd get some stuff done and have time to vegitate. Not so much. Hannah was sick Mon- Wed. Ryan was sick Thurs- Sat. Hannah started puking again on Sun. morning and we're still dealing with that. This weekend was a lot of: you go visit with your family, I'll stay with the sick chiclet. Then we'll switch. Fun! Family togetherness! Relaxation! NOT. My house is a pit of destruction that smells vaguely of vomit and I don't have lick of energy to fix it.
I got a little Christmas shopping done on Sat (the one day that no one had a fever or ookie stomach) but when I got home and looked at the loot it became all too clear how much I actually have left to do. This week the calendar flips to DECEMBER. Can I get a YIKES??
I also came to the realization this weekend that there are some people who you cannot possibly make happy. And also those same people will never like you the way you want them to. This was a hard realization for me because I am one of those personalities that craves for everyone to like me. Oh well. I just have to live with it. Or at least try to. And now I can relax. Instead of always being on guard and not acting like...well...acting like me. I'm just going to be myself because what difference does it make at this point? I've tried every other possible me-ness and none of my fun personalities has been pleasing to said people/person.
Family time can be oh-so fun.

wear something stretchy...

and eat up!!!

Happy Thanksgiving from our corner of the world :)

go with a smile and wear armor...

i decided to brave the grocery store this morning for the turkey day fixins i need. It's the Tuesday before turkey day and people are already rude and nasty. I just can't figure it out. It wasn't busy, so there wasn't any of that cart jockeying in the aisles to get to the spot you need. People are just grouchy. In my opinion, if going to the store to get your turkey fixins causes you to be a sourpuss, you should not go. Easier said than done, right? I know. I didn't WANT to go. I went out of necessity, but I also plastered on a smile and tried to be cheerful. There's a Starbucks in the store for crying out loud! Get happy over a gingerbread latte!
I had so many people who rolled their eyes and huffed away because I had the AUDACITY to forget my x-ray glasses so that I could see them coming as I came out of an aisle. It wasn't like I pushed on ahead. I stopped, let them cross, smiled and said "OOPS! Sorry." When a cranky old lady rolled her eyes at me, I added on a "Happy Holidays!" just because I knew it would piss her off. Cause I'm sweet like that.
This is why I'd rather be strung up by my toenails than shop the day after Thanksgiving. There are just some nasty, crabby people in this world. Not even a full-fat gingerbread latte can make shopping with hordes of cranky and greedy Grinches do-able.

no good title for this one...

it's been a rough week around these parts. One of those weeks where you find yourself mumbling "this just sucks" under your breath. A lot. I tried to find humor in little things this weekend, but it was tough. My very good friend Marsha lost her miracle baby last week. Little miracle Marissa, who blessed our world for 3 short months. Her funeral was last Friday and it was by far the worst thing I have ever been through. The worst part was knowing it was so gut wrenching for me and I wasn't Marissa's mommy. What Marsha is going through now, cannot even be imagined by me. I do know that Marissa is in heaven with her grandma. And her grandma is spoiling her rotten. In fact, Marsha's dad said to me at one point, Carol is running up some extreme credit card bills in heaven. Thankfully those suckers don't have to be paid back. We smiled about it. Smiled, during a day where there was so very little to smile about.
After everything was over and everyone had gone home, Marsha, me, and our good friend Elizabeth sat around with a fabulous BOX of wine. We drank and talked and laughed and cried. It was therapeutic for me and I hope it helped Marsha in some way. My heart is broken for her, but I know God will bless her with a child someday. She is destined to be the world's greatest mommy. I have known that to be a fact during the entire 15 years that I have known her.
I know the next days, weeks, months, are going to be the worst for Marsha and family. I hope if she pops on here and finds this post she knows I love her and I am sending her hugs in my head all day, every day.
I am ever so thankful that I was able to come home and hug the pieces out of my 3 chiclets. You sometimes forget how blessed you are in the day to day nose wipings, butt wipings, battle breaking-ups, etc. Marissa now reminds me daily how very blessed I am and I thank her for it. And also we have photographic proof that she was pissed off at the Buckeyes for losing to Illinois. She really was a cool kid. Even if it was for a brief time.
We love you and miss you sweet Marissa.

clark griswold revisited...

it was once again, not so much a winning pinewood derby day for justin and his golden silver shark car.
It was also once again a day where I could sit back and watch the psychotic parents wanting THEIR cars to finish first. The kids of said parents were running around the gym not watching or even caring about their cars. The dads watched with intensity, critiquing the way the cars ran on the 2 different tracks. It was, quite frankly, obnoxious. I guess for some people this is the highlight of their year. Building a car for their child and watching it run, hoping their kid scores a trophy on a car they didn't spend 1/2 a minute working on or even thinking about.
Matt & Justin plan to get reinforcements next year. He's hoping for the car the rivals Clark Griswold's experimentally lubed up sled in Christmas Vacation. The type of car the zips off the track, and runs clean through the bleachers, lockers, and few classrooms, and into the cafeteria down the hall. I fear Matt will be the freakish dad watching the cars run down the tracks and sweating over a dorky trophy.

pinewood derby....

in other news, today is justin's pinewood derby race. Since he lost miserably in every heat last year, he and Matt decided to try a different route this time. The car looks the same, but the weights are in a different place. Also the wheels got graphite this year. Matt refused to do anything "extra", like graphite, last year. He wanted to win the old-fashioned way. HA. Did you catch that whole lost miserably section earlier?
One other thing he did? He glued the axles in. The wheels fell off after the race last year, so he figured a little glue would do the trick. A little glue would've been perfect. He used gorilla glue. It expands. Are you starting to form a picture of what happens when you put expanding glue on an axle, really close to a wheel? Yep..he pretty much glued the wheels to the axle. Oh yeah...that baby is going to fly down the ramp. Or maybe it'll just sit there at the top because the wheels are unable to turn. And of course everything gets done at the 11th hour in this house so Matt was pulling off the wheels and trying to drill the glue off 15 minutes before weigh in time. Never a dull moment. It's an entertaining looking car anyway. It's painted shiny bright gold. Justin picked shark stickers. The stickers that also had the cool "Silver Shark" label for the hood. So his shiny gold car is called the Silver Shark. Keep 'em guessing. That's our motto.
Race results will be posted tomorrow.

take it back....

when i said bring it on, i shoulda been more specific. By "it" I meant wine (not whine), sunshine, happy comments, a tasty yet fat-free and thus guiltless dessert, something fun, something to make me laugh.... anything but what I got.
What I got? Oh... a teacher that has pegged my son as a problem child. He's a pain in the ass, but not a trouble-maker by any stretch of my (or anyone else's) imagination. I also got a girl child screaming in the middle of the night about her painful (and now goopy and pink) eye. Thanks to the gods of pink eye, our home is infested with whatever creepy-crawly germs cause the dreaded pink eye. **cringe** **hork**
So to whomever I provoked with my former statement "bring it on", I beg of you to TAKE IT BACK!! And next time you bring it on?? Bring more wine. I really needed it to survive this pissy week. Thanks in advance.

bring it on...

it's been one of those days. More like one of those weeks, but I don't like to whine. I could hardly type that with a straight face.
You know how it is when you clean like a crazy woman and then you turn a corner and realize your house is STILL A COMPLETE PIGSTY? Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Oh and, add to that, pink eye. In both my child and the teenage girl who was supposed to babysit tonight during the 8:40 **PM** conference that I must attend with my girl child's teacher. I believe the 2 instances of pink eye to be unrelated but each puts a special and significant kink in my week. Add to THAT the normal day to day splitting up arguments between children who are never, ever wrong, finding socks that were taken off in 2 different rooms (and we wonder why there are no matches) trying desperately to find mittens and gloves that match because this week Mother Nature decided to turn all winter and shit on us, and let's not forget that 8:40 **PM** conference. I was told to list my 3 choices. I listed 2 times around **6** pm and one time that was in the middle of the day tomorrow. Somehow out of those 3 choices, I was given the obvious one. The one that is the last conference of the day. The day where the teacher has been in conferences since 11 **AM**. Oh, yeah. That's going to be an effective conference.
But I don't like to whine. Really, I don't.

my husband is a genius...

he taught me how to link. It is with joy that I can link you back to this post, or this post, or my personal favorite- this post. Or if I want to embarrass myself again I could link to this post.
If you wanted to buy me a Christmas present, you could look here, or anywhere here.
You want my favorite cookie recipe? Right here it is. Although I personally delete the walnuts. I also found using Heath chips is a fabulous substitution for chocolate chips. You're welcome. What about my nightmare? Right here it is. Wanna see the cool artist I found at a craft show yesterday? Here she is!
How fun is this???? If I had asked him a thousand years ago I could have done this way back then. He gave me the "duh...you don't know how to do that?" look when I asked him about it. Whatever, I never claimed to be a computer geek :)