It's not you, it's me

Alayna I love you but I just don't think we can be friends for the next couple weeks. I'm sorry. I know we have been friends for a long time and while it is true that you have been there for me more times than I can count, I just don't think I can stand by you through this. Here's my beef. At 35 weeks pregnant you look like this: Soooooo not fair! You and your cute little basketball belly that you can't even see from the back. And your cute maternity clothes that don't look like maternity clothes. And heels? What?!? Seriously, I love you and I can't wait to resume our friendship after whatshertoes is born but for now, I hope you can understand why we just can't be friends. No? Maybe this will refresh your memory:

Me at 32 weeks pregnant. A couple of things you should note:

1. I cut my head out of the picture so you couldn't see all of my chins.

2. If you look closely you will see that I am roughly the same size as the Christmas tree I am standing in front of.

3. I am not only NOT wearing maternity clothes, I am wearing Robbie's clothes. In this picture, it is Christmas eve so I am wearing my fancy outfit.

4. At the time that this picture was taken I had not driven for over a week because I could not fit behind the steering wheel. It was 4 more weeks until the kids were born and then I was on painkillers for two weeks after that. By the time I was able to drive again I had to retake my driving test.

5. I was still pregnant for 4+ weeks after this picture was taken. The pictures taken after this were so bad that I could not show them in public. I am saving them in the event that one day I need something from the kids and I can guilt them into doing what I want by showing them the pictures and saying "Look what I went through for you!"

6. Heels were not an option for me. Heck, shoes weren't even an option for me. I spent months in slippers.
7. The weird looking thing hanging from the sleeve of my shirt is, indeed, my puffy swollen hand.

I could go on but I think you get it. Now, I don't want any pity because I had two kids using my gigantic belly as their temporary residence. I know that it is different but it still isn't fair! I love you Lai and I can't wait to come and hold your sweet little girl when she is born and I hope to be the same "Auntie Nobody" to her that you have been to Ben and Abby. So give me a call when you give birth or gain a couple of chins.

Pumpkins Pizza & Popcorn

This has been a super busy week and so we didn't get around to carving our pumpkins until tonight. We've been talking it up and planning all week. I even brought home "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" from school so we could have the complete Halloween experience. As soon as I was home from work we got to work on digging the guts out of our pumpkins. Abby loved to grab the gooey mess and pull it out of her pumpkin. Ben on the other hand...not so much. He preferred to use a spoon at all times. Can't say either of them surprised me.

I love the way she watched as Robbie carved her pumpkin, giving him directions and asking "what job can I have now?"

Ladies and Gentlemen I give you Abby and her silly pumpkin!

The kids decided that they wanted some friends to watch the movie with them so we invited Izzy, Annie and Joey over. We all snuggled up on the couch and ate some popcorn and Ben didn't even ask too many questions!! The kids have been excited about tonight all week and they loved every minute of it!

In other exciting news: Robbie's work hosted a company wide coloring contest and Abby was crowned winner of her age group! When Robbie first gave the kids the papers there was a little confusion about the way a coloring contest works. Ben colored (scribbled) his as fast as he could and announced "I'm done. I win!" Apparently he thought that the fastest artist would win. After a lot of tears, we tried again (thankfully Robbie had brought home extras). This time Ben colored a bit slower but after about two minutes he was done. His sister on the other hand, used lots of colors and worked hard to stay inside the lines. She worked very hard and when she was finally done she was convinced that she would win. Now, I'm not going to lie. Her picture was good. She did a nice job. But it still looked like something colored by a three-year-old. I knew that what she had done was pretty good, but she is no art prodigy. Just a girl who loves crafts and who worked very hard to do her best. Turns out that her best was THE best and she won! The prize? A $25 Target gift card! Next year I'm entering.

Tonight, I leave you with the picture of our pumpkins all lit up. Happy Halloween!!

Introducing Steve and other adventures from our weekend...

It's weekends like this that trick me into thinking that I like fall. The sun is shining, the air is crisp, and all sorts of fun activities await us. So while I loved every minute of this weekend I know the truth is that I do not actually like fall because I know that soon it will be dark 20 hours a day and rainy 7 days a week. When that time comes I will look back fondly at this weekend and remember the sunshine and smiles and know that fall isn't all bad.



Here's how this weekend went down:



When I got home from work on Friday, it was beautiful outside! The kids and Robbie had spent the afternoon gathering all of the supplies that we needed to build a scarecrow. This all started last week when Robbie found a pole while cleaning out the woods that "will be perfect for a scarecrow." I just let it go because he is known for his hair brained schemes (like the time that he printed out 84 pages of directions on how to carve a canoe out of a tree) and I thought that this, too, would blow over. It didn't. But guess what? It was so fun! I got to spend an hour outside with my fun, funny family and we had a blast!!

We spent most of the time throwing the hay at each other ("HAY FIGHT!!") but somehow we were able to get some of it into the scarecrow. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Steve...

Our fall fun didn't end there. We had a wedding to attend in Seattle and after Ben was so confused and disappointed to find out that his class was going to the pumpkin patch and not on a ferry ride (I seriously have no clue where he got that idea) we decided that it was high time that they went on a ferry ride. So after a morning of flu shots, we hopped a boat to Seattle. They (really just Ben) thought it was "too cold on the bow" so we spent most of the time inside but they were excited nonetheless.

The wedding was beautiful and so much fun (congrats Mel & Derek!!) and the kids did well during the long ceremony. I packed a huge ziplock for each of them full of snacks and they munched away for the entire service. At least they were quiet. Pretty good for two people who only stop talking when they are sleeping! We danced like crazy and then headed for home and our nice cozy beds. Because....

In an attempt to get as much as possible into one weekend and to take advantage of what very well could be the last sunny day this side of July, we headed to the pumpkin patch first thing in the morning. We found this farm by accident a couple of years ago and have been going ever since. It was so fun! We took a hay ride out to the field and searched until we found the perfect pumpkins (pretty much the first 4 we came across).

What a great weekend!! I love my family and friends and am almost forgetting how much I hate fall!

The Ugly Truth

So if you have been paying any attention at all you have noticed that I am a little (okay, a lot) OCD about cleaning and organizing. You know I like things where they go and if they don't have a place we must not need them. You might not know (but I'm sure it won't surprise you) that things left on the counter for more than 15 minutes usually end up in the garbage. Clutter and messes stress me out and the only time I can relax is when it is all put away.

I am about to let you in on a deep dark secret. Yesterday I was finally able to relax. We have lived in this house for ten months now. And before that I lived in my mother-in-law's basement for a year and a half. And before that my house was being packed and there were boxes in the corners. So it is safe to say that April 2008 was the last time that everything was put away in suitable fashion. I know I had all of you fooled. To an outsider, it would appear that everything is where it should be. But few people have had the opportunity to venture into my storage room. It is upstairs, in the corner of the house off the playroom. The door is always closed. When we designed the house, there was no attic or crawl space or basement so I knew I would have to have someplace to store things. You know, Christmas things, tubs of things from our childhoods, the kinds of things you are supposed to put in an attic or crawl space or basement. So we added a storage room to the plans. I thought it was a perfect solution. But then the tubs were stacked on top of each other and in front of each other and all of the things that I wanted to get to were always in the back on the bottom, no matter how arranged it. And so to get to anything I had to move everything. And more stuff just kept ending up that room and before I knew it my storage room looked like Monica's closet. I can't believe I just showed you that. I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem. Well even though it was way upstairs and the door was always shut I always knew it was there. And even though the rest of the house has been neatly organized since 48 hours after we received our occupancy permit, this room has been haunting me. We have looked at shelves and thought about building some of our own but the cost was always so high and we (well Robbie) could always think of something more pressing that the money could be used for. So no shelves for me and my nightmare continued.

Sure I could pretend that it wasn't there but deep in my heart I knew the ugly truth. It was really starting to eat at me. I couldn't find anything that would work for us. Until my stroke of genius...CRAIGSLIST!! The third thing I clicked on Sunday evening looked perfect. I handed the phone to Robbie and he called and arranged to go see it the next morning. By noon on Monday I had received a text that said "got em" and I can't remember the last time I was so giddy. I tried to concentrate at work but all I could think about was the evening of organizing that lay ahead of me. After swimming lessons, with the kids in bed I FINALLY got to begin. In just a few hours the disaster that was my storage room turned into this...

Now, I can relax. I can sleep easily at night and I can find pretty much anything I own in under 5 minutes. That, my friends, is true happiness.

Just one more reason I LOVE my kids

I constantly feel lucky to have the kids I do. There are so many reasons that I love them but tonight's reason is that I can vacuum their rooms while they are sleeping! You may know that cleaning is a pastime of mine and while I enjoy cleaning (most of the time) I L-O-V-E me a clean house. Sooooo since you obviously already know how lame I am (I just spent my Friday night cleaning my house and now I am posting about it on my blog...even I can see how pathetic this is) and love me anyway I know that you won't judge me for what I am about to tell you.

I will say it again. I love a clean house and with relatively little planned for tomorrow, visions of relaxing and playing with the kids jump started my cleaning expedition tonight. As always, I made my list so that I could cross things off as I finished. My original thought was that I would do some tonight and some tomorrow but once I got going, I didn't want to quit until everything was scratched off the list. "Everything" included a lot of vacuuming, even the kids rooms. It was late by the time I was ready to finish up my chores and the kids had been sleeping for hours. Most people would worry about waking them, scaring them with the noise of the vacuum even. Not me. I knew that I would not be able to sleep until all the work was done, so I went for it. When I entered their rooms, this is what I found...

So sweet! Who would want to disturb that, right? A lady with a mission, that's who. With them both sleeping soundly, I picked up their rooms (I even hung some art work on the wall in Abby's room!) and started vacuuming. Just like the kids that I know and love, they slept through the whole thing! When I was done vacuuming I remembered that the one thing still on my To Do List was "change sheets" in the kids' rooms. So I did! How, you may wonder, do you do that with the child sound asleep int the bed? Easy. You just move them to the freshly vacuumed floor, change the sheet and put them back.

Not only do my kids have amazing sleeping abilities (this might quite possibly be a genetic quality that they inherited from both sides) but they are also so supportive of my need to constantly clean! When I was finished with Ben's room I woke him up to use the bathroom and when he walked into the hall (which I had vacuumed minutes earlier) he smiled and said in his groggy little voice, "Oh Mommy, it looks so nice and clean." That's my boy!

90

That's how old my grandpa is. We all had a great time celebrating his birthday this weekend. It was great to all be together. Here is a picture of my grandpa with 4 of his 8 great grandchildren. Abby, my nephew Andrew, my cousins daughter Keira and Ben.