Apparently I Need Reading Glasses Too....

Ok, so I was getting ready for bed the other day. On my bathroom counter I found this cute little card that said "Uplift With Courage". It seemed like a nice little sentiment.

I started thinking to myself that maybe I should stick it on the mirror in the kids' bathroom, just to give them a little boost.

Maybe it will inspire them to be a little nicer to the kids at school or in their group of young women at church, I thought. Maybe it will inspire them to run for President someday. Maybe, just maybe.....

Maybe I should have looked a little closer. Upon further inspection I realized that it actually said, "Uplift with COVERAGE".

Uplift with coverage? Huh? What does that even mean?

Then I realized where I had seen that little card before. It came off of the bra I had bought the day before.

An Enlightening Conversation

Me: "I don't like my new glasses. I think the lenses magnify my eyes, which also magnifies all my wrinkles. They look worse when I wear the glasses."

Morgan: "Let's see. Put them on and then take them off again."

I did what she said and, much to my chagrin, she told me: "Nope, it's not your lenses. Your wrinkles look the same. You can just see them better with your glasses on."

Darn.


And in other news: I have now started to get over some of the truly traumatic parenting events from last week. Not sure if I'll recover from at least one of them. Austin is now banned from any and all jewelry.

My Budding Artists

Ally is really good at drawing dragons and warriors and stuff. AND she does have some mad nunchuck skillz - for real. She took karate and everything and has a nice orange belt to prove it.

(Is it "numchuck" or "nunchuck"? It sounds like numchuck, but when I google it, the most legitimate sources say "nunchuck". What's up with that?)


Morgan said it took her over three hours to do the shading on my upper lip.

Apparently there's more where THIS came from.

(But hopefully I won't be the recipient of it. I don't know if my self-esteem could handle much more.)

35

I am in awe of my daughter, Morgan.

She got a 35 on her ACT.

That's almost a perfect score. In fact she did get a perfect score (36) on her English and reading sections. She got a 35 on her science, which surprised even her, and then her math was a 31, which is still a great score - in fact it's the same as her composite from the last time she took the test.

AND she was really sick the day she took the test. She had already missed 2 days of school. She was so sick, I told her not to worry about the test at all and that she could take it again in a month or two.

I'm sorry to brag here. I just couldn't keep it to myself. I'm so proud that I'm bursting.

Bursting, I tell you.

Random Photos And The Short Stories That Accompany Them

This is a pinata of Summer Wheatley. We ended up with it after a Napoleon Dynamite party at our friends' house last night.

Ally won this bling as a prize. Austin was VERY sad, so now he is the proud owner. He started out as Pedro (hence the leftover moustache if you look closely) but is now Kip.

This is the new rug I got for the laundry room. I was going to paint it this shade of blue (with some new white beadboard) but now I wonder if there is enough blue in the rug. I like the rug because it reminds me a little of how they decorated The Wynn in Las Vegas. (And it looks "happy". I try to surround myself with as much happiness as possible because there is a lot of junk out there that could drive me crazy if I let it, and sometimes I do.)

This is what our downstairs bathroom looked like last week. It is now painted, though to be honest I don't totally love the color. We were trying to work with what we had. Hopefully it will work for 5 or 10 years and then we can deal with it again then. I'll show the finished room when I get the trim up and change out the light fixture and hopefully frame up the mirror too, which may take a few weeks.

This is what the walls looked like from removing the wallpaper and border from the top half of the room. Not sure what happened, if the walls weren't primed before the wallpaper or they had to use extra strong wallpaper paste to put the border on. All I know is it was a pain to fix.


This next one makes me laugh. Every time I look at it.

Here's the story: I happened to have a good hair day a couple of weeks ago. I really wanted to have a picture of myself because good hair days for me are few and far between and I wanted photographic evidence. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to take a picture of me but I finally asked Morgan and she halfheartedly snapped a photo but it wasn't very good. It was from far away and kind of dark. I really wanted a good picture, so I tried to casually snap a candid looking shot of myself while I was pretending to watch t.v. Unfortunately I missed most of me - except for my nose, but I got a good shot of Morgan. This photo is funny because it looks totally staged but it isn't. That's just what she happened to look like right then - like she was caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Unfortunately it isn't a very flattering angle of her either. Maybe next time she'll take her job more seriously when I ask her to document an important occasion.



And last but not least, the picture that had Hal laughing so hard he was crying and he totally offended Austin's 1st grade teacher......

Austin came home one day saying that they had made silhouettes of themselves. I was so excited because Hal has a silhouette of himself at about that age (which I'm hoping we can get from his mom - he's not sure where it ended up) and I thought it would be fun to hang them together. I asked Austin how his silhouette looked and he kept saying "My head looks berry, berry skinny." I didn't think much more about it until Hal came home and tried to tell me how hilarious it looked. He said he just kept laughing and he hoped the teacher didn't see him, but he didn't think she did. The next time I went to help at the school I saw it. Austin's teacher said "Your husband was laughing at this so hard he was crying." I got the whole story from her. This was the first time she had ever done the silhouettes. Her student teacher had wanted to do them. They had a hard time holding the kids still while they traced the silhouettes and then the kids cut them out themselves. I think Austin looks kind of like a sleestak from Land of the Lost. I said something about his mouth and the teacher told me when she had drawn the silhouette, his mouth had not been open. He added that part himself.

I'm glad he doesn't really look like that!

It Should Be Illegal For Old Women To Have Internet Access

Because it might make their children have violent thoughts about what they might have to do to get their mothers to quit calling them and asking the same questions over and over.

And over and over.

And over. And over.

And over.

Questions like "Which is my username again and which is my password?" and "My internet is little, how do you make it big again?" and my personal favorite, "Which button do you push to turn the computer on?"


And, hypothetically speaking, it is really annoying to have to remind your mom to use the virus scan religiously if she is going to be on the "hollywood" websites searching for news about Robert Pattinson. (Honestly, it's mainly just annoying to have a mom who does nothing more than spend her time looking up information on movie stars for hours on end.)


And, hypothetically speaking again, it is REALLY annoying to have to FIX your mom's computer after she has been on "hollywood" websites and got the computer messed up because she didn't know what a virus scan is and "forgot" to ask you about it. (Seriously, of all the questions she did ask, this is the one she didn't.)

And.

It is also annoying when your mom says the reason we pulled up something that looked different from what saw at her friend's house on a particular website A YEAR AGO is because I must have spelled "Robsessed" incorrectly. Like, how many different ways are there to spell Robsessed, for Pete's sake? Then she smugly told me that I must have forgotten the .com and that's why it didn't look like she thought it should. It wasn't even worth explaining that if we got a website, I certainly did put the .com. And, just because it didn't look like it did at her friend's house is because they change information on websites every now and then. I won't even go there, it's like arguing with a toddler.

And people wonder why I would be "Team Jacob" if I had to pick a side.


I'm sure you must all be wondering why I'm not worried about her reading this and getting mad at me.

Well, let's just say that I'm pretty comfortable with her level of ignorance right now. I'm sure she doesn't even know what a "blog" is, and since mine doesn't involve Robert Pattinson, or any other Twilight characters or movie stars, I think I'm safe for quite a while.

My Daughter Is (Semi) Famous!

Ok, so I'm glad we have such talented neighbors/friends because every once in a while one of us will get to ride on the coattails of their success. Here is one such example:

If you look very closely, you might just recognize the "ghost", none other than our very own Ally. My very talented neighbor, Shaunda, wrote a fun young adult book and needed a dark haired model. We happened to have a spare, dark haired girl at our house and she happened to be available AND she came with her very own wardrobe. I'd say it was a win-win for all involved. (Especially me, since I didn't have to do a thing and I got to read a fun book with my daughter on the cover.) By the way, that is Shaunda's daughter, the lovely Joanna, also on the cover.

This was a fun and enjoyable book to read, though I don't want to give too much away. I do think it was written in such a way that girls AND boys might like it. It was written so descriptively that I actually had a dream (nightmare) that I was in one of the last scenes of the book and I woke up almost exhausted from what happened in my dream. It's not that it's a scary book at all - it isn't, but something that happened is something that would totally panic me in real life. (But we all know that I'm terrified of some normal everyday things - like public speaking. Or doing just about anything in public.)

Anyway, my thanks to Shaunda, who also has written and published other things - most notably The Book Lover's Cookbook. It's a fun book that has excerpts from many well known books along with recipes either from foods in the book or inspired by passages in the book. She even got some of the recipes from the authors themselves, like Roald Dahl.

This book is now available in print (on Amazon) and also on Kindle, for all your progressive young readers.

Crickets

The girls won't allow me to talk about them too much online these days, but I think I am still allowed to talk about the past when what they did was usually still cute and funny and not "embarrassing". So, here goes:

One year at the Nibley City Heritage Days celebration our friend's son, Daniel, caught a little frog in the park. My girls were about 4 and 7 at the time. They begged him to give them the frog, which he did, and we happily took him (or her) home. Even I was pretty happy with the frog. We named her (or him) Lily.

Well, the next day I started worrying about what we should feed our new pet. I bought her a little plastic terrarium and we got her environment as close to the one she had come from as we possibly could. I then called the pet store to see what kind of "frog food" they had.

"You need crickets." the guy said.

"Crickets? You mean you sell dried cricket parts?"

"No, they will only eat LIVE crickets."

"Live crickets? You have got to be kidding me." I replied.

"Oh no. We get them in regularly. You just need to pick them up every week or so and they'll stay alive until your frog eats them all."

Well, being the responsible pet owner that I am, I drove on into the pet store for my first bag of crickets. I purchased about 15 or 20 of them and we headed for home with Ally holding the bag on her lap in the back seat. At that time we were juggling between 2-3 different vehicles for some reason and I remember EXACTLY which car we were in, my mother-in-law's old (to her - "fancy" to us) Buick that was a nice silvery blue color. As embarrassing as it was to be seen in the "old lady" car, it was a pretty smooth and comfy ride. Probably the most "luxury" car I've ever driven.

The image of what happened next is permanently embedded in my brain.

I was driving along happily, contemplating the "Mother of the Year" award I would receive someday when blood curdling screams from the back seat assaulted my ears. Since I was driving I didn't immediately turn around to see what the problem was. Pretty soon I didn't need to turn around, I saw them.

Lots of them.

Crickets.

Lots and lots of crickets, jumping ALL over the car. Ally was deathly afraid of bugs back then (she still screams like that whenever she sees a spider and I swear that girl can spot a baby spider from about a mile away) and she was terrified. Somehow the elastic or twist tie or whatever it was that was supposed to be holding the plastic bag shut had come off. And they were jumping. All. over. the. car.

I could barely drive, it was like we had our own little plague going on right there inside the car, it was wild! (And hard to concentrate on driving I might add. Good thing I wasn't more freaked out by the crickets themselves or I might have crashed or something.)

We managed to make it all the way home, about a 20 minute drive, and I hurried to catch as many crickets as I could - which was only about 4 or 5. We fed them to Lily that day and the next one and then I convinced the girls that we needed to turn Lily loose where Daniel had found her "because she missed her mommy". There was no way in heck I was going to to through that again. The crickets were pretty expensive too, around $5 if I remember right.

I was pretty sad to let her go, because Lily was a pretty fun pet while it (he, she?) lasted.



Back to the Buick, that car is the same vehicle that we took to Nebraska one year where we caught fireflies and THEY somehow got out and as we drove along at night you could see one light up in the car every once in a while. We did get a few of them home where we promptly released them. They hung around and lived for about a week. Hal swears that about exactly a year later he saw them again one night. Maybe some of the other neighbors happened to bring some back from somewhere else, who knows.

A Quick Peek At The Girls' Rooms

Since things are a little dreary around here, I thought I'd let you peek into the girls' rooms. I love the bright colors there, and I think both rooms turned out really fun.

Disclaimer: Both these photos were taken shortly after we moved in, when it was still fun for them to keep their rooms clean and school and real life hadn't started back up yet.

Here's Ally's room. We added the beadboard and I think it makes it look kind of fun and beachy, which is what she was going for. This aqua paint is BY FAR the paint that gave me the most stress. The first color was even more "in your face" than this one, if you can imagine it. Even this color kind of glows in the dark. But, she is happy with it so I guess that's mainly what counts. I do like the green that she chose as the accent color. I've also promised her that we can get rid of the Hello Kitty pictures in the frame as soon as we find something that is more "her" at this point in her life. I like the hanging Japanese lantern balls. We had some in her old room but I guessed at the size and ordered the wrong ones. I wish they were bigger.

Here's Morgan's room. Her bedspread was definitely the most expensive one in the house (like three times the cost of mine). But, it was the only one she really loved and I hated the first one she picked out so it was worth it to me. I love how her paint color turned out. We added the board and batten in this room. It was pretty much the same as in her old room. She got the Japanese lantern ball things too, and I wonder if it looks weird, since their rooms are right next to each other. Oh well. I do love her orange pillow. I found out there is a Home Goods store in the Salt Lake area so I made a special trip there and I think it was worth it just for this one pillow. I think I'm going to have to head back there again this summer. We were going to paint the pink tray she uses as a nightstand but we haven't gotten around to it yet. Also, she made a cute bulletin board that has her room colors plus pink in it, so we may just leave it.

Well that's it. Have a bright, cheery day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hey, I got roses! I don't usually get roses for Valentine's Day, so it was kind of a big deal. (Austin made the cute decoration in school.)

I don't generally love our white mantel, because it's a little too formal for me, but it matched everything else quite nicely for this month's decorations.

Over the kids photos is my favorite quote, because it's so true. Also my favorite photo of each of the kids. I thought the mantel needed something else, so I made the banner the day Hal took the kids to his mom's when I had bronchitis. I was supposed to be resting but I thought I'd "hurry" and make it. A full three hours later I was done. At least next time I make one (I'm thinking a "summer" one would be really fun) it shouldn't take so long, right?

Hope you had a great day too!