Ladies With Class

Olivia hosted her first (and quite possibly last) slumber party last Friday for her 9th birthday. Here's a few pics to commemorate the high-class occasion!

Since it was done first, let me show you a picture of her horse cake made by yours truly. The fence is made out of Kit Kats and the horses are walking through tall prairie grass because the icing was thick, but Olivia was happy with it and so was I!

For dinner we ordered pizza. And no, they are not wearing make up. They are wearing pizza sauce. On their faces.
They turned the livingroom into their sleeping chamber. Every time I pulled out the camera, there was some serious posing going on!

The whole crew! They look all sweet and innocent, but don't let them fool you.

More posing. Peace!

And more. What's with the dogs on the heads, anyway?

In the kitchen getting their drinks. I told Olivia she could have soda and chips for movies once they settled down for the night.

Once we survived the night, (and they only woke me up once, by the way!) I made them all pancakes for breakfast. One girl didn't get to spend the night, so she missed out.

And after breakfast, the concert! What talent...

After the other girls left, I got ready to take Tabby back home. However, they had to experiment with the make-up Olivia had gotten for her birthday first. Yes, it's blue eyeshadow. And yes, Olivia has a gem in the middle of her forehead. She wore it there all day, by the way. And yes, we did go out in public. It was her birthday, so I humored her.

Connor is One!

Last Friday Connor turned one! I can't believe my little boy is growing up so fast. It's such a cliche, but it's true. I thought I would spend the day taking pictures of him to document his first birthday as I have seen other mom's do, but we only made it about an hour into the day with that idea. He never even got out of his PJ's. In my defense, however, I was trying to pull together a birthday party for Olivia that night. (In case you don't know, Connor's birthday is the 19th and Olivia's the 20th.) Since we are going to see our SC family next week, we decided to hold off on his actual birthday celebration till we get with our family. However, here's the pictures I got of him on his special day!

After getting up and having a breakfast snack (nursing) he participated in one of his favorite activities - dismantling the diaper bag.

Then while I was making breakfast, he started on his second-favorite activity - cruising around the kitchen and seeing which cabinets Mommy will let him open.

He also go a birthday card from his Auntie Janice that he loved reading!

It was really, really interesting!

This is Connor with his girlfriend, Debbie. They've been together since Halloween, but sadly now it must be a long-distance relationship. She's mom to one of Olivia's friends and a good friend of mine. They just moved to Broken Arrow (about 2 hours away) at the end of the school year, so Debbie brought her daughter down for Olivia's party on Friday, and I drove her home on Saturday. Debbie and her kids gave Connor his first birthday present! And like all girlfriends, she knew exactly what he wanted - something with batteries!

Unbelievable!

Last night it happened. Ben and I were fast asleep in our bed, and suddenly without warning there was a crash and an outcry. The outcry was from me because our ceiling fan (which had been running, of course) had ripped out of our ceiling and fallen on me. Fortunately, it only got my leg and I've got plenty of muscle/fat padding there! Once we were sure my leg wasn't broken Ben moved the ceiling fan to the garage (see picture above) and we flipped the power back on (the fuse had blown) and tried to get back to sleep. In our post-adreneline high we laughed in bed about the irony, the chances, what have you. And although I have had some... interesting... personal accidents in our marriage, this one can not be held against me! I had nothing to do with it. I was not clumsy or thoughtless or blind in this one. But really - what were the chances??

Now that it's morning, I'm just ticked. That ceiling fan was old, and it has wobbled (loudly!) since we moved in, but of course if it's not falling on you, leaking water, or 900 degrees in your house, it's not important enough to fix. Although I've been and am grateful for the roof over our heads (especially considering we had to live in Intown Suites for a week when we got here!) I'm just fed up with the problems of this old townhouse. It will be nice when we move.

Overworked and Underpaid

In case you have all been wondering where I have been lately...

...this was the "to do" list that I made for myself exactly one week ago. And I could have actually written about 2 more pages since then! Both Olivia and Connor had birthdays last weekend, we're getting ready to go on a two-week vacation to see old (and new!) friends and family in SC and I've had a bazillion things to do to get ready for our women's group meeting (Enrichment Night) tomorrow night at church. And just in case you think I'm exaggerating, you should know - I never exaggerate! Ever! And never fear... one thing on my current "to do" list in my head is update my blog, so you'll hear more from my soon!

Groovin' (Part 2)

I used to think Connor had good taste in music. Apparently, he just loves to dance. While waiting for the sun catchers to bake today the girls turned on one of the "demo tunes" on our keyboard it's one of those cheesy 80's-type theme music things - not even good enough for Rocky and that's saying something! Anyhow, I looked into the livingroom and there it was. Connor was dancing! So was Kelsey and Olivia in a way. Either that or they were having serious nervous system issues...

Harder Than It Looks

It all started in Hobby Lobby the other day when I saw some kits to make the real, old-fashioned sun catchers. Not those cheap plastic things that you can buy 2/$1 at Walmart and paint, but real, honest-to-goodness suncatchers that have the metal frame and the plastic beads that you pour in and then melt in the oven. I thought it would be a great project for the girls one day this week. So this morning we set to work.

Olivia picked out the horse (of course) and Kelsey the rainbow with hearts.

As you can see, I pulled out a piece of foil to put their frame on with the intention of carefully sliding it onto a cookie sheet to bake when the time came. Fortunately, I realized sooner rather than later that it would have been disastrous.

(And yes. That is a pair of tweezers Olivia is using to carefully move the beads that fell into the wrong spot.)

I soon pulled out my old cookie sheets, moved the frames onto them, and replaced all the plastic beads for them so they could continue on.

And after a little clean-up help from Mommy and those tweezers, this is Kelsey's finished product pre-baking!

And Olivia's

And voila! The finished product!

(And no, Kelsey's face doesn't normally look like that. She hasn't figured out how to "pose naturally" for the camera yet. She's all raised eyebrows and frozen smiles...)

For some reason, I don't remember it being this hard when I was a kid.

Dinosaur *ROAR*!

Yesterday morning my neighbor and I took our kids to the zoo. They have a cool dinosaur exhibit up through the end of June, so of course we had to go see it! It was awesome, because many of the dinosaurs are robotic and move their heads and tails. They also roar a lot. It's a very... loud... exhibit. And some of the dinosaurs were HUGE! Take this t-rex for example...

And the triceratops...

I wasn't sure how Connor was going to feel about all the noise, but he loved it as much as the girls did!

Of course, we DID see more than dinosaurs. Look at these chimps chillin' in the shade...

And of course, you can't forget the obligatory picture of the kids sitting on the zoo statues. This one is a rhino.

And by the end of it all, this is what we felt like. IT WAS HOT!! And HUMID! How am I ever going to survive SC when we visit??

Life As We Know It...

Doesn't she look so sweet, innocent, and young posting with this (giant) dandelion?

A mere 18 hours later, this happened. She's "chatting" online with a friend from school. What!?! Already!?!

Friday at Johnson Park

Friday we decided to go for a bike ride to Johnson Park, which is about a mile from our house. Usually Olivia tires out quickly while going up hill and I have to stop for her so we can rest periodically. This time she was hardly winded and I had to stop and rest! Why? Maybe it was because we pumped up her tires on Wednesday. Or maybe it's because I was hauling an extra 65-70 pounds behind my bike. Or maybe, just maybe it was because it was the THIRD day in a row that I'd gone for a bike ride involving hills and small children. Anyway, once we got there the girls had a good time...

...riding on the helicoptor...

..and digging in the dirt.

But Connor wasn't too happy about havintg to sit in the sand. The whole time he kept one of his legs up - didn't want to touch it! What the heck is going to do when we go to the beach??

Bed Head

He kept blinking... but it's adorable anyway!

Bookworm

I guess the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree...

(By the way, she doesn't know I took this picture - it's not posed.)

And look, Kristi! She's finally reading Harry Potter - I told her Jared was doing it, and she decided to give it a try!

Sour Grapes

Alright, alright - I know I'm doing a million posts today but I just can't resist one more! Kelsey ate some grapes the other day that she thought we a little sour. She was so funny I had to shoot a video, which of course she then had to ham up a bit more...

Our First Week of Summer

Summer is officially here and I'm officially starting to lose my sanity.

We had a lot of this...

And a little of this... (no, I can't talk about it so don't even ask!)

And one afternoon of this... (it was wonderful!!)

Groovin'

I am going to try to post this video and hopefully you'll be able to see it. I know, we either need a real video camera or better lighting in our livingroom, but I'm not the one that built this apartment without an overhead light in the livingroom!

So last Saturday night Ben and I were watching old episodes of Bones and there's this one episode where Angela and Hodgins are getting married and Angela's dad is in town (played by one of the dudes from ZZ Top). Ben and I are watching this episode around 10:00 p.m. and Connor is playing in front of the TV. As the guy from ZZ Top is starts playing his guitar, Connor starts weaving his head back and forth - grooving to the music. We thought it a funny coincidence till we backed up the show and played it again. Sure enough, Connor was groovin' to the music for real! It was so funny!!

Quick Update

OK, so it's been almost 5 weeks since I started my experiement of running 20 miles per week and giving up desserts. With the exception of this past week (where I screwed up in the dessert department) I've been sticking to it.

So to recap, first we started with this:

Two weeks later we had this:

And two weeks after that we had this:

No more updates till my last one at the end of June!