My Personal Trainer

It seems this is my new personal trainer. She has really gotten into working out lately and is determined to work daily on being "super strong and super healthy." She is super competitive in just about everything, so being the strongest kid in First Grade (yep, she's just six) would really make her skirt fly up - if she wore skirts, that is.

I think it's great that she likes to exercise. We never discuss weight or being fat or anything, but we do discuss healthy habits, like limiting sugar/junk food and being active. (I sound like a Prevention ad.)

Anyway, I've found a big-time bonus to her having this little GI Jane-obsession. She motivates me now. Today, for example, I said I didn't really feel like exercising. I just wasn't motivated. I just wanted to be lazy today. You know what she told me? "Mom, you just gotta stop thinking about it and get with it."

She actually talked me into a 40-minute circuit. We took turns lifting weights and running on the treadmill. It was actually pretty fun, having someone to work out with who doesn't see working out as another daily chore.

Now, if she can only train me to put down the Oreos...

Painting with Daddy

The kids have really gotten into Legos lately. Aaron wanted to get them one of those Lego tables, but since he likes to build, he opted for building them one instead of buying them one. It turned out great.

He decided to paint it on Saturday. And he thought it would be cool if each of the kids painted a different color on it. I thought he was crazy, so I stayed inside watching TV while they were outside. He had them pretty well organized. Reese did the red leg, Rhett did the orange leg, and Avery got the two blue ones. The painting lasted a whopping 20 minutes, but they loved it.

As expected, Rhett got a little wild with his brush...see the orange paint above his ear?

He doesn't seem to mind.

Reese got a little far into her paint as well.

She still has traces of red paint in there. It hurts her head when I try to brush it out. You know how tender a princess' head can be.

Avery didn't make a mess. She just is a mess...

I'm afraid she's becoming a bad influence on her younger siblings.

He looks way too sweet to be a rock star!

I think it's safe to say everybody had fun. Well, maybe not everybody. Guess who got to be in charge of clean-up?

I Don't Like Today

I really hate days like today. I have absolutely no reason to be a grump, but I am. Ok, I guess I have some reason (no decent sleep in over a month, no money AT ALL in my checking account, extra 5 pounds on the scale, not a moment without my children lately, including the solo trip to Oklahoma), but really, nothing a normal, sane person couldn't overcome. Problem is, I don't think I'm sane. I suffer from depression. And I'm sick of it. I am convinced it's a chemical problem and I am on meds, which help most of the time. Except when I forget them at bedtime, like I did last night. So I wake up from a fitful sleep, grumpy for no reason at all. It's days like today when, instead of working out, I make a dessert that I know I can't keep my hands off of. I also want to spend money I don't have on crap I don't need. And I can't decide if I want to start a fight with my husband or go cry in my bed. I want time away from my children after a full-tilt, solo weekend to Oklahoma with them, although snuggling with them seems to make me calm, happy and grateful. Basically, I don't know what I want. It kind of sucks.
But you know what? Just writing it down helps. After reading my ridiculous pity-party, sob-story and feeling almost too embarrassed to hit publish, I am going to publish. Then, I am going to go do 20 push-ups, 50 sit-ups and then eat the dessert I made. I feel better already.

Oklahoma...again

We were in Oklahoma last weekend while Aaron was in New Jersey, playing with his friends at the beach. The kids had a weekend of "firsts."

Here they are at Josh and Emily's dock at the lake...none of my kids have ever gone swimming in a lake. First of all, I'm not a laker. I like the beach just fine, but prefer a nice, in-ground swimming pool with a bar nearby. Second of all, I'm completely paranoid about my kids drowning in a lake. I have nightmares about it. But, I did want to hang with Emily and her kids Saturday and I did want my kids to have the full Pawhuska experience and Lake Bluestem is part of it...so, we went. I thought I'd have to be in the water with Rhett the whole time. Nope. He jumped off the dock and climbed the ladder at least 40 times. He was a fish!

The girls loved it too. Reese took a bit longer to warm up to the idea of jumping in the murky, dark water that is the lake, but once she got in, she stayed in.

Nobody drowned, so, even though I will probably always be a pool girl, I won't hesitate to go back next time!

Now for the really good stuff....Sunday, Mom's boyfriend, Jerry, took us out to see his horses...and let us all ride. Avery even got to ride by herself, without a grown-up holding the reins. There's a little part of me that thinks she may marry an Oklahoma cowboy and move up there as soon as she has the chance. Not that that's a bad thing, as long as she waits until she's thirty to do so. I'll just have to get some boots and start loving the lake, that's all.

Here she is, showing her skills.

Avery couldn't believe I forgot her boots and jeans. She had to borrow JD's pants, which were about 4 inches too short. And her tennis shoes. "Cowboys don't really wear tennis shoes, Mom." Sorry. We may have to get a pair of boots to just leave at Grammy's. It's too much for a non-cowgirl to remember to pack boots and jeans when it's 105 degrees outside, especially when I have three other people to pack for.

It was a setback, but we made it work. I think that, once she got on the horse, she wouldn't have cared if I had made her wear a skirt and rhinestone flip-flops. Ok, she might have cared about that, but you get my point. She LOVED it.

Reese and Rhett even loved it. No one wanted their turn to be over. Here's Avery, riding with Rhett.

And here's Reese, riding with some girl who also didn't have cowboy boots. Pay no attention to her, please.

I just have one question: How did my hometown, which used to bore me to tears, get to be such a hot spot of entertainment????

P.S. I almost forgot this picture...see the horse trough the kids are walking toward?

When JD spotted it, he said "Hey guys, let's go look at the hot tub."

That's just how they roll in P-town...

She's Turning Into a Teenager Already

I mean, just look at her. Headphones in, oblivious to me and everything around her, playing her Nintendo DS. If she had a cell phone, I'd swear she was sixteen instead of six.

She worked hard last weekend to earn an "iPod" (really a $5 mp3 player that Aaron got off of Woot one time.) She made a list of songs for us to download for her. The list looked something like this (translations in parentheses):



The Clim (The Climb, Miley Cyrus)
Avin and Chikmuks (Alvin and the Chipmunks)
Big and Chuky (Big and Chunky, Madagascar 2)
Jony Cash (Johnny Cash)
Michael Jackson
Hana Motana (Hannah Montana)



If it had a checkmark next to it, it meant Reese wanted it on hers too (the mp3 players were 2 for $10 so she had to do some cleaning to earn one too). Every song had a checkmark.


Reese doesn't seem to care much about hers, but Avery LOVES hers. She walks around with headphones in all the time. And she sings. At the top of her lungs, all the time. My favorite is when she sings "Jackson" by Johnny Cash. We got married in a fever...hotter than a pepper sprout... it's adorable.


Today, she is singing "Billie Jean" by the late, great MJ. And I can't stop laughing because instead of "the kid is not my son," she is saying "but the kiss is not my side."
I hope she never realizes how loud, off-key and funny it is because she'll stop. That will be sad, because this is my daily entertainment.


Have I mentioned that I love that kid?

I can ride a bike....

...if you push me.

And I will scream if you don't.

Not a Turd in Sight

The following picture is gross. I know this, and I know that some of you will think that my family must be really gross, but I promise that we do not keep turds or dead animals anywhere inside this house. Ok, we do keep turds in certain places, but that's only because I can't get all the short people in this house to flush the toilet. But no dead animals. And it's not like we just started keeping the turds. They've been around for a good 3-4 years.

So what, if not turds or dead animals, is attracting these disgusting creatures? Last week, we killed 41 of them in about an hour's time. The kids and I were counting. I thought for sure we had a problem in our house, so I asked Aaron to buy these traps. Look at our window about 12 hours after installing the traps.

.

You should have seen them after 2 days. Unbelievable. So what in the world is going on? Do we have a hole somewhere?

Here's the real question: Why, after installing new traps, have we attracted zero new flies? Is it possible that they saw all their friends dying and decided not to come into our house? Why has this invasion suddenly stopped?

And why, oh why, did God create flies in the first place????????

Bored?

Aaron just sent me this link...hilarious, satirical look at today's news and current events.
http://www.theonion.com/content/index

July 4th Weekend

I don't know about you, but I believe that the 4th of July should be spent near water. A pool, the lake, heck a sprinkler system will work in a pinch. Whatever the source, I'd say water is necessary. Friends and family aren't a must, but they sure do make it more fun.

So, let me just say that we had neither. This is not to say we didn't have any fun, but we had to work harder at having fun than we usually do.

After lying around all morning, we decided to check out the Frisco Freedom Fest. It was advertised as "Free admission" and "Lots of free Kids' Zone activities" so we thought that sounded like a great way to spend time before the fireworks started (scheduled for 10 pm).

Here we are, just arriving at Frisco Square, around 5 p.m:

I like these pictures because, not only are we all festive in our coordinating red, white and blue, but we are still full of hope and anticipation of the 5 hours of fun we are about to have. (Did we really think the kids would last for 5 hours? Sure, with FREE activities, live music and "tons of Frisco restaurant booths" to choose from.)

Our first activity was the Euro Bungee. Avery was the only one brave enough...thank goodness, because it WAS NOT FREE. It cost 6 tickets. Aaron went to buy tickets while we stood in line. He came back and informed me that he just spent $30 on 30 tickets.

Okey dokie...well, this is a big activity. It has to cost more than the other things. Plus, Avery loved it.

See? She's loving it. Totally worth six dollars.

Now, on to the next activity...tons of bounce houses. Since bounce houses are everywhere these days, they have to be cheap.

THREE TICKETS? PER CHILD? That's three freaking dollars a child to jump on a dadgum bounce house! It's not looking like our $30 of tickets are going to last 5 hours....seriously? THREE DOLLARS TO JUMP ON A BOUNCE HOUSE? There is a restaurant by our house that has two bounce houses out back...sure, the food sucks, but at least the bounce houses are free!

We decided to take a break with a snow cone. $3 each? Yeah, but you get to make your own! Surely that's worth $3, right? Kids LOVE to squirt that syrup stuff. Suicide snow cones on the 4th of July. Gotta love that. Oh wait. I have picky kids. None of them wanted the vomit-colored snow cones they had created. There's another $9 down the drain. But look how cute they are with their sweaty, red faces.

So, where is this Kids' Zone with "tons of free activities?" It's way, way in the back...behind all the three and four ticket items, of course. It's the crappy bean bag toss where the bean bag weighs more than the actual board, so it tips over when you throw it. It's that fishing game, where the kid throws the fishing line over a screen and someone behind puts a toy on it. We have like, three paper gliders that fell apart 10 minutes after we got them. There was also a game where a kiddie pool was full of ducks with numbers on the bottom. I'm sure there was supposed to be some sort of system, but the dude running this "game" just handed a prize every time a kid picked up a duck, regardless of the number. More gliders.

We walked all the way to the back, playing one crappy game after another, until we came to the paramedic/fire station portion. The kids liked that...here they are with one of Frisco's old-timey fire truck.

So, to summarize: We spent $9 on snow cones that went in the trash; $30 on bounce houses and bungee jumping; $13 for three sandwiches; and $6 on water. All this in 2 hours. We were too broke to wait the last 3 hours before fireworks, so we came home and got in the kiddie pool in the backyard. We then had popcorn and watched a movie until 9:45, when we drove up to the CVS parking lot to sit and watch fireworks. I wouldn't say I would do it all over again, but hey, it's a memory. That's what holidays are all about, right?

P.S. If you ask my kids what their favorite part of the day was, I bet they would all say the fireworks. Not because they loved them so much, but because, at one point in the parking lot, one guy had his headlights on and another guy went absolutely berserk, yelling "HEY, IDIOT! Turn off your lights, IDIOT!" over and over again. We all got in the car and laughed all the way home, mocking the yeller. The next day, that's all they wanted to talk about...the yelling guy. Hey, at least that was free.

Uncle Bo

My brother and his wife stopped to stay with us on their way to Oklahoma Sunday. We hadn't seen them since Christmas, so we were so excited for them to get here-and equally sad when they left.


Avery LOVES Uncle Bo and Aunt April. Here she is with Bo on the couch. She told April later that she wasn't really sleepy, she just didn't want Bo to have to snuggle by himself.




Bo and April are both coaches, so they brought Avery plenty of gear. She got a 'real' athlete's backpack, a Javelina (Bo's team) sweatshirt, and each of the kids got a football camp t-shirt.


They loved the shirts. They slept in them Sunday night and refused to take them off all day Monday. I finally convinced them to let me wash them Monday night. I actually tricked them while they were in the tub, or I'm not so sure I could have gotten them to the washer. I don't know if it's the shirt or where the shirt came from, actually! Either way, we all miss them all the time and are considering petitioning for a job for Bo somewhere closer to us!