Found Item

Proof that someone in the Atlanta library system has a decent sense of humor. Juvenile easy reader, check!


(FYI, the vampire meets a nice goth lady at the end of the book and everyone is happy, happy, happy!)

"Feeling very protestatious"

I got some pretty good face time in this news bit. I almost missed my giant head early on, but it's there!

Women Hold Nurse-In To Fight Breastfeeding Restrictions

The Graduate

- minus Dustin Hoffman & Anne Bancroft. And a whole lot less Simon & Garfunkle.

Today was Frankie's Pre-K graduation. I'm not exactly sure what the standards are for Pre-K graduation, but I'm assuming he knows enough letters and numbers for it to have been considered a successful year. Contrary to popular belief, I did not cry, although I did get a little teary while the kids were singing. We've been really happy with Epworth Day School and I feel as though Frankie's had a really wonderful experience there; the only problem is that it isn't in our neighborhood, so almost all of his classmates (save one other, who will be home schooled) will attend a different elementary school. I am, however, thrilled that he's signed up for Kindezi, and I know he'll thrive there. (Did I mention that *every* child at Kindezi is performing above grade level in reading and math? It seems as though 6:1 is working. But I digress...)

Tip 'o the hat to ya!


F and his teachers. One of the bonuses of being the first 'graduating' class is that the kids picked out their own cap & gown colors. Blue isn't one of his favorites, so I'm kind of surprised he chose blue, but hey, when you are four, you are allowed to change your mind time and again!


Once again, this is the best we could get. Oh well.


Videos...for family that could not attend (aka everyone but us.)

Lots more words.

I figured I'd better update at least one more time before I have to dive head-first into a cesspool of undergrad essays, many of which are borderline indecipherable and others that are written on Tyler Perry films, which is almost as bad. But I digress...


First of all, you are probably not curious about the running, but I will tell you about it anyway. It was *so* hard; I crossed the finish line, walked over to where Jason - who had finished the marathon almost an hour earlier - was waiting for me, and said "I am never doing that again", apparently with a huge scowl on my face. Jason is my brother-in-law, who told me he'd pay me $100 for completing a marathon (he's a high roller.) After a particularly good eight-mile run in December, I signed up for the marathon and the regrets started the next day. I made it through the 18 weeks of training, only got badly sunburned once, only missed two runs (both of them five miles), and developed some seriously awesome calves. I wasn't nervous until about mile 14 of the actual race, when it started to get really hot really fast in Nashville. By mile 16, I was getting weary. By mile 18, I was cursing myself, swearing I'd never, ever run again. I somehow made it to mile 23, where I got a second wind and I managed to finish pretty strong in spite of my multi-mile struggle. I started out with a 4:30 pace group, but the pace leader started out way too fast (sorry, but 9:30 min miles are unsustainable for 4.5 hours when you should be running 10:18's) and by the end, I was passing other folks who started out with the pace group who couldn't keep up, either. I finished in 4 hours 53 minutes - I'm not proud of my time at all (in fact, I'm a little embarassed that it took so long.) Sadly, I'm now trying to figure out if I can train to do it in 4:30 next year. I have no aspirations of qualifying for Boston, I just want to reach my initial goal! In other news, Nashville is a pretty cool place, even if it is the home of Ke$ha.


Juston closed on the Willard house today, which means we now only own two houses! It's a huge stress off of our family to finally have sold the house, and we didn't lose too much money on it. Now the focus is to finish our current house; we are still toying around with the idea of moving but nothing is set in stone, and after some of the events of this spring I'm kind of happy just to stay put. I'm working on Frankie's paperwork for kindergarten registration, Harper is enrolled in preschool, I've got my 3 jobs, Juston is still at Cartoon Network - things are nothing if not consistent and fairly comfortable. Oh, and I'm a blonde now. :)


Blogger is being stupid right now and won't let me upload any pictures, so images of cute kids - consider them forthcoming.

Almost there...

...and you can tell that I was really happy to be finished!

Shrocky

Our newest family member. That makes us humans - 4, animals - 3. If we aren't careful, they might take over. P.S. the fish was named by a 4-year-old, hence the name that isn't even a real word.

peekaboo

mas huevos!

It's been a long time. I admit it. I've been busy, sometimes, anyway. I thought about stopping, but I can't shut the blog down - that would be like giving up on an ongoing project that is on the train to nowhere or something like that.
So what's new? Things have been down, they've been up, we've been digging in the dirt, getting all spring-ed-out. I'm still set to run the marathon and still would be considered for the fat girl category in that Salt Lake marathon. I went running with a friend this morning and she, who is terribly thin, thought it was very offensive that they would even separate out those categories. Next week we will see if 26.2 miles kills the fat girl. If it does not, I can write my manifesto on the topic - which I composed over about eight miles of speed drills a few weeks ago. Until then - run, fatty, run! :)

What have we been up to? We've been to the park, zoo, museum, doing renovating at our house, working in the garden (growing peas, tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers this year), working, working and more working (tons of freelance lately, picked up a fourth class this semester, and an extra day at drop-in - I have no idea why), and playing at the house. F got bunkbeds because, you know, he's a big kid now. He loves to climb up into his bed and listen to audiobooks (thanks, library!) He's had some adventures in dressing himself, with the wardrobe staple of choice being sweatpants because, as he says, his legs might sweat. *sigh* We toured the newly remodeled Atlanta Mormon temple and F's comment was "I don't like this because I'm a kid! When I'm a grownup, I will like it, but it's boring and I'm a kid!" Yup, he gets it. We also got our kindergarten enrollment packet, which is kind of surreal. Both kids in school next year - huzzah! Dedicated work time for mommy.

This year we had the 'annual' egg hunt, which is basically a great egg pick-up, where the eggs are littered about in the park and kids go crazy. I estimate that we had about 1000 eggs and roughly 50 kids, so a decent turnout, although I will admit I was hoping to improve on last year's numbers. Maybe next year! Overall it was a success and I'm pretty sure that everyone had a good time.

Meh.

I've just not had the desire to blog lately, and it seems as though most everyone else out there has felt the same sentiments as I find that most of my friends and family have given up on this medium as well. Trust me, I still have lots of useless questions to throw out into the universe, like, what am I going to do when I grow up? Should I be offended that, if I were to run the Salt Lake marathon, I could qualify for the fat girl category? Why won't Frankie sleep at night? And I still have lots of strong opinions, but I'm learning that they aren't as important as I maybe once thought they were. Plus I'm too tired to care as much as I once cared.

We are still trying to sell the flip house. We are still both working at the same jobs. Frankie is still in Pre-K and doing well. Harper is still growing like crazy. Life is consistent, which isn't a bad thing. That doesn't mean that things won't change drastically in the near future, but if they stay the same, I can't say I'd be upset, either. That's all for now. I've got stinky dishes to clean up before I go to bed.

Frankie's got the fever...

...Bieber fever!

Everybody wants a...

...banana.


...in the bathroom.


...to share with a dog.


...with whom you will then share a bed.

Grandma Bait

Here are some videos for grandparents and those with a blood or by marriage relation to me and my children. I would give myself too much credit if I were to think that other people are interested enough in our mundane lives to actually watch videos of my children. But here they are for your viewing pleasure - my children dancing, once again, and Harper saying 'doggie' over and over followed by blowing a kiss. Adorable to the mother, tolerated by the rest.

Ruffles

Yep.

More Ice Capades

We're no longer iced-in, but I figured you wanted to watch more videos of my kids riding in the laundry basket last Monday. :)





We forced Bridget to take a ride. She hates us.

Update.

We're still here. We ventured out on the roads yesterday to the grocery store, which was in a pretty sad state of low stock. Things seem to be improving today, although schools are still closed and we're going a little crazy. Juston finally went to work, even though he's not sure if it's open or not; he's ready to get back to normal. And since you've all been dying to know, the gym is finally open and supposedly the babysitting will be open this afternoon, so I won't have to miss another training run this week. Hooray! The college has bumped the semester start date to next Tuesday, which is lame since I had a beautiful syllabus and schedule all designed up that now I have to butcher. Oh well. Go snow!

Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, Snowtopia, Snowed in.

It snowed here last night. A LOT. In many parts of the world, the governments are prepared for snow and have plows, salt, etc., in order to keep things moving along. Not in Atlanta. The entire city has been crippled for over twenty-four hours. School was cancelled today and is closed tomorrow. Juston's work shut down, so he got a grownup snow day. We watched one of our neighbors spin his tires while trying to back out of the driveway. The freeways are giant sheets of ice. Needless to say, we went nowhere today. We did, however, involve ourselves in some cold-weather mayhem.

We forced Bridget to wear a sweater. And then Juston thought a bib would be a nice addition (edit: i can't believe i put "edition". smh.) to the ensemble. I'm pretty sure she hates us.

Here's a bad, low-light photo of the early stages of the snow at around 11 PM Sunday night.

Snow on the trampoline!

My face is half-frozen. This is my "I missed my first day of marathon training because of this stupid snow" expression.

Harper just wanted a wagon ride. I eventually gave in and pulled her along the road, which was basically a bunch of ice. (That, and she whined and gave me some stink eye until I caved in.)

The rosemary never dies!

We used a laundry basket as a sled. We make do!

Since we are low on milk and bread, we might have to pull the wagon to the grocery store tomorrow; it's only about half a mile away. Juston's work has already issued an announcement for employees to call in at 10 AM and find out the final status for tomorrow, so it looks like he at least gets another sleep in due to the weather. (Maybe he'll get the priviledge of staying home to finish insulating the floors.) And that's day #2 of marathon training shot since I'm not about to run on solid ice and I can't drive to get to the gym (not that it's open anyway.) Oh well! Might as well stay home and eat cookies. :)

New Year's Noms!

Too much information Tuesday.

Well, it's January. That forsaken month is upon us when it's cold and there's really not much of interest in the immediate future. Back to work, back to paying bills, back to trying to sell a house, back to scrubbing toilets. On the bright side, Frankie starts back to preschool in the morning. I decided that, to commemorate the start of the second half of the school year, today would be a 'kid day', where we did stuff that was pretty much designed for their entertainment, although I did sneak some laundry and a trip to the bank in there. For starters, we spent about an hour and a half at the zoo.

Harper really wanted to be in her 'ride' today. Every time I took her out of the stroller, she cried.


Frankie spent a good portion of the morning with his binoculars glued to his face.


"In all the world, my nest is best!"


He 'cheeseburger'd' for me.


This is the calm before the storm; she was scared once the train started and wailed a bit, especially in the tunnel.





I even splurged and let the kids ride on the carousel. Well, at least one of them had a good time, right? (There are no photos of Harper as I had to ride with her to keep her from having a meltdown.)


There is no photographic proof of our shamefully non-nutritive lunch.

After lunch, I took the kids outside for a walk/ride since it was such a nice day. It went fine for awhile until Frankie started to have a breakdown roughly half a mile away from home. It was a long walk back.

Harper gets the best deal of the bunch - no work involved!


Thanks, Santa, for the orange bike (Frankie was very adament about getting an 'orange' bike.) No thanks, City of Atlanta, for the terribly dilapidated century-old brick sidewalks in our neighborhood. They would be charming if they weren't in disrepair; as it is, they are terribly frustrating to a four-year-old trying to learn to ride a bicycle.


Speedster!


When we got home, Harper put on the binoculars and plopped herself into the green chair; obviously, she was quite pleased with herself.


We did some cape time; Frankie spent some of his on the floor, lamenting life.


Somebody get this boy some thumguards. We're seriously at our wits end with the thumb sucking; I'm mentally prepping for years and years of braces.



Happy January!

Merry Christmas!

For those of you who didn't get a card....you missed the extreme cuteness. Be careful - the kids are so cute your face might explode!

Live it out.

I wrote this post almost three weeks ago. It seems like a good time to make a random post since I'm so behind on photos. My camera is chock-full of 'em, but since I'm in Utah and lacking a proper camera cord, it will be a few days (probably early next week) before you get any good pictures. So enjoy the reads.

*********

This morning, I had a lot of time to think during my morning run. I got to reflecting on the past year and took a turn away from my usual cynicism and started to think about the good things that happened in 2010. It's a little late for Thanksgiving, and a little early for the new year, but what the heck - if I don't write it up now, it probably won't happen. 2010 sucked in many ways, so this is my way of trying to dredge up my 'inner optimist.' Also, we don't tend to do Christmas cards, so this is a mini-rundown of my year for those who care. If you don't care, no worries. I don't blame ya. :)

- We survived six weeks of a child in a 3/4 body cast. If our family can survive that, we might be able to survive just about anything.
- Juston kept his job. It may not be ideal, but it's work and we've been able to pay all of our bills. Thanks, Juston, for making sure that we can eat and that I can blast the A/C when it's 100 degrees outside.
- I got the opportunity to work on a big exhibit for TCM, as well as some smaller projects for TNT Latin America. I love that I get to freelance. I'm also maxed out part-time at my teaching job. Full-time would be ideal, but right now I'll take what I can get.
- The Kindezi school opened in August. The ribbon cutting ceremony was this morning, and the 6 students to 1 teacher ratio is WORKING. I've had the opportunity to volunteer there once a week and it's been fantastic to see the school in action. I'm very optimistic for our children's future there.
- Harper turned one. She charmed her way into many hearts and she has the most endearing growl.
- Frankie got a haircut. He looks like such a big boy now and on his fourth birthday, he asked me to ask him "What happened to my little boy?" He's also mastered "Little Big Planet" this year, which he plays with Juston several nights a week (but only after Harper goes to bed, of course.)
- Juston flipped a house, which is a huge accomplishment. He worked really hard on it and it's going to make someone a really lovely home. We're just waiting for that perfect buyer now...
- I ran my first half marathon in November.
- I have the most amazing snuggle pug.

Yep. Things are good - I tend to exaggerate the difficulties in my mind. When I step back a bit and take a look at things, I get some perspective slapped into me and it helps me to appreciate what I've got in my life.