Yesterday I caught Ella trying to blow her own socks off.....literally. She must have heard that expression somewhere recently. 

The girls have all been playing outside most of day. They have been cloud watching, pairing up for hikes in our "woods", and now they are decorating a tree by poking dead leaves onto the branches they can reach. The tree really needs to be trimmed or cut down, but they LOVE that tree. Sometimes when they get in the holiday spirit they call it their Christmas tree and hang every ugly plastic yard toy they can find on it. 

I absolutely love watching them play from my big kitchen window. If I were to go out and sit on the patio or join in their play it would turn into an exhausting session of fielding their unending questions or mediating their arguments. So I stay inside. And I watch. I watch the way Gwen bobbles around the yard in her mud boots from one interesting thing to the next. I watch the way Ella flies on her swing like a superhero, over and over and over again. I watch the way Josie and Addie look out for the younger two, helping them into their swings, pushing them, holding their hands and leading them thru the more dangerous paths on their "hikes," turning over rocks and logs and showing them the gross bugs underneath.  Yes. I love to watch.  I am proud of the loving sisters they can be when they don't know I am watching.

brought to you by the letter S

Spring.

Swings.

Silence (a rarity).

Sandwiches.

Sopha Sisters.

Smiles.

OK...this is supposed to be a movie....what's the deal?...there is an error with the upload every time!? Any ideas?

So after I posted my last entry I came across the blog of a woman with 2 young children whose husband just died very unexpectedly. I bawled my eyes out and felt absolutely horrible for whining about Steve and his gift giving impairment. Truth be known, I am a very lucky girl and could absolutely NOT go on without him.............Ok. I was totally just about to describe in detail each and every characteristic that I love about my man when he came into the room and asked what I was writing. He then pretended to freak out that I was revealing his inadequacy in this area and told me to quote this..."Fine then, I won't buy you ANY gifts. Not even a freakin' Whoozit!" In case you don't know us, our relationship thrives on "pretend" arguments like this one.

I realize how overwhelming and boring a blog can be when written novel style like my last two posts. So I will end with a conversation I had with Ella earlier today. E- Mommy, what day is today? M-Monday. E-But Addie told me it was spring! M-Monday is a day of the week and spring is a season, so it can be Monday and spring at the same time. E-OOHH! (light bulb goes off) They're mixed in together out here? :) Gotta love her!

My thoughts runneth over

Is it socially acceptable in blog world to post more than one entry a day? Cuz as I was just catching up on 3 days worth of dirty dishes, my mind was running rampant on totally random topics I wanted to write about, maybe none of which will be read or appreciated by anyone other than myself. I was so lost in thought that I splashed soapy water all over the floor a minimum of 7 times ...no kidding. Too bad that wasn't the area of the kitchen that really needed mopping:(

I just discovered at the convention that chocolate is a love language! And it is MY love language! I used to think it was affection or quality time, but no....the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that chocolate is what makes me feel most loved! It says "I want you to be happy, I love your body just the way it is, and I will gladly pay your dental bills in exchange for the honor of having you as my wife." I suppose technically chocolate IS a gift, but gifts are NOT my love language. I get physically ill when Steve brings me flowers because I know that he has just spent precious money on something that will be dead and useless in a couple weeks. Of course, if someone who does not share my checking account decides to gift me with flowers, I will graciously thank them and delight in every last posy.  I am telling myself to post this thought "as is" and go reread "The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands," but am overcome with the need to share my disappointment with Steve's attempts at gift giving.  It started early in our marriage. I was pregnant with Addie, our first, when I was presented with a Whoozit for my birthday. Anyone with kids knows that a Whoozit is a round squishy monster-creature baby toy that sports bizarre appendages. For a baby....a wonderful educational gift......for a pregnant birthday girl.......a cause for a long hard cry. 

This year on my birthday I was convinced that Steve was really going to put some thought and effort into my gift......I am honest to a fault and he knows each and every time he is responsible for my disappointment.....so I thought he was really gonna bring it this year....to make up for all the others. He was late coming home from work and I just KNEW it was because he was busy planning something wonderful. But when he prefaced his presentation by saying...."now just keep in mind, this was all 75% off," I knew I would be disappointed once again. Keep in mind, I am ALL about 75% off, but I could tell by the tone of his voice that this would not be worth even 10% of the full price . Turns out he bought me some hideous wine glass party stickers (to use for what?), 3 boxes of blank note cards, each featuring a different fruit, and a horribly obnoxious CD of someone we had never heard of. Never buy a CD of someone you've never heard on a drug store clearance table.......it's there for a reason! So that was it.......a gift that said "I have no idea who you are or what you like.....but I DO know you enjoy a good bargain." Steve DOES know exactly who I am and what I like though, so this birthday was quite disheartening. Maybe that's why gifts, with the exception of chocolate and lotto tickets, are not my love language.

Why is blogging so hard? Because I care too much what people think of me? Because I'm afraid I haven't mastered all the rules of grammar yet and I don't want to give homeschoolers a bad name? Because I don't know if homeschooler is one word or two? Because I seem to be incapable of writing short and witty posts and instead fill them with unnecessary words and ramblings? Because it takes me 5 minutes to figure out the correct spelling of unnecessary? Because I'm afraid my addiction to the use of "dot dot dot...."(what are those called?....) will become all too evident.....So Nikki, you are my first reader. Thanks....I wasn't yet prepared to tell people about it...you know....hadn't done any revisions or anything.....the perfectionist that I like to think I am.....but I saw you had a link for Twiggy on your page, so I guess it's a go. 

Today in the middle of the Key Note Speaker "speech?" I got a sickening phone call from home. After I ducked out of the auditorium, I listened to what seemed like 3 minutes of Gwen screaming hysterically as Steve yelled to the other girls to get her blanky. I could tell by Gwen's cries and Steve's tone that something was NOT right. When he finally realized I had answered the phone he yelled "You have to come home right now!" He proceeded to tell me that Gwen and Ella had been playing on a blanket chest we have in front of a (locked) window in their room.  My first thought was that they had somehow opened the window and Gwen had fallen out.....from a high second story. In reality, she had fallen off the chest to the floor and Steve thought her teeth had broken all the way through her lip to the other side. My heart was racing as a sped home to find Gwen looking horribly beat up, but playing semi-happily. Turns out she somehow cut both the inside and outside of her lip pretty bad, but the bleeding had stopped so we could see that her teeth hadn't actually gone all the way through her lip. What a relief! I won't be forgetting that sickening phone call anytime soon. 

Today I supported March of Dimes by buying a plate of cookies and subsequently also supported Thunder Thighs for Equal Opportunity Laps;)

My 3 year old, Ella, has been asking lots of questions lately...."Mommy, is God really real?....then why doesn't he talk to us? Is there more than one God? Am I really a princess?"

I hate telling her that technically she isn't a princess, but so far she seems content enough to just be MY princess.

Random....that's how I roll!

potty talk

Addie's birthday is tomorrow, and since we have church and a picnic at the lake and possibly a movie planned, we let her open her gifts tonight. The gift ideas she gave me were a camera, a fishing pole set, and Zoobooks (a magazine she saw on a commercial). Yesterday I just happened to find a stack of OLD Zoobooks at the MACHE convention for a quarter each.......she LOVED them and had no clue they were from 1986:) I couldn't bring myself to buy her a camera and how often would she really go fishing anyway anyway? (Also, my feet weren't capable of taking me anywhere but home).... So I picked up an educational game and fun sketchbooks/notepads at the convention. The game is called Some Body and it's all about anatomy and physiology (for kids). I just had to get it! Anyway, after sticking the decals of each body part on the guy outlined on the game board, I decided to quiz them with the provided questions. Keep in mind they were already quite giggly about me trying to describe the bladder by using the term "pee sac." So I read the card that asked "Which body part can detect odors"....I was explaining that odor meant smell so that Ella would get the answer right when Josie interrupted by yelling "your butt!" Let me clarify that she did not mean MY butt, but rather ANY butt. They all started laughing hysterically, and I have to admit I joined in.