My Curly!

I have been wonderfully blessed with a great husband, two beautiful daughters, a family that loves me and the most recent addition to our family, who in just a couple weeks is going to be two, my little Curly, Leilah Grace.

We recently traveled to the Sandsation festival and had so much fun. I don't get to spend a ton of time with her because of our busy schedules but we got to spend an entire weekend together as a family building sand castles, going on horse rides, playing at the beach, going to the bakery, and just all around having a fun time. Watching her play in the sand and be care free was so wonderful. It reminded me of what is important in life. That as adults we often forget about having fun and being who God made us to be. We are often so wrapped up in what we should do or should say or how we should act that we loose ourselves.

Last night Robb and I went a saw a movie - not necessarily one I would recommend, but he loved it. In the movie there is a part where a father is talking to his grown children and telling them that as a child he had wanted to be a T-rex dinosaur but that his father had told him that was unrealistic and to grow up, get a job and be responsible. He said the he always thought that he would do that but when he had accomplished the responsible things he would come back and become a T-rex. The problem was that over the years he had lost it and no longer knew how to be a T-rex. His point was that he wanted his boys to be responsible, but he didn't want them to make the mistake he made and loose their dinosaur.

So, I encourage you all to keep your dinosaur. Pick flowers, eat berries, use hula hoops, ride a trike, swing from the monkey bars, love life, love others and most of all love who you are.

I am your mother and I know everything.

Sara and I finally connected. We have been trying to get together over the last month, having not seen each other since the beginning of June. Her and her beautiful little ball of fire came over for a play date which was great. The girls got to play outside while Sara and I visited and caught up on the goings on of the last couple months. As we visited I fixed us some lunch, we had lunch with the girls and then continued our visit.

It was getting to be about 3:00pm and Sara said they better get heading and I knew that I should probably be getting going pretty soon too as Robb, the girls and I had plans to go to the pool and go swimming. Sara and I walked out onto the little deck at the top of the stairs and looked out to the backyard where the girls were playing on the swings and with the sand. The three of them were quite a site and seemed to be having such a great time. Such innocent little faces one wouldn't suspect anything less than angelic.

I told the girls that it was time to head up and get our stuff because we were going to be leaving soon and Sara called down to Hanna that they were going to be heading home. Then I heard Olyvia say something but didn't really catch all of it. I was sure, however, that I did hear the word poop. I said, "what was that?" She then yelled again, "There is poop, and Ellie touched it with her hands." I have to say I was perplexed. Poop? I am thinking, what kind of poop and how did it get there and why did Ellie touch it with her hands. But instead of asking any of these questions, I said "what?" sort of chuckeling thinking there must be some confusion. I know, I think a little bit of me . . . or maybe all of me . . . was confused. I asked, " you guys are just playing pretend, right?"

Olyvia then began to explain, "No, its real. Ellie pooped in a bucket and dumped it all over and touched it wither her hands." Ellie then says, "Yeah mom, I pooped in a bucket and it was fun." As she says this, she is looking up at me with this huge grin on her face.

My smile that was on my face, as I had previously been chuckeling thinking they were playing pretend poop games, immediately turned down as my mouth dropped open and I again said, "what?" Sara, trying to hold in her laughs, held her head down as she let out a little gasp. While half laughing (out of shock) myself, I said "this isn't funny. Do you think that she really pooped?" She exclaimed that she had to see this for herself because she couldn't have really pooped.

So we head down the stairs, at this point a part of me is still thinking that they are playing pretend and confusing pretend with reality. We get over to the swingset and I ask them, "where is the poop?" Olyvia tells me that it is "all over." Sara then spots some. I grab the closest bucket which seems to have streaks of some kind of wet mud (NOT WET MUD). I push the poop pellets into the bucket with a leaf and continue to look around for more. While doing so Olyvia mentions that Ellie might have gotten some on the slide. Sara looks, and sure enough there are poop streaks all the way down the slide that have dried on. Oh my goodness, I cannot believe what I am seeing. I am looking at Ellie, who has know climbed up into the house part of the swing set and as doing so my eyes scan her back only to discover, that there is poop all the way up her back side. I immediately turn her around and begin stripping her clothes off her only to discover there is no poop on the inside of her clothing. A question arises, how did poop get on the outside of her pants smeared all over, and non was on the inside of her underwear? Interesting, huh?

Striped naked, except for her crocks, I take her inside to get washed off in the laundry sink. Sara offers to rinse the slide off with the hose. I am walking Ellie to the laundry room, trying not to actually touch her hands which by this time I have noticed are covered in feces (Yummy!) and Ellie actually says to me, "isn't that great mom that I pooped in the bucket." I again find myself saying, "what?" I must say that my vocabulary during this particular incident was horrible.

So while I am washing her off in the laundry room, Ellie has realized that maybe pooping in the bucket, smearing it on the slide and dumping it all over under the swings probably wasn't the best idea and goes for a quick save. "Mom, Olyvia peed in the bucket too and dumped it out." She then looks up at me waiting for a response. My eyes get big, my teeth clench, and I am thinking Oh my goodness, what where they thinking? but I catch what she is trying to do before I say anything and I choose my reaction wisely. I ignore what she said and continue on my explanation of why we DO NOT poop on our toys.

We got all cleaned up, into clean clothes, hands washed, and tell Sara and Hannah bye and that we will see them on Saturday. We then rush upstairs so that we can finish grabbing our stuff for swimming and head out the door. I then realize that I know something that Olyvia doesn't know that I know. I decide to show my upper hand and start instilling fear into her - for when she is a teenager. We are upstairs and Olyvia is standing by the door. I know she is thinking, "I can't believe I got away with that." I look at her while I am folding the towels for swimming and say, "I know you peed in the bucket Olyvia, so don't even try and put all the blame on your sister. That behavior is unexceptable and disgusting." She looked up at me with the biggest eyes of shock she had ever seen. She said, "what? But how did you know?" I simply said, I am your mother and I know everything. When you do something wrong, even when you think I don't know, I do.

Of course later when I told Robb, he laughed.

Vomit

I am exhausted. I am trying to remember how many times I was up last night and I can't. I know I was up at 12:00am because I remember looking at the microwave on my way from our room to the bathroom. Then there were other times - I remember seeing the clock again at 2:38am. There were actually two different times to get Olyvia waterwater. She was so sad, crying that her legs hurt too bad to walk to get water. Then I think Robb got up once to get her water at the same time I was up getting her water . . . all I remember is meeting up with him in the kitchen and realizing we were both getting her ice water. All this said, I spent from 2:00 to 4:00 this morning getting her water. She was so devastated and kept saying her legs hurt. I finally, a little after 4, was able to calm her down and get her back to sleep.

30 minutes later I was woken up by the sound of her throwing up all over her and her sister's bed. (Ellie had come into our bed sometime around 1 when Button decided that she wanted to sleep in our room. Ellie has to be where Button is. Ellie actually dragged Button's bed into our room.) I am not sure what it is about the sound of vomit that makes one move at warp speed, but I was out of the bed and into her room quicker than a fighter jet and was ushering her to the bathroom while she tried to keep her mouth covered with her hands. She was crying and I was trying to comfort her with my hands while keeping the rest of my body as far away from the front of her as possible. Plus, Olyvia hates to be icky so she was crying about the vomit being in her hair and seemed more upset over that fact then the fact that she wasn't feeling well.

I was able to get her to the bathroom where she threw up one more time in the bathroom sink. I then stripped her down to get new pjs for her. She immediately asked to take a shower so that she could "get the icky stuff off." I obliged of course, running a warm shower and letting her get in and rinse off, standing in the stream of warm water, while I went and got her some fresh pjs. By 4:45am I had her all dressed in fresh pjs and laying in bed with me. Ellie had finally calmed down - since once she heard Olyvia getting sick she started crying - and had moved over to Robb's side of the bed and Robb was now on the couch in the living room.

Olyvia immediately fell asleep and so did Ellie. I of course tossed and turned for the next hour and a half, keeping an ear open to any sounds from Olyvia that might sound like she was going to get sick again. Around 6:30 Olyvia was woken up by Robb saying his good byes and asked to watch cartoons. He got her all set up in the living room before he headed off. I finally gave up the hope of getting any sleep and headed to the shower to try and wake up.

Both my princesses are doing better now, sitting on the couch eating toast and watching cartoons. Ah to be young again and be able to regenerate energy at such a quicker rate.

Grocery Shopping.

Yesterday was a lovely day, other then the freezing cold temperatures in the morning and the fog we seemed to have hanging around our property. Come 10:30am it was quite beautiful as we headed off to do some grocery shopping with the girls.


I had put a list together, of course not including everything that I would need. I never seem to remember everything. I continually tell myself that I need to keep an ongoing list in the kitchen so that as we run out of things that we need, we can add them to the list. We actually did do this for awhile and it worked great. Why we are not still doing this I have no idea. One of those questions to add to the list of imponderables that I have growing in the back of my mind.


Going through the grocery store with the girls is quite the adventure. Between the "can I have this" and the "please can we get some of this" I usually pull my hair out before we leave the produce section. Another oddity. Why do we start in the produce section. This is something we have always done. We come in the grocery store and get produce. This worked nice because it is the first section we come to when we come in the store. The difficulty with this was that throughout the remainder of the store the girls were throwing stuff into the cart so that by the time we got home we didn't have peaches but rather peach jam and I won't even go into what our bananas and grapes looked like or our tomatoes and avocados. But what can you do? Well, we have found a solution to this problem that works quite well. Central Market (http://www.central-market.com/) has these great small carts that the girls can push. We get two, one for each of them and then proceed through the store letting them help us put stuff into them. This cuts down on a lot; no fighting over pushing the cart and each cart has two baskets, so no squashed produce. It really is a win win.

How much love?

For the last 12 years we have expressed our love in many different ways; from how we treat each other, to the little things we do and say, our love is known by both of us. However, throughout the last 12 years there is one particular way that has been consistent. No matter what small acts of love we do or love poems we share with each other, when quantifying how much he loves me, he always tells me "I love you tons and tons and bunches and bunches." I don't know what it is about that, but it makes me smile. The warmth it gives me to think of the amount of love that is . . . He doesn't just love me a ton, but tons and tons and bunches and bunches. How lucky am I to have that much love? I feel truly blessed that God has put us into each others lives.

To Have A Dog.

Last night Button came to stay with us. I was going to add a picture of button and realized that we don't have very many of her and none that I could add at this moment. I will have to take care of that. Anyway, my dad headed to Alaska last night for a week long fishing trip to get some Silvers - he is very excited - and since my mom had to take him to the airport, we kept Button at our house for the night. The girls love it when we watch her and it lets us have the experience of having a dog without the long term commitment of actually having one. It also has allowed us to see what responsibilities we would take on as husband and wife and as dog caregivers. I have decided there are certain aspects of having a dog that I do not do. Most likely I had previously decided this in my mind but am now voicing it. First, I do not do poop. If the dog decides to poop in an area that is not that great, say our lawn (this in and of itself would be funny since we have five acres and only a piece the size of 1/5 of a football field is actually grass), I don't pick it up. That is Robb's responsibility. I also don't take the dog out after dark or before light. If the dog has to go potty late at night or way early in the morning, I prefer Robb to do that. What I have discovered of our relationship is that Robb is ok with that. He wonderfully abliges me and does all the doggy dirty work. He says it isn't willfully, keeping in mind he has a more passive personality. So instead of just saying no, he might later give the dog some paper which she would then tear to shreds and I would find myself picking up. He doesn't do this sneaky though, he proclaims the he is going to give the dog paper, gives it to her and then heads out. But, as long as I don't have to go outside, after dark, in the rain or wake up before the rooster crows to take the dog outside in the wind and hail, I will pick up shredded paper.

Vogue Magazine here they come.

A normal day at the beach, right? With my girls, not quite. We went down to the beach in Indianola this last May with Olyvia's class from school. It was a cooler day but the tide was way out so we were able to hike way out on the beach looking at crabs and bull heads and the like. It was a great time. As we were getting ready I knew that this was an event full of photo opportunities and I didn't want to miss out on any of them. I told the girls that I wanted to get a couple pictures before we headed down to the beach. I wanted some of them all ready - you know, the before pictures. I gathered the two of them next to each other, put my camera up to my eye and said "ok, pose for me girls. Smile big." The above picture is what I got. It screams cover of Vogue magazine - main article "Difficulties of Couture Modeling" subtitle "Kids show us how to get it done."

Since Olyvia was very small, I have every year sent their pictures in to different agents in the area to try and get them modeling jobs. They have each been called in once to different ones but have not landed any jobs. I think there are clients everywhere missing out on some great pictures . . . like the ones below.