Is it just me.....

.....or does anyone else feel like why do I even bother???? Why bother:

• doing laundry when clean clothes get thrown on the floor in a ball because they don't want to put them away or changed their outfit 10 times because something was "bugging" and now they no longer look clean
• cooking healthy meals, or any meal for that matter, when someone always has something to complain about whether by saying it looks or smells disgusting, or by dry heaving or vomiting it back up (for real people) or smothering it in some sort of sauce to cover up the taste
• cleaning up anything when 2 minutes later someone has decided to unload an entire basket of toys, a game with a million little pieces, 50 markers to "see all the colors", every stuffed animal to find the right one and the entire bookshelf of books to make paths, fences or other barriers to try and keep each other away from something. Sometimes all this happens at once. Did you not remember the crying and drama for the last 2 hours while I made you clean all this up???
• decorating when my decorations seem to get rearranged in different places all day and manage to always break, rip, or get hidden in an excellent spot that no one seems to find them ever again!!!!
• getting "ready" for the day when someone spills an entire glass of milk on me, or insists on pushing their peanut butter, jam, or chocolate face all over my one nice shirt or pants
• teaching my children not to fight or scream, which for some reason they can't seem to remember after 2 seconds, but manage to remember a treat they ate 2 years ago or the line from a movie they saw once
• eating healthy when I feel crappier after eating a salad then I do a bowl of mashed potatoes made with heavy cream, pizza, diet dr pepper or a tray of stouffers mac and cheese
• being nice to people. For some reason I think if I just keep doing it, I will actually start feeling nicer but I am still waiting

This is laundry for my family of 4 when I decide to inspect their closets and on

their floors and any other hiding place other than the laundry basket!!!! It's quite ridiculous.

Happy Halloween

I guess the older they get the less pictures we take?!?! Not one of them really turned out, but here's our collage of Halloween events. The kids were Rapunzel and Flynn Rider from the movie Tangled. Hope you all enjoyed your Halloween. We had lots of fun!!!

We already have requests for next year, a black cat and a robot. That sounds like my easiest one yet!!!

Field Trip

My kindergartner is on her first field trip today!!! She is beyond excited to ride a school bus for the first time. They are going to a pumpkin patch. Hay ride, corn maze and pick your own pumpkin. I wish I was there to see her excited giggles, wiggly little legs and uncontrollable smile. These are her school pictures!!! I wish I had mine to show you the similarities. Just imagine adding huge bangs and darker hair and that is what mine looked like. That is NOT her real smile!!! The class picture is more accurate. I should have known she was going to be in the front and put her in pants that are a better length. She insists on wearing socks with her shoes. But I think it just makes for cuter memories!!

Spotify

It's like I'm back in the TSC computer lab downloading songs from Napster when I should have been studying!!!!

Some things I like about my kids that I want to remember

A few months ago Philip wanted to do a taste test night. He went to the store and bought an assortment of snacks with different flavors. We lacked blindfolds so we tried wool winter hats, but this picture is about how long they lasted on their heads. It was July!! They both thought it was hilarious to close their mouth and have us put food in it. Now both of them are addicted to doing this and make each other "test" food all the time and occasionally I hear a sentence I dread, "mom, close your eyes and I am going to put something in your mouth" all sing-songy and then pop goes in a curiously warm fruit snack, or a soggy cracker. Gross, but still cute.

This is Ben's toy. The way it came about our family was very lame and dramatic, but it has slowly become one of his favorites right now. (I will spare you the long story of me alone on a trip to UT, stopping at a McDonald's in Primm for lunch, multiple fits about not getting the right toy, food, drink, you name it and a middle aged very annoyed man loudly criticizing me to his partner so everyone could hear his disgust in children and people who shouldn't have them, namely me!!!! Not kidding). But aside all that, what I love is what he has named him, Powerful Dog. I think it might have derived from the movie Up because it looks like the scary dog on there, which was one of the reasons he didn't want it at first. We have some great names for the toys in our house and all are completely their own. Enna, Buster, Princess, Powerful Dog, Ramasaucy and Petty (Philip's personal favorites), back it up guy, gray guy, van-truck, hospital bear..... It goes on. Amelia takes the more creative approach and Ben is a more call-it-as-I-see-it namer. But I live to hear the names of their toys and imaginary creatures.

These are my kids legs, side by side. They fell asleep next to each other today and for some reason I love the contrast of their skin so I had to snap a pic and share how tan she is and how stark white he is. In my family Amelia is considered pale!! So does that make Ben albino??

Here's all their cousins on my side (minus one) to show you what I mean. I also love this pic because he is freaking out, my nephew is just so happy to hug him, my other nephew is trying to calm him down by rubbing his leg, and Amelia is perfectly posing for my sister's pic totally unphased by his drama.

It only took 9 days!!

That's all it took for Amelia to violently shake free of my hand when she approached her classroom. Obviously she didn't want her teacher to see us holding hands. My heart dropped a little. Luckily she had no problem giving me a big hug and kiss and yelling out "I love you" so I will just chalk it up to the fact that she doesn't like holding my hand (which she usually doesn't like to hold hands even as a baby, she was always breaking free to do it by herself) and not that she has already out grown me!!!! This is a pic of picking her up after her first day of school. Her face looks like this every day after school. Grinning ear to ear.

My first day of school all over again

Amelia went to Kindergarten today!!! She could hardly get to sleep last night and was up at 6:30 this morning because she didn't want to be late. I was starting to think she was abnormal because she has been so excited (for nearly a year now) with no sign of nervousness about school at all. Just sheer excitement. I finally got to see a little glimmer of normal first-day-of-school-nerves when she told me that she couldn't finish her bowl of cereal!!!! That's a pretty big deal for her. She's usually a 2 bowl girl and I have to cut her off. But she put on a good front and didn't admit to anything less than total excitement. I like this series of pictures because it shows her from the leaving our house to where we leaver her at school.


This is her making her way to her classroom. Notice the hand wringing!! It slowly progressed to nail biting!! But she still is smiling.












This is outside her classroom.















And this is her classroom. She was one of the first kids there, so she got to pick her seat and she chose the table with no one at it in the front of the class. She was really starting to loose the smile at this point. Luckily she had to wait about 10 minutes or so until the teacher started and the parents were asked to stay the first 10 minutes after that to go over what to expect. I think this really helped because by the time we were ready to leave, she looked bored and ready to do something. I had given her a kiss and said my goodbye's when she first sat down, so I made Philip go up to give her a hug and kiss goodbye (so I didn't break down crying in front of everyone) and she waved and blew me a kiss and was smiling and that was it. Just like that we got down graded from the most important people in her life to sharing it with someone else now!!! I held it together just fine. I think Philip was more emotional about it than me!!! Now I just wait to go back.


Guess what the first thing Ben did when we got home???? Get Amelia's Jessie doll, a toy he is typically not allowed to play with. It cracked me up how he is wasting no time taking advantage of free reign of the house.