I made it a week....

I have never been one for Valentine's day. Forced love and romance...gag. Kids make everything different. I have to be more involved in holidays for their sake and I actually surprise myself at how festive I can get while rolling my eyes!! I really have kept our kids out of the holiday loop until Amelia started school and they have to keep reminding her of things like Valentine's day!! Since Amelia is in school we had the task of creating cards for her classmates. I took her to Target hoping she would just pick something off the shelf and I would have to do nothing but supervise her signing her name. That proved to be a complete mistake. 20 minutes in 1 aisle just comparing the Disney princesses to the fairies and the Toy story to the Cars and how this person would like this kind but this person wouldn't like this, and I like the candy in this one but this toy would be fun and why can't I give a stuffed bear to everyone in my class and pretty soon our cart had like 6 boxes in it. This was not working. Plus the boxes had like 20 in them and we needed 25, so buying 2 boxes just to have 15 leftover nasty candies was not appealing to me. I finally decided to buy a bag of suckers and some glittery stickers and go and home and make them. It took some convincing, since this is a new tradition for her, she wanted the store bought stuff. But luckily she is my child and loves a good arts and crafts project and once I mentioned glitter stickers, she was in. She chose to make butterflies for the girls and superheroes for the boys. I cut everything out and stamped the message on them and then she got to sign her name and decorate the butterflies. I fell asleep while I was supposed to be overseeing the decorating and when I woke up, this is what she had made.

At first I was a little disappointed at the scribbling and the lack of symmetry that a real butterfly has, but as she was showing me each one and explaining the thought and care she took to make each one unique and special, I felt so guilty that I did not instantly love them. And then felt stingy and didn't want to give any of them away!!! I had to take a picture and share. Hope you can zoom in on some of those drawings. I can't wait to hear about it all when she comes home. Finally, on the drive to school this morning, this is what I heard and had to laugh and share.

A: Ohh, I just saw 2 birds kissing. How cute.

B: They were kissing?? Are they married??

A: I don't know?

And I will share with you one of my favorite Lucille quotes, for those of you in the Arrested Development know. I told Phil this quote this morning while warning him of my lack of acknowledgement for this holiday, and I will extend that to anyone else who wants to scoff at my cynical disgust in this holiday, "If that's a veiled criticism about me, I won't hear it and I won't respond to it!!!"

Happy chalk candy, cheesey cards, excessive use of pink, unnecessary guilt and forced gift giving, Valentine's day!!!

....black and blue all over....

It's all fun and games until someone gets their eye blacked out!! Ben was doing some pretty tricky wrestling moves when he fell on his wood bed in just a way that instantly popped out about an inch and has slowly blossomed into this nice huge shiner!! The pics are one from each day. They do not do it justice, and it doesn't help that he hates his picture taken. Don't let that smile fool you!! It was the only one of like 10 that he is holding still enough to not be a blur.The middle one is much more true to how it really is!! It goes all the back to those totally awesome shaggy

sideburns. Today he was wearing a sweatshirt all day with the hood on and it just made him look like a totally rotten child. He is happy to play the tough guy part!! It's healing a lot quicker than I thought, so we'll see how many more colors he gets to. I had to post these pics because not only were they cute, but his eye is how my heart feels today. Philip had to start a new job in Utah and left today and I have to stay behind in order to give birth in 8 weeks!!!! I am starting to realize the danger in leaving a 32 week pregnant girl alone with 2 kids, a house to pack while

trying not to go into labor "too quickly", and having to eat up all our food so I don't have to move it when I already am too big for my maternity shirts (which I can still wear non maternity pants, so how does that work?? I am telling you my belly is a phenomenon this time). Plus my distraction/hobby is to bake and bake and bake and with no one to share it with and not to mention Valentine's day around the corner, it is a cocktail for a diabetic coma. (Have I mentioned I am a stress eater?!?!) If anyone wants to send early labor vibes this way, I would love it. Not too early, but the sooner my baby comes (healthy...no NICU) the sooner I do not have to be a single parent.

Holiday recap in a collage

Unfortunately these days blogging is always the last item on my never ending lists of must do's, should do's, and would be nice to get to's!!! So you get holidays in condensed collage form. We enjoyed Thanksgiving with some friends and one of our favorite traditions, gingerbread houses. We kicked off our Christmas countdown with lots of decorating, ornament making, holiday baking, a little party for our sunday school kids from church, "camping" in our CA winter wonderland while watching the Grinch, Christmas with my brother, games, visiting a butterfly preserve, tide pools, lots of yummy food, sunsets and warm, warm beach weather. Now I am happy to see my calendar mostly empty this month (at least for right now) and might enjoy some time to spring clean, knit and make room for Bagley #3 due in 3 months!!! Hope all of you had a great holiday season and a good start to 2012. This year has to be good since it is the end of the world, right!!!!

Funny things

We were talking about different things people are good at or can do. Amelia's comment, "I am really good at throwing up all sorts of ways!!" Yep. Glad she has turned a negative into a positive.

Seriously....

Why is it that kids get the worst bruises, scrapes or cuts, rashes or take scissors to their hair right before you are supposed to get pictures done??? I wanted to attempt to take a very overdue family picture this weekend. Ben had a little incident with a solid wood chair right above his eyebrow. You know the kind that indents so hard it cuts them. Yeah. That's not going to be gone by Sat!!! Sorry for the terrible webcam pic that makes it so hard to see, but you get the idea. **Sigh*** And this is why we haven't had a family pic done in 3.5 years!!!!

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!!!