I Didn't Know They Still Came That Way

If all goes well I will be kid free and in good health Friday morning. My goal is to clean my oven; cause my two year old oven is not self cleaning! Seriously why do they even make that an option? If you can all remember we were not allowed to move into the house until Fannie Mae installed an oven. We were not allowed to buy one ourselves and of course Fannie Mae chose the cheapest oven Lowes carries. Go ahead and go to Lowes check out the ovens and the cheapest one is ours. It is a total piece of crap! It cooks unevenly and had ruined many a dish of mine. Now you may ask, So why not just buy a new one? Well, it is hard to buy something that expensive if you don't REALLY need it. Long story short when our renters move out of our other house next year we will probably swap ovens, but that is a year away. So until then this Friday is oven day and maybe moping the floors if I can get it in.

Schizophrenic

Um yeah, Mae is pretty much a schizophrenic. For the longest time of late she has been a beast... as seen here.


For the last three days she has been a total doll. So squishy cute. When she was born my niece Liesl would say Mae was a cutie pie bubbles and the nickname has stuck in our family. These last few days she has defiantly been a cutie pie bubbles.



*FYI I would like to point out to my mom that Mae does not have a pacifier in either of these pictures, so proof that she doesn't always have one in.

Above and Beyond

I needed to go to my monthly doctor's visit last Wednesday and Jeff couldn't watch the kids having missed so much work already for our sick weekend. My lovely friends Dandi and Kristy offered to watch my kids and took them to the Gentry Animal Safari! Talk about above and beyond. I am told my kids were perfect, for which I am so grateful, but at the same time, why aren't they perfect for me? Is it just me or does that picture of Max just sum him up in one shot?

Spring

Planted some dafodils last fall just on a whim. Glad I did.

Instead

I have lots of things I want to blog about, but so many of them are very intense or at least detailed and when I sit down it is just too overwhelming. So instead of sharing I have decided to let them go or at least simmer until I really feel like sharing. But a few brief points

I would like to thank all my friends who helped me out during our current sick spell.

I am encouraged and discouraged by the progress of my yard. I have been able to do a lot during nap times and with the help of a young fella in my ward. Little projects are underway, but there is just SO MUCH TO DO it is overwhelming.

We have our renters paid up in full and re-signed for another year which is good cause there is NO WAY we could afford to sell the house this year.

Baby Spike is healthy and presumably happy set to come June 30th. I was given the option of the 30th or July 5th and decided to go before everyone left for the holiday. After our group sickness this weekend, Jeff and I are a bit terrified about how we are going to survive the delivery while taking care of the kids. I am sure we will get through it but it will be super tough.

Took Mae to the doctor for the 18 month checkup and she is 50% for height and 50% for weight, but I really hate the way they measure kids based on all the other kids. So if my kid is normal and all the kids in the US are obese what does that mean? Why can't they just tell me how my kid is doing and leave everyone else out of it.

Jeff's whole area at work has been rearranged and we are still waiting to learn how things will turn out. He is on a new team and will pretty much be the most senior person on the team, which will lead to excellent opportunities to lead, but also possibly more work. He doesn't have a new boss yet, so that is always a potential worry. He has always been the luckiest guy at Walmart ISD in regards to bosses and pager schedules, so being ever the pessimist I am nervous that his luck cannot last. Jeff, the optimist, is not worried at all. I am so lucky to have bagged such a happy positive guy. Sometimes I just want to point at him and laugh, "FOOLED YOU! You're stuck now, it would cost too much in child support to leave me." But that wouldn't be too nice so instead I just make sure he has plenty of time to play video games.

Had to get out...and the consequences

Some of you may have caught my last really whinny post before I had the good sense to delete it and replace it with the Super Spy post. I went on an on about needing to get away and to get away from my kids. Well wouldn't you know that I got both my prayers answered this week. Saturday I persuaded Jeff to take us to Tulsa, about a two hour drive each way, to go to their zoo. I could tell that he didn't really want to go, but being the loving husband he is, he understood that I needed to get away. So off we went. It was a fairly uneventful trip. The kids did well and we didn't even need to turn on the dvd player til we were almost there. The one unfortunate part being that Mae refused to nap along the way. The zoo was fine. As many of you know I LOVE zoo's and so am a bit picky. I enjoyed myself, but the place really needs some TLC. (And lots of cash.) I think from now on we will stick to the Oklahoma City Zoo which is just an hour further away and way better. One really nice part of this trip was that for the first time Max actually enjoyed seeing the animals. He has just whined or only been interested in the playgrounds in the past. This time he was looking for animals and pointing them out. One thing going for this zoo was the reptile house. I usually don't like this area of Zoo's since I hate snakes but this zoo was heavy on turtles and low on snakes, just the way I like it. Mae did okay considering she hadn't taken a nap, but she when she decided she was done she was DONE! Luckily the zoo was so small we got to see it all before we had to leave which was also the time it started raining. We didn't get to ride the carousal because of the rain, but I wasn't too heartbroken cause 1. No carousal can top the awesome one at the Little Rock Zoo, and 2. As we got closer we realized they were blasting Miley Cyrus music from the thing, Now I am a actually a closet Miley music fan, but it just seems wrong for a carousal to play non- circus/old-time/ carousal music.

The trip back was long as it always is, Mae slept til we had to slow to pay the tolls. We stopped at the Taco Bell in Siloam Springs, (BTW Siloam Springs will be #1 on my next list of things that must go.) It was cute to see Max feed Mae rice. They can be so cute together. We got home around four in the afternoon and I started throwing up around six. I continued to have nasty vomiting for the next twelve hours happening like clock work about every two hours. Good Times. Poor Jeff didn't even want to go to the zoo and then had to take care of the kids all day Sunday. It was no wonder that he got sick by Monday evening. So in a way I did get an entire day away from the kids. I am saving up my thoughts on why this happened and how everyone reacted to the situation for my next post. Until then enjoy the pictures and be careful what you pray for.

Super Spy

The adorable picture comes from a birthday party Max attended last winter. The theme was spy games. They made badges for all the kids. Max's was so super cute I had to share.