Him Not See

The kids have a little Christmas tree that they decorate. It is filled with little plastic ornaments of all the Disney characters from my tree when I was little. Antiques, if you will. It was nice when they were little because they could feel involved with the tree trimming without breaking any of our nice ornaments. Their ornaments are constantly being rotated around the tree. Last year little silver strands of tinsel were added for a lovely effect.

Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs are all represented on their tree. Until this year (when the snow white movie was released from the vault) none of the kids knew who those characters were and took no interest in them whatsoever. But Claire's favorite princess is "So White" and she has loved the Hi-Ho's ever since she watched the movie.

So tonight, an hour after she was tucked into bed, she crept downstairs to take the Hi-Ho's off the tree. She proceeded to peel off all of their eyeball stickers. She brought them over to me announcing, "Him not see!" Those poor dwarfs never stood a chance... And yes, we do have our Christmas decorations up already... I know you're jealous! Christmas just lasts longer at our house!

Things I learned at Disney World

• It really is a small world after all... I bumped into an old friend from high school, right beside Cinderella's castle!
• Everyone should use credit cards... and not just any credit card, but one that has a decent perk program. Three of our airline tickets were paid using miles earned from our visa, and we had so many disney reward points from our other visa, we were able to eat at the park free for 2 days.
• Going to a bonfire on the first night will result in smelling like a bonfire each night thereafter.
• Katie changes her underwear A LOT during the day. For our 6 day trip, I packed her 14 pairs of underwear and she used them all. By the 4th day.
• A flight planned during Claire's naptime doesn't mean that Claire will take a nap!
• I really shouldn't try to keep tally of all the money we spend on a vacation. It's just too depressing.
• Disneyworld buses are trained to only turn right. It took 45 minutes on the convenient disney bus to drive us 2 miles down the road because we took backroads all around Orlando so we wouldn't have to make a very dangerous left turn!
• A "travel" sized tube of toothpaste lasts for 4 days. Not long enough.
• All Claire really needs to have fun is a beach ball and some water!
  
• Sometimes a "Lazy River" is just too lazy! We were barely even moving!
• I should not be in charge of packing... 15 pairs of flipflops, and not one single pair ended up in my suitcase! I had to buy shoes as soon as we got there!
• Walmart in Orlando is a lot nicer than Walmart at home! But still, who wants to go to Walmart on their vacation!? Oh, yes... people who don't pack shoes or diapers.
• The "Midieval Times" restaurant has a very low overhead. They don't even have silverware! As Katie said when they plopped a chicken on her plate, "Seriously, how am I supposed to eat this?!"
• Breakfast in the Cape May restaurant... $100. Breakfast in our room... priceless! We got to relax in our jammies for an extra 20 minutes!
  
• Balloon animals are useless. And when they pop it becomes a very bad day for everyone.
• Don't take a picture of Tinkerbell as she flies down from the castle. Resist all temptation to capture that magical moment.

• Do take lots and lots of pictures of your little girl meeting the princesses they love! These are the moments dreams are made of!

• 300 tvs to watch the Redskins game from every angle at the ESPN zone... and they still stink!
  

ADHD

I think I might have ADHD. Maybe I've always had it, but it was never diagnosed. My distractability and inability to focus on any one task has never been as noticeable as it is now. My brain is jumping all over the place~ Here's where my head's at right now:

• Geez, is it Thursday already? Another week done, another week that I still haven't gotten my Daisy leader training finished. Or started.
• I gotta make sure I stop by the bank to open the account for our troop, at least I will have done something leaderish before the next meeting.
• Ok the next meeting is tomorrow, I better iron on those patches to Katie's uniform... are we troop 1718 or 1817?
• Why on earth do I need to send in more money for Ryan's lunch account already? All he buys is milk, there's no way he's out of money yet!
• I hope that book order comes in before we leave on our trip so the kids can have some new books to read on the plane.
• Why did I buy that 5 pound bag of broccoli? No one's going to eat that much broccoli... I guess I can make some broccoli cheese soup... a lot of soup.
• I still have 12 apples left, what else can I make with apples?
• Is there an apple/broccoli dish I'm totally overlooking?
• We have to get our Disney Rewards points certificate before our trip... after saving them for 2 years, we better get a lot of free stuff when we're at Disney!
• Do we want to do Odyssey of the Mind again this year? It was fun I guess, and worthwhile. Can we fit it into our schedule? Maybe, but only if the kids are on the same team. And I can't help out too much with coaching.
• I need to figure out lesson plans for preschool next week... pumpkins...hmmm and then monsters... maybe we'll become Germ Busters and do a lesson in handwashing and flu prevention...
• What questions do I need to ask Ryan's teacher at his conference? Hmmm, how to walk the line between advocating for your child and becoming a pushy know-it-all?
• Why did I agree to be room mom? How am I going to get this fall party planned while on vacation? Am I going to get online and check email at all when we're there? I better get something out before we leave.
• Why havent' we gotten Halloween costumes yet! Shopping the week before, everything is going to be sooooo picked over!

ok, my head hurts. But for every answered question or thought process, there are 5 new questions or tangents... my mind is in a whirlwind. Boy do I need this vacation coming up!

Rock the Red

A holiday weekend, an extra day to procrastinate all the things that are piling up on my list. I am gearing up to really tackle my to-do list that has been catching up with me. Tim is in the middle of tiling the fireplace. Ryan has just started a big homework project that's due tomorrow. Katie is knee deep in Barbie clothes and some big party for one of her Webkinz pets. And Claire is naked. Yes, she's wandering around the house naked. But somehow the next thing I know, we're all in the van heading downtown.

We got a call. It's my friend, who shall remain nameless lest she get busted at work for giving out client tickets to her friends, offering us 4 tickets to the Capitals game. Tonight. In 2 hours.

Of course we'll go, how can we pass this up?

We're 8 rows from the ice, right behind the Caps goal. We're sitting with the rich people! Now THIS is a hockey game! We're close enough to see the players' facial expressions, and Ovechkin's missing tooth. Close enough for Pop Pop to see us on tv, thanks in part to Ryan having an end seat and dancing in the aisle flapping his little wings the entire time. What can I say, the kid loves hockey.

We all are swept up in the excitement, and surrounded by red jerseys, so we detoured to buy shirts for everyone. Plus we figured what we saved on tickets we could spend on shirts and food right?

Hmmm, is that Katie I see wearing a RED shirt? What? Has the earth imploded? Is that the same girl that doesn't admit that the color red even exists? Who draws rainbows with pink instead of red? I cannot believe my eyes!

By the way, with her missing her front teeth, I was cracking up all night listening to her shout at the top of her lungs, "Let'th Go Capth!" It was like sitting with Daffy Duck.

For Claire we bought a large foamy finger. Which turned out to be a huge mistake, as anyone else would have had the foresight to realize. Claire needed a 10 foot radius to swing that thing freely. But like I said, we were swept away with excitement and everyone around us received many bonks to the head. We also found out that Claire is good for 2 periods of hockey. Honkey, actually. During the third period she announced, "I all done honkey," and started to climb all over the 4 of us in an attempt to tunnel her way back to the car. She was asleep as soon as we clicked her carseat.

And speaking of sleeping... going to bed at 11 on a school night was probably not the smartest thing to do! Waking this boy up for school in the morning is going to be a nightmare!! Especially since I will be waking him up a little early to finish that Fall project.

Mickey Mouse and Bitches

That's who we're going to see at Disney World... according to Claire.
I love her mispronunciations, listening to her talk is so much fun! (those would be princesses, by the way, that we are going to see at Disney World).

Another fun and slightly embarrassing mispronunciation is pumpkin. Thank goodness no one understood her or even flinched when she announced that she was going to the f***** patch.

Almost as funny as when Ryan was a baby and he had a similar mispronunciation for truck. Or dumptruck. We had so much fun getting him to repeatedly say dumptruck for our friends. Yes, we were so immature. Immature, but also very very funny.

The first time we went to Fuddruckers was also kinda funny, but anyone could make that mistake!

Katie never was difficult to understand. She had no mispronunciations to speak of. She went for the embarrassing moments in other ways, such as asking the Target cashier, "Are you a lady or a man?"

Dear Christopher Columbus,

I know you wouldn't have predicted when you started out your journey 517 years ago that your accidental "discovery" of a land that would one day be known as America would one day lead to celebrations of your achievement with grandiose sales on mattresses and cars and days off from work and school. You wouldn't have known that this celebration would come just at the exact time when people would need a 3 day weekend. And you couldn't have possibly known that one day there would be a sport called soccer and that sport would sometimes be played at 8am on a Saturday, and that during said celebration of your journey, soccer games would be cancelled. But over here in Ashburn, VA we are very, very, very thankful!

Steamy Fun!

Have you ever wondered if you can make your carpets even dirtier while cleaning them with a steam cleaner? Well I am here to tell you YES, you can!


It all starts with a tiny little gumball that your kids leave buried in the rug. The heat from the steam cleaner will dissolve that little gumball until it's just a mere blue smudge on your white rug. You will no doubt do a double take from the irony of suddenly seeing a stain where there wasn't one a moment ago. From a machine designed to remove stains there is suddenly a stain in its track. Hmmm, wasn't that fun?

Fl-ackle

yes, that's about right... it's kind of a combination of flag and tackle football. Ryan is in heaven, it's the perfect way to spend a Friday night as far as he's concerned. I had no idea what to expect when we signed up for this. Every other sport we've enrolled him in involved one of the kids' dad volunteering to coach. The main focus and interest was on the snack afterwards.

This time, we have a former NFL player coaching, so I knew there was somewhat of a step up from what we'd been used to. So they had a couple of practices during the week, learned some plays, we have all these sheets of paper with little X and O figures with arrows pointing everywhere... I won't pretend to know what any of that means. So we show up at the field for the game and were blown away.

This was a real football field, with goal posts, yard lines, booming speakers, a flashing scoreboard, and concession stand brimming with tons of spectator foods. There we were, lined up at the gate, $2 in hand for admission, this was the real deal. I've never been this excited at football game in high school or college! The boys were lined up outside the field and as the announcer called each name, they came running out through the goal posts to the sounds of their adoring fans.

The boys will rotate through playing all the positions, and I won't pretend to know what they all are, but Ryan did get to be the quarterback a couple times- his favorite position so far because, as he pointed out, he will definitely get to at least touch the football if he is quarterback. And touching the football is very important.

I wasn't expecting much. I kinda thought that each of the teams would score a touchdown every time they got the ball. But there was a surprising amount of blocking and tackling involved (for a sport that wasn't supposed to have tackling). I also figured most of the action would be running with the ball, I didn't think they would be coordinated enough to throw to each other (or able to catch). I was wrong. One of Ryan's 2 touchdown passes was captured on the video below. Yes, I am the proud screaming momma in the background! He was so calm and cool, looking around for his receiver and lining up his throw just before the guys grabbed his flags. And the kid that caught it slipped right into the end zone. It was such a thrill to see Ryan's face light up. He was beaming. And he hasn't thought of anything else since. He's up hours past bedtime reliving the moment.

The Ants go Marching...

Hoorah, Hoorah...
What's the very last thing I expected to see when getting home from vacation? All the unpacking, laundry, bills, restocking the groceries looming over my head... and yet there's another pertinant task taking the lead as I rank the priority of these jobs, weighted against the exhaustion I'm feeling from the day of traveling.

After all the cleaning we did before leaving because isn't it so refreshing to come home to a nice clean house... On the kitchen counter is a skittle. Or what's left of a skittle. It was a green one, but almost all the green shell has been removed. Removed by ANTS!! Ewwww, there is a steady stream of tiny ants marching to and from this skittle, each carrying off an invisible chunk of skittle. I follow with my eyes the line of marching ants and see that they're heading through a tiny crack in the mortar between 2 tiles on the backsplash. Heading through that crack and into the outlet! I shudder to think what it would look like if I took that outlet cover off.

Tim is on top of this situation quick as a wink. One minute he is my pack mule, unloading a weeks worth of junk from the beach, the next minute he is flooding the outlet and countertop with ant spray. Those ants don't know what hit them. Who knows how many days they had been working on that skittle. Who knows, maybe there was a handful of skittles and they were finally on the last one!

And NOW we can get to the laundry, the bills, and head out to Costco to restock the fridge with food for the week.

Time and Space

I could enjoy the ocean views forever, from the kitchen, the bed, even the giant bathtub. Everywhere I go in the house I have a view of the shoreline, I just love this week. I am so relaxed, I feel like we've been here for a month instead of only a week. I can barely remember what the calendar holds for us when we get home. I don't even recall what my house looks like. I have lost all track of time and space, I've been in another world, and I don't know if I want to return to real life!

Goodnight 5 year old...

I tucked my sweet little 5 year old into bed tonight for the last time. She is so perfect and snuggly sweet in her new bed. She jumped from a twin to a full, so she looks so little laying on that huge mattress!

As I whispered to her, "Goodnight little 5-year-old," for the last time, she just looked up at me. She is soooo not sentimental, not a thought spared for savoring childhood. She just said right back, "Goodnight big 33-year-old," and that was the end of that. No, she has no time or patience for mushiness or syrupy sweet musings about growing up too fast or things I remember doing when I was a little girl. She is all business. Very matter-of-fact. She is thinking about the party.

THE party. The Webkinz party. Have I finished making the Wheel of Wow? What about the gem mining? What other games can we have in case the things we've planned leave a lot of extra time? Do we have enough ribbons and flowers for the hairbows? What if the girls forget to bring their webkinz pets? What if the other girls have boy webkinz and they don't want to make hair bows for them? What prizes do I have to give away? Do I have enough prizes? Do we have enough cheese and toppings for the pizza? What if someone doesn't like the topping choices I bought? Ok, all these concerns are things that have crossed my mind as well, but the 6 year old birthday girl should not be worrying about them!



Tomorrow when she wakes up, we will snuggle together and enjoy breakfast in bed and I'll pull out her scrapbook and show her the pictures of when she was a baby with the cutest little punchy cheeks that were so thick and so fat I couldn't even tell if she had any teeth. My little baby Katie... all grown up.

The Fun Ship

Carnival advertises as "The Fun Ships" and they truly are. It is the ideal vacation for a large group- big enough with enough variety of activities on the ship find individual activities, and small enough to reconvene at times to enjoy family time. We had people ages 2-66 on board the ship and found something fun for everyone to enjoy. Including "Camp Carnival" for the kids. None of our kids wanted to be separated from us, as I predicted, but maybe on a future cruise the lure of bright lights and video games (ahem Ryan) will entice them. Ryan was invited to a party one night in one of the lounges from 10-1am! Fun Ship indeed! These kids are learning how to party hard core from a very early age!

The kids had so much fun playing with their cousins on the ship. They loved the pool and waterslides and especially the mini golf course up on the sun deck. I don't know what Ryan would have done without that!

Tim and I had a good balance worked out which included me taking the kids back to the cabin after the nightly show had ended around 10pm and getting them settled into bed (after a bit of swinging from the bunks like monkeys) while he went to the casino for a couple hours with the guys. He enjoys a good game of Craps and has gotten either very good at it or very lucky. He won 60 bucks one night, the same night that someone lost 200, so he must have felt a little smug about that!

And before you get to feeling sorry for me that I had no free time... my me time came in the mornings. I snuck out very early and was usually the very first person at the gym. I enjoyed a nice workout and then sat on the sun deck watching the sunrise, in a quietnesss only the first one awake on the whole ship could enjoy. Then I took a nice long hot shower in the spa, where they have an unlimited supply of towels and tons of space, not like the little mini-shower stall in our stateroom with the floppy nozzle that keeps twisting and pointing in the wrong direction.

It is the little things, you know, and when all the little things are just right, they add up to make one very happy vacation.

The Long Haul

The price of plane tickets for 5 to Tampa is a little steep for us, plus there's the added struggle of not being able to bring as much stuff. When you're loading up the car for a long trip, you can pack almost everything. Except toothbrushes, why can't I ever remember those? So it was a no-brainer that we were going to drive to Tampa for the cruise. We like to do our long drives at night. Get a couple hours under our belt, stop for a late dinner, and pop a movie on for the kids and BAM- they miss most of the journey, happily cuddled up with their pillows and blankets. And we actually get to have good conversations with each other, rather than running interference and throwing snacks and crayons to the kids. And we can listen to good music instead of the Wiggles or Sesame Street (not that I don't love a good Ladybug Picnic).

What we didn't expect was that Tim's dad would want to drive down with us... commit to 12+ hours in the car watching Disney movies and napping in an upright position. Especially since he could have flown down with Tim's mom and been there in a couple hours. But rotating 3 drivers behind the wheel would lessen the strain on all of us so we snatched him up when he offered. Plus, come on! Doesn't this look fun?

So here's how our drive went:
5:00 pm starting our journey, all smiles, excitement looking ahead to our vacation

7:30 why did I have to eat that chicken fried chicken at Cracker Barrel? I can feel that gravy congealing in my arteries while I sit here... all semblance of the healthy eating plan is out the window in preparation for the cruise

9:00 the way we've positioned the seats and cargo, there is enough space for me to curl up on the floor of the van. I don't sleep while sitting, so I finagle my way onto the floor with some pillows and am almost as comfy as I'd be in a bed... well, ok maybe that's a stretch, but it's not bad

12:30 I'm awake, it's my turn to drive. We're just pulling out of a gas station in NC when BAM a giant splatter of bird poop hits the windshield, right in my line of sight. What kind of bird is even awake this late?

1:00 I'm enjoying my quiet ride, everyone is asleep. Tim is using a roll of paper towels as a blanket, poor thing!

1:45 Wow does South Carolina have a TON of adult video stores! Glad the kids are asleep and not reading these billboards!

2:30 What in the world is Claire doing awake?! She's in a half awake dazed slumber mumbling "Mommy Hand, Mommy Hand." So now I'm holding her hand while sitting sideways in my seat. Great. Why did I sign up for the midnight - 4am shift?

3:00 Now Claire is watching a movie. At least I have my hand back. My numb, purple, dead hand.

3:30 There's Mr. Pete's Pecans and Gas... there's a store I think we'll pass on

4:00 Someone else's turn to drive, I'm heading back to sleep...

7:30 Look out Tampa, the Erny's have arrived! We're looking for a Bob Evans for breakfast and Ryan is complaining that he slept through all of South Carolina, he really wanted to see that state! Bummer for him, maybe on the way back he can check out the "Gentleman's Clubs" ugh, we'll have to find another distraction for him, or at least an alternate explanation for what those places are!

Multi-tasking

I am hardcore. I've gone to the dark side. I will not miss my workout to cuddle and coddle this baby of mine. I am tired of her going to sleep at 10:30 or 11 and leaving me with no me time in the evenings. So today I had a crazy thought... and stumbled on a new multi-tasking endeavor- weight lifting and cardio all at once! She loved being in the backpack and kept saying "Giddy-up Mommy" (thanks Tim). 28 minutes into my workout the bouncing suddenly slackened and it felt like she doubled her weight. Finally. Asleep. Apparently she is just as hardcore as I am. Let's set the score at Mommy=1, Night Owl=0.

I carefully finished and stealthly, smoothly climbed off the pedals and maneuvered her ever so cautiously to the bed. I was nice and sweaty so the backpack slid right off and I was absolutely positive she was still fast asleep as I peeled her out and laid her gently on the bed. I was just turning to finally breathe and walk away when I caught her out of the corner of my eye. She was smiling up at me from the pillow and whispered, "Boobie Time?" Grrr. And the score's even.

This is how much she loves the pool...

BeBe Choot On!! BeBe Choot On!! This is what I hear all day long, Claire chanting, asking if it's time to get her bathing suit on.... She is never satisfied, even if we spent the entire day at the pool, and so far 4 hours is the max for Ryan and Katie, Claire is still digging her fingernails into the door frame of the locker room as we try to pry her from her beloved pool.

The English Lesson

We have seriously dumbed down our speech around here. I know you're not supposed to use baby talk when interacting with your baby, and you should explain everything just as you would want it explained to you when talking to a toddler. We've never done it before, but this time around with Claire, we have really dropped the ball on vocabulary expansion. We use sentences like:

Mommy do it.
Mommy hold it
Daddy take it
No touch!

She uses the same types of sentences to communicate with us. So we're all on the same level. Tim and I talk to each other like this when the kids aren't even around. Caveman speak, or cavebaby speak... it's very efficient. And completely unnecessary for a child who will frequently take the child safety locks off the cabinet doors, dig around for what she needs in the cabinet, and then put the safety locks back on...

Score: Wall-3, Katie-0

This was a bad week for Katie's head. She slammed into 3 different walls and got 3 head injuries. I am a pretty calm person, I don't get rattled too easily, but the first time Katie slammed into the wall at my parents house, my mother gasped so loud she nearly sucked in all the air from the room, which contributed to Katie's panic. We held her down with an ice pack for so long, that the goose egg didn't get very large, and the bruise is already fading to a lovely yellowish gray. Thank goodness too, because our big family trip is coming up soon, and nothing would look worse in our family pictures than a huge purple lump on her forehead.

The next head injury was right under her eye. Again, forced ice pack, lots of screaming, and the bruise and swelling was pretty minor considering the force with which she she hit the wall.

The last incident was much worse, at least for me because there was a lot of blood involved. And we were at a friend's house... what could be worse than bleeding all over your friend's house? Katie suddenly was calling my name and stumbling toward me down the hall. None of the other kids could really tell us what happened, just that she must have tripped and fell into a corner. As she got closer to me, I could tell something was wrong, one half of her head was red. Like a horror movie. It started dripping down onto her shoulder, that's when she noticed it and started shrieking. I couldn't even see where the cut was, her hair was all matted and sticky with blood. We laid her up on the kitchen counter and used the hose from the sink to rinse the blood out. Eventually I found the source, and it was a pretty small cut, less than half an inch, but apparently head injuries come with massive amounts of blood. My friend assured me that her kids had all had much worse, deeper cuts than this on their heads and were turned away from the ER without stitches or staples. An hour on the couch auietly resting and watching tv, Katie was cured. What a rough week for her head... I wonder how many brain cells died during those ordeals...

Random Tidbits

1. Add these to the list of keys that have been broken off my keyboard: control, alt, d,z,x,c,b and esc. So now I have to guess where the z and x are because I never really knew. Thank goodness I hardly ever have to use them. Claire brought them all over to me announcing, "I broke it!" Like that was her goal for the day. She was so proud. Last week it was my space bar. Luckily it kinda snapped back on and works almostallthetime.

2. Our washer and dryer are stacked, and up on the top of the dryer is where I store a bunch of lunch boxes, coolers and insulated bags. Why do we have 13 of these things? 3 I can see, one for each kid. Oddly enough, not one of them is big enough to store all the drinks and snacks we need when we have a day trip planned so we end up using one of the bigger coolers from the garage anyway. Every time I do a load of laundry, and that would be at least once a day, no fewer than 4 of them tumble right off the top of the dryer. Today I am going to find them a new home.

3. I discovered that Tim has an emergency golf shirt in his trunk with his clubs. As in, "Honey, I had a golfing emergency today, I'll be home late, the guys wanted to catch a quick 18 holes..." hmmm, sounds a little like premeditation to me.

4. Katie made a "Do Not Disturb" sign for her bedroom door. She told me that when she takes it down I am allowed to go in there and clean it... well, how do you like that? Hmmph.

5. For 2 days in a row I have raced into our room as an afterthought and put a diaper on Claire while she napped. She is sooo into her big girl panties now- the ones that have Minnie Mouse on them- that she refuses to wear a diaper. I tend to forget during the day how close we are to soggy carpets and puddles. Do you know how hard it is to put a diaper on a baby all balled up in the fetal position? And I live in fear that she will wake up and her hour long nap will be even shorter.

6. I recently found out that there is, allowable by FDA standards, up to 6 rat hairs ground up in each jar of peanut butter. Needless to say, this has caused me some distress as peanut butter is a major staple of our diet. I can't bring myself to buy it, and the kids are getting restless- they eat a pb&j sandwich every day for lunch. I should just get past it- the way I made concessions to eating chocolate even after finding out about how many insects are allowable per ounce. This rat thing is just different to me I guess. But if you put them both together, my obsession with Reese Peanut Butter Cups is cured!

7. Claire, "Clue" as she calls herself, or rather, "Baby Clue" finally has allowed me to put her hair in piggytails! She is sooooo cute!!

The Impulse Purchase

There was no way we could leave the store without this...

She was just waaaaay too happy. And I'm a sucker for this kid. And I foolishly allowed the delusion to build in my mind that this might be just the thing that gives her incentive to sleep in her own big girl bed... hmmm. We'll see about that.

Puppy, Puppy, I love you!!!

Boppy-Boopy-Boo

We watched Cinderella. Claire was in awe. After the movie she had her new shiny wand and was dancing around in circles pointing it at each of us singing, "Boppy- Boopy- Boo!!"