Megan Turned Two Today!

My youngest is now two years old. It's amazing how quickly the days pass by. We had a low-key birthday celebration for her today. I wasn't feeling well, so she had a simple cake instead of the "pupcakes" we were planning on making. (Maybe this weekend...)

To make her day special, we visited Michael for lunch,

then played at the park

and threw rocks in the river.

Later, she played with bubbles while I worked on her cake.

Megan loves dogs, so we rented this movie

and ate hot dogs. For her birthday, Megan received a pretty purple Radio Flyer tricycle, a plush yellow lab (I'm tempted to make it real),

a bouncy ball, a princess cell phone, and a cute handmade apron from her grandma and grandpa. She seemed most enthralled with the toy phone, which was an afterthought that we saw while standing in the checkout line. (Go figure.)

I am so grateful to have Megan in our family. She is such a sweet, fun-loving, caring little girl. She is a joy to have around. She's getting even more interesting as her vocabulary expands. She definitely has her own personality.

Happy Birthday, Megan!

Bread, Leprechauns, and Madagascar

In my last post, I mentioned that I was really looking forward to going out on a date with my husband. I also mentioned that our daughter was sick. She was sicker than I thought, so we wound up canceling our babysitter and watching a movie at home, after the kids were in bed. It was kind of funny when Mason came downstairs and asked why we weren't in bed, too. He said we should be in bed. We told him that we were on a date and to go back to bed.

Since we didn't get to go out on Friday the 13th, I was really looking forward to our date on Friday the 20th. But then Michael came home sick from work on Thursday. He was sick on Friday as well, but thought he felt well enough to go to our Relief Society Birthday Dinner and out to a movie. We made it through both the dinner and the movie (unfortunately, because I HATED the movie), but he felt worse and worse as the night continued. The next morning, I found him bowing to the porcelain god. Poor guy. This is his four day weekend. We were planning on making a lot of progress in the office, but he has been feeling absolutely miserable.

I have been feeling like a troll. These are the times when I especially hate people who have nannies and can just leave their kids for a bit while they take a nice relaxing vacation. I NEED A BREAK! (Don't we all?) We are on week two of potty-training Mason. He is slowly getting it. He really prefers to wear a diaper because of how convenient it is. All I can say is that I'm sick of poo. I hate it. But I continue to persevere because I know that each day is one day closer to the day when he will go in the toilet instead of his underwear. And that will be a great day, indeed.

Anyway, here are some of the goings-on at my house this week: On Saturday night after I had put the boys to bed and was combing out McKenzie's hair, Mason came downstairs covered in marker and said, "Hey Mom, look. I'm Madagascar! Thomas is too. Come see!" They had colored their faces and "paws," their "cave," and Mason's little cow. I can't get my flash to work, so the pictures turned out blurry, but here is one for illustration purposes.

Tuesday was St. Patrick's Day, as you know. We were surprised to find that some mischievous leprechauns had visited our home and turned our milk green, and the children's cereal into Lucky Charms!

Thank goodness they left my cereal alone. It didn't look very appetizing with green milk, but it tasted fine.

I tried to make bread this week for the first time ever. I think I was too impatient in mixing the dough. It didn't turn out very well. My friend, Molly, came over to help salvage it, but it was a lost cause.

I was thinking it might not be worth all the effort to make bread (since it didn't even taste that good) until Molly brought one of her loaves over today to share with me. I took a picture of her loaf next to my loaf so you could get a better idea of how bad mine was.

Molly's bread inspired me to try again and this time, I think we have a winner.

Counting My Blessings

1. It's Friday, so it's the last day of the week that I have to get up super early, and tomorrow I can sleep in.

2. McKenzie had a bowl near her so when she threw up this morning, the mess was contained and easily cleaned up.

3. McKenzie threw up before I sent her to school, thus preventing me from having to haul all my kids to school to pick up a sickie.

4. Thomas went to preschool today, which was a huge blessing because he was being a total punk this morning and I was sick of dealing with him. He always says he hates to go to preschool, although he truly loves it, and this morning he added, "You're stupid, Mom. I hate you!" Always a great way to start the morning. He was in a much better mood after school. (Because he loves it, of course.) Punk.

5. My friend loaned me Madagascar, which kept the kids occupied for awhile while I worked on compiling our tax info from last year.

6. My child had a potty accident on the leather couch, not the fabric couch, so it was relatively easy to clean up.

7. My other child wet his pants on the counter (instead of the carpet), another relatively easy mess to clean. (He was trying to get something off the top of the fridge.)

8. He peed on the Reeses Pieces on the counter, so now they are no longer tempting and I could finally throw them away.

9. I am totally looking forward to a date with my husband tonight.

10. It's naptime.

Watch Out For Giant Pickle People!!!

Last Monday, Thomas brought home a book from preschool created by the children, titled:

The kids had adapted the Little Miss Muffet rhyme to themselves and illustrated what they would eat while sitting on a tuffet, and what might scare them away. The children wrote food combinations such as chicken noodle soup, squishy marshmallows and watermelon, a strawberry bagel and cream cheese, ice cream and pizza, tomatoes and apples, curds and whey, peaches and watermelon, macaroni and cheese, and pizza and corn. Their fears included spiders, a bat, a silly clown, a bumblebee, a tiger, and a camel.

This is what Thomas wrote:

I have to explain.


My kids like to watch Martha Speaks! on PBS.

It's about a dog named Martha who can speak because she eats alphabet soup. (The letters go to her brain instead of her stomach.) It's a very benign children's program and the kids love it.

A few weeks ago, an episode titled "Martha's Pickle" aired. One of the kids on the show was watching an old black and white horror flick with Martha about giant alien pickles that invaded earth. They didn't get to see the ending. At the same time, a local food distributer began marketing a new pickle recipe by having people dressed as pickles randomly walk around town, with no explanation. Martha believed that alien pickles had invaded her town. They eventually got everything figured out and everyone was fine at the end (as you can see here), except at my house.

Thomas and Mason were both concerned about the Pickle People. That night (and a few nights afterward), Thomas climbed in our bed because he was having bad dreams about Pickle People. Ironically, Thomas loves to eat pickles. I tried to point out that even if there really were giant pickles (which there aren't) he could defeat them by eating them. He's calmed down some, but as you can see, they are still on his mind.

P.S. The vocabulary for that episode was: bizarre, odd, normal, farfetched, rumor, unusual, weird, wacky, ordinary, strange, and report. I wish he would have picked up on some of these words instead of the alien pickle people!

Busy Bees

Remember back in November when I was gearing up to paint our home? Well, Hopsack was the declared winner, but then I chickened out and we bought 5 gallons of Desert Fortress, which was a shade lighter. It turned out to be too light. We painted one large wall and could barely tell the next morning. But since we had 5 gallons, and we didn't think of taking it back to have it tinted darker until later, we went ahead and used it on the rest of our home. We painted the family room Hopsack. It's still lighter than I had anticipated, but it works well with our dark furniture.

Now that the walls have been painted, I finally got my clock that I bought in 2007 mounted on the wall! Yay! And we got our family pictures up... mostly. The actual group shot is missing because it has to have a fake window photoshopped out of it. But it will be up there soon.

The walls and entertainment center are still pretty empty because it's all so new! We purchased our first real living room furniture last November. We love our couches. I wish we had ordered the wood protection package for the wood furniture, though. It's more distressed now than when we bought it. I don't know what I was thinking. But I still love it.. I'm trying to figure out how to fill the bookshelves in the entertainment center (besides with just books) and what other decorations to put on the walls.

I also repainted our front room to a red I like better (it used to be an orangey-red)...

and carried that color into our kitchen.

{I love it!}

We bought some drapes this week and tried out two kinds of valances with them. Neither one looked good to us. They were too low, and not our style. Now we're looking for some kind of scarf to drape in front of the curtains.

If we can just get the right shade of Winslow White to paint our office door and trim, we'll be set. We've tried 4 different cans of Winslow White to match the wood to the other trim in our home, and none of it is light enough. We tried color matching at Lowe's, but that didn't work, either, and Parker Paint has so far been of no help. Michael will try again with them on Monday. Maybe we should try painting it Churchill Vanilla. I used that color to paint the ceilings of the dining room, front room, and office, and you can't even tell the difference from the other ceilings in our home. It took me awhile to concede that it was a waste of time.

There you have it; a little update of what we've been busy working on these past few months. I can't wait to show you our office when it's all done!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Drip, Drip, Drip...

This is one of those blog posts I wasn't planning on doing. But it's a day in a life that started with 10 minutes of no supervision while I was on the phone and Nature called for Thomas. (Michael had left to run some errands and pick up McKenzie from a friend's house.) Thomas was being Mr. Independant and cleaned up after himself. Normally, that would be great. However, he overloaded the toilet with all of the Cottonelle wipes that I had just refilled in the dispenser, and then Mason flushed the toilet for him. I don't know how many times. I just know that I started to hear a drip, realized that my boys were too quiet, and ran upstairs to investigate. I found over two gallons of clear toilet water on the bathroom floor, and the carpet saturated at least two feet out and around the corners into the children's rooms on both sides of the bathroom.

My boys were hiding in their room. I was not happy. I put them in time out so they wouldn't get into any more trouble while I cleaned up the mess. They giggled and laughed most of the time. It was infuriating that they didn't seem to understand the gravity of the situation. So I took away all of their toys and sent them straight to bed without dinner. I think they finally got it. Later that night, Michael and I found water dripping from our fan in the family room onto our new coffee table. (We got new couches and furniture for our family room just before Thanksgiving.) It's still dripping today.


You know when you sit on the grass and it looks like it's dry, but it really isn't and your bottom gradually gets wet from the moisture in the dirt? That's how our carpet is. I sat on the dry area just beyond the wet part to change a diaper and by the time I got up, my jeans were wet. Not fun. The carpet is still very damp in the hall and both children's rooms for several square feet. The worst part is, it's wet with TOILET WATER. Michael keeps telling me that it's the same water as the water that comes out of all our other pipes, but because it came out of the toilet, it's disgusting to me. And I swear, it smells like toilet water, even though he says it shouldn't. Yes, let the Gibb times roll...