Random

•I really stink at Words With Friends. I love playing it, but I always lose. Unless my opponent quits. You'd think I would be good at it because I have a decent vocabulary thanks to my love of reading, but I'm not. I hope the more I play, the better I'll get.

•Garrett was talking to me about respect the other day and we were discussing things that are and are not respectful. Out of the blue he said "So if I say 'what the hell' that's not respectful, right?" What?! That was a fun discussion. (And no. We don't talk like that at our house...)

•We bought Cooper's new "big boy" bed over the weekend. I'm not a personal fan of toddler beds and/or twin beds (unless space or money dictated that I must purchase one or the other. And I did grow up sleeping many, many years on a twin bed, lest anyone think I'm a "bed snob".) We bought him a full size bed for his room, very similar to the one Garrett has. A bed that size can basically stay with them until they move out, so we ultimately wouldn't have to buy any more beds. That's a nice thought. The bed won't be available for pick up until Saturday, so I'm excited to see what he thinks once it's set up in his room. When the crib is taken down, it will convert into a headboard/footboard for the bed, so I'm looking forward to seeing it like that. (But also a little sad to know we won't use it for it's initial purpose anymore.) We won't be moving him out for a few weeks though. I want to get him used to seeing the bed in there and maybe even take a nap or two in it before taking the plunge and tearing down the crib. I know the first week or so will be rough. I'm not looking forward to that part.

•I've spent some time researching "couponing" and have come to the following conclusions:

1. I'm jealous of the women who have the time and energy to spend on saving lots of money like I know many out there do.

2. I have zero desire to do my weekly shopping at more than one store. I know that's a big part of the couponing concept and I just don't want to do it. We don't live really close to very many grocery stores. We do have a CVS relatively close, but there aren't a lot of products that we need from there on a regular basis. The only true grocery store within 15 miles is a Brookshires and I need to do some research on them to know if they do double or triple coupons ever.

3. I *gasp* actually like shopping at Walmart. They have everything that I need under one roof. If I'm needing to pick up an article of clothing or pair of shoes for the boys, I can run through those sections of the store. I have 2 monthly prescriptions for myself, so I can easily pick them up on grocery shopping days. Our local Walmart is pretty clean and I feel relatively safe going there (in the morning hours. I have a hard time going to any store at night solely for safety reasons.) I recognize a good number of the workers, know who the better Monday morning checkers are and can make the occasional run through their toy section to let Garrett spend his allowance every month or two. Not to mention their diapers/pullups are cheaper than anywhere else and we'll be buying them both for quite some time to come.

4. I plan to continue clipping coupons and looking online for coupons and using them on products I already plan to purchase at Walmart anyway. This morning I saved $10 by doing just that. It's not much, but it's more than it would have been had I not taken the time to clip them.

•I am a terrible mom and sent my boys to school on picture day wearing play clothes and with "regular" hair. (Garrett is always looking for reasons to have "spikey" hair.) Of course the pictures turned out really cute, except for their clothes, and I had to order some. I'm kicking myself because the pictures would have been 10 times cuter if they had actually worn cute clothes and had a touch of product in their hair. The plus to kindergarten is that Garrett has to wear a uniform every day, so at least if I forget picture day again next year, the only thing he'll be missing is "spikey" hair.

•Tomorrow is kindergarten registration. That's all I have to say about that for right now.

Spring Break 2011

This week has been Spring Break in our area. Because of Keith's job in accounting, we can't really make many plans during this week as a family so I've never put much thought into planning our week. I'm sure once the boys get older the 3 of us will make plans to do some fun stuff during their break, but for now, it's hard to plan on doing anything of much excitement with a 5 year old and a 1 year old.

Keith has been traveling quite a bit to Paris lately for work. (Paris, Texas, unfortunately. Not France.) As it turns out, Keith had to travel the week of Spring Break so the boys and I figured we would tag along. This week, Keith only had to be there from Tuesday-Thursday, so the boys and I left a little after lunch on Tuesday to make the 2 hour drive. Keith was already there hard at work. We headed straight to the hotel and got checked in and settled into our room. Then we changed and headed down to the indoor pool. Garrett was very excited about swimming.

We were literally 1 foot away from stepping into the pool when a maintenance man walked in and told us that the pool was closed for treatment. First, there was no sign anywhere that stated this. The pool was full of water, there was no equipment sitting around that would lead you to think it was out of service. Second, couldn't there have been better planning to avoid this during Spring Break? That seems like a bad decision made by someone somewhere. I know that sometimes they don't plan these things ahead of time, but during Spring Break I would put a rush on getting my pool fixed. To be perfectly honest, the pool was the main attraction for this trip, so to say I was frustrated with this would be an understatement.

Thankfully, we don't have cable or satellite at our house, so switching between the Disney channel, Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network kept the boys pretty well entertained for the rest of the evening. We went and picked up McDonald's for supper and ate in the hotel room before heading to bed. Keith got back to the hotel around 8:30. After the boys went to sleep, we watched a lot of HGTV. I would have that channel on 24/7 at home if we had it. Really cool shows!

On Wednesday morning, we all went down and ate breakfast at the hotel. I love the fact that hotels now are getting away from the "continental" breakfast and tend to serve a "hot" one instead. Of course the boys only wanted cereal, but Keith enjoyed eggs and sausage and I had biscuits and gravy. After Keith and his coworkers left for their client, the boys and I hung out in our room some more watching cartoons. I checked with the hotel front desk and the pool was still closed. They "apologized for the inconvenience." Later in the morning we went to the movies and saw "Rango". I wouldn't recommend it. There were several parts where the characters cussed and the storyline just didn't impress. Not to mention that it was almost 2 hours long, which seems like a good 30 minutes longer than most cartoon movies should be. I assume their target audience are children and many children can't sit still for that long.

Thankfully Cooper slept through part of the movie because during the parts where he was awake, he enjoyed kicking the seat in front of us more than he should have. I know the lady was not happy and I did my absolute best to keep him from doing it, but short of leaving or moving (and the theater was pretty full so I don't know that I would have found a seat with an empty one in front of it), I didn't have many options. I hope when adults go to kid movies, they anticipate that sort of thing. I know I didn't even flinch when the boy behind me burped. Long and loud and continuously. Which then enticed my child to attempt the same thing.

After the movie, we met Keith and his coworkers at a cool burger place in downtown Paris for lunch. They had a wide variety of options for a burger. One of which was a burger patty in between 2 grilled cheese sandwiches. Can you even imagine how unhealthy that would be? It doesn't even sound appetizing.

After lunch, the boys and I went back to the hotel for naptime. Unfortunately no naps were actually taken, but I strictly enforced quiet time for an hour, so that helped me to regain my sanity. Thankfully Mickey Mouse Clubhouse was on for awhile after that, so the boys were entertained. (We did bring toys, lest anyone think that I automatically assumed the TV would be a good babysitter.) Then we ordered pizza to be delivered to our hotel room. Incidentally, I placed my first online pizza order. I always worried that the local pizza franchise didn't really check those orders, but I know now that they do.

The boys took showers and got into bed where they "rested" until Keith got back to the hotel around 9pm. About 30 minutes after the boys finally went to sleep, Garrett started thrashing around in his bed, moaning and everything. I finally got him to tell me that something hurt, but before we could figure out what he was talking about, he threw up in the bed. That was fun. You haven't really lived until you've cleaned puke out of a pillow in a hotel sink.

We put down a layer of towels underneath him and put a trashcan beside him in the bed and then we tried to settle down for sleep. That was pretty impossible since Garrett thrashed and moaned once an hour, every hour. He never actually threw up again, but since I wasn't sure if he would or not, I still grabbed the trashcan every time and held it in front of his face until his "moment" passed. That was loads of fun. During one of these trashcan sessions around 3am, Keith told me that he thought Cooper had thrown up in his bed.

Here's the thing, initially Keith had been sleeping with Garrett in one bed and I was with Cooper in the other. Garrett nearly missed puking on Keith and then we swapped beds. At 3am, rather than being puked on, Keith was the lucky one to get pooped on. Cooper didn't throw up, but he was having very bad issues of a different variety. (I'm sorry for the turn this post has taken. Unfortunately it is very much a representation of what our Spring Break was this year...) I helped Keith clean up and then we hosed Cooper off in the shower. I'm pretty sure if there were people in the room next door to us, they hated us by this point. My apologies to you. We did our best to be quiet, but there's not much you can do when holding a 1 year old whose been woken up at 3am and shoved into the shower to clean up what no amount of baby wipes could ever clean up.

We then had the fun task of cleaning up Cooper's bed. Both of the beds in our room have now been scarred for life. We put down another layer of towels (thank goodness for housekeeping who left us extra that morning!) and Cooper went back to sleep pretty quickly. Unfortunately that was not the case for Keith and me. Earlier in the night, we had debated heading on home because we were already planning to leave first thing the next morning, but Keith decided against driving home in the middle of the night. At this point, we were regretting that decision. We turned on some more HGTV and dozed until 6:30am. Then we packed up, cleaned up (as best as you can when armed with baby wipes and hotel soap), left a good tip for housekeeping, and headed home.

Keith had already taken the day off because our window company was coming out to change some windows in our house. So once we got home and unloaded, I got changed and headed to the church to print bulletins. I normally work every Thursday at our church printing, folding, and stuffing all the bulletins (among other things). Thankfully Keith was home so I didn't have to bring the boys with me this week (they're in school on other Thursdays.)

We will now wrap up Spring Break by attempting to catch up on missed sleep, scald all clothing worn during the "night from hell", do more cleaning around the house, and hope and pray that no one else gets another stomach bug.

Spring Cleaning Kick-Off

This weekend has basically jump-started spring cleaning around here. My first project was Garrett's room because it was desperately needing a good cleaning so I figured it was the best place to start as any.

First I have to say that I do have Garrett pick up in his room every other day or so. He does a very typical kid job of cleaning up, but at least it's bearable. Every other month or so, I have to get in there with him and really clean up to get the clutter back down to a minimum so he can slowly mess it up again. Such is the life of a mom. I do want him to enjoy his room and play with his toys and I always let him keep out any big projects or "scenes" he has created, but the clutter of toys and things strewn about gets to me after awhile. Not to mention, he just doesn't want to play in his room when it's a big mess.

We cleaned his closet (minus going through all of his clothes. Most of them still fit him pretty well and we aren't entrenched enough into spring-like weather for me to begin moving around winter clothes. In Texas, summer clothes stay accessible year round, so we're good for now.) We also cleaned out his train table, which is basically a catch-all/junk drawer nowadays. We sorted through all of his toy bins and his bookshelf. We filled a trash bag full of broken toys or trash or papers with all of his drawings on them. (Yes, I would love to save every single piece of paper my child draws on, but it's really impractical. Just today we had to throw out at least 3 dozen pages of drawings.) I also completely removed every crayon and marker that had somehow made its way into his room. He's been having "accidents" with markers in his room. 2 different spots on his carpet along with some stray marks on his comforter. They are now all in a child safety-locked cabinet. I hate having to do that, but I also hate having to scrub marker out of the carpet too.

All that remains to take place is to vacuum and clean the window and blinds and my first room for annual spring cleaning is finished! Only 9 more rooms to go! (Assuming I'm dividing open areas of our house into rooms, along with counting bathrooms. In the ideal world, all of those places would receive a thorough cleaning, but in reality, it probably won't happen. I'll just dream about living in a house with all rooms being simultaneously clean...)

Lately

One minute it's January and the next it's March. How did that happen?

We've had a pretty uneventful few weeks lately. The boys have been healthy, which is always nice in the winter. Garrett had a stomach bug last week and Cooper has had a cold but other than that we've been well. They stay busy going to school 2 days a week along with church on Sundays and Wednesdays and occasionally going to the library for Story Hour.

Keith has been staying really busy with work. This is his very busy time of year, though he stays pretty busy year-round. He works at least 12 hours a day, 5 days a week right now. He's also been traveling some lately, but hopefully that will end soon.

I'm staying busy with my part time job at our church and just trying to keep on top of keeping the house (relatively) clean and everything else being a SAHM entails, like being a mom. (I apparently am trying to see how many times I can write the word "busy" in one blog post...)

In a couple of weeks, we will have kindergarten registration to attend. I'm alternately excited and scared. You can't help but be scared when it seems as if every other night, the local news is talking about bullying in schools. Not to mention the budget crunch that Texas schools are facing. I really hope that won't have a major impact on his school district, but it seems as if it's affecting everyone right now.

I have a few blog post ideas that I will hopefully be motivated to post soon. My apologies, yet again, for how infrequent I've been posting lately. I feel like I'm walking a line as to what I should and should not post as far as Garrett is concerned. He's getting old enough to care about what I would share about him in a public forum so I want to be respectful of him and what he may read about himself one day. However, I won't be able to keep myself from posting the funny things he says. He really does keep me laughing!

Just today he decided that he and Cooper needed to be dressed up as super heroes. So Garrett put on his Batman suit and then asked me to tie a blanket around Cooper to be a cape (though he has a Superman cape, but he didn't want to use it for some reason.) The blanket I tied around Cooper has cats on it, so I said Cooper was Catman and Garrett was Batman. But Garrett said "No, he's Superman who fights bad guys with cats." For some reason that just gave me this mental image of Superman running around with a cat in his hand and I could not stop laughing. Garrett didn't appreciate it at first because he thought I was laughing at him (and he hates the thought of being laughed at). But I managed to explain that wasn't the case so then he wouldn't stop talking about Superman and his cats because he thought it was the punchline to a joke.