Day 234--School Clothes Shopping

After a busy morning with Spencer's football practice, Glen helping in the concession stand, me finishing the sacrament program, trying to get all of our chores done, going on a 4 mile run (I'm PATHETIC!), we then went to the Leesburg outlets to get a little school clothes shopping done. It was pouring rain, so I left my camera in the car....Emma, however, saved the day when she pulled her little camera out of her purse and took this picture of Ellie pondering over shoes. Ellie actually didn't end up getting any shoes there, since they didn't have the ones she liked in her size, but it was fun to watch her deliberate and choose!

Day 233--Morning and Night

Caramel rolls ( by Cami and AnnaLisa) for breakfast...
cool storm clouds by night.

Day 232--Great Falls

I let the kids talk me into going to Great Falls today.

We never did see the falls and I made them walk a long way on a hot and humid day...

but everyone ended up having a good time anyway (despite the complaints that I was torturing them).

Introducing....Eliza the Toe Sucker

Glen and I are both a little on the shy side, so I'm always impressed and amused when one of our kids shows through with an outgoing, bubbly side to their personality. While I think that all of our kids are naturally a little more social than we are, I've been shocked to realize that some of them don't even seem to have a shy side.

Take Ellie for instance. Ever since she could talk she's loved engaging people in conversations....strangers, friends, and siblings. She's friendly and eager to connect with others.

It was interesting to see her out of her comfort zone while it was just her and I out in Utah. While she did talk non-stop with me on the airplanes, it was fascinating to see her concerted, consistent efforts to connect with a whole host of people she's not as familiar with.

Not only did she have a set introduction down that she used for all the friends and relatives she met, but she also had a couple of humorous stories she liked to throw into the introduction to put her new friends at ease.

Here's a little sample of her average self-introduction (scaled back to be a little more concise than her version)...

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Hi, my name is Eliza (never mind that no one actually calls me Eliza other than the people I've just introduced myself to)
and one time when I was a baby I sucked on my cousin's toe.
He was asleep and I thought it was my thumb so I started sucking on it.


I still like to suck my thumb. Did you know that one time Mrs. Lengel (Adam's kindergarten teacher) sucked my thumb too?
My birthday is March 23rd....

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Day 231--I Blame it on the Weather...

The weather was goofy today. I'd be driving through the pouring rain one minute, then suddenly the streets would be dry and the sky clear. Another few blocks and it'd be pouring again. It was all just kind of weird and goofy...

which was exactly how I felt today. Random singing, dancing, and just plain randomness would describe my behavior. The kids thought I was, well, rather weird and goofy, but still seemed to enjoy the goofiness right along with me.

Play Dates: Then and Now

Play dates when they're four:

Princess dresses, tiaras, dolls, and fighting over who gets to be the mom when they play house.

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Play dates when they're twelve:

Straightening each other's hair, trying on each other's new school clothes,

manicures, applying make-up to each other, and ogling over Zac Efron.

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Both of them pretending to be older, but somehow the 12-year-old version seems a little too realistic to me and scares the living daylights out of me. While Ellie and her friends look fancy and cute all dressed up in their princess clothes, Cami and her friends just look beautiful. I can't imagine the day is too far away when little frog princes really do come knocking on our door. AAAAAGH!

Disclaimer: While it may appear that I have kids old enough to go to middle school and high school, it's merely all an illusion. I am still a young mom with young kids. Got it?

Day 230--Laundry and Baseball

The start of Spencer's two-a-day football practices has brought with it a new urgency to keeping up with the laundry...

and Spencer experienced his first bout of jealousy with his new sporting commitments when he returned from practice to discover that everyone but Ellie and I were downtown at the Rockies/Nationals game.

They came home happy to report that the right team won the match-up.

Rockies 4--Nats 3.

(You couldn't expect 2 Colorado boys {Aaron and Glen} to root for anyone else now could you?)

Customers of the Year

I have a love/hate relationship with Wal-mart that only be rivaled with the love/hate relationship I have with chocolate.

I love that I can pay only $1.84 for the same bottle of shampoo that would cost $2.79 at Safeway, but I hate the fact that I always leave there with a big headache, a huge bill, and an inexplicable desire to take a shower.

Sometime mid-August every year, I start bracing myself for our annual pilgrimage to the land of long lines and roll-back prices to replenish the kids' school supplies. The school publishes a list of all the items they need grade by grade. Markers, pencils, highlighters, scissors, folders...it's all spelled out for me in black and white.

4 dozen pencils--check. 6 Highlighters--check. 3 pink erasers--check. 3 boxes of 24 crayons--check...

Things were going surprisingly well until we hit one box of 12 Washable Markers on the first grade list.

Sounds easy enough, but I dare you to find a box of 12 anywhere. We found boxes of 8, 10, 16, and even 11, but not a single box of 12.

So after wasting 5 minutes of searching high and low and briefly entertaining buying non-washable markers, I eventually decided it was a box of 10 or nothing. Whoever wrote that list clearly had no idea what they were asking for.

Then I got to the next item....20 glue sticks. Woohoo! Double packs of glue sticks are 5 for $1.

Oh wait, their lists clearly state that only large, white glue sticks are acceptable, which happen to be $1.59 each. Yep, that would mean I spent 30 bucks for glue sticks that could have totaled 4.

So an hour and a half later with 2 carts full, our bank account drained, and the kids in various stages of starvation I left with a satisfied air that somehow we made out better than last year...

then I went home and took a shower.

Day 229--Another Wad All Gone

With the massive leaking of our faithful 15-year-old hot water heater, we blew another huge chunk out of our basement budget today.

Post #501: Dedication

Eight years ago today, Glen and I officially answered the siren call of the American dream and became the newest starry-eyed home owners in town.

We were young, naive, and eager to settle down while we gained financial freedom as our home exponentially increased in value.

As homeowners, we dutifully stripped off old wallpaper and painted all our walls any color but white, bought a trampoline, lawnmower, and grill so we could enjoy our first ever backyard, and planted flowers in our front yard.

We were on a home loving honeymoon.

Of course over the course of the next few years we got a little dose of reality (mostly right in the wallet)...

You know like the toilets that stopped working, termites that mated in our garage, washing machine that flooded, appliances that broke (again and again), windows that got broken, mailbox that fell over, wallpaper that started peeling, and rodents that ate right through our garage doors.

Our wallets are a lot emptier than we expected, but guess what?

It's the house I've lived the longest in in my whole life and it's almost double the runner-up (the house in Blaine, MN I lived in from 6th to 10th grades).

And guess what else?

We still love our house...foibles and all. Our "to-do" list is still miles long, but our house is becoming more and more OURS every day.

Our bathrooms may be messy, but they're beautiful underneath that mess. Our garden may be full of weeds, but the fresh basil from there is delicious. And while the work on our basement project still hasn't officially begun, it's going to be awesome when it is finally done.

So in honor of our eight year anniversary of living here, I thought I'd dedicate my 501st blogpost to it in hopes that it would think of us kindly and remember how much we love it.

Oh crap! It's ticked that I missed the 500th post...

a flooded hot water heater. Oh joy.

Day 228--Missionaries for Dinner

Hehe! I just read my title and realized it sounds like we ate the missionaries for dinner, but EEWW! We would never do that. But we do love having them over to our house to eat dinner with us once a month. We love the spirit and missionary zeal they bring to our home and we love that in some small way we feel like we're supporting the missionary efforts in our area. Elder Perriton and Elder Lebbie are both wonderful missionaries and a joy to have in our home!

Day 227--Two-A-Days

After a week of two-a-day football practices starting at 6:00am, this is a common sight at our house. Ironically this picture wasn't taken at our house though. This is while we were visiting Matt and Karey's house. Apparently our conversation was a little dry or something. :)

Day 226--School Supplies and Birthday Parties

After a play date for the kids was canceled for this morning I was bound and determined to make today my back-to-school shopping day. I wanted to be out the door no later than 9:00am, which meant we didn't leave until 9:30. Even with the late start the school supply aisles were void of people when we got there. I gave each of the kids pens and went up and down the aisles calling, "How many packs of pencils do you need?" "Markers. Who needs markers?"
Spencer was at football practice at the time, so obviously I had to bring someone extra with me so I wouldn't be gypped of my full quota of children. We put Cami's friend Mikhaela to work pushing the second cart and helping keep track of Ellie. Now we've got everything on those blasted lists except the math supplies (rulers, protractors, compasses, etc), which we could not find anywhere. Oh and a pencil box for Adam too. He totally refused to take a pink or purple or sparkly one, which were the only ones Wal-mart carried.

Then an entire month past her 12th birthday, Cami finally had her birthday party. Since one of her best friend's (Mikhaela) birthday is coming up soon, they thought they'd plan a joint party and make the best of it. They planned every last detail, down to homemade ice cream cake, "13 Going on 30", frozen pizza (because it was cheaper than ordering), and swimming in the dark. All their planning paid off and they had a fabulous time with their friends.

The Refrigerator Challenge

Although I've always loved to cook, you may have noticed that lately it's taken on a whole new zeal for me as I am constantly making new things for the Recipe Shoebox. As part of this new zeal I've also developed a whole system for finding and organizing my recipes. It's one of the small sections of my life I actually consider organized.

Unfortunately organizing my recipes has not rubbed off on the state of my refrigerator. I consider that my refrigerator is merely a symptom of the rest of my life--cluttered and disorganized. At any given moment I probably have at least two open bottles of ketchup, the mostly empty dredges of several bags of shredded cheese, and some long forgotten yogurts that have gotten stuck in the back.

Occasionally I get a bug to clean it out (or bribe some unsuspecting relative to do it for me), but for the most part I am content in the state of my refrigerator. Ask me for the feta cheese or the tomatillos and within 11.4 seconds I can pull it out for you. You may end up with some dried cheese chunks on your foot in the process, but at least they're cheese chunks that have lived a long and happy life on the shelves of our fridge.

A couple of weeks ago after dropping another $200 at the grocery store and barely being able to squeeze it all into my fridge I decided that I needed some professional refrigerator assistance. I looked in the phone book for Refrigerator Assistants and came up empty, then several days later I came across this entry on my friend Ashby's blog about how she endeavored on a "Eat-What-We've-Got-Challenge". Her mission was to not go to the store (or to a restaurant) for an entire week and just make do with what she already had in the house.

It was just the inspiration I needed. That same day I took an inventory of my fridge (YIKES!) and started making a new menu based on the ingredients I already had in the house. No last minute trips for a couple of ingredients....NO STORES AT ALL! I had some random fruits and vegetables, a little cheese, some assorted dairy products, and my food storage. It was set to be culinary creativity at its best...

To be continued....