Category Archives: Summer Fun

Aug29

Happy Happy Birthday To Me!

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Insert cutesy music from Sprout birthday segments here, because now that is how I hear the birthday song in my head.

Yes I know, I spend too much time with a toddler! :)

My birthday weekend started with a photo shoot with my besties and the lovely ladies at Vixen Pinup Photography. Here are the unedited photos that they allowed me to take on home.  Hair and Photos are by Nikki Moreno, Make-up by Candypants Cunningham

After all that fun we went to dinner at my favorite sushi restaurant Sushi Haru. Then home for a Vaudeville Party that ended up being one of the best we have thrown. And ask our friends, we can have some wild parties!

The Costumes:

Apparently I wasn’t forward thinking enough to get a good pic of mine with the camera…but I make an appearance in the Photobooth pics later on!

The Ladies:

Zombies!:

And a random pic of my hottie husband and my bestie:

Then we had a photobooth app set up to take fun photos!

Here are the ladies:

The Couples:

The Zombies complete with a Group Thriller Scene:

No, I am not sure how Zombies took over my Vaudeville party but they did! Maybe next year we will just go with a Zombie theme!

So far 30 is great and that was the Best.Birthday.Party.EVER!

Aug22

Copious Amounts of Coffee and Turtle-Loving Dykes

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So my Saturday night plans seemed pale in comparison (not really, but it was equally as fun!) to the Friday night Olive Garden dinner and drinks and desserts (and ultimately a raucous and probably annoyingly loud but hilarious conversation between 3 couples). We followed dinner up with an equally entertaining poker night and round of inappropriate and hilarious commentary.

On Saturday, I planned to go see The Help with my Book Club ladies (some are my same girlfriends from dinner and poker) and then discuss the book and movie over coffee. Little did I know my night would end with talking about copious amounts of coffee to a police officer at a sobriety checkpoint.

The movie. was. AMAZING! I really mean it, I am hard on made from book movies. I tend to adore the book and despise the movie unless it can stand alone in it’s own merits. Truthfully, a lot was dropped from the book to the screenplay, but it was necessary. The book was chock full of well-developed characters that there was no way to stuff it all into a movie. Alas, that is a different post, for a more serious time.

On to Copious Amounts of Coffee and Turtle Loving Dykes…..On the way home from a 3 hour-ish discussion at IHOP, one of my friends and I were corralled into a sobriety checkpoint. They had like 15 guys milling around at the checkpoint and we were basically the only people on the road. Seriously, that’s our tax dollars at work!

Anyway, we pulled up and I rolled down my window. The cop asks the obligatory, ‘Ma’am have you been drinking tonight?’ To which my friends answers, ‘Copious amounts of coffee!’ and I say, ‘Coffee, coffee and coffee!’ The cop look taken aback and waved us quickly on. I am sure he was wondering if it was safe to let us overly caffeinated crazy women on the road but had no idea what to take us in for.

Then as we get back on the road we realize what we must have looked like on top of the caffeine excitement. We were both in sweats and t-shirts, definitely not club attire. Hey, that how we roll when going to a movie and a book club meeting, yo! We also had smeary makeup and swollen eyes, not sure what he thought about that, but it was an emotional movie…..so….um….yeah. Don’t worry we took the pic below at home, not on the road. Didn’t want to give him a reason to pull us over!

Suddenly my friend yells, ‘Is that a turtle in the road?’ She has a thing for turtles. It wasn’t, turtles don’t fly up on there side like a paper bag when a car drives pass, so we were good. I asked her what she would have had me do if it was a turtle? Pull a crazy u-turn after leaving the sobriety checkpoint to save a turtle? She said yes.

That cop would have probably just thought, ‘Those crazy coffee-drinking, turtle-loving dykes!’ And then he would have taken us to jail. : )

Aug12

Chocolate Milk and Laura Ingalls Wilder

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These are things my children are obsessed with…..

I’m not sure if they are having crazy growth spurts or suddenly have a vitamin D deficiency that I was unaware of. My daughters, who before last week had to be coerced into drinking milk, have been drinking 3 -4 glasses of chocolate milk a day.

At first I thought our lack of funds may be the issue, since it is hard to keep juice and Gatorade in this house on a super tight budget. (We avoid keeping soda and sugary drinks in the house as much as possible.) This week, however, I was able to get the grape juice and apple juice that we usually have on hand. They still picked milk!

Also, out of nowhere my oldest daughter produces my old Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Not just a few, she unearthed the entire collection.

Every time my daughters disappear, I find them in the bedroom, my oldest quietly reading to my youngest daughter. And quiet is…..so. not. them.

They have gotten through almost a whole book (give her credit the reader is just starting 3rd grade!) since the Cataclysmic Wii Remote Tragedy of 2011….you know, 2 days ago….

Somehow I feel my son was left out of this post.

He very consistently drinks 3 cups of milk a day and is not happy about the recent milk consumption developments. It has caused two dangerous situations where he wanted milk now and the carton was surprisingly (to Mommy) empty. Daddy was sent immediately out to rectify the situation.

My son also reads daily…he reads Good Night Scout…about 50 times a day. Mommy doesn’t have that kind of reading stamina, so thank goodness this (awesome!) book reads itself!

Aug10

Dance Magic, Dance!

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My kids were stir crazy tonight, refusing to go outside and hanging on me no matter what I suggested to them.

This was partially due to the fact the girls lefts the Wii remotes out and the bathroom door open this morning, resulting in the Cataclysmic Wii Remote Tragedy of 2011.

This isn’t a picture of our toilet…but….

due to Bubby’s fascination with it, we have found toys, keys, cell phone, tv remotes, toothbrushes, clothing, child-size forks, and now Wii remotes in the toilet bowl.  We are just lucky he hasn’t figured out to how to flush or we would be in trouble.

His obsession is why the bathroom door in our house is always shut.

To ease the cabin fever of my little ones, we baked cinnamon coffee cake, the Cinnabon kind and I introduced them to one of my favorite movies.

Labyrinth.

All three were sucked in immediately. Yes I said all three.

Even my 18 month old watched the. entire. movie.

Without moving…..at.all.

I was so stunned at not having three monkeys using me as a jungle gym that I just sat and stared sat them

the. entire. movie.

What little gems from the past have you introduced your kiddos to that they have actually loved as much as you do?

Sep10

Float Trip at Bennett Springs – Day 3

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So do you feel you have waited long enough for the third installment? Really, I have a good excuse. J Starting school slowed me waaayyyyy down on pleasure writing but I did decide to drop a class (due to kid’s activities, not this) so here I am!
We all woke up on the third morning of the float trip a little worn and grumpy. My body ached all over and the bump on my canoe-assaulted head ached like crazy. I had, however, promised pancakes cooked in bacon grease and another buffet of eggs, bacon and sausage. Yum! 
While sorting our stuff into the cars and finding all the necessary cooking utensils, John decided that some leftover steak (from our feast the night before in case you have forgotten because I neglected to tell the story in a timely manner) would be just magnificent with his eggs.  So began the goose chase for the steak, resulting in many frozen hands from deep dips into coolers and wet heads (from the puzzled head-scratching with the drippy hands, of course, dirty, dirty minds!).  Well it turns out in the end all of our steak had gone missing and get this, one ear of corn was also taken.  This, of course, ruled out raccoons. I have seen some crafty coons but never any with the dexterity to open a ziploc bag without tearing it, remove one item and reseal the bag. Poor John! No soup….I mean steak for you!
We ended our camping ordeal with mad dashes to find mousies and blankies and that special dollie…and a trip to the hatchery.  The Trout Hatchery was pretty neat, if you like that sort of thing.  I have to admire the cleverness of the place and the effectiveness.  My kids thought it was one of the most amazing things they had seen.  Part of me has a huge problem with any sort of captive breeding of any living thing, so the hatchery was not my favorite sight.
The girls followed their Daddy across the rickety metal bridge-like contraptions looking down at the different sized trout.  This made my heart stop as I could just see them falling in. I noticed some really big trout in the side with the teeny-weeny ones and made some comment to Shana.  We were abruptly answered by my 4 year-old, “That’s the big sister fish, she’s babysitting the baby fish!”  All in all, it was a good time for them at least.
I have to say, the trip was pretty successful.  Much better than last year when we went camping while I was 2 months pregnant with morning sickness. The ticks were even more successful, as we pulled at least 8 off each kid just on the trip home and about 10 more at home in the shower.  My final count for my self is 22 of those nasty little suckers and I still have healing bites all over my legs.  I hate ticks!
Aug30

Float Trip at Bennett Springs – Day/Night 2

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So, in the grand life of mommyhood, I haven’t had time to breathe let alone write! Now that I have a few quiet moments with the baby napping, the preschooler happily reading quietly after her first day of school and the second grader at Grandma’s; I will tell you about Day/Night 2 of the Float Trip.  The morning started out pretty hectically.  For some reason, we parents decided after our late night it would be just fine to get up at 9am to cook breakfast and get ready for our canoe trip which was booked for 10:30am.  Mothers of the world cringe, yes, we admit it….it was not our smartest moment as mommies. LOL  
If you remember from Night 1, we could not get firewood, so while the guys went to get some; we tried to at least get coffee going on the little propane grill and get all the eggs, bacon, sausage and pancakes ready to throw on the fire.  Much to our surprise the morning fire was an epic FAIL.  Eventually everything was cooked on the propane grill and we threw kids and men food quickly before rushing them to get changed for the canoe trip.  Then we realized in our haste to get everything covered from the rain the night before we had mixed up everything we had brought for the canoe ride with everything else we brought. Sigh! Insert a bunch of expletives here and skip to the canoe ride. 
My girls were not very impressed at all with the canoe for about the first hour and a half of the ride.  We were on the 9 mile Ho Hum trip and about a half mile in Braeleigh announced that she was ready to get out and go home. Fabulous.  However, once we started letting the girls switch canoes so that no kids had to ride alone for very long, they were more into it.  Especially because Gillian’s friend Montana was way more into it and that spiked the girls’ enthuasiasm.  Everything went pretty well on our first big stop, the guys found a small pond up the beach and they took the girls to explore.  We ate lunch before taking off again and the girls had finally decided that this whole canoe thing might be pretty cool.  The water too, except for when Brae had to touch ‘seaweed’ or Gillian saw minnows.
We found the minnow thing out the hard way….. Gillian decided right after we passed by a perfectly good beach that she had to pee NOW! Brae had gone in the canoe with Montana and her parents, so I had plenty of patience to be ornery.  I threw her on into the water and told her to go and her Dad hopped out to help her get back in when she was ready.  That’s when she saw the minnows. She ran up the rocks and hung on the tree roots sticking out of the wall of dirt she was up against.  Now I would have been more concerned about snakes in the tree branches hanging down, but she was not.  Those minnows were gonna eat her alive though.  After several minutes of screaming and her Dad and I insisting she swim back over to the canoe, I lost that patience and paid for it dearly.  I let her Dad get back in the boat and I jumped out to get her.  I still can’t figure out why my strong 6 foot tall man could not do this, but I grabbed her off the dirt wall, walked with her through the minnows as she screamed and put her back in the canoe.  Now here comes the payback…..my barely 5 foot 6 inches self could not get back in!  Needless to say, I rode the next ¼ mile on the outside of the boat through a nice deep part of the river full of slimy things swimming around my tummy and legs.  At one point one of those slimy things went up the leg of my capris and I swore to Gillian if it was a snake she was in sooooo much trouble! (Don’t worry it was just algae or ‘seaweed’ as Brae called it.)
The rest of the canoe trip was pretty uneventful until the very end.  Gillian got over her fear of minnows when Montana got out of the boat and was playing in them.  Braeleigh decided ‘seaweed’ around her feet wasn’t so bad since Mommy had had some in her pants.  At the end of the trip, my fiancee and I ended up in our canoe alone.  Apparently that was not a smart idea for me, since without the girls he was way less careful and flipped us. Boooooo on him!  Not only was it not the hilarious experience he thought it would be, we lost all our stuff and the canoe decided to bash me in the noggin.  So that made for a short night……for me anyway.  We went back to camp, grilled steaks and corn on the cob for dinner. (so freaking yummy!)  I headed off to the tent to go to bed with the girls soon after that….
Aug25

Float Trip at Bennett Springs – Night 1

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So….no matter how prepared you try to be….when you go somewhere in a group you still tend to run late.  In our case we wanted to leave town by 4pm, but it was actually after 5pm when we started out of town.  Though I am usually the culprit, lol, I was not this time.  We ended up getting to our campsite at dusk, which meant (just like every other camping trip we have been on) that we were setting up in the dark.  Unfortunately that wasn’t our only hurdle, we had nasty neighbors and rain on the way in.
The guys got the tents set up while us moms tried to throw dinner on the small propane grill for the kids.  We didn’t bring firewood because of all the regulations and we figured they would have some somewhere at the state park.  Nope, they sold it at Fort Bennett though, so we had to make a choice, possibly get rained on while we wait for the guys to find their way to the fort and back or make food the best we can.
After the guys got the tents up, our snotty next door neighbors with nasty attitudes decided to inform us that we could not all be on one campsite that it was against the rules to only buy one campsite for more than 6 people.  We brushed them off, it was none of their business that we had paid for two adjoining campsites but they weren’t so ‘adjoining’ like the guy on the campsite registration line promised.  There actually was nothing adjoining about them, we had an expanse of the woods come up in between them so we had to choose one side or the other. We had brought a big 8 person tent for us to all sleep in.  We were just going to put our sleep tent in between two sites and spread the rest of our equipment out across both sites, but the dumbass on the reservation line must really not have cared or looked because I told him all this.  Apparently we chose the wrong side, because our nosy neighbors just couldn’t wait to rat us out when the park patrol came by.


Once the patrolmen knew we paid for both sides, he really didn’t care, he just told us we needed to move one tent because only two were allowed on one site. (We had three set up; one for sleeping, one for food and one for the port-a-potty for the kiddos.)  Which is where my brain went on a mental tangent, how could they make the regulations be 6 people but 2 tents?  That didn’t make sense because 3 couples could rent a site and all bring there own tents (by the way, the site does not mention a tent limit when you reserve, I actually went back and checked and it was listed off on another webpage that you may or may not have found your way to).  Does that mean 2 of them would have stuff into another tent?  Or would they have to pay for another site? WTH?  Anyway, we moved the potty tent and he noted it down so that no other patrolmen bothered us.  The snickering from the campsite next was irritating until they saw that we could still all sleep on the one campsite.  My inner teenager plotted a night of egging their tent or baiting raccoons into their food tent which made me smile.
I got my revenge later during the crazy storm we had.  Not by egging or raccoons, I’m a mom; I don’t let my inner teenager take over….always. :) The intensity of the storm came and went.  It came down drizzly at first then in sheets then drizzles…you get the point.  So we were all piled in the sleeping tent, which we had made into a nice big bed by inflating three blow-up mattresses and placing them side by side across the entire tent.  It was hot because we had to keep the windows covered and put extra tarps on to insure that none of us inside got wet.  We had fun though just chatting and playing with the kids.  Suddenly, mid-downpour, our 7 year olds decided they had to pee.  Lovely.  Why couldn’t the patrolmen come by after it started raining; now the potty tent was across on the other campsite?  So, I dug out the ponchos I had packed and the guys braved the storm to take the poncho-covered children to potty.  Our friends’ daughter peed and they headed back, no big deal.  Not my daughter.  Ahh, revenge!  She begins to squeal and scream and carry on at 2am waking our neighbors up mid-snore.  Daddy long-legs had found their way into the potty tent and my girl is terrified of spiders.  My fiance, not so good with the patience thing in these situations, starts yelling at her because he tired of getting rained on.  From the tent it sounds like they are killing each other.  I give it a few minutes and when they continue to carry on; I get out and intervene for the sake of the entire campsite.  And that ended our first night of camping….