BFF Is Now MRS

After a long and teary weekend, we finally got Juju married off. Arwyn didn't feel much like cooperating at the rehearsal and I had frightful visions of screaming (mine) and crying (hers) at the wedding.


But, of course, she surprised me and was a cheeky little cutie pie, running down the aisle and dumping her basket of flower petals, then running back down the aisle after Juju made her grand entrance. When I heard that the ring bearer (Juju's nephew) and flower girl (Arwyn) were to both be two year olds, I told Juju that I was not responsible for Arwyn's behavior. She didn't seem to care what they did as long as they were involved.


There were only a couple of hiccups along the way, one of which involved the bride, a bridesmaid and the mother-of-the-bride taking turns sewing me into my top. It stayed on the whole night and had to be torn off later, which sounds a lot more fun than it actually was. The highlight of the day had to be chasing packages of flowers down the middle of the street in downtown Indianapolis as the wind tried its best to sweep them away. Ha, wind! You ain't got nuthin on me!


Bubby was a champ, as always, wrangling the child the entire weekend and riding up and down the escalator fifty million times while I fulfilled my bridesmaidly duties. I was amazed that everything the child managed to pour down the front of her dress (chocolate and several mystery stains) magically came out in the wash yesterday.


In all, I'd say it was a good weekend and I need some posture lessons.

One Word

I saw this over at Nino's. You can only use one word answers.

Hmmm.........

1. Yourself: tired

2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend husband/wife: sweet

3. Your hair: colorful

4. Your mother: tries

5. Your Father: complicated

6. Your Favorite Item: camera

7. Your dream last night: forgetful

8. Your Favorite drink: coke

9. Your Dream Car: new

10. The Room You Are In: living

11. Your fear: regrets

12. What you want to be in 10 years: happy

13. Who you hung out with last night? family

14. What You're Not: dull

15. Muffins: blueberry

16. One of your Wish List Items: computer

17. The Last Thing You Did: sleep

18. What You Are Wearing: clothes

19. Your Favorite Weather: fall

20. Your Favorite Book: many

21. What Is The Last Thing You Ate: coughdrop

22. Your Life: full

23. Your Mood: foggy

24. Your body: sore

25. What are you thinking about right now: supper

26. Car: camry

27. What are you doing at the moment: typing

28. Your summer: fun

Give it a whirl.

Everybody's Doin' It

A post a day keeps the therapist away! There are prizes!


Come on, you know you want to.

Cheers

I'm supposed to be writing a toast for JuJu's wedding reception which is in THREE DAYS. What I am actually doing is reading blogs and shopping for toothbrush accessories for Arwyn (thanks, Melissa!) which may sound frivilous but really isn't. Have you ever tried to teach a two-year-old to spit?

So I thought I'd share some funny things Arwyn has said and/or done lately before I forget and they are lost in the annals of time. I just typed "anals of time" and earlier I wrote "bookies", combining books and movies. Yes, let's get Arwyn her own personal bookie for Christmas. On to the list.

• She got a new book called "No Hitting". One night she hit Bubby in the head with the book while chanting "No hitting! No hitting!", then she wanted him to read it to her. He refused on account of the book being violent in nature.

• One day after school she heard her buddy Henry say that he wanted a special cookie. She kept whining and moaning for a "spesha cookie" and just would not let it drop. I realized this was one of those times when I should just buy the damn cookie already and keep my peace of mind for five minutes. We had to run some errands, so we stopped at a bakery to get the "spesha cookie". We walk in and look around, no cookies. Fourteen types of bread, muffins and scones but no cookies. So I did what any great mother would do. I bought a $7.00 bag of snickerdoodles with orange sprinkles. I later fobbed them off on my in-laws.

• Out of the blue she will say "Merry Christmas, Mommy!" This little tidbit can be linked to her adoration of Christmas related movies. The Nightmare Before Christmas, Disney Princess Christmas, Strawberry Shortcake Christmas, Spongebob Squarepants Christmas, Sesame Street Christmas, Mickey Mouse Christmas. If only they made a Transformers Christmas. Transformers, reindeer in disguise!

• One afternoon we were playing outside and she was picking up sticks and attempting to throw them onto the stick pile. She kept letting go of the stick too late and it would fly over her head and land behind her. She would look around, perplexed why the stick wasn't ending up on the stick pile. After performing this little ritual three times in a row, she looked at me and said, "What's the deal, Mommy? What's the deal?"

• One evening she turned the tv off and told her daddy he was in time out. Daddy was upset that she wouldn't tell him what he'd done wrong to deserve a time out AND turning the tv off.

There you have it. It's a laugh a minute around our house.

You Made the Blog

Happy Birthday to our good friend Ryan!

Home Sweet Home

My friend's husband took our girls for a ride on a small school bus. They looked out the window, pointed out cows and argued over whether it was a "bus" or a "school bus" with Arwyn looking at me for confirmation. My answer? "Yes."


Her outfits get more and more ridiculous as she tries to dictate what she wears. Most days it's just not worth the battle.


I survived my first and last bachlorette party this weekend. It was fun, but I was so glad to come home to this:


And I thought running around after her all the time wore me out. WOW. Is that yet another sign of getting old(er)? You don't need to answer that. Seriously.

Belated

Monday was JuJu's fiance's birthday. Happy B-day, Big D!

Happy Birthday Bubby

This sweet, mischievious looking fellow is my husband circa 1978. It is his Kindergarten photo, given to me by his sweet grandma last year. Sorry for the weird angle. I had to take a picture of the picture, in order to not ruin the surprise as Bubs usually fulfills my scanning needs.


Happy Birthday, Baby. You're the one I can be still and peaceful with. The one who I can laugh with (and at) and be silly with. You get my jokes and my looks. You sometimes know what I'm thinking before I've fully formulated the thought. You are a wonderful daddy, playing with Arwyn, bathing her, taking her for walks, giving me a break when you can. You are a patient teacher with both of us.


I'm baking approximately 2,000 chocolate chips cookies this afternoon in lieu of cake.


Thanks to Jenny for the fun alphabet that I used on all of the decorations.

Warm and Fuzzy

Arwyn had her first hot chocolate Monday night. Well, let me rephrase that. Mommy and Daddy had hot chocolate. Arwyn had lukewarm chocolate soy milk with marshmallows. In a big girl (vintage thrifted Thermos) cup. She only spilt about half of it.


This was our Fabulous Fall Dinner Monday night: Simple Risotto, Cinammon Apples, Puffed Butternut Squash (so easy! so good!) and Salad with Feta and Pinenuts. It was very yummy, if I do say so myself. A lot of times I spend all afternoon cooking and think it is going to be great and by the time it's finished, I don't even want to look at it anymore. But this lived up to the hype.

The Orchard

Saturday we had our annual trip to the orchard to pick up pumpkins and all the other fall accoutrements we can't live without.


I look so pissy because I am looking directly into the sun.


I'm a little bit pumpkin crazy. These are the three we ended up with from the orchard and they now reside on the front steps of the porch. We also have some smaller ones from the grocery. Arwyn gets excited about the pumpkins too, so how can I resist? No jack-o-lanterns yet, though. I prefer my pumpkins unmolested.


Here is Arwyn petting Pearl the Pig who is dining on rotten apples. A young man working at the orchard told us this pig used to belong to a local furniture salesman who kept Pearl at their store. They had to get rid of her because she was a health code violation. A pig is a health code violation?? Shocker!!


She didn't really care if I took her picture 50 times as long as I didn't touch the apple cider slushy. Share, schmare.


Happy fall, everyone.

Under a Shady Tree

No, this is not our house. This is our neighbor's house. They like to decorate. A lot. It lights up at night. This is just Halloween. There's still Thanksgiving and Christmas ...

Halvsies

Here are two more professional pics from the half marathon. There's a reason why they take all the pictures at the beginning of the race! I was definitely not smiling at the end.

Flashback Friday El Fin

I have had a request to continue Flashback Friday, so perhaps it will just be on hiatus for a bit. You like me! You really, really like me! Ahem.

I think I was about 4 or 5 years old in this picture, so it was probably taken circa 1979. All of these photos seem to be from around the same time. These are the cute ones, if you're really good maybe I'll dig out some embarrassing ones later. This one was taken in my parents front yard. In the background behind the trees you can just make out our crazy neighbor's house across the road (I didn't say street because it was a road. We lived in the kun-tree.) Crazy as in give your wife $25 a week to buy groceries for your family with three kids, then yell at her when there's no food. When she finally leaves you, follow her around town and "accidentally" rear end her. Stockpile the house with guns and refuse to let her get her belongings without the sheriff in tow. I was always careful to be extremely friendly to him, waving nicely any time I saw him. Hi, John! Please don't shoot in our direction! You scare the crap out of me! Wave, wave.

I'm certain my mom made me wear the dress (It's pink! And it has lace AND bows! The evil trifecta!) and my sister somehow coaxed me into the barettes. Sometimes when I look really closely at these pictures I see Arwyn's little face in mine. It makes me feel strange. Good in a way, to know that I was ever really that cute. Dreadful in other ways, such as God I hope she doesn't have my skin. But everyone says she looks like her Daddy anyway.

There is now a fence where the grass ends and those tall weeds begin. Looks like somebody needed to bush hog the field. That field is now home to my dad's pet cows. He recently told me he's been building fence since February. That sounds like a lot of fence, but maybe he's just taking his time. Or he's slow. The fence was a pain when we were playing ball in the yard and it went over the fence, as it invariably always did. Time to climb the fence, and did I mention the barbed wire at the top? My brother could jump over the fence without climbing it. If I tried that, I'd end up eating a faceful of grass with a bloody stump where my leg used to be.


Now this is a good picture. I am wearing some horrific monstronsity of a patchwork dress and I think it's even velvet (What is that? VELVET???). It looks like it may have been two sizes too big. And I am rockin' the knee socks.

There are so many things to tell about the background, I don't know where to start. I am sitting on top of the woodbox. My dad built their house and it used to be heated with a woodburning stove (before the attic caught on fire, but that's a whole 'nother story.). There was a little door cut into the side of the house. The wood was kept on the other side of the fence. So first you had to throw it over the fence, then carry it to the house, then throw it through the little door where it landed in the woodbox. Filling up the woodbox was bad, but the worst part was the actual procuring of the truckloads of wood we needed to heat the house all winter. We would spend a whole Saturday driving back and forth to the lumberyard, getting load after load of wood. It was torture. I would do anything, ANYTHING AT ALL to get out of this. The best year was when I got contacts and the debris kept blowing into my eyes and I had to stop every five seconds to rub them.

The piece of wood directly above the woodbox was the contraption that kept the lid open while you got wood out of the box. What is with the electrical outlet up there? If you can't tell from this photo, my dad is a lover of all things wood. He used to have a shop behind our house and at one time attempted to make a living selling things he made. He woodburned the sign? plaque? piece of wood with the longhorn and his initials. Everything he made had his initials on it somewhere. To my left is the chimney and beyond that is where the woodburning stove was. My brothers used to love to torture me by threatening or actually putting me in the woodbox and shutting the lid, sitting on top so I couldn't get out, etc. while I screamed my head off. Good times, good times.

Several years ago my dad converted the woodbox into a built-in couch. Don't ask me how, but he did. I can't say I was sorry to see it go. The stove is still there but no longer in use. Now they have fancy-schmancy electric heat.


I've been making some changes to the ole blog. There could be more to come, so stay tuned!

Pre-Order Ends Today!

40 is the New 30

ATS, Mr. T, Iceman, Daddy, Uncle A-non. No matter what you call yourself, you're still the big 4-0, dude.

We Did It

I said I wouldn't talk about it much on here, and boy howdy, I never mentioned it again! But the half-marathon was this past Sunday. JuJu came down to run/walk with me, what an IDIOT! Just kiddin', Ju's. I have trained 2-3 times per week since the first week of June. The longest distance I'd gone before the race was 10 miles (half-marathon is 13.1) and I had really slacked off the last couple of weeks.


It was HARD, but I am glad I did it. I really wanted to quit around mile 12 and what a loser I would have felt like then! When I told JuJu not to let me quit, she thought I was kidding. I really wasn't. Parts of it were really fun. There were over 300 volunteers, which included people passing out water, Gatorade and orange slices all along the route, people cleaning up the trash, cheering us on, and blocking traffic. There were all kinds of musicians along the route to motivate us. We got to run through our local semi-famous baseball field. They announced our names over a loudspeaker as we crossed the finish line. We got medals. Those were the good parts.


I felt like we were doing pretty well the first several miles. Then about mile 9 I started to feel the burn and not in a good way. After mile 10 I couldn't really run anymore and we walked the rest of the way until we were close to the finish line, so we could finish strong. This was really emotional for me and I was a little surprised to find myself crying at the finish line. I was proud of myself and SO RELIEVED to be finished! I think the only thing I said was "Where's the car?"


My goals were to finish the race on my feet, run at least part of the way, and not finish last. I accomplished all three of those goals. I finished 1399 out of 1447 (100th in my age group).


Congrats to our friend Jeff who finished 130th overall and 19th in his age group!

Special thanks to my great bud iMollie who brought the kids out by herself and even made a sign to cheer us on. When I saw that cute little blondie in his boots, I knew it was them.

Thanks, JuJu for crawling along with me (not literally, thank God) and for all of your support, on Sunday and always. Sorry we didn't get a picture of the two of us with our medals. We'll have to remember that next time.

Uncle Aaron's B-day

We spent Friday night and Saturday at my brother's house for his birthday shindig. They have two girls who are 7 and almost 2, so Arwyn had a grand time playing with them and all of their toys.


She especially loved the outside play area that my brother built, which I didn't seem to get any photos of, even after she fell off of it.


Daddy had fun too. He had to show her how the scooter worked, ahem.


From the looks of things, it seems we will be purchasing some sort of tricycle for Christmas. She loved this one and one at a friend's house earlier on Friday. It didn't take her long to figure out how to pedal it on her own. We don't have an outside area this big where she could ride it, but maybe she could do laps in the basement until spring?

Next-to-Last Flashback Friday

I tried to find a picture with my big brother in it for this post. His 40th birthday is Wednesday and we went to his house this past weekend for his birthday blowout. He smoked a pig! He's crazy like that.

That's him behind me and my buddy Patrick on this contraption. This picture was taken circa 1979 at Santa Claus Land, which is now known as Holiday World. We took a family trip there, which is rather ironic considering our family didn't celebrate Christmas back then. My only memory of the trip is all of the kids rode in the back of the truck (safety first!).



I'm totally digging the mural on the wall behind me in this one and my mismatched outfit, which I am sure I insisted on picking out myself.


I have lots of posts in my noggin, it's just a matter finding the time and clearing out the cobwebs enough to write a few coherent sentences.

Lookin' for My Shirley

Full disclosure: my craft projects don't always go as planned. Case in point: this little Halloween shirt I made for Arwyn.


It was supposed to be a white shirt with black ghost, minus the Jackson Pollack effect. I was shaking the jar of paint, following the directions like a good little girl, and after I took the lid off, I decided to give it one more shake just to be on the safe side.


Well ... the seal was broken that covered the top of the jar. Black fabric paint went all over the ironing board, the shirt, the floor, pretty much everywhere. Bubby stepped in it and started tracking black footprints across the floor. So I just went with it. She won't know the difference. I still have one more shirt left and I was thinking maybe a witch hat, but she already has two Halloween shirts so maybe I'll just wait for inspiration to strike.


I found these iron-on embroidered monograms and couldn't resist. Now I just need some saddle shoes and my fall wardrobe will be complete.


It was so easy, I just might start monogramming everything I own.

Warm Wednesday

After spending the morning at the park swinging, chasing our friends and going down the big twisty slide all by herself ...


... we had to stop for a "wemon swushy" on the way home. Ahhhh, that hits the spot.


She said, "I DID have fun park Lindsey Kole. I DID have fun swing and slide."