Hello. This is old age calling......

This week's conversation with Erik

ERIK: Mom.....what's this? ( pointing to my parent's corded phone )

ME: That's a phone honey.

ERIK: ( looking puzzled as he picks it up and checks it out) No it's not.

ME: ( Rolling on the floor laughing ) It's not? Well then, what is it?

ERIK: I don't know but it's not a phone silly mommy.

I suppose in all of his three years, he has never seen a phone with a cord before. He hasn't seen a camera that doesn't display the picture for a few seconds after you take the shot either. He also has never known a world that didn't have Spongebob or Elmo.

Phrases a mom never wants to hear

someone say when they call your cell phone:

1. This is so and so from the such and such public pool

2. Your son, Jack, just split his head open

3. He might need to go to the hospital

Honorable mention words a mom never wants to hear:

1. Ambulance

2. Fire department

3. Stitches

Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as the scenarios I had going through my head right after I got the call because all I remember hearing was "Split his head open blah blah blah" and "Ambulance blah blah blah". Once I got to see it for myself, the bad mommy in me couldn't get the phrase from a Monty Python movie out of my head. "It's only a flesh wound!"

It took a couple of stitches to put him back together again. He was a trooper the whole time. Didn't cry at ALL! He totally deserved the Sonic Blast afterwards.

You don't know hot

until the heat melts the heal of your shoe off. Or you lay flagstone in Arizona on the record breaking, hottest 115 degree day of the year and almost pass out.

Yep. In Arizona we have 3 seasons. "Hot" = springish, "Of course, because I just washed my car"= late summer/monsoon/fallish and "Are you kidding me?"= the rest of the year.

I forgot how hot 115 degrees feels. It's not pleasant. Especially when your fountain soft drink gets warm after 10 minutes in the shade. That's just messed up. Wanna know what 115 feels like? Go turn on your oven to 115 degrees, stick your arm in it for three months and while you're at it, turn on your A/C with a setting of a frigid 82 degrees (because 82 degrees feels "nippy" compared to 115), then gasp in horror when you open your preposterous electric bill that is as much as a car payment.....if you're lucky. That's what it feels like. Or blast about five hairdryers on high in your direction. That's 115 degrees with a "breeze" like we had today.......in the shade.

I know it's cliche, but honestly, after it hits 110, it's all the same. Eh. What's five degrees more? That's what the neighbor's pool is for anyways.

Happy Birthday to me!

This is the face of a 38 year old:

This is the Coke my friend Robyn brought me:

This is the dinner Kirk picked up for me:

This is my out of focus chocolate with chocolate filling Costco cake. Notice the 3 candles and a number 8 ( What? Did you really think I was going to MAKE my cake? Because, really....how do you make a cake that portrayed "Holy cow! I must be old because my daughter asked me if I had email when I was her age" well enough? )

This is the result of my previous blog hint:
These are my new orange and grapefruit trees

That I hope don't have the same fate as my tomato and spice plants:



These are drawer pulls and knobs that I hope to have installed some day:

This is the face of one WAY excited child:

As is this:
It was a great day! Thanks everyone!!!

p.s. Happy Birthday Brian and Uncle Dan!

Confessions

Admit/Confess/Divulge. Whatever you want to call it.


1. I drink diet Coke like a fish ( I know. Shocker. Have you seen my food storage? )

2. I don't iron



3. I've flirted my way out of a speeding ticket



4. I've never seen the movie ET



5. The older I get, the darker I like my chocolate


6. My daughter killed our friend's beta fish we were supposed to watch while they were out of town 5 minutes after it was dropped off at our house. She got a wooden spoon and "stirred" it. We spent the next week jumping from one pet store to another, with dead fish in a Ziploc baggie, trying to find one that looked just like it. The girl never knew



7. I drove with some friends on a whim to the Grand Canyon and three of the five of us thought it would be fun to ride in the bed of a pick up. A few hours into the drive, in February, we started to realize it wasn't such a great idea after all



8. I'm deathly afraid of heights and extremely claustrophobic



9. When checking out at the grocery store, I put my items in a specific OCD, neatly stacked and arranged order onto the conveyor belt



10. I got bucked off of a horse riding bareback at the stable next door to our house in Pennsylvania. I picked the one horse that wasn't broken in yet. My parents didn't find out until about 10 years later. I've had back problems ever since



11. I remember the combination to my elementary school lock. 19-34-12. I still have the lock


12. I would rather drink hot dog water than eat sushi


13. I haven't read a novel since my first child was born ( Who the heck has that kind of time unless you're a man and can lock themselves in the bathroom for 30 minutes uninterrupted? )


14. I actually enjoyed my c-section and recovery WAY better than the

( ehem ) "other" option. I especially enjoyed the 4 sometimes 5 days, if I could swing it, "vacation"


15. I can't wink


16. I color my hair

17. I still have leg warmers I wore in the mid 80's in my drawer. I'm saving them for an 80's night sometime

18. I discovered a whole new wardrobe now that clothes I haven't been able to wear in about 4 years finally fit again. The bad news is peasant shirts are now out of style.

19. I'm turing 38 on Saturday and like smelly lotions from Bath and Body Works

( how's that for a hint?)

Wordless Wednesday

well Poo!

So I took Erik to go "pee pees" in the potty today. We're still kind of working on the #2 part. He tells me "I'm thinking it's too hard." Okay. Fine.

I went upstairs to get the baby up from his nap and heard two flushes of the toilet downstairs. Intrigued, I went downstairs to see what Erik was up to.

He was standing in the family room bum naked and I asked, "Erik, did you go poopies in the potty?"

He replied with enthusiasm, "YES! I put the POOPIES in the POTTY!" Of course, I was a little skeptical and went to the bathroom afraid I'd have a mess that I really didn't want to have to clean up. But, I didn't see anything! He really DID go poopies in the potty!!!

We proceeded to dance and shout "YAY! Erik went poopies in the potty!"

I then looked around to put his big boy pants back on but only saw his shorts.

"Erik? Where are your big boy pants?"

With as much excitement as he could muster he said while pointing to the toilet, "I put the poopies in the potty mommy!"

Already knowing the answer to my question, I hesitantly asked,"You mean you poopied in your big boy pants and then put the big boy pants in the potty?"

"Yes! I put them in the potty then FLUSH!"

Well Poop. Guess we're not as close to being done as I thought.

World Traveller

My husband is currently in Barcelona. Yesterday he was in Prague. The day before that, he was in Helsinki.

His life is rough.

We talk to each other several times a day. You have to love that I can dial his cell phone number, and not even need the area code or those weird country codes, and I can reach him just about anywhere in the world. Except Japan. Salo Finland and Shenzhen China....yes. But the technology/most cell phones owned per capita capital of the world, Japan? No.

Go figure.

Our conversations are generally me listening to his planes, trains and automobile adventures and exotic things he ate which more often than not, gave him some kind of intestinal "issues" as I eat left over macaroni and cheese or cold pizza and tell him how the highlight of my day was that after three weeks, Erik finally pooped in the potty. So, I suppose in an odd way, we both have our own intestinal "issues" we deal with.

Tonight, the conversation was about planes. I guess he took the airplane version of a clown car from Prague to Barcelona yesterday. His body didn't even fit in the seat and had to sit sideways on the flight.

Which then had us talking about "those airlines". You know, the ones crying over the price of oil rather than poor management so they need to cut corners any way they can. First, it was the $10.00 fuel surcharge they tacked on to each plane ticket several years ago back when we thought $1.25/gallon was ridiculous and people were lined up down the street the night before the new gas hike would take effect to fill their tanks. Then there was the $3.00 segment fees for each leg. Now it's more fuel surcharges. Then last week, American announced they were going to start charging $15.00 for each checked bag.

Are you kidding me?

That's another $30 roundtrip! And if I'm just going to Disneyland with a couple of kids and had to check a couple bags, it would end up costing me as much as the plane ticket!

So, what is that going to persuade travelers to do?

As I see it, people are going to be forced to start WEARING every possible article of clothing they would normally have packed in their checked luggage ON the PLANE.

For men, they will start with wearing a weeks worth of underwear under their swimming suit, a couple of pairs of shorts followed by jeans and khakis for those dressier days. On top, the layers will be three t-shirts under two layers of button-up shirts, a flannel jacket and a winter coat. If it's not winter, the outer most layer can be substituted with pajamas. Or really, you could forgo the pjs altogether and just wear your birthday suit to bed. That would save even more space.

Women's layering technique is the same as the men only add a skirt over the jeans. I heard that the pants under a skirt thing from the '80's is back in style again. Convenient.

Yeah....laugh now but I swear, the next flight you take where you have to fork over 15 big ones just to check your bag, you'll see that guy or girl doing just as I suggested and you'll think to yourself, "DANG! That's brilliant! I wish I had thought of that!"

Then, all you would need to bring is one carry on with your essentials like the quart size Ziploc baggie with the three ounce bottles of liquids and/or gels which may or may not be confiscated because if you packed, I don't know..... say a 5 oz. tube of children's toothpaste that had less than an ounce of content left because you managed to get it TO your destination when it contained roughly 2 ounces but because the container read "5 ounces" despite the actual content left, it would be deemed unacceptable and put in the hazardous materials bin by the 18 year old why-be-consistant-security girl who obviously doesn't have kids of her own because if she did, she would know that they don't make children's toothpaste in 3 ounce travel sizes.

I think I'll rent out some space at the airport for a disposable clothing line.
I'll call it "Disposable Digs" and include a suitcase for people to put the clothes in and they can return it when they fly home. I could charge $14.00 for three days worth of disposable clothes which I think would be totally worth it. People spend that much on a slice of pizza there at the airport. You laugh........but if all of the airlines follow American's lead, you'll be thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Gotta love a free market economy!

Picture perfect?

Trying to chase a 14 month old for his belated 1 year photo is as tiring as taking four kids to Walmart during nap time.

At least the conversation sounds the same. "No! Don't touch that! It's icky!" and "Come back here!" or "Please leave the toy alone!"

So on the windiest, most overcast day we've had in ages, I decided to give it a try. Somehow I forgot that the last pictures I took of him he wasn't walking yet. No wonder I broke a sweat in 75 degrees.

I just wanted ONE good picture. ONE! So, I had to take 100 pictures that looked like these:

( This one is when he finally responded to my flailing arms while saying, "Ian! Hi! Hey Ian! Hi! Over here! Look at Mommy!" It's him talking to me on the phone with his now muddy hand. )

All before I could get the money shot.

And people wonder why we don't do family pictures more often.

Happy 3rd Birthday Erik!

Erik is now one big stereotypical package of a three year old!

And fondant is my new best friend.

We had a double party on Friday night with the kids in our babysitting group rotation since it was our turn. The kids LOVE a party! So, I made Erik a Blue's Clues cake and made an Ariel cake for the other birthday girl. I thought it was a good thing I didn't throw away the last Little Mermaid bath toy. I knew it would come in handy again some day.

Just look at the utter glee on the kid's face! What a ham!

Sneaky big sister and brother.
This would be Ian showing us his baby sign for "MORE!" which he does often and with fervor if chocolate is involved.



Random angles of the cake:

My latest project

You might ask yourself, "When on earth do you find time with four kids to do all of these extra curricular things like blogging and stock trading and coming in the top 1.1% last week in the CNBC portfolio challenge (shameless plug) between planning Sharing Times, writing the upcoming Primary Program, end of the school year activities and five summer birthdays?"

That's a good question.

The short answer? Diet Coke.

The longer answer? My husband has been going out of town a lot lately and I always need a project that both keeps me sane and keeps me up until way past my bedtime ( that is if I still have the energy ) because that's the only time of the day when the house is quiet and I can actually hear myself think. Sometimes I'll have full conversations in my head while I work. Seriously. And the cool thing is that whatever I'm debating to myself about, I'm always right.

So......here's the latest. The boy's bathroom.

I first put wainscotting on the walls:

Then took two tries to get the right shade of green:

Added little initial boards I made from wood and material plus hooks on the wall:

Oh, and while I was at it......I nailed some boards to the wall in my hallway and hung a bunch of hooks because I was tired of backpacks laying all over the floor. LOVING IT by the way!

Now I need to come up with something else to do next week..................

Nice going CNBC

$1.000M
Total Portfolio Value*Top 42.3% Game Rank*204631st

4,918 (0.5%) Gain/Loss, Intraday

The above probably makes no sense to anyone but me but I'll try and explain it. See, CNBC is doing a million dollar portfolio challenge. You have 5 different portfolios each with 1 million dollars to compete each week for a prize. It started yesterday and was full of glitches. Of course. Finally, after waiting until 10pm last night to see where I stood with my earnings from yesterday's picks, I saw that I was up 4.5% or $43,000!!! I had great picks with McDonalds, Research in Motion ( thanks to the new Blackberry thingy ), Genco shipping and Apple.

Then I noticed the leader board which showed the top 25 winners from yesterday. The most that was made was $17,000.

HELLO!!!!!!!!!???????

I made $43,000! Today, I noticed my account only had the original amount in it and that I was only up .5% today. I see what stocks in theory, traded yesterday in my transaction history but for some dumb reason, I'm not getting the credit from the gains. I made $17,000 from Genco shipping ( GNK ) alone!

idiots.

( Bitter? Who me? )

Oh well, the winner this week gets a pair of tickets to the World Series. And you all know how much I love baseball...............

I'm holding out for the $500,000 grand prize.

EDITED TO ADD:

Here's where I stand today! After the royal hosing I got from the first day, I've moved from the top 42% to the top 13%!

$1.009M
Total Portfolio Value*
Top 13.8%
Game Rank*
70787th
Game Rank Position*
+9,018 (0.9%)
Gain/Loss, Intraday
+9,018 (0.9%)
Gain/Loss, Weekly*
+9,018 (0.9%)
Gain/Loss, Overall*

Blues

Someone did a little more than "Think" in the "Thinking Chair".

Yeah. You're really smart.

And I really need some more Spot Shot.

Check it OUT!

THIS is why I blog!

Now I don't have to feel guilty about not writing in a traditional journal.

This book was only for 2006 and ONLY 62 pages. I better get going on 2007 which had twice as many entries!

Create your own book at blurb.com