I feel so loved March 26, 2009

We were all sitting in the family room tonight playing, when Amelia walks up to me, puts her arm around my neck and proclaims in such a loving voice, “Sometimes, I love you.” That girl cracks me up! Another of her favorite things to say is that she almost loves something… which means that she really likes it a lot. As in, “I almost love cookies.”

Today, I took the kids to a gymnastics place and they each took a trial class. Jack’s class was a Mommy and Me class, so I was with him the whole time. He kind of melted down during the class, but I think we’ll be enrolling both of them in the classes. Amelia had a blast in her class. She was a little afraid of the bigger trampoline they had, but overall her teacher said she did well. And she was in a class with 4 other boys. The teacher said she kind of showed the boys that they were actually supposed to listen to the teacher.

And on another note, here are some more recent scrapbook pages:

Not much March 15, 2009

Not too much going on around here. This past Thursday, the kids and I went to Sea World. We have season passes, so we try to go once a week during the cooler months just for the morning. We usually see the dolphins, penguins, sea lions and the whale and dolphin show. But this week, Rick, Miriam and all the kids happened to be going during Elisabeth’s spring break. She works at Discovery Cove and gets a few free tickets to Sea World out of that. So they all got in free. Amelia was so surprised to see them when we walked up. Miriam took her and Jack off to see the penguins and I got to ride some roller coasters!!

Then after we all watched the whale and dolphin show, we headed over to the kiddie section. They have several rides over there including a roller coaster for kids. This year, every time we get close to Sea World, Amelia will start asking if she can ride the roller coasters since she can see them from far away. I have yet to convince her that she has to be really tall and really old to ride those roller coasters. So when we got to this roller coaster, she was all excited because she could ride it. Well, Jack was being cranky, so I stayed with him while Amelia went on the roller coaster with Marissa and Dalton. After I got Jack settled down, I was able to run back over to the roller coaster just as it was about to take off. And I got there just in time to see Marissa and Amelia getting off the roller coaster without having gone on it. Amelia wasn’t screaming, but she was kind of freaking out and losing all of the nerve she claims to have about going on roller coasters.

So after she got off we all went on the tea cup type ride they have over there. She loved that. Then we went on another kind of fun ride that she loved as well. After that one, we kept trying to convince her to get back on the roller coaster and try again, but she was having none of that. So Marissa and Dalton went to ride it and Amelia and I were going to watch. As we were standing there, I kept trying to convince her to ride it and eventually something I said clicked and she agreed to go on it as long as I held onto her and as long as it wouldn’t go too fast. Well we rode it and after it was all done, she said, “That was fun!” However, she didn’t want to ride it again.

While Amelia was riding all of those fun rides, Jack only wanted to play in the water section they had. So we stripped him down to his diaper and let him go for it. He loves playing in water and had a blast putting his hand into the shooting fountains.

 

Yesterday, I met up with a someone I’m friends with on an online message board about scrapbooking.  We met her at Planet Hollywood in Downtown Disney. Here are a few pictures from then.

This is Melissa (the friend), her son Kieran and Amelia inside Planet Hollywood:

Here are Jack and Amelia playing in the water fountain outside:

If you look closely in the picture above, Jack was in the process of turning himself around so he could just slide right into the water fountain and play. Well, this was his reaction when I wouldn’t let him do that:

Amelia and Kieran:

Melissa and I:

 

And last, but not least, here are a few more scrapbook pages I’ve done recently:

More scrapbook pages February 28, 2009

I have a few scrapbook pages to post on here that I’ve done recently.

Duct tape really does fix everything! February 23, 2009

Warning: This story is not for the squeamish!

 

So today started off just like any ordinary day. Then the unthinkable happened! When I pulled into the driveway after having gone to the Y and Publix, there was a black snake slithering across the driveway! Oh, I almost puked. So my silly first reaction was to push the button to close the garage door. If I hadn’t done that, it probably would have kept slithering to the other side of the yard. But I guess the noise spooked it and it slithered right into the garage.

So I left the car running with the kids and groceries inside, grabbed the shovel and went over to our makeshift work bench. The snake was freaking out and just slithering wherever it could go, but was too fast for me to chop its head off! The way the makeshift workbench is set up, the snake was able to hide out under a board out of my reach. I probably tried to get it to come out for 10 minutes or more. Then I realized that the kids needed to get out of the car and so did the groceries.

So I unloaded all of that and went back outside to figure out what to do with the snake. After conferring with Daniel on the phone, I decided to trap the snake by stuffing the hole he was in with towels. I even put heavy cans of paint on top of the towels so the snake couldn’t get out. And like a dummy, I closed the garage door because I didn’t want someone breaking into our house.

Here’s what my trap looked like:

Then at naptime, Daniel called to ask me how things were going. So I confidently walked out into the garage, around the car and immediately started freaking out. I told Daniel that I had to call him back. Again, my first instinct was to open the garage door. This freaked him out again and he went back into the work bench area, but in a different section this time. So I took my car out of the garage and began my snake stakeout! I got a chair and the ax and waited! That stupid thing poked his head out of his hole at least 5 times and eventually ducked back under the board the same amount of times. So again after conferring with Daniel, I proceeded to cover his new hole with… wait for it… duct tape!!!  And here’s the picture of my second trap!

Later in the day, again after talking to Daniel on the phone, we decided that I should try pouring gasoline into the crack that you can see just in front of the duct tape above. So I did, not realizing that the gas might interfere with the adhesive on the tape. And then the tape started moving! Oh man, did that gross me out something awful. But the snake couldn’t seem to peek its head out  from under the tape, so I lifted it with the tip of my ax head. And I saw the snake stuck on the tape. Again, I was grossed out, so I put those paint cans on top of the tape and waited for Daniel to come home. Luckily, he made it home before 11 tonight!

So when he got home, he reluctantly pulled up the tape with ax in hand and this is what we found!

I think we were both prepared for the thing to suddenly jump off the tape and wriggle up our legs or something, but it was as dead as a doornail! After convincing Daniel not to throw the thing into the bushes again (now that’s a whole other blog post and it’s a whole lot grosser), the tape and snake are now in the garbage can waiting for pickup tomorrow! So like I said… duct tape really does fix any situation!

Nothing much February 17, 2009

Nothing much is going on around here. Well, there’s the whole issue with our HOA, but that’s a story for another time! Instead, I’ll just leave you with some more scrapbook pages I’ve done recently.

 

Counting February 6, 2009

Jack surprised me yesterday by counting all the way to 12! He’s known bits and pieces of number sequences, but has never counted all the way from 1. Then he started pulling blocks out of the bucket and counting them. He only got to about 4with actually counting them, but I thought that was pretty good. For some reason, it took Amelia a long time to realize that you can actually count items instead of just reciting numbers.

Do you know the muffin man? February 1, 2009

No, not the one who lives on Drury Lane, but the one who lives on Hampshire Bay! Jack LOVES muffins! Here is a picture of him from Thanksgiving day eating a muffin I had made for breakfast.

One day he saw me taking some muffins out of the oven and screamed his head off for them until they were cool enough to eat! All the while screaming, “Muppins, muppins” because that’s what he calls them.

 

Yesterday, he wandered away from me and later I found that the three muffins that had been on the counter on a paper towel were all laying on the kitchen floor with bites taken out of all 3 of them. It looked like a rat had come and nibbled bits out of each muffin. Pretty funny.

 

And as a bonus, here’s a picture of Jack doing his “angry eyes.”

Night Guys January 29, 2009

That’s what Jack said to us after we put him down for bed last night and were leaving his room… ‘night guys. He’s such a funny little guy.

 

Oh and here are a couple of more scrapbook pages I made:

 

So Funny January 26, 2009

Jack was being so quiet in Amelia’s room today while I fixed lunch, so I snuck up on him to take a peek. He was sitting there “reading” books. He had the Dr. Seuss ABC book and had turned to the page for C that shows a camel on the ceiling. It was so funny to see him turn the book around and around over and over. He had to turn it upside to see the camel right side up, then turn it back the right way so the opposite page was the right side up. Over and over, it was hilarious.

 

And I wanted to share a couple of scrapbook pages I made recently. I am taking a class from Jessica Sprague to better learn my newly acquired Photoshop Elements. I made these 2 pages from the first week of her class. They were premade pages, but I still like how they turned out!

Knock, Knock January 23, 2009

Amelia thinks it’s funny to tell knock knock jokes. But she has a slightly different take on them. First of all, if I’m the one starting the joke it goes something like this:

Me: Knock, Knock

Amelia: Who’s there?

Me: Boo

Amelia: Boo what?

Me: (I say the punchline anyways even though she kind of missed the point of the joke) You don’t have to cry about it.

 

We just think the “Boo what” line is absolutely hilarious!

 

Then there’s the version when she starts the joke:

Amelia: Knock, knock

Me: Who’s there?

Amelia: {insert the name of whatever her eyes land upon in the room she’s in} For example, shoe

Me: Shoe who?

Amelia: You don’t have to cry about it.

 

This morning was a pretty funny time of knock knock joke telling around here.