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After I ACCIDENTALLY deleted the picture from our girl's lunch the other day Amy sent me another copy. And she wasn't bitter about it at all. So here we are. My, how we've grown. And none of us looks like we're about to turn 40, right? Right?

Friends are Friends Forever

A couple of weeks ago Jake and I were out walking through our neighborhood when I noticed a car had stopped at the corner nearest us and there was a lady inside just staring at us. I figured she was just marveling at the gorgeousness that is Jake and didn't think much of it. But then I noticed she was clearly looking at me and mouthing something at the same time. So after looking behind me to make sure she wasn't talking to someone else I just looked at her and kind of shrugged my shoulders. Then the car turned the corner and left.

Only then it stopped again and the lady got out. At which point I thought, this lady is going to try to steal my child. I was prepared. I've still got some kickboxing skills I learned years ago back before marriage and babies happened. Just ask Mike. I could kick some butt if I had to. It might have been a little trickier with this belly offsetting my sense of balance, but like a lion protecting her cub I stood there thinking, "Bring it on lady, BRING IT ON."

However, I quickly realized that the child napper was smiling widely and saying my name! Turns out she was no threat at all. Turns out we were friends back in junior high and high school! Weird. I couldn't believe she recognized me after all this time. She actually said that my face looks exactly the same! God bless you Terasa. My wrinkles and age spots thank you.

Anyway, we exchanged some info and the following week she was gracious enough to invite Amy and I to the resort she works at for lunch. It was fancy! It was also good to spend time with friends who knew me when I hairsprayed my bangs up in the front and loved me anyways.

My most vivid memory involving Terasa was the night of the Great Escape. We were in high school and one of my friends called around midnight saying they were coming to pick me up to go toilet paper some cute boys house. Being the considerate teenager that I was, I decided not to wake up my parents and ask them if I could go. I just climbed out the bedroom window when the car pulled up out front. If I remember correctly, one of the girls moms was actually driving us around. So after an hour of TP'ing they dropped me off at my house. I quietly crept back up to my window and discovered with great horror that my bedroom window had been closed and locked. One second later, the porch light goes on and I hear my daddy say "Kimberly Val." You know you're in trouble when you hear the middle name being brought out. Needless to say, all of the girls ran off in different directions and left me to face the music all by myself. I swear even the mom driving took off before she could be implicated. And that's the night my parents took the handle off the inside of my bedroom window rendering it impossible to open. Which I might add was a huge fire escape violation. How was I supposed to escape a house fire if I couldn't climb out my bedroom window? It's a chance they were willing to take. To this day, I don't think they've put that handle back on. Anyhow, I wanted to post a picture of us girls after lunch the other day but I seem to have deleted it. Too bad because I think we look much better now with straighter hair and no blue eye shadow.

Thoughtless Thursday

Okay, I do have a couple thoughts. I just love this picture of Jake throwing out his gangsta' signs. Actually, he's landing his imaginary airplane. There's nothing gangsta' about him except for the way his pants ride down his flat little bottom. He's 100% sweet little boy.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I know you're thinking "oh no, she didn't." But yes, yes she did. I put up the Christmas decorations on November 15th. Clearly a breach of Christmas protocol. But I just don't care. Because the decorations make me happy. And it's only two weeks early. And we had an empty corner to fill. My friend Leslie and her two kids came over Friday night and helped. Can I just say it's pretty funny watching small boys decorate a tree? Jake had more fun taking everything off of the tree than putting them on. And the next day Mike and I had to kind of rearrange some stuff. Because little kids have a tendency to cluster ornaments in one small area of the tree. Here's an example.



The boys danced for joy when their work was finished.




However, I'm happy with the finished product even though Mike and I still have a poor little Charlie Brown Christmas tree. He's small but he's festive. Someday, when we grow up we hope to have a grown up tree as well. Have you seen the prices of Christmas trees lately? We clearly need to start saving. If you would like to donate to our Christmas tree fund just call 1-800-TREESFO'PO'. In the meantime, I'm desperately trying to hold off playing my Christmas CD's for a couple weeks. Because clearly I don't want to get carried away with the upcoming season.

I live for organization

Remember how yesterday I told you that Target had provided me with an idea for organizing the mountain of toys in our living room? Well, Mike went and bought me the shelf I had been looking at and we had the MOST fun organizing the living room. And by we I mean me. I think I'm the only one who thought it was fun. Anyhow here are some before and after pictures. Just look what a difference it made!



See the stack of puzzles and books on the floor by the piano? And the overloaded plastic toy container in the corner? My eye is twitching just thinking about it.

So, we found a shelf with cubes and baskets on sale at Target to help with the problem. First, it had to be assembled. That is a boys job.




And afterwards, voila! Clutter and chaos gone! Organization and sanity have arrived. Also, we can use the baskets as a new time out spot.




Does he seem a little confused to you? Oh, and you know that corner where the toy box used to be? It's empty now. You know what I think would look really good over there? A Christmas tree.

Your Target is a Wonderland

Mike had to work some overtime last week which meant Jake and I had a couple days of just us which meant I was desperately looking for some quality entertainment. So, of course, we headed off to Target. Jake doesn't particularly enjoy shopping (I'm hoping Emma will fill that void for me), but I have found the perfect way to keep him content in Target. Did you know that for just $1.63 you can buy a bag of popcorn and a coke at Target? I let Jake hold the popcorn and he was so happy for the next hour. He never once asked to get down. It was seriously the best $1.63 I've ever spent. It allowed me time to browse through all of the unnecessary things that I totally need in the store. We walked away with some Christmas ornaments and an idea for a new toy organizer for the living room. But more importantly, we walked away with a new found hope for future shopping in the form of a red and white bag full of popped corn. I wonder if this is what the pilgrims were thinking about when they popped their first corn kernal. Or was it the Native Americans? Either way, I'm sure it TOTALLY had something to do with toddler entertainment.

Everyone poops

Here's the thing. For the last seven or eight weeks or so, Jake has been going through some serious episodes of diarrhea. I won't go into details, but just think green, runny, foulest smelling thing you can ever imagine. And then picture it in a diaper. Mike took him to the doctor last week and they said it could be a parasite (ick!) or some sort of bacteria living in his tummy. So, they gave us a stool sample kit. The kit had three sample vials in it each with its own nifty little collection spoon. The object was to get three samples of poo from one diaper.

Mike immediately told me I would be responsible for the collection. I said okay, because I've had collections before. I collected roly poly's and ladybugs when I was a kid. As an adult, I collect little glass dolphins and obsessive compulsive tendencies. Collecting things is not a problem for me. I knew it would be gross but I've done gross before. In college I volunteered for a marine mammal rescue program which mainly consisted of "rescuing" dead dolphins washed up on the beach. Trust me when I say there is nothing grosser in life than the smell of a decomposing dolphin. Words cannot describe. Words can also not describe my horror one day when we were doing necropsies on one unfortunate bottlenose dolphin and another volunteer accidentally dropped its head on the beach and the rotting brains fell out and then he (the volunteer) sort of stepped in them. There was an audible squish. It was gross. I also spent five years in California performing dissections of mackeral which are perhaps the foulest smelling fish on the planet. What I'm saying is I've smelled gross before.

However, I was not pregnant for any of the aforementioned happenings. So anyway, a week ago I got Jake up and took off his dirty diaper and took it to the kitchen table to perform my collection. It has taken me a week to write about this because the memory is still so painful. I filled one vial up and started convulsing and gagging and carrying on. To which Mike said "uh, honey, you okay?" My knight. I said "uh, I think I'm going to throw up so you will have to finish this thing." I felt like a failure calling in the backup quarterback or something. (Good thing my backup did a lot better job than Brad Johnson has done for Tony Romo). So my husband had to get out his gas mask and put it on to finish our little collection.

All that to say that the test came back negative. Which is good. Except that they want us to do it two more times just to make sure. I will seriously pay someone to come over and do this thing for us. Any takers?

Wordless Wednesday

Almost Famous

In my years in the "outside of the home" workforce I had several brushes with fame in the form of movie stars, musicians and even some politicians. I don't want to drop names but let's just say I've met some people. However, meeting Dixie, Dennis, Michelle, Robert, Kenny, ZZ top guys, Melanie and the like is NOTHING compared to the email I received today. Let's just say that Peyton Manning, quarterback of the Colts, sent me a personalized email. I have really hit it big. Click here to see what he sent me!

If the Kirby man comes a knockin', tell him to keep on walkin'

Thursday afternoon around 2:45 our doorbell rang. This caused Brady to start barking up a storm which in turn woke Jake up from his nap early. We all know that waking a little one up early from his nap is one of the worst things in the world. Needless to say, I was already in a foul mood at the person behind door number one.

Mike answered the door while I ran upstairs to calm the raging beast. When I came back downstairs Mike informed me that the woman at the door was from a carpet cleaning service and they were coming back in twenty minutes to clean one room of our house for free to drum up future business for their company. I couldn't really be mad because our carpet always needs to be cleaned and who can turn down free? I was a little frustrated though because Jake and I had a play date at 3:30 that I didn't want to be late for.

The next thing we know we have three people standing at our front door introducing themselves. They all walked into the house, shook hands and pet the dog. Then two of them left and one of them stayed to clean the carpet. His name was TK which annoyed me on many levels. I mean what kind of a name is TK? What does that stand for? Total kookoo-head? Totally krazy? I just don't trust anyone named TK. I need a good honest name like John or Jack or Jake. Not TK.

Anyway, as soon as were alone with TK he pulled in the real reason he was at our house. He had brought along with him a Kirby vacuum cleaner. So, he really wasn't there to drum up business for his carpet cleaning service. He was there to sell us a Kirby vacuum cleaner. Even though he knew that Mike needed to leave for work at 3:30 he spent the next twenty minutes quizzing us on our vacuum knowledge and telling lame joke after lame joke. I seriously thought we had been sucked into some kind of really bad Las Vegas comedy act. The one thing he didn't do in those twenty minutes was clean our carpet.

When he finally got around to the cleaning part, guess what he did? He made me pull out our Dyson vacuum and then I had the pleasure of vacuuming the same three foot area of carpet over and over again while TK counted to thirty. THEN, he asked Mike to do the same thing because he's an equal opportunity torturer. All the while he is counting to thirty in the loudest, most obnoxious game show host voice I have EVER heard. When Mike was finished vacuuming, TK said he would never ask us to do something he wouldn't do himself. So, he proceeded to vacuum the same area of carpet while counting to thirty proving once again that vacuum salesmen can indeed count to thirty. He even clapped for himself when he was done. I swear to God.

Of course all of this was to show us how crappy our vacuum cleaner is in comparison to the Kirby. He then took the Kirby and vacuumed that same area of carpet and pulled up lots of dirt. I felt so ashamed. Here I thought we had a quality vacuum cleaner. By now, it was 3:30 and Mike hadn't even gotten changed for work which meant he was going to be late. He told TK this but he could have cared less. He kept quizzing Mike on dirt, pet hair and vacuum suction. Finally I distracted TK by showing him a wad of dog fur on the carpet so Mike could run upstairs and change.

By this time I was so annoyed I decided to take matters into my own hands. I looked at TK and said "I really don't want to waste anymore of your time. We can't afford to buy a Kirby vacuum cleaner and we are satisfied with our Dyson. And I have to leave for my son's play date now." To which TK replied, "Kim, don't you want to be able to get your carpet 100% clean?" So I said, "sure, but we still can't afford your vacuum cleaner." And he said "Kim, for just a dollar a day you can own this machine and get your carpets 100% clean." To which I said, "TK, we would be paying a dollar a day for the next ten years in order to buy that Kirby." And then he said,"Kim, isn't it worth it to have 100% clean carpet?" To which I said "TK, I'm going to have to ask you leave now." I have never gotten to say that to anyone! I felt so liberated! Only he completely ignored me. He just kept saying "but Kim for just a dollar a day, clean carpet, CLEAN!"

I told Mike goodbye, grabbed Jake and left the house. Mike told me later that poor TK looked really dejected leaving the house. I'm sorry, but he was there for over thirty minutes and still didn't manage to get the carpet clean. Maybe if he had focused more on cleaning and less on his one man comedy show there would be a nice, shiny, new Kirby sitting in our living room. Maybe, but I doubt it.

Question

Is it too early to put up our Christmas tree?

Thoughtless Thursday

Baby Bump Week 20

I turned a corner in this pregnancy last week and am happy to report I'm feeling really good! Still can't stand the thought of being in close proximity to raw chicken but most of the nausea has passed and I'm getting some energy back. Little Emma is on the move a lot now and Jake said her name today while patting my stomach. I hope he has some clue about what's coming!

Binky Free!

Jake has had a pacifier (binky) ever since day one in the hospital. It was the only way the nurses could keep him a few hours in the nursery at night without waking me to feed him. And I have to say the binky has been priceless. It comforts him, helps him sleep and gave me a break sometimes when I was nursing him. However, as his two year birthday is fast approaching Mike and I have started thinking about when we could take it away without causing permanent trauma to his psyche. We decided to give him a few more months hoping by then he would be a little easier to reason with.

But on Sunday morning, the unthinkable happened. We were down to just one binky. (I swear someday when we move out of this house we will find an entire mountain of lost binkys under the furniture.) We were on our way out the front door to go to church when Mike says "where's the binky?" Madness quickly ensued. We were already running late and began frantically searching the house for the bink because God forbid this child go anywhere without it. Car rides without binky? Unbearable! Child care without binky? Unheard of! Alas, we did not find the binky. We went to church, dropped Jake off at his class, and apologized profusely to his teachers about the inevitable meltdown he was bound to have. But when we picked him up, they said he had done fine without it! Miracle from heaven! I figured those Sunday school teachers must have just been praying really hard for him that morning and that there was NO WAY he would be able to take his afternoon nap without his beloved binky.

So, Mike headed off to the store to buy a new one. In the meantime, I went ahead and put Jake down for his nap because he was exhausted. He did cry for about ten minutes and I could hear him in his crib saying I WANT BINKY! But by the time Mike got home with the new ones, he had fallen asleep. And he stayed asleep without it. Which led us to think, "I wonder if he could go the rest of the day and night without it too?"

We had some friends over for dinner and Jake and their little boy ran each other ragged. By the time we put him down to sleep, he was so exhausted that he only asked for binky a couple times, cried for about five minutes and then fell asleep. WITHOUT A BINKY! He woke up once during the night asking for it but I got him back to sleep without it.

So today at school I told his teachers the whole binky story and asked them to try to not give him one at school if he asked for it. I did put one in his bag as an emergency because I hate to make others suffer. They were totally supportive, let him cry for about ten minutes at nap time before he fell asleep and did not give in to his demands. He had a great day.

As the saga continues to unfold, he is currently on night number two without his good buddy binky. He did cry about 25 minutes tonight but finally settled down. I attribute that to him seeing some of his baby binkies in the pantry and having a meltdown before bedtime. Needless to say those little guys are now in a box and I'm hoping this will just get easier and easier for him.

I felt kind of bad taking it away but he clearly can do without it. And Mike and I had become slaves to the binky. We were always trying to hunt one down before we could leave the house. So now, on the eve of election day, I can truly say that we are all free!

Halloween Recap

Okay, Halloween is so much fun with a toddler! Jake had an okay time at the Fall Festival at our church. He really wanted to get in the bouncy house but they wouldn't let anyone under three in. Bummer. He did get to play a baseball game that he enjoyed though. He had the most fun when we got home and decided to take him trick or treating. He carried his little pumpkin bucket and raced up to the doors holding it out once he figured out he was going to get candy. He even said trick or treat a time or two although it sounded more like "tick o teak". I swear he loved his dino costume, but we could not get a picture of him smiling with it on.