Spectacular Spiderman

The best gift Jake has ever received is this Spiderman costume my friend Katha gave him for his birthday last year. He has made use of it more than anything else he owns-with the exception of his beloved crab.

I think it is hilarious that he needs to cover it up with clothes when he's being SpiderMan's alter ego Peter Parker. He seriously thinks no one will know he is Spiderman if he has a short sleeve shirt and shorts on over it.



Yesterday, he dressed it up with a hat so he could wear the mask but still be incognito. We went to the park with him dressed like that. Surprisingly, some of the children there recognized him as Spider Man despite the disguise. He was called upon to fight evil and save the park from the bad guys. He did not fail. Except when some older boys pulled a toy shot gun and a toy knife on him and scared the heck out of him and made him cry. Seriously? You let your child bring these things to the park?? Of course, their mama's were probably thinking, "seriously? you let your child dress like that out in public?"





Spidey loves to play at the park.





Emma Mae declined to play the role of Mary Jane and went about her business all by herself. These two crack me up every single day.

Six years!

Today Mike and I are celebrating our 6th year wedding anniversary. Six years ago today we got married in a park over looking the ocean in California. It was one of the best days of my life. Perfect spot. Perfect amount of friends and family (except for a few out of state friends we missed). Perfect person for me to marry. Since then we have moved to two different states, somehow lived through the deaths of my two beloved pets (which I'm convinced I couldn't have done without Mike), had two adorable little kids and moved into our first official house. Wow. That seems like quite a bit for just six years. The one thing we haven't done yet is taken a honeymoon. Maybe for our ten year anniversary??

Not every day since then has been perfect because I am not perfect. As hard as I try I know I am a difficult human being to live with. So I thank my hubby for putting up with me and for doing so with a smile on his face almost all of the time. I thank him for not seeing the bags under my eyes or the wrinkles on my face. I thank him for taking over with the kids when he sees I've had enough. And I thank him for working so hard while going to school to give us a better future. You're awesome honey!

We've actually been celebrating this anniversary for the past two weeks. Mike arranged for a babysitter a couple weeks ago and took me out to dinner (yummy shrimp tacos) and a movie. Then, a week later we did something wild and crazy. Something that we had both wanted to do for years. Something that says, "yeah, we're married and old and tired but we're still super cool." We decided to forgo the traditional six year gift of candy, iron or metal and opted for ink instead. Ya'll. We got tattoos. Because nothing says I love you like permanent marker.

It was really a fun bonding experience for us. We drove into down town Austin and went to this place called Electric 13. The two guys there were awesome. Mike knew exactly what he wanted (USMC on his arm) and even took in a picture of the font he wanted it to be done in. I, of course, was more on the vague side. I wanted a small cross and a small, realistic looking dolphin. I was thinking something tiny on my ankle or foot. Well. My tattoo artist, Mig, drew up something combining the cross and the dolphin that was really cool without looking like the dolphin was being crucified. But I felt it was too big for my ankle. So I opted for my lower back.

The entire time we discussed doing this I was really worried about Mike. He has a fear of needles and pain. I may have done a little smack talking. But I've been pregnant twice and had two c-sections so I really thought I could handle this tattoo stuff. Well. It hurt. The parts on my spine hurt a lot. I even said owie once but trust me I was thinking of other words in my head. Mike did really well aside from his arm falling asleep during the procedure. Three hours after arriving we walked out with fresh ink and a new zip to our step. And no sooner had we gotten in the car than Mike turned to me and said "what do you want to get next time?"



Pardon the back fat. When did I get that??! It's really hard to get a decent photo of the tattoo without showing a little skin. I apologize, but some of my friends have been hounding me for pictures. And yes, my dolphin's tail is a little disconnected from his body. Several people tell me that's how it is supposed to look but I'm considering going back in to get him to fix that.

We also went to a wedding Friday night. Mike was a groomsman. It was nice to get all dressed up and go out!

How can I wear out the children?

Today Mike had to leave for school at 7am and I knew he wouldn't be back home until 10pm so I decided to pack the day with activities to keep us busy. First things first, I had to let Jillian Michaels back into my living room. It's getting a bit too chilly to take the kids on our usual morning walks so I'm resorting to a work out video to get my exercise. I hate it. Emma sat in there watching me the whole time going "mama! you doing exercise?" So normally the things I would say out loud to Jillian about her workout torture had to be kept silent in my brain. That was a work out in itself.

Later I took the kids to a new bouncy house place that I had a coupon for. Jake hooked up with several boys his age there and they just took off being super heroes the entire time. I think it is just in a boys DNA to fight bad guys and ward off evil. Poor Emma Mae had to play by herself a lot because the boys just didn't want her around. To make it up to her I took them to Chick Fil A for lunch afterwards. She loved it. Jake whined the entire time that he wanted to go home because he was so tired and said he just really doesn't like chicken.

As it turns out, when I got them home they both felt feverish. I loaded them up with Ibuprofin and told them to both take a nap. Amazingly, Jake perked up after laying down for ten minutes. It took Emma ten minutes of screaming in her room that she was "NOT TIRED MOMMY!" before she passed out for the next hour and a half. I will never understand why you would fight someone who is telling you it is okay to go lay down and go to sleep in the middle of the day. I would bring that person gifts and tell them that I will love them forever.

After naptime, we went to WalMart because I've been promising Jake that we would replace his old Spiderman costume before Halloween. He lost the mask and the costume itself is riddled with holes. Spiderman has been a busy guy. Well, our WalMart didn't have the cheaper $10 model in his size so I ended up spending more money on a muscular Spidey that turned out to be two sizes too big for Jake. I immediately had buyers remorse but I cannot pry that thing out of Little Man's hands. He keeps telling me that it is falling down on him, but when I tell him we should take it back and look for something in a smaller size he gets very misty eyed and says that he will just grow into it tomorrow.

Also, he brought me the old costume tonight and said "mama, can we just give this old one to those people who need things?" Clearly, my talks of giving to those less fortunate than us are sinking in. Sure, it would be nice if he wanted to give the less fortunate nice, good things instead of stained up things with more holes than swiss cheese. I have to remind myself we're making baby steps here. And I remind myself that he is saving up his allowance money to buy his sister a new doll. And maybe some chicken nuggets because goodness knows he doesn't need any of those for himself.

We started today with a little bit of this...






then we did a little bit of this...



(that's watercolor all over Em's face)
then we did a whole lot of this...

Top 10 reasons I'm fairly certain I'm losing my mind

1.) The other morning I asked Jake three times if he wanted me to make him some soap (instead of toast) for breakfast. Shockingly, he said no.

2.) That evening I made myself a nice salad for dinner and went to the fridge to get some salad dressing but came back with peach jelly.

3.) The next morning I tried to heat the syrup up in the spice cabinet instead of the microwave. Shockingly, that did not work.

4.) Today as Emma was pressing a chocolate granola bar all over the kitchen table making a huge mess I just said "that's cool" when she informed me she was making chocolate patterns.

5.) For the last month I've been asking friends what happened to our local Christian music station because I wasn't able to tune into it in our car anymore. I also couldn't seem to get it to come in at work so I figured it had gone off air. My friend Jana told me she was listening to it every day so I verified the FM number for it and tried it again the next morning. No dice. This lasted an entire month ya'll until I discovered last week that I was really just dialing in the wrong number. 100.5 instead of 105.9. I am Crazy.

6.) Frequently losing my words. I've just stopped talking because so much of the time I can't think of the word I'm trying to say.

7.) Totally can't remember the other four reasons I know I'm losing my mind....HELP!

Tuesday, tuesday

Our air conditioner decided to take a leave of absence Thursday evening. I think it was feeling under appreciated. After all, it has kept us cool through 100 days of 100plus degree weather this year. And we hadn't said thank you or bought it anything nice lately. Also, a bird committed suicide inside of the unit. We finally got someone to come out and fix it yesterday afternoon. Evidently, air conditioner repairmen don't do weekends. And really, what are the odds that someone in central Texas might need AC assistance on a weekend? I'm sure we're the only ones. Fortunately, we got a little cool front in over the weekend that kept our house a toasty 85 degrees instead of an unbearable 103. In fact, I think we all got used to the warmer inside temps because after he fixed it yesterday Emma Mae woke up from her nap saying "mummy, I soooo cold!" And this crazy wet stuff fell from the sky for about four hours on Sunday. I believe it is called rain and I believe we are very grateful for it.

Today, I took Jake and Emma Mae to run errands with me which is their very favorite thing on earth. They were pretty good while we were out so we made a pit stop at the pumpkin patch and I let them pick out some little pumpkins for themselves. When we got home they promptly got out the markers and stickers and decorated their pumpkins. We also made not one but two trips to the park today. And those kids were still full of energy at bedtime. I am not. I feel like the AC must have felt last week. Here are some pics from the day.

Go Panthers!

The Panthers played valiantly today but if you keep score based on how many goals each team scored then I have to say they lost the game. If you keep score based on the fact that everyone is a winner then I guess they won. Jake did really well. He got in there and kicked the ball some even when it was surrounded by other kids. He is still very bummed that he hasn't scored an actual goal during a game though.



Is this the cutest pony tail you've ever seen??

Bouncy house visit

On Tuesday I took the kids to a bouncy house to play for awhile. We were the only ones there for the first thirty minutes. It was heaven! They had so much fun. I took the opportunity to try to figure out my new camera. I'm still learning.






Look at this cool feature that lets you turn your photo into a drawing!



We had a fun time right up until Emma Mae peed all over the tile floor. She NEVER has accidents. But the two times she has had them they have been in very public places. The other time was at our neighbors house at their one year old's birthday party. We were all out in the backyard and looked over just in time to see her peeing all over their brand new playscape. What a way to make an impression! I'm glad no one had a camera out then to capture that particular moment.

Dolphins and words

Sunday night I had a date night with Jake. I took him to see Dolphin Tale. He was so proud to be going on a "date." He kept saying that we were on a date and that dates were for boys and girls. Mike put the idea of popcorn in his head before we left so I had to spring for a kids snack pack when we got there. It came with the longest piece of Laffy Taffy I have ever seen. It must have been two feet long. And Jake ate every single inch of it before the movie even started. Then he polished off his popcorn and Sprite halfway through the movie.

We went to a six o'clock showing so we didn't get out until after eight which is pretty late for Jake. He was so hyped up on Laffy Taffy, popcorn, and sheer dolphin love that he was bouncing off the car walls on the way home. I kid you not he was talking a mile a minute. I didn't even know half of what he was saying. Turns out he didn't either. At one point I heard him say something like "mama! I squashed it! I don't even know what squash is, what am I saying?" Then he kept telling me that he was killing bugs that were trying to eat him and that he had a small fire coming off of his lips from the spicy (salty) popcorn he ate. He was hilarious. I plan on stalking up on Laffy Taffy for sheer entertainment purposes on days when I'm bored.

The movie was fantastic. It was nice to see a movie about a dolphin and watch my boy show the sheer joy of the same animal I love so much. We talked through the whole thing about dolphins. I'm sure our fellow movie goers loved us. At one point Jake actually cheered and said "I just love this movie!" It was also cool to be able to show him the amputees in the movie and try to explain to him that his daddy wants to make "cool legs and arms" for people that need them. We will definitely see it again.

On a side note, if you did not read Big Mama today you should do so. She was talking about a word cemetery that her daughter's teacher created for words that are totally over used. I just noticed that I wanted to use every single one of them in this post. Several times. In the comment section of her blog she asked people to put what words in the English language they would like to bury. Of course, I said the "p" word that means underwear. I was happy to see so many people agreed with me about that word! I've been led to believe over the years that there is something wrong with me for hating that word. Well. I'm here to say that I am normal. Several people also hated that word. Also, words like scab, epic and moist. In fact, so many people were disturbed by moist that I'm starting to not like it either. Unless you're describing a brisket in which case moist is great! But if you were to combine the moist word with the "p" word I would be completely disgusted and I would have to go live with the dolphins in the wet ocean where they only speak in whistles and clicks.

Soccer and coffee cake

Today was the Panthers second soccer game. They were great. I think the game ended up in a tie but as Jake's coach told them "they were all winners" so I'm not sure who really won the game. Jake is having so much fun. He is a little out to lunch on the field but I'm trying to be okay with that. Also, he started doing some very weird sort of chicken run today that is very unlike his natural run. We think he's having equipment malfunction of some sort. He's so short that his shin guards cover almost his entire leg and we think they are bothering him when he runs. I want to make him a t-shirt that says something of this sort so that other people won't make fun of him. I have issues.



Mike is a wonderful daddy and arranged to have Saturday morning off from work so he could come to the rest of Jake's games. Praise God. Because I need someone to keep me in check too and remind me that this is just a game. A four and five year old game. Although there are two kids on this team who could probably go pro next year. But they have probably had a bit more practice and they probably don't feel like they're running on stilts. I'm just sayin'. Enjoy it now, Max and Diego. You just wait until Jake grows into those shin guards!






Jake did make two goals today. Of course, they were both in the pre-game warm up. And there was nobody else playing or defending the goal or anything. But he made those two goals, threw his hands up in the air, jumped up and down and said "yahoo!" He was so proud. I love it.


This is what Emma Mae does during the games.

I tried another new recipe tonight I want to tell you about. It's actually a breakfast food, but it took several hours to bake so we ate it for dessert. It's a lemon pull apart bread that I found on pinterest last week. Normally, I don't do recipes that look like they're going to take a long time. Especially if they use words like "meanwhile" in them. But this looked so good I had to give it a try. And it really turned out good too. Very lemony and not too sweet. It would be good for a brunch or shower or something. Here's the link to the recipe.