I had no idea!

It involved one of my favorite white tops, a parade, a long walk, and a soggy taco from Taco Bell.

Long story short: blue Dawn completely took out the stain all over the white top.

Way better than Shout or whatever oxy stuff I had ever used before. Amazing! Note though, that it has to be the blue colored Dawn. I don't know why, and I don't really care. All I know is that it WORKED!

The Drive Home

I'm still cracking up as I write this.....


Samy: "Mom, in my school, there are kids who have crazy issues, but their parents still want them to learn, so they go to my school. Well, today I was doing the monkey bars and a girl with crazy issues came over and kicked me."


Me: "Samy, it's called DIS-A-BIL-ITIES. The kids have mental and/or physical disabilities. We shouldn't call it 'crazy issues'."


(But I'm for sure going to adopt that term for personal use.)


Sorry, but that was too good not to share. Have a good day.

Reason #164...

... that I love a smart phone:

Standing in the checkout line at the Children's Place today. Watching the lady in front of me hand over her coupon to the clerk, thinking to myself that I should have gotten a coupon before I left home. Then, wait a minute... I swipe out my phone, google 'Children's Place coupon', and voila! 20% off my entire purchase!

I showed clerk-lady the coupon on my phone like it had been there all along and I had come in planning on using it.

I felt so smart! (doesn't happen often, so I have to applaud myself when it does...)

This is ART

I found this picture. No idea when it was drawn. Can you tell what it is?





It's the Star Wars (Return of the Jedi) scene where Lea is tethered to Jaba the Hut as his slave. Isn't that Awesome! My family is a little obsessed with Star Wars right now -- thank you Christian. The artist of this work is none other than Samantha! I love Princess Lea's bikini top and C-3P0. Not sure what the thing is in between Jaba and C-3P0, but we won't get into that..... We'll just leave that one alone.

Doings and Findings of late

Clicked into photos on my iPad and found these gems...

Other things we've been doing:

Went to the Grand Canyon (and Zion and Bryce canyons) this summer. So. INCREDIBLE.

Met up with some of the family in Utah. So. FUN.

Eric slept.

Hung over the side of a cliff at the Grand Canyon to get a shot down. Little scary.

One turned ...

Another turned (Darth Vader is hiding a candle)

That was summer. Now we're a couple months into school. Good times... good times....

Night and Day

I make quite a few observations with the amount of laundry that is turned around in our household. One of my latest is this:

Two teen-aged boys. One young man, in a five day period, regardless of how much prodding, reminding and pleading from a mother, can go through three to five pair of underwear. The second young man within that same five day period, all on his own, will go through anywhere between six to ten pair of underwear.



It's difficult to see in the picture, but the taller stack of underwear (belonging to teen-ager "B" consists of 9 pair. The smaller stack, that of teen-ager "A", is three pair. This is about four days since the last washing where underwear were involved.
The craziest of all is that Teen B (clean underwear guy) has a room that looks like a rabid dog attacked it, whereas Teen A (foul underwear guy) will frequently clean his room just because he feels like it.

What does one do with that? How does this even happen, and is there a point where it will equal out a bit?
Nice, huh.

Competition Complete

Since October (2010) Maren has been rehearsing/practicing (I don't know what the official dance word is) for her team dance competition. She is in a group of four girls and they have worked really, really hard to prepare for these competitions. Today was the last one that they had entered into.

Well done girls!

(Someone always suggests a silly face picture)

When we signed up to compete, we weren't aware that competitions could be on Sundays. (I guess I'm naive) Our Director/Studio Owner has been really great about requesting that we compete on Saturday, and it worked for the first competitions, but not this one. So, we took Christian and Samantha with us to watch Maren for church today. We made Eric and Logan stay home and get a ride from friends. I thought it would not be the best to let the teen-aged boys not only skip church, but sit through dance after dance of scantily-clad, gyrating young girls on stage in front of them in stead.

Fun, fun. I love watching Maren dance. Beautiful!

A mother's love

That's a Storm Trooper action figure.

Let's zoom out......








Yep, there's poop under there. It's in the "sanitary cycle" as we speak (the Storm Trooper, not the poop).

I used a disposable spoon and bowl to "fish". They are now disposed of.

On the bright side: Potty Training is WAY mastered!

genius

Every now and again, I'll go through the kid's phone text messages just to make sure everything's on the up and up. This morning, I read through a string between Logan and a friend of his. Can't tell if she likes him or not, but if she does, she has got to be so totally frustrated with his oblivion! But then again, maybe she's not the sharpest tool in the shed, considering some of her comments, like how she said she had to ask her younger brother how to spell squirrel. My most favorite exerpt is as follows:

Friend: hi logan wat ru doin?
Logan: homework
F: done with mine what subjct?
L: algebra have a test tomorrow studying
F: o can i help, im good at science
L: umm, algebra is math

Yeah, she's probably not clued into the fact that he's oblivious. It's all fine.

Saturday is s special day

So stinking fun!!! What a great day! Samy cracks me up because she is a scrawny little string bean, but man, can she take it (and give it) on the soccer field! She just started her second season with the team. This week was the toughest game yet. The opposing team towered over just about every one of our kids. And they were good. Real good. And dirty. Every time you looked at number 6 he had his foot stuck out tripping someone, or an arm out elbowing someone. At one point, he and Samy collided and took each other down. Bless her little skinny heart, she got right up and kept going. After that, she was elbowing right back! I gave her a tiny pep talk during the next break. I said: "don't ever hit push first, but if someone pushes, hits or trips you, you do it right back to them! Don't take it." Good girl listened to Mommy. After Samy's game, Maren and I came home and dolled her all up for her first dance competition. She entered into a team competition where her and three other girls are performing a lyrical dance. They've worked really long and hard. Today was the first of four competitions that the group has entered. They did such a good job. The only down side is that she was starving and I kind of forgot to feed her lunch because we were a little late. So imagine how much better she can do when she's not famished!

I couldn't take pictures of the performance because it's illegal, but they really did do a great job. So beautiful.

Fun, fun special Saturday.