Who's In Charge Here, Anyway?

From the time our kids are about two years old, until they are about five, it seems, we spend a lot of time reinforcing who is (and who isn't) in charge.

When Jack was about three, we had been saying (a lot), "You are not in charge."

One day at the table, he said, "Grammy's in charge, and PawPaw's in charge, and Daddy's in charge, and Mommy's in charge. I ... am NOT in charge." We laughed and laughed and still say that to each other and to him.

So now Charlotte and Mitchell think that they are in charge all too often and we've taken to reinforcing with them that "You are not in charge".

The other day, Charlotte and John were sitting on the couch having some sort of serious discussion and he said to her, "You are not in charge." Without missing a beat, she fired right back, "You aw not in chodge, eedah." Oh dear, we still have some work to do. We had to hide our faces while we cracked up.

This morning, I went to turn on a show for her in my bedroom and we were laying on my bed "chatting". She started getting all bossy on me, so I reminded her, "You are not in charge." She quickly replied, "I not in chodge. I just tawkin'!"

What a mess.

First Day of School

Nothing says "first day of school" like new shoes!


The obligatory full-length body shot.


Head shots only


I think this one is my favorite.



Walking into school. They met up with their friends Sam and Ben in the parking lot and left us (the parents) in their dust.

Really? Why did we walk them in? This is the one and only time I do it. The rest of the year, I just slow down in the circle drive and push them out.

P.S. Scrapbookers - imagine how CUTE these pages are going to be. I get to work with GREEN and PINK! My two favs! Although Jack may not look on it too kindly.

My life in bullets

It seems like I just can't make the time to sit down and write a blog entry lately. (Or, really, for a long time.) Every time I think I want to say something, I can only come up with a "facebook-status-like" line for it. I remember when I was in high school, one of my favorite teachers, Mr. Noto, always complimented my friend, Stephanie, because she was so concise. I gotta admit, it always made me a little bit jealous! Well, I think I'm getting there. Look out, Stephanie!!!

• My mom is at the cabin this week. Alone. I'm a bit envious.
• I've spent the week doing all the last-minute prep stuff for school. The kids start on Monday. Ordered the brown uniform shoes from Land's End. Ordered the Grammar workbooks and hardback textbook for Holly to the tune of $60. Ouch. Ventured out to multiple stores to buy white tennis shoes for the kids (Converse leather at Dick's - $24.99!)
• Went to parent orientation yesterday for both kids. It's a long day, but I always come home excited to start the year. I really think Jack is going to thrive in fourth grade. He's reading some great literature this year, including The Witch of Blackbird Pond and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. We're going to breath a deep sigh of relief and hopefully have an easier year with Holly this year. It's funny - I should have sighed that sigh at the END of last school year, but I didn't. I was still all bunched up. Now I have, and it's nice.
• I think parent orientation may be my favorite day of the whole school year. There's a group of us that have 4th graders and younger siblings and we all get together for lunch in between our orientations. We've been together since our oldest kids were in Kindergarten. It makes me happy. Wendy, LaNita and I were there yesterday. We were sad that Kerry could not join us, they've moved schools and she couldn't make it work.
• I did NOT sign up to be room mom for either of the kids this year. When the teachers mentioned it, I got a couple of "nudges" and "looks", but I stayed strong. I promised John I would not do it again, since it just takes up too much time - time that I don't really have. (Time that I could be blogging!)
• I went to Gymboree to get school socks for the kids. They did not have Mitchell's size out on the rack, so I asked if the salesperson could go to the back and check for more. She said she couldn't because there was no one else there to watch the floor. But she could call next door and see if there were two people working. If so, one of them could come over and she could go to the back. Now, let me just say, the store next door is Janie and Jack. Janie and Jack is a Gymboree Corporation store. So that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that I WORK AT JANIE AND JACK!!! And she knew it! I'm still a little baffled by it.
• John has been traveling this week. And I am thankful he has a job. That's all I'm going to say about that.
• John's trip to Toronto next week got canceled! YAY!!!
• The kids' last day of indoor soccer is Saturday. I'm kind of sad, because I really did enjoy watching them play. Holly Grace surprised us most of all. She has natural ability. (Thanks to John, because she most certainly did NOT get that from me.) All the kids have scored this season (Mitchell, Holly and Jack). We will be glad to get our Saturdays back, though. We've been committed to soccer from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. every Saturday for six weeks, now.
• I got popcorn ordered for our Cub Scout Pack. Come see us at WalMart on 407 the last weekend in August and the first weekend of September. We have $6500 worth of popcorn to get rid of!

That's all for now. I'm off to find a Sharpie and start labeling those school supplies.

Scrapbook Camp Update 6

Thursday 

Nani Dot, my grandmother, arrives at 9:15 bearing gifts! A Paula Deen cookbook for me and one for Christi! We are excited about our new cookbooks! There’s a recipe in it that I just happen to have the ingredients for, so I whip up a blueberry coffee cake right then and there. Nani Dot is thrilled. Also, I put some more chocolate chip oatmeal cookies in the oven because they are John’s favorite and he’ll be arriving home from his trip anytime. At this point I pat myself on the back. It’s really hard to reach your own back, but I am pretty flexible.

John arrives home, the cookies and coffee cake come out of the oven. And this is all before 11 a.m.! John eats a bit, changes clothes and heads to the office. Nani Dot gets ready to go and I decide to take a quick look at her computer. She shows me what’s going on, and she’s exactly right. IE has just quit working. Get a load of this: my grandmother pays her bills online. How awesome is that? Consequently, she is feeling a little lost with no internet and she is looking at two weeks without her computer. Bummer!!!

After she leaves, I start working on it in earnest. I am no computer whiz, especially when it comes to PCs, but I can sure google with the best of them. I google “internet explorer not working vista” and the first result is a blog that has a recommended fix. I try it. No good. I read in the comments about some of the other fixes that have worked for other people. And guess what? I get it to work. As soon as that computer has a working browser, I head over to mozilla.com and download Firefox for her. Ah, yes, much better.

I call her about 1 p.m. and tell her I think she’s all set – I’ve moved all her “favorites” over from IE to Firefox’s “bookmarks” and she’s thrilled. I offer to bring her computer over in the evening, but she’s so excited that she wants to come get it right now. Okey dokey! She arrives in fifteen minutes flat. And she says she’ll dogsit for us next week while John and I are both out of town because I fixed her computer. Yeah, baby. I’m wondering who got the better end of that deal and I’m thinking it’s not her. J Also, she says she’ll “dance at my wedding”, which I think is hilarious, because, even if I had another wedding, why would her dancing at it be any favor to me?

Christi and I have to run a few more errands in the afernoon. Pick up a few extra prints at Wolf, Target run, Belk’s and once more to Hobby Lobby. Then it’s to the scrapfreak’s house to pick up our orders. Fun!!!

We get home and I am seriously, frantically scrapbooking for just a few more hours before we have to pack up our stuff and head to Amarillo. We have a final Scrapbook Camp meal of Wingstop lemon pepper wings with their famous French fries and veggies. In true Lodmell fashion, we eat our wings in the media room. John and I really can’t imagine eating them anywhere else. We have Get Smart from Netflix and we watch that while we eat, and then while we fold laundry. It’s a really funny movie, even funnier if you watched Get Smart as a child.

We scrapbook a little bit more, then get busy packing up all our stuff. This is a huge task in itself. Christi will be taking her supplies with her to the cabin, where she will spend just one night, then head home with the boys and Cory, who is meeting us there. I am taking my supplies to the cabin to spend another week scrapbooking with my mom. We will have the added distraction of the kids … but no errands to run there!

Final page counts:

Christi: 25 completed pages! Amazing. And lots of supplies purchased for future pages.

Crissy: 20 competed pages and 54 page kits (power layouts) prepared for next week.

It’s been a great week!

BIG THANKS to Grammy and PawPaw who gave us the whole week. What a gift!!!

Scrapbook Camp Update 5

Wednesday

Wednesday morning we really sleep in. I’m talking about after 10 a.m. wake-up time. It’s so nice. And it’s just very rare that we get to sleep in that late without feeling guilty.

We think that maybe not leaving the house ALL DAY would be a great idea.

We get busy scrapping and watching the rest of the bonus materials from The Sound of Music.

Now, at this point, I should probably confess that I have not done a ton of actual scrapbooking. I’ve spent the week sorting photos, uploading photos, ordering photos, and shopping for scrapbooking supplies. And I’ve also been making page kits (also known as “power layouts” for your CM people out there).  So it doesn’t sound like I’ve accomplished a lot, but on Wednesday, I actually sat down and started putting photos on paper. Hooray! Remember, I have four children. And each of these children have their own [series of] albums. When I first started scrapbooking, I bought a Creative Memories Baby album for Jack. And I thought that I would fill up the baby pages and then stop. But then I couldn’t stop. And so then I thought I would take each kid’s album to age 5, or when they started elementary school, then stop. But that didn’t “take”, either. So here I am, with multiple albums for each child. And no end in sight!

We want to watch another movie, but not one with too much of a plot since we are trying not to get distracted from our “creating”. I pull up Netflix and find that we can watch Singin’ in the Rain online. Christi discovers that Good Mornin’, which her mom always used to sing to her in the mornings, was from Singin’ in the Rain. Later, we turn on Bedtime Stories for a little more entertainment.

We also discover scrapfreak.com. This is a website run by a super-nice lady in Highland Village. And guess what?!? You can place an order and then pick it up from her, thus saving on shipping costs! She has some really cute things (we love Cosmo Cricket) and so we place an order.

My grandma calls to see if I can take her computer to the mountains with me and have my brother work on it. It’s a PC running Vista (no wonder she’s having problems) and suddenly Internet Explorer won’t work anymore. Now, bear in mind that my grandmother is in her 80’s. I’m just proud that she knows what Internet Explorer is. She says that she will bring it over in the morning if that’s okay. Dangit. We’re going to have to get out of bed at a decent hour, because she gets her errands run before it gets too hot outside and her first stop is the pharmacy that opens at 9 a.m. I am the second stop on her list.

It’s another late night, but this time I set my alarm for 8:30 a.m.

Scrapbook Camp Update 4

Tuesday

We have a big day planned. Headed to the library to get the Sound of Music, to Dallas to the AAC to get our circus tickets (this is a great thing) and to do some shopping in Dallas.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Circus tickets, the good ones, are $30 each. That’s for lower level. The higher ones are $15 and $10 each. The kids each earned a FREE ticket to the circus. Now, you might be thinking, yeah, that’s probably the $10 nosebleed section tickets they earned, but no, they were the $30 tickets. There are more expensive tickets (“front row” and “VIP”), but free $30 tickets make us quite happy. The only caveat is, though, that you have to exchange your vouchers in person at the AAC box office. Which is not exactly convenient.

So, how exactly did the kids earn their tickets, you ask? SUMMER READING PROGRAM, I tell you. At the LIBRARY!!! And this is how easy it is: Read five books (or have your parents read them to you) and then have the library stamp your voucher. How easy is that? If you’re going to do it, though, you have to exchange those vouchers early. The good seats for the weekend shows were going quickly. However, we were able to get tickets for the Tuesday night show at (what would be) center court, about 1/3 of the way up on the lower level. $180 worth of tickets for the bargain price of $60 (one ticket for me and one for John!).

After the AAC, we go to the American Girl Store to get Charlotte’s Birthday present (a Bitty Baby). And this is where it gets a little cooky. We park in the parking garage and get out to walk in to the store. We get out and as we are walking away from the car, we realize that there is something underneath, right in front of the rear tire. It is a giant human turd. I don’t even know if I spelled that correctly, but that’s what it was. I can’t even believe it, it’s so disgusting. Really, I didn’t think that’s what it was because it was so large. It looked like that spray foam insulation stuff, but we're pretty sure that flies aren't that attracted to foam.

Another stop at the “Scrapbook Barn” and then we are on our way home. Oops, we are headed northbound on I-35 at 4:45 in the afternoon. Not the smartest move on my part. We divert onto 3040 and continue on what would be John’s commute if he were home. From the intersection of 3040 & 2499 we call and place an order for takeout from PeiWei. Oh, yes, this week just keeps getting better.  We make one last stop at Wolf Camera before picking up our food. And now, I’m going to let you in another little secret: $.06 photo prints. Here’s the deal: go to ritzpix.com and upload your photos. Be prepared. It takes FOREVER. You might want to start them uploading, then run a marathon, or you runners might want to go to bed and sleep, because when you finish the marathon, your photos will still be uploading. Anyway, don’t order your prints yet!!! Wait until the next Tuesday or Wednesday. Order 3.5” x 5” prints and they will only be $.06!!! What a screaming deal. Even when you can find them that cheap at York Photo, you still have to pay exorbitant shipping charges. The prints are small, but if you are scrapbooking with them, you’ll probably find that that’s okay, especially for the price. I almost ordered my prints through Shutterfly and picked them up at Target where I would have paid $40. Instead, I paid $15 at Wolf Camera. Yahoo!!!

We watched The Sound of Music and then watched a majority of the second disc's bonus materials. Wow, that Liesl (Charmian Carr) is still beautiful today. 

   

And don't even get me started on Captain von Trapp. 

So that’s Tuesday. I'm all about the great deals and handsome singing men. That's just how I roll.

Scrapbook Camp Update 3

Monday

We wake up late. I don’t even remember what time. It is sometime after 9 a.m. I have to work for a little while as soon as they receive the shipment of clothes for a floor set this evening. I’m just going to go in for a few hours and unpack, sort and hang the tiny childrens’ clothes I love so much. Christi’s twin sister is coming over for the day with her girls (who are 13 and 15) and one of their friends. I decide to mix up a batch of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.

I get the call that the boxes “have arrived” so I get ready to head over to Janie & Jack. Right as I’m leaving, Carrie and the girls arrive. I hate to leave because I know they are going to have so much fun, but the boxes await.

I’m gone for about three hours. When I arrive home, the swimming is in full swing. The girls are having a great time. I have some lunch and visit with Carrie. She is an amazing cook and has brought some yummy treats for us.  We have a birthday cake for Carrie’s oldest daughter. She is fifteen today.

A tour of the garden is given and oh, so sweetly complimented. We pick tomatoes, okra and cucumbers and we melt. Wow, it’s hot. We head inside. The girls want to watch a movie or play Wii, so I set them up upstairs with Guitar Hero. I don’t know who likes Guitar Hero more, the girls or Christi and Carrie.

When the foodfest ends and Carrie and her girls have to leave, we get busy scrapping again. Then, because we are SPONTANEOUS, we decide to go to Hobby Lobby. It’s 7:25, and they close at 8:00, so we have to hurry. We’re there by 7:35 and have only ten minutes before the Hobby Lobby employees begin their nightly countdown to “Quittin’ Time”. It makes those last precious minutes of child-free shopping so stressful to have them pressuring us: “ATTENTION Hobby Lobby shoppers!!! The time is now 7:45 (or 7:50 or 7:55) and Hobby Lobby will be closing in 15 (or 10 or 5) minutes. Please make your final selections and take them to the front where a Hobby Lobby associate will assist you.”

Later, while we are scrapping, we listen to the entire Sound of Music soundtrack about three times. It makes us happy. We sing loudly. We decide we need to watch the movie, so I check and (because I am a genius) find that it is in at the Lewisville Public Library.

Again, we stay up far too late. We have big plans for tomorrow (including a stop at the library), but we might have to get a late start …

Scrapbook Camp Update 2

Sunday

9:00
I roll out of bed bright and early. Christi is just coming downstairs. It's been years since either of us has slept in this late without feeling guilty. John is nowhere to be found. The lamp by my bed is still on.

9:05
We hear the media room door open. John comes downstairs looking sheepish (and still half asleep). Oops. He fell asleep on the couch in the media room watching "The Dark Knight".

10:30
My Aunt Debbie calls to say she dropping a breadmaker off at my house for my mom. I convince her to stop and chat, taking her on a tour of the garden. She is delightful and a wealth of information. She points out that I have basil growing among my cherry tomatoes (?!?). I should leave it there, apparently, because basil likes shade and the tomatoes are shading it. Incidentally, she is the one who told me I should put crushed up eggshells in the garden to keep the snakes out. It works.

12:00
Christi and I have finished an entire pitcher of iced tea. Every time we fill our glasses, we squeeze an orange wedge in it. YUM!

2:00
The scrapbooking, organizing, and photo uploading are in full swing.

5:00
I am freaking out a little bit because John has a flight to catch at 6:30 to Florida and he is not done packing. Wait, I forget who we are talking about.

5:05
He's done packing and I kiss him goodbye.

7:00
Christi and I decide to put a casserole she brought in the oven and go for a swim while it cooks. While we are in the pool, we decide to see a movie tonight. On the spur of the moment. JUST BECAUSE WE CAN! We will see "The Proposal" at 9:25.

9:15
We leave for the movie. We look cute.

9:20
We arrive at the movie theater. The parking gods are smiling on us because we are spontaneous! We park steps away from the theater - right in front.

9:21
The movie ticket gods are angry because the parking gods love us. We take out a loan for our movie tickets. Hi, I'm Crissy. I am a hundred years old and I think that movie tickets are overpriced.

9:22
We buy popcorn and a coke (to share because we are cheap ... also because we have very little money left after buying our tickets). The total comes to $11.50.

9:25
We walk into the theater. It's not full at all. We have great seats and the movie starts.

11:30
We leave the theater still laughing. The movie was Hi-Lar-Ious. We may see it again later in the week - it was that good.

11:45
You thought we were going to go to bed, didn't you? Nope, more scrapbooking...

Later
(Can't say how late - my mom's reading this!!!) We decide to call it a day.

Scrapbook Camp Update 1

Saturday

We all meet in Benjamin, Texas. Yes, it's the middle of nowhere. But it is almost perfectly equidistant from Amarillo (Grammy & PawPaw), Midland (Cory & Christi) and Flower Mound (John and me). The kids go nuts seeing each other, Charlotte almost darts out into traffic while we are unloading the cars (and loading them into Grammy & PawPaw's cars) and Cory and I die from the heat while installing carseats in Grammy's Land Cruiser. Literally. We are still laying in front of the courthouse in Benjamin dead.

It's 104 degrees.

1:30 p.m.
Christi and I start the drive to Dallas. There are no children in the car. It's really weird.

2:30 p.m.
We get to Olney and pull into Dairy Queen to grab a quick bite. Incidentally, they give us our Blizzards at the window, then have us pull around to wait for our food. You can imagine what we snack on while we wait for twenty minutes for our food.

2:50 p.m.
We receive our food. We are no longer hungry. Our Blizzards are mostly empty.

5:00 p.m.
We roll into Flower Mound. It's still 103 degrees. We need a few things from the store, so Christi suggests we "get it out of the way". We stop at Wal-Mart. I melt.

6:00 p.m.
We arrive at my house and unload Christi's things. She immediately wants to get started scrapbooking, so we get our stuff set up.

8:00 p.m.
We are living on the edge and just now decide to think about dinner. Can't do that with kids underfoot, for sure!!! We sit down to dinner with John (leftovers!). John starts a pickle-making project in the kitchen. Our nostrils are permanently damaged by the vinegar/dill odor.

Midnight
We head off to bed. John is upstairs watching a movie, so I leave a lamp on for him next to the bed.

Grandkids' Camp 2009

All my kids (and my brother's kids, too) are at my parents' cabin this week for Grandkids' Camp 2009. This is the first year that my parents have had all seven kids. I can only imagine how exhausted they are. Thank you, Grammy and PawPaw! They update their blog every night so that we can keep up with the happenings at GKC.

My sister-in-law, Christi, is here. We have spent every GKC together since 2001. It's the best time. Once she started scrapbooking, we decided to spend the 4-5 days working on our books. We have ALWAYS had at least one child with us and many years one or the other of us was pregnant. We decided to update my blog with our activities of the week so that Mom and Dad can see what we're doing this week. It's heaven. :)

The Plague you didn't hear about

This one didn't make it into the book of Exodus.

Holly Grace has to do a project on Egypt at school. She chose to make a "model" of Egypt. Into a large, shallow tub, we poured a bag of play sand. Then, we made a small "Nile River" down the middle, lined it with aluminum foil, and formed a delta at the low end. Then, we put a bit of potting soil down either side of the river and sprinkled rye grass seed down the riverbanks. Every couple of days, we "flood" the river and the grass has grown to be several inches tall. Later Holly Grace will add some small models of pyramids, etc.

So, after we put "Egypt" together, we left it on the bar in the kitchen. Soon we discovered that the potting soil and seeds had been disturbed and there were new topographic details emerging in the desert.

Charlotte.

She had to have been the culprit. I quickly let John know that we were going to have to move Egypt to a safer place, as it had been hit by the 11th plague - the plague of Charlotte. We had a good laugh over it, and then moved it into our bath tub. Our tub surround is so wide that she can't reach in and mess with it. (This is also where the baby chick lived, safely, for 2 1/2 weeks before she moved to the farm where she now resides.)

Later that day, John was sitting with Charlotte, having a conversation. He asked her, "What kind of plague are you?" She promptly replied, "A PINK one!" and giggled proudly. So we began referring to her as "the Pink Plague."

Anxious to see if she would "perform" for me, I asked her a couple of days later, "What kind of plague are you?"

She thought for a moment, then looked from me to John and said, "CHICKENS!"

Who knew?

In the Garden

Lots of people have been asking what's in our garden. Well, in our actual "garden", until yesterday, NOTHING! John and I cleaned it out (it was so overgrown after some neglect last year, ahem) and got it ready, but ran out of time to put anything IN. Besides, I raked and shoveled so much I developed a blister that's taken two weeks to heal! I was so traumatized, I had to take some time off from gardening.

We actually have two other "dedicated beds" for the things we love so much that we need MORE than we have room for in the garden. One is an approximately 50 square foot asparagus bed. Start your asparagus now and in three years you'll thank me! This is the first year we've harvested our asparagus and it's gone gangbusters! We eat asparagus every couple of nights with dinner. It grows SO FAST.

Our other bed is a dedicated strawberry bed. We started out with three little strawberry plants in our garden three years ago. Those multiplied and became 21 that year, then more than 50 after that! They are now in a 25 square foot bed on the south side of the house and, after a little trauma from transplanting them, recovering nicely. I walked by the other day and there were two little strawberries getting nice and ripe. I didn't share them. They were SWEET!

So, back to the actual "garden". Yesterday we put in 16 tomato plants - some Better Boys, some Early Girls, some cherry tomatoes, and something else (can't remember just now) and some "unknown" variety that my aunt dropped off (extras they couldn't plant in their HUGE garden). We also planted four bell pepper plants and two jalapeno plants. Those (the jalapenos) are solely for others, as I don't care for them. Leave a comment if you want some and I will save them for you when they start producing.

My "jack-of-all-trades" husband put a drip system in our garden last year, and it's sooooo very nice. Now if we could just keep the critters out. And I don't mean the kids. I mean, I do, but also the kind of critters that live down in the creek and come up to munch when we're not around.

Also, my uncle gave us some blackberry shoots when we were out at his farm last spring. We planted them on the fence behind our garden. One is doing GREAT and is blooming right now. The other, well, it kinda got mowed over sometime last summer because it wasn't well-marked. But, it seems to have recovered and is thriving! We probably won't get any fruit from it this summer, but next year we should! Also, plant #1 has sent up a shoot nearby, so we'll dig it up and put it on the fence as well.

There are lots of little seedlings in our garden right now. They look like they are either watermelons, cucumbers, yellow squash, or zucchini. That's what we had out there last year that may have re-seeded itself (which in itself seems miraculous to me). I tried to leave as many of them as I could and we'll see what we end up with!

I love gardening this time of year. It's so pleasant outside. Ask me again in July ... maybe not so much at that point. I hate going out there so much that our okra ends up 6-8 inches long and much too tough to eat by the time I go out to check on it.

And now, breaking the almost six-month silence ...

It was the Baby Jogger City Mini, or BJCM in stroller circles. There I've said it. It's overwith. And I am so glad because this post has had me stumped for this long. Here's the rub: She's ridden in it, like, twice. She's now "too big" for the stroller. She doesn't even call it her "Slow-der" anymore. And yet I can't get rid of it because what if?

What if we go to the State Fair and need a stroller because we stay all day and she's exhausted and almost thirty pounds and my arms can't take it anymore?

What if we go on vacation? Through an airport? And I don't want to lose her?

What if we go shopping? Oh, wait. *laughs maniacally* Like that's going to happen. That's what preschool days are for. And grocery carts. Wait a second. This might explain why just about everything in my house recently has been purchased at "The Wal-Marts".

Now, back to our regularly scheduled (or randomly posted) programming. Whew. It feels good to get that off my chest.