Author Archives: Jen
As much sun as I could stand before I had to scoot my chair over.
Today was Father’s Day swim day at the water park so we all went and had a great time. Of course I didn’t manage to get one single picture of Tom or us with the kids. So this picture of me will have to suffice. 🙂
Also? Your Tip of the Day? Don’t expect to stay mostly dry if you go down a water slide in a tube with your husband. I got totally dunked, drank a bunch of water, and came up coughing up a lung. But my makeup and lipstick didn’t budge!
Carnival reward!
The kids have been doing pretty good on our new summer schedule routine (no whining, picking up, keeping organized, doing schoolwork, following rules) so their weekly family reward was a trip to the local carnival!
We met friends there.
Bumper cars!
Katie wanted to go on the little coaster. Owen did not. 🙂
Owen’s list of cars he wants.
He used to just have two on it. I’m not sure what happened recently. 🙂
Someone got a timeout at the pool today.
One of the rules for going to the water park and being able to run around on their own is that they MUST come and check in at each safety break. These happen every two hours and are announced on the loudspeakers—and they clear the pools. We’ve had a few issues with them not remembering and they’ve been given warnings. Today was the last day for warnings, so Katie had to sit out for 15 minutes (past the end of the safety break, for a total of 30 minutes). I figure that’s small payment for the stress she caused me having to go hunt her down (and not finding her on the first go-round).
Look at that cute toothless face!
Part of our new couch is here!
There’s a long story behind this but suffice it to say we’re almost at the finish line.
Katie lost her first tooth!
She was a hot mess when it happened—she was afraid it was going to bleed like a bloody nose. I literally had to hold her and have her breathe deeply to calm down. But then she was happy!!
Getting her tooth pillow ready!
Who wants to come for ribs Saturday night?
We might have just discovered that Owen left the basement freezer open. Who wants to come for ribs Saturday night? Not kidding. We have four racks of ribs in the sous vide.
I told them they better not tell me they’re bored once this week.
Yes, this is how much milk was put back in the fridge.
At least they told me we needed milk when we were at Sam’s Club this morning. #thestruggleisreal
Kidisms 47
We were out and about and Tom was revving the engine and taking the corners fast to make the kids screech and laugh. Right as we were getting off the ramp onto the highway, Owen started to say he didn’t like to go that fast and Katie, seeing no one in front of us, says “But look at all the room we have to go fast!”
“Look at Ray! She’s having a soak tub!”
Me: Katie do you need to take water for lunch?
Katie: Nah, I can survive without it.
At the playground, Katie showed me how she could slide down the pole. I said I’d never done that.
Katie: Oh that’s right. You might break yourself.
How I relax at the pool.
In the shade, all the time.
He loves to interrupt my selfies.
So I included him!
My vertigo is back. Do. Not. Want.
It’s actually BPPV—or Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. It’s nothing major (the episodes are only happening in bed when I tuen over and they only last a few seconds), but it is annoying.
Each part of the name describes a key part of the inner-ear disorder:
Benign means it’s not very serious. Your life is not in danger.
Paroxysmal means that it hits suddenly and lasts a short time.
Positional means you trigger the vertigo with certain postures or movements.
Hopefully it just stops on its own like it did the last time.
My work buddy
She sits next to me at the table when I’m working.
Dual lap warmers
MEOW!
Katie’s shoe sorting.
I buy too many shoes (on sale) for Katie to remember what styles and sizes I have so I have to keep a photo collage to reference when I’m out shopping. Today we had to redo it since it hasn’t been done in about 2-3 sizes.
Owen is harder to buy for—here’s what was in his closet. 🙂
A girl and her dog.
Look who we ran into at the park!
They were just getting done with morning camp and we were just arriving to go to the playground!
Katie loves the pole.
They still like the baby swings. The only rule is that they have to get in and out of it themselves because I am too old to be picking them up, putting them in, and trying to wrangle them out.
Two cuddle bugs.
Maggie scared the hell out of us tonight. Again.
It’s hard to get back to sleep after you’ve been awoken at 3:30am by your dog screaming (seriously, that’s the best way to describe it…and it’s seriously awful) because she’d gotten her mouth/snoot/teeth hooked between the bars of her crate and her paw was bleeding from scratching at it.
If Tom wouldn’t have been here I’m not sure what I would have done. We didn’t even have tools big enough to cut the wires—he had to bend them with brute force until they broke.
We wondered what on Earth was going on…until we realized it was raining again. She must be REALLY messed up from that lightning strike.
(Much after the fact we both said we really wish we would’ve gotten a picture of it because it was truly unbelievable. Honestly, I had thought about getting a picture but I had left my phone upstairs because we hadn’t expected to find anything insane…and we were too wrapped up in extracting her safely to worry about it.)
So we bandaged her paw and Tom stayed up (since it was almost his normal waking time) and I was up—trying to calm down—until about 6am when I finally crashed.
This is the solution Tom had come up with by the time I rolled out of bed at 9:30.
It’s not perfect but we really don’t want to let her free roam if we can help it as she tends to move around quite a lot at night and wakes us up.
She doesn’t seem too worse for the wear. Thankfully.
These two love the bean bag.
Ha! It’s not who you thought, is it? (We sold our couch in preparation for a new couch that is taking longer to arrive than we initially planned.)
Tech-free summer is even longer now…
So Owen snuck into our bedroom and was caught using the iPad that had previously been taken away twice, including for the rest of the summer (and then lying about it). Owen was the actual guilty party but Katie knew he’d done it.
I want to take away the new Xbox they’ve been promised, but after some discussion with Tom, we’re not taking it away but the date they get it back will get pushed out if they keep making bad decisions. (Owen has had two major bad decisions since. I’m hoping he gets it by Christmas.)
We’re not even a week into summer break and I’m done.
The weather cleared so a bunch of this happened.
I love that she’s not afraid.
She came home like this.
Katie was playing at the neighbors and came like this—they were doing hair and dressing up. She loved the earrings.
Welcome to my personal hell.
Okay, one of my personal hells: A garage sale. Last minute. In the rain.
This is a community-wide sale that we only found about Thursday so we didn’t put much effort into it. And since it was rainy we didn’t really have much to do anyways so I sat there and worked on business and blog stuff the whole time.
I did have a helper for a bit.
And a cuddler.
A Katie quartet
She needed to change her clothes to go to the dentist and her first attempt didn’t cut it (bike shorts that are meant to only be used as undershorts for dresses) so I suggested the skirt. Then surprised her by suggesting her Tangled heels. She was so damn cute…
Waterslide!
The perfect suit for her.
