And from the school’s Facebook account (back in class):
Category Archives: Facebook
Elsa vs. Robot
Edited to add: I posted this picture on Facebook and these were the great responses:
What Owen knows about me.
This has been going around Facebook lately, so I did it with Owen. I have to say his answers surprised me—things I was SURE he would answer a certain way he didn’t. And I have no idea why laundry makes such a big impression!
Without ANY prompting, ask your child these questions and write down EXACTLY what they say. It is a great way to find out what they really think. When you re-post put your child’s age.
Owen, age 6
1. What is something mom always says to you? Make bed.
2. What makes mom happy? Happy kids.
3. What makes mom sad? When we are being grumpy.
4. How does your mom make you laugh? Make jokes.
5. What was your mom like as a child? Playing with your grandma.
6. How old is your mom? 41
7. How tall is your mom? 5 inches I think
8. What is her favorite thing to do? Watch Ellen.
9. What does your mom do when you’re not around? Watch Ellen again.
10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for? A fashion show.
11. What is your mom really good at? (loooots of thinking) I don’t know.
12. What is your mom not very good at? Doing laundry.
13. What does your mom do for a job? Wash clothes.
14.What is your mom’s favorite food? Pizza
15.What makes you proud of your mom? I don’t know.
16. If your mom were a character, who would she be? Marion (From Indiana Jones)
17. What do you and your mom do together? Play games
18. How are you and your mom the same? We both do laundry.
19. How are you and your mom different? You have dark brown hair and I have light brown hair.
20. How do you know your mom loves you? Because you love me.
21. What does your mom like most about your dad? You love him.
22. Where is your mom’s favorite place to go? Shoppers (grocery store)
23. How old was your Mom when you were born? 35 (He guessed and was right!)
Truth.
We’re even.
The kind of friend I am.
I saw this on Facebook and had to save and share it. 🙂
Owen’s butterfly
Owen was so excited to show me his project from art class—I had to stop him from trying to unroll it as we walked home!
Do all moms love their kids’ artwork as much as I do? Or maybe I’m just super excited drew something not video game related. 🙂
Facebook friends saw something else.
I see a ninja turtle.
If that’s not a ninja turtle fighting a giant spider, I’ll be really disappointed.
So I told Owen people thought it was a ninja turtle—thinking he’d be thrilled because he likes ninja turtles—and he said incredulously “It’s a butterfly!” 🙂
Winter Humor
Superhero Spirit Day!
Today was Superhero Spirit Day at Owen’s school! I had debated sending him in his complete Superman outfit but honestly worried about bathroom breaks… 🙂 So he wore his Super Owen cape and a mask! This was a picture posted to Facebook!
We have bunk beds!
We’ve casually thought about getting bunkbeds for Owen’s room (one with steps instead of a more dangerous ladder) but didn’t want to spend a lot of money on them because we didn’t need them. So one night I happened to see on a Facebook yard sale group that someone was selling a set for a decent price. The bonus was that they were shorter overall so the top bunk was not super high. Long story short, we ended up getting them. It was mostly a spur of the moment decision, but Tom and I both agreed on it so there you go.
Well, have I mentioned that I hate bunkbeds because they’re a total PITA to make? But I thought maybe I was misremembering or blowing it out of proportion and even if it was awful, I’d suck it up for my kid…but holy crap it’s just as awful as I thought.
And.
I thought I’d like that they weren’t full height beds…but holy crap are they low. There’s no way Owen can sleep in there (under there) long term because he can’t even sit up—he can barely roll over. And there’s no way adult guests could fit comfortably in there (when we need an extra bed, we’ve put someone there and move Owen to Katie’s room). And of course that makes making the bed even harder.
So at this point I was thinking we’d made a huge mistake.
But.
Thankfully Tom is handy and he can lower the base of the bed so there’s more room.
Worst case, we take it apart after a few weeks of testing and sell it (hopefully getting what we paid). :/ Best case Owen loves it and we get a lot of use out of it. (Mommy guilt sucks. I’m tempted into things I’d otherwise not be.) And for now, the kids loved playing on it while we were assembling it…
“I can touch the ceiling!”
Bed time!
Our personalized snowflakes!
A friend posted a link on Facebook to create your own personalized snowflake. I thought it was so cool I did all of our names. You can actually watch the snowflake change shape as you enter letters!
The order:
- Jennifer – Owen
- Thomas – Katie
Pumpkin fun at school!
Owen’s class has been learning about pumpkins. (These pictures were stolen from someone else who was there helping out the class and posted them in Facebook.)
Today they cut some open!
And got to see what was inside!
And even helped scoop them out!
Bye bye Birdie…it’s bittersweet.
I wasn’t expecting to see this today in my Facebook feed—and it totally caught me off guard. I’m obviously happy, but it’s definitely bittersweet. I hate that we lost all the money we put into it (floors, deck, fence, shed, and stainless appliances), but am glad we were able to short sell fairly easily without losing more.
It’s no secret to anyone that I didn’t love the house (that damn kitchen!) and it’s obvious it wasn’t going to be our forever home…but we still had six years worth of memories there—pre- and post-kids—and it’s a little sad to think it’s really gone. But then, I am an emotional sap…
Accidental utensil rainbow
It wasn’t until I shoved one of the blue spatulas in that I realized they were in rainbow order!
I also posted this to Facebook and our friend Claudia posted “Or you have gay spatulas.” It made Tom and I actually LAUGH OUT LOUD. 🙂
Snakes. Why does it have to be snakes?
Bugs? Don’t like ’em but I can deal. Frogs? Okay. Lizards? Fine. But snakes? AHHHHH.
I don’t do snakes.
Guess what Tom just found curled up in the garage…in the very center of our garage sale pile?!
He poked at it with a stick to get it moving. It travelled around a bit—and was probably 4-5′ long. FEET.
And then, if that wasn’t freaky enough…IT SLITHERED INTO THE MOLDING AROUND THE GARAGE DOOR FRAME.
DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY.
SO IT’S REALLY INSIDE THE GARAGE NOW.
We need to move today. 😐 I’m not sure I can go in the garage again.
Tom looked it up and it’s apparently a rat snake?! Tom says it’s a good snake. Sorry, there’s no such thing as a good snake.
/shudder
Here’s the conversation that happened on Facebook after I posted…
You will never be this loved again.
A friend posted this on Facebook and I loved it. It’s hard to think when you’re in the middle of a meltdown, tantrum, or mess…but it’s the truth. I’d love this on a big poster to hang somewhere I’d see it every day…
So. How big does a hole in your hand have to be before you should consider getting stitches?
I was washing knives this morning—being careful!—yet I still stuck myself. Right in the middle of my right palm right down a major line. Ugh. I kept pressure on it and didn’t think it was all that serious, so I posted the above question on Facebook. These were my favorite responses:
Can you see thru it? 🙂
A little duct tape will take care of that!
If you have to ask, you probably need stitches.
In all seriousness…between all the responses, a quick Google, and talking to David (my ex-PA stepdad), I decided to go to the ER. However, there was one problem—all the roads were still completely covered in ice. I had a brief thought that maybe the main roads would be better (like at home, Roberts Road can be horrible, but once you cross North Down it’s clear) but DUH, this is North Carolina. I felt okay going slow (25 in a 45) but as I got closer to town, I saw a line of cars slowing down, some stopped, and some turning around. I wasn’t even halfway to town by that point, so I just turned around and went home. (Come to find out later, it was at least a tractor-trailer accident and someone caught another accident on their phone while stopped for the previous accident.) And the police were telling people to stay off the roads. So I made the right call. If my hand had been lots worse, I may have pressed on—but it wasn’t.
However. The more I waited and watched, the more paranoid I got. It hurt—but it was most likely just normal bruising and not (my paranoid side) that I cut a muscle or nerve. It had stopped bleeding—but started again when I opened my hand too much. By this time it was after dinner and dark and there was no way I was going out on the roads…which meant even if I decided to go to the ER in the morning, it would be past the general 12-hour cutoff for suturing a cut. Ugh.
So I popped some more pain pills (a naproxen at first this morning, then a hydrocodone this afternoon, now Tylenol tonight), slapped some Neosporin and a bandaid on, and called it good for the night. If it’s still oogy in the morning, Tom will take me to the ER. He wouldn’t have to take me, but he has to report to work tomorrow at 11…unless, of course, he’s dealing with me. 🙂
P.S. I just realized the pic makes it look like one big hole. Trust me, it’s not a gaping hole…it’s just blood making it look that way.
Throwback Thursday
Throwback Thursday happens on Facebook and I love posting pics. I need to post some of them here because the blog doesn’t go back that far for most that I post…so stay tuned for that. However, this is what I posted today.
Welcome home, Tom!
He wasn’t scheduled to land at MCAS (Marine Corps Air Station) Cherry Point until 6:30, at which point they had to unload and do admin stuff and only THEN get bussed an hour to Camp Lejeune. The official ETA was 10:15, so I planned to leave at 9. But it’s the military, so surprise!
The easiest way for me to do this is follow a direct timeline according to my texts and Facebook posts. 🙂
6:28 Owen tells me he wants daddy to pick him up from school tomorrow and “Mama, you can stay in the car.” He’s going to have such a big surprise in the morning!
6:44 Tom texted: Landed
6:44 I texted back: Woohoo
6:45 I posted to Facebook: The eagle has landed. (It was Liked by 72 people.)
8:01 Tom texted: On the move. (He sent a Glympse so I could follow his progress.)
8:19 Tom texted: I should be ready by 2130.
8:20 I texted back: 9:30?!? I need to leave earlier.
8:24 I texted my next door neighbor (who was coming to stay with the kids) asking if she could come over a bit earlier.
8:40 I pulled out of the driveway.
9:03 & 9:13 Following his progress—if I had left about 10 minutes earlier, I would have likely been following the bus on base:
9:17 I posted this picture on Facebook: So close, yet not quite.
9:21 Tom texted: At armory now.
9:21 I texted back: I’m watching. 🙂 (I could still see him walking around on Glympse.)
9:26 I posted this picture on Facebook: Bags are unloaded from a separate truck first, ahead of the guys.
9:27 I posted this picture on Facebook: This is what the scene looks like.
9:37 Tom texted: We are half way done. 15 minutes. Getting back on bus. Four guys left.
9:40 I posted to Facebook: I was so excited to get out of the house that I forgot it was freezing. I have no hat, gloves, or scarf. I’m frozen.
9:43 Tom posted to Facebook: M4, M9, and NVGs turned into armory. On bus to see Jen and do the Sea Bag Drag.
9:45 I posted this picture on Facebook: Waiting while freezing my fingers off.
9:46 I posted this picture on Facebook: They’ve rearranged the bags three times now.
9:54 A friend took these pictures of our reunion. Not quite as romantic a picture as you’d probably imagined. 🙂
And of course our traditional selfie (we did them before they were a thing):
9:59 After Tom found his bags, we took this selfie with the iPhone so we could post it on Facebook: He’s home! Better pics later! (It was Liked by 127 people.)
10:04 A buddy of Tom’s helped haul all his gear to the car and then took this picture:
10:48 Maggie welcomes daddy home:
I always said I wouldn’t color my gray…
But just a little wouldn’t hurt, right?! I know I have some gray, but when I looked at this pic I snapped today, I have to admit I was a little shocked.
Facebook comments:
- Kristin—I don’t mind my gray either, but my hairdresser seems to. She owns my hair, so I get what I get. 🙂
- Jean—Love graying hair! Don’t change it.
- Tommy—If you color, go crazy. A magenta or blue streak ought to look good there.
- Brad—Hair color questions aside, this is a very good picture of you. You could do what I do and get a “tint” – I’ve got a little less natural gray than what I see in your picture, but when I went to my new style a few years ago, my wife convinced me to try the tint as well. The analogy my stylist uses is that the tint is like stain or varnish on wood; it’s translucent and lets the underlying product show through, albeit with a slightly different color, whereas an actual dye job is more like paint. I’m probably going to get hate mail from this, but since you asked: Knowing about what age you are, I’d cover it a little, whether tint or the full works. Strictly my opinion. 🙂
- Me—I’m not hiding my age: I turned 40 this year. 🙂
- Kelly—You’re pretty.
- Eddy—Just remember, you earned that gray hair!
- Kristin—Eddy, that’s how I look at it. I earned it. And Kelly, you’re completely correct.
- Katherine—I dye mine every 4-6 weeks. I will NOT go gray without a fight. At least not until I’m a grandmother.
- Tom—What happened??? I have only been gone six months!
- Me—I told you it’s been rough.
- Wendy—Time to hit the (dye) bottle.
- Elizabeth—I may have earned my gray hair but I def don’t want to see it! (at least not until I’m older) 🙂 Dye that up!
- Me—FYI Tom said he liked it but I can color it if I want.
- Wendy—Tom said that because he is a very wise man. He knows there is no other answer.
- Ruth—YOU LOOK GORGEOUS! I wouldn’t color it!
My diagnosis.
Nerd parenting!
I just told Owen there was a new Star Wars Mythbusters and he was positively gleeful.
My friend called it “Nerd parenting at its best!”
Daddy wanted to go on errands with us.
Tom texted me on Facebook to say good morning and I told him we were headed out on errands. He said he’d like to go with us, so I kept sending pictures. And FYI it’s harder than you’d think to take pictures while you’re shopping…while trying to keep an eye on one and keeping the phone away from the other who wants “Alno.” 🙂
Waiting for the hair place to open:
Getting ready to get his hairs cut:
Waiting for brother:
At Walmart:
A tempting display:
“I want to push her!”
Done!
Showing daddy Owen’s big boy booster seat (he uses the regular seat belt now) and his new hair cut:
Waving to daddy!
The stockings were hung…
The first attempt…
And the stockings drive me nuts. Does anyone have stockings that hang correctly? This is our third set that hang sideways. Why is it so hard for manufacturers to comprehend how a hook will make it hang? This irritates me EVERY year.
So I posted exactly that on Facebook…and my friends came through with ideas!
But first, the kids seeing them for the first time:
So…my second attempt, complete with curtain rod! Perfect!!
Well, the stockings were perfect—but the garland needed adjusting. There’s no way I could live with the garland like that. Looking at it all day every day. /shudder
So, the third and final attempt:
And that’s as good as it’s going to get this year!
Today was a Facebook day.
Nothing really blog-worthy happened today…but I did post a few things on Facebook that I thought I’d share here:
Up today? Toy Story. Both are fully entranced. Unfortunately, we only got to see about 10 minutes of the movie before our network decided to flake out…and an hour of messing with it did nothing. Which leads to…
I am so sick of our worthless wireless network that there just might be 500 yards of ethernet cable running through the house when Tom gets home.
On the best of days, I don’t have the energy for two sick kids (with one super snotty girl). On a day like today when I am feeling exhausted and headachy, I REALLY don’t have the energy to be up and wiping noses every two minutes. But when you can see the snot fly through the air during a sneeze…you can’t really ignore it. At least Owen can (mostly) do his own and can kind of help with Katie…but I still need to intervene a lot.
Aww crap. I just realized Katie is likely teething. It’s about the age and would explain the extra chewing and slobber. Yeah, you’d think I would have thought of that before now…but no.
I’m so glad Owen didn’t want to take a nap today so that he could fall asleep on the couch at 4:45. 😐
And I just had to be a mean mom and wake Owen up from a nap. I just couldn’t let him take a long nap at this time of day when his bedtime is 7:30…because I am NOT giving up my nightly alone/me time if I can help it. Especially since I want to go to bed early since I’m not feeling the best.
How can one tiny girl produce SO much snot?!
Of course the best time to find out the humidifier in your kid’s room is dead is at bedtime. GRRR. Unfortunately, this means a trip to town—since it’s the weekend, Amazon wouldn’t get here until Wednesday…and with a coupon at BB&B I can get $10 off. Blurg.
It’s all 100% true.
I usually don’t repost these types of things that I read on Facebook…but after a day when most of the stuff on the list has been irritating me, I really needed to see it to get a grip.
Things about me you might not know.
This game has been going around Facebook whereby you are given a number and you are then required to tell that many unique or fun things about yourself that most people wouldn’t know. I’ve really enjoyed reading the answers from all my friends, and while I didn’t officially get a number I thought it would be fun to play along.
- At a very young age I knew I didn’t want children and actually asked my mom if I could get a hysterectomy. Wisely, she assured me I should wait.
- I still didn’t want kids until a few years after getting married… But that changed during the few days after finding out my Grandpa Len had died and I was with all my extended family back in Michigan and I realized how much I loved my family and didn’t want it to end with me. It’s a good thing Tom was on board.
- From that moment, it took three years to get pregnant and involved both of us being tested (no issues), though one of those years Tom was deployed. 🙂
- We are currently on our third deployment: ~9 months, ~13 months, and hopefully this one with kids will be the shortest at ~6 months. When you dream about falling in love with a military man (Oh! Those uniforms!) you never think about the sucky parts.
- In college I made a list of the top 25 or so things I was looking for in a partner. The top 5 were CRITICAL. When I met Tom? He had none of the top 5 but I still knew from the first night he was the one. Yes, I knew the very first night that we would get married. It took four years but we did it!
- I loved every part of my wedding and would do it all over again in a hot second. I loved all the unique touches (trumpeter, writing our own vows, one of the groomsmen barfing in the bushes during the ceremony, reception on a dinner train, personalized cake topper, and a horse and carriage) and to this day people still tell me how awesome it was.
- For someone who is a homebody and doesn’t like change, the military is not really the best thing for me. I always said I would wait to have kids until we were settled so they wouldn’t have to move schools…but life just doesn’t work that way (I got old too fast and Tom had decided to stay in for 20). But, we have met the greatest people and can’t imagine life without having met our best friends Roger & Ursula Mitchell and Tom & Karen Trimble).
- I :heart: Amazon. If I never had to leave my house to shop I would be just fine. I have my fingers crossed that someday we move somewhere that Amazon delivers fresh groceries. If you ask me where I got something, chances are probably 90% it was from Amazon, 5% it was from another online source, and 5% it was local. 🙂
- If I never had another job again I would be just fine. I am NOT someone who has to work to feel validated.
- I don’t consider myself a hoarder, but my pantry has been referred to as Dharma. Yes, I also :heart: Costco and Sam’s Club.
- I hate being late. For anything. Even with two kids on a hectic morning, I still make it to Pre-K (with a 15 minute drive) at least five minutes early.
- This was the first year since we got married that we didn’t have Chinese for our anniversary dinner (it started as luck then we planned it and even managed during his past deployments). We changed it to steak and shrimp this year so we’d be eating the same thing on the same day!
But I don’t want wine!
So, this happened today.
Alas, I really wasn’t anything special as he was apparently accepting friend invites from anyone! 🙂
*Edited to add: Hmmm, today his Facebook page is completely MIA. Oh well, it was fun and exciting while it lasted!
Teenage Crush Flashback
What a flashback I had today. I was 13 and in LUUUUUV with Don Johnson…so I obviously had this record! RECORD, people. As in not even on cassette…
