Monday Meanderings

Summertime has been a time of toast. And cereal. Basically the only two things the girls have been eating since May.

Savanna has decided that she wants toast with plain cinnamon instead of the traditional cinnamon and sugar. Problem is, she doesn't actually eat it.

I used to clean bathrooms and do laundry on Mondays. Now I am down to just laundry, leaving the bathrooms to fend for themselves. Results as expected.

Stayed up until past 3 to finish a Wilkie Collins mystery before my Shakespeare class started today. Loved the book. Paying the price.

Moving expenses have been a nightmare. Wasn't the point of all this to SAVE money?

Haven't had to spend too much on gas lately. Turns out, not getting dressed quickly stifles my desire to want to go anywhere besides the pool, which we can walk to.

I think I broke my mom's exercise bike. Turns out, consoling myself over the loss with handfuls of peanut  m & m's has not been the wisest of decisions.

Time to Say "So Long"

Craig and I had this gem done many moons ago in the beginning stages of our domestic bliss. We had it up in our first apartment, and never have displayed it again since, so we decided it was time to part with our sexy caricature once and for all...though not without photographing it first for posterity's sake. Now you (and posterity) know what we would look like if we were cartoons.

Pretty accurate, don't you think? Except I am not convinced that he actually got my eyes small enough.

Bedrooms and Bum-Bums

After a couple nights on the couch,

 (so she could be closer to us while she was sick)

 Julia tried taking over the loft and started 

calling it her room. We nipped it in the bud and sent her back
 to her actual room though not without some regret that we had to start putting the girls to bed in the same room again.

("She won't stop singing!"

"She's wiggling too much!"

"I can't sleep when she's in here!"

Etc.)

In related news, I peeked my head into Savanna's
tent-bed the other night to give her a smooch
while she slept and just about planted one
on her little bum-bum. She had flipped around in
her sleep and I almost discovered it a second too late.
When I told her about my near-miss the next
morning, Vanna just about died laughing.

32 and better all the time...

 32 years ago, in a kingdom far away,

this handsome prince was born.

Years later, he met and married his loving, doting princess.

And she lived happily, blissfully, wonderfully ever after.

Happy Birthday to the sweet man who picked me. Can't believe what a prince you turned out to be!

What Not to Wear

Here are two of this season's fashion faux pas to avoid for those who like to stay in the know.

Exhibit A: The winner of the Tracy family's Ugliest Christmas Sweater Contest. (My sis couldn't find an adequately ugly sweater for a contender, so she made one, complete with poinsettias, bows, and bells.) Pictured here on my brother-in-law, LaVerl. Even when it's cold, sometimes you should just say no.

Exhibit B: Your two-year-old nephew's jacket. Sometimes tight is right, but only when you can actually get it on all the way. Modeled here by my brother, Michael.

Check out that camera strap, people. I should probably be fired from taking pictures for a while.

On Genes and Furniture Placement

My dear husband is a very motivated person. He loves to plan and scheme and to see said plans and schemes come to fruition. Case in point: while we were moving, he brought almost every single piece of our furniture from our upstairs to our downstairs and then again from downstairs to upstairs at my parents' house completely by himself. We're talking dressers, entertainment center, desk, etc. (Well, some call it motivated, others call it crazy.) He truly will do anything once he sets his mind to it. (Once he sets his mind to it, mind you...not when I set his mind to it...)

His rationale was that with the combined forces of a dolly and his smooth moving skills, it really wasn't such a big deal. (Here we differ on a large scale: I have been known to consider it a big deal to get a jar open by myself.) His mad skills involve moving furniture end over end on their way up and down the stairs, making it an allegedly "easy" task.   (As you can see, he and I don't typically use the word easy in the same kinds of sentences.)

The more I get to know my oldest child, the more I see how like her dad she is. Julia is very motivated, very independent, and she very much likes doing things that are her own idea (and little else). Case in point: the ottoman. One morning when the girls had risen with the sun (and thus a lot sooner than the likes of me) I found that they had somehow managed to drag the ottoman all the way up the stairs and get it up on the top bunk. (They = mostly Julia.) While I sat their dumbfounded, Craig recognized her genius. He asked how she got it up the stairs and she replied, ever so nonchalantly, the she had done it end over end.

The funny thing is, she never actually saw Craig move any of the furniture down or up the stairs, because he had done it all after the kids had gone to bed. She just figured it out because her crazy little brain wires are identical to her dad's.

Guess it's true what they say after all: the ottoman really doesn't sit far from the couch.

Some Food Humor to Satisfy the Palate

Lexa's idea of helping with dinner

Tortilla Face

(Scary) Tortilla Face

These girls leave no evidence behind...

The new comfortable way to drink Pero from the couch

Ready for Bed

During all of the moving craziness (when I was apparently not paying enough attention to my children) Julia came home from school one day and said she wanted to get her pjs on. She then proceeded to jammify herself in record speed. When I mentioned that she had done it super-quick, she said, "Do you know how I did it so fast? I had my nightgown on under my clothes!"

 Yep, all dang day under the hot Phoenix sun, J wore two layers of clothes so she would already be in pajamas when she got home.

With all of the pajama wearing and blankie-sneaking 

that goes on with this girl, you would think she
would be more excited to go to bed at night...

Hot Lips

A little while before we moved, I was pulling warm clothes out of the dryer and a tube of Chapstick fell onto the floor. My smart cookie instincts told me to open that tube right up, and when I did, molten hot Chapstick dripped right down onto my tired little feet. I consider it a tender mercy that the tube didn't leak all over my newly cleaned load of laundry.

We were 4 days away from moving, and I would not have dealt well with ruined clothes in that moment.

Moving On and Standing Still

For quite a while, Craig and I have been considering the idea of moving closer to his parents so that we would be more available to help them. (Read: Craig thought it was a good idea and I wasn't ready.) Craig's sweet dad has Parkinson's Disease and his equally sweet mom is caring for him entirely on her own. We were already relatively close to them (about 35 minutes) but knew that we needed to be closer. Until really recently, though, the time just didn't seem right. Then, one day, something seemed to just click and we both knew that the time had come to move on. (Read: I was finally (mostly) ready.)

So began the whirlwind process of refinancing our house so we could afford to rent it out, asking the ginormous favor of my parents to let us move into their temporarily vacant house for the summer, hiring a property manager, looking for renters, renting a storage unit, packing up all of our belongings, rearranging someone else's house to accommodate our needs, and saying goodbye to a house and a ward that we love, all the while wondering how on earth everything was going to work out. Oh, and also trying to find a new house to move into before my parents come back in the fall. It has been a period of overwhelmingly nightmarish and hectic scrambling, the likes of which I have never experienced.

Now that we are semi-settled (as much as we can be while still looking for a permanent house and knowing that we will be moving yet again with in the next few months) I feel like I am in a weird sort of limbo. Not really in my old life, but not quite into my new life yet either. After such an acutely overwhelming experience, I somehow feel...underwhelmed. When so much was going on, I really didn't have time to think about how I was feeling (besides the un-ignorable sensation of constant stress) and now that the rush is over (but with so much still left undecided) it's hard not to feel blue. And knowing that this faith-stretching, prayer-saying, breath-holding time in my life is not yet complete doesn't exactly help the sunshiny rays of optimism shine through to my heart. One of these days I am going to run out of sighs completely.

Thank goodness all of the most vital parts of my life are still in tact: wonderful marriage, amazing kiddos, happy family life. And thank goodness we are living next to a pool for the summer. (Since it appears I have not yet had enough experience in the holding my breath department this year.)

P.S.

The girls are settling in just fine...

...as are their beloved stuffed animals.