Friday, October 27, 2006

Post Every Day You Will


So I am gonna do this in November. Post once a day. Every day. For the whole month. I can do it. And YOU can too.

Interested in joining me and a bunch of other bloggers? Sign up here*. And be sure to let me know if you are in!





*This site's language is rated PG-13.

Friday, October 20, 2006

A Good Crime Deterrent

When we moved into our house, one of my favorite things about it was how we didn't have to do anything to it. (Much unlike my friend Anglea is doing to her current house.) The walls were painted in colors I liked-mostly. We had new counter tops, new kitchen cabinets and new fixtures all throughout the house. Everything from lighting to new faucets. It was glorious. (And made it so I could forget how much I hate our carpet.)

The two bathrooms upstairs have new toilet paper roll dispensers too. They are the kid with just a post so you can slide the TP roll on and off with great efficiency. It is perfect for the lazy TP Roll changer. The downstairs bathroom has a traditional toilet paper dispenser. The kind where you have to take the middle cylinder out and slide the empty roll off and then the full roll back on and then replace the whole thing without dropping the TP Roll on the floor because that's gross.

Yesterday I figured out why we have two different kinds of toilet paper roll dispensers upstairs and downstairs.

Toilet Paper Theft.

By putting the TP dispensers that require a little extra work in the guest bathroom, now my guests can't grab the roll and run.

So don't even try it.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Because Sometimes You Just Need to Laugh...



Lucy...eating a lemon...Mommy and Daddy are so mean! :)

..>

Friday, October 13, 2006

Colorado Part Three: In the Beauty of His Holiness



Day Two of driving…..are the kids driving us crazy yet?
Surprisingly, no! We had (cue the music from heaven) in car DVD players. And we also had (add angels with trumpets and extra bright light) The Curious George Movie on DVD!!! It was like driving miles and miles all by ourselves. J

For this leg of the drive we saw a whole LOT of nothing. And a whole lot of nothing. And nothing.
But don’t think we were bored; we had Mr. Trivia leading the way!
That’s right; give Damon a topic, say, clouds.
Mr. Trivia would ask the question, “What is the name of the cloud pattern we are driving under right now.”
Who was fastest on the radio button? Me? Kristen? David with some sort of smart aleck remark?

Besides learning totally random facts, I also learned:

Damon. Knows. Everything.
Seriously, everything.

Right before the rest of us threw ourselves at the feet of Mr. Trivia for even trying to walk around with our heads so empty without knowledge, we turned a corner in the road and entered Utah.
It was overwhelming.

We drove by these deep red dirt mountains. Rocks that were piled high on each other like the hills themselves were trying to touch God. There was even a feel of Dr. Seuss in the hills. I was amazed. I saw the sedimentary layers of the earth cut open by the road we were driving on that dated back to Noah and The Flood. It was like driving by a secret history.

The drive continues and we entered Colorado. It was there that I was humbled. Humbled by the beauty of God’s creation. Damon kept asking, “What do you think?” And I ran out of adjectives.

We were driving down the freeway beside the Colorado River. The trees leading up into the mountains were alive with reds, yellows and greens- it was nothing I had seen before. As we drove through tunnel after tunnel, I taught Nathan how you hold your breath and arms and feet in the air when passing through the tunnels. We drove around each gentle curve of the mountain and felt almost a part of the nature surrounding us. Around one of the curves, we came upon a small town nestled at the foot of the ash tree covered mountains. This was the perfect place to pull over.

When we got out of our cars, I wanted to take a million of pictures, laugh, fall to my knees in worship of the Lord and His Beauty and sing at the top of my lungs all at the same time. Instead I cried. I stood on the side of a mountain, overlooking a sleepy town, with some of my dearest friends around me and cried because I knew my wildest imagination couldn’t create such beauty, such perfection. If we had to turn around right then and go home, I would have been happy. I cried because I felt this moment was only the beginning of many moments to come all throughout the week.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Colorado, Part Two: Hoe-and-tel Number 1

When we pulled up to the hotel in Mesquite, NV, we were all SO SO happy to see a nice hotel. I was also kind of excited to see the WalMart Supercenter down the street-I had always heard of this magical place and its discount groceries but never actually visited one. Quick, Bethany, what did you forget???

We checked in our three separate rooms and we all discovered the same thing at the same time:

Toddlers LOVE hotel rooms! They have beds to jump on, there is TV, a fridge just their size and since Mom and Dad are so distracted bringing bags up to the room, they can enter and exit on a whim.

Even if you are Lucy.
Even if both parents are in the room.
Even when the (defective) top lock has been done.

So Lucy got to know the hallway of our hotel really well and we only really lost her once.

It was time to swim. Lets see, we packed swimsuits for ourselves but forgot them for the kids so Lucy got to go in just her swim diaper and Nathan went in the pair of shorts he wore in the car that day. Couple that with the generally rumpled look David and I were sporting and we had a nice cross country redneck family look going.

We had a good swim, knocked the chunks off in the outdoor shower and left the daddies to get the kids cleaned up so the mommies could go get some dinner. The guys planned to hit the buffet across the street for dinner so the rest of us were staying "home" with the kids so we "HAD" to go to Wal-Mart Super Center to get food for ourselves and the kids. It was everything I had imagined and MORE!

(For those of you keeping score at home, you can mark this moment as the moment that we officially stopped kidding ourselves that we could feed our kids healthy food while on a road trip.)

Once the food was purchased and kids fed, the 3 Mommies each tackled putting kids to sleep in a hotel in their own manner. Emmy used the straight on approach of laying Sophia down and then laying down with Alexis until she fell asleep. Kristen used the begging method of "Please, please, please Ben, go to sleep." I went with the tried and true method of hiding out in the bathroom with my laptop playing Spider Solitaire. After about 20 minutes of this, I got a text message from Kristen. Our texting conversation went something like this.

Kristen: I miss Chris

Me: Yeah, I kind of miss David…I just don't like sitting here in the bathroom

Kristen: I think mine is asleep, are yours?

Me: Yeah-mine are out. Hey, meet me in the hallway.

And that is how Kristen and Emmy and I ended up in the hallway of the Falcon Ridge Hotel in Mesquite, Nevada with coloring books and crayons in our pajamas. I would like to state, for the record, that Emmy is an amazing color-er! She used smudging and blending techniques that my Thomas the Tank Engine Coloring Book has never seen before. By the time the guys got back-and got over seeing their wives sitting out in the hallway of a hotel-we were slap happy but ready to sleep. Our bellies full of microwave oven dinners and our hubbies-smelling like smoke from the casino buffet!! Yuck.

Stay tuned for tomorrow installment of "Colorado Part Three" or "This Leg of the Trip Has Been Brought to You by the Curious George Movie!"

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Colorado, Part One

Welcome Home to me.


We went to Colorado-Estes Park-with Kristen and Emmy and all our families. So if you do the math, that is 3 Daddies, 3 Mommies, 2 three and a half year olds, 1 two and a half year old, 1 one and a half year old and 1 one year old. All in 3 SUVs. But the great thing? I would do it again in a heart beat. I am so blessed with amazing friends all across the board. These friends especially are great. We all love each other equally, our hubbies love each other, we love each other's spouses....none of that, "If only he wouldn't bring his wife along" you know?

I haven't been on a vacation this size in 5 years when David and I went to Hawaii before kids and even then, we flew and had to pack very little clothes (hee hee, for more than one reason.) It was quite an ordeal getting ready for this vacation but now I am a pro at getting my kids to fall asleep in a hotel room, hacking into the hotel's wireless internet and feeding my children a full meal from the menu at a Texaco Food Mart. (Where is the QuickTrip when I need it Liz!?)


We left Friday Morning from Poway and about 10 minutes into the trip Nate the Great wanted to know if we were at our cabin in Colorado yet. (Poor kid and his warped sense of time: he thinks each day is actually two days when he takes a nap. So if he naps, and, upon waking up in the afternoon, tells you about what he did at school that day, he will tell you that he went to school yesterday, not today. He is living 730 days a year instead of the standard 365.) We tried to explain that it was going to take a few days to get there and we would be staying at 2 hotels (or a “hoe-and-tell” as he says it) before we got there.


We had radios lent to us by our neighbors so the three cars could communicate. That was fun. After many inappropriate discussions and odd trivia from Emmy’s husband Damon, we decided that the radios release any inhibitions you may possess that might prevent you to have such odd, disgusting-yet-hilarious conversations with each other. Regardless, the radios helped the trip move along quickly.


We hit Mesquite, Nevada that evening after a good number of hours on the road. We did a quick inventory:


2 kids
2 parents
45 hairs out of place
10 decibels of hearing loss (actually less than we expected)
192 crevices in the car filled with Cheez It crumbs, papaya snacks and Breakfast Bites
3 Cars full of happy, vacationing families.
1 Hotel Swimming Pool calling our names.


……………………Part 2 to soon follow……………………….