Shooting hoops

We recently acquired a new portable basketball hoop that we wheel into the street and all the neighborhood kids come out to play pickup games. One mom asked me, "Do you really want to be the neighborhood hangout?" To which I replied, "Better here, than somewhere else. After the game, I'll make them take out my garbage and recycling cans."










Go Jer! Go Jer! Go Jer!

Wish it was spring...

This is the time of year where you kind of feel like, 'okay, holidays over. Winter, snow - that was fun. But I'm ready to be done with that'. The past few days here in Seattle has been 55 to 60 degrees and SUNNY! So I pulled out my gardening books to plan out this year's gardening projects and looked up my yard pictures. Thought I would share my pictures with you and you can dream about spring with me. It is so close...yet so far away. Today Blake, Chili, and I went out and cleaned up the backyard - only lasted about 1 hour, but good enough.

This is the view of my front yard in early April. I use this picture to remember where the bulbs are planted.

A gardening tip I received: use golf tees to mark where your bulbs are planted. The tees can be seen when you are digging around, but not visible to the street.
This is my backyard on the sunnyside in summer. The firepit you are seeing was last year's yard project. I'm not fond of turf grass - so we dug up one side of our yard and put flagstone down with groundcover and installed a firepit with crushed rock.

You know when you live in the suburbs when...

So today Jeremy and I had a hot date - we got a babysitter for four hours and went and looked at minivans. That's right, minivans. I've done the math back and forth and back and forth and even though we all try to avoid going there, I think that the minivan is the best option for our family. We had a minivan when Blake was born, but back then we were 25 years old and I thought it was funny that a woman in her mid-twenties was driving a white van. Now that we live in the middle of Trumanshow-ville suburbia, I don't think it is as funny now as it was then.

Sleepover part deux

This is where the boys got the concept of sleepover night - notice Chili is part of the pack in this picture as well. That's nana and poppy sleeping over.

SLEEPOVER!!

When I was growing up, my brother and I used to have "sleepovers" on Friday nights - which basically meant we would pull the trundle bed out from under his bed and I could sleep in his room. We were allowed to play with our toys in our beds, stay up late, and occasionally my mom would bring the small TV in his room and we would watch ourselves to sleep. This must be in the genes, because my boys despretely wanted a "sleepover" which meant we would pull out our couchbed and they could sleep downstairs and watch TV until late into the night. Chili LOVES sleepover night because that means she gets to sleep on the couchbed with them all night long. She always ends up with her head on jackson's pillow in the morning.

As Jackson puts it, "Chili was in heaven all night".

The Soggy Doggy

There is this wonderful local commercial up here in
Seattle for a local dog washing business called The Soggy Doggy. They are currently promoting their "Dog Wash-a-matic" machine which looks like a front loader washer. You put your dog in the machine, and it sprays your dog with water and soap, then dries it with warm air. Keep in mind that the dog is inside the machine at all times (it doesn't spin around however). Blake recently decided to put his toy dog (not Chili, don't worry) into our family dog washamatic - aka my washing machine.

here is their website so you can see the washamatic for yourself. http://www.thesoggydoggy.com/washmatic.htm

Redoing mom's room

painters are expensive, so we'll use our cheap labor that is built into the family. Isn't this why we have children?

problem is, this is the point in the painting project that the boys decided they were "done".

Stay tuned for the completed project.

Redoing mom's room part deux

Changing out the blinds - to the more fashionable bamboo roman shades

Grrrr....Grumble, Grumble....Grrr....

okay, here's my day today. I managed to make German pancakes (recipe of my childhood best friend's mother) in the oven AND run Jackson to his school for a before school art class he takes at 7:45am. We were on time, my kids' bellies were full, I had nothing to do today but get my eyebrows waxed and workout - boy my life felt pretty great. But then, that glowing moment lasted only so long because as I'm pulling out of the school parking lot, my car started sputtering. Hmmm....must be the cold weather, I think. So I continue to drive home. But then the sputtering gets worse AND the engine light goes on. I did get home but feeling very unnerved because I know an expensive "German car" repair is on the horizon. We've been talking about getting rid of the passat even though I really like my car. But then, once again, I'm stranded without my car for the next two days while the mechanic combs the state of Washington for three random coil engine parts that cost about $100 each. Grumble...Grrr....Grumble....Grrr.....excuse me while I feel a little sorry for myself right now.

What freaked me out...

I don't know about you guys, but one of my guilty pleasures is watching Wife Swap and Supernanny on monday nights on abc. I think the draw for me is even though I am really hard on myself as a mother, I feel after watching those shows that my kids aren't that bad or my family isn't that bad, or as a mother I'm not that bad. Last night, on supernanny they had a family where the mother was widowed and left with three boys and one toddler daughter. I got the impression that she was a somewhat passive parent and boy oh boy were those boys out of control!! And when I say out of control, they had swear words that even made me blush, hammered and detroyed each other and their house, and had absolutely no respect for their mother.- even hitting their mother and locking her out of her own bedroom! And i think the mother had kind of given up. This episode was particularly disturbing because I found a couple of similarities between that mother and me and using the power of correlation, I thought that perhaps my two boys would end up like hers because sometimes i'm kind of passive in my parenting. Never fear, when we woke up this morning, by boys were busy with their morning routines without being told, did all their morning chores, and were pretty pleasant and kind in their demeanor towards me. Can I tell you how relieved I feel?

When i grow up, I want to be just like my dad

One day a few months ago, Blake decided he wanted to go to work with dad. He wanted to wake up at midnight (like dad), work all night, then come home, eat lunch, then go to sleep (like dad). As it turns out, I dropped him off when Costco opened and he worked for ten minutes. Those three year olds...even though they work for a food court smoothie they are completely unreliable.

Another snow day...

This will seem funny to those of you who deal with ice and snow throughout the winter - we're kind of a bunch of woosies up here in the northwest when it comes to anything frozen. We're used to liquid stuff that comes out of the sky - not the frozen stuff. Anyway, when it snows up here, school gets cancelled bascially until the snow or ice melts. We've had about five snow days thus far and may get another snowstorm on Wednesday. my kids will be in school until the 4th of july - which isn't necessarily a bad thing...


blake learning how to make snow angels

Oh look - there's my child in the middle of the street - making a snow angel.

The Dog...

Meet Chili - our dog. She wants to be a jedi knight when she grows up. I happened to capture on film a day when she decided to practice wearing the jedi hood - a.k.a. kitchen curtains.

My two boys...and the dog

honestly, this picture says it all if you know my boys' personalities: jackson is the older one - responsible, good natured. And Blake - well that smirk on his face says it all. His motto in life is kind of like this: "I tried to be good, but I got bored". Cheers.

WELCOME! WELCOME!

Sitting here on my couch with a terrible cold and boys building a stellar castle in the other room and I thought - today is the day that i will finally start this blog I've been meaning to do! Can't find my camera to save my life, so no pictures for now, but at least it is a start! Inspired by my cool cousin in Utah, I decided to do this blog just to archive memories - things that I mean to remember, but often forget about. Kind of like when you happen to write something cool in your journal and then go back a year later to read it and say out loud, "that was funny" or "how we've changed since then".
Things to know about me right now: taking a break this quarter from school (I'm still a student at the university of washington studying child and family psychology), love watching tv shows on DVD (currently entrenched in medium, season 2) and planning two major house projects: a) redo the kid's playroom, and b) redesign the garden yet again.
see ya soon!