The fact that these two amazing human beings call me mom is the best thing that ever happened to me. A lobster dinner is just icing on the cake.
Happy Mother's day to my mom, my sister, and all the dedicated, loving, hard-working women out there. And thanks to the men that gave us the gift of motherhood. Best gift ever.
We went camping for Spring Break (for five days in a tent!) and came home with buckets and boxes full of treasures from the sea. The beach we were at has tide pools, interesting and varied rocks polished smooth by the waves, and shells and sea glass of all different sizes and colors. But what to do with all the goodies, aside from putting them in jars and bowls and/or leaving them to gather dust in the garage?
I used some crochet cotton and the Klutz Hemp Bracelets book to create some wearable memories of our great week. This was the first one I made, just a trial run, and since then I've made a few more, with a few beads added in.
I also collected some smallish rocks with natural holes in them, that I hope to string up and make into necklaces. I want to do some crocheted rock covers, too. Ack! So many ideas, not enough time or energy.
I found this amazing, incredible, natural heart rock (I mean, isn't that freaking beautiful?!) but Jessica made me put it back into the water because she said the seaweed was still alive. I don't think it was, but couldn't tell her for absolute positive sure that is wasn't, so I was a good girl and put it back in the ocean. Thank goodness for cameras, or that sucker would have had to come home with me.
And one last souvenir I brought home? I had a pretty bad sunburn on the backs of my legs and my feet. I'm the one with the pink water shoes, so, yup, it now looks like I have some funky tattoos on my feet. At least they kind of resemble hearts - and thank goodness for socks!
So, I've been missing a lot of things lately. Missing my family at Thanksgiving because we couldn't travel, missing the kids' school activities, and missing from this blog space. Why? Because I got a job exactly one month ago. After 9+ years of not working outside the home, I finally accepted the fact that I need to financially contribute to the household, and after a few false starts, I got a wonderful job that I'm loving. It's seasonal, so I won't be working when the kids are out of school. Most days, I am still able to drop off the kids and pick them up at school, and man, that first paycheck sure felt wonderful. I get to be around books all the time, and I don't have to deal with customer service. Love!
Except for all the "missing," of course. I feel guilty about not helping out in the classrooms, I feel stressed when Rebecca's grades seem to be slipping, and I feel sad when Jessie wakes up at 4:52 a.m. to come into my bedroom because she knows I have to be at work before she starts school the next morning and is afraid I will leave the house without saying goodbye. I feel a pang every single day when I leave the kids, but I suppose we'll all get used to it. Sooner or later. I knew it was going to be hard, and a big adjustment, I just didn't think it would be such a physical feeling in the pit of my stomach every day.
Yesterday, Jessica said she'd pack me snacks for my lunch. I got a Hello Kitty container filled with goodies. Candies from her special Halloween stash, a Rice Krispie treat, crackers, and a love note. Just like the ones I write for her. Warmed and filled my heart for sure.
I've been getting these cookies from IKEA ever since I first started going there. And now they're discontinuing them?! Is that true? How can that be?! Is there anything equivalent that I can buy easily here in the States? The girls and I bought three packages from the last case our local IKEA had. We'll be savoring them slowly. Sob!
The tooth fairy has been really busy at our house lately. Between the two kids, we lost four teeth in five days. They were popping out all over the place!
One of the gifts left by the Tooth Fairy was this cool box made from two super-crispy one-dollar bills. Jessie wrote her a note asking if she could please have her tooth back again, so she put the tooth back inside.
I love the gap, front and center. I'll be kinda sad when the permanent teeth come in. Summer is over, and the babies go back to school on Monday. I am going to miss them, it's been a wonderful few months. We did a lot, but it went by too fast and there is still so much we want to do. Lazy days are over, no more going to bed late and sleeping in even later.
But look! No training wheels for Rebecca. Such a huge accomplishment.
Goodbye, summer 2011.
Regina and I have been communicating for years now, from the very beginning of my blog, I think. We have so much in common, our kids are pretty much the same ages, we are about the same age (I'm a few months older - ugh!) and we've emailed, commented on each other's blogs, swapped many goodies, and sent packages back and forth.
But on Monday, we finally met face to face. At Downtown Disney, where my kids said it was cruel to take them without actually setting foot in Disneyland. But meeting Regina made up for that.
It was comfortable and easy and the night passed by much too quickly. She's exactly as I thought she'd be, and oh-so-patient with my little chatterbox (I'm pretty sure Rebecca talked to her more than I did). She even brought me gifts.
Have you seen the e-course she's offering in August? There's still time to sign up, I can't wait to learn from her and get creative with my kids, too.
The girls say I don't have to call her my "blog friend" or "online friend" or anything like that anymore. She's just my real friend.
We went on our annual blueberry picking outing over the Memorial Day weekend.
We got another batch of monsters, look at that guy! So sweet.
Oh my gosh, when I see the picture from 2007 I just can't believe it. How did that girl grow up and turn into this one?
Let's take another look at that giganto-berry. Jessie said triumphantly, "Beat that!" How about I just eat that?
I got a great big heaping helping of spam last Friday. This one was a doozy. I'm so sorry if you got my "teary-eyed message from a hotel in London." I can assure you I wasn't there and I didn't get mugged. If I had, I would not send emails to every. single. one. of my contacts asking for money to be wired to me. Of course, I was irritated when I first heard about the spam, but I figured, oh well, that's okay, I'll just send an email to my contact list telling them sorry and to ignore the previous message. But when I got home and accessed my account, I found that I had nothing there. No saved emails that I was going to get back to later, no archived and categorized messages of things I'd been keeping for the past 15+ years, and no contacts. Not a single solitary one. Those effing spammers cleaned out my entire account. I'm trying to get the contacts restored via Yahoo!, but so far no response. Needless to say, I am through with Yahoo. I've set up a new gmail account, you can send me an email by clicking on the link in the top left sidebar. You can now contact me at greetingarts (at) gmail (dot) com. And please do, that way I'll have your email addresses again. I lost everything, even my own parents' email info! Luckily I remember my sister's...
Anyway. That was my whole Friday... and Saturday...
But on Sunday we had Easter fun.
I made a few Easter Peeps pins, one was given to Rebecca's teacher on Friday, and some were for the kiddos. I used the template found here, just reduced it way down so that it was a little less than 2" tall.
I attached a miniature one onto a hair tie, so Jessie could wear it as a bracelet.
I knit up some tiny baby bunnies (we call them mini dust bunnies) and put them in a few Easter eggs. The rest had erasers or jellybeans. We went to Grandma and Grandpa's house, invited a bunch of the relatives, had an egg hunt, dyed eggs (32!), decorated cookies, and ate a lot. Like a lot a lot. Very nice afternoon.
Now it's back to dealing with the spam.
A wonderful woman from my knitting guild passed away a couple of weeks ago. It was a shock to me, even though she'd been undergoing chemo for a while. It was a sad, stunning piece of information on top of a pretty bad, tiring week.
I wanted to do something, make a change. This is me before.
And this is me after. 10 inches of hair donated to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths, in Lynne's name. And then Jessica wanted hair just like mama's, so she decided to chop hers, too.
She had nearly 9 inches.
Her cut seemed much more drastic than mine, but it suits her quite well. Her little sassy personality.
She's way cuter than I am, but I can live with that.
After several weeks of terrorizing classmates (and Mommy) with her precariously wiggly tooth, Jessica finally met me at the gate after school with a nice space in her bottom row of teeth. So proud, happy, sticking her tongue through the hole, checking it out. We took the tooth home, cleaned it up, and set it on the nightstand for the Tooth Fairy that night.
And I promptly forgot all about it.
Thank goodness for Rebecca! She always gets up and dressed before Jessie even pokes her head out of the covers, and I heard her calling from the other room, "I can't wait to see what the Tooth Fairy left for Jessica!" My eyes bugged out of my head, and I sprinted downstairs, grabbed two shiny quarters and a miniature kitty from my toy stash, raced back upstairs and had everything set out before Jessie even registered the fact that the alarm had gone off and she was supposed to get up.
Whew. That Rebecca saved my behind!
