Seriously

No matter how much you clean up after 2 kids (well 3 if you count Justin)....you really can't tell that you did anything 30 seconds later. Clean, repeat, clean, repeat....my new occupation title is "janitor". (I should add popsicle fetcher to that as well)

For a while I was a flylady follower...she really helped me get organized. Well, I should say that she tried. http://www.flylady.net/ Anyway, this is my favorite quote from her.

From Flylady herself:

"Housework done incorrectly still blesses the family"

My new motto.

Take out the word housework and insert cooking, yardwork, picture taking, etc, etc.

xoxo

We will miss you Uncle Bill!!!

Pure Joy

Garrett is not a camera poser (unlike his sister at this age), so usually when I get pictures of him he is being very serious. I was so excited to capture these shots of him playing in the yard last week. My intent in this blog entry was also to thank Uncle Bill for the twirly wind sock that Garrett was having so much fun with on this day. I'm pretty sure that I only have a handful of readers, but Uncle Bill was one of them and I knew that he would get a kick out of seeing Garrett having so much fun with this. xoxo

It's all about ghosts these days...

I'm not sure what's scarier...the fact that we have a ghost in our house or the fact that the ghost might break a leg going down the stairs in her roller skates.

Happy Birthday!!

Justin's birthday was Saturday. Courtney and I baked him his favorite cake on Friday and then we had a birthday breakfast Saturday morning. I never realized that putting whip cream and rasberries on a pancake could bring a little girl so much joy. She had so much fun "surprising" Daddy with special pancakes. And, of course, we had to have the birthday candle right in the middle of it. :)

After birthday breakfast we went to Grandma's to celebrate Justin's cousin John's upcoming wedding. Claire and her family all came for lunch at Grandma's and we went to Dee's for their shower. They got lots of pretty things for their new home. I love showers! We loved meeting Claire's family. They were all so nice and we can't wait for the wedding!

The Diapers

They aren't your normal cloth diapers. They are so cute! This little lobster one is that latest one that we got. I think that I like this so much just because there aren't alot of "cutesie" things that you can do with boys. They work just like regular diapers with velcro or snaps. You just throw them in the wash at the end of the day and voila!

We have a "raffe" (giraffe) one coming...(Garrett's new favorite animal)....he's gonna love it! I'm on the lookout for a John Deere one. I know it has to be out there somewhere. ;)

Recycling in a small town

The whole world has sent out the red alert that we need to be better at being "green". I have found that this poses quite the problem when you live in a small town. Unlike our friends that live in the city, we do not get a recycle pick-up at the garbage stop. This makes recycling very inconvenient. I had decided that recycling just wasn't for us because it wasn't easy....that was until I decided that we were the trashiest family in town. Seriously, the amount of trash that was coming out of this house was incredible. There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to contain all our trash to the one huge receptacle that we have. I mean, it gets picked up twice a week, there's no reason why this shouldn't be doable for a family of 4.

Baby steps.

1) The local grocery has the plastic bag recycle bin, so that's easy. We do that.

2) The cardboard boxes from cereal and so many of the other foods and products are now going to have to find a recycle center. This has cut down tremendously on our weekly garbage load.

3) AND....Gasp! I'm using cloth diapers. (I know, I can't believe it either) There. I said it publicly. I can't decide if this was because I want us to be less trashy or because the diapers are so darn cute and easy to use these days. (pics to come soon)

These are the things we are going to ease into for now. Hopefully we'll add more as these become more of a habit. Like I said. Baby steps.

(and, yes, that is a Target bag holding all the plastic bags ready to be recycled....I know, I know.... I had banned Target, but I broke down and have gone a few times because they have the best local selection of "green" cleaning products)

One day....

....one day he'll make them all and we'll wonder where the time went.

Downtown McGregor

I FINALLY figured it out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Garrett has been saying "drop drop" all the time lately. For the past few weeks Justin and I have been puzzled trying to figure out what he is saying. Today we're in the car and the Barney lover that he is is doing his usual yell, "Barney, Barney!" and I DJ up the Barney songs on the iPod. Then he starts yelling, "DROP DROP!" I put 2 and 2 together and the new song to our blog is what you get.....I hope you enjoy it as much as he does. (notice I said he and not we) Now, not only do we get to listen to Barney all the time in the car, we now get to listen to this song over and over and over and over....well, you get the picture. I'm just glad we figured out what "drop drop" means now. It was literally driving me crazy...more than this song now does. (I actually used to think that it was a fun & cute song...not so much anymore)

What is it about sticks?

Both of my kids love sticks. Courtney is finally growing out of it, but Garrett would have been happy all day with this stick. I wanted to work on taking some shots with my new lens and this is what I got. "Playdate with a stick."

The drool cracks me up on this one because he really never drools. Not sure what the deal was.

Playing with sticks is hard work.

Could it bring him any more joy? Seriously?

Again, playing with sticks is hard work, but somebody's gotta do it.

This particular stick is very, very interesting.

And, of course, we must ride the stick. EVERYTHING is a riding toy in Garrett's mind. I think this is cute, as long as it's not Courtney's breakfast tray being ridden across the hardwoods making big scratches.

FEEEEEEL the Heat!

Courtney was old enough this year to run summer track. I thought it would be a good fun thing to do that was literally less than a mile from the house for practices. We decided to just do the one local meet this year, but she had so much fun that we may have to also go to the one in Temple. I love this last picture....it really captures the cute, excited look that she had when she would take off of each jump for the long jump.

She participated in the long jump and the 50M dash. The long jump went well, but we had a slight mishap in the 50M. The girls went first, but when the girls took off, all the boys that were supposed to run next also took off...the coaches yelled, "stop, come back" to the boys, and Courtney stopped and came back because she thought they were yelling at her. She still went ahead and ran, and the 6th place ribbon didn't seem to bother her at all. :)