M.I.A.

Yep, that’s me.

I unintentionally spent a little time away, which led to a longer time away, which has made it REALLY hard to return. It’s not like anything crazy has happened – life has happened. That’s all. And life is great! But life is busy, and my blog (and all my other hobbies) get sorely neglected when life gets busy.

At the end of the day, I blog for myself – to preserve my memories and the things our family does. So I’m really only hurting myself. I use this cool “slurp” function on blurb.com at the end of each year to pull all my blog entries into a book. Then I add photos or scrapbook pages from the year to complete the book. And that’s all fine and good – except when I go M.I.A. And now I’ve got a 2 month “gap” in my memories. And we all know my memory alone isn’t enough to fill in that gap!

So… my last entry was July 30. What has happened since then? Let me catch you up quickly….

In July we had Jon’s whole family come to visit – which was a blast! We had 17 people and 2 dogs under our roof. It was such a blast that I spent a bunch of time pulling together the photos, but no time putting it on the blog. Probably should’ve done that! We also had our neighbors and wonderful friends from Baltimore come visit us for a long weekend. What a breath of “home” their visit was to us! Again… should’ve put pictures up and shared about the time…. But didn’t. And we went to Kansas City for the weekend – met my parents halfway and let the kids have a fun time with them. Again – no pictures on the blog. Not a good track record going here! And then we had Amara starting Kindergarten, Amara starting piano lessons, Amara turning 6, both kids starting soccer again, a family trip to Denver, and Dominic starting a new preschool. And there you have it – 2 months in one paragraph. Now you’re caught up on our life!

During the past 2 months, I have been adding goofy things the kids have said to Facebook. They really need to have a “slurp” feature on FB, too, so I can pull from there for my annual book…. Hmm….

So I’ll troll through my old FB status updates simply to be able to add these to the book. If you’re my “friend” on FB, these will be old. But still funny. So feel free to read or skip. They’re most recent first.

9/26: Amara’s talking to Grandma W on the phone. Grandma W lives in Wyoming. We live in Arkansas. She says, “Grandma, it’s FREEZING in Arkansas.” Somehow I suspect they’d consider it balmy here.

9/26: I do believe the kids got their fashion sense from me. And that’s NOT a good thing. We sent them to get dressed so we could head to Sam’s. They both had full dressers, as laundry was just completed. So they essentially had their entire wardrobe from which to choose an outfit. Dominic entered our room wearing a red Lightning McQueen t-shirt with turquoise, green, and yellow plaid shorts, navy blue socks with basketballs on them, and I think black shoes (not sure if his shoes were on yet). As I was laughing at him and telling him to go put on jean shorts, Jon said, “Just wait, another one is coming.” Amara walked around the corner in a bright purple butterfly t-shirt paired with a teal, yellow, and green skirt (inside out no-less – which doesn’t work when the skirt has built-in shorts), black and pink socks with ear-muffed monkeys on them, and black slip on dress shoes. She said she matched her colors in groups. I confess I was laughing so hard at their choices that she actually started crying – and I felt terrible about that. But I did let her keep on everything but the skirt – and just helped her select a skirt that matched. I think Jon needs to give lessons in fashion to them.

The kids were talking about ankles and bones. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what they were talking about within that context, but my ears perked up when Dominic said, “Mom, sometimes my bones bite my ankles and I scream like a girl.” I laughed at the “scream like a girl” part – which for whatever reason really amused him, but I think also embarrassed him, so he had to backtrack on himself and remove the “scream like a girl” from his statement.

9/23: You know it has been a long week when the kids wake up with the following comments. Amara: I wish it was Saturday. Dominic. I wish it was a day where everyone had to go to school except us.

9/20: Dominic: I saw a car without a bottle cap! Me: You mean a hub cap? Dominic: Yeah.

9/10: (Dominic’s last day at LSP) Dominic just informed me that Miss Clara and Miss Trista are his girlfriends. (They’re his teachers.)

9/5: Conversation in the backseat. Dominic: Amara, what do you want to do? Amara: Let’s dance! Dominic: I don’t want to dance. I want to fight coyotes!

9/5: Dominic: Sometimes I eat jellyfish for breakfast.

9/4: Dominic at 7:30am: Mommy, it’s morning. Me: I know, but we’re still sleeping. So is Amara. Dominic through a tear cracking voice: Why do you always do that? You always sleep too long. I don’t like people who sleep long.

9/3: For Amara’s birthday, we went to the Japanese Hibachi grill. They turned down all the lights and turned on strobe lights. Amara said, “I think they’re going to come sing Happy Birthday to me in Spanish.”

8/31: Dominic: Mommy, when I can ride my bike without training wheels…. I can have a motorcycle.

8/25: Dominic: I know why King Kong is mean. He’s really, really hungry. (Must be a Wxxxxxxx!)

8/22: Amara has a baby doll who is lacking in the clothing department (she’s got 2 outfits). So I took one of Dominic’s old sweaters and made it into a dress. Amara ended up with legwarmers out of the deal – the sleeves worked nicely for such a purpose. The funny thing: She wouldn’t take them off!

8/14: One of the sweetest things… Both kids are supposed to be napping. They’re both in their own beds. But they’re not napping. They’re singing. And they’re not just singing, they’re essentially singing a duet with each other – each with their own words and melodies, but definitely together. This is the good stuff.

8/7: Upon picking Dominic up from his Sunday School class tonight, Jon was told by his new teacher, “He’s a blast!” Why thank you. Yes… he is.

8/5: Amara mastered the art of tying her shoes!

8/3: I find it ironic (or poetic justice) that Dominic obeys the shoes in the closet rule at bedtime – by gathering up ALL his shoes from the house instead of getting jammies on and teeth brushed like he was told to do.