Happy Anniversary to Me!

Yesterday was the 16th anniversary of the day Dan and I were married.

Holy moley. We are some old people.

It can be a bit difficult to celebrate the occasion when you are half a planet away, but we did our best.

The boy and I went out to dinner with our good friends. And we had a hoot of a good time.

I'm sure Dan celebrated by eating some delicious dinner at an Army dining facility! And he sent me these...



Oh yes, folks... those are chocolate covered strawberries.



Loads of HUGE chocolate covered strawberries skewered into a cute little flowerpot.

I think I'll keep him. 16 years is a long time to train somebody.

After consuming several of these lovelies, I said (out-loud),

"Thanks honey! You sent a great present!" (You know, 'cause he can hear me all the way over there.)

The boy then says (with a little dance),

"Daddy is AWESOME!!"

I'm thinking, "Awwww.... how sweet. He recognizes the love his father has for his mother..." (Should have known better.)

Oh but no.

Because he adds,

"Daddy sent a present with sticks!"

Let the Weight Lifting Begin

Just another random conversation I had with the boy this morning...

(Don't look away... this one is G rated.)

the boy: "Can I have a refill on this juice?"

me: "Sure... Wow! Are you super-duper thirsty this morning?"

the boy: "Nope. I am just super-duper manly. So I need lots of juice."


Who knew?
3 days of 4th grade turns a one-glass-of-juice boy into a two-glasses-of-juice man.

Hi Ho... Hi Ho...

It's off to school he goes!!

And I haul out the camera to capture the memory. The smile and the sweet pose and the magical moment preserved forever...

(Imagine a loud screeching of brakes.) But noooooooooo. I forgot. This is the boy I'm talking about here. The one who HATES getting his picture made. The one who... if you recall... says that hell is just people taking your picture all day. I wonder if the devil uses digital or SLR?

"Smile, honey! It's your first day of 4th grade!"

"No, silly! OPEN your eyes more! You look tired!"



"OK. Now you look scared. Not that wide."

"Stop laughing at me so I can get a good shot!"


"Well, fine then... be that way."


Happy School Days folks!

Just When You Think It Can't Get Worse

Let's all pause for a moment and thank the Good Lord above that I don't live in Southeast Asia.

As you may know by now, there's ENTIRELY too much Animal Planet viewing going on at our house.

Folks, brace yourselves.

There are snakes that fly.

Yep. FLY.

As if I could be ANY MORE AFRAID of them.

Now I find out that there are some species that will hurl themselves from their tree and glide through the air. Then they undulate their snakey bodies from side to side to go further. (Even the word "undulate" is wigging me out.)

Oh. Dear. Lord.



Imagine that skinny demon swooping through the sky above you.
That is just a million levels of wrong.

"Hell on Earth" pretty much sums it up for me.

It's when I find out things like this that I momentarily consider having our cable shut off. (Except I can't imagine a world without the Food Network or Design Star or Hell's Kitchen or TLC or Tori & Dean and now I've revealed too much.)

May God save us all from the flying snakes.

Warning: Following Information Gives You a Glimpse Into my Warped Mind

I have been avoiding the blog.

Not for any good reason... like more time cleaning my house or organizing my closets or catching up on my scrapbooking or going away to the woods on a prayer retreat or shopping for organic food or knitting my own clothes or earning money for my child's college fund.

None of that has happened.

Can you sense where this is going?

Old man Guilt is creeping in again.

"You didn't make the boy read enough this summer."
"You didn't take him to the pool enough this summer."
"You didn't lose 50 pounds this summer."

I even begin to let other people's words and actions affect how I FEEL about things. I begin to question my own God-given intuitions and decisions.

"You don't sit up and cry every night... so you must not miss your husband enough."
"You aren't very sad about school starting... so maybe you don't treasure your child enough."
"You aren't running a marathon... you must not appreciate the body God gave you."
"You aren't raising free-range chickens... you don't care about your family's health."

See what I mean?

It's NUTS!

(I'm nuts!)

For the record, no one has specifically SAID any of these things directly to me... It's all a broken record that I allow to play in my head... Loosely based on what people actually do say.

I let so much of the world influence my thoughts and motivations.

Just when we "grown-ups" think we've conquered that whole "peer pressure" thing... It comes back in other nasty forms.

Why am I so hard-headed when it comes to the truth? And the correct way to think?

"Since then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above...Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things."
(Colossians 3:1-2)

Nothing a Little "Shark Week" Won't Cure

Don't ya'll hate having a cold in the summer? A cold isn't my idea of fun at ANY time of the year, but in the summer? Gimme a break, here, Mr. Germ.

Stuffy nose + 100 degrees outside? No breathin' going on here.

Despite my youthful wildness (and there was plenty of it), I can say with sincerity that I've never had a hangover.

Until yesterday.

No, my husband's absence didn't drive me to the tequila bottle (yet).

This girl took herself some NyQuil.

Good Lord.

There ought to be awards for just getting that stuff down.
And the next morning?
I felt like I'd been run over by a truck.
My mouth was dry, my eyes wouldn't focus, my feet were heavy, and it took a lot of coffee to get me feeling somewhat normal.

Good thing I'm not a heavy drinker.

It's also a good thing the boy and I had the Discovery Channel to amuse us this week.

For those of you land-lubbers out there... it's been Shark Week.
Our most favorite TV week of the year.
We learn a LOT and get creeped-out even more.
And we vow,
"We're never going back in the ocean again!"
(Until the next time we go to the beach.)

We do love us some Shark Week.
What an amazing planet this truly is.

I just wouldn't recommend watching ocean creatures eat people while hyped up on NyQuil.

I LOVE Cooking Camp

Yep. You read that right. Cooking Camp.

Well, actually, it's "Culinary Camp."

And that's where the boy is going this week. Well, for three days.

He loved the first day. "Except for all the cleaning up," he said.

The best part?

HE BRINGS HOME FOOD!!

Real honest-to-goodness food that I did not have to fix. That's "prepare" for you non-Southerners.

And I am a happy momma! Today we had broccoli and bacon quiche and cherry turnovers for lunch! Awesome! And so much better than PB&J's. What a treat!

Except for the part during lunch when he informed me that the symptoms of the Norwalk Virus are vomiting and diarrhea.

Apparently they discussed food safety also. Yummy.



And now totally unrelated 'cause that's the way I roll..
While having a chat with my friend about "Positive Day," she asked,

"Do we get to have a 'Negative Day' too?"

Hee hee.

So then I decided to come up with some other good "Day" ideas:

"Yell At Your Kids Day" (Which comes much more than once a year at my house!)

"Lie Around the House Like a Bum Day" (Would we feel less guilty if it were a "designated" day?)

"Cry At the Drop of a Hat Day" (PMS, anyone?)

"Exercise is Evil Day" (Can this be 364 days?)

"Junk Food Day" (coincides with #4)

Those are just a few of my suggestions.