crawling across the finish line and el niño is my bestie

We barely made it to the end of school.  We self destructed in the last week.  Miley got the stomach flu, Jovey's fever turned into a rash that covers 50% of her body, and I contracted the most evil sinus infection of all time.  (Dave was fine, the butt face)

All on the same day.  Then the clouds opened up and god said, I hate you alfalfa.  ;) The last week of school, full of fun times and wasted opportunities for learning.  ;)  Yeah, Mie was a tad disappointed.  She rallied for a day and made it to collect her desk stuff and books.  I almost sent Dave to do it.  It was not the big finish we had planned on.  We were going to have a party.  Oh well.  It's the thought that counts.  ;) or so I've heard.

The girls are feeling pretty fine now, I'm on my way (thank you antibiotics), but the party has been postponed for a moment.  Here's our first day of summer break. . .

Momma is sick, so Miley took charge of getting both of them ready for the day. . . and the hair, oh my the hair.

She also made lunch for herself and sis.  She even cleaned the dishes.  She's so grown up now that she calls herself a 2nd grader.

The sky may seem dismal in these next pics, but we are loving having el niño back.  It's still cool here.  Miracle.  No really, MIRACLE!  I don't even mind the rain.  It's different and not causing flooding like our normal rain prefers to do.  So we'll keep the clouds around, it's a new color for our sky.

I bought a stack of books for Miley to read through this summer.  She's already on her way.  I should have got her a library card instead because I have no where to put any more books.

the Struggle is real

I've found myself without inspiration for the blog lately. . . and some other issues. . .

. . . Short.  Miley wants to cut her hair.  She asked her Dad to help persuade me to let her do it.  It breaks my heart to cut her beautiful hair.  She wants it to her shoulders.  I guess we'll be able to donate it, but it is still sad.  Her hair grows quickly, so I don't know why this is hard for me to do.  I don't know why she wants to cut it either, her reasons are ridiculous. . . like when she flips her hair over into her face and then back, there is still hair in her face.  Ummmm, yeah hon, just stop doing that, problem solved.

. . . Stalled.  Jovey's potty training sticker chart has been pretty stagnant.  She'll do it if I make her use the potty every hour, but let's face it I'm still burnt out from potty training Miley four years ago.  I don't have it in my to do it again.  ;)  She's gonna have to potty train herself.  I'm feeling ok about this.

. . . Sinking.  I need to replace rocks in our waterfall.  The sandstone pieces are crumpling.  I didn't know they were using sandstone at the time.  Idiots.  I'd rather spend my money elsewhere, but I guess this needs to be bumped up the list or else there may be an avalanche back there.

. . . Splinters.  So Dave went out of town for the week on business and immediately after he left I was working in the yard and got a huge splinter in my right hand.  I am right handed.  Crap.  I asked Dave to come back and fix it for me since it's a medical emergency he should be able to ditch the trip.  He didn't think they'd accept my excuse.  I tried everything to get the stupid thing out, short of needles.  Cringe.  I couldn't.  How do people do it themselves?  Should I have went to the instacare?  Is that too dramatic. I thought about the emergency room since they are better trained for surgery.  I couldn't ask a friend to do it cause then they'd see me possibly lose my cool when they used a needle.  I have a reputation to uphold here.  ;)  Suffer, that's what I did instead.  No more gardening when D is out of town.

. . . Smells.  Dave made omelettes the other night.  Sometimes he cooks.  Always there is a smell that lingers into the next day.  It only happens when he cooks.  My house is contaminated with onion stench now.  What is wrong with my house?  Or what is wrong with Dave's cooking?  I can't decide if Dave cooking is worth the stink and the extra big mess I have to clean up in the kitchen.  Toss up.

. . . Stuck.  I may never get a new calling in church.  I'll be in nursery FOREVER.  It's been two years and I said I'd do it until Jovey is done in December.  However, they've been looking for help in there for the whole TWO years and no one will accept the job.  NO ONE.  I'm starting to hate these people.  It's actually a fun calling so I don't know what the problem is.  We just need more help.  We have 15 - 18 kids (1.5 - 3 year olds) generally, which must scare them out of the crap.  It doesn't usually feel like Lord of the Flies in there.

. . . Small.  I have some political issues that I am very passionate about.  I like to read things about them on all sides.  Lately the more I read the more I feel like there is no real solution to these issues.  It's not just that people will not agree or compromise, it's that we've gone too far for things to be fixed.  I am searching for a way I can make a difference even in a small corner of the larger issue.  Anything to help something and in the process dispel this feeling of smallness.  My big three issues are Racism, Education, and Abortion.  It's very interesting how the three of them intersect.  I love to talk about them, but not on the internet.  That is not a good place for those kind of talks.

. . . Shelved.  My camera is sad and lonely.  I don't take it out these days.  I don't know what happened to me.  My phone has supplanted my beautiful Nikon.  It's just not right.  I don't know how to remedy this.  My phone is an evil genius like that.

. . . Surviving.  I was tired of dreading Mondays.  It occurred to me that just merely surviving Mondays and maybe other busy days of the week so I could enjoy Saturday, was a vast waste of time.  One day a week that I looked forward to, yeah that's not good.  It's not that the week is bad, just filled with normal work stuff and nothing special.  I wasn't enjoying every day with my girls to the fullest.  They are growing up too fast to waste it with busyness.  I decided to change that.  It really just required attention to my attitude and maybe a little activity to lighten the load of normal life.  Thank you Mondays for kicking my butt and waking me up to living and loving every day.

lime and coconut

The House:  So we're looking to add more stone to the house, as I mentioned before, but we can't find the same stone we already have.  Yep, goners.  My eyes may have sustained damage from scouring all the pics of stone to find a match.  I think this means my house is too old and we must move before nothing can be replaced.  Yeah right, I'm too lazy to do that now.  It's getting hot.

This is the stone, isn't it nice, so I don't want to replace it to add more.  Ugh.  Maybe I'll scrap this plan and get a blender instead.

We put up a windmill type thing on the back hill.  You know those metal spinning artistic something type decorations?  I was hoping it would scare the birds away from the plants and also flying into my windows.  So far it's been pretty good.  Except when we got down from the hill and noticed we put it in the ground crooked.  It didn't want to be straightened, so I walked away.  It turns out I do not have OCD, cause the thing is still crooked and I still haven't had a go at fixing it again.

The hole in our wall is now a door in our wall.  It's been very handy.  I didn't want to admit that, but Dave was right we needed this door.  Life is so much better because of it.  Angels singing, and everything.  ;)  Or, it at least got the garbage cans out of my way and it got Dave to help me spring clean the garage.

One day on our afternoon stop at the park a kid there told me I looked like Gru, from Despicable Me.  I said thank you, and . . . how?  She told me we had the same nose.  From the mouth of babes. . . Careful, I may poke your eye out with this thing.  ;)

Miley is sure she would make a great secret agent, and has made business cards to that effect.  I'm not sure business cards are so useful for secret agents.

Jovey says 'WHY' about a thousand times a day now.  I am dying.  It used to be my favorite question, cause it is always the first one that pops in my head, but now I never want to know WHY again.  I can't take it.  Another thing she says most often is 'pinky promiss' when I ask her to do something.  I assume Miley told her that one.  I don't know.  She remembers things much too easily.

When Miley was asked what her favorite sport was, she said, 'Soccer. . . and I really like to knit.'   Ha.  Gymnastics is over for the season and I'm happy that she persevered even when it wasn't so easy for her.  She worked hard, and we saw improvement which was fantastic.  She's crazy enough to even want to do it again.

It's wedding season, and so far we've only been able to attend 1 out of 3.  Sad.  But so happy for all these lovebirds.  This is Chandis, a girlie I've known since she was 13.  She was our go to babysitter for years and we are going to miss her guts now that she's all grown up and married.

The little girls LOVED her party.  I had to drag Jovey off of the dance floor.  It wasn't easy.  She LOVES to dance and appreciated the audience watching her as well.  Miley loved seeing Chandis and Kristyon swap cake and have their first dance.  I covered her eyes when they kissed though.  ;)  She thought it was all sooooo romantic.

I showed Dave these rings and he got them for me for mother's day.  Miley loved them.  The girls also painted me some plates which I didn't take a pic of, but Dave did on his instagram.  They loved painting them and loved giving me them and telling me about every step and brushstroke.  I don't love mother's day, but I do love my girls and how much they loved celebrating the day, so it was definitely worth it.

We had sushi one night last week and I told Miley I'd give her a dollar if she ate a piece of wasabi.  She agreed, even after I warned her it was spicy hot.  It was a small piece and after she ate it without crying, Jovey wanted to try it too.  I tried to talk her out of it, but she persisted so I gave her a piece.  It was the funniest thing to watch.  I had to force her to drink something to get rid of the spiciness.  I gave them both dollars, and then offered Miley another $5 if she'd eat the rest of the wasabi.  She declined.  ;)

Yesterday I offered Jovey a slice of mango and she totally freaked and wouldn't take the food from me.  I think I may have scarred her for life.  ;)

may day

I lost a whole month.  Yep.  Goners.  It was back in 2006, July to be exact.  Not like the time I blocked out a whole school year, 3rd grade I think I skipped it, no this time I lost it due to neglectful backup procedures.  Any photos from July 2006 fell into a hole in my backup disks.  It turns out my disk backup of all my photos was pretty haphazard at best.  Stupid disks.  Or me.  Or something.

Oops.  I hope we didn't do anything interesting then.  Dave wasn't concerned by it, since it would probably only be him in those pics and it might have been a chunky phase, and maybe the dogs, or nature. . . I don't know I didn't look through any of the pics from the other months.  Drag and drop.  It was tedious.

I found this out when I was transferring all my digital pics to another hard drive for safe keeping, and so I no longer need to deal with stupid disks.  What a pain.  Did you know that Amazon Prime does photo storage for free as well?  Yeah, I love me some Amazon.  I need that many kinds of backup for my precious (gollum gollum) pics that I didn't look at, just moved over.  Maybe I'll look at them again. . . sometime.

I found that my photo count for January of this year equals my whole year of 2006.  Yeah, I guess there wasn't much to photograph pre-Miley.  Of course, maybe that wouldn't be the case if I had the lost photos from July, assuming I took any.  Wow, maybe I didn't take any.  ??  We will never know, because I also did not write in a journal.  Fail.

Miley got out a photo book of my family pics and was trying to tell Jovey who was in the pictures.  Yeah, she didn't recognize me until 2001, and that's just because Dave was in the picture then.  Him she knew.  My magically changing hair seemed to throw her off.  And she's really bad with names anyway.  Just ask her aunt Breht or our neighbor Julia.

Jovey is very unhappy with my chatbooks.  I get 5 a month until we get caught up with where I am on instagram.  They are books of my instagram pics.  Anyway, we just got the one starting 2013, and she is yet to make an appearance.  She does not understand this.  She should be in all photos since forever.  It's just rude to leave her out for all those years.  'Where baby Jovey?'  Not being born makes no sense to a toddler.  ;)

Here is the reason we take family pictures every year. . . because my parents tortured us with it.   Just a sampling from the past. . .

Miley knew who most of the people were in this last pic, from 2012.