A short conversation...

Some of the most interesting conversations occur in my van, while I'm driving kids from one activity to the next. Today for example:

Davis: Why are cats so popular?

Me: What do you mean?

Davis: People like cats. Why?

Me: Well, some people love cats. And some like dogs. And some like both.

Davis: Dogs are friendlier. They lick people. Cats don't lick people.

Me: Well, actually, I guess cats *CAN* lick people. If a cat licks you, you'll feel that their tongue feels scratchy, kind of like sandpaper.

***Okay, this is what I MEANT to say, but I was interrupted in the middle of my sentence.

This is what was actually said:


Me: If a cat licks you, you'll-

Josie (shouting): GET RABIES!

I started laughing so hard, I almost ran over a cat. ;)

Pop Culture things I wish would just go away...

*The phrase: “I love me some ____ …” fill in the blank here:
1. ‘of that’
2. ‘me’
3. ‘hot yeast rolls from Logan’s Roadhouse’,
4. ‘indiscriminate name dropping’.

*Matthew McConaughey. Now this particular belief makes me a pariah amongst my girlfriends. (Or at least that’s how I felt when I admitted this at Happy Hour last week!) But seriously, I just can’t take him. He bugs me. I don’t want to think about his sweaty pits, and I don’t want to see him down on the field at the UT games anymore. And I completely love Matt Damon for his ‘spot-on’ impression of him on Letterman…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuYD2cwMbpw

*References to ‘Cougars’… you know, the overdressed forty-somethings who ‘prey’ on younger men and reek of desperation.

*Reality T.V. At the risk of offending my American Idol junkie friends, I think all reality T.V. shows should just go away (preferably to an island where they will be forced to ingest sheep’s eyeballs and will discover that they are completely unable to Outlive, Outlast, and Outplay)
Now, I admit, I have watched some reality T.V. in the past. Um… ‘Real World Hawaii’? Couldn’t look away from that train wreck… but, seriously? Don’t you think it’s run its course now?! Oh please, God, tell me that it’s run its course?!!


*The following words/ terms:
1. bling,
2. manscaping
3. ‘on the down low’
4. Brangelina
5. Octo-Mom
5. any invented word that contains the words ‘tweet’ or ‘twitter’ (i.e. ‘tweet-up’ or ‘twitter-licious’)

*Pontiac. What?! Oh really? Okay, never mind. ;)

What a bunch of characters...

Checked off the Six Flags 'character list' this weekend…


1. Foghorn Leghorn. Sadly, my kids had no idea who the ‘big chicken’ was. Yup. That’s what Davis said. “Who is this big chicken?!” Did that deter me from making them stand there for a picture? I think not, my little chicks. ;)
And I will be making an effort to DVR a few more ‘classic’ cartoons. ‘Phineas and Ferb’ be damned!

2. Robin (of Batman and Robin fame…) Of course, Batman was nowhere to be seen. Which was actually okay, since we saw him two weeks ago and got his picture then.
But Wonder Woman was there, and it was the same Wonder Woman from two weeks ago as well. So, got another picture of her. So…um… yay.

3. Bugs Bunny… What’s up, Doc?!! Why, my excitement level when I saw the ‘wascally wabbit’… that’s what was up. The kids were pretty jazzed about seeing Bugs, too. I mean, it’s Bugs frickin’ Bunny! Cool.

4. Some guy in red tights? The Flash was his name, I think. And guess who was with him?
Wonder Woman. Again. I did my best to have all three kids kind of scooch over and stand by Flash, and tried to kind of move the camera so that I could easily crop her out of the picture later. (I didn’t want to be rude and tell her I didn’t want her in the picture, so I faked it.) Really, though, I do NOT need 57 pictures of Wonder Woman this summer. No matter how much it looks like she’s falling out of that golden bustier, Phil… ahem.

5. Henry the Octopus and Captain Feathersword from the Wiggles. If you have not had a preschooler within the last decade, you may not know who they are. Lucky you!

6. And lastly, we saw the Green Lantern? Hornet? I really don’t know any of these Justice League characters. Superman, yes. Orange Magnet-head, no.
And I’ll give you one last guess who was hanging out with the Green Lantern? If you said Wonder Woman… DING, DING, DING!

Does this woman not have a home or a secret lair? I think she might have a superhero complex or something. ;)

'Project Upload'... complete!

A month's worth of Project 365 layouts... click on the picture to get a bigger image if you want to read the journaling!

That's HAWT!!

It’s so refreshing to know that my son *does* sometimes listen to me… well, sort of listens... halfway listens, I guess.

You may remember a few days ago, I blogged about Davis calling a girl in his class, ‘hot’. Well, we had a little conversation about it, but evidently he is not alone in this behavior.

When I went to his class to be a guest reader today, I noticed that there were only girls in the classroom. His teacher told me that the boys were having a little ‘powwow’ after recess with the assistant principal, and that they would be back momentarily.

So I started the book (Harry the Dirty Dog, by the way), when the boys trooped in and sat down for the story. At this point, his teacher steps outside the classroom to talk with the assistant principal, and I see them looking in through the window in the door and laughing a little.

When his teacher comes back in, she is still giggling and whispers to me, “Remind me to tell you something kind of funny before you leave!”

Well as it turns out, the girls had been complaining to the teacher about the boys in the class calling them ‘hot’. It’s a first grade epidemic, I guess ;) And his teacher, being ‘on the ball’, had asked the assistant principal (who is male) to have a little discussion with the boys about respectful language, how to treat young ladies, things that we do or do not say to them, etc. All well and good, right?!

Afterwards, Mr. Morgan (the assistant principal) reported back to Davis’s teacher that in the midst of the discussion about using respect, etc., my son pipes up with…

“Yeah, we shouldn’t really be calling the girls that. It’s not respectful to them, and we shouldn’t call them ‘hot’ until junior high.”

Oh, dear. That wasn’t *quite* the discussion we had. ;)

Disney documentation... DONE!

Would you just look at that?! What is it, you may be asking? Why, it’s my Disney scrapbook. And it’s FINISHED! I finished it as of about 8:30 last night. And when I say, ‘finished’… I mean ‘finished’.

All pictures documented? Check! Journaling completed? Check! Pages put in chronological order in a suitable OCD way? Check!

So I had to make the title page my ‘picture of the day’ for yesterday. Exactly 6 months from the time we were there in October, I finished the scrapbook. Six months… that’s got to be some kind of record.

58 pages. Yep, you read that correctly. 58 pages. That’s 11 ½ pages for each day we were there. Phil has pointed out that I spent more time scrapbooking the Disney vacation than we were actually ON the Disney vacation.

To which I replied, “Shut up, honey.” ;)

Scrap it!

This was my ‘picture of the day’ for yesterday. Well if we want to split hairs, I took the picture today because I forgot to take a picture yesterday for Project 365… but I straightened it up yesterday, so I think it counts. (Who really cares? It’s my book, right?! Wow. Getting a little defensive… sorry ;)

Let me just say… and I’m not proud to admit it…but I covet other people’s scrapbook rooms. I love to look at scrap spaces in magazines and on scrappers’ blogs. I drool over custom crafting rooms like some people lust after fancy cars or high dollar purses and shoes.

I want to be an organization junkie, with color coordinated tins and tubs and buckets and boxes. I would love to have an entire room devoted to my hobby, with areas for paper storage, a separate table for a sewing machine to be able to stitch on my layouts, and yet another table with my computer for journaling.

I’d love to be able to completely revamp my personal scrap space, have bulletin boards to display pictures, completed layouts, and custom bookshelves for my albums. And I’d want a couple of extra tables to have my friends over for crops.

But this is the real world. And what I have instead is one wall in my master bedroom. (Fortunately it’s a big bedroom ;)

We just don’t have an extra room for me to transform into my scrapbook room. 4 bedrooms + 3 kids… well, you do the math.

And to get the extra space, we’d have to

1. move (not happening),

2. build an addition onto the house (of course, we’d also have to win the lottery!)

3. give up the playroom (not happening… where would we put all those toys?!),

4. sacrifice the formal living/ dining areas (also not happening… sometimes those rooms are the only clean ones in the house!)

5. or give away one of the children. (not happening… well at least not today ;)


I’ve had to make the best use of my available space, and I think I have. I have tools and emebellishments stashed in wooden boxes, organized in canvas baskets, and sorted in various labeled drawers. And of course, I have a spot for my Cri-cut, my Cuttle-Bug, my Zutter (thanks, Marcy!), my F.R.E.D., and my laptop (and if the only word you understood in this sentence was ‘laptop’… you know you’re not a scrapbooker!)

This is a far cry from the kitchen table and a tub of supplies, which is what I had 9 years ago when I started. I’ve got a ‘system’ and it works for me.

Would I like to have more space? Sure.

Do I let the lack of a gorgeous scrapbooking room keep me from documenting our lives in pictures and with scrapbook pages?

Nope. Not even close.