Last day of school

Today was the last day of school for both the kids. Fellan apparently cried and cried today because he's going to have a different teacher next year. He's such a sweet little boy - I think he wanted to give his teacher another hug before leaving, but she was apparently done with that, telling the kids, "No more hugs!" I guess she's happy the year is over too. ???

Anyway, the excitement at Marxo's school was that one of her little classmates fell off the monkey bars this morning and broke her arm! Yikes! Marxo spends nearly ALL her time on the monkey bars these days - she has callouses on her hands. (If I didn't know any better, I'd think that we were forcing her to do hard labor in the fields based on those little hands.) I had no idea that falling into that springy mulch stuff could still break an arm. It's a good thing my husband, a.k.a. "Safety Dad," wasn't there. Marxo would have been banned from the monkey bars for life if he would have actually witnessed the accident.

I finally got the Sears pictures put onto my USB key and brought them to work today. Here's a cute pic of the kids. At the time this was taken (last weekend) one was a kindergartener and one was 1st year pre-school. Now I have a first-grader and a 2nd year preschooler!

Idiocracy

To top off the Memorial Day weekend, we tried to get the kids to bed early Monday night and settled down for a nice evening of watching a movie we'd had on the DVR for months: Idiocracy.

We heard about it and thought it would be funny, and although it was funny in certain ways, it was still lacking in others. The gist of the movie is that the army freezes an "average Joe" for supposedly one year, but it ends up being 500 years. Society has, by that point, degraded into stupidity-fueled, violence-ladened reality TV - as in, pretty much everything is reality TV - and everyone is now super-stupid. (And, of course, the world is covered in trash.) The "average Joe" is now the smartest person in the world and he has to save the world from itself.

So, the funny and rather sad part is that I could totally see the US going down this path! But, the movie itself just wasn't very good. My husband actually fell asleep about 30 minutes before the end. When he woke up, he asked me what happened and I was able to summarize what happened in the end in one sentence, [**spoiler alert**] "They send Joe to Rehabilitation, a reality-TV show where all contestants get killed, but just before he gets killed, they realize the plants are growing, so they save him and he ends up becoming President." I just looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently it has "achieved a cult following". Egads. Another example of why I can see the US ending up like this.

Now, if you really want to see a great post-apocalyptic movie, I highly recommend WALL-E. The downfall of society is just so much cuter and easier to watch! And the hero of the movie is a loyal, hard-working, lovable robot. What's not to love about that?

Caught in the rain

We always check the radar before we go out for a family bike ride. We got caught once in a cold, cold rain with the kids when they were little and they didn't like it one bit.

And technically, we did check the radar on Sunday morning, too, except that we checked it at 7:15am and started out for our ride at around 10:00am. Do you think a couple of hours can really make that much difference? LOL!

We ended up getting caught in a huge thunderstorm only a little over half-way through our "quick ride". We did finally make it to an underpass - just as lightning was striking right across the bayou from us! - where we could huddle with the other stranded bicyclists who didn't check the weather before heading out.

The most amazing thing to me about the experience was that our kids didn't complain a single time. I was expecting to get an earful from Marxo because she didn't want to go for the bike ride in the first place and she always complains about being cold on bike rides - even when it's 80ºF outside!

Apparently, we subject the children to enough "adventures" that they've gotten to the point where they silently accept the fact that we're going to torture them throughout their childhood. (Well, there are many more examples of how we torture them, however, I guess I haven't blogged about them! I can't find another entry to which to link!)

Other than that, I guess we had a fairly uneventful Memorial Day weekend. We got some pictures taken of the kiddos at Sears on Saturday morning, had dinner with some friends on Sunday evening, and watched a million episodes of Scooby Doo. Or at least it seemed like it. :)

New Office - Old Bathroom

So, my company moved our office to a new building at the beginning of the year. However, when they started moving people over here, they suddenly realized that there wasn't enough room in the building to hold everyone, so some of us stayed behind at the old building. In the last month, however, they finished the build-out of the final floor (and apparently laid-off enough people) and moved my project over here. This has tripled my commute! It used to be 2 miles and now it's 6 miles. (I'm very spoiled. In Houston, a commute this short is completely unheard of.)

Anyway, this morning, they were doing some work on the women's bathroom of my floor, so I had to go down one floor to use the bathroom. As soon as I opened the door, I realized that they must have run out of money right as they got to the bathrooms of my floor. It's a different world down there - everything has motion sensors - even the soap dispenser. Hrmph, and to think we still have to flush our own toilets and pump the soap dispenser ourselves. Not to mention the fact that the soap dispenser is actually installed in the spot where the hot water handle would be! (it's one of the strangest things I've ever seen, actually) But anyway...

The good thing about moving to the new office building is that there is a workout facility in the basement and it's really nice, too. I lifted weights today for the second time since moving here, but I miss my weight-lifting buddy, Courtney. I'm the only female down there and the guys are just waaaayyyy too serious about building muscle-mass for me. I went in, changed clothes, did my little weights circuit (legs, arms, legs, sit-ups, arms), went back into the locker room, changed, and left. I think the guys were still on the same machine they were on when I started. They all stared at me when I left.

In other news, we spent nearly all of Mother's Day cleaning the kids' bedroom. About once every six months, we have to spend pretty much the entire weekend trying to clean and re-organize the kids' bedroom. We have a nanny that likes to "pick up" the house before she leaves every day, which sounds really nice, but her idea of picking up means that she finds the closest open container and puts everything in it. The kids' bedroom had three Pull-Up boxes full of junk that had been stuffed in there because, Hey Look! How handy, an open container to fill! Two times ago when I found a used Pull-Up in one of their toy storage boxes (which, I hate to say, made me so enraged that I said some pretty nasty things about the nanny in front of the kids...), we went through this ritual and I got out the label maker, labeling everything in their room. I was hoping that the kids might learn to read through osmosis and that the nanny might stop long enough to actually read the labels. Neither of those things happened.

So we went through the process again around Christmastime and again this past weekend. This time, however, I think we're going to take my mom's advice and designate something - maybe a laundry basket - as the place she can stuff things (during the organizing process I usually come up with one place in particular I'd like for her to stuff things) and then each night, we'll have to get better about forcing the kids to put away their toys. We'll see how that goes. I have a feeling that along with many other things we have tried to tell her, this concept just won't make it through to her. Good thing she's really great with the kids... :)

The other topic that's keeping me busy is trying to keep up with this Feingold thing. But that's a-whole-nother post of it's own. Hopefully soon.