Abduction

I found this picture again recently. My husband sent it to me right after we got back from vacation in early August. The nanny hadn't gotten back from her vacation yet and the kids were left to their own devices any time my husband had to take a work phone call.

On this particular day, the kids had apparently decided to play the game "Mouse Trap". The e-mail I got from my husband said, "Went to clean up mouse trap - couldn't find the mice. Then I found this! Where do you figure they're taking her?! :)"

(Click for larger image)

Street closure

I love four day weekends! But they still go by too quickly.

On Saturday and Sunday, we were able to get in a couple of family bike rides, but yesterday, we had to spend the day cleaning out my husband's office of all the cardboard boxes that have accumulated in the garage for the last year.

Turns out that they're going to start ripping up our street today (supposedly - although I talked to the husband a couple of hours ago and they were just putting up "wrong way" signs up all day) and we wanted to try to get the garage cleaned out before they do that because we're hoping to be able to park over there when our side of the street is torn up.

They put a sheet of paper in our mailbox on Friday saying that the east side of the street would be closed starting on Tuesday and that it would be closed for a month. I assume that after they're done with the east side, they'll move on to the west side. Which would mean that the street will be closed in one way or another for a minimum of two months, but I'm not holding much hope of that being the maximum amount of time - the street one block over has been closed for five months already. *sigh*

We've been looking forward to this street reconstruction for quite awhile, though. About 11 years, actually! Since we first moved into our house, water has collected in front of our driveway and the only way to get rid of it was to sweep the street down after every rainfall, yard watering, or car washing from anyone "upstream" of us.

In the last few years, we've given up completely and just come to enjoy the sound of toads outside our window in the springtime. But now, there is hope! - Although I do hate to get my hopes up too high because they usually get dashed pretty quickly. There's always the possibility that they'll screw this up and leave us with an even larger moat!

Well, that's OK, Marxo thinks she's a princess anyway. We'll just make it a proper moat, fill it with alligators, and install a drawbridge. I hope the alligators don't eat the toads. I kind of like the little buggers.

Day off

Today was my day off from work and I spent it as usual - going to Target and then Sam's, but today, I got all crazy and made a side trip to the Container Store. Woohoo!

Actually, my husband and I usually try to go for a bike ride on Friday mornings and then I do the shopping in the afternoon, but it was raining this morning and the husband had too much work to do. There goes my motivation, huh?! Actually, we're planning to go for family bike ride tomorrow morning and hopefully Sunday morning, too.

This afternoon I got to finally see Fellan in his Tae Kwon Do classes. We signed him up for Tae Kwon Do and Marxo for gymnastics this fall. We'll see how it goes. Marxo has already been invited to join the trampoline team and I know she would love it, we just don't seem to be able to work out the logistics of going to an additional practice with two working parents. Plus, SHE'S FOUR! Isn't it a little crazy to get her into "real" competitive sports at the age of four? (and no, YMCA Soccer doesn't count as a competitive sport.)

Tomorrow is the only day this Labor Day weekend that we have nothing planned. We're headed to a friends' house Sunday afternoon for a pool party and have a classmate's birthday party on Monday morning. We're going to make the most of tomorrow. :)

Motivated (for the moment, anyway)

My friend Courtney asked on her secret blog, "How do you keep yourself motivated?" regarding working out and getting healthy.

Well, I haven't been very good about keeping myself motivated lately. And by lately, I mean for the last 6 years, 4 months - which is, coincidentally, the exact age of our first child.

Before having kids, I was in the best shape and health of my life. I hadn't been to a doctor (aside from the yearly OB/Gyn check-up) in probably 8 years, I had tons of energy, and I never fell asleep during those boring meetings at work. I attribute all of this to the fact that my husband and I exercised every day and ate about half the amount of food that we ate before we got healthy.

It's really easy to backslide, though. We've both gained quite a bit of weight and definitely need to do something to regain our aerobic fitness level. Vacations aren't as fun anymore when you can't count on your body to respond to crazy physical challenges as if they were nothing. I've gotten sick the last two Fall seasons and I don't bounce right back. But, just wanting to have more fun on vacations and wanting to not get sick every Fall weren't enough to push me back into an obsession with physical fitness.

A friend of ours was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer at the end of last year. The prognosis for her was horrible and the thought of her children, who are the same age as our children, having to grow up without their mother is just absolutely unthinkable. She is thankfully doing everything she can possibly do to beat the disease, and from what I can tell, her prognosis has improved, but we don't know for sure yet.

This is actually what is motivating me now. I'm afraid that some life-altering illness could come along and try to get me while I'm unhealthy. And I don't want that to happen to me. I want to be so healthy that if it catches me, I'll be able to give it a better run for the money, or that it might bypass me altogether. We can hope, right?

I worked with a woman who told me one time, "I plan to live forever." That's kind of a silly thing to say, but once you think about it, it's a good idea. She wasn't saying that she would live forever, she was just saying she is planning to live forever - and she's planning to live forever by eating good foods, exercising and taking care of herself. I'm making that my plan, too.

Golden Locket

About a year or two ago, Chick-fil-A gave away condensed versions of some "classic" stories. I think we ended up with The Wizard of Oz, Great Expectations, The Prince and The Pauper, and one I had never heard of, A Little Princess.

We've read A Little Princess a couple of times and it's a nice story. The kids like to listen to it because it finally ends up in a happy ending, of course, but I think they're also intrigued by the fact that the little girl's name is Sara.

The other day, we were in Target at the $5 DVD endcap and found the movie A Little Princess, so we couldn't resist. We bought it and ended up watching it this past Sunday evening.

In the book, Sara's wealthy father dies from disease and the event is approximately one sentence long. I guess it's something that didn't leave a huge impression on the kids. Apparently parents die all the time - and the mothers seem to be always dead in children's stories to begin with - so no big whoop.

But in the movie, Sara's wealthy father has gone off to war and there is one scene that shows him dying as he tries to save another soldier. Well. That definitely made a stir. Why did he die? Well, it's a war and everyone tries to kill the other side in a war. But why would they do that?! Well, it's just what happens in a war. One side decides they hate the other side and then they kill each other. Mommy and Daddy, I'm sad. I love you. I don't want you to die.

By this point, Fellan's rosey little cheeks and tearful eyes were too much for either my husband or I to handle and we both got a little weepy as he was hugging us.

The British government seizes her father's assets and the only thing Sara has left of her father is a golden locket with his picture and her mother's picture (who had, of course, previously died). But, the evil headmistress at her boarding school takes that away from her, too, and makes her become a servant in the school.

In the movie, Sara and her not-dead-only-had-amnesia father are eventually reunited and all is well again. And once again, during the reunion scene Fellan had us in tears again because he "loves us so much and wants to have a golden locket to keep our pictures in." (dramatically clutching an imaginary necklace to his heart)

I spent quite a bit of time Monday trying to find a "boyish" (as Marxo would put it) locket, but they don't exist. I think we're going to try to talk him into a photo dog tag instead. We don't want our sweet boy to get beat up for showing his friends his golden locket.

Finally

Well, I finally did it. I finally got over my fear of working out at lunchtime and having to shower and re-do my hair at work.

The thing that pushed me over the edge was the fact that school just started again and we never got into an evening workout routine over the summer without school. I'm thinking there's no way we're going to be able to figure something out during the school year!

So, I sucked it up and decided to try it out this week. It's surprisingly not too bad. I've gotten into the bad habit of just wearing my hair in a ponytail all the time, so it's no big deal at all to dry my air and pull it back into a ponytail.

But the real bonus to this working out at lunchtime thing is that I don't have to shower and wash my hair in the morning! I can roll out of bed, give myself a quick rinse in the shower (only to wake up), get dressed, and make it to work a little earlier than usual.

I don't know why I didn't try this sooner.

An alien was here

We're still having issues with Fellan being afraid of the dark and thinking that there are aliens in the bedroom with him. I had hope earlier this week because he slept through the night on Sunday night without waking up being afraid. But last night was a very bad night.

I heard him calling for Daddy at 1:30am, then again at 3:30am, and eventually my husband had to take the camping pad down to the kids' room and sleep on the floor with Fellan so that he would calm down. The husband says that he's not sure Fellan even slept last night - which I would believe because I thought I heard him chatting with his baby doll when I finally got out of bed at 5:30 this morning.

I guess he's still afraid of aliens. He's at least thinking about them very frequently. This morning, he apparently said, "Well, an alien's definitely been in the bathroom - it smells gross in there." But Marxo immediately fessed up. "I poopy farted* in there." (LOL! Thank goodness there was an explanation, otherwise we'd have to deal with all smells being related to aliens, too...)

*Poopy fart: What we originally called really stinky farts, but has now become the term for all farts in our family. (Doesn't every family come up with a special term for farts?) :)

First day of school

Yesterday was the first day of school for Fellan. This year he only knows two kids in his class and in talking to the other parents, it seems they've done this for everyone - I guess they're really trying to mix the classes up.

We asked him if he saw his girlfriend during recess and his response was, "Yeah, but I told her 'no kisses' because I was busy playing tag." Typical boy. :)

Eyes in the back of my head

During our trip to Colorado, I had to finally let the kids in on this fact: All mothers have eyes in the backs of our heads.

It's something I remember my mother telling me and I had the exact same reaction as our kids. They were curiously intrigued, but they've finally gotten to the point that they understand joking and sarcasm and after about 2 seconds, they both simultaneously said, "No you don't!"

Aha, that's when my eyes had to kick in. "Get your fingers out of your mouth!" "Stop playing with that toy and get it out of your mouth!" "I told you to keep your fingers out of your mouth." etc.

Good thing they haven't quite figured out that there are mirrors in the front of the car and that the sounds they make are a complete give-away to what they're up to. They'll learn it quickly - too quickly, I'm afraid. But for now, I'll keep up the act. We moms need to retain our air of mystery as long as possible!

Vacation Update

It took us a good week to recover from the fun of our vacation! We had a really good time, but it was seriously exhausting.

We got there late on Saturday evening and spent Sunday getting acclimated to Colorado. We also had to go find some trailer bikes to rent - that was much more difficult than we imagined. But, after visiting four different bike shops, we finally prevailed and spent the evening relaxing.

On Monday, we tested our conditioning and rode with the kids to Breckenridge. It was probably only 10 or 11 miles, but it's all uphill. We hung out at the river bank in town, ate lunch, got a little rained on, and then headed back down to the condo. Unfortunately, we didn't get very far since my front tire was flat. And then, of course, it really started raining.

We finally found some shelter from which we would not get squeezed out (some people are really rude!) on a covered bridge and managed to get the tire changed, the rain stopped, and were on our way. By the time we made it back - racing another huge rainstorm home - I was seriously worn out!! I managed to stand up long enough to make some spaghetti and then we all went to bed.

Tuesday was a hiking day - we hiked the steep way to Lily Pad Lakes - and managed to meet some people there from The Woodlands. (Can't get away from those damn Texans!) :)

Wednesday was another biking day. This time we went to Copper Mountain. Once again it was all uphill on the way there, but downhill the whole ride back. In fact, Marxo spent nearly the whole 2 hrs on the way up singing and she spent the 45 minutes back squealing! While we were up there, Marxo jumped on the big trampoline/bungee-corded-harness thing - doing back flips, double-back flips, and front flips. (this cemented the fact that we REALLY need to get her into gymnastics since she had never before done any of this, but followed directions and fearlessly did everything the "instructor" told her to do) There was also a miniature golf course there and we all played a round.

On Thursday, some friends came up to visit us and go hiking with us. We hiked again to Lily Pad Lakes - this time from the flat direction - and managed to break our record of avoiding the rain. We got caught this time, but were luckily fairly close to the car at that point.

Friday was our final biking day (thank goodness!). We rode to Keystone and on the way back, we stopped in Dillon and took the Water Taxi across the lake to Frisco.

We decided to prolong the wonderful family trip and drove down through Roswell, NM to check out the aliens. We were pretty disappointed - we didn't see a one! This hasn't prevented Fellan from being terrified of the dark and waking up every single night to tell us that he heard/felt/saw an alien in their room and that he needs to come in and sleep with us. I'm hoping the beginning of school next week is going to exhaust him enough to finally sleep through the night again. :)