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. :)

I considered it...

You know, every time I came to my blog page over the last couple of months to check on the "Blogs I Read" section, I thought to myself that the title of my last post would be the perfect way to just let a blog die. But, the reason I started this blog was so that I would have a place to post cute stories about the kids and keep my parents informed of what's going on in our lives. (I'm obviously not good at either of those things, but those were truly my reasons for starting the blog, and it's good to have a "strech-goal" in life...)

Since I last wrote, I attended my 20th high school reunion, went to Venezuela on a business trip, my pen-pal came to visit us last weekend, and now we're getting ready to head to Colorado for a week of vacation.

The reunion was really nice. I got to see a lot of people I hadn't seen since our wedding nearly 16 years ago and I think everyone else had a good time, too.

The trip to Venezuela was also really nice. Caracas is a beautiful city and the food was wonderful. I even got to practice some of my Spanish and it inspired me to finally order a membership to El Puente (which I've been wanting to do for about 8 years now!) so that I can continue to practice and hopefully expand my vocabulary enough to hold an intelligible conversation with the client some day.

Pen-pal? Yes, pen-pal. In third grade my class and a class from Indianapolis exchanged letters. I got paired up with someone who would end up becoming the only constant friend from my childhood. For me, it seems that friendships come and go, mostly depending on whomever I'm located close to (or working with) at the time. I'm really a bad friend, in that regard. I'm so glad that my friend Courtney has a blog so that I can at least keep up with what she's doing from time to time!

My pen-pal is sort of the same story, except that we've never been in the same location. We write to each other fairly infrequently, but we realized this past weekend that we've now been friends for 30 years! The first time we met face to face was when she came to be a bridesmaid in my wedding. Then I was part of her wedding, and we've visited her a couple of times through the years, but this was the first time she was able to make a trip to Texas. It was so fun having her here with us and we're hoping that it will end up being an annual trip! :)

Last night, I spent the evening getting the kids' clothes ready for the trip. Tonight I need to start thinking about my clothes. And I need to figure out what food we're going to take along with us - we're driving and it's so much cheaper to buy in bulk at Sam's here!

I guess that brings us up-to-date. Maybe I'll have time to post something next week, but I kind of doubt it. We'll be too busy biking and hiking, I hope!

Motivation gone

My motivation seems to have gone on hiatus for the day. I'm supposed to be lifting weights and then making a quick trip to Target or Whole Foods or someplace constructive, but instead, I'm sitting here pretty much doing nothing. I just had my second breakfast, so I'm waiting to get hungry enough to have my lunch.

While I was perusing some other blogs, I remembered I took a picture this weekend that I just have to post. My company's picnic was this past weekend and instead of having a traditional picnic where everyone gets together at a park or something for food, my company has been having their picnic out at a "ranch" with bunches of activities for everyone. This has, oddly enough, become a highlight of the year for our kids. They LOVE my company picnic. Which is pretty cool - I like to watch them have fun being kids.

One of the things they immediately started talking about when I told them that we were getting close to the date of the picnic was the climbing wall. Marxo and Fellan have been obsessed with climbing a climbing wall for about two years. Actually, Marxo has been quite a bit more obsessed than Fellan.

When we got to the picnic, the begging began - please, can we do the climbing wall? Please? Please? PLEASE?! We needed to eat first, but then we made our way over to the climbing wall. Marxo wasn't quite ready to do it at first, so Fellan got the harness on while Marxo went off to the gigantic inflatable slide. Fellan climbed up about half way, then dropped, then climbed half-way again, and he was done.

When Marxo finally decided it was time, she climbed, lost her footing and started dropping, but caught herself before getting to the bottom, climbed some more, dropped a little, and then made it all the way to the top!

I snapped this picture with my phone right before she dropped. Awesome! I love to see her do things like this because it convinces me that she really did get some of my adventure-loving genes and not just the princessey ones that she must have inherited from her father. Uh... or... maybe that didn't come out right. :)

Random stories

The other day I was leaving from work and had to wait on the elevator. I heard it ding and stood next to the doors waiting for them to open. Only they didn't open! After waiting a few seconds, I turned around and caught the elevator that actually did open right before it left the floor. Luckily, there was nobody on the elevator...

Could have been the same day, but I don't remember for sure, I was sitting in a teleconference listening to a guy from Switzerland telling us about their hyper-compressor and all the cool features it has. He got to one point in the presentation and said "eunuch". I was pretty sure he wasn't trying to say that the secret behind the amazing performance of their compressors was that they make them out of castrated boys, but it took me probably two full minutes and several "eunuchs" later to figure out he was saying "unique".

The other day right before we all headed upstairs for bed, Fellan turned to us and said that regular mattresses have springs and they cause pressure points which can make you toss and turn all night. But tempurpedic mattresses are made of foam and they don't make pressure points. (I'm not kidding, he basically regurgitated the entire commercial to us completely out of the blue.) We assured him that the IKEA mattress he sleeps on is made of foam and so he shouldn't have to worry about pressure points while sleeping.

He's a walking infomercial - he tells us about 5 hour energy drink, perfect push ups, rapid bath pet bathers, and on and on. I think that means we watch too much TV.

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?