Some places just stay in your heart....

Almost eight years ago Jack, Mike, and I left Texas. We were excited to be getting home close to family and our fabulous friends. But we didn't realize how much we had fallen in love with our new home of San Antonio. I miss it SO much -- and this week, we get to go back!!!! I can't wait, so I had to post a few of my favorite things that I'm so excited to get to visit again!

The Bluebonnets. Who can resist a field full of these gorgeous peppy spring flowers. I just hope they haven't all gone by the time we get down there.

The Alamo! No Texan, whether native born or just wishing they were, can't resist the birthplace of Texas Independence. Mike and I used to sometimes just hop in the car and drive down to see it. It just has that kind of spirit to it.

The Riverwalk, especially at night. (Just don't eat and Cafe Rio.)

Instead, definitely eat at Taco Cabana. Freshly cut cilantro in the salsa bar -- yum!!!

And then there's the wildlife.....

Longhorns. So cool!

The beautiful live oaks in all their amazing shapes.

Coyotes! They used to serenade us from the park behind our apartment every evening in the summer. And then there's the one that seemed to commute at the same time I did -- he'd cross my path on my way to school.

And the cowboys in their pickup trucks!

And our favorite favorite hiking places --

Hill Country SNA

Lost Maples

Pedernales Falls -- also home to the worlds most fabulous beef jerky

And the Frio River

Oh, man, there is just NO WAY I am ever going to be able to leave again. I love this place!!!

Midnight Visitor Revisited

Jack has lately gotten into the Wimpy Kid series. We read it together most nights before he goes to sleep. So he's really excited that the new movie is coming out, and we said we'd read like crazy this week so we'd be ready to see it. I jetted home from the gym after class tonight so we could get on it -- only to find him already fast asleep in his bed. Well, he just wandered out, still half asleep, squinted through his sleepy eyes and said, "Wimpy Kid?" I think he must have thought it was still evening or something. So....we have a date for tomorrow. We're going to get snacks, snuggle up on the couch, and read until we are done. Or fall asleep. I guess they better be sugary snacks!

Oh Hail!!

Springtime in Ohio -- you never know what your gonna get. The day started off grey, then major rain, then super bright sunshine and 60 degree temps, then -- BLAMMO -- hail.



Best moment of the day -- Jack and his friend Clay yelling insults at the sky. "Oh, yeah, is that the best you got??" and then CRACK, huge lightning/thunder and the lights went out. I didn't realize Clay's eyes could open that wide. I'm still laughing!!

Sweet Silence

Last night I just wanted to cry. My poor little guy, doubled over and screaming in pain, me not knowing why or how to make it better. Tonight I'm smiling ear to ear because he's sleeping peacefully and happily and with no pain at all. Makes me think of a quote I heard somewhere: Having children is like allowing your heart to walk around outside your body. I'm just so grateful that he's feeling better!

What are they teaching our children??

Jack's reading homework today started out innocently enough:


Oh, sweet little garden snails! I wonder what they will get up to?







GAAAH!! What is this? That's TERRIBLE! Poor little garden snails getting eaten!! First the wren, and then the hedgehog and then the toads -- down they go, two by two, gulp GULP! Ah. At least there are two left at the end.....







Ummmmm. Ok. Happy snails. Perhaps we should give them some privacy?





Yup! And there you have it, kids. The grand ol' circle of life!

Like the snuggles, but not the reason for them!!

Poor bug! He's feeling awful today. Actually, has been on and off for more than a week. He gets these awful stomach pains that have him double over and cry out. And then he'll be fine for a while. Or even for a good half a day. And then they come back. At first I thought maybe it was constipation or gas pains, so we treated him for that and it seemed to go away. Then it came back right before school and I thought, yeah, right. No way am I falling for that -- and off to school he went with a stern warning that he better really be sick if he called me to pick him up. Gets off the bus holding his belly that afternoon and says, I felt bad but I didn't call you because I knew you wanted me to be tough. (Cue cracking of mommy's heart until crushing weight of guilt.) Headed off to doctor who couldn't determine that anything was wrong and told us to go on with the gas/constipation ideas. The pains have been better through the week, but still troubling him. Still in the back of my mind I'm wondering if he's just playing us. This is not jsut cause I'm hard-hearted -- the pains seemed to show up at the most convenient times. As in, he was totally fine playing outside with his buddies all day, but then at bedtime was in dreadful pain and needed to stay up and watch Johnny Test to make him feel better. Or.....he was having a great time all Saturday but, ow ow owwww, could not POSSIBLY get up out of bed to go to church. Well, I went off to work today and emailed Mike when I got there to let him know that Jack had left his backpack in my car. I find out from Mike that the pains have hit again and he's keeping Jack home from school. You know Mom's always know better than Dads, right? And so I figured, ha! Sucker, he's pulling one over on you. Only to get home and find that the poor little guy has been falling asleep all day and hasn't really moved. We haul him back in for doc visit number two and there's still nothing conclusive -- but the normally rambunctious, no-attention-span boy is lying listless on the exam table, not moving or really talking. Clearly something is not right. We take him off for an xray of his belly and some basic bloodwork and just as I'm starting to imagine all the seriously dreadful things that this could be.....something clicks in the boy and he's all lively and chatty and wanting to go to the park. What?!?! Then shortly after getting home (we did NOT go to the park) he's back to tired and --- here's the only good bit -- wanting to cuddle and snuggle and have his mommy around. This is particularly welcome because Mr. Socially Aware was so concerned about keeping his Cool First Grader image that he would not let me touch him through all of the waiting for the doctor. Every gentle stroke of the hair was angrily tossed off; if my arm grazed his shoulder I was struck with a glare of such malice as would cause the most hardened criminal to back away. I'm hoping someone will gently remind him that he is still only 8 and is allowed under statute to still love his mommy for some years to come??

Given the Cool Dude routine, I took it as a sign of how cruddy he felt that crossing the parking lots at both doctors offices today he quietly and willingly slipped his little hand into mine. Is it terrible of me to be a little grateful for sickness??

I was pretty proud of him when he could his blood drawn. A) He was totally brave about it. A little nervous, but he kept it together. B) He was really really curious and closely watching everyhting the guy did and asking lots of questions. What does an eight year old boy with broad imagination ask in these circumstances? In order, here we go:

1) I thought if you take blood out of someone then they will die. (Keep in mind, it was a finger prick and at this point the guy had taken about three drops off Jack's index finger!) We told him how many pints an adult has and you could see him trying to mentally work out how many chocolate milks from lunch that would be.

2) He wanted to see the thing that had pricked him and when the nurse told him it had retracted so you couldn't see it Jack told the guy that was because blood had germs in it and he needed to be careful not to get them.

He was a little horrified by the XRAY tech who sort of immediately told him he needed to take his pants off. Considering we had just this weekend had one of "those" talks about how some bad people like to do bad things to little kids, you can't quite tell what might have beens swirling around his little mind!! His eyes swivelled round and locked right on mine and I told him I'd stay right there. Still, he was VERY careful maneuvering around under the little plastic sheet. Such a cute little grown up boy! Still so fun to see the world through his eyes!!

Mike wanted me to tell you....

A sign of the times?


Jack got a lego catalog and was paging through it telling us all the things he wanted and what he would do with them. Then he found this. I want this one mommy! What would you do with it, I asked? He said, I would build it and then I would build a lego man out of all black legoes......

My Week

Hmmm, so much for updating my blog whenever anything interesting happens. The problem is, well, besides being busy and tired, I refuse to do this on anything but Mike's laptop...because my laptop and our home computer are old and slow (like me!!) and I am impatient and can't take it. But considering that MIke's laptop goes to work, and I am at the gym most of the evening, and he actually does like to do some freelancing and farkling at night, well, it's hard to carve out some time. Except on Sunday. So here's the update.....


Jack's birthday was on the 3rd, and lucky him, a card from his Auntie Jean came with a whoppingly big check just for him. Our little guy has always been just a wee bit materialistic, and this windfall was almost too much for him, as you can see in the photos:





So, there's really only one thing Jack likes more than money and random stuff and that's guns. So off he went with Mike to the military store and came home with what might be the loudest cap gun ever made. At least I like the smell of gunpowder.

Thank goodness, and just in time to save what's left of my sanity, the weather turned gloriously springy this week. Sunshine, breeze, temps in the sixties. Ahhhhhh. I got done subbing early one day and headed out to the reservoir and got in an awesome workout of running and doing the stairs. It felt SO good to be outside and warm and in the sun that I just kept going and going. 'Course, could barely move the next day, but it was SO worth it. Then I got to pick Jack up from school and we headed out to the park. It was sweet -- we were there early enough that the only other kids there were little toddlers with their mommies. Jack and I have been regulars at this park since he was that age, and there was something really nice about remembering all those times.

Of course, MY boy is NOT a toddler, so he climbed up to a good sniping spot and watched over all of us make sure no bad guys snuck up on our position.

Anybody remember the myth about Zeus and whichever one of his children sprung whole from his forehead? I went him one better:

Mine is already armed!!!! :)



Jack snatched my phone so he could take pictures from his perch. Here's teh world as he sees it:
It was St Patrick's day, so he told me to act like I was pinching somebody. He was REALLY into the pinching this year. His poor friend Angel got it good, from what I hear.


Phew! Ohio comes alive, finally!! Please please stay warm now. Of course, it always always snows during Spring Break, but a girl can hope, right?

And speaking of Spring Break: I'm officially on mine! Had my Physics final on Saturday and after decades of running scared from Physics....I GOT A HUNDRED!! On a final. Ooh, am I pleased with myself. Of course, it was just a community college and the course was totally skewed in order to make it really really hard to do badly, but I'm still so pleased. Particularly with having made it through the last question about the bullet that fires from the gun and hits the wooden block attached to a string....how high will the block swing? I did it!! (Not the shooting, just to be clear. LOL!)

And finally...as I was sliding into bed at midnight last night, guess who came to visit me, all bright eyed and bushy tailed and saying he wasn't sleepy:
Surprise surprise, he was no longer bright eyed and bushy tailed when we got him up for church this morning.

Spring Crafts

Dunno if it's old age or spending too much time with Jenn, Bonnie, and Mandy over the years, but I've been bitten by the crafting bug. Part of it is Jack -- he DID spend too much time with Mandy, who decorates her house SO cute for every holiday. Jack started coming home and asking why OUR house wasn't decorated, and that triggered my "you're kid is missing out" gene, and the I had to respond, right? So...it's getting on for Spring and in addition to the whole decorating thing, the spring fever is hitting and I want to redecorate everything. (EVERYTHING!!!) Luckily for my bank account, I limited it to doing some flowery cute things to make it feel a little more like spring even when it's grey and yucky outside.

First off, I saw some little flower pots in Meijer and thought.....I can do that. I can do that BETTER. So I took myself off to JoAnns and got some paint, some flower pots, and some flowers, and eventually turned them into:


We used to have a huge forsythia bush on the side of our driveway when we lived in Yellow Springs, and I have always loved the crazy yellow sprigs that shoot everywhere. It feels like the personification (flower-sification??) of the way I feel in spring.

Then it was time for the bathroom to get a little sprucing up. I borrowed Mandy's cricut (THANKS!) and got some cute paper and some flowers and used an old basket and frame and, voila!


Is it kinda pathetic that I'm so proud of myself? Or that it makes me happy everytime I see it?

Great Date!

Mike, resident Apple-addict, made a date (not with me, thankfully!) to go stand in line for the new ipad and go to a movie. So Jack and I made a date of our own. It's swim night at the Y, so Jack went with me, hung out in KidsTime with his best buds while I taught my cycling and pilates classes, and then we met up at the pool. After we'd had our fill of splashing (and, turns out, he'd had his fill of pool water), we got changed and headed out for pizza, then back home to eat it (in the living room!! A rare treat -- I hate to eat in the living room. Left over lessons from my mum: avoid eating in the living room and never buy sugary cereals!) We had planned to play the Wii together while eating our pizza and later watch a movie and have popcorn. Well, believe it or not, a full day of school followed by an hour or two in the pool will wear a boy out. He played one race with me on the Wii, and then we snuggled up together to watch Planet 51. About 1/2 an hour in his little head snuggled down onto my shoulder and he was out a few minutes later. I got to carry him off to bed -- which I haven't gotten to do for a year or so since he decided he was a big boy and had outgrown all that stuff.

I just love those times when life finally slows down, there's nowhere to get to and no rules to enforce, no homework to be done, and we just get to chill and hang out together. I used to hold him as a baby and think, I can't bear for him to grow up! Holding that tiny little warm body and rocking, I thought there could be nothing as wonderful as that feeling. And here he is, growing up and changing and turning into a person in front of me, and while I miss that tiny baby to snuggle, dang, I just really really like my boy. Not just love him, I mean, that goes without saying in the mama-grizzly-bear kinda way that you don't know you have in you til you have a kid -- but I just really like him. What a cool kid! I'm glad he's my bud.

Had to add this photo, because it's my favorite.

Curse you, Boy Scouts!

(I like to be an equal opportunity hater)

Just spent a ridiculous amount of time sewing little patches on to little tiny arms. Seriously, have we not heard of iron-ons? The worst of it is: just looked at my finished product and realized, Dang! The numbers aren't aligned. Want to take bets which will win out -- my OCD or my laziness?

(Stay tuned for pics of Jack's first trip to Cub Scouts. He's only been talking about it for a year and a half!)

Curse you, Girl Scouts!!

How is a girl supposed to keep her girlish figure when you put out more-addictive-than-crack things like Thin Mints. I have single-handedly demolished almost an entire sleeve. Hear that popping sound? Yeah, that was the button on my waistband. Thanks a LOT!!!

It's Mardis Gras, y'all!!!

Mardis Gras has big sentimental value in our family. Jack was born on the Monday before Mardis Gras, and as we were waiting to hear news of him coming into the world, we were invited to our good friend's for a Mardis Gras FHE. And before that, we'd lucked into Mardis Gras on Galveston Island when we celebrated our fifth anniversary. So now, to recognize our Southern roots and Jack's status as a gen-you-ine Texan, we make King Cakes every year.

King Cakes are ridiculous looking....

but very very yummy. They are essentially great big cinnamon rolls in a circle. With lots of frosting. And necklaces!! What more could you ask for??


And better yet...there's a little surprise waiting inside:


Why, oh why, you may ask, is there a plastic baby lurking in the cake? Because it's epiphany, baby, and that is the baby Jesus. Ok, set aside for a minute the fact that I've just wrapped baby Jesus up in dough (can he breathe in there, even??) and shoved him in an oven for 20 minutes or so.....and then will attack his little hiding place with a knife and potentially EAT him -- we are totally honoring him here. Really. (And besides, with as many Catholics as there are in the world, he must be used to getting eaten by now.) Here's the deal -- if you get the baby in your slice of cake, you have good luck this year AND you have to make the King Cake the next year. We must not have stressed that last bit enough in years past, because we have yet to EVER get a King Cake made for us. But hey, maybe next year!!

Lassez Les Bon Temps Roulez.....or whatever! Happy Fat Tuesday!! And to help with the giggles and the fatness, here's one last photo, one of a series taken amidst massive giggles by my darling son. Should I be offended...or worried?