Bellies, Behavior and Blessings

I'm such a boring blogger these days!!! Shame on me!!! Let me just say however, I don't know if I've ever felt so fulfilled in all of my life! I love being with my girls and my free time has been filled with keeping a nice house consistently (I think I'm in a new record), having lots of people in my home again, finally completing our foster paperwork/classes/steps (we lack one home study and are excited to get a child in the new year), playing with Scentsy, and am following the Lord's leading to a new sensitivity and reactivity to some homeless friends God has led into my life. When I breathe, I breathe deeply these days but not because I'm tired but because I am so complete and content. Life is full and I'm being used in ways I only hoped I would be just a few short months ago.

Two nights ago Beatle prayed, "God, you're my favorite. I mean, I can just imagine you and me in my bed--cuddling." :) On her thankfulness list, her teacher translated her little scribble scrabble and wrote to the side that her number one was "God" but when I looked closer at it, I saw she wrote "MIGAD". haha! But for those of you who are still hung up on making fun of my kindergartener's simple writing skills, you are missing the "MI" at the beginning of her number one answer. My God. Her God. She's thankful for HER God. That makes a mom's heart swell!

And to touch further on her writing skills, she's actually satisfactory. :) haha! We got her progress report yesterday and she was satisfactory in academic and excellent in conduct. When I told her what her report said and told her the things Mrs. Bettis said we should probably work on a little more with her writing, Beatle paused and asked thoughtfully, "It's behavior that you really care about, right?" Awww! "Yes, Beatle! We care more about your behavior than what's up in your head because we know you are smart and can learn all that when you are ready."

Yesterday, I was trying to negotiate the doctor out of sticking Birdie's finger for an iron check. Alas, he won and, turns out, she IS anemic! So wierd but I'm glad he stuck to his guns, I guess. Just some iron suplements and we should be all patched up.

Birdie turns 10 months tomorrow. I saw a lady tonight a church who is due in 2011 right around the same time I was due with Birdie. And, I started reminiscing about the big belly at Thanksgiving and the clothes I was wearing this time last year...I actually really, really missed being pregnant for a few minutes.

Some pictures!

I bought this for Beatle when she was born--many frames with a list of "firsts" with magnetic backs. One day, I went into her room to see that they were all scrambled up and the wrong label was on the wrong picture. I asked, "What happened?" and she told me that a few days before she got mad at me and mixed them all up. Oooo, she really got me back with that one. :) Hey, right now, I really do appreciate that that is as vindictive as she gets!




Some pictures from the weekend...



Sleepy Birdie...ripping her socks and hat off all night wore her out.



Beatle said she held her breath through this whole picture...

Pilgrits

Halloween was nice. My parents came to town. However, we were really confused when to trick-or-treat. Hot Springs never declared a day and everyone we talked to said something different so we wound up going both nights! :) We had a cowgirl and an Indian. Keeping Birdie's cowgirl hat on proved to be the biggest trick of the night. Beatle was so wore out from partying with my parents this weekend that she went to bed at 6:30 last night and I had to wake her up a little after 7 this morning! I couldn't believe it.

Today, Beatle came home from school telling me a little bit about the Pilgrits. :) She told me that they sailed here in a big boat a long, long time ago--like, in the 80s. haha! I had to chuckle out loud at that one.

Birdie can let go when she pulls up and stand alone now. It seems like she's achieved a lot with her mobility in the last month and so, in turn, I achieve less everyday. ;)

My sister comes to town this weekend and I'm really excited to spend some one-on-one time with her!

She Gets Me

My daughter, Beatle, has a sense of humor very much like mine. We are definitely two different people but she gets me...my five-year-old gets me. I can be talking to another kid and slide some discreet humor in the mix and Beatle will just look at me with twinkly eyes and I know that she knows what just happened. Or like tonight, in our car in the parking lot after church, we were hungry and I was rifling around in my wallet to see if I had any money and after I looked through it, I turned to her casually and asked, "You wanna go get a beer?" And then we both start howling with laughter at the same time, the same way. If I could put that sound in a mystical conch shell and wear it around my neck like Ursula the Sea Witch, I would. She's my daughter, first and foremost, but she's also my buddy.

Spills, Thrills and Chills

I had a list going of all the things I should blog about but of course I couldn't find it when I had a chance to blog.

I've started selling Scentsy. It just seemed to crazy not to. Here, no one really knows about it and the ones who did wanted to buy from someone but didn't know who to go to. So far, I haven't made ANY money but it's been fun. :) haha!

Scentsy does remind me of a Birdie story. She is into EVERYTHING! I have come to the conclusion that most of the stress in my life right now comes from trying to accomplish too much when she's awake. We're just in that stage where if I leave her unattended for too long some sort of catastrophe is brewing. I had my trial scents where she could reach but they're all wax and in jars she'd have to unscrew. I didn't care to much if she rifled around in them. Well, I forgot about the room spray. I have no idea how a 8 month old figured out how to unscrew the lid but she was sitting in a mess of aromatic oil when I came back...and it was sticky! (Not what I imagined.) Our house smells awesome though and so do all my cleaning rags which makes me want to suggest to the company that they start doing a line of some sort of laundry fragrances!

I have never been so thankful for my hardwood floors in all my life! Just the other day, Beatle walked in with her grape creamslush and it just fell to the floor as soon as we walked through the door. Purple goo was oozing everywhere. I just stood there for a second until it soaked in what just happened...it's not everyday you see something that color on your floors.

We've since learned that the fireplace that BR tried to install could have blown us to smitherines because it was originally made for propane not natural gas. So, we've got to try to re-coop our money and sell it to someone who has propane; not to mention, thank the Good Lord for sparing us once again from our own ignorance.

Beatle spent the night last weekend with her best friend and I thought she'd never come home and then when they did go their separate ways, they just cried and cried so we let them talk on the phone and invited her over after church on Sunday. I'm so glad Beatle has found a good friend from a nice family!!!

Beatle broke up a fight at rugtime yesterday...I heard about it from another teacher who said that she just cracks them up. She apparently asserted that he calm down while she held the boy's fists until he calmed down a little bit. Then he started to do the boxer shuffle with his dukes still up asking Beatle, "You want a piece of me, Beatle? You want a piece of this?" bahaha! I am rueful to say that this is the boy that is still her boyfriend. I told Beatle that she doesn't want a man like that to marry. I asked her, "Do you ever see dad try to fight me?" "Yeah!" she declared from the backseat. Ding, dong! Scuffling is NOT the same as real fighting.

She and I went to the Little Rock Philharmonic Orchestra to listen to spooky music from popular movies and symphonies. We had a date and we enjoyed it a lot. Coming in costume was encouraged so she wore her Indian costume and I dressed up like the conductor. Right before we got out of the car, she made me wipe off my fake mustache because she was afraid they wouldn't let me go into the girls restroom with her. haha! She's turning into such a worrier. Aren't kids not supposed to give a rip? Even in the balcony, I could tell she was stressing and she finally told me it was because she thought the balcony would collapse. My mom worried at a young age because her parents were emotionally unstable at times. What are Beatle's tendencies telling me???

Also, Beatle says "Hatan" instead of "Satan". It's quite cute because she's usually talking quite seriously when she says it.

I better get back to tending to the house and the babe before she starts teething on the toilet brush or something! Oh, have I posted that she pulled our laptop off of an endtable and killed it??? Yeah! I'm on a borrowed one. Children are blessings from the Lord!!! :) It's times like those when I have to remind myself that people are more important than things. Love you all!

Be Wary of Nicknaming...

Two cute expressions Beatle says--"whooped cream" instead of "whipped cream" and "oh right" instead of "alright".

She's now in love with the boy who was tormenting her and calling her fat the first few weeks of school. He said she looked cute yesterday and she made a heart with her hands at him across the rug at rug time. She said that he said, "Yeah baby. That's a heart oh right." :) Why do we always go after the boys that drive us crazy??? Hopefully, her taste in "men" will improve as she ages.

Yesterday, we had a blog worthy conversation on the way home from school, oh right! :) She was telling me that the boy she used to love, Gage, (you know, before she fell in love with the other boy) was making up nicknames for other kids so Beatle thought she'd come up with a nickname for him. She shortened his name and dubbed him "Gay". By her incredulous accounting, "He just got so mad and told the teacher. And the teacher made me, me!, apologize. I don't understand...I was just making up a nickname for him and my teacher said that that word means happy anyways." She seemed like she was still in a fog of disbelief. I asked her if the teacher understood what she was trying to do and she said that her teacher did and explained it to the boy but, nonetheless, Beatle still felt at fault for the whole thing and didn't know why. BR and I committed long ago to the idea that we will have a constant dialogue with our children about sexuality instead of just having one jarring conversation about it. So, parked in our driveway, I mustered up the simple (and I stress, age appropriate) words to tell her what "gay" means to a lot of other pople as well as pointing out what God's Word says about it. She sat quietly and listened, with her eyebrows doing a lot of activity, and then said, "Well, he must have known about that meaning. Can we eat our snack outside today?" haha! BR and I had a good laugh about that. Ahhh, the wonders of school!

More Corndog Related Disappointment

I've been edged out. Yes, me--pushiest of the pushy--has been edged out. I am no longer a homeroom mother. I had been asked along with another mom to share responsibilities as room mother. Easy cheesy, right? It sure started off that way. I did a party, then she did a party. I'd give her a call now and then with things that I knew was going on and share emails I had with the teacher. I thought all was going swimmingly until she decided there needed to be a pecking order. We started chatting after school one day and she told me she had seen a paper somewhere with her name billed on top of mine so I went home and told BR that I was getting vibes that she was wanting to establish some sort of something about this. Next day, I'm picking up Beatle and her teacher comes to my car window and said that So-and-So's Mom had sent home a letter with all the kids proclaiming she was the one and only room mother and the teacher was concerned and wanted to see how I felt about it. I told her that if she wanted it that bad, she could have it. I have higher ambitions...the PTA! Muhahaha! :) P.s. The letter was absolutely ridiculous. I haven't had one of those "high school" moments in awhile. I guess I was due.

WE SOLD OUR VAN! R.I.P GOLD DUST. Just this afternoon, right before the game, a guy came and got it. He had been stalking it from day one and kept giving us these low, crap offers. Then we realized, nobody was giving us any offers so we met in the middle and it's done and out of our front yard! Yay! And, I don't know if this is considered racist or stereotypical but I'll tell you what, from all my time in Fort Worth having yard sales and then selling the van, Mexicans drive a freaking hard bargain! They like to negotiate. BR would tell you that they are absolutely one of my favorite people groups...I would be one if I could. I love their sense of family but also, they work really hard for their money and they appreciate it so they want to get THE LOWEST price for something they can. BR was like a true car salesmen; you know, you'll start negotiating and then they have to go "talk to their manager" off in some office and you never see them. I was inside making empanadas for the game and BR came in a few times needing a pep talk to hold firm to our price. haha! Empanadas too...what a kicker. He did really good though.

This may surprise you but my whole life I've done stupid things. :) I laughed until I practically peed myself the first few times I saw Tommy Boy but especially the part where he's "Fat guy in a little coat". My sister has always been much smaller than I but I would always "try her clothes on". There were a few instances where I'd even stretch things out or bust zippers. It makes no sense; it's a compulsion. Even if she leaves her jeans lying around now, I would definitely think about slipping them on. There's just no explaination for something so stupid. Well, something sort of like that happened this week. I was swinging Beatle on her swing in the backyard and I thought I would try to see if I could hold myself up on her trapeze bar. It never even crossed my mind that I was such a lard that maybe the timber couldn't hold ME up! I'm counting on my husband's carpentry skills to fix my boo-boo or we owe her a new swingset.

Her swingset has two parts to it; the part that I broke and then a little look out part with a slide up high. I'm thinking it was in my panic to make things right after tubby demolished her playplace, I mentioned something about having a sleepover up there on some weekend. As soon as I picked her up on Friday afternoon...it was THAT weekend. We went to a crafts fair that closed long before we were done poking around or even got a corndog! We were all totally devastated. It never even crossed our minds that it would close so early on a Friday. I ran up to a food vendor asking if they still had corndogs and, with a smirk, the cashier told us that those were the last two, pointing to a plate some skinny girl was holding while she was bouncing away. We were devastated. In an effort to cheer herself up, Beatle starts talking up all the things we're going to do when we get home for our mom/daughter campout. BR knows that I'd rather be sleeping in my own bed so he lowers the boom on Beatle, telling her that mommy may not sleep outside. Does timing mean nothing to him?!? There she is in her trucker hat with crusted lunch still on her face boo-hooing in the midway of a closing craft fair. After shooting him a look of "What were you thinking?!?" I assure her that we will have our sleepover. Then, he finds a BBQ truck that still had some food. Beatle states that she wants a turkey leg but I tell him that I really just wanted a corndog and don't want anything from here so he starts to leave. Again, for real? Please BR, don't hold back, just heap the disappointment on her head all at once. While I really appreciate him being sensitive to me, he was totally oblivious to another fragile female in our family. We got her a turkey leg and she happily ate it all the way home in the jeep. :) Our sleepover outside was fun--lil bit scary since I was supposed to be the rock--not gonna lie. You could tell though, she was SO happy. BR came out to check on us (and get the remains of the turkey leg carcas--it takes awhile to eat one of those and we didn't want to have it with us out there while we slept for fear of critters) before he went to bed (he slept on the couch with a window open) when we heard something. He grabbed the flashlight and shone it at the building and saw a "huge" rat. Yuck! And then something woke me up at 1 am. I rolled over to see a skunk in our back yard. Ewww! But overall, we had a blast, nothing got us and we slept well.

Ok, I'm done for the night! After talking about last night's sleep on boards outside, I'm ready to get into MY bed now. :) Sorry, I've been awful windy tonight!