Only 73%??

So, the folks are coming out to visit for ten days (mine, from Ohio) and they are bringing along my neice who hasn't been to California, I think, since she was my flower girl at the wedding (She was barely three and needed to be walked down the aisle by her daddy, my brother, to keep her on track). So, I don't have a lot of time for blogging.

After moving into this house we did a lot of unpacking and got out and put away most of the stuff we really needed and left all that other crap in boxes up against walls, and in closets, and in corners of every room. Now with visitors looming, I have been taking a second look at getting back to unpacking a few more of those boxes, maybe putting a few more pictures up on the wall.

And so as not to leave you with some little tidbit in my blog to read (because I know your day is less swell without it, I leave you with this little "meme" test I took (wow, my first blog-meme. Am I stooping low? Selling out? Getting cooler?) which tells me just how addicted to coffee I am.

I am 73% Addicted to Coffee

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

In My Dreams...

In the middle of the night:

Noah: Mommy! Mommy! Can you fix my blankets? They are all twisted.

Mama: Sure, Babe. Here ya go.

(back to my bed…)

Daddy: I was having the weirdest dream. I came home and there were these giant foam animals up on the roof. When I asked why, it turns out you were secretly running a puppet show on TV and you had just won an Emmy award for it. Someone showed me the footage of you making your acceptance speech up on the stage!

Mama: Wow. I was dreaming I was folding laundry.

Come On! Big Money, Big Money!!

Okay guys, I know you are coming here to find out what is up in my life, and here I am using up my space (well it IS MY space, ya know...) to enter some cool contests.

Over at 5 Minutes for Mom, they are having a number of really great contests, and you can enter one or all of them. I am picking and choosing the ones I want (ranging from mama-blogger business cards to a weekend away for Mama at a spa in Arizona!), so keep your fingers crossed for me, and maybe even head on over there and check it out yourself!



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There is another awesome contest too, over at ArsGeek, a site that seeks to free your inner geek. Over there you have the chance to win a Zen Stone MP3 Player or Phillips MP3 Player just by leaving a comment! Check out the contest here.


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Over at Mommy Of Three (I can relate) there are a few contests listed, but I am entering to win a copy of The No-Cry Discipline Solution by Elizabeth Pantley.

As Karen (not me, the OTHER Mommy of Three) says: "Disciplining children is arguably one of the hardest skills for parents to learn. As a parent herself, Elizabeth Pantley knows what a challenge it is to establish good discipline, and she shares the hard-won wisdom of her experience with parents in this latest edition to her revolutionary "no-cry" approach to parenting." You can enter too!

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And here is a funny one... Bloggrrl.com has a giveaway based on that lovely midwestern game called Cow Patty Bingo! Thats the one where you grid off a field and bet on where the cow will leave her happy little deposit. If you mention your favorite post of here (this review on a self help book is mine). Head on over there if you want to give it a try. This contest runs until July 31st.

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I'm a Busy Body

While wandering about the blogosphere (wow, thats the first time I used that word... I am so IN, so NOW!) I stumbled upon a couple contests and thought I would share them. This one is for this great organizer called the Busy Body Book over at Mum's the Wurd.

Its awesome because they look so cool in their fabric covers and are fully customizable, which is great because I can never find one that fits my odd world. If you want to enter too, you can do so here!

Wordless Wednesday - Sanibel Island, FL - Sunset

I had another picture planned for today, but the computer crashed and so we are back to the laptop. So today, and old favorite of mine. An oldie but a goodie. March 2005.

Cold Hard Cash

A conversation with Noah as I was tucking him into bed tonight:

Mama: Okay, I love you Honey, I will see you in the morning.

Noah: Mommy, there is cash in the freezer.

Mama: Ummm…. Huh?

Noah: There is money in the refrigerator and in the freezer too.

Mama: There…is?

Noah: Yeah, it’s the round kind and the paper kind. It’s all full up.

Mama: Um, okay. How did it get in there?

Noah: I don’t know but you should go look.

Mama: What should I do with it when I find it?

Noah: Get the mop, and sweep it down onto the floor. Then open the back door and push it all out there. Make a HUGE pile!

Mama: But won’t it blow away out there?

Noah: Yeah, it will. But that way, people in other countries can see what our money looks like.

Mama: Okay, honey. You go to bed now. I gotta go check out the fridge.

Noah: Yeah... You do that.

Mama: Goodnight, Noah.

Noah: MOM! WAIT!! Don’t let it blow away! You should spend it.

Mama: What should I buy with all that money?

Noah: (after some serious thought…) A one thousand... and two year old….

DINOSAUR BUTT!

Mama: Goodnight, Noah.

(As I am going down the stairs…)

Noah: Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I said Dinosaur Butt!!

Little Slugger

It’s so nice when you feel like you have a good balance of work and play in a weekend. Like it wasn’t wasted sitting around, but you didn’t feel like you had no break either. This was a good weekend.

Saturday was a mix of errands and hanging around the house. Michael took the babies for a long stroller walk while Noah helped me clean some of the still-unpacked boxes of toys out of his closet. If we can just get them sorted through and into the toy storage bins, we can then freecycle what we don’t really need, and make room in his closet for the unpacked OTHER boxes that are hanging out in the stairwell! Got halfway, through THAT job, mostly because unpacking (and PUTTING AWAY!) toys you haven’t seen in months is really not so easy for a four year old kid to manage.

Michael built a bookshelf for Noah’s room to hold the myriad of books that were handed down to him from Bayuh’s classroom teaching days. (Bayuh is the name Noah made up for my mom when he was just a wee thing. It sounds a little like Bee-uh. Or how someone from Boston would order a brewski.)

On Sunday, I took Noah to a birthday party in a local park for one of the girls in his Montessori Preschool class. He had gotten a few invitations earlier in the year but this time he really showed interest in going. There was a the inevitable “jumping room” and the “required-for-birthday-parties-in-Southern-California-Piñata”. There were many girls and just a few boys, but Noah, his classmate Ryan, and a couple of the dads played baseball for at least a full hour! Noah really hasn’t had a lot of practice with ball playing so the three year old kid (read: only child) showed him up a bit. But after a good deal of practice, he really started pitching pretty well, and hitting the ball quite a lot!

A good time was had by all. I even enjoyed a little adult conversation, which I rarely get since I haven’t made any new friends here yet, and almost never talk to the couple people I do know. It was good to get away from the (forgive me Luka) desperation and drama one of my twins is constantly displaying every time I walk into the kitchen or go to the bathroom.

I never knew how nice it could be to sit in a folding camp chair in the sun, with sunglasses on, pretending NOT to be dozing off.

Maybe that whole soccer-mom-on-the-sidelines thing WON’T be so bad…

Just Don't Call Me Late For Dinner!

My twin boys turned 18 months old on Wednesday.

One of them calls me "Mima" (his grandmother's nickname).

The other one calls me "Daddy".

...sigh...

Wordless Wednesday: Not Clear on the Concept

This is my first posting for Wordless Wednesday. Over at 5 Minutes for Mom, and at wordlesswednesday.com, a bunch of Moms post a pic each Wednesday. Check them out!

Hmmm... Is it cheating if I use words to give the photo a title? Is it cheating if I use words to WONDER if using words in the title makes it no longer wordless?

Hmmmm....

Queen of the House

I was trying to think of the best way to explain my life to you. I think this says it all...



I have to give credit where credit is due... I saw this first on another mama-blog called Halushki . Its awesome writing if you wanna check her out.

What if the Grass is Greener Over at Sherwin-Williams??

I make my husband crazy sometimes.

He says that I have to “see ALL the grass” before making a decision so that I don’t get sad because I find that the grass is greener elsewhere. He knows me so well. And he very patiently waits while I look at ALL the grass, and even steers me towards any grass he thinks I might find interesting.

Confused? See, when I want to buy something, (and mostly when it is something pricey) I get in my mind exactly what I want it to be like and don’t want to stop looking until I have seen all my options. I have been burned one too many times when I see something close to what I have been looking for, but not quite there, and I decide to go and buy it anyway.

It always turns out that I find EXACTLY what I was looking for a couple days later for a better price, and now I am left regretting my first purchase.

Well, now we are planning on painting the living room green. I have been out gathering all the green paint chips at Home Depot, Penney’s, Sears, Wal-Mart, etc. I have been poring over all of them, holding them up to the wall at different times of the day, at different angles, trying to find just the right shade of green. Every time I think I have it figured out, I will be out shopping and wander through another paint aisle and come home with another handful of paint chips, knowing that the golden ticket MUST be among these!

I now have about 50 paint chips, each with about 5 colors on them.

All green.

And I haven’t even BEEN to Sherwin-Williams yet…

Tilt-Shift Photography

Awhile back, while wandering through random photos on flickr.com, I came across a really cool photo process called tilt-shift. It was discovered a LONG time back when camera lenses were mounted on a bellows, and if the bellows was tilted a bit, large chunks of the photo would go out of focus and an interesting effect would happen: the rest of the photograph would appear to resemble a model, a little miniature version of the real thing.

I can’t explain it as well as I can just show you some examples. There are a group of these tilt-shift photos here and here. This one is awesome! And here is a before and after.

To get this effect nowadays (since most people do not have movable bellows cameras) people have gone so far as to mount their regular lens on a flexible rubber mount between the lens and the camera. I even saw one person had made a mock-up with a toilet plunger.

Well, leave it to Photoshoppers to find a way to copy almost any process. It seems there are some tutorials out there in how to take a normal photo and do this effect. But these tutorials explain using the pricey new Photoshop CS, which I do not have, thank you very much.

So, knowing not a LOT changes in new versions of Photoshop, I followed along the tutorial and tweaked the process a bit. The result is not likely as good as it would have been with CS filters, but it’s really not bad!

You need to use a photo that is taken from above for the effect to work best, and also with things that would translate well to toy or model versions of the originals like buildings and cars. I didn’t have many pics that would work well, but found this one I took of the Maid of the Mist in Niagara Falls. If I am out and about with my camera, I plan on taking some shots that will be more appropriate to the process.

Pretty cool, no? Let me know if you want to know how I did it.

I can hook ya up!