Three

My little man turned three this week and I've gotta say, I pretty much love him to pieces! There are days that I think he might not make it to the next day, let alone his next birthday, but when hes not being a holy terror, I adore him! I mean, really, how could you not! Just look at him.

Birthday's in our house tend to be a bit of an affair! On Monday, we had a family dinner at Manda's (our kitchen has been torn apart for a few weeks, but thats a whole other post!). Tuesday was his actual birthday, but we couldn't do the dinner on that day becasue I teach piano lessons. After I was done teaching on Tuesday, we decided to take him into a movie. We actually were going to take him bowling or mini golfing, but bowling was all booked forleague bowling and as soon as we got to the Movie Mill to go mini golfing, he changed his mind and was determined to see a movie! We had his party with a few friends on Saturday and it was a blast!

Lately, he has been huge into maps and pirates. So, we had a pirate party! The kids all got to decorate a foam pirate hat and then got swords and eyepatches. I know, you're saying "What! She gave a group of kids swords! What a stupid woman!" But the kids were actually really great with them! We didn't have a single problem with anyone hitting anyone else or anything like that.

It took about 14 shots to get this picture, but here we all are giving our best pirate "Arrr"!

After they were all decked out in their pirate gear, we went on a treasure hunt. We went across the "lake" in front of our house, around the park and the baseball diamond, back across the lake and found the treasure under the tree in our backyard. The treasure chest was full of stuff for lunch!

TJ carried our map and led the way!

After lunch, we opened presents and had cake! And, I have to say I have pretty awesome sisters. Due to our kitchen being torn apart, I asked my one sister if she could pick up a cake on the way out. When she showed up, they had both gotten together the night before and made an amaing cake which the kids LOVED!

After cake, we went on another treasure hunt where the kids found their treat boxes (that looked like mini treasure chests. I forgot to take a picutres of those!) Then we watched the Princess and the Frog until their parents came to get them! Overall, it was a huge success!

My three favorite things about TJ right now

1. How sensitive he is. He is always concerned about how everyone is feeling.

2. His crazy imagination. As I type this, he is sitting on Papa's lap singing "Row Row Row Your Boat" looking for animals, monsters, whatever he decides to find!

3. How much he loves Myles. He was so upest that I didn't get Myles any pirate gear for the party. So he shared his.

How lucky am I!

Mi Vida Loca

Things have been pretty crazy around here! However, its been good crazy for the most part. In an effort to keep this post from taking 132 hours to read, I'm just going to glaze over most everything that has been happening.

A while ago, I'd had enough of TJ's soothers. So, we concocted a plan. For a few weeks, we talked about the Soos Fairy. She comes and takes the soos's from kids who are ready to be big kids and she leaves them a present. Then she gives those soos's to little babies who need them. At first he was resistant, but after a week or so, he got pretty excited. One night, we left a note for the Fairy along with all his soothers. Then we went to a Hurricaines game with my sister and cousin. When we came back, the soothers were gone and his present was in their place.

We also decided a while ago that it was time to start potty training. TJ actually just started going on his own, but then became really disinterested. Combined with trying to get him to get rid of the soothers, we knew were asking a lot, so we bribed him. I'll be the first to admit that I'm all about bribery! Anywho, we decided that we'd give him a big boy party when he was going potty on the toilet and had no more soothers. He picked two of his friends and they got to make pizzas, watch a movie and have "football cakes'. TJ was determined we were having a football cake for his party, but I was not about to make a whole cake for 3 kids. Then I kind of forgot about it until the day before, so here is my last minute idea!

I've mentioned before that I'm really trying to get the business name out there, so we've decided that we're going to do quite a few trade show type things. We had our first one a few weeks ago. We changed up our display and added some new products too. Here are a couple of pictures.

For Easter, we had tons of fun around here. We decided for Easter dinner to have a steak BBQ. Check out these babies James picked out!

The town had an Easter egg hunt on the Saturday after Good Friday. It was COLD and super windy, but still really great. I love the fact that the town is starting to do more of these things. As you can see, TJ was FROZEN!

On Easter Monday, we held our second annual Gilbert Easter Egg Hunt. We invited a bunch of friends and got together to hunt eggs. James and I provided 3 eggs for each of the kids and then the families provided 5 eggs for each kid in their family. We barbequed hot dogs and had cookies for the kids to decorate. One of the three eggs that James and I provided were homemade chocolate covered marshmallow eggs. They were so easy and yummy!

Well, there has been much more craziness, but I've prattled on long enough! Hope you all had a great Easter and that life is going well!

Stay Tuned...

Ok, so I suck at blogging. Oh well, it is what it is! However, this weekend I fully intend on taking a break from the insanity of my life and blogging about said insanity. It will be fun. Super fun. You should make sure you come back and read about it!

Friend by Default

You know that person who you hang around with only because they are friends with your friend. I'm that person. Always have been, probably always will be. I call it being a friend by default. Somehow, I manage to become friends with one person (lets call them Friend A) who is involved in a lot of the planning of things, so I get invited by them and get to meet lots of other people who I consider my friends. However, if the someone other than Friend A plans something, chances are I'm not going to be invited. More than likely, Friend A will be invited, but not me. Somedays this makes me sad, but for the most part, I'm just grateful I have such an amazing group of Friend As. Or should that be Friends A. I don't know!

15 Minute Makeover

My cousins little girl turned 7 (or maybe 8? I'm so not good at this remebering thing anymore!) this past weekend and TJ got to go to her party. I asked James to pick up a gift bag on his way home from work in the morning, but I guess he didn't hear me when I said I was going to give her a few hair bows. He brought home a bag that was big. Like, minimum of 12" long and 9" high big. WAY too bigh for a few hair bows. Unfortunately, I didn't know this until about 20 minutes before the party started and I went to get the bag out! I scrambled trying to think of what else I could give her, but had nothing on hand. Then I remembered that I had emptied a can of formula that morning.

So after a little two sided tape... (you can actually see part of the cute gift bag in the background!)

Some cutting out of flowers, rolling to add dimension

Adding some inked paper flowers and brads..

And hot gluing on some ribbon then the flowers...And voila, one pretty bow holder, done in less than 15 minutes!

Wildly flailing in an attempt to stay standing... maybe..

Oh, where do I start. I know I haven't blogged about anything real in ages, but quite honestly, most of what has been happening over the past month or two is just too personal to put all the gory details on the internet. Lets just say it has been an extremely difficult few weeks and I've been feeling like I'm going to crack. However, things are (hopefully) going to be sorted out at least somewhat soon, I think. Hows that for ambiguous! Anywho, I've decided that its time to focus more on the things I have control of and forget/push aside and ignore the rest! So, here is my question. How do you other mommies out there do it? How do you find balance between improving yourself, being an involved mom, loving wife and working? See, I'm trying to balance all of the following...

1. a 2 year old thats potty training

2. a 6 week old who will only sleep when he's being held and is only happy for about 5 minutes when hes not being held. Seriously, this is not an exaggeration. I've timed it. Repeatedly.

3. teaching my 2 year old counting, abcs, manners, ect

4. a husband who is working full time, going to school part time and trying my patience much of the time. (Let me insert that I am super in love with James, he just doesn't handle the baby phase very well, so its getting a little tiresome!)

5. being a wife to said husband

6. baseball season. No, I don't play but I'm a baseball widow and its already starting. Ump training every other week, meetings, ect.

7. alterations season. I NEED the extra money, but I've got to figure out where I'm going to put all the dresses (somewhere safe) and how I'm going to get my baby to be happy for longer than five minutes, because if I can only sew when hes sleeping, I'm never going to sleep. I'm just going to sew instead of sleep. Which really won't be good.

8. trying to be more involved/play with my kiddo. This is something I'm not really good at for some reason. I've got TONS of ideas of fun things to do, but TJ doesn't like any of them. Or at least he didn't when I tried stuff before. SO I gave up and now hes seeming like he'll be interested, but I'm not sure how to "fit it in". Holy crap, don't I sound like a bad mom!

9. I've been lacking in spiritual drive lately and I'm positive its because I'm pretty wishy washy on studying my scriptures. So, I'm determined to be more dilligent. Again, the issue is time.

10. Losing weight. I've been doing really good at eating right (most days) but exercise is not happening. I LOVE going to the gym, but I don't have the money for a pass or the time to go. So, I'm trying to do stuff at home. I hate it and I'm not really dedicated because I'm not looking forward to it. Crappy. (As a side note, I would like to point out that I am already below my pre-pregnancy weight! Yep, you read that right! I'm not going to give you numbers right now because thats a whole other post, but whatever!)

11. Figuring out some sort of marketing plan for Yummy Mummy. This sounds simple, but the budget is very limited and I have no background in marketing. Sewing, no problem. Marketin, big problem!

12. All the other crap happening in my life!

This, of course, is an abbreviated list! I'm sure your lists are the same, so please, share your secrets with me! How do you do it? Any tricks?

And just because I've posted too many posts without pics, here are a few Rhonda took for us!

Family

*Sorry, this is a long, pictureless post! We had to get a new computer and I have none of my pictures put on this one! But, its a funny story, so hang in there and laugh at me!*

Happy Family Day all! Around here, James had to work, so the little boys and I hung out around the house and took it easy. With it being family day, I thought I'd let you in on the story of how our family started. In other words, how James and I met. (I'm totally stealing this idea from Rhonda, but her story was so great I thought why not!)

I had just started going to the student ward after going through my divorce and moving back home. Lets just say, I was in NO mood to deal with any serious relationships, but my bishop counselled me to go to the student ward instead of the family ward. My roommate and I ended up becoming friends with a few guys who were also roommates. When we first started hanging out and they found out that I was working at the Maple Leaf Pork slaughter house on the kill floor, they told me one of their other roommates lived there. I'd never seen him around their house or at church with them, so I had no idea what he looked like, but they told me his name was Gilbert. We all had hard hats with our names on them at work and no one that I saw had the name Gilbert on their hard hat. However, its a big plant, so I figurered we just were in different departments.

Meanwhile, there was a guy at work with the name James on his hard hat. I avoided him like the plague! Ever time I saw him, he was covered in pig blood, swinging his knives around and swearing worse than a sailor! (Let's just say James was less than active at this time in his life!)

A few months passed and I went to a house part with my roommate. I was pretty shocked to see James from work there! He was sitting on the floor, looking like he was either drunk or hung over and had a fresh tattoo on his let. I was even more shocked when he recognized me! I kept our conversation as short as politely possible (he was scary!) and then left!

A week or two later, it was General Conference. My roommate and I were going over to the boys house to watch the Sunday morning session. Over the past couple months, I'd started liking one of the boys in the house and we'd been doing some pretty serious flirting. I have to admit I had slightly less than pure motives to watch conference at his house! While we were in the middle of the session, in walks a very hungover scary James from work! The boy I was snuggling with says, "This is my roommate, Gilbert, who I was telling you works where you do!" Turns out Gilbert and scary James were the same guy!

After that, we started hanging out. Things kind of fizzled with James' roommate, but James still wasn't the kind of guy I wanted to date. Fun to hang around as a friend, but that was it! Slowly, we started doing everything together. At first, there was always a big group of us, but then it started to be just us. After about a year, I was pretty into James, but he didn't think it was a smart idea. He'd come back to the church, but didn't think he was worthy of dating. He was SUPER resistant! So, I didn't push. We still kept doing everything together and everyone thought we were dating. On July 1st, he came with me to my Grandma's birthday lunch, but I was very careful to introduce him as my FRIEND. A week or so later, he told me we needed to talk. He drove out to a field in the middle of nowhere with the music blaring. (James doesn't handle serious discussions well at all!) For the longest time he sat there babbling about nothing and I thought for sure he was going to kill me and leave my lifeless body in the middle of nowhere! (Not seriously, but the thought did cross my mind!) Finally, he just blurts out, "I guess you can tell people we're dating, if you want to." With that, he jammed the car into drive and sped away. He didn't say a word the whole way back to town or when he dropped me off! Talk about romance! ;)

A month or so later, we went to a Bulls baseball game. James is an ump, so ball games had become a big part of my life. When we got there, he said he'd be right back, which was the norm, so I went to get a seat in the bleachers. It wasn't a super busy game, so I was sitting in the middle of a huge open space. Throughout the whole game, he kept walking in front of the seats, but never looked at me. I was wearing a bright shirt and waving, but he totally ignored me! I was SO ticked! Baseball was not my favorite thing, but he had talked me into going to yet another game and then he ignores me the whole time! When we left the diamond, I was cranky and so was he, although I had no idea why! We went to East Side Marios to get some food and he went to talk to a friend of his who was working at the bar, leaving me yet again! I was getting less and less impressed. As we were finishing eating, these two guys from the bar came by and said "We're not leaving till you do it." I had no clue what they were talking about, but they kept saying, "Come on, we've been waiting all night and we've got to go." I just assumed they were seriously drunk, but they weren't leaving. Finally James said fine, got out of the booth, got down on one knee and pulled out a ring! I was shocked, but managed to squeak out a yes! Apparently he had a huge thing planned at the ball diamonds, but he couldn`t see me anywhere! Oh well, it all worked out in the end!

I love him beyond words and love the little boys we share! I've loved (mostly) the past five years and look forward to so many more!