Crazy Love

Hillary from theothermomma has issued a "linky challenge." All participants are supposed to write about something CRAZY. Hope you'll hop on over to her blog and join in!

Now, Hillary and I literally met in the toilet paper aisle at Wal Mart (we bonded over an ooold sorority date party t-shirt I was wearing), so I guess that might be crazy story enough, but just in case, I think I'll add on the story of my Crazy Year.

Now, if you had met me in the first week of June 2002, here's who you would have met:

(Hold on folks...due to some technical difficulties- and possibly my ability to literally destroy most every computer related thing my poor husband has worked so hard to link up- we have no photo of me in my young, single years. *gasp!* So I guess I'll just have to tell you I was one stunning, 20-something lady with model thin legs and long, flowing blonde hair to the middle of my back...............what? You think I made that up? Okay, fine. I made it up. But I was pretty darn young looking.)

Anywho - I was young, single footloose and fancy free. Working full time as a Youth Director - a job I had held for a little over a year.

Now if, by chance, you saw me that first week of June 2002, and didn't get a chance to speak to me for another 7 months, you would have missed this momentous occasion:

Yep,

Yep, that's right, a mere 7 months later I was married to the love of my life.

And then to add crazy on top of crazy, if you didn't see me again for another 8 months and 2 weeks - just a random number - ha! You would have completely missed out on the 2nd picture above!

(Now, this photo was taken nearly a year later, but you get the idea, we had a kid!)

And that's just about the craziest thing that ever happened to me. One year and five months later, I was a person whom God had taken on a whole new path with a whole new life AND if you had told me that first week of June 2002, that this time next year I'd be married with a baby on the way I would have laughed really hard and then asked if YOU were C-R-A-Z-Y.

That's my crazy thing! What's yours?

JR Photography Inc.

JR loves (and I mean loooooves) to take pictures with the "real" camera. Ever since the 'Cannon Powershot Incident of mid - 2009' we've only allowed him camera time while we are supervising his photography. But every once in awhile he manages to take a few while we aren't looking. The results are always amusing.

So what is a camera good for? Annoying your baby sister:

Crazy self portraiture - future Facebook profile pic?

Catching your mother in her workout clothes (which I would never wear all day long - nooooo, not me!)

Bothering the poor, sweet, sleeping dog.

And, nearly getting yourself attacked by the family cat.

Fun times.

Next Ansel Adams? We shall see.

The Tale of a Tutu

I'll never forget the day we bought "the tutu."

While I think the technical name for what we own is a petticoat, poor Rob could never grasp that word (since he had never heard it before in his life - gasp! - poor thing, so deprived of all things Jane Austen & all those other lovely romantic authors.) In any case, this pink, fluffy darling article of clothing became known as simply "the tutu."

ML could have cared less what we called it though. When she saw it on the rack at a local Christmas show (you know the indoor kind with all the booths and vendors?) she DEMANDED to try it on, and once she had it on, she marched away from the booth, already determined that she was the rightful owner of this fluffy pink skirt. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Period.

It cost of pretty penny, but even Rob forked over the money readily because it was the CUTEST THING EVER. No joke.

We could hardly walk down the aisle without every person stopping to poke the person next to them and say, "Look at that girl in the pink tutu." And if you think ML didn't know she was the center of attention, you'd be wrong, dead wrong. Because if there is one thing ML enjoys, it's the spotlight.

And so it began........ We wore it to Disney to meet the princesses.

(Did I mention it travels well smooshed into a 2 gallon zip lock?)

We wear it around the house for fun.

And yes, we even wear it to bed.

That's right, I went to check on her last night and found her in bed, dead asleep, wearing the tutu.

Because you just never know when Prince Charming might come calling in the middle of the night.

Sweet Dreams.

Fall

Fall is in the air and Fall Break is here to prove it! While I knew this would be our first "official" week long school holiday (what with JR starting Kindergarten this year,) what I didn't anticipate was how lonely we'd be with all of our friends and most of our neighbors off on vacation! We've missed you dearly and can't wait for y'all to hurry back and hear all about your trips.

In the meantime, we've made just about as many trips to Hobby Lobby as is humanly possible in a three day time span. Crafty seems to be the name of the game this week. We made this door hangar pumpkin for Miss Roberts, JR's amazing, super patient, kind (I could go on and on here with the adjectives) Kindergarten teacher. We have a few more things to go with it, but this was the first project.

Next we moved on to making cookies. This was one project I was dragged into kicking and screaming. Hot glue guns and paint pens?? I'm your girl.

Baking cookies? Not so much. But here's where I went wrong, you see last year, JR had an awesome Batman themed birthday party (if I do say so myself) and at one point in the party planning process I found some Halloween cookie cutters with the perfect Batman shaped "bat" cookie cutter. I threw them in the cart (at Hobby Lobby of course!) thinking, "Oh, I can make some great cookies for the party out of that!" Well, of course, guess who never got around to baking cookies for the party? (See above ~ once again the paint pens and glue guns won out!)

So, at the end of October, while packing all the other Halloween decorations away, I tossed in the cookie cutters. Well, low and behold what do my children find when we open the box this week?

And once they found them, it was non stop, relentless, unending - BEGGING. "Please, Mommy? Can we PLEASE make some Halloween cookies? Please?"

So finally I relented.

Please note that they both have their mouths open, talking at the same time.

Now when we began, the perfectionistic, Martha in me assumed we'd be making cookies that looked like the ones located at the bottom of these photos. I mean, hello - I wasn't expecting them to PIPE the icing, just spread the colored icing around nicely, without going too far (aka over the edge) and you know, pretty much just ice the perfect cookie.

Ha!

This is what we got:

And they were beautiful. Each and every one of them. They all tasted yummy too! Perfect with a cup of tea on a cool autumn night.

Happy Fall Y'all!