live what you love.

free time.

Free time... what a fabulous luxury I'd forgotten about. All of the days are running together and I'm not putting on makeup every day (or even every few days, if we're being honest) but it's been a really nice break. I've been able to actually keep up with Project Life! Only for 2 weeks, mind you, but what a great feeling. To have 2 weeks of our life documented in this nice, organized way. And it's so fast & easy! I'm just thrilled with it.

 

And I'm in love with my planner. Keeping it updated has been so much fun and makes me feel so organized. I took this photo when I hadn't fully filled in this week yet. It's gotten much busier! Tomorrow is the deadline for re-entrustment at the kids' school, which requires paperwork and a lot of $$. The hardest part, though, was writing "1st and 4th grade" on the paperwork. HOW can that be possible?! I can't possibly have a 4th grader. And my baby... Kindergarten is one thing. First makes her seem so big. Then there's a cheer camp that I have to sign up for & pay for tomorrow. MK will be going to a camp for three days next week and then cheering at two of the high school varsity basketball games. Love that! Then there's soccer registration on Saturday for both kids. And then Parker was asked (by the high school coach) to start a training program at a sports gym one night per week with some of the guys from his football team. He wants them to gel as a group and to be prepared as they head into the higher leagues and when they get to him in 9th grade. What?! Doesn't seem possible.

 

Mary-Kate is still taking dance and learning two dances for the recital this year. She started talking about her birthday a couple of months ago but now I guess I really do need to figure out what we're doing. The thing I hate about both of the kids' birthdays is that Parker's will always be around Thanksgiving and MK's has fallen during spring break for the last few years. That means that any party has to be figured around the fact that most of their friends will be out of town for the week before/during/after. Ugh! Right now she's talking about The Cup, The Groovy Pad, ice skating, or painting. Any other great ideas? I'm all out! I do know that cake pops will have to be involved, and decorations like this would make me very happy.

As I wrote that, I thought back on her other parties & decided to look for a photo from each. And I'm dying now. Dead. Dead. Dead.

 

thawing out.

Tap-tap-tap... Is this thing on? I've started slacking off again but now I'm getting back into a good schedule. My question, though: Is there anyone out there?? I'm wondering if I lost all of my readers in my little hiatus, so if you're still reading, leave me a comment... it will make me happy. :)

Wow. We got some snow over the last week and our kids were out of school for three days. That is unheard of around here. They finally went back today and oh my, was I glad to get back on our routine. We all need that daily schedule. It was nice to be holed up and cozy... but I also missed two subbing days, my first this year, at the kids' school so I was bummed about that. The idea of a small paycheck again was so exciting!

 

The kids loved playing out in the snow even though we still haven't bought proper clothes to wear in it, nor have we bought a real sled. I am sorry to tell you that they used two toybox lids instead, which may rank just slightly higher than a laundry hamper on the redneck scale of homemade sleds. MK & I made some snow cream, which was fun to make but no one enjoyed actually eating it.

 

Ah, and do you see something missing in the above photo? Little Miss lost her very first tooth on Monday. I was DY-ING. It was literally hanging by a thread and I kept forcing her to let me wiggle it... then once when she closed her mouth to get out of my grasp, her eyes got wide and she pulled the tooth off of her tongue. I was screaming & almost crying & she went into shock. Once they start losing teeth, it's all different. Their faces start changing and they just aren't babies anymore. So sad. :( But such an exciting time. She put her little tooth under her pillow and the tooth fairy left her $5, along with a white feather that must have fallen off of her wings!!

 

We went to Memphis over the last weekend to finally celebrate Christmas with Dave's mother & cousins. Our kids love playing with Ethan & Colin, who are in 5th and 1st grade. And look at who's tallest... my nutjob 3rd grader. At his yearly exam he measured in the 97th percentile in both height & weight. Whaaat??? I just don't think of him as being that big, but when you see him around other kids, you go "Oh." He's not overweight by ANY means, which is what he thought that meant (grrrrr). I told him, he's just a human garbage disposal and he's a solid muscle. He comes up to my chin and can easily take me down if he gets an urge for a WWE match. He's literally hungry twenty-four hours a day. We can never fill him up. I can't even imagine what it will be like when he brings in his friends in a few years to clean out our pantries!

 

And three little things that are making me happy right now...

I started doing Project Life. I just couldn't say no and have convinced myself that I will follow through with it. For the first layout, I dated it January 1-11, for one simple reason: that was the date range of the 7 photos I chose to use. I'm not doing a "photo a day" because I know I won't follow through with it and I don't want that pressure hanging over my head. I may have weeks when I do have a photo a day because that's how it works out, but I'm trying very hard to go with the flow and just use what I have.

 

And while we were in Memphis, we visited my favorite bookstore and I had a goal of picking up my calendar for the kitchen... I've had the Mary Engelbreit calendar every year for at least 15 years - it's become an addiction - but this year I waited too long & they didn't have it. But I am so happy with what I did get that I couldn't possibly go back! And the best part? It was 75% off. Crazy deal.

 

And my most favorite purchase, maybe ever, is my MomAgenda. The most adorable little planners, nice and heavy, and my chosen color is my favorite color on the planet to look at. Just makes me so happy. And the best part, again? 75% off. Seriously. What a deal.

 

2011.

Oh my. What happened to my life?! Not documented, that's what. From August until, well, now, I've been a zombie.

I haven't cooked a homemade meal.

I've done laundry but it was a many-day process from hamper to drawer. And it was/is never-ending.

I spent my waking hours either at school or planning my next day at school.

I've said, "Not right now" to my children so many times, I could cry.

I've neglected pretty much everything that I love doing.

With some of my newly-found free time, I decided to go back to my blog-to-book project. Blurb has some crazy bug and it won't slurp typepad blogs properly (or mine, at least) so I have been working on cutting and pasting it (seriously). And as I did this, I read back over a million entries and then noticed that our lives stopped in September 2010. I thought, do I actually make a book & just end it in the 3rd quarter of the year?! Do I write up "make-up" entries to make it feel complete? Or do I just chalk this year up to the year of chaos & forget it all? I decided to just leave it as it was... because that's how it was. Our lives were crazy and out of control and left no time for anything normal. And it's documented, in a book, for our family to look back on and remember.

So... I'm back. I went at such a fast pace for the last several months that when I reached my last day of student teaching and the kids started Christmas break, I felt like I'd hit a wall. Things went from 100 to 0. And it's taken me a few weeks to get back into the swing of my life, or what it once was, and feel "normal" again. Now that the holidays are over and the kids are back in school and our house is beginning to feel as though a family lives in it instead of passes through it, I'm feeling good.

welcome back, old friend.

And just like that... it's fall. It's Labor Day, and making lunch for the kids is the extent of the labor I've done. We had a full weekend and I was just fine with doing absolutely nothing today. The weather here jumped straight to autumn and it made me (and everyone else in the state) absolutely crazy. Gorgeous, perfect, fabulous. And just in time for football.

 

There is nothing better than the first cool day of the season. And not a cloud in the sky. And the best football in the country world. If you aren't a Vol, I feel for you, I really do. Because there is just nothing like it!

 

We didn't get to tailgate for this one because MK had a birthday party in the afternoon (breaking rule #12 of football season - all birthday parties shall be on Sundays). And tailgating is my favorite part. :) But there's plenty of time to make it up.

 

 

Even though it's a holiday, Parker still has football practice tonight. And Every. Other. Single. Night. Killing me. His games are really fun, though! He's getting better & better and it's so much fun to watch from the stands with the other football moms. :)

 

And tomorrow, it's back to school. I'm starting to get the hang of the schedule and my internal alarm clock has already adjusted itself to wake up every single day at 5:45, even on the weekends. Lucky me. :) I had my first evaluation last week and it went perfectly. I was oh-so-relieved. Only 5 more to go! And 14 more weeks. I'm ready to be certified and done and with my own classroom. Good thing for me, being a teacher means that the days fly by. Being a clock-watcher is not an option anymore! Here's to fall... hope you're enjoying every second of it.

the insanity.

Woooo mercy. That's all I can say. Insanity. A hurricane of busy-ness. I'm honestly having a really hard time adjusting.

I haven't taken any good photos in I-don't-know-how-long and it's bugging me. When I look at my friends' and other bloggers' gorgeous photos I just want to cry, feeling like I'm missing out on recording so much of my own family. I haven't scrapbooked in months & feel like I've missed so much. I just can't juggle everything we've got going on right now.

Parker's football is continuing at 4 practices/week (thank goodness it's through our church/school so we're always guaranteed no practice or homework on Wednesday nights!) plus Tuesday night and Saturday morning games.

I flipped my lid a few nights ago with my poor dear husband, crying and demanding to know why that much practice is required of 8-year olds. I still think it's ridiculous & seriously can't wait until the season is over. We got to see him play for the first time on Saturday though and it was something else. Nothing like soccer! He got trampled and it's impossible for me to keep up with him on the field so I was clueless until my dear husband said calmly, "He's down."

I looked over & saw the coaches crowded around him on the field & the announcer called for the other players to take a knee. And if you know me... well, you know I was over the fence and on the sideline in 1.2 milliseconds flat. Thankfully Dave and even parents from the other team convinced me that Parker would kill me if I went out on the field, and I kept myself on the sidelines. Finally he made his way back over (he just got the wind knocked out of him & I think it really scared him) and proceeded to get back on the field and make a huge tackle. Blew my mind. He played his second game last night & had a great game. He plays every single second & loves it. You'll just find me holding onto the bleachers with white knuckles, praying for his safety.

Mary-Kate had her first soccer practice and dance class. She loves both, of course. So good at both. I just watch in amazement. At Parker's first football game we found out that they have cheerleaders from the elementary school. So what did I do, the idiotic moron that I am?? Signed her up, of course! If we'll be at all of his games anyway, she could just cheer & they would both be happy, right? Right. But unfortunately the cheering practices are at the same time as her dance class, which helped me realize that I'm an idiotic moron and had no business signing her up for one more thing anyway. So no cheering for now.

Whew.

And then there's school. That little five-day-a-week thing. The kids are both very happy and are doing fabulously. Every afternoon Mary-Kate tells me every detail of her day, which is what I've been begging Parker to do for four years now. :) She tells me who got time outs (she never has & never will, just ask her) and who she ate lunch with and played on the playground with. And who had on the same uniform she had on. :) I love it. Parker's answer is always going to be, "Nothing." when I ask him what he did, so now I force him to tell me three great things that happened and at least get something out of him. His teacher sent home a note yesterday that just made us beam, so I have to share it. I'm so proud of that boy. He really does have the sweetest heart and is so smart and such a good little athlete, too. And he's growing up way too fast. Third grade seems so much older.

I've been teaching for two weeks now. Wow. I've honestly never been this exhausted in my life. Teachers work harder than anyone on this planet and I'll take anyone down who thinks otherwise! There is just so much to do and so little time to do it all. The unexpected things that happen during the day take up so much time and then you still have to meet all of the standards and goals and read papers from home and get things together to send home and and and... It's all just blowing my mind. I started teaching math right away and have been using the ActivBoard which is really fun. We have great kids - I love second grade - and I have my first evaluation next week so please help me out by crossing your fingers & toes!