Oh Christmas Tree, oh christmas tree

Going to pick out the Christmas tree was always my FAVORITE part of Christmas. We would jump out of the van (all 7 of us) running through the evergreen maze in search of the"perfect tree". I always seemed to have a good eye for it and found the one we brought home on many occasions. I remember my dad pulling them out as we would point to them and looking straight up thinking there couldn't be anything more tall or glorious in the whole world. There was just so much magic surrounding this tree that would umbrella my presents in just a few short weeks. The excitement was almost to much to bare back then.

My kids now ooze this excitement and nothing starts off the Christmas season for me than reliving this through them. Madison's second Christmas, "tis-mas twee" was one of her few words. When Christmas was over and we put the tree outside she stood at the door and cried and cried "bye bye tis-mas twee." Last year Emily's first words were, "dat's pwetty" while pointing at the Christmas tree. There is just some sort of magic in that tree. Yes, i still Believe!


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One thing I have always wanted to do was go and cut down our own tree. The thought of it just seemed so romantic and exciting to me. Well Nathan and I found a place not to far from our house this year with the long needle pines (very hard to find here in the south) and I could hardly contain my excitement. The day was perfectly nippy with a cold December sky. The only thing that could have made it more magical would have been if it was snowing, but we live in Charlotte so let's be real here. We couldn't have asked for a better wintry day in this part of the country. The kids took off running through the Christmas tree forest (at least to them it felt like a forest). "What about this one!", "I like this one!" the kids are yelling. Madison screams at Nathan "Daddy I want a MON-STER TWEE!" (yup she still says twee, i know i should be concerned but it will be cute for another year or so). We all rounded a corner and I swear angels sang as we saw our tree-the perfect tree. A gorgeous color perfectly shaped - no holes and it was a !monster! standing at 9 feet tall. The funniest part was watching Nathan carry it out completely lost in it's branches to find out only 100 yards from the car that the man had a wagon to pull it out on. HA! He was pulling pine needles out of cracks and crevices for hours! Memories! I love this time of year!!

christmas pics

Awww, they still love their brother.

Emily is making a funny face.

Halloween!!

I lost my camera but finally found it this morning. Here are the pics from Halloween this year. Emily's favorite holiday for sure!! She is obsessed with candy so she figured out real quic that saying twi-o-twee meant candy in the bucket. She would follow with a quick teen-too (always the polite one around here) and hurried to the next door (or car) giving away candy.


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Emily's first skunk!!

So as we were driving down the road two nights ago we came across a very freshly hit and extremely potent skunk. As we approach the smell Emily yells A MESS! The closer we get to the smell the more urgent her cry became...A MESS! A MESS! MOMMY MOMMY A MEEEEEESSSSSS!! A MEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!

As soon we were out of smells way her screams subsided. I laughed the rest of the way home!! sigh I love little kids.

Here is also a cute story about my little Madison:

She sung a solo at church today for the primary program. After we got home I was telling her how proud I was and how awesome she did even though she was scared. She said to me," I said a prayer and asked Jesus for help and he put his magic on me so i could remember all the words."

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Seriously one of the sweetest and proud moments/days of my life with her. It's nice to have days like these so full of joy and assurance that despite all my shortcomings, I might just be doing a good job. :)

SCREAMING LIKE LITTLE GIRLS!!!

It has been one screech filled week around this house. I know by the title you are probably automatically thinking of Natalie and Madison. I would be lying if I didn't admit to taking a HUGE part of the ear piercing screaming that has left my ears numb and my throat soar. Lets just start with the first toe curling experience:



HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3


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Jenn and I and my girls went to see this opening night. We were there and in line about 20 min. early. Madison was all dressed up in her HSM cheerleader outfit. She turned every head in the house with "AWWWW's" and "soooo cutes" abounding. Then......the line moved.. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!


So the movie starts and we are going through the previews. Zac Efron has a new movie coming out.


EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!



A few minutes later the movie starts and of course it as an extreme close-up of Troy's face sweating and blue eyes gleaming. Forget about hearing anything for the next five minuets


EEEEEEEHHHHHHHAAHHHHHAHHAHAHAHHHHHHAAAAAAAAHHH

HHEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHWWEEEEEEEEEEEHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.(get the point)


My sister Jenn leans over to me and says that this wasn't what she expected it. I replied "Really? ....It's exactly what I expected." She just rolled her eyes playfully and replied "this is crazy" under her breathe. Well almost three hours and endless amounts of squealing later we made it safely home with great memories of the girls.




NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK


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Take my little girls and age them about 20-25 years and you will have me and my sisters and friends Thursday night. (Although I must admit in fairness that my sisters and I took the cake on this one !!) My two friends Sheila and Alicia and then Jenn and Meagan and I all went to see NKOTB!!!! I was crazy OBSESSED with them when I was little. Joey was my Zac Efron. I WAS going to marry him one day. I drooled on his face on my pillowcase every night. I kissed his poster goodbye on my way to school in the morning. (I did say obsessed right?) I still actually have his and Jordan Knight's barbie dolls, my girls play with them all the time. Of course they don't know who they are, oh well.



So the night started with us driving around looking for cheap parking. I rolled down my window at a group of women walking towards the events center and screamed, "Oh-Oh-Oh-OHHHH-OH" to which they replied "OH-OH-OHHH-OH!!! It was so funny and just got me even more stoked for the night to begin.

When they came out I was 9 again.

(Combine all of the above screaming here.)

I was screaming, dancing, squealing, laughing, spinning in circles, yelling I love you Joey!! (I did mention obsessed earlier, just reemphasizing that.) At this point I lean over to Jenn and say "THIS IS CRAZY!!!!" a little excited! She didn't roll her eyes, I don't think she heard me... she was screaming too.

It was amazing! I didn't know that time could magically rewind itself 20 years but it did for me on Thursday. It was soooo much fun to be 9 again. The energy I had was something of a miracle. I had no worries of anything of adulthood from 8 till 12. It was just such a blast, I wish I could go again. The only part that sucked about it was walking out the doors and automatically being 20 years older.


Oh, and just to add one funny bit of info. All of the men's bathrooms were made women's bathrooms for the night. I found that to be hysterical!!

Farmer's Market

Let me just start by saying, YES, I do know that I'm a slacker. It's been way too long since I've posted on here and have absolutely no idea where my summer went and cannot believe I'm staring Halloween dead in the face. And i do mean dead!! HA! Get it halloween, dead, dead, halloween. (yeah i know lame joke, couldn't resist)

So, with that out of the way....

I took my kids to the Triad farmer's market in Greensboro this past weekend and had our nephew Caden meet us there. This is a bit of a tradition for my kids and I and couldn't not get Emily in on the action. They build little houses out of pumpkins which is perfectly adorable when they are little like her. I used to take Natalie when she was a baby. Ahh the memories.

We stopped to buy some peanuts from one of the local vendors. We of course had to go get some cotton candy ice cream from Hershey's ice cream shop, and then went to pick out our pumpkins. You have to love the prices of the farmers market we got a HUGE pumpkin and 4 little ones for the kids to paint for $18. Emily and Caden each got a bouncy ball out of the little qurter machines and spent a good 45 min throwing and chasing them around. We all had fun but were ready not to be freezing anymore so we said our goodbyes and got in the much warmer and far less windy cars.

Yay for blogging again. I'll try to better,

i promise. :)

Summer fun

We went out onto the lake with some friends. We all had a blast!! Madison and Bryson drove the boat. Bryson threw a couple of people around during his turn. He would go from 0 to 60 and then a dead stop, so...... the people who were standing payed for it. The girls had a lot of fun tubing. Bryson was a little afraid of this but had a lot of fun jumping off the boat into the water and swimming around. We fed some fish and had a picnic on one of the island beaches. It was a fun day!! Enjoy the pics. Hope everyone's having a great summer!!

OUR BIG NEWS!!!

Well, Nathan and I figured that it was about time to come clean with our big news. We've kept it quiet for sometime now... well, it's time you all knew:

Bryson is soooooooo excited! He has waited soooooo long for this. We even let Bryson pick out the names for him as long as it wasn't darth..........anything, really. And the name he came up with is ...drum roll please!

STRYDER DASH VLAZNY ...had you going didn't I....he he

(nathan may have helped a bit with his first name!)


We promised him when we found out Emily was a girl that we would get him a boy dog one day. They have all had goals they had to meet to show the capability that they were ready for this HUGE responsibility. They all rose to the challenge with great excitement! Stryder is 7 1/2 weeks, and is an Aussie. We are all looking forward to having long games of catch. Madison just wants to teach him lots of COOL TRICKS!! (I'm not really sure what they are.) I on the other hand am getting a wagon and am bound and determine to teach him to bring in my groceries!! You know you'll all be jealous when that happens. Not IF that happens but WHEN it happens. Anyway, here are some pics of us getting him and bringing him home!! Enjoy!!





LET'S GO PLAY!!!!!!


my do-dee

SCHOOLS OUT!!

After having a very lazy pretty calm and peaceful day at the pool it had me look back and think of my childhood summers. Here are some of my favorite things:

• After swimming for hours and you are so water logged your shaking from being so cold, then laying on the hot pavement and feeling like you are melting onto it. I LOVED THAT FEELING!




• I loved near the end of a thunderstorm, getting on my bike and riding through the water in the opposite direction it was running down the street and having it spray up on you.




• Spending all day at the baseball fields searching for lost change under the bleachers, from the pockets up above because Swedish fish only cost 1 cent a fish. I bought plenty of "just one fish" over the years.




• Being in such good shape you'd see the ice cream man go by your house and were able to go inside grab your money and then catch him a block away. I was a good customer! One year at the end of the summer he gave me all the leftover candy cigarettes, lollipops and paper button candies he had left in his truck.




• candy cigarettes, bad i know but I LOVED them!!




• Being freezing at someones house after they had the air conditioner blasting and then getting in a really hot car and having the warmth just take over and fill you up in a matter of seconds.




• Not having a care in the world, this I miss the most!

I asked my kids what they liked about summer,

• Bryson- going to the pool and i'm excited there's no school




• Natalie- My birthday and going to the pool




• Madison- going to the beach with my whole family and the pool with my whole family. Oh yeah mommy, and getting soooooo HOT that you HAVE to go to the pool!




• Emily- uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh baoon!!!! (she let go of a balloon a few days ago in our entryway and it still hasn't come down. She is very concerned about it. It's all she has said for two days straight now. Her neck has gotta hurt from looking up!)

Well, that's our favorite things about summer. How about you, what are yours?

Beach Babe Blast

My friends Sheila and Alicia and I went to Myrtle Beach for 4 whole days without kids or husbands!! We had a blast!!!









We shopped til' we dropped (on a few separate occasions). We went out to eat and had people wait on us!! We didn't do the waiting, YAY!! We swam in the ocean and didn't worry about anyone drowning, we swam in the pool and didn't worry about anyone drowning, we spent a few hours in the hot tub........and you guessed WE DIDN'T WORRY ABOUT ANYONE DROWNING!! (do you know how amazing this is?)
We got a pedicure and a massage, and then we shopped some more. When we were shopping, we didn't go in kid stores. We even went into stores where EVERYTHING could break and didn't stress out about it! We thought we would sleep in but were so well rested from laying on the beach and not worrying about the well being of our families that we were all up by 8:30 ready for the day. It's funny....you don't realize how much your mind being on your kids takes such a physical toll on your body. One thing I did find absolutely amazing is with the three of us moms there the hotel room stayed really clean and all the grocery's were put away in maybe 3 minutes. THREE MINUTES!! I found this nothing short of miraculous. I think I gained a little bit of insight why women put up with polygamy. J/K :)

(This is a joke people, I really think that's disgusting but couldn't resist the opportunity.)




this was the theme for the weekend, next time we're making t-shirts!!




Anyway, I'm happy to say we all came home to healthy kids and husbands who had survived and were all a little more loving and appreciative of us all. Not that they weren't before, obviously they are all awesome for letting us go to begin with. Every mom needs to do this! It is sooooooooooo good for you. So to all of my friends out there, start planning a girls weekend getaway! We decided we are going to make this a tradition to go the weekend before school is out to let ourselves be ready to deal with summer.










Next year, I think we are going to Charleston. Who wants to come with?

Getting old is scary

I definitely believe I am a person with a young spirit. I still feel as though high school was just yesterday and I haven't aged a day since then. Life though has a very funny way of offering up moments of clarity so intense that a 1080 hd television looks fuzzy and gray.
I turned 28 last Friday and while i still feel as though this is not an "old" age the definite realization that I'm a grown up and I can't hide from it any longer has made my nights lets just say, far more restless. This is a big year for our little family as far as realizing how big our kids are getting. Natalie is going to be 8 and getting baptized in August and I now find myself questioning all of my parenting skills over the past 8 years and how the crap did it get here over night?!?!? My daughter is going to soon be found accountable for every roll of the eyes, stomp up the stairs, slam of the door, and slip of the tongue which is usually in the sound of "ehhhhEHHHHHehhhhhhhh." (I know you all know what I mean.) Now I'm worrying about stuff my mom worries about. Did I do a good job, is she respectful, is she confident, does she have a testimony, will she stand up for what is right? On top of all of that my 3rd kid starts Kindergarten just a few weeks after that and I have already succumbed to the idea (and warned of it by her preschool teacher) that i will definitely be getting notes home from kindergarten for Madison's behavior and to just be prepared for it. And while my daughter is not a bad kid, she is definitely full of energy and very stubborn with the ideas that she gets in her head. I'm not sure how to handle the teachers looking at me as though I've raised this uncontrollable ball of energy and haven't done anything to contain it. While I know that I have tried EVERYTHING in my power to steer her down the right road when i dream of the road she takes to adulthood it is always winding, very bumpy, with a few spots of, let's just call them shadows opposed to darkness. Not in any way do I think she is evil, she is just one of these people who won't learn from anything but her own experience and it still might take a few of her own before the lesson really sinks in.

What is most scary is that these are the minor concerns on my list, the past 10 years since i met Nathan have flown by faster than the wind carried my kids kindergarten registration papers down the street last week. I just barely blinked and they were gone. What is terrifying about that is that in another 10, Natalie will be 18 and our time with her at home will be finished. AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!! I'm too young to worry about boys dating my daughters and girls dating my son, but the time is short at hand when we will be buying a shot gun to shine on the front porch as they approach my house to adore my kids. Natalie will be in a school with sixth graders in august, sixth graders know and talk about things i don't know and don't want to talk about. I have really learned how much I took advantage of childhood. Why didn't any of us listen to the wise old adage of "ignorance is bliss". I know that I would give almost anything to have just one day where I could live my life this way again. Even just a few hours where i didn't have to worry about sex, drugs, alcohol, and all the other insanely moral issues my little children go out and face in this world everyday would be truly welcomed. Really all can say is exactly what i started with, Getting old is really scary!!

KIDS ARE FUNNY

I was just thinking about all the funny things i have heard kids say over the years along with the things i never thought I would say or hear being said. I have many of these funny little quotes since becoming a mother almost 8 years ago and thought I would share some of the funnier ones i can remember from my kids and my friends kids.


Bryson to his friend Tanner
Bryson hears the words "a womens got" on the tv, he replys "women's got, what's a women's got?!?!" Tanner in reply "ohhh, you'll see!"

madison to me
"I'm right and yooouuur wrong mommy, YOU get an X!! "(while making an x with her fingers and shoving them in my face)

madison to a middle age hippee women in target
"Are you a witch?"

Tanner in prayer
"thank you for president Lincoln who was our 16th president and got SHOT IN THE HEAD!!"

me to Natalie
"Don't flush the elephant down the toilet!"

Madison to me
me " why did you want bryson to cut your pretty hair?"
Madison "because it wouldn't top gwo-ing"

Natalie to the peacock
"PRETTY CHICKEN!!"

bryson to the elephant
"kitty!"

Bryson to the bear
"kitty!"

Bryson to the alligators
"kitty!"

Bryson to the mountain lion
"kitty!"
me to Bryson "yes son that is a kitty"

Shawn to his mom
He dropped his stuffed elephant who he named horny for the tusks
MOM, GET HORNY MOM, MOM GET HORNY!!!
mom to shawn, shhhhhh i'll get him shawn just be QUIET!!

jennifer to madison
J "i didn't know that madison"
M "thats because Iiiiiiii am SMARTER thaaaan YOU "

madison to me
"All the boys want me to be their girlfriend and keep fighting over who gets to marry me. (huge sigh) Sometime that boyfriend thing makes my heart feel soooo empty."

I'm sure I could go on for hours, but I just thought I would share some funny moments. I love kids even on bad days, kids are always good for a laugh.