I just got off the phone with my BFF Kissy. She is being sent away to Tisdale - she is a manager for 7-11, and they get sent where they are needed. She is pretty excited that after her two weeks in Tisdale she will be on vacation. They are going camping - not tent, they only do rv camping, and after two days at the lake they are heading to Calgary.

We are hoping that her time in Calgary coincides with our planned vacation in Calgary this summer so we can head to the Calgary Zoo together. There is a Butterfly enclosure at the zoo that I think the boys will absolutely love! The last time we were in Calgary, and went to the zoo, Our eldest was 4 and our baby was only five weeks old so they didn’t get very much out of ANY of the zoo experience!

I will warn you here and now that when we return from our vacation, you will be overrun with pictures for quite some time!!!

(deal with it)

Quite a few months ago Logan had a sleep over. During that sleep over, his bed was mysteriously broken. I asked if anyone had been jumping on the bed, but each little head shook in the negative.

OooohKAY then.

We lugged Logan’s broken bed out to the garage, it looked like an easy fix, cut some new 1×1’s, re screw in the flats, up about an inch higher in the sides and..for a bit of added stability (read: OMG WHY DO KIDS JUMP ON BEDS???) we would put a piece of plywood over the whole thing.

HA! Jump on THAT, brat!

Annnd. Yeah. The broken bed sat in the garage for a few months and Logan slept on the floor of his room, on his mattress for a few months and things were..well. They just were.

Then, I opened my email…must have been Monday, to see a slew of emails from a site called Freecycle. Freecycle is cool. Everything is free!

One of the emails was fora  twin bed with a “big drawer underneath you can roll out”. I emailed the poster asking if the bed was still available and made arrangements to come and pick it up that evening. I knew the bed was from IKEA from he freecycle post, so I spent some time looking up online instructions to put the bed together. I didn’t find them until after we had driven to the city and picked up the bed. On the inside of the bed was a  barcode scanner thingamajig that had the name ROBIN on it. Once I had that name, it was easy-peasy to Google IKEA Robin bed Instructions!

Except. The bed is IKEA, so we didn’t need the instructions. Hubs had the bed put together before I got back to him with the instructions LOL!

Check it out!

Pretty cool, eh! It’s even blue, like his room!

My.Head.Is.Pounding.

I’m POSITIVE it has everything to do with how looooooong, how very, very, very long our day was today.

We went to bed at 2AM, and got up at 7AM. I washed my hair, took my diet pills and Chantix, made sure the kids weren’t in their underwear and herded them, with hubs, out the door to the football field for an eight AM game.

I hate Morning People.

After the game (our team lost) (spectacularly) we walked half a block North and waited in the plus 34 heat for the parade to start. Our town is having it’s annual rodeo this weekend, and the thing starts off with a parade.

I was impressed with the Grease float, watching those dudded up guys doing the hand jive was hilarious. I was less than impressed with the teen girl who tried to jump onto a moving float in the parade. She fell off, and Hubs is certain that the way she landed, she will have broken her tail bone. Lucky for her, the ambulance was just three pony’s down the street and the emt’s got her scrapped off the road and into their vehicle.

What kind of example is that for kids though?

AHNYway. After the parade we had to run back home, get Kid one out of his football gear, and head to the city. My sister lost her wallet at the mall and a constable had called my father, who in turn called me, because God knows I have nothing else to do, so that I could drive her to the police station to retrieve it.

And our experience there? THAT’s a whooole other blog post!

After that we drove her home, and went for lunch. We were starving! By the time lunch was done we were looking at an hour and half before we had to get SON one to the pool to meet up with his friends, he had a slumber party planned with them, and the pool came first! (No - not at my house, I’m not dumb enough to take on ten ten year olds on my own!) We kicked around the mall, it’s across the street from the pool, so it was perfect.

After the mall and dropping Son One off at the pool, we had to do our grocery shopping. Three hours of my life I will never get back!

We got home at 6pm this evening.

Looong Day.

I have a shockingly bad memory. For example, The day before yesterday I made a doctors appointment. The appointment was for the VERY NEXT DAY at two PM, but if I had not written it on my hand in ink, I would not have remembered to go!

A bad memory is not a fun thing. I am constantly struggling to remember peoples names and trying to drive somewhere in the city is damn near impossible because I cannot remember which way to go, but until scientists discover a way to give people a memory upgrade like they do for computers, I am stuck with my bad memory.

This is where blogs come into play. With my eldest, I was rarely on the computer and had very little idea what the internet was for and had certainly never heard of a blog before. I had a memory book for him, and I filled it in religiously. Now when I want to know when he got his first tooth or walked for the first time, all I have to do is flip through that book.

We never got a memory book for our middle boy, so most of that stuff is forgotten. I remember that he walked very shortly before his first birthday, 10.5 or 11 months old, but not the exact age, like I do with my oldest. With our youngest, I had discovered blogs by then, so when I want to remember what he was up to on “this” day, or “that”, I just go to my archives.

As an example, today my baby lost his very first baby tooth, and I will always know when and how, because I wrote a post about it on my blog Paint!

For me, my blogs are a wondrous thing in terms of helping me to remember the important happenings in my life, and there is nothing more fun that to decided to go back two or three years to that days date and see what we were up to. In 2006 on may 28th I wrote a post about how Parker’s grade one teacher had called me from the school to tell me that Parker would be passing Grade one. Little stuff like that, it’s exciting to see.

The only BAD part, and the reason I am not linking that post, is three years ago when I started blogging, the idea of spell check or even re-reading a post to catch errors was a foreign concept for me. The post is FULL of typos and errors and even half formed html code! Nasty, but. . . It’s where I was back then, and due to a recent poll I took, the old posts will stay like that, errors and all! (And in their own way, those misspelled, messy posts are helping me to remember how far I have come in my blogging!)

On Mother’s Day weekend, my father and his wife brought over a very large trampoline. It’s 14 foot around! It’s HUGE, and takes up nearly half of my back yard!

I’ve been a bit leery of trying it out, but today I took the chance, and hopped on!

OMG. My legs were SO shaky and I was so WINDED  after only about 5 minutes of jumping! Its like someone took some fat burner supplements turned them into rubber bands!

It was scary though. I was on for just a few seconds by myself when my middle boy hopped on, then my baby and finally my eldest. They made me sit in the center of the trampoline, holding my knees to my chest  to play “Crack the Egg“  They jumped all around me, tossing me everywhere, until I had to use my hands  to stabilize myself!

And then, when we were just jumping around, Blake did something that made me bounce really high and I screamed very loudy and very shortly I got off the trampoline.

The boys seem to love it, and my husband as well, but I would MUCH rahter stay on solid ground and just watch them Jump!

A few months back, my eldest son had to do a big project on our Province. I ended up printing out over 40 pages of information from the school sanctioned websites for him to use for research. Ideally, he should have been online looking at them himself, but I am rather addicted to my computer.

All three of my boys like the websites WebKinz and MiniClips and are always asking me if they can play on them. But again. I am rather addicted to my computer.

Because of this, Micah and I are in the process of researching netbooks for the boys. Oh, not one for each, one to share. The biggest  reason I want a net book for them, as opposed to a laptop or desktop, is the size. They can easily take it to their Nana’s for sleep overs, and it will not take up a lot of room in my house.

The other thing that has us interested in netbooks is the price. Dude. They are So freaking cheap! Not only will the boys be over the moon with their Christmas gift, I won’t have to share my laptop anymore! It’s a Win-Win situation, dontcha think?

On Friday afternoon I went to an auction/outlet type store with my Mother in Law. I wasn’t looking forward to going.

Turns out I had a blast.

Not only did MIL and I get a lot of good talking and bonding in, I managed to pick up two long sleeved, “long torso” shirts and a set of baby doll pajamas - all for under ten dollars. If that wasn’t enough savings, That same night hubs and I were killing time in the mall waiting for our movie to start - we saw Star Trek- and I found a store will a hell of a sale going on.

It was SO good, I left the store to locate my husband (he was in the games store LOL) to ask him if I was reading the sign properly. THEN,  when I went to the til to pay, I ALSO asked the sales lady if the sigh was right! It was one of those too good to be true things.

The sale was on Tank tops, again, the long torso kind. I’m a big fan of shirts that come in the Long Torso option, even though I do NOT have a long torso! (Long Torso are the kind that cover you so you don’t have to worry about stretching, or reaching for something,  and having your tummy paunch pop out) (if long torso tanks aren’t your type, you can pop some Apidexin instead!) AHNYWAY. The sale was on tank tops and they were FIVE for ten dollars! Two bucks a piece!

I checked the individual tags when I got them home and was putting them away, three of them were originally marked at 18 dollars and two of them had been marked at 12 dollars.

That is a MAJOR savins, AND I had planned on stopping at Old Navy on Saturday as I had seen in their flyer that they had tank tops on for 7.50 if you bought two or more.

For Easter we gave our youngest son Logan, a very small suitcase. It’s almost like mini Samsonite luggage, it has the extendable handle and the wheels, but it is also fuzzy like a teddy bear, and has a beany bear sized Baby bjorn mounted on it’s front.

It’s *really* cute, and he loves it alot.

The other morning I was surfing online when logan called “Mommy! mommy come look!”

So I did.

Three words:

EL

OH

EL

I’m wondering if anyone reading this has tried the Kettlebell training exercises?

The infomercials and online ads look interesting, but I’m wondering if it really works. If you have used it, and if it worked for you.

I’m thinking that this slurppee and these nachos I am scarfing down aren’t helping my cause, and I do feel a tiny bit guilty that I AM eating these snacks while blogging about weight loss, but dude. SO NUMMY!

Anyway. Kettlebell training, Yes or no?

I was reading a blog post this afternoon about a woman whose laptop was starting to be a total jerk to her.

One of my biggest fears is that I will go to turn on MY laptop and it won’t turn on, that I will lose all my pictures, that I will have to be without ANYTHING until we can afford it, so I started out reading the post with trepidation.

She would turn on the laptop and find it had not charged, it was like the laptop wasn’t recognizing her power cord. She would set it on her lap and it would be fine for a bit, then the screen would dim and thigs would start flickering again. Finally, she got tired of the laptop misbehaving so she called her boyfriend over. he happens to be somewhat of an expert of computers and other electronics.

He took the laptop from her and gave it a pone over. Then he handed it back to her, laughing.

She had plugged int eh power cord, just… not all the way! The cord was jiggling as she moved around, hence the flickering.

I would say that she is definitely NOT the right candidate for any IT jobs!!!

Anyway. Her post really amused me, and it made me remember a time, way back in high school, when I had a blond moment, every bit as her power cord related blond moment was!

I had a little red car. A Ford..something. I can’t remember what exactly, but it was a small two door, four seater. it was old, it was rusty, but it was mine.

One day, after school, I went out to the parking lot, climbed into my car and turned the key. Nothing happened. I tried again and again, and still, NOTHING happened! Since it was an old car, I figured that something under the hood was wrong, so I went over to a group of guys who were smoking and asked them if they could help me. Naturally, with MY luck, the one guy who came over to help was one who I had quite a crush on.

I figured he would just look under the hood and tell me I was screwed, but instead he got into the car, put the key in and tried to turn it. When nothing happened, looked at my dash, then started to laugh.

Seems that I had been in a hurry when I got to the school that morning and had stopped in my spot, then shut off the car - without taking the car out of the DRIVE gear.

In case you did not know, a car must be in PARK to be turned on. It will not turn on in any other gear.