Oh Valentine's Day...How I miss thee.....

On T.V. and in the movies, Valentines Day always seems to go smoothly and perfectly. The couples walk in to a restaurant,  have reservations, and immediately sit down to a candle lit dinner. Their children (if they have any) are with a babysitter and the only thing they have to think and talk about on this wonderful day of love is each other. Awww.....

So, it doesn't really work like that for me and Coach anymore :)  I don't think it actually ever did. Does it really work like that for anyone????  As a child, I remember riding around with my family on Valentines day attempting to find a restaurant to go to. We would go to Olive Garden, see that the wait was 2 hours, and then move on to another restaurant. We usually ended up saying forget it, and either waiting the 2 hours at restaurant #4 , or picking up something and going home. 

I remember saying, "That will not be me! When I get married, it will be romantic!" Well, 6 years later, and 3 children later, I understand the struggles that my parents faced when it came to making Valentines day, the day of romance. How could it not be romantic? I'm sure I was sitting in the backseat belting out some N-Sync. (so sad) 


I've got some advice for this upcoming Valentine's day.
I know you are all thinking, "What amazing answer is she going to give us?" "How can we still have an amazing, romantic, special, one of a kind Valentine's day even if we have kids?"  (Hopefully they're not singing N-Sync. That would be weird.)

I don't really have an answer. Sorry. What I will tell you, is that I am reminded daily that my children are a blessing. Yes, sometimes things don't go like they do in the movies, but real life is so much better. When my daughter hugs me and tells me that I'm her Valentine, I am reminded that the small sacrifices like not getting to go out to a special dinner are not really that important.


Okay, now  I am going to tell you that if we don't have a babysitter, I will probably order pizza, light some candles and hang out with my hubby for Valentine's day (after the kiddos go to bed). The romance is in who you are with, not what you do. For those of you who do get amazing reservations, and meet at the top of the Empire State Building, I am extremely jealous! Tell me how you do it :)

~Wishing you all a day full of love~

Joe: My Best Friend

5 Reasons Why Coffee is My Best Friend!

1. Have I told you I'm not a Morning Person (See the blog labeled A Tu-Tu A Day Keeps the Morning Blues Away)

2. The next few days are going to be busy. Coach's basketball team made it to the playoffs! Yea!!!!  Although I am very excited for him, this means that he will be gone a lot more preparing the team for the upcoming games. Tonight he has traveled to Dallas to scout out some teams he may be playing against. Tomorrow is game night, and Saturday the team will be playing a make-up game due to the snow day. Because of this, I am warning you ahead of time that my posts may sound a little delirious :)  But that only makes them more fun. Right?  I guess we'll see.


3.  Yesterday I awoke at 5:45a.m. (yeah I said A.M.) to a banging noise in the living room. I sent Coach to check it out. He returned with an expressionless face like he had seen a ghost. I asked him what the noise was, and all he said was, "Your daughter found your nail polish." Needless to say, the rest of the morning I was scrubbing bright red nail polish (the one from the post about betting!) out of my white carpet.
***** Tip!!!!! ************
If you ever spill nail polish on the carpet, after scrubbing it with soapy water, use Windex to help remove the remaining stain. (Found that tip on the Internet when I was hoping for a miracle, and it worked!)
I hope deep down in my soul that you will never need that tip, but just in case!
***********************
She had also painted her legs, arms, and lips. She apparently thought it was lip gloss. I will have nightmares about that morning for years! There were no pictures of this, I was busy feverishly scrubbing the carpet.

4. Coffee makes me sit. I'm not sure how or why. When I wake up on the weekends, I usually do so with a vengeance. I have a list of things to get done running through my head, and I jump straight to work. Coach is a coffee connoisseur. I've never seen someone drink so much of it. It is the first thing he does every morning, so as soon as he places the cup of coffee in my hands, I feel like I need to sit down and take a few minutes to enjoy it. Although it is full of caffeine, it is probably the main thing keeping me calm.

5. It's easy to make! I know this sounds silly, but at this point in my life, anything that only takes a few minutes to prepare, and has a setting where it turns itself on and makes itself is definately a favorite. It's like the croc-pot of beverages. Not only that, but my husband is such a coffee lover, that I very rarely have to actually make my own. Score!


I tend to agree with Mike Ditka from the Movie "Kicking and Screaming"

Coffee is the lifeblood that fuels the dreams of champions.

The Best Bet: Superbowl Fashion

Ok, so I am going to let y'all in on a secret. I am officially addicted to betting. I don't mean any of those illegal bets, or ones where you make money off of someone. I mean ones where I get my husband to do things for me because I am a good guesser!

Coach and I have a long standing tradition of betting on sports teams. I love sports (tennis, soccer, volleyball, ice-skating.... pretty much all of the one's that my husband doesn't care about), but I would much rather be watching some reality show that makes me feel like my life is Waaaay normal.  In order to cure my boredom during games Coach and I  started making bets. He soon realized that it encouraged me to actually watch the sports he is interested in and learn a little about the games.

 If there's something in it for me, then I am a great supporter. This is how I learned what first downs were (I'm not really sure how I was a cheerleader for so long, and never really understood what I was cheering for.) I've even learned what a tight-end is. We won't talk about what I used to think it meant :)

The last game we made a bet on was of course, The Superbowl.

Since we don't bet for money, I definitely try to get something good out of it! My toe nails were beginning to look a little rough, and I am too cheap to go get them done (and am not really full of spare time), so I decided that if my team was to win, then I wanted Coach to give me a pedicure. Not just paint my toe nails, but really do it up. Scrub my feet, wrap my legs in hot towels, the whole shebang! The whole point of the bets is to make sure that you have the other person do something that they would never do unless forced to by the loss of a bet. (I love it!)

Coach decided that if he won, he wanted me to be the perfect coach's wife for 3 days. I pretty much feel like I am already pretty perfect at it (Not!). I was supposed to bake the team cookies, create a gift bag for my husband the day of a game, and attend the game in full team colors (etc... etc....).  I was pretty much supposed to worship him for three days. He would love to be spoiled like this all the time, but life is a little hectic for me to normally come up with baked goods for the team and worship him :) I have 3 monkeys that I'm busy chasing and a job, sorry Charlie. But this is what would happen if I was to lose.

We shook on it, and moved on to our team choices.

The way I pick teams really cracks up Coach. I usually just say I have a feeling about who will win, and who won't. I call it my MommyPsych. I think all moms have a 6th and maybe a 7th sense. We do have eyes in the back of our heads you know!  I really didn't have an opinion about who I wanted to win, but I remembered that I had an old comfy Packers t-shirt packed away, and that it would be fun to wear a shirt supporting my team. So, based on my outfit, I decided to choose the Packers. Coach, was happy to go for the other team and the bet was on.

Long story short, I'm sure most of you saw or heard the outcome of the game, so you know how this all turned out. It turned out with a happy Autumn!

I would like to thank my best friend Stacey, who let me borrow her Packers shirt approximately 8 years ago (Not sure if I stole it or if she gave it to me..... Sorry Stace. Let me know if you want it back!).









Just so you know Stacey, you are the reason that I am sitting here with soft feet and pretty red toes. Thank you friend!

Thanks mom for passing down the Flintstone feet



Poor baby, I think I passed them down to her too!
Mini-Me was determined to have her toes
photographed
(ooohhhh..... I just love baby toes!)

 I am proud to say that I won this bet because of fashion! Superbowl Fashion that is!

If you are ever having trouble with getting motivation to watch a game with your spouse, I would definitely recommend  betting! It makes it so much more fun. Please do not hold me liable if you end up having to worship your husband, you win some, you lose some. I am now out of professional sports team shirts to help me make choices, so I guess I will be using the MommyPsych for March Madness! I do occasionally lose, so I'll let you in on those sad days too :) We'll think happy thoughts of painted toes until then.


Thank you Coach for always going along with my crazy bets!
You are a great sport!



Ice Cream For Breakfast?

Yesterday it snowed here, and it's already almost all gone today. That's the way I like snow, here today, gone tomorrow. It was a very light snow, but for the south, this was a blizzard. Everyone got out of school, and the boy across the street was shoveling the snow out of his driveway with a real shovel. I awoke to the horrible scraping sound. It was an interesting sight.

My two oldest monkeys woke up bright and shiny (of course) and immediately wanted to go out to play in this white delight (mmm....that sounds like a name for ice-cream, maybe that's what I will name my snow ice-cream!).

I bundled them up Missouri style! To me that means so many layers on that you can't feel your arms and legs anymore, and plastic bags over your hands and feet to make sure the water doesn't seep through your clothes. We don't really invest in heavy gloves or boots, because you only get the chance to use them every 5 years or so.

Poor Baby Gray watched from the window because he has been sick. I felt so bad for him. At one point I hopped outside with the girls and threw snowballs at the window. He thought that was hilarious. One of my favorite things about babies is that anything you do is super funny. I get him laughing so hard that he can barely breathe, and I start feeling like I'm the next Lucille Ball. Then I look over at Stinkerbelle who is giving me one of those looks like" Really Mom, Reallly?" and I realize that I better enjoy my short time of being the funniest woman in the world.

Anyway, after everyone got tired of playing, I headed out and collected some untrampled snow to make snow ice cream. I have some fun memories of going to my grandma's house and having her fix this for me. In my mind, it was the best thing I had ever tasted, so I decided to make my own and it was pretty good too :)

Yes I was using a strainer to scoop it up, don't really know why,
it's just what I grabbed (worked pretty well though)

Homemade White Delight  (Snow Ice-Cream)
Ingredients:
Vanilla
White Granulated Sugar
Milk (you can also use condensed sweetened milk but plain whole milk worked just fine for us)


Directions:

First get a gallon of snow

Add 1 cup of sugar to the snow

I let Stinkerbelle poor the sugar

Pay no attention to Mini-Me's fingerprints in the sugar

Add 1-2 tablespoons of vanilla (I added 2 because I wanted it to be very flavorful)

 

Mix together,

and while mixing this, you add 1 to 2 cups of milk.

You can always tell it's winter when there is a big pile of
coats in the background :)

The snow we had was very dry, so I added 1 and 1/2 cups of milk.


Pretty simple! Spoon it up, and enjoy!

The kiddos were having it for breakfast (healthy huh?) so they thought it would be fun to add some cereal. I was not brave enough to try it, but they really liked it!!

Survival Skills

 7 Things I've survived this week:

1. An amazingly cold day and no socks (I hate socks, they make my feet clostrophobic- let me be free). My nickname in high school had something to do with stinky feet. Not sure why? They weren't that bad. I'll probably steal some socks from Coach to wear tomorrow so my toes don't get frostbite and fall off ;)

2. My speech darlin's turning into little gremlins at the elementary school (weather changes always make them crazy but power outages only added to the spaz factor)



3. Working on 4 hours of sleep. Baby Gray was at home sick with Coach. I hate it when babies get sick. You feel like you can never do enough. The nights were full of lots of rocking, cool washcloths, and vicks. Poor monkey.



a pic of him on a well day!





I took a pic of myself to
document the fear



4. A chicken attack. I see a little girl at her home for therapy and on my way up to the house, a chicken/guinea (not really sure what it was) decided to chase me. For some reason, animals think it is fun to attack me.I promise you I'm not exaggerating, I walked out, ran to my car, and it was pecking on my car after I got in. Growing up I had hermit crabs, hamsters, dogs, cats, birds, and fish (I was bit by all of them except the fish- I'm so glad they don't have teeth). Needless to say my dream of being a veterinarian did not become a reality.

5. Heavy snow! Just kidding. We got two inches, and that is probably a record! The kids loved it!

Stinkerbelle got to make her first snow angel, and Mini-Me only thinks snow is good for one thing. Eating! Everytime I looked up, she was getting another mouthfull.

We made snow ice-cream. I'll post the recipe for that tomorrow.

6. Walking in and seeing Mini-me putting everything she could find in the toilet after she was supposed to be in bed. We have since decided to put a bell on her door, so we can have a warning if she gets up in the middle of the night to explore. Why the toilet??? Why do kids love the toilet so much? The world will never know.

7. The underwear gnome came to visit my house and stole all of Stinkerbelle's undies. I walked in to the living room after about 20 minutes of doing work to find Coach asleep on the couch, and the underwear gnome trying to escape through the back door. Not sure how she did it, but she accomplished putting on 12 pairs. Beware, the gnome escaped and is armed and dangerous.

Not sure how she got away
with all that junk in her trunk

Snow Day Survival Tip: Have plenty of food!!!! Thank goodness we went to the store a few days ago, or I would be suiting up and skiing to the nearest convenience store! Okay, there's not enough snow to ski on, but I'd get there somehow!

Things That Make You Say Ewwwww!!!

Last night was game night. It was an out of town game so I again chose to support my Hubby from the home court :) While he was off helping boys become men and changing the world, I was at home changing diapers. I know that being a mom is a way of changing the world but it can be hard to remember this when you are running through the house trying to find the magic eraser because Mini-me thought it would  be fun to draw in pen and marker all over the walls while you were putting baby Gray to bed.

She also colored herself

By the way I would like to personally thank the maker of the magic eraser. Whoever you are, if I ever meet you, I would like to give you a big kiss, for saving my life so many times! I love you Magic eraser maker. Oh, wait, it is made by Mr. Clean isn't it?  Mr. Clean you have a big kiss coming on that shiny bald head of yours if you ever turn out to be real.

Anyway, not only was last night b-ball night, it also was a night that would change my life forever. I have been scarred and pictures have been ingrained in my brain of things that I think no woman or child should ever have to see.

Let me explain.  One of my favorite things to do is go to the public library. I love visiting it, even though we have our own library of hundreds of childrens books at home. The smell of the library makes me happy.

When coach and I were dating, he used to make fun of me because I would make him go with me to the top story of the university library and smell the old books. I think he thought/thinks I was crazy but loved me anyway! They need to make a room spray called, "Old Books." I would definately buy that one.

Anyway, recently I let my 5 year old Stinkerbelle come with me to pick out books for the family. We went during nap time to give Coach a much needed few minutes of quiet. Stinkerbelle picked out the books for all of the kiddos, and I looked at a few I will attempt to get read. We quickly grabbed our selections and headed home.
Well, last night I began to read one, which during checkout I had figured was a potty training book. I am not sure now. The book is called, "Everyone poops." I told you it was scarring. I thought this would be a cute little potty training book, but no........ no, no, no. It is much more!!! Please beware that if you do read this book, you will be scarred. My sister came over, and I had her read it :) Told you I am mean to her.

Anyway, the book starts out talking about how animals poop (I hate that word by the way) *Gag* , where they do it, what it looks like, and then moves on to humans... I don't care to talk about it much more, but I have to say that while I was reading it, the kids thought it was hilarious. Even the baby was saying "Ewwwwwwww...."

 After finishing the book, I told the kids that we would not be reading it again, but the damage was done.

Today, Stinkerbelle brought me a picture she had drawn.

What have I done? Coach saw the book and thought it was hilarious. Men.
You've been warned :)

Sister Talk 'N Fruit

Last night Coach was out watching his favorite college team get beat. I would feel sorry for him, except he was cheering for Missouri to beat UT. He got what was coming. I'm not really a fan of either, but Texas always comes first around here. (Sorry to all of my Missouri friends and family)

 I'm pretty sure he was the only one in the UT stadium wearing black and gold. Someone actually bumped into him as he was leaving the bathroom, and they apologized, saw his Mizzou hat, and took back their apology. We take our sports pretty seriously around here.

While Coach was out getting hassled by Texas fans, my sister came over to keep me company and hang out. She lives about 45 miles away, so occasionally we take turns driving to each others town. She and I get along really well now, but we love to remind each other of the horrible things we did to each other as children (she swears I was the only one, but she has no idea how much she taunted me). I couldn't help it that I thought it would be funny to see her eat dog food, and to see if she could escape if I taped her up with duct tape and left her in the basement. Wow, it sounds pretty bad on paper, but believe me, she loved the attention :) 

Our annual pajama match
(Yes, we are nerds)

Anyway, during our intellectual conversation last night about which shoes go better with our outfits, and the new Coach purse that she got a great deal on (which I am way jealous of by the way), I found out that she had never had a pomegranate. Random topic I know, but this is my new favorite fruit, and I had to share it with her. I know it's strange, but that's how sister speak works. One topic to another, and no real reason for the switch.

 I told her how I had just discovered this really cool fruit, and how fun they were to eat. Since she had not ever had one, I figured many of you probably have not had one either, so I had to share my new find and recommend it! I am including my step-by-step process of preparing a pomegranate. It takes a little time to eat, but it is soooo good for you. I've heard there are some awesome health benefits of it, but really I thought it was neat because it was different than the everyday apple, banana or orange. These are the kind of things I get excited about :)

There are always funky looking fruits at the grocery store that kind of scare me, no more Mr. Pomegranate, no more

Cut it in half, because the work is on the inside

There are little seeds on the inside (these are what you eat)

I would not recommend eating the peel!

Time to get dirty. Use your fingers or a spoon to pop the seeds out.

Is it just me or do my hands look extra wrinkly???

The seeds are kind of in little pods

Have a bowl ready to catch the seeds, I say this because I peeled my first pomegranate in the car

BAD IDEA!

Seems like a lot of hard work for one fruit

But you really do get a lot out of one.

According to Coach, each seed is like a drink of juice

I think the seeds are what would happen if a blackberry and a cranberry had babies (weird I know)

You'll See!

Try one and let me know how it goes!!!