Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

The Soccer Star

Adam had his first night of soccer practice tonight. He absolutely loves soccer, even though it's obvious after tonight we have work to do.

He started off strong with a dribbling exercise. Luckily, we had practiced this before at home. Thank you freshman year of college 1/2 credit PE Soccer. However, before he was done with the drill, he had tripped over his own feet and fallen twice.

His coach explained the simple rules of a shark & minnows game -- which I clearly heard from 12 ft. away. The kid that was the shark was to try to kick the soccer ball away from the kids that were the minnows. Adam must have been admiring his own astounding soccer skills because he missed that the goal was for the other kid to steal his soccer ball. Three meltdowns ensued, complete with whiny "H-E-Y, that's M-Y soccer ball!" before he realized there was a pattern and that was the game.

Near the end of practice, the coach decided to let the kids practice their running and have a race against each other without soccer balls. Every other kid on the field heard this instruction and kicked their soccer balls neatly in a row off the field. My kid, decided that he would use this time to make a goal in the net. His sense of elation was cut short when he finally realized that his soccer ball was not with the "in crowd." Even though the coach gave the okay to just leave his soccer ball, Adam could not join the group of racers because he was tangled in the net. After releasing Adam back into the wild, the coach said, "On your mark, get set..." to which Adam yells "GO!" and all the kids take off. The coach called them back to start again. This time Adam wasn't ready for "GO!" because he wasn't the one saying it. After all the kids took off, and he turned around to notice, he went full speed ahead...only to trip over his cleats and eat dirt.

I will say, what my son lacks in skills he makes up for in heart. Despite falling in the dirt numerous times and being last place in every game or skill, he still got up for more. All the way home he talked about the best time he had.

My Mother's Revenge

We've been having trouble in kid land lately. On numerous occasions this week Adam has tried to turn his room into a waterpark. When cups of water became off limits in his room, he decided surely it was alright to upgrade to a pitcher of water. I caught him wet handed with a half filled pitcher returning to his room. He neglected to tell me had already dumped 3 pitcher fulls in his window seat. (Why did we choose the room with a window seat for a him?-- the feature is totally wasted on the boy unless you count the times he has used it as a spring board to jump to his bed across the room.) I can only assume his hotwheels needed to go to the car wash. I made him clean up the mess, which now has the added mess of 5 drippy towels when I had just finished up laudry today. Since he's going to pappaw's tonight (which means he'll come back with King Adam status as the only local grandchild) I wanted him to clean his room. He is fighting it off with a vengeance. As I was putting away my own laundry I heard him say, "Stupid Mommy" in response. When I asked him about it, of course he wouldn't come clean. He said, "All I said was yes mommy." We went on and on and he finally spit out the truth. Since he said a bad word (stupid is a bad word in our house when you are 4) and he wasn't honest he had a dose of the naughty word medicine. I just had a flashback of my own childhood where my mother was making me eat stew, which I still despise to this day. Even the sound of it -S-T-E-W -- it even sounds gross. I was giving my mother a time of it. She told me I couldn't leave the table until I ate it. I went on and on about how great it was that I was getting to watch tv past my bedtime (thanks to open concept layouts.) Her final straw was to tell me I'd be having it for breakfast if I didn't eat up. She went into the next room and under my breath I muttered, "You witch." She tore out of that room and I knew I was in big trouble. Today my mother got her revenge.

On a side note...I also remember my mother saying "I hope you have two kids just like you" Now that I'm pregnant, that's quite frightening.

Valentine's Day Crafts

We had a Valentine's Day Party a little eary at our house this year. I wanted to do it on the day that all my childcare kids were here. The kids got to decorate gift bags with die cut hearts (thanks to a good friend who used her cri-cut for me!) and decorate one Valentine's card for their dads and one for their moms. Since most of the kids I have are ages 2-4, I had to make this really simple. I pre-cut all the shapes for them so they just had to stick them on the page. I used Microsoft Publisher to create some basic shapes, and then just printed those shapes on to the back of scrapbook paper. It made it really easy to print & cut them out for the kids. The best thing is I was able to save the "drawing" on my computer so we can make them another time. I can also share email them if it something you'd want to do with your kids.

Our Festive $5 Table Decorations

The Robot Card

The Flower Pot Card

Money can't buy style

I realize that finding maternity wear in one's personal style can be a challenge but, this is so wrong on at least 7 different levels.

Note to self...

#1: Everything in the Saginaw Walmart is flipped from the N. Tarrant Walmart...including the placement of women's and men's restrooms. A sincere apology to the man at the urinal.

#2: Follow up on Adam's underwear rotation. Earlier in the weekend, I happened to notice Adam was wearing the same underwear as the day before. When I told him he has to wear clean underwear every day, he told me non-chalantly "No, I don't." He wasn't rude about it, he genuinely seemed surprised that I was at all concerned about this. Which gave me the distinct feeling this might not be the first time of double under-roo usage. I figured we'd better nip this in the bud before we have real problems when he is stinky teenage boy. Maybe he's just trying to save me from extra laundry. Yeah, that's it.

My First Quilt - 4 years in the making

Here's my very first quilt, finally finished, after 4 years! I decided when Adam was a baby to make him a quilt that he could lay on/play on while we were at church. I got the top done relatively easily and then realized I completely lacked the skills to go any further. Then I somewhat figured out how to do the hand quilting (which I'll never do again) and then again realized I had no idea how to do binding. The quilt would sit untouched for 6 mos. increments until I could figure out the next step. In the midst of all this frustration, my husband commented about how the quilt was kind of girly, so the quilt was exiled for a long while as my son started nursery and no longer needed a play blanket. The quilt resurfaced as I was digging out all the stuff from our office/craft room and turning it into a somewhat useable nursery. I realized all I needed to do was the binding, and I now know how to do that from other quilts I've finished. I finished this off fairly easily and now little miss Hadley will have a play blanket. Which is good because it is kind of girly. (Sorry for the crooked picture, I cannot figure out how to take a good photo of quilts)