Rain!

We finally experienced a break in the drought and these are some photos Mike captured as the clouds were moving in. Kind of scary to have a churning wallcloud with that little dropdown cloud from it. There was tons of cloud to ground lightning - or post hole diggers as we call them back home - and the ever-present gale force winds that accompany anything in this neighborhood. Not sure with that 2nd photo - but it looks like either an elf's foot or a bird's head.

Zachary continues to make great strides in baseball. Not sure, but I think he makes this face everytime he goes to catch a ball. Kind of looks like a cross between fear and "I got it!"! He's really enjoying it and played his first scrimmage game Wednesday. He hit 3 times and got on base all 3 times. Pretty good! They've got him playing at the pitching mound. He's really good at fielding those short balls and throwing it to 1st base to get the runner out.

I took the kids to our church's indoor playground yesterday (yes, they have a huge indoor playground due to the number of months of foul weather here) and they had a great time. There were a couple of other kids there that Zach hooked up with - a 10 year old boy and an 8 year old girl. They started running races and Zach was beating the girl and only 2 steps behind the boy. He's really getting some speed from those long legs!

This week I've actually been staying up after the kids go to bed. It's been kind of nice to have total peace and quiet for a couple of hours. Of course, there were a million other things that I could've been doing, but instead I just plopped myself on the sofa with a glass of lemonade and vegged out! Of course, the downside to this is I'm getting caught up in some of these reality shows and it's making going to bed harder because my mind starts spinning with "What comes next?" thoughts. Mike just cackles and heads off to bed and is snoring soundly when I finally crawl between the sheets. While walking around between commercials one night this week, I did decide that after 18 years of wedded bliss - it is time to retire some of the objects d'art, i.e. junk, around our house and replace them with something more in keeping with our rapidly advancing.................age. Ok, I'm not talking crocheted kleenex box covers, diaper stackers and false teeth holders here, but some more mature purchases of decorative pieces on end tables, the mantel and whatnot. In my quest on Thursday I stopped off at Hobby Lobby and lo and behold, they had decorative articles (i.e. junk) on sale for 80% off!!! We've got a BINGO! I ended up spending about $75 and got nearly $400 worth of stuff - really neat, grown up looking things too! Although Mike was amazed at the prices of the things I purchased and he likes all of them, he thinks I should go to bed earlier so I don't have time to look at all the things around us from our 20's and save him some money! LOL! I think he's afraid I may actually start looking in our closet at our clothes next.........................

Holy Cow!

Holy Cow! That was my reaction today at Katie's speech where she's taking a speech/articulation summer camp taught by 2 graduate students. It's just Katie and Will, a little 4 year old boy with loads of energy and a form of autism. I get the fun of sitting behind a 1-way mirror in a tiny room and observing the proceedings for an hour and 15 minutes. Today's session started off with Katie saying............nothing. Would not speak or utter a sound. These 2 poor graduate students had no clue what to do. I sat there for about 10 minutes to see if they'd be able to get Katie pulled out of her shell and to interact. No such luck. Finally, I went in there and told Katie in nice, yet no uncertain terms, that she was there to work so that mommy and everyone else could understand what she is saying. She looked at me and with the sweetest face said "Ok mommy, I work now". During this time, Will was starting to get his gears cranking and figuring out how he was going to work the therapists today. He was pretty much all over the place and between him hitting himself in the forehead with his fist and walking in circles, it was a bit of a 3 ring circus. Close to the end of the session was snack time. Well, today they had grapes - yummy for both kids. Will crammed all of his in his mouth at once. The therapist reminded him to chew 1 at a time and he glared at her. When he finally was able to swallow those down, he started looking around for more. The therapist asked him if he'd like more and he shook his head in the affirmative. She reminded him he needed to use his words and ask for more. This is when he got a big sneer on his face, lifted up his fist so that all could see it and proceeded to slowly raise his middle finger! Yep, 4 years old and flipped her the bird!!! I started laughing so hard I was crying and almost fell out of the chair! I think the best word to describe both therapist's reaction would be flabbergasted. 3 hours later writing this, I'm still laughing so hard I'm crying. And I thought Zachary misspelling a word into a cuss-word was embarrassing!!!

The past 2 weeks have been just nuts. We listed our house for sale, decided on a builder for our new "ranch" style house (i.e. 1-story), decided on a lot and are in the waiting status for the lot to be transferred to our builder. The cleaning nutcase (that would be me) has been going through the house like a whirling dervish picking up stuff, taking down photographs to depersonalize our home (so someone can envision their pile of crud here), and doing paint touch-ups and the 1000 other miscellaneous things you do when you sell your home.

Zach is doing quite well with baseball. He's really learning to catch the most of the balls thrown at him and last night during practice they practiced throwing the baseball at a 5 gallon bucket while trying to make it in. Well, lo and behold, he hit the bucket 3 times - so his aim is really getting good. Which, of course, means I will not be playing catch with him as I don't want "Official Ball for Pee-Wee T-Ball" emblazoned between my eyeballs! He finally got to practice hitting the ball off the t-ball stand last night. He hit the ball pretty good and immediately chased it down, picked it up and ran to first base...............and he thought he'd won........oops! He was quite deflated when they told him he got himself out - although it was pretty dog-gone funny. Bright side of that - over 1/2 of the kids that hit the ball did the same thing. Nothing like being a trend-setter! The photos above are from Monday's practice. They were teaching the kids how to run the bases and paired them up and made it a race. The girls got a 5 second head start. My long-legged son has finally grown into his legs and lordy, I've never seen the kid run that fast before in my life........even for dessert! He passed up the girl he was racing between first base and 2nd base and turned on the after-burners and just blew around those bases. As you can see from the blurred photo I couldn't get a clear shot of him cause he was running so darn fast. This past weekend he was running races with a neighbor's niece, who is a junior high school track star. She gave him a few "pointers" she said when they were racing and before the end of the night, he was beating her at the races. We thought she was just being sweet and letting him win - now we know better. That boy is just fast.

I met with the Nutrionist yesterday and learned all about carbs, dieting, exercising and in general, learned more than I really ever wanted to know about food. Whatever happened to just "watch your portion sizes and exercise" as advice? Well, I guess with the advancement of McDonald's and every other fast food restaurant serving us all "biggie" sizes, we have lost sight of what a real portion size is supposed to look like. I learned it yesterday with the funky, rubbery play food they use to show you how your plate should look when you put the food on it. In essence, a child-size portion of meat and starchy vegetables to barely fill 1/2 a plate but enough broccoli and other vegetables to make me walk "lightly" on my toes from the ever-present "emissions" I will be releasing. I was also given my daily "recommendation" for my total carbohydrate intake, as well as calories. Oh, and just as we were wrapping things up, she read her notes from the referring physician and then told me that he wants me exercising 5 days a week and is expecting at least a 10 pound weight loss at my next check-up in October. Of course, that's when she also told me that I would be seeing her at that appointment in addition to the physician. Nothing like a little pressure about losing some weight - or 32 pounds to be exact. UGH........ Bright side of all that was, I got loads of information for Mike as well, and the nutrionist will be wanting to know what his weight is when I go in for my follow-up appointment. I got all the carbs and calories for Mike and sprung those on him this morning. He wasn't too thrilled when I told him that I asked about his "bagel day" at work, where they bring in bagels for everyone from Panera Bread. He always eats a cheese bagel..........but not anymore! Discovered those are 100+ gram of carbs and over 400 calories and considering that he's now on a 200 carb a day diet and 2500 calories, he's going to have to go with the plain old boring bagel at 40 grams of carbs. He was pretty shocked at the amount of carbs and calories that had - and what he's allowed. Think from his expression though that he might really start getting into losing weight since I'm going to have to be a food-nazi for a while. He's only got about 55 pounds to lose to my 32 pounds - I'm sure being a man he'll lose it in a month while it will take me a year to lose 10 pounds.

Baseball

Oops!


Look between your legs Zach! PS - the kid's expression watching is priceless!


Holy Cow! He caught a flyball!

AAANNNNDDDD - he caught it! Great stretch! Future outfielder?

Wow! It's really in my glove?!!!

Now you catch the ball dad!

Well, the summer is here which means it is time to for organized activities for the kids. Katie is going to be doing speech 2 days a week for most of the summer - figure that's about enough, but may check into some dance classes since she loves to dance around the house. Zachary was another story. He has nothing to do this summer, so we decided to enroll him in something to burn off energy. Why not baseball - he can throw the tar out of a baseball and he loves batting. So, there are so many kids here that the sports activities are done through a lottery system. Everyone signs up by the deadline and then the computer randomly picks kids to get into the limited number of spaces they have. Pretty dumb really. Whatever happened to first come, first serve - oh, well - whatever. Anyway, he got in so he's in baseball. He goes 2 days a week and he started Monday. It was loads of fun and he actually learned a lot the very first day. We went again Wednesday evening and he had a different coach who was struggling quite a bit with some of the boys and didn't seem organized enough to know what he was supposed to be coaching. So for the hour, the kids spent about 20 minutes actually learning while the rest of the time was spent horsing around with the coach. Not optimum when you're paying for the camp - but oh, well. Anyway, Zachary learned enough from the 1st day so that when we got to camp 10 minutes early, the coaches tossed Zachary a ball and told Mike to go play catch with him to warm him up. The photos are of that catch session - pretty funny - but you can see him advance in catching the ball in the 10 minutes they spent together. Interesting. One thing you'll notice from all of the photos is that Mike isn't in them. I don't have a wide angle lens - heck I'd need a fish-eye lens - to get Mike in the photos because he stands so far away. I told him to scoot up and he said "No Way! Zach throws the ball too hard!". Wimp! Yeah, well, I won't play ball with him either because he's nailed me one too many times. After several near-concussions, you quit having a fun game of "toss". Now I play with Nerf balls!

Can you spell this?

Ok - we're at Walmart yesterday and things have gone extraordinarily well with having 2 kids in one of those kid-carts which holds 2 kids crammed across from one another. One kid has to put their feet one direction and the other puts their feet the other way...........yeah, right! I haven't been grocery shopping with Zachary for a long while because he just doesn't enjoy figuring out which tomato has the fewest knocks, dings and bruises and which can of green beans is the cheapest. Katie was trying to explain it to him, in kid language, and she finally looks up at me completely exasperated and confused and says "Mom, he no get it.". An older lady going down the aisle looks at Katie and says "Honey, they never do". I couldn't contain myself and busted up laughing in the middle of the store. People must've thought I'd lost my mind from the looks they were giving me ............ of course, I was still laughing out loud as I was continuing my shopping aisle to aisle. So as we are continuing through the store on our way to the checkout, I've recovered from my fit and am only paying halfway attention to what Zachary is saying - ok it's going in one ear and out the other. Now this may sound like I'm ignoring him (ok, I am) but the kid wakes up talking and doesn't shut up until he falls asleep at night. I'm wondering what in the world happened - he couldn't say but 3 words at 2.5 - we stuck him in speech therapy and good heavens! the child learned to talk and hasn't shut up since. So, Zachary decides that he wants to check his Kindergarten readiness and starts spelling everything he sees "shirt" - "s-c-a-c-t". Huh? Well, at least he knew it began with the "s" sound and ended with the "t". So I spell it for him "s-h-i-r-t.......shirt". May I add a disclaimer here - you know, you learn the hard way that you should never spell a word in a public place that can be misspelled into a 4-letter word by accident. Yep, you got it - Zachary says "shirt - s-h-i-t ..... shirt".......Yeah............... At this point we are in line at the checkout register with the 40 million other shoppers - oh, and did I mention it's full of the end-of-the-month club shoppers at Walmart. In case you don't know who the end-of-the-month club shoppers are - it's all the elderly people who've just gotten their Social Security checks. You could hear the teeth bouncing off the floor tiles from the little old ladies and the "hrumphs" from the little old men. The elderly gentleman directly behind us starts whistling. Zach quickly forgets "shirt" and asks "how do you spell 'whistle'?". Now considering my complete and utter horror and mortification over 'shirt' I did wait and go through my mind very quickly on whether this could be misspelled into the "wrong" kind of word..............uh, nope. So I spell it for him - of course, the little booger got that one right the first time and the elderly gentleman behind us gave Zach a high-5 for it. At this point the checker had my items rung up and had just finished deducting my coupons - all $8.50 worth - and so I quickly paid my.....$191.00 tab (yes, that's per week - now you know why I clip coupons!) and made a break to the car. Right as we hit the door to go out, it starts pouring down rain (of course there was none in the forecast). My thought was "Great" - but Zach beat me to it "great! We left our raincoats at home, mom - and our fruit chews are all going to melt together." Well, we all do have our own priorities......................