This morning, during Sunday morning cartoons, the Cat in the Hat was talking about how certain animals use their tongues to get their food. And then they went on to talk to a giraffe.
Then, at breakfast, we had these D-lish cinnamon buns with the cream cheese topping; not the low fat on these babies but the real sugary icing.
Skylar loved ’em. Dylan loved ’em and Mommy cleaned her plate. Really! Her plate was shiny after she was done.
So I couldn’t resist the giraffe analogy and how Mommy likes to get her food using her tongue. I said, “See? Look how shiny Mom’s plate is! And look at mine…I use my fingers. Mommy uses her tongue” And then I demonstrated for the girls.
The girls all had a good laugh. Mommy laughed the hardest. It was a good way to start what looks like a beautiful Sunday here in the Lowcountry.
And the stories reminded my of another beautiful day, the day last Christmas when Dylan and Skylar got to feed momma and baby giraffe at the zoo and got a first hand look at those amazing tongues (that mommy appears to possess)
So if you want some nice warm feeling this lazy Sunday, here’s a look at Dylan and Skylar feeding the giraffes last Christmas.
Have the best, lip-smackin’ Memorial Day weekend ever!
One of my favorite writers and funniest lady I know, Leeanne Shirtliffe (Ironic Mom)
has a book being published this week, “Don’t Lick The MiniVan” and Other Things I Never Thought I’d Say To My Kids“.
How many out there have some children, raise your hands.
Now those of you with hands in the air, how many of those kids can be the cutest thngs you’ve ever seen? Keep your hands up.
And how many of you with your hands still in the air have kids that have done, or said some things that have you scratchin’ your heads thinking these kids can’t possibly be prodigy of mine! If so, take a look at Leeanne’s book. She’s a fun read (I hope I can say that about her) and maybe, just maybe, she can remind you of some of your own stories with your own Minivan Lickers!
Have fun! If you are looking for a fun (ny) read this weekend, or this summer, check the Ironic Momout and her book. She also does blogs for NickMom and others. She gets around! She’s funny and she knows how to use it!
Last night, while we all were all eating, a UPS truck pulled up in front of our house. It was apparent they had something for our house. But what was it?
I joked right away, “oh that’s some Big Beer from Texas. Laura Hayes said she was going to send some in a comment just after I posted about buying and selling our house. “
You know what? I called it!
One of my original followers and long-time friend of the family, Laura Hayes has a heart the size of Texas. She sent up 6 beers that were made in Texas. Plus a bottle of (Texas) ‘Rangers Home Run Red’ wine, only available for sale in Texas. Home Run red wine, eh? I gave my wife a wink and hoped I could score a Home Run some night this week.
If I can give a shout out here, Laura is actually the mother to our very first nanny, Jessica Hayes. Jessica came on at a very special time in our lives. Not only was she a great nanny but she was an great amateur photographer and filled both ours and her mother’s house up with adorable pics of our very first child, Dylan.
Laura took our miracle daughter to heart. This lady sent gifts to Dylan in the mail, including some great educational books and learning materials for our daughter. And you may know the results of these investments!
Laura quickly became part of the wonderful list of ‘grandmothers’ to Dylan. We had a grandmother type name for her. Dylan would try to pronounce Laura but it came out, ““wa wa” . And the name stuck. Ms. Laura became Grandma Wa-Wa.
We had the honor of meeting this nice lady one time in a visit that was too short. But we thought it would be one of many more. Her daughter, Jessica, has moved back home to Texas to continue her photography and go back to school I believe.
Jessica, was awesome in her own right. She was great with Dylan and completely relieved us as parents as to how good a teacher and role model a nanny could be.
However, what I really remember and truly miss, and unfairly to Jess, was her ability to make her professional looking videos for us. FLIP video is such a drop off compared to the magic an creativity Jessica possesses…
Here is a sample of Jessica’s work (in case any of you would like to hire her)
A video summarizing Dylan’s first year:
A video showing Dylan’s 2nd birthday and the present of a new baby sister, Skylar:
Or get your tan oil and and your favorite boat drink and travel with us on our getaway to someplace warm on Valentines trip:
Ms. Laura sent a cordial letter with her intoxicating package that stated she also sent us something from Target. I felt bad, as we have never received any gift from her for Target. What should I tell her?
And then I opened the days mail and there was a gift card that would just about cover….ah…
Well, I better hold off. I don’t know if I wanna tell the misses about this yet…its that nice!
Thank you so much Laura for your kindness and generosity! We love you!
I will soon be playing “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” upstairs this week!
Other good news, my parents are still in town this weekend and opted to get us a new patio table and umbrella for our anniversary…which isn’t until September. Thank Mom and Dad! Make sure you use it while you are here!
The weather is warmer and we are planning trips to the beach in the weekends to come. Come with us if you are in the area! We would love to have you with us! And our summer vacation is right around the corner. Hello summer!
See? I told you I would try to do better the next post?
To be fair, the prostate results didn’t go as hoped for this afternoon. I have a few more tests to see if the cancer spread anywhere else and then they may have to remove it. So I guess its imperative I ’round the bases this week’! As another blog friend Susie said in her Wild Ride, just more obstacles and U-turns. So with a deep breath I say, “Let’s do this!” Life is short! Opps….sorry… bad saying….Howabout “Its better to burn out than it is to rust”.
That doesn’t really fit either. Oh well, I’ll figure that saying out. Anyone else have one that fits? Does anyone want to hear some poor prostate jokes with little to moderate bad taste?
No, I have these girls to live for and that’s more than enough for me, looking forward. More than enough….
I know this blog has been uninspiring lately and I really hope this is the last.
I wish things would work like they are supposed to work. Now this could be anything, from a car to the Internet to a service to an airplane. If it is supposed to work one way or do just one thing you count or rely on, it needs to do its function.
Yes, cars get old and wear out and don’t perform. Things like that are expected. It may be disappointing sometimes but it doesn’t set me off.
Going to a restaurant, for instance, and being placed on a wait when you can see plenty of open tables is what I am talking about. If I was asked to wait and the place was full it is understandable. But when you see open tables and you are hungry? Restaurants aren’t supposed to work like that.
Or movers that show up late with out the agreed upon number of staff, or vehicles. Or lawyers getting paid to do their jobs but missing some very important details. Or an airplane ride that says it will have a plane ready for you at a certain time, at a certain terminal, with a seat for you, only to find out this isn’t your plane at all and you have to scurry through half the airport to find the plane that is meant for you, only to find its not leaving for several hours, making you miss your connecting flight so you can’t kiss your girls that you missed the lat two days good night that same night. Yea stuff like that really sets me off.
And so it was Friday night; birthday eve. I raced through the streets of Philly, stuck in traffic, fracturing more than a few traffic laws, relying on a GPS that knew more of where I was than I did, going though all that stress to make my flight home to see my girls before they go to bed.
I made it with moments to spare.
US Air, ya gotta love them! I swore I would never fly US Air again because they did this very same thing to me and my family the last time we flew them…at this very airport.
I make my flight, against the odds (a demise of my own actions this time). We get called on board only for the grapevine to pass around, “this isn’t our plane. this isn’t our plane. did you hear, this isn’t our plane”
The flight attendants call us back out to the gate and say its not our plane (who’s plane is it then? It looks like our plane! It could be our plane. Why can’t this be our plane?) They tell us our plane is resting down at terminal A10, the International terminal.
Like the Liberty Bell, the US Air service out of Philadelphia needs fixed
Now I want t stop here for a sec. If this sounds vaguely familiar well this is the exact same ordeal my family went through on our last family vacation to Jamaica this past September..with American Airlines, who we also swore we would never use again.
So like a herd of angry buffalo we stampede against the flow to this new terminal; new plane. The illustrious US Air staff was prepared telling us this plane just arrived and it would need to be cleaned first.
Oh, it just arrived on a flight from Athens Greece!
OK clean it up. How long can that take, even with that long flight?
Oh, and I notice my cell phone is dying so I have to switch it off to save some power.
Then they tell us the plane will need some maintenance issues addressed before we take flight so our plane will be ready in 90 minutes. (!)
And that 90 minutes along with the time of the flight just made me miss my connecting flight for the second half of my journey home. Now what?
By the grace of God, the man standing behind me in this now unfortunate line in front of the US Air terminal was from Charleston too. He was on the phone to his travel agent it sounded like. I showed him my ticket going to Charleston and held up the peace sign, asking him if he could find TWO seats to Charleston.
I heard him say the next connecting flight was already filled up. Several long minutes later he smiled and said they found a direct flight to Charleston leaving Philly at 9:00pm. He handed me his phone and I gave my details to the agent.
Phew! Crisis averted! But I was not going to hug my girls tonight before they went to bed. And made to suffer dinner in a foreign place with huge prices for inferior food (finding out 30 hours later just how poor a quality this food was).
I spent just about the whole amount of a birthday check in a ‘Bistro and Wine’ bar directlybeside my new gate to freedom. I wasn’t going to miss this one no matter how many chardonnays I had! I found a delightful ‘Menage a Trios’ that I never tried before. Ordered a 3 course meal at the bar, trying to pass the next 3 hours with the bartender without being asked to leave.
Time passed and boarded this tiny plane and slept all the way home uneventfully. I turned my cell back on and found a text from mommy asking me to be sure to give Dylan a hug when I got home; she asked Mommy to tell me that. I was more than happy to oblige! This morning she sat on my lap the entire service during church. It was pretty cool.
All dressed up for when Daddy gets home
And so I didn’t begin my birthday waking up in some strange hotel room wondering how and what flight to catch to get home, which is what was running through my head some 4 hours before.
OK, some good news!
Our construction team says the leak in our house turns out to be the supply line feeding water to the wash machine. So they don’t need to tear out the brand new virgin shower and tub after all! And that will be fixed sooner than later! ( Hurray!!)
My parents drove into town last night. We have two b-day cakes and a tub of homemade banana pudding, a gift from my wife while I was away (my favorite).
So much for the 2 pounds I lost this week riding my bike to work! Ahh, it’ll come off again. I got some small puny weights for my b-day in which I can rehab my shoulders from at home, instead of waiting for the day in the gym. So life is good.
Now if you can wish me luck as we review the results of my prostate biopsies on Tuesday. My reservoir for handling bad news is about drained.
A perfect transition into the saving theme of last year’s birthday drama….
Sorry, again, for this parade on depressing news. I will try to do better next time! 🙂
I know some of you may be looking for pictures and updates from our new location. The truth is we are still wading through a few more boxes in most every room. We have moved in! But it is not a Home Sweet Home yet.
The good news is we have great neighbors all around us. This neighborhood is filled with kids! Dylan’s new best friend is Deidra, a nice 10 year old girl that lies beside us. They are already planning a sleep over on Friday! We still have to install some lights in these rooms….
I have to take a moment and point out my friends at Palmetto Movers. This is the company I arranged to move our possessions from one house to the next; keeping them in a truck over night while the houses went through closing.
Not only did they get started 2 hours late, with 2 employees instead of the scheduled three (one of the two was hung over), they also forgot to bring a truck with them! (!!!)
The two employees showed up at my house about an hour late then decided to go to the U-Haul center for a moving truck. They drove there in their car and returned with the truck and trailer. Only thing was one of them forgot to drive the car back that took them there, leaving the two without transportation for their ride home. It appears I paid for them to go to that U-Haul depot as they were on the clock. I guess it was a good thing I was only paying for two; to do a one person job that should have been done ahead of time, instead of all three.
I had to keep pumping them full with Mountain Dews and Protein Bars so they could get the job done in a timely manner. They were paid by the hour after all. I tried to set the pace as I became the (missing) third man to pack up our things on the truck. If I slowed down, they slowed down I noticed.
The next day the unloading got put off as it appears the paralegal for the buyer of our home forgot to put in the closing statement where our loan was being paid off by the sale of the house. Yes, 30 minutes before we are to go to close to buy our new house, my mortgage guy says the previous sale of our home was invalid due to this error. A new HUD statement needed to be drawn up and signed by both parties in order to transfer any type of funds in the sale.
Well, it’s a good thing we were living in our car at the time! We made it to that attorney and signed the forms and made it to the attorney’s office for our new home purchase on time at 2:00pm. The trouble was the buyer of our old home had to work until 4:00pm and could not sign the statement any earlier.
So we sat on the curb at our new house, our trusty movers by our side, waiting for the word we were allowed to move in. Tick, tick, tick. Finally at 5:00pm we got word “the closing was going to the banks.” It was over. We should be able to move in….
And that’s what we did. We didn’t have keys to the house but I did know the combination to the garage door opener. So, pumped full of Mountain Dew, my trusty team kicked it into gear. We had minimal damage, scratches or breakage moving in. I ordered some pizzas as we were getting close.
Our Realtor finally called and asked how we were doing. She’s says, “Oh no, the money didn’t transfer yet. Your house hasn’t cleared the closing yet.”
“You are kidding, right?”
We went ahead and started filling the house up with our belongings, the entire time waiting for a “Yay” or “Nay” on the move in, wondering if or when the police might show up. We kept going after all, these trusted movers were on the clock! They did OK. They only broke a leg or two on some chairs and sofas and scratched some end tables and washing machine. I bought them a pizza at the end of the move. Then the head mover handed me a bill for $90.00 more than what we agreed upon….since we got done so late and they couldn’t return the truck that day. Never mind they showed up 2 hours late the day before, they were a man short day 1, broke some stuff, and I fed and hydrated the them. I was so tired I wrote the check and tried to put the whole experience behind me insted of arguing the point at the end of the day. I just wanted to be done at this point.
Between them and the certain Paralegal it made me wonder how some people survive in the business word. Such mistakes or errors in customer service would not last that long in my company; or that of my wife’s.
Breaking news….before I get too nasty on some people the blows here keep coming.
If you have a garage you most certainly have to step ‘up’ into your house when you enter your house. This suggests your house sits on a cement slab. Well last week I noticed water seeping out between the top of the cement slab and beneath the floor of the house. Think about that for a second. There is water coming, sitting somewhere beneath our floor and on top of the cement slab it sits on. …in a brand new house!
Can we catch a break?
So the builder’s plumber comes out. He gives me some lame excuse why. Meanwhile the water keeps seeping out. Another higher-up builder comes. He says the water is coming from a shower drain. The problem is we have never used this specific shower.
So they are going to tear out the back wall / sheet rock in my garage to dry the area and try to find the source of the water. AND…open up a hole in our laundry room and probably tear up the marble floors in the master bathroom …and said shower and more than likely the scallop shaped tub..in order to find and fix this drain.
Should I get a lawyer? My past experience of selling a house says termites like to chow down on wet wood. Should I get the termite people out there?
Last month I tried to take these setbacks in stride. After all we were selling our clunker and buying a new one. Now, I’m afraid, I feel like I am becoming not such a nice guy. And I am sorry for sounding like such a whiner here (continuing)). I think I need a little more break until things improve.
PS..we found another great nanny (in a long line of great nannies) to take care of the our little gems while we are at work. And today Dylan is taking a tour of her new school that she starts next fall. I turn 29 on Saturday…and my parents are travelling down to visit (to spoil the grandkids not really for my birthday)…after I travel up to there section of PA on a business trip this week. And life goes on…
And then I read my friend Mei and life doesn’t seem so bad:
OUR LIFE IN 3D 