Mommy Day

My mom hates having her picture taken.

She always has answers - even if they're not the ones I was looking for or wanted to hear.

She's always been there for me 100% of the time.

My mom was built to be a mom. Everyone always comments on how motherly she is.

My friends adopted her as honorary mom. So have all my brother's friends.

She can bake an apple pie that will knock your socks off and make them fly around the room. 

She was the best nurse when we were sick, and she shared her barf bucket with us when we were that kind of sick. 

She doesn't like cats. Hates them actually. 

But she loves, loves, loves to fish. Dad says he created a monster. 

My mom didn't drink coffee until her mother-in-law tricked her into it with tasty flavored creamers. Now she drinks it everyday and she drinks it black.

She still hates mustard. Except for onetime that my dad thinks otherwise.

My mom was a goody two shoes with a slightly rebellious side. She had to be slightly rebellious because otherwise I wouldn't know how she ended up with my dad. 

When she was six years old she walked home from school because she didn't like her substitute teacher. 

She used to get in trouble for combing her hair during class. 

My mom is a mom to four kids - that's no secret around here. And she and my dad have raised us all the best they know how.

We were taught to ask questions. Don't take things at face value - find out why it's that way. 

I don't like rules that I don't know why they're there. If they make sense, that's fine. If they don't, they drive me nuts and I don't want to follow them. I got that from my momma. 

She taught us to love Jesus and prayed before bed with us when we were little.

She taught us to bake. Cakes, cookies, pies, we loved being in the kitchen. (If only to steel the dough.)

My mom taught me to hold my head up high and be myself, even when being myself meant being different than everyone else. 

She taught us to have morals. She taught us to have values. 

She taught us to learn the other side of the story so we could argue our points more effectively when we came across opposition.

Throughout our lives she has backed us up in whatever we do. Gymnastics, Track and Field, Soccer, Attempting to Ride a Unicycle, Drawing, Mathematics, Painting our fingernails, she's been there for it all. 

My mom is a beautiful, strong woman of God. She's modeled what a good mother should look like and she's modeled what a good wife should look like.

And most of all, she's always loved all of us kids through the good, bad and ugly moments of life. I love you mom :)

You're Hot Then You're Cold, You're Yes Then You're No

So there's this thing called 'Arts and Crafts' and some of you may or may not have experienced this phenomenon once or twice in your life. I am all over the artsy side, but the crafty is a bit different for me.

I'm not a very crafty person, but on a whim Momma and I decided to make those hot/cold scented pads. You know, the ones you can buy in a mall or so and they go in the microwave or the freezer depending on how achey your muscles are?

Yeah, we thought we would undertake the task of creating one. Off to Hancock Fabrics we went to buy fabric and thread. All the fabric and thread has to be 100% cotton, and since we didn't have any of that just laying around the house, we jetted off to the store.

I picked out some blue fabric, because blue is my absolute favorite color. I couldn't decide between two of them, so I go both. We just got some fat quaters because it was cheaper.

The fat quarters we bought measured in at 18" by 22" so we cut them down to 18" by 9" for our intended size. Just big enough to span shoulders, stomach or back. You know, whatever strikes your fancy.

I got some blue cotton thread to match. Mom broke out her sewing machine and we double seamed the edges to be safe. Since we were filling them with a rice mixture, we didn't want one seam to break and then have a rice spill all over the place.

After we sewed the edges, it looked like this:


We sewed chambers to fill with rice. The tubes were filled 2/3 of the way with a mixture made from regular white rice and Bengal Spice Tea (which smells divine when heated).

After we filled the chambers with rice, we sewed the open end shut with another double seam.

We heated the new creation in the microwave for 3 min. It came out piping hot and nearly burned TheKeeper, who reacted by prancing around the kitchen as though he had ants in his pants.

Too bad I didn't get any video of that.

Anyway, I would advise only heating it for 2 to 2 and half minutes. It stays warm for a quite a while, smells good. It was only 5 dollars for the fabric, four for two spools of thread, and it took maybe only half a day to do.

I'm only guessing on the time because Momma left me for over an hour to take TheMechanic and DP to an orthodontist appointment.

TheKeeper enjoying the end product:

I had to take this picture while he was actually laughing. Otherwise you would have seen him throwing up a peace sign and making a weird face. Typical teenage boy. Ha, ha, ha.

Return of the College Sophomore

So it's a new school year. And I'm back in my lovely dorm room in anticipation of the classes that will begin Monday - on August 24th - aka Princey and my 9 month anniversary. Whoop. Happy day, here's some home work ;)

But I'm here with a new attitude. Last year I was here because I thought maybe someday I would thank myself for my selfless choice to better my education right after graduating from high school without taking a year off. Then second semester I was really wishing that I hadn't come back to school and I battled with myself to decide to stay.

Then somewhat of a miracle happened.

I changed majors.

When I started college I wanted to know exactly what I was going to do and then go do it. I didn't want to change my major a whole bunch, and that if in fact I did resort to a major change that I would still be in the same field so I didn't feel like I squandered a whole lot of precious time. However, my major has changed 180 degrees and I think I'm all the better for it.

I'm now majoring in something I think I may actually enjoy since I get to take some classes that I actually get to draw in. Yay! And I have Princey here, so I won't be going home every weekend to get distracted from my studies.

Also on the plus side, because Prince Charming and I worked together all summer under the same roof for 3 months, I'm not really worried about getting sick of him. Plus here, we each still have our own space which is a nice thing to have.

Today has been a very busy day, and I'm really glad it's almost over. Moving in was the hardest part because I had a few big boxes that would have been nice to have a boy help with, but Prince was busy doing something that I'm not exactly sure of what, so Mom and I unpacked by ourselves.

Here's Mom standing in front of the breeze because it was about a million and six degrees out.

Here's the room after I unpacked all the boxes:

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go draw a toad...

Decorated Anticipation

So today was my last day of work at Twinlow for the summer. I came home to an eye doctore appointment and was told my eyes loved me so much that they needed some glasses. So I'm going to become a very cute 4-eyes and Princey will love me just as much as he did before. He helped pick out my frames.

My mom wanted him to come home with us for dinner.

(She says he's a keeper.)

(And she was keeping a dirty low down rotten secret from me that she almost blabbed about to Princey but thought otherwise.)

She tried to entice him with the lucious pulled pork that was dinner, but even though he would have loved pork over the chicken that was served at his house, still he decided to stay. I think he just missed home - which is understandable because the boy hadn't been there in over a week. Whatevs. He's a lot different than I am in some ways.

BUT as it turns out the real reason my mom wanted him to come home with us was because of the dirty secret that she didn't tell him.

Our Yukon XL in all it's glory pulled into the drive way after 6 o'clock this evening and my beautiful mother hit the door to open the garage. As the door slowly creaked it's way up, it revealed the most amazing thing I've seen all day. (Excluding my friend Vampire's epic display of his newly learned wake boarding talents.)

It was

my

new

car!

I would show you a picture of the epicness that is my new ride, but there are none yet. It's a beautiful white Mitsubishi Lancer and I LOVE IT beyond all reason. Seriously. I probably love my new car as much as Tia loves the Twilight Series. And that's saying something.

Anyway, I suppose I may post something of actual excitment tomorrow for those of you who care. :)

Mommy Day

Today is Mommy Day.

And I have a mommy. And she seriously rocks.

She let me come home this weekend :)

My mother has put up with my antics for 18 years and for whatever reason she still loves me. Mom has raised four kids and gets compliments that her children are so well behaved (but she knows we just fool everyone because at home we are not always well behaved).

When the Keeper and I were younger, our parents were a lot more strict with us than they are with The Mechanic and DP. I am the oldest, so I got to push boundaries and test limits before anyone else had a chance to break loose :)

You see, I came along after my parents were married for three years. My dad had just had back surgery before I was born, so he took care of me for the first few months of my life. I've heard that one time my mom came home from work and I was crying so she picked me up. But I wouldn't stop crying, so she handed me off to my father where my crying conspicuously ceased. She didn't think I liked her. But now she knows that's completely untrue.

I remember when we were little Mom and we'd get sick with the stomach flu, she would lay down a sheet in front of the TV, put her Barf Bucket next to us, and let us lay in the living room all day.

I remember when I was scared, or I'd had a bad dream Mom would let me crawl in bed with her. It was always a safe place to be. Mom was always a soft place to land when the world seemed like a hard to place to live.

During this last year of college, I started out not coming home very frequently. I wanted to assert my freedom and live life out from under my parents' thumbs. I made mistakes. I fell down. But I always know that even if I'm in a heap of trouble, my mom still loves me dearly. In the second semester I started coming home more regularly, and Mom would still always tell me she was glad I came home.

I make her laugh like none of the other kids do - although they ALL have their moments, trust me. Our life could be a sitcom with the kind of jokes my brothers and sister can crack at the perfect moments.

I love hearing my mom's voice. Sometime's I'll just call her because I want to hear her talk. She has one of those voices that can just calm you down no matter what's wrong. And she always has an opinion - even if she won't tell you what to do because you're big now and need to make your own decisions. She's always got a good bit of advice to hand down. She knows her strengths and her weaknesses and she will ALWAYS do her best. She leans on the Lord for everything and used to always say bedtime prayers with us every night.

Mom never tried to get by without diciplining us when we needed it - and let me tell you, sometimes we just needed it. When she was mad at us for disobeying, we knew. And we high tailed it out of there before we made it even worse. ;)

But throughout the years my mom has been one of my heros, she's someone I look up so much and I want to be the same kind of mom to my future kids that she was to me.

My Beautiful Momma