Let's play Battleship!

Our family enjoys a good game of Battleship, well, most of us. I will find almost any excuse not to play, truly, ANY excuse. I'm no good at it and I can't stand that it takes a million years to play it. I need not say anything about Monopoly if Battleship is too long. Anyway, if we have to play, let's play on a real life Battleship! That folks, is exactly what we did! We drove for an exceedingly long time to go visit the beach and a battleship that is parked on a river. It. Was. Awesome! Not the drive of course, because anyone that knows me knows that I detest the car for any amount of time. I am way worse than the children. I actually have thoughts when we're driving that sound something like this in my head," How am I ever going to survive this car ride?! We are never going to get there. I want to just curl up in a ball and cry my eyes out while throwing a huge fit that I am still confined to this blasted car seat!" No that's not a exaggeration. You can ask dear hubby, he'll tell you that I have actually told him my thoughts about the car, on more than one occasion. Anyway, once the awful drive was over, and I quite literally jumped out of the car, I was so happy that we had made the drive. We were staying for the weekend, so the first stop was the beach. Another well known fact about me is that I do indeed hate the beach. The sand, smell and feel of the salt on my skin are just a few reasons I don't like to spend time there. But the littlest offspring had never been to the beach. Not to mention the other three members of our family love the beach. In fact they love the sand and the smell and the salt water that is there in abundance to play in. I was just happy to be out of the car, so I'll take the beach! The day had turned rather blustery, but we didn't mind. We tried for a little while to only have little feet go in the water due to it being windy and cold, but little B just couldn't help himself. So, off came his pants.

Even when it's the beginning of April and it's cold outside, the water on this side of the country is WAY warmer than on the west coast. He didn't even act like it bothered him at all. I wouldn't let the waves wash over his legs, so when they came, I stood him up. But he loved the wet sand. He would pick it up and throw it towards the water. He loved to hold it and squeeze it through his fingers.

When I stood him up he would stomp his feet and dig his toes into the sand. 

This young one had no use for the water due to it being too cold. Not to mention, we had seen a dolphin in the water. He was convinced it was a shark and so there was no way he was risking the loss of life and limb. Not to mention, he had found not one, but two trucks in the sand and was happy to play with them while staying dry. He really wanted to walk on the pier, so we went up there. We couldn't figure out how to get onto it. There was a locked gate, but we could see that people were out there. So, we went around the building that was on the end of the pier. There was no way out there on the other side either. We went into the store to ask how to get out there. There was a door in the side of the store, that was the only way to get on to the pier. We started to go out, but realized that you had to pay to walk on the pier. Lame! Since we had been on a pier before, we opted out of paying and walked under it instead

She could cartwheel her way through life. She did stand upright once in a while, but mostly she just liked doing cartwheels.

They loved being at the beach so much that we ended up staying for almost two hours. I will admit that it was cool to see and hear waves. That didn't happen in Florida, so waves are cool and so was seeing a dolphin play next to a surfer.

We went to the hotel and went swimming in the freezing cold pool. OK, I was the only one that thought it was cold. They all loved it and I will say that I love to people watch and there are always interesting people to watch at a hotel swimming pool. The next morning was the trip to the battleship.

This is most of the ship. I tried to get all of it in the picture, but if I had gone back far enough to get all of it, the ship would have been tiny.

This the propeller that was on the ship when it was in use during World War II.  This ship was big enough that it could hold 2300 men on it at one time. Some of the crew were only on it for a few months and other's were on it for a few years. 

It was raining when we got there, so we wanted to look at the stuff on the main deck before the rain got worse. It was freezing! It was cool to read all the little signs that were on the ship. It was cool to imagine this plane flying onto the ship and being able to land it safely. 

These guns were all over the sides of the ship. They were on both sides. 

These were all over the front, on both sides. If I remember right, it took three men to use this gun. They had it locked in place, but if it hadn't been locked, B would have been able to stand up straight with the rest things on his shoulders and move it around like it was meant to be moved. I think it would have been terrifying to be the ones to use any of these guns. One sign said that the ship had hit a Japanese plane and there were Japanese soldiers in the water. The guy that had written the thing said that he looked down and saw this Japanese soldier looking at the ship. He knew that the Japanese solider was trying so hard to memorize this battleship so that if he got rescued or made it out of the water without being caught, he could tell his Captain what the big American ship looked like. But the Japanese guy never had a chance, as he was floating there, someone on the ship took him out with one of these guns. How awful! I am thankful there are men and women willing to keep us safe, but it has to be such an awful job!

There were four or five of these big pot things. Can you imagine being the cook for a ship that can hold 2300 people? Everything in the kitchen was huge. It would have to be, I know, but it was still amazing to see pots, pans and ovens that were big enough that you could cook people in. 

This is at the front of the ship. Want to see the bullets they used for those guns back there? OK, I'll show you!

Crazy right?!

The whole thing was so awesome! We spent two hours on the ship. We could have spent longer but M was truly freaking out because she was panic stricken that we were lost in the belly of the ship and that we were never going to see the light of day again. She kept asking if we knew where we were and where the door was to get out. One time I made the mistake of saying,"I don't know." in response to K asking what something was for. M thought I was telling her that I didn't know where we were or how to get out. I'll spare you the details, but I learned not to say that again. Not only was M a basket case, but the young one attached to me really wanted to get down, me not complying to his request resulted in a few good smacks to the chest by his head. K wanted to know what every single screw and bolt was used for and most of the time we couldn't answer him. So, after M falling apart because I said I didn't know, little B slamming his head into my chest for the millionth time and K asking,"what's that for?" for the million-billionth time, I was really ready to leave. 

This is how he felt about the ship-not impressed. He's the only one that didn't love one thing about this ship. The rest of us really liked it and are amazed at it's size and that it was used in real life!

 

Already?

We aren't sure how, but the last 365 and a fourth days went from this:

  To this!

Yes folks, a year has already come and gone. No one knows just how it happens so fast, but it does. One night you're up all night with a crying teeny tiny one and it seems like the next day he's pushing a car as he walks behind it. This little dude makes everyone in our house happy. He laughs really hard when M and K act like hooligans, which is basically every day! He loves all food and would be so happy to eat all day. He adored his bottle so when it was time to switch to a sippy cup, he declared mutiny and wouldn't drink milk for at least two full days. We tried to trick him by warming the milk up before we put it in the sippy cup, but he wouldn't have it. Finally, he gave in and no longer wants a bottle. He. Loves. Cars! Just like K! If you put a wide array of toys in front of him, he will pick the cars every time. He crawls around while he pushes them all over the house. He doesn't like to be cuddled. The other day he was crawling on the kitchen floor. His hand slipped and he face planted onto the tile. When I picked him up to love him, he pushed against me. He just wanted to be held while he cried, but he wouldn't look at me or let me love on him at all. He says, hi and waves, well it looks more like his arm in broken and he flops it around, but he does it while he says hi so we're saying it's a wave. He loves to say whoa! Especially when M and K are being loud and crazy. He'll look at you and with big eyes he whispers/forces the W sound out while he says "whoa!" It's awesome! He just started saying uh oh and will say it about a million times a day. In the car he just says it over and over. He does NOT like the blow dryer or the vacuum. Both of those send him into instant tears. We're not talking a few tears. No, he cries like the lid on the solid wood toy box just came down and smashed his finger. It doesn't matter if you are vacuuming or blow drying your hair in another room, he will start crying and trying to crawl away from the sound. He loves to wake M and K up in the morning. I usually get him first and then take him into their rooms. He stands next to their beds and hits their pillows or mattresses all the while jabbering away that it's time to wake up. He loves to be outside and when we go to the park or go on a walk, if he gets a snack whilst being outside it's like the best day of his life! He loves primary songs and at church on Sunday's when he's totally exhausted and ready for a nap and we still have 2 1/2 hours to go until church is over, if we go into the primary room where he can hear the kids singing, he'll calm down and just listen. He is such a chilled out happy little boy. We all love him so much and are so thankful that he came to our family!   

kitchen chairs

I don't normally like to toot my own horn, but TOOT TOOT is all I have to say about our kitchen chairs! We bought our table and chairs a meager 6 1/2 years ago. They survived the move from Utah to Florida with only minor damage. They survived the move from Florida to here with only a little more minor damage. Little by little, the fake leather has started to peel away. It doesn't help when little fingers see that the stuff is peeling off and they can't help but help with the shedding process. I thought that it would be so cool to be able to recover the chairs. But as we all know, I am less than handy and I just saw dollar signs as my trying to be handy and recover the chairs turned into us buying all new chairs because I totally destroyed the ones we had. Every day when I would see little pieces of fake leather on the kitchen floor I thought more and more about figuring out how to recover the chairs. I was talking about it whilst standing in a group of ladies from our ward one night. When I mentioned that I wished I knew how to do things like recover kitchen chairs, J perked up and said that she has in fact recovered some chairs before. She said that it was really easy. That the cushion of the chair screws on with little screws. All I would have to do is unscrew the cushions, buy material and using a staple gun, staple the material around the cushions and then screw them back onto the chair. She made it sound so easy but I know myself too well. I know that when I do things that should be easy, like add oil to the lawn mower, it never goes smoothly. What usually happens is I add too much oil and when I try to turn the lawn mower on the oil cap goes shooting skyward as the oil rains down on the grass, mower and me. Then we have to spend a good chunk of our day researching how to drain oil out of a lawn mower without the whole thing exploding. But who's talking about oil and lawn mowers? Let's talk about kitchen chairs. After J told me how to do it I went home and flipped our chairs over. No shocker, I didn't see any screws in the bottom of the chairs. A few weeks later J was over for something and I remembered to ask her about the chairs. She looked at them and after some deep investigation she found the screws. I played it cool and told her that I was sure I could recover the chairs now that the screws had been found. That night I said a quick prayer and turned the chair upside down. I prayed and unscrewed chairs and prayed some more. I called my mom to ask her how much material I should buy. She told me to find the area and double it. I did, but the answer told me that I needed something like 27 yards of material. Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but that seemed like way too much material. I did the next smartest thing I could think to do. I took one of the cushions with me to Jo Ann's where I met J and she led, guide and walked beside me as we put the material on the counter, put the cushion on the material and rolled it over to see how much it would take to cover one cushion. That scientific method told us that we didn't need near 27 yards, so we went with that way instead of my mom's way. Later that night J gave me a brief tutorial on how to do it. I took her staple gun and staples and went home. I'm not gonna lie, I was so nervous,I was sweating profusely.

These are the before pictures. This is what they looked like from each side. Poor sad little seats.

This is what they looked like when I was done! Not too bad for my first go around with covering chairs if you ask me! B was a huge help. He would hold the material tight while I used the staple gun. We're not expecting these chairs last through the millennium, but we wouldn't mind if they did!  

 

Brotherly love

Little B loves to walk as long as he can walk behind the fire truck. I think it's a case of the lazies because if you hold his hands to help him walk, he'll take a couple steps and then bend in half so he can crawl away. Pushing the fire truck has turned into something he loves to do. It's right up there with pulling all the books off the book shelf, climbing the stairs, and use B's laptop as a stool to reach things on the computer desk.

 I like this one except that K is sitting weird. I'm not sure why he's sitting like a robot, but whatever. I love that you can tell that the little one is walking as he pushes K around the kitchen.

I love this one because he's so happy to be pushing him! I know that it looks like he's going to fall, but he totally has everything under control. I thought that K must help by walking as Little B pushes him, but on Saturday afternoon, Little B was pushing M around the kitchen and she had her legs up over the teeny tiny handle bars so her feet weren't touching the floor. He was able to push her around the kitchen while she happily sang one Frozen song after another.

I couldn't just leave the image on him using the laptop as a stool to your imagination! He loves to climb up there and play with all the pens we have in our pen's mug and with the pencil sharpener. When he gets tired of those he bangs on the computer desk itself while he yells to the beat. I love my little fellas so much!  (Don't judge his outfit, it was laundry day and this was what was left in his drawers. :-))

Happy Friday!

Welp, another week is drawing to a close. Nothing major to report. No one's sick, or hurt or had their undies flushed down the toilet. As an added bonus, undies were worn to school every day this week! It is with a heavy heart that I say that there have been weeks in the past when I couldn't say that. As you can imagine when a certain young one of ours gets out of the shower these days the questions are asked," Are you out of the shower?" "Yes!" "Do you have jammies on?" "yes!" "Do you have undies on?" big sad sigh before we hear the response, "Yes."  I would say all in all it's been a calm week! Let's talk about Dr Seuss for a minute, or ten. Ok, as we all know it was his birthday a couple weeks ago. Wait, what's that you say, you didn't know that?! Your young one's school didn't send home a paper telling you that they were going to celebrate him for an entire week so your kids needed to dress up or do something crazy with their hair, clothes, socks or skin everyday for the upcoming week?! Odd! Ours did. As soon as I read the paper I thought to myself, "Self, do we really have to do all this? Maybe they didn't tell the students what was happening. Heaven knows that our young ones don't like to feel stupid and all the things on the paper have potential to make one feel very stupid. Maybe just maybe we won't have to do it." Wrong! It's like our kids can read my mind. As soon as I thought those thoughts K looked at me with a huge smile on his face and told me day by day what they were supposed to be doing to celebrate Dr Seuss. Some of you may be thinking that I'm truly a Grinch for not wanting to participate in a week long celebration. In my defense, I am so far from crafty that it's truly painful. The thought of coming up with things that will celebrate Dr Seuss and not have our off spring feel stupid is a real challenge and feels me with instant anxiety. The one I was most dreading was Friday. The second graders were supposed to dress up like a character from a book and have a parade around the school. I think the color actually drained from my face. M came spinning over and said,"On Friday I'm suppose to dress up like a character from a book. Hannah was Thing One before. I want to be Thing One or Two. They look the same you know." I told her thank you that I did know that. I asked what Hannah had worn. She said a red shirt with Thing 1 written on it and red pants. I told her that we didn't have a blue wig for the hair. She said,"Oh that's ok, Hannah didn't have blue hair either. She just had brown." Hannah must be the Thing 1 expert! I told M that I have a red shirt, but it has writing on the front. So we can turn it inside out and she could use that. She happily danced away and I sighed a big sigh of relief that we already knew what she was going to dress up as the following Friday. Fast forward to the next Friday. It's 5:55 in the morning and the phone rings. You would think that my first thought was that someone had died. Nope! I knew it was the school. How did I know and why were they calling so early? The weather! It had rained ice all night so I knew that they were going to tell us that school was either delayed for two hours or it was called off all together. It was just delayed. So, I went back to bed! The icy rain continued to fall, so at 7:00 the phone rang again. This time school was being cancelled. Hallelujah! That meant that we didn't have to send M to school as Thing 1! No such luck! On Monday they told us that due to school being cancelled, the activities for Friday had been moved to the next Friday. Big time bummer! Friday comes, I get food for the young ones. I ask them to go get dressed. I tell M I'll be up in a minute to get her the red shirt that she's going to wear to be Thing 1. She spins around and says,"Actually mommy, I decided that I want to be Sally." Sally is from The Cat in The Hat. I look at her and say,"Oh I'm sorry. Sally wears a black jumper, which you don't have. A white shirt with a ruffle, which you don't have and a big red bow in her hair, which you don't have." Now I know that some of you reading this would have no problem making that outfit out of whatever you had around your house. I am not like that. I would have had to go to Goodwill everyday of the previous week to try and find the needed items of clothing. I digress. She gave me the little attitude cough of annoyance and then said,"but I want to be Sally." I said once again,"Sorry Sweets, you don't have the stuff you need to be Sally. I can't magically make the outfit appear. You can't tell me the morning of that you want to be Sally when we've been planning on you being Thing 1 for two weeks. I can go get the red shirt and you can be Thing 1, or we could try to do Cindy Lou Who." Imagine M dorking around. What I mean by that is for the next 5-10 minutes, she rolled around on the floor playing with her hair, picking at the carpet or trying to pick the baby up and roll around with him. I asked her probably close to a million times to please go get dressed. She finally sighed a mighty sigh and said"Fine, I'll be Thing 1" I told her I would come get the shirt so she could turn it inside out. She turned around slowly and asked. "Wait! Will you be able to tell that it's turned inside out?" I said yes and she said whilst doing the attitude cough,"Well, I guess I'll just be Sally." Up to this point I had stayed calm even though she had been dorking around for close to a half an hour. I could feel my blood pressure rising as I not so calmly said,"Just go get dressed in normal clothes. I will send a note to your teacher telling her that you didn't want to wear an outfit." She started to whine and said, "But I HAVE to dress up!" I told her that her choices were Thing 1 or Cindy Lou Who. She stomped upstairs saying, "Fine! I'll be Cindy Lou Who." At this point we have 9 minutes before we are supposed to be leaving to take them to school. It takes me 9 minutes to do a pony tail. I am no hair doing guru. Now she wanted me to figure out  Cindy Lou Who hair in 9 minutes? Right! Yeah, that didn't happen. It took me quite a bit longer than 9 minutes.

  Here's the most annoying part. When she got in the car after school she said,"Guess what mommy? I didn't have to dress up as a Dr Seuss Character. It just had to be someone from a book." My mouth fell open and all I could do was shake my head. I may or may not have been cursing the school in my mind. She said there was a girl in her class dressed as a ballerina. Another boy was a football player. So, she could have worn normal clothes with a pony tail and said,"I'm Sara from the book, Best Friends." SO ANNOYING!!! There's so much wrong with the world these days and one of them is celebrating Dr Seuss for an entire week and at the end of said week dressing up as a character from any book!

Shall we try soccer?

K really wanted to try playing soccer. He hasn't really showed any real interest until the last few months. We looked around and found a team that doesn't play games on Sunday. When we took him to register he could hardly wait for the season to start. When we took him to his first practice, he was the only one on his team that had never played before. The coach told everyone to do 10 toe touches on the ball and K just stood there not knowing what to do. The coach took extra time to show him how to do not only toe touches, but everything else that they were working on that night. K caught on pretty quick. Thankfully we aren't trying to prepare him for the world cup or anything. The kid loves the game! His first game was pretty awesome to watch. I keep telling B that someday I would love a fancy camera so that we can zoom in really good. Our camera wasn't able to zoom in far enough to get his ear to ear happy smile, but we were able to get a few pictures. A few? Who are we kidding. We all know that I have a problem taking about a million pictures at any given event even if we've been there before. I'll spare you most of them, don't panic! His coach had said that they were still little enough that there wasn't going to be a goalie. During practice they would just do kicking drills and work on passing the ball to each other. On the first game the coach found out that there was supposed to be a goalie. K was picked as the first one in the goalie box. My first thought was, oh dear! Good thing they don't keep score because I'm pretty sure that the other team is going to get the ball past K! The coach had been telling them a lot that they can't touch the ball with their hands. K has had it drilled into his cute little head. To put him in as goalie at the last minute and tell him as you're running away that he can pick the ball up and kick it has chance to go very very badly.

 This was what he looked like most of the time. B would try to yell across the field that he needed to watch for the ball. But, he liked to look at the back of the net, or the sky to see if there were any planes he could look at. Or pick the dead grass off his socks. More than once he stood at the back of the net with his fingers holding onto the net leaning forward and just hanging out while the game went on in front of him. One time he stuck his hands inside the green jersey thing. When we asked him why he did that he said that he wanted to see if he could just kick the ball and not touch it with his hands. B told him that as the goalie he can pick up the ball as long as it's inside the red box. K said,"I know, but I just wanted to see if I could do it without my hands." Good thing there wasn't anything shiny to catch his eye or all hope would have been lost of him blocking the ball!

He heard B yell that the ball was coming. He was all business! I do love this one. The team they played was a tough team, But K rose to the challenge!

He did it! He blocked the ball! When he kicked the ball away he was so excited! He never did touch it with his hands. He would only kick it, but he got the job done so that's what's important right?! He loves to play and loves to practice. The only bummer is that the level he's at is the last level that plays all their games on Saturday. If he wants to play next year, his games would be on Sunday's. We are hoping that they will change that so that he can play again next year too.

In other K news, he really wanted his hair spiky for church yesterday. We put gel in it and used a blow dryer to solidify the gel. He saw it and got a huge smile on his face. He wanted us to take a picture so we could send it to his teacher at school. He loved it so much that he wouldn't let anyone touch his hair and every few minutes he would ask if his hair was still standing up. I wish this picture wasn't so bright, but I love that you can see his dimple so good. B touched the top of the spikes, this was after church mind you, and K said,"Daddy! Don't touch my hair! I want it to stay standing up!" Then he looked at me and asked,"Mommy, is my hair still standing up? I want it to stand up for school tomorrow too." I told him that it was still standing up but after he slept on it all night we would have to do it again in the morning. I have never seen a little kid care so much about his hair. Hopefully this is just a phase and not an ongoing hair obsession!

I wonder...

Have you ever ponder the mysteries of life and realized you might never find an answer? There are some common mysteries that we know the answers for like, where did I come from, where am I going and why am I here? On the other side there are three things that have been puzzling me as of late like, where in the world is that airplane? What happened to that shirt and why has our gas bill almost quadrupled since November? Let's talk about the first one, the airplane! So, it's flying from Malaysia to Beijing and just goes missing?! What in the world?! Now, I in no way profess to know what I'm talking about but with all the spy devices that are in the world and are surrounding us, you would think that we would be able to find this plane. If it had crashed into the ocean, wouldn't there be oil in the water? And another thing, one doesn't fly over water en-route to Beijing from Malaysia right? Truth be told I'm awful with geography, I honestly can't show you were we live on an unmarked map of the United States. No that's not a joke, that's a true story morning glory. I think that Malaysia and Beijing are over that way somewhere and that there's no water in between them. Anyway, if it had been the bad guys that took over, wouldn't they have already announced that they did it? They seem to like boasting about the awful things that they do. I heard, and who knows if it's true, but rumor has it that if you call the cell phones of the people on board that they just ring and ring and ring. Shouldn't the cell phones be dead by now? They should just go to voice mail. If they had crashed into the water, wouldn't the phones have been ruined? If they had crashed into the ground wouldn't the phones have died with the people? Well the only idea I have as to the whereabouts of the plane is maybe we have a modern day city of Enoch on our hands! Maybe the people in the plane were so awesome that they were taken up to heaven mid-flight! That would be an awesome story to tell in heaven. When someone asked you how you died to be able to say,"Oh I didn't! I was on a plane going to Beijing and came to heaven instead! That. Would. Be. Awesome!

Mystery number two, what happened to that shirt?

This here shirt went into the washer white. When I went to change the washer and dryer, this is what the shirt looked like. I've got nothing as to what happened. There was no red crayon, marker, paper, sticker, or food that was in the washer with this shirt. Nothing else in the load came out with pink on it, just this shirt. It has added to my not being able to sleep at night because I am just perplexed as to what happened. That is a true mystery folks!

Item number three- why has our gas bill almost quadrupled since November? Let me just start by saying that is not great! It does not fill me with warm fuzzies or happy thoughts. I heard a commercial on the radio the other day that said,"Tired of high gas bills? Here's a suggestion to make your monthly bill lower. Keep your house set at 60 degrees." I almost ran the car(with it's heater set at 80:)) off the road! 60 degrees?! The gas company must be trying to deal with the over population problem. I freeze in our house as it is. We did lower the heat once we saw that bill was going up by almost $100 every month. We keep it at 71. I walk around with sweats, long sleeves, a sweatshirt, slippers, blankets and a jacket on to try and stay warm. CEO's of utility companies suck!