Semi-Retired

Yep, I am. I'm Semi-Retired. I quit my full time/over time job and now I'm Semi-Retired. I never thought it would be a difficult transition but I struggled there for a few weeks. Trying to figure out what to do with my time. I started cleaning my house but that wasn't very fun, so I gave that up pretty quick. I did recently unpack my office, that feels really good because I can now reach my computer with my eyes closed without tripping over something. So that was really productive. I decided I should start doing our laundry instead of picking the "less dirty" out of the dirty pile, and that has helped our family hygiene immensely. For real though, I'm really enjoying being a Mom again. Being there emotionally for my kids when they get home from school. Helping them with their homework and interacting with them. It takes working full time to enjoy those little things that most get sick of after doing them every day.

It's cold and rainy today. High of 61, low of 47. I turned on the heater and oddly enough I love the smell of a heater that hasn't been run in 9 months. It's like the sure sign that Fall is here. If I could I'd go to Hobby Lobby and spend hundreds of dollars on Autumn decorations and decorate my house all up for Thanksgiving. I don't think we're going to do anything for Thanksgiving this year, just stay in Dallas. We recently went on a Cruise to Mexico with the whole family and my parents, and before that we went to Las Vegas and Cancun, just Brad and I. So it's been a super busy year, lots of traveling. So I think we'll stay close to home.

Now that I'm Semi-Retired I'm sure I'll get back into blogging, so feel free to check up on my blog again. I'll post some super cute pictures from Tori's Baptism on here soon. That was October 9th in Washington. I forgot we went to Washington in October too. Man, we've been all over the place! But it's been an incredible year!

J. Hilburn's New Video-This is why we moved to Dallas...

Sorry it's been so long

This was definitely blogworthy:

Abbie- "There is a boy in my class that has a crush on me. He likes me even more today than he did yesterday"

Tori- "How do you know he likes you?"

Abbie-" He keeps hitting me and smiling at me. And I don't like it. I wanted to tell him to stop liking me, but I don't want to hurt his feelings."

Me- Tell him you just want to be friends, but you don't want to be his girlfriend."

Abbie- "I don't think that will work. He likes another girl too."

Tori- "That means he's cheating on you!"

Abbie- "Hmmm, he IS cheating on me."

Me- (trying to hold in my laugh) Tell him he has to choose between you and the other girl. That's how I got your father to make up his mind, he's gotta choose one or the other. Then hope that he'll choose the other girl so you'll be off the hook :)

Happy Anniversary $2500 later!

Brad and I had our 9th anniversary on 5/11/10, we went to go see a movie from about 5:30-8:00. Dropped kids off at some good friends of ours that have kids their age to babysit. Came back and Abbie was on the couch crying with an ice pack on her head. Our friend said she fell but she's okay. Tori convinced me to come outside to see where she fell. She fell off of the trampoline, hit her head on their ladder and then the concrete. Abbie's headache got increasingly worse so I called our pediatrician and went to the Urgent Care Clinic. Both places said to take her to ER. So we went to the ER, they did a catscan, came back with "She has a decent size fracture in her skull, we need to send her by ambulance to Children's Hospital, then she'll stay overnight over there for observation. That way if anything gets worse they have the ability to operate if they need to there, but right now its just for observation." So they gave her an IV, strapped her down on one of those board things with the neck brace and all and I rode with her in the ambulance, went to Primary Children's hospital and upon arrival about 20 doctors/nurses/etc. were all in the room surrounding her. It was pretty crazy. In about 5 minutes they realized she was fine, no need to even send her there, they were kind of annoyed because she didn't have any bad symptoms like passing out, or dizziness, or nausea, so they unstrapped her from the board thingy, took off her neck brace, gave her a Popsicle, and she hopped and skipped out of the hospital at about 1:30am. So THANKFULLY she is fine, but sucks that we have to pay for two ER visits AND an ambulance ride, but I'd pay that in a heartbeat if it meant she was okay. At least we have insurance. Holy cow it was scary though, and I'm VERY tired. :) I'm thinking we'll hit our Out of Pocket Max for the bill $2500, what do you think?

Happy 9th Anniversary Brad!

It's Time

Well, it's time to update ya'll so this may be a long one. I'm sorry for the lack of blogging. I'm pretty busy nowadays, but life is good. So around Valentine's Day Brad took the girls to a daddy daughter dance, here are the pics:







It snowed a few times, in fact we had some record snowfall this year and they didn't even close school! We had about a foot of snow. I figured out the school board had never seen so much snow that they probably didn't know that they could cancel school and that snow days were called snow days cause you're supposed to cancel school when it snows. My goodness. If record snowfalls don't cancel school, what does?





For Brad's birthday we went bowling. i got a video of Tori bowling, it was so cute. It's pretty dark, but its worth watching, you'll get the gist of it.



We're heading to Kentucky to go for a drive and visit Mark (Brad's brother) and Mark's wife Sarah, who are visiting her family in Kentucky, so we're going to go meet them there and have a blast, we can't wait.

The last story is really hilarious, and I apologize for the delay, but here it is:

About 2 weeks ago I was working at my desk and Abbie was sitting on our bed, playing with some real handcuffs that Brad had from his days of doing transports for troubled youth (that's what he wanted me to tell you the handcuffs were for, I think they make him feel powerful, like he could arrest someone if he had to, but I promise he's never used them on me, I swear.) So Abbie was playing with them and all the sudden she says, "Mom, look what I did!" in a happy/proud voice. I looked over and saw that she had handcuffed her ankles together. I raised my eyebrows kinda like "wow, cool." Then her eyebrows furrowed and she said, "you have the key, right?" I started laughing hysterically because I knew I didn't and I hadn't even thought of that until she mentioned it, and she started crying. It was SO FUNNY. Man, if I had a camera crew follow me around to catch moments like these we'd be rich off of america's funniest videos. You know what I think would have won the grand prize? If we had caught the lizard escape on video. That surely would have won. Anyway, so I had to calm Abbie down and assure her that Daddy was coming home from work to unlock the handcuffs so she could walk. I carried her downstairs to watch tv to distract her so she'd stop crying, and that worked, and then she waddled her way around downstairs until he came home about an hour later. It was classic. Sorry I don't have any pics, I'll get better at that.

The Dog Bed

So we bought this dog bed for Nali from Costco and almost every morning Nali is on the floor and Abbie is in her bed. Brad thinks we should buy one for each of the girls so they don't steal it from the dog. We had to get proof in a picture for future blackmail purposes :)

Farewell Lizzy

I hate to say it, but the day has come. Lizzy has been let out into the cold and dreary world to become part of the food chain once again. She had a nice 4 1/2 month vacation in the sunny sand filled cage where all of her food was provided for her and she could relax, protected and well fed. Brad was looking at her today and realized she was covered in mites. Not sure how the mites got there or how long they've been there, but he decided it would be better to let her go and fend for herself than to trap her in a cage full of mites and watch her die a slow and painful death. She wasn't eating her crickets that we gave her and she has been trying to hibernate but hasn't been able to because of the warmth and the noise and all that, so he let her go. I'm just glad it was Brad's decision, not mine.

Also, for Halloween the girls won fish at the carnival. We had to go get a fish tank and all this crap to keep them alive. Since then we purchased 3 other fish. They started dying about 3 weeks ago, one by one. And then they started eating each other! It was so nasty. All but one fish died so I dumped them out and had compassion on the last one, kept it in a big cup. The girls were fine with it, not one tear shed, so i figured they just didn't care much. Brad dumped the last one into the toilet one morning so that the girls wouldn't have to go through the last one dying... They realized first thing that morning the fish was gone and Abbie started bawling! I'm like, 5 fish die, you don't care, the last one dies, you freak out? Totally unpredicted. I told her that Daddy let it go into a lake. She was upset because that one was hers, and it was the last survivor. Kind of like she won the contest for last living fish. And we went and killed it. Brad told me after the fact I was supposed to tell her that it died first. I wasn't about to completely lie to her, so I told her he let it go into a lake, because I figured that whatever body of water it ends up being could be considered a lake, right? Well apparently she wouldn't have been sad if it had died first, it was the fact that it DIDN'T die, and we let it go that made her upset. Who woulda known.

So its just us and the dog now. Simplicity is much better. I think we're done with the crazy pet phase of our life. I hope the girls enjoyed it because we won't be going there again :)

I was at the pet store on Saturday and was looking at the little yellow parakeet birds. I had a flashback to my childhood. Brian and Michael's (my brothers) little parakeet had broken its foot and couldn't fly (not that it really could in a cage either) and Mom and Dad were taking it to the vet to get better. The parakeet didn't come home that day. Now that I'm a mom and I know how bad birds stink, and what a huge upkeep they are, I have a feeling that the bird didn't go to the vet that day. Mom, would you like to fill in for me what REALLY Happened that day?

Update

I'm sorry I've been MIA lately. I have hardly had a second to breathe. The girls are getting ready for bed, so i thought I'd add some pictures real quick since I found the cord to upload the pics from the camera. I got my hair done about 2 weeks ago and when I got home I decided to give Tori a new style and it just happened to look just like mine :) She likes to call herself "mini-mama"

Pics

It's been a while, so I thought I'd show you pics of Dallas Snow... its pretty lame, but at least its snow :) And then a funny one of Abbie :)

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