Help! My baby's voting Democratic!

Alpha's school had a mock election today.

She voted for Barack Obama!!!!!

I guess we forgot to tell her we're Republicans....

Jim takes comfort in the fact that she pronounced the party's name as dee MO cruh tick.

A Halloween sneak-peek!

We've had a fun weekend! Friday, Alpha was out of school for parent teacher conferences. I took the day off so we could go see High School Musical 3!!!! omg!!!! It's TROY!!!! Troy and Gabriella finally kissed. But only briefly. The movie was, well, about what you've come to expect from HSM. It was a fitting end. (Even if I did sit there and wish Jim was with me so I could make some snide comments....) The girls loved it, so it's all good.

Funny moment: We're about 5 minutes into the movie when Beta leans over and asks in a loud whisper, "Mommy, when is High School Musical 4 coming out???"

Saturday was mulch day! I got out and mulched all the plants I'm supposed to mulch every year. The yard looks nice now, but my back kinda hurts....

Saturday night we went to a Halloween birthday party! The girls got to wear their Halloween costumes for the first time. (so we get more than one use out of them. Yay!) I've got some cool pics I'll post at the end.

Today, we finished up the mulch, planted a gardenia bush in the backyard, and went to community group. Oh yea, and Alpha practiced riding her bike without training wheels! But that's for another post.

The girls are really looking forward to this Friday. It'll be fun to trick-or-treat in a neighborhood with houses. Two years ago, our first Halloween here, it was kind of sparse. Now we've got houses all up and down our street!

Well, it's getting late. So here are those special sneak-peek preview pics I promised:


For those of you with absolutely no pop-culture influence whatsoever, we've got an American cheerleader and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. (Notice her basket with Toto!)

Fair Days, Fair Days!

I've been gone. Out of town. Busy. First, I had a CPE conference to attend in Little Rock. So I drove down Wednesday and spent the night with my mom. Jim and the girls drove down Friday night. (and managed not to kill each other.....) Saturday, we had our quarterly family birthday celebration! We celebrated Jim's, Matt's and Emily's birthdays. Jim's was Sept 20, Matt's was Oct 9 and Emily's is Oct 27.

Without planning, 4 of us wore purple shirts! This picture includes my cousin Kayla, me, Aunt Martha, and my mother.

After the birthday party, we all went to the state fair! My girls were so excited. We ended up staying way too late so we got home way late on Saturday. (or was it Sunday then? I forget.....) Anyway, here are some pictures from my weekend.

This is Beta holding her nose because the cows were "stinky".
Here they are on the dumbo ride. It's good to have a big sister to pull the bar for you. :)

Snow cones in October?

This picture is horrible. I'm "doing the weather" at KARK's booth. I thought it was a really neat idea! They set up a green screen and let you do the weather like the regular weather people do. The kids were way funnier than me. And I wish that was only the camera adding that extra 10 pounds.
Alpha got to milk a fake cow again. She did it last year and really enjoyed it.

The Farris Wheel. One of the last things we did. Alpha and Beta got to sit with Grandmother while Jim and I sat on the other side. The girls liked it at first, but then, we couldn't get off! The operators kept missing us. Alpha got mad because she was ready to move on to other things....Beta stayed pretty happy though. Neither of them stayed in their seats, which made me almost hysterically nutty. I think I managed to control my self fairly well, in the end. :)

Cha-Cha-Cha!

The other day, our book order from Alpha's class came in. Beta had gotten a diary with a puppy on it that includes 2 keys and a fuzzy pen. She loves it! She writes her deepest, darkest secrets in it......like D, R, L, O, and B.

Tonight at bedtime, she mentioned that when she told her gymnastics teacher today about her new diary, her teacher thought she was talking about poo poo. I asked her why and then, it hit me.

"Did your teacher think you said diarrhea?"

She laughed. I laughed! Heartily!

I guess she told her teacher, "I got a diary" and it sounded like "I got diarrhea."

I have honestly NEVER thought those two words were even closely related.

Maybe I should go explain.

Maybe not.

Lunchtime conversations

So it's Sunday lunch. We've all gathered 'round the table to eat a hearty lunch consisting of popcorn shrimp, mashed potatoes, and green beans.

Beta says, "Mommy, are these shrimp dead?"

Ummmmm......

Daddy replies, "They're cooked."

"But do they know we're eating them?"

No.

Then Alpha, holding the ketchup, says, "We buy this he-knees ketchup all the time!"

That's "Heinz", sweetie.

Never a dull moment.

I've been tagged!

Ok, Kim. I'll try this. I don't usually do these things either. (I hate email forwards as well.) But this seems interesting so I'll try.

7 Random and/or Weird Things About Me

1. I used to organize my clothes in my closet in rainbow-color order (red, orange, yellow....etc). Now I organize them by function, and THEN by color. (long sleeve, short sleeve, dressy, etc.)

2. I played volleyball as a team sport in 7th grade.

3. I like cherry and grape candy, but I do not care for real cherries or grapes. I like apples, bananas, and watermelons, but I do not care for apple, banana, or watermelon-flavored candy.

4. I learned to overcome my fear of bees, wasps, spiders, and snakes after I had kids. Mostly, anyway.

5. I play World of Warcraft.

6. I like to play classical music when I play the piano, but I do not like to listen to classical music. It bores me.

7. When I was 2, I was afraid that I would go down the bathtub drain when the water was let out. I would scream bloody murder if I was still in the bathtub when the drain plug was pulled.

Now, here are my 5 tags! (I don't know 7 people with blogs!) Let's see if Robin, Holly, Jennifer, Amy, and Anna W. will participate.

P.S. I tried to post the image with the rules on it, but it's not showing up. I've got the code in my post, but it's not working. And my computer expert husband can't figure it out!!!!! Go read Kim's blog to see the rules.

Something funny!

Ok. After my mini rant, I'm sure you all want something a lot less serious. So here goes.

Last night we were in Target looking at Halloween stuff. We were in the aisle with the candy bowls that have hands that grab yours when you reach in. This other family was a few feet away. There was a mom with her 3-ish daughter in the basket and her 6-ish son. The little girl looked at the candy dishes and then said to her mother, "Mommy! This is the kind of stuff that'll scare the crap outta me!"

Great. We're in debt.

I don't want to get too detailed. And you can argue with me and probably win. But I don't like this bail out package. I think we're a capitalist society that should have let the companies that made bad decisions die from their fallout. I support some laws to protect homeowners from said companies that would try to foreclose on their homes. But I don't like us being so far in debt.

I wish everyone would quit talking about Sarah Palin and start talking about the actual candidates. We're about 6 weeks away from the election and all I hear about is the VP candidate. What's up with that? This economy is also distracting from the election. I wonder what the candidates and campaigns think about that.

I also don't like the media's insinuation that the state of the economy is a direct result of whomever is in the White House. There are business cycles and consequences for companies' actions. The current recession is just part of it, and I don't think it could have been avoided much. Things were too crazy in the 90's. Things had to come back down at some time.

Oh, and some news outlet reported that Barack Obama was predicting the mortgage crisis 2 years ago. *I* was predicting the mortgage crisis 3 years ago! Anyone who knows anything about finances could tell that when you make loans to people who don't know how to handle that much money, things are going to be bad! When regular people tell themselves, "Well, we had to take the ARM with the low interest rate b/c that's the only way we could afford the house", then they CAN'T AFFORD THE HOUSE! Because the ADJUSTABLE rate mortgage is going to go UP!

My best strategy is to follow Dave Ramsey's advice. Start an emergency fund, pay off your debts, (except the house, for now), and control your own spending.

/Rant

Ok. I'm done now. Back to happy and fun posts!

You know, we always wanted a boy....

Before Jim and I had kids, we talked about whether we'd have boys or girls. He told me, long before we were even engaged, that he'd like his son to be named James Franklin Kane IV, since he is Jim Kane III. So when I got pregnant, we just assumed we'd have a boy!

NNNNN! Wrong.

A beautiful baby girl was born to us. Our house looked like a bottle of pepto had exploded and we had stuffed animals everywhere! What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice.

Fast forward to this past Tuesday. Alpha's class got to go on a field trip to see a play and then to a park afterward. They spent the entire day out. She had tons of fun! When I picked her up, she was telling me all about her incredibly fun day. Her favorite part, she said, was when she got to FILL HER SOCKS UP WITH SAND at the park! I turned back and noticed she had shoes on but no socks. I listened and then asked where her socks were now.

Silence. . . .

"Um, I lost them in the sand."

I'm like, what? You left them there because you couldn't find them? She says yea, and then gets very embarrassed and turns away. Great, I think. So I told her she wasn't in trouble, but that she needed to keep up with stuff like that.

Fast forward to this morning....

It is cold today so she has to wear her tennis shoes. She tells me they still have sand in them. Jim has her go shake them out on the back porch. Time is passing quickly when she comes in and announces she can't do it. I get frustrated and tell her to hurry and get her hair brushed and socks on while I shake out her shoes. (we've been running close to late nearly every day this week. I'm tired of it!)

I go outside and shake half of the Sahara out of each shoe. Seriously.

Fast forward again to tonight. I'm doing laundry. Darks with a few jeans. I pick up her pair of jeans and SAND comes spilling out onto the laundry room floor. I hurriedly make it to the backyard and proceed to dump the remaining half of the Sahara dessert out of her pants pockets.

What did she do at this park? Did she put sand in every possible holding area she had?

What happened to my sweet little girl who wears dresses and doesn't make messes?

I think I left her at about age 2. This little girl I have loves to play outside and get in the dirt! (She does like dresses, though.)

So maybe we got our boy after all.....

I've joined the masses!

Well, I did it. I succumbed to peer pressure. I set up a facebook account. I don't know how I'm going to keep facebook and this blog going at the same time. I guess I'll just do a little bit of each.

Facebook sounded silly when I first heard of it. And it is. However, I have met nearly 20 people I knew from high school! They've written on my wall and I've written on theirs! How cool is that?

Maybe this will be fun.