Soccer, Tball, Banana Fana Fo-Fana

Do you remember when you were a kid and you played sports and your mom looked like she was always in a hurry and you didn't really understand why? Well I understand.

For the first time as a parent, I had not one but TWO kids doing sports at the same time. I know what some of you are thinking, "Try having more than two kids, newbie."

After basketball ended, Ali decided she wanted to play soccer. I was honestly a little disappointed. Quite frankly, I don't understand that "only-use-your-feet" business. I never played. I don't know the rules. I don't know the lingo. And sometimes I accidentally sat on the players' bench thinking it was there for spectators. They really expect me to bring my own chair!?

I will admit, though, that seeing Ali play it was SO MUCH FUN. She's actually really good! I mean I know I'm biased, but the girl is tall and skinny and fast. She's coordinated with her feet, she's smart, and, most importantly, she had fun playing. I don't think her team won very many games, but not knowing much about soccer meant I really didn't pay attention to the score!

Look at that kick!!! She really loved being the goalie, but my favorite part was watching her play the field. I've seen her play softball. I've seen her play basketball. Neither of those sports really sparked much aggression in that kid, but soccer brought some of that out in her! I mean yes, she was still my little girly-girl who would sometimes dance and get sidetracked. :)

During all this time, we had Jordan playing tball (we're not allowed to call it that though. "I don't play tball, I play baseball!!!") It turns out that our little prodigy doesn't care much about being good at baseball. He's your typical 3 year old tball player who likes to play in the dirt and has no idea what's going on 98% of the time. Despite that, though, he still looks adorable.

See that uniform? The first game he just wore black shorts because we couldn't find any pants to fit him. Then my mother-in-law found him a pair of baseball pants and took them up about 2-3 sizes. Good thing she's good with a sewing machine! Otherwise he'd just been wearing black shorts all year. Also, his tiny fat feet aren't big enough for cleats, so he has to wear good ole tennis shoes. His shirt fits him alright, but it's a tad too short so it can't be tucked into his pants. I don't think his ill-fitting clothes have hurt his performance much, though. 

Even though things got a little hectic for a while, we managed and enjoyed every minute of it, as I'm sure most parents do. I have a feeling, though, that this is only the beginning of our hectic lives as parents with athletic children. Oh boy.

I Need To Poop, Mom

It has literally been forever since I have posted anything on here! Not that nothing has been going on--really there has been TOO MUCH going on that I just haven't found the time.

So today, let me interest you in a little story about my stinker boy.

As you probably already know, my child has never been a good sleeper. He's much better now than he was for the first 18 months of his life, but he still doesn't let us sleep through the night more than a few days a week. He wakes up crying because he's hungry, thirsty, had a bad dream, misses us, wants his sister, can't find his doggie, is cold, needs to pee, fell off the bed, can't find his ninja toy, wants to read a book, etc.

Let's get something straight: I am not one of those moms whose kids sleep with her from the day they're born until they're 23. I like my space. I don't like having feet in my back and a butt in my face. So anytime he gets in bed with us, I immediately turn my back to him (because he's going to kick me... and I'd rather it not be my boobs). Sometimes, if I'm not really really sleepy, I'll just pick him up and stick him back in his own bed... followed by several minutes of crying and, "But I neeeeeeeeeed you!" Go back to sleep, kid, it's 2 a.m.

Last night he ended up in bed with me (when did that even happen?!) and my husband ended up on the couch. This meant I slept on the very edge of the bed while Jordan elbowed and kicked me for several hours. At around 4, he jumped up and started crying, "Mommy I needa poop!" My first thought was, "Oh dear Lord, please don't let him be sick." So I jump up and run him to the bathroom (expecting the worst, you know what I mean), flip on the light, and toss him onto the toilet. "Mamma, cover my eyes, it's too bright." So now I'm holding him to make sure he doesn't fall into the toilet while also shielding his eyes. Luckily, he wasn't sick, he really did just need to poo.

We stay in this uncomfortable (for me, anyway) position for about 5 minutes while he does his business. Finally he says, "Mama, wipe my butt, I wanna go back to bed." So I do that, while still shielding his eyes because obviously it's still too bright for him, and then we go back to bed. That's when I realize he had peed in my bed. Ahhhhhhhh!!

So I did what any respectable parent does in that situation: I threw a towel on top of it and went back to sleep. Surely I'm not the only mom to ever do this. Right???

After a couple more hours of kicking/elbowing, my alarm goes off. I roll over and give him a kiss and say, "Good morning sweetie, I love you." He springs up and says, "Mama, you can't go up to the castle!!" "Oh, okay, why not?" I ask. "Because you just can't because the cars can't and they go vroom vroom!!"

Just another day in paradise!

Minecraft Creeper Valentine's Box

This past weekend we decided to let Ali decorate her Valentine's box for school! I let her browse Pinterest for ideas ("So if I like something and want to save it for later, I just pin it?" Exactly, my dear.) and she chose what she calls a "creeper" from the Minecraft game. She is addicted to that game and I don't understand what's going on. All I know is the graphics are really pixeley and isn't this the 21st century!? Anyway, a creeper is apparently a Minecraft villain... but that's what she chose. This is what they look like:

Link to this image here.

 And this is the picture she found on Pinterest the she wanted to duplicate:

Link to this image here.

So we found a square box that once belonged to a small food chopper, dug out some green paint and paper, and got to work. The only green paint I had was lime green, so we mixed in some black (afterwards I thought, "Hmm, brown would have worked better...") and came up with a pretty awesome villain green. She painted the entire box (several coats). We then took three different shades of green card stock and cut them into neat perfect squares. Just kidding, they were no where near perfect. But they were semi-square-ish. She glued them in her own special pattern and then we added the black eyes and a nose (or is it a mouth? not sure.)

See that awesome creepy green paint color? :)
Here she is gluing on her squares. 

After everything had dried I cut a hole in the top and voila! Minecraft Creeper Valentine's box.

The finished product! With the exception of cutting out the black nose/mouth, the entire thing was done by Ali.

And there you have it! She was so so proud of her box. I can't wait to hear what her friends thought of it! Next on the list is Jordan's box. His will be much easier to construct! I'm thinking a tissue box with stickers on it... ;)

Super Hero Birthday Party

My son turned THREE!? Is this for real?? I can't believe he's growing up so fast...

Lately he's been obsessed with 3 things: Cars, planes, and Super Heroes. His favorite super hero is He-Man, but since it's now 2014, He-Man decorations aren't exactly easy to come by. So we decided to just go with Super Heroes in general as the theme for his birthday party. We stuck with the basic colors: blue, red, and yellow.

First, the invitation:

I found a really cool invitation on SnapFish.com that looked kinda like this, but I didn't want to pay $30. So I started designing it myself. I found the little superhero images from a Google search, as well as the background and the city outline. I then sent my idea to my best friend and she tweaked the heck out of it and came up with this! It was perfect! We printed them on card stock and voila! She also designed the envelope.

 

How cool is that!? 

Okay, on to the actual party.

The "fun" table. For the buildings I used cardboard out of the recycling bin at worked and covered them with plan black paper and cut up some yellow squares for the windows. The little signs I cut out of poster board from Dollar Tree. The red streamer also came from Dollar Tree... as did all the table cloths.

Even the grandparents got in on the tattoo fun! We found these at Walmart the night before the party and couldn't resist. 

The masks were cut out of the same poster board as the signs. I found templates here. 

Random stickers from Walmart and Dollar Tree.

Foam swords from Amazon (6 total) The kids had so much fun beating each other up with these. 

Can't have a party without PIZZA!

Fruit punch (sugar free drink mix) came from Walmart. Straws came from Amazon (144 in a box and we used around 10. We may never run out!!)

Super Suckers! These guys took forever to make. The box is just another box I took from the recycling bin at work covered in red paper (also from work). I poked holes in it and stuck the suckers in. Voila! I got the sucker idea from my sister who threw her son a Super Hero party last year. 

Can you see the Superman logo shape? I baked cupcakes because we're too poor to pay someone else to make something fancy. haha This is what I really wanted. Too bad, so sad. They were yummy at least. 

I tried to be creative with naming the snacks. Eh, it was harder than I expected. The little name cards can be found here. 

Possibly my favorite decoration was this hand-made banner! I wish I could take full credit, but I hardly did anything to this thing other than hanging it up. I got the idea from Pinterest (of course) and a template for the letters came from here. This made my life so much easier. I used the poster board I bought from Dollar Tree for everything, and had a student assistant at my work cut them all out for me. HA!

The whole setup.. ahh, lovely :) For the food table I put a blue table cloth on bottom, and a red on top (because they weren't really big enough to cover the whole table anyway, and this looked cooler than just one color alone). I should have taken a better picture of them, but at least you can see the blue poking out a little bit. 

I thought it would be fun (okay maybe not fun, just cool) to have a picture of my son hanging up for family and friends to sign. I took a picture of him at the park with my old worn out camera and had the Media Services Department where I work blow it up to to size 16x20. $3.84!!

I'm such an awful photographer! But here's his gift table... "Super Presents." It's our coffee table covered in a plastic table cloth. Fancy. (And that boring brown present on the right? Yeah... that's from us. I used packing paper I dug out of the recycling bin at work. Hey, it was better than the pink cupcake wrapping paper I had at home! He didn't seem to mind...)

My shy little birthday boy in his Superman outfit! (bought here)

I just love those house shoes he has on lol Santa Claus got those for him for Christmas. How convenient!

Opening up one of his super gifts!

After all that partying... the birthday boy was SPENT. He played and played and then passed out and didn't wake up for 3 hours.

Even Superman takes naps. 

Planning his birthday party and decorating for it was So. Much. FUN. Seriously, I love doing that kind of stuff. I started weeks ahead of time and got lots of help from my student assistants at work and, of course, my wonderful hubs. After the party was over I really didn't want to take everything down. All that hard work in the trash!?!? We did keep his birthday banner though. In fact... it's still hanging in our dining room. ;)

Bad Parenting

A few weeks ago, my mom sent us home with two new bags of giant building blocks. When I finally remembered about them, I brought them in the house one weekend for Jordan to play with.

Okay, so I'm kind of a perfectionist and it really, really bugs me how my son puts those blocks together at random. I mean, can't my two year old tell that the tower isn't going to stand with only one little block as a base? And doesn't he know anything about symmetry? My husband, apparently, is just like me. At first, we just sat in the floor watching Jordan playing with the blocks. Then we'd say something like, "No Jordan, put this little block over here instead." And then it got to where we would move the blocks around when he wasn't looking.

It ended with us taking over the building blocks completely. As in... Jordan laid in the floor while we completely forgot about being parents and instead acted like children for about an hour. Shameful! (But... also kinda fun...)

Here is the castle Jordan started building that we kinda... took over.

"I stole my son's building blocks because he wasn't putting them together how I wanted! Thumbs up!"

 Then we decided we could build a bigger, better one. So we tore that one down and built this beauty:

And this is what poor Jordan did while Mommy and Daddy went crazy with the building blocks: 

Okay, so maybe we're bad parents, but I can't help but laugh every time I think about it. At one point Jordan tried to put a block on our masterpiece and I instinctively grabbed the block before he could get it on. My husband started laughing and said, "Did you seriously just take that away from your son??" Ooops.

So maybe we did go a little crazy, but Jordan eventually got his revenge.

So there you have it, Bad Parenting 101.

Basketball

A few weeks ago Ali had her first ever basketball tournament and I MISSED IT because I had a huge race that weekend (that I'd been training for since August). And her team won the tournament! Wahoo!

So I'd been kinda pouting since then because I hadn't got to see her play. Well she finally had another game this past weekend and it was soooo much fun to watch! 

Here she is guarding someone while on offense... haha

And then she realized she didn't need to be guarding someone and decided to get WIDE OPEN under the goal instead!

And here my little girl dribbled the ball all the way up the court and then shot a cute little jump shot!

Number 4, which used to be my softball number. 

After I saw this picture I thought maybe we should enroll her in track, too. Look at those long legs! And that stride! Good grief, she is a natural runner. Wonder where she gets it from? ;)

 Sunday afternoon Ali wanted to go to the park to practice some more.

And here's what Jordan did while sister practiced: 

Rosie the Elf

Well let me just say: Our elf Rosie did a stellar job of being creative this year. You'd think she'd be running out of ideas but she's one smart elf. ;)

Day one: Rosie came in on a zip line. That thing must have taken about 30 minutes to put together... She's so cool. 

 Look: she even used some of our flame-less tea lights to light the runway.  

And apparently she's a Super Elf (which we already knew!)

One morning we found that she'd taken some of the kids' toys and toilet papered them. Naughty elf. 

One day she decided to learn how to play basketball. It looks like she caught on pretty well! 

And of course, what kind of elf would she be if she didn't roast some marshmallows and make s'mores? I'll never figure out how she blackened that marshmallow using a battery operated candle... must be Christmas magic.

Here we found an organized race among several of the kids' toys. 

Look, she even made a checkered flag to wave at the finish line. How clever.  

I didn't realize Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz would be so... competitive. 

Uh oh... Rosie has a gambling problem. We found her and some other toys playing cards. What's in those glasses? A quick taste test revealed it was only fruit punch. Whew... 

Nice bow, Rosie!

Apparently Rosie made good friends with Ali's American Girl dolls. Here she's fixing Allison's hair and it looks like they were also playing a BFF game. 

"If you could change the name of one of your BFFs, what would you change it to?"

LOL

Then one morning we found her coloring in Jordan's coloring book. She really needs to work on her coloring skills. 

 One night, right before we all went to bed, Jordan broke a tire off of his FAVORITE race car. OMG, end of the world. So  his sister says to him, "Don't worry Jordan, Rosie can fix it with her Christmas magic!" So off they run to find Rosie and I hear Jordan asking her to fix his car "priddy pwease?"

Also that night, Ali lost another tooth. She put it in a baggy and hid it under her pillow REALLY WELL, apparently, because when she woke up the next morning her tooth was still there. Oh man, the Tooth Fairy let the ball drop on that one. Or did she?

When we found Rosie that morning, not only had she made herself a cup of syrup and eaten half a peppermint, she'd also used a hot glue gun to fix Jordan's car AND... 

She left a letter for Ali about her tooth. Whew, catastrophe averted. 

One morning Jordan found Rosie in this over-sized plastic bottle. 

Here she decided to break the ROOF OFF our gingerbread house. Brat. It was okay, though, because that meant Jordan and I could finally start breaking pieces off to eat since it was already "ruined". Thanks Rosie!

She must have felt guilty about the gingerbread house because she was hiding in Jordan's stocking the next day. 

The morning before my big Spartan Beast I found this lovely little note on our bed frame. Awe, thanks! 

One day we found her hanging from our pull-up bar. She must be working out.

Thankfully someone pays attention to the plants in this house! The poor ivy hadn't been watered in a long, long time so Rosie did it for me. 

She likes basketball video games too, I guess.

One morning we woke up to find all our shoes tied together. 

Ali woke up one day to Rosie "stealing" money from her money jar. 

Our last morning with Rosie was fun! We'd left her some little miniature cookies and man, she went to town on those things. She spelled out Thank You in M&Ms. 

Messy chocolate face.

She also left a trail of M&Ms from the kids' bedrooms to the living room. We're lucky we didn't get ants that night. 

And here the kids are on our Christmas morning picking up Rosie's M&M trail. Ali was putting them back in a bowl. Jordan was just eating them. 

And there you have it! Rosie the Elf, December 2013. 

I didn't do a very good job of taking pictures every day, so there are only 19 days represented with the pictures. Some other things she did that I forgot to take pictures of:

Made a swing out of a toilet paper roll, covered it in wrapping paper, and hung it above our couch... we caught her swinging on it, too.

Took Ali's CD player and hooked up some ear-buds to it. We found her listening to music that morning.

Found my husband's old iPhone that had been missing for several months and was playing games on it.

Took a ride on a giant rubber ducky in the kids' bathtub.

I'm forgetting a couple, but you get the idea about how brilliant she was this year! I can't wait to see what she does next year! Maybe she should start planning her ideas early...