Flag Football in Frigid, Freezing California

Twins had their first game yesterday...one word..COLD! The wind and freeziness(yes, I believe that is a word) tends to kick up around here right as soon as football kicks off. They did great though despite the 12 layers of shirts I had on them. In between offense & defense they would run over and climb under the blankets with John and I to get somewhat warm. It was like playing football in Antartica I'm telling ya! I mean, last time I played football in Antartica it felt just like this!

Keeping up with the Welch's & the rest of America

Okay, okay, okay...I confess...we are without Tivo....we have been living in the dark ages apparently. Well now that baseball playoff's have begun(Go Red Sox) we are having a revolt amongst the natives that the games tend to continue WELL past bedtime around here which means they are missing a signifigant portion of the fun. That will never do so John boy made a phone call and lookie look, Comcast is having DVR free for a year! Yippee! So after spending 35 minutes in line today at the Comcast place we have our new DVR box. Can I just say how ghetto that place is? Can I also say that if you where your pajamas to the store, and you are carrying your kid who looks like they haven't bathed in a week then you probably shouldn't be spending $$ on cable every month! Perhaps our priorities are a little off base? Maybe 1st should be get dressed, bathe the baby, and then worry about your TV viewing opportunities? Just a thought! Anyhoo, the war is over...peace & baseball will once again reign among our home.

Why I love being a mom. Edition 327

I've been writing notes to the boys via their magna doodles recently, simple things like, "Great job on your soccer game today" or "Thank you for doing the dishes without being asked!" or "So help me if you don't start picking up your underwear off the bathroom floor!"(Kidding on that one...though I do mean it! :) and leaving it on their pillow so when they go to bed they find a little message. Well today, I found a note back to me on my bed. Not thank you mom for taking care of me, thanks for slaving over a hot stove and cooking my favorite dinner....no, no, no....what do I get? A breakfast order. Too cute. In some way I am convinced that this is Jordan's way of being thankful by continuing our little message writing service....or at least I choose to believe that! I love that boy. Well, I am off to make "toaster thingies" for him!

Feelin a little blue

What to do, what to do, what on earth to do with this precious child of mine. Justin is so far not improving in the realm of being civilized with other children. And I, being the incredibly impatient mom that I am, am feeling a bit discouraged. He was at flag football practice yesterday and no kidding, within the first 5 minutes he had pushed two kids down and pinched another one. I had to pull him off of the field. It is SO devastating to watch your own child not be able to interact... for the other parents who look at you like you have two heads and try to keep thier kids away from yours. For me, for John, at home, in our family he is fabulous. When we go out, he is fabulous. When he gets around other kids that irritate him...not so fabulous. I won't go into too much detail but just know that we are feeling very challenged right now so please pray for our boy. We need joy to fill his heart.

This is the book I picked up at Barnes & Noble. I read another one while he was reading some of his books; it is like they are talking about Justin. We feel like we are doing everything we can do to help him and to be honest, we are a little clueless as to how to proceed. I quit my job, we tried a new school, I am homeschooling him, we work with him, we work with him, we work with him. So will you pray for us? This issue affects every bit of our daily lives, it affects our family, it affects our marriage, it affects his relationship with his brothers, it is far reaching but I know we will not give up...we will NOT give up. -signed- a very blue blogger.

If I may be so bold

So when you are an at home mom everyday can feel a little like Groundhog day. (Can I get a amen?) Get up, get dressed, kids to school, homeschool, clean, dinner, pick kids up, football practice, soccer practice, showers, homework, bed...I said go to BED! So it is the little things in life that make you happy. My little thing? Blue toilet water. Yep, you heard me..and yes I am in full realization that that is downright pathetic but hey! Give me a break, Groundhog day remember? I was talking with my good, good, very good friend Lisa yesterday and we were discussing how fun it is to be "domesticated", well I submit to you ladies and gentleman that this is the height; the pinnacle if you will, of domestication. Blue toilet water. With four boys comes lots and lots and LOTS of pee. Pee everywhere, everywhere pee. This stuff was sent to me from the good Lord himself. So come on over, have a cup of coffee, I'll bake you some homemade scones...but before you leave...go pee in the blue toilet water.

Get out the leftover popcorn!

Do you have any leftover popcorn from last week's VP debate? I am all out....(dude Chris...we need a refill!:) We'll be watching with our kids will you?!

Big Breaking Baseball News

Look who got up, dressed and downstairs at 6:30am this morning to watch Sports Center to see if his beloved Boston Red Sox won their playoff series against...errr..that other team they were playing. Guess you can tell by his priceless reaction who won! Lovin life that boy! Go RedSox!

Facebook?

So I started a page on Facebook...mostly to keep up with good friends(Lisa) though I am a little conflicted. I love my blog, I kind of like to think of it as a daily journal that I am going to have bound into a coffee table book at year's end...each year's end...so that I and my kids will have a lasting momento of what this crazy life was like for us day to day. But Facebook? Hmmmm, I haven't had a chance to sit and navigate through it completely so maybe I am missing somethin but I just can't quite get into the vibe of it. Thoughts? Let's take a poll! Hold on, let me see if I can figure out how to insert a poll....standby...

Okay, I figured it out but can't get it to appear in the middle of the post. So take a minute, vote, give me a shout out and let me know!

Apple Dippers McMommy style

Best thing since sliced bread..in my book that'd be replacing McDonald's french fries with apple dippers. We don't go there often but it is nice to do a drive by every now and grab a big, big, very big cup of sweet tea for me and throw some apple dippers at the kids. I can't tell you the last time these boys had a McDonald's french fry...these dippers are way better. So I being the cost concious madre that I am came up with our own version; a little apple, a little carmel sundae syrup. Sugar yes. Artery blocking fats and yucky cholesterol no!

I am actually speechless!

Wow, can you believe I have nothing to say? My camera battery is dead and I have nothing blog worthy to report! I think I have writers block...errr..bloggers block? Yikes, I hope this doesn't last too long. It could be a danger to societal population at large to not have Sonia Martin contributing to this bloggers world on a daily basis...just think of the implications!

Fire's a burnin'

There is some sort of large fire occuring on base....again. On the 16th of August close to 200 unoccupied(praise the Lord) homes burned to the ground in what was the largest AF housing fire in the history of the USAF. Don't know what today's story is but my oh my is it ever smoky out there. Here are some pics of the one on the 16th, it was pretty incredible.

Power Outage

Power went out this morning at around 5am and thanks to our totally awesome government smoke detectors(can you sense the sarcasm here?) they beep incessantly for about 5 minutes whenever the power goes off. Joy. So guess who has been up since 5? Yeppers, every single one of us. Anyhoo, turned out to be a blessing. After 2 trips to the Shoppette for coffee(because even frontiersmen needed coffee!) we settled into the driveway on a beautiful fall morning and guess what? No electricity rocks! We had so much fun playing football, taking training wheels off(more on that later) and riding bikes & reading...it was great! I think we forget how wrapped up we can get in the computer, a new episode of Tom & Jerry, or video games. It was so fun to be an unplugged family for the better part of the day! I think next Saturday I might just have to flip a breaker when no one is looking and claim another power outage! By the way, does anyone know if they sell battery-operated coffee pots? I mean, I'm all for no power but come on, a girls gotta have standards!

Fabulous Fridays

This is my favorite part about Fridays. No Homework. I loathe homework and have strong objections to it! My question is this, why am I giving you my child for 7 hours a day to educate only for you to turn around and give them 1-2 hours of homework to hog the precious couple of hours of family time that we have together every night? It stresses the kid out because they are tired of working all day, it stresses the parents out because we have practices, youth group, dinner,siblings, showers, and family time all that we get to cram into a few hours in the evening! Stop the madness! Whew, now that I got that off my chest time for some Friday fun!

Get out the popcorn!

It should be some good television tonight!

Out of the mouths of babes...2nd edition

Ahhh, Jack. Sweet baby Jack. Rarely do we have melt downs in the morning but when you wake up very tired, and your dog eats your pancakes while you were putting your shoes on, it can throw a 6 year old boy off course a bit. So as the dog is wolfing down the last of his pancakes I calmly suggest that it is going to be okay and that he can have a bannana instead.

Me: It's okay you can have a bannana! (Insert big, enthusisastic, overy excited about a bannana mom voice here)

Jack: I don't WANT a bannana, (insert crying Jack voice here) They are for MONKEYS!

Insert laughter by every one of us, except for Jack, here. Which only served to make the sad child become a mad child because we were all laughing, but it was oh so cute! We love that boy!

Kudos to KUDOS!

John and I decided that these boys cost too much to feed so we enlisted them in the Air Force and sent them off to war. Is that being a bad mother? Took the boys out yesterday to "KUDOS" stands for Kids Understanding Deployments. Wow, what an amazing job those people did putting it all together. It was phenomenal with a capital Phenom! They got to do everything from load up their very heavy mobility bags on the pallet, to drive a tank, took a tour of both a KC-10 and a C-5, confidence courses, first aid station where Jordan got to make his "patient" throw up...thank you Jordan, testing out night vision goggles and on and on and on! The whole point is to walk them through a mock deployment to Base X to see what their daddy goes through when he deploys and at the end there was even a Welcome Home celebration complete with a color guard, and loads of people cheering and waving their welcome home signs. I can't say enough good things! Their official orders were signed by the base commander, Mick E. Mouse(though I am still very offended that Minnie did not invite me to his change of command ceremony) and they now have Top Dog Clearance. They all had a great time and I noticed everyone wore their dog tags to school today....I guess if they get drafted today off of the playground they are at least a little prepared.

Out of the mouths of babes....

I thought I would begin a new segment in bloggyland entitled, "Out of the mouths of babes..." I went with that title rather than something along the lines of, "Cute/Dumb/Ridiculous/Hilarious things my kids say" because that was just too much to say. So here goes, segment one from yesterday afternoon:

Me: Hey beans, I am going to go upstairs and clean the bathrooms, you keep reading and I'll be down in a few minutes.

Justin(aka beans): Yeah mom, you better. I just did a big poop up there and it is MEESSYYY!

Oh, and lest you leave me a comment wondering why we call him beans let me just tell ya. When the twins first started "talking" Jack would call Justin "Nana Beans" we have no idea, NO idea, where he got that from but it was quite cute if I do say so myself. Their conversations would begin with something like this, "Hey nana bean my toy." "No Yack(who can pronounce a J at that age) it my toy!" Ahhh yes, Yack & the Bean stalk, those were the days.

For Ellie

Here you go Ellie, a couple more pictures to tied you over until you can come over and see them!