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While Cleaning 8 Year Old Boys Room

(Feel free to hum the 12 Days of Christmas while reading)

I FOUND..............


1 Set of Batman Clothes (no sign of Batman!)




Two chewed pieces of GUM







Three plastic bugs




4 Gold Dobloons




5 Bowling Pins




Six Plastic Snakes




Seven Water Baloons




8 Different balls




Nine King Fu Belts




Ten Smelly Shoes




11 Lego Pieces




Twelve Comic Books




Disclaimer: I don't normally clean his room, but he was gone and it was time to purge!! All of the above, with the exception of the gum, survived the purge. I guess I'm hoping Bruce Wayne comes back for his clothes!

I Scream, YOU Scream, we all SCREAM........

We have a Valentine's tradition.

It is the only day of the year that we go here, which makes it an

extra special treat!

What is better than ice cream?

Ice Cream shared with a good friend!

Happy Birthday Ben-Jammin

Yep, it’s true. Eight years ago today I gave birth to this little guy.

We were a little surprised because your due date was Leap Day, instead you came on Valentines Day. Daddy was relieved because he had not done his Valentines shopping yet and he was sure your arrival would make me completely forget that he had nothing for me. He was right, I didn’t care. What a sweet little Valentine you were. We had been calling you Benjamin for months before you were born, so when I said I wanted to name you Valentino, and call you Tino, daddy said NO! That was a good thing because the name Tino just doesn’t seem to suit you and your blonde hair and blue eyes. So Benjamin it was.
We brought you home and started our life as a family of three. You were the sweetest baby in the history of the world. You rarely cried, and when you did, it was only for a purpose. You ate like a champ and slept ALL the time, including through the night by 10 weeks old. You loved people and were completely content being passed around at church and family functions. You were such an easy baby and we thought we must be the perfect parents!
Then you became a toddler. We started calling you Hurricane Ben, because everywhere you went you left a little path of destruction! You loved to empty everything out of the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen and then sit in the drawers; you were also very fond of unrolling the entire roll of toilet paper and shoving it all in the toilet. You figured out how to open the fridge and we would often find you dumping things on the kitchen floor. We quickly learned the meaning of baby-proofing and I think we were the only family in the neighborhood with a lock on their fridge.

But through it all that you were still a very happy little guy and you loved to be around people.
The preschool years were so much fun with you. You learned to talk, and it became a favorite pastime of yours! You started making friends and began demonstrating your keen ability to persuade. It was during these years that mommy and daddy decided that you might grow up to be a lawyer or a politician, but every time I mentioned that you said no, that you wanted to be a Worship Leader. You have always loved music! At preschool you quickly made friends with everyone in your class, you loved being with so many kids.

When you were almost four you became a big brother! What an exciting time that was. You took to being a big brother like a champ and are so good at the job.

You were such a helper to mom; I used to pay you a nickel for each dirty diaper you threw away for me, even the stinky ones!
One of the greatest memories for me was the day you prayed to accept Jesus into your heart. You were five years old, and knew exactly what it meant to have Jesus as your Saviour. It brings me an amazing amount of joy to know that you love God and even more joy when I see you demonstrate that love to your friends.
The school years brought along the excitement of learning to read; another favorite pastime of yours! Once you grasped the concept of reading you began to devour anything that you could get your hands on; from Henry and Mudge to Henry Huggins to Calvin and Hobbes. Oh, and how many nights have I gone into your room thinking you are asleep only to discover that you have snuck your glasses back on to read by the light of your fish tank.
Benjamin, the last eight years have been filled with so much joy! I love the way that you care so deeply for people and love God with all your heart. And even though “all I wanted was chocolate, but I got a smelly, stinky ol’ boy instead”

I wouldn’t trade you, my smelly, stinky ol’ boy, for all the chocolate in the world!
Happy Birthday Buddy!
Love Always, Mom

Check This Out

I stumbled across this today and thought it was such a great idea! Basically it is software that you can use to turn your blog into a real book. Whether you are a blogger who blogs as a way to preserve your family history, or blog as a way to "scrapbook" your life and memories, a crafty blogger, a photo blogger or are just a narcissistic blogger like me you now can "publish" your postings in a pretty reasonably priced hardback or softback book.

Now, who wants a copy of my blog in hardback!?!

Tired and cranky.......

Yep, that's me tonight. Oh yeah, and craving chocolate, which is unusual, because I normally don't favor chocolate (but I do love me some carbs!!). This afternoon, I stood in the grocery store checkout line exercising every ounce of will power I had not to grab at those chocolatey candy bars that were 3 for a buck. I did pick up a couple and look at the calories, and having just come from the gym, I wasn't about to waste my entire workout on one measly candybar, so I resisted. Then I got home, started dinner and sat down for a few minutes of my favorite past time of

blog surfing,

and I found

this.

Hello!! Love those cookies!

So I made them.

(minus the coconut)

Thanks Emily for squashing all my willpower!!

If you have a spare minute, go check out Emily's blog. She is a fun mom and takes amazing pictures that make me want to move to Texas where the sky always seems to be blue!

Somebody call the fire department!

I just found this picture and thought i'd share it with you:

This is my birthday cake last week.

And that wasn't even enough candles.

No wonder I'm tired and cranky!

HTML and me are NOT friends....

Every night this week, I spent hours messing with my blog trying to get the darling header that Shannon created to show up. I could not get it to load through the edit option. I went on Blogger Help, asked questions, Googled answers, swapped e-mails with some Blogger Star named Panther, read blogs about HTML code, and just about gouged my eyes out because it was all greek to me. So last night when I got online I was just about to abort this whole blogging thing in favor of taking up watercolor painting, but I had to make my blog rounds first. Lo and behold I get to Heather's blog and she has a cute new design also. What? Just earlier this week she was asking me if I kenw how to customize her blog. Of course I had to tell her that I had no idea because I am technologically challenged and instead of taking computer classes in school I took extra PE. Well, Heather being the smarty pants that she is, went and figured it out all by herself. I immediately picked up the phone and called her to tell her I loved the design and that I thought she was a genius and would she please help me figure out why I couldn't get mine to work. The genius compliment really helped, she said yes. I e-mailed her my header, login, and password, and within minutes she had my header on my page. Seriously folks, I had spent hours this week failing at the task that took her less than 30 minutes to accomplish. I called her back again and said "how'd ya do that?" Her answer went something like this: "oh you just had a bad HTML header code, so I rewrote it and reloaded the picture". Ummmm, okay.

So once again, thank you to Shannon for the great design and to Heather for being an HTML genius!

Look at my birthday present from my husband!

Yep, you're lookin at it!

It's my new blog design courtesy of

Shannon over at EightCrazy.

Somehow, in between packing to move and taking a

mission trip to serve the people of La Chureca, Nicaraugua

she took the time to design a new template for my blog in my favorite colors!!

Special thanks to Shannon for the awesome design and to my loving husband Dave for the great gift.

I am a happy blogger

(well, I was a happy blogger before. Now I am a HAPPIER blogger.)

We are having technical difficulties applying the header, so please stayed tuned for the finished product!

(That means that you have to check back often!)