40 before I turn 40!

1. Take a cooking class ~Dutch Oven
2. Do a Living Will
3. Lose weight
4. Plant a garden
5. Scrapbook Jillian's (my almost 1 y/o Daughter) first year of life
6. Drink more water
7. Get a passport
8. Take a hot air balloon ride
9. Start exercising regularly
10. Enlarge and frame a Wedding picture
11. Use my Hubby's (DH's= Darling Hubby) Airline passes more frequently
12. Become more organized
13. Have date night with my DH 1 time every 2 weeks
14. Grow my own herbs
15. Learn how to make pot stickers
16. Cook more from scratch ~ no cake mixes, or boxed foods
17. Take a Family trip with my parents
18. Stop cursing in front of my young Daughter
19. Go back on Weight Watcher's
20. Add some color to my walls in my house
21. Be more aware of my posture
22. Utilize the Public Library more
23. Start a Birthday Calendar and send cards
24. See the Grand Canyon
25. Learn to use and be comfortable with a gun
26. Plant a tree
27. Take a day trip with Gwen (my 15 y/o Step-Daughter)
28. Take dancing lessons
29. Set healthy boundaries ~ read Boundaries By Henry Cloud, John Townsend again
30. Do the "Love Dare" with my DH
31. See myself 1/2 as sexy as my DH does
32. Blog again
33. Read more
34. Become debt-free (except my Mortgage)
35. Try not to procrastinate (this one must be really important...had on the list 2 times!)
36. Feel comfortable in my own skin
37. Be the best Mom/Step-Mom I can be (I have a almost 1 y/o daughter, 15 y/o Step- Daughter and a almost 14 y/o Step Son
38. Start making my own cards again
39. Read "Total Money Makeover" again with my DH, listen to his show online and DVD'S
40. Do a budget again

Jillian's first Thanksgiving!

Well this year we all have a lot to be thankful for! 2009 has been a good year! We had Jillian! What a blessing she has been. She is such a happy child and that I am very thankful for. I am also very thankful that everyone is healthy. Dad had some issues with Vertigo, but we think we figured out the problem and working to fix it. We all have had a few bugs go around, but for the most part everyone is good. The other thing I am very thankful for....We don't have to put Jillian in daycare! Bill watches her Mon and Tues....My Mom watches her Wed-Fri. It is a huge help and My Mom does so much more than just watching Jillian! I have to say everybody pitches in and helps out. What more could you want...right?

Thanksgiving was very nice. We had the kids and ate a wonderful Turkey dinner ~with all the fix ins. Jillian even had turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy and a taste of pumpkin pie. The whole time she ate she talked....nom nom nom...mmmmmm It was too cute. The kids Mom came and picked up the kids later, My parents left and Bill, Jillian and I all went down for a nap. We woke up and had pumpkin and chocolate cream pie ~yummy~ I think Jillian enjoyed her first Thanksgiving! I know I did!

Bad Blogger!

I have been a bad blogger lately! I need to be better...will I be? probably not, but I can try!

• This year is supposed to be a really bad...flu (H1N1) season...so I decided to try and nurse Jillian all the way thru it. I am really glad I have nursed this long! I know its not for everyone and I respect that. Some women love it, some women hate it! Well...this all said....Jillian has 8 teeth! Sometimes I wonder what I am thinking...lol Actually it is pretty good so far...she usually only bites me when she is falling asleep.
• Like I said before Jillian has 8 teeth (4 upper 4 lower). She has been a wonderful baby during this. I am quite impressed. Yes she gets whiny, yes she gets fussy and sometimes she can be downright pissy, but for the most part she is happy! I am truly blessed.
• Of course as a (New) Mother I have to broadcast her achievements! What kind of Mother would I be if I didn't?! She has been sitting up for a long time and she tried crawling she preferred backwards tho....really she would walk rather instead. She is standing while holding on to things...she pulls her self up to stand and she also stands for a few seconds without anything. OH...the joys of when she starts walking! I am scared! LOL She drinks from a sippy cup and eats a ton including:cheerios, teething cookies, plums, peaches, carrots, zucchini, chicken, apples...squash, sweet potato and avocado were not her favorites. We are trying new things all them time. I think she will have enough teeth by next month to eat steak! LOL She claps (in a funny way) and loves to dance( just like her Dad and Brother) She has flown to Phoenix and to Portland and is a very good traveler (I am very happy about this!) Hopefully she stays like this. We also drove to Tahoe with her and the kids in the back seat. She did just fine. She plays peek-a-boo and talks a lot....wonder where she gets that from?! A little while back Grandma was talking to her...saying....MAMAMAMA Jillian crinkled up her nose and said DADADADA. She is also developing a ton of funny facial expressions! I just love watching her. She makes me giggle. I am sure there are a ton more things she does, but I can't remember everything. If you have had a child...you understand. Your child takes your memory with em!

Off to Portland ~the meeting of Jillian's future Hubby

Jillian I decided to go up to Portland for a few hours. My Dear friend Katy (from NY) was visiting her sister. This was Jillian's second trip on a plane (the other was Phoenix) and she did great! Plus Daddy has never flown with us either. We will have to go somewhere that he can come :P A second set of hands would be wonderful! I hope that Jillian stays a "good" traveler! Jillian and I flew in on a Saturday about 11:30am. Katy picked us up and went back to her sisters. We ate, and her sisters son...who was 2 months younger than Jillian met and played. The first thing Katy said when we walked in was...Jillian meet your future husband! He was a real cutie! Around 3pm Katy drove us back to the airport to get on our flight home. It was a short trip, but we had a great time. It is always nice spending time with friends. Thank you for inviting us and tell your Sister thank you too!

Halloween

Ok...so Mommy couldn't decide what Jillian would be so she got to be 3 things! LOL She ended up wearing the bumble bee out, but she sure looked cute in the others!

My lil Pumpkin!

Grandma and I had another photo shoot. Here are some of the pics! Isn't she a doll!?

Whose poop is this?

One of my dear friends sent me this and I cried laughing so hard! Be sure to pee before you read!

Whose Poop Is This?
I’ve become a shit archaeologist.
By Margaret Curran

When you mix together three kids and two dogs, you’ve got a recipe for copious amounts of unidentified shit. You’d think by now I could tell who left what shit where, but that’s not the case. Let me give you some examples…I’m attempting to potty train my son Jason. I’ve resorted to letting him run around diaper-less while trying to monitor him, putting him on the potty when he displays ‘defecation behavior’ (the white-knuckled gripping of any sturdy surface while squatting and grunting like a feral monkey). I can tell you from experience that this method of potty training doesn’t work when you’re a single mother. There’s way too much going on to follow a bare-assed baby around the house. Fifteen minutes into my new experiment, I found him in the closet naked from the waist down, pointing to a big pile of crap. He had a terrified look on his face – apparently he was frightened of his own shit. I was forced to ask the obvious question: “Whose poop is this?” Okay, I didn’t really ask, I yelled it at the top of my lungs while Jason clung mightily to my leg. I looked down and realized that the remainder of his clandestine crap was dangling from his ass. That was all the evidence I needed to pin it on him.Not long after my failed potty training experiment, another turd appeared on my dining room floor. This time I knew it wasn’t the baby, as he was properly diapered and enjoying his mid-afternoon nap. “Whose poop is this?” I yelled from the dining room.Based on the stench and consistency I could tell it was recently deposited. I’m skilled at differentiating fresh shit from old, petrified shit. I’ve seen enough loads of crap in various settings that I’ve become a f@#king shit archaeologist. Both of my girls came running into the dining room. Jillian, my six year old daughter, piped in: “I swear to God, Mom, it wasn’t me!”"Well, dear", I thought, "I certainly hope it wasn’t you. You’re f@#king six years old and if you’ve taken to randomly shitting on my dining room floor, we’ve got bigger problems than this here pile of crap."
I saw the puppy skulk by; his tail was suspiciously planted between his hairy little legs. He’s been nothing but a shit machine since the day we took him home. What was I thinking when I brought another living, breathing thing into my house that couldn’t control its own bodily functions?As any good mother would do, I ordered my kids to pick it up. But I should have said "clean it up" because to them, "pick it up" meant just pick up the pile and dump it in the toilet, not wipe the floor underneath the pile. Later on, I happened by the seldom-used upstairs bathroom. The smell coming out of that room was beyond revolting and, being a somewhat responsible mother, I was obligated to make sure there wasn’t a dead body hidden in the linen closet.I discovered I would have preferred the dead body. I peered into the toilet and screamed:“Whose poop is this?” Jason, who had recently taken to mimicking my screaming tirades, repeated my words in his baby talk.“Oohs oop is dis?” At 2 1/2 he still doesn’t speak well. When his speech impediment is coupled with the bad haircut he got from his father’s blind barber, he reminds me of Curious George without the fur.Jillian sheepishly bowed her head and denied the shit was hers. Under a scathing and skilled cross-examination, she finally confessed.“It’s my poop, mom. I didn’t flush it because I was afraid it would clog the toilet and flood the bathroom.” Really? I have two children who have shit-related fears? How peculiar… “Tell me, Jill, exactly when did you deposit this load in the toilet?” “When it came out of my bum.” She answered innocently. “No, Jill, how many days ago did you do this?” “Oh, two. I think. Maybe three.”“You ‘think’? You ‘think’ you took a shit two, maybe three, days ago and didn’t flush it due to flooding concerns? This pile of putrid crap has been floating in this toilet for two full days? And nobody who inhabits this floor of my house has seen it or even thought about straining their grubby little hand by pushing the handle and getting rid of it? That’s a load of crap!”Jill piped up again. “Um, mommy, you shouldn’t say ‘crap’. My teacher says you should use the polite word for poop, which is ‘feeshes’. F@#k your teacher – she’s a shit head. “Jill, it’s pronounced ‘feces’ and I don’t care what your teacher calls it, would it be so hard to flush your own shit down the toilet?” I screamed. Jason stood behind me, in full mimic mode:“Ood it eeee so aard to ush ur on it own da doilet?” he bellowed while wildly flailing his baby arms above his Curious George head. I ignored my monkey baby. Through clenched teeth, I ordered her to flush the toilet. My stomach lurched as I realized that something was missing from that bowl. Something should have been floating alongside the offending blob of shit. But the shit stood alone. There was no toilet paper in there! Not only had she left two-day-old shit in my toilet, she hadn’t even had the decency to wipe her ass when she finished! My kids are pigs! They get it from their father’s side of the gene pool. A few hours later, I noticed a foreign pile of shit in the middle of the kitchen floor. I approached the offending mound, attempting to identify the culprit prior to making any accusations. This was where my archaeological shit training came in handy. “Okay, whose shit is this?” I was done with using the word ‘poop’. This pile of shit had put me over the edge. It was the shit that broke the camel’s back.All three of my kids scrambled to attention at the kitchen door. The girls were trying to cover up their devious smiles. Jason was running at full speed, heading straight for the unfamiliar poo. “Eeewww!” he screeched. “Ooose it is dis?”"Nicely done Jason" I thought. He was finally expanding his vocabulary. See, I am a good mother. I looked over at the girls and they were laughing uncontrollably. Jill ran over to the shit (oh, excuse me, "feeshes") and scooped it up with her bare hand. I flinched in horror as she held it out toward me, as if offering me a cookie.“Mama, it’s fake poop! We tricked you!” I stared at the rubber crap in Jill’s hand and I did the only thing I could do -- I laughed so hard I cried. My girls may have inherited their hygiene habits from their father, but it was then I realized they got my sense of humor.As punishment for freaking out their mother with faux feces, I banished them to the backyard to perform the most dreaded chore in the entire world -- dog doody duty. I even sent the baby out there with them. He was surprisingly talented when it came to finding the dog shit piles. I stood at the kitchen window, smirking to myself and watching proudly as my little guy ran from shit stack to shit stack screaming:“Otay, ooos it is dis?" That’s my little monkey…