Mom My Ride

I don't know if this is old or not but I just saw it so I thought I'd share:

Sunday Conversation

Cindy: "Do you want to walk to church today?"

Brent: "Nooo." (thinks it's too hot)

Cindy: "What kind of example are we setting for our children? That when you grow up you...drive everywhere?"

Brent: "When I was a kid we drove to church every Sunday. Now we walk when the weather is nice."

Cindy: "What qualifies as nice weather? Between 75 and 85 degrees? That only adds up to about a dozen days a year!"

Brent: "And only two of them are on Sunday." (laughs)

School Supplies!

I was starting to feel anxious about going back to school next month. But then I realized, I get to shop for my own school supplies this year. It helps, a little. Brent suggested I get a Trapper Keeper, however, they didn't have them at Wal Mart and I'd need the nerdy 1980s variety anyway.

Kids Are Useful

Isabella made dinner

How Many Have You Read?

I saw this on another blog:

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice -
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -
6 The Bible-
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll-
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne-
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood-
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen-
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens-
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez-
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck-
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville-
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt –
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

I've read 15. Some I haven't (or rather never) finished, however. I'm sure many of you could do much better than I did. I love books but I don't completely love reading. I wish I did. Get bored and distracted too easily. I was surprised at some of the books on the list. "The Da Vinci Code" was entertaining but I wouldn't call it great literature or anything (just my opinion). I was surprised "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night" was on the list. That was an obscure book I found for book group a couple of years ago, trying to find something different. Maybe it's not as obscure as I thought. We didn't end up reading it because there was a little too much "language" in it. Ended up reading "The Memory Keeper's Daughter", which was a good book. I also like to read non fiction too but this is a good list to work on.
The last book I read, a couple of weeks ago, was "The Actor and the Housewife" by Shannon Hale. It's about a housewife who becomes best friends with a famous British actor. Improbable premise, but a fun read. Although it did have some irritating elements to it.

Books I'm currently reading (sort of anyway):
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (I really need to finally read a Jane Austen book.)
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (How controversial could this book be, really? It was written in 1945!)
The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman (Wal-Mart practically controls America, boring book though.)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

What are your thoughts? What would you add to this list? How many have you read? Go ahead, embarrass me!

Anti-Anti-Dentite

Today I took the kids to the dentist. Ending my five year stint as an Anti-Dentite. No cavities! Maybe I'm not a complete failure as a mom. Maybe my dental insurance isn't the world's worst dental insurance. Maybe dentistry isn't a sham after all!

Domestic Bliss

We went away for the 4th of July weekend and stayed in a hotel. Noah, of course, threw up on his sleeping bag. Isabella did too after drinking the big slushy drink and then going swimming and jumping repeatedly into the hotel pool. Luckily, she made it to the bathroom with no mess involved. What's up with my kids and throwing up in hotels anyway? So the sleeping bag has been waiting for me to take it to the laundromat to wash the barfy smell out of it. (The mess was wiped up well enough but the stink remained, of course.) I also needed to get the quilt on our bed washed since it is also too big to put in the washing machine and honestly, I don't recall ever washing it. So I figured, might as well make a day of it so I (and the girls) stripped every bed in the house, loaded up the van, and took off with the kids for the laundromat I had recently noticed next to the Albertsons. I know, I'm goofy, nutty, crazy, whatever you want to call it but I was so excited when I entered that laundromat. It was so clean! And organized! One wall full of nothing but washers and the opposite wall filled with dryers and lots of clean tables to fold things on! Impressive, I tell you. We got there just as a woman was unloading the four super-sized washers and filled them all up plus one smaller washer. While the stuff was washing, the kids each got their summer school workbook page done. The girls got their daily reading done while everything was drying. We had time to walk over to the bank next door too. It all took about 2 1/2 hours rather than the All Day+ project it would have been at home!

1 sleeping bag, 1 blanket, 2 comforters, 4 quilts, a bunch of sheets and pillowcases and shams equals: One Happy Me!

Remember When....

Remember when you became friends with your son's kindergarten teacher and she came over so you could go to the park for lunch with her and all of your kids? Remember when you went to the park and the kids were playing after lunch and your son decided to throw a rock at a tree to try to hit a piece of wood that was stuck in the tree? Remember how his aim was WAY OFF and he hit your friend in the head with the rock and she began to bleed profusely?

Remember that?



*She's okay. Didn't need stitches or anything. Still feel like crap about it though.