Who is that?

It's Carmen.


Carmen decided she wanted to grow out her bangs. Actually, she wanted to cut them off, but I explained that's not how it works. I was sentimental when she wanted a short (bob) cut when she started Kindergarten, but this is a different thing entirely.


I talked to my friend (stylist) Tammy, who suggested doing something short while we waited for the bangs to grow.

We bought a bunch of kinds and colors of headbands, so we're committed now.

I really wanted to have our family picture made (since March, actually), but I'm not sure about styling her hair right now.

Incidentally, this last picture shows her last day with both of her two front teeth! She wobbled them so much, they didn't bleed when they finally came out (the first on Father's day, the second 5 days later). For the record, these are the 5th and 6th teeth she's lost so far (in a year since she lost the first one in the library).

Why I don't go to Tom Thumb

OK, so David told me that if I'd shop at Tom Thumb instead of Albertson's, Target or Walmart, we'd get more miles. And after shopping all spring for a vacation deal, I'd really like to have some miles.

So one day recently we went to Tom Thumb. Carmen & Gabe like to go there because they have child-sized carts that they like to drive around the store, "helping". But I don't like to go there. It's small, the parking lot is a pain, and, worst of all, the carts are all worn-out.



When we got there, I was holding Paloma on my left hip. C&G had their cart (I made them take turns with it), but I could not find one with an intact seat belt for P-Lo (an absolute necessity right now, since she wants to climb and get around). I pulled out cart after cart. Some of them stuck together, you know, so it was hard to do with one arm. A few carts in, we were blocking the whole entrance to the store. I wish I had a picture of that. People who were trying to get in had to make a path through the carts that had broken or missing seats and seat belts.

Several minutes later, a manager came to see if I needed help. I did! We found one, almost all the way at the wall. I think he now knows there is a problem.



We got our groceries, but Paloma was in rare form: wouldn't let go of the bananas (and other things) without shrieking. We did get this photo before we left. I wanted you, my readers, to be able to visualize how many carts I was talking about. I actually think it was more than this, and it covered about twice this amount of space.



We have not been back to Tom Thumb since.

Stacy's visit

My friend Stacy (who moved to Alaska 5 years ago) was in town for a visit last week between Steven's Aggie football camp and Abby's Dallas Cowboys cheerleader camp.

We spent an afternoon at her friend Vicki's house where Stacy got her baby fix:

It was great to have the kids occupied so we could catch up!

We're working on her (and Steven) to move back to Texas, but he really wants to stay for his last two years of high school. He's getting to play varsity quarterback, so I understand why he wants to stay.



Lance has gotten so tall, he'd easily pass for a 14-yr-old, but he just finished 5th grade. Abby just finished 3rd.

Paloma had fun with Vicki's dogs, who followed her around hoping for some food.

Too-soft serve

I took the kids to Jason's Jelly (Gabe no longer calls it that, but I still do) one evening and David was supposed to meet us there if/ when he could so I could go to a meeting at the library. When the kids finished eating, Carmen asked if she could go get ice cream. I said yes. David is usually the one that gets the kids ice cream because it's torture for me to serve it and never be able to eat it, so I'm rarely the one to serve any dairy desserts. However, I make an exception for Cheesecake Factory and Saltgrass Steakhouse cheesecake (maybe once a year). I try to serve the kids the things David can't have. You would think that includes ice cream, but he has a little sometimes if he hasn't hit his 45 carbs for the meal.

Anyway, I was sitting in the booth watching her from across the room, thinking, Man, it's nice to have one kid big enough to help like that. At that point, I saw her coming towards me with a worried look and grabbed her camera out of my purse and shot this:



The ice cream was too soft and falling off the cone. But she made it!

The Lone Rearranger

Paloma's favorite thing to do is read books. Her favorite book is still Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I've even heard her saying the words from it in the middle of the night to herself in her crib.
But her next favorite thing to do besides read books is to spread them all over the place. She likes them to cover the floor. I am not kidding.

Now all of you know I love books, and I have them in every room, but I like them on shelves and in baskets, and believe it or not, ORGANIZED. I like to be able to put my hands on whatever book comes to mind at the appropriate time. And I like to treat them nicely. Apparently I have not passed on these traits to my youngest child yet. But at least she loves books.

She is starting to remind me of Sally, as in When Harry Met Sally. For example, today she said, "I unt a drink of water with ice in it, please." She often asks for Chockat Milk, Mommy Milk, or MACH (her code word for my milk since she was tiny). I'm afraid she might have picked up on another word for that from Stacy when she was here last week, too.

Earlier this week, she was pretending to talk on a cell phone (as usual) and she said, "Gigi is so big!" (This is to be taken as a compliment, since that's what Gigi says to the girls all the time!)

Another funny thing she's been doing lately is naming things she likes to eat or drink, getting us to repeat her, then saying, "Great idea!" as if we've offered those things.

Her curious/ mischevious streak is evident lately:

• We did a 500 piece Looney Toons puzzle the other day--well 499 pieces, because she ran off with some and now one is still missing.
• She has liked to empty containers for a long time and there's no end in sight, I'm afraid.
  
• She is unfortunately STILL interested in my makeup.
• She's become interested in putting things in toilets (we never had to put locks on them with the other two).
• She often takes the flash card adapter out of the computer and runs off with it (pretending it's a cell phone).
• She colored on the (off-white carpeted) stairs with a red crayon. (She LOVES to color & draw just like Carmen did. "I color!")
• She colored on the beige recliner with yellow Sharpie.
  
• Here she is saying "So Big!" so I could show you how she colored her HANDS.

When I was trying to get my classroom ready for summer school, I had to take her with me a couple of times.

While the other two were happy to watch a DVD and play with beanbags, Paloma prefered to take the potted plant Gabe gave me for Mother's day to the back of the classroom, push it off a desk, and spread the potting soil around on the floor.


While I was cleaning that up, she went to my desk where I'd been sorting papers and cleared it off with one swipe of her arm and said, "I cweaning!"

And this is how she reacted when I removed her from that mess.

That is sooo gross. The floor is cleaned only once a year. I'm not kidding. It gets a light sweep every other day during the year, but mopped and waxed only once a year in the summer, and obviously that hasn't happened yet!

When we went to get Carmen's hair cut, she ran from one shelf of styling products to the other taking things off and moving them around. The people in the salon laughed since she was obviously putting on a show. When I finally cleaned up enough behind her and caught her to restrain her, she started screaming.

This morning I handed her two small pieces of trash and asked her to put them in the trash. I laughed later when I found them in Gabe's toy garbage truck.

She also now likes to summarize a meal, for example after Luby's (kids eat free) Wednesday night, she bragged to me in the car:

"Mommy feed me potatoes. Daddy feed me nanas. Daddy feed me stawBERies. Daddy feed me I-keem."

I say bragged because she held out for the fruit & dessert and David gave in. She said all this when I took her to the car so the others could finish.

She is still normally a good eater, but she LOVES breakfast the most. In the mornings, she will eat breakfast with each person separately as they wake up if we let her. She likes to talk about breakfast before she goes to sleep: "Butter Crunch!" Our friend Amy asked her the other day if "Butter Crunch" was her favorite, and she responded, "Cheerios!"

I've been saving this post for weeks because I wanted to put in more pictures, but I'm going to go ahead and publish now and maybe add pics as I find them.

Happy Father's Day, Dad (Hidy)!

Here's my dad in his truck, Ol' Blue. It's a 1952 Chevy that's been in the family since it was new. It spent most of its life as a farm truck, but he's had it in top condition for the last few years. He doesn't baby it, though: it still works great for hauling and delivering!

And that's Millie, his lab, in the cab smiling for the camera. Dad asked me to take this photo for a contest at work of employees and their pets.



While I was there I also got this shot of Allison's new puppy, Ratch.

We went out Saturday night; it's a tradition now to go to Babe's. I'll have to post pics of that later because we took a lot of them.

We're celebrating with Abuelo and David next weekend because of Gabe's party.

The piano has many uses

We always thought it was a good place to play when we were little, too.



"Mom!" "Come in here!" (They're hiding, but can hardly contain the squeals of delight before they knock down the blocks.)

Saturday in the Bookstore

One afternoon when we were running errands, I talked David into letting me go to Barnes & Noble because I had a gift card (thanks, Charis!) that I was itching to use.




My aunt met another (flight attendant) birthmother on a plane who recommended the book Adoption Healing, so I wanted to see if they had it. (They didn't, but boy did I have fun spending that GC anyway! )

I especially loved the "Touch the Art" board book series:





We got a couple of gifts while we were there (for birthdays and Father's day) and the bonus was running into Bobbie Wygant in the parking lot as we left!

David & I both loved Bobbie; we worked with her at KXAS years ago. She is amazing, an inspiration.

Seek and ye shall find

Gabriel has been reading for a long time now, but he is just feeling confident about Seek-n-Finds on restaurant menus. He used to have me find the words and he'd cross them off the list when he found a match, but in this picture he was proud of finding words himself!

Having a Ball

The kids went to soccer camp again this year, but it only lasted 4 days because of Memorial Day.


Carmen won a medal for winning her (3 person team) game on the last day.


The first day, they were dragging and tired. We had a discussion about attitude and the next day, both Gabriel & Carmen won "Hustle Award" ribbons. The third day, however, when I woke Gabriel up, he said, "I don't want to go to soccer anymore!"
(Quite different from Mason's attitude!)


Thankfully, it was moved indoors this year. (Last year, it was blasting hot, but this year it rained all week.) The only bad thing about it being indoors is it's so much harder to get good pictures. There is plexiglass around the field because it's a real indoor soccer venue, so I offered to get shots for next year's brochure when I talked to the coach (my colleague). He liked the idea, so I was able to go on the field and take a few shots.

Paloma did not cooperate, though; she refused to stay on the sidelines and wanted to play with the cones (they looked like hats to her).

I would've had a better picture of Little Miss Conehead, but this little buttinski girl kept taking the cones away from her (even the ones from a stack on the sidelines).




Mason helped try to keep her on the sidelines one day when Mom was getting her haircut. He was very sweet with her. There are more pictures of this here.



Carmen & Gabriel found a "secret passageway" that led from behind the goal up a ramp to the stands. It seemed like they had as much fun on this passageway as they did in the camp.


Miss Priss wanted to get in on all of the action, including the kids' water bottles.

I don't know how much they got out of it, but I'd prefer to start out in the summer for a few days as opposed to a twice-a-week commitment for season play, especially because C & G couldn't be on the same team anymore. Brittney, one of my former yearbook kids who helped coach the camp, offered to coach a team for Carmen if she stays here in the fall, which would be great.

Starting the week of soccer camp, Carmen started asking David daily about going to play soccer in the evenings. We went to school one night to play, but the field was swampy and each time the ball bounced in the grass, it created a splashing explosion of insects .


Carmen wants her daddy to be her coach, but I have trouble imagining how we could fit in one more thing during the school year.

Where is my Easy Button?

I might have mentioned before, David got me an Easy Button to remind me to sometimes, or more often, simplify. If only it were as easy as pusing a button . . .

When I went to get favors for Gabe's party, I first tried Rebecca's, but the kids had to wait in the lobby while Paloma had to stay in the cart. When the employee showed me around, she told me Paloma had to be quiet. So of course, she was not. We didn't stay very long.

I wanted to figure out what I could buy in person before I ordered anything online, but the party date was drawing near, so next I Googled U.S. Toy Company. Mom had told me about it, but I'd never been. So I printed out the directions from Google maps. But once we got to Carollton, we discovered it was no longer there. I also had seen that there was a location in Plano, so I called David and he gave me directions to it. So we ended up being in the car an hour on the way there. I called my cousin Chrys to see if we could arrange lunch or something. It wasn't a good time for them, but it was fun catching up with her on the phone since we usually communicate via blogs.

The kids had fun looking at all of the novelties (junk), but Gabriel had spotted the Thomas train table at the front of the store, so he asked me repeatedly if he could go play there. They got to do that when I was checking out, so he was appeased. My favorite finds were traffic-cone shaped candles, Dr. Seuss stuff and a pretty real-looking and -feeling pair of child-sized handcuffs. Telling David about the trip later, I explained that there was part of an aisle of racing stuff, but it was pretty cleaned out. So David told me, this is race weekend... that explains a lot.

Anyway, since we were already so far north, I asked Chrys how to get to IKEA, and we went and picked up another mattress for the trundle bed (the first one was too thick to fit under the bunkbed). Carmen & Gabe were fine because they got to play at IKEA. I think Paloma slept on both legs of the trip to and from.

So back to the favors. There are so few things that aren't junk. I wanted to find some car-related things besides pencils, stickers and balloons. The Pixar Cars favors are the same ones that were available last year (we already used some of them) and not that great, but still expensive. So I decided to use my Photoshop skills to make a favor I think at least some of the kids will like: personalized license plates. I took a picture of a license plate, took out the numbers, and found a decent font that looks like the letters are raised.

Here's one:

Meg kept the kids for us so we could go out for our anniversary.
We had Indian food and it was really good!
I had Chicken Makhala (?) , which is a very RED, somewhat spicy sauce that had a smell like pancakes with syrup.

Also, we had some yummy appetizers and I ate too much naan, my favorite thing about Indian food.

I'm sorry to say we didn't take a photo of us. : (

Anyway, when we arrived to pick them up, we were surprised to find them watching Cars. They had seen it already in the last day or two and I'd told Carmen it was her turn to pick a movie. So here she is pouting about having to watch Cars again.

But of course Gabe was happy.


And Paloma was having fun as usual looking for buttons and knobs to tamper with.



Thanks again, Megan, and Susan, Joe & Andy for helping out!