Merry, Happy, and All That Jazz!

Okay, okay, you can berate and belittle me all ya want to...I'm a busy lady!! I've got limited time here on the computer in the library, so let me make a long story short, for anyone who was wondering:

My husband got a job! w00t!!! He's actually had it for awhile now, and I think that I may have already posted about this in a previous post, but I'll say it again - my husband got a job! w00t!!! That being said (and said again), he's been in Dallas since the beginning of November, and the kids and I moved in temporarily with my mom in Illinois. This ia great because, well, we get to have one last holiday with my family without the stress of travel, plus, we get to spend loads of time with my mom before we move away permanently.

Now this sucks because my children and I are apart from Papa Tango, which makes my heart shrink every little time I think about it, yet it makes it grow as well. The kids area greatly missing Daddy, but have gotten to see him every once in awhile due to flying standby (yay for working for an airline!!). This also bites because I have very little internet access at mom's house. When I say very little, I mean I can access email and facebook from my phone, but not really anything else - hence the serious lack of blog posts recently.

We are still looking for housing in the Dallas area. We'd better get a move on too, because I'm already on leave from work and the whole reason for taking it was to get the family moved and settled. We've got a couple places in mind, one in particular for which I'm waiting for some information to be mailed to me. Pray we can find something sooner rather than later so we can get this show on the road! In other news, I finally made it to the great state of Texas, and all I have to say about that is "YEEHAW!!". The traffic is in desperate need of some serious driving lessons, and some parts of Dallas are more than a little frightening. But the outlying areas are nicer and much less scary. This is a good thing.

So friends, be patient, please. I actually have my own library card now, so if I can sneak away during naps to post any updates, I will. If not, think good, moving thoughts for us and I'll be back in the saddle soon! I hope everyone had a very blessed Christmas, and if you're out and baout on New Years Eve, please be careful and responsible!

Leaving...on a jet plane.

Okay, so I'm not. But I am leaving. Actually, we are leaving as a family. My husband has gotten a job with Southwest Airlines. This is excellent, as it's been a long haul with him being unemployed. The whole time has been trying for us as a family and us as husband and wife, but we're stronger because of it. And let me tell you this - we will never take the simple things for granted again!

This is also scary, as it requires a move from the Midwest...the only place I've known and spent all but two or three years of my life. We will be facing Dallas, Texas, head on come the end of this year. Patrick will be going on ahead of us, and I'll be staying here with the kids to make it through the holidays with my family. Then we'll make the trek down to Dallas to join him at the very end if this year.



What an exciting prospect, no? I've never been to Texas, that I can remember at least. I know this will be difficult. I know that I'm the world's biggest baby when it comes to heat - it makes me cranky and miserable. I also know that I'll be leaving behind my family and friends. I know I'll be a K-State fan in the middle of SMU territory.

However, the longer summer in Texas just means a longer growing season (and they do have air conditioning there, too, so I've heard :P ). And I do have friends that live in the Dallas and surrounding areas, and I've got an aunt, uncle, and cousin that live in a not-too-far away city. And I don't give a hoot about SMU, or the Horns, or TCU. I'm a K-Stater til I die, baby! (Plus, although I'll never, EVER be a Cowboys fan, at least I like Houston!)

So, this is the start of a brand new adventure. I'll admit to having cowboy hats and boots picked out for the kids already.



I will also admit to dreaming of moving right into a house on a couple acres out in the semi-middle of nowhere. I have dreams of a good garden, a T-bar clothes line, and an eventual chicken coop.

Dream house photo courtesy of Connor Homes

These dreams will stay just that for awhile though...it's been 14 months on one {teensy weensy} income, and we'll have to spend a short while recovering from that.

So, fair warning - I may be out of sorts for a little while. We will be busy packing and moving to our temporary home (thanks, Mom!!), then moving and unpacking. I do plan on taking time off from work to get the family settled, the kids school stuff figured out, and all the other little big things that will knock on our door. Oh, and if you live anywhere on the way from Missouri to Texas, keep your eyes peeled and ears open for us between Christmas and New Years!

Spring has Sprung!!

...and yes, so has my belly! I'm 22 weeks pregnant now, and showing like a freaking bowling ball (or at least I feel like there's a bowling ball in there!) So so much has happened since I last blogged, I can't even fathom where to begin.

First, let me share with you the mother...MOTHER, I tell you, of all things chocolate chip. I found this website whilst Stumbling (imagine your surprise), and I think I've visited the site at least once a day since then, just to gaze upon this mound of chocolately, chippy, cookie-y goodness. And although you can order them for shipment, you can also feel free to pay a hefty price tag (uhm, like $65 worth of hefty), and my hips really don't need them that badly. So...as long as I don't absorb any calories from licking my screen (I'm sorry), then I'll be fine. And this website will have a daily visitor from now on.

The NY Levain Cookie

After viewing that website, I felt the need to make a cake (didn't have cookie stuff on hand). But I did, by God, have a cake mix and a couple cans of frosting in my pantry (hey, I'm not completely all natural and homemade...not yet anyway). So I prepare mentally for the task of mixing oil, water, and cake mix, and I open the frosting to help it achieve room tempurature status. Lo and behold, Big Boss Man has struck again. How one man could possibly eat as much frosting as mine does, I'll never know. (Although truth be told, I seem to remember sneaking frosting from my fridge when I was younger...ahem). Anyhoo.

So...now I have less chocolate icing than I originally thought I had, and the only other kind I've got is a white cream cheese frosting (oh, to die for!). BBM, however, doesn't like cream cheese frosting, and threatened to never take the trash out again if I used it on this cake. But I really didn't think we had enough chocolate left over from his frosting OD to ice the cake. So I convinced him to let me sprinkle chocolate chips into the top of the cake batter before baking it, then using the chocolate frosting on top of that. He agreed, although it turns out that I had plenty of chocolate frosting for the cake anyway. That cake has since been eaten.

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And now, on to the baby. Since discovering that our little Junior Mint has girlie parts instead of boy parts, there's been a whirlwind of clothes-cleaning mahem and foolishness going on around here. I first discovered a couple boxes of The Boys' older, smaller clothes, which I promptly washed and have taken to our local resale shop. I've not gotten the results of that outing yet, but I figure it'll give us a little cash, and what they don't take for resale I can either A) yard sale at my mom's ucoming sale, or B) use for beginning sewing expeditions. God only know what will become of those things, but if it comes down to it, I'll practice sewing a straight line on them!

Another thing Little Miss Junior Mint has done is made Mama Bear extraordinarily tired. T.I.R.E.D. I can't seem to sleep enough, and instead of being sort of sleepy at the end of the work day, I'm completely exhausted. I feel like doing nothing but falling into my bed when I walk in the door. I have a doctor's appointment this Thursday, and I'm going to ask them to do some bloodwork, just to make sure levels are as they should be. My mom, God love her, likes to tell me that "I'm not as young as I used to be" (raspberries to you, Mom!!!), and I understand that I'm supposed to be tired. But exhaustion is another animal completely. It's all I can do to cook dinner every night without having to take a break after operating the can opener. And that just ain't right!

Little Miss Junior Mint has decided that she likes to wake up early in the morning, just like The Boys do, and that my bladder makes for the best punching bag of all her surrounding choices. She likes orange juice and milk (thankfully, not mixed together), LaChoy chicken chow mein, and Twix bars. Luckily, she does enjoy other things too, and nothing that I don't usually like. I have had a few of those late night "Oooooooh, does that sound good" cravings, but I've either been shot down by a sleeping Big Boss Man, or kept them to myself to keep from being shot down by a sleeping Big Boss Man.

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Finally, my youngest son surprised us the other day when he came into the house, after a hard day's worth of playing, running around, digging, and other such boy stuff. He walked in, like nobody's business, and proudly held up a bone. Now this was no t-bone from last night's dinner, oh no. And it was no remnant of doggie bone that we sell at The Greens, 2 for $3. This was a huge, very real, very femur-looking BONE. Lookie, I've got pictures to prove it.


See? Ew.


Can I get another "Ew"?


Sorry about the blurriness.




In case you can't tell, that's a normal-sized paper towel that the bone is sitting on, corner to corner...that's how big this bone was. It was real enough to warrant a call to the non-emergency St. Louis County police line. The woman taking my phone call politely listened to the beginning of my story (because, you know, I can't tell someone something without leading up to it with a story), and when I got to the words "dug up bone", she interrupted and asked for my name and address. Let me tell you. A few days prior to this incident, a woman got hit by a car on my street, and I think the officer may have shown up quicker to our house than to that incident. He was a nice guy hailing from Hanover, Mass. He rather quickly decided (after chatting with Little Linebacker for a few minutes about where he'd found the bone, if there were any dug up or "fresh" looking areas near it, or any other bones that he'd left there for later) that this was probably a leg bone of a deer. We spent the rest of his time here small talking about his time in the Marines and where it took him around the world (many places where Big Boss Man had lived as well, so they had plenty to talk about), and how cops are distributed around this area, since we never seem to see any in Pleasant Ghetto unless they're called (and then it takes awhile to get them there). He then got called just around the corner for some unknown reason (dispatcher-speak, I suppose), and left, although he took his time and didn't use sirens when pulling out, so I guess it was muy importante. Methinks he'd much rather have stuck around and reminisced with BBM for awhile.

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And last, but definitely not least, we have the maiden voyage of Artorius Surveillance Drone. We've waited a long time for that moment, as the plane arrived way before our Florida Escape. BBM assembled it, and we finally took it out last night to watch it soar. Of course, we had an audience, albeit a small one consisting of a couple neighbor kids. God knows we couldn't do this with the comfort of just our family members there.



And that's about how that went. Now we didn't just leave it at that though...we obviously had to try it again. So we thought maybe we didn't have enough runway, and made a minor adjustment in takeoff direction, giving us approximately 25 more feet of play room.



And that was that. Obviously we hadn't notice some structural damage suffered in the first attempt, which caused the drone to taxi in one direction only...to the left. After Part Dos of our surveillance drone's flight, or lack thereof, we decided to give up the ghost for the time being. Of course, this had nothing to do with the fact that 2 of the props had been sheared off and 2 of the cowlings had detached. And let's not talk about the fuselage. Let's just thank the sweet Lord above that this was not a manned flight. The drone made its way back to the Hangar, however, and repairs are being made as I type this out. Rest assured, you'll see more of that thing.

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And now...I think I've touched upon all the things, important things, at least, that have happened in the past two weeks. I realize fully that I haven't posted pictures of our Florida Escape. You can sleep easy tonight, knowing that I still have plans for those. They were deleted, however, from the camera before I could get them onto my computer. And sending them from one computer to another proves much more difficult than just uploading them from the camera. Wait patiently, dears, they will come.