more curious sleeping habits

you know how much i love taking pictures of payton sleeping!

like most moms i always check on my babes a few times before i finally go to sleep. they're just so cute. jackson has always been good about sleeping in his own bed. Payton on the other hand, he's a bed hopper. It didn't start until nate was gone. i like to think he started climbing into my bed to comfort me because i was so sad. by the time nate left for "the desert" he'd either climb in bed with me or climb in bed with jackson. 

now that life has returned to some form of normalcy he's still a little wanderer. i'm thinking he's a sleep walker. i was a really big sleep walker when i was little. methinks he inherited some of my crazy sleep habits! i've been known to fall asleep anywhere no matter how uncomfortable the circumstances. oh the stories i could tell.

anyhow, after i did my face washing & teeth brushing last night i came out to the living room to find him like this. he slept in this position for a solid 30 minutes. 

i love it!

duck hunt

the good ol' days

i walked past an old ford bronco the other day. i'm one of those people that glances in the windows real quick. i'm not a thief checking for goods, i'm just a little curious. inside this bronco there was a stack of old cassette tapes and an old school tape deck with a tape sticking out of it. when was the last time you saw cassette tapes in regular every day use? 

it totally made my day.

then it got me reminiscing about the good old days.

i was in heaven when i was in 5th grade and got my very own alarm clock radio with a cassette player. i rode my bike down to IGA and bought some blank cassettes and i was ready to go! fully equipped to record any song that came on the radio. every night i would anxiously wait until 9:00 for the "hot 9 at 9" so i could record all the songs. when a couple friends started getting cd players and few years later i thought "this is never gonna catch on. why would you want a cd when you can record any song you want to a cassette straight from the radio?" but eventually i jumped on the cd bandwagon. before long we were all burning mixes for best friends and boyfriends. i still have bunch of them. remember how long it used to take to burn a cd? i remember spending almost an entire saturday at a friends house making a mix for my boyfriend. it took FOREVER!!!!

i don't feel like i'm old enough to be saying this, but can you believe how things have changed over the years? We didn't have internet in my house until i was a freshman. that was 1998. i had a cell phone senior year that was only capable of making and receiving calls. no texts. no voicemail. nothing. now i have everything at my fingertips with one tiny little device. pretty much everything i need is in my iphone. thus explaining the picture of old cds spread across the floor. they haven't been used in years. i was getting ready to throw them out when the boys found them and starting playing with them. my first reaction was to say "NO, YOU'LL SCRATCH THEM!" but caught myself and let them have their fun.

here's to the good ol' days :)

kiddo lunch

a few weeks ago jackson and i were having a heart-to-heart and broke down crying and told me he couldn't concentrate in school and he felt like the dumbest kid in class. that was shocking for a couple reasons. 

#1 he's not dumb. #2 i had no idea he was struggling.

so of course i instantly started researching everything ADD, homeschool and a bunch of different things to find a solution to the problem. my boy who loves school was all of a sudden telling me he hates school and never wants to go back. 

i talked to his teacher, took him to the doctor to see if he needed to be tested for ADD, then sat down and talked to him again. a couple days had passed and he wasn't so emotional about it so we sat down and talked about it again. it turns out all the things that were bothering him were things that had simple solutions. the biggest thing though was the concentration. since nate is a veteran and is going to school full-time jackson qualified for free school lunch. so i gladly sent him off to school each day not worrying about lunch. come to find out they have two options each day. and from what jackson says he eats nachos every day. he said the other stuff is gross. no wonder he can't concentrate in school. a bowl of cereal in the morning and nachos for lunch? i won't be up for mother-of-the-year this year.

so we stopped having cereal in the morning and i started cooking him a healthy well-rounded breakfast. i also committed to sending him to school with a healthy lunch. it's been a week and there is already a huge difference. he feels better about himself and about school. he's concentrating and finishing his work faster. and he's happier and behaving even better at home. 

Food Matters!!!

banana, celery & all natural peanut butter, cherry tomatoes, cream cheese-cucumber-sprout sandwich on whole grain bread, annie's bunny crackers & mixed nuts, choc covered pretzels, V8.

turkey-cheese-romaine sandwich on whole grain bread, all natural apple-strawberry applesauce, chocolate almond mild, mixed nuts, carrots & ranch, annie's bunny graham crackers, mini babybel cheese wheel.

turkey-sprout-tomato sandwich, apple strawberry applesauce, cheese wheel, vanilla soy milk, annie's crackers and mixed nuts, yellow & orange bell peppers, chocolate covered pretzels.

peanut butter and honey sandwich, apple strawberry applesauce, cheese wheel, vanilla soy milk, mixed nuts, yellow and orange bell peppers, cherry tomatoes.

strawberries, grapes, apple strawberry applesauce, V8, annie's crackers, peanut butter and honey sandwich, cashews.

Pride and Prejudice

this little beauty arrived in the mail yesterday. 

i've never had much use for ebay. but i've been giving the boys a room makeover and was looking for some vintage things like globes, maps, books etc. i kept getting outbid on the things until i realized i could keep track of everything on my iphone. even though i have all this technology i'm still not totally up to date on how to use it all.

anyhow.

i ended up going to a local teacher supply store and found a beautiful globe and some world maps for the boys. apparently a ton of other people were looking for vintage globes too and i kept getting out bid at the very last second. please excuse my language when i say that's pretty douchey. but it is an auction so i guess it makes sense. maybe i'm too polite for the auction world. 

i did win some cool things though. jackson loves reading so i've started a small collection of vintage hardy boys books. 

and i ended up with this beautiful little copy of pride and prejudice. i wasn't even looking for it. i just happened upon it late one night. i was laying in bed in a haze. i don't know what i typed in to my phone, but before i knew what was happening i was bidding on that thing and watching it like a hawk for the next three days because i was determined not to get outbid for this little thing. 

i have many books on my bookshelf and all of them are possessions of great worth to me, but this one tops them all right now. i love jane austen. i especially love pride and prejudice. and i love vintage finds.

life lately

i don't think my life is interesting enough to give a descriptive log of what we're up to, so we'll let the pictures do the talking.

jazz hands

my sister has three handsome little boys, but in may that all changes. jackie is having a girl! so obviously i wanted to make her a quilt. i asked her pick the colors that she wanted for the quilt and i'd pick the perfect fabrics. i think she was trying to keep me from spending too much money on the quilt so she just asked me to make a quilt with fabric i already had stashed in my collection. I don't make a lot of stash busting quilts so I took this as a challenge and said, "Oh I'll make you a scrap quilt. I'll make a scrap quilt that will blow your freaking mind-hole!"

So here's where we stand with that.....