phew.

On his way to run some errands with the kids the other day, Spencer decided to swing by a park to let them play for a bit*. Immediately he realized his mistake of stopping in an uber-nice area of town. Looking around, there was a ratio of one kid per parent (with each parent closely following their small charge) and the place was flooded with massive amounts of khakis, tucked-in polos, and loafers.

As he sat around watching his bare-footed, crazy-haired, dirty-faced mowglis run around, he was approached by a mom who asked him incredulously if all three kids were his and if he actually came alone to the park. After he responded in the positive, she asked him how he did it as she had two small boys at home and couldn't even manage to leave the house when she was alone with them. At this time, the mom had a bit of a epiphany. She theoretically wiped her brow, telling Spencer that, "It must be because I have TWO boys, while two of your kids are GIRLS." phew, indeed.

With a chuckle, Spencer just gestured to our girls playing together, saying, "I don't know, that one there, she's a wild one."

So, next time Scarlett's standing on top of Georgia's dresser, chucking things off, or Georgia's painting herself, the house, and every window in sight with mud, I'll think to myself, "It's a darn good thing we have girls." [insert eye roll and dripping sarcasm here]


p.s.-Catch-up post a-comin', I promise.

*Yes, he was alone with all three kids on a Saturday morning, running errands, AND stopping at a park? Where does he keep his cape, right?

post-run cuddle

I snapped these pictures this morning while cuddling with a freshly-woken Scarlett after my morning run. She crawled up onto my lap, insisting "Car-yett is big girl! Car-yett Yif-ett is big girl!" in retaliation to an insult, I'm sure. I was all sweaty and zitty, she was goobery and covered in glitter from a heavy application of lipgloss the night before, but it was such a simple moment that I couldn't help but share.

ps-yes, that is a 3-6 mo binky in her mouth and no, she was not allowed to have it.

my never-ending cycle

I'm not sure exactly why I bother cleaning my house or bathing my kids. I'd like to say you're seeing the worst of it, but really, you're only seeing the parts that allowed me to keep my head enough to take pictures, so realistically less then half of the really bad times. I'd also like to claim that this was spread out over a long period of time. In reality, these have all happened within the last week. You don't eeeven want to begin to imagine the many states my bathroom has been in this week. It's a never ending cycle of dirt, crumbs, and messes. Welcome to my life.

My daughter has a thing for potting soil.

So it begins...

...and ends

The mud mess (especially in their hair) was so horrible that I had to hose them off before bringing them in for showers. Georgia thought it was great fun...Scarlett, not so much. The ironic thing is that they had done the exact same thing the day before. *sigh*

This picture doesn't eeeeven begin to do justice to the blueness of Georgia (I think it was too light in the kitchen for the light blue chalk). She was totally rockin' it Braveheart style.

I had my back turned for 3 minutes, I swear. I turned around to this...someone thought it was a super-great idea [insert dripping sarcasm here] to have a "flour dance."

That brown blob you see on the floor is Ezra. He's literally rolling around in the stuff.

If Ezra looks a little unsure in his "cheese" here, it's because he can see my glowering face staring at him from behind the camera.


We were right in the middle of dinner the other night when Ezra jumped up and said he "had to do something." We were thinkin' along the lines of a potty break. Nope. Turns out he just haaaad to make this to "catch all of his good dreams." I'm sure you can imagine the tape and paper product trail his amateur dream-catcher left behind.


Nobody ever claimed cupcake-making was clean work...
But I like to think that maybe some of this could've been avoided.


I didn't even get a chance to show you Scarlett bathing in the sprinkles. She got some in her eye while aiming for her mouth. I'll be honest...I totally laughed while she whined.
(don't worry grandparents, she blinked it out very quickly, no scratching sensitive eye area occured)

The End.
(well, not really the end of the messes...unfortunately those never seem to go away.)

Monets and Temples and Rednecks, Oh My!

Spencer and I celebrated our 6th anniversary on August 7th. To celebrate, we drove to St. Louis (about 3 1/2 hrs away) to do sealings in the temple there and then spent the rest of the day hanging out like newlyweds (minus the vast amounts of PDA).

A huge thank you to my mom for coming up early and watching the mowglis (she was coming up to help with Ezra's surgery the following Monday).

This was our first trip to the St. Louis temple and we really enjoyed it. It's a lovely temple (as are they all), but after the nearly 9 hour round-trip drive, I can't even wait to get our own in north Kansas City a mere 40 minutes away.

As I was too absent-minded to take a picture in front of the temple, you get these instead. No, I didn't take these, but I wanted to give you a chance to see how lovely the St. Louis temple is. Go here for lots more beautiful photos.



After we got done with the sealings we picked up some lunch and headed over to the St. Louis Art Museum. It was totally Spencer's idea to spend our anniversary wandering around, looking at old paintings...does my husband know me or what? :)

Overall, I was really impressed with the SLAM. First off, it was free. I suppose they kind of have to be since they have the motto, "Dedicated to Art and Free to All" chiseled over the massive front entryway. Inside...*happy sigh*...I was in heaven. Absolute bliss. There were works by Monet, Rembrandt, Manet, Warhol, Lichtenstein, a crazy van Gogh and not so crazy van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, Rothko, Degas, Gauguin, Giacometti, O'Keeffe, Picasso, and just so, so many more.

It was my first time seeing one of Monet's huge Water Lilies pieces in person and it was absolutely awe-inspiring. You know when you look at a piece and you just...get sucked in. All you can see or think of is the colors and the image; you're practically breathing in the piece, drowning in it. Well, that's how it was. I walked away from the SLAM remembering why it was that I spent my entire time in college studying Art History. When I'm around art, I feel as if I simply can't live without it...but this post isn't supposed to be about art, it's supposed to be about my anniversary, so I'll now show you some pictures of my husband to even up the score.

Cute picture of Spencer in front of the museum grounds.

A very little Spencer in front of the very big museum entrance

Whitney in front of the fountains

On the front steps

After we were done with the museum we walked around the grounds a bit. While they were lovely, I'll still take the Kansas City Sculpture Park (attached to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) any day.

On the bridge

Token kissing picture

We went out to dinner at Fitz's, a fun little burger joint that makes and bottles the best root beer (if you've ever been to the previously mentioned Route 66's Pops, I know they for sure sell it).


While I didn't get any pictures of us there, I did, however, snap one of the restaurant across the street. Apparently, it's a Mac 'n' Cheese shop. How funny is that?

This one is for, you Grey Grey.

After dinner, we started the long drive home, just enjoying the silence radiating from the back seat.

I love you, my dear. Thank you for making me happier then I could have ever hoped for.



I normally would end there. However, Spencer would be entirely disappointed if I didn't include the highlight of his evening. Seeing this beauty pull up next to us in the gas station, I'm pretty sure it was obvious to all that we were officially in Redneck Country.

While I didn't notice it at first, Spencer quickly pointed out to me the absurdity of a station wagon pulling a trailer much longer then itself. The coup de grace?...

The fact that the back wheels weren't even touching the ground.

The End.

ya know, like the band.

The other day Spence and I came up with a thought that we couldn't help snickering at...

Want to know what would make us the meanest/funniest parents in the world?


Buying Georgia a Better Than Ezra t-shirt.

ya know, like the band.

Sorry for the mini-hiatus, loyal readers (although looking at my lack of comments on my last post, I'm beginning to wonder just how loyal y'all are...), but there's been a lot going on in our little corner of the world. Ezra got his tonsils and adenoids out on Monday. While the overall recovery is going a bit better then expected, there's still mountains of popsicles to eat and Loratab to force-feed around the clock. I'll be checking back in hopefully sooner rather then later.

Idaho and other random tidbits of life

We got a new computer last week...and we forgot to take off everything before we unplugged the old beast...which means that I don't have any of our more recent pictures, since I oddly downloaded and erased everything off my camera (highly unusual, I know). So, you only get the (very few) pics I took while in Idaho visiting family. I'll have to do a catch-up later.

I've come to realize that I'm not too much of a picture taker. As I watched some of my fellow reunioners (yup, made up word right there) struggle to get their children to pose and smile for pictures or lurk around looking for that Perfect Shot, it occurred to me that I'm just not one of them. I would much rather sit back and enjoy the moment then stress myself out trying to coax my children into a spontaneous photo shoot. Don't get me wrong, I love the pictures I do get, I just find that I rarely exert the effort and stress needed to get absolutely wonderful photos. Then again, I'm lazy like that.

So, these were the two (count 'em: 1...2) pictures I managed to take at the big family picnic, neither of which were particularly good, I might add:


Luckily, I pulled out the camera a bit more often when we managed to squeeze away from my side of things to meet up with Spencer's family in Bountiful (they were nice enough to drive 2+ hours just to spend the day with us).

Thanks Grandma and Grandpa for the dress-ups!

The world is a better place when bubbles are involved

The event of Georgia's day? Throwing grass on Uncle Isaac


Aunt Leslie and Scarlett

Ezra and Grandma

We all fell in love with this cool little shake and burger joint we stumbled across

So there's your Idaho update, folks. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but as I warned earlier, I'm not always much of a picture-taker. Apologies also that the post is a little Scarlett-heavy, however, as Pinkalicious's mommy reminds us, "You get what you get and you don't get upset."

Here's a few other random tidbits of life for y'all...

This afternoon Georgie was playing superheroes. After zooming around for a while fighting fires and conquering evil, she plopped down, cape intact, and informed me that Super Georgia was now going to make rolls. I couldn't help but smile 'cause, you know, "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world."

As a follow-up to my recent exercise post, last week I started to run. I get up at 6:30 in the morning and run for 1.5-2 miles, 3-4 days a week. I was already getting up at 7:00 with the kids most days and I realized that getting up half an hour earlier a few days a week wasn't going kill me. So, I made like Nike and just did it. To be honest, I was really expecting it to go badly. Reeeeally, truly horrible, in fact. You see, my entire life I've abhorred running. H.a.t.e.d. it. The last time I ran even semi-regularly was gym class in 8th grade and it was not a pleasant experience, to say the least. This time, however...not so much. It's odd, it's like my body kinda sorta likes it. It's really been going great, actually. I went out and bought some running shorts the other day to make sure I stick with it ('cause the guilt will get to me otherwise) and I'm really hoping I do, if for nothing else then the stolen Me Time running squeezes in. As for now, in the famous words of Monty Python, "I'm not dead yet."

In response to last week's purse post, I've been asked to provide a picture of the bag I actually did get recently, versus the bags I just dream about. Despite my adulterous day dreams, I really do love my new purse. It's mildly flamboyant and oh-so-me. While it might not make the angels sing, it at least deserves a heartfelt rendition of Stevie Wonder's Isn't She Lovely.

Here's a random thought to end with: Today I found freezer jam in my pantry and a couple of days ago I found melting butter on my entertainment center. I think it's safe to say I'm a little scattered. Three (very) small mowglis will do that to you.