Pardon me but I'm trying to have a life here

I am sorry but you know how life goes. School activities , PTA fundraisers, awana , and 3 kids in sports. Oh yeah and I have 1 full time job and 3 part time jobs on top of being a stay at home mom. I just flat out haven't had time to sneeze let alone blog. But I found a cool app for my phone that let's me post on the fly. So I wanted to test it out. So there you go. One day I'll be able to enjoy my time but for now it's full speed ahead.

Save yourself!!! No where is safe!!!!

So you may remember we have had several coyote sightings over the past couple years. I have mentioned it here.

It's not really that big of a deal. We see them, we shoo them away. End of story.

This summer I have been seeing them more and more as I walk early in the mornings when they like to roam. No big deal. Just a part of suburban sprawl living. They were here first so short of my middle class guilt for moving into their home and setting up a Quiznos, there is not a lot I can do about our coexistence but leave them be.

But lately there have been a lot of cats missing and raccoon corpses across in the field that the boys have discovered. So it sort of just is what it is.

Well apparently Bug and his band of warriors (aka his friends) have been watching the local news and noted that the coyotes have made headlines. The coyotes, due to the urban sprawl and lack of food supply have been venturing into neighborhoods and helping themselves to nice snacks we have so nicely been leaving out like pet food and well....pets.
My boys have decided it was up to them to take their neighborhood back in manner of Braveheart.

One of Bug's friends which for anonymity sake I'll call Mikey, is one of the funniest kids to watch. Every group of kids no matter which gender has one kid in the group that gets picked on just for being plain weird. Poor Mikey has few social skills and just is sort of oblivious of the world around him. Usually weird parents spawn weird kids. But not so much the case here. His parents are totally cool and try desperately to get him around other kids in hopes that social skills may rub off on him. But not so much the case with Mikey. He will wander around the neighborhood dreaming about capturing dragons or werewolves and tries in vain to engage the other boys in his obsession with the mythical. The other boys usually openly mock his love of the make believe and he blows it off none the wiser.They are never cruel as I won't allow that kind of behavior, But he is just sort of "that kid" in the group. All the kids like him for his quirks and he does have lots of friends so it's not like he is an outcast or anything. He is the type of kid that will wander into our house when our kids are not even home and try to hang out with us or just use our bathroom because it was closest to him. Even though he lives on the same block.
Rockstar and I secretly have deemed him as either of these stereotypes.

Ralph Wiggum from the Simpsons

Or Butters from South ParkYeah he's "that kid".

He's a good kid, just a little odd but he cracks me up with his antics.

So enough background.

So Mikey comes blasting into our front door a couple days ago out of breath and in a frenzy.

Bug and his friend Skyler ask him "what seems to be the problem?"

He replies "Guys we have a serious problem on our hands!!!!The coyote's food source has run out and we need to protect ourselves and our families from this threat!!!We need to go right now up to your room and develop a plan!!"

Bug and Skyler look at each other and just sort of chuckle.
"Whatever Mikey." They say and go back into the family room where he follows.

"I'm serious this time!!! I saw one out in the field just now!!! He chased me all the way here!! We need to come up with a plan!!" he says nearly out of breath and hopping up and down.

Now mind you, it was 2 in the afternoon. A little unlikely that there were wandering coyotes in broad daylight in the middle of the day.

Bug- "Are you sure it was not just a dog? I doubt there is one out there now."

Mikey- "well it might have been a dog, but this is serious!!! It's up to us!!! "

Bug- "Ok Mikey, just chill the heck out!!! It's not like there is a T-rex waiting to pounce in the bushes!! It's just a dumb old coyote. He's more scared of us than we are of it. It's not like they eat people or anything!"

This is what I imagine was going through Mikey's mind right now...
They all decided that they would talk about their plans to stop the wild coyote and protect their families and civilization after they got their wits about them.

Another viewing of Jurassic park should do the trick to clear their minds.

Of course Mikey spent the majority of the movie in the other room peeking around the corner just in case the dinosaurs jumped through the screen and got him.

It took everything within me not to sneak up behind him and grab him just to watch him jump, but it turns out I'm not completely dead inside that I seek to destroy a child's nerves. I didn't, I just wanted to.

What like it wouldn't cross your mind?

So yeah as of yet, there have been no coyote hunting plans laid out, but I will keep you posted as it unfolds. The drama and excitement as my boys take their neighborhood back from the grips of the vicious man eating coyote.


To be continued......

Summertime awesomeness!!

So since my last gigantic mega post I am now all inspired to get completely caught up on everything and start fresh back into the world of the blogesphere. (it's a word, look it up)
So if you look at the time stamp on this post you'll notice that we are half way through July. A lot has happened already this summer and I have dropped the ball on documenting it. Egad!! How has this happened?Well I'll tell you. I have been busier doing it than I have been documenting it. It happens. So here's what we have done thus far.

The first official week of summer we hitched up the trailer and went camping with 2 other families. Between all of us we had 13 kids total. They had a blast running a muck over here and there. We even had one of the other kids break their arm. Because it's just not a family get away without a major injury.
We had fun though. hanging around the fire, playing volleyball and making smores.

Here are some of the highlights.....Sunshine is decidedly the checker champion of our family. I let her win the first game and then she whipped us all on her own the rest of the weekend. She was pretty tickled with herself.
This is where I spent the better part of my weekend. Our cut throat volleyball game.Then here are some cool pictures Jason got with his phone using hipsomatic. It just puts cool filters on it and makes it look all vintage.We have our cute little vintage trailer.
Then there was the making of the smores.

All in all we had a great time.

Next was the 4th of July.

This year we did it a little different. My mother in law got us all tickets to see the Broadway production of the Lion King that was in town and they happened to fall on the night of the 4th of July.
I have only one word for this production.
AMAZING!!!!

It was an awesome combination of puppetry and stage production. The kids , especially Peanut was mesmerized for 3 hours straight. It was an awesome gift from my mother in law. I have such a deep love for all things Broadway related and it was fun to be able to watch it through my kids eyes and see them get excited for the same reason that I love it.After the performance got out, it was about 9 at night so almost time for fireworks downtown. There was a ton of people pushing their way into the perfect viewing spot. We had parked on the other side of the river to avoid the parking nightmare that was surely to follow on 4th of July downtown. So we made our way across the bridge through the masses with 3 kids in tow. We were able to get out of the crowds a little and find a decent spot to watch them. We were even close enough that we could see the barge that they were shooting them off of in the river. So that was cool. They were going off literally right over head. In fact we were showered with paper and debris from the mortar shells.
Then these next pictures I realize are not the best of quality, but they crack me up and speak a thousand words.
The kids lit off some of their fireworks and were all tickles as they were smoking. Then realized they were probably standing too close and should get out of there and fast. It just sort of cracked me up to see these pictures in sequence.Then last but not least.......Bug at the ripe old age of 9, finally, FINALLY, lost his front tooth. Almost all of his friends have not only lost their teeth, but have a full set of adult teeth. He got his late as a baby, so in turn lost them late too. His dentist was not too concerned. It it rare to do it this late, but it does happen. it doesn't help that he is sort of skeeved out at the thought of pulling out his own teeth so he was not exactly in there moving things along by making them loose. So they literally just need to fall out of his head on their own accord. The prospect of money doesn't even motivate him. He just sort of marches to his own little drummer and you just can't make him do something he isn't ok with. Whatever. We're one step closer now. If only we could work on getting the other one out at the same time so it doesn't look so goofy :)At the rate he's going, he's going to be shaving when his adult teeth come in.

Good Golly Miss Molly!!!!

Good grief it has been a ridiculous amount of time since I updated this blog. It looks like another epic mega post is in order to get you all up to speed in my life.

It has been an insane several months with a lot of twists and turns.

Here's where you left off.......

February......Sunshine's 6th birthday.

She decided that she wanted to do a cupcake decorating party. So we had all her besties over for some sugar fueled sticky fun.

We decorated cupcakes....

Then came the pinata. Which let me just say right now that little girls wielding a bat hopped up on a sugar rush was a sort of ill thought out plan, but we made it work.When it broke ,the girls all screeched and descended on this poor thing like a pack of vultures. It happened so fast I forgot that I was no longer watching dainty little girls but sugared up fiends delighting in the prospect of candy that was surely waiting for them if only they could strike down this paper mache animal on a rope.
Then just to drive fear into the hearts of her enemies, she felt she needed to wear her victim around for a while. Have I mentioned lately how awesomely weird my kids are ? :)Through it all they all had a great time.

Next we move on to Bug's 9th birthday party in April.

He wanted to have a small party at home but take some friends over to the aquatic park for the day. I like a man with a plan. Simple and defined. I can do that.We opened presents. Then off to the water park we went.It's hard to see, but that streak of lightning coming down the slide there is Bug.
Him hitting the water.Then we came on back and had some root beer float cake. By his request of course.
Moving right along, also in April my friend Erin and I trained for and did a half marathon. It was sort of to round out our Biggest loser challenge we were doing for our gym. We walked it, but still that's a 13.1 mile walk. It was tough to say the least. But because we are who we are we felt compelled to not only do it , but do it in a tu-tu. Because really, why wouldn't you?To read more about my race and see more pictures go here to my other blog. Just so as I am not repeating myself.

Ok....so moving right along we are now into May.

My awesome Rockstar husband took on a huge project through his school. On top of being a straight A student he felt he needed to push himself even more and take on a project for NASA. Yes, that NASA. I'd give you the whole story, but he wrote it all out so nicely in his blog that I'll let him give you the whole back story of it. Go check it out over here. It's ok....I'll wait.

What he didn't mention on his blog is that he was interviewed by a couple different publications and made all kinds of news here at home. Here are a couple pictures from his photo shoot.


We are ridiculously proud of what he has done.

Ok now that you are up to speed as to why he was there, I'll just throw out there that I went with him for (a mini vacation) moral support. So while you got to see the inside of the space center in his blog, I'll show you what I saw that weekend.
This is the outside of the space center where Jason spent the majority of his weekend. I just got to drive past it and get some pictures. In fact, I spent a lot of time just driving around and taking in Texas. I had never been and wanted to see what all it had.
I went through downtown Houston. Nice, but about the same as any downtown of any given city.
I drove down to Galveston and played in the warm 82 degree gulf of Mexico. It was almost too warm. Don't get me wrong here, I am in no way complaining, I loved the warm ocean, it was just so odd seeing that I am so used to the frigid Oregon ocean. It was awfully nice though to get in and play.I saw a whole bunch of oil refineries driving around. That's something you don't get to see here.
But here is where I spent the majority of my time away from my life......Either in my hotel room reading a grown up book uninterrupted with no pictures.
Or here..... choking in the crazy Texas humidity.I spent most of my time alternating between the two. It was a fun 4 days away, but I was more than ready to come home when the time came.

Once we got home, we dove head long into baseball season. Bug was playing on the farm division of little league. He had to try out and was placed on a team where he was one of the best players to sort of stack the team. It did wonders for his self esteem. He had a really good year.Moving along to the year end of Sunshine's ballet and her spring recital. They did a big production of the story of Esther. She was an angel. She had a lot of fun and did a great job. She also loved the backstage environment of getting ready with hair and make-up. It was almost alarming to see these little girls (some 3 and 4 years old) tarted up in full stage make up. Here are a few pictures from that.
So here we are almost ready to wrap up our school year (and this incredibly long blog post) but before we do, we need to properly Graduate Sunshine from her kindergarten class. It has been a fun year but the time has come to move up to all day "big kid" classes.
So that pretty much brings you up to speed. I now see the need to keep on top of updating this as I have spent the better part of my day getting this post up and ready to go.
Also, I did notice that this post is very Bug and Sunshine heavy. Peanut was feeling a little left out so here is a cute picture of him just to level the field.