Lily's Interview - 3 Years Old

1. What is your favorite color: White!

2. What is your favorite number: Thirteen

3. What is your favorite thing to do with Mommy: Paint the toes!

4. What is your favorite thing to do with Daddy: Saddle up (This is what she calls Texas Roadhouse. When someone has a birthday the servers chant "Saddle up! Saddle up!" and Lily loves it.  We actually took her to Texas Roadhouse a few days before her birthday this year so they would chant it for her, and she could ride the saddle.)

5. What is something Mommy always says to you: Mama, saddle up, Oco Dita (Oco Dita is what she calls my parents' dog, Carita. I call Carita, "Loco Carita." so that's where the Oco comes from.)

6. What makes you happy? Cereal, Dita (Dita again being, Carita. For some reason she was thinking about Texas Roadhouse and Carita this morning!)

7. What makes you sad? (Unintelligible babbling while making a sad face.)

8. What makes you laugh? Momma, Oco Dita

9. How old are you? Thirteen

10. How old is Mommy? Three

11. How old is Daddy? One

12. What is your favorite thing to do? Go to the park, go potty

13. Who is your best friend: Addie

14. What do you want to be when you grow up? Bringing the peanuts!  (???)

15. What are you really good at? Momma! Pee pee

16. What are you not very good at? Pee pee

17. What did you do today? Church (No, we didn't go to church today.)

18. What is your favorite food? Cereal, pizzaaaaaa!

19. What is your favorite song? It's A Small World After All

20. What do you want for your birthday? Cupcake

21. What is your favorite animal? Giraffe

22. What is love? Love. Peanut!

23. What does daddy do for work? Peanut com, work

24. Where do you live: In a store

25. Where is your favorite place to go: To the park

Some Days

Some days are really good. I wake up, take a shower, get dressed, wake Lily up and we make oatmeal together. We both sit at the table and talk while we eat.  We help each other clean up and we unload and load the dishwasher together. We do some cleaning around the house, do laundry, and maybe even vacuum.  We'll do a nice wholesome activity, and go for a long walk outside in the sunshine. Lily has a nap, and I relax and catch up on my shows. Lily wakes up and we make dinner together, and everything is ready when daddy comes home, and we have a nice hour together before I have to work.





And some days I don't want to wake up. I roll out of bed, but I don't want to get dressed and take the dogs out, so I wear mismatched pajamas, only so the cops don't get called on me for indecent exposure. I feed Lily a bowl of colorful sugar, and turn the television on. I plop down on the couch, and play on my phone until Lily gets bored and starts bringing toys over to me because I'm not paying any attention to her. I feed Lily lunch of Easy Mac, and then make her take a nap even though she's not tired since we haven't done anything. At some point I text Lance telling him not to expect dinner, and that if he brought something home (usually Little Caesar's) it would be great.





Today is the latter.

Although I did make dinner.



I'm feeling back to my old self again! The old, tired me that was around for 6 months. I wouldn't say I'm depressed, but I definitely have no energy or willpower.  Two days in a row now.

My head feels cloudy, like I've just woken up. Even though I woke up about 9 hours ago.


I feel like a failure of a mother and a person.


I'm pretty tired of not having any friends. I know it's a two way street. So what I should say is that I'm tired of not having the courage to make friends.


I'm pretty homesick for a home that I don't have.


I feel like Lily is missing out on social experiences because she's not in a playgroup, she's not in a pre-school, or a dance class. She doesn't have little cousins nearby she can play with.  It's just me and her. Day in and day out. I feel like a failure because I'm caught between wanting to enroll her in something, but being afraid of the days when I get off work at 4am. How will I get her to a 10am class?  Getting out of the house before 2pm is a challenge, on any given day, let alone the days where I get off work really late.



I'm caught between loving my job and needing the insurance benefits, and not wanting to work and being able to sleep more.  I feel overextended and overwhelmed.


Here's to hoping I get off work at a decent time tonight so I can get the rest I need to stop feeling sorry for myself.

Twitter - Part 2

I was reading old blog post and came across the post I made about my Twitter feed.


It made me smile.  So here are more blurbs from Twitter.

Duck Tales and Friendly Goats

These past couple of weeks have been really great.



Life isn't always peaches and cream, but when I've been in a depressed haze for six(ish) months and suddenly come out of it, I realize how beautiful life is, how beautiful the earth is, and how beautiful my family is!



I have a lot to be grateful for.



I'm finally taking advantage of having the entire day with my beautiful daughter.  She is such a happy, carefree, spunky little girl. She makes little things exciting.



We've been taking our dogs on walks every day. Not just outside around the grass, but actual walks, over to the community pond, and we walk all the way around the pond.  It takes about 20 minutes total.


Yesterday we were out there for an hour, and we both got a little burned.  I got distracted by a couple of ducks.


When we first walked up, I thought one was attacking the other.  One duck had the other by the neck, and was forcing its head under water.  Just when I was about to throw a sea shell at the ducks, the duck broke free and swam away really fast.

The antagonist chased the duck around, and tried to attack again and again.


Then I realized that it was a boy, and he was trying to mate with the other duck, which I assume is female.


I'm a little embarrassed by how long it took me to realize this.


So then I calmed down, and wasn't so worried about the ducks.  Although, clearly this lady duck was NOT interested.  And that boy should have gotten a clue.

If you look closely, you can see one duck biting another in the neck.

 Lily picked me some flowers.

And she asked me to take her picture.

Today we went to Animal Kingdom.  We don't go there very often because there aren't very many rides for small children. My goal was to not go on any rides and just experience the animals.

We were headed towards the "Affection Section" where you can pet goats and stuff, when we saw.... Daisy Duck!

Seriously. My legs though. Why.
They don't match the rest of my body in any way: Color. Shape. Texture. Oh, and I have a huge bruise that I have no idea where it came from. It's actually mostly healed... you should have seen it last week!

Lily got a Wilderness Explorer book where you earn "badges" after completing tasks and finding certain things.

She.loved.it.

Here she is by a giant "shark." (Lily says it's a shark. It's really a fish, but I can't remember the name of it.)

She wanted to take my picture.

Riding the train to Rafiki's Planet Watch.

Brushing a goat.

Brushing another goat.

After having a major meltdown, we had a snack. Cheetos and lemonade. Yum! (I hate Cheetos.)

She was doing a "backyard scavenger hunt." There were pictures of several bugs/creatures/animals in her book, and she had to circle the ones she found. She loved this so much we had to do it twice!
Here she is circling something she found.

Pointing at something she found.

We had a great day.  There was still a ton more non-ride things to do at Animal Kingdom, but you can only get so far in a few hours alone with a toddler.  Next time we will go on jungle treks and see some tigers and gorillas.  Lily loves animals, and having a little booklet makes her even more interested in them.

Lily's Rainbow Party Pictures

Lance took the pictures for Lily's party.

Then he texted them to me, and I saved them on my phone, thinking it would be easy to get them from there to my blog via automatic syncing and whatnot.

WRONG!  There was no automatic syncing of these photos. I had to email them to myself, check my email from a computer (instead of my phone), and save them to my hard drive.

This also greatly reduced the quality of the photos.

I feel like this really shouldn't be that difficult. Ug.






Anyway, the party happened.  Lily loved it.

I felt sorry for myself because we invited 10 kids, and 2 showed up.

I'm grateful for only 2 kids showing up. It made everything easier and faster, and my house wasn't insanely hectic.

However, it reminded me how alone we are out here.



Without further ado...

That drink was THE BOMB!  I was going to make rainbow ice cubes, but after a practice run they didn't really work out. So plan B was to serve lemonade with lime slices and frozen strawberries (yellow, green, red). It looked pretty and the strawberry-lime-lemon flavor was amazing. Super refreshing!

Those balloons were part of the treasure hunt. Lance ended up taking the reins on the treasure hunt, and he decided the kids should get a toy or treat at every clue, to keep it interesting. It worked like a charm!  Inside those balloons were chocolate gold coins.  It was a big hit to be able to pop a balloon at the end!

Here's the food, minus the fruit salad because I'm an idiot.  I forgot about the fruit salad until after everyone had started eating. So, we did serve it, but we didn't get pictures of it.  (It wasn't very pretty anyway.) 

Rainbow veggies!  It looked pretty, but it wasn't very easy to get the veggies you wanted.  We have tomatoes, carrots, yellow bell pepper, cucumber, broccoli, olives, and the cauliflower is supposed to look like clouds.  On the right side is cheese. The idea is to create your own veggie pizza slice.

Super proud of my rainbow jello!  I'm not a jello fan. I suck at making jello. I had to practice this, and my practice run didn't turn out well either.  But these looked and tasted great! And the kids loved them. We have Raspberry, Mango, Melon, Blue Raspberry, and Grape Jello. The picture looks like yellow is there, but there was no yellow. The only yellow Jello was lemon, and I didn't think that sounded good with the other flavors.

Ok, pointless balloons.  I wanted balloons to make a rainbow out of, for the treasure hunt and for decoration.  Then Lance took over the treasure hunt, and then we never really communicated what the balloons were for. So they were just hanging out on the patio.

As soon as Lance brought them in, Lily was really excited and took them into her room, which had the ceiling fan on.  Yup, tangled.  So we had to separate each one. We had a few casualties in the process.

The birthday girl, in her rainbow tutu.

She wanted to sit by herself.

Lily kept asking for more Jello, but all she wanted was the whipped cream.

Cupcake decorating

The girls had lots of fun with this!  Each of them were so different.
Lily ate and decorated at the same time. I think the frosting was gone before she got around to putting sprinkles on.
Addie threw sprinkles all over the place, then asked for more sprinkles. I told her no.  She used what she had leftover and decorated really fast and wanted to just look at her cupcake and carry it around with her.
McKinley slowly decorated her cupcake, and decorated it, and decorated it. I think when she left she still wasn't done decorating it.

This was right before we sang Happy Birthday. We had to hurry because she was eating more than decorating.

I wasn't going to have Lily open presents. I really hate opening presents in front of people. I also was worried about Lily liking one present a lot more than another, and I didn't want anyone's feelings to get hurt. I also didn't want the kids to fight over toys.  Ugh.  But, Addie really wanted Lily to open her present, so...

Lily's face sums it up.

It was a good party. I'd do it all over again. I just wish I knew how many people were going to come so I could have saved time and money (and anxiety)!