Saturday, August 23, 2014

Lulu Bean is FOUR?

I remember when we left Oregon only a year and a half ago and so many of our friends were like, "my goal in life is to get that Lucy to talk to me." 

Most of them wouldn't believe this Lucy we have now. This 4 year old girl we have now, she's like a completely different person. Tony likes to describe her as a walking sitcom. She drops one-liners all the time. She throws out "I am going to give you infinity hugs" like it's going out of style. She's the sweetest thing full of random sayings. When you offer her water, most kids would say gross, but she proclaims, "yes! that's my favorite drink in the whole world!" She is kind and sweet and above all she is grateful. Her only downfall, she has a hard time trying. Sometimes if it's too hard, she will barely try at ALL and just say.... "uhhhhh... it's tooooo hard." Even if you ask her to "please pick up that piece of lint and put it in the trash." It's hilarious. But I suppose it's part of the sitcom charm. 

Just yesterday we were at the splash pad and a friend of mine leans over and says, "you better watch her, she's gonna grow up and be a supermodel." It's funny, I've never even thought of her that way before now. When Tatum was born, everyone always said how pretty she was. I didn't think of Lucy that way. Her crazy Lyle Lovett hair always got in the way. But as she's really starting to grow into herself, she really is a striking little girl. And with such an awesome personality on top of it, that girl is going to move mountains, I just know it. 

Brand new
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 Four
 


Tatum turned 6... I know, I'm behind.

So there's this kid that follows rules. Those even exist? I don't even know what to do with her. She keeps me on my toes, that's for sure. I have to say, having a child that is kind of a little bit opposite of who you are, but in a totally good way, it's sort of good for you. When I want to break the rules, and Tatum is around, I can't. Or she will totally call me out on it. And what are you gonna do? Ummm.. sorry. I know I wasn't supposed to do that. I promise I won't do it again? It's almost like she's the adult sometimes and I'm the child. It's been good for me. I've grown up a lot. At least I know that when the kids are older and I send her with Spencer or Lucy that the truth will ALWAYS reveal itself. I just have to find a way to make sure her siblings don't hate her for it.

I swear, everytime I look at her she seems to have grown 2 more inches. She's helpful and sweet and smart. SO smart. And KIND. When she was 4 we had a talk about what it meant to be beautiful because it was about that time that everyone, people she knew and people she didn't, were telling her how beautiful she was. We were driving home from somewhere, we pulled into the garage, I turned around to talk to her and she looked like she was about to cry. I asked what was wrong and she blurted out, "Mama, I don't think I'm beautiful." Well that just about broke my heart. We went into this huge conversation about what it meant to be beautiful. We talked about exterior beauty and being pretty, which she totally obviously already was, but that being beautiful had more to do with what was inside your heart and how you treated people. Since then, she has blossomed into the sweetest kid. Her last day of Kindergarten, her teacher awarded her with the "Kindness" award and she spent her entire recess yesterday trying to help a friend rekindle a friendship with another friend when she had no reason to and would gain nothing from it.

I'm so proud of Tatum. I think she knew that beautiful girl was inside her. She just had to figure out how to bring her out.

3 weeks
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Monday, August 18, 2014

Honeymooniversary

Little known fact, when Tony & I got married ten years ago, we were broke. Tony was in grad school and I did what any other person with a degree in Art Studio did, I worked at Starbucks. Over the years I took solace in the fact that we would have anniversaries. I knew that we wouldn't always not have money and that one day we could go on a vacation. Well... as the years went by and as the amount of children went up, I started to worry. I wasn't getting any younger and there was a price that baby making was taking on my body. As I hit 30 and my 4th baby came out at 10 pounds, I felt ruined. I spent my 20's pregnant and my youth was gone.

So my sweet sweet husband decided on a whim to whisk me away to Cancun on a weekend for our 10th anniversary the weekend before our kids school started back up. I love that man, but he's not a detail man. We spent a real quick day and a half on the beach in gorgeous Cancun at an all inclusive resort with 9 bars and a million pools... But let's be real, any longer and I would've missed my babies so much I would've been begging him to take me home. But he didn't really take into consideration that a 6am flight home meant a 2:30am wake up time and a 3am checkout of the hotel time... which dominoed into a horrible, horrible day of events that meant we spent 19 hours traveling to get home to our babies. But I'll spare you the awful details of me crying at the airport and the jack & cokes I consumed and just show you the beautiful pictures of our amazing honeymooniversary and tell you that now that I've finally stamped my passport for the very first time, I've decided that we are going to spend the month of June in Mexico every year...


I'm totally in the ocean.
 Fully stocked all inclusive bar.
 Totally chilaxin.
 Best food ever.
 Awesome entertainment.
 I'm in the ocean.
 Check out the dude on the freakin' futuristic overboard thing.
 #honeymooniversary
 Swans
 Tony had to find shade day 2 cuz he totally burninated...
 ...while I still swam.
 Love this pic of us.
 I'm a dork. I really was just trying to get a picture of my feet in the sand but was somewhat intoxicated and couldn't figure out the angle to do it.
 That's totally Brett Favre.
 I want a pool hammock.