My Desperately Important Scarf...

...and Bebe's Birthday.  :)



I own a scarf.  I love that I have a scarf!  I almost never ever need a scarf, but I wanted one, and Christmas morning, my DREAMS came true!  Mitchell bought me the one thing I could not live without when we were at Disneyland this year, and he hid it until Christmas--he even put on the best believable facade ever--being disinterested & annoyed that I would want to make such a frivolous purchase that day.  So I restrained, and he bought it behind my back anyway.  I LOVE HIM!  Don't you love the scarf, too?  It's so beautiful!  I also got the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic for Christmas from Taylor, and I can relate COMPLETELY to the Girl in the Green Scarf.  Sometimes the manikins just speak to you, and sometimes you just really must have that "Desperately Important Scarf".

As for this picture--I love it for another reason, too, besides the fact that I'm sporting my new scarf in it. :)  Heber had a birthday, again.  But this year, more than ever, I just look at him and wonder where the time went.  He's the baby of the family, and as the oldest sister, I used to just cart him around on my hip.  There are 12 years between us, but I have always felt close to my brother, Heber.  He's a great kid!  I used to hug him and tell him I was going to squeeze him forever.  Sometimes you just wish you could!  I've always thought he was adorable & we'd squeeze his chubby little cheeks.  I don't know what happened, but his face isn't round anymore, he's taller than ALL of his siblings and just keeps growing, and at school last year, his coach nicknamed him "Casanova".  Wouldn't those girls just leave him alone?  He's MY baby brother!  : )  He cracks me up, because for New Year's we were shooting off so many fireworks that when my mom asked him what kind of cake he wanted, he decided he wanted a bomb-cake.  My mom with all of her creative cake-making skills once again delivered an original masterpiece, and it was tasty! 

Happy 15th, Mista Hebe!

Funny Conversations

D-Jo:  Remember, there are salt water animals and freshwater animals, and the salt water animals would die in a lake or river, so they have to stay in the ocean.  And the goldfish and other freshwater animals can only live in the lakes because the ocean is too salty.
Tyson:  Let's just mix the sea water and the fresh water together.
D-Jo:  You can't really do that, because then the salty water wouldn't be salty enough for the salt water animals, and the freshwater wouldn't be good enough for those animals and they would both die.
Tyson:  Okay, well then the catfish and the dogfish will just need to stay in the freshwater at Lake Powell.
D-Jo:  Right.  : )


D-Jo: (Reading) Rinoceros are the only animals with horns on their noses.
Tyson:  What about Triceratops?  Triceratops have horns.
D-Jo:  Yeah, but Triceratops are not alive anymore.
Tyson:  YES THEY ARE!
D-Jo:  No they're not, because they're dinosaurs.
Tyson:  Triceratops are alive anymore!
D-Jo:  Really?  Where?
Tyson:  They are alive at the jungle!!!!

Tyson (to me & Mitch):  I love you both more than 3 garbage trucks.
Mitch:  Are they full or empty garbage trucks?
Tyson:  (LONG pause & contemplation)  Full.  Dey are full.  I love you more than 3 FULL garbage trucks!!!

The next day:

Tyson:  Mommy, I love you more than a dead tree.
D-Jo:  Thanks, son, I love you more than a dead tree, too.

The Faith of a Child

My oldest son, Tyson, is only 3, and he already demonstrates faith and gratitude.  Whenever he loses something he loves (like his blanket, or the purple Bob books, or most recently his brand new Hot Wheels motorcycle), we will do everything we can to look for it, and at the point where we're defeated, in pure and simple faith he will say to me, "Mommy, let's just pray to Jesus!"  So we do.  We kneel down by his bed, or in the living room, or by the couch at grandma's, and we will ask for help to find what he's lost.  In every instance we have found what he's lost.  In the case of the little reader books, a friend came over a couple days later and found it in a totally random place that we would have never looked and Tyson immediately said, "Jesus helped us find the purple book!"  It's so sweet!  I remind him to say a prayer of gratitude, and so then we'll kneel down again and tell the Lord, "Thank you for helping us to find _________."

This morning, Tyson was getting in the car with his brother and daddy.  They were going to buy more eggs for a special New Year's breakfast.  I was sitting down to play the piano, and he darted back into the house with excitement to tell me:  "Mom!  Come look!  There's ice on the flowers!  Jesus gave us snow!"  A couple of days ago, there were reports of snow in the valley (which I haven't seen since I was little), and I thought it would be fun if we could see it.  But since it wouldn't stick and was so light in the places it was coming down, I talked myself out of trying to drive to the areas where the clouds were dark to show the boys, because there was no guarantee we would happen to find it.  We sent up a wishful prayer that if it was the Lord's will, that maybe we could get snow over by us, too, and we bundled up and played outside until there were no dark clouds over us anymore. I figured the answer to our prayer was "no", and that was okay.  But here we are, 2 days later, and the ice on the flowers-which really does look like snow reminds my son of the prayer we said, and it makes me cry that he would immediately remember whence the blessings came. 

What a great way to start off the New Year--with another simple prayer answered.  We love the Lord! 

My Sister's Surplus of Make-Up

Surplus  [sur-pluhs, -pluhs]  –noun

1. something that remains above what is used or needed.

2. an amount, quantity, etc., greater than needed.

This is not a farce.  Everything in this tote and including the tote is my baby sister's SURPLUS of make-up!  I even forgot to put in one container of eye-shadow AND the extra powder before I shot the picture, not to mention that there are things underneath what you can see from this topical view, such as more eye-shadow, more mascara, hair-ties, and hair-pins. 

The day after Christmas I was helping her organize some things, and in payment of such service (which was not expected) she de-junked her make-up bag and gave me the extras that she no longer needed.  I will never forget the way Taylor's jaw dropped and eyes widened as he walked by vacuuming and watching her hand me piece after piece of this wonderful treasure. (Let me put this in perspective for you:  she threw away at least half as much as what she gave me, and she kept at least as much if not more than what she gave me.  Never in my life did I imagine that someone would own so much make-up for their own personal use, especially since the amount of make-up I previously owned was maybe about 1/3 as much as she gave me.)  And I am still AMAZED!

She didn't even need to give me a Christmas present this year,

because my new make-up tote will last me MORE THAN A YEAR!

(probably 2 or 3 years) 

Thanks, Jode!  I love you!

Killing Venus Fly Traps...

It's been an interesting day to say the least.  We started out by finding the 17 year old cat we've been caring for took her final rest on our back porch.  We saw Santa, but it took an hour and a half of standing in line, and this afternoon when the neighbor kids left to go home, Tyson got bored & found some spray paint that my very talented husband (who is also making gifts for Christmas) just happened to leave out barely in the reach of our curious and imaginative little Tyson.  When I smelt the aroma of spray paint I RAN outside and this is what I found:

The explanation:  "I had to kill the Venus Fly Traps!"  Only my sweet Tyson would come up with something like that--it's a perfect mixture of 2 of his favorite things:  Planet Earth movies and his own little imaginative, yet "logical" world..  For your viewing pleasure is his demonstration of how a Venus Fly Trap moves.

TRADITION!!! TRA - DI - SHUN!

 Tradition means that the pecking order is still alive and well.......

uh......but in reverse order with the youngest three of our family. 

 Tradition means that come "heck or high-water" you still go because you'll have a cruddy day if you don't...even when it means ditching your extremely ill husband on the couch at home. (Let's give a shout out to Mitch for surviving the flu AND strep while we played in the snow...we left at 6 am and returned at 5pm and he was IN THE SAME PLACE WE'D LEFT HIM.  Quit reading this it makes us look bad, but in our defense, no one knew how sick he was until later.)

 Tradition means that all you have to do is say,

"This is our first annual ______"

and you've got something worth keeping.

 Tradition is repeating your son's comments because he's the funniest person on the planet: 

"Let's make a snow-tomato!"

Tradition means that even though I have 500+ pictures of family on 4-wheelers at the beginning OR end of their Christmas tree hunt, that I take another one just to make sure we capture an "original" kind of moment.  (Surely this picture is slightly different than the other 499 similarly posed photos from previous years.) 

Tradition means that ON SITE you chat about what you're going to name your picture folder this year so that you don't accidentally delete all the photos from "Christmas Tree Hunting" last year.  Should it be Christmas Trees 2010, or 2010 Christmas Trees?

Tradition is 3 generations discovering the LOVE in kicking off the Christmas season the right way:  in the woods, with your family, marching through mud or snow, traipsing through the forest, snowballing grandma's car, having vehicles getting stuck in the snow, bailing others out, hunting for hours to find the PERFECT tree, remembering the trees of Christmas' Past, having freezing fingers, building a fire, eating Thanksgiving left overs, and loving every second. 

This is our TRA-DI-SHUN!!!

Baby Squawk Squawk

We hit a few fun milestones this week with E.J., who has been lovingly nicknamed "Baby Squawk Squawk" by his big brother.  It's so hilarious to me that Tyson made it up and endearingly says it with a squawking tone...I'm pretty sure this nickname is going to stick around a while.  Besides getting a new nickname Emmett has...

1. ...started folding his arms on his own for prayers.  On Monday he saw us praying over dinner and quit playing with the food on his tray, brought his little hands up by his chin and held still for the prayer.  He does it every time, now.  Grandpa T says that he winked at Emmett last week during a prayer and that he understood he was supposed to close his eyes so he covered his little eyes with his own hands.  SO PRECIOUS!
2. Emmett has a favorite book, now.  It happens to be The Napping House.  We read it over and over and over, and he carries it around the house sometimes.  Luckily this favorite book of his is in a board book format, which Tyson has also termed as a book with "fake pages."  Whenever the boys try to read books and look at the pictures Tyson makes sure that Baby Squawk Squawk gets the ones with fake pages and that the books with real pages are safely in his own hands.
3. Yesterday, Emmett brought me a box of muffin mix and wanted me to open it--he thought that because there was a picture of muffins on the front that I would open the package and he would eat it.  Instead he got to help me mix up the muffins.  He had so much fun and wants to help me stir each time I cook now.  He grinned and said cheese on purpose for this picture documenting the first food he made.  SO CUTE!