The Handstanding Shark

On Monday JC and I took the boys swimming. I have been having trouble getting Rub to try swimming without his floaties, so I assigned JC the task of getting the kid to swim sans floaties. So JC says to him, "Hey Rub look what I can do?" Then he went under water and stood on his hands. Duh! Why didn't I think of that. The boy lives upside down. So Rub says, "Hey lemme try" to which JC told him he would have to take off his floaties first. So off they came without a second thought and down he went, and came back up with a huge smile on his face. Then JC stepped out toward me in the middle of the pool and said, "Hey Rub, I'm gonna have your momma." This time he hesitated a little, but only until JC was within reach of me then he was off like a little shark. Pushed up right between us and pushed JC away. JC said, "See Rub, you don't need floaties." and that was that.


This is how Rub eats his lunch.


This is how Rub just hangs around.

I took the boys swimming Tuesday. Rub jumped right in and started swimming all around the shallow end of the pool and jumping after the rings. Dub said he wanted to swim with out floaties too, so off they came and off he went like a little fish. They are not by any means strong swimmers yet, but if they fell in I am pretty sure they would be able to swim to the edge. By the end of our swim today I had Rub swimming in the deep end with me. The big boys are trying to get him to dive. He tried a couple of times and might just have it mastered by the end of the summer.

Still Waiting on My Radioactive Super Powers

When I went to Santa Ynez for my Uncle Van's funeral in April I got bit by something on my left shin. Then I got a rash all over the front of my shin. After 8 weeks of itching and misery I finally gave up on the rash clearing up on its own and went to the doctor. I have also had a suspicious looking something on my neck for several weeks so I wanted the Doc to look at it too. He grabbed a pair of forceps and a scalpel and sliced off a nice chunk of the thing on my neck and dropped it into a specimen container.

Next he asked me the story about my leg. Then he lectured me for not coming in sooner. Mentioned antibiotics and that it might have been a tick bite and Lyme's disease blah blah I tuned out at this point because Lyme's disease is like a power switch to my brain, been there, done that and didn't even get a t-shirt for it. Then he stuck me with a needle and pumped my shin full of lidocaine. Then he took the deepest punch biopsy I have ever seen, slapped a band aid on me and gave me hug and told me he would call me with the results in two weeks. Oh and he was sending me to the dermatologist for a full skin cancer work up....tuning out blah blah...Can't hear you...blah blah blah...not listening. Then he said, how's your heart doing? I said, "Great, full of love. I have the best family and friends ever." Then he cocked his head to the side, gave it a shake and put his hands on his hips and said, "SIT!" and proceeded to look up my records from my last cardio visit. After a few Hmms, umms, uh-huhs and tisk tisks he said, "Did you have any pop today?"
I love that he calls it pop, it makes me smile. "Um, well you see I was up at 4 am this morning to go to Fresno and..."
Again, he shakes his head, "how much?"
"Well you see it was a long day and..."
"NO MORE POP!"
"I can't have any dairy and I can't have any 'pop' so where is the joy? All my favorite food groups ripped away."
"You realize 'pop' and chocolate donuts are not food groups right?"
I smile, he knows me so well. I miss working with him. "No, but they should be."
He gives me another hug and tells me to behave, hands me a stack of stickers for the boys and disappears into the next room. I really have the bestest Doc EVER, except that he forgets I bleed like crazy and that band aids give me rashes, or maybe he just figured whats one rash on top of another.
His assistant came in and shook her head at me, I wanna say "WHAT!?" But I don't because I love her and she has gauze and adhesive free wrap in her hands. She takes off my band aids and cleans me up. We have a good laugh at how Doc treats us (his assistants past and present) like his own kids, and we both know how lucky we are to get to have him as our Doc.

I Have A Double Digit Kid

I missed blogging about Vootz on his birthday because I was dealing with more death in my family. So I will catch up now. On April 29 Vootz turned 10! Double Digits Baby!!




I was so excited when I found out I was pregnant with Vootz. I figured I was pregnant and I would eat what ever I craved and I didn't care if I gained a hundred pounds I would lose it. I had always been pretty tall and thin, losing the baby weight would be cake. DUMB! I ate Los Tacos everyday on my way to work because that is what I craved. I ate mexican food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Could not get enough of it. I gained about 60 pounds. I was HUGE!!! I was two weeks over due and miserable. The doctor induced me at 10 pm on the 28th. I went from 0 contractions to WOW! MY BODY IS RIPPING TO SHREDS FROM THE INSIDE OUT!!!! With in five minutes. I went in to the hospital planning on no drugs, no epidural. After five minutes I was begging for drugs. I could not have an epidural because I was not dilated, so they gave me Demerol. I very rarely take even Tylenol, so Demerol knocked me through a loop or two except when a contraction would hit...then it was like they had given me nothing at all. After contracting hard all night at 6am I was still only at a 3. But a 3 was enough to get me an epidural so I was okay with that. After they gave me my epidural I fell asleep for about an hour until my water broke. I called JC ( I had sent him home after they admitted me, so I would not kill him ) I told him my water broke and he needed to come back. At 7:30 I was crossing my legs trying to keep Vootz in until JC showed up. At 8 JC walked through the door. At 8:03 Vootz was born. I pushed twice and told JC to shut up once which he is still mad about to this very day. I asked him what took so long to get there and he said he thought it would be a while so he finished watching Scooby Doo and took a shower.

Vootz weighed 8 pounds 10 ounces. He was quite honestly a pain in the rump. He was impossible to get to sleep, it took hours and as soon as I would lay him down he would wake up. He HATED to be swaddled. The nurses would swaddle him and lay him down and he would scream like a banshee. I would unswaddle him and get him to sleep and the nurses would come back in and wrap him back up and this went on and on until I left.

He adored his Buppa Dude (JC's Dad) and still cries and misses him terribly. He always wanted things "towed up". Anything that could be tied to anything, he wanted to "tow it up". He is very smart when he puts forth the effort, but gets easily frustrated. He loves to read about WWII, baseball and our family history. He can build anything with Legos and yesterday built me a picture frame with a hinged stand. He is a hard worker inside and out. He is very sensitive and compassionate. He has a huge imagination and loves to play outside and build things. He loves music and John Wayne movies. He can tell you anything you want to know about the Titanic. He loves to read himself to sleep, but it usually takes a few hours. He is still impossible to get to sleep. He loves to sleep in. He is a great swimmer and diver. He loves his brothers and takes great care of them. He is very much a homebody. He gets upset at the thought of going anywhere without at least one brother to comfort him.

This year he placed in his classroom science fair and got to move onto the school wide science fair. He made Honor Roll 3 of the 4 quarters and got to have a sleepover with Buzz at Papa's mountain house. He wants to learn to shoot guns and drive. He is not sure what he wants to do when he grows up. I love you Vootzky!

Ps. He might have been switched at birth because the boy has the best tan you have ever seen on a caucasian boy. He also has a TON of super thick blond leg and arm hair. I also pulled a two inch long blond hair from his cheek last week. HEAVEN HELP ME!

Look Who's 8!!

This little ham is 8 years old today!!!

When I was pregnant with Buzz I was very, very sick. I lost weight and was on IV's a lot. I didn't have to wear maternity clothes until I was eight months pregnant. I never had to wear maternity pants with him, just rubber banded my jeans closed. After I lost so much weight in the first six months I gained it all back and then the day I delivered I was only five pounds heavier than when I started. I also took a nasty spill down a flight of cement stairs at my brother in laws apartment while carrying Vootz. My hip gave out and down I went. My doctor made me use a cane for the remainder of my pregnancy. Buzz was 7 pounds 14 ounces. He had really short white hair that stood straight up. That is why he got his nick name. He also had really bad reflux, so his name changed from Buzz to Bulimic Buzz. He was a great baby. He loved his swing, he would fall asleep mid crawl, mid bite, in the bath or whenever, wherever he wanted. He has always been very close with his dad.

Buzz has always been a great student and hates to miss school, even when he is really sick I have to force him to stay home. He makes friends easily. He loves to draw and make up his own books. He loves to play on the computer. He can use the paint program like nobodies business and kicks booty on their games, when one of his brothers or his mom get stuck on a level it's Buzz to the rescue. He is an early riser, no matter what time he went to bed, he will be up with or most times before the sun. He is very sensitive, compassionate, loving and timid. He will cry if you raise your voice at him and easily gets his feelings hurt. He is the first to try to make someone feel better when they are sad or sick. He use to be extremely afraid of dogs, or any animal for that matter and would not even come outside if the neighbors dog was out. He is incredibly funny and has me in stitches most of the day. He wants to be a video game designer and artist when he grows up.

We always celebrate his birthday on the 4th and we always use sparklers as his candles. His birthday this year falls on the day our stake does baptisms, but Buzz didn't want to be baptized on his birthday so we will wait until the 31st of July instead. WE LOVE YOU BUZZ, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Hot Enough To Fry An Egg

It's been HOT here. It has been 104 degrees. Now it gets way hotter than that here, sometimes 115, but what has been so bad about the heat this week is it has also been HUMID! We are a dry heat kind of state. We can handle the heat but when you throw in humidity we have a problem. This week we actually had a day that was 104 with 34% humidity. I thought I might suffocate.

The boys were watching Curious George this morning and George and "The Man in the Yellow Hat" made a sun oven out of a pizza box to cook their lasagna in when the power went out during a heat wave. So the boys came to me and said they wanted to make a lasagna in the sun with a pizza box. It took me a minute but I figured out what they were talking about and thought, hey why not, might as well make use of all that heat outside. Well aside from the fact, we don't have a pizza box or the stuff to make lasagna and it means I will have to go outside, away from the comfort of my A/C. So we went on a hunt for suitable boxes and all the supplies. I of course did not have everything we really should have had, but we made a solar oven out of what we had. It turned out pretty good. We tried to make bread in it, and it would have been good too, except I let it rise first and then it continued to rise too much in the oven and fell. So note to self, omit the second rise. I have been reading about them for a while and would like to have one, a nice one like a Sun Oven, not the cardboard one we made today. A Sun Oven is on my wish list. I think it is awesome to be able to cook in the dead of summer with out heating up my house and will try any method available to achieve a real dinner without turning on my kitchen oven.

I was slicing some of the homemade bread I made in the real oven for dinner tonight and Rub says, "I know mom, just one slice 'cause we gotta save some for our good friends Tizzo and JR."
I said, "Oh, really? Are they coming for a visit?"
He said, "Yup. Gonna come have some bread with us and then dad, and me are gonna play some green 2 with them."
Now I now most of you probably have no clue why this is so funny, so let me enlighten you. Tizzo and JR are friends of JC's. They have never met in person, they play on line video games together on the same team or clan as they are called. Tizzo lives in Arizona and JR lives in Indiana. My kids recognize all of the voices of JC's clan members. Listening to my kids talk about them, if you didn't know better, you would think they were their uncles of something.

Oh Mrs. McKee, I'm So Sorry

Dub conversation...pay attention to the principals name and how Dub says it...

Mom, why do you take me to school all the days?

Because wouldn't you miss your friends and Mrs. Mckee, Miss Hughes and Mr. Sentes if you didn't go to school?

Yes, but Mr. "Sentence" wasn't there today.

He wasn't?

Nope. Mr. "Sentence" had meetings today. So I couldn't be sent to his office today.

Ummm...have you been sent to his office before?

No. But if I was bad today I would have had to talk to Miss Hughes instead of Mr. Sentence.

You aren't bad at school are you?

No. Just sometimes I get in a little trouble.

Really? For what?

Sometimes my mouth forgets to how to be quiet.

Oh. Well let's try to remember how to be quiet from now on ok?

I didn't say me mom. I said my mouth*pointing to his mouth with both hands and over exaggerating the word.*


Sorry Mrs. Mckee, I am afraid you have your hands full.

Odds and Ends and New Things to Come

Yikes it's been awhile. I have been very busy lately. I have totally re-done the boys room to make room for lil Dub to have a real bed. He had a toddler bed that fit nicely at the end of the big boys bunk bed/trundle, but it broke, so he was using a toddler mattress on the floor. The only way to fit them all in their room was going to be to get rid of the bedroom set they had and replace them with two more compact metal framed bunk beds. What they had was a very heavy, bulky, wood bunk bed with trundle. Great furniture from This End Up that I have had and loved since I was a child. I really did not want to get rid of it so this was a big decision for me. Thankfully my mom took it to her house for visits from the grand kids. Yea Mom! I figured while I had the furniture out I should paint and clean the carpets and take down the bent up destroyed blinds and hang some curtains...specifically black out curtains! I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE black out curtains!! I took out everything including the doors and light, and painted, hung new curtains (all by myself I might add, had to use the drill and molly bolts and everything), built a nightstand (again, by myself), built the two new bunk beds (Okay, I didn't do this part my incredible brother in law and sister in law did...THANKS GUYS!), hung a new light...that actually works! (Okay I didn't really do that part either, because it takes a step ladder and deals with electricity both of which I am afraid of...THANKS JC!) Hung the doors back up (also by myself and while I was talking on the phone...I am the multi tasking queen!) So the boys camouflage room is almost finished, just a few more little things to do. They are way excited! I will post pictures as soon as it is ALL complete.

I have also been super busy in the kitchen. So far this summer I have canned strawberry jam, orange marmalade, apricot jam, cherries and chicken.


I have made so many loaves of bread I have lost track. Worked on my dutch oven baking skills.


Baked cookies, cupcakes, muffins, graham crackers, blackberry pies, beef pot pies and cakes. Yesterday I did something I have always wanted to try...I made my own marshmallows! They were mmmm very tasty! I have had several people ask me about the marshmallows and how to make them, so I will tell you....just not today, because I would like to be able to SHOW you how. I am a visual learner so to help all of my visual learning peeps out there I will make more mallows tomorrow and have step by step pictures. I have decided my blog needs a make over, just not sure what I am going to do with it. I do want to add a step by step recipe section I know that much. For today check out this website for some easy, yummy, pancakes using your food storage wheat. Made them for dinner tonight...they were a hit!

I have also been busy with the three big boys outta school and Dub in school. We have been spending a lot of time swimming so I can keep the kids sufficiently tired out. By the way have I told you how much I LOVE black out curtains?? LOVE THEM!! I have been able to put my exhausted kids to bed at 7ish and have them crash out almost immediately because their room is nice and dark, even though it is still very much day light outside. It has also helped keep their room and the hallway where the a/c thermostat is like 10 degrees cooler! Now I just need to get some for my room.

So much more to do this summer...
My sister in law just brought me over a lot more apricots to jam tomorrow.
Going to the temple on Friday with two of my best friends (my mother in law and best friend/PTC VP)
Potatoes and Carrots to can on Saturday
Step by Step Tutorials to work on
Blog over haul
Two boys to teach how to swim
Collect all my recipes written on scraps of papers, napkins, post its ...and put them in the computer and print out a book!
More sewing projects than I will ever accomplish in my lifetime.
My nieces toenails to paint
The rest of the house to paint
Oh the list goes on and on. Right now I will start with making me a s'mores...priorities people, priorities!