Our first cruise

I'm still getting over the cruise.  I've spent the last few days still feeling like I am on a boat.  I didn't take very many pictures because 80 percent of the time I was pretty queasy.  That and I didn't really want to hang on to a camera.

It was a beautiful crisp, cool day when we left the port in Galveston.  

Being that this was our first cruise, I was rather disappointed that we couldn't throw streamers off the boat like the Love Boat.

So the first night I was on a rush and didn't feel the boat rocking and rolling too much.  We had a great time at our first dinner with our friends from church.  I'm so glad that we got a table all to ourselves so we could chat and get to know each other better.  

{look at that decor!  I'm convinced that the designers had a challenge amongst themselves to see how many patterns and colors they could use on one boat!)

Here begins no more pictures because the next morning I absolutely felt the boat rocking and rolling. A lot more than I wanted to.  I was also jumping out of the bed every time I heard a noise thinking that we were going to go down like the Titanic.  So I napped while hubby read and I was refreshed and ready for formal night.  

What a treat that we got to dress up in our fancy new clothes that we had to buy just for the cruise! 

It was a memorable night.  Great food, awesome friends, funny comedians and dancing.  The dancing was my favorite part.

Excursion Day:

Hey, I have a tip for you.  When you are queasy on the big boat you will definitely be queasy on a little catamaran going up and down on very choppy waters taking you to a remote island in the middle of nowhere.  Just a warning.  We ate more than our share of guacamole and met a really cool couple that live in our city.  It was nice to relax and hang with new friends.

The water was the most beautiful shade of blue.

Some other fun friends that greeted us at night.

We finally enjoyed a traditional cruise drink on the last day.  

Why is it that I start to feel relaxed on the last day of any vacation?  Maybe the drink helped.

Until next time!  Maybe.  (-:

Catching up!

Wow!  I am behind.  But with good reason since hubby and I just got back from a sunny beautiful cruise to Cozumel, Mexico!  Before that, there was Halloween and a lot of prep work for my in-laws to stay at our house to watch the kids.  Therefore, bloggin' was put on the back burner.

First up, Halloween.  It was fun but crazy this year.  Last year I picked out a few costumes for them off of Amazon and had them choose.  One click later and I was done.  Not so much this year.

 J-man wanted to be a completely black ninja.  No red, no nothing, so I had to buy all the separate pieces and go to two different Wally worlds for the plastic swords.  I didn't mind since I was putting so much work into Roo's costume.  When will I learn to keep my mouth shut?  I just happened to mention it would be cute for her to be a Fireside girl from Phineas and Ferb.  After many tears and learning that you can't just buy one, I found myself painstakingly making little patches for a Fireside girls sash and searching our town for an orange tank top.  She had the I saw a bear patch, I climbed a mountain patch, and Waterfall patch to represent what she achieved during our Yosemite trip. 

 I love how both costumes turned out and had fun making them!

{she refused to wear the beret so we went with the large red bow instead}

{Fireside girls patch, Waterfall patch, Mommy loves me patch, I'm a star patch}

*********************************************************************************

I can't help it!  I had to post this.

 I'm really surprised that there was not one time that I didn't sing this on the cruise.  

I had been singing it daily.

*********************************************************************************

After getting dressed, we celebrated with a Halloween dinner down at the neighbor's house.  She went all out with eyeballs in the juice and mummy wrapped dogs!

crazy outtake but that's what he looked like going from house to house so quickly!

I'm hoping to get pictures of the cruise up soon but we are in holiday full swing here now.  I have two school Thanksgiving lunches this week on two different days!  Are you ready for the Holidays?!

Happy Halloween!

A corner just for me

I didn't mean to take such a bloggy break.  It just happened.  I have some projects going on but they involve painting and I can't go outside to do it.  My town is getting swarmed by mosquitoes so we have been stuck inside.  They are so bad that we had to run all the way home from school the other day and soccer practices were cancelled.  

Anyway, I did do a little rearranging though.  I'm slowly but surely adding furniture to my empty front room and it makes me very happy.  

 This area of our house is right by the front door in formal living room that we now use as our workout room.  I don't want it to be empty but we still need space to move, jump and lunge around.

I bought the rocker at a local antique store.  This chair is very comfortable even though it doesn't look like it.  The table is a hand me down from my house growing up.  It has moved with us umpteen times and I so glad that I still have it.  I remember dusting this sucker when I was younger and it was a pain to get in between all those grooves!

Here is a closeup of the detail on the chair.  

The lamp was on clearance last year at Target but it took me forever to find and make over a shade.  When I found one, I spray painted it and then hot glued rope around it.  Two hours later and a few burned fingers and I have a new lamp.  But wouldn't you know that I would run out of rope at the VERY last second.

That's OK, I just turn it around and no one can see it!

Books I've read

Let me start out by saying that I'm not much of a reader.  I would love to be but I have a tendency to fall asleep after reading only two pages at night.  Reading two pages a night doesn't get you far in the book world.  So the fact that I have read 4 books since the beginning of the summer is huge for me.   I think because my kids have gotten older, I actually have some time to read.  This coupled with several good book recommendations from awesome bloggers recently has helped in my book reading success.   Since I liked some of them so much, I thought I would share.

The first book of the summer, Bloodroot, was recommended by Edie.  She summed it up by saying that "it gets under your skin".  And it sure as shoot got under mine.  I started it on my getaway vacation with hubby.  I spent more time with the book than hubby.  On the mornings I was supposed to be sleeping in, I woke early and read it for hours.  I won't get into the details, but I will tell you it it's not for the faint of heart.  Of course Edie describes things much better so go here to read more about the book.

I'll only mention that I read The Midwife's Confession because, honestly, I didn't really like it.

Moving on, I finally read The Help.  I didn't even know about it until I watched a 20/20 episode on it.  I should get out more.

I'm glad that I read it.  I saw this performance on So You Think You Can Dance right after I finished reading it and I cried while watching them.  

And finally, I just completed Ellis Island by recommendation of the Sarah of Clover Lane.  (I already found a few more books to put on my list while searching her blog for this link!)  

It was great.  I'm so glad that it didn't end up being a cheesy love story.  I don't do those.  It was a little slow in the middle but I'm glad I hung on because the ending was surprising for me.  

So I'm currently reading In the Company of Others.  

I have been reading all of the Mitford series dating back from my student teaching days 13 years ago!   If you are looking for light, funny but meaningful stories, I highly recommend them.  They are a family favorite. 

I'm hoping to get some more reading done today so I can keep up on my good reading stretch.  I'm home today with the other sick one now!  I like to share books and my kids like to share germs. 

Healthy Hump Day-A crazy weekend recap

Things have been a bit quiet on ye olde blog since it has been crazy around ye olde house.  Here's how our weekend and the next few days played out.  When something goes wrong with my kids I tend to shut down.  It's hard for me to focus on anything else.

Friday:
6:00 pm:  J-man slices the heck out of his heel running around outside and it is bleeding everywhere.
6:30:  stitches or no stitches?
6:45:  Dr. down the street checks it out and says to go to urgent care to be on the safe side.
8:00:  Urgent care does a thorough cleaning and closes it up with steri strips.  It's more of a flap than a deep cut.
9:00:  Kids are asleep and I'm thankful that it was just a cut and nothing worse.

Saturday:
9:00  Roo has a soccer game in the morning and the ball came to her a couple of times so she actually kicked it.
*I don't remember the rest of the day.  But I think it involved some crafts down at the neighbors' house.  See?  Hard to focus.

Sunday:
10:00 am  J-man sits with me at church during worship because of his foot.  Then tells me the whole time that his ears hurt.  I tell him they are just full of gunk and that he's fine.
The rest of the day we do everything to keep him off of his foot.  It's torture, I tell ya. (for all of us)

Monday:
8:00 am:  Send J-man to school but get a work in appt. for the doc for his ears and by now he's coughing.  Since he has asthma, it puts me on alert.  At least she can look at his foot too.
9:45:  See a different doctor than our regular pediatrician.  She doesn't even take the bandage off his foot and says it's fine.  Whatever, I already know that.  She changes his allergy meds to a super duper one I've never heard of that is expensive but says his breathing is fine.
1:00am:  "Mommy, I'm coughing really loud and it hurts."  He sounds like a seal and is freaking out.  I pull out all of the asthma guns and put him in a steamy bathroom.  He sounds better and falls back to sleep while I lay in the guest bed waiting for him to cough again.

Tuesday:
8:00: Roo relishes in her independence to walk down to the neighbor's house that morning by herself while I keep Justin home for observation.
The rest of the day is steamy bathroom visits (more torture) but he's doing better.
8:00pm:  He is sounding worse and has now lost his voice.  I sit with him in the steamy bathroom to monitor his breathing.  Unfortunately, I know what labored breathing looks like in him.  He's not laboring just a horrible cough.
9:00: We do another breathing treatment while I pray.  I put him to bed and sleep in the guest room again.  He coughs throughout the night but never gets up.

Wednesday:
8:00 am:  Home again for observation and he's only missing the 4th grade program that he is playing a xylophone part in anyway.  He's not too sad.
8:30:  I sit down to write a Healthy Hump day post since it's Wednesday.  Wait, what was I writing about anyway?  Focus Kristen, Focus.  Oh yeah, you should take this when you feel like something is attacking you.  It might help!

{click on picture for a link}

Halloween mantel

The kids wanted Halloween decorations and this is as scary as I get!  

I did not want to spend any money so I went to my handy printer once again.  The crow was filled in with a sharpie and then cut out.  The sticks were collected outside of my church the day I was volunteering and spray painted black.  

I love how it turned out but I especially love that I didn't spend any money.  

******Happy Halloween******