Child Labor (part I)

Every season has its quintessential symbol - the Christmas tree in winter, the jack-o-lantern in the fall, the blooming flower in the spring, and for me, in the summer, it is lemonade. And not just any lemonade mind you - I mean the real deal - homemade squeezed fresh lemons add the sugar type of lemonade. Even though I love lemonade I don't make it that often because the amount of work you put in far exceeds the sweet reward at the end, until now.

Now I have free labor who will happily squeeze my lemons for me


And whose only payment is to nibble on the leftover rind of the lemons (can't tell you why they like such sour things)

And I get a freshly squeezed pitcher of sweet heaven..... Now this is why you have kids!!

Happy Mother's Day

The sleepless nights
The sleepless mornings
The tantrums
The personal sacrifices
The mind numbing monotony of reading the same book 1,000 times in a row
The sibling bickering
The lack of the pre-kid social life
The fact you will never have your pre-baby figure back

All of these things gripes disappear and you realize that all of it is worth it when your son brings home the handmade mug from school that reads....

"My mommy helps me cook dinner.
I like it when she eats breakfast with us.
My mommy looks pretty when she gets dressed to to go the hockey game.
I like it when my mommy cooks dinner and hugs me.
I love my mommy."

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there (especially mine).

Bouncy Part 100

So I seem to be in a rut of videos of my children bouncing - hopefully this will be the last. Raif took this last week. He was sitting in the chair reading when this happened by and thought it was funny enough to share....

Van Gogh Kind of Day....

A warm, sunny afternoon day. Old packing carboard found in the back of the garage. Finger paints that Mom wants to get rid of. Two precocious children. A recipe for one big giant mess.

Spring Crafts

Springtime has such wonderful crafty things to make but the problem is that no one (including me) wants to stay inside to make them. My kids would much prefer being out among the flowers than making them out of pipe cleaners and tissue paper. But a couple of rainy and cold days over the last couple of weeks have given us at least a little time to use our creative side.


Birdhouses happily adorn our kitchen windows.


I got these little craft pots and butterflies at (where else) Michaels with the grand idea of having the kids fill them with different types of homemade flowers. After the pots were made and butterflies painted we spent a rainy afternoon making flowers. But then the kids decided it would be so much nicer to share their flowers than to put them in a silly old pot so off the flowers went to school to be shared with teachers and my pots and butterflies are pretty lonely. Oh well - their idea was probably better than mine anyway.

Seriously??

OK, either my husband is determined to have my kids in a Cirque show, be Romanian gymnasts or simply enjoys getting me upset (I personally think it is option #3).

Cooking dinner this weekend while the kids were in the bedroom with Daddy and look what I walk into when I announce dinner is on the table....

Anybody got an Ark??

6 1/2 inches of rain yesterday - more to come today (the news just said we got 10 inches and the worst for us hasn't hit yet). In some parts of Nashville they have gotten 15 inches in the past 48 hours. Yep - we are pretty much in a giant lake around here. The roads around our house are pretty much impassable. I-40 and I-24 are flooded as is a large part of downtown Nashville. Except for a couple of soggy patches in our basement we have been spared, luckily - for once I am thankful to live on a hill. The only major flooding we got was to my vegetable garden.

Here is Raif out in it yesterday trying to save my plants. He managed to make a trough and divert it around the garden so hopefully we managed to save most of the veggies.

Not the best picture as it was taken from inside the house but you can sort of see the river of water streaming out of the bottom of the garden.


The gutter at the front of the house. Most of the flowers were submerged at some point yesterday. A couple of my smaller flowers have been completely covered by mulch so I am going to have to try to dig them out if and when the rain ever stops.

The rains lifted and moved a lot of the mulch out of the gardens and onto our walk and front yard.

But at least the kids are having fun - watching the storm from the safety of the front porch.