Fire Hydrant

Today we a good day, and it is only 1pm. So far we have walked to the park, played there for 2 hours, then walked home to find a wonderful thing; the fire hydrants were open!

Much more fun than the wading pool full of water.

Grandpa and Joe were out too, so we raced sticks and boats down the street,

Got soaking wet and had the time of our life :) Who know what fun we will find after our nap.

This is a post for family, if you stumble across my bit of 'cyber-inter-intra-net-web' and want to give your input too, you are more than welcome, but mostly I am looking to find out if this trait is inherited or my own singular oddity.
I was doing laundry today and as I was folding all of my husbands underwear and then moved onto mine, I realized that, honestly, 'do these need to be folded?' I guess my mother always folded our underwear and encouraged/demanded that we fold the underwear when we folded laundry (rarely). But really, as Claire would ask, 'Why?'
So if you have any thoughts, do you fold your underwear or just throw it in a drawer? Do you fold your significant other's underwear? Does he think it is strange? Do you know why someone would beging this silly waste of time habit? let me know, I think I am going to try to just throw my underwear in the drawer today and see how it feels. I have yet to leave the kitchen after doing dishes without wiping the counters... Habits are hard to break, especially if they aren't yours to begin with.

*ammendment: I tried just throwing them in, and ended up quazi folding the underwear, what is our obsession with underwear drawers?

Come Visit

Ok since I love my mother and miss her SO much lately, I feel the need to fulfill her every request/demand/dream in the hopes that she will fulfill my dream/request/demand that she come out here immediately. So as requested here are some pictures of our 'new' place. (The BEFORE pictures) There are 5 rooms, you see them all right here.

Bedroom for two Bedroom for mom and dad
Living/dining/playroom Kitchen
Bathroom for the queen The queen herself
(not in the tub from the new place) but how cool that we get to keep the pink tile...

That Belly Dancer has nothing on my Claire

We practice 'tea party' today to enhance our hand/eye coordination. Mostly we just played with water. The weather was so pretty.
In other news, yesterday we signed the contract on our new home. YAY! Pictures to come when we have some after pictures, we don't want to scare you with only the before pictures :) Please do pray because timing is gonna be a little tight. (by tight I mean impossible) But since nothing is impossible for my God we are moving ahead, eating out to celebrate being poor, and folks, we are in escrow!

Iovino's Oscar

So we colored eggs...

We colored eggs, I'm still not sure why. Claire won't remember it and didn't seem any more attached to the real eggs than to the plastic ones. Jimmy, well he doesn't have a coloring egg past so he wouldn't have missed it. But me.. well we did it every year, it's like one of those traditions you want your kids to remember as fondly as you remember it from your childhood... So we colored eggs...

Ready... Set... Color...

After coloring eggs, we decided that we NEEDED to see them again,

And give them a second coat of color

Then we were done.

My Dad the Pirate King

So lately I have been finding out tons of things about my parents that I never knew about them. For example, one friend brought to light that they may have sued a man in FL in the '80's. This sounded absurd to me and turned out to be just that according to my mother, however what are the chances that there was another David Havener out there who met a Brenda and got married? Strange.
Then today I find out the my dad is being held hostage on a lifeboat in Africa... who knew, I mean last time I talked to him his phone was cutting out a lot but still there were no 'argh''s in the background or singing. (pirates always sing)
I found some information as I was investigating the pirates holding my father in this absurd manner; who holds hostages against the US navy and FBI and Coast Guard in a lifeboat? a lifeboat. What kind of sissy navy must we have if they can't take over a lifeboat? Anyway, I'm not worried, these pirates can't be very good, first let me remind you of the lifeboat, then there is this lovely quote:

"A pirate named only as Badow told the Associated Press that a "good number of well-equipped colleagues" were heading to the scene to help the pirates escape. "We are not intending to harm the captain, so that we hope our colleagues would not be harmed as long as they hold him," Badow said."

So many things wrong with this;
1. His name is Badow? That's his pirate name? come on...
2. He is talking to the associated press via satellite phone. I guess pirating has changed since Johnny Depp
3. And his language isn't at all what you would expect from a pirate; 'colleagues' 'not intending to harm him' 'we hope our colleagues won't be harmed'? Where are the 'arghs' and the crass nature?
4. They sound like they don't really want a hostage anyway... no walking the plank (can you put one of those on a lifeboat?), no ..? I dont know... I feel they should be more violent or crass....
I feel jipped. My dad is only gonna be stolen (ok he gave himself up) by pirates once in his life, and it's turning out all wrong.
Thanks a lot Hollywood for my unrealistic views of pirating.

Uh-Oh

So my dad called and he wanted some pictures of Claire and our family to put on a digital picture frame for my Grandmother. Unfortunately, I found that ALL of our 'recent' pictures of Claire look like this...

either that or her bottom half is naked. So I guess today we will have to break out the camera and take some decent shots of Claire when she is clothed. Wish us luck...

MESS!

So, we started potty training this last week... we thought we were doing really good, until I started keeping track of things today. So far today (it's only 4:30) we have been thru:
4 pairs of pants
an entire roll of paper towels (I am open and eager for any other suggestions of what is good to clean pee off of floors/ride-on toys that will not kill every acre of rain forest before we graduate to big girl underwear)
2 sippy cups (don't ask why we are on our third, you don't wanna know what happened to the other two)
4 Advil (for mom)
1 lovey bear
1 baby doll (who really just had to go potty but fell in)
and we are growing dangerously low on patience for accidents that happen less than 4 in. from the potty chair because we can't 'aim' (isn't that supposed to be a boy problem?)

So, that's where 'we' are; thinking 'we' may have bitten off more than 'we' can chew but assuring ourselves that 'we' are more stubborn than her bladder.
She really is doing well... But who would have thought that teaching her to pull down her pants would be the hardest part of potty training?!