sometimes you just take awhile to post stuff...

Just over a year ago I left the most fulfilling and probably the most difficult job I've had so far. My two years of full-time nannying came to an end. When I would think about how it would be to leave I came to two conclusions about how I would deal with it. 1 being that I would totally shut down my emotions and not really feel much at all and 2 that I would become a complete basket-case and melt into a sobbing mess.

Truth be told, I did both. Which is why still a year later I am just now posting this.

When I left their house on my last night all was fine. I said good bye, knowing that I would be back often and the love was still there. But as I drove away I completely melted down. I'm talking gut wrenching sobs to the point where I actually had to pull over because it wasn't safe to drive anymore...

It took me two weeks to get up the courage to go back and say hi... whereupon I was received with a very cold shoulder from little Andy...



I went to his preschool to drop off some pictures I had taken for the teachers and upon seeing me totally ignored me. I figured he needed the space and he would come to be when he was ready... he later told his mom that I hadn't come to see him at all and that I didn't even want to hug him. WOW. Needless to say, that left me in another puddle... I left the school and sobbed my eyes out... the little boy I had grown to love so much and had spent the majority of two years with was totally rejecting me. Can you blame him though? He was just doing to me what he thought I was doing to him...

I returned the next day having made sure his mom told him I was coming to see just him and when he saw me that time gave me an unending hug. The kind where i wasn't sure he would ever let go unless I pried him off. And not that I wanted to, but after about 5 minutes of just sitting there with his legs wrapped around me, we finally set out to play.

Time heals stuff like this and that's why I'm ok to write it all down now... I'm not trying to be a baby, I'm just being honest. Before I left last year, we took pictures of each other to remember that time... the girls are old enough that posterity means a lot to them and I have since felt terrible for not sharing the pictures sooner with them. But now I am :)

















and in other news, something I haven't shared yet I don't believe is that starting monday I get to spend the rest of my summer with these 3 kiddos. Maureen emailed me a few months ago asking for suggestions for summer child care... and as I thought about anyone else watching them another summer I couldn't help but cry. I knew that it had to be me. There will never be another summer like this... and it won't be like last... and most certainly next year will be another one to remember. I'm so excited to start a new adventure and a new chapter in this book of life that I feel is just getting better and better :)

I'm a kid person

Over the years I've logged countless of watching and caring for different kids. People have assumed things of me, saying, "I'll bet you never want kids of your own after watching so many that aren't yours." OR "This is great birth control for you huh?"

I'm going to open it up here and be quite honest about my feelings on this topic. These people to some degree were spot on. For the last 2 and a half years I've been quite certain that I did not want kids for a long while. It's hard enough dealing with someone else's children day after day, and I got to go home at night. I've always felt in my heart that I want to stay home with my kids once I actually have them, so the fact that I would be with them all day AND all night has been very apparent in my mind.

knowing that, the last 2ish years, I've said, yep, you're absolutely right. I don't want kids now, and I'm not sure when I will want them. I have always known that when the time was right, God would lay that desire in my heart. But to some degree I worried that caring for so many other people's kids had tainted my vision of child-rearing and caused me to become bitter towards the process.

I can say in all honesty that over the last 6 months of being "kid free" that I simply cannot imagine living my life void of children. I want them, I need them, but I can wait to have them.

There is so much to be learned from kids. Maybe because I am such an analytic I can take the craziness of life with kids and turn it into some mosaic that looks like art.

Now, you may be thinking at this point that I can only see things this way because I've been kid free for so long now, but it's not true. I've been taking care of 2 little ones the last few weeks and I can say in all sincerity that watching them has made me realize all of this. It's given me the opportunity to remember the good times, the bad times and all the cool stuff that happens in between. Even when I'm all done having my own babies, I hope and pray that God will bring children across my path because the world is just a brighter place with new life running through it.

Now go peel your kid off your screaming toddler.

cookie cookie cookie

Two years ago Melissa and I made the cutest Valentine's Day cookies... and ever since then I've fantasized about doing it again. There are a lot of things I am motivated to do with the idea that I get to take pictures of it when I'm done... I love taking pictures though. There's something really satisfying for me to make something cool and then take an even cooler {at least in my mind} picture.



I made enough for Melissa and her friend Sheri and I to decorate when they came over during naptime... yep, I'm takin care of kids again. I can't seem to stay away lol. I have another post brewing about that topic...

But before they came over, I let the kids do some decorating of their own. I didn't give Lilly any frosting, really, she didn't need it. She had enough fun just eating it. And when it was gone, she was more than a little vocal about wanting another... heh



This one of the other hand did quite well with the frosting I gave him...



I only gave him red because I figured much like play doh, all colors would get mixed to red eventually anyways... but that didn't stop him from asking for more. I'm selfish though, I wanted the pink and white for mine!



So then later on when Sheri and Melissa came over we had a blast decorating the rest.





And then cookie monster {aka me} ate them.

These cookies were from a new recipe I tried and I really really liked it, so here it is.

Sour Cream Cookies {makes about 5 dozen cookies}

For cookies:
1/2 cup softened butter
1 1/2 cup sugar {I used raw and it turned out great!}
2 eggs
1 tsp almond extract
3 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sour cream

Mix butter and sugar well, add eggs and almond extract. Blend until smooth. Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, sour cream and salt. Mix until blended and dough forms a ball. If dough is too loose, add flour. Cover and refrigerate a few hours.

On a well-floured surface, roll out and cut shapes with cookie cutters. Bake at 425 degrees 4-6 minutes. Cool on wire rack before icing.

For frosting:
1/2 cup softened butter
1 lb powdered sugar
2 tsp almond extract
4 Tbsp milk
1/4 tsp salt
food coloring

Mix together and blend until smooth. Use sandwich size ziploc baggies and put about 1/2 cup frosting into corner of bag and cut a teeny tiny hole to do detail icing.

These cookies aren't just your average sugar cookie. It's the almond I tell ya. It makes them so flavorful!

pools and kiddos... again

A couple months ago, when I finished my job as a nanny, I had every intention of putting pictures of them up and writing some sappy post that would make me cry at just the thought of it. But I never did.

Not that I didn't have the pictures... not that I didn't have the words.

The truth is, I was just too sad about it at the time. And the less time I had to think about it, the better I was.

However, it's been a couple months since then and I'm doing much better. It's so much easier now to look back and remember the good times... and those sad feelings are fading more and more each day.

Last Sunday they all came over to go swimming and we all had so much fun I had them over again today.



When I was little I used to do the jumping into stacked up tubes thing, like Claudia is doing here... and for some reason, although I can't recall the memory explicitly, I feel like I had some sort of head-smacking-on-the-side-of-the-pool-or-deck accident doing that...



Also, in case you ever wondered why photographers don't like to shoot at high noon, let these pictures serve as a classic example. They are blown out and I had to work pretty hard to get them to even look like this. I mean, there's things you can do... but seriously... let's just shoot later on, k?



Tomorrow I'm going to be going down to the name of some valley I can neither pronounce or spell for my big family reunion. Before that though, I have a shoot in honeoye falls! In the morning... when the light is nice :)

it's not over

The traditional Easter baskets sit here filled with candy haunting me... well not really actually. But it sounds dramatic.

Yesterday, all Andy wanted to eat was candy... so after letting him have a couple pieces, I finally said, "ok, that's it. No more candy for awhile. Easter's over."

To which he replies, "no it's not. Why can't we just keep having Easter?"

Well, that ended our conversation about that. Until I got on the computer this morning and began reading Michelle's Easter post. She had linked to the video from my church this past Easter morning and I clicked on it to see the cardboard testimonies at the end.

In the very beginning of the video, Pastor Josh gets up and says his Easter greeting and includes this phrase, "Jesus came to tell us it's not over... the world said it was over, the devil said it was over... but Jesus said, 'It's not over!'"

That's the part that Andy grabbed onto and said, "Easter's not over!" and looks at me like, see i told ya so! now where's that candy...

HAHAHA!

cookie decorating on a snow day

The other day, on the kids snow day I decided that it would be fun to come to my house and make the cut-out cookies. All went well for awhile, as you can see from the below pictures... but it wasn't long before things went south.

This one's for Jim

Unfortunately, for the sake of the process, the actual decorating part went painfully slow. I decorated an entire rabbit family in the amount of time it took them to decorate one cookie. Their cookies were lovely though, but in my family, cookie decorating is serious business. It needs to get done as quickly as possible to maximize eating time potential.

Before the decorating even began though, they got ahold of my video camera and went to town. while i was going through all the footage to edit, I found some less than appropriate mooning, which I kindly cut out. however, i laughed SO HARD when I saw it! (note, if you're watching this from the actual site, you may want to scroll to the bottom and pause the music player :)

snow day

how perfect is it that 3 days before Christmas there would be a snow day? It would actually be even better if it was tomorrow! Then Christmas vacation would start just that much sooner ;)

The house got very quiet, and I wondered what in the world they could be doing so quietly...

So i ventured upstairs to find out...


this is what i found :)

and no, Claudia is not sick contrary to the way it may look. She wanted to "look sick" for the picture. I think she did a pretty good job LOL!

And this was obviously taken with my cell phone haha. I love the ethereal glow coming from the right side of the picture...

Gingerbread houses (take 2)

As I sat down to commemorate this momentous occasion of creativity that has once again occurred with the children, I was very excited to link up to LAST YEAR'S POST about making gingerbreak houses. However, when I went back to that post, I realized that the slideshow I had created had somehow been hacked and now displays pictures of some mamacita and her boytoy on their cruise to timbuktowhoknowswhere.

Therefore, I am not linking to it. But if you care to go back in the archives and find it, you are more than welcome.

But fortunately for you, I have carefully documented the entire process in picture form and am now prepared to share it all. You're on the edge of your seat, I can just feel it!

The pieces displayed for all to see...


thanks to Wegmans! I seriously. love. Wegmans. Seriously, goodness knows I would have loved to be able to make the pieces myself... but that just wasn't happening this year. These are soooo much nicer than what I rigged last year. We did the whole mini milk carton and graham cracker deal last year... and the frosting did NOT work.

I had great plans of taking andy to school and going out to buy ingredients for frosting/mortar and then booking it back to the house whereupon I would assemble 3 gingerbread houses...


however, the best laid plans are all too often laid to rest when preschool teachers have "classroom gingerbread house making" planned already! So I couldn't get to the store and back to the house and then back to pick him up with enough time so I just went to pick him and his carefully constructed house up after picking up the necessary ingredients.


This would be a picture of me not swearing while trying to keep these houses from falling apart...

Gluing these babies together proved to be a much harder task than originally antipated. The sides kept falling over, and I most surely did NOT let any cuss words slip out of my mouth during that time... nope, I didn't.


Let me tell you, last year I only used confec sugar and milk. That DOES NOT WORK. I found a great recipe this time and while it took awhile to dry, it was hard as a rock and PERFECT. It's all thanks to the egg whites and cream of tartar... seriously KEY ingredients. Here is the recipe I used. Leave the milk in the fridge, and do not use it if you want your houses to stick together people!


Once I finally got the houses to stick together, I moved on to organizing the candy. Look how much stinking candy we had! I may or may not have eaten enough to make a fourth gingerbread house...


There's something about the candy in these little ramekins that satisfies some sort of urge to be ocd. It's like all perfect, and untouched... yah, that didn't last for long.


All while I was preparing for this frenzy, I was playing my current favorite playlist off of pandora.com. And this also, my friends, is where the magic happens. I realized I've never taken a picture of my little lappie. I love that the wireless now works and I have a new battery that allows me to take it all over the house and have oh so much fun with it :)


Soon enough, claudia and syd got home from school and Andy got up from his nap and the decorating began.


The frosting had not completely dried, so I instructed them to be very careful while touching and placing things on it...


Unfortunately, being very careful to a 4 year old is not quite as careful as is necessary...

and we ended up with one gingerbread house beginning to fall apart at the seams.

This made for the beginning of a very sad afternoon. I explained that he would need to wait longer for his house to dry before he finished decorating it... but 4 year olds don't really get the whole waiting thing. Attitude ensued. Crying began. Irrational outbursts of emotion overtook the airwaves.

So I asked him what he would like to do that was special instead of decorating right now. And he said he wanted to play "sink or float" This is a game that we got from his preschool a few weeks back and he LOVES it. He would play it pretty much all day if i let him. And it's exactly what you think... you get a whole bunch of stuff from around the house and sort it into two piles predicting which will sink and which will float.

Well, when he was done playing, he decided that the nice warm water would feel really nice on his feet. So he stood in the tub, and then asked for a chair...


He then proceeded to sit there and ask me for various things such as gumdrops, chocolate milk, a backrub... you get the picture. and he did it all with this look on his face. What a little stinkpot!

I realized after I had left for the day that I forgot to take pictures of the finished works, but they were really nice. I would like to say that I'll take pictures tomorrow and then share them... but I just don't think i will! why make empty promises?

We had a lot of fun though, and I am going to miss doing this with them next year... :(

i've had it

Generally, I am a very tolerant person. However, I have gotten to the point recently where I am fed up with picking up little grumble piles everywhere, closing doors and picking up dirty sox.

Therefore, I decided to write out a list. I don't feel like it's fair to expect kids to do things that aren't clearly laid out for them. And though I have said these things many times, sometimes it lasts for awhile and they just need reminders. However, I wrote up a list so that they can refer back to what is acceptable and what is not. This house is going to be a lot cleaner from now on... read more to find out why...

This will be the discussion I have with the 3 of them as soon as they come in from frolicking in the snow. I didn't want to spoil their fun just yet...

When you go in or out shut the door.

If you make food, clean up the mess.

If you are done with a game or craft, put it away.

(is it just me or is this all common sense so far? ... sigh)

Do NOT put your things on the kitchen table or the counters when I tell you to "put them away."

If I ask you to do something and you either don't do it, or don't finish doing it, you will be able to do some super fun cleaning chores.

If I speak to you while you are watching TV and you don't respond appropriately, there will be no more TV that day. More cleaning will ensue.

Be respectful of the house, your parents' time and money, your siblings and me.

Be helpful and try to solve problems instead of creating them and expecting me to always fix them.

Tattle-tailing with an attitude (no matter how right you may actually be) will no longer be tolerated on any level. Attitude = room/cleaning/no electronics/or whatever I decide.

When I talk, listen. I will listen to what you have to say after I have finished. Don't cut me off to make a point. Your point is that you don't trust me to help you and that will get you nowhere... well, maybe your room.

*big sigh*

Well there you have it. Reasonable I say, right?

my first guest post!

Today, I'm over here at Sgt and Mrs Hub giving a review about the camera I currently use.

It's my first guest post, and honestly I'm a little beside myself. What is the proper etiquette in a case such as this?

Should I sit in front of the computer all day and STALK her blog just so that I can see the comments coming in???

I could continue speculating as to what my options are... but i'll just stop there. because going any further would be just that. speculation. Since my intent IS to sit her and stalk the blog aaaall day LOL!

Too bad i actually have a life... otherwise my butt might become attached to the chair. besides having a life, there is a 7 month old in the background who has decided to wake up... Well I guess if he never actually went to sleep... he's not really waking up.

This brings me to a point I have been meaning to make for like at least a month and have not gotten to doing it yet!

About a month and a half ago, I took on a new charge. He was 5 months at the time, he's now 7. and his name is Jonah. He is super adorable and soooo laid back. Except when it's time to go to sleep. HA! I won't even go into that.


He's adorable right? Seriously, his cuteness makes up for the whole not sleeping thing LOL!

I just basically wanted to share him with the blog world and give myself yet another excuse for my highly intermittent blogging.

Alrighty, I'm back to stalking Andrea's blog now! Come on over and check it out :)


post from one year ago yesterday (again with the yesterday, but seriously, if it was lame, i would just skip it. and trust me, there were a lot of lame ones. this one's actually funny): where are you black sweatshirt?