Friday's Photo Finish Fiesta...

Join in for Candid Carrie's Friday's Photo Finish Fiesta....




I love this photo because it shows off his gapped little teath and that cute little smile that he is always flashing. Plus it will always remind me of the cosntant state of drool that he has been in for the past 6 months.

The little one is all smiles and drool. Happy Friday!

Play along at An Island Life for Aloha Friday.

My question for you……..

Do you blog in secret or do you share with everyone you know?

See my answer to this question in my previous post.

Do you blog in secret?

Yes, yes, yes, I blog in secret. I have many reasons why and you can see all those reasons below.

I don’t use my real name in my blog but all that I blog about in my life is very real. Sometimes I wish I was in fantasy land but no such luck! I would love to use my real name and say hello I am Suzie Smith because there are probably a million Suzie Smiths in the world but my mother cursed blessed me with a unique name and then my husband gave me an also unique last name leaving me to be the one and only. I don’t think I am the only one out their but I don’t think you are going to find too many of me either. So I use a childhood nick name to blog under.

Since my mom gave me such a unique name I was kind enough to bestow this blessing onto my oldest son. He is the one I refer to as Luke (also a nick name). I love his name and it isn’t to often you find unique boys names. I just wish everyone would stop trying to say it like it is French. It sounds out just like it is spelled people. We are in America for crying out loud. I am afraid he is going to deal with that the rest of his life just as I deal with everyone hacking up my name. He will thank me for it later…. LOL.

I started blogging to vent and found it is a great place to joke about the people in my life. It gives me a great journal for things my kids have done but also a wonderful sounding board.

Here are some of the reasons why I blog in secret:

I love to rag on my husband and he would just freak out if he new I was calling him out on so many things for all the world to see. Ok it isn’t all the world but it is all you wonderful people who come back and read about my crazy life. I sometimes think it would be a good dose of medicine for him to see me vent but then I decide it isn’t worth fighting over. Plus this way I say what I want, I feel better, and he is totally in the dark.

My mother… oh she thinks the world wide web is full of psycho’s and crazy people. She doesn’t understand why anyone would put anything personal out their for all the world to see. I think she believes that someone will read about me, look me up and come after my family with a hatchet or something. It wouldn’t even be good enough to her that I blog under a nick name and no one knows where I live or anything truly personal. I would never here the end of it so she will never get to read my blog. She doesn’t even agree with doing something like this and having it protected with a password. She just has her panties in a wad and this wont change so I won’t even try….

Oh my mother-in-law.... I haven’t said too much about her yet but I have lots of material I try very hard to refrain from using. So she can’t know because if I need to vent about the latest stupid stunt my mother-in-law has pulled with my kids, I can. Even though in most instances I chew her out for her stupid stunts, why I bother I will never know because she doesn’t change. A great example…. The time she drove all day long with my son in an unattached car seat. In and out of the seat a dozen times and she doesn’t notice how loose it is? Hello…. it took me a second to notice when I took him out of the car. Oh and then she couldn’t buckle the baby’s buckle so she just sat him in the seat and went on like it was no big deal. He was probably 5 months old when she did this. All I can say is the woman has no brain in her head….

My friends are not familiar with blogging, unless they blog in secrete also, hey maybe I am sharing my life with them and don’t know it. I doubt it because they here about all the same stories you do so they would definitely figure it out and ask me. I don’t know what they would say or think about my blog. I know most of them would say “I don’t have time for that”, and most of them don’t have kids. Hello like I really have the time….ok, I make time because I enjoy it. It’s a little bit of that me time I am always complaining about not having enough of.

So now it is your turn. Do you blog in secret or do you share with everyone you know? Tell me, tell me, I promise I won’t tell if it is a secret…LOL.

Ramblings of a Good/Bad Day

Today I am just frustrated and feel the need to vent. I will start with yesterday. It was the first day of my new reduced work schedule. I was so excited to start this new schedule. It started with a mad dash before noon to go pick up Luke at his school so we could spend some time together.

He is not a kid who likes change so I need to make small changes at a time. The first change was switching to morning latch-key. That has gone very well this week. The second step is to get him to ride the school bus home on my half days so that I don’t have to do this mad dash out of work a little early to pick him up. The bus will make it less stressful on me since he will be on it for a little while.

Anyway I picked him up and I wanted to show him that the bus isn’t scary so we followed it for a while making a game out of it. Plus I wanted to see the type of route it took to know if he would be one of the first off or one of the last. He had so much fun with me chasing the bus that he was all excited to start riding it. I was so happy that my little game worked. Pretty clever on my part!

We get home and I call the transportation department to see about adding him to the bus. Oh no…. he has to ride 5 days a week or we won’t take him. Why? Well if they have a sub they won’t know. Ok he will ride the same days of the week every week. They won’t change so WTH…. Now I am mad because I was counting on the bus just to relieve the stress of the mad dash from work. Don’t I pay taxes and shouldn’t all students have the right to ride the bus? It is public school for crying out load. What I find most funny is a flyer went around for the school district and it said driving to school is a privilege and a parent’s choice but the bus is still an option on days when the weather is bad and parents don’t want their child to drive. How is this any different???? Heck mine is better because it is two set days a week. I am getting mad again and I am starting to think I am going to right a nasty letter to the school board because this is wrong.

I decided to use these half days off to spend more time with Luke. He told me a couple weeks ago that he wanted to be little again. I didn’t understand and asked why… and it was because he got to spend more time with me. This just crushed me and broke my heart. The poor kid went from being my whole world to sharing me with his baby brother. I now feel awful. So two days a week I will pick him up from school and we will leave the baby at the sitters and we will spend 2 hours with just him and me. Yesterday we played games on the computer and made brownies. It was really nice!

Finally my day ends and I am ready for a good nights sleep. Ha...in my dreams maybe. Of course I have to sleep to dream...hehe.

Thomas and I both have these awful head colds. He obviously was having issues with it last night and he was up every hour. I am exhausted today with a head that feels like it is going to burst from the sinus pressure. I kicked my husband out of bed one time to take care of him. He sucks at this by the way and eventually he looses patience and passes him off to me. Hello… I have already been up five times while you are in peaceful dreamland. One of these nights I am going to take my feet and push him right off the bed. That’s not nice but it might make a point with him. Now Thomas is wide awake and I can’t get him back to sleep. I take him for a while and then I put him in his crib. He is in our room so it is impossible to go back to sleep when you know he is awake. He also has an Ocean Wonders toy in his crib and he just kept turning it on and off, on and off. I was ready to scream between the lights popping and the music playing at random. Eventually he went back to sleep but it did take an hour.

If I survive today it will be a miracle.

Wordless Wednesday

It is so rare that I put pictures of my kids on here. I take thousands of pictures but always hesitant about sharing them. Today I am going out on a limb….I thought everyone might enjoy my boys for Wordless Wednesday.

The big one loves to color and the little one just wants to steal the markers.

Share your wordless Wednesday with me so I can check it out.

My Over Priced Daycare

This has been a sore spot with me since school started. So please forgive me for bashing here. I loved his preschool up to this point.

Y first issue, when he started kindergarten I would have thought prices would go down when your kid is attending four hours less per day than before. Yes that’s right they raised my rates. He goes less and I pay more. Doesn’t make sense to me! Yes, they drive them on the bus to and from school and gas prices are high but they are not so high they can justify this increase. I have been ticked about this since school started and have been searching for another option.

Finally I have taken action and am taking back my money. So now, I am going to work two half days a week while my son is at school, and three full days. Each grandma will get him from school two other days and that just leaves one day. I am 15 minutes from his school so that one day a week I will drive over at lunch time, pick him up and take him to the babies baby sitter who will charge me $10 for that half day. I think she is under charging me but she won’t take any more because he is only their a couple hours.

Yes I am about to take a pay cut to reduce my work hours but at the same time I will be saving $488 a month. This is savings after I spend a little extra money on gas, pay for latch key in the morning and the other sitter for that one extra day. This is huge!

. Finally, no more expensive weekly child care bills. No more paying for childcare when my child is out sick. No more paying child care when we have a holiday and my child isn’t their. No more paying child care when I take vacation and my child isn’t their. No more, no more, no more…. Stick a fork in me because I am done. LOL

One kid is expensive, two kids is pushing it and well any more than that you might as well sign over your paycheck. Why am I working? Oh yeah, because I feel like keeping the daycare in business. NOT!

What do most of you think of the day care/preschool systems? It’s not all bad but I defiantly feel like the price hurts the most. I know my money isn’t going to the teachers because they don’t make anything.