It's Happening.

I am turning into my mother. Not that that's a BAD thing. At all! She is a wonderful person and is/was a great mother. But. Lately some things have come flying out of my mouth, and a split second after I hear myself saying these things I smack my hand to my pursed lips in shock. REALLY?! I just said THAT?! It's like my mom circa 1988 has invaded my body. Things I SWORE I would never say to MY own kids are becoming standard issue replies to Ella these days.

"Because I SAID SO."

"If you are not over here by the time I count to three..."

"Where's the pen I just had laying RIGHT HERE?! Hmmm? HMMMHMMM?!?! Why can't I ever have anything of my own without it disappearing?!"

That last one right there is a big one from my childhood. There were five of us kids in one house, and for some reason we were always taking Mom's ink pens and/or scissors. I vividly recall my mom rounding all five of us up in the kitchen, and making us search the house high and low for every ink pen we could find, and we were to bring them all back to her. Where they would just disappear again in about two days, all forty pens. I find myself saying this "Why can't I have ANYthing nice?!" about seven times an hour lately.

But I am trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to look at things from Ella's perspective once in a while. The pen I left on the counter? It DID have a cute little butterfly on the side of it. Irresistible! The cream-colored ottoman in the front room of our house? Why, it's nothing but a 3x4 blank canvas for Ella's artistic expression! The wall, tables, and couch, too. When you're three, there's really no way to grasp that Mommy and Daddy paid $1500 for that couch so you had better not spill fruit punch on it, young lady.

The ottoman. With an outline of Ella's hand in marker.


Ella's table, that is apparently NOT stain-resistant. Which is, you know, GENIUS considering that it is a KIDS' TABLE.


The couch. With all of its assorted stains, spills, and rips.


*Sidenote: I'm not completely sure what's going on right there with the naked Barbies and the stuffed animals. I'm also not entirely sure I want to find out.

So, in addition to trying to get over the fact that I will not have a nice couch, table, or carpet any time in the next, oh, seven years, I am also reminding myself that one day I WILL have a whole house full of lovely, expensive, hand-print-free things. And I will probably be sad that no one is there to spill something on them.

Picnic, Parks, and Perfect.

Long morning at the park, wading in the water, letting Charlie touch the shells and rocks on the river banks, Ella running through the fields and picking flowers, watching tadpoles swim, finding baby turtles, swinging, sliding, skipping. No one else there, complete silence. Well, except for the three year old shrieking and asking "why?" a thousand times, and the infant babbling and laughing and also shrieking. But no phones, no email, no chores to be done. Perfect.

Ella-isms, v2.0

Ella is just full of it. Literally. She is either going to be something brilliant like a rocket scientist, artist, or doctor....or she will be something scary with a side of sociopath-ness. Because she is a world-class pro at spewing crap whenever she thinks it will get her something she wants. But she sure is cute while she's doing it.

* "Mom, you look like a marvelous lady today. I like it when you take a shower."

* "Nothing is fair. I know you have candy that you aren't giving to me."

* "In fact, I CAN have a cookie for dinner. I don't really want spaghetti. Mimi told me I could have a cookie instead." -said when she hadn't seen Mimi in, oh, three or four days.

* "Charlie can be Mr. Penis." -said in Target, in a crowded aisle.

* To a lady in Walmart: "Hi, my name is Ella, it starts with an E-L-L-A, what's your name? Do you like dogs? We have a dog named Stu. I see some ice cream in your cart, mom can we buy some ice cream the vanilla kind do we have sprinkles at home to put on it and can I have it in my Horton bowl SPLAT". That last sound was my head exploding right in the middle of Walmart.

Big, Fat Update-y Update.

So it turns out? When you have kids and it's summertime? You're busy. Very much so. We've been at the pool, at the splash pad, at the park, at the bouncy-inflatable-oh-God-please-don't-catch-Hand-Foot-And-Mouth-Disease place, watching fireworks, riding bikes and scooters, taking walks, meeting friends, and various things of that nature right there. Which means that taking five minutes to pound out a blog entry ranks right up there with "scrub toilets" when the kids finally fall asleep around noon. Somehow I feel a smidge odd about having a lovely, updated blog when we are all picking clean clothes out of the dryer when we need something to wear, and I have resorted to kicking the large-ish crumbs that stick to my feet into the space underneath the oven rather than sweeping. So without further ado, I give you An Update.

*Ella's new favorite place. Ever. On Earth. I think she has asked to go back to "the jumping place" about seventeen hundred times since last week. Which would be fine, except for that a friend that was there with us last week said "Oh, the girl is coming in to clean the bouncy things" and I said "Oh! Fantastic! At least we know that this stuff is clean and the kids won't pick up any nasty..." and she was all "With Windex." Dear Bouncy House Place Employee Girl: Lysol Wipes.





*Charlie. Is cute. That's about all he's up to these days. He is trying ever so hard to crawl, with no success. Unless your definition of "success" is "rocking your body back and forth like you're having a seizure and then slamming your face into the floor. Hard."



*Me. Am sad. The dance studio I grew up in (literally) and spent the majority of my time in from the ages of 7 to 18, is closing. I know, right? I DON'T DANCE ANYMORE. Why should this matter? If you are asking this, then you...sound like the husband. But it does matter! It's sad! There was (is) an amazing lady behind that place that had an enormous, huge, very very big influence in my life and got me and my friends through some rough, rough times. We were a family. So I've been attending farewell get-togethers this past week. Which adds to The Busy-ness Of Abby.

The front of the dance studio, covered in pictures and letters and memories and now I need a Kleenex.


*Ella. Has developed a completely irrational fear of all things mushy and gushy as related to Charlie. Spit up. Slobber. And BABYFOOD. She is so freaked out by the possibility that the squash I am feeding Charlie will somehow leap across the room and land on her that she will not come near me at his mealtimes. She gags. Dry heaves. And this was her face when I dared walk within three feet of her holding a bib with green beans smeared across the front.



* Fourth Of July. Meh. It started out just peachy, with my mom having a slumber party with Charlie at her place so we could take Ella out alone for some big girl time with mom and dad. The In Laws even decided to join us, and we planned to meet at The Spaghetti Factory. Awesome. I love that place. So, like the true idiots that we are, we were running late and decided hey! Let's just park right in the middle of all of the holiday festivities downtown. I don't know if any of you have ever been to the downtown fireworks in Nashville, so let's just say that I don't think I've ever seen that much traffic anywhere, ever. Nightmare. So we make it to the restaurant, order our food, and BANG! Lightning and thunder. Awesome. Rumor had it that there were huge storms moving in quickly, and they were starting the fireworks show early. So we shoveled the food down our throats and made our way outside. Still having fun! Psyched to see the awesomeness that is Nashville's Firework Show! What happened next can best be described in pictures and smart-ass captions*.

"Hey, since it's about to rain, let's just scrap the stand-on-the-walking-bridge idea and head up to the parking garage that for sure has a killer view of the riverfront where they are staging the fireworks. This is a no-fail plan."



"And we're off! We are so smart. This is going to be awesome."



"I know that the city spends about two million dollars on this spectacular show, but seeing just one-twentieth of the action from between two buildings is just as good."



*All was well in the end, and I really didn't care that we didn't get to see the whole show as I have seen it countless times before. It started raining about five minutes into it anyway so we had to leave, but Ella was still absolutely thrilled with what she got to see. She kept screaming "The fireworks are candy sparkles!" over and over again. It might be fair to note that at this point it was about two hours past her bedtime and she really had no clue what she was saying.





* Charlie. Still cute. And still sitting in that damn exersaucer. He loves that thing so much I'm thinking of starting an album of just pictures of him in it. It should be full by Friday.