Rice Family

We had so much fun in Lawrence visiting Bob and Gail! Tons of good food and great company!! And of course worlds of fun was fantastic! as always. M had lots of fun, but she really wanted to ride the Crazy Catapillar because her cousin Cara rode it and she saw a video of it once; unfortunately the crazy catapillar was broken. But M and Jodi had lots of fun riding the other rides. No fear. Lots of fun. very hot. Definately worth it!

This is the new word I know that I passed to M: (M carrying around some toys and accidently drops them. Under her breath she says):Dagnabbit. I suppose it't not too bad, and kinda cute actually.

People try to tell you "Don't do that. I've done it, so just trust me. Learn from my mistakes." I used to hate that. I'm sure all young people do. And some older people. The thing is, most people learn from their own mistakes, and don't believe that other peoples mistakes will become thier own. I have learned otherwise. About, oh I don't know, 85% of the time when someone tries to warn me of something and I don't listen I do make the same mistakes. And it's not fun any of the times. So today, I am using ALL of my strenght to listen to my big sisters advice - despite what my own...judgment (or emotions)...are telling me. And I mean ALL of my strength. I figure she must be right, and my choice of path isn't worth the trouble and frustration. We will see. Thank you Megan.

I LOVE my kids!! E is growing like crazy; He still doesn't do much, but I can get him to laugh and smile, and he is getting much more efficient with his hands so he can grab more toys! M is just as fun and smart as ever. She really likes those Fancy Nancy books, and so do I. It really surprises me, but she really does pick up some of the vocabulary from them (which are pretty big words sometimes). Just now she was sitting on the couch reading a book (not fancy nancy) and got to the back and said, "And that is such a nice masterpiece." (masterpiece being the word from the book) The cool thing is that she actually uses them correctly. We're having a lot of fun so far this summer, and I'm looking forward to more of it!

Here is Sugar now. She is turning into a great dog, and she is beautiful. She still has her puppy tendencies (like chewing and licking) but she is really a pretty good listener...most of the time. I guess I could just say we have our good days, and we have our bad.

These are the clouds that scared me. You can kinda see the cirlce of clouds in the middle. They started to spin together (as if about to form a funnel) which freaked us out. These ones just looked awesome.. These pics are from a storm yesterday evening. I feel a little silly now, but I was fairly certain a tornado was gonna form right over our heads! Some of the clouds started to rotate in a circle, so in a rush I made J help grab the kids and dogs and headed up to aunt Nancy's house (b/c they have a basement and we do not.) It all passed with no harm done, but the clouds looked really awesome!

This is J setting our mouse traps. I watched him set three, and by the fourth one I forced him to let me take pics because his reaction was always the same when he released it on the final step! (and, yes, I know he is sexy; no, he is not naked, although it almost looks that way. Besides, setting mouse traps naked does NOT sound like a good idea to me.)

We were in the car the other day and this is our musings: M: mom, look, it is flashging on, off, on ,off. It's blue. And it's purple! Me: uh, huh. What is? M: The light. On your chair. It's blue and purple. Oh, it's soooo pretty! Me: What light, baby? M: From, from, from my dewl. They are purple and blue. Me: What is a Dewl? M: No. On my shoes. The dewl. Like the boy with daddy at work! They are sparkling. Me: OH! JEWEL! The jewels on your shoes! I see! You're so clever. You mean Jewel, like the guy daddy works with, Jul. M: yeah. J's coworker's name is Jul (Sounds like Jewel) and M got some crocs from aunt megan and her cousins that have a jewel on each (one blue, one purple) that were reflecting light onto the back of my chair. She is clever.

we have a mouse problem. We noticed this little mouse because he kept leaving droppings on my counter in the kitchen, and because he was eating my no-bake-cookies! (horror of all horrors). Mouse poison has already been laid under the house, but apparently it is not doing the trick. We proceeded to buy a glue trap, and the next morning, lo and behold, a glue trap with a bunch of mouse hair on it. And this rodent is still doing its deed on my counter tops. J even baited the mouse with no-bake cookie pieces, to no avail. So we resorted to the mouse trap that kills - duh duh dun! So we were sitting in the living room watching a movie and all of a sudden SNAP CLANG! Took me a minute before I realized what had happened, and then J went and checked; we got the sorry little SOB! We left a couple of traps out just for good measure, but we were fairly certain there was only one (my mom promised there would be more, but I did not want to believe her). Next night, sitting in the living r