I’m not big on posting pictures of myself but I’m trying to post a photo to go with each letter so maybe someday I can turn it into a children’s book and make a lot of money and get rich and buy an old, restored Mini.

Back in February Kait, Ben, and I had our eyes checked. Kait desperately needed new glasses, Ben I suspected may need them, and I had been having more and more tension headaches. My vision is fine but the eye doctor said my eyes may be starting to strain even though I’m seeing perfectly so he gave me a very low prescription and said to wear them as much as I felt necessary and see if they did anything to ease my headaches. My headaches got worse for a while but have decreased, though I’m not sure that’s due to the glasses because I really don’t wear them that much, and when I do wear them it’s only because I’ve never worn glasses before and I think they’re new and fun and cute.

Early this morning before the light of day my 3 year old was up, wandering the house in a crying panic because he had to go poop (his words). Jesse has recently gained a new understanding about his poo and where it should go and is very adamant about it, often flipping out when he has an urge.

So I got him calmed down and put him on the toilet. He went and promptly asked for a piece of candy. I didn’t give him one though.

Also, I cannot get Gypsy by Fleetwood Mac out of my head.

Last time I went over to my friend Marty’s house she baked me this brussels sprout, bacon, and apple dish that was very amazing. So recently I decided to recreate it myself, sans apples per Kait’s request.  I doubled the recipe, using two large bags of fresh brussles sprouts and an entire package of bacon, added too much olive oil because I kept thinking it didn’t have enough.  This didn’t effect the taste at all though, as is evidenced by how much I ate.

I can’t stand how good this stuff is and neither can my stomach because I ate half the pan ended up sick. Seriously. I devoured a half a pack of bacon and an entire bag of brussels sprouts and probably an eighth of a cup of olive oil because I have no self control and like to punish myself with deliciousness apparently.

If you have enough self control and want to eat this you can find a great recipe here that involves a more realistic amount of olive oil, and less bacon. Although I don’t see how less bacon would make it any better so you may want to ignore that part. In fact, you should probably add more bacon.

Just make sure you don’t eat it all in one sitting, justifying it by telling yourself that brussels sprouts are good for you.  I tried this, it was a definite fail.

So we live about 500 feet from this little lake and lately we’ve been seeing an abundance of big slider turtles around.  I wrote about a week or so ago, and now I’m writing about it again because yesterday while we were rearranging our garden we saw this large turtle digging herself into a hole under one of our bushes.  Apparently baby turtle season is coming up so it’s very likely that this mama was laying her eggs under our bush.  She tried a couple of bushes, it appears, before she settled on this one.  She was very hissy for a gal who wanted us to possibly babysit a couple dozen children for the next 2 to 3 months.

We continued to garden around her, not disturbing her but checking on her every so often just to see what she was up to and all of the sudden she was gone and we were like, How on earth did she get by all of us without any of us even noticing?

I don’t know how to tell if she hid any turtle eggs under the bush or not and I’m afraid to dig to try to find out and Google isn’t being of much help.

Our garden is not as big as it sounds.

Also, I know E is for Easter.  I went against the grain. It’s what I do.

I’ve been thinking most of the day about the letter D. This is unusual for me. I asked my boys for suggestions and they didn’t have any good enough ideas because I’m certainly not going to write about dragons even though one of my boys insisted it was the perfect word but it’s not because I don’t blog about dragons, people.

So, after pondering it forever I became desperate and thought I might find something inspiring in my picture folder and suddenly my boys became winners because apparently D is for dragon.

Because in my pictures I had this picture of a dragon. 
A dragon on a leash.

And Akbar makes a blog appearance twice in 3 days and so he’s pretty much almost famous. My boys bought him a lizard leash so they could safely take him on outdoor excursions in our front garden. I swear he’s the most stoic lizard ever because he didn’t protest one bit, although he did keep quite a serious expression through the whole ordeal. Just look at those eyes.  They are pretty much shouting, Really, people? Really?

And just incase you have forgotten your alphabet, tomorrow is E. It is also Easter.

Hmmm…

I wonder what I’ll be blogging about for E.

We went to my home town for an Easter family reunion last weekend and just before we left to drive up there I got this text from my sister.

Would your boys like to take home the last crawdad from mom’s classroom? (my mom teaches 3rd grade)

And I made the mistake of reading the text out loud. I figured, What is the harm? Only Kait is in the room, but apparently I figured wrong because she piped up loudly, OOOH!  I WANT IT!

And that’s how we got a pet Crawdad named Pepe Jacques Lol (The 1st). He’s named after Pepino Rodrigo Serrano Gonzales (AKA Pepe The King Prawn).

It’s like we’ve become those crazy pet people because now we have a cat, a dog, 3 lizards, 1 crawdad, 3 live garden cats, 2 live garden raccoons, and there are two flies hiding out in the upstairs bathroom because my kids can’t seem to remember to close the front door ever.

I feel like this is ridiculous.

P.S. I know that C is a day late but it’s okay because I recently found out that there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, not 27, so actually I’m right on schedule now. Plus, I’m planning on posting about D today too.

I remember the day that Joseph Dale was born like it was yesterday because it was the most painful experience of my entire life.  He was turned funny and my doctor liked to take a more natural approach and wanted to get him to turn by himself, which didn’t happen until I started pushing (I promise this isn’t going to get gross) and he still really didn’t want to turn but after rocking on a ball and pushing for an hour he turned and then it was all over and I had this little tiny baby with a huge head that resembled a warped triangle. Kait had the smallest little perfectly formed round head when she was born so when Joe’s came out all squished we didn’t know what to think except oh my goodness what’s wrong with his noggin?

My sweet nurse assured us it was perfectly normal and his head will round out nicely within a week or so.  While I was no longer concerned, Rabbit was beside himself with questions. 

When?

Why?

Why?

When?

How?

Huh?

I just kept reminding him that it was all going to be okay and about two weeks later Joe had a nice sized peanut head, perfectly shaped, no longer triangular, and Rabbit stopped asking me if Joe’s head would always look like that.

That was 14 years ago today and he’s no longer that little baby with the squashed head.

Now my oldest son is well into the teenage years.

Dear Joe,

You’re forever growing up, well on your way to being a man, and I’m so proud of the person you are becoming.

I love how you protect your siblings, how forgiving you are when somebody wrongs you, how encouraging you are when you’re helping your younger brothers learn something new.
I love how hard you work to do what you know is right and how patient you are with other people. I love your character. I love your positive attitude and your quirky sense of humor.

You have a heart for God and a desire for good and this will serve you well in the years to come.

And I’m particularly fond of you.

Happy birthday baby boy who isn’t so much a baby anymore. I love you.

I’m late on this because I didn’t know about it but April is blog-the-alphabet-month apparently and Kait is participating so I must copy her and do it too.  I figure if I start today I can get all 27 letters in this month unless I’m doing my math wrong which is highly likely since my brain is pretty much limited to only 1st grade arithmetic.

Obviously I’m going to start with the letter A because who am I to mess with the alphabet? Some things just aren’t up for deconforming (can I say that?).

And a is for Akbar.

He is one of our newest pets. He’s a Chinese Water Dragon and he likes everybody but me because apparently I’m scary looking and whenever I go near him he backs away and looks at me all sideways.

He is named after a corn. Don’t ask.

Okay. If you really must know you can watch the following video.

Yeah. My kids think pretty much everything is funny.

Edit: My husband just informed me that there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. Apparently I have the brain power of a 1st grader in reading, too.  And what’s sadder is that I’m not even embarrassed about it.

First, for you geeks who are getting it, here is the celebratory shirt I created that will help you recognize this day for years to come.

You’ll want to make sure to purchase your error 404 t-shirt today so you don’t forget…  It’s available in every color and style you can think of. You aren’t limited to the girly, light blue one above.

Also, today I found the best error 404 page in the history of forever. Go there and be happy.