We don’t go too long around here without a direct reminder that venomous spiders do exist and are out to get us.  The kids didn’t even bother to take a picture of this one because strange and unusual poisonous spiders happen so often around here.

Ben found another brown widow in our house two days ago. This one was making a web on our staircase and Joe identified it quickly. It was in the corner under the lip of one of our carpeted stairs. Right where feet walk. Where Lucy crawls even though she’s not supposed to crawl up the stairs.  Where we could have easily stuck one of our toes into her fang-y face.

Shivers, people.

I called maintenance again and they’re sending an exterminator out sometime I don’t know when but hopefully soon. Hopefully right now.

Today I was contacted by a researcher for a well-known show about buggy things where the narrator doesn’t have the best grammar and I yell at the show and Kait is like, Wow Mom, that really bothers you, as if she doesn’t even know me at all.  The researcher had found one of my older blog posts where I mentioned our brown widow infestation or maybe it was this one, or even this one where I talked about another resident brown widow, and wanted to know more about our story for a possible piece in an upcoming show. Now the kids think we’re going to be famous and I’m wondering if I need to clean my house real nice and bake some crumpets.  I don’t even know if crumpets are something you bake. What the heck is a crumpet anyway?

I highly doubt our story is worthy of a spot in the pest-show’s line up and I can’t decide if being on the show would be really neat or really weird anyway.

Is it just our family that seems to attract venomous spiders?  We have lived in 9 houses and 3 of them have had some sort of brown widow problems, and in one we found a black widow but she was belly up when we spotted her.  We found a brown widow in this current house before we’d even gotten ourselves moved in. It’s like they are lying in wait for us and that really creeps me out.  Either that or they’re just way more common than most of us realize but probably not. They’re probably just after me.

Lucy absolutely loves the beach. She’s fearless when it comes to the surf. When the water comes in fast and knocks her down it seems to invigorate her and she going to give me a freaking heart attack because she just runs into the waves without any concern for the fact that she’s a real girl and needs oxygen to survive and I have to spend all of our time at the beach chasing her giggly little self around.

I like how she wears her hat and sunglasses without ever pulling them off. It’s like she knows she’s stinking cute. Because she is.

Lucky for me, Jesse doesn’t like the surf at all.  He likes small water holes with no moving water and if a gentle wave slowly washes up close to him he takes off running back up to the dunes. That’s one less kid to have to worry about being swept out to sea.

And here’s a picture of Sam yesterday, looking mighty stellar in his Toy Story 2 t-shirt.

And Kait got a picture of David Hasselhoff.

Oh, wait…  That’s Matthew.

The ocean temperature has been almost like bath water lately and the boys had tons of fun jumping in the waves while I kept redirecting busy little Lucy away from danger.

I totally meant to get a picture of Kait but with Lucy keeping me on my toes I never got a chance to take her camera from her for a second.
And why is there not a picture of Jesse, you ask?  Apparently he’s been inadvertently deleted.

Still, it was a really good day.

Until Gabe got attacked by a shark.

Okay, so it wasn’t a shark. I tried to convince Gabe to tell everybody he was bit by a shark while at the beach but he said, with a very straight face, Mom, nobody is going to believe that.

So, it was the neighbor’s dog, who was being walked on a leash on the road while all the boys, plus a few neighborhood kids, and Lucy, were in our driveway.  This family walks their dog past our kids playing almost every day without any problems.  But this time, as the dog walked past Gabe she lunged towards him, pulling the girl walking her to the ground.  The dog then jumped on Gabe, clawing at him and biting into his arm before the girl’s dad grabbed the dog and laid into her good.  It was not fun but the dog has had her Rabies shot and Gabe is okay. 

Not that I’m happy Gabe got bit, but I’m so glad that it was just an arm and that it wasn’t one of the little ones the dog turned on. There were a lot of small children very close by. Lucy was standing only 4 or 5 feet away. That is the stuff my nightmares are made of, people. Except they usually involve alligators and not dogs. But now they’ll probably involve dogs too.

YOWZA!

Okay, so I like zombies. SOSUEME already.  And it’s not that I actually like the zombie itself, but I like the interest, the conversation, the planning (you know, for just in case…)

Anyway…

So I found this on Pinterest and I really need to know where to buy this Zombie family graphic.  I think that in the event of a zombie apocalypse this could maybe throw off some actual zombies – assuring them that we’re actually zombies ourselves (You know, just in case…)

…

Okay, so I asked Google. I can buy it here for $16. Very excellent.  You can never be too prepared for these things.

My sister-in-law, Nina, pinned this pizza casserole thing onto one of her Pinterest boards last week or the week before and I showed it to Kait and suggested she make it some time and tonight she did and it was WAY yummy.  I wish I would have thought to snap a quick picture of it because hers turned out much larger and cheesier looking than the one in the Pinterest picture because she piled it on thick. You know, feeding 8 kids and all.

It was seriously good, people, and the recipe can be found here at For Mamas.

We name our vehicles around here and our white Chevy Express 12 passenger van has been dubbed Xena Warrior Van and I don’t know why because we’ve never even watched that Xena show.

There isn’t much else to say about this except she’s not much of a warrior. Her door handles didn’t even survive 2 years. How’s that for stupid? At least they’re a really cheap fix.

And the only picture I can find of Xena is this one from almost 3 years ago and it’s dark right now so I’m not going to try to get a fresh one.

Moving onto Y now because I have less than 2 hours left in April, and that means less than 2 hours to finish my A to Z posts.

Will I make it?

This is a giveaway for a $25 Burger King giftcard. To enter:

1. Read this post in its entirety. With interest, people.
2. Leave a comment telling me about one of your funniest eating out moments. Or just leave a comment. Whichever. But I like funny.
3. Make sure that your email address is real. I shouldn’t have to explain why here but I won’t publish your email. It’s only used to notify you if you win.
4. You can leave a second entry if you pass this giveaway on via your blog or Facebook or Twitter or however.

Enter to win by May 9th, 2012. The winner will be announced shortly after. Now – read on to find what this is all about.

I was offered a $25 Burger King gift card by My Blog Spark and one to give away to one of my readers. In exchange they asked if i would go to Burger King for free and let you people know what I thought of it. How easy is that?

Burger King has recently expanded their menu to include a variety of made-to-order Garden Fresh Salads, Snack Wraps, Real Fruit Smoothies, Frappés and Crispy Chicken Strips. Burger King also offers a menu for those who don’t want to spend $10 a meal. By utilizing this value menu I was able to feed myself and all of my 8 children for under $30 – and it was very timely with Rabbit gone to sea and all. It definitely helped us to get out of the house and enjoy a bunch of burger King yummy-ness.

I love all the menu choices they have now but I think Burger King’s classic Whopper and fries are still my favorite and great because now I’m hungry.

If you’re interested in checking out Burger King’s new goings-ons make sure to leave a comment because you could totally win a $25 gift card!

We will announce the winner here. I’ll also email you if you’ve provided your email address. But, I can’t hang onto your winnings forever so make sure you check back!

Subscribe to our RSS Feed so you don’t miss any of our giveaways and winner announcements!!! Contact me if you would like me to host your giveaway! Visit this page to see our complete contest rules. View our privacy policy.

“Disclosure: The Burger King gift card, information, and giveaway have been provided by Burger King through MyBlogSpark.”

I have been pondering the letter V for a whole couple of minutes now with no good result so I’m just going to have to go with vacant.

And vacant works pretty well right now because my brain has felt a little on the light side for the past week or so, hence the lag in alphabet posts.

And now I still have to come up with something for W so I can be completely caught up.

This was easier before I my brain crapped out.

People can no longer spell this 3 letter word properly and it appears to be okay with everybody except me. 

Another good reason to homeschool.
KIDDING
Sort of.

I guess I’m on a roll with the rants today, yall. 

[toilet rant]

Boys and toilets seem to repel each other and it doesn’t matter how often I clean our downstairs bathroom, it always needs to be cleaned.  Always. Because of the boys.

And I’m sorry if you’re a boy and your reading this and you’re offended.

No, I cannot tell a lie. I’m not sorry.  What I am is irritated at the fact that I have to clean the freaking bathroom 7 times a day.

[/toilet rant]

Rant over.

It took a while for Lucy to be able to walk in regular shoes because the soles are heavy. I had to be so careful about what footwear to get her because if I put a pair of harder soled shoes on her she would sit down and lift her foot up to me, asking me to take them off of her. Want to wear these pink boots girl? Nope. How about these sweet little tennies? Not a chance. However, in the last couple weeks she’s become much more comfortable walking, almost running even, and my shoe options for her have opened up quite a bit.

Today I started out my search for shoes for her by going to Become.com, a website I learned about this morning that specializes in giving shoppers relevant search results, expert reviews, forums, merchants, and more. I did a couple of random searches and found everything from hammock stands, which I am in the market for as it were, to tree fort kits that have nothing to do with trees, to a glass shade pendant section and I have no idea what that even is.

I ended up finding the cutest girls suede boots pink and all soft and warm. However, most of what I saw won’t fit Lu for a while. Plus, it’s all Florida down here and who needs suede boots in the summer anyway?  So I’ll just have to bookmark my favorites and hope they’re still available come winter.

Disclosure: I was paid to write this post, obviously. However, all opinions are my own. Just so you know.