Graduation Day

Graduation Day

My son graduated from high school last Sunday.  We had an awesome day! 

I have to admit, I thought I was doing pretty good with all of this--

but I think I am having a harder time than I expected. 

I have been telling everyone--and myself, that I am so excited for this next phase in our lives,

 and I am. 

 My husband and I can spend more time together, I will have more time to catch up on reading and relaxing and of course, cleaning and sorting through things

(that is a different blog that I can't write yet because i am still in denial

and if I write it then i have to deal with it!). 

Anyway, back to graduation--I guess I am a little sad about it. 

 I was pretty much a stay-at-home mom, and when I wasn't home I was at the school. 

 It is so cliche to say, but here it goes, "Wow, where does the time go?" 

Going through old pictures for the graduation party has made me laugh and cry. 

 I am so proud of both of my kids!


~Sue

Happy Mother's Day!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY TO ALL THE MOTHERS OUT THERE!

Especially to my wonderful mother and my two sisters! 

I love you all!

Not sure what we are all looking at here, but this is our Mom, then Deb, me and Sue. Sue ~ I think you're prego with #1 here! Deb ~ love the facial expression! And don't you just L.O.V.E. my Birkenstock's with socks!

This is a picture of Deb and Sue and cute, adorable, sweet 5 1/2 week old baby Amy! :) Sue ~ not only do you have extremely long legs in this picture, but look how long your toes look!!!! Oh my, it brings tears to my eyes! And Deb - this must be where I got the idea to wear socks with my sandals...always looking up to my big sisters!

Here we are all grown up and now Moms ourselves! I wish we lived closer together and we could enjoy this day together! Miss you!

And of course, to my beautiful mother! I love you so much! I miss you! Thanks for being such a great Mom and friend!

~Amy


P.S. I'm going to brag about my little chickadee's for a moment...this morning at about 8am, I heard the munchkins in the kitchen. At about 8:30 they bring a tray into my bedroom with a plate of 2 Schwan's pancakes, a piece of cinnamon sugar toast and fresh coffee! Yes COFFEE! My little 7-year-old daughter has learned how to make me coffee...and she's pretty darn good at it! I didn't throw it out, I drank the entire pot! It even had cream in it! My son went and clipped a couple flowers out of the bouquet they got me with Daddy and put them in a little vase for the tray. They did all of this by themselves, Daddy was still sleeping too! They brought me their presents they had made for me at their little community education Mother's Day class! Very cute! My daughter was so hungry that she just needed to share my pancakes and toast with me. What a perfect way to start a Mother's Day! It makes up for all the fighting and screaming and not listening...well, at least for a little while. :)

A Quick Moment

So last night I stopped at the grocery store for a few things.  Among the items in my cart was an adult beverage!  When I got to the checkout line, the kind of awkward, young man ringing up my groceries said to me "Um, I'm going to need you to get your ID out for me, please."  To which I replied, "ok."  I have never understood why people get so upset and offended when asked for their ID.  Anyway, the young checkout boy took a look at my ID and said in a very loud, surprised voice, "WOW, I wasn't expecting that!"  I kind of paused for a moment, (what was he expecting?) then finally smiled and said "thank you!"  I'm taking it as a compliment!!  Made my night and I walked out of the store with a little more skip in my step!
~Sue

Garage Sale!

It's that time of year again...GARAGE SALES! I'm not a huge garage saler, but I do enjoy going to them every once in a great moon. I have to be in the right frame of mind and it needs to be nice weather. Plus, I really don't like getting up early, not a morning person, so I probably miss all the good stuff.

Here in my small little speck on the map, we have a city wide garage sale. It now starts on Friday afternoon through Saturday. So if you want to get the really good deals you have to take off of work on Friday and head out that morning.

If your an extremely organized person and prepared, a little OCD, you get a hold of the garage sale list that the paper puts together and you research it to see what sales have what you need and map out your plan...I've never been that organized, always wanted to be though.

This year I didn't go to any sales, instead my friend and I had our own garage sale {at her house, Thank God!}

My motivation to the kids to get rid of all the crap wonderful toys they have, is that they get to put their initials on the little colored dot and they get to keep the money! They are all about keeping the money! We went through all of their books from when they were babies. This was harder for me then I anticipated. Actually, I hadn't anticipated it being anything except cleaning out their closets. But many of the books brought back so many memories from when they were babies and toddlers. {sigh}

My big items to sell were my red couch and green chair/ottoman. They are both the over sized kind of furniture.

This is a picture of the red couch {kind of} it's off the Slumberland website, but remember ours was bought in 2000 or 2001.

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This is the green chair and ottoman.

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Now, WHY, you ask, am I showing you furniture that already sold? Well, let me tell you, it is a great Seinfeld worthy story.

On Friday afternoon, while I was working the garage sale solo, this lady comes in. She looks at the furniture, sits on it, walks around it and actually looks interested. We already bought a new sectional so at this point I just really, really want to sell it. It isn't coming back home with me, if I don't sell it I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. We talk about the couch, she lifts the cushions and sits on it some more. Finally, she asks me if I'll take a lower price than what I'm offering. What am I going to say but OF COURSE!

"Great" she says, "Wonderful" I say! SOLD!

Then she proceeds to go get a tape measure out of her mini van because she lives about 35 minutes away and she wants to take it home with her right now and she wants to make sure it will fit...In.Her.MINI.Van.

What?! Seriously?!

Now, I'm not a very good judgment of fitting furniture into vehicles, but there is NO way, my over sized couch, chair and ottoman are fitting in her mini van!

But after she measures it out and informs me that her seats all fold into the floor, that it will indeed fit in there, if we just manipulate it a little. Manipulate my a** - to me it looks impossible.

So she backs up her mini van into the driveway and takes everything out of the back, which includes a Little Tykes wagon, mind you! We each grab an end of the couch. I'm not a muscular person. I don't really have any upper body strength and my muscles are still sore from putting the trampoline together earlier in the week! She doesn't look like she has much upper body strength either and she is shorter than me, which means her arms are shorter than mine, which means it is really hard for her short, little arms to get a good hold on the over sized couch!!! {deep breath}

We take all the cushions off and set them aside and carry the couch to the back of her mini van. I'm already a little out of breath from this. {oh my!} There are a few people now that have come to the garage sale and are giving us strange looks like "you dumb women, you can't fit an over sized couch into the back of a mini van alone, but with an over sized chair and ottoman too? NO WAY!"

She thought that if we could get the couch in half way then FLIP {yep I said FLIP} the green chair over and onto the couch it should fit. So we get the couch in half way and it actually looks like it might fit. We get the green chair upside down and on the edge of the couch. Nope, not gonna go in, we have about an inch that we need to maneuver it to get it in. It's just too tight. we realize that if we take the small legs off the chair that helps, but we still just can't get it. It was like a big life size version of Tetris!

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I love Tetris, but at this point I'm really starting to hate it. There is no *ksjkl*ing way this is going to work! I'm starting to get really sore and I've lost hope. The good news is that I thought this was really funny so I'm laughing hysterically while we do this. My laughter started getting a little manic I think. Not sure if the lady who bought it thought it was quite as funny as I did.
So we figure out if we take the chair out and turn it around while it is upside down it might just give us that inch that we need. Sure as Hell, it did. After quite a bit of shoving and sweating the SOB went in. I.CAN.NOT.F-ING.BELIEVE.IT! So here is the proof of what we did!!!

Here's the back of the van with all the cushions squished around it.

Here's the driver side door, not sure how she fit in the drivers seat! We stuffed all of those bags under the couch.

After I took this picture, she still fit the wagon in next to the couch on this door!

Well, all in all, it was a very successful garage sale. I still have some stuff left, but I got rid of that damn couch and chair!

~Amy

Bucket List

I've never really thought of having a bucket list. Are there things I want to do someday? Yes. Have I ever listed them and kept track of them? No. I know I want to travel. Go to Europe, Australia, Sweden, Hawaii. Oh and here's a weird one, I've always wanted to hold a monkey, not sure why just some strange fascination from when I was a kid. Don't judge me on that one.

I'm not real adventurous, so I haven't really wanted to do any of the athletic stuff like scuba diving, bungee jumping, jumping from an airplane, cliff jumping/diving…
Ah cliff jumping/diving, yep, definitely not on my bucket list, yet I seemed to have found myself at a location in Jamaica last week where that is what people were doing. YIKES!
We took a catamaran to a bar that is located on a cliff on the ocean.

Rick’s Café in Negril,Jamaica!

It was absolutely beautiful! They have been named on the Travel Channel’s “Worlds 10 best beaches”. I would have to agree, it was absolutely breath taking.
Many people swim from the catamaran to Rick’s, some take small boats. Which was very scary since the boats and swimmers were all going to the same ladder to go up to Rick’s Café.
I knew my hubby wanted to jump off the cliffs. I knew I didn’t. The first cliff my hubby wanted to try was about 25 feet high. There were locals all around the cliffs. Some standing higher than the 35 foot jump on a makeshift diving board plank thingy. {see it in the picture below, it is way up above the Rick's sign, there is a man on it!} Some in trees and some just on higher cliffs. They waive and jump up and down getting the tourists all excited. Then they jump/dive! 

WOW! Holy Crap! Did they really just do that?
I stood up on the 35 foot cliff and prepared to take pictures of my hubby braving out the 25 footer! I took that first step up on the landing and saw a sign. A warning sign to be exact. They said to me, “be sure to read the sign, Mon, before you jump.” I said, “oh no, I’m not jumping just taking a picture of my husband.” Then I looked at the sign. Big Mistake! I should have taken a picture of it, but all my breath had whooshed out of me when I stepped up onto that platform. But basically it said how dangerous this was, you could die or injure your back! Then that was it, nothing to sign, no waiver forms, no one to tell you all the risks! I’m in Human Resources, this is a very hard concept for me to understand that a company wouldn’t make you sign something before jumping into something so dangerous. And there my dear, loving husband stood. At the edge of the cliff getting ready to jump. I really couldn’t breathe now!
He let another guy go before him and I was stunned. He isn’t afraid of heights and he is the adventurous sort of person so what was he waiting for? Well, come to find out he wasn’t sure how to jump in order to not injure himself. But No Worries Mon. A local Jamaican climbed up the side of the cliff to tell him how to jump correctly…arms first out to your sides like a T, then down to your sides and straight as an arrow into the ocean.

See him climbing there, that little yellow speck? {sigh}
Keeping them out to your sides, I guess, helps you keep your balance to keep you upright. Yeah, whatever.

So there he went! Arms on their way to straight out to his sides.

HE DID IT!!!! And HE’S ALIVE!!!!
I was so proud of him!!!!
Then we walked around Rick’s, took some pictures, bought T-shirts for the kids. My hubby then decides he can’t leave without jumping off the 35 foot cliff! Seriously, I’ve finally recovered from you taking that last leap and actually surviving! Now you want to make my heart race again!!!!! Yep, pretty much, he did!
He didn’t hesitate at all this time and my camera wasn’t working the best, but here he is in the light blue plaid swim trunks, standing at the top of the 35 footer looking down right before he jumped!!!!!!

AWESOME!

And here he is after the jump!!

And again - he did it and he's alive! Whoop! Whoop!
On our way back down to get to our catamaran, there is a ‘little’ 15 foot cliff. My hubby says, “you need to do this!” I say, “what, have a beer?” Oh No, he meant jump off the HUGE 15 FOOT CLIFF!!!! Into the ocean where there is no one in there to help you swim or catch you!!!! Where are all the life guards anyway!? But then I see there is a little boy jumping, he’s probably 10 or 11. I can do this! I know I can!

I had to give myself a little pep talk, while the little boy and his brother probably looked on like, come on old lady, get to it, quit being such a chicken.
But I am a chicken, I’ve never done anything like this and it scares the complete crap out of me! I’m totally afraid to do it. I felt like I stood on that monstrous little cliff for hours. It was probably only 30 seconds, but still!
Then I reached up and plugged my nose and just JUMPED!!!!!

I DID IT!!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!!!

And I’m pretty sure I lost my top and in the very crystal clear ocean water flashed my boobies at all of Rick’s Café to see! But I don’t care I just jumped off a fricken cliff people!!! I’ve never been so proud of myself! ME. I did that! I can tell my kids that I did that and that I’m cool!
I almost ruined it by swimming the wrong way once I was in the ocean. I was so nervous to jump I didn’t really figure out how to get back out of the ocean once I jumped in. My hubby said it was like watching a kindergartner play Tball for the first time and run to 3rd base instead of 1st! I kind of swam the opposite direction of the ladder. But No Worries, Mon, I jumped off a cliff and my boobies are floating for the world to see and I’m swimming the wrong direction and I don’t know how to get out of the ocean.  I LOVE IT!
But alas, I did get out and had my top back in place and hugged my hubby and now have a great story to tell my kids! {deep breath}

So I guess I quickly added, then checked off cliff jumping into the ocean on my bucket list. What about you? What’s on your bucket list or even things you didn’t imagine should be or could be on your list? 

~Amy

It's Started!

Wow--you two are really making me do this!  As I was reading the "About Us" section I must admit I was getting a little emotional.  Really made me miss you both.  I love the profile pictures you picked for us, Amy.  I think it is so hilarious that we each have a glass of wine and Deb has a cup of tea!!  Love it.
Well--Here we go.  I will do my best.
~Sue