OK, OK, OK – I know I got carried away and entered SEVEN entries into 5 Minutes for Mom‘s photo contests – but I DO love photos, I love 5 Minutes for Mom, and so naturally I love their photo contests, and I just couldn’t help myself!! (blush). Hopefully they won’t disqualify me for being passionate about their contests!! :D

Daddies are always at the heart of Summer fun.

Maybe it’s because they’re not around quite as much as Mommy, so the excitement of having Daddy around adds to the fun.

Or maybe Daddies are just genetically more fun!

Here are a few pictures of the absolute joy and glee that Daddies bring to summer!

This is a photo for 5 Minutes for Mom’s summer contest!

“Explorer” is the middle name of all toddlers!! There is no better place to explore than outside. Especially when flowers are blooming and butterflies are flying and bees are buzzing!

This is an entry for 5 Minutes for Mom‘s wonderful summer fun photo contest!!

Toddlers are funny creatures. They absolutely can LOVE each other, but they will still play “near” each other, rather than “with” each other. These two little girls are best friends. They were in toddler heaven getting to go on a beach trip together, but being toddlers, they still had their fun on opposite sides of the beach towel! True summer fun for toddlers: getting to play
independently, while being right next to your best friend!

Here’s a Picture for 5 Minutes for Mom‘s summer fun contest!

This is a picture of Ali sitting in the ocean for the first time (with Daddy behind her and Mommy in front of her, of course!).

She loved the lapping waves and the fun of splashing. This picture encapsulates her absolute love of water!

This is a photo for another great 5 Minutes for Mom contest!!

Ali is a very girlie girl. Any time she sees a mess or anything on the floor that shouldn’t be there, she points, gets a worried face, and says quite dramatically, “OH NOOO!!!”.

It was Daddy’s birthday, and I wanted to help her do something special for him.

Finger painting!!

At first, she was quite unsure about getting so messy. I kept reiterating to her that it was for Daddy, and that is what helped her start getting into it. This picture was when she was the MOST consumed with her task at hand. She was fully committed to making Daddy the perfect present!!

The finished artwork now proudly has the prime real estate in wall space in Daddy’s office.

For the full “picture story”, click here.

This picture is for a contest over at 5 Minutes for Mom!!

Ali and AJ are BEST friends. They talk about each other every day, and are happiest when they are with each other! Our families went on a beach trip together this summer, and those two little girls were in absolute heaven! Here are the best friends holding hands with each other, and with their beloved Daddies. That is true summer heaven.

This is a photo for the Summer Fun contest over at 5 Minutes for Mom!!

Ali’s favorite playground activity is swinging!! She begs for “swing!!” anytime she sees playground equipment. Once she’s in the swing, good luck getting her out!!
In this picture, she is completely zoned out, relishing the moment!

To the remaining Eli-Junkies and all others that are following the Eli story line of this soap blog opera:
My question is – do you all have access to Facebook? The reason I’m asking is that Lindsay posted some awesome pics of Eli yesterday, and I will re-post them here if there are still people who only have access to my blog for updates. However, if everyone is facebook savvy now, then I will quit re-posting facebook pics, and only post new pics of Eli when they aren’t on facebook or when I take them occasionally.
Let me know if you want reposted facebook pics!

Ali and I are feeling much better today, just both very sleepy and exhausted feeling.

I got a new “bee bonnet” last week. Or maybe more aptly put, a “bee bow”.

You know how Ali loves hair bows, and they have just the CUTEST bows ever on Etsy? That is where I buy all of Ali’s bows because there is literally NOWHERE in town that has cute hair bows. Even if you can find a store that has bows (which is hard to begin with), they are horrid poofy 80’s bows (sorry, Mom, I know you made me wear these when I was little, but it’s ok, it actually WAS the 80’s).

Anyway, Ashley, AJ, Ali and I were walking through the mall the other day, and I mentioned how well a kiosk in the mall would do selling hairbows like the cute ones on Etsy, because they would be SOOO super easy to make, and there would be no (current) competition in town. Plus, think of all of the stay at home Moms (like us) who walk the mall allll the time. Ashley surprised me and said “Totally! We should do that!!”. I wasn’t quite expecting her to think it was a doable idea, and she might have just been being nice, but it set of a row of dominoes in my head.

It wasn’t purposeful, it’s just that my geeky businessy side took over my mind and FORCED me to concoct an ENTIRE business plan in my mind.

Gotta find out how much a kiosk costs in the mall.

I could buy all of the supplies, then get all of the already crafty stay at home moms I know (like Greta and Lydia), and all of the potentially crafty SAHM’s I know (all the rest of ’em) to make the hairbows, and I could have this great spreadsheet keeping up with how many they made, and then split the profits at the end of the month according to the percentages of the total hairbows made.

I could have tiered levels of how much they got per hairbow depending upon the complexity of the hairbows.

I could totally sell the hairbows for 1 for $5, 3 for $12, 5 for $15. . .etc. Or should the price point breaks be different?

How would I get people to actually work at the booths? Maybe high school girls? Maybe the aforementioned SAHM’s would like to work a few hours a week.

How much FUN would Ali and AJ have getting to help out making and keeping up with hairbows in a few years? I really got off on a long rabbit trail thought stream on that one. It reminded me of all of the crafts we made as kids (in particularly, Heads, but that’s another blog for another day), and sold at Christmas time (at Christmas Village and Homestead Hollow) to earn money to buy Christmas presents with. I absolutely LOVED doing that!! I would keep up with how many I made, what the break even point was, how many dollars that I would make per Head, etc. Yes, it’s true, I’ve always been this geeky.

Back to hairbows. I figured out inventory control systems, accounting systems, profit points, costs, etc. All in an afternoon’s “back of the mind” thoughts.

I even tried to call and find out how much it costs to lease a kiosk at the Galleria, but their sales staff was quite incompetent with this device called a TELEPHONE and kept accidentally hanging up on me and giving me the wrong numbers (maybe they knew that I wasn’t ready to lease a kiosk tomorrow).

Anyway, I know all of this is crazy talk – I already work for three companies, am a stay at home mom, and of course have to make time for my blog. Plus, businesses like this rarely ever make much money. And I remember how much unbelievable TIME it took for my Mom to run businesses at home.

But it was so FUN to think about!! And it still is. . .my geeky side still has a hostile takeover of a little corner of the back of my mind, trying to figure out how to make the time to make it work.

I know, go ahead and say it. I enjoy numbers WAY too much.

So this is one of those times that the benefit of blog therapy comes into play. You know I’m all about hyping all of the positives of blogging, and so today it’s therapy.

You see, it’s therapy because I had a really crappy day, and I knew I couldn’t just not blog about it (I have to be real!!), but I refused to whine (I’ve kind of set myself up to having to keep to a “no whiner posts” standard now that I wrote the Forms of Blogging post). So, I had to deal with my bad day sooner than I might have otherwise have liked to so that I could share what I knew God was going to teach me through it. Well, I didn’t know WHAT God was going to teach me, but I was sure that there had to be a lesson.

To briefly summarize my day (this really IS brief compared to what it could be!), I still felt awful today – fever got higher, and had general symptoms of illness (no details necessary, right?). We did what we could today, but I just didn’t feel good, and it’s really hard to be a Mommy and feel awful at the same time. Maybe that’s why God usually gives Mommies amazing immune systems. Mine just hasn’t grown in yet.

Anyway, this afternoon, we went to Wal-Mart, and I managed to be backing out of my parking space at the same time as a very small and completely invisible Mitsubishi sports car was also backing out behind me. Yes, I messed up my one-month-old bumper. I was so confused when I felt the impact, because I had looked really good before pulling out (still gun shy from my last wreck). So after getting out and exchanging the usual apologies and decided who would call the police, I got back in and looked through the rear view mirror to figure out where I had gone wrong.

And I am not exaggerating, people: I could NOT see that car AT ALL.

You see, it was this tiny little sports car, and it was so low to the ground that in my tall SUV, it didn’t show up in my rear view mirror. He was pulling out too, so I’m hoping it is a non-fault wreck. And I’m thinking we should just “patch” my bumper rather than getting a new one since I seem to have issues with the bumper (but for the record, I’m not the only one – Chris backed into someone the WEEK after we got my new bumper – just left a scratch though and the other people weren’t damaged and didn’t want to call the police. Obviously we’re not supposed to have a shiny new bumper).

Then finally, as we’re coming home, I hear Ali doing her poop strain in the back seat. I get her out and take her upstairs, and on the way up, her diaper leaks alllll over me (Second time in a week! ). Except that this diaper is baaaad. Like, sick-bad. So I take her temp, and sure enough, she’s got whatever I have.

Anyway, so you can imagine that I was feeling pretty crappy (literally – ha!). Already felt sick and miserable, and then add the wreck (and getting pooped on). I was feeling a bit like a money pit: two wrecks and two trips to the emergency room (#1, #2), all in 75 days! And yes, I just added those days up, thanks to my blog. Then of course poor Ali didn’t feel good, and here I was feeling sick/bad and wreck/bad trying to care for my feeling sick/bad 18 month old.

So. I couldn’t blog about all of the above without some positive perspective (and I was really needing some new perspective for myself too, not JUST for you guys), so I came before God while mashing potatoes (also good therapy) for dinner and asked Him to please fix my attitude and show me what He was trying to teach me. He never disappoints!! He mercifully brought two verses to my mind, and through them showed me two things:

1) Perspective. Psalm 18:19 –“He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.” – God has blessed us SO much this year in so many different ways. We have been in constant awe of His provision and love that He has bestowed on us. There are so many people out there that are REALLY struggling – take McKaylee and her parents. McKaylee is Ali’s age and has an inoperable brain tumor. I admit it – I usually can’t read her Mommy’s blog because it makes me cry just thinking “what if that were Ali” – and not much reading makes me cry. Or my co-worker Sharon who had surgery to remove cancer yesterday. Or Chris’ old roommate whose house flooded yesterday while he was visiting his wife in Pennsylvania where she is getting long term treatment for a mystery ailment. Perspective. We are unbelievably blessed. A fender bender is not near the end of the world. It’s not even the end of the day, as God showed me by miraculously lifting my spirits!