My Mother's Day Present

I received my Mother's Day (and probably my birthday as well) gift this week! It was a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens...for non-camera enthusiasts (or camera ignoramuses like myself) this is basically a short lens for up-close and super personal. I'm still getting to used to a few details, like not having a zoom and just how small 1.4 aperture really is, but here are some test shots over the past couple days...

The Hooters Debacle

In one of the recent Facebook notes asking "have you ever," I responded to a question about "Have you ever marched/protested?" with a reference to my Hooters experience of the early '90s...since I had a couple requests to blog about this, here is the joy that was that day:

Being a pilot, my dad had an opportunity to visit many restaurants in different locations across the US and beyond. Over one trip in the early 90's, he returned talking about this place called "Hooters." The restaurant they apparently visited was family-friendly and even had male waitstaff, plus they served these great chicken wings.

So off my family goes, and I can still remember it was the Hooters in Arlington's Lincoln Square, my sister was roughly in her late teens and I was roughly in my early teens (maybe 12 or 13). We enter the restaurant and I have no doubt I will never forget the horror that my tween eyes encountered. Men were everywhere, leering at my sister, and the waitresses that had their t-shirts pulled up and back with rubber bands.

I was horrified and disappointed. Why on earth would a girl want to reduce themselves in that way?

I refused to drink even water from this establishment or look at the waitress the entire time. I would not eat and wouldn't even order.

So this may be why I have such an aversion to places of this nature...

Me from roughly the time period of the "offense"

My New Perspective on Mother's Day

I've been thinking about this post over the past week...a couple details remain the same - I still feel very grateful for my mother and all she does for my family and I. I still feel amazed by all the fabulous mothers I know and wonder how they seem to 'do it all.'

However, I had planned to go into how, having now been through 3 Mother's Days as a mom, instead of feeling like I deserved some huge, special day, I felt so grateful to be a mother. Because we were ready for Kendall almost 2 years before she was delivered, I always felt like I wouldn't take my children for granted. It definitely wasn't as easy as we perhaps thought!

And perhaps I should rephrase...I still do feel very grateful...I love little Leah's smiles and giggles...her 'deliciously chunky' baby-ness...I love Kendall's silly monster faces and her scrunchy nosed smiley face...but the past 10 days in general have been hard.

They are still feeling really hard right now. It's not that I need help. It's just not easy. Tantrums happen. Discipline must be enforced. Mommy is not so good with these two little details.

But maybe that's what makes a mom a mom, and not a dad (no offense Dad's)...you work all day (either in the home other otherwise), you might be sick (ready to not be sick at this point), but you keep going. Kids get baths and put to bed, dinner is made and dishes are cleaned, home is kept and laundry is done.

So early Happy Mother's Day to all my Super Mom family and friends! But now I'm thinking we should totally get more than just one day...

The Flip Side

This has been an eventful week in home...Daddy left for a work conference on Monday morning and I received a call around 10:30 from Kendall's daycare revealing her 3 bouts of poopies that morning and that I needed to come get her. Whatever bug she had was brutal - not just from the poopy situation - but it made her extremely fussy and needy.

Monday continues with no more bathroom incidents, so Tuesday morning I prepare her for preschool, sadly relieved because she was being so high maintenance and I have been struggling with some sort of sinus infection/cold that hasn't left me in the most patient of moods. We walk into her classroom and her teacher says "Kendall can't come back for at least 24 hours."

I almost cried...that's how bad you know it's become, when you'd rather work than stay at home. So I take her back home and we wash all the yuckiness out of the house from the previous day and make it to the store to pick up some pedialyte and other necessities...I felt really grumpy for about an hour...I'd invisioned how this day was supposed to go down, and this was NOT IT...but then something miraculous happened...I prayed about the situation and really got over it...Kendall had a gloriously long nap and I had the chance to continue my study of Proverbs in the merciful afternoon sun...this all again showed me that just because I plan something doesn't mean that 1) it's going to happen or 2) that I can ever have the best plan...because in this case, it was such a blessing that I ended up staying home that day. I had the chance to snuggle with my sick baby, mop up the pieces of my home, and give my sanity a much needed rest.

More from the Book of Kendall

A typical morning conversation between Kendall and myself...

Kendall: "Mucky, Mommy" (translation = milk)
Me: "What do you say?" (trying to ease manners into every day life)
Kendall: "Warm it up!"

We'll keep working on that one...

Stay-cation here we 'go'?

This past week (and a half, for part timers like me) was vacation time for our little family. I think the last real break we had was our mini-vacation to College Station over Memorial weekend 2009, since I refuse to count maternity leave as vacation. We have a trip scheduled for July but neither of us could stand to wait that long, so we decided to try out the 'stay-cation' and booked a couple nights at Great Wolf Lodge.

I will say this...the trip to Great Wolf (as with the rest of the time off) was fun but definitely not relaxing...I think the day of the relaxing vacation is on hiatus for awhile, unless we can budget in a few nannies here and there. My dad described it best - if you take the kids, you have the stress of the kids...but if you leave the kids, you miss the kids...not sure what the solution is yet, but we have another decade or so to figure it out.

So we stayed a couple nights at Great Wolf early on in the week and I would definitely recommend it. Loved the water park. The rooms are super clean and safe. A little pricey, but considering it took us 10 minutes to get there, it had an automatic advantage, plus what vacation is not expensive? Kendall was a little apprehensive but she tried (aka we pushed her) down one of the baby slides a couple times. Trenton and I had a blast on the adult rides, particularly on the day my sister and her daughter Rachel were able to join us. I have never been a huge water park fan ever since I got a bloody nose from going down one of the slides at Wet 'n Wild and park security 'tracked me down', but I think I may be reconsidering...

Each evening the hotel has a story time, complete with singing and dancing trees and forest creatures. We only caught story time the 2nd night, of which I only saw about 5 minutes before I heard a gurgle gurgle and suddenly saw the explosion rise up on Leah's shirt. Trenton said that Kendall enjoyed it and even took a picture with "Wylie," although instead of howling at him, like the rest of the children were instructed to do, she did her classic "funny face" which I'll have to detail down below...the rest of the evening she talked about Wylie...when we asked her where he was, she explained that he was 'outside the door' but when we offered to let him in, she was no longer such a big fan.

For those of you who know me well...my feet were horribly bruised from the rides, but sadly I did not photograph the injuries as I usually do...strange since I photograph most things these days...but I didn't have much time to dawdle on the injury before we were unpacking from the trip (from which we had an obscene amount of baggage for only 1 full day) and moving the furniture around for the carpet cleaners to come Friday.

Pan to Saturday, Rangers baseball day! Yes, we did take both children and no, we won't make that mistake ever again. Oddly, Kendall was fine and it was baby Leah that put up all the fuss. I think the poor child is teething horribly and she cried for probably about 2 hours on the outing. I think I got to see a few innings, but the rest of the time was spent walking her back and forth outside the stands.

Trenton, Kendall, and Wylie

The Water Park

Blessed Easter

I love Easter more as an adult than I ever did as a child. Partly I think this is because many of my Easter memories were with my mom and sister solo with my dad on a trip somewhere. I find that slightly odd because even though, as a pilot, my dad was typically gone 3 to 4 days out of every week, I don't remember him being gone much. My dad was always great about being involved the whole days he was at home.

But returning back to Easter, for some reason I have memories of my dad being away, my sister (almost 6 years older) away at some friend's house, and my mother and I alone at home. I really don't recall many egg hunts, in fact the most noteable Easter memory may have been the one time it snowed that year and my chinese uncle Jack and a neighborhood friend walked the whole mile to the local Kroger for marshmallow eggs and jelly beans. That frigid walk felt like the longest mile of my life, at 7 years of age. In fact, I think Uncle Jack had to run home and drive to pick us up - we were that cold.

I also have a much greater appreciation of God's sacrifice - as a mother, but most importantly as a wretched sinner that has no business being anywhere near the glory of God. However, in some miracle of events that we can never fully thank Him enough for "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." I would post a few pictures, but I have so many that I love I decided to put together a slide show. Maybe it's the beautifully colored dresses, or the looks of genuine joy as the kids find 'candy gold', but I always end up with so many precious pictures that I can never decide which ones to include...