Memories from the Forgetful

Ok so after I post these pictures I will accept that I cannot change the fact the we are back in Cincinnati and will get on with writing my blog in more regular intervals. Unlike some people I know who blog more often when they are on vacation. So now I give you...... Photo Vomit.




Yes, my two year old smokes cigars. What's it to ya'?











Ok, he didn't really smoke a cigar, but he did have lots of fun this week.
Ohhhhh Vacation..... I miss you. Come back soon

It's Allayna's Birthday ya'll!!!

Happy Birthday Allayna!!!!

Here are some pictures from our vacation!!!!
Gratuitous walking on the beach holding hands shot.

My sweet boy on the beach.


The BEANS!!!

Harrison doesn't look too happy, but that's because his sweet sensitive baby skin and the salt water and sand don't really agree with one another!!


My guy has style.




My cute Hubby at dinner.

Look at this cute little group of people!


Here's my little Lincoln

Chris took our little family down to the boardwalk.

We went to the Gay Dolphin... there is a ridiculous amount of stuff in that store.

This is scary... Harrison and Chris playing an arcade game together.

Lincoln was less than impressed.

It is only Tuesday, but I'm feeling sad about coming home already.
I guess it wouldn't be called vacation if I didn't have have to come back eventually. I will try to savor every moment. More pictures coming soon.

"Let's just call a peach a peach"?
I had never heard this expression before 10 or so days ago. I knew what it meant, but thought it was funny, because who would call a peach anything but a peach? Is this a common expression? I need to know. The phrase comes from my dear fiend Joanna. Joanna has other catchphrases like, "It's not a big of a deal." So as you cn see I don't trust her 100% in this arena.
I imagine the phrase would go something like this, "Let's just call it what it is." or "Let's just call poop, a poop. It is what it is." or "Let's call a roach a roach." Sometimes people try to make bad/gross things not so bad/gross by calling them a different name.
This is the real reason for this post.

Ack!!!! One of these crawled up my pants while we were on the pier yesterday evening. My husband called it a palmetto bug, my eyes called it a cockroach. I felt some relief, because I thought... "Hey it's just a palmetto bug, nothing too bad." Of course I get back to the beach house and type "palmetto bug" into the google search bar and lo and behold... IT'S A ROACH!!!! UGHHH. So to my dear husband "Let's just call a roach a roach." I'm not falling for that palmetto bug thing again.

It's Dwarfs not Dwarves I've checked a couple times.

Ok, so I said I would gather up some vacation memories.

In honor of our traveling day I will tell you about our traveling days we've had in the past. You will all want to come on vacation with us from now on.

Our parents would wrap gifts and put them in our trunk. If we were good we would get a gift to open for our next leg of our journey. It would usually be things like coloring books, crayons, dolls, stuff like that. But I remember one year specifically. My mom got us Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was so cool and exciting. This is the sad part. I can't remember if we got all the dwarfs or if Allison got something different. I would imagine I would remember only one of us having the princess and the other being very disappointed. This is how it would look if we hadn't both gotten a doll.

"Can we open a gift now?"
"Sure... let's look in the trunk."
We each pull out a gift get back in the car.
One of us beats the first one in opening and we peer over to see a sparkly dress on a beautiful princess we start ripping at the paper wildly to find.....!!!!

A wrinkly old man with a gray beard, who is short in stature and wearing sack cloth pants. Just what I ALLLLLWAAAYS wanted!

I'm sure I would remember how this went.... unless I was the one who opened Snow White. In that case who cares... EVEN SCHMEVEN.

I have been a bit overwhelmed lately. Nothing serious, but have had a hard time trying to concentrate on writing a blog. These are my thoughts for the day, it is easier to write what I am thinking randomly instead of trying to make any sense of it.
1.) I am cheap!!! Some of you probably know this, but I should have my picture next to the word "frugal" in the dictionary. I have been squeezing my poor big baby into tiny jeans because I paid full price for them. From what I understand... some people buy things full price and never wear them then donate them to Goodwill. I am not one of these people. I buy things years in advance to save myself money. It's a problem and my babies rolls have been speaking to me, I need to relax. I will pay $5.49 for a combo meal, but I pay $7.00 for a pair of jeans and have a heart attack! There is something wrong with me.
2.) I like that people notice I am trying to lose weight, but then I also think, "Well, was I looking fat last time you saw me, because it must've been an obvious change for you to comment." Then I think I should be proud of my tiny accomplishment and stop over-analyzing everything. When people say I look good and were curious if I've lost weight, my response should be, "Yes, I have been losing weight, thank you for noticing." I will work on this.
3.) Also, I am tired of racist, sexist, nasty jokes. Even when it comes from people I love. I can't take it.... It is... uh... I will stop there.
4.) I can't wait for vacation. I will have to uncover some long lost vacation pictures in celebration of Friday when we leave for South Carolina.
Here is one of Allison, Allayna, and I. Man, I was a tan kid.

I cannot wait for our family vacation this year. Last year we went to St. George Island. Never heard of it? I am not surprised. We hadn't heard of it before Mom booked the vacation either. It doesn't matter where my family goes we have fun together. We laugh until we cry. Everyone has a good time and it is just relaxing and fun for a week.

Here are some memories from Vacation '08




This photo here is Ava and I singing karaoke.

It was bad. Very bad. Not Ava... me.

So, I thought I could sing karaoke. I chose a song from my child hood, that I enjoyed when I was 12 or so. It was a mistake! It was "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees. The song started and I quickly realized it didn't go quite how I had remembered. (Whhaaaaat?!? I have a bad memory?) It was a sad and pathetic attempt I was looking at my family and they were trying so hard to help me and sing louder to try to get me to sing it right. I couldn't get this DAG song! Chris was standing at the bar. (Most likely ashamed to claim me as his wife) He witnessed one guy lean over to his friend, roll his eyes, and say sarcastically "Killing me softly?" Soon Ava came up and sang with me. She must have felt my pain and wanted to save me. She might have known more words than me. I was sure I was going to be attacked by an angry mob afterwords, but with a cute baby saving the show I was pretty sure they forgave me. It was awful.



This is Grandma Cheryl, you may recognize her from my zoo pics. She makes everything fun, even dominoes. Well dominoes is pretty fun to begin with, but it's more fun when she makes trophies.



Guess who won?



Are you having a hard time figuring out which one was the winner? You were probably wrong. See I tricked you. I said guess who was the winner and then put up a picture of my trophy. I actually was the loser. Grandma couldn't find a horse at the thrift store for the "horse's ass" prize. (I don't really know what that means but everyone else seemed to think it made sense.) So she bought a unicorn instead. She was so excited to show us she ended up pulling it out of her bag-o-trophies and exclaiming "And the loser gets the U-corn's ass!" She doesn't cuss very often so she must've been looking forward to it or nervous about it because she just skipped a good portion of the word unicorn. Ryan's trophy is a crappy wad of aluminum foil and painters tape, he was in first place, and Chris' was a crab with eyes glued on to it and 2 shells for the "butt" and it was glued on top of a pinecone. (The best part about Chris' trophy is, it had it's real eyes but grandma couldn't see it's little crab eyes so she glued some on it's backside and she glued the shell butt close to the crabs real eyes.) Sorry Grandma, I called Ryan's trophy crappy! I meant it was an awesome wad of aluminum foil.

Here is a collection of just a few more pics from St. George Island.





Hopefully Harrison likes the sand more this year.

Warning! It's a long one. I need to filter some info probably. I will get the hang of this.

My parents rock. (Although I might not have always known this) It is so true. Growing up I know for sure we went on vacation every year, well, at least as far as I can remember we went on vacation every year. It didn't matter if Dad was still in school or we were poor and lived in North Fairmount, I'm pretty sure we still went.

When I was 15 I so did not appreciate the fact that my parents did this. I had just finished my freshmen year @ Colerain, Allison had just graduated, and Allayna would have been 6 almost 7. We were on our way to California for 2 weeks. Now to any normal kid this would have been awesome, but this was the summer of bummer for me. I had lots of new friends at home and had been hanging out with them since school had let out. Now, poor pathetic me had to go to California. Whaa whaa whaa!

The trip started out with us having to make 3 connecting flights and one was through a super big airport (which I can't remember right now.) We knew we'd have a tight squeeze at one point but we were being optimistic about it all. (Ok, I want to say it was O'hare, but I may have to correct it later.) So we land in "O'hare" and realize we have about 15 minutes to get on our connecting flight and if I recall correctly it was over a mile to get there. We had to take a shuttle to the concourse and after that we had to run. It looked like it was straight out of a sitcom. My mom took off her shoes and was sprinting and my dad booked way ahead of us. We were running on the moving sidewalks trying to catch our flight. I am sure you are trying to picture us dragging poor little 6 year old Allayna behind us to get there. Now this is sad, I can't remember if we made it after all that drama, but I'm gonna say we did. We deserved it after that long run!

Our first stop was in San Francisco and we stayed in the Adelaide Inn now known as the Adelaide Hostel. It was in a dark creepy alley and pretty difficult to find, and kind of.... old and stinky. Allison and I shared a room together and Allayna stayed with my parents. I called my friends every night and Allison wrote love letters to Ryan or something like that. We went to China town where Allayna got a bright red kimono and we skipped around holding hands, once again like a sitcom family. We saw lots of jade objects and after a while we said we should start a collection. Dad would say every time the jade was for his "correction" and we would all laugh (every time). We walked down to the pier where we saw sea otters breaking things over their bellies and got some really cool pics of me in orange pants and a pokemon shirt. I hope they do not surface.

This is getting long, but I must remember more than I thought. I will recap the rest in tidbits. Like flashes of memories.
*flash* Allayna would do this creepy surprised face where she would look at something in amazement rub her eyes and then look again in amazement, this made us laugh everytime.
*flash*We went to Big Sur where we talked about lighting farts, played the "HAHA" game and got whipped in the face by sand. It was beautiful. We laughed.
*flash* Dad wore his sunglasses without one of the lenses for a long time without noticing, we laughed.
*flash* Allison made fun of me when I was on the phone with my friends and I punched her, we didn't laugh.
*flash* We did our morning exercises in our underwear, we laughed.
*flash* When we got home, my luggage was missing, with all of my new clothes, I didn't laugh.

This was before teenagers had cell phones and text messaging. I'm glad. I wouldn't have such great memories, blurred or not, if I would have had one in my hand at all times.

Mom and Dad, I don't know if I ever thanked you for that trip, but I want to say it now. Thank you for always making me laugh even when I am a big, teenage, brat.