Boys and other random things: Jan through March 2017

As we were looking back over my posts from when the boys were babies, we realized how much we have forgotten about it all.  It makes me sad to realize we forget anything.  But it also makes me want to find some time to just hit on some things we might forget.  My accounting brain decided to try quarterly reports.  Hah.

Joel:

He gave up racing his Hot Wheels Nascar cars for Lent.  The afternoon of Ash Wednesday we found him lining up little bouncy rubber balls on his race track to race them instead.  Yesterday he thought of coins, and borrowed all the change from his dad's nightstand.  He now has his own Fantasy Nascar team where he picks five drivers each weekend, and he studies for this more than anything he does for school.

He just came and asked one of his typical, out-of-the-blue DEEP questions:  "Mommy, how does God hear everyone when they are praying?  EVERYONE?  How can he do that?"  I answered carefully, because trying to explain the concept of omniscience is tough with a 7-year-old.  I asked if he hears Father Eric during each Mass say, "The mystery of Faith".  He did.
Me:  "Do you know what mystery means?"
"No."
"It means something that can't be explained, or looked up in a book.  So God being everywhere and being able to hear everything is something we can't explain.  It's sort of like He is the greatest super hero EVER and has some amazing powers."  I am not sure that was a satisfactory answer.  But he walked away.

Joel has found a good friend, Thomas, who is very much like him, loves baseball and video games.  The only difference is Thomas is waaaaayyy into super heroes and J not so much.  But they've been to each others houses for sleepovers and things went pretty well.  I really like his parents, Ana and Pete.  They are older parents like us and seem very level-headed, willing to help at the school, but they're also fun.  We spent New Year's Eve at their house and had a good time.  Definitely a couple we would like to hang out with more - if only we can find time.


Huge news for this boy is his grades.  This quarter is the first quarter ever that he is eligible for Honor Roll, and he made A-B honor roll!   I'm so proud of him.  I can be a little Tiger-mommish when it comes to grades.  Jav is always on me to lighten up and realize if they are trying hard it doesn't matter what grade they get.  But I know how smart they both are so this is difficult for me.  But Joel has a very tough teacher this year and I wasn't expecting much, but he has surprised me with these grades.  He still will say out-of-the-blue, "I don't think I want to go to high school or college.  It's going to be really hard by then".  We remind him that each year you have to learn more and work a little harder, and if you do the next grade won't be that bad.  He grumbles and moves on.   On the other hand we have Gabriel who is already thinking seriously about where he wants to go to college.  He can't wait.  Man are they different.


Gabriel:
Gabriel and I went to see School of Rock at Theatre Arlington.  It was a total youth cast, even the parts of adults.  It was fantastic!   I think Gabriel has the theater bug BAD but unfortunately the camps for that type of thing are really expensive.  ($300+ as opposed to $150-175 we pay for others.)   He already decided to attend Rock Camp at his music school again this summer so he's got to make those tough choices next year.

Gabriel has given up games on the Ipad for Lent.  He wasn't quite ready to give up all video games yet.  I wish he had given up arguing.  Sheesh.

He has grown at least 2 inches since Christmas and his school pants are all of a sudden too short.  We're going to get one new pair for Friday Mass, and the rest of the time he will just have to flood away.  Just when we thought Joel might catch him, he shot up.  But now Joel is following suit and seems determined to pass him.  They will both be taller than Jav's mom any day.

And in the WOW department, Gabriel's good friend Charlotte asked him to go with she and her family on a crazy two-night road trip to Carlsbad Caverns!  They have four kids ranging from Charlotte (4th grade), Emily (7th), Katherine (Senior in HS) and Michael (Junior at University of Dallas).  They each brought someone, so 10 people in 2 vehicles with 2 hotel rooms.  G stayed in his sleeping bag on the floor with Charlotte, her mom, dad and Michael.  All the other girls were in the other room.  They drove out Tuesday morning, stopped for sand dune sledding at Monahans Sandhill State Park, and arrived at Carlsbad at 9 that night.  They spent all day at the Caverns and had a picnic lunch down there.  They were originally supposed to go home through Roswell and see the infamous Hangar 18, but the family voted to head toward the Guadalupe Mountains Nat'l Park to hike and rock-hop.  They didn't head back home until 1:30pm and arrived back at 1 in the morning Friday!   G was a tired boy for the rest of Spring Break, but very happy he got to go.  Pics to come, hopefully.

People who know how control-freaky I can be about my kids were amazed that we let G go on this trip.  It was not easy for me.  But we have gotten to know Charlotte's parents and family pretty well the last couple of years and we both think they are the best parents, very devout and responsible.  The kids are all honor roll students; the younger girls are altar servers and the two older ones are lectors and Eucharistic Ministers at Mass, Charlotte's dad and brother are both Eagle Scouts.  I don't think I would have let him go with anyone else, and I didn't really worry that much about him.  But I sure was happy to hug him at 1 in the morning when he got back!!!

I'm proud of G for finding a good group of friends this year.  A mixture of boys and girls (but mostly girls), they all care about grades and being well-behaved at school, as opposed to the super competitive sports boys he was trying to be friends with before.  He has never seemed happier.



Family/Random:

My dad had surgery for kidney stones and other male issues I won't go into.  He did fine, is still recovering but almost back to normal.

My mom took me to see the FW Symphony play selections from Rogers and Hammerstein movie musicals while the movies played on a huge screen above them!   It was so great.  The music is very moving anyway, with the visual factor added in I welled up quite a few times.

We have been having a blast watching Master Chef Junior.  The boys love all the kids, and I think it will inspire G to help me in the kitchen more.  But J....he is so funny.  He says, "wow that looks really good" about something they're making.  Jav and I then hopefully ask if he would eat it and he always says, "Oh no way."  Shaking my frustrated head.  

The other show they loved was "A Series of Unfortunate Events" on Netflix, based on the Lemony Snicket books that no one in this family had ever read before the show.  Gabriel has almost read all of them now (they had them at the school library), and I'm interested in them too.

We made a huge decision in our TV-watching world.  A few years ago we were told that satellite wasn't an option for us any longer unless we put the dish on the FRONT of our house.  Not on the roof, sticking out from the front porch.  No.  So we went Uverse, but kept having problems with the signal popping in and out, and the cost significantly rising each year.  The signal problem turned out to be squirrels chewing on the line.  My brother had recently rid himself of all satellite/cable for TV, and has the Amazon Firestick with apps on 4 tvs now.  We decided to do the same thing.  We have Netflix and Amazon Prime, Playstation Vue for local TV and sports and our favorite cable channels, and we are thinking of adding Hulu.  We LOVE it!  We also had to add more bandwidth and stronger signal, so we switched to Charter for internet only.  Our bill has dropped over $100 a month!  The only complaint I have is that we still don't have PBS, but Playstation Vue people swear it will be available soon.


And at school/church, Gabriel trained to become an altar server in the Fall and is serving pretty regularly on Saturday nights now.  It's good and bad, we needed to attend more regularly, but sometimes we have family get togethers that we have to do on Saturday nights and if he's scheduled you have to find someone to swap nights with (kind of a pain).  But we are very proud of him for wanting to do it and have fully established ourselves as 5 pm Saturday Mass regulars.

During Catholic schools week in January, the school has students participating in all the weekend Masses.  Our boys had a Mass where G did 1st reading and Prayers of the Faithful, and J did the greeting and 2nd reading.  I was a nervous wreck ( more for Joel because he had some challenging words for a 1st grader), but they both did beautifully.  I would never, ever have been able to get up in front of a sanctuary full of people to do what they do.  The first grade class was scheduled to lead some important Masses this year.  The first was when Bishop Olsen officiated and spent all day at the school.  And the second was for Accreditation Week, when the team to evaluate our school visited the entire week.

Father's Day

We went to Railhead for BBQ Saturday night with Jav's dad and forgot to take any pictures.  It wasn't a real kid friendly place, and neither of the boys liked their food.  It was ok, but won't be going back.  They didn't even have Shiner Bock on draft for God's sake!  What kind of a Texas restaurant do they think they're running?  We had to settle for Ziegenbock.  But Jav's dad seemed to enjoy everything, so that's what mattered.  

And what do we love about Father's Day, along with getting to honor all the great Dads in our lives?  DONUTS!!!!!!!  The 2nd time this year we get donuts and sausage rolls for breakfast (the 1st being Mother's Day).

Jav, the greatest Dad in the world (alright, tied with my dad), and his boys.  We were supposed to go over to my mom and dad's but they had a carpet issue and asked if I would host at the last minute.  Since I hadn't had the family over since Christmas (!!!!!), I agreed.  Mom and Dad brought the food, so I just had to make sure the house looked halfway decent.

Three of four cousins making silly faces, while the fourth one just looks at them like they're crazy!

Luckily it wasn't too hot to get the hammock out.

My dad and his two babies!

Mamaw and Poppy and their clan.

Staged, true, but funny nonetheless.

We had pizza and salad and birthday cake (it was also my sister-in-law's birthday).  Poor April always has to share her birthday with Father's Day festivities.    But it was a really fun day and I'm glad we got to spend time with everyone.

Scottish Festival!

As I've written before, we love all things Scottish.  We're not sure why, we just do.  We try to go the Scottish Festival every year, but in years past it's always been the first weekend in June, and really hot.  Imagine our excitement when we found out it was moved to the first weekend in May, which happens to be close to our anniversary.  And since we spent our honeymoon in Scotland, it seemed like the perfect weekend.   

There were fewer people this year, maybe because of having to compete with Mayfest.  But we loved watching The Highland Games (especially Gabriel), enjoyed the food and wonderful music, and good beers from across the pond.  Oh, and the people watching can't be beat.  OK, maybe the crazies that show up for Scarborough Fair are even more entertaining.  Maybe.  

 You can't believe how many people wear kilts...

... and various other strange getups.  A tail?  Really?

This was a new feature for kids this year.  These huge balls float in a shallow pool of water, and if the kid can stand up he will be "Running on Water" (the name of the activity).  They looked like giant hamsters to me.  But Gabriel all of a sudden wanted to try it.  Gabriel does not normally jump at things like this, and we were sort of, well, delighted that he wanted to try something new.

Here he is getting his bubble blown up around him.

And this is what he looked like for the entire 8-10 minutes he was on the water.  Not much Running on Water.  Just a whole bunch of Falling Down on Water.  We were so proud of him, and he had a blast doing it.  We won't go into how much his neck hurt the next day.  Oops - silly parents!  We were so delighted we didn't think about possible bodily injury.

This was one of the better costumes we saw on this day.  I told the guy so, and after we walked off Jav thought I probably insulted him for saying he had on a "costume". Honey, do you really think that HE thinks he's a pirate?  I don't think he was that much into character.

This little guy seems to have fun wherever he goes.

My handsome guys.  It was a really fun day, that I hope we'll get to do again next year.

Mountain men they will never be...

...and I'm not so sure that's a good thing anymore.

Let me try to explain the genesis of my crazy thinking.

I think we have done a good job in starting the boys off on the right foot academically. They love to read, learn, and ask questions. I think as parents one of our main goals is to help them get "book smart". We want them to WANT to go school, make great grades, and get into a fantastic college. But what about common sense stuff? Or practical life lessons? Neither one of us can work on cars, figure out how to fix plumbing problems, or build things with wood. The only things I feel I can contribute on a practical level (besides basics like doing laundry) is to teach them about gardening, and possibly growing their own food.

But what if they need more than that to survive one day? What if something catastrophic occurs to take away our comfortable and relatively easy way of life? What if the food or water supply was contaminated or rendered somehow unsafe? Every time a story breaks about bacteria infecting people from a food source it scares the crap out of me. I think we have a tendency to hold onto blind faith that whatever is on the shelves of our grocery store is 100% safe to eat. Or what if global warming kicks in sooner rather than later, and drought becomes the norm? All of a sudden there's not enough food to feed everyone, and things start to get ugly.

Paranoid thinking, maybe, but not completely farfetched.

A couple of years ago, we were kind of sad to realize that there was no one to take Gabriel (this was before Joel) fishing. Well, we could take them, and I know how to attach a lure to the line and cast it. But if I ever caught a fish I wouldn't know the first thing about releasing it, let alone keeping it to clean, filet and serve for supper. My Uncle Robert used to take my family fishing, and although he threw most of what we caught back, he would sometimes keep one of the bigger ones and we would have some beautiful fresh fish filets for dinner that night. My mom, coming from a family of uncles on her dad's side that actually fished the Gulf commercially, claims she used to know how to clean them, but isn't too jazzed about trying it again. My dad would go fishing with his grandfather, Daddy Buck, but Dad never had the patience to actually sit and fish. He loved to hike, so that's what he would do while his grandfather fished.

Uncle Robert and his brothers all hunted too, and and could skin and butcher a deer without thinking about it. After all, their father (my maternal great grandfather) had been a butcher for his career. I have second and third cousins who killed their first buck before they were 10 years old. I used to play just outside my Uncle Robert's smokehouse, where he had different cuts of venison hanging everywhere and the smell was sometimes horrible, sometimes heavenly. But my parents never got into the hunting way of life. In fact, my Dad may have gone along on some hunting trips when he first started meeting my mother's family, but never had the stomach for killing another living creature. Which is the way I feel about it too.

Jav's dad never got into hunting or fishing either, and Jav himself was too busy playing baseball to worry about the outdoorsy stuff. So the boys have little or no knowledge to gain from their dad. Which up until now wouldn't really have bothered me. I've been a hater of guns and hunting for some time now. When we started having children, I just assumed they'd grow up in a gun-free home. That included toy guns, in my opinion. So other than a tiny plastic water gun that didn't work that someone gave him last summer, Gabriel hasn't had the word "gun" in his vocabulary. But he recently went to a classmates' cowboy-themed birthday party where the party favors were a hat, bandana and plastic water gun. He had a great time once he got home getting dressed up, especially once I told him there were some boots in his closet that someone gave us that probably almost fit him now. Then he told me while driving to school one morning this week that one of Tita and Tito's neighbors has a BB gun in his garage. How, I asked, did he know this? Because Tito took him to say "Happy New Year" and the man let him hold the BB gun, and may have even let him shoot it. The details are sketchy.

But the thing is, I am starting to wonder if they might someday NEED to know how to hunt or fish for their own food.

We would love for the boys to get involved in Boy Scouts, and my dad and I are on the verge of taking Gabriel on his first hike at the Fort Worth Nature Center. But even if they love it, it doesn't mean they'd end up even more outdoorsy. I asked Jav what he thought about getting them a BB gun when they're a little older, but only to shoot at targets in the back yard. He thinks I'm crazy in thinking that they won't try to aim at any animals. I wondered about archery electives, or taking them skeet shooting. At least they could practice at hitting a target. But the thing is, you could practice on non-living things your whole life, but it wouldn't give you ANY sense of what it would be like to actually track and kill a living creature.

There is a scene in "Into the Wild" that really grabbed me. It's towards the end of the movie, and college boy Chris McCandless has hitchhiked all the way to Alaska in his quest to turn his back on the establishment. He has read countless books on surviving in the wilderness. He kills a moose and is attempting to skin and butcher the animal before the meat starts to rot and becomes inedible. And this is where he realizes that reading things out of a book, no matter how fierce your determination to do them, is not the same as real life experience. He fails, and I felt his agony of realizing that not only did he kill that majestic animal for nothing, but that he may have blown his chance of finding real food for a long, long time.

So would the boys be able to turn into Mountain Men in a pinch, without having grown up going hunting and fishing? Probably not. I guess we need to hope that they become so successful after college that they have the money to hire someone to do it for them. And I'll have to keep pondering that BB gun issue.

Another crazy zoo trip

We had my niece, Macy, over to spend the night last weekend. We decided to take her to the zoo, partly because they were having a new dinosaur exhibit and partly because it was absolutely beautiful outside that day. Every time we've been to the zoo lately, we've seen some really neat things. This time did not disappoint, and was just made even more fun since Macy was with us. This was the first dinosaur we walked up on. Gabriel is not convinced at this point that it's not real. They all moved and made noise, and were just so cool!

This guy was the biggest one. A little while after this was taken, we ended up at Gabriel's favorite spot - the birds of prey. (Which just happens to be mine too.) We always see something pretty amazing from these beautiful (and big) birds. And this time was no different. One of the Bataleur Eagles was sitting on a nest, and looked quite content to be there no matter how many visitors were staring at her. Then, we realized that one of the Harpy Eagles had landed just over the walkway and was causing quite a stir. He was literally two feet above our heads, but we were coming at him from behind. When I started winding around to try to take his picture from the front I overheard other zoo patrons saying something about being sorry for the mouse. I thought, uh-oh. And sure enough, he was clutching a little mouse between his gigantic talons. I tried to tell Macy and Gabriel to just walk on by and not look too close. But what does a little kid do when you tell him/her not to look at something. They gawked. And were so excited to see the mouse. Luckily, just after we all had cleared him and were looking for the Andean Condor, we heard the crowd go, "eeeeeeewwwwwwwww!!!!!" So I guess we just barely missed seeing him eat his dinner, which would have been a little too much nature, even for me.

This looks like a triceratops, but is something called a torosaurus.

I just love it when Gabriel can spend time with his cousins. These two aren't very far apart in age, but when Cade and Macy are both at our house they have a tendency to play with each other and sort of forget about Gabriel (which I totally understand!). But that's why I decided to start having them over one at a time, alternate months. Gabriel and Macy had a GREAT time together and really bonded this time.

My very cute chubby-cheeked men.

She is such a cutie! We had so much fun with her, and laughed so much our sides hurt during dinner. I love she and Cade SO MUCH and am so glad they are close enough to be able to see them so often. Next we'll get Cade in May. Yay!

Ducks

I'm trying to get caught up on posts since that vacation one took me about three weeks to finish!

Labor Day weekend we went to Randol Mill Park to feed the ducks and have a picnic for my mother-in-law's birthday. That's what she wanted to do.

It was a little too warm to walk around the pond, but we did a little walking. Tia Sandie also brought a big ball that we played catch with.

I can't figure out who Joel looks like in this picture.

Mmmmmmmm. Italian Cream cake from Central Market. I'm sorry Nana, but it was just as good as your homemade version!

Joel just laughed and laughed at the silly birthday blowy doohicky (what do you call those things?)

The Birthday Girl!

New blog

I found my third cousin, Callie, on Facebook this past week and was so happy to catch up with her. She's from Fredericksburg, and went to NYC to write for Martha Stuart's design magazine just after graduating from UT. I was very impressed by this gutsy move, because she is such a sweet, girl-next-door type and I never imagined her doing this. Well, it turns out she has started her own design firm with another colleague and is doing really well for herself. I think they are both really talented from what I've seen on the website, which you can find by clicking on the "Scout Designs" blog link. Now I'm even more impressed, and a teeny bit jealous. And the great thing is, living in the Big City hasn't changed her sweet nature one bit. I hope she enjoys continued success (and I'll keep living vicariously through her every once in awhile).

I'm so lucky. No I mean REALLY lucky.

Today is my wonderful hubby's birthday. I will start off this post by saying that the ONLY bad thing about marrying someone as truly thoughtful as Jav is that it becomes way too easy to take him for granted when we are in the swing of this crazy thing called life.

But it hits me in little details throughout my days and evenings how much I love him and why.

He has the patience of Job and never lets my frenetic impulsiveness or moods disturb his calmness. He puts up with my Type A personality with something I can only call amusement, which seems to totally work for us.

He never complains about anything. If I give him extra honey-do's on the weekend (which is usually already packed full of things he is trying to get done), he just tries to get them done with no protest.

He is a hopeless romantic and isn't afraid to cry when his emotions get the best of him, something I think makes a man somehow more manlier.

I have as much fun watching old movies with him as I do watching baseball playoffs. We recently took four nights to watch Dr. Zhivago, which I had seen twice but he had never seen. I came away from it with a much deeper perspective sitting there watching it with someone I love.

He has the best laugh I've ever heard, and he uses it often. And he makes me laugh.

He makes sure to talk with his Mom almost every day.

He is a terrific Dad, and one that I know will be the best role model I could hope for. And as an extra bonus, he's warm and loving, and really gets into being a parent. He is involved just as much as I am, even with the messier parts of parenting.

He'll eat just about anything I put in front of him, and even if he doesn't really like it will say it was "interesting".

No matter what we little mundane things we are doing or what errands we are running, during any given second of every day, I love being with him.

Happy Birthday Honey!

What I learned from Gabriel's birthday party

Taken the morning of the party, he is already so excited he won't sit still for a picture.

The cake.

He has his new dinosaur t-shirt on I bought for the party.

We threw another backyard birthday party for Gabriel Saturday. Even with only inviting immediate family, Godparents and kids, and our few neighbors that we're really close to, the guest list turned into 21 people. A few couldn't make it, but it still seemed like a lot of people. We followed the same idea as last year and set up the ping pong table in one corner of the yard, and added a croquet course on the other. The new swing set proved to be pretty popular with the kids.

Everyone seemed to have a good time, especially Gabriel, who is our little party mingler. He greets each new arrival with a big hug. He never stops moving, and goes from one group of people to the other to see what every one is doing. He sometimes will stop mingling and join them for a little while, but then he's off to the next grouping. The thing I'll remember most (besides the things I have listed below), is the look of pure joy on his face when everybody sang Happy Birthday to him, while he sang right along with us.

I, however, did not have as good of a time as I did for his birthday last year, and was very upset when it was over (probably due to complete and utter exhaustion). After giving some thought as to why, here's what I have learned from this year's party:

10. The minute I finally have time to relax a little and maybe even play some ping pong or croquet, everybody's ready to go home.

9. My dog apparently doesn't like the way my uncle moves around. He was a new addition to our guest list this year since he now lives here instead of Fredericksburg. We're very happy to have him with us, but he moves very awkwardly due to his strokes and we couldn't get Molly to stop barking at him and had to lock her up in the garage. She's never done that to anyone before.

8. The kids love it when it's pinata time, but I am starting to hate pinatas. Last year my niece almost got whacked in the face. This year it was almost Gabriel. For a few seconds I thought he had been hit. This was the point where my blood pressure got up so high I could feel it, so I went to lay down.

7. Planning a sit-down meal instead of just snack foods when you've invited more people than your table holds is a big mistake, especially when it's too hot for anyone to want to sit outside. Which leads to...

6. Apparently late September is always going to be hot, or at least the day we plan Gabriel's party will be. What happened to our 75 degree highs from mid-week?

5. No matter how much planning we do before hand, we are still scrambling to do tons at the last minute, and are busy throughout the party. It's very frustrating to realize the party has ended and I got to see very little of it going on. I have to piece together what happened by watching the video.

4. Small doses of family are good and welcome at this point. Large doses are bad. Just very bad.

3. Never attempt to throw any kind of party when you are 42 and 7 months pregnant. Your hormones and nerves do not understand the concept of "party time" at this point.

And the things that kept me going:

2. I value my husband's patience and willingness to jump through hoops more and more each year. And I think I might lose it without his sense of humor and ability to calm me down.

1. No matter how much work it is, how many things seem to go wrong, or how exhausted you are afterwards, if Gabriel had fun it was all worth it.

And he did! (More pics to come).

First carousel ride

A little over a week ago, we went to lunch with Jav's family for his Mom's birthday at Cheesecake Factory. That place has some GOOD food, although I think their menu is so extensive that it's hard for people to make a decision. They need to pare it down a bit. We decided to split three different kinds of cheesecake for dessert: Chocolate, Red Velvet (with delectable cream cheese icing), and Dulce de Leche. I tried really hard to not pig out and eat more than anyone else.

After we finished, everyone was really full, and Jav's Mom and sister had the brilliant idea of walking into The Parks mall to let Gabriel ride their huge indoor carousel. So we all took a little walk to walk off our lunch, and Jav was voted the one to ride with Gabriel. He was a little apprehensive, but mostly excited. He picked out a horse and when the thing started moving, I don't think I've ever seen him smile that big! It was great fun to watch and try to get pictures every time they sped by. He of course wanted to ride it again, and this time picked out a tiger to ride. It really did make the day even more special. Now I know it will be a blast to take him someplace that has even more rides-once I'm in a little better shape to do that!