March.

I'm sticking with my theme of "what do we do in the wintertime?" since March here is still very much wintertime. 

We spend about $100 on Monster Jam tickets only to leave 10 minutes later because the kids can't handle the noise.  All these newfangled "mommy" blogs talk about giving your kids experience MEMORIES as gifts and not toys, and SEE WHAT HAPPENS??? 

We get sick and have VERY bad hair days.

We go to restaurants and see how many forks we can stick out of our mouths.  Always a crowd-pleaser.

We go to the Mirror Maze and I'm confronted with the freakish, nauseating, terrifying nightmare of 100 Connors and 100 Shelbys surrounding me.  (Thank goodness Noah was outside with the ticket taker because he was too scared to go in and puked in the trash can.)

We play video games while sitting in boxes with cats.  Wait, what do you mean you don't do that??  Huh?

And sometimes we're unusually cute and get along with our siblings and do normal things like build stuff with Legos.  :)

February.

Ever wonder what people in the Northeast do in the doldrums of winter?   We build forts and look cute for all of 2 seconds before we poke each other in the behinds with the sticks and throw the balls at the ceiling and get the fort kit taken away:

We then make old-fashioned box & blanket forts that we don't want to share with our brother and sister:

We leave menacing notes about stealing scarves.  Because her brothers just MIGHT be tempted to steal her My Little Pony scarf.  Whatevs, Shelby.

We see way too many movies (find the hidden Noah if you can!):

We attend Cub Scout functions where Noah decides he wants to represent the Sudan.  Wha?!?  What kind of weird 8 year old kid wants to do that?  But here's proud Noah with his Sudanese pyramid & camel cake:

We take water polo lessons - enlarge the photo to see Noah's *attentive* face in the upper left corner.  

We draw hideous faces on heart balloons and buy nerdy matching family pajamas and take photos of ourselves (I command you to IGNORE the living room in furniture re-arrangement & painting disarray).

We still luvz our snow, TRUE STORY.

We go to Skyzone and learn embarrassing life lessons.  I was so excited for Skyzone to come to our area!   UNTIL I couldn't climb out of the foam pit without help, and then discovered the hard way that I couldn't even do normal jumping because …. ummmm… uhhhhh ….. I was lazy about doing my kegels.  Is that clear enough???  Tres embarrassing, let's just say that.  The 40s are NOT the new 30s and whoever said that is a big fat stinkin' LIAR who has never attempted jumping at Skyzone in their 40's.  On the plus side, Connor is a crazy wild man at Skyzone - here he is managing to wave at me mid-flip! 

Noah's no slouch at Skyzone, either.

On the other hand, Shelby IS sort of a slouch.  She doesn't jump into the foam pit.  She carefully crawls over to the side and then kind of ROLLS into it.  It's really kind of embarrassing.  Whose lame kid IS that, anyway??

We get our cars serviced - here's Noah posing with Mark's Porsch and my Ferrari. 

Okay, so unlike the snow, that is NOT a true story.  Our 11 year old Volkswagen was in the back and not out for showing off and photo ops, it's like the shop was embarrassed by our car or something!  Pffft.

We discover an alarming number of photos of pets in our February 2014 photos file on our computer.  What was I DOING taking all these pet photos??!?

January.

Connor celebrated his 11th birthday at where else but Koto?, his favorite restaurant!  Although I'm realizing now that if it's about the chopsticks, I could have saved myself about $100 bucks … dang!

Noah was delighted to find out they'd made a movie about him, starring Russell Crowe!  Awesome!  Alas, if only the movie had been awesome, too...

We continue to LOVE our New York snow, TRUE STORY!

Shelby had a pretty much EPIC Frozen party for her 6th birthday.  Connor (aka Kristoff) & Noah (aka Sven) did photo shoots with the girls and bringing in fake snow (SUCH a ridiculous thing to do in late January in the Northeast!) was a huge hit. 

You must notice the pear-shaped, square-shaped weirdness of Connor's feet!  Those were NOT easy to do!  (unlike Noah's Nitrocircus-shirt-wearing reindeer costume)

Here's the party aftermath.  Holy crap.  That should win me Mom of the Year or SOMETHING. 

Ode to Terry, and a Guilt Trip

Once upon a time, I had a marvelous friend named Terry.  Terry and I worked together at the Cache Chamber of Commerce in Logan, Utah, and we had a grand time.  We ate lunch at the Copper Mill at least 2 days every week, gossiped and laughed (in a good way - ha ha) about our coworkers and always ordered the "pork butt" sandwich and thought it was funny every. single. time.  We even went on vacation to Disneyland together! 

I don't have any photos handy of the two of us, but if I did it would look something like this.

In the meantime, here are the places of note - the illustrious Cache Chamber of Commerce, where it all began:

And the Copper Mill, home of the equally illustrious pork butt sandwich (and most over-rated restaurant in Cache Valley, in my oh-so-humble opinion):

Then one horrid dark day, Terry's football husband (now dumb schmuck ex-husband) got a bigger and better job (yes, bigger & better than coaching USU football, true story.  Ha HA.) and Terry moved away.  We never saw each other again.  Terry was off in bigger and more exciting lands doing exotic things like attending the Kentucky Derby and winning an NFL Superbowl in Florida.  Little 'ole me was left behind in boring cowtown, Utah.

Not one to take a hint that I'd effectively been dumped (she just wasn't that into me anymore), I persisted in sending Terry Christmas cards every year.

Fast-forward SIXTEEN YEARS later and *message alert ding!*, I received an email from … Terry!  She'd found my 2008 Christmas card with my email and blog address on it, realized how much she missed me and how much she'd neglected me, and read every blog entry.  That's a LOT.    And then emailed me to tell me she was wondering why I'd stopped blogging late last year and what the heck had happened in the last year?  Was I DEAD!? or what!?!

As it turns out, the rumors of my death based on my lack of blogging in 2014 (and for most of 2013) were much exaggerated.  I'm alive, just lazier.  But in my euphoric state of being re-connected with my dear Terry again (YES, I forgave her and took her back), I promised to rev up my blog again.  And I even put the address on my 2014 Christmas cards to MAKE myself do it.

So, COMING SOON, will be our Ritchie 2014 just-barely-getting-it-in-under-deadline blitz blog entries, brought to you courtesy of peer pressure & guilt trip from Terry! 

Proof of Life

We finally got our first real snow for the 2013-14 winter.  It's only about 3 inches but we'll take it!  Please and THANK YOU!

Every year in winter I see this view...

The neighbors (not just that house, but all around us) have a nicely shoveled/snowblown driveway and pristine, lovely sparkling snow.  And now look down.  That's our front yard and driveway.

Now, here's the view out of our back windows:

Left side of the fence...our yard.  Right side of the fence, our neighbor's pristine, lovely sparkling snow with nary even a squirrel track, much less hundreds of dog and kid tracks.

Proof of life at our house.  LOTS of it.

I may not have pristine, pretty snow, but I DO have a built-in work force to shovel the snow.

But keep in mind that will NEVER happen again this winter - the kids begging to shovel the snow.  From now on it'll be begging to go out and play, doing the whole, tortuous 15-minute-per-kid-snowsuit-hat-gloves-wool socks-boots routine.

After which in less than 10 minutes they'll all be whining to come back inside, thereby triggering the whole even-more-tortuous-20-minute-per-kid-peeling-off-snowsuit-hat-gloves-wool socks-boots routine-leaving-melted-snow-everywhere, which then triggers at least one of them slipping & falling on the wet floor, thereby triggering MORE whining and wailing.

But it IS CUTE proof of life, good thing they have that going for them.

I'm sitting here now puzzled about why exactly it is that I like the snow??  It never looks pretty at my house.  It turns my kids into begging, whining hyenas.  It hides the dog poo in the back yard so you can't tell until it's too late that you're stepping in it.  *ponders another one of life's big questions*

Too Sexy for His Shirt

Today is 3rd grade picture day!  Call me crazy, but I always let my kids pick their clothes and backgrounds for their school photos.  I just don't take them that seriously or stress about 'em.  Connor always picks blue or green and prefers fairly plain clothes anyway, so no worries there.  Shelby always picks pink or rainbow backgrounds, and I DO help her with her clothes a bit (and her hair a LOT).

But then there's Noah…

Last year for his 2nd grade photos, he picked a bizarrely ugly rainbow splotch background and he wore his beloved bow tie tee, which he calls his "dress up shirt."  I just rolled my eyes and went with it.  But look at his smile!  This is one of my all-time favorite photos of Noah, because it's just so…. NOAH - big goofy grin with a goofy shirt.  On a rainbow puke background.

Anyway, today he emerged wearing this T-Rex shirt.  AND he'd already picked a waterfall landscape background (corny!!!!, ugh!!!!!, but yes, I went with it).  I pointed out that for his school photos, he'd look like a T-Rex wandering around in the wilderness.  Just a suggestion, just sayin'…

He thought about that, went back into his room, and emerged wearing his favorite pretend-leather tough-guy biker shirt.  Oh yes, MUCH better, Noah.  Eye roll again, please.

I then asked Noah how he wanted his hair done and of course, he wanted a faux-hawk.  But I was tired of using the cheap crap from Ulta (he came home from school with flat hair every day, oh no!) and tossed it into the trash, and dug out the super-expensive but super-POTENT "Short Sexy Hair" that I used to use on him (until I tried to save money).   You just can't cut corners on hair gel.  Or cheese.

Despite having previously used it, Noah evidently had never read the product name.  But this morning, he got a good look at the tube and shrieked, "WAIT, YOU'RE MAKING ME SEXY???  I CAN'T BE TOO SEXY, MOMMY!!!"

Mommy:  "Do you even know what sexy means?!??"
Noah:  "YES!  AND I ALSO KNOW I CAN'T BE TOO SEXY FOR SCHOOL PHOTOS!!!"

All together now - GROUP EYE ROLL!!