O Brother

Brothers are special people. My brother is pretty special (and today I don't even mean special ed). Mr. Smartypants and his brother have a unique relationship. They couldn't be more different, but love each other inspite of their differences. Now, I'm not a boy, obviously, so I don't get the whole brother-brother relationship but I get that it is unique as I've been able to watch my husband and his brother. I look forward to seeing what happens in ten or twenty years with this:



Gotta love the brother bond. They were watching cartoons together.

The post with no title

I really have no title, just wanted to share this picture of the herd with everyone. Fall is arriving around here and we are beginning to dress as such. Hats are all the rage this season.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Beauty may


indeed be



just in the eye


of the beholder


but behold this


because this is truly beautiful.

Finally...after all that waiting

Are you sick of waiting on me to get my act together yet? Well, I'm finally getting it together just for you, just because I love you all so. Really, I do....I swear. Okay, so not as much as my kids or my husband, but I still love ya bunches.....

Enough teasing...so I have this exciting new surprise that has kept me busy and away from my computer...and no, it isn't another baby...those of you who thought that will be lined up and shot at will. By a really large firing squad that is really scary looking. I promise...

Okay, really...here we go. Can you guess???












We have a new place to live!!!!!
Now this may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but as Lesli and Debra can testify to, my previous digs were anything but spacious. I've seen ants with bigger houses than what we had. All six of us were crammed into a very small 3 bedroom house with no garage. We literally lived on top of our stuff. We had been on a list for larger quarters since last November. Finally we got called. What a glorious day. The new place is much newer and MUCH MUCH larger. We actually have a place for everything we own! And all our children too. Please pardon the dirty laundry and piles of randomness that appear in every picture. We were moving and hadn't quite gotten settled when these pictures were taken. We are much more settled now, although parts of my house are still a mess (like my closet, go figure). Mr. Smartypants and I are basking in the glory of space. A commodity that was hard to come by a few weeks ago.

A side note:
after looking at the pictures I just posted, I realized they in no way do our house justice in reference to the space we have. The rooms are larger than they appear. I'm a crappy photographer. What can I say?

Surprises, New and Exciting

I realize it has been some time since my last post and I apologize to all of you who have apparently been stopping by frequently to check to see if I have anything new and exciting for you. Well, I have a really good reason for the temporary abandonment of my postings. I'm still really tied up and busy with said reason, however, I will reveal to all of you in short order, what has caused my absence. I'm sure many of you will be as excited as I am (or at least close). For now however, I have some UFC Ultimate Fighter to suffer through. Apparently my husband knows one of the contestants personally. They apparently swapped sweat (that sounds almost as disgusting as my husband used to smell after those "fights") at the Mixed Martial Arts gym my husband trained at when we lived in Texas. Well, I'll get back to you soon with the exciting new surprise. For now, I must go see what the banging is coming from downstairs.

Eating socks.

Okay, just when you all thought the washing machine debacle was over, here we go again. Sort of. I ran the front-loading washing machine cleaner through my wash on Thursday and it still didn't work. Actually, it seemed to get worse. Now, we knew that my washing machine was probably really dirty, but I would have thought the cleaner would have helped. It didn't. So on Friday, I took the herd to escort Noodle to the airport and Mr. Smartypants worked on my washing machine. It was, in fact, very dirty. He compared what came out of the drain hose to toxic waste that was probably illegal in every state but Louisiana. So, yes, my machine was very dirty, but that isn't all. There is apparently a small catch basket that sits just outside the washing machine drum to catch larger debris before it goes into the drain hose. Uh, when he opened that up, he found not one, but TWO socks, clogging the little basket. Ya, two socks were causing my laundry nightmare. My washing machine was EATING MY SOCKS. So, if you think your dryer is eating your socks, think again....it's probably your washing machine.

Do I have too many kids?

The title of this blog is not an attempt to allow you to decide for me if I have too many kids or not, but instead, a post about personal decisions and respect for those. A wildly popular blogger that I regularly read just posted this post about the Dugger family and their recent announcement that baby 19 is on the way. The post made me start thinking (I actually had time for that this morning...I only have three children today) about my own family. Now, four kids isn't really all that many kids. There are lots of families around us with 5, 6 or even 8 kids. I consider those to be big families. Not mine. Its funny, though, because I still get strange looks when I go places. I'm sure I'm quite the sight: two kids in a stroller, one strapped on my chest and another tagging behind me yelling, "mom! mom!" I took Noodle to the airport yesterday to catch a plane to go see his Grandmother in Chicago for the weekend. I got lots of comments about the red hair on the twins, loads more about having my hands full (and yes, I will agree that my hands are full) and even one question about how many were mine (I also had Noodle's 17 year-old half brother with me). Mr. Smartypants and I carefully considered and discussed the total number of children we would have after the twins were born. My nice even number of four children did not happen by accident. We decided to have a baby with the twins and were blessed by two, Moose was also very planned and agreed upon ahead of time. (I won't lie to you, we were relieved there was only one of him). We have agreed that we are most likely done (unless someone who loves us very much wins the lottery) as our resources will limit the number of children we feel we can raise and at some point I would like for all of them to go to school so I can go to the bathroom alone and it not be 3am. But everywhere I go, I get looks. Most in amusement at the circus (and I'll be the first to admit, we are a circus), some in amazement that I so successfully contain them in the afor mentioned manor. Some in disdain because I have so many small children. I got a new look yesterday in the airport: the "please God, don't let her be on my flight" look. He he he...the shock people will be in for at the gate going to Germany if Uncle Sam sends us there next! Can you imagine sitting next to us for an international flight?!? ha ha...even I wouldn't want to sit next to us. All the airport jokes aside, my family is the exact right size for US. We are blessed beyond all reason and I couldn't imagine life without any of my kids. I realize that 4 kids isn't for everyone and that we all choose to have or not have children according to our own lives.
I would beg of you to read the blog I linked to above. She says it better than I ever could. And when you see a mom with many children, even if they're acting like kids, comment to her what a beautiful family she has. If they're well behaved and you notice, say something to her. I know from experience that it will probably make her smile, and she'll feel a little bit better about having to take ALL her kids to the grocery store even when she doesn't want to. And thanks, from the bottom of my heart, for keeping the "she's crazy" and "are they ever gonna stop" comments about me in your head. I know you've had 'em. So have I.

Pointing fingers

Whenever you point a finger at someone else, you always have four pointing back at yourself. I remember hearing this time after time as a kid. Don't blame someone else because chances are you're to blame, too. Man, I hate it when that turns out to be true. As previously noted, my washing machine has been on the blitz. It's been flashing error codes at me. It's not working, it has had a funny smell for a couple of months. It's all the movers' fault. Then I checked the Whirlpool website to see what the error codes meant. I'm a retard, and its okay because I can admit it. It's looking like the movers didn't break my washing machine. In fact, it may not be broken at all. It may be *gasp* dirty!!! How does a washing machine get dirty, you ask? Well, apparently it is a problem with front loading machines. Because they use so little water, the drain hoses don't get rinsed as well as their top-loading sisters' hoses. This causes all the nasty that was in you clothes to gum up in the drain hoses in your washing machine....eeewww gross....this causes your machine to not be able to drain properly...causing the computer system to kick out the appropriate error codes. Go figure...I need to wash my washing machine.
I'll be purchasing a special cleaner for front loading machines tomorrow, and Mr. Smartypants will take apart my drain hoses to make sure they're clean and kink-free. After all that, I hope that my machine will run appropriately. And if you happen to work for the moving company that moved us to the woods...I owe you an apology. I am sincerely sorry that I blamed you for my dirty washing machine.