MyRanda girl is 7 years young

As I am writing this- 7 years and 3 minutes ago Miranda was born :) Its crazy! It feels like yesterday, yet is hard to remember a time without her. She is a hillarious, wonderful, passionate lil girl and we are very lucky to have her. I hope you enjoy this fun collage of pics of our girl over the years.



We are having the big shindig celebration on the 28th when Aunt Jaime is here visiting, but tonight we had some cake and sang...


Just a little snippet of my girl. Here is a conversation we had just yesterday.... hope I get it right cause its pretty funny.

Miranda~ "Mom, I don't want to have any babies"
Me~ "You don't want to be a mom when you grow up?"
Miranda~ "No, I want to be a mom. I just don't want to have babies"
Me~ "Well how are you going to do that?"
Miranda~ "I'm gonna buy some"
Me~ "you mean adopt?"
Miranda~ "Yup, I'm gonna adopt 2 babies and 2 kitties and then I'll be a mom"
Me~ "That sounds great Miranda"
Miranda~ "Mom, when I grow up will you help me find the place to adopt them cause I don't know where its at"
Me~ "ofcourse I'll help you, but you might change your mind and want to have some of your own babies"
Miranda~ "KNOW I WILL NOT!!"
Me~ "Okay, thats fine too. Did you know that I will be your babies grandma?"
Miranda "I'm not having babies mom (getting very frustrated with me) remember? I'm going to adopt them?"
Me~ "I know hun, but after you adopt them they will be your babies. You will be their mom and I will be the grandma."
Quiet, she is thinking for a bit...
Miranda~ "Mom, I changed my mind. I want to live by you when I grow up, not in Baltimore"
Me~ "Why, I thought you wanted to live in the city, city girl"
Miranda~ "If I'm gonna take care of my adopted babies I don't want them to live very far away from their grandma like mine are far away from me. That would make them sad."
Me~ "Well Baltimore really isn't that far away"
Miranda~ "No, its too far mom. I want to be your neighbor when I'm a mom and come to your house and let the babies play with their grandma"
Me~ "sounds like a plan hun, but you can always change your mind if you want too."

lol- she cracks me up on a daily basis. I am every so lucky and greatful for this sweet girl of mine :)

School days are here again!!!

Both of the girls started school last Monday, but I didn't want to make a post until all 3 kids started and todays the day! Oliver got on his bus this morning and went off to preschool :)

Avery's first week of Middle school was great- she loves all of her classes and made a couple of new friends, one whom spent the night here Saturday night- I really liked her :) She is excited to actually start learning this week, I'll remind her of that in a few weeks when she has 7 classes worth of homework!


Miranda is hillarious, she likes school but doesn't give me much detail about her days other than that it was a good day, she didn't get her card flipped and who she played with at recess.


Feels weird to have a completely empty house, but also kinda nice. You'd think that I'd be getting a lot of stuff done but yeah.. not so much. I went for a run this morning, blogged, cleaned up a bit and got laundry going, but for the first day I'm just enjoying my time for a bit!

As always, enjoy the pics of my cutie pies off to school :)

So this is growing up.... Birthday fun!!!

We are in the process of planning Miranda's 7th birthday. First let me start by saying that I am in some major denial about my little girl turning 7!!!! They just grow up so fast, I can remember her being born like it was yesterday. Since I am thinking about this I thought it would be nice to do a post about Oliver and Avery's parties since I was MIA at blogging during the spring!

First- Avery turned 11!!! Ahhhhhh Preteen- I'm totally scared. We have found one of the best places for birthday parties- one of our local aquatic centers. The kids get a full 2 hours to swim, plus the place provides pizza, drinks and ice cream. All I have to do is show up with the kids and a cake! The party was on a Friday evening and Avery got to have 3 friends come home with her for a sleepover after- the great thing was that they were all exhausted from the swimming and were asleep by 11pm- yay!





Then Oliver went and turned 3 on me- what was he thinking???? We did a big old party for him at Romp-n-Roll- what a blast! I think we had just as much fun as the kids did :)He also got his very first bike on his bday- super cool green one!





My friend LeAnn made that totally rockin' birthday cake!!!

Here's to kids growing older and having as much fun with them as I can while they do it :)

Oliver's school pictures

I was looking for pictures for a different blog post when I came across these and just had to share- they are the cutest. I know I'm his momma, but seriously look at these and tell me I wrong :)

Olivers class at CUMC- check out his pose!

Here I go again...

I have now been gaining and losing the same weight for approximately 12 years, or right around the time I first got pregnant. I'm not one of those thin mommas that looks like they tucked a basketball down their shirt and then can go lie out in a 2-piece swimsuit weeks after popping that ball out. As a matter of fact I gained no less than 70 pounds with each of my kids- its a wonder I'm not up to around 400 or so. The only reason that I'm not is that somehow, through a lot of determination, hard work and a bit of deprevation I've managed to lose all of the weight by said childs first birthday (With Miranda I lost that and then some- I had lost 105 pounds in that first year).

Maybe there is something about a having a boy, or something about turning 30- or maybe its my crazy messed up thyroid. No matter, the point of fact is that here I sit over 3 years later, having lost 40 pounds but holding on strong to that last 30 (okay- I gained back some over the summer- booooo!!!) more like 40. Whats the deal? I can't seem to find my zone, or more realistically just have found that I like food way too much to not eat what I want when I want.

Regardless today was day 1. The first day of September and the first day of getting back to a healthier me (who will also be able to fit into her cute clothes again). Now with the girls back in school this task is a lot easier now than my failed attempts over the summer. In my previous weight loss journeys I found it best to take it one small step at a time and not make crazy goals. The overall goal is to lose 40 pounds, but believe me I'll be happy with 1 at a time- this aint no biggest loser ranch here.

My goals-
*Exercise~ gym 4-5 days per week for cardio 45-60 minutes and weights 2x per week
*Eating~ 1200-1500 calories per day
*Water~ minumum 64 ounces water

To keep track and keep myself accountable at the end of each day I'm starting a seperate blog.
Here is the link if anyones interested :)
http://shrinkingme-amber.blogspot.com/

Wish me luck!!!

Walking down memory lane.. or at the very least Addie street

"Its not easy to find someone who cares, its not easy to find magic in pairs." Anybody guess what that song is from??

Pete's Dragon :)

Today while shopping at Costco I made the mistake of going down the movie isle, as I always do, I had planned to buy the Hannah Montana movie for the girls. They had this deal where if you bought that and Pete's Dragon you automatically got $6 off so ofcourse I bought them both- great deal! I remember liking the movie as a kid.

Oliver wanted to watch it this evening after dinner so I put it on, he fell asleep on the couch a good 15 minutes into it. Now normally when something like this happens I put the kid to bed and turn on "real TV"- not so much tonight. I sat there and watched all of the movie, and sang along. How had I compeletely forgotten how much I loved this movie? It might seem totally silly- it is. I wanted to BE IN this movie when I was little.

I remember now- it is so much fun for me when something comes back to me from my childhood that had previously been lost to the void of mommy brain. I don't know how old I was, I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old. I know this because these particular memories are from a house that I spent those years living in, we called it the "house on Addie street". We moved from that house the year after Kindergarten, but I don't have very much stuff that I remember from then so when I see it I grasp it. Okay- so back to the point (is there one? maybe, maybe not) I shared a room with my older sister (who is my best friend and I miss terribly, but thats a whole other novel) and we had this little record player and only a few records to play on it. One of these were the songs from Pete's Dragon, see I don't have memories of actually watching the movie but I watched it tonight and I knew those songs in and out! I just have a synpet in my mind- me lying down beside our closet in our room singing as loud as I could. Thats it.

One other small thing I remember from that house, very insignificant but I wanted to write it down. Whistle lollipops- no clue what they were actually named, but it was a big deal. We would walk down the street to the store to get them- they were suckers that were also whistles- cool beans.

Me, my sis and my mom at the house on Addie street~

visitor pictures :)

I have a half an hour to kill before taking the other little to school so will just knock another blog post out :) hahaha- two hours later and I'm done!

This past year we had so many awesome visitors- there is just no possible way for me to share all of the pictures on here so I'll just give you guys a few pics of each visit for a little recap.

First to visit was the amazing Aunt Corrie- she is so much fun, come back to us Corrie!! She came to visit for the Winter Holidays- unfortunately I was sick when she got here, she was such a huge help. While she was here we went to Boyds Bear to have breakfast with Santa, went to see the Holiday lights at the zoo, went up to Baltimore for a day and loads of other fun stuff!



Our next Visitors came in the spring. We are very luck that the Houghton's are able to come out for their spring break and visit us!! The downfall to that is there break isn't usually the same week as our so the girls are still in school. During the visit we spent a day exploring Frederick, Port Discovery in Baltimore, and the Catoctin Zoo!




Two weeks later was the kids' spring break and we got Grandma Jackie and Grandpa Odie to come out and visit us for the first time ever! This trip was so special to me, I miss my grandma and grandpa so much and it was great to show them where we live and Washington DC and stuff like that, but the best was just hanging out with them.


Then came our last visitors, Kit and Jodi. They made it out here for some really fun stuff! The night that they arrived we went to Miranda's dance recital and then they got to attend Avery's 5th grade graduation. Ofcourse we did all the regular stuff, day downtown, Baltimore and ofcourse dinner at Sakura :)





Next visitor~ Aunt Jaime at the end of September!! Tomorrow the countdown officially begins :)