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It's official, I'm now part of the schooling community. Cole proudly stepped on the school bus this morning, gave his bus driver a hug, took one picture for mom and sat next to his friend in the front seat, all the while talking 90 miles a minute.  BUT, Mommy didn't cry like everyone thought I would. I think daddy might have teared up a little, it was Tyler who cried and cried and screamed for his Coley.  I think mostly b/c he wanted to ride the bus with him, not so much that he is gone for the day, but you never know what those 2 year old minds are thinking.

And to add to Tyler's missing his brother today he's going to a Women's luncheon with me - just what every boy wants to do!!

I'm lost, we got up on time this morning and everyone was dressed and eating breakfast before 7:30, but so far I haven't done much else. I have laundry to do and finish cleaning the house before I pick up my mom and m-i-l at 11:30 for the luncheon, better get after it I suppose.

Okay, Tyler is downstairs again in the potty - I can't even get a post typed out before he says he has to pee again.

But that is not what this post was about.  Do you ever let your kids wash your feet while they are taking a bath? I sometimes use their bath time as a relaxing foot massage for mommy time. The boys love to wash my feet and play "doctor" as Cole calls it. He'll put a washcloth over my leg and the toy frogs under it to "heal" my wounds or aches. It really is relaxing, if you can handle their slight touching that tickles.  If I'm lucky after their bath they rub lotion on my feet too.  I know this sounds funny reading it, but there is a point to it all. Do you ever get near someone and get that tingly feeling on the back of your neck or have the hairs on your arms stand up?  I've always been told that that feeling is the energy you are receiving from a person, somone who obviously has lots of good energy surrounding them.  That's the feeling I get from Cole when he's rubbing my feet/legs, and that motherly wish for my child to be a doctor when he grows up starts working.

Tyler has made it to the potty 5 times so far today and has peed every time.  He's even come down stairs twice to tell me he has to go pee - it's a miracle!!!!  I'm so happy, and of course I bought a box of pull-ups yesterday at Costco - might be giving those away to anyone with a boy pretty soon.

Okay make that 5 1/2 - he went poop and didn't even fuss about it, he flushed and pulled his undies back on, he skipped the wiping part but that's okay, mommy can fix that. I'm just so excited - I'm hoping it clicked in his little brain that he needs to go potty in the toilet and then we're closer to that Disney trip.

There are several rooms in my house that could use a make-over, or just a finished project. But all the HGTV shows are for the LA area only, and that just irritates me.  I'd really like someone in an "A" frame house to have a make-over so I could get some ideas with limited space and very few vertical walls.  Jason, maybe that's an idea for a future promo or something - there has to be some local designers/contractors willing to do something to promote their business and think outside the box (literal translation since I don't have a "box" home).   Maybe I just need to stop watching these programs, it's not like I don't have anything else to do all day.

Is there such a thing as a toddler not wanting to be potty trained? Tyler shows interest every now and then, he tells us when he's peed or pooped, but otherwise he has no desire to actually get to the potty in time.  We told him if he learned to use the potty we would take him to Disneyland (we are already going in 9 weeks but he doesn't know that).  But now I'm sticking to the fact that if he isn't potty trained he's not going, he'll have to stay home. He wants a Mickey Mouse balloon. I even printed a picture of one from the Disney website and taped it to the mirror above the toilet for him to see. He'll point it out to me and tell me he has to use the potty to get the balloon, but getting him to actually do it is a whole other story.  W

Where's the other potty training mom - are you having any more luck than me? Any ideas?

After four years of pouring my heart and soul into this 4H club it looks like we might fold this year. We have to have so many kids over the age of 9 to run the club, and we only have 3 this year, that's at least 2 short of minimum and a bunch short of making the club run smoothly every meeting.  I haven't told the rest of the club yet, I've talked with one mom in particular about it.  We are thinking of joining another club off the mountain and just deal with the fact of driving our boys down twice a month for meetings.  Since this mom and I are both leaders we can lead projects for our  boys up here, but it's not much fun doing things on your own without other kids to talk to, etc.

There's a community club leader meeting/dinner this Thursday night that I had already said I was going to but am now thinking I should skip it.  I get emotional when I think about the club folding and what to do.  Would you go if you were in this position?

I have always been the tennis shoe person, I only wear sandals when it goes with an outfit or a trip to town sometimes.  But while I was at home recovering from surgery I wore either socks only or sandals, for over 2 weeks. Now my tennis shoes hurt my feet and my sandals are comfortable.   There's so much dirt around my house though that wearing sandals all the time makes my feet dirty.  Maybe it's a good thing in disquise - since I'm working again and tennis shoes are not very professional looking, I'll wear dressy shoes more often.

The month is almost over and it's time to tally up the budget for July.  Brian and I were talking about it over the weekend, he said he was glad I was trying to get us on a budget and figure out where all our money goes, but I didn't tell him any other details about the spending. I said I'd show him at the end of the month.   Our grocery & extra splurge stuff spending as just over $1300 for the month, over $300 for lunches/dinners for the month, $380 in gas, then the almighty $3,000 for utilities/mortgage, etc. bills.  For a grand total of just over $5,000 for the whole month.  That's alot of money when you think about it.  Especially when you think that we don't always have that much coming in every month.  Looking at the spreadsheet I realized I have all the bills in the wrong month, everything is written a month ahead, i.e. I put the august house pymt in the july column. Oops, guess I'd better fix those things.

And I don't mean any cuss words, I'm talking about the budget "b" word. I started keeping track of everything we've bought in the month of July, thank goodness the spreadsheet program has a long list of columns and rows.  I listed all the groceries (I had made a grocery shopping list a while back trying to find the right fit for me), my makeup, dog food, dog treats, etc.  So far we have spend almost $800 in groceries and other things for us (like a music CD that hubby has been asking for for 3 months).  I thought I was doing good keeping my grocery budget around $400, blew that out of the water this month.  One thing I did wrong though was to try and make the spreadsheet work for the whole year, instead of month by month.  I had to go back to a few items that we've bought more than once (like milk) and add the amounts all together, then when I was trying to add a new line item, I had to go back and move the numbers that went with it too.  So I decided to group the first part of the month together to save me from going through all my receipts again, and starting from the 20th do a day by day list and see how often I buy certain items.

I figure if I can do this for the next 6 months I should be able to get a handle on the impulse shopping and really get things together around here.  I haven't told hubby what our numbers look like so far, I need too but I know he'll stress over it and then he gets grumpy and extremely short tempered. I figure I'll wait til the end of the month and show him the print out and see what he says.

I did another spreadsheet with all our monthly bills, so I can see the difference from month to month, what goes up or what comes down at certain times of the year, and if I pay extra one month (more than the minimum due).  Gas was another big ticket item for us, but there's no way for me to get around it right now. Once I start working it'll probably get worse, driving on this mountain isn't easy on a tank of gas.

I need to put in a line for toys - that always gets me in trouble, I buy toys for the boys when I know I shouldn't, they have more than enough and don't play with half of what is in their toy boxes, and there's 2 huge storage boxes full in their closets.

When I want to buy something I think about it as a want or a need, sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not.  I want new sunglasses but I don't need them, so I won't buy them. That and I really don't want to make an eye doctor appt. for me, I have too many other appts. on my calendar right now through the month of August.