keep smilin' keep shinin'

i was lucky enough to meet up with a few friends and my sister the other night for dinner at pf chang(kid free!). it was such a great evening, just sitting, eating and talking. these girls are my friends from middle school & high school, which i find to be such an amazing thing. i am really blessed when it comes to my friends and family. i just wish i could see them more often.


my girlfriend and my sister-



my other girlfriend who drove 2 hours just to come to dinner, then drove home. love her new haircut-



yup, we made the waiter take our picture. it doesn't happen that often, believe me, that we can get our picture taken together so we had to keep record of it-

i want to ride my bicycle, i want to ride my bike

sweet cheeks got a set of her own big girl wheels! yes, she is off the trike and is now riding a 12" purple, princess bicycle. the bike of course had to offer room for phoebe as well. it is amazing. i actually think she does so much better on this bike than she did on the 3 wheeled kind. this one does have the training wheels, or stabilizers as "charlie and lola" call them. i am so impressed with just how great she does riding her bike though. we took her on saturday to a nearby park so she could ride freely on flat ground. our driveway is quite steep and we don't have sidewalks. i absolutely love watching her go.

sweet cheeks is a safety girl. she seriously wouldn't dare thinking about riding at all without her helmet.



and she is off-



so cute, she and her doll cruising together.




after the bike ride was over, we walked the park a little. sweet cheeks attitude quickly soured when mommy wouldn't carry her. sorry but it was way too hot and i know she knows how to walk!




***

yippy for vacation. we will return next week. i will have lots of great stories and pictures to share then.

-

the alternative

i really think sometimes things just happen for a reason and i have the perfect example of that. this past weekend, i decided to once again join the husband and sweet cheeks for a quick morning out to yard sail. please do not even begin to get the impression that i enjoy doing this, because i still do not what so ever. the reason i go is because i really enjoy watching sweet cheeks do it. she really gets a kick out of it, and that is what puts a smile on my face. so we head out to an area that the husband found out was having a large neighborhood yard sale. they were so excited, me not so much. the first yard sale we hit was small. what the guy lacked in stuff, he overcompensated with in his sales pitch & personality. he pointed out clothes, nick nacks, and a few other things that he had for sale. next, he pointed us in the direction of a small box that looked to have 2 or 3 dvd's in it. i looked in and then i saw it. it was none other than the entire season 3 of punky brewster, not even taken out of it's plastic wrapping yet. how could this be.



As i slowly, still in awe, picked it up out of the box, the man tells me that we can have it for one dollar. ONE DOLLAR! this is a show that i absolutely loved as a kid. i could only hope now that sweet cheeks would love it as much as i did. so of course i bought it. my plan was to hopefully get sweet cheeks to like this show and slowly begin to wean her from her favorite show, hannah montana. my plan so far is working. sweet cheeks is really loving the new show. she is even already singing right along with the theme song. she really gets a kick out of punky's dog brandon. i love seeing her laugh to this show. i have to admit that i also enjoy watching it with her. it is a smack in the face of just how horrible the styles were back then. oh my gosh. it has already reminded me of jeans tucked into large, wigwam socks, as well as wearing two different colored high-top converse. what were we thinking. i will say that i love that the language is much better for a toddler than her other favorite show. we shall see if it sticks! but for only $1, i knew there was definitely no harm in trying.

ballerina, you must have seen her

sweet cheeks is my beautiful ballerina. we bought her this little tutu style dress the other day and she was in heaven! we could barely get in the door of the house before she was begging me to put it on her. she was ecstatic! we get upstairs to her room, get it on her, and she quickly puts on her princess shoes as well. you could just see my little girls face magically light up. i knew she felt like a princess in that instant. amazing what a little tutu and some heels can do for the spirits of a toddler. wonder if it would have the same effect on me? no seriously- don't worry, i don't even own a tutu.





nothing says "happiness" better than the kiss on the face by blue dog!




sweet cheeks wanted to take phoebe and her doggie for a walk on monday night. we were outside for about 5 minutes before the mosquitos planned their attack on us. it was not a pretty site. we then scratched our way back into the house, which in a time of war, felt like a very long way. we had lost that battle hands down.

here she is posing next to phoebe. what you can't see in this picture is her doggie, which was really a ball on a string. you have to love their imaginations at this age.



here she is proudly posing with all of her stickers that she got from the pediatricians office earlier in the day. i brought her in for a congested cough, which of course was just a virus we could do nothing about other than wait. sweet cheeks wanted her grandma to see just how many stickers she got for being such an amazing trooper when the nurse was slowly pinching and squeezing small drops of blood out of sweet cheeks tiny pin-pricked finger. i, as well as the nurses in the lab, were quite amazed.

matt damon

i love matt damon. i loved him as jason bourne in all 3 of the bourne movies-identity, supremacy, and ultimatum. the first and third being my favorite. not sure i cared for him much prior to these movies. though i did enjoy "good will hunting."

this song about matt damon by sarah silverman was actually just nominated for an emmy and i love it! the song is freakin hilarious (to my parents if you are reading this post, don't watch the clip- a bit too much language which i do not use but do think adds to the humor of the song) i hope everyone else finds it as funny as i do!




here is a photo of matt damon in character for a new movie he is in called "the informant" in which he had to gain 30lbs! it's not pretty-

sweet nibblets & sweet sarcasm

who doesn't love some good sarcasm every now & again? the husband and i are both pretty sarcastic people. we don't work at it, it just naturally comes out of us. sweet cheeks has it in her dna to be this way & is already becoming a bit sarcastic herself. just the other day for instance while brushing her teeth, she turns to me and says "why are you just standing there, do you work H-E-R-E!" i was a bit shocked but then it came to me. i realized where she had gotten it from. sweet cheeks is sarcastic, but she isn't learning this from her parents. she is learning it from a teenage millionaire named miley cyrus!



sweet cheeks has really gotten into the hannah montana show. her older cousin watches it, so of course sweet cheeks wanted to watch it to. at first, i thought it was cute that she wanted to mimic her cousin. then i thought it was even cuter that she would sing the theme song right along with the show. it was also cute when she asked for some hannah montana pj's at target the other day, which we did get her. the show is pretty funny. billy ray, i mean robby ray, quite often jokes about his old mullet which we all so clearly remember-

and her brother jackson is goofy. but i am now seeing the downside to letting my toddler watch a show meant for girls quite a bit older than her. she has picked up some not so nice words like ugly and stupid. she is throwing show quotes at us left and right now. she turned to her daddy the other day and calmly said, "i don't know how to tell you this dad but JUST GO AWAY," emphasizing her point even more dramatically by throwing her hands in their air. i always knew that my kid had an amazing memory, and i have mentioned that before, but now that memory is being used for hannah quotes. i am torn. do i let her keep watching this silly show that she so enjoys and doesn't really understand in the first place? or do i nip it in the bud and hope that she finds a new show on sprout or noggin that is more age appropriate?

the beep family

so i made a new purchase this week from jk studio, a little etsy shop with lots of cute wall decals.
i got these two monogrammed decals (obviously, our names are not shown)

for sweet cheeks label, i plan to put it on her headboard, which is just white. so i actually think it should turn out cute. the colors it will be in are pink and lime green-



ours i plan to hang in our living room
it will be in a chocolate brown color so it should go well in our newly painted yellowy-gold colored room-





of course, i am definitely a far cry from martha stewart. home decorating is just not a skill of mine. sometimes ideas look better in my head, so we shall see how it turns out.