A FUNNY!

Wes was headed to bed early because he had gotten up early to fish. Colson was laying in bed with him when I walked through the bedroom. Wes sweetly asked if I would come snuggle with him until he fell asleep. Colson sat straight up and cheered “why because you are a scaredy cat too?” It was as if he had found this great common bond with him.

SCHEDULE CONFLICT SITUATION

I mentioned yesterday that there was a schedule conflict with last weekends activities. When the schedule came out on Thursday showing her performance time for both Saturday and Sunday as 9:30 am, I struggled through the schedule conflict. Colson had basketball pictures at 7:40 and a game at 8:15. Wes was in town but he never handles anything as big as basketball pictures (I know it’s not really big, but trust me it’s all in the perspective). So my first thought was to have Jennifer take the girls down and I’d leave right after pictures and be there in time to watch them perform. When I told my plan to Jennifer she said that’s silly. It’s a 4 minute routine that they are doing AGAIN on Sunday. She was going to handle it all….great! So when I told Calli that on Friday night, her face twisted up in the most awful way and tears emerged. I explained the situation and assured her I’d be there Sunday. She kept herself somewhat composed and then went to Colson and sobbed her heart out. Of course Colson was clueless. “Huh? What? Why are you crying?” interjected in between her gasps for breath. What do I do? I can’t believe she is crying over this I thought. Then Wes came up with a great idea. He would go. He planned on going to this one anyways with us so he could just go on his own. When I tucked Calli in that night, she began to wimper again. I explained that I had never missed any of her competitions in 2 years. I had never missed any of her soccer games and in fact there was very little I ever missed of hers. I reminded her that I would see her on Sunday, when it counted more. She softly said that Daddy had told her that maybe he could go and went to sleep.

The next morning when I woke her up at 5:15 AM her eyes weren’t even open when she again told me that Daddy said if he felt good, he would go. That’s funny I didn’t know he was sick but whatever. I reassured her that he would be there. At 6:00 when we left her face dropped. Colson and Wes were snoozing in the bed and she said “I guess Daddy isn’t coming” I explained that he would come for the performance but that Jennifer was taking her for the early warm up time. A smile came to her face. Whew, we dodged another bullet there. And that river of tears would have been a little messy with the glittered eyes and mascara lashes. Wes made it in time and all was well!

NOTE TO THE READER(S) THAT THINK(S) I’M THE MEANEST MOM IN THE WORLD….Had Wes not decided to go, I probably would have gone back to the original plan and hiked it down to Reliant to see her 4 minute routine. You can give me back my mom of the year award.

WE GOT THE BLING!

Friday was Calli’s academic pep rally where theY acknowledge all of the kids with good grades, good conduct, perfect attendance (which we’ll never get), and then some special awards. Calli again got straight A’s for the 3rd 6 weeks. So far, we’ve made it to the 4th grade without making anything lower than an A. How many tears will come along with that first B she brings home? I can’t imagine! But we are very proud of her. She also received the Academic medal this 6 weeks. One boy and one girl from each class. This is awarded to her for her hard work in the classroom and her participation during lessons, etc. She’s a good student, like her mama :)

Saturday we got up at the crack of dawn (5:15 AM) to get all dressed up AGAIN for another 2 day competition. This time we were headed into Houston. Because of some schedule conflicts (a whole different blog post), Wes ended up going on Saturday and Colson and I went Sunday. Colson really wanted to go….I think something his sister talked him into wanting to do. So the outcome? First place again!!! They won first place in their level 2 Youth group. And then they won high point for ALL level 2 teams (ages 5 to 18). So needless to say they are super excited. Their winnings earned them a big medal and another jacket, because we really need jackets in Texas right? And how many tears will come along with the first NON first place that she brings home now. Oh the lessons we learn as we grow old.

BATTLE OF THE BULGE...SCHUBERT STYLE

We have image issues already in our household and it comes from the least likely member of the household….Colson. He’s SIX. He’s a BOY. Seriously? Now let me preface this by saying that we are not body conscience around our kids. I do work out a lot and Wes does the treadmill but the talk is mostly around it’s healthy to do. I NEVER say I’m fat or I need to lose weight in front of them and I don’t dally too long in the mirror checking out my rear end. But somewhere along the way Colson has decided he is fat. When I blurted out in a hysterical laugh he said “seriously mama, I can’t even see my toes”.

His solution?

*He’s gonna run 100 laps around the trampoline every day which he did today. Only later I found out that it wasn’t 100 laps but counting to 55 two times. I guess that’s as high as he can go without some help.

*No more junk food! Now he’s said this before but the problem is he doesn’t know what food is considered junk food. So when he makes that statement he has NO IDEA what he is committing to forego. This afternoon he had Calli go through the refrigerator and pull out things he liked to tell him the fat grams, calories, etc. As if he knew what all those figures meant. He settled on carrots with Ranch…not bad. And of course there is the exception to this. He’s going to have coke icees on Friday’s (usually our Wednesday treat) and when he goes to Grandma’s but he’ll only have one there. And he’ll have donuts on Friday (our standard Friday treat). BUT he’s only going to get a dozen donuts (he really means a dozen donut holes and his usual is a dozen donut holes and a chocolate sprinkle….no judging. I don’t let him get the chocolate milk).

Let’s see what tomorrow brings. Who wants to bet he’ll forget?

A WEEKEND OF CHEER

So after Colson's basketball game on Saturday, Calli and I, along with Carson and Jennifer headed over to Ft. Worth for a weekend of cheer. This was their first big competition and it still amuses me how crazy this whole cheer thing is. I mean don't get me wrong...it's fun and entertaining and amazing to watch the skill of some of these girls, especially the older ones, but it's just seems so funny to take it all so seriously.

We arrive early evening Saturday night, drop our stuff in the room, go out for a bite to eat and head to bed. We hop up bright and early Sunday morning and don the hoochie mama attire and head to the convention center. The girls did awesome on Sunday and landed themselves in 1st place out of 6 and only in the lead by a little over a point. Talk about excited. We got the text from the team mom of their success over lunch and Emily (another friend), Calli and Carson immediately had to text their daddies to give them the news. In my head I'm thinking so how do a group of nine year olds handle the pressure of performing again tomorrow so that they can remain in first place because they all wanted it bad! A group of 34 girls from 6 to 11 all had their eye on the coveted jacket and they wanted it. I heard one mom from another team say that her daughter had told her "she wanted that jacket so bad she could taste the leather". Although it wasn't leather, I got the point and I think it was a little over the top. Ok so I don't think that's healthy but that's how some of these kids were thinking. We spent the afternoon swimming and headed a few miles outside of Ft Worth to Incredible Pizza so the girls could have something to do that night where they couldn't get hurt.

Later that night, I got a little peak inside Calli's head and saw how mature she was in all of this (I'm not sure if mature is the right word). In that performance earlier that day, the girls have several stunts. One of the stunts is kinda difficult (well they are all difficult but somehow they make it look so easy) and Calli and Carson are both bases for their flyer Gracie....darling girl. So Gracie goes up in the air along with the other 5 flyers and she is the only one who hints that she's about to go down. Somehow she saves herself from falling and from even detracting from the group as a whole. Calli told me that when Gracie went up she over rotated and started to tilt to the right, which is what we saw. Calli yells up at her "Gracie, I'm not letting you fall. Tighten up". As I said they recover and as they brought Gracie down in sync with the others they all yelled "we did it" as they ran to their next pose. Of course all of this was inconspicous to us in the stands and who knows if the judges saw or heard them but I think it was cute. It shows the teamwork and determination they have. Good life skills I think.

So they go into Monday in 1st place and most of the girls were nervous. And I think their moms were just as nervous. They performed but not quite as solidly as the day before. The big debate was whether or not we dropped a girl in our stunt or she came down too early and stepped out. All of a sudden we had about 33 experts on the whole routine, scoring, deductions...the whole nine yards. They had it all figured out as to who was going to win 1st place but then they would all second guess themselves. I wanted to say "if you wait an hour and 10 minutes, you'll know". So we end up pulling it off and inched their way into first place winning by .17 of a point. A win is a win though! They earned their jackets that are 3 sizes too big and made for a great trip home.

I don't know if i have mentioned but one of Calli's friends that has cheered with her for 2 years now and is in the 6th grade found out right before Christmas that she had a brain tumor. She's undergoing radiation and it's obviously something that we pray about often. Of course it's caused her to drop out of cheer but the girls still wanted to honor her. So they sewed (or the team mom did) these gray ribbons on the side of their uniforms in honor of her. Very sweet I thought. I'm hoping it put a smile on her face to know her team misses her.

Of course then there is the packing, laundry, and the preparation to do it all over again Saturday. Luckily (on my pocketbook) it's in Houston this weekend.

MICHAEL JORDAN? NOT SO MUCH

Saturday morning Wes woke Colson up saying "Is this my Michael Jordan?" Colson looked at him with a dazed and confused look on his face and said "huh?" He doesn't know who Michael Jordan is but if he had to do with basketball....he liked him. This is our first year to play basketball and Saturday was Colson's first game. We knew we would be on his friend Karson's team and it was a nice surprise when we showed up to practice 2 weeks ago to find another friend on the team...Cline. It was an even nicer surprise for mom since now I had my best friend to chat with at practice and games. I know, I know....if we were best friends, we should know that our sons were on the same team but that's just how we roll.

I won't say he was a superstar but he's actually better than I thought he would be. By the end of the season, I'm pretty sure he'll get the hang of it and he'll be all over the court. I think Wes thinks it's silly for him to be playing since height is not one of our family traits so I'm sure he won't play it later in life. But any team sport is good for these kids and it sure helps his coordination. And as much as he goes and does for Calli and all of her activities...the kid needs something he can do right?

I think he smiled the whole time he was playing. And he did get one breakaway with the ball and ran halfway to the other goal before he realized that we were all screaming at him to go the other way. It's all good at this age!

BLONDE MOMENT

So yesterday Wes gets a call at work from our next door neighbor who has lived there for probably 3 years and we have never formally met, telling us she was nominating us for "neighbor of the year"...just kidding. We would NEVER qualify for any such award but she did call. She was informing us that her yard was being flooded and she thought we had a busted pipe from the freeze.

So Wes zips it home to check on things and calls me as he's standing in the back yard. Of course as soon as I heard flooded yard I knew exactly what happened. I didn't need to hear the rest of the story that ended with "I'm looking at our pool and it has about 2 feet of water in it".

Once again, I screwed things up and don't know how. The previous day, I was cleaning out the big filter and I should preface my defense by saying I really don't know anything about maintaing our pool. It has seemed fairly easy so far...I just throw a bag of salt in the pool once a week and it seems to be going well. It's one of those where it is so easy that I think I'm totally screwing it up. I know there are some other things I should be aware of like stabilizer, DE, shock and when those terms are mentioned, my eyes glaze over. So, I was following my hand written instructions of cleaning out the DE filter, which I have done one other time and somehow I don't think things got set back to normal operation. When you clean out this filter, it pumps water underground and comes out of a pipe at the side of our property and now we know will run down the natural slope into our neighbors yard when not cut off properly. I noticed after I finished that the water was still running out of the pipe. I made a mental note to check it in a few minutes...and I did! You thought I was going to say I forgot to check it didn't you? I did check it, but it was from a distance and I guess my eyes are failing because apparantly the water continued to pump. And I now know it pumps the water straight from the pool.

So my neighbor got a really good unsolicited watering and we got an empty pool. I called our "pool guy" and asked him to come fix what I have obviously screwed up.

FROM NEW YORK CITY TO....

I've had a couple of blog posts about our somewhat redneck status but I think it might be official. While I'm not intending to be racial, politically incorrect, or anything of the likes, I feel like this announcement and the fact that we attended said announcement, qualifies us as a redneck.

The Schubert's attended

MONSTER TRUCK JAM 2010!

There I said it and yes we did it. Pit pass and all. I was very unfamiliar with the whole Monster Jam phenomenon, and let me say that it is a phenomenon, and after last night, I will still ring in non expert in this category. And I'm pretty ok with that. Last week, I invited ourselves to crash some friends of ours good bonding time. The Hoegemeyer's (Kyle and Audra) have kids (Grace and Hutton) almost the same age as ours and Hutton, their son, had gotten tickets from Santa to attend their second Monster Jam event. Since Santa wasn't as on the ball for us as he was for the Hoegemeyer's, I had to go the hard way about gaining tickets to this event...ticketmaster. I purchased tickets on Wednesday, only a couple of sections over from our friends and the anticipation began.

We headed down in the early afternoon because we had pit passes, or they did. We were hoping to get some at the door, and we did. Now someone of my knowledge would assume that this event would take place in a parking lot of a Walmart or something. But how little do I know! This event packed out Reliant. Ok so it wasn't packed but for a bunch of trucks to be racing around on some dirt, 3 floors of Reliant is packed to me. I had no idea there was such a following for such a crazy sport...is it a sport? So, I got ahead of myself. We wandered around on the floor of the stadium, posing with the trucks and drivers, getting autographs and beginning our eductation in the world of monster trucks. I was laughing at Audra, who I think could be a supermodel, as she walked around dressed for the red carpet (if you could wear jeans on the red carpet), with her high heel boots, houndstooth blazer and hair and makeup flawless amongst a sea of people who may have been wearing the same clothes for 3 days straight...and some may have slept in them. Ok so I may be exagerating but you get my point.

Who got into it? Calli! She gets excited about everything. I think it's a girl thing. I don't ever have to worry about her thinking something is too babyish, boyish or just not cool. She likes it all...or she tries it all usually. Colson really wasn't into the pit pass thing I think because he was clueless as to what made these trucks and drivers so special besides them looking cool..the trucks that is.

A few hours later he realized. As they raced around the arena at full speed, jumped over cars, flipped over dirt piles, survived crushed tops, wheel axle breaks, engine fires all while blowing out our eardrums, he thought it was pretty cool. He ended up sitting with Hutton, Kyle and Audra and Grace (their daughter) sat with Wes, Calli and I so I didn't see his immediate reaction but did get a few texts from Audra documenting their excitement. The first half of the event is spent racing. The second half, and much more exciting half, is spent with what they call freestyle. They have 90 seconds to show the judges and crowd how high and far they can jump, pop some wheelies, do some massive spinning and just show off. As the first truck crashed doing a flip or something, I gasped and my heart stopped. The people around me jumped to their feet waving their arms and hollering screams of joy and excitement. I took a brief moment to laugh and question their sanity before the next truck came out and did virtually the same thing just a different method, and the crowd roared again. So I quickly caught on that crashing, flipping and the likes was the excitement and so while I never jumped to my feet I did begin to relax a little. It was really loud though! We all donned rifle earplugs and my ears were still ringing. When we finally did meet up with Colson, the first thing he said was "can we do that tomorrow?" It's also the last thing he said before he fell asleep at midnight still in the car on the way home. He raised his head up from playing his DS, blurted out his request to see it again next week and rolled his eyes back collapsing his head on the window. He didn't even wait for an answer which was no, before he was out.

I think Kyle summed it up well when he mentioned that this is one of those things where you go home and give yourself a good parent pat. It wasn't something I'd want to do every Saturday night, but our kids had fun and it was good just hanging out together.

SAY WHAT?

This is the word Colson created with his tag super speller. I know, I know...he doesn't know what it means nor does he even know what the letters put together spell. While we are working on him sounding out words, I think we'll pass on this one. I can see his happy hiney running into Mrs. Arnold's class Monday elated to tell her that he knows how to spell the word pimp. For those of you that know Mrs. Arnold, can you picture her sweet face upon hearing that?

My funny friend Ali, who keeps me laughing daily with her crazy antics on facebook and now on her blog, posted the much longer version of this the other day. There were almost 60 of these bad boys that made me laugh. I picked the ones that made me laugh out loud for your reading enjoyment. I think you'll get a kick out of them.

1. The letters T and G are very close to each other on a keyboard. This recently became all too apparent to me and consequently I will never be ending a work email with the phrase "Regards" again.


2. Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn't work? You take the cartridge out, blew in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ's. We just figured it out. Today's kids are soft.


3. Sometimes, I'll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realize I had no idea what was going on when I first saw it.


4. How in the world are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?


5. I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.


6. The only time I look forward to a red light is when I'm trying to finish a text.


7. How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear what they said?


8. Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using 'as in' examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss's last name to an attorney and said "Yes that's G as in...(10 second lapse)..ummm...Goonies"


9. MapQuest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.


10. Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I'm from, this shouldn't be a problem....


11. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection.


12. There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.


13. I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.


14. "Do not machine wash or tumble dry" means I will never wash this ever.


15. While watching the Olympics, I find myself cheering equally for China and USA. No, I am not of Chinese descent, but I am fairly certain that when Chinese athletes don't win, they are executed.


16. I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Dangit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What'd you do after I didn't answer? Drop the phone and run away?


17. I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.


18. When I meet a new girl, I'm terrified of mentioning something she hasn't already told me but that I have learned from some light internet stalking.


19. I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it's on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.


20. Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.


21. I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.


22. Even if I knew your social security number, I wouldn't know what do to with it.


23. Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet my life everyone can find and push the Snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time every time...


24. I wonder if cops ever get ticked off at the fact that everyone they drive behind obeys the speed limit.


25. The other night I ordered takeout, and when I looked in the bag, saw they had included four sets of plastic silverware. In other words, someone at the restaurant packed my order, took a second to think about it, and then estimated that there must be at least four people eating to require such a large amount of food. Too bad I was eating by myself.

So how many made you laugh out loud?

Happy Birthday to the love of my life! At the Schubert house we get younger...or that's what we tell ourselves.

I love this man and everything he is to me and the kids! He's an awesome husband and amazing father!

Happy Birthday baby!