Mabe In America!

I have been a huge fan of Tom Mabe for, oh, eight years now. He is just a regular guy that sat around and waited for telemarketers to call him and then taped the call and pranked the telemarketer. He lives in Kentucky. I have the first CD he put out about eight or nine years ago. Anyway, I noticed last night on television that he has a show out called Mabe in America and I didn't even know it! I assume it's kind of like a Candid Camera show or something. I HAVE to catch it next episode. He is really funny. I found this little video on YouTube of him that I thought was pretty clever. This is Tom Mabe's way of Feeding the Homeless.

Okay, I finally found some bedroom furniture for Jackson's big boy room. The wood is darker than what I had in my mind, but it's really good, solid furniture and I think it will serve him well for years to come. Tom, Jackson and I went to see it last night and bought it. We bought it off of Craigslist. The lady said her son never slept on the bed and the stuff was brand new, for the most part. I think we got a pretty good deal, too. Here are a couple of pictures. We got a captain's bed and mattress, the chest and the nightstand.

The picture with the bed is not very clear, but it's a nice bed. Tom is going to pick it up on Saturday. I initially wanted a trundle bed, but these drawers will be great extra storage since the rooms in this house are SO small!

I am so wrapped up in getting Jackson's little birthday invitation completed. I wish sometimes I wasn't so anal and OCD about things like this. But then I just wouldn't be me, now, would I?

Jackson and I were just laying down together and I was telling him "Jack Schneider" stories, which are just that, stories I make up with him as the main character. Anyhoo, I started to talk to him about how he's going to start school this fall (preschool) and how he'll be meeting so many new friends and having snacks and he'll have to obey the teacher, blah, blah, blah, and that I would be dropping him off and then picking him up.

I thought it would be good to start getting him prepared mentally for this new thing in his life. Well, he started crying and got really upset and was saying, "You go, Momma. You go with me, Momma." My heart was breaking. I cried too! Then I assured him that I was never going to leave him, ever. That preschool might be having to make room for me. I'll be like Jethrina in the back of the room!

Until next time...

PRINCE CHARMING

I love that little look he has. So cute!

Well, we had a pretty uneventful weekend, for the most part. I finished up some work I had and Tom and Jackson went swimming a couple of times. Here are some pictures of them going down the slide. I know you've seen pictures just like this a million times, but here we go again! I went up there to take some pictures of them and it was so hot that I couldn't stay.

On the big boy bedroom front, things are not going well. I got that furniture in from Penney's that I had ordered for Jackson and I just didn't like the color. It was supposed to be distressed honey and it was more like orange. I really hated my kitchen cabinets at my old house, which were oak and orange, and they reminded me of that color. Anyway, below is the bed I want for him. It's too expensive, though, so I am trying to find something I'd be as equally pleased with. So far, not any luck. I'm hoping one morning I'll check Craigslist and there it will be, the whole bedroom suite! I know, I know, dream on.

I'm looking at this bedding for him because I love all the primary colors, even though he wants a digger bed.

This is the bedding I WANT for him. He would absolutely love it. It's got all kinds of construction equipment on it. It's just what he wants! I haven't given up on it yet, but it is discontinued and you can only buy it now on eBay, and it is going for WAAAAY too much! The last twin quilt, sheet set and sham that I saw on there went for $300! There is no way I will pay that for bedding. I am cursed with expensive taste.



I did find some gigantic red letters today at Marshall's for his room. I got a J, A, and C. I have to find a K now. If I can't find a K in the next few weeks in their shipments, I'll take the A and C back and hang the J on his wall. Can't anything work out for me???

Here are a couple of pictures I took last week when we went swimming at Wesley's house. Those boys together are really crazy! Jackson loves hanging out with Wesley.



I have been working on his birthday invitations and I think they're going to be cute. It's kind of silly that I spend so much time and effort on that kind of crap, but I just do it so he'll have it for his "life" box that I keep for him. He wants a Tom & Jerry birthday this year, so I was able to download some clipart and make the invitations. When I'm fully done with them, I'll post the finished product.

Well, finally, here is Jackson's "park." Tom really outdid himself, along with some good friends and neighbors, getting this playset put together. Had we known what it was going to involve beforehand, I don't think we would have done it. That whole ground leveling thing was just craziness. We decided to go with a gravel base instead of mulch, and I think it nearly killed Michael and Brian and Tom who did the bulk of hauling it to the backyard in wheelbarrows! But it's done, it's going to be here for as long as we're here in this house, and Jackson could even get married up in the fort part.

Jackson likes playing on his "park," but he prefers to have somebody else on there playing with him. He doesn't like to play alone. He likes to get his digger equipment and dump truck down there and scoop the gravel out and fill his dump truck up. I guess we should have just bought him a pile of gravel and been done with it, huh?

Then the next outdoor project was getting a patio poured, stained and stamped. Well, here's a picture of that. We are really pleased with how it turned out. I think we will get years of use out of this thing. Money well spent, I hope. The border is a cobblestone look and the middle has been scored to resemble large tile. Now we have some landscaping to do, and quickly, because we have all this dirt piled up to the sides! I tell ya, it's never ending!

The concrete guy who did our patio, his name is Joe. I guess Jackson has heard his name so much coming from us, but the day they were here working on it, I was on the phone with Tom as Jackson and I were eating breakfast, and when I hung up, Jackson said, "That Daddy? That Joe?" He is a nut. Then today Joe came back over to fix a couple of spots and darken the border up a little, so Jackson saw him this morning, plus he heard me call and tell Tom that Joe was at the house. So out of the blue this morning, Jackson said "I love Joe." I think he aspires to be Joe someday, going job to job, operating construction-type equipment and driving a motorcycle. Ah, the life.

Until next time...

I'm So Behind...

Does it really matter at this point if my pictures are in order of occurence? I am so far behind on this thing! But a couple of things I really wanted to mention, when we were in Jasper the last time, not this past time for Beek's wedding, Pa-paw put Jackson on his tractor with him for the first time and let him steer! Jackson was really excited, but he was also a little scared too, because as he had a perma-smile on his face, he was also saying "Get off, get off."

Anyway, when we were in Jasper for the wedding, they rode on the tractor again, and this time Jackson had NO FEAR! He really likes riding with Pa-paw! Here is a video of this past time, and the pictures are from June 29, his first time on it. I'm going to put one of them in a frame for his new big boy room!

While we were at Pa-paw and Ma-maw's, Jackson had quite a spread of snacks. Let's see, from the left, he had Goldfish crackers, dried fruit snacks, Cheetos (his favorite), popcorn and a juice box! Oh, and a Smoothie popsicle! And look at that smile on his face! He is so spoiled by his grandparents, which I am fine with. He had such a good time over the weekend with everyone.

Over the 4th weekend, when Mom was here, we took Jackson to Opry Mills because I had seen this little train tooling around in there, and I knew he would love it! And, of course, he did. We got tickled at him as we were riding on it because he was waving to everybody like he was in a parade. Some people waved back, some didn't, but he was having fun. When the train came to a stop, the "conductor" let him put his sweaty little hat on and I took his picture. It was with my little crappy camera but still cute!

This little video lets you follow us on our little Opry Mills excursion. Sorry the quality is so poor.

We also attended the Schneider reunion the weekend of June 29, I think it was. This is a picture of Jackson, Tom and Grandma Bernie Schneider, which is Tom's grandmother, so it's Jackson's great grandmother. I'm going to have to print this one out!

Jackson really didn't mingle with anyone at the reunion, he was too busy playing at the park in front of the building where the reunion was held.

It was his first time on the see-saw, and he wasn't quite sure about it. Of course, I envisioned him smashing his face right down on it because Tom was sitting on the other end and doesn't know his own strength sometimes. Plus, I remember how we used to treat the smallest person at the playground (Fontaine Finch); we'd hit the ground as hard as we could, and it would send her sailing through the air almost. Anyway, here are a couple pictures of my favorite Schneider (no offense, Tom) from that day.

Okay, the next post I will have pictures of Jackson's "park" that Tom and a few of his friends worked on putting up, and I'll have pictures of our new patio. It got poured this week, and it looks really good. I think we'll get a lot of use out of it. Sorry this post was jumping all over the place!

Until next time...

WEDDING IN INDIANA

Since I'm so behind on this blog, I'm going to start with the most recent stuff and work back as best I can. I'm still in the midst of this computer nightmare, but I was able to download my pictures from this weekend onto the "new" computer, even though I still can't use it to work on. Ugh!

Well, we're back home from Indiana after going to Mark and Kyla Buechlein's wedding. It was really something. The church was beautiful, Kyla looked beautiful, and as far as I can tell, the ceremony went smoothly. If anything was amiss, I sure didn't catch it. It was really nice! Mark's uncle, who is an archbishop, officiated the ceremony, which made it really special.

I took like a gazillion pictures, and I am so bummed that only a handful look decent. The lighting in the church was just not good, or it could quite possibly be user error, but the pictures I took in there were HORRIBLE! Everything looked orange. That's why you'll see a lot of these pictures in black and white.

I have more to say, but I'm really tired from the trip, so I'll just get right to the pictures, because that's all the grandparents care about anyway. The sad thing is, there aren't too many of Jackson because he was really grumpy at the reception, so he wouldn't even look my way most of the time. I had to wake him up from his nap to go, and he was a little crank pot!

The newly married Mark & Kyla Buechlein

Mark & Kyla at the rehearsal dinner

Me and Jackson on our way to the rehearsal dinner


Jackson & Daddy at the reception

Me and Kelli Bleemel (I look like an Amazon)

Grumpy Butt and us

Chad, Lisa & Caroline

I'M SO BUMMED...

that my computer crashed. Well, I don't know that it exactly crashed, but the motherboard cracked when it fell from my chair (oops) and that fall damaged the hard drive. So that's why I haven't posted in a while, and boy, do I have LOTS of pictures to post too! I just don't know where they are at the moment or if they were even retrievable from my hard drive. Best Buy supposedly transferred my old data to a new laptop Tom bought me, but I'm having trouble navigating around this Vista crap. Ugh! Hopefully in the next few days I'll have some stuff to post. Y'all come back now.

HOLIDAY WORLD!

Here is a smattering of pictures from our Holiday World experience. We rented a wagon to haul the boys around in and that was really handy. I took a lot more pictures and I'll be posting them on a Kodak gallery for those family members that want to look at more pictures. I think we were at the theme park from 9:30 to 6:00 that night. It was quite a day, let me tell you.

We didn't stay at the water park part very long (Splashin' Safari) because Jackson got shot in the eyes from water shooting up from the ground and he was crying so hard. He literally could hardly open his eyes. That was our sign that it was time to go. Both Jackson and Wesley had a great time, I think, and we all had fun just watching them.

Tom and I finally decided on some furniture for Jackson and ordered it. What I originally wanted was Pottery Barn Kids, but let's be real, the bed alone was 1,100. That just was not feasible for this stay-at-home mom. Anyway, we were able to get a twin bed, trundle, nightstand and chest for under 1,000. Mom got this same bed for Jackson for her house, but she got it in black. We ordered it all in distressed oak. It's on backorder until August, so we won't be getting it until then. Below is a picture of the bed. But we got the chest, which is a little taller, not the dresser that's in the picture.

While we were in Jasper for the weekend, Jackson got to swim in Grandma Hart's pool. He had a really good time, too! He has become quite a good little swimmer. With floaties on, he can dog-paddle all over the pool.

I've got lots more pictures to post from the weekend, but maybe I'll get to it tomorrow!

Until next time...