Steal x2

Didn't I tell you I buy things for the cheap? Didn't I tell you I was a bargain hunger?

Well in this case I was as much a "hunter" as a guy who hits a deer with his truck is a "deer hunter", but I digress.

While walking through Target buying paper plates and such, I stumbled upon the dusty remains of their home decor event. Everything remaining is 75% off. And there, lo and behold, are two of these:

Originally priced at $149.00, got them for $37.25. Let me say that again. $37.25.

Side tables, for a living room I guess. I'm using them in my bedroom cause I'm nifty like that.

Who needs garage sales??

Score!

Since we're all showering at different people's houses lately (see renovation post), I had Anna hold on to my kids for a few minutes longer tonight while I ran to Meijer to get some masking tape for said "renovation."

While there, I had to look in the kitchen section. I just can't help myself.

I snagged one of these for 50% off, or $11.00.

*Anchor Hocking cake stand. To display all the crap I make that nobody will eat.

I also bought a horrible cupcake cake for Jake's class, to take with him on Friday. I won't get into how I feel about cupcake cakes, but let's just say we have a tepid relationship...

Maybe the kids in his class will feel the same way and Jake will bring some rejects home, to display in my cake stand.

"Renovation"

So you know the old-style bath and shower mixer taps with the plastic star design?



Yeah, that one there in the middle. The cheap plastic thing.

Well the name label fell off of ours. The little circular plastic thing in the middle.

Chuck's reaction to this?

Change the whole fixture! So we get down to brass pipes and he finds that there's a slight leak.

Leak? Rip out the whole wall!



So we are on day two of not having a bath or shower.. but he's working on it!

Test, test

I'm testing this great blogger app on my G1 and it seems to be working great. I can't add pictures but when Jake ends up pulling down a whole pile of cans at the grocery store, I can let the world know right then and there. You're welcome!

Photos and a surprise

Oh, oh laptop and picturesss.



Luke and I are sick, both in special and unique ways. While he has a river of crusty green snot, I've nearly lost my voice and have a nice, dry cough. The other two boys are fine. Go figure.

Without further adieu, I present you with weird pictures of me and my kids.



Jake being Jake




Jake making Luke giggle




Ok, yeah, I don't have any makeup on. Don't look at me, look at the cuteness.

And, last but not least, my new ring:

Flamingo Blogging--Coming Soon!

Chuck's been taking his laptop to work almost every night and we all know how I feel about his computer... But anyway, I feel like I've neglected this blog for too long and it's time to get back on track, regardless of the nearly collapsing desk and monitors so tall I hurt my neck when looking at them. Broken legs and whiplash are just some of the pains I'm willing to endure for my faithful reading public, all 2 of you.

Chuck, that wonderful man, has been helping me out every day with laundry and doing dishes. While he is stuck at home with Luke and no car, I still like to think he'd be doing those things even if he could escape the house. So kudos to you, Chuck!

It's actually been a good 2 weeks as far as buying cool stuff goes. I bought two units* of Spanx high-rise panties. I'll have to take some before and after pics, they do their job well.

I also have other pictures I need to upload, but I can't find a single USB port on this bloated sideways coffee table Chuck calls a computer. I'd probably kill myself tripping over things to get to the back and, while I love you all, I have my limits.

It's a good thing I got my school refund check and am the new owner of a 'flamingo pink' laptop! Now I can upload photos and bookmark pictures of kittens with pancakes on their heads without risking my stuff being erased. Once it and my new printer get here, I will set up a nice workstation from which to email pictures of my children covered in substances and post stories of embarrassing things I said to the neighbors.

I'm also selling my flood-damaged car and getting my large tax refund on Friday, with which I will purchase more things. The Lowes by my house has 50% off grills right now. I know there's 1.5 feet of snow on the ground right now, but I also plan on buying a snowblower in July if it makes you feel any better. I like having my priorities in order!

So once again, I have no pictures for you. I've explained why. All I have is empty promises and well wishes.

Till next time!

*Why would they call a single panty a "pair"? It's one unit of panty, why pluralize it? If I were to say I bought two pairs of something, wouldn't that mean I have 4 of them? Now I'm confused.

That's My Babymama!

So my birthday was on Friday. My birthday is always special because it falls in the week of super 75% off sales at The Body Shop and Bath and Body Works. First order of business was breakfast, which I ended up making myself for some reason... Then off to the mall, where I took advantage of aforementioned super sales.

The mall was fun, mostly because I never go to the mall and just seeing those people and things are interesting once in a while. Luke enjoyed himself; he smiled and laughed at almost everything there. Then we went to the food court for lunch. That was... something else.

Chuck said they had a great steak and potato place there. Then we got there and it was literally called The Great Steak & Potato Co. Who would have thought?

As he was standing in line, two girls of uh.. urban persuasion.. walked up and remarked how cute Luke was. He thanked them and then they asked, "Is it yours?"

He was caught slightly off guard, but replied, "Yes." They eyed Chuck and Luke up and down and nodded with approval.

They asked, "Are you taking your baby out for the day?" I'm assuming they meant, like, for visitation.

He didn't really know what to say to that, so the conversation fizzled out. As he was bringing his food back to the table, they spotted me and say really loudly, "OOOHHH, that must be the babymama!" They looked extremely confused.

God forbid two biological parents of a small baby get along well enough to be seen out in public together without visitation agreements. Sustained relationships? Commitment? Fathering more than one child with the same person? HUHH?? Whaat?

What is this world coming to?

Back to skewl

First day of classes today. It's a strange feeling to be dead tired at 9:00 in the morning and know that you've already been there for an hour and you have two more classes left. It's almost like high school again. I guess I'm crazy for taking 17 credit hours, but I'm trying to graduate on time. I also don't want to take a Maymester class this year (a whole class packed into the month of May). I'd rather take a break and work on my house, maybe schedule my wisdom tooth-ectomy.

I have the same teacher for English as I did last semester. I loved the look on her face when she walked into the room. She may be a damn hippie, but she likes me and gives me good grades. I just regret nearly getting into a fist fight in her class last semester, which she addressed by stating we would no longer be talking about politics in her class. My fight wasn't about politics, it was about a girl being racist towards me. But I digress.

I thought my Biology teacher would be the same. No. He's a bald, all denim-wearing ecologist who was studying bugs in Europe over the last 4 months. Yeah, quite a character.

Tomorrow is Bio lab, Math, and Chemistry.

Anyway, I'm dead tired and want to go to bed like... now. I'll wait until 9, I suppose.

Check back tomorrow for a more lively post.

Fatty and kids go sledding

We (minus Chuck, who had to work) went sledding with our neighbors today. She had called another friend of hers to meet us at the new park our town spent nearly $100 million on. You would think that for that much money, they would have a nice sledding hill. Wrong. They literally slapped a sign that said "sledding hill" on the back half of a landfill and called it a day. We got out of the car, looked around, and decided to go somewhere else.

My neighbor drove us all to her usual place in a town next door. The hill was half as pretentious and twice as fun.

My 7 months pregnant neighbor and Luke, who fell asleep, decided to retire to the car early while me and the other kids continued to sled for about an hour.

The heavier you are, the faster you slide into the fence and the harder you fall on your ass walking up the stairs. I must have gone down about 60 mph!

I really should do it more often, it was an amazing cardiac workout. I was huffing and wheezing all afternoon. Go fatty, go!

Popsicles

So Jake is begging me to let him have popsicles for breakfast. First of all, say it right, kid. It's not "postikles", or even "poskiples."

If he can learn to say the word, I'd consider feeding them to him for breakfast. Until then, his sketelon can't have any poskiples.

Wah wah

The last few days, Chuck has taken the laptop to work and I hate his computer, so... I have storiez.

The other night, Jake walked into my room at 4:30 in the morning. He was bawling his eyes out and crying, "There's cheese on my bed, there's cheese all over my bed!"

Being more than half-asleep, I reassured him that there was, in fact, no cheese on his bed. Everything was fine, go back to sleep. He continued bawling and demanding that there was cheese on his bed. I finally dragged myself out of bed and walked into his room, where I discovered the macaroni and cheese he had eaten for dinner, puked all over his bed. I stripped his bed and threw the sheets in the hallway, to deal with in the morning. I then went back to sleep.

Every hour or so, he would come back in my room and tell me he had to puke. In the middle of telling him to go to the toilet, he would just puke wherever he was standing. At one point, Chuck thought it was a good idea to give him some cherry Pepto Bismol, which he puked in my trashcan and on my bed.

He puked probably 3 or 4 more times before breakfast, which he ate just fine. I thought he had gotten it from the neighbor boy, who had the stomach flu the week before. Since Jake's had it, I've kept him away from David. Then his mom called me tonight and told me he's throwing up again. So I guess we are transmitting this bug back and forth somehow, I just pray it stays away from the baby.

CHEESE!

Stealz

I got these shoes for $5 today



5 DOLLA!#@$@

Buying In Bulk

Has anyone ever seen a can of formula this big? Chuck bought it on sale today, apparently cheaper than the regular stuff. It's next step formula. Jake looks kinda strange here with his lip gloss and half-closed eyes:



*Yes, I know it isn't for Jake, but I took a picture with him holding it for size comparison. 20% more!

After a nasty MRSA infection in early November, I lost the use of one breast for feeding Luke. Since he's growing and I can't always keep up with one boob, I give him one 4 oz bottle of formula every day. At the most, he'll eat up to 8 oz while I'm at school. One bottle. Any guesses how long this can will last? He'll probably be in college before we run out.

My Christmas: A Montage

I guess I was too busy to consider starting a blog before Christmas, when all the cool stuff was going on and I had fun new things coming into my kitchen. I hate writing big, long, boring blogs, but I'll try to make this one fun and short and full of pictures. Like a children's book.

My Christmas started on Black Friday. I shopped at Target, since it's close to my house and it was the latest-opening place in town. Six o'clock in the morning seemed reasonable compared to 4 or 5.

I won't tell you how much I spent there.

My Christmas tree, which you've seen, was purchased in early December. I want to say the 2nd or 3rd. That was an adventure. First of all, we've been using a fake tree that was given to us by a friend's mother for a couple of years. This was the first year we decided to go buy a real tree. The logic behind that was that we'd wait until Christmas was over and snag a really nice pre-lit tree on sale. More on that later.

The tree stand that I was given by my MIL was more like a flower vase. It was pretty, but could only fit a trunk inside with a diameter of about 2 inches. After whittling the trunk of my tree down with a sawsall in the driving snow for an hour, I gave up and asked my neighbor if she had a tree stand of normal size, or at least a chainsaw. She said she'd lost both in the flood. I went back to shaving pieces of my tree off in order to fit it inside my vase.

Her mother then found the tree stand after almost 2 hours of sawing and I was saved. She helped me put it up straight and then left me to my decorating, which was mostly uneventful.

You've already seen the tree.

My favorite part of Christmas soon began. Baking! I made my first batch of gingerbread men and absolutely hated the dough. Mixing the dough, washing the molasses off my machine, the heavily floured surfaces, rolling that crap out, how quickly they went soft. Ugh, no thanks. I'll stick to sugar cookies. I've vowed to make 1 or less batches of gingerbread a year from now on.



*Don't the sugar cookies look more like 4th of July cookies? Haha.

I might also mention that this was my first time seriously decorating cookies. I bought a 2 oz. jar of silver dragees from Fancy Flours in early December. They got to my house speedily and I was able to decorate my gingerbread men (and other shapes) with them.

(A quick sidenote on dragees. Some liberal bleeding heart in California sued makers and distrubutors of these little edible balls, claiming they were toxic. Now everybody's Christmas cakes and cookies in Cali will be a little less merry thanks to that asshole. If you live in any of the other 49 states, however, you should be able to get them.)



*I'm guessing I put the red in front because 1) I ran out of white frosting, and 2) My train hit an elf.

We also assembled a gingerbread train 2 days before Christmas. This one I bought at Target. I was not about to attempt one from scratch. The train came with white and green royal icing in bags, and I added the rest. That Christmas tree in front of the train was from my sugar cookie endeavor. Not bad for store-bought.

On Christmas day, we went to Chuck's paternal grandmother's house. Almost all of his aunts and uncles and cousins were there celebrating. I got $100 from Grandma Pullen, with which I bought these:



*There's so much crap in the background of all my pictures. We still don't have a basement, ppl.

Once again, Target. They were 50% off the day after Christmas. At first I was going to wait until they were 75% off to buy the other 4 place settings, to make 8. When I went back two days later, on Sunday, they were almost completely gone so I decided to go ahead and get the other 4 at 50% off.

In the picture I have: 2 serving platters, 2 serving bowls, 4 salad plates, 4 cereal (?) bowls, 4 Dinner plates, a cake stand, and a bowl made of gold branches. I'm assuming I can put fruit in there or lay a napkin in it and use it for dinner rolls. Whatever, it looks hawt. Here's a close-up of the salad plate and the cake stand:

See the birdie?

See the other birdie? They match!

Apparently this was holiday dinnerware. It looks like year-round stuff to me. This is my first nice set of china. I guess you can call it china, it's porcelain. I have it housed in the liquor cabinet for now, but it kinda looks nice with the champagne glasses hanging behind it and the light that turns on when you open it. No, I don't have a picture of it put away.

The last thing worth mentioning was the death of my stand mixer. Two days before Christmas, right at the peak of my baking season, my KitchenAid Pro 600 died. Well, I mean, it ran. It just made a horrible clicking noise with every rotation. For some reason I considered that dead and didn't run it anymore; although I guess for all practical purposes I could have continued to run it into the ground. KitchenAid was nice enough to honor my warranty and send me a new one, no questions asked. Now that's a warranty! The only problem is it didn't come until 2 days before New Years, and by then I was too pooped to bake.

I don't know if anyone else has one of these things, but I use it for everything. I was literally lost in my own kitchen without my stand mixer. I felt naked. And alone. But now I have a new one, which sometimes shorts out when I put it on the stir setting. But I'm not about to complain and have to wait another week and have my FedEx guy show up at 8 AM for pickup when I'm trying to sleep in on my vacation.

So that was my December. In a nutshell. I may revisit Christmas Eve/Morning at a later date, cause that was kinda fun too, but for now that's all. Yay Christmas!

Summer fun

While most people want to enjoy their summer going to baseball games and playing at the park, I'm signing up for a human cadaver prosection program at Indiana University.



Ew, right? I think it's cool.

A little background, I was a CNA (certified nursing aid) at a nursing home and hospital for a while, and have background in dealing with... dead people. As a biology major, I have a number of ways that I can go with my degree and I feel that a course like this will make me stand out if I ever have to apply to professional school or even a competitive job.

I love how the flyer says "breakfast & lunch provided."

Stuff I've been doing

Our neighbor's son had his 3rd birthday party last night (real birthday: Dec 27), and it was a fun mess of packaging and food and brownies. I forgot my camera over at my house, so I have no pictures of the cool Thomas theme and mini-train track she had on her cake. Is anyone else a fan of cake wrecks? Not that her cake was wreck-worthy, but it made me want to take a picture of it nonetheless. It was actually a brownie.

Anyway, our lovely Christmas tree went to the curb this morning. I'm going to pull my Xmas bin upstairs today and finish putting the decorations away, and I hope to be completely done with this whole holiday season. It was fun while it lasted, but my 4 year old is still asking about presents. And that's just.. no.



It's my birthday next, on the 16th. Then we'll be done with birthdays and celebrations until my baby turns 1 in the summer. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I just want to make it to Easter alive.

Opening post...

My name is Heather, I live with my two boys Jake (4) and Luke (6mo). Oh yeah, and there's the boyfriend guy too, Chuck. He supports us while I go to school and stay at home with the kids. That's his only redeeming quality.

Sorry if I sound a bit harsh, but he just... nevermind, bad day.

I'm a gun-toting, Sublime loving, hard studying, Republican momma. I bake and cook a lot and love buying gadgets and things for my kitchen. My kids do funny stuff which I capture through photos and video. Occasionally, I buy things for myself. Sound materialistic? I guess that's the point of this experiment. To show you my life and my stuff, and make fun of it all through self-deprecating humor.

That will all be documented here. If you care. Some do, some don't. Some will, some won't.