Halloween Costume Designers, Radar Detectors

Dear Makers of Halloween Costumes,

Why do you think it is ok for little girls to dress up as meth addicted hookers? That may seem a little strong, but hey in a few years they move up to these costumes:


(These are the TEEN costumes)
All I can say is, Halloween costume designers, I hope you are all blessed with beautiful daughters and that they love Halloween and the costumes you have designed.

What goes around comes around,
Mama to a Bumble Bee & Witch
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Dear Person with a Radar Detector,

Why own a radar detector if you are going to go 42 M.P.H. in a 55?
I'm just saying.

Thanks,
Road rage person riding your ass
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First Crushes...

As my eldest daughter is getting older she is starting to have all those little rights of passage that every girl goes through. First it was her body starting to change a little as she prepares for puberty (my freak out on that here) and now her first crush.

I find it amusing that a lot of girls first start crushing on some random piece of our media, whether a fictional movie character or even a book character. For me, although I can't remember my very first crush, I do remember getting all flustery and telling my mom I was going to marry Eddie. Yes I said Eddie, as in "Eddie and the Cruisers".

Isn't he dreamy?

When I was a little older and could understand the mechanics of love a little better I found myself falling for a more intelligent guy, the proverbial "nice guy". And thats when Lloyd Dobler became my crush.

Plus Llyod drove an awesome car. I find it totally awesome that my youngest daughter was given the middle name Chevelle after that very make and model. (Ashlyn Chevelle Malibu just doesn't have the same ring as Ashlyn Chevelle?).
Now my 8 year old comes to me telling me that she loves someone. I smirk a little and ask who. She proceeds to drag out our very worn copy of Twilight and points to Edward (Squeee Go Team Edward!). So I ask if she means the book Edward or the movie Edward, and she of course answers "the book mom, duh". She goes on to explain that when she's old enough for a boyfriend she wants one who has a super fast cool car and who will protect her from everything. I smile and think don't we all.

And now I sit here and think, wow my little girl is growing up. And wow, we have the same taste in emo vegetarian vampires!

People in Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones...

***WARNING: Pretty bitchy, self impowering rant ahead. If your not in the mood skip this post***

I will do what my heart tells me is right.

I will do what I would not be afraid to admit to my children.

I will speak my mind.

I will not be told how I am allowed to react to things.

I will 'do unto others as I would have them do unto me'.

I will not fear the temper tantrum that seems to follow me speaking my mind.

I have learned a lot of things in my 27 years on this earth. One of the most important is that I am very resilient and can 'pick myself up by my bootstraps' when need be. I have restarted my life once as an adult of 21, went through a horrible divorce and remade myself. I know I am strong and that I make good decisions. There is nothing in my life that I am ashamed of, nothing I will have any problem discussing with my daughters when the time is right. I will not have anyone try and shame me for my thoughts or my reactions. I speak from the heart, my ideals may not mesh with yours but that does not make them wrong. Yes, I have a temper, you can blame it on my Irish ancestry if you wish. Do not fault me for it. Ignore it if you must, I'm sure if you hide your head little ostrich it will go away.

I'm very sick of wasting my time conforming to others ideals and behavior patterns, hoping that others do the same. I wish I could have no conscience for just one day...I would really like to see how it felt to care about nothing but myself. But see I even feel guilty wishing for that.

I'm sorry for the rant, just needed a little space to vent.

100 Books to Read Before You Die

So I'm sure you've read my previous post about how thrilled I am to have a kindle? Well I was thinking about it and I've been reading a lot of fluff lately (One too many Nora Roberts novels) and I want to better my person a little. So I figure I would start knocking a few books off this list here.

Do you know the average person has only read six of these books?

I have crossed out the ones I have read (and actually remember). I'm sure I may have read more of these in high school but I don't have the foggiest what they were about (Maybe I read the Cliff Notes?) so they don't count. Right now I'm reading Slaughterhouse Five, and I must say it is actually a pretty good book.

Feel free to thief this list and put it on your own blog, just when you do please leave a comment so I can come visit your list and see how superior your reading skills are!

100 Books to Read Before You Die

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 Slaughterhouse Five- Kurt Vonnegaut
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most works)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Bible
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Choke- Chuck Palahniuk
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My Husband Is Made Of Awesome...

My husband knows how much I've been missing him. He knows that I from insomnia, living in the middle of nowhere-itis, and the wrath of two hyperactive children. I've done all I can do to keep myself busy. I mean really how much cleaning can I do? My DVR is cleaned out. I spend countless hours on the web at night reading blogs, playing on Pogo, and goofing around on Facebook.

I have faced facts, I am bored. So I complain. Call me Complain Jane, it won't hurt my feelings.

My husband takes my complaining pretty serious. "Happy wife=happy life" and all that.

He bought me a Kindle!!!

For those of you not hip to what a Kindle is here are the specs:

Display: 6″ diagonal E-Ink® electronic paper display, 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 16-level gray scale.
Size (in inches): 8″ x 5.3″ x 0.36″.
Weight: 10.2 ounces.
System requirements: None, because it doesn’t require a computer.
Storage: 2GB internal (approximately 1.4GB available for user content).
Battery Life: Read on a single charge for up to 4 days with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to two weeks. Battery life will vary based on wireless usage, such as shopping the Kindle Store and downloading content. In low coverage areas or in 1xRTT only coverage, wireless usage will consume battery power more quickly.
Charge Time: Fully charges in approximately 4 hours and supports charging from your computer via the included USB 2.0 cable.
Connectivity: EVDO modem with fallback to 1xRTT; utilizes Amazon Whispernet to provide U.S wireless coverage via Sprint’s 3G high-speed data network (check wireless coverage). See Wireless Terms and Conditions.
USB Port: USB 2.0 (micro-B connector) for connection to the Kindle power adapter or optionally to connect to a PC or Macintosh computer.
Audio: 3.5mm stereo audio jack, rear-mounted stereo speakers.
Content Formats Supported: Kindle (AZW), TXT, Audible (formats 4, Audible Enhanced (AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; PDF, HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion.
Included Accessories: Power adapter, USB 2.0 cable, rechargeable battery. Book cover sold separately.
The Amazon Kindle 2 is now available from Amazon for $259.

Basically it's an electronic book reader. That means when I can't sleep and its 2am, the kids are sleeping and I've just finished my last book, I just pick one off a list and within 60 seconds I'm back to reading.

Did I tell you I love my husband?

Missing Him...

Since we had our first official snowfall last night (a mere two inches) and Jay is heading across the midwest trying to make California by Tuesday, I thought this was fitting. One of my biggest fears is a jack knife.

Missing you Homey...

The Mommy Confessions- Nutritionally Deficient Mama

I haven't done a confession in awhile, so here goes nothing. I have been having a rough time with my husband being gone for 4 weeks at a time, and unfortunately my kids nutrition is suffering. I am depressed - I'm not going to lie. So instead of baking fresh bread and spending each day cooking some great masterpiece, I've been going the convieniece route. No not fast food but easily made processed food like spaghetti sauce from a jar and noodles or hot dogs and mac n cheese.

I feel so guilty.

It doesn't help that the 20 month old has completely sworn off veggies. I try and cut them in small pieces and hide them in things but to no avail. She can sniff out veggies faster than my dog pulls his antibiotics out of a meatball. My older daughter has great eating habits and will at least try everything put in front of her, so I have no worries she'll come down with scurvy.

That is my goal for the week up coming. Come up with simple healthy meals that I can make and freeze the extras for the days I'm feeling a little lazy. That and keeping the house on my level of clean, which it really hasn't been since before I got sick.

If anyone has recipes that their picky toddlers approve of send a link my way. I feel I can use all the help I can get now.

Roll On Eighteen-wheeler, Roll On

"Roll on highway, roll on along
Roll on daddy till you get back home
Roll on family, roll on crew
Roll on momma like I asked you to do
And roll on eighteen-wheeler roll on (roll on)" -Roll On, Alabama

Well its official. Jay finished his week of orientation and testing, and has now joined Moose in the rig. He has 20,000 miles of training to do before he is a fully vested driver. Right now they are on their way to Maine, but at this moment are in Massachusetts (just got a text with an update). So if any of you happen to be behind a Prime truck please be kind and don't cut them off, big rigs can't stop on a dime.

I miss him dearly, its only been 7 days but it really feels like forever. The girls are doing well with it although Ashlyn has had a few episodes of "I want Da Da". She doesn't understand I can't just make him appear out of thin air. Jay calls everday and talks to the girls and tells them he loves them. Ash pretty much just tells him about her shoes or hot dogs, but he doesn't seem to mind.
I miss my husband, but for now good night!