A preview of what will be on my new blog (once my husband helps me get the Wordpress template in place)

Top 7 Fake Swear Words 

The fake swear. For anyone with small children, you know what I’m talking about.

7) Friggin

6) Shitake

5) H-E-double hockey sticks

4) Shizzle

3) Freakin

2) Sunnuva

1) Eff!

Honorable mentions: flippin, shish-kabob, gosh-darn it

Got something better? I’d love to hear it… and possibly add it to my G-rated repertoire.

Okay, this content is not mine. But it was so freakin funny I just had to give a little link love to a friend of a friend. Click here for the word of the day, and a few pearls of wisdom from Mr. T.

I pity the fool who don’t watch this…

Today is Zoe’s last day of preschool. *sigh* Yeah, I’ve known this day’s been coming for a long time, but it doesn’t change the weird-ish feeling in my gut. My baby is finished—forever—with preschool. She’s had the same teacher for the last two years, so she’s, understandably, having some separation anxiety.

Jachin’s last day of school is tomorrow, and tomorrow is really a fake day. He goes for an hour—just long enough to give his teacher a present and get grass stain on his clothes before peddling back home on his new bike that is way too huge for him. Then there is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Three measly days to rest before…

Monday! Monday marks the beginning of our insane summer. Summer is actually MORE packed with shuttling kids around, shelling out cash for various items of absolutely no worth (like the $4.00 hotdog at the local pool), and dealing with lost items that will never, ever be found (like the goggles Jachin lost on our trip to St. George ). You lose something during the school year, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be able to locate it in the school’s Lost and Found closet. You lose something during the summer, and you’re just screwed. That item now belongs to the Lost and Found closet of the Mysterious Universe.

I love where we live, though, in that there are several very kid-friendly places all within biking distance of our new house… places that we will be frequenting all summer. First there is the Scera, home of weekly kid movies with 50 cent popcorn, a cool pool (the site for the kids’ daily swimming lessons), several parks, outdoor movies and plays, acting camps, and a slew of other neat things. Last summer the Scera did a pirate day camp that went along with their Peter Pan production. The kids learned some basic fencing moves, walked a plank, wore cute pirate bandanas, and got to fly over the stage in the harness-thingy. It was very cool. Other than the Scera, there is also the Orem Rec Center, home of dance lessons, indoor swimming, basketball camp, and coach pitch. Thanksgiving Point—although not within walking distance—has a ton of cool things including the dinosaur museum, a petting zoo, an amazing golf course, and huge gardens with an outdoor amphitheater with an awesome waterfall backdrop. (Def Leppard played there last summer and I missed it, darn it!! If they ever come again, I vow to be in the front row.) UVSU has a Single A (thanks, Grant) baseball team—the Owlz—that the kids love…they have fireworks every Friday after the games. BYU has a sweet animal museum and planetarium. Basically, we live in a great area for kid activities.

And all of this starts Monday.

So here I sit, 4 days until D-Day, taking a big inhale. Going to my happy place… while I still can.

Okay, because I am obsessed with blogging (it’s true… the lack of housework will attest) I’ve decided that one blog simply won’t do it for me. As of late, I’ve become pretty enamored with lists. Lists can be really funny; not to mention they are the only way a scatter-brained, free-spirited person like myself can get anything done. So I am launching a blog that is just about lists. Sound boring? I promise it won’t be. You may become addicted to lists as well! So until Suz’s Top 7 (the working title) is up and running, I invite you to visit another hilarious list blog that I love reading. 1 Bad Mom (a woman I’ve neither met nor spoken to, but I put her in my Blogroll because she’s a hilarious writer) has a blog dedicated just to lists . Check it out.

Long Live the List!

Today was Jachin’s 8th birthday. What a cutie. He got a new bike that is too huge for him, but he manages to ride it anyway. He also got the standard favorite: lego sets. We had a BBQ on our new deck, overlooking our rock and dirt backyard and hung out with family. It was great. In honor of Jachin’s birthday, I though I’d do a post about the origin of his awesome name.

No one ever, ever knows how to say my son’s name.  We get “Jay-shin”, “Jack-in”,”Jeng-kin”, “Jay-sheen”… all kinds of really exotic sounding pronounciations. Maybe I should have heeded my grandmother’s warning while I was pregnant: “You’re going to name him what?!? He’ll be spelling that to people his whole life!” And indeed, he does. But his name has a meaning; a cool meaning, in fact. In other words: no, we did not make it up. It’s biblical in origin. (It is also, according to a Google search, a town in Alabama.) I think it’s an incredibly strong name and a good name. As far as the pronounciation, I just started saying to people, “Jachin…. like ‘bacon’.”

Jachin hates this helpful rhyme. I’m not sure why. He likes to eat bacon. I told him it could be worse; his name could rhyme with “sausage”… that would be really weird and not nearly as cool. Between bacon and sausage, bacon is hands-down the cooler breakfast meat.

I love you, Jachin. Happy Birthday, sweetie.

As any writer (or in my case, “wannabe writer”) will tell you, there are days when the ideas and the words just come from nowhere, flying on to the paper. Other days, though, there’s just nothin’. After sitting down at the kitchen counter this morning, my laptop and my Sugar Free RockStar energy drink before me, I realize… I got nothin’. I’m just in a writing funk this morning. Maybe it’s my brain.

Or maybe it’s my hand. You see, I incurred a softball injury last night at the ward activity. There I was, puttering around in the outfield, acting like I was actively engaged in the game, when my husband got up to bat. “Suz, it’s coming to you!” he yelled. I smiled and punched my fist into my glove a few times thinking, that silly man thinks he can aim where he’s hitting. So of course, to my great surprise, he smacks it right out to me. Crap. I have to try to catch something. So I run backwards a little bit, thinking I’m under it. And then I realize that it’s going way behind me, and I’m not anywhere near under it. I completely missed it. Everyone around me groans, and I’m hoping that no one has put any money on this little pick up game. I’m a little embarrassed. So the next guy gets up to bat and I’m thinking okay, if anything else happens to come out here to me, I have to really try to catch it. So then this guy also smacks it right out to me and I’m wondering what the hell… But this time I get right under it. I’m totally going to catch it. Crack. Instead of hitting the pocket of my glove, it hits the kinda fleshy part of my wrist. I can’t even pick the ball up off of the ground now because my hand immediately goes totally numb. The six year old boy, Anson, next to me in the outfield picks up the ball and throws it infield. “Are you okay??” everyone is yelling to me, because it was the crack heard ‘round the world. My pride is also totally numb at this point, and I’m suddenly remembering why I was a cheerleader in high school instead of playing a real sport. (yeah, I said it. Cheerleading isn’t a real sport…) At least when I got up to bat I managed to hit it, and I ran to first base successfully. It wasn’t a total failure. But my hand really hurts this morning. And I’m not typing anything unless it’s really worth typing because pains are shooting from my wrist to my elbow, so I’m not wasting the pain on just any crappy…

woah, look it… I wrote a post. How did that happen?

And here I thought I had nothing’…

My husband found this on the camera card… Zoe figured out how to take pictures and record video on the camera. You just can’t ask for better memories…

And not bad camera work…

In fairness, everyone has had their fair share of bad hair days. May I present the reason for all of mine.

Groovy, huh? This is a pic of the Crunkletons and the Stewarts, my mother and biological dad’s families (respectively). My mom is in the second row, white shirt, to the right of my buff and shirtless uncle Matt. My dad is in the back row, directly over her right shoulder.

You think you’ve got hair troubles?

*shut your mouth!*

*I’m talkin ’bout the Fro, baby*

*We can dig it…*

Occasionally I will have a dream that will spark a memory from my childhood; something that I haven’t thought about in years. One of those dreams was last night, and here’s the childhood memory:

When I was about 8, my little brother, Sean, and I somehow got a hold of a short-wave radio. I have no recollection of how we got it. Anyway, we asked our parents if we could use it. They showed us the basics—turning it on, surfing the frequencies, certain choice short-wave phrases—and then my brother and I went out into the backyard, climbed the apple tree in the corner nearest the highway, and began trying to talk to people.

We decided that we needed “handles”. I can’t remember for the life of me what my brother’s was. Mine, however, was “Sheena”… as in “Queen of the Jungle”, which was my favorite movie at the time. So there we were in the apple tree and we started getting in touch with various truck drivers passing by on the highway. Sean and I only knew a few phrases that our parents told us (and those phrases they only knew from Smokey and the Bandit movies) so the conversations were usually pretty short.

“Hey, there, good buddy,” we’d say.

“Uhhh, hello. What are you kids doing?” the strange trucker would ask.

“Are you doing the double nickel?” (referring to the speed limit of 55) (*snickers*)

“Yep, sure am.”

“Ok. 10-4, good buddy.” (*more snickers*)

This was basically the conversation we had each time. Rarely, we would have a rude trucker telling us to “get the hell off”, but it never deterred us or kept us from snickering. 

In retrospect, talking to strange truckers on a short-wave from the top of the apple tree in our backyard was the 1984 equivalent to sending your kids into strange chat rooms online to talk to weird grown-ups. But it was fun, and nothing happened.

After a while, we grew tired of saying the same three phrases to people. I think that’s why we stopped. Or maybe it was because my mom finally realized that we were actually contacting strangers on the highway. Either way, it was a short-lived recreational activity. But man, what a funny memory.

This is Sheena signing off, over and out.

We had a lovely weekend in St. George, Utah. It was a great diversion from regular life, even though we did pretty regular-ish things while we were there. I mean, swimming—pretty regular. Shopping—pretty regular. Hiking—pretty regular. Eating at The Pizza Factory—pretty regular… oh, except for the part when Zoe sent a full glass of Diet Coke flying across our table, into the air, and finally landing in a cool splatter pattern on the back of some large man’s white t-shirt.

I was mortified. After the initial frozen state of shock, and praying that the man wouldn’t stand up and beat up my husband and/or myself, I started thinking:

 What is the proper thing to do? Is there something written somewhere about post soda dousing etiquette? Do I wipe off his shirt? I mean, he can’t reach around to do it himself. But is it okay to touch a total stranger… especially in a wiping-type motion? Luckily, his wife decided to deal with his shirt. And she politely handed us the rest of their spare napkins to wipe up our still-dripping table, and the floor which was pooling with 16 oz. of Diet Coke, complete with those little shredded ice chunks. Our waiter walked over and all I could envision was him slipping in it and dropping his tray of beverages on the already doused man. There simply weren’t enough napkins to handle such a situation. But alas, I warned our waiter in time and he sent over a kid with one of those rag mops to slosh the soda around on the floor—not actually absorbing any of the soda, but at least distributing it over a larger area of the floor.

The whole time that all of this is going on, Zoe is crying because she feels so badly. The wife, in the midst of cleaning her husband’s shirt, is also trying to console my daughter. I mean, it was an accident, but it made me feel almost worse that the wife was being so gracious about it.

They left quickly and we finished our dinner without (further) incident. When we arrived at the front counter to pay, an older couple in line ahead of us looked back and said, “Are you the ones that had soda spilled on you?” I said, “No, we were the spillers.” She gave me a knowing look that only a woman with children can give. I added, “And I’m not sure which is worse: being the one getting spilled on, or being the one having to apologize.” She reminded me that it happens to everyone. And I reminded myself that we aren’t from St. George and that we wouldn’t have to see any of these people ever again.