exposing the ugly, naked truth...

Oh, not me.  My pantry.  I don't think you can grasp the extreme nature of how much it was stuffed and disorganized.  I came home from the grocery store and Gary told me there wasn't room for everything.  Today I decided to tackle it.  As you can see, I already cleared off half a shelf before I thought to take a picture. 

I threw away a big trash bagful of old stale chips and cereals.  This is a closer picture of the two bottom shelves.  Note the bottom shelf is for the boys foods.  Their snacks and poptarts.  Dem ain't mine!!

Frankly, I'm embarrassed at the excess.  For cryin' out loud!  I've been to a third world country!  I KNOW how privileged we are here in the U.S.  And somehow I'm hording a grocery store in my house.  Here's the after  photo:

Disregard the pantry floor.  It harbors our recycling (that and the bag full of empty pepsi cans on the doorknob), plus larger items that don't fit on the shelves.  What did I uncover?  3, yes, count them, THREE unopened bottles of  KC Masterpiece BBQ sauce.  And TWO unopened bags of popcorn.  And two fairly new, opened boxes of graham crackers.  And two boxes of lasagna noodles.  I make lasagna every other year or so.  Weird.  yes, I do have a lot of beans and tomatoes, but I eat those every day.

Note the nice new rice cooker (that I now have a spot for on the top shelf).  I bought it today and used it today.  I bought it as a reward.  I've been on Weight Watchers core plan for a week and lost 4.4 pounds!!

I'm not sure about the arrangement of everything though.  I swapped the shelves I put the canned goods and the boxed goods on.  But I don't like the tiered thing I have the cans on.  In theory, it's great, but the depth of the tiers is too shallow.  I can just imagine cans falling on the top of my head.  (excuse the extreme grammar errors)  I'm organizationally challenged.  So I think I did okay.

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how summer is shaping up...

This is going to be a different summer.  I can feel it.

First off, one of my best friend's here is moving.  :-(  This is not good.  She's the one person here, other than Gary, that I can talk to about spiritual things - who's on the same page as me.  Our boys are friends.  We go to the same church and several social things.  She lives in the same neighborhood.  We are walking buddies sometimes.

That's the sad thing.

I've set up a schedule of sorts for the boys.  A chore chart so they can earn an allowance and finally buy that Wii game they are begging for.  They are doing a Summer Bridge page each day, handwriting, reading, reading a devotion on their own, wiping their toilet and sink and emptying wastebaskets.  So far, they are cooperating.  I'm loving it.  I'm stunned that they are doing it. 

So that's an oddly organized thing.

This week the boys are going to a science class, called "boys tech camp".  It's from 12:30 to 4:00 and it's all about things that are fast and loud and how it works.  They've made flywheel cars and solar cars.  Thursday they are going to make rockets.  They are having a blast, except today.  Ryan came out of the class, saw me and started bawling.  All the way home he was sobbing.  He informed me that he didn't want to go to class tomorrow for two reasons and I couldn't make him.  So I asked him why.  And he said that they were going to work with craft knives and super glue tomorrow.   He's afraid.  I'm sure the teacher had good intentions and just wanted to stress the importance of being careful, but Ryan takes these things to heart.  The teacher told them that the slightest touch of the craft knife would cut them to the bone.  And the super glue will permanently stick you to what you touch and you would have to cut away the flesh to get it off.  So I told him the knife thing was an exaggeration, that it is indeed very sharp, but you'd need pressure to make it go to the bone.  Plus he had earned the knife badge in cubscouts so he had learned about knife safety.  Gary reviewed knife skills with him tonight.  And then I told him that superglue is indeed strong and fast drying, but solvents can be used to pry your fingers apart.  We looked it up on the internet and it said that fingernail polish remover would work.  I also toldhim that EVERYONE glues their fingers together, and if he gets glue on a finger to let it dry and not touch anything.  *sigh*  Before bed he began to tear up again, and informed me to be prepared because he may cry during the night.  *sigh*  What a sweety pie. 

oh, I also told him that if he cut himself, they could just superglue it together.  And he said no!  And I said yes, that's what they did when you cut your forehead.  I'm sure it wasn't reassuring, but it was true!

So that was a traumatic thing.

I'll end on an oddly funny note.  Yesterday, walking to the class, the sprinklers were on in the school yard, so we walked on the sidewalk.  As we walked along, I felt something on my legs, like a vine or something, hear/felt a snap and then suddenly, I was doused from the rear with water.  I swung around and saw a balloon unloading on me!  We ran a little bit and looked back and all we saw was a clothespin on the ground.  I'm sure there were kids across the street giggling behind a window.  I wasn't mad because it was a hot day and frankly it felt good.  So I took them to class and went back home the same way.  Mysteriously, the balloon and clothespin were gone!  Aha, just as I suspected, a booby trap.  So on my way back to pick them up, I went the same way out of curiosity.  I saw a fishing line casually draped across the sidewalk, but I did not see any water balloons or other objects lying in wait.  There was a flip flop in the grass.  I wish I had tripped it just to see what would happen.  The fishing line and flip flops were not there on the way home.  Hmmmm....

I just thought it was all fun and funny.  And I'm so glad it was just water and not something like dog poo.  I wonder how they made it work?

We do have a few fun things planned.  Next week is Vacation Bible School.  What is a summer without VBS?  And then later will be a short trip to Maui.  Nothing much in between.  Some swimming, some beach and lots of laziness.

Last Day of 3rd Grade!!

School's out!!  At least until July 30 - so enjoy it while it lasts.

Here are photo's of the boys coming out of the school.  As you can see, Ryan doesn't pose, but Jake does.

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20th anniversary!

I'm not sure what the computer time will say it is, but to me, it's May 28.  It's our 20th anniversary today!  Since our Singapore trip was our official celebration, we just swapped cards and went out, as a family, to California Pizza Kitchen followed by Cold Stone Creamery.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, it's what we did for my birthday too.   Hard to beat a sure thing.

Today I took the boys to Global Village and we bought webkinz.  (I had a buy 2 get 1 free coupon that expires May 31)  I got my first lil'kinz.  It's a little pink pig and I named her Petunia.  Ryan got a Leopard Lizard and Jake got a Blue Rhino.  This makes 7 (yes SEVEN!) for each of them.  It's Webkinz mania in the Brock household.  The good news is that it's pushed Pokemon to the side, for a while at least.  It still pops up every now and again.  It's really funny, because my kids NEVER played with their stuffed animals.  Their friend Ricky is the catalyst.  Ricky just moved here last summer and he has always been into stuffed animals and had already had a nice collection of Webkinz.  He's a natural born leader.  My guys are totally followers.  I don't think that everyone should be a leader, but I do hope that my boys can and will stand their ground when it counts.  Ya know?  I pray about that a lot.

Anyway, I've been finding myself going on their webkinz account and doing the gardening, feeding them and putting them to bed.  LOL!  Now that I have my own pet, I can reallly get in there and fix things up.  He-he-he!

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What I've been reading lately...

I try to be a good mom.  I don't reach the mark very often, but I try.  I know that I can't control everything that goes into my boys' minds, so I do my best to be aware of what does.  So my reading, as of late, has been ruled by the books my boys read.  (aside from my daily Bible reading, which I've been doing a good job of keeping up with, I'm only 1 day behind!)  I like to order lots of books from the scholastic order forms that come home.  Here are a few that I have read:

Goosebumps: we got a box set and I read them all.  Entertaining, but very formulaic.  I like that he feels free to make the story wildly outlandish instead of trying to think of reasonable explanations.  I don't like that the parents are seen as unreasonable and uncaring to the children and the children are disobedient and bratty and obnoxious.  Oh well, they find it entertaining and it gets them to read.

Rascal: this is an oldie about a boy and a baby racoon that he takes and raises for about a year, set during The War.  It's autobiographical.  I LOVED THIS BOOK.  I want my boys to read this, I want them to love it as much as I did.  I want them to want to be as creative and industrious as the boy was.  (I want a racoon now)

Sounder: while this book is named after a dog, and the main character is a boy, it is NOT a book about a boy and his dog.  It is about a sharecropper family who hit upon hard times, harder than usual.  It is also a true story.  It is a beautiful book.  A beautiful book.  Not a beautiful story.  It's sad and depressing and tough, hopeful and hopeless.  I cried.  I want my boys to read this, but I don't think they could even come close to comprehending what it's about.  This is a book that came in a pack of Newbury Award winning books that I ordered and it was just sitting on the shelf.  Until we rented Old Yeller at the video store and the lady told us about the Sounder video, starring Cicily Tyson.  We haven't rented the video yet.  I'm debating whether they should read the book first.  That's usually my requirement.  But I wonder if the movie would provide the images they need to have in their minds to visualize while they are reading...

Peter and the Starcatchers:  this is the book I'm currently reading.  I'm pretty wild about it.  It's a nice thick book, part of a trilogy.  It's the prequel to Peter Pan.  Co-authored by Dave Barry.  It's an easy read, very fast paced and impossible to put down.  It's full of action and pirates (note my pirate on the side! isn't he cute!) and violence.  But the violence is not detailed.  For example, the British sailors embark the pirate ship to engage in battle and all the book says is that a few minutes into a bloody battle the captain realizes that they would never win.  So, you have the action without the gory detail.  Perfect for this mom.  I'm sure if a movie would be made of this book, it would be wraught with gore.  The book has no cursing - yes!  Even with hard core pirates.  Idjit is the worst I've read yet.  We bought this book Friday and Jake is on page 300-something!  This is very exciting to me.  He loves to read, but it's usually non-fiction.  I'm glad to know that he can follow a long story and not just bites of trivia.

And since there are 3 of us trying to read this book at the same time, I have a backup read.  Our National Geographic is here.  I'm on an article about the other Mexican border.   I know, most people reading it would be thinking about border policies and getting all riled up about politics and migrant workers and illegal immigrants.  Blech.  I don't think like that.  I hate politics.  I'm thinking about their plight and mission work and my heart reaches out to them.

Lahaina noon

Yesterday was a Lahaina noon day.  I'm sorry I didn't have my camera with me to take pictures.  This is the deal.  It's a day when the sun is directly overhead at noon, making your shadow the smallest ever, or non-existent if you are a flag pole.

We had fun yesterday.  The church had a picnic at Kailua Beach Park, complete with baptism in the ocean.  The skies were clear and beautiful and it was windy - I think it's always windy there.  The boys played in the sand.  A bunch of them were digging to china.  At the end, Ryan had thrown sand in Jake's face - where sand went up Jake's nose (thankfully not in his eyes) and Jake decided the best way to get the sand out was to stick his finger up there.  Hence the nose bleed.  Oy.  And  with his delicate nose, it requires a 10 minute steady pinch to get it to stop.  Good time to go home.

It was very crowded at the beach park.  Tons of people picnicing and grilling.  The water was just about as crowded, with kite surfers, wind surfers, paddle surfers, regular surfers, boogie boarders, kayakers, snorkelers - oh, and swimmers and frolickers.  Much too crowded for jellyfish or sharks.  I do believe the ocean level must have raised a few inches with all the bodies that entered it yesterday.  Even if just for a few hours.

Yesterday the cubscouts went out to the local veterans cemetary and put flags and leis on the grave markers.  I have pictures, but I haven't uploaded them yet.

Gotta go shower.  My main task for today is to find a strapless bra or one that has those clear straps.  I have a retirement ceremony of a good friend to go to on Thursday and I've got the perfect skinny strap dress to wear.  Hopefully I'll find something without causing too much emotional distress.

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