Fully Alive…Ready to Smile

I’m addicted.  So, so addicted.  I can’t stop and I don’t want to.  You can’t make me.  Ha!  Although I’ve actually run out of room on my flair board, so I guess I will be forced to stop.  I really don’t do much on my Facebook, but after seeing this on Amanda’s blog, I got kind of intrigued and the rest is history.

Now I want them in real life : )  I hope you can read them, because this board really gives you a glimpse as to who I am.  Jer was shocked at how much of me was reflected by this.  I LOVE it!

***ETA: After publishing this post I realize you CAN’T read them, so here are some of them:

Sigh…they just make me happy!  There are more, but they don’t really say anything and are just pretty pictures.  Which are your favorite ones?

Okay, okay, okay already.  Here are the pictures from my “27 Dresses” party.  Of the 6 girls that were at the party, 5 of us wore our dresses.  The other gal, didn’t fit into hers.  But in a good way, she was smaller than the last time she wore her dress (and she’s had twins), lucky bum.  I think quite possibly the boning in my dress punctured some internal organ or another.  The smile pasted on my face is actually just shock and me holding my breath so I don’t bust the zipper.  And I’m leaning back in an effort to keep my tummy from protruding out the bottom of the boning!  True dat!

Here I’m raising my hand to actually make room to breathe.  Sure wish I could remember what I was saying cause apparently I was rockin’ the house with my hilarity!

And classic Erin, not paying any attention to the person trying to take our picture while I shoot off my mouth about some inane subject or other.  Brilliant.

From left to right: Candace (girl who has had twins and is now too small for bridesmaid dress a.k.a. “lucky bum”), Becky (wearing a lovely cream satin number from her brother’s wedding), Moi (a.k.a. loudmouth party hostess with the mostess and yes, I do in fact clean my house and do general daily activities in that little number!), Svea (who might not like me saying this but isn’t she stunning in that red dress…pregnant!  Yeeee!!!), Shelley (looking all sexy in her strapless chocolate goodness), Rachel (kudos go out to her because I got her in a dress, neener, neener, neener!  She just had a baby 2 months ago and she DOES NOT WEAR DRESSES!  EVER!!!  I got her to wear her bridesmaid dress from a friends wedding where they all wore a different color of wrap with white tank top.  It totally counts as a bridesmaid dress!  So yay her).

About 30 seconds after these pictures were taken we ran, leaped and bounded to the bedroom where yoga pants, sweatpants and stretchy pants of all manner awaited us.  Because really, who can eat taquitos, spring rolls, popcorn chicken, cream puffs, pumpkin bar and popcorn when your body is stuffed into a dress that isn’t really comfortable to begin with?  But let’s face it people, the dresses could totally be cut off and worn again!  So true.

I’m so happy everyone played along with my little party idea and please, feel free to steal this idea and blog about it so that I can see all YOUR dresses : )

I’m on a streak!  Three for three…three amazing women who have amazing blogs and who are so amazing in person.  I’m going to see how many times I can say ‘amazing’ in this post (have you ever noticed when you say a word many times over and over it starts to sound really funny and then you just keep repeating it and wondering how it ever came to be a word in the first place?  Um, right, where was I?…).

I just had the loveliest evening with an incredible (and yes, amazing) woman.  Nicole was gracious enough to agree to meet me for coffee after only having met me via our blogs.  I’m really enjoying this meeting amazing (there it is again) blogging friends.  I mean, they are so great on their blogs and smart and intelligent and fun, but in person…wow!  And what’s really great is that Nicole lives only 25 minutes from me.  : )  Yay!  And I thought we got along splendidly (phew, found a different adjective…hard to do when you are really excited about something and all your brain repeats is “amazing, amazing…”), which hopefully means many more such fun filled evenings.

In Nicole, I found a person who like me a) can talk a lot (I’m learning this is a good thing), b) can wander off into other subjects completely unrelated to the one that was currently being discussed and meander back to the original topic all without missing a beat (at least she is good enough to state that she will be veering onto a new path, I tend to just tear ahead without warning…I will take lessons from her on that), c) loves to laugh (and she definitely made me laugh).  She is so cute!  Adorable, really.

What more can I say?  I look forward to getting to know her better.

Ping Pong is an OLYMPIC SPORT?!????

Here are some little morsels from my week and upcoming weekend, none which are long enough to have a really interesting post by themselves, but combined…morsely goodness : )  At least to me.

The other day my mom and I are looking at a clothing catalog and she points out a pair of shoes that she thinks are hideous.  I thought they were quite cute!  And I said so.  She thought I was just saying that to be silly.  Then Jer and I are shopping the other day and I said “Oh, I need a new pair of shoes because I only have a few weeks before my deadline to have my 12 new pairs of shoes by the end of summer.”  We walk into my favorite shoe store and I zone in on a gorgeous pair of black leather shoes.  EXACTLY like the ones my mom hated.  Which just for the record, made them even more desirable.  Rebellion reared it’s ugly head and these beauties found a loving home in my closet.  They already feel like part of the family!  And all I can say to my mom is “neener, neener, neener!”  : )  She did grudgingly tell me that they were really cute on me, which made the purchase even better.

*****

Yesterday I hosted a jewellry and accessories party at my house.  The perfect evening…shopping coming to you!  Doesn’t get better than that.  Especially with all the gawgeous stuff that my cousin’s company Pink Fusion carries.  Look at this sweet bag I got.

*****

This is how I found Aidan after her nap the other day.  She wasn’t even quite awake yet, but she’d had the forethought to put on a nice warm hat.  Good thing because it was like 36 degrees Celsius (96.8 degrees Fahrenheit).  She wasn’t fond of the whole picture taking, flash in her face right after waking up.  But if you want to do things like this, it’s inevtible, really.

*****

Can I admit something?  I am a marker snob.  I keep buying my girls new packs of markers because they always want me to color with them and I CANNOT STAND coloring with markers that are drying out or ruined by little girls who press too hard.  So I buy new packs every couple weeks so that I can color happily with nice markers : )  We have a lot of markers!  (Can anyone guess what I spent the afternoon doing?)

*****

Tonight I’m having a few girlfriends from church over for a “27 Dresses” party.  What’s that, you ask?  Or maybe you don’t care, but I’m gonna tell you anyway.  We are going to watch “27 Dresses” and eat food and in honor of the movie I’ve asked them to wear a bridesmaid dress for the party.  We will be taking pictures fo sho!  We’re not yet too old for some goofy fun and I hope we never are!!

 *****

Tomorrow I’m going to a baseball game.  One of my friends asked me to go to a game with her.  Then 2 days later a different friend asked me to go to a game with HER.  What are the chances?  They don’t know each other, but both decided that this was the week to submit me to a long slow form of torture…9 innings long!!  So I told them if they wanted to go see a game then they could both go with me to the same game because like heck I’m going to TWO baseball games.  I don’t even like baseball!  I was telling a friend today about how I wasn’t going to actually watch baseball, I’m just going to the game to be with my friends and have fun.  I was told that I HAVE to watch the game.  WT*?!?  I don’t HAVE to do anything!!  Well apparently I have to watch the game because it’s important to keep your eyes on the ball in the event that it should end up flying into the stands and come hurtling at your head at high speeds (which apparently it does on a fairly regular basis), you can prevent being injured.  I snickered and said something to the effect of “that will be an interesting girls night out with balls flying at our heads” which resulted in a long bout of hilarity and guffawing.  So mature, I know.  Sigh.

*****

I decided on a whim that I wanted to take my girls to the States for a girlie night.  So Monday the three of us (along with my mom and my brother’s girlfriend Steph and her daughter Monika…who all thought that was a splendid idea) are going for a night.  We booked a suite so we can all bunk together and we’ll do some shopping and some swimming in the neat little kiddie play area and just have some good old fashion girl fun.  No boys allowed!  I’m not sure that my 2 little “Daddy’s girls” are quite sold on the idea of Daddy not being there yet, but they’ll get over it : )

*****

And that’s all for me.  Happy weekend! : )

I awoke from my months long emotional/physical stupor to realize that while I was *away* my bum went missing.  I think perhaps it’s been gone too long to put out a missing person report.  Can one report missing parts of one’s anatomy?  Oh, okay. Um, well, I guess I’ll have to figure something else out ’cause frankly, it’s just wrong, all this walking around with no bum.  Technically it’s a miracle I’m walking AT ALL since I think a large role of the gluteus maximus is to propel humans on their feet from point a to point b.  Really, I’m a walking miracle.

See?  Disturbing, isn’t it?

Apparently I had the frame of mind during my mental absence (can you have a “frame” of mind if you are mentally absent?  Things that make you go “hmmm”) to cut my hair, but not find my bum, because shorter hair will get me far in life.  I’m actually truly surprised that I’ve been physically able to sit and do nothing for all these months because sitting can be a real challenge with no hiney.  Extremely difficult.

And now I will be getting off my area “formerly-known-as-bum” and I will hie myself away at once for a jog to relocate missing nether regions in hopes of at least making contact and reestablishing good relations, all this with high hopes of retaining it in a more permanent position of employment.

_{**edited to add: I actually cropped my bum out of that picture…I do have a little more than is depicted.  But not much.  Must defend what there is.}

Well I think technically it’s the day after.  So we can say that lately I’ve been in a funk.  A cloud.  A fog.

Then I got a happy pill.  It’s an all natural happy pill called STR-J (the STR stands for stress).  And Lawd, I love it!  It’s like I woke up yesterday with a renewed sense of…um…something.  Not words, apparently.  But something.  Vigor (did you know when you enter “vigor” into Thesaurus.com it comes up with “oomph”…I didn’t know oomph was actually a word in the dictionary.  Interesting.).  Where was I?  Oh yeah, I’ve regained some energy.  It kicked in sometime yesterday afternoon and I was off on a rampage.

Since 3:00 yesterday afternoon I have washed my bedding, done 4 loads of laundry and folded them AND put it all away (seriously, people, that’s a landmark event right there…that’s as much as I’ve done in a whole week lately!), washed dishes…TWICE (oh, yeah), cleaned my oven (okay well technically my self cleaning oven cleaned itself, but whatevs).  I swept my floor, dusted, washed the insides of all our windows and the outsides of 4 (the rest are like a thousand feet off the ground, so it’s going to take a largeish ladder and a person other than moi to do that since I don’t do anything over 36″ off the ground).  What else…I know there’s more.  I can feel it.  I wiped down about 6 1/2 baseboards before my attention wandered, cleaned out and reorganized my desk (archeology at it’s best), cleaned out the old/unused/too small clothing from the girls’ drawers, organized my books and took out all the ones I’ve read and restacked the ones I haven’t yet read.

(just a few more and I’ll hit the ceiling!  The ones in the large stack are the “to read” books, the ones under them are some of my decorating and design books and then there are the beloved “Twilight” books in their place of honor.  Did I mention the other day I read “New Moon” in 7 hours?  Straight up!  Not lying.)

While cleaning out my desk I found the supplies for a project I’ve been intending to do so I whipped up 2 shadow box art displays for Ella’s room with Barbie clothes (’cause I had some extra time on my hands).  At some point when I get to a scrapbooking store I’ll buy pretty paper to put in the background of them, but for now white paper will do.

If you look closely at this next one you could imagine it being used in a C.S.I. episode…

“If we enlarge the reflection and enhance it we could probably get a clear match for the nailpolish color on the person taking the picture.  If we cross reference it with all the samples we have in the A.N.I.S. Database (*snickers* she said…oh never mind) aka “Automated Nailpolish Identification System” we should get a hit.”

Catherine interjects with “Wait!!  Isn’t that O.P.I’s ‘I’d Like to Thank’”? 

Startled looks from the rest of the team.  “What?!?  I love O.P.I.” (and they always just have that sort of random information at hand cause they are smart like that and that’s why that show is frickin’ awesome)

Not to mention what they could have done with the crumbs that I apparently forgot to wipe up before taking the picture (shaking head in disgust!)  

Anyhoo, I also read blogs intermittantly, possibly had a shower somewhere in there, went through 3 new cook books and made a list of healthy choice recipes (which will be another post) and all the pantry items that I need to buy to make them, and cooked a very nice dinner both days (my family thanks me because I think spring rolls and tacquitos are not really considered “dinner”…what!?  Don’t be hatin’ on me, at least I remembered to feed them…most days).

I think that about sums it up.  And if for some reason anyone thinks I’m bragging about my Martha Stewart like awesomeness in the housecleaning/crafting/organizational arena, can that thought.  By the time I do any of that again, y’all will probably have cleaned your houses like half a dozen times.  I mean, if I have to blog about it…really.  Why do you think we move every 6 months to a year?  Just kidding.  Kind of.

Now I’m tired, but happier.  My house feels liveable again.  My conscience is clear.  I think I pretty much cleared up the rest of August to waste my time doing whatever the heck I want.  Now I think a glass of wine, a bubble bath and “Eclipse” are singing their siren song.

Sigh.

Two hours is just NOT long enough with someone as wonderful as Kimberly.  She’s eloquent, beautiful, gracious, sweet, fun…everything I knew she would be!  When she walked in the door of the restaurant, I jumped up to throw my arms around her (natural reaction to greet someone you’ve never met, isn’t it?) and knew that I was greeting a lifelong friend who has already come to mean the world to me.  She was with her husband, Neil who was a real sport to sit there while we talked and talked and talked.  Trying to fill all 120 minutes with as much as we could.

I’m still a little overwhelmed so I’m not sure what else to say.  It’s such a crazy experience meeting someone for the first time even though you feel like you know them so well already.  I hope she can echo my thoughts in saying that it was perfect and the only thing that could have made it better was to not have had to say goodbye so soon.

The first shot of us was quite funny.  Neil started laughing and said we should take another one.  Deer in headlight eyes and fake smile.

I think the second one turned out nice, although my smile still fell a little while waiting for the camera to flash.

_{And isn’t her hair just lovely?  She just cut it and I think it’s so sweet on her.  Just thought I’d say.}

By the third one I was laughing, and I have to say Kim kept her composure beautifully!

Another lovely memory was created and I had to blink back tears as I walked back to my car.

So why is it not fun?  I haven’t been doing a lot of blogging lately because I’ve been a little emotionally and physically stressed.  I’m in a bit of a fog.  It just doesn’t make for very upbeat blogging!

The stress has been causing some pretty wicked tension in my neck and causing a doozer of a headache which in turn makes me feel more stressed.  It’s affecting my eyes, which causes more tension headaches from the strain.  It makes me restless when I lie down to sleep, so I don’t sleep too much, which causes more headaches from tiredness.  Then on top of all of that I got a nasty case of something akin to vertigo from being on the dock for too long at the lake and it has yet to recede.  I feel like I’m constantly on the dock, swaying and a little dizzy.  It’s causing a pretty unbalanced feeling and making my stomach feel queasy from the combined swaying feeling and headache.  The vertigo happened to me last year for the first time and it took many weeks for it to go away.  Yuck!  I’m not one to complain too much about my physical state because I’ve been much worse off, but enough is enough.

I went to see my naturopath today (who I’ve been seeing since I was diagnosed with Crohn’s 15 years ago and has helped my overcome many physical hurdles in my life) and she had a suggestion for me.  She recommended I go for CranioSacral Massage.  Sounds kind of spooky, doesn’t it?  I’m up for pretty much anything at this point because I’m living in zombie land.  I can hardly drag myself out of bed and that’s just no fun.  I’ve been for deep tissue and therapeutic massage in the last few months and nothing is helping.  So what can it hurt?  And hopefully it will help!  She also gave me some natural pills to help with relaxing (and sleep) and stress relief.  You know, I haven’t had an undisturbed night’s sleep in almost 6 years.  Can you imagine the havoc I could wreak on a good uninterrupted night of sleep?  : )

I’m hoping that this means that things will be looking up for me.  It’s worth a shot.  I feel completely unlike myself and it makes me sad.  So if you have a moment to send up a prayer that things will right themselves soonly, I’d really appreciate it : )

I’m pretty sure that as an aspiring lady of leisure I could get used to large quantities of time at the lake :)  My time was well spent.

Pretty much like this for 7 days…

And that is the one and only picture of me from our holiday : )

YES, that is “Twilight” lying on my lap.  I started and finished that book in one day.  It was quite good.  I’ve never read anything in that sort of genre and I was quite enthralled (I picked up the rest of the books today when I was grocery shopping…YEEEE!!).

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from our week (clicking on them makes them clearer).  I’m really tired since it was a busy day shopping, unpacking, laundry, baking Aidan’s birthday cake (her birthday is tomorrow) and getting suckered into watching a movie at 10:30 p.m.

The sunset is almost always brilliant (if it’s a clear evening).  In the 25 years we’ve been going to this place I think we’ve taken the same shot every year.  And every year it takes my breath away.  I was laughing as I took the picture because it’s like deja vu.

One evening at sunset the girls were playing on the rocks and “swimming” (although they never got in past their knees).

My little Aidan just loves her Papa (my dad) and she convinces him to take her on little adventures all the time.  This particular adventure took place in a little inflatable raft.  I know you can’t see their faces, but I loved the way the water sparkled and caught the sunset.

That’s all for today.  I’m going to bed.  Big day tomorrow with 2 birthday parties…one to host and one to attend.  That will create lots more photo ops, so it may be a while before I’m caught up with them.  Thanks for all the lovely comments while I was away.  It’s always nice to come home to an inbox full of love!