Watching him soar

    Last week I attended yet another meeting about my up and coming freshman. I really believe they hold quite a few of these meetings so that the women who are in denial (like me) can slowly come to terms with the fact that their babies are indeed starting high school (anyone have a paper bag? Deep breaths). On my best day, I'm a semi half intelligent woman, so you would think that mistakenly giving my 14 year old his father's boxers and socks on a regular basis would have been the real turning point for me. But no, not me, I just think to myself, the boy has really big feet for his age. He just takes after me and is going to be tall! That's it, that's the reason why he wears men sizes and has a squeak in his voice every now and again. It has nothing to do with the fact that he is growing up, nope not one single piece.

    And then I go to this meeting, and it's all about Alex's honors classes and what each college is looking for. And how the next four years will fly by. And how making them understand how important each and every day is towards their college careers. And once again, it's going to fly by. In between each piece of important information I received that night, I kept thinking about his very first day of school. The first day I dropped him off and how much of an emotional wreck I was on the inside and how good he was that day. He started Pre- K 4 just as he has every other grade since that first day, a very confident little boy. I was so excited for him when he went to school, yet so filled with the need to be with him. We had never spent 7 hours in a day apart. That was the hardest part for me. Not ALWAYS being there.

    So as I look forward on the next four years, I know that my chipmunk cheeked little boy, will look and sound more and more like a man. But in my heart he will always be that little boy that let go of my hand on that hot and humid August morning turned to me with his crooked smile and apple name tag attached proudly to his uniform shirt and said, bye mom see you in a bit." He turned into his class room and I picked up the pieces of my broken heart, my box of kleenex and my 1 year old and walked back to my car.

    I don't look at time as flying by anymore, more like soaring through future memories

I'm SO going into the white light!

don't be fooled, they are really vicious beasts and are just napping in between missions

bye bye carpet

hello hardwoods

Brian has worked on the spindles for the past two Sundays and they are turning out beautifully. Hopefully he will be done this weekend, so he can give his back a break!

new carpet in the bedrooms

we still have some minor details to work on, you know like door knobs :)

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it is a beautiful shade of DONE. My husband, my father in law and I worked on our very first house together back in Louisiana. We got that house just perfect and then within a year sold it. This time, it's all for us. We are going to enjoy every inch of this house for as long as God keeps us in it. Which we're hoping is until retirement :)

she's a sneaky little witch

Welcome to Pandora's Box or what use to be called the Johnson home.

We started off planning on just painting some rooms in the house and having the outside painted. We threw in some new fixtures to be hung and that was supoose to be the extint of the remodel for now. During the second day of painting my neighbor informs us that he found a hard wood guy who was willing to give both of us a deal on the labor if he did the houses in the next two weeks. So our painting project turned into refinishing our exctisting hardwoods and adding it to our two front formal rooms, up our stairs, into the landing and hall. Okay great, it will be beautiful! Then my husband decides while that's going on, he should change out our spindels from wood to wrought iron.

Sounds good honey. Then of course after the hardwoods were done up stairs (the spindels are a work in progress) we realized how badly the carpet was in the bedrooms. So your never gonna guess what we did next???
Yep you guessed it, recarpeted the bedrooms. We have the painters coming back one more time to paint the bottoms of the steps and the baseboards. After that Pandora's Box is being shut and duck tapped close. At least until after Christmas, that's when the kitchen remodel will begin!
ARE WE HAVING FUN YET OR WHAT!!!

Nice and Easy

My boys really are very predictable. I guess that's good because their momma doesn't do well with surprises. I like repetition, I like knowing what's next. On most days I know how the afternoon is going to play out just by the way they sit on the sofa. Some days you can see the ominous clouds looming before the bus driver even pulls away from our street. The last couple of days this is the way I have found them

side by side on the sofa flipping the channels between Sports Center and The Weather Channel. They have been banned from video games during the week and I have to say that that was one of the best parenting moves I've made in a long time. Between 3 days of track practice, band practice, art lessons and anything else we can squeeze in, video games had to go bye bye Monday- Friday.


For a few weeks I was thinking that these two little penis toting creatures weren't going to make it to their next birthdays. Their arguing, fighting and just plain rudeness to each other had me seeing stars. In the past week or so I've seen a calmness come over them. Maybe it's because we've opened Pandora's Box in our house and little missy wasn't ready to close anytime soon. One project has turned into....well a whole bunch. And we have all been ready to get back to our regularly scheduled lives. Maybe they realized (after being told over and over again) that I really meant it when I said their allowances were now going to buy my hair color, because lord knows when momma stresses the grays start to popping! Or maybe, just maybe they got sick and tired of hearing their own selves complaining. What ever it was that flipped their switches, I don't really know (or care). All I know is my tired gray hairs thank you!