I do not like roaches. I have a very irrational fear of them. I think it stems from when I was a little girl and one of my older brothers would chase me around the house with them and threaten to throw them in my hair. So, I really don't like roaches.

Josh is out of town for the next week or so. I have to wake up pretty early in order to get everything ready so I can take Ella to school and get to work on time. So I'm walking down the stairs and I round the corner to go to the kitchen. It's 5:30AM, so my eyes are still blurry and I'm a little out of it and I see a dark shadow on the floor a couple of steps in front of me. I think to myself that I didn't leave anything out on the floor, so I bend down to take a closer look and it's the biggest, fattest roach I've ever seen. I immediately run away and hide in the living room. So I peek around the corner to see if I scared it away, but he's still just sitting there being fat and ugly. I turn on the TV and some lights to see if any activity will scare him back into the walls, but he doesn't move. After about half an hour of waiting for him to move, Sadie wakes up. At this point, I'm running out of options because I can't let her down to walk around or she'll eat it and that is a situation that I never want to find myself in again (yes, again but with the other sister). So I hurl my flip flop in the general direction of the roach and run up the stairs to get Sadie. I wake up Ella and get her dressed and ready for school. We come back downstairs and he's only moved about a foot closer to the wall. So I let Ella walk by him (she doesn't even notice him) to see if she scares him away but he doesn't even budge. Ella comes back and she asks me to make her some peanut butter toast with banana slices for breakfast and I told her I couldn't make her breakfast and that she'd have to eat at school this morning. She got so upset and I finally admitted why I couldn't go into the kitchen. There was a man-eating roach in the way. So she walks over and takes a closer look and here is the next few minutes of dialogue between us:

Ella: Mommy, you don't have to be scared. He's not crawling, see? It's just a bug, so don't be scared. It's ok.
Me: But Ella, I'm really scared of roaches. They're really gross.
Ella: It's okay Mommy. You can just kill it.
Me: But I don't know how.
Ella: Just take your shoe over there and SMACK IT
Me: I can't do that, Ella. I'm really scared of it. Maybe I could get some bug spray.......
Ella: Yeah, get the bug spray! It's in the garage. Come on, I'll show you. You can put Sadie in the high chair while you spray it.
Me: Ugh, okay...


So we walk out to the garage, find the bug spray and then go back into the dining room. At this point, Ella is now hiding behind the curtains peeking out. But she's not hiding from the roach, she's hiding because she doesn't want me to spray her in the eyes with the bug spray. So I stand there for a few minutes trying to build up the nerve to spray the roach and I look over at Ella and tell her how I need her help, her love and support because I can't kill this roach. She nods at me, very knowingly, and holds my hand as I spray the roach. That nasty thing was too fat to even run away. So, I killed it. I have not yet picked it up. I blocked off the area so Sadie couldn't get to it and was able to make Ella some breakfast. I came to work and asked my mom if she'd come over to my house and throw it away for me, but she told me she wouldn't do it and that it's tough love and it's good for me to have to throw it away. I'm already having a little bit of a panic attack thinking about having to go home to the man-eating roach. Luckily the brother from which my fear of roaches stems from lives a few minutes from me. Maybe he'll come get it for me...........


A little dramatic? Maybe so. I never said my fear was rational. Lucky for me, I have a brave little daughter who helped me through it this morning. I love her like crazy.

I wish time would just stand still.

I cannot believe that Sadie will be one on Friday. This year has flown by so fast and it seems like every year they get faster and faster. I ask Ella all the time if she would please stop growing up and now Sadie keeps doing it too! This time last year I was a nervous wreck and I was terrified of ruining Ella's life by having another baby and her not being the center of my attention. Boy was I wrong. These two girls love each other so much. Sadie sometimes gets tired of how much attention Ella shows her, but then when Ella's doing something Sadie will go over and yank the hair out of her head and then smile. So I think they are pretty even at this point. Sadie is still blissfully unaware of how to share and the concept of being nice versus being an onry little thing. So she gets a lot more breaks than Ella does, but when Sadie does get a teeny, tiny little pop on her hand, Ella looooves it. :) But Ella and Sadie are so great to each other and love to play together, share sippy cups, food, toys. Anything and everything is for both of them. I'm truly blessed. This has been a fantastic year for our family. This two girls are the bread to my butter, the icing on the cake, the apple of my eye...they all work.

AND I'm excited about attempting to bake (and decorate) my very first cake this year. Well, I guess I technically made Ella's first birthday cake (it was a duck) and it had a lot of, um, character. This time, I'm using fondant...So I've got some Betty Crocker cake mix for backup. The sad part is that I don't even own a mixer; I have to borrow my mom's. Maybe I'll find out that I like baking and can justify spending the money on one after this attempt.

Some updates on the fam:
Sadie is WALKING! She started taking steps at the end of April, but about a week or so ago she got to where she walked more than crawled and now she doesn't crawl much at all. Only when she falls and then she'll crawl over to something so that she can stand up and walk again. I love this stage.

Ella can (mostly) write her name. I love it. Sometimes the letters are on completely different places on the page, but she can write the E, L, L, and A. You might have to squint to see it, but she's making some serious improvements.

We spend LOTS of time on the karaoke machine. I've got some music loving kids.

Ella doesn't really care for Yo Gabba Gabba anymore :( Sadie loves it.

Our house is still on the market. 15 and a half months now. But we just purchased a new fridge, stove, and dishwasher and this week we're going to tackle new countertops. Hopefully this will drum up some interest and we can get into something with a little more space. There is no way I'm having kid number three in this house!

Oh, and we've got another Mud Run coming up and this time we convinced some other crazies to do it with us. :)

Josh is awesome, as usual. The best I could ask for. *love*

That's what happens.

She's so much like her dad

Does it get any better than this?

I am Mommy to the most amazing little girls who steal my heart a million times a day. I love being Mommy to my two precious little ones. Watching Sadie learn and grow and absolutely adore her big sister gives me so much joy. Watching Ella figure out just who, exactly, she is and wants to be is such a privilege. She told me today that when she grows up, she wants to be a Mommy to a little baby girl and a baby boy and she wants to stay home with them while I go to work. And if you know me, then you know that's not something she heard me say. I love working part time and I love being a part-time stay at home mom. But my favorite part about her future is that she thinks we'll still be living together when she has two kids. :) She's so innocent, beautiful, perfect, and she amazes me every day. And when I get to rock Sadie to sleep every so often, when she falls asleep in my arms it's the perfect end to my day. She is so innocent, beautiful, perfect, and amazing. I love watching her peacefully drift to sleep. Her face is so angelic and soft and completly contented. She makes me feel special. So, I'll ask again...does it get any better than this?

Daycation

Josh has been working out of town a lot lately. He got home at about 3AM on Saturday morning and was supposed to be leaving again on Wednesday. So he took Tuesday off and we had a daycation. I was thinking back and we have never done that. We've never taken vacation days to just go and do something fun with the kids. We've gone out of town, but we've never just decided "hey, let's go to the ___ tomorrow". So we went to Kemah and had a great time with the girls. We ate lunch at the Aquarium and then Ella and Josh rode the carousel and we finished it off with a ride on the train. She and Sadie had a great time. After Kemah, we went down to Galveston beach and that was quite a trip. The last (and only time) she went to the beach was July 4th, 2009. Living so close to the beach, you'd think we would go more often. Nope. I've never really been a beach person. I don't mind going to the beach, but it's all of the clean up when you get back that I hate. There's sand everywhere. But we ended up going today and had a really good time. Sadie pretty much ate her weight in sand. It was pretty disgusting. And it took Ella a while to warm up to the sand and the water. She wasn't a fan of all of the jellyfish that washed up on the beach, either. (I should mention that we live on some pretty less-than-favorable beaches, by the way. Could be the reason that I've never loved the beach.)But after about half an hour, she loved it. She loved digging through the sand looking for shells. She gathered up a pretty good collection and then buried it for someone else to find next time.

Here are some pictures from the day. And since i absolutely hate the way blogger uploads pictures, they are in very random order....

Grandparents are wonderful :)

I love watching Ella and Sadie with their grandparents. Every Sunday after church, we go over to my parents' house for lunch and we usually end up staying until dark. Since we live in a townhouse, we don't have a yard for the girls to play in so they get in a full week's worth of outside play on Sundays. We had such a wonderful time yesterday. And the weather has been perfect! Tomorrow, we are headed to Kemah for a fun day with the girls. I am so excited. Pictures to come later!

Here are a couple of pictures of the girls with Mimi and Grandad. Ella did not want her picture taken, but by the time they made it back from riding around the block, she was pretty darn excited about Grandad's motorcycle.