I know I am supposed to correct them, but it is just so cute

Like all children, my kids have some things that they say that are just too cute - even if they aren't technically the correct way of saying the word or phrase. I realize the good mom thing to do is repeat what they said in the correct manner so that they will learn - but is it bad that I just want to hold on to a few of their adorable phrases? I will probably find out that answer when they head to college still talking like toddlers. But for now I am going to enjoy them. A few of my favorites:

"Goose forward please" - this is Z's way to ask someone to scoot forward

"Glittering is bad" - this is E's way of talking about litter. As I have said many times, our world would be much prettier if people were glittering instead of littering.

"All the singalallies" - E's version of singing Beyonce's song All the Single Ladies. I prefer E's version

"Sank you" - E's way of saying thank you. I know this is one I should really correct considering she is 5 1/2 but it is really sweet.

"No kank you, no kank you, no kank you" - Z is the politest mad kid in the world. When you do something he does not like such as put him down for a nap, insist he takes a bath, or suggest he stop hitting his sister he uses this phrase. We get comments from people all the time about what a polite angry child we have.

"I'm going to hit you now mommy!" Z has the grammatical portion of this phrase down pat but I just love how he gives us warning each time he is going to hit. It is a good thing because he is a pretty strong kid and usually has some sort of object in his hand that will maim you if you don't move out of the way.

"I wub you mommy" - Both kids have used this same one and I say it back to them - how can I not? Clearly this is my favorite.

100th Post

So this is my 100th post. I've been sitting on that thought for two weeks now thinking I had to share some major truth or amazing insight to my readers for this momentus post - and nothing has come. But today I realized maybe that is the point. Blogging for me is just that - for me.

There are some amazing people out there who blog. They have made it into a business, have huge followings and it is their livelihood. That is awesome for them and to be honest, early on I had aspirations to be those people but alas, life got in the way. I'm okay with that.

In the 11 months that I have been writing this blog, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my what I am going to write and how I am going to make it funny. Doing that puts a lot of pressure on my brain and with a full time job, 2 young kids, a workaholic husband and 2 crazy dogs, I don't have time to for unneeded pressure (of course who does?). Now I do love to write funny - it is in my genes - and my kids and husband are extremely entertaining. If I wrote every funny thing they did, I'd have blisters on my fingers from all the typing.

With this 100th post I am going to now relieve myself of the pressure. SWOOSH - gone.

Blogging to success (if you consider followers a success) takes a lot of work. Not only do you have to keep your blog up but you have to continually read/comment on other people's blogs. There are many blogs that I enjoy and like to comment on but I am no longer going to troll the Internet for people I can read and comment on only to hope they will return the favor.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly hope people enjoy what I write and I would love to have many many followers. I know there are numerous people who read my blog but do not comment per se (meaning they don't comment online, they often do let me know that they read the latest entry), and that is fine because just like I don't want to pressure myself I certainly don't want anyone who reads my stories to feel pressure either.

So what I am rambling on about here? Who knows. But for now on, pressure is off. If I feel like writing, I will write and if nothing comes to my head I won't - or maybe I still will and it won't make sense but I will not stress about it. The other goal I had for this blog from the very beginning was to have a collection of snapshots from our life that my children can enjoy for years to come. Mission completed there.

Thanks for reading.

I have nothing to say

The weather has been beautiful and the kids and I are enjoying it immensely! We have been outside as much as possible. Several trips to the park, rides in the wagon, picnic on our front porch and much more.

I haven't had time to blog because I am having to much fun enjoying this weather with my kiddos. The novelty will wear off soon I'm sure and I will have time to organize my thoughts into some writing of some sort.

Hope you are enjoying lovely weather too!

Poor No-man

This past weekend it snowed 7 inches in one day. Love that unpredictable Kansas March weather! My poor little guy was sick and couldn't go outside to play but our sweet daughter decided he would feel better if she built a snowman by the door for him. She went to work with her 5 year old hands and built, what in my opinion, is the most glorious snowman ever.

Z loved looking at it out the window and kept saying "beautiful no-man!" - he leaves the "s" off of snowman which makes it all that much more cute.






Like Kansas does, it was 65 degrees the next day and our snowman didn't take too kindly to that. It looked very much like a snowman crime scene when you looked out our front door. When Z saw the melting mass of snow, he began to yell "poor no-man! poor no-man!"

Once he recovered from that, it actually proved to be entertaining to see how much our no-man melted each day and I had high aspirations of taking a picture yesterday of only the scarf, hat and gloves laying on our lawn.

However, when we got home from running errands someone had set them on our porch. Apparently the neighbors don't take too kindly to us leaving our outerwear all over the front lawn.

Victory is mine!

Although it is March Madness, I am not speaking of a basketball victory (although I'll throw out a Rock Chalk Jayhawk!). I am talking about a much more important victory, one that truly matters - I won the argument of the race car bed!

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

If you don't know what I am speaking of, click here and it will bring you up to speed on the major battle that was brewing in our household. It's all kind of a blur now and to be honest I'm not sure how I did it. I wish I could remember what exactly was said by me that put the ball 100% in my court and led me to win, but I don't - which really stinks because I'd like to use those argument skills again in the future. Oh well, I'm just glad it happened.

Here is where we netted out with Z's big boy room. The only thing it is missing is new window coverings but I gotta say I think it is adorable. I was taking the pics in a hurry for something else so when I have a minute I'll tidy his room a bit and take some better photos and post them. Wait, who am I kidding? No I won't.

Oh and I have to say that although I had purchased bedding for my son's big boy bed about 5 minutes after he was delivered, when I got to the actual designing of his room 2.5 years later, I bought all new bedding. My husband really loves it when I do things like that! It definitely isn't the first time and I can't imagine it will be the last. Oh well, that is what Craigslist is for. Anyone in the market for some cute boy bedding?

KC Parent magazine

As some of you may know, I write articles for a local parenting magazine called KC Parent. I just started doing this last year and I really love it! I have done research on things I would never have thought about before and I have been able to share some of my best parenting tips to people around the city.

The magazine belongs to the Parenting Publications of America and this past week they had their big award ceremony. More than 110 magazines and websites were competing for these top honors.

KC Parent received 9 awards including Most Improved, Website General Excellence, Investigative Reporting, several Front Cover awards and much more.

A direct quote from our editor "this was our first year to ever win an editorial award for the magazine in the 6 years we’ve been competing as we won in the Personal Essay category as well as the Investigative Reporting category."

And this was the first year I was writing for them - coincidence? I think not!

Okay, none of my hard hitting stories on things like "Transitioning Your Child to their Big Kid Room" and "10 Steps to an Organized Refrigerator" won any of the awards - but still I am very excited to be a part of such a great magazine.

I am one of "those" moms

What is that you ask? You would be right to assume my carpet needs a serious vacuuming - living in a house with two furry dogs and two furry (okay not furry but messy) kids - it normally does. However the carpet had actually been vacuumed just a couple of hours before this picture was taken.

This is my apology to all the mothers out there that I have judged when their children cut their own hair. I always had the same response when I heard a child had done that: "What kind of mother leaves a child alone with a pair of scissors long enough for that to happen? That is just bad parenting."

Well now we know, apparently I'm that kind of mother - hence the gobs of hair on the floor. Thankfully my daughter has a pretty thick mane and you cannot tell she went all Edward Scissorhands on her head - but I was not pleased when I found out that she had done this.

This is something I would expect from our crazy 2.5 year old and so he is never allowed to be alone with anything sharper than a tennis ball, but my smart, rule following, timid daughter? Never in a million years would I have thought she would have been that kid - or more importantly I would be that mom. I'm guessing this is a first in a very long line of days that I am going to have to eat my words.

My Mother the Artist

I have written about some of the amazing people in my family - my dad and his new career as an actor, and my grandmother who is 96 years old and just published her 8th book - but I realized today that I have not written about my mom. She is pretty amazing herself. Clearly I'm the black sheep of this crew.

About 8 years ago my husband and I bought our first house in Denver, CO. It was a super cute house that was more than 100 years old. After buying the house and doing a few improvements we were out of money. I called my mother and asked her to paint us a picture for an empty wall because we couldn't afford art. My mother at that point had never painted anything and said she would give it a try. I didn't just pull this out of the blue, she is an incredibly creative woman and has always been able to draw so I figured she could paint as well.

So here we are, 8 years or so later and she makes a real living as an artist (www.joyrichardsonart.com)! She is often invited to hang her paintings in different galleries and restaurants and had an extremely successful showing in the Oklahoma Art Festival last year - and will be there again this year. She has people calling her often for commission works and she has made a name for herself as an artist. It is all really awe inspiring from a person who had never painted anything until they were about 60 years old.

You should see my house. It is like a Joy Richardson museum. I still have that first painting she did for us. It is hanging in our bedroom. I keep searching my mail box for my 10% commission check - afterall I am the one who got her started - but it just hasn't shown up yet. Hmmm...

I'm Stealing it #10

I have never been much of a coupon person. When I remembered, I would use those Bed Bath and Beyond coupons that I get about 3 times per week, but other than that, couponing wasn't something I understood or took the time to organize. And to be honest I still do not understand about 90% of it. Couponing is a very detailed process that takes a lot of work.

Even though I am about as far as you can be from being serious about it, lately I have sort of gotten into this whole deal. I will never be like those ladies on tv that get their $200 grocery bill down to $11. But I have picked up a few tips and have been saving a lot of money actually.

Before now, the thing I never understood was how people saved money. To me it seemed when I would take a coupon to a store, the store brand of that item would be less expensive than the brand name minus the coupon. I have been in marketing and advertising for like 15 years so I fully understand that in the majority of cases the store brand is just as good as the brand name item and often they are made by the same company but just have different packaging. So I would end up buying that store brand item and leaving with an unused coupon in my hand. Don't get me wrong there are certainly some exceptions to this - i.e. have you ever tried non name brand Saran Wrap? Does not work.

So anyway, I have figured out that the trick to coupons is pairing them with a store sale on that particular item. Like I said, I am not huge into this and I do not sit down with the circulars from my grocery store to see what is on sale each week and build my family menu around that. If I did I would save a boatload on my grocery bill but I am just not that organized - yet - stay tuned maybe one day I will be! But I do cut coupons (well not cut, print them off on my computer) and if there is an item I need or foresee needing and if that item is on sale, I buy it using my coupon. Cha-ching - saving money!

I was at target the other day and my bill was around $90 but with my coupons I got it down to about $70. That is real money I saved! It was kind of exciting.

This post is definitely not a coupon tutorial, I really just wanted to share a few websites that I use because I have gotten some amazing deals. I have REALLY enjoyed using online coupon codes - much more than using in-store ones. By now you probably know to never buy anything online until you have typed that store's name into google with the word "coupon" - the majority of the time you can get at least free shipping.

The coupon code deal that I am most proud of was on a pair of Crocs boots for my daughter. Who even knew Crocs made kids boots? Well they do and they are cute and perfect snow boots. Anyway, the deal was that you could buy one get one free and get free shipping for $13.99 by entering a certain coupon code. The boots are normally around $40 or so. So I bought two pairs for my daughter - in sizes bigger than she wears now. I bought a yellow pair for $13.99 and was getting a pink pair for free. I got an email the next day letting me know that the yellow ones had run out but they were still sending me the pink ones - for free!

Here are my favorite sites to visit:
Wicked Cool Deals

Brads Deals

KC Penny Pinchin Mama

Some of these websites have tutorials on couponing that I have not taken the time to read but I assume they are probably very helpful and will teach you a lot. I know that CVS has some amazing deals with their Extra Care Bucks program. I have not figured it out yet but I need to sometime as it seems people are actually making quite a bit of money off their purchases. Not sure how that works.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. I am totally stealing these great deals from these other people's hard work - but that is what they have developed their websites for. So far it has been sort of fun and I'm proud of some of my purchases. Some of the deals I have gotten were just amazing!

Happy Shopping!

Goal!

He watched an entire episode of Max and Ruby inside this basketball hoop and when it was over he screamed bloody murder that he was stuck and needed out. Weird kid.