Yummy Mommy

Sweet summertime...

Excuse me while I dust the cobwebs off of poor old Yummy Mommy here! I've just been so busy and...yeah, excuses excuses. I think that, rather than feeling guilty about neglecting my blog, I am going to take an official hiatus, probably until September. I may post occasionally if I get really inspired, but mostly we will be so busy that it probably won't happen. In September I will do a "What I Did This Summer" style post like they make you do at the beginning of the school year. Here is a list of things I will be reporting on:

• Next weekend, the 20th and 21st, we are headed to Cortes Island for the annual arts festival. Hubby is playing in a couple of bands and we have a babysitter lined up for Saturday night- yeehaw!
• Then the weekend after I head to Calgary ALONE (meaning, without kids) as a friend who lives there is about to have her first baby- exciting! Hopefully I will get to Banff too to see some friends from when I used to live there, back in the pre-kid days. *sigh*
• August 11, hubby and I are headed back to Cortes Island ALONE for our anniversary, which is actually on the 12th. My wonderful mother has agreed to take the kids for an overnight as a friend of hubby's is having a party over there!
• August 18 and 19 I hope to attend this music festival in beautiful Cumberland, BC.
• August 20th and 21st Brodie and I, along with my brother, his girlfriend and some friends, are headed to Tofino, honestly one of the most beautiful places on earth, for our first surfing lessons.
• August 27th, 28th and 29th- heading to Nuchatlitz Island for some West Coast fun!
• Hopefully in amongst all this I will be able to keep attending most of my pilates classes (which I LOVE) on Monday and Wednesday evenings.
• Soccer practice starts up again in August, so I am hoping to make it to some of those.
• Don't  really have plans  for the long weekend, but I'm sure something will come up! 

Hope your summer is as full of fun!

Wordless Wednesday

Part II

Another advantage of early rising- two, count them, two, blog posts in one day. A slight increase from the two a month I was managing previously. The reason for this post is to share some exciting news- no, I'm not PREGNANT ('cause thats what people always think when a woman says she has news!)- I got one of the tasks from my list that I was really dreading done this morning (yet another advantage of getting up with the birds). And, as usual, it wasn't nearly as bad, nor did it take nearly as long, as I thought. Here are before and after  photos to prove it!

Agh, thats embarrassing! And I had actually already put a few things away before I thought to take a "before" photo.

But now...

We'll see how long this lasts!

Yep- second official day of my summer vacation.....

...and it's 6:20 am and I have already visited facebook, had a bath in which I even shaved my legs, had my pot of tea and started cleaning up my computer desk. This is partly husband's fault, because it was his snoring that woke me up at 5am. *sigh*

It is a glorious morning out there, though, and I guess I should be grateful I got to make it a part of my day. When I witness a beautiful moment like this, I always think of this quote by Brandon Lee- Bruce Lee's son, from his last interview before he died:

Because we do not know when we are going to die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well and yet everything   happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many times will you remember a certain   afternoon of your childhood? An afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you cannot conceive of your life without it? Perhaps 4 .... 5 times more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise ...... Perhaps twenty and yet it all seems limitless. 

That goes for glorious mornings too! So thank you, honey, for waking me up so I could be a part of this lovely dawn!

I took these pictures 5 minutes ago so you can see what I mean about "glorious"!

Hallelujah!

I feel like singing the hallelujah chorus right now. Except with my voice, I'm sure I would scare the heck out of my daughter and possibly cause my 9 year old, spayed, indoor cat to have kittens, and my husband hates cats and only puts up with the one we have because she was here before he moved in and I told him he had to, so I will restrain myself. I am glad the school-year is over, though. I do love my job, but working full time with 2 kids was a bit much. Back in the spring, to get myself through to the end I wrote this post that included a list of all the marvelous things I was going to do with my time once I was on summer vacation. It was things like "drink martinis on the deck" and "go for long hikes with my friends in the woods", and "finish my wedding scrapbook"  and such. I still plan on doing these things, IF the weather ever decides to cooperate- saucytart was mentioning in a post that she's glad that they are getting some rain to water her garden, and I was thinking to myself- "You can have some of ours, sweetheart." But I digress. The point of this post is that, now that I have been off for a few days  the reality of how much our house has deteriorated in the last few months while we have all been run ragged is sinking in. So I realize I am going to have to add some less fun things to the agenda that will nonetheless make me feel so much more together and make the house so much more functional in the long run. Plus they will keep me from being as embarrassed as all get-out when people come over to visit! Here goes:

1) Tackle the storage area- we have a small crawlspace under the eave of one side of our house- that is crammed to OVERFLOWING with who knows what. Which brings me to item 2:
2) Get rid of junk we don't need, plus stop buying more junk we don't need, as the Flip-Flop Mama suggests in this post.
3) Deal with my poor garden and plants on my deck, which have been SADLY neglected.
4) Start a compost.
5) Clean out the desk that was built by my grandfather which sits by our front door and has become a repository for the hugest collection of random junk you have ever seen!
6) Return the giant collection of both refundable and non-refundable recycling that has accumulated downstairs.
7) Stay on top of bringing in said recycling in so it doesn't become a giant collection!
8) Clean up my desk area.

Well, I guess that's enough for now, so I don't get depressed.

So, what's on Miss Chloe's agenda for the summer?

I'm not sure, but apparently it involves covering herself in smiley-face stickers!