This Minivan Life

We just spent a few days in Dallas, while there I couldn't help but make a few comparisons to the two places. When we first pulled into Dallas I felt so homesick (I know homesick for Dallas!). it was so good to see places I knew, understand the freeway systems, and be able to get to where I needed to go without so much help from the GPS (still some help cause I'm not great at directions). But after a day... no a drive in afternoon traffic, I could see some of the perks of living in Austin. When we lived in Dallas we had friends. We had a support system, people that we could ask for help when we needed. People were friendly, they expected us to show up, and seemed to be (sometimes) disappointed when we didn't. This was comforting. We didn't have much family in Dallas so building this support network was important and such a blessing. In Austin, well we don't have this. We actually don't have this at all, but to be honest we didn't when we moved to Dallas, s

Mr. Zach is 5 months old. I am always behind writing these… boys reading books. So Mr. Zach is 5 months old. When I see babies this age I tend to think “wow that is just a cute baby blob, not much personality yet” and then I look at my own kids and I think “how does one little person have so many preferences, expressions, and so much personality!” Zachary has quite a bit of personality already. He is getting big(ger). He is a giant, he is in 9 month clothes now… yes that’s right. His feet are still tiny, which is a bit funny. Boys chatting before story time -Zach loves his brother and his dad. When we call Brian or he comes home from work Zach’s head whips around to see him and he doe all his best tricks to get his dad to pay attention. So funny how both boys are enamored by their dad. And Michael… he adores Michael.  He doesn’t mind Michael constantly smashing him, hugging him so tight only his little eyes are visible, or that Michael does not like to

I downloaded all the photos from my phone and i came across a few random gems.  Brian had to work late one night and my little friends would not go to bed, I put them in my bed and they were out so fast. We moved them when Brian got home, but I had to laugh, there was no room for us even if we had wanted to sleep in our bed!  I'm mean and I took a picture before comforting zach. he has such a cute mad face, and yes those are real tears.  Mikey really loves zach and constantly puts his face up against his brother's face. you generally see him give a tight hug and zachary's little face poking out.  Michael has a LOT of ducks. One night in the bath he told us about the duck family, the lense wasn't wide enough and the uncle muggle duck was cut out of the picture (for future reference the "football" duck is the uncle muggle duck). So from left to right: uncle muggle (for in the picture, well the corner kinda is), the colin duck, the emmy duck, the za

A couple of weeks ago i finished a project I had been dying to do for ages- refinish our kitchen table. Ok I probably need another coat of wax now that I scrub it so often, and yes it was a first attempt, and no i haven't done the chairs, but it's a start! We bought this table about 4 years ago off craigslist. The previous owners used it to store the mail, and it was $200 for the table and 6 chairs. We thought it was a pretty good deal. It was just a generic table, but it was solid and served us well. After a few years of dinners, paint projects, markers/pens, and play dough it had seen better days. Plus the table top was always slightly sticky, maybe due to the finish coming off (which i think was happening but it didn't look like it was), maybe due to my constant scrubbing, whatever it was these stickiness was annoying. SO I decided to paint  it- plus i thought painting it would make it less boring. So i made my own chalk paint and did it. and so far we love it. it isn