50 States or Bust

Let me disclose that I cannot take full credit for this brilliant idea. I read an article in one of my parenting/soccer mom magazines someone purchased a subscription for me as a gift. In an issue they shared a story that inspired me to set a goal for our family.

Goal: We want to take Adeline to all 50 states by the time she graduates from high school. That is about 3ish states per year.
Lofty? Probably.
Crazy? Possibly.
Impossible? Nah.

For weeks I jokingly mentioned the 50 states or bust goal to Brett, and then to the rest of the family. In reality I was just verbalizing it enough to make it materialize, because it wasn't a few weeks after that mention that I invited she and I on a road trip my parents had planned almost a year prior. I don't normally invite myself on such adventures, but they agreed to let us stow away. The days following I packed us up for a 9 day/1,500+ mile trek up north. We hit 5 states that trip alone, and Adeline had a freaking blast. 8 months have passed and she still mentions it.

Thanks to my job (and what is evolving into quite the family business) as Junk Drunk Jones we get to travel a bit. We just got back from a trip out west that knocked off another 4 states on her list.

Is this goal gonna work out? I have no idea, but I am going to try like hell to make it happen. What is your favorite state? When we make it there, what should we be sure to see?

Thai Food

Recently my niece Chelsia started working with my family at our flooring company, and we share an office. I am pretty sure she has been bored to tears (physically) at least once. At least she gets to look forward to being around dad and I every day.

Dad: Hey kid, what the hell are you eating?
Chels: Thai food.
Dad: What? Cat food?
Chels: No! Thai food.
Dad: *blinks*
Chels: THAI FOOD. 
Dad: Huh? Stef, what is she trying to say to me?
Me: Thai food, dad. THAI food. You know, Thailand/ T-H-A-I.
Dad: Oh, so, ok.
Guess she could be eating a cat. (ok I may have said that last line... but I know dad was thinking it).

Adeline Decides Recap #FOUR

Business as usual over here. Since Recap #THREE we have been pretty busy doing important stuff. Like building big forts and sleeping in them:

 Family Fort Night was wildly successful according to Adeline. The mister and I have to disagree, we slept terribly. We also had to keep up with her waking every few hours to cry because she forgot she was in a fort, and then had to change positions.

 Bacon found a crack in the fort walls for them to peek out of. 

 Everybody together now! Awwwwwwwwwww.

  Bacon seems to be oblivious to the fact that his partner in crime is total lunatic. Total. 

Adeline took a trip to her first buffet. As we can see in the photo she made this particular selection after eating a plate full of random crap (I want to say majority black olives and ham). Dessert was an interesting assortment of jello, pudding, grapes, and gummi bears. Yummmm  ?

Still can't decide if this is the look of a full belly, or of total regret. 

       Over the weekend I (Junk Drunk Jones) was working an antique show, because that's my gig these days. After visiting with me she decided to take her dad for a little tour around the show. She found an old guy who sells cowboy hats and saddles and decided to take them for a test drive. I am extremely happy to report neither of those actually made it to our home.

But this did:

She took her first trip to Ikea with her dad and after playing Goldilocks and trying out all the beds she snagged the lovely fish pillow for our house. She says it is for our couch. It is THREE AND A HALF FEET LONG. And shiny. Thank baby jesus Ikea doesn't have an entire line of fish decor (yet). 

Here's the Goldilocks shenanigans:

Picking out extremely weird couch cushions can be exhausting. 

       For all of you who are exceedingly jealous of our new couch cushion I am pleased to let you know that you too, can own one. You can find out how to purchase your very own here. I am going to say it is probably for a very limited time only, these bad boys are going to go fast. 

*Correction: Ikea's website says available in store only. I bet that is so they can limit how many you purchase at a time. They have to ration this kind of crap out you know. My kid is a visionary, and is probably just ahead of the fish decor craze before it explodes. Hurry.

Thanks for recapping with us. 

Want to know what we are up to? We are letting our toddler make decisions, for her health and well being (or something like that). You can read all about it here and here. 

Luck of the Irish?

In honor of St. Patrick's Day I would like to provide a little proverb I heard from my father recently.
Let me start this by saying that my parents are a great source for really wacky sayings. Some are true blue southern sayings, and the rest I am fairly certain they just make up as they go. Some of the traditional stuff follows along the lines of: "colder than a well digger's ass" or "madder than an ol' wet hen" occasionally something is "rough as a cob", etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not immune to using the oldies but goodies, and I've been known to come up with a few odd lines myself.

When asking my dad how someone we knew happened to be so lucky all the time he found an interesting adage for me in the recesses of his mind. He could have just said "some people are just born lucky". Instead I got this:
"Some people can take a dump, fall in it, and wind up covered in gold. The rest of us? Well, we just wind up covered in shit".

Happy St. Patrick's Day, may you all wind up covered in GOLD today.

Adeline Decides - Recap #Three

So far so good with our little experiment. We are one month down, five (or more) to go.  I am realizing this recap that I should have taken more pictures. Ah well.

The vegetables I mentioned she selected from our Farm to Fork CSA program were delicious. She did well:

She ate half of that broccoli the first day. Let's just say that the resulting sounds and smells that venture produced she got from her father...

She decided this week it was prime time to start doing her own makeup, she was channeling her inner Frida Kahlo and only used my black eyeshadow to create this look:

She selected her outfit for preschool picture day:

She looks thrilled right? Pffffffftt.

My dad decided to teach her the art of being still and taking a nap:

She decided to call shenanigans and just moments later:

Adeline - 1                My dad - 0

On the topic of naps, we sort of let her decide to no longer take naps. NO MORE NAPS?! I would have laughed straight in my own face if I heard that this would be a consequence of my little experiment less than one month into the project. It was painful for me at first because I am a routine, overly organzied, go by the schedule, complete freakazoid. We transitioned from full on naps to "quiet time" in her room because she was too occupied to fall asleep, to not even trying to go there and fight with her to rest. There have been a few slip ups where she has dozed off against her wishes to stay awake, and a few car naps but that is about it these days.

BUT guess what? Bedtime is an absolute dream now. She falls asleep instantly. No more hopping up, water requests, extra stories, multiple fruitless bathroom trips, lost stuffed animal retrievals, *and enter here any and all other wacky requests we've heard her come up with to prolong bedtime. She also sleeps in later in the mornings, giving me time to get some stuff done around the house.
I would have happily traded nap time in a long time ago if I had known.

I didn't have any life decisions to make this week. She did get to select a few outfits and my hairstyle the other day though. She decided to select a hair band, and pigtails for me. Done and done:

If you want to know more about our little Adeline Decides project/get caught up on what we are doing for the next 5 months you can see all of the goodies here. 

Dream Sharing

The title suggests something fanciful and fun. However, what happened at 5:00 am this morning was neither fanciful or fun.

I was having a pretty vivid dream, I was in a building (possibly my house) and I saw a large spider, so I got a can of bug spray and sprayed it. The spider then turned into dozens and dozens of smaller spiders that then jumped on me and started crawling all over me (disgusting right?). I am then trying to frantically brush them and throw them off of my body.
All of a sudden I woke up from the bad dream to Adeline screaming and crying at the top of the stairs. Which was a welcome reprieve from the spider attack that was going on in my mind. 

I quickly ran up the stairs to see what was wrong and all she was saying was "Mommy! Get the spiders off of me!" and was swatting at her legs and crying. I picked her up and asked her to try to tell me what was going on and she then realized she was dreaming and that there weren't physically any spiders on her body and she said, "It was a very bad dream the spiders are everywhere". I of course told her I was having a bad dream too, and was totally freaked out at that point that all of this is going down.

I also told her that I would sleep the rest of the night with her in her bed and we could make sure that the spiders and bad dreams stay away. We get tucked in and she says, "let's hold hands because we are best friends". Off to sleep land we went.

Has anyone else ever had this happen before? I don't know if every detail was the same for her because she didn't exactly explain through all the crying every little part of it, and I sure wasn't going to ask her to keep talking about it.

Adeline Decides - Recap Dos

I am realizing that the blog is turning into recap posts only. My apologies. It's a big experiment so it is taking up a lot of our time.

If you are new you can catch up by clicking HERE.

If you are not new, and you have actually read the garbage exceptional material that I type - congrats and high five for being awesome. There were some close calls this week with Adeline being the captain of the ship better known as my life. Now for some highlights.

I let her order my sushi:

I let her pick our Spring wardrobes. We took a trip to Target for a pair of flip flops. A PAIR. 2.5 hours and an undisclosed amount of dollars later and she and I both have lots (and lots) of new threads. I did direct her to the sale sections so that helped. She even nabbed this dress which she claims is hers, but that I can borrow when I need it. So sweet. It is pretty isn't it? I would love to wear it this week but Ms. Georgia Weather is being the usual bi-polar bitch that she is and I can't quite wear it yet because of another "cold snap". Blah.

 Disregard the demon and dead guy as part of the backdrop.

She decided on how to fill a lot of our free time this week, and that consisted of lots of craft projects and operating of large motor vehicles:

She almost had the liberty of deciding what the next household pet would be. I am not sure why she thinks the three absolutely insane dogs she already has aren't sufficient, but she really thought outside of the box this time. She requested a pet bat ( I blame the Great Mouse Detective). I made a few futile attempts to talk her out of such a crazy idea, one being a trip over to Pinterest to show her that bats are ugly and creepy. Um, that blew up in my face when we came across:

and:

I know right? The kid is onto something.

I was at that point convinced that we did indeed, need a pet bat. Thanks to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources - Wildlife Division for taking the wind out of everyone's sails. According to their handy dandy website we now know that will not be able to obtain such a pet, legally. Thanks a lot rules. You can see the list of things we are not allowed to have as pets by going  here. I think maybe some permits would fix that? But apparently bats are expensive, and you need to buy like, a whole slew of them (I think the technical term is a "colony"). Hindsight, acquiring a "colony" of an exotic species does seem like a bit of an undertaking.Totally a project that will happen should we win the lottery. We will have a full staff to tend to the colony. *sigh and end daydream*

Oh and she also selected our vegetable list for the week. We placed our first grocery order for farm fresh goods through Farm to Fork CSA. 

It was a pretty successful week for -Adeline decides-.

*Sidenote: When my dad brought home that pet turkey when I was little, that was apparently a big no-no too according to the exotic pet list. You can read about that debacle here.