Melts in your mouth. Not in your hands.

It's no secret that I am addicted to chocolate.

Today I ate way too many M&M's. WAY too many. I just couldn't stop myself. It was awful and so good all at the same time! Did I say how much I love and am addicted to chocolate? Because I am.  Darn those M&M's. If I gain 5 pounds, it'll be their fault, not mine.

As evil as those little candies are, they are also a great teaching tool.

My mom potty trained me when I was Sydney's age by rewarding me with them. And letting me reward my potty-training dolly with M&M's whenever she peed on the potty chair.  I was always happy to help my dolly when she refused to eat her chocolate. Guess the addiction started early for me.

Elisabeth learned her colors via you guessed it - M&M's. She didn't care to learn colors with us when she was little until we were at a birthday party and family members asked her to get them various colors of M&M's. She happily (and correctly) obliged.

Now Miss Sydney is learning about the magic of M&M's as well.  Primarily, she is learning that they are WAY yummy.

Sydney is also learning to share with her sister. (And her sister is learning to share with Sydney.)

The M&M's are helping Sydney learn to count too. Usually it starts with a finger point for "one", much like she is doing in the photo below.

What comes after one? Let me see if I can spell it out for you.

Tchüüüüüüüüüüüw (make sure the last few letters are said a few notes higher than the rest). It looks like this:

We're still working on numbers higher than that. Right now all numbers above two are also pronounced "Tchüüw"!

Thanks M&M's! You never cease to amaze me. In your honor, I will eat some more of you tomorrow.

A letter to my dear husband Mark.

To my awesome husband:

7 years ago today we were married in a beautiful church in Madison.

Happy Anniversary!



We have grown quite a bit in the past 7 years. We've had the good and the bad and the sickness and health. But every moment has been experienced together, and has made our marriage stronger.

Thank you for always holding my hand,

And for helping to keep the flame alive in our marriage,



(and for not telling anybody that my garter was down to my ankle during our ceremony and that I tried to hike it up right before we lit our unity candle - I'd sure hate for everybody to know something like that.)

Our families have grown up and grown even larger in the last 7 years.

We now have a beautiful family of our own, and our oldest is almost the same age now as our flower girls were then.

I loved you so much then.

And I love you even more now.

As we continue to walk our path in life,

I simply ask that you continue to love me as much as you loved me that day,

And continue to eat cake with me.

Just make sure it's sponge genoise cake layered with apricot preserves and hazelnut buttercream frosting, okay?

I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always.

xoxo,
Erin

The post titled Good Old Times

Well I had no idea what to title this post, since it's really just a bunch of pictures from another local nature preserve. I antiqued them while experimenting with iPhoto on our new Mac (that I LOVE, by the way).


Hence, the title.

Goodbye Summer

I have a hard time letting go of summer and all that it stands for. Usually I sit in denial about fall being right around the corner (or like it happens to be today, the next square on the calendar), but then I am faced with obvious signs of change.

The good news is that I love fall just as much as I love summer, if not more!

Acrophobic Mama

Hello my name is Mommy and I am an acrophobiac.

I haven't always been this way. Before I had children I loved all things scary and all things full of height.  But there is something strange that happens when you have children (or just get older, I am not sure which is the true culprit, as I haven't used my fantastic market research skills to isolate and test each variable). You develop fears. Mostly irrational, but still fairly understandable fears.

Mine is a fear of heights. I can't stand being up high. We have a balcony that overlooks our living room and I don't even like to get too close to the edge. I envision myself tripping on a pantleg and plummeting to my death as I fall over the side of the railing. It's a good thing the balcony is very wide, because I walk straight down the middle no matter what!

So when we went to the festival after the parade last weekend, my fears kicked into high gear as we stood in line for the ferris wheel.

I LOVE ferris wheels! The colors. The lights. The nostalgia.

The heights.

I always seem to forget that part until we're standing in line and looking up.

I went back and forth, trying to decide if it was a good idea to take Sydney on the wheel of death with us, or if she should stay back with Mark because she was sure to slip right underneath the small piece of metal they call a "safety bar".

I literally had her going in and out of the line. And at the very last second, I had Mark pass her over the platform and the very nice carnie ("carnie" is not exactly PC, I know. But it's in the Urban Dictionary! And he really was nice!) helped get us sitting as safely as possible.

And that was it. The three of us started going up up up. I forgot that it takes you up backwards, which somehow makes me even more nervous. I also forgot that it stops continuously so that the next seat of death can be unloaded and loaded. And then the next. And the next.  Which of course means that the seat of death that you are sitting in will swing with each.and.every.stop.

I thought I was going to throw up from fear of one or all of us falling out! So I put on my fake smile so Elisabeth wouldn't know how freaked out I was, and up we went some more.

BARF!

Once we got going continuously I did a little better, and I discovered that if I kept my eyes looking out at the clouds instead of down to where I was about to fall to my death I wasn't as nervous. And fortunately for all parties involved, the ride eventually came to an end.

 

Have you developed any fears recently? Please tell me I am not the only one!