Things I want to Remember About Today

• Ned himself took my order and handed me my sub.  He looks just like his picture.
• Sunshine asked me if I was 18 years old. 
• She also "figured this out". . .when I told her raspberries remind me of my Grandpa, she said, Yhea, because they're Red!  Do you get that?  If you do then you are smart and you know Sunshine is, too.
• Fabulous phone calls from my wonderful sisters!  They are the best.  I am one lucky girl.
• Mr. Handsome left me a note this morning before he went to work.  I can't tell you how happy that makes me.

Thankful. Very.

Well, lookie here, cyberfolk.  I'm still alive.  I've just been hunkering down, bunker style, tending to the needs of the sweetie and family.  Seriously haven't had time or mental capacity for blogging.  But I'm so root-toootin THANKFUL that I had to share some pics from this holiday weekend.  I love these people.  Sadly, I didn't take a group shot. . .too busy enjoying everybody!  It was truly a beautiful holiday weekend.

 Ummmm. . . .the food was divine.  

May have been the yummiest home made meal I've had all year.  Likely.

We went and visited Grandpa's newly lain headstone in the afternoon that day.  I am so thankful for our heritage and the very good people who've gone before me.  And Mr. Handsome & I made plans to have a giant shared headstone someday (. . .when that far away day of departure finally comes. . .)
It was very romantic, actually!  Seriously, stop teasing me now!

So I Took a Little Blogging Break

But now I'm back.
And I'm just gonna dive in on a funny conversation we had at dinner time. (Though I should likely show you pictures from our many summer travels instead.  But I'm not going to do that  yet!)

Miss Sunshine has been playing all day with a "tater tot cave man" she got in a wacky pack at Sonic (Yikes!  Did I just admit to succumbing to the pressures of six kids home at lunch on labor day so we packed up the van and headed out for fast food?  Why yes, yes I did.)  So she's playing with the Cave Man and says.  "This is my favorite Cave Man!  His name is Sunshine."

Her older sister cannot quite stomach a Cave Man named "Sunshine." She tries to reason with her:  "Sweetie, maybe you should name him something else."
She responds with confidence:  No.  His name is Sunshine.  He is yellow like the sun.
Sister:  Maybe you should call him Mustard.
Sunshine:  No.
Sister:  But don't you think he's going to get teased with a name like that?
Sunshine (emphatically):  No.  His name is Cave Man Sunshine.

My Little Miss Sunshine likes her moniker and is going to spread it around, 

even to tater tot shaped Cave Men. 

Scatter that Sunshine, girl!

That's What I say about the Chocolates

Yesterday I kept finding crumpled sucker wrapers and sloppy sucker sticks all over the house.  Like literally ALL OVER. 

I was confused.  Where are they getting these from?  Hadn't they been moved?  Didn't Mr. Handsome just relocate a bag of suckers (that--I must add--I did not purchase, they were left over from a bridal shower decoration last summer) so that the kids couldn't get into them anymore.  Obviously, they were still getting into them.

I followed a literal trail of sucker wrappers til I found this kid, sucker in mouth, and confronted her, "What the heck, baby girl!  Where are you getting these things?"

She immediatley looked frustrated, even angry, brows pinched together, pointed above her head, then blurted out, "Mama!  They're just not up high enough!

 (see that Walmart bag?  If I was better at de-junking, you know that bag full o sticky sweets would be in the trash by now. For now it is re-hidden, outta sight!)

Wishing I were Good at De-Junking

For some people, de-junking feels good.  I know this cuz I hear them say, "doesn't it feel good to get rid of all that stuff."  For me, it does not feel good.  It hurts.  It is painful.   But I'm thinking it hurts like surgery.  Initially, really painful, but in the end much better and healthier over all, right?

I am cleaning out an old office closet today and I'm trying to chuck out a slew of old college papers/notebooks/binders.  It is practically killing me.  I could seriously use a coach, "you can do this, you can do this!"  I just found a binder full of papers from my first "organization" class I took 13 years ago at Wymount.  And ya know what?  I chucked those papers in the recycle.  My teacher would be proud of me!

How about you?  Does de-junking come easily for you or is it a "required surgery"?  And why do you think that is?  Is it in out DNA, the way we saw it modeled when we were raised? 

You tell me!


****Addendum!  I just found a true treasure in the closet!  Read about it here.

The Best part of my day

Otherwise entitled:  I Like to Pretend I'm not Super Busy

I took my little ones with me to Cost Plus World Market this morning.  Ummmmm. . . that was a mistake.  Imagine Mr. Bingley running around like a manic and me trying to keep him calm while ignoring glances from childless patrons.  When we got back to the car (empty handed) Miss Sunshine wondered why we had to leave that fascinating store as she was having the time of her life checking out all the World's Goods.  I calmly explained that "Maybe you didn't realize this, but your little brother was being a nightmare in that store."  Nightmare.  She was quite taken with this concept and kept visualizing him as a swamp monster, I'm sure.

Since the kids had given me a run for my money that morning, I'd thought about sending them outside for lunch while I ate inside without them.  As in, by myself.   But after I took them out side, laid out their colorful blanket and presented them with their yummies, I felt bad at not sitting down to enjoy lunch with them together.  The breeze beckoned me.  Miraculously, someone decided to swap May's weather for March's and its been beautiful in my sunshine state today.  So we laid down on our tummies side by side and ate ants on a log followed by homemade oreos.  You know what?  The little monkeys can be down right enchanting when you're not trying to shop with them.  Said Sunshine, "Mom, I made up a word.  The word is 'millatay' (rhymes with grand jette).  Millatay, millatay, millatay.  It means this:  'It is really a nice day outside and don't you think we should go to the park?"  She has been trying to get me to take her to the park all week and I keep saying, "nope, too hot." But not today!  We giggled over that one. Millatay! 

 Miss Sunshine also said, "Mom, did you notice there's not a cloud in the sky today?"  She was right.

Then I got to muggin on Mr. Bingley and she took my picture.  (What, don't you give your nice camera to your four year olds?  It enhances their creativity!)  Turns out that pretending your not busy and spending lunch with the pre-school set outside is pretty darn wonderful.  Certainly the best part of my day.

Just in Case You Needed More

Here's some memories from life on the boat.  We only had one full day of cruising and that's probably good.  By Friday night was feeling a little whoosey and saying, "Can somebody please stop this constant rocking motion!???!"  Even so, we loved our boat, the Serenade of the Seas.  And had a fabulous time with dinner and dancing cards and sky gazing each night.

 

 

So you want the low down on Barbados?  You wanna hear the stories of celebrity sightings, poisonous sea creatures and a dark man named Dark Man?  Here's the scoop.  After much debate we decided to hit a beach we knew little about--my trust Lonely Planet guide gave us precious little info in the Barbados chapter--but Crane Beach did come up as one of Barbados's best.  White sands, turquoise waters and no facilities made for a secluded setting, or so they told us.  Also, Mr. Handsome, who had made friends with every single person wearing a name tag on the cruise ship told us that our cruise activities director said Crane was amazing and worth any inconveniences.

We met us a taxi man who said his name was Dark Man.  He drove us quite aways along the southern side of the island and let us off at the end of a steep straight with directions to walk over the rocks to find the beach.  He would pick us up when we called him back on his cell phone.  Deal.

This is what we saw when we stepped out of the taxi and said goodbye to Dark Man.

This is the no facilities beach. Roughing it.









 (Flying Fish Sandwich.  Thank you Caribbean girl in the purple shirt with the Canadian accent.)

As you can see, the beach turned out to be amazing.  A. MAZ. ING.  The weather was gorgeous, the sand was crazy soft and the waves were just right for boogie boarding.  We had a great morning.  I thought we'd had everything we could ask for on this, our last day at port, a great way to wrap up an absolutely fabulous week.

 

 

 

Steph looks so radiant I had to share despite the closed eyes :)

 

But there was more adventures to come. . . 

So after we'd been there a while, a group of people arrived and took some seats not far from us, about 12 feet away or so.  I thought they looked like nice, attractive people who had the good fortune of having enough money in their pockets.  Something maybe about their clothes or they way their carried themselves?  I don't know exactly what bespoke the money part, maybe the man's hefty silver watch that he was wearing out in the surf.  They had some darling little kids, who looked to be straight out of a catalog.  White blonde curls sticking out from a sun hat and a little pail and shovel to dig in.  I thought those two little boys were quite cute.  Stephanie, however, thought their father was a movie star.

She suddenly whipsered, eyes wide, back now stiff: "Do you KNOW who that IS? Do NOT look, do NOT look."

I looked.


So the attractive family with plenty of cash is famous too.
But I am apparently not piped into the right circles as I do not recognize any of them and Stephanie is agonizing trying to figure out which celebrity has parked it right next to us.  I am no help;  I don't even subscribe to the Entertainment Tonight App, let alone the E! app.  Jill, too, has which movie he is in on the tip of her tongue.  They are adamant that I get a good shot of him with my zoom lens and I spend the next few moments trying to be the most discrete paparazzi on the planet.

I do not want to bother a famous person.  I am much too cool, calm and collected for that.  See, I don't even know who they are, right?  Jason figured out who he is, cuz with a job like his, you have to be in the know.  Leiv Shreiber.  He was the bad guy in Salt and was the Wolverine's brother in some X-Men movie.  I missed both of those, but he looked like a nice guy and a good dad.  I am intrigued to know he has stared with Hugh Jackman. I would have recognized that guy.


So I nab a few distant shots of some man's head out splashing in the surf to appease my lovely girlfriends and then I take to the waters myself.  These waves are just to perfect for boogie boarding to pass up!  I felt like a kid again riding the waves all the way into the shore, laughing my self silly at the simple exileration of it all.
 

 
And then, then when I was back out in waste deep water to catch more waves I was suddenly hit by a wave of acid fire spreading across my legs.  Hmmmm. . . .water is not supposed to feel like acid fire.  Something is definitely not right.  I looked down at my hand and saw a strand of deep blue threads sticking to my hand.  These threads were obviously pumping fire poisions into my body and a glance at the water to my left proved that I had been stung by some insidious ocean creature.

Holy Crap.  Do I pull these strings off of my hand with my other hand?  Will that just make the poison go into both hands now?  And my legs are on fire, fire I tell you!  I get those super fine threads of blue off of me and tear into the shore and exlaim, "I think I just got stung by a jelly fish!" to the first person who will listen.  The thoughts in my brain jumble in sincere panic, something like this:  I am from Arizona.  We don't have jelly fish there, just scorpions and WHAT THE HECK!  This kills like fire in my veins and do jelly fish kill people?  Didn't that crocodile man from Australia die from a jellyfish sting?

But I tried to play it calm.  No one around would have guessed these were my thoughts.  Stephanie kindly guided me to a nice man who cut coconuts with a machete.

He told me in his thick Caribbean accent that I needed to dry off my skin with a towel.  He hadn't yet told me if we needed to go to the hospital for any anti-venom so I was still in freak out mode.  I looked at his hand and he was holding some ointment--apparently this tube is going to save my life is what my mind is putting together when he says, "Can you put dat on yourself pleez, because I would love to do dat but dat would not be right.  No, not be right."

This seemed to wake me up.  Oh, of course.  Cortisone cream.  That's all a girl needs is a little cortisone cream and I will certainly put that on my legs myself sir as I can now see that there are lines of welts all along my upper thighs.

I decided to rest up a bit and read a book on the chair under the umbrella after that.  I had had plenty of time in the surf and was not going to risk any more jelly fish stings (which turned out to be a portugese man o war, a little googling taught me later).  Jill, Stephanie and I saw several more of these Porgugese stingers floating around and fished them out of the foamy surf and put them in the garbage can, so they would not sting somebody else.  (Ha.  Aren't we so motherly?!!)

But this is not the end of the story, oh no.  Remember that cute little boy with the shovel and pail? The one who's daddy is a movie star?  Well not long after my little episode that darling boy, the one who looked like he was out of a darling catalog started to scream, scream, scream!!  He is shrieking in pain. . . like his feet were on fire.  Fire in the water!  I know what that feels like.  He just got stung by a JELLY FISH!

Well of course I didn't let the fact that his father was famous stop me from running the few feet over to to blonde little cherub to tell his lovely mother (who was wearing a hat and sunglasses) that the man at the coconut stand has cortizone cream for the jellyfish stings.  She did not pay much attention to me and with a quick "yha, yha" I realized that she had this covered and did not need any advice from me.  I went back to my chair but was pleased to notice that they did get some cortisone for their little guy.

And a few mintues later Jason came back out of the surf and informed me that Leiv Shriver's long time partner is Naomi Watts and that was who I just spoke to.  Naomi Watts, a famous movie star that I have heard of, who happens to be from Australia--where everybody knows about jellyfish and portugese man o wars, and she vacations in Barbados regularly. I just thought someone like that might need a little advice from an Arizona girl like myself.


And so we said goodbye to Barbados at the end of one adventurous day!  I still have a chain of baby pearls seared into my leg from that Porguese Man o War (p-mow for short). As a post script, you should know that Dark Man went ballistic when we brought up Rhianna on the drive back to the boat.  Apparently she has done nothing for the children of the island or something like that.  We had to tie Tyler down to the back seat so he wouldn't go into a Libertarian political debate with the taxi driver.   We wouldn't want to miss our boat :)

 And you thought I was going to end this post with a picture of Liev Shreiber.  No, no, no.  Not after I got in tight with his girl Naomi.  You'll have to come to my house to see that one. 

The Eternal Question: Beach vs. Mountains??

Can you believe I still have more cruise days to share with you?  I hope I'm not drawing this out!! I want to remember these amazing details, though, so each day gets its post :)

So I've had this little debate raging, positively raging, in my mind for many years now.  If you could only pick one, only one to be your surroundings for the rest of life--would it be the mountains or the beach?  Seriously, I agonize about not having an answer to this.  How it perplexes me!  But thankfully we don't have to choose, not even on a Caribbean cruise.  You can have your beach AND the mountains, too.

Dominica (as Castella on St. Kitts pronounced it Dom i NI ca) is known more for its mountains than its beaches.  Its jungely, rain forested, cloud covered mountains.  A jungle with zero poisonous animals?  That is my favorite kind!  The Mr. and I both believe that a lot of the time, pictures are better than reality.  Like when you're looking at a picture of a beautiful lake, you're not thinking about the reality of mosquitoes or wind.  Or when you're looking at the picture of the beautiful beach, you're not thinking about the scorching sun or the sand in your sandwich. . .

But let me just burst that bubble and say, at least in April, Dominica was awesome.  The weather was beautiful.  Not too humid at all and it was so green, with leafy canopies towering over you that I felt like I'd stepped onto a different planet.   Our excursion took us to Trafalga Falls and Emerald Pool, both must see's.  Our short hike down to Emerald Pool I felt like I was in an Indian Jones movie--like natives were gonna pop up at any second from behind the trees (in my imagination the natives are friendly).  I was so in love with every single leaf on every single tree I wanted to take a picture of each and every one of them!

Swimming in Emerald Pool was a huge highlight for me.  Jill had said on St. Kitts that she had just lived out her dream of holding a monkey.  On Dominica, I lived out my dream of becoming a Emerald Fairy and swimming in one of nature's most marvelous of spots.  If only I'd had a water proof camera you'd see what the view looked like from the water.  Instead I soaked it up in my memory and will be going back to that memory repeatedly when the heat of the desert hits full force.

 People name their cars here.  Ours was Barbie.  We saw another called "Life Must Go On."

 

Leaves, I am in love with you!

After this morning packed with luxurious rain forest adventures, we still had time to visit Champagne Bay.  This was equally extraordinary and a highlight for my water loving husband.  After a short boardwalk stroll over a rock strewn beach we arrived at our snorkeling destination.  The champagne name refers to the fact that there are constant bubbles drifting up from the rocks out here due to some subterranean activity.  They looked even prettier than I imagined they would.  And the fish were blue and iridescent.  I am heady just thinking about it, no champagne needed!

Taken from the boardwalk as we walked to the snorkeling spot. . .

Can you see the iguana in this picture? 

      

How about in this one, taken a few seconds later on a neighboring tree?

 Rocks at Champagne Bay

 Somebody else's underwater pictures at Champagne Bay.  They don't do it justice. 

I think you'd need a video camera to capture the shimmering sparkle!

Whoa, that island wore me out!  I loved every second of it, even the white knuckle driving on twisty roads with crazy steep grades and insane drivers.  But if you think I'm out of stories, just wait until tomorrow's stop at Barbados;  I did promise you some celebrity sightings and jelly fish stings!