Emily turns 2!

I can't believe this little blondie is turning 2 today! She is such a fiesty little cutie pie! She has gotten quite a wild and demanding little personality lately. She's sweet and cuddly sometimes and loud and energetic the rest of the time. Her scream (both happy and mad) can deafen you from across the room. But when she is not screaming at you, she talking, talking, talking your ear off. Some commonly heard Emily phrases are "where are you?!" and "what you doing Mommy?" and "shush! be quiet!" and "I do it" or "Emily do it." She is very into doing everything herself now, including anything that has a buckle or snap or clip of some sort. She has to walk everywhere now, which means her and I are a slow team in public these days. She loves playing outside and riding her "bike," a tricycle. She occasionally picks up a doll but prefers brother's toy cars and trains. She loves her some Elmo and any sort of music.
Her she is dancing to Nicki Minaj's Idol performance. I am going to write to Nicki, Lady Gaga, and Justin Bieber to request they each make a childrens music album since my kids love their age-inappropriate music. I don't even listen to any of their music but my kids are obsessed! Not sure how that happened!

Happy Birthday to our sweet little Emily!

Brian's New Old School Desk

{the before}

Well, I'm up to no good again with another old school desk makeover. I'm seeing a trend here. The last thing I have time for is refinishing more furniture. But, sometimes you are at an antique store and see a grimy old desk that is covered with rust (no chewing gum though!) and you check the price tag and it is such a steal, that they are practically giving it away! And then you run into a good friend, who confirms your idea that this would make an awesome little desk for Brian. (It helps to have company when you are crazy.) Then you walk a few booths down and see an adorable old school chair that would fit perfectly with the old school desk and it is a steal too!! Does this ever happen to you?! No? Okay, well it happened to me last week. And after a few squirts of lime-away, some scrubbing, sanding and some red spray paint, Brian now has a cute new school desk that he never dreamed of having! (Sometimes your Mommy knows what you need even when you don't and this boy needed a red school desk and chair!)
{the after, isn't it adorable!?}

{a little cubby to stash away stuff!}

{I couldn't just leave it red, have to give it a little distressing!}

{We are starting to work on telling time on a clock so I bought him this cute little Pottery Barn Kids airplane clock}

He really does like his new desk and he and Emily have already had quite a few "mine, mine, mine" screaming matches over the chair!

Sopraffatti

"Sopraffatti" means overwhelmed in Italian. (I'm so awesome with the google!) But in any language you could say we are overwhelmed! There is so much to do with an overseas move. There is so much to do with any move really. But getting sent overseas again is a new brand of pain I had forgotten all about. The first 2 times we did it, we were young and childless, with alot less crap, and no worries. Life has gotten busier and crappier (stuff-wise only of course). I feel like we move one step ahead and then 3 steps back! Like for example, getting passports. What a nightmare. Since the kids and I need a no-fee tourist passport with an Italian visa inside and Steve needs both an offical passport and tourist passport, we had to fill out the applications online, print them out, get pictures taken, take the whole thing to base after making an appointment. Oh wait, Luke AFB doesn't have a passport officer until the end of April and has no solution to this problem. We can't wait till the end of April because passports take 6-8 weeks, Visas take another 4 weeks, and we are leaving AZ on June 20th! So what did we do? We loaded up the kids and our applications, drove down to Tucson for the day to see the passport officer on that base. They actually had their stuff together down there and 10 minutes later our passports had been applied for. They arrived today! Yippee. One step down, 3 more pop up. We still need to get Steve's 2 passports back. Where are they? We have no idea. Steve needs to take the kids and I's passports to base to apply for the Visas. We need to sort, purge, and sell crap, then sort, purge and sell crap again. Have a garage sale. Sell a car. Sell our fridge. Find a home for our dog. A loving one. One that likes annoying little dogs with potty issues. Do you want a sweet dog? No? We need our medical clearances to come back from Aviano right now so we can get issued orders so we can schedule our pack out. We need to pack out. We need to drive our van and guns to Virginia. We need to ship the Van to italy. We need to see everyone we've ever been related to or befriended since we won't see most of them for 3 years. I need a glass of wine!

See what I mean, lots to do! Which means I should get sewing cause I have some orders to finish now. And all this might explain why I won't really be blogging too much until probably the fall when we will hopefully be settled into a beautiful Italian villa and living La Dolce Vita!

A, B, C, D, E, Daddy!

Emily loves singing her ABCs and although she is pretty good at it, she throws a "Daddy" in there every now and then instead of "F, G." She also usually sings it all the way through loud and proud but she gets stage fright when performing for the video camera! And she wanted out of her chair!

13 Years Ago Today

13 years ago this picture was taken at my Debutante Ball, the weekend Steve and I met. Just a couple of babes! Look how young and skinny we are!! My goodness. I never ever thought that 13 years later that handsome young man in the Mess Dress would be my husband and that he'd come running down the stairs with those same pants 30 minutes before we need to leave the house for a formal event, yelling "help! my pants were waded up in the dirty laundry bin!" And I never imagined I'd know exactly how to make them presentable, while yelling to Steve in the next room, how to make dinner for our two wild children while I ironed. I also never thought I'd spend the night of our 13th Deb ball anniversary filling out passport applications in preparation for our move to Italy! I'm pretty happy with the absolute madness that 13 years has brought!

Random Hawaii

Here are some more random Hawaii pictures taken throughout the 10 days
Crazy big storm waves washing away the sand. This beach across the street from the condo is called Magic Sands because sometimes the beach has sand and sometimes it is just lava rock. Storms or periods of big surf will wash away the sand within a day or two and then over a few weeks, once the storm or big surf has passed, the sand moves back in to cover the lava rock. We had a great sandy beach for the first 4 days, then the day we drove to the volcano park, a small rain storm came through and changed the direction of the winds and caused some gigantic waves. We watched for the next 3 days as the beach washed away and then the last few days as it slowly started to come back in. It's a neat process to see but a real bummer when it cuts into your beach time!

We did alot of this!

The kids torturing the condo!

The Worst Boat Ride Ever!

This boat ride was my fault sort of. I know how much Steve enjoys fishing and thought he might like to go on a deep sea fishing trip one day while we were in Hawaii, so I suggested HE go. Somehow it turned into him and I going, and then envolved into him, I and Brian going. So, up we were at the crack of dawn on our last full day in paradise to set sail on a tiny boat to catch the biggest fish in the sea. Poor Brian spent the better part of the four hours with his tiny head over the side of the boat, getting sick. I spent a good 3 hours fighting getting sick and finally beat my nausea with an hour left in the boat trip. No one caught a thing. Not even a bait fish. It was sad really. We did see some humpbacks but couldn't stop to watch the action since the grumpy Captain was dead-set on someone catching something. We also saw a few spinner Dolphins leaving the marina. Let's just say Steve thought it was awesome (really?) and Brian actually was somewhat enthusiastic at the end of the trip, but I will never again set foot on a small fishing boat in open waters. Ever. It was a nice reminder of what morning sickness feels like though.
Trying out the chair that saw no action that day

Staying close to the side

There is nothing out there. Or there is, but they are all laughing their fishy laughs as we pass by.

Smiling at the end (short-term memory loss perhaps?)

Went to lunch at the harbor afterwards where we purchased fish tacos since we weren't able to catch our own fish tacos :(