4 Hour Vacation

A four hour tour…a four hour tour. Lets take it back a bit..

I am still going to get to the paintball story, but prolly once I get home. We had 12 hours at home after Rush before driving to Vancouver, then on Thursday we sat in a lineup for an hour and passed on through to the United States of America.We shopped till we dropped, almost literally. We found a fantastic outlet mall!Then we checked into our hotel and had a lovely italian dinner. We were at a conference on Friday morning at Overlake Church in Redmond. It was really good. I’m still not used to conferences ending at like 4 o’clock, but it made for a more relaxing time. If you ever get a chance to see Tim Hawkins, or Anita Renfroe do it!!! They are soo funny it’s killer. I’ll find you a youtube vid..hang on.

There were some other sessions that made me think WAY to hard for the a.m. Then so hilarious sessions that were really refreshing. My least favorite part of the conference was that Hawk Nelson is playing at Overlake next weekends….grrr. WHY?? This would have been a great weekend for them…seriously. And the Newsboys are next month…GAA.

So then we get to the exciting part My real Vacation. We had our amazing Hotel in Seattle booked and all these cool touristy and awesomely awesome things planned. It was to be day 2 and 3 of our Vacation time ever since we’ve been married. We always go to conferences or stuff like that, but not real vacation. Loon lake is like Vacation, but it doesnt count because on vacations someone else should make your bed and cook. OK not always, but I was just really looking forward to Seattle with Morgan. We truely were sleepless in Seattle.We checked in to our Hotel, which was fantastic, You could see the space needle out our window from like a mile away. Then we wandered around downtown seattle and seattle Center. Everything was closing soon so we didnt go to any of our stuff, having planned on doing most things on Monday. Then we got a phone call telling us that Morgans Mom was too sick, so we had to come home and get Emily. His poor Mom could hardly talk. It was really sucky. So we loaded all our stuff back in the car and headed for the Canuck border.So there you have it a 4 hour vacation. Most definitely the most expensive 4 hours I’ve ever had. Figures that this trip I didnt book cancellation insurance. Then I made the mistake of saying what elese could go wrong…On the way down the disney store was gone and on the way back it was there, but closed…..Seriously… I was hoping to look there for cool stuff. dumb store hours fly-by-night company….
Well this concludes this episode of strange things that happened in my life. I’m sure it will make a good sermon illustration at some point.

Lego-ness

So I’m letting Em trash her room. I’m switching her closet around finally. After we finished switching her room with the office it still took a month before I got around to doing the rest of it. So that was what I decided to do today. Emily really wanted to play in her room, so thats what she’s doing. She runs back and forth between her room and the office giving me a running commentary of everything I’m doing. It’s pretty cute. I thought I’d take a break for a few minutes to blog and just chill.

It feels good to organize things. Morgan switched the basement around yesterday too. It looks alot better. Still looks like a bomb went off down there, but it’s a huge improvement. I think we are going to try and get it all settled this week.

The story of the week. Coco and I built our church out of Lego. It was a fun project that consumed the better part of 2 days. We got given a HUGE box of Lego to add to what we already had(Thanks RJ!!). So then we built and built! It was super fun. Then we took pictures of everyone and all the buildings and stuff. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The most ironic thing of all is that the day we finished building our project just happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Lego Block! How crazy is that? So here are the pics we took for your very much ocular enjoyment!

The whole masterpiece!

The Strong Man

Youth church!

Me on my Drums!!

Family Portrait! Like Roxy’s hat? or My dad’s mullet?

Brothers Forever

I need to take more pictures this week. I’ve just been being lazy about carrying my camera all over cause it’s huge. We’ve been looking at getting another camera. Ours is old enough now that an average small point it shoot it is the same megapixels. We want to get a smaller camera because by the time we are ready to go anywhere we are already carrying a diaper bag, a purse, and Emily(all 23 pounds of her) so our very nice, but heavy camera bag is a bit much. A couple of times I just put the camera in our diaper bag, but we almost had issues with that. Diaper bags are not safe places to put anything…ever. Not like it will get stolen cause bad guys don’t think diaper bags are a good place to rummage through; there could be poo in there… Its just that cracker crumbs and milk and other mysterious liquids and food particles aren’t the number 1 thing you should try and coat you things with.

I’m so excited. I was previously excited about snowboarding on my birthday. I was gonna convince my sister to lend me her awesome Oakley goggles and everything. We have a youth trip to Kelowna for Rush youth conference. It splits up into 5 categories of things you can do during the day on March 1st (Happy Birthday me!). One of which was snowboarding. YAY!! But alas and alack only 1 person picked that as their option, so no go on that one….sad sad. Now it gets to the good part. I have always ALWAYS wanted to play paintball. I didn’t think many of the kids would pick that option, but they all did! So. Now I’m going paintballing on my birthday!! I’ll be 25, so my goal is to hit 25 youth, not get hit 25 times. Bring on the paintball!! AND we get to have a youth conference too. with worship and bands and speakers. Family Force 5 is going to be there and Starfield. I’m torn between the two band. I love them both and haven’t seen either of them, so I’m not sure who I’d rather go see. The concerts are on at the same time.

“I’ve been looking at WordPress templates lately. I haven’t seen one I love yet, but I’m going to keep looking. I just want more than the free templates offer. I’m thinking of going back to a server side wordpress where I have more control than I have right now. ” That is a typical everyday geek moment for me. Morgan and I have what we call “Geek Check”. We pause shows or ask randomly “Geek Check?” For example on our new favy show, Terminator (only show to watch…stupid writers strike), this guy rattles off a list of tech terms and computer specs. Morgan paused the T.V. Yay for PVR’s(like Tivo, but on satellite)! He looks at me and says “Geek Check? How much of what he just said did you understand?” Sadly I hung my head. “All of it”. total Geek, I know. Then last night on the new reality show Moment of truth they called a famous football player out on to the stage. The T.V. pauses. “Geek Check? Who’s that guy.?” Nope, I had not Idea. never heard of him. Once again, proven to geek out.

We’ve been watching American Idol too. Wow that sounds like we watch alot of TV, but thats really not that much because we skip all the commercials with the PVR. Here is a moment I shall remember forever. I tried to find the one with the best quality

Come Downstairs Mom

I’m done for the day! What a crazy day. I’m not sure which is harder studying all day or trying to keep Emily busy and out of trouble. She’s getting mischievous. Little turkey grins at me and grabs whatever it is I didn’t want her to grab. So here is today’s moment of utter madness:

I run upstairs to punch some holes in this weeks recipes from Saving dinner. Then from downstairs I hear “Come downstairs Mom”. I head for the stairs and look down to find a completely nude toddler. She says to me “I go potty”. I’m like “ok we’ll go potty. Hope she didn’t pee on the floor”. Thats when I see them. Turds!!! Everywhere!!! AND one of them got stepped in and smooshed into the carped, and is now presumably being walked all over the living room on a size 5 foot. I guess I took to long coming back. So I took Em to the potty and cleaned her all up and shoved her in her high chair with some crayons while I dealt with…eww. Sooo anyways I shampooed the carpet today. Another step ahead of the Flylady routine. haha. I was only supposed to shine my sink, but I got all crazy and shampooed the carpet. Even though it was necessary I still count it as a point.

I hate potty training. Actually Em is really good at it already. She’s only pooped twice, but if I’m home all day she will only pee in the potty. It’s harder when she’s at a babysitters or something. She is too afraid to miss something, so she wont go. I bought her a potty book today. She loves that. And we got her Dora fruit snacks. Those are her candy treat. She’s never even seen Dora, but for some reason she is in love with her. Its weird. I’m not even sure she’ll ever get to watch Dora, but I’m ok with milking the “Dora” aspect of the treats for potty training. I figure she must have seen it once at someone else’s house or something. I cant even figure out how she knows who Dora is. She calls her Doy-ra.

I rocked the drums last night! I played with my Dads high school guitar class for their concert. It was like three hours. It was so much fun. I was so impressed with how good some of those punks are getting. When my high school guitar class played anything they only picked notes on nylon string guitars and pretty much just played Louie Louie. These kids were awesome. I was a bit nervous because most of the songs I had never even heard except yesterday when I looked them up on Youtube. I hadn’t played any of them before. The drums for Kryptonite by Three Doors Down is pretty tough to just go on stage and play for your first time, but It went pretty good. I kept losing my monitor, which was frustrating, but still ok. I have the theme song from Grey’s Anatomy stuck in my head. They did such an awesome job of it. We even played on song I had never heard before. It’s easier to do that with church songs than regular rock, but I’m glad it worked out good. I wore Roxy’s big Flying V earrings just for dramatic effect. I’m trying to get the video off my camera, but the last time I did it crashed my computer, so we’ll see how it goes.

Ok so seriously awesome movie…Stardust! I loved it. I think I can safely compare it to the league of such greats as Princess Bride and The emperors new groove. It ruled. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s a classic. I’m going to buy it next chance I get, otherwise It’ll cost me a small fortune renting it over and over and over. Its the story of a Young man who heads across a wall into another world to search for a fallen star to bring back a piece for the girl he loves. His journey is amazing. He runs into what’s left of 7 princes also seeing the star. Witches, Pirates, and even a goat turned into a man. How could that not be awesome. I want to tell you the whole story, but I don’t want to ruin it for you. And for the record: Robert De Niro is my hero!

?WX

I’ve decided to start a new blog meme. Its called the “?WX”. Its the weight eXchange. Kinda like the TSX (Toronto stock exchange) or some other stock exchange. But this way I can post weekly stock in my weight gain or loss. Silly I know, but a way for me to keep tabs on where Ive been and where I’m going. Then just like when they say why a stock crashed or rose I can put the causes beside it. Please feel free to have your own ?WX. Mine will be the CWX. Courtenay’s Weight eXchange! I like Pluckymama’s “Weight Loss Wednesday” report so I think Ill try to update my stock on Wednesdays or days when I do so great I have to put it down.

CWX™ = down 2.4↓

Made it to the gym again today thats 3 times this week. They were only open that many days, or I’d have gone another time. My back is a bit sore today. The squat machine has a hit out on me. That sucker is mean. Why I otta… It was a great feeling to make it so much this week. The fall was so hard to kick my butt. My whole body feels better already. I slept way better last night too. I decided to stop whining that my gym doesn’t have any cardio and just use the treadmill we have here. I have to stop making excuses. It’s like I’ve made my old gym into this perfect place where workouts were easy and all the machines were great and I loved it more than Disneyland. So not true. There was at least 2 machines that I loathed! They only had 1 elliptical so if it was in use I was out of luck. Although I kind of had a personal trainer and it was like 5 dollars cheaper a month, it wasn’t Fitness World by anyones standard. SO. No more excuses Courtenay.

Emily made me laugh so hard I cried yesterday. She looked at me and said “18 months.” I said “pretty close. You are 20 months” So she said “20 months”. Then I followed that up with “How old are you?”. Emily looked up from her high chair and said.”I’m fine thanks, how are you?” It was one of the funniest things she’s said this week. She got 2 Robert Munsch books and 2 Phoebe Gilman ones for Christmas. So we’ve been letting her read them. She’s has gotten alot less rough on paper books. It’s so fun to read full stories to her and especially the classic books that I read when I was little. So she walks around the house saying”Murmel, Murmel, Murmel” and “Jillian Jiggs pigs”. It’s really cute. I didn’t even remember Jillian Jiggs until Jenny read Em the story with the line “Jillian, Jillian, Jillian Jiggs! It looks like your room has been lived in by pigs!” Took me right back to the good ol days.

My Feta Chicken with Zucchini turned out pretty good. I would probably add less lemon next time, but overall I quite enjoyed it. I took a picture for you. Tonight is Canton Beef. It sounds really tasty. I forget what the side dish is, but I’m sure that’ll be great too.

Oh and here is the song that is stuck in my head…Thanks Morgan!*sarcasm*