Ode To Joy #1 - i thank you God for most this amazing

I have been having a little bit of a struggle lately dealing with the monotony of day to day life. Since voicing my struggle a while back it seems like everywhere I go or everything I hear is about having joy in your life. I don't believe in coincidences and feel that these things were put on my path of life for a reason. I have learned some amazing things in the past few weeks and I thought I would share them with you. Maybe they can help you with the things you are dealing with in your life. I am going to call it my Ode To Joy series and I will share one thing each day that I have learned that has helped me to find joy in my life. I am calling it Ode To Joy because Beethoven's 9th symphony has always been one of my favorite pieces of music, and the 4th movement entitled "Ode To Joy" has always been my favorite part of that symphony. So for my first Ode To Joy I would like to share a poem that my sister Kristy shared on her blog a while back. Since she shared it I have not been able to get it out of my mind. I think it is a beautiful poem and I decided to memorize it. I have and I find myself repeating it several times a day. It is the first thing I say to myself when I wake up in the morning before I get out of bed. I am so not a morning person and there is something about this poem that wakes me up and excites me about the day that lies ahead. Whenever I start feeling blah about my day I repeat it to myself and somehow it helps me feel better. It makes me realize that each day is AMAZING in it's own way and a is gift to us from our Creator. A gift that needs to be lived and loved and appreciated to it's fullest. The poem is by E E Cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

A Conspiracy Against Mothers

I am of the strong opinion that toy manufacturers have entered into a conspiracy against mothers everywhere. I spent the majority of the day yesterday cleaning Emily and Aubrey's room. If you have seen their room recently you will understand why it took all day. So about the conspiracy theory, how else do you explain the fact that every little girl toy out there comes with 5,000 little teeny tiny parts? It makes me CRAZY! I remember several months ago when I was going through toys and getting rid of a lot of stuff, I got rid of about 20-30 little tiny hairbrushes. Every toy comes with a hairbrush. It is ridiculous. Especially when any hair that you would brush on a toy gets messed up when it is brushed. This thrilling reading material for you I am sure. Anyway. After cleaning their room I had Steve come in and take their bed frames out of their room. You see they have developed this great system of cleaning called, "shove it all under the beds". I was so mad yesterday when I was cleaning it out. And I am sick and tired of them never being able to find shoes that match or clothes or homework or library books because it all get shoved under the bed. So if they think that is an option, well, I have taken that option away. And I would just like to clarify that the above picture was found on the internet, that's not all our stuff.

Oh Sweetheart, You Did Such A Great Job!

Does it make me a bad parent if I look at my kids papers and art projects when they bring them home from school and tell them what a great job they did and then as soon as they aren't looking, throw them in the trash?

Oh Yeah! I'm Doin' The Happy Dance!

La, la, la, la, la! I am so very excited. Woo hoooooooooooooooooo! Sanjaya is off American Idol. I just finished watching it and I screamed right out loud with delight when they said he was going home. Then I jumped up and down and did a little happy dance in my room. Thankfully no one else was there to witness it. Sanjaya, Sanjaya, goodbya, goodbya!

New Form Of Punishment

I really like Zac's teacher. She really does a great job in not only teaching her students to be good students, but also to be good people. She has a rule in her class that when someone gives you something you have 3 seconds to say "thank you" or they get to take it back. She also has them write thank you notes whenever anyone comes into their class to help. They have written thank you notes to me and they also made b-day cards for me on my b-day (since I'm the PTA president) and they made cards for me when Addison was born. Yesterday Zac forgot his homework folder at home. I was gone all day and didn't realize it until school was almost out or I would have taken it to him. Whenever someone in her class misbehaves or forgets their homework or anything she makes them stay in from recess and write a "responsibility". This the the responsibility Zac wrote yesterday. I share it with you because I love it and have decided to come up with "responsibilities" of my own to have my kids write when they misbehave at home. Here it goes:
I am an intelligent and responsible person. I want to be happy and successful in my educational experiences. I realize that certain good habits and behaviors can contribute to my success. I will make more of an effort to take personal responsibility for meeting our class expectations. I wanted you to know that I am trying to make the needed changes and I need your parental support. I need to complete my homework everyday and bring it to class.
I love it!

Miserable Failure

My attempt to launch a political debate failed miserably. On my previous post "Irritation In The ER" I expected some feedback. I figured at least one of you (whom I shan't name) would disagree with my viewpoint. But nobody said anything. I was in the mood for a good argument and everybody just ignored me. Oh well. Maybe another time.

Dinner Out Doors

We eat dinner at my parents house every Sunday after church. It was such a beautiful day yesterday we ate outside on their deck.

Isn't She Just The Cutest Thing Ever?

Addison has a new toy. So it's not really new. My parent's gave it to her for Christmas. She was too little then to use it, but She is the perfect age now. I just put it together the other day and she LOVES it. She gets so excited when we put her in it. I just couldn't help but take 500 pictures of her because she was being so cute. Click here to see the pic's.

He Actually Wanted To Poke His Eye's Out

My sister Kristy got me started on this Newsies kick last week. She had watched The Prestige and was talking about how it reminded her of when she was a young girl watching Newsies and falling in love with Christian Bale. And then I went OH MY GOSH! That's who that is! DUH! He is just all grown up now. I can remember watching the new Batman movie when it came out and asking Steve, who is that??? And I knew he was so familiar and I just couldn't remember. Steve never having seen Newsies (tragic) had no idea that he was the star of Newsies. Then I remember watching The Prestige and asking the same thing and Steve said "he's Batman" and I was like, "I know, but he is someone else too." Thanks Kristy for getting it all straight in my head. So since she brought up the who Newsies subject I haven't stopped singing the songs from it yet. The kids and I have been listening to the CD all week. So I could stand it no longer. I went out and bought the movie yesterday and declared "Family Movie Night". I kept the movie top secret because I knew that someone very near and dear to me would not be too thrilled to be watching that movie. He just likes Batman so much and I felt like he needed a new perspective on him. The dancing and singing side of Batman. So we watched it and it was even better than I remembered and I had so much fun watching it. Steve on the other hand said something about wanting to poke his eyes out, but I wasn't paying too much attention, I was busy singing along. I just knew once he watched it he would be like, "Honey, that was such a good movie, thank you for introducing it to me. I really have been missing out all these years." But he wasn't. He said it was the worst awful movie he has ever seen and the accents in it were horrible (duh, Jersey accents are horrible) and the singing was horrible and Christian Bale was the worst of them all!!!! Can you believe that? He even asked if we had actually spent money on that movie. Oh well. He said now I have to watch 2 movies with him of his choosing. Ok honey. Like he doesn't know I fall asleep in the first 20 minutes of movies anyway. (except the one we watched last night)

Irritation in the ER

I just watched last Thursday's ER. (I never watch anything at it's scheduled time, I record it on my DVR and watch it when I have the time) I am so irritated! I have been watching ER since it began over a decade ago. In the past few years though it has really been bugging me because the writers use the show sometimes as a forum for their own political beliefs, which are not my own political beliefs. It really bugs me when they do that because they don't even try to do it covertly. It is just so blatant. I am thinking, are you that talented of a writer that you can't slip it in there more non-chalantly, you just have to stick it in there just to stick it in? Anyway, the latest episode had one of the EMT's on the show with a really bad cough and he thought it was from when he went to help at ground zero after 9/11. He was blaming the government for not telling them that they needed to wear a mask when cleaning up the debris. Ok, I feel really bad for any heros of 9/11 who spent countless hours sorting through the mess and cleaning up and who might be suffering health problems now due to their courageous efforts. But really, is that the governments fault? I mean think about what was going on right after 9/11. No one was prepared for that. Everyone was in shock. Everyone was doing the best that they knew how. No one had dealt with anything like that before. But, don't you think people might think, maybe perhaps, they should put a mask on, all be themselves? I wasn't there, but I could see the smoke and debris in the air for weeks after when I watched it on TV. I wear a mask at my house when Steve is sanding drywall. No one had to tell me to do it. I just figured it out all by my little old self. I just think that people should be able to think for themselves, like big grown up people and not have to have someone constantly telling them what to do. Is that what the government is for anyway? I don't want the government constantly telling me what I have to do in my life. Do you need the government to tell you to wipe your butt after you go to the bathroom? Hello, we live in AMERICA, land of the FREE and home of the BRAVE and sometimes bravery has a price. Can't people make decisions for themselves and then face the consequences of those decisions, weather good or bad, knowing that it is a result of their own choosing and not have to pass the blame onto someone else- especially when they do it only when it is convenient for them. Grrrrr....