this will be a long-winded one

Here I am again, months later. Bad, Ginny! So much has happened! That'll show me not to wait so dang long!

The girls started gymnastics. Here they are looking so adorable:

Right?

Both girls absolutely love it and get to do it with some of their buddies, Alys and Charlie. So that's been fun!

School is going exceptionally well for everyone (including mom :)). Grace has really picked up on the reading, which was going a little slow this summer. Sydney seems to like school as well. She is still quite the little mommy's girl, and would much rather be with me, but is also meeting some fun new friends and gaining some much needed "socialization". Damn wild animal!

Wade and I got to go to Chicago for a tiny vacation and we had so much fun. I kept thinking to myself, "why did we leave?" There is so much to do! and see! and eat!

And then I remembered:

Wow, traffic is UGLY there. But we had so much fun reminiscing, seeing our good friend Maja, driving by our old apartment and a few of my old job sites. It was a fabulous birthday gift for Wade, who turned 30 (really 38--seriously how is life happening so fast? He was 23 when I met him!) September 10.

The girls also had fun at Annaliese's birthday party~~~ she had real, alive ponies! Which the kiddos loved.

Let's continue this epic post with a little soccer update! When I was having quite a heated debate with my friend Ashli and my brother regarding Grace and her "non-interest" in sports, team or otherwise, she decided to sit on the foam cooler and proceed to break it into a million pieces! Good job, Grace. You make your momma proud. Plus, you made me look right, which everyone knows how much I love to be right!

And last, but most definitely not least, Grace had a little, um, accident.

Yeah, she broke her wrist falling off the monkey bars at school.

So, allll that stuff I just reported on! Yeah, it really doesn't apply anymore.

She can still do choir though?!?!??!?! *gulp*

The Quick Trip

I totally forgot to write about our funnnn trip to Vegas! Probably because it lasted all of 36 hours annnnd Abigail died the morning after we returned.

Here's Wade and I looking super cute, no? And he's wearing his HOT PINK sunglasses. Tell me, what man would be comfortable enough with his manliness to wear these?

Once again, Vegas didn't disappoint. God, I freakin' love that place. The flights were eazy breazy, although everyone is in agreement--DO NOT TRAVEL SOUTHWEST VACATIONS-- too many horror stories from the friends. Anywho, the room was great (mirage), the gambling (blackjack and texas hold 'em) was awesome and the food (nobhill, burger bar and Japonais) was killer!!!!!!!

Here is Ashli and myself, she's looking high, as usual. I mean, she's not high usually, just kinda always looks like it in pictures.

I have to admit, going to Vegas with 3 other couples had me worried because it's not exactly a couply-kind-of-place. But it rocked and we laughed our asses off. And, of course, the small sweet victory of NOT having to change diapers and fix sippy cups of juice for a few short minutes.

Back to reality!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

for the love of money

Oh, it's on!!!!!!!!!!!!!


It's less than 7 hours I will be hitting the tables in crazy L-V.


Awe yeah.


Annnnnnnnd, I'm 8 pounds lighter!! So, bring on the foodddddddd................




Wish me luck, peeps!

The big SD

So our trip to San Diego was amazing. The weather was a ridiculous 75 degrees, sunny and well, be-autiful! Grace had the time of her life boogie boarding in the ocean and building sand castles. Sydney was a bit more of a challenge. Her moods changed like the salt-laden winds. Whew! We all agreed that she was not allowed to go on another vacation until she was three. Everyone knows this is a tough age, but I think she's winning in the high-maintenance, bratty, demanding, diva-esque department! What can I say, we are a family of winners!!

Anyway, it was so good to see my bestest friend, Meredith and her kids and hubby. We got to go to SeaWorld, the zoo, shopping, seal-watching (a fav of Sydney's, although she calls them otters) and the BEACH!!!! We had a few problems with our hotel and service (or lack-therof), but overall the trip was awesome. Grace asked us everyday how many more days we had in California because she was "not going back to Oklahoma!" Ha! Too bad we have our roots firmly planted in a booring, land-locked, sweaty state! Oh well, guess that's why we have vacations!

Didn't I mention diva?

It's good to be back!!

nutshell version

Well, peeps, so much has happened since my last post. I know, I suck in the new posting arena. Let's see: Grace decided that she didn't want to talk to me about the fact that she had gum in her hair and chose to cut her hair AGAIN!! She is so destined to be a hairstylist. Which would be cool cause then she could be on that show Shear Genius, oh wait, I would rather her be on the show So You Think You Can Dance. My new obsession. God, Wade has got to be so embarrassed by me! Anyway! I decided to not be mad and told her that we would have to get a summer cut and she was all, "GREAT!!" So, hmmm, no punishment or consequence there. And here is a pic of the VERY short cut:








We went on our annual trip this summer, this time to San Antonio. Most of you out there are maybe wondering why we would go to such a destination and I am here to tell you that it is the bomb. It's only an hour 15 minute flight, no time change, plenty of sunshine, pools and SEAWORLD!! We really wanted to go to San Diego to see Mere and fam, but this really worked out better for this summer. It was paradise I tell you. I could have stayed several more days! Both kids were so good, although Grace was completely against the camp the hotel offered, which was fine since Sydney was too young to go. I finally got out the fact that she was shy meeting new friends. Huh??!? I noticed that she was not as chatty with the other kids as in vacations past. Hope that phase passes quickly. I can remember meeting lots of kids when my family went on vacation. I do think I was older though. While Grace was amazing on the trip, I noticed a little extra eye-rolling and heavy sighing. Hmmm....not too sure what that's all about. I do not like bratty behavior! I'll have to keep my eye on that one! Anyway, fun was had by all including super-daddy! The kids are going through some serious daddy withdrawal this week. Every 5 seconds Sydney asks, "where's daddy?" So cute!!







Her first pedicure, get em started early,bitches! Am I really that surprised that she acting bratty?!? Duh!



















Syd got a beautiful braid like sissy and here she is admiring the woman's work. Hah!
























Syd and her daiquiri, chillin' at the "beach".





















Grace lost her 6th tooth! Whew! She's keeping that tooth fairy b-u-s-y!!!!! I know, who really cares except me and Wade.



Today is my mom's birthday. June 18th. You wanna know how my dad celebrated that! He took Grace to his girlfriend's house for a party, didn't pay attention to what she was doing and, OOPS, there was a teeny-tiny accident involving my daughter's knees and a moving treadmill. Nice. The child is lucky she still has a face. Shizzzz.....



Grace told me today that she is postive you are getting cake in heaven. Happy birthday, mommy.

the hair

ok, so the hair. On our 2nd to last day Wade had the idea to take her to this frilly, silly place in the mall called libby lu's. Not surprisingly, this place is pretty popular in Texas. You get to pick between several different hairdo's and then get your nails done, makeup etc. Every little girls dream. So Grace picked the "princess" up-do. Watching these women do this made me tired. She had to have used an entire can of aerosol hairspray and at least 60 bobby pins to bring this thing to fruition. And here was the finished product:


Never mind that she looks like a pedophile pin-up, look at the intricacy and detail! Of course, she loved it. Not my style, but whatevs. We got to the Museum of Natural History and she says, "mommy, why is everyone looking at me?" ps- she always thinks people are looking at her, the narcissist that she is- and I say, "it's probably your beeeuuutiful hair." To which she begins taking it out. Oh I begged and pleaded for her to stop, but she had her mind set on it. We went to the bathroom where it took me 10 minutes to remove the hairspray laden pins and it looked like a freakin disaster. Sticking up every which way. Thankfully I talked her into putting it into a ponytail in order to tame the beast. Kids. Why do they have to make everything so damn difficult.

Onto a completely different topic. The roach display. Seriously. why? Name one important reason or benefit for this thing to be on our planet. And they are feeding them! Look in the cage! Those things need to spend some quality time at my house. We could kill them in 2.2 days flat. Just like our hermit crabs (don't worry ladies, I threw the crab carcasses away this time). Alls I gots to say is EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

I'm not even gonna apologize for the lengthy delay...just gonna say HAPPY NEW YEAR and here's to 2007 being a hell of a lot better than 2006.
Rubbing the buddha belly for good luck...


So what the hell have I been doing, you say? Life at the Starr's has been hectic while the days without school have seemed long overall Christmas/New Years break flew by. We went to Houston for a mini-vacation after the new year and while it was fun, unfortunately, I was sick the entire 4 day trip. I had a bitch of a cold where I couldn't breath, or taste, or want to taste. So that sucked. I ate less on that trip than I have in weeks. Which, while thinking about it, was probably a good thing. The final day ended with me waking up with a little stomach virus (read: diarrhea) and nausea. That was very uncool. We did do some really fun things though. The Children's Museum was awesome. They had a little "tot spot" for the under 2's and it was incredible. Sydney loved it! We also went to the Butterfly rainforest at the Natural History Museum and that was also unbelievable. Imagine a really big, warm, beautiful place with millions of butterflies flying around landing on all the little kids. SO fun. There was one pesky blue, very large, butterfly that wouldn't leave Sydney alone. He kept dive bombing her and she was literally trying to run away from it, to no avail. We also went to the Galleria, which is by far the largest mall I've ever laid eyes on. Wade and Grace went ice skating while Sydney and I roamed around. So, here are the pics...
A little shaky at first, but was skating like a pro within the hour!

The infamous "tot spot" where Sydney kicked ass and took names...


Grace and her butterfly, so very proud (I'll explain her hair on the next post!).

I'm Baaaaackkkkk!

Sorry people!! We have been without a computer for over a week now and finally bought a new laptop! It's been killing me! I haven't looked at a computer in over a week and now that I have access to one I'm too overwhelmed to check all the blogs!!

Anyway, Las Vegas was fabu! I swear Wade had to drag me out of there kicking and screaming on Sunday. My personal heaven is Vegas. I love the whole vibe of that city, not to mention the food and gambling, my 2 favorite past times. wow, simply spectacular fun.

Wade always has his eyes out for me for movie stars anywhere we go and, sure enough, as I was playing some cards I hear Wade yelling at me from another table, "Ginny, there's your guys." I look up thinking, HUH?? and sure enough there was Carlos and Mike from desperate housewives. Exciting, no?

I have so much going on at work, but I'll save that for another post. I'll just leave you with a couple pics from the trip.! Missed y'all!!

Here is Wade's best friend from Altus, Jeremy, who was recently dumped by his wife of 6 years. ouch.


And here we are at MIX at Mandalay Bay. Probably the coolest looking restaurant/bar I've personally ever witnessed. Aren't we precious?!? Yea, you know I'm showing a little cleavage in Vegas...

OMG we're finally home

Did you miss me? A little bit? Sorry I didn't have time to post before we left, but last Thursday we went to Cuchara Colorado for one of my best friends weddings. You know, the one where Grace was the flower girl! That part was very exciting. She made best friends with the other little kids her age, which was really fun to see. During the wedding she whispered loudly, "THEY ARE ABOUT TO KISS," to her new little friend, the other flower girl. I can't wait to see the video with me glaring at her the whole time. But I'm getting way ahead of myself here. The flight and drive was, as expected, simply horrific. Sydney was not the friendly traveler and had to be passed back and forth from mommy to daddy the whole way. And she developed this incredible screech that the other passengers did not find cute or appealing. The car ride was even worse. Lots of screeching and crying. I swear that child must have carsickness because she absolutely despises the car. I did my best to ignore her, as it seemed that helped better than trying to play with her. Oh I almost forgot. The airline didn't send my little red bag with all the essentials in it, such as toiletries, curling iron, perfume, and MY MAKEUP! Yep, the bag never made the trip to Cuchara and sat patiently for me in terminal 16 at the Denver airport. So that was fun too.
Once we finally arrived Sydney was beside herself and couldn't quite make it to the party on Thursday night. I wasn't too upset about that though. So the next couple of days were spent trying to keep her satisfied seeing that she wasn't up for much playing or partying. I have to give it to Wade, though. He was mom and dad on the trip and did a damn fine job of it. I was fairly busy attending to wedding things like decorating, hobnobbing, giving a (shitty) speech, standing up in the wedding and posing for pictures. So my hat comes off to him. The baby loved this though. I didn't think it was possible, but she is more of a daddy's girl than Grace was at this age. But, as expected, Grace was incredibly good on this trip and once again, handled Sydney's moods with ease. I'm sorry to say that I really don't have many exciting pictures to post from the wedding, but I do have one exciting revelation, documented below:
before:

after:

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Isn't that soooooo exciting! The only problem was that she spit the tooth out onto rocky terrain and we couldn't find it. We had to find a small white rock to replace the tooth with. It looked remarkably like the tooth even though she wondered why her tooth was so "crooked" looking. Oh well! She didn't know the difference.

Anyway, very glad to be home and I don't think we'll be taking anymore trips for a while. Can't wait to see everyone.

Radiohead

Ok, most of you know that my wonderful, adoring husband decided last minute to get us tickets on Ebay to the Radiohead concert in Berkeley during our vacation in California. Let me start by saying that in theory this was awesome. The band is practically extinct and were only playing 6 shows in the United States. Radiohead is sooo our band. I heard them for the first time before I met Wade in Dallas in 1992 while slightly inebriated with friends from college. I didn't know them at the time and the show was actually free and being the cool under 21 year old girls that we were, when our fake i.d.'s worked, we were pumped. When I met Wade and he played them for me, I slightly remembered this show and said, "I think I like these guys." Wade thought the same and then they came out with hit after hit album. We LOVED them and saw them any chance we got, which wasn't a lot, since even then they didn't play that much live. Thom Yorke is weird. He always has been, touting strange verbage and then there's the eye. If you don't know what I mean, please google his name and look at his face. Kinda weird. Anyway, we were both excited for this show knowing that this would probably be the last time we would ever see them again. It was kind like closing a chapter in our lives. The show was at the Greek theater on the campus of U of Berkeley. The venue was very cool: outdoor, colliseum look-a-like (of course you couldn't smoke, another reason to loathe California), but cool nonetheless. They played 25 songs and I knew 4. Two from the bends and two from OK computer. The four songs I did know were soo not good. You could tell that he really didn't want to sing them and was just doing them out of obligation for idiots like me who like the old stuff. All the rest were new and his new is techno! or techno his way. It was very strange.
I am NOT complaining. Even though I didn't know many songs, it was still really fun hanging out with the hubs shopping and eating (that's really what we do best!) And we didn't get lost one time (our most often reason for out of town fighting). So I certainly wouldn't have not gone. Plus, I got to see a lot of peculiar people doing mushrooms AND I kinda hung out near the complimentary medic area. Oh yea, I saw some groovy shit. Those Californians like their psychedelics!

legoland

This was our one and only "outing" for the kiddos last week. It's sort of a strange playpark having very little to do with legos except that practically everything in there is made of legos. For some reason I thought it would have something to do with playing with legos. I was wrong. It's kind of weak for an amusement park but better than, say, Frontier City. The cost of entry is the most I have ever paid, EVER! Get ready for this peeps, $53 for adults and ten dollars less for chitlins. I crap you not. Grace rode 3 roller coaster (that's all there were) and the water portion was shut down because of some snafu. Other than that there were a few play areas for the smaller kids. Moral of story: not worth the $$$. That being said, we still had a blast hanging with Mere and her kids and Sydney loved it. All the kids and noise, right up her alley. We had big plans for the San Diego Zoo and possibly Seaworld but we changed our minds after we were stuck in traffic for over an hour and Sydney SCREAMED the entire way back to the hotel. It was bad timing on our part as it was dinnertime for the chunky monkey. We also took a wrong turn which extended the impromptu road trip and Wade and I seriously considered driving off the cliff straight into the ocean. No, really, we thought we were going to kill each other. So, from that point on we decided we would just hang close to the hotel area and swim/play there. We saw no reason to venture that far again and I feel confident that we made the right choice. So on to some pics:
this first one is Grace in front of one of a thousand lego built characters.


the next pic is the good girl taking a nap at legoland, she actually slept for about an hour

And finally, back to the 2nd home, the hotel pool. Notice the droplets of water on her face...so sweet.

I had a couple more photos to show but blogger decided to be a pain in my ass! One of them was Sydney trying to get out of the carseat- it's really funny! Hopefully things will be better tomorrow for dear 'ole blogger.

Back in the big O-K-C

yea! We are home from vacation! Now I need a vacation from the vacation. Just kidding. We had a blast! The mvp of the trip was....GRACE! She was truly amazing. All the child wanted to do was swim at the hotel pool. It was two steps from our room and there were tons of kiddos about her age. She probably logged in an average of 4 hours a day of swimming. And the parentals only had to be swimming about 1/4 of that average. very relaxing!


Now Syd on the other hand took a couple of days to get herself situated into the whole Southern Cal thang. Believe it or not, the sleep concerns I was having were completely moot. She was a total trooper considering the fact that there were about 400 screaming kids playing in the pool right outside her door. It didn't even phase her. Yea for sleep training!


So I have to say probably the best part of the trip was seeing my friend Meredith. Wade kept saying, "you all are so domesticated now" because he knew us way back when, you know when we couldn't get out of bed because of the mad hangovers. Her kids are darling and I already miss "Sheshy" saying, "uh-oh baby" after hitting said baby to make her cry in order to say "uh-oh baby". Get it. It was freakin' hilarious. I woke up today thinking I needed to call her to make plans for afternoon swimming. sigh. C'mon, Mere, move home, the hens would embrace you with open arms (right girls!!!) Anyway, I know that would never happen because for some reason she likes to pay Westminster tuition for her housepayment and she likes her satan worshipping babysitter:)

Anyway, I have a ton of pics, but I really don't want to bore you with them. At least not all at the same time. So I'll just post a few and then do a few more tomorrow etc.etc. Cool?

This first pic is in the airport and we were lucky enough to be sitting right next to a magician (the gods were definitely looking down on me) and this kind man made these amazing balloon concotions for Grace.

This next is Syd on her first beach tumble...doesn't she look excited... toes pointed and all...
and let us not forget Sydney in her own seat on the way to San Diego. She actually looks like she is being a good girl, but, oh no she is not. Not too fond of the 'ole airplane. And fitting I thought was her shirt, "unforgettable." and trust me, the other passengers wilst not forget. Thank God I brought along a baby einstein video as it was the only thing that would SHUT HER UP.
more to come tomorrow...
p.s. happy birthday, Jamie!