Recommendations

So I was going to post a video but I can't seem to upload it in a timely fashion so I will use this blog to make 2 recommendations. Both random, but valuable for those that have kids.

# 1. Personalized suitcases for kids. My kids are always going to my parents house. And, for whatever reason, (not like my parents had 6 kids or anything) they can never figure out which clothes and shoes belong to Tristan and which belong to Caleb. Yeah, common sense tells you to look at the size and then do the math on their age but they are getting old. So, I decided to get the kids their own suitcases. I ordered them from this website - Luna Belle Boutique. The kids absolutely love them. They roll so the kids love rolling the suitcases themselves. I would recommend as gifts. Here's some pics of them I took.

#2. Vaporizers. This might be an obvious for other parents but unfortunately not for me. I have spent a lot of money on 5+ vaporizers since I have had kids. None seem to work. I actually was starting to think they were just a scam of some sort. But then my doctor told me how beneficial it could be for my kids. So I looked a bunch up and read the reviews. I finally decided on the Crane Drop Shape Cool Mist Humidifier. Love it! I'm about to order 2 more. You can actually see the mist and it fills up the room pretty good. The only bad thing is that it will only last about 8 hours before you have to fill it again. But honestly, that is a tiny detail compared to how awesome it is. Get it.

I know this blog was kinda dumb but I'll try and upload that video for you next. It's pretty funny. Well, Vincent doesn't think so, but I do.

I'm back!

So I got an e-mail from my brother, Nate, who is deployed right now. It reads:

 

 

Yo,

Put some fresh shit on your blog. I just google'd it since my last deployment here 2 years ago because that's when I get bored enough to read it. But I just read you're getting rid of it. Start that shit back up. I got 2 more months of boredom ahead of me. Entertain me. Tell vincent to get on that shit if you're "too busy". Quit having children. I'm out!

 

So obviously, how can anyone resist that plea from the heart? So I have decided to try the blog again. I will really, really, really try to post 1 blog at least 1 time a week. My goal is to just share the stories that I share with friends and family and just try to make a blog about them. The problem is so much crap happens to me that I forget to blog about it. But I got an app on my phone so when something happens, I'll make a quick note. Hopefully this helps the blogs become more frequent. Also, if my audience out there can contribute, I would appreciate it. I mean, Nate, don't get me wrong. I like writing for you but it doesn't hurt to know that other people give a crap about what I write about. Feel free to become a "Follower" or put your e-mail in so that when I publish, it gets sent to you. Also, please comment on my blogs. I hear from people that they thought a certain blog was hilarious but I never hear anything on my blog. Please comment. This will encourage me to write blogs if I know people want to read it. Okay, soapbox done.

So where to begin? My life is a train wreck. First there's work. So I don't know if I explained my job completely because I am just now starting to understand it. But I work for a benefits software company. Basically they sell the software to like say, Lockheed Martin. Then I would be the account manager and in charge of getting all the employee's information loaded onto the site. Also I would have to get a list of their carriers and contact them to build a report that needs to be sent from the site to them updating any changes with employees. Basically the process from start to finish is mine. So if they have special requests for their plans - i.e., rate changes from doing a wellness exam, I would make that happen. I use javascript and whatever else behind the scenes to make the website perform correctly. Then the company uses the site for their employees to enroll in during open enrollment. It's especially busy during 4th quarter - because everyone wants their benefits effective 1/1. That's why you didn't hear from me at all. Things have calmed down but cleaning up data is the biggest issue I  have right now. I work Tuesdays and Fridays from home and I love that. It lets me save gas and toll money and also lets me sleep in. It is super challenging and I usually learn something new every day. Fo' real.

Vincent. He is doing great. He got a new smoker and has been smoking all kinds of meat. It's actually sad because he'll smoke a 10 lb brisket and I can't stand brisket and the boys eat about 3 bites. So Vincent ends up eating the whole thing himself for lunch for the next 2 weeks. But he loves the smoker. His next big project is a kegerator. He makes all his beer at home. It's actually really really good and saves money. Well now he wants to build a 4 tap one using a huge deep freezer. I'm not sure how it will be done but I have asked that my brother, David, be involved. Like we don't have enough crap in our garage, by the way....

House. Ugh, I hate this topic. So, we haven't put our house back on the market since the last time. We transitioned the carpet downstairs to stained concrete. I hate it. The acoustics are awful. We have decided to install laminate downstairs, on the stairs, and upstairs in the hallway. We are actually in the process of doing it right now. I just ordered a sample of the color we like and if we like it in person we will order the full amount. We decided to do laminate versus hardwood for 3 reasons. 1, it's a LOT cheaper. 2, they look very very similar now. Laminate has come a long way. 3, our house is in a bracket where people won't be insisting on real wood. They'd settle for laminate. Anyway, we were going to do hardwood but I really was against the waste of money. Which brings me to moving. We have decided to pay off our debt, except for student loans. I know they're considered debt, but I don't really consider them to be since they don't affect your credit. We have no problem taking forever to pay those off. But once we pay off the debt, we have decided to rent out our house. This way we can get out of it but not have to spend money to get rid of it. Vincent says the timeline is this December for moving. I am a pessimist so I would assume the beginning of next year. But honestly if we have all of our debt gone, we should have extra income to work with and be able to be prepared if anything happens with our house as a rent house. That part makes me really nervous.

The kids. This topic is overwhelming. I wonder at least 1 time a day why I had kids. Tristan is almost 4, Caleb is 2 1/2, and my sweet Brayden is 6 months old. Tristan and Caleb are terrible. I mean, awful. And I don't mean that in a funny way. I mean that in an exhausting way. We don't go very many places on the weekend because of Tristan and Caleb. If we go to a store, they take off running. They don't even know where they're going. Just trying to free themselves, I guess. And I don't want to hear advice on whooping their asses. I whoop their asses. I spank them till my hand hurts. They don't care. I think it's the age. Bedtime is an absolute nightmare. I drink more since they started sharing a room together. First it was Caleb being bad and would keep Tristan up. So we moved Tristan to our room until Caleb fell asleep. Then we would move Tristan back into the room with Caleb. Now, Tristan wakes Caleb up when he goes back in and they party hard. Caleb has already destroyed his bed frame. He now sleeps on his mattress on the floor. It looks white trash but I'm not buying another one for him to destroy. Now we just put them together in the room at bedtime and go downstairs and ignore them. It's all we can do right now. Ugh. But Brayden. He's so sweet. I keep telling him to not grow up and be like his brothers. He just smiles his gummy little smile at me and melts my heart. But I know better. They all turn 2 eventually. Sigh.

So I believe we're caught up for the most part. I know there are tons of stories that I need to share but I'll wait and put in a blog.

Any comments, suggestions, or ideas for the blog???

 

 

Retirement

So I have decided it is time to retire this blog. I know it has been forever since I blogged last so I'm sure you've moved on but I really don't have time for this. So I just wanted to make it official. Maybe if I get more time in the next few years but I don't have the time now. I have 3 kids under the age of 4, 2 beagles, a full-time job, and a family full of drama. Unfortunately, right now, typing blogs is more a chore than fun so I need to go into retirement. If you hang out with me, you won't miss out on any of the funny stories and drama anyway. Lucky you. :) Also I try my hardest to stay current with Facebook. It's not the same as a blog but I try to keep a lot of pictures there. Please join Facebook if you haven't yet......Aunt El. :)
Anyway it's been fun. Hopefully I will be back soon.

party of five

Holy crap! Where to begin on updates???

First, we are now a party of five. Brayden Matthew Martinez was born on 9/26 at 8:02am, weighing 7 lbs 10 ounces. It was a great delivery. I'm not sure if I ever shared my very intense anxiety about my last C-section but to sum up - it was one of the worst experiences of my life. This one, though, was VERY different. The anesthesiologist was amazing and made all the difference. She asked me about my previous experiences and what I would change. I told her about my high anxiety and she said she would do anything possible to make it a better experience. During the whole thing she told me exactly what was going on and kept me distracted enough from my own thoughts. I told Vincent to talk to me to keep me distracted too. His distraction talk? He told me he was going to clean the house. Then he told me he was going to clean the carpets with the carpet cleaner. Sad, but it actually made me happy and kept me distracted for about 2 minutes while I envisioned my house completely clean. After becoming huge and EXTREMELY uncomfortable these last few months- lots of things were not being done. One being the upkeep of once daily/weekly chores- like vacuuming, cleaning the carpets, making sure laundry was put in the right place (i.e. making sure my husband put away clothes correctly). It was sad how embarrassed I was of our home. And of course everyone came to visit right after the baby was born and Vincent had had no time to clean. Darn.

Anyway, back to the operating room. Anesthesiologist was amazing and so the delivery was very low anxiety. I had my tubes tied because there is no way we can ever do this again. I have 3 children- all under the age of 4. I am a retard. Tristan has really blossomed and been great. He loves his big brother role and takes it very seriously. Caleb, on the other hand, is seriously becoming a very real candidate for temporary foster care. He has entered his terrible twos (great timing, bud!) and it's even worse than Tristan's. He touches everything we tell him not to and he everything is followed by a "No!" from him. We had the worst first week together as a family of five because I put off making Tristan and Caleb sleep together until the baby came. That's because every time I tried to make them sleep together in the same room, Caleb would play for hours. I am not exaggerating- hours. He would be up till 11 or 12 until I would give up and throw him back in his room/ Brayden's new room. I spanked him so much my hand hurt. He was being so bad that I would spank him and then he would blatantly disobey right after I spanked him so I would come back to spank him again. He would see me and then take his hand and spank his chunky thigh himself- as to say "See? That doesn't hurt me. I dare you to do it again". Vincent and I didn't know what to do. Avoiding the issue of them sleeping in the same room seemed best. So when it finally happened, we had no back up solutions. Caleb was literally staying up till midnight the first week. Then, one night after Caleb kept turning off the TV that Tristan was trying to watch, I took Tristan out of the room and put him in our room to watch his 30 minutes of TV. I left Caleb in the room by himself with no lights or TV and he fell asleep within 10 minutes. So, that's where we're at. We put Caleb to bed 30 minutes before Tristan and he falls asleep no problem. I think Caleb just gets too distracted with anyone in the room with him. That's fair. At least we know now.

Brayden is sleeping 5 hours at a time right now and it's been good because Vincent has been home this whole time. This Monday Vincent goes back to work and I'm scared because it's on me. Plus I have 3 doctor's appointments to go to next week and it's really hard to go anywhere with a baby- yikes!

Alright well now I'm exhausted and I'm up for the next shift for Brayden. I'll try to update again soon.

Floors Update

So a little over 2 weeks ago we started the project of staining the concrete on the living room floor. I say started because it was a week-long project. First, Friday night we removed all the furniture from the living room. This was a project in itself because I am pregnant and Vincent didn't want me to strain something. So we moved things creatively. Like with the help of a rolling chair. And those 'EZ Sliders' - those things really do help. Then Saturday the hard work began. My brother David and sis-in-law, Becky came over to help. First, carpet was removed. Then we had to clean the concrete. And this was no easy feat. There was the adhesive from the carpet plus random spray paint all over it. First we took soap and water, cleaned it, and then sucked up the dirty water with a shop vac. That took forever. Then we went to Home Depot and rented a buffer machine. This was what got the glue and paint off the concrete. We had the machine for 4 hours and it took all of that time. Then, of course, we had made plans that Saturday night so we had to stop to get ready. The next day was cleaning the concrete with soap and water again but this time we got smart about it and rented a Rug Doctor from Home Depot to suck up the dirty water. Much faster. After cleaning it completely it had to dry, which took about 4 hours. Of course, Tristan’s birthday party was Sunday so we went to that right after cleaning. Then we got home from the party and were exhausted so we decided Vincent would take that Monday off and work from home as well as work on the floors. Well, he got up and started on the stain. It was supposed to be sprayed on by one of those spray containers that looks like you use to put pesticide on your lawn. It was supposed to be 1 can for the whole floor. Vincent put it on really thick so we ended up using 3 ½ cans on the floor. I was freaking when he called me to tell me that he ran out of stain about a third of the way in. I thought it was going to look awful. But, thankfully, it just made the layer thicker and probably less likely to peel off in the future. I’ll take it. Then we had to wait for the stain to dry. Since he put it on so thick, it took a lot longer than normal. Since we had to continue our work week as normal, we just decided to put off putting on the sealer until the weekend. Did I mention that we decided to put the dining room table in the kitchen?? And that the dining room table fits the kitchen with about 8 inches of room to walk around it? It was awful to try to use the kitchen for Tuesday and Wednesday. Finally I couldn’t take it. On Thursday, I went to Home Depot, got a high-tech mask and put on the sealer myself. I also bought this “non-skid” additive to add to the sealer to make the floors not so slippery. It was easy to do. You put it on with a roller that is the same length as a mop. It took me about 30 minutes. But it took about 12 hours to dry so Friday we were able to move the furniture back in. But the floors look great. The only thing that is annoying is the acoustics right now. The TV has a slight echo because we have yet to buy a rug for the room. I read online where other people mentioned that once they had a rug in there; it really helped out with the acoustics.

Right after we cleaned up everything leftover from the project on Saturday we went to my Aunt’s for the Masdon swim party where my Grandpa from Georgia was the guest of honor. He came back to Texas last year for the first time in like 10 years and this year he came again. It was awesome, since we hardly get to see him. We had a great time besides being exhausted from cleaning up the garage from our project.

Oh and did I mention that while we were storing our living room furniture in the garage during that week, it also happened to hail? I mean, seriously hail?? Like slightly larger than golf balls hail? Yeah, Vincent and I could only sit and watch as both of our cars were destroyed by the hail. That was the closest to crying I’ve ever seen Vincent get. It lasted about 10 minutes but caused some serious damage. Good timing.

And although I don’t have pictures from the living room project, I do have pictures from Mother’s Day. My brother, sis-in-law, nephew, sister and the 4 of us went to brunch thrown by a friend that has a catering company. It was delicious. My sister Naomi took some great pictures. Here are those pictures. She's really good at pictures. I always steal hers  :)