Second Son's graduation has me thinking about how I show up as a mom. I tell you, it's not how I thought I would back before I was one. When I became a mother, something inside me changed. Something went a little left. It's like a secret code was activated and now inside me lives a fierce warrior. When pushed, she pushes back. Hard.

Ok, where did we leave off? Oh yeah – Memorial Day weekend…. Well, Sweet Pea was here that weekend, but it did not stop the manual labor efforts in the backyard. While Second Son and I continued work on building gates for the deck, Sweet Pea and PDD went swimming in the kiddie pool: Tuesday after work, Oldest Son had one of his co-workers climb the...

Friday was the last day of school for my kids. Sweet Pea came over the Grandma’s Thursday evening with permission to stay the whole weekend, so she got to attend PDD’s awards assembly with me Friday morning. PDD received a total of 5 awards at the assembly: Honor Roll, Citizenship (her first time receiving this one!), Reading Achievement (for reading more...

Yesterday (Saturday) morning, we got up early and met my BFF Patsy at IHOP for breakfast at 8.

We tackled the repair of the privacy fence on Saturday. Second Son decided we should just get it out of the way, so I called Baby Sis to see if she’d go to Lowe’s with me to get the lumber (she’s got a truck, I don’t) and called Dad to see if he’d bring extra tools and come in to supervise and engineer the project. We got started about...

I've always known my kids are smart. Most of the time, their smarts serve them well. But, on the odd occasion, their smarts get them into deep, deep doo-doo. PDD is eyeball-deep in doo-doo right about now, thanks to her smarts. Let me rewind.

Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net is running a series this month called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, and I've decided to follow along. He was going to start the series on the 1st, but ended up having to delay the start to the 6th. Warmed my heart to see a big-time blogger have to give himself a little more time to get his act together. I'll likely be doing this in spurts and batches because, as you know if you've hung around here any length of time at all, I have "issues" trying to blog daily. :)

Over 3,000 candy-filled eggs snapped up by a crowd of elementary kids in under 5 minutes flat! (Click through to see the video.)

Oldest Son did not stop with the cabinet/desk project. On Sunday afternoon, in another fit of he-manliness, he built this in my front yard: I will be sure to take another picture later in the summer when the sedum is in full bloom. It grows fast, and will drape itself down over the limestone. That’ll be really pretty. Speaking of pretty, PDD knows I L-O-V-E...

PDD has a male Beta fish called Tiffy. Don’t ask. This is the same child who named our dog, Cheerio. Yeah. So, ok, Mr. Tiffy has been swimmin’ around in murky waters lately. His ‘room’ has been about as bad as PDD’s – crap everywhere. In his case…literally. PDD had been on me all week to clean his bowl, and I kept putting...