After the normal thanksgiving dinner at mom's house we packed up the car and headed to mississippi. Rob has alot of family that live there and it's a really nice get away! They live right smack dab in the middle of memphis and tunica!! It's about a 5 hour drive. We got there around 9:00 thursday night. Rob's cousin had made a whole fried turkey just for him. Rob, George (our brother in law) and myself sat around and almost ate the whole thing-it was awesome. We spent the night at his cousin's house that night. We got up the next morning, got ready and headed over to his aunt's house. They made a huge breakfast with ham, sausage, bacon, eggs, biscuits, gravy, hash browns, it was awesome. After breakfast, Kelly, George and I headed to graceland. I really wanted to take alivia but she was having a good time with the other kids and rob wasn't going either so she said she wanted to stay with daddy. I've only been to graceland one other time with kelly and we just visited the house. This time we saw the house, the cars, the motorcycles, the after dark musuem. It was fun, it was really cold that day. We were there for about 4 hours. We headed back to the house and then we went to tunica. They had a crab leg buffet that night it was really good. We played for awhile and got back to the house around 12. We got up the next morning and had that same breakfast again, it was just as good the second time-when these people make a meal they don't mess around!! Rob played a poker tournament at the casino all day saturday. The rest of us stayed at the house and watched movies. That night kelly and I decided that we were going to make dinner for everyone just to show them our appreciation for taking us in for the weekend. We made a huge hash brown casserole, green bean casserole, salad, rolls, tomato cucumber salad and we bought fried chicken, it was really good too. You never have a bad meal in the south!! We stayed in and watched movies that night too. We woke up sunday morning and left to go back home. It was a miserable drive home, it rained the whole way. We got back around 2:15 on sunday. we all took showers and put our pj's on.

Rob spent all last night working on our bedroom and bathroom, I feel like it's never gonna be done!! All of a sudden alivia is obsessed with my cd from the movie walk the line. I played it in the car on the drive back on sunday and we got in the car this morning and she said "play music mommy?" I said "this is music" she pointed to the cd player and said "play that music" i put the cd in and she said "thank you" I like that cd but i don't think i can listen to it every day. That's about it for now. We have a busy couple of weekends coming up. This friday is a party for some of our friends that are getting married this week, saturday is alex and brady's bday party, sunday we have to bowl. The friday after that is my home and garden party, saturday is brayden's birthday party and sunday is a family cookie day thing. The holidays have def arrived. I threw my xmas tree away last year so i have to go buy another tree too!

Last friday night Jack and Anthony spent the night. Alivia and Jack had so much fun playing together. On Saturday we went to the circus!! It was so fun. When we first go there Jack was crying and wouldn't look!! He warmed up after about 15 minutes though. Alivia loved all of it. Rob even went with us!! We stayed home all day sunday. It was so nice. I got alot of cleaning done, I made some bread in my bread machine, cooked dinner in the crockpot all day and even made a cake. Alivia and I stayed in our jammies all day. It was wonderful! Monday I wasn't scheduled to work the desk in my office and Amber was off so we decided to take care of wedding stuff. I called a florist to see if we needed an appointment and they said they couldn't fit us in, I called another florist and they said if amber didn't know what she wanted then it would be a waste of their time and on the third call, we finally made an appointment. We were there for almost 2 hours and amber is very happy. They will me making all of the flowers for the wedding party, all of the centerpieces and even her cake topper. That was a huge thing to scratch off the list. I've been calling around for rehearsal dinner ideas, no luck yet.

Alivia's vocabulary grows and grows every day, I can't believe some of the things she says and comes up with. Yesterday morning in the car she was talking to me and I guess I didn't respond to her fast enough and she said "MOMMY? I talkin to you" Last night, she wanted me to open the front door so she could go outside to my car and go bye bye and she wanted me to stay home and watch her baby. She handed me her doll and said "Watch me baby, her be good" "I haf a go to yerk" This went on and on. She was makin me nuts. Then in the bath tub she informed me that she needed to hurry up because "maw maw pickin me up little bit" She is so independent and has such an imagination. She is such a neat kid.

So we are going to tunica after we do thanksgiving at my mom's on thursday. We will stay there until sunday. we are going to go to graceland while we are in the area. Kelly and I went to graceland before but george will be with us this time. Elvis is george's idol, so i'm sure it will be a different experience with him there. Today is kelly's birthday and we are going to dinner at the boat i think. Alivia and I have had ALOT of quality time so I'm looking forward to a night out!!

Yesterday on the way home from daycare alivia told me the sun was in her eyes and she needed sunglasses-this is all I could come up with!!

This is a funny email I got:

THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!! If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!! When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning ... uphill BOTH ways. Yadda, yadda, yadda.......... And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! But now that... I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!! There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, yo ur drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister! We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and asteroids' and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE! When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed! Sure , we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards! And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up.We had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot. That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980! Regards , The over 30 Crowd

Are you aware that you are in public?!?

I work next door to a Schnucks Grocery store and I visit it frequently. Our Hq office was paying for the branch offices to have Ice Cream so I got designated to do the shopping-go figure! Anyway, I was in the Ice Cream Aisle trying to figure out how to get the most for our money and a little girl about 3 or 4 years old opened up a door and grabbed a box of Ice Cream. Her mom came up behind her and told her to put it away telling her they had ice cream at home. The girl immediatly bursts into tears trying to convince her mom that they really needed to get some more because the ice cream at home was gone. They went into the next aisle. I was walking around still trying to weigh my options and ran into the mom and daughter again, she was still crying then I hear her say "If you were behaving then I would be nice but when you act like a stupid idiot, I don't give two shits!!"

I'm glad she wasn't looking at me when she said that because my eyes got huge and my mouth dropped!! I couldn't believe she said that to a child that young. I see serious issues in that family's future......