Last night we were blessed with several inches of snow. It's mind-boggling to think that a week ago we were walking around in Orlando in shorts, and today my kids were out snow-sledding. They were even using their sand-pails from Florida to make snowmen.  read more »

Looking over my last few posts, I realize that I may have mistakenly made two impressions - that I had no fun, and that I didn't appreciate the vacation at all. The truth is that despite the exhaustion and aggravation of visiting a place that is expensive and overpopulated, I did still enjoy myself. But this time, it wasn't Disney's doing. Rather, I enjoyed being with family. In fact, it was wonderful to catch up with my sister, her husband and meet my new little niece. It was a joy to see Choosyboy bond with his grandfather on the Buzz Lightyear ride.  read more »

Although I tried to prepare myself for the sticker-shock, I am always amazed at how expensive everything is when we visit Disney World. A sweatshirt for the kids will run $45. A t-shirt is $20. Mickey ears were about $13. Nearly every sit-down restaurant in the park will cost you $25 per entree - even for Mexican food! Bottled water was probably our biggest recurring expense, as we were feeling dehydrated and dried out from all of the air conditioning.  read more »

We were happy to arrive in Orlando, where the weather was much warmer and we could store our jackets. My parents picked us up at the airport and took us to the condo that my father had traded his timeshare for. It was nice, bright and roomy. Best of all, we had our own bedroom and bathroom.

Unfortunately, the tap-water had this bad smell to it. It's hard to describe - different from Memphis, but not much better. It actually smelled burnt. So once again, we would be dropping lots of cash on bottled water.  read more »

Our flight to Orlando was originally booked with Frontier Airlines about four months prior to our vacation. We wanted to make sure that we took advatage of early booking fares. However, a month before our trip, Frontier decided that they were no longer flying out of Memphis and we were SOL. After raising a bit of hell with them on the phone, they managed to switch us to a comparable flight via AirTran, a carrier that I had never heard of before.  read more »

We're back from our week-long stay in Disney World, and (as expected) I now feel as though I need a vacation. Our trip started with a drive to Memphis, which is about six hours away. We had picked up Choosygirl an hour early from school to hit the road and get there before nightfall. The drive went pretty smooth, aside from having to stop every hour or so for the kids to use the bathroom. We brought a kiddie potty in the car with us in case we were caught between service stations, which always helps (if you don't mind the smell).  read more »

Choosypup is a year-and-a-half old mutt, although some like to call her a "designer breed". She's an odd mix of Jack Russell Terrier and Poodle, which basically means that she is small, sassy, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. We saved her from a white trash dog breeder in SW Missouri.  read more »

We're flying down to Florida this weekend and taking the kids to Disney World. We haven't had a family vacation in quite some time, and although I suspect that Choosymom and I will probably feel like we need a vacation by the time we get back home, I'm sure that we will all have a blast.  read more »

Choosyboy received a little FM radio from Santa for Christmas - his first. Last night, he decided that he wanted to hear it playing softly while he was trying to fall asleep, a bedtime routine that he picked up from his older sister.

The conversation went like this...  read more »

I just wanted to spread the word about some nasty viruses that seem to be making the rounds. I was looking through my blog referral logs and noticed a couple of strange looking URLs. I tried visiting them to see who was linking to my blog, and soon found my browser trying to thwart a malicious attack. The two sites attempt to force your browser to load a virus masquerading as a plugin. Even if you click the "cancel" button, it will popup again and again in an endless loop. I finally had to force my browser down using CTRL+ALT+DEL.  read more »

...but at what cost?

We finished off our returns at Kohl's and Target after dinner. The toy that we returned to Kohl's was worth a whopping total of $1.37. Clearly my mother had been shopping the clearance sales, which explains why she would buy Choosyboy a strange green plastic scottie with an unusually long tail that looked like a piece of deformed saltwater taffy. The packaging said it was a character from the Krypto the Superdog series, which my kids are unaware of since we don't get cable. It was also a POS that we were happy to return.  read more »

Our road trip hadn't kicked off until late in the afternoon, well after lunchtime, so by the time we had arrived in the city and made our first return, it was nearing time for dinner. As we had made our way into town, there were all kinds of interesting mom-and-pop type restaurants on the outskirts and I had made several mental notes as to where we might eat once we had finished some of our shopping. Unfortunately, all of the big retail stores that we had to stop at were quite a distance from the edge of town, and I didn't feel like driving back through the traffic to get to them.  read more »

Well, you've already heard about our unfortunate meet-and-greet with the kamikaze owl. So what was it that made the rest of our day so horrible? Well, for one thing we were driving over an hour so that we could stand in not one, but three different service desk return lines. But we weren't there yet.  read more »

...when the owls die?

Yesterday, we took a drive to the nearest large city so that we could do some additional Christmas gift returns/exchanges. I know what you're thinking. Christmas was several weeks ago. Admittedly, we'd been dragging our feet a bit, since the closest Kohl's, Toys R Us, and Target are about an hour away.

Since we relocated to our new small-town home nearly two years ago, I find that visiting the "big city" does nothing but stress me out. I loathe the drive there, and I dread trying to find my way around a strange city so full of construction and traffic.  read more »

Music plays a HUGE part in our lives. As a big music fan and a musician myself, I inundate my children with all types of sounds and styles. I play old music and I play new. I play tunes for my kids that other parents would be afraid to play - not because they are obscene, but because they are brutally honest and not always "shiny happy people" type songs. And I (of course) play stuff that my kids find laughable at best.  read more »

I'm feeling a bit miffed today, as I have just discovered that one of my fellow bloggers has given my email address out to spammers. How rude!  read more »

You're probably expecting a lovely little anecdote about my daughter's first cellphone. Nope, sorry. My kids won't have cellphones until they're old enough to know not to use them.  read more »

I was originally going to title this post "the perfect toy". After all, it's something that all kids *love* to play with. It doesn't need batteries. It's see-through, waterproof, inexpensive, and it's shock resistant. Unfortunately, this morning I was made painfully aware that it is also a bit on the heavy side and much more effective than our bedside alarm clock - as long as you don't mind your three-year-old waking you up by crushing the bridge of your nose.  read more »

I'm going on two weeks of being sick now. My mother is convinced that I need to go see a doctor, but I sense that I just need more sleep. It's a true catch 22, actually. Feeling like crap (and it is especially worse at night) means that I don't get much sleep, but I need *extra* sleep to get over this cold, right?  read more »