Grace's First Birthday Party!

Grace is ONE!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRACIE LOO!

Her 1st birthday celebration was Sunday. We planned to have the shin-dig outside in the backyard, with bubbles, balloons, chalk, water balloons... but thank you Miss Mother Nature for deciding that you would rather us have it inside.

Grace was such doll, she toddled around visiting everyone and showing them how cute she was with her sprout of hair on top of her head. Her BIG sister had a blast singing Happy Birthday and helping to open presents. Both, Grace and Ava had friends attend and they had a great time. What an enjoyable and memorable day!

Suffocation anyone?

I was online ordering cute little pink bunny car seat strap covers, and I noticed this suffocation contraption for sale.

What kind of sick idea is this??

Where do you live where you actually need one of these things? Iceland? Why not just grab an H-E-B plastic bag out of your pantry and put your infant inside? He will suffocate either way! What happens if you turn away for one millisecond, and little Johnny decides to shift his head a fraction of an inch to the right? or left. He's done! No more air for little Johnny. This thing is hilarious. If you are in need of keeping your kiddie warm/dry, PUT EXTRA CLOTHES ON THE CHILD or A RAINCOAT.

5 Years as MR. & MRS.

Saturday was our 5 year wedding anniversary. I really cannot believe it's been 5 years, seems like yesterday we were standing at the alter gazing into each others' eyes and saying our I DO's. I'm sappy this morning. Maybe it's the quiet time I'm experiencing right now, as both girls are busy and I have a moment to get away and sip my creamy coffee in private. And not have to re-warm it a dozen times before I'm finished with the first cup. That's a rarity. Right now I'm listening to occasional giggling and hands slapping on a coffee table. I'll take it!

Okay, so Saturday was our big anny. In the next week or two, we are taking an overnight trip to relax with just one another and do... n.o.t.h.i.n.g. Except enjoy each other's company, maybe take a, CAN I EVEN TYPE IT? A nap. Just chill out, relax and have a good time, without two toddlers running circles around us. By Golly, what will we do with ourselves?!

I keep blabbing. Onto Saturday night. We decided to try a sort of new sushi restaurant in the Arboretum, Kenobi. Kenobi used to be Dan McKlusky's back in the day and that is where Terry and I had our first date! 9 years ago. I remember what he wore and what we ate. Beautiful memories. :) No more blabbing. Annemarie moved into a new place last week, and since we are never out and about without the our children, we wanted to check it out before dinner. We arrived and scoped out the new casa, Toni was there and her and Annemarie were planning on dining at the same restaurant! We decided to all go together! They were there to celebrate our big day 5 years ago, and why not?! Terry and I can have romance and private talk at a bazillion places besides a table in a restaurant, so that was that. We had a great time, tons of laughs, as always, and tons of pictures. Both Annemarie and Toni ordered me and T an 'anniversary dessert' which both arrived at separate times and one with a sparkler! Fun! The sushi was wonderful (we still can't find another place that tops Mikado for our sushi desires, but this place was a close 2nd.) Good times, happy celebrations all around!

Here are some pics-n-such:

The drinks were delicious, as you can tell...

Tag

I was tagged by Annemarie... I am to list seven random things about myself and then tag seven other people.

I never participate in these things, but since Ava is eating lunch and Grace is snoring, I will bore you with 7 useless facts about Kara Loo.

RULES: 1. Link to the person that tagged you and leave a comment on their blog, so that their readers can visit yours. Her name is linked above. 2. Post the rules on your blog. 3. Share 7 Random facts about yourself on your blog. 4. Tag 7 random people at the bottom of your post, linking to their blog.

Useless fact #1: I weighed less than 3 lbs. when I was born.
Useless fact #2: My ultimate fear: Roaches. Roaches with wings.
Useless fact #3: I secretly love it when Grace is whiny and forces me to hold her.
Useless fact #4: My first car was a 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra.
Useless fact #5: I enjoy sarcasm.
Useless fact #6: Prison terrifies me. Please Lord don't ever send me to prison.
Useless fact #7: For six months in middle school, I spoke only in a British accent.

Wow, those tidbits of information are juicy and thrilling! What are you going to do with yourself now that you've had a peek deep into the real Kara. I hope you can continue on with your day and not constantly think of me. I wish you luck.

I hate to be the lemon in your sweet fruit salad, but I do not wish to follow Rule #4.

Can I screw something, puhleeze?!

Terry and I were putting a piece of furniture together, using screws. He was doing all the work and it looked fun and I asked if I could screw a screw in, because he never lets me.

His response: "Just let me do it. I've been screwing things in longer than you've been screwing things up."

We both laughed out loud and continued screwing.

I love him, he cracks me up.

How do YOU say it?

Ava was in her bedroom, with the door shut (her new favorite thing) cutting orange play-doh at her table. I wandered back to her room a few times to listen at the door, and kept hearing her say the same thing over...and over... and over again.

Take a listen.

Bad Boys...Bad Boys

Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? This show is priceless. Everyone has seen at least one episode, and I'm not embarrassed to admit, Terry and I have probably seen every single one. How can you not enjoy watching dirty, drunk, mullet sporting hillbillies, in beer and sweat stained wife beaters get tackled then arrested? We LOVE it. Don't judge.

If you've ever seen Mystery Science Theater 3000, you know it's about ad libbing words for the characters and making fun of bad movies. Well, we do that with Cops. No, we don't watch it on mute or anything, but Terry and I banter back and forth with what we think these hillbillies are saying and we're flipping hysterical. We crack up.

Last night was no exception. Earlier this week I set our DVR to record some episodes that happened to be on between 3-5 am. We laid in bed last night and pressed play. OMG! I don't even know where to start with what was wrong (great) with this Cops episode. Usually, it's the bad guys we poke fun at, but in this particular one, it was the cops themselves that we berated and ridiculed.

First of all, here's Bubba. The opening scene starts with him driving an early 80's model cop car. Right then and there we knew this would be great. This episode took place in Hoboken, NJ. Oh God, it just gets better and better. Evidently, a sweaty fat guy went into a liquor store and tried to pass a $50 counterfeit bill off as real. The sweaty fat guy bolted when the owner figured it out. Bubba and the officers were taking information from the store owner, who all, by the way, had beautiful mustaches and wore HUGE tinted glasses. The officers used walkie talkies the size of Velveeta blocks, they had the long, flimsy antenna wire too. How old is this crap! Terry and I were having trouble breathing listening to how these people talked, and how Bubba told the sweaty fat guy: "We need you to come down to headquarters." HEADQUARTERS?" Who says that!

Meet Elayne. She had us rolling. Look at her cop hat. WTH? Who wears hats like that? It's not even on her head! It's hovering over her head. Guess she's saving her pony tail from becoming flattened? Look at how much air is in between the bottom of the hat and the top. Love it.

Set your DVR to G4, Channel 239 at 3 a.m. sit back and enjoy.

Toodles.

Bullets are fun

6 things that may or may not be interesting that have happened lately:

• the discovery of my new favorite drink: Vodka pineapple. YUM-O.
• the acceptance that my left big toe will soon be without a nail. (Oh shut up. It can be a common occurrence. It doesn't make me a dirty person.)
• the doctor removal of a tiny scrunched up purple rubber band from inside Ava's ear canal.
• the tan in a bottle I know and use is now empty, and of course, they improved (replaced) it with a new formula, and that formula sucks.
• had a meltdown when a certain someone used all the milk without telling me ~ when I poured a bowl of my beloved cereal, I was left with no other option than to sulk for 2 hours.
• made a fool of myself while reading aloud the label on a bottle of tonic water.

I could go on and on, but I must leave to get Ava from pre-school... and Grace might be eating kitty litter.

Toodles.

Good Night and Good Luck, Melissa

Saturday night, the girlie's got together and went out for dinner and dancing. Our friend Melissa is moving to Minneapolis in a couple of weeks and we had one last 'hoorah' out on the town to send her off right. We always have a blast, laughing, catching up, making jokes, dancing, and of course... drinking. I met Melissa a couple of years ago, and we hit it off right away. She cracks me up, is super sweet, and is always up for anything. We started the evening with dinner at Cantina Laredo on W. 3rd Street. Being born and raised in Austin, I love me some good Mexican food. This restaurant carried a very fun and lively vibe, we had a wonderful time. We helped to provide more of the fun and lively vibe by adding some loud laughing and hysterical story-telling. Even though there was a slight debacle with a certain glass of ice cold water, we ended up with a free gigantic piece of chocolate cake that fed all 6 of us, so it worked itself out. Everything was lip smacking good. We all enjoyed our meals, and drinks. Oh my, the drinks. All of us had margaritas and by the time we were finished, we were definitely ready to par-tay. We were fat-n-happy, and it was time to find some good music and shakitty-shake our boo-tays.



Toni and Laura had to leave after dinner :( so it was Melissa, Annemarie, myself and Jill that ventured out to find some fun. The night was filled with music, dancing and laughs!

Thanks for the fun Mel! Take care!

Special delivery

I love technology.
But not as much as you, you see.
But I still love technology.
Always and Forever.

Look what arrived yesterday! (Not the cat with the gigantic head, the box behind cat)

By golly, it's our new monitor!

Oh, and look! Here is a picture I took of Joey who happened to be lounging directly in front of the new monitor. Oh dear, it seems I got some of the monitor in the picture as well. Silly me.

Word of the Day

What's the word of the day today? QUEASY

Have you all been to Bush's chicken? I stopped by there to grab a quick and healthy (ha) lunch for me and Ava loo. I got my usual - 2 pc. dark meat meal, It was my first time at Bush's but whatever the chicken serving locale, I always get the 2 pc. dark meat meal. That's my thing. I came home and divvied up Ava's portion and my portion. Sat down and bit right into my piping hot chicken leg. I was startled when just as my teeth pierced the meat, scalding hot chicken liquid shot right onto the middle of my forehead, and into, YES INTO my right eye. Stunned, and trying to blink out the boiling hot chicken liquid I suddenly became QUEASY. There's the word of the day, used in a sentence for you. I became QUEASY because shortly after I wiped off my forehead and blotted my eyeball, I realized that a chicken's jugular vein must be located in its leg. This really disgustingly thick blue vein was dangling from the bone and hot chicken liquid was continuing to drizzle out of it. Say it with me: Queasy.

I've eaten my share of fried chicken, but never have I come across a chicken vein so large and totally I don't even want to continue describing it because that's just dirty.

Sorry if you were eating lunch.

Perhaps a bowl of Frosted Flakes will set me right again.

Someone's at the door for you Honey!

Ok. So. One quick fact about the workings of our marriage: We keep it light hearted and funny, most of the time. One of the things Terry and I do is ring our doorbell when the other does something really stupid, or idiotic, those are the same thing, but you get my drift. As if to say "DING DONG, YOU IDIOT, LOOK WHAT YOU DID, HOW STUPID AND RETARDED AND OMG YOU ARE A LOSER!" That game makes us happy. Aren't we sweet?

Here's an example ~ to give you an idea: It was dinner time and I looked in the cabinet next to the stove for the salt and pepper to season our meals. If any of you Toni, you know that the salt and pepper belong together at all times, they are not to be separated. Ever. Well, we agree and that holds true most of the time in our house, but holy cow, when I opened the cabinet, Salt and Pepper were not present. They were absent. I glanced around the kitchen, nope, not on the counter, not on the table, what the frick? Where could they be hiding? I forget about finding Salt and Pepper and decide to focus on something more important like making Ava dinner. I grab a cup from the cabinet and reach for the milk off the top shelf in the fridge. Good God, instead seeing the milk, I see the Salt and Pepper sitting next to the milk. I quickly grabbed them out of the fridge and shut the door. Turning around slowly, with them hidden by my shirt, I was praying Terry wasn't watching me. OH DAMN. There he was with that damn smirk on his face ~ He'd seen the whole thing. He rolled his eyes and went running for the doorbell. DING FRICKEN DONG. I'm an idiot with no brain. Who puts the Salt and Pepper in the fridge? (that's a whole other story, evidently, Terry thinks my brain melted when I gave birth the first time and to his defense, I do some pretty dingy things now and then. Most new moms will agree that happens, it's called Baby Brain. The baby took my brain.)

That is the gist of why we ring-a-ling the doorbell on each other. It's fun. To us. We are weird, don't hate.

The point of this whole thing: Terry came home from work yesterday and told me the most EMBARRASSING story of all time. He did something so flipping retarded and unbelievable, and OMG I totally ran to the door and DING DONGED his ass, then ran to the computer to BLOG ALL ABOUT IT. He knew where I was headed, and basically tackled me in the hallway and swore me to secrecy... I'm sure he's been sweating thru this whole post wondering if I have the balls to tell his 'TOTALLY EMBARRASSING, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DID THAT' story. Honey, I love you and I will keep it a secret. Until me and the girls go out this Saturday night and I have two drinks, then it just might slip out.

Q & A for today

Question: How can you not love 15 bean soup!? There are 15 amazingly unique beans to savor and enjoy in every delicious serving! I mean come on!

I will give you my personal answer to this question: I CAN'T.

I simply cannot enjoy this soup knowing there is one bean in particular that I'm sure all of the other beans hate having to be associated with. The terribly disgusting and ugly white chickpea. Why is this damn bean amongst all others in this package? Nobody enjoys crunchy, ugly, starchy, gritty beans! Seriously!

Dear HamBeen's Corporation:

Effective immediately: Take the collection of dirty white chick peas out of your Hurst 15 Bean Soup package and re-name it 14 Bean Soup. More people will purchase your product if you do that. I made this soup last night and just finished a bowl for lunch, and what do you know... there were 7 dirty, crunchy, ugly, gritty little useless white chick peas at the bottom of my bowl. What's with the insides of these things anyway? What you should do is include an individually wrapped toothbrush inside the package, because now I am left with gross gritty residue in my mouth after attempting to chew the stupid things. I dumped my bowl down my kitchen sink and I swear they dulled my garbage disposal. How do they not soften when you boil them for 3 hours for God's sake?

Dirty bean.

Me and Terry: 5 years of marital bliss!

What else can I say? Bliss is an accurate description even though it sounds ultra-cliche. We are in lub and will be celebrating our 5th anniversary at the end of the month. We have so much fun together and every single day is filled with hilarity. Terry literally does anything and everything to make me smile, and I lub him to bits.

Enough with the barfy love stuff. That's personal anyway so stop intruding upon my personal thoughts...

Ok. Onto Annemarie. AP is what she is called by most, but I call her Annemarie. It's my decision. I can go against the norm and call her what I wish. Annemarie is the bestest. If bestest were a word... it would describe her. She has some major talent with photography and how lucky were we to have her shoot us for some fun, flirty, funky pictures to celebrate and remember our milestone?!

We started near SOCO and the fun began. She took a plethora of pictures, WAY too many to post.

Here are my favorite 20!










































*Click here to view Annemarie's favorite 20 from our fun filled morning :)