GET RICH QUICK

So, with the holidays approaching and all, I figured I'd help y'all out with how to make some easy money:

Take it from your kids.  Take all of it.

The Great Taco Tasting

I'm going to tell you one of the more awesome things I have done since I've graced you with my presence on this earth: I starved myself for a week and then went to Taco Bell.

Dangerous Marine Life

We went to the beach two and a half months ago.  This is what I remember of it.

Kids Eating Sandwiches

We went to the mountains in Virginia over our summer track-out to have a reunion with Matt's extended family before settling down to eat and burn anything that was semi-flammable.  

Girls' Weekend

I see lots of people post about how they are desperate for a girls' weekend out of town.  The thought of going to the beach for a weekend with my girlfriends while we do nothing but refill our beer coozies in between eating copious amounts of nachos makes me go, "Naw, that's for wussies.  Let's go to West Virginia so we can go hike 20.7 miles in the mud and while we're at it, let's see how many animals we can kill with my van.  Now THAT's a girls' weekend.  As long as there are gnats.  Don't forget the gnats."

The very last preschool payment

...can now go directly to Duke!

Or more likely it went directly to the preschool and now we are free to redirect funds to the hospital.  But you get the point.  My Taco Bell budget may have slightly increased as well.

You should be dancing

...because you'd be burning more calories than you are right now on your internet device.

Unless you are pinning low-fat recipes and 30-day squat challenges.  Go on with your bad self.

Ten steps to a kick-ass 90th birthday party:

1.  Assemble family members around birthday girl.  Get a photographer to follow you around.

Happee Birthdae, Natulee

There's not much I can't do with a free font and the never-ending pile of card stock leftover from Daniel's second birthday.

Happy Birdday, Dan

I like the tradition of making your kids make their own birthday desserts.  It doesn't have to be cake- you can stick a candle in most anything.  Unless they want birthday soup for dessert, in which case you'd have to float some tea lights in it.

Benjy

Last month I was totally in the mood to not get up early in the morning and tackle a long-ass hike but I was kind of in the mood to get up early in the morning and watch other people tackle a long-ass hike, so I got in my van and spent a weekend volunteering at an Ultimate Hike.  It was a lot easier than actually fundraising and hiking.  Plus, I got to turn off the Kidz Bop on the way down and listened to all the horrible CDs I bought in high school that I believed to be the epitome of good music but turns out to be 80% horrible.  And I screamed that 80% at the top of my lungs BECAUSE I COULD.  The other 20% I sang in my Aaron Neville voice.  I know, you're disappointed you weren't riding shotgun.  You should be.  I AM GOOD.

more flotsam, more jetsam

One of our favorite people decided to shave her head at one of our favorite breweries for one of our favorite charities so it was a no-brainer that we were going.  Beer + baldies = I'm totally reaching into my wallet and digging out whatever I haven't already spent on Taco Bell to whoever has their had outstretched.

flotsam and jetsam

Things have been happening here day and night, night and day.  Day and day and night and day, but mostly day because that's when stuff happens.  Except when you get up in the middle of the night because you really shouldn't have eaten that questionable taco that had been left out for an indeterminate amount of time.

Maturing Gracefully

So, lots of times I think to myself, Am I the only one of my friends who feels like they are still not grown up? but sometimes I think this out loud and then I get a Mommy, who are you talking to? response.  I've never been above talking to myself; I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you can't talk to yourself, who can you talk to?  But I'm totally just saying that to myself and myself keeps telling myself to stop repeating myself so often.

An Expensive Haircut

St. Baldrick's is one of my favoritest events because A) You get to be a rockstar and fund the cure for childhood cancers and 2) Beer.

I love you more than Taco Bell.

Life is busy, and I am lazy, so between those two is the reason I forgot to tell you that Eve had another check-up in January.  So, she had a check-up in January.

Check-ups are easy, it's just making sure no one wants to over-scan your kid that's the hard part.  Like, I'm all for being diligent, but when I say Just put it on our tab! all fun and fancy-free, I don't really mean that.  We are already in medical debt up to our eyeballs, and that's saying something because my eyeballs are even higher than most people because I'm really tall.  So, the hardest thing is convincing the ultrasound tech that no, I don't really think we need to have a chest x-ray since we're going to get a chest CT done in an hour.  It's already like an x-ray, but better.  I know this because I've seen the bills pictures.  I should be more scared of extra radiation, but isn't that like spitting in the ocean at this point?  Right now, I'm most scared of not having this paid off before the cyborg collection agents of the future thaw my cryogenically frozen body.

Save lives, lose weight!

So I've found the dopest way to lose weight.  And I mean dope like they meant it in 1992.

Boy-Pattern Baldness

A message from Daniel to each and every one of you reading this, unless you have already opened up your wallets, in which case we say THANKS FOR KEEPING IT REAL FOR THE BALD KIDS!:

The Final Countdown

So far in 2013, I have heard da-da-da-daaa...da-da-da-da...da-da-da-daaa...da-da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da-DA-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-DA-DA-DAAAAAAAA approximately ninety-four and a half times before 7:30 a.m.

Home Movies

So, I've had such a fantastically fun time reading hundreds of thousands of paragraphs in the whole A Game of Thrones series that I thought you all would enjoy reading hundreds of thousands of paragraphs, too.  I took a break between books 4 & 5 to bring you this ridiculously long post with much less fantasy and many more incomplete sentences that start with And.  And I included lots of movies for those of you who don't want to read the book.  There's enough here for you to take three good bathroom breaks with your smart phone.