This past football weekend

We had some friends over since we had worked so hard on the living room. We cooked hot dogs and watched football all day. We started out watching the Alabama football game, well it was boring. Bama beat the crap out of Arkansas. We all hung out outside with the kids, playing with them and cooking the food on the grill. We still had football games on, but nothing really important. Then it came time for the LSU/AU game. Well my husband is a big LSU fan but most of the friends that we had over are AU fans. I am a true Bama fan, but cheer for LSU when not playing Bama. So there sits me and husband, the LSU fans with about 4-5 AU fans. As the game went on, the score keeps changing, AU then LSU, it was a game that kept me on the edge of the couch. Then when LSU scored the final touchdown, we knew the game was pretty much over. The AU fans in the house got quiet, one even walked out. We had a blast having our close friends over but that game was intense. I am now happy that they game is over with and we don't have to go through that for another year. I am really nervous about the Bama/LSU game, cause that really causes tension in our house. Last year was really rough during the LSU/Bama game, me and hubby didn't talk for the rest of the night. Hopefully I will not get mad like that again, because Bama will win. I am also worried about this weekends game, Bama/Georgia. I will probably be sitting on the edge of my seat for that game too, but I can't wait either. So I hope that everyone has a great football weekend, cause there will be a bunch of great games on. I wish that today was Friday and the work week would be over. Just one more day. ROLL TIDE and have a great rest of the week and weekend.

The final look...

This is a picture of the old big screen tv that we use to have. Of course, Haylee being in front posing for the camera was cuter. But I wanted to show you the before project.










Here is our new tv sitting on top of the old tv. We gutted the inside and made it a DVD case. The walls are a new color in this pick and the trim work is done. We were in the process of wondering what color to paint the ceiling.










I loved the way that everything came out, we worked so hard and long on this project.
















This is the final look of our living room. This is my favorite picture. It shows the fresh new paint on the ceiling, walls, and trim. It also shows the new paint job on the old tv casing. It was solid brown and we painted the inset black.




I am so proud of our new living room. We have been looking at the same living room for over 7 years. The color before was just tan with white trim. Now we have a completely different look. We love the brown trim, was questionable about it, but love it now. We still have some work to do on the floors. That is our next project. We have hardwood floors, we are wanting to sand them and stain them. There is so much stuff that has built up on our pretty floors, they don't look as pretty as they use to. But after we do our floors, our next mission is Shelby and Haylee's room. They have outgrown their room and so we are moving on to a new color. It is hard to decide on a color that they both agree on, but I think we have finally come to a final color, actually many colors. There are a lot of different colors that they want, they want some kind of design on the wall. I hope that I can do it the way that they want, because I am not artistic at all. Well I just wanted to show why I have not blogged in awhile and let everyone see the final look of our pretty living room.

TOO FREAKIN CUTE

I just thought this was too cute and had to post this pic for everyone to see. Haylee was looking on the front porch and started laughing. I asked her what was so funny and she told me to come look at the little kitten. It is amazing how they can sleep anywhere.

My sister

Not very many people know that I have a sister that is only 7 1/2 years older than me. Our family has been through a lot with my sister and her medical background. My sister started out having cervical cancer when she was pregnant with my youngest nephew. After having him, she had a full hysterectomy to get rid of everything. Then she found out she had thyroid cancer and had to have her thyroid removed. She has had colon cancer numerous times and has went through chemo with it. Now we have been informed that she has cancer on her liver. She is not a drinker or smoker. She is a very healthy person when it comes to her habits. So now she has to have surgery tomorrow where they are wanting to remove at least 1/3 of her liver, maybe 1/2 of her liver.
I have somewhat got use to the fact that my sister has a lot of medical problems. We have dealt with all of her cancer and getting her better and we have also dealt with her having narcolepsy. She has custody of her two youngest sons, which are 7 and 8 years old. They know that she is having surgery but they don't know what she is having done. They will be spending the weekend with their father and then will be staying at my mom's until she gets better.
I do love my sister and hope that everything turns out ok. Me and my sister have had our share of problems, believe me. I have somewhat learned to get pass everything and move onto the future.
I just needed to get some things off my chest about having to deal with my sister and her medical problems. Please keep my family in your prayers and help us get through this.

Our foozball Saturday

I have just found out that Alabama's game will not be on a regular channel next week and am very upset. I will get to watch the LSU and AU game next Saturday on our new tv in HD, but it is not the same when I am a full blown AL fan. I have been waiting patiently for a game to come on tv, because they have not really played anyone since Clemson, but I consider Arkansas a well known team and think it should be on tv. I had to rant about that for a minute to get it out of my system until next weekend...lol.
Now the AU game was a joke to me. AU beat MSU by 1 point. That is just something to me. I thought they would have come ahead by way more than 1 point. You know that Tubbie is going to be raising some hell with those boys this week in practice. They have LSU to play next week, so they better get ready. Jason is a LSU fan and so that is who I will be cheering for next weekend until they play Bama. I know I probably just made some people second guess me because I said that I will be cheering for LSU, but it is on when LSU plays Bama.
I hope everyone has a good weekend. Oh and gotta watch the race tomorrow, it is the first race for the Chase.
Sorry, my sports fan just came out a little... :)

What is wrong with these kids these days?

Ok, I was on the bus this afternoon. The route was going ok, better than the other days this week. Well I have my hyper, loud kids in the front seats. Well I have decided after today that I cannot sit them all together. They like playing and falling out of the seat and whatever else comes to mind. So I finally decided to separate one of them from the other two. So I moved him to the seat behind him to see how that would work out. Well he continued to fall out of the seat and bother other students around him. Well our school assistant principal has made a deal with the kids that if they are good for the entire week, then they get to get in a space bounce for free for 15 minutes. Most of the kids are very excited about that. Well this one student said that he didn't get in it on Wednesday and he will not be able to get in it on this coming up Wednesday. I just plainly asked him, "What is wrong with you? You know the difference between right and wrong, why can't you act right?" His response to me was "I am ADD!" Why are parents telling these kids that is the reason that they are acting the way that they do. My husband has ADHD and I have a mild case of it. Neither one of us are on meds for it. Shelby has been recently diagnosed with it and she is not on meds. She knows the difference between right and wrong and knows that we will beat her butt if she doesn't act right.
That just really urks me to know that kids are using this as an excuse to try to get out of trouble. Instead of saying "I am doing wrong and I admit it" they want to blame it on the ADD or ADHD. That is just crazy to me. I do understand that some kids have to have their meds or they are trouble and a half. But this kid takes meds! I hope that you see where I am coming from when I say this. I say this because I do have children, one of which has been diagnosed. But when she gets in trouble, she will tell everything under the moon but not that she has ADHD. And also nowadays, it seems like everyone has some kind of ADHD. The doctors diagnose most children that act out with ADHD. It is like it is a safety net for some parents. I hope that I don't offend anyone with this post, but it is just something that really bothered me this afternoon on the bus. I just had to get some things off my chest. Hope everyone finds the humor in this while also finding the sadness in it. Instead of parents raising their children, they depend on medicine.

The dentist...

Me and Shelby just got home from the dentist where she had to have a stainless steel cap put on one of her molars. My fear has continued on from me when I was her exact age. Poor child, she has my teeth and has to go through the same things that I had to. She had to have teeth pulled and we are now saving up money for her to have braces in a few years.

When I was her age, I had to have 4 teeth pulled in order to make room for more teeth to come in. The dentist that I had was the worst dentist that any child could ever have. I was very nervous about having anything big done like that and he made it worse. He stood there and screamed at me and told me that I was going to do what he said. I was in tears, my parents were no where to be found. I ended up getting up out of the chair and screaming for my mother. She heard me and came back there and I told her what happened, she gave that guy a piece of her mind. My mom said words that I had never heard her say before. Long story, short, we found a different dentist and everything went great.

Now to Shelby, she started having problems with her teeth when she was 1 1/2 years old. She had her first dental surgery when she was 2 years old. She had to have stainless steel caps put on her 4 front top teeth, with the white coating. Well I just so happen to find the second worse dentist out there for my daughter. He did not feel like it was necessary to calm the child before doing anything. It turned out that she hated going to the dentist. If she even thought that she was going to the dentist, she would shut down on us and would not do anything. Well we got lucky about a year ago and found the perfect dentist. She loves this dentist. Everything that he has done to her, she has enjoyed. He makes going to the dentist fun for her and she loves that and so do I.

But as I sit there watching Shelby in the chair getting her teeth worked on, I can't help to think back to all the bad experiences that I have had in the past. I thought about my bad past and even the bad past that we had with her first dentist. I also sat there thinking about how big my baby has got. She is about to be 7 years old and I just don't know where the time went. I am very happy to have found this dentist and I am glad that Shelby likes him so much.

The picture above is of her trying to smile after her dental work. Her bottom lip is still numb and she is tired too. You can't even see the cap, it is so far back.

Thinking out loud...

As most of my friends know, I think a lot, but mostly to myself. I have never been real good at expressing myself to others. Usually when I try to express myself, people get the wrong impression of me. Most people think of me as a harsh person, but I am just a honest person. If you don't want to know the truth then don't ask me. I have learned that it is better to be a honest person than to lie all the time. I lived a lie for a long time and couldn't take it anymore.

I was married right out of high school to my high school sweetheart. We were together for 4 years before we got married, so we figured that it was meant to be. Little did we know, we were too young to make the decision and we were not meant to last. Me and my ex-husband, Kevin, moved to El Paso Texas in the middle of June because he was in the Army and that is where he was stationed. That place was awful. I have never felt so alone in my life. I went there as a young wife with no friends and no family near me. I have always been very close to my family and this was a HUGE test for me to be so far away. Well me and Kevin were doing good for the first little while, we finally got pregnant after trying for 6 months. We were blessed with a beautiful baby girl, Kourtney Brooke', she was perfect in every possible way.
We brought her home and she was everything that a mother could dream of. She was not a baby that fussed a lot, only when she really needed something, which was never. She slept through the night at a week old. I would go in her room and wake her up just to make sure that she was ok. You know when you are a very young mother, I was 18, that there are so many fears. You learn as you get older that those fears are just fears and there are ways to prevent them from happening. She was beautiful, she had blue eyes, brown hair and was always smiling. Me and Kevin had never been happier.
Well the nightmare soon came true. I worked nights, so that I could be home with Kourtney during the day while Kevin was at work. Well one Saturday morning, I worked extremely late, came home at 4 am. It was Kevin's day to have to get up with Kourtney, so I decided to work late to make some extra money. Well I woke up a little after 11 am to find my daughter laying in the floor with a toy launched down her throat. It was the worst thing that any mother will see. I went and woke up Kevin, since he was a medic, he got the toy out and started CPR. I had already called 911, they were there extremely fast. I was thinking the entire time that this was a nightmare and that I was going to wake up any moment now. I kept going through movements thinking this. We went to the hospital waiting patiently as the doctors work on her and try to get her back for us to live our happy life with. I got sick, the sickest I have ever been. I knew something was wrong once I started getting sick. Not long after that the doctor came out to tell us that she was gone. My 5 month old baby girl was gone. I didn't know how to react. I told him that he was wrong, he needed to go back and work on her some more, that I know she is alive. He told me that they brought her back one time, but couldn't keep her stable. They worked on her 5 hours. I thought with how long they worked on her then she was going to be ok.
Then it was time to call my parents and tell them what had happened. They didn't believe me, I had to get Kevin to tell them again for them to believe me. Once they realized what had happened, they were in a state of shock. I was in Texas with my daughter dead and my family in Alabama. I didn't know what I was going to do. This was on a Saturday and we were not able to really do anything until Monday. We had to get through the weekend thinking about everything and dreading the trip back to Alabama to face everyone. I was so ready to come home and thinking that things would go away. I was wrong. We finally got everything arranged with the military for us to be able to leave and come home. We had to make arrangements for Kourtney to be flown to Alabama also. It was the longest flight that I have ever been on. It only took about 4-5 hours, but it seemed so much longer. Me and Kevin both tried to get some sleep but was not successful. We finally landed and our families were there waiting on us. I went straight to my dad and basically collapsed in his arms. As the week went on, it was like I was numb and couldn't feel anything.
We planned the funeral and went through with everything. So many people showed up at the funeral, most of the people I don't even remember talking to that night. I don't remember that much about any of it, other than the fact that I pulled up a chair next to Kourtney and sat there until they told us we had to leave. Once everything was over, I talked with Kevin and told him that I couldn't go back yet. He went back to El Paso without me and moved everything out of the apartment that we were living in. I told him that I could not go back to that apartment. So he done all of that before I would go back. Once I did finally go back, we looked for another apartment and tried to move on with our lives. That was nearly impossible. Nothing was ever the same again. The way I felt about him, the way that I looked at him, the way that I lived my life. I knew then that it was not going to work between me and him. I loved Kevin and a part of me still does, but I was not in love with him anymore. Every time I looked at him, I saw Kourtney and it made me angry to even look at him.
I then came back to my home, where I was meant to be. It took me and Kevin forever to get divorced but once we did, it was like a weight was lifted off of me. I never thought in my life that by the age of 19 that I would be divorced and had a child die. I learned a lot from those experiences that I had. I learned that life is something precious that is a gift to us, we should not take advantage of it. We should love our life and love the life that we live.
I started out this day reading about other peoples lives and was very interested in knowing how they got to where they are now. This is a part of my life to let you know why I am the way that I am. I have 2 beautiful girls now and they are my life. I live my life to make them happy. They get on my nerves sometimes, but that is just children in general. I know that kids will be kids and there are times that I just let a lot of things go with them because I want them to enjoy what life they have also. I hope that I did not bore anyone with my story or made anyone upset. That was not my purpose, my purpose was to let you know what I think about A LOT. There is not a day that goes by that Kourtney is not in my mind. Thinking of her reflects on what I do that day. Some days I am down about everything and then some days I am happy that I was able to meet her, even if it was just 5 months, that is 5 months that I will never forget. I will be probably posting more stories about Kourtney and what she meant to me. I hope that everyone looks at their children and lets them know how much they love them everyday, never miss a day!!!

Shelby is her father!!!

We were all sitting down to eat supper and was catching up on the day. Well Shelby told us that she had a dollar. Me and Jason both asked where did she get the dollar from. Well Jason's daughter then tells us that she sold a .35 bag of chips for $1 on the school bus. Now I told her that this was wrong, but then in the same breathe me and Jason start laughing. Jason said that is his daughter "the shark". Now this is not something that I would have ever thought of my child doing, much less at 6 years old. I guess that tells me what the future will bring with her.

How do I start this out???

I have had a very busy day with everything that has been going on today. I started out my day with running late to go drive the school bus this morning. Then I had to meet my mom at the school with my daughter because it was "Grandparents Day". I met with them and took both my children to the book fair and bought them some books. My oldest child is in the 1st grade, please pray for me... So far right now everything is going ok, most of the time. She has came home with some marks on her behavior chart a few days, but has been doing better at school. But when she comes home, that is a total different story. I talked to her teacher today and she told me that everything is going good with Shelby, that it will just take some work. She is not wanting to learn her sight words, at home. As of right now, I am so fed up with trying to help her that it is an ongoing battle that I am losing. I also have a 3 year old that is so interested in learning everything that she possibly can and it drives Shelby crazy when she watches and wants to know what she is doing. I understand where Shelby is coming from when she wants Haylee to leave her alone, but then again it is easier to teach the same thing to two children instead of teaching it two times. I am slowly working on my patience. I am working on getting certified so I can sub at the Elementary school and I am also thinking about changing my degree to Education. I can deal with other children better than my own, it is like my own children know how far they can push me and push as far as they possibly can before I explode.
But anyways, back to my day. I had to go for a MRI today. This was the first MRI that I have had since I was 7 years old. The MRI that I had when I was 7 was awful, I screamed and cried. This time, I was nervous as hell. I went in there with the idea of something completely different than what happened. I was lucky and got the open MRI. I think it went fairly well, I could have fell asleep if there wasn't so much noise. I am hoping that they can find something out with my neck and I hope that it is not anything too bad. I am on so many different meds right now and I hate taking meds. It was a fast and painless procedure, those I can deal with.
I then came home and had to get ready to drive the school bus this afternoon. I was really dreading driving the bus because it was so HOT outside. But I got on the bus and got to the school and visited with some teachers. Then the bell rang, all the children come running out to the bus. They were louder than normal and I could tell this was going to be a rough afternoon. Well the high school students got on the bus and were extremely loud also. My route is the longest route at Vincent, it runs into Vandiver and Sterrett. Almost every afternoon, we have to sit at the RR tracks for longer than we should because the students do not want to shut their mouths long enough for me to listen for a train. Well today was the longest that we have ever had to sit this year. They were so bad that an Kindergarten student stood up and told them to BE QUIET, RR TRACKS! That is bad when a Kindergarten knows the rules better than a high school student. Well the route was going ok, just really loud. Then all of a sudden I run into rain, thunder and lightening. I actually went towards a funnel cloud, or at least that is what I thought it was. I rushed the kids off the bus and went on my way. I did not want to stick around there and see what it was. I finished my route and came my butt home before I had to deal with anymore bad weather in a bus.
Now I am home with two children that do not want to get along and dont want to listen to anything I am saying. So as I close this, please pray for me and my children because I really don't know what this night will bring. My hubby is on his way home, so he can take over when he gets home.