Life and stuff

Some days I feel like I'm having an outer body experience and watching life past by. I'm not sure where the days go, nor can I say what we did on those days. So, I'm going to sum up some latest and greatest happenings around the Bell household.

Jake - Started 4th grade. Since then he has received his green belt in martial arts and is officially considered a 'high belt'. He will spend the next 3 months practicing to test with his martial arts sticks (yeah, I'm sure there's a name, but I don't know what they are called). Also, Jake joined the elementary school orchestra. For the school year he and his buddy are the only two cello players the school has. Apparently, we didn't get the memo that cellos are not allowed on the bus and we are locked into this rental contract, so we are making do. This should be interesting. Hopefully, we have more luck with the cello than we did with the guitar. When Jake isn't at martial arts or thinking about practicing his cello, he's in the chess club and also is part of the school's flag football team. Yes, there is homework nightly that has to get done. Our week is pretty packed with Jake's stuff.

Andy - Um, right now Andy is all things Transformers. His little world revolves around transformers. Somewhere in there we are trying to fit in the alphabet and writing (he knows how to count and all this colors). Andy refuses to learn to write with a pencil, marker, pen, crayon, etc. A work in progress. He's in his happy little world and we love a 3 yr old mind. I can't believe his 4th birthday is quickly approaching next month and doesn't seem like it should be here already. They grow up so fast (and doesn't help this one is quite a little momma's boy).

Steve and I - I think I summed it up in last two paragraphs. Oh, yeah, and that full time gig we have during the day called jobs. For 11 hours Mon - Fri Steve and I work at intellectually demanding jobs so you can only imagine a few things 1) how does our house get cleaned, 2) when do we get things done, and 3) how? Well, we have Saturday and Sunday the two fastest days out of the entire week. Nothing gets done during the weekday (I highly discourage dropping by), so we can spend what little time we have with our kids. A typical conversation with either Steve or I is "Yep, totally busy - that's it." But I think we live the lives of majority of the folks out there, so we are not unique... just busy. So, I could have written 'Steven and I - totally busy.' :) We recently had date night and that was pretty darn awesome. We had a lovely dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House followed by the musical "Wicked" then a little casino time before calling it an evening (or early morning, we got in around 2am). We love our musicals and "Wicked" was pretty darn spectacular. What a wonderful story of how one becomes wicked/evil - is it self inflicted or is it your environment? Well, that's a whole philosophical blog, so I'll just stop here.