lins.in.love: March 2012

It’s the end of the month again and I cant help but notice what a sorry excuse for a blogger Ive been. I have SO much rad stuff to do in my head, I just lack the disipline (and time not being a slave to two babies). So again, Im going to make a promise to be a better blogger. Mostly I think I need to stop doing so much planning about blogging and just WRITE. Whether its important or not, write about it. My goal is to blog every/every other day, or at least 3 times a week. Im also going to promise to make this blah blog a little more asthetically pleasing. Im such a noob at all this, but I promise yall, I’ll do my very best. Tonight for example Ive got an (extremely) image heavy post planned with some photos we took of the boys last week. Theyre pretty fantastic, so Im excited to share. So I’ll leave you with that, and hope that someone somewhere is getting something from this. If not, that’s cool too. I started this blog as a way to document and look back someday on this point in our lives, our growing boys, and the things that mattered to me at 26.… Theres more to come, promise!

xo, L

I FINALLY got around to uploading and editing all of our photos on the camera from our little Kansas vacation, and here they are! Along with the story of our incredible journey... (I'll do another post with our Instapics for the week)

We picked up the rental last Monday and decided that driving through the night would be the best option for driving ten and a half hours with an infant and toddler. We rented this FANTASTIC crossover, the 2012 Ford Edge, that was so roomy and comfortable and completely badass. We completely fell in love with this vehicle over the length of our trip. We’re seriously thinking of making it our next car this year sometime. Anyways, so we loaded up, ate dinner, bathed the kids and got them dressed for bed, then put them in their carseats with milk, and BAM- both passed out before we even got out of San Antonio. SUCCESS! … or so we thought. Cash ended up waking up when we were going through Dallas, half way through the drive and stayed away until 45 minutes before we arrived. He was good though, and quiet, so it wasn’t too bad. Luckily, when we got there, my sister Ashley was there waiting (the folks were at work) and took the boy, plus my nephew Ryder, so Ro and I could sleep. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening hanging out at the house and called it an early night. The next day, we got up and got all the kids bathed and dressed to go into Wichita to have all the grandboys’ pictures taken. My mom, sisters, nephew, and us met my brother and his family at the portrait studio, which was quite the experience with a four year old, 2 two year olds, and 2 four month olds. We got some pretty good shots, considering, and I’ll post them in another post. Afterwards, we all went out to eat at Applebees before heading back to the Eldo. Thursday we spent the day relaxing, and Ro and I left the kids at home with my mom and sister and drove into town to explore. El Dorado has the most adorable bunch of houses, and we love to just cruise up and down the streets and scope them all out. First we hit up Braums for some UH-MAZING single dip cones (for only $1.30!!!!!), then spent the next few hours creeping around and taking pictures of gorgeous houses. We also found quite a few thrifting spots! Id been to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill there before, so I knew I wanted to hit those up, but we also found a huge blue building labled The Bargain Barn, and a cute little shop called Gizmo’s Flea Market. The finds in this town were INCREDIBLE. Seriously. I hit up a lot of stores here in SA but never have I ever experienced such a epic amout of finds. Especially in the furnature department, which of course, is off limits to me since I have no way of getting furnature back home to Texas. Naturally, I found my dream couch at the Salvation Army. But more on that later. I plan to do a post just on my Kansas thrift finds. I will tell you, however, that I did make that sweet girl MINE! Hahaaa!

Needless to say, we had a pretty fun day just cruising around town and eating ice cream cones.

Friday was a big day. My sister decided that come hell or high water, we were going to the the matching tattoos that we’ve been wanting to get for years, while I was there. Back when we were still in high school, I bought all 3 of us girls a necklace from James Avery with a silver clover charm that’s made up of 3 hearts, one for each of us. We wore them constantly and decided that some day we would get matching tattoos of the charm. Since we’re only together once a year at the most, it never worked out for us to get it before, but this time she was deturmined. So we called a shop, made an appointment and planned to go in on Friday while Mom kept the kids. Which meant that we had to decide exactly what we all wanted, if they would match exactly, or all have their own style. We decided on the later. Ashley got a single line version of the charm on her ribs, and Bailey and I got them on opposite forearms, hers in black and grey and mine a traditional style with color. Mine is currently in the gross, scabby phase, but hopefully it heals nicely because it’ll end up being the center piece for a tattoo Ive been planning. Anywho, we got the tattoos, then headed to the mall, ate delicious prezels and drank Orange Julius, and picked up some green accessories for Saturday. You should know, upon planning this vacation, we picked the dates in accordance to when the annual Fake Patty’s Day celebration takes place. It’s a HUGE St Patty’s Day party in the down town area of Manhattan Kansas, home of Kansas State University. Its an area called Aggieville, and its basically streets and streets of bars where all the college kids party. Take that, throw in a bunch of green clothing, and LOADS beer and you have the ultimate party. The reason its called Fake Patty’s Day is because they host this insanity a week BEFORE the real St. Patty’s Day, since the 17^th always falls during Spring Break and a lot of people go out of town. Thus they created this holiday as another excuse for everyone to party and for the bars to make even more money. The people there take it very seriously though! They get up at like 9am, and have house partys for Kegs and Eggs. Green keg beer and green scrambled eggs. After the house parties, everyone heads downtown to Aggieville and hits the bars to drink LOADS of gigantic $5 cups of green beer. My sister has a fabulous downtown apartment above one of the resturaunts in Aggieville, right in the middle of the party. We were able to go down to the bars and get out drink on, find friends, and take them back up to the apartment to take shots, or pee. It was a crazy day. We both drank WAY too much, but luckily Bailey didn’t, so we filled our bellies with greasy food and headed home to Eldorado and the kids. We had a BLAST but I was excited to get home to my babies. Plus I was a little worried about Mom having all three boys by herself. She was fine of course.

Sunday, we spent much of the day nursing hangovers. My stepdad made busciuts and gravy in the morning and barbequed all day for the family dinner we were having later. My grandma, uncle, cousins, brother and his family all came out and ate bbq that afternoon, hung out and the guys (and me) even went out and shot all the guns in the pasture. It was great fun, and made me miss being able to go to the range all the time like we used to before we had kids. Monday was our last day in El Dorado, since we planned to leave that night. Bailey was off work that day, so we took the kids into town, met Mom for lunch as she was getting off, then decided to go back to the thrift store for a few things I still wanted to snag, including my glorious couch. It was great ending to an incredible trip and I cried as we loaded our things back into the rental and said our goodbyes. Ive had to do this so many times throughout my life that I don’t usually get upset about it anymore, but it seemed especially hard to leave this time, and I did. And after a looooooooooong drive back to Texas, we finally reached out little green house.

We had such a great time, and I was SO incredibly sad to leave, but I can honestly say that I am glad to be home. I really missed our little home and our regular schedule. Sylas didnt sleep well while we were gone, AND caught a nasty cold which caused him to be uncharachteristly fussy, and Cash barely ate the entire time. I can happily say that Sylas is (mostly) well and back to his usual giggley self, sleeping all the way through the night and Cash has been eating everything in sight! Not to mention the fact that there were two kitties anxiously awaiting our return! Looking back while editing these photos reminded me of what a great trip we had, how much I missed my family, and how much I HATE living so far away from them. If I could ever convince the mister to move, I most certainly wouldn’t hesitate. It makes me so sad that Cash and Sylas will never be as close to his aunts, my best friends in this world, and my mom as they could be if we lived there. Theres nothing, besides my dad, keeping me here, but Ro’s entire family lives here in San Antonio and his close circle of friends, so convincing him to would be next to impossible. But I’ll keep trying. In the mean time, I’ll just have to get us back up to Kansas as often as possible. We’re already planning to return in August, if at all humanly possible, for my brothers wedding. Fingers crossed it actually happens!

Ryder and Cash playing outside on our first day