The other day at Disney the entrance of Tomorrowland found us face to face with a swarm of angry bees.  At first, I couldn’t figured out what they were.  They looked like tiny bubbles until I noticed they were dive bombing those oblivious to them.  Will was trying to push me through them and I flipped out.  I think he thought they were just a bit of Disney magic or something.  Regardless, I refused and found an alternate pathway.  At that moment I was thinking with that many bees; I can’t believe I wasn’t stung. That was mistakes #1.  Mistake #2 came yesterday.  We were in the new house and Annie dumps a cup of sand into it.  As I came bounding out of the house…shoeless, my foot met a little bee and the bee would say I won, but not without a latch ditch-effort stinging from the bee.  In my book, he won.

For those of you not aware, I am VERY allergic to bees.  The last stinging resulted in various hallucinations, lethargy, and my tongue swelling.  I do have an epi-pen that expired awhile back and a new one that has been waiting for me in the pharmacy for several months now.   Oops!  I went into quite the panic when I realized I was stung and had found myself in a puddle of my own tears pondering my impending doom.  Do I drive myself and risk choking on my own tongue or maybe puking in the car?  A friend came to the rescue, dropping me off and sweeping my children away.  Long story – short.  I was stung…I got a fabulous cocktail of steroids, antihistamines and an assortment of other things I can’t pronounce IV style, which resulted in a 2 hour peaceful and quiet nap in a hospital bed with a heated blanket.  I got all hooked up to a monitor with various electrodes…I think that was to avoid the impending doom.  And, I didn’t die!  It was a good day.

Side note: Scary experience…blessed to be minimally inconvenienced…thankful for a healthy body…not really a drama queen, it’s just fun to write that way sometimes.

Surprise, surprise…we are moving again.  We’re excited for the extra room and all the character our new house will have to offer.  We are only making the journey up the hill.

This is the first time I have moved(I think this makes 28 or 29…I’ve lost count) and just started crying.  I was so overwhelmed with everything.  To be quite honest, this should be one of my easiest moves.  This wasn’t planned, I wasn’t given the opportunity to be methodical about it all, it just fell in my lap.  I have seen so clearly my Heavenly Father’s hand in all of this in retrospect.  Had I still been expecting, I would be puking my guts out right now and probably close to my last nerve.  I get a house upgrade that is very affordable, relatively speaking.  We will still be in the same ward and the same school boundaries.  Yay!  We LOVE our friends!! We will finally be able to stay in one location for longer than a year.  Coming soon… April 1st.

I love when random comments or events happen that remind you how much you LOVE being a mom!! I must be lucky because it has happened twice this week.

Event #1

The kids and I are in the car headed to the beach.  After being in the car for 2 minutes, the following conversation takes place.

Hudson:  Mom are we at the beach yet?  I have a headache!

me: No Hudson, we just pulled out of the driveway.  We won’t be there for another 15 minutes.  Do you even know what a headache is?

Hudson:  Moooom, a headache is when your head hurts and my head hurts.

me:  Where does your head hurt?

Hudson:  Well, I always get a headache when we are supposed to be there.  I have a headache so we should be there already.  My head hurts all over it.

Annie:  I have blonde hair all over my head.  Sometimes I just call it yellow!

Event #2

Annie and I were walking through the Christmas department of a store a few days ago.  We had the following conversation:

Annie:  Oh mommy, it’s Jesus!

me: What?!

Annie:  Can I hold Baby Jesus, please, please, please?

me: Um, sure you can.  Be very gentle.

stroking his belly and head softly…

Annie: Oh, he is so darling!

Needless to say, I was thankful they were selling pieces of the nativity separately so we walked out of the store with a Baby Jesus.  I couldn’t possibly make her return him to the shelf after that.  I found it a little funny as we were checking out.  I glanced up at the register’s monitor as the clerk scanned the baby.  I felt very awkward seeing, “Jesus $2.00.”  I stood their with mixed emotions wanting to laugh and be horrified at the same time.  I just bought Jesus for $2.00. I felt extremely blasphemous.  Come to think of it…I still do, to a degree.

This is the last shot we have of Annie and her piggies.  As of Sunday afternoon, they went, “Wee, wee all the way home.”…via Hudson.  He was so kind to free the piggies and her long sweeping bangs.  This last week Annie has been yelling at me to cut her piggies off every time I go to do her hair.  I should have seen it in the cards.  I didn’t think she would get this desperate.  We aren’t quite sure what happened, but Hudson did eventually fess up to being the barber who made it all happen.  He confided in Will and made him promise to not tell me.  Too bad I was walking down the stairs when the conversation was still in progress.  Obviously from Hudson’s reaction, I did not handle this mommy moment with grace and dignity.  Finding more patience and kindness is on my to do/to find list.

You can see where the piggies were and now where they are not!   So Monday morning found us out to get Annie’s hair fixed and Hudson grounded from the Wii for 3 days.  Of course his response to the consequence was, “I didn’t feel like playing it on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday…only Thursday, Friday and Saturday.”  Wrong answer Hudson.  Had I been a vengeful mommy, I would have extended it to a week with those words. Let’s just say that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday have proved to be much longer than he thought.

I pulled a pair of pink stripped socks out of my drawer yesterday as I was trying to declutter my house. This was the conversation I had with myself:  I really like these stripped socks.   But you only wear them once a year on Valentine’s Day so you really could do without them.   Is there a way I could keep my socks, but not use them as socks?  Sock Monkey!!

There you have it.  Another random birdwalk of the brain that happened to end in a sock monkey today.

Our photo club decided to practice bridal photos this month…and I got to be the live dummy.  I still have my wedding dress and it fits so how could I resist?  How often do you really get to wear your wedding dress anyway?  Considering my actual wedding experience and the fact that I have limited memories of my actual wedding, it was nice to get to wear it one more time.  I did note that I look considerably older than my first bridals.  Then again it has almost been 7 years.

I do carry a little bit of guilt from the whole experience.  I tried to be gracious about all of the well wishing and congratulations I received.  I even held my tongue when a guy held up his baby girl and said, “This is what you have to look forward to.”  I wanted to say, “No, you have no idea what YOU have to look forward to…just wait until she’s 2!”

The guilt hit full tilt when a guy approached me and asked if I was a model or a bride.  Technically, I am neither, but kind of both.  Apparently, my response of bride lost him a bet…oops!

She kind of looks like a Liggy, right?

Will and I attended the opera last night to see Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto.  I haven’t been for quite some time and Will has never had the experience so I surprised him with tickets.  I got balcony seats thinking that if  he didn’t like it I wouldn’t have wasted hundreds of dollars.  I thought I bought for the front of the balcony, but of course I wasn’t paying attention when I looked at the diagram and accidentally bought the farthest back tickets instead.  Talk about a classic Jessica move.  Will joked that he forgot his baseball glove.  Several times he suggested that the vendors should be selling hotdogs over champagne.   Note to self: balcony tickets stink(In my defense, I’ve never sat in the balcony before).  

I digress, anyway, the opera was fabulous.  They had a fantastic set of singers cast, hailing from several international locations, which was so fun! The orchestra was amazing.  Will was kind enough to rent binoculars for me, which helped.  We forgot the camera so here is the after picture.  Will doesn’t look too tired, does he?

Hudson approaches me today and asks if he can play Rock Band. I tell him no because it is Sunday and no because he is too little.  We are actually thinking we are going to return it anyway because it takes up too much room. What do you do with a drum set in a house our size?

He then says, “Well can’t today just be Friday instead?”  Of course I stiffled a chuckle and told him the days of the week were solid.  

“But we can just pretend it is Friday, Mommy,” he replies.

 ”No, Hudson.”  

Hudson then tells me, “But Mom, I think Friday is much stronger than Sunday.”  I’m not quite sure what he meant by the comment and the flexed-muscle pose that accompanied his words, but my decision stands.  

Hudson, I love you, but NO it cannot be Friday!