Dear Justin

I miss your handsome face and your big hugs.  I miss your laugh and your smart mouth and I miss talking about stupid things.  I miss your reassuring presence and bigness.  I miss your movie lines.  I miss your Saturday pancakes and I miss Deadliest Catch.  I miss your scratchy feet, do you miss my cold ones?  I miss when we go to bed and you tuck my cold feet into your warm legs and hold my cold hands.  I miss your nose whistle when you sleep.  I miss texting you.  I miss kissing you and I miss your big hugs.  I miss all your shenanigans and I miss how much you love dogs.  I miss your logic.  I wish you were just sleeping on the couch and I could just go wake you up to go to bed.  I miss how you line up all your tools biggest to smallest.  I miss how you can't stop buying big shelves and other storage solutions for the garage.  I miss talking to you on long road trips and I miss your sweaty hugs after you go to the gym.  I miss VH1's Best 100 countdowns and I miss when you make fun of me.  I miss that day you and Drew laid down on the benches in Old Navy while you were waiting for me and I feel bad about that day I didn't share my granola bar with you.  I miss putting my face in your neck when we hug.  I can still feel what your warm neck  feels like against my cheek and whenever I think about it I hold really still so that feeling wont go away. I worry you I haven't told you all of this enough and that you don't know how much I love you.  I keep you in my heart all the time, please keep me in yours too.  I imagine myself there when I can't get to sleep at night.  I picture myself all snug in your heart, behind your ACUs and your body armor.   I am so proud of you and I am so grateful for all these things I miss because these are all the things I look forward to when you come home.  Please take care of yourself because you are so so precious to me and Drew.
Love,
Me

Easter Revelations

This Easter we went to my parents house and we had an awesome time, we just don't have any  pictures to prove it.  This blurry cell phone pic of my handsome little church goer is the one and only picture I took all weekend.

I know.  I'm so lame.  But at least now we have proof we attended church.  Drew even stayed for primary.  I asked him what he learned and he said 

"That Jesus died and went to heaven, but he's comin' back in 3 months."  

So mark your calendar. 

He wont even notice...

This morning after breakfast Justin sat on Drew's favorite toy gun and broke it.  From the picture you can tell it's pretty hard to miss and I find it odd that Justin didn't see it first and I feel like this fact further illustrates my point in this post.  But back to the gun.  His grandparents have bought this gun for Drew at least twice that I know of but it really feels like he is on his third.  He loves it.  So this morning,  I hear the loud crack of the barrel breaking off followed by "Shit." And he sounds worried.  So I go investigate because usually the crack of a toy being broke is followed by a "don't leave your toys out" talk with Drew.  So I knew it had to be bad, and it was.  Fortunately it was a clean break so I told Justin I had some Gorilla Glue in the shelves above my desk he could fix it with and then if he put it somewhere that Drew couldn't see that Drew never even had to know about it.  So when he goes upstairs, I assume this is what he is doing.  No.

This was Justin's idea of inconspicuous:

Yes.  That's a book balanced on top of it.  A big Fleetwood Mac coffee table book.

So instead of hiding the gun he does this balancing act with a book and then displays everything, front and center on my desk.  In the room that is right next door to Drew's.  But I know nothing of this until a little while later I ask him about it and then he tells me its on my desk.  Only I've been sitting at my desk and, unlike him, there is no way I wouldn't notice a giant green toy gun.  So we go check and sure enough, there was no book balanced precariously on a toy gun above my head, unbeknownst to me the entire time I was working.  So we ask Drew who right away says "I don't want to talk about it"  He seriously thinks that this is an answer for his parents.  I cannot even count the number of times he says that like we are just going to be ok with it.  I have even started making it clear that it is not an acceptable answer when I ask him stuff.  Like,  "I know you don't want to talk about this, but do you know where ALL my measuring cups are?"  We tell him he is not in trouble and Justin starts explaining what happened but all I can think about is that there is a gun loaded with Gorilla Glue somewhere in my house. And Gorilla Glue is no joke.  There are some things you can never take back and Gorilla Glue is one of them.  So Drew goes and gets the bottom half of the gun from his toy box and we get the top half which fell behind my desk when he tried to take it down.   The glue wasn't dry yet so Justin recreates his work of art because I didn't believe his whole balance-a-huge-book-on-a-tiny-gun-barrel story and because he had a point, the instructions on the glue do say to apply pressure.  So we left it that way to dry so I could get a picture of it, but can you imagine how confusing that was for Drew?  To see his toy gun like that?  He had to have been wondering (among other things) if he was the one that did it and just forgot about it.  Why else wouldn't he have asked us about it?  He just went and put the remaining half away.  It makes me feel bad to think about him trying to figure out just what the hell happened.  And its funny to me that Justin read the directions in the first place because its not usually his style but even funnier is that this is how he chose to interpret these instructions.  But I'm glad he did because finally I have the photographic evidence I need to prove that this is where Drew gets it from. His nickname is Shenanigans because he is always up to something.  His life is a three ring circus of his own making and I used to wonder if it was because he is an only child but for some time now I've known that it is a genetic trait inherited from his dad.  If we tell him to go brush his teeth he will, in fact, go brush his teeth, but he does it standing on the counter next to the sink.  If I tell him to put his shoes away I will later find them and every other pair he owns loaded into the back of his big dump truck and "parked" in the laundry room.  Its like as soon as the thought "I know what I can do with all these shoes" enters his head he is powerless to resist.   He is almost compulsive about adding that extra bit of mischief to everything he does.  Exactly like Justin.  Only difference is in a 5 year old its hilarious, in a husband it is maddening.

March Madness

I could think of no other way to put my mine and Drew's bracket on my blog other than take a picture of it with my phone.  I did, however, waste a bunch of time trying to find a way.  Blogger is the biggest time vacuum there ever was. 

So this is how we did it: I read him the team names and he picked the winners based on the sound of the school name and his own personal associations.  For example, he has Duke over St. Johns for the championship.  Duke is his dog's name and John is his grandpa's name.  There are a few improbabilities but its a pretty solid bracket.  We really need Northern Colorado to be the Cinderella story this year and this may be the only bracket in the state that has Wofford over BYU but based on Drew's selection process, they really are the better choice, phonetically.  The pot is up to $200.00 so if we win maybe Drew will look back on this day as the day we started winning a $200.00 bet and not the day he was disappointed by the lack of leprechaun sightings.  Its been kind of a bummer for him.  If I had known he expected to see actual leprechauns on St Patrick's day I would have prepared him for this but I had no idea until this morning when we were picking out a green shirt and he said "Oh man, I hope I see a leprechaun today".  Looking back, I wish I would've tried harder to explain things to him instead of go get my phone and text it to Justin.  He has a trap set for one at his daycare and everything.  So for now I'm off to distract him with Richmond's victory over Vanderbilt and prepare him for Northern Colorado's elimination and hope he doesn't notice southern Utah's shortage of leprechauns this year.