Monday, August 30, 2010

Catching Up

With a found camera, and photos uploaded to my computer, I'm ready to catch everyone up on what has been happening in the Kellen household.

Sometime before our trip to St. Louis I was sitting on the couch wasting time on the computer and I kept hearing a clinnnk, clinnk..... what is that sound? I choose to ignore it and continue browsing on the web when I hear it again. Clinnnk. A lightbulb went off and I knew that sound was coming from my camera. BOOOYYSSSS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I found the two guilty parties under their fort in their room with my camera carelessly on the floor.

Sam: Mommy we were taking pictures.
Me:  You are not supposed to be touching things that aren't yours Samuel.
Sam: But mommy, we got some really good pictures!

Samuel the Photographer

Artistic right? :o)

Meanwhile I've been wanting to cook up some new dishes because, well, I'm tired of the same old stuff! You should fix this dish if you don't want ANYONE but yourself to enjoy it (note the sarcasm). 


A wonderful scrumptious pasta dish with pasta you have on hand, coarsely chopped asparagus, bacon crumbles, parmesan cheese, and a yummy white sauce made from sauteed garlic, half-n-half, and melted mozzarella cheese. YUM-O!

Now on to our St. Louis vacation photos, and what a better place to start than in the car? 


After the 4 hour drive of "How many more longer will it be til we get there" questions we all had a lot of  stored up energy to use. After all, what are hotels good for anyway? 


The next morning we ate some seriously good food at Chris' pancake house:

This was the good ole' fashioned restaurant that had free coffee and cookies in the waiting area, with cute old couples standing around visiting. You know the kind? The kind where you can't walk a step without all of them telling you how sweet your little family is and to soak up every minute of them while they're young. The kind where everyone is friendly and will start up a conversation without hesitance. I love those kinds of places and so did the kids! Their buckwheat pancakes were superb, the chocolate milk was like a milkshake rather than the (joke-for-chocolate-milk) where restaurants use a wimpy half squirt of Hershey sauce for your chocolate milk.


With our bellies full and spirits up we headed off to the St. Louis zoo! To be continued....

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Missing

If I find my camera that has gone missing, I will share pictures from our St. Louis trip and various other fun photos. Anyone know where it is?

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Early Birthday Post


TWENTY SEVEN! Wow. Can it be that I’m only 3 years away from being 30? I’m trying to recall where I thought I’d be and what I’d have by the time I was thirty. I’m sure I figured that I would be married and have one child, a career….lol….that shows you how much I knew.  At 27, I have been married for 5 years, I have three children (4 and under), a house, 2 cars, 2 dogs, and a garden! When did all of this happen?

I blink my eyes and I still have memories so fond of high school I swear I can smell them, I blink again and I feel my sharply pressed military uniform on me/my shined shoes to a mirrored finish on... one more blink and I’m back to my life where I'm at today – incredible.

Isn’t it funny when we are younger we believe we’ll still have all our best friends from high school, and be buddy buddy with them to the end? Or that time won’t fly by so fast, that certainly, there couldn’t be, one day we wake up and wonder where all the time has gone. Time is a funny thing. When we are in the moment it feels like time crawls but once we are out of that moment, looking back, that it seems like a blink of an eye. I remember being in the Navy, extremely homesick, without old high school friends to chill with, that I felt my 5 year obligation would take literally FOREVER to end. When you happen to live out of town, you don’t think of how everyone else’s lives continue on without you. I’d come home on leave and all of the sudden my brothers are 3” taller, another year older, another grade higher, new things were done to my childhood home, I no longer had a designated room of my own; new memories were made without me in them. Weird.  I’m not sure of a more odd feeling then leaving home, making a life of your own, then to come back and experience that odd feeling. It’s almost like an out of body experience, where you feel like you’ve been dead or something; but then your time home comes to an end and you go back to YOUR life and you don’t think much of it until you go home again. (I know that all sounds like a bad thing, but there isn't a better experience then knowing you have no one to cling to. You learn so much about yourself and what you are truly capable of, I wouldn't change anything!)

That time of my life is done. I’m back in my home state, only 20 minutes from my parents, and see everyone enough that I can’t tell just how much we are all changing before our own eyes. Now I look back and can’t believe that I was in the Navy for 5 years, let alone it being apart of my life at all. As quick as it became my entire world, just as fast, it is hard to believe I ever took part in it. This is more of a reason to reaffirm my belief that everything happens for a reason. Be happy; be happy in the place you are currently in! If it were for one change in any of my decisions in my life I probably wouldn’t be where I am now. And I’m happy. I really am. Being a stay at home mother isn’t a glorious, we don’t receive daily praise for having the laundry done, supper on the table, dishes washed, diapers changed BUT, to me it is the most important! We can’t take our money with us when we leave this world, so why run around chasing a buck if you can afford to be home, loving your children? One day I’ll be gone, but it is through my children that I’ll live on. It is through MY hands that my children are learning to become decent caring people.  This world could use a little more love in my opinion, and maybe there would be more of it to go around if there were more stay-at-home-mothers teaching their children the value of respect, honesty, integrity, good old fashion hard work, and most importantly, love.

And for god’s sake, just because there are stay at home mothers, don’t talk down to us! Don’t assume we are unaware of the latest current events happening, don’t look down on our job because we are with our children rather than being in a cubical in a building! Just as you wouldn’t want someone to “dummy down” to you at work from a person with a higher held position, us stay at home mothers don’t like the “dummy down” conversations blowing our way from business women. We both are businesswomen…just in different fields of work. Everyone has their time, so treat others as you would want to be treated, we might just need each other's expertise someday!

From a girl...

 to a sailor... 

to a wife...


a woman...

 to a mother of 3, in a matter of 27 years…


who would of thought? Life is good!

Cheers~
Amber