I know, I’m sorry….I’ve been a bad blogger.

I thought I would share what I just downloaded from my camera and maybe you all can piece together the last few months of my life.

Levi is 7, he has the largest two front teeth in the history of front teeth and he knows it.  When we make fun of his teeth he sticks them out and starts acting like a monster.  I’ve never seen a kid so proud of his giant front teeth.  He LOVES to play with my camera and the result is usually an hour of  filming everything in the house and about 85 pictures of himself making weird faces.  I spend a lot of time deleting his stuff, but making sure I don’t delete all of it because he’s pretty funny.

Then I have about 5 billion of these photos on my camera.  This is one of Clay’s jobs.  He snatches my camera from time to time and takes photos of his job sites.  I hate deleting them because sometimes they are of beautiful buildings and details that only an architect’s wife could appreciate.

After I cleared all the photos from Levi and Clay off of my camera I came to the few photos I snapped during Thanksgiving.  That very small woman sitting next to Clay is Carmen, my childhood friend.  She lives in the same town as my parents and her husband’s business intercedes with my mother’s business on a daily basis.  That means Carmen’s husband owns a FedEx route and he picks up the puppets my mom is shipping out to her customers.  Carmen’s husband adores my mom and my mom likes Carmen’s husband more than she likes me, so it was a winning situation to have them at my parent’s home for Thanksgiving.  Carmen and her girls taught us how to play a dice game called Farkle.  Guess who lost?

Yeah, that would be me. The loser of Farkle has to complete a task that is decided before the game begins.  I had to go to the same house that Carmen and her family had mistaken for my parent’s home just a few hours earlier. With all their Thanksgiving food in their hands thinking they were at my parent’s the older gentleman that answered the door thought that maybe my parents did live there, so Carmen and Charlie went in and quickly realized they knew absolutely nobody in that house.  The loser of the Farkle game had to take a pumpkin pie and basket to the door of that house and ask if my parents were home.  It was very embarrassing to say the least, but we got a years worth of laughter out of it.

Many of you have asked,”How’s Salt?”

Here she is helping to decorate the Christmas tree.

And here she is helping to decorate Ellen’s leg with a few puncture wounds.

Never has a kitten been loved so much by so many people as this little fluffy-wuffy-kitty-witty.  I swear we worry about her far more than we worry about our children.  And if that’s not enough to make you hurl a bit of stomach acid, then you should also know that we call her, “The Baby” and periodically use The Baby as an excuse not to help others, “I can’t fix dinner, I’m holding The Baby”  or “I can’t do my homework because The Baby is sleeping on me”  or “I’d love to help you do the laundry, but The Baby doesn’t want me to leave the room.”  You can understand how difficult life is when you have a baby in the house.

I made my yearly batch of beirocks or beirochs or beer rocks.  We ate them for four days.   I found out my oldest son was giving them away at school and then I asked him why he hates me so much.

This is Levi taking a snooze at our second home, aka the basketball gym.  My friends, I have a serious case of Bleacher Butt, it has caused my butt to be big, flat and also…ginormous.  I could use a good drug to cure me of this awful disease.  Here let me show you how I got it.

*All the DECENT basketball photos are courtesy of my sweet and talented friend Mrs. Mama.

I’m the mom that says (and by says I mean yells) things like, “DON’T TRAVEL!”  and “HEAD FAKE!!!”  and “DON’T FOUL!” and the more than occasional, “USE THE BACKBOARD!!!!”  and then my daughter’s favorite, “MAKE YOUR SHOTS!”  I know, it’s almost like I’m a coach with all my helpful input.  Honestly, I don’t understand how my kids can play the game without me there.

This is her senior year and I promised I wouldn’t miss a single game.

Nothing could keep me away from watching #24 do what she does on that court.

Or watch her coach the girls from the bench.  And in case you didn’t see him, that’s Clay up at the score table taking stats…..for every single game home and away for the girls and boys varsity teams.  He takes his job very seriously.  And yes, I love this picture of Ellen’s coach.

This is Big John, he’s one of our home court refs.  He looks really scary until he smiles, and then fahgetaboutit the whole room melts under his charm.  I love this photo of him.

Oh, how I am going to miss this next year.

Are some of you wondering why I’m all, “Ellen this and Ellen that…doesn’t April have a son that plays basketball too?”

Well, yes I do.  So, let me show you the great shots I got of him playing and the reason I posted my friends photos instead of mine.

I think I might put this one in his baby book.

I love this action shot of him.

This one is worthy of some sort of award.  I’m there people.  I’m am right there getting the best shots of my kids on the court.

I let my kids request what kind of cake they want.  I used to spend an entire day building and frosting complicated designs and then I had a 4th kid.   Isaac wanted a gold dragon on a two layer cake.  I frosted this in about 10 minutes and we ate it all gone.

We took Ellen to Build a Bear for Isaac’s birthday.

We told her it was Disneyland.

And now she can cross that trip off her bucket list.

Her enthusiasm was not to be dampened by her father or brothers who quickly grew weary of her.

I tried to take a fun Christmas photo of my family.  But……yeah.

My family doesn’t do “Nice Family Photo”.  Look at Levi’s feet.  Yes, his shoes are on the wrong feet.  I can only do so much people.

We love the show Parks and Recreation.  I gave this t-shirt to Seth for Christmas.  He thinks Ron Swanson is the perfect man and quotes him much too often, “I like dark haired women and breakfast food.”

Seth helped me turn this floral atrocity into….

This very vanilla landscape.

And uh, it still looks like that minus the broom in the shower.  I know, I know, I suck at finishing projects.  I promise I’ll get it done before I die.

And that my friends has been my life according to my camera for the last several months.   You’re welcome.

I have been watching episode after episode after episode of Grey’s Anatomy for the past several weeks. It’s my mind altering drug of choice. It’s been sucking all the difficult things in reality out of my life which has made me nice and numb to the world around me. I find myself saying, “He’s going into De-Fib call Dr. Shepherd!” And I say words like acidosis, tachycardia, ephemeral, don’t mess with the pancreas, he’s doing a whipple, and other things that I have no idea what they mean and obviously can’t really spell them or pronounce them correctly. The human degradation that occurs in that show is so highly revolting and ridiculous that I can’t look away. I simply….can’t…stop….watching!

I may never be able to enter a hospital without thinking that every doctor in the place has either died and come back to life or slept with at least three other people that they work with. I will just assume that they have struggled with drug abuse, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, cancer and that they’ve been arrested or admitted to the psyche ward at least once. I will also think that they are about to break ground on some amazing never before attempted surgery that will help people with brain tumors and I’ll probably look at them through my Grey’s Goggles and think they are some level of HOT. Even if they are not even remotely attractive, obviously they are hot, because all the people at Seattle Grace seem to think that everything wearing scrubs is hot. And THEY TALK ABOUT THE HOTNESS EVERY CHANCE THEY GET, because obviously that’s how people in the medical field deal with their stress. Yeah, I have a problem.

Clay will be so happy when I’m done with my Grey’s Anatomy binge and decide to enter real life to participate with real humans that have real problems. He knows that I have odd coping mechanisms, so he watches me watching this awful show and he does something more mind filling like plays online chess and asks to have his back scratched while his wife gets stuck in McDreamy Land until she can resurface.

Okay, so now I have to share my little crazy quirk with you. Every once in a while I will play the “What If” game. I started playing it in my head recently after a Grey’s Anatomy episode in which Dr. Izzy Stevens inherited eight million dollars from her dead fiance. She had no idea that he was a wealthy man because she didn’t know him outside his hospital bed. He was a heart patient, they fell in love, he asked her to marry him in a moment of panic when she was purposefully stopping his heart by cutting his L-vat wire in hopes of stealing a donor heart from another patient so he could be bumped up to the top spot on the recipient list and get the heart. You got all that? Okay, so Izzy’s guy dies, she falls apart and then one day she gets a check in the mail for eight million dollars from the guy she was going to marry that she only knew in the hospital bed. Izzy sticks the check on the fridge because she doesn’t know what to do with the money…..and here starts my “What If” game.

What if I suddenly inherited 8 millions dollars?

Okay, that’s too easy. So, I put stipulations on it. Now you can play the game yourself and believe me it’s not easy. It goes like this.

1. You are given 8 million dollars cash.
2. You have exactly 24 hours to spend all of it.
3. You can not spend one penny over or under the 8 million or you lose it all.
4. You have to spend the money by purchasing, not donating.
5. You can help as many people as you want, but it has to be by purchasing or paying for service, so if you want to help your favorite charity you have to find out what they need and buy it for them or you have to pay their bills. So, you would have to go to the electric company and pay the bill for them, you couldn’t just give them the money to pay the bill.
6. All transactions have to be completed within the 24 hour period, which makes large purchases like real estate and land difficult, but not entirely impossible.
7. You are allowed to purchase services as long as those services are paid for in advance and a contract is signed stating what the service will entail and a comprehensive price list of the service.
8.Remember you are toting around cash with you to do all these transactions. You can go get cashier’s checks, but remember how much time that takes.
9. You may NOT hire anyone to help you.
10. Go!

You see how this is difficult, right? Do you know how hard it is to spend that much money in one day and complete the transactions? Of course, I change the rules all the time, but I keep to the 24 hour period. I have yet to be able to successfully spend all the money in time. It’s such an exercise in not thinking small that I have to get out of my head the basics of life. You can’t just go buy food, clothes and pay off your debt and donate the rest, that’s not big enough although yes you can do that, but you’d be wasting time. You know how long it takes to buy a vehicle right? Well, think how long it might take to buy 10 vehicles. So time is a factor.

I find myself wanting to buy land and housing, but I’m not sure if I can get those transactions done in 24 hours unless I have all the right people at my disposal, which I probably won’t. My latest plan is after I help my family, a few churches and a host of other charities that feed and clothe people, I would race to the hospital and say, “I have this amount of money! I want you to go to the oldest unpaid accounts and start paying them off until there is no money left.” I realize this would help some people and would be useless for others, but it’s the only way I can think of that would get rid of every penny without going over or under the $8 million.

Wah-la! I win!

I have come full circle in this game. At first I was paying off my debt, buying everyone a good vehicle, adding on to my house, building a barn, buying land, purchasing stuff for the kids’ school, paying the mortgage for our church, pre-paying college, etc. It was all very focused on trying to insure that I had what I wanted and that everything I loved was taken care of as it should be. But, then I realized that’s just not going to cut it. Yes, I could pay my bills, but trying to renovate the house and build a barn? No, there was no time for that and no way a contractor could give me an accurate estimation of how much that would cost for me to pre-pay the services and it would waste so much time. I even tried to think how I could purchase something that would continue to generate income for me. But, in the end I just wanted to be done with it. What a stressful thing it would be to have the responsibility to spend that much cash in one day and keep your integrity as a human being.

Izzy Stevens finally built a free medical clinic with her $8 million, she didn’t keep any of it for herself. Once again, Grey’s did not let me down by being realistic. Thank God! Because it would be a real shame for me to come out of my McSteamy coma to find that the show actually had some element of normal human reaction or interation to it. So, as I continue to languish in my catatonic state of Greydom you all can play my game to help distract you from whatever it is you need to ignore at the moment.  Not that I want you to join me in my McCrazy McGrey’s place, because that would just be McWeird.

What if my friends? What if you were suddenly thrown into the $8 million dollars in a day game?