Revelations

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately....so much so that Tom has asked me to please stop thinking because I'm making his head hurt. But through all this thinking and praying I've come to a few realizations or "revelations" as I call them......

Revelation #1 - My career goals do not end with me running an office at a Recreation Center. One morning, while lying in bed and saying my "good-morning God - help me get out of bed" prayer - it suddenly became clear that I was to go back to school and become a Kindergarten teacher. And when I say "suddenly' I mean "SUDDENLY"!! I have never showed the least bit of interest in teaching. I've always had a lot of respect for teachers...its a job that takes a lot of patience and hard work, without always seeing the rewards. But after a lot of praying...and panicking....I decided this was where I should be heading. Let the quest begin!!! Okay God, now what???? "Well", I thought, "what does it take to go back to school?' MONEY!!! Okay, I've got none of that. Where do I start? This is what lead to my second revelation....

Revelation #2 - I am a financial idiot. I have no idea how to control mine or my husband's spending habits, I love instant gratification and I make stupid decisions because of that. If there were such thing, I would be president of the FIA - Financial Idiots Anonymous. I can now stand up and say, "My name is Karin Condame - and I'm a financial idiot. God works in mysterious ways, when I had finally come to terms that his plan for me was to teach, I got a letter a few days later from my roommate in college. She had just gone through an awful year of buying a restaurant and nearly going bankrupt because of it. She was told about Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University and managed to pay off $13,000 worth of credit card debt in just few months. I was interested in how she did that so I went to library and got his book "The Total Money Makeover" after the 1st chapter, I had come realize that if I ever wanted to go back to school I needed to stop living paycheck to paycheck and mostly stop blaming everything else for our bad spending habits. It's not the restaurant, it's not the child support, it's not because our cars keep breaking down - those things don't help, but if we had a sensible plan and budget to begin with those problems wouldn't seem so bad. Taking responsibility and admitting I have a problem is the first step...right? So now were on a road to financial recovery.

Those were my two big revelations. I think that's enough "revealing" for now. Tom can't handle anymore changes. He's truly afraid that tomorrow I'm going to decide we need to pick up and move to Alaska or something. No Alaska for me...I'm too busy staring at excel spreadsheets and obsessing over the $2 I went over-budget grocery shopping last week.

Catch up

It's been so long since I posted that I decided to title this blog exactly what it is....a catch up of little blurbs that will hopefully fill in the gap of the last 3 months.





My awesome husband brought my best friend Kelly down from PA for my birthday. She came down on Friday and was sitting on our back porch with a bow on her head. Saturday we went to the day spa and got manicures and pedicures. Then went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant on the harbour. We then went to see the "Sex and the City" movie. After the movie we went out to dinner with Tom and the kids. The day ended with Kelly and I lying in bed in the guest room watching Harry Potter. NOTHING gets better than that!






We had a great summer. Jeannelle was here for most of it and she was a big help with the boys. TJ spent the summer in "big camp" with Kindergartner's and now believes he should be going in Kindergarten. We spent a lot of time at the pool and I still don't have a tan.

We had so much fun in Ohio visiting my family this year. We piled the whole family, including the two girls, into a mini-van and drove up for a whirl-wind week of activities. Mom said she wanted to keep us so busy that we collapsed into bed at night...and she succeeded! The first half of the week was spent at the Island. We managed to have 14 of us in a 2-bedroom cabin. The Stumps were good enough to sleep int their tent for a few days - while the rest of us managed to find beds...not necessarily in bedrooms - but we're not picky. The last half of the week we went to Cedar Point and the Cleveland Zoo. We had a blast. The only one who seemed to not completely enjoy himself was Chris. His life is pretty much a vacation, so i think he was confused as to why we had to take him away from his comfortable life to sit in a car for 11 hours to go somewhere he doesn't know to see people he doesn't know. He was so happy to be home that he walked around the house singing our first day back. Oh well, some day he learn to appreciate it!

I just had to throw this picture in. We put in a playground set and did our best to landscape our pine-straw back yard. But why did we bother? I think the boys would have been happier with the mud pit. They still found one section of dirt.

Reach to the sky!!

I consider myself (for the most part) to be a pretty good mom. I spend as much time as I can playing with them, I'm firm when I must me - which is a lot with toddler boys - and I take them to church and Sunday School every week. But I had to stop and review what I've been doing wrong when Tj was swiinging on his swing set and said to me, "Mom, I'm going to swing so high I'm going to kick God in the butt". Hhhmmm....What would God think of that? I like to think that he got as good a chuckle out of it as I did.

Looking back at my previous posts, I realize that It's been a while since I posted some recent pics and videos of the kids. Obviously, I find it much more entertaining to pick on my husband....can you blame me? But really, I should at least give a brief update on those two little boys who have an amazing way of making me want to hug them and strangle them at the same time.

TJ constantly surprises me with how much he knows (if you ask him he knows everything). There is a reason kids are called "sponges". He absorbs everything we do and say and can repeat it at any given moment - whether you want him to or not. There's definitely no pulling a fast one on this kid, you tell him we'll go to the pool later on the weekend - and Saturday morning he's putting on his swim suit before breakfast. My plan this summer was to teach him to ride a bike without training wheels - I figured it would be a good summer activity and it might take him that long to get the hang of it. So we took the training wheels off the bike and ran beside him holding on just like you're supposed to. Only TJ had other plans in mind. He soon was going faster than I could run and took off on his own. He stopped and looked at me like "so what was so hard about that?" I posted a video below of him doing one of his "tricks" which is really just graceful falling - but I promise you he was ok.


Chris was my "easy" baby. He never fussed much, he went right to sleep in his crib, and started sleeping through the night by 6 weeks. I thought I had it made - until he reached toddler-hood. I often wonder what an 18 month old has to be so angry about? Mostly he just wants what he wants when he wants it. And if he doesn't get it - the arms start flailing, the head gets thrown back and the screaming starts. Whoo- I now realize I was pretty lucky with TJ being so layed back. But of course he's also incredibly adorable and extremely funny. He has whole conversations with you without you being able to understand one word. He's also extremely happy...most of the time. He wakes up in crib and is smiling, sometimes talking away to the the stuff animals. TJ and I - who are not so happy at 7am - are completely baffled by this behavior. There is no doubt that Chris will be the comedian of our family.

So here's some videos and pictures....

New Playground in Backyard....Thanks Grandma Sue & Papa Pete!





TJ's Big Jump Chris' Big Jump

TJ's "Trick"

Tom's Birthday

I can no longer complain about Tom' budlight obsession....I've totally given him a free pass to collect a much stuff as he likes! What other wife do you know that would turn their garage into a Budlight shrine for her husband's birthday. I figured if he's going to keep collecting stuff, he might as well have a nice place to show it off.....not in the house!

Another Great Tom Story

Well one more year of Heritage has come and gone and Tom and I managed to survive. This is the 6th year we've been managing the commissary for the concession booths and we still are in awe of what an amazing week it is. It is so much work (much more now with two kids in the mix) but when we are sitting in our golf cart on the 18th hole over-looking the calibouge sound watching the PGA pros walk past us, we know it's definitely a privilege to be part of such a cool event. If the subject of moving away from the area is ever brought up, we quickly squelch the thought knowing wherever we move or whatever job we took - it most likely wouldn't include spending a week being paid to hang out on a golf course. Each year we've done this we seem to get a little smarter about our job at the commissary, but there are always the "fires" that need to be put out - and there's always a good story to be told. So here's this year's "good story". I must preface this with saying that If Tom had a say in what I wrote on this blog this would be a completely different story.

It was Thursday of the tournament and it had already been a long week. It's hard for me to leave the kids in someone else's constant care, the normal "guilty" feelings that are a part of the normal make-up of any mom take over. I know I need to be at the commissary but the questions "are my in-laws tired of the kids?" and "am I taking advantage of my sister being here on vacation?" kept creeping into my thoughts...even with the few beers I had. The busiest part of the week was still ahead of us and I already felt I hadn't seen the kids enough. So when Tom wanted to go to the "19th hole" (a golf term for BAR) I reluctantly said o.k. I figured another hour would be okay. I should have known better. Needless to say an hour quickly turned to two and I was getting very cranky and ready to go. Just as I finally got Tom in the golf cart a small cute blond woman (who I had noticed was paying a lot of attention to Tom earlier) bounced up to Tom asking him to drive her to the club house - which by the way was about 50 yards away - max. I quickly stepped in and said we needed to get home to OUR kids. Tom looked at me- almost annoyed that I wanted to go home - and said "come on, we can take her" Just when I was thinking - okay this chick can sit in the back, it is a maintenance cart, but I've sat in the back before - Tom was saying "you stay here - I'll be right back". I don't really remember what I was thinking at that point or why I decided to comply with this idea, but next thing I knew I was left standing there while my husband drove off with a cute blond who was acting 1/2 her age and was obviously in the mood for some more partying. Tom came back about 20 minutes later and we left together and that was the end of it. I teased him about it a bit...I really wasn't mad, kind of amused by the whole thing actually. But by the next day the story had gotten out to the all the vendors and booths (thanks to the Barry the Bud guy who witnessed the whole thing). It was classic. By the end of the week, he had "thrown" me out of the cart and went home with another woman. Of course this was all in fun....the more people teased him, the more defensive he got, which of course just made it more funny. He's actually standing behind me now exclaiming how "everything was blown out of proportion" and "totally exaggerated". HAAHAA!!!! It's my blog...I'll tell the story how I want! :) He won't live this one down for a looonnnnngggg time!

How I know I'm raising a boy

TJ and I were driving home from work yesterday and it was low tide. As we came over the bridge you could easily see al the oyster beds. So I gave a brief science lesson and told him all about oysters and even explained how sometimes a piece of sand can get inside an oyster to make a pearl. He looked thoughtfully out the window for a moment then said "mom, I think there are actually bombs inside the oysters and they are all gonna go BOOOOM! Wouldn't that be cool mom?" Ahhhh Boys, they are not happy unless something is being demolished or destroyed.