The Noehren's

This little assignment is going in Grant's keep box for sure!  I saw a friend post the same assignment her son did beautifully and thought I'd share Grant's assignment gone wrong.  Brian and I still laugh every time we read it.  I guess the assignment was on emotions and they were supposed to write "When I feel happy..."  etc. on the back of the picture they drew, but as you can see somewhere in the middle Grant got a little confused and morphed the back of the page with the next pages emotion.  Hilarious! "I feel happy when I have a lot of fun with my friends" "I feel angry when I get love" "When I feel love I get hurt" "I feel jealous when I am in my room and my sister doesn't get to" - because she has a later bedtime. 

Over the last year or so I have experimented with different eating styles, read a lot of different health books and thyroid books, watched a lot of food documentaries, and changed a lot of my shopping habits.  I have started buying better quality products, especially when it come to any meat or dairy products.  It just makes sense.  Who needs more hormones - not me! I'm no holistic-only type.  I love modern medicine!  Doctors are great!  I just figure that there is only so much extra hormones and chemicals our endocrine systems can handle and mine is in overload and my synthroid isn't covering all the bases.  I've been happy with my changes and continue to learned a lot.  Then I read  this CTWorkingMom's post by my wonderful sister in law Michelle and realized that I had been storing my carefully bought food in old ratty BPA laden plastic containers and serving my kids food on old ratty plastic plates and cups....

Sequestration.  Say what?  Since I only dabble in politics, I honestly didn't know much about this until my sisters who live in DC started emailing about the sequester and how it will affect them, and many other federal employees.  I think we all understand the need to "trim the fat" or whatever they say, but nobody likes to lose a job, or take a paycut - which is really what this boils down to.  Then I read this  article in the Washington Post and realized that we too will be affected by the sequestration.  This is bad news for junior research faculty, such as Brian, seeking grant funding!  After Brian and I read this we had the same reaction - 1) uh-oh and 2) whew!  Reaction 1 is because it was already a nearly impossible research funding market and it is clearly only going to get worse.  Reaction 2 is because Brian, by the grace of God, was funded by both the NIH and the NSF just this year for two different 5 and 3 year ...

I don't know why, but I love certain traditions, as silly as they are - and St. Patrick's day morning is one of my favorites.  I am the Leprechaun and Brian is the Easter Bunny.  It all works out!  The kids awoke to quite the stash.  The leprechaun went to Walmart late the night before feeling a little hungry to buy this year's offerings and bought enough sugar to put us all in a coma by noon.  Oops.  Brian made green pancakes.  The kids enjoyed their lime sherbert floats, and it was a fun Sunday full of green stuff! 

If you know me, you know I love a good road trip!  So, when Brian had a quick one day conference in Charlottesville, Virginia you know I had to tag along.  We took the kids out of school Thursday and drove over through our old Virginia stomping grounds.  While Brian was in his conference on Friday, the kids and I took off for Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson.   Howdy, I'm Thomas Jefferson! Try as I might to get them excited, Grant was less than impressed.  He was still in crazyville from being sick all week.  Oh well.  That happens.  I kept telling myself during the whole tour that I'll never see any of these people again, so who cares that they are judging me and my crazy son's behavior.  Haley learned a few things and now the kids can say they've been to the house on the nickle.  Woo hoo.  Luckily, I have been there before (sans children) and had already seen all I wanted to see, so I was able to be more laid back a...

About 2 weeks ago I had my first surgery ever - a tonsilectomy.  After dealing with yucky issues from my beat up tonsils due to lots of step throat in my life I finally made an appointment with an ENT to get their opinion on things and they recommended I take them out.  He explained that it is an elective surgery and I wasn't in any harm, but that it would be best in the long run to get it done to avoid the same issues over and over.  I was in.  Sign me up!    He explained that at my age it is a much more painful procedure than a child and that recovery is about twice as long.  Ok, I guess I'm still in.  Then when he started talking about cutting things I kinda got queasy so I huried up and scheduled a surgery before fear changed my mind.  I figured now is as good a time as ever.  My parents could stay for a couple of days to help out and the kids are both in school.  Let's do it!    Once I got home my mom started...

This February, Brian turned 37 and my mom turned 70 all in the same week.  It was a super fun week of birthday celebrations with Valentine Day smooshed in between.  Isn't she adorable!     My mom loooooves to travel and she also looooves her favorite European cereal weetabix.  When I saw Trader Joes carried it I couldn't resist getting her a box.  She was in heaven.   With the help from my sisters I also made a nice photo book of our amazing mother.  It was a hit!  We are so glad she came to celebrate the big 7-0 with us.  It was a lot of fun. 

Here are a few random gems from last month.  This first one is my favorite.  I was in the other room one Sunday and things got super quite.  I asked the kids what they were up to and they responded "We are covering up daddy in newspaper!"  This I had to see...and sure enough a soundly sleeping Brian was covered in newspaper.  This makes me smile every time I look at it.  Not sure where the mustache craze came from, but you gotta love it.   Following the same mustache theme, Haley cracks herself up creating her own mustache and unibrow.  She begged me to take this picture.   This little man is learning to read!  I love school!  It is like magic - he comes home smarter every day.  We are super proud of him.  

Kentucky finally got some snow this month!  It didn't last long, but we had fun in it before it left.  We discovered that the road was a total sheet of ice under the snow so we created a luge.