don't get the glue

I may be a bat shit crazy helicopter mom with regards to safety hazards but I will be dammed if my children’s serial lack of situation awareness doesn’t both constitute and justify my consistent and habitual behavior.

I have a new love of snow crab legs that I like to enjoy while sitting on a bean bag at the coffee table. It’s the little things people, let me eat my crab legs and drink my wine while watching a movie on a Monday night…

Anyway it was a regular evening around 8 pm of course right before bed when O decided to do a swan dive over her pottery barn anywhere chair straight into the coffee table. Right in front of my face, literally inches away! It was fast and clean and very Ninja like. She essentially did some sort of screwed up reverse back bend while simultaneously smashing her facial area into the edge of the table. With my cat like reflexes I snatched her up and ran into the kitchen, I have no idea why,  suppose the kitchen seemed like an appropriate place to run to – maybe it was my fight or flight impulse to just run somewhere. Regardless I grabbed her face and inspected her mouth to see all her teeth in place and not bleeding! Thank little baby Jesus. C runs over at this point and I reassure him she is totally fine and it just sounded worse than it was. Except he disagrees and says put on a bra we’re going to the ER. Not sure why I didn’t think to look at her chin but there it was a gaping hole. My worst fear, ok well one of them, there are a lot but this is up there.

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To be fair she didn’t even cry all that much. I on the other hand….

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So disgusting.

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Note to anyone who has a “clean” cut. They requested the use of glue which at the time I was all for because it seemed less invasive and traumatic for all of us involved but the glue didn’t seem to hold and the wound opened significantly over the next day or so. I was so disappointed I didn’t demand stitches, oh well live and learn. We got a prescription silicone scar gel to treat the scar and over the last few weeks it has helped drastically but what a nightmare. IMG_4283

trouble

Dearest Cousin (you know who you are),

I am both excited and terrified for your upcoming wedding. I know it will be the most amazing, memorable night of your life, it’s after all every girls dream to have a wedding with family and friends, a gorgeous gown, a loving night full of dreams and happy endings. However, I am genuinely scared O may not comprehend this is not her wedding, she talks nonstop about her wedding and her wedding dress and the party and flowers and how excited she is to be having her wedding.

Maybe there is a book on this topic. Like you can buy books on how “every body uses the potty” (oh, which reminds me O wrote a book specifically on this topic) or you can buy books about when your family pet dies and goes to animal heaven. I need to purchase the How to teach your 4 year old she is part of a wedding, but it’s not her wedding. Ugh, I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

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Then there is W. Look at that face. It just screamsssss trouble, it may not scream it in an articulate manner in which you the recipient would understand, but you would get the point.

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They are both so excited for “their” wedding and ask me nonstop when their going to have it.

Keratin Smoothing Treatment

My hair is a hot mess. I heard a persons hormones change every five years and that can have an impact on hair texture. Mine has progressively gotten coarser. I had thin pin straight hair until puberty then it went curly. I never had a beautiful curl like O but more of a Brittney Spears type crimp, and mostly in the back… very weird and stupid.

Here are some unflattering pictures of my lion look. This is blown out with no product. I should go out in public like this. I could scare kids. It is so fluffy. Like a collie. I look like Lassie. IMG_2487IMG_2486

You know how people get dogs that look like them? I should get a Lassie. OMG I have a mini Lassie…

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Her hair changed to a woolly freaking mess after she got fixed. We are both in the same sinking hair ship. At least we have each other.

Anyway, I bought this:

Keratin Complex Natural Keratin Smoothing Treatment 4 oz

$54

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G1MOZ2K?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00

Got it off Amazon and gave it a try and it worked really good! It took forevvvvvvver but mostly because like I said I have a lions mane. And I should have gotten the 8 oz for sure.

  1. wash with a clarifying shampoo
  2. blow dry
  3. spread on smoothing serum and bake for a while
  4. wash again
  5. blow dry again
  6. flat iron for like a million years

done. This was after the serum application and blow dry. It is still fluffy but there is a small difference.

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This is after flat ironing for a gazillion years, It was very smooth and thin. You can’t get it wet or wear any hair ties for 3 days. I got stuck in a terrible downpour on the second day but after washing it stayed very straight and didn’t frizz or curl up at all.

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It worked really great and did exactly what it was supposed to do. However… I will never do it again because my hair though frizztastic was very super soft. After the treatment it felt like straw for daysssss. I couldn’t wait until this shit washed out. I could stab someone with the disgusting stiffness of my perfectly stick straight hair. Ultimate decision it worked great, felt terrible. It lasted like 2 – 3 months. It’s finally out and I am so much happier. Guess the grass isn’t always greener!!! I just bought a iron wand thing and I am going to embrace my curlish hair and try to at least reduce the frizz but I must say I am much happier dealing with frizz than stiff nasty straw!

that's a wrap

I am impatient.

When I start obsessing over something I want it yesterday. Some things I have no problem letting go while others fester like an old bag of chicken neck baits on a hot summer pier. That is really nasty if you’re wondering.

I just wrapped the Redmonton webseries and I feel so much emotional turmoil. I am so happy to now reap the benefits of all the long hours spent getting off-book, running lines, developing my character and filming. I am so ready to start something new and really great but at the same time I have to try and be patient and strategically plan my next steps get all my tools together and proceed with a knockout plan.

This webseries was such a blessing though. I really learned and spent so much time in front of the camera it literally became invisible. The cast and crew were so much fun and really talented.

I haven’t actually been submitting to much of anything else lately because of the commitment to the series so I am excited to get back out there. Just totally impatient. I think to make matters even worse is I surprisingly booked two gigs just last week! Of course they were scheduled to both film on the same day so I had to stick with my first commitment but it seems like the long hours on the webseries has really helped my audition technique.

I don’t have a lot of BTS but here are a few snaps from the past couple months filming (in absolutely no particular order)….

bari bts1 BTS2 caroline ben caroline carolines house family IMG_3278 IMG_3498

my view take1

box trolls

O. M. G. this movie was horrible. Not only are these things totally creepy but the movie was weird and dark. Guess it was my fault for not looking at the rating before we had family movie night and watched this awful train wreck. I just assumed cartoon – kids, plus C’s mom was talking about how the daily shows were all touting that someone carved all these figurines and positioned them all individually throughout the whole movie so it wasn’t computer generated or something – that could all be rumor mill though I wasn’t interested in this enough to find out so I have no clue what the facts are…

***spoiler alert***
box trolls

What I do know is the movie was creepy, the trolls were creepy and at the end during the big monologue of individuality where the bad guy smashes all the trolls with a big stamper O lost her shit and flipped the F out and I was left dumbfounded staring at the TV thinking WHAT THE F IS THE RATING ON THIS SHOW!!!???? Yes, again bad parenting I should have done my HW. Obviously the trolls were all fine and had snuck, (WTF is “snuck” not a word? Spell check keeps telling me it’s not a word. What is the problem – what is past tense for sneaked???)

Anyway all the trolls had escaped their boxes and all was well with the world, happy ending tra-la-la, but still to see O completely devastated made me want to hurt people. Whatever. Lesson learned, although the rating thing only would help with the creepy-ness of the movie because O has since had complete and utter breakdowns from Big Hero 6 and Home. It saddens me that she got stuck with my emotional instability. I just watched the latest Fast and Furious and cried like an infant. So sad!!!

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AND to top it off my kids want to wear boxes like all the time. Its so annoying to try to cut holes in boxes. Big Hero and Home are totally EXCELLENT movies. I mean, who doesn’t love Jim Parsons?

fair

We took the kids to the fair last week. I am excited just thinking about it. I love taking the girls to do fun stuff. Plus I have been shooting a webseries on the weekends so I wanted to do something fun and special with them. Plus, plus I wanted to see how W did on the rides because I want to plan a Disney trip.

IMG_2841 O being herself. Hollywood 24/7.

IMG_2848 Look at that face! She was so adorable. I was nervous she was going to blow a gasket because she’s all in the “do-it-myself” phase which literally makes me want to throw shit. There is a lot of stuff that drives me crazy that I have been able to let go of since having kids; like order, hygiene, a clean house… but when I am in a rush, like every morning – I don’t have time to watch you take 27 minutes to put on your underwear, W. Nor do I have time for you to change your outfit 64 times, O. I am just about capped on my maximum OCD tolerance. I digress…

Anyway I thought W was going to loose her shit and fight me standing next to her on the carousel but she let me hold on to her. Actually I was pretty bummed because C bought them both unlimited ride bracelets before we realized W was too small to ride any rides!

IMG_2858 Lucky for us this fair wasn’t too strict on rules and let W onto the rides anyway! We just watched the rides first to make sure there weren’t size restrictions for a reason… like the higher up ones.

That was her first ride by herself, she had this weird face the entire time and she didn’t move a muscle, O had the same reactions on her first rides when she was little! We were like… “is she scared?’ “is she going to cry?” “why is her face like that?”

Then she got off and wanted to do it again, and again, and again so we knew she loved it.

W reallllly liked all the rides that were horses. I think she would totally *love* to ride horses when she grows up but I doubt C will ever let that happen. I used to ride horses for years when I was younger and decided to pick the hobby back up after I met C. He would come watch me in my lessons sometimes and decided I wasn’t very good. Just because I got thrown off a lot doesn’t mean I wasn’t a good rider, I like to think I had very challenging horses – therefore I was actually an excellent rider… but anyway –

 

IMG_2891 IMG_2892 IMG_2894 They let her on a bunch of rides she was too small for – oops!

IMG_2898  We were safe about it though. This little kid swing was awesome.

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C won a prize throwing a baseball at a wall of bottles. He had to break a bottle. He’s so manly and strong.

IMG_2910 O and W played this game of throw a ball in a hole – win a prize. O picks a cute blow up pony. Ugh, W not so much.

IMG_2914 She picked some crazy ass purple alien. Whats worse is the damn thing stands up by itself and she puts it in odd places throughout the house and scares the shit out of me. She also put stickers all over its face for some reason. Creepy.

IMG_2921 Ssssso fun. I want to try Dutch Wonderland next.

snapper

I have done a garden every year with moderate success. We have great morning sun and lots of ground so it’s pretty easy to get veggies to grow around the yard. Last year C made me a really great formal looking veggie garden and we had tons of veggies that went to waste. Every year we say we are going to only plant one of each type of veggie plant like cucumber or zucchini but then I always plant two in case one dies and then I feel to guilty to pull up the other one because it’s like alive and all and I don’t want to kill it. So weird, I know.

I experimented this year and did Lima Beans and Broccoli. I have never done these before and didn’t care too much if they worked or not so I just planted them right in the ground, oh I did spinach too. IMG_2408

I dug a trench and put in spinach and the broccoli. The next day I saw the Guniea Hens in my garden with big holes all in the areas I planted the seeds. Ok. That round was done for. No biggie.   IMG_2411

Well a few weeks later I planted a row of sunflower seeds and they came up all nice and neat and then a whole bunch of other stuff came up all jumbled in a group. It’s lima beans, broccoli and 1 small spinach plant.

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We are working on replanting the front too because the super cold winter killed a lot of our plants out front. Ugh so much work.

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To my surprise a friendly (NOT!) snapping turtle took a liking to my small zucchini also. We were all staring at this prehistoric beast and realized it was acting all weird, like in a trance. I knew from my extensive National Geographic watching (and C said he knew from that kid sea turtle movie) that it was nesting!

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How crazy is that?! Like real life NatGeo. I’m scared now we will have an infestation of snapping turtles.

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O did some amazing artwork at school to represent our little turtle family.

new toy

Ok, soooooo I caved and purchased a selfie-stick. I know, so lame. Just typing these words I feel a hot wave of shame and embarrassment, but I gotta be honest… It. Is. AWESOME.

I busted this little gem out in the car on the way to our camping destination and you can read C’s lips probably… he’s saying “you are such a losssser”

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Oh ok, wait – Lemme get in on this – I’ll throw up some gang signs. IMG_2601

It is so cool. And it just made sense that I totally needed one. I never get to be in any pictures! It’s not like I’m some duck face, straw sucking, bathroom snapping selfie obsessed kinda girl. But I might become one now… joking!

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or am I joking?? I actually did a little research on selfie sticks, not because they were expensive – they were all about $20 but more on the different “types”. There were some with plugs that go int your phone, some with bluetooth remotes for snapping the pic. I went for the newest 2015 MPow model. It has bluetooth so it hooks up with your phone, then on the handle there is a small button you push for snapping the picture. It folds up pretty small and fits easily in a purse. It feels really secure and safe when holding my phone too, a lot of reviews said other sticks were very flimsy. You can kind of see W’s arm pushing the picture button in out first selfie attempt of the three of us.

Actually all pix posted was the real extent of my selfie taking. It was a very worthwhile investment though and just for all you parties interested I got it off Amazon for like $20. There were a few colors available, I got Blue because for whatever reason that one was on sale for cheaper – like $15.

[New Generation] Mpow® iSnap X One-piece U-Shape Self-portrait Monopod Extendable Selfie Stick with built-in Bluetooth Remote Shutter-Blue

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UV3D24M?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00