Got Milk? Warning to the squimish

The picture below is not me nor my daughter

Okay, so I'm still nursing (which it's only been almost 4 months; props to those that go way long (Sara B)). I have to go back to work today (suckass) and so I'm, of course, getting little Shaymeister hooked on bottles but still giving her boob milk. I have 24 bags frozen but the little squirt eats ALOT and I want it to last more than a week. I HATE pumping milk. For those that can pump 8 ounces in 10 minutes, (you know who you are), you can get on with Prairie Farms if you need a job and leave the rest of us alone. I pumped this morning for 25 minutes (this is my net surfing time) and I got 2.5 ounces. Okay, to those that don't know, this may last a 3 1/2 month old for maybe an hour. Well, I'm dry. I'm pouring the gold (needs to be on the stock market) into the bottle and the F'n bottom wasn't on right and I lost an ounce. I'm sure for a guy it's the equivalent of being kicked in the balls repeatedly by a 4-year-old.


Why do I nurse? Sure, it's the "best" for the baby, but a large part of it is due to the price of gas...aka "the boat" and our inability to qualify for WIC, I want to hold off buying formula for as long as I can.


Anywhoo, to the nursing mom's out there, I heard you can sell your milk somewhere on the internet. Hook me up, please, and I'll happily "hook-up" to that friggin' pump.

Where are the fish?

Well, the big tourney proved unsuccessful for the duo of John & Brad. They showed up at 4:00a.m. ready to get down to business, and the deal fell through. They did catch 2 keepers but needed 5 big keepers totaling over 18 pounds to win.

On a happier note, while they were out fishing from 6 until 2, we were having a party at the campground. Brad's wife, Becky, (my cousin) and their son Brayson were there; my cousin Christy who is expecting a baby ANYTIME; along with their parents Lynn & Don. Of course mom, dad, me & my girls and Kaydo were there, as well as Jarad, Kiki, & Owen.

mom & Shay having a conversation

No $$ for the day for the big boys, but we had fun, anyway. Sarah D's blog with the description of rules is correct (JGosnell knows a little something about fishing). The top 2 winners do have to go through lie detectors because of the possibly of cheating exists out there and there was word that someone did cheat but it's hard to watch all 85 boats and check their live wells before starting, etc. Supposedly someone had a stashed several keepers in a cage and planted it in a spot on the lake but someone last week found it and let them go. For the cheaters, may they get hooked in the hand and have to get stitches and get the screaming cha cha's.

Owen did hit another milestone and CRAWLED for the first time!!! He's such a stud. He's getting his hair cut today for the first time so you may see a new little man soon.

Too many young boys...stay clear

I was thinking the other day that there our friends have mostly boys. This leads to many troubling thoughts from the parents of 2 daughters. I mean, Farley boys, Diel blood boys, Fritschle boys, Baltzell boys....where does the list end??? But, I do know my girls won't be "girly" per se. As JGosnell asked, "Why you girls raising tomboys?" to Jess & I. I looked over at Scout as she is jumping on the hood of Jess's truck and El is rubbing sand in her hair and I thought, you know, I'm not too worried about all our friends boys being wild for my precious girls. I know my girls will be able to kick their asses and not worry too much about it. Oh, here's a pic of Shay agreeing.

Shay says, just try it.

Boilermaker, Mason, Carpenter....

JB wears many hats this Summer. Besides boilermaking, he's been completing many projects this summer. He's really getting good. Here's a pic of these AWESOME benches he made out of left over stringers from our stairs. The bench part is hickory from our woods that he hand-peeled. He had enough to make 4 adult and 1 kid bench.

Also, I had him put a dusk-till-dawn light in and I wanted him to stone it. He used some of our leftover landscaping rocks and rocked-out on my lamp post. He had to make the frame and all and it turned out AWESOME. While he was working on this, it took me back to the LHOP (Little House on the Prairie) (SarahD knows what's up) when Charles made the alter out of stone to pray to so that Jason Bateman would heal from his sickness. Rockin' cool.

He also made the handrails for our front and back porches. I tell you, he's going to have to watch out or he'll be switching careers.

Tournament of Champions

JB is "practicing" (I didn't know you could) this morning for the big fishing tournament that is coming up this weekend. He's out right now with JGosnell but will be fishing with Brad Shew on Saturday for the tourney. The prize is $5,000 so let's hope & pray he wins so we can make a boat payment :( and pay our property taxes. If he wins, I may even not be so bitter about purchasing the boat.....well, we'll see.

I'll be @ the tourney to take pictures, so stay tuned if you're interested.

Birds

So it's a normal Summer Wednesday morning at the Bennett estate. JB opens the door to the garage and says, "Man, another bird." Just then, the bird beelines it into the house. Shay & I were standing in direct line of the bird and I of course scream & duck; El is on the couch scared cause I screamed so she starts crying and the bird heads for the windows after taking a few spins in the ceiling fan. We have a 27 foot ceiling in our great room so I'm thinking we're never getting this bird out and we're going to have crap everywhere. JB goes & get one of his fishing nets and is on a mission. I grabbed the camera. We're all screaming and cheering (El included) and JB succeeds after it runs into the window a few times and gets itself loopy. Here are the pictures. JB

JB's the stud of the day.

Assistant, anyone?

I'm blogging like CRAZY today! I thought I'd post this pic of El "taking pizza orders" in our hotel room. I'm thinking the front desk person was not happy with us; she pushed the front desk button ALOT.

Indy-Restaurant

So, the italian joint dad loves was our plan. It's located in the Circle Center so we go, park, and start looking at the shopping stores while preparing ourselves for this unbelievable food we had coming. Mom had a business card from the place and dad calls to make a reservation.....it closed 3 months ago. Damn. So, now we had to decide what to do.

We are next to a Harry & Izzy's, we check out the menu....no go. High priced and not that interesting. Dad heads out to the street to try to find this italian place he heard about somewhere sometime ago. In other words, he's going out on a whim. We hang out in Nordstrom's dreaming of $400 boots and JB is ticked off at the price of t-shirts and dad comes back. He's not sure of a restaurant so we head out walking. We see a sign for seafood and we all LOVE seafood so we head to it. It's The Oceanaire. We check out the menu and it was higher priced than Harry's. We say, screw it, it's vacation. It was the most ultimate place EVER and we cannot stop talking about it. If you love seafood, go. It's worth every dime. They also have an actual oyster bar with something like 18 different kinds of oysters. I didn't know there were that many kinds. Here's a link to their website. http://www.theoceanaire.com/Location/Default.aspx?id=5

We had 3 people as our wait staff and were a little leary with the girls, but they were sooooo nice to us!!! They even have a crumb picker upper and our waiter cut up El's shrimp scampi so I didn't have to! Wow, this place was awesome. In the front of the restaurant was a Ferrari and a Bentley. I had to take pics. JB says our waiter saw my boob while I was nursing Shay so that's why he was sooooooooo nice. :) I said it was so worth it.

Our vacation 2008--zoo

We finally decided that we are just going to have to pic a day and head to Indianapolis so that we can get some kind of vacation out of this summer. Mom & Dad were hoping to get the whole crew to go, but it's hard to get everyone on board due to work and other stuff going on. JB actually didn't get called to work so we said, we're doing it.

Mom, Dad, and my crew headed out at 6 Thursday morning for Indianapolis. We were planning on hitting the zoo, the circle and this awesome Italian restaurant that mom & dad go to anytime they are in Indy. After stopping in Terre Haute for some IHOP we got to the zoo and it was awesome. It helped that my girls were AWESOME despite the hot weather. It's a nice zoo. You do have to pay (unlike St. Louis), but we got free dolphin show tickets and it was soooo worth it. We fed a giraffe, saw koalas and you can get much closer to the animals than St. Louis.

http://indianapoliszoo.com/

See slideshow of our pics here. http://picasaweb.google.com/shastaschack/IndianapolisZoo2008