Happy birthday, Brett!

The man of my dreams just had another birthday, and we've been celebrating!

We started with dinner Tuesday night at Nana and Papa's house. Nana made pot roast, and for the birthday cake, she made banana nut bread, one of Brett's favorites.

(I promise I don't dress my kids! But don't they look great in burnt orange?)

On Thursday, Brett's actual birthday, he requested that I cook him a spaghetti dinner.

Of course, we had to have cake!

Katie led us in singing "Happy Birthday."

And Brett couldn't wait until he blew out his candle to steal a Snickers from his Snickers cake!

The other part of his birthday evening was spent with the new love of his life:
We took Frisco to the Mommy Park. Up until this point, we'd only taken her to Nana and Papa's house to play with her cousin, Prince. To her, a ride in the van = GOOD TIMES. (Just wait until she visits the vet soon!)

She was a little too happy to be in the van!

We all took turns letting Frisco walk us.

She got some special attention while the kids completed the fitness challenges.

And that's not all: Brett also had some big weekend plans to extend his birthday celebration a little more.

The dog blog.

"So when are you going to 'blog' the dog?"

So I guess it's time to admit that we have a dog now. She was a stray that had been hanging around the neighborhood for a few weeks until our across-the-street neighbors took her in. They were going to be spending a weekend in Frisco for the big KLTY concert, so they asked if we could watch her while they were gone. Voila! We inherited a dog, and in honor of our neighbors' destination, her name is Frisco.

Mind you, Brett adopted her on that Friday when I was sick as a dog. I slept off and on all day, and at one point, I awoke long enough for Brett to raise our bedroom window and whistle. And that's how I found out we had gotten a dog. Woo-hoo.

Nevermind that I had no input here. Forget that I might've wanted to give her—oh, I don't know—a girl's name. And completely disregard the fact that we're trying to sell our house and we now have this crazy dog in our backyard to scare away buyers.

I put off blogging about our new pet because (a) it took me a while to warm up to this mutt, and (b) she was obviously someone else's pet, and I knew that at any minute, somebody would come along and take her away. But our letter carrier told Brett that Frisco had been on her own for a good while, and all the "lost pet" calls we got turned out to be nothing. And my resistance to taking her in?

I got over it. Just look at how much Brett loves her!

The kids have wanted to get a dog for a long time, but Brett? He's SO happy!

He walks her at least once a day, sometimes twice. (He's even lost NINE POUNDS in the month since Frisco came to live with us!)


He just loves taking care of her, and for the most part, she's super receptive! She loves the attention he showers on her. She even tolerates taking a bath!



She's definitely crazy, though:
After her first few days with us, she discovered that our deck steps lead to the roof. We'd be leaving the driveway, look up and see our pooch sitting up there like she owns the place! When we were in Arkansas, our neighbor/dog-sitter called because Frisco had jumped off the roof into the front yard. Crazy, I tell you! She has also eaten just about anything left behind in our backyard (including our swing's seat cushions—GRRRR).

But how could you not love this face?

So, yes, now we have yet another black and white pet. Truthfully, I harbor some resentment because this isn't the best timing, and I honestly think her presence has something to do with why KitKat ran off (just three weeks after Frisco moved in).

Still, she's a sweet pup, and she brings my sweet husband so much joy.

Welcome to the family, Frisco!

I miss my cat.

KitKat's missing, and since she's been gone since last Thursday, we're having to accept that she's gone for good. And that's not good.

It's truly ridiculous that I love that cat so much. I've never been a "cat person," but KitKat and her sister, ChaCha, turned me into not just a cat person but a certified Crazy Cat Person! I'm the one who was always allergic to cats, the one who always preferred rough-and-tumble dogs, but these kitties just stole my heart. And KitKat was my cuddler. She's the one who would come say hello when Brett or I would work at the computer. She's also the "smart one" who was trained to touch the box of canned cat food every morning. I'd ask her, "Where's your food?" and she'd walk over to the box, reach up and tap her paw on the cans just inside the box opening.

We let her into the yard last Wednesday night, and Thursday morning she wasn't at the door as usual. No biggie—we've been getting up at different times during the day, so maybe I just missed her? The cats sleep through these summer days, so I kinda thought she was in a kid's bedroom or under the sunroom chair. But after VBS that night, we realized we hadn't seen her all day. Strange.

When she still didn't show up Friday morning, we knew something was wrong. Now it's been six days, the city animal shelter doesn't have any black cats, and we're out of hope. And that makes us very, very sad.

Here's the story of a Bradymaniac.

OK, so I may be just a little obsessed with the Brady Bunch.

Yet another part of Project GOOD has been packing up our collections. (Yep, that's "collections," plural. Sad but true.) In our current house, we turned our "fun room" into a pop culture mini-museum; his sci-fi stuff, comics and monsters mingled with my Bradys, Friends and UT items. Who knows what our set-up will be in our next house, so as I packed these treasures away, I figured I'd better document what's in my collection in case I never see them all together again!


The whole* collection is documented on Flickr:

Click the big image to see the individual pix.

And just because no Brady collection would be complete without a singing and dancing hamster, I offer this:

*Sadly enough, this digital archive's incomplete! My Brady T-shirts have already been packed away, and I didn't shoot our Columbia House Brady VHS collection or either of the two complete series DVD sets. We have a slew of other videotapes—Brady Brides, talk show appearances, etc.—that I didn't document, either! And yes, I know that my Bradymania is WEIRD!!!

Pineapple bowling.

Among all the (discounted!!!) beach party supplies we found was this game. During the party, things were a little too chaotic for anyone to play, but after most of our guests had gone home, Katie set up the pin(eapple)s.

Katie created a different font for each page of her scoring notebook.

The bowling ball is a coconut—cute!

STRIKE!

Beach bash.

For Ryan's 12th annual pool party, he chose a beach theme, so out came the palm trees and coconuts!

I threw some rubber duckies in the pool before the party (they were left over from my ducky-themed bunco), never realizing they would be turned into grenades during the party! It was fun watching the kids chunk them back and forth across the pool.

Conspiring...

...and then attacking!

The adults found what shade they could to stay cool and (mostly) dry.

We commented that in the 12 straight years that we've been having these pool parties, our pool seems to have shrunk! These big kids take up more room than the little ones did back in the day!

It's become a tradition for us to serve Utz cheese balls, and this year, one partier discovered that they are delicious when dipped in the chocolate fountain (a.k.a., the chocolate volcano).

When it was time to cut the cake,

...we had a kitchen full of friends and family!

He's been 12 for three days, and I still can't believe it.

Several of the guys took a look around Brett's collection, and at one point, Brett got to show them his book. Pretty cool!

Present time!

Ryan was surprised to get a dock for his iPod. He was so tickled with all of his gifts! At one point, I think he had dollar signs for eyes.

So another crazy swimming party is in the books. Since our house is for sale, this may be our last one of these parties here, so we really tried to soak it all in. Have we really had 12 of these parties? That's a lot of cheese balls!

Whew!

What a week! We've come to the end of a fun but exhausting VBS. These five days have worn me out, and I didn't even have to go to a job during the day like most of our volunteers did!

One of my favorite things about this year's VBS was the donation drive. Each night kids had the chance to help an orphanage in Bulgaria. Last winter HCC kids collected coats for the orphans there, and money raised this week will cover the postage costs for that shipment. It was wonderful to see the children so excited to give! They would just run to the well to drop in their coins and dollar bills.

Ryan and Katie got to experience all kinds of things, from donkeys to stone-carving. This was Ryan's last year to attend as a student, and since he's one of the older kids, he considered sitting this one out. I'm so proud of him for setting such a good example for the other kids. I was so proud of Katie, too, for the way she dove into the synagogue lessons. I was tickled to hear her help Ryan recite Hebrew at dinner tonight! As always, it warms my heart to see how much both kids love our church family. We are so thankful for Jamba and all of our amazing helpers.

And me? I'm hoping all the Diet Coke I have consumed this week will eventually wear off and maybe—just MAYBE—I can get some sleep!

Sentimental journey.

Another artifact unearthed during Project GOOD: old Six Flags maps! My family had these on our gameroom wall in Tyler. You could say we're big SFOT fans!

I'm not sure when this map was made,

but it's from the Big Bend days! I was technically tall enough to ride that coaster before it was torn down, but I never did. Bummer.

And there's the big slide coming off the Oil Derrick! This was pre-Shock Wave, and LaSalle's Adventure was in the spot where the Roaring Rapids is now.

Remember the Mexican train? A few of the characters from that attraction are now along the regular train route.

There was a dolphin show and some kind of petting zoo, too. Crazy!

Here's another Six Flags map from the Dub Archives (a.k.a. a pile of stuff that's been sitting on a bedroom bookcase since I hauled it over here from my mom's apartment):
The Judge! I can remember using this map to memorize that ride, tracing my finger over the hills, trying to recall each dip of the roller coaster.

Remember the Roto-Disco? It was also called Rotoriculous (or something like that). That part of the park has really changed. On this map, the bumper cars were called the "Infernal Electrical Bumping Machines" (How '70s is that?), and now they're gone completely.

The Texas Chute-Out was a big hit when it first came out. I can remember seeing a model of it at Tyler's Broadway Square Mall. The model had little motorized chutes going up and down, and I could barely wait for the ride to open. The first few times we got to ride it that next summer, we had to wait FOREVER just to board!

Bugs Bunny's Gold River Adventure was still the Spee-lunker Cave (which apparently has a cult following—who knew?), and my FAVORITE ride was still there near the Southern Palace: the Spinnaker! Runaway Mountain is in that vicinity now.

There's the tower without the big slide, but the Shock Wave is there! I think it's funny that the extraordinarily long queue for that big ride is represented on the map. We have told R&K about the line that used to be two hours long and how it extended to where the go-cart track is now.

Six Flags used to be a once-a-year event, and every year I could hardly sleep the night before our visit. I have so many great memories from that place, and I would love it if someone would write an illustrated history of the park. Seriously! The few old photos that are hidden there in France make me want to see more from back in the day. At least I have a few old maps to remind me of the park I got to visit when I was Ryan and Katie's age.