Lucky Number 8: Pizza Buffet for Father's Day

Since I got home from Girly Girl weekend on Saturday evening, and then Jeff and I had to rush over to chaperone a stake dance, I was left scrambling a little bit to figure out what to make Jeff for his Father's Day dinner. As soon as I mentioned pizza as an option, Jeff was on board, so I ran to the store at 11:00 Saturday night to pick up all the materials for a Personal Pan Pizza Papa's Day Party!

It was so fun to have everyone make their own little pizza. Though both boys chose the same toppings and Jeff and I chose the same toppings, and we had leftovers for the whole week, so we probably could have managed with just two pizzas, but it was more fun with four.

You guys know by now that I'm the world's worst gift giver. My parents bred out of me any inclination to grace people with kind, thoughtful, and heart-felt gifts. It's the struggle of my existence. Specifically around holidays where gifts would typically be exchanged.

Jeff unfortunately is the best gift giver. I often warn him not to spend money on me, so he will go so far as to find a thoughtful gift that I love, and that he didn't have to pay anything for, thus making it a doubly awesome gift. He's outdone me for every Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary/Chinese New Year to date.

But that was all about to change after Jeff came home from work one day and said, "I think I want to get P90X 3."
My initial reaction was, "WHHAAAAATTT?!?!" Because I thought the videos were somewhere around $300, and he has a gym membership, so I wasn't ready to fork over $300 when he already had a way to exercise.
He defended himself, "It's pretty expensive if you get it directly through BeachBody, but I was looking on KSL and there were some for $40-$45."

Okay. That was way more in my price range. But I already had this great initial overreaction going for me, so I continued to run with it while I decided if I would succumb to his P90X 3 desires. I replied, "Well. If you want P90X, then you'll have to cancel your gym membership."

Jeff finished off our conversation by resolving, "I'll have to read some more about it and see if it's something I really want to do. Then I may try it out a couple of times to see if I even like the workouts. But I think it's something I'd really like."

Meanwhile, I went to the store or something and that's when I realized I had played that whole situation just right. Because I really didn't have a problem paying $40 for P90X 3. I actually kind of wanted to try it too. And I still had this whole front up with Jeff that I was appalled at the thought of buying P90X, and with it being just a week before Father's Day, I knew I had struck gift gold.

The next day I got on KSL to dabble in the P90X market. To my surprise, the cheapest listing was in my city, and it was still available! I made elaborate plans to pick it up in the middle of mutual so that Jeff wouldn't notice me unexplainably slipping away one evening.

And just like that I became the best wife in the universe. Six years into our marriage and I finally got Jeff a gift he was genuinely happily surprised by.

I love Mondays. There's something about Mondays that make my kids play nicely with each other (usually). Especially if we've had a busy weekend. If we've been out and about all weekend, the kids treasure their Mondays to be home and back with all their toys again. I try to get caught up on laundry and house cleaning from the weekend on Mondays, so I take advantage of the boys' good post weekend behavior to get a little work done.

I was so thrilled as I was in my room folding laundry to hear the boys out back giggling and bouncing around on the trampoline. Their favorite trampoline game is to pick "poison berries" off one of our bushes that grows some kind of weird berry on it, and they throw the berries on the trampoline to try to dodge the catapulting berries as the bounce.

I was sure I'd find them playing poison berry when I looked out my bedroom window to inspect the cause of their eruptive laughter. I instead saw this:

After a quick, surprised scream, I ran down the stairs out to the deck, where I turned around to grab my camera, then went back to the deck, raced down the stairs, snapping pictures the whole way there, and then I said, "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" snap. snap. snap. "You boys CANNOT ride a bike on the trampoline!!" snap snap.

Eli took note of the mixed message I was sending while screaming at them, but documenting the moment, so he started laughing even harder, and I seized the opportunity to get my last shots before "putting the bike in time-out."

We have yet to figure out how the boys even got the bike onto the trampoline. I'm fairly certain it would have had to have been a team effort, and for that I congratulate them. I love it when they're so clever in their naughtiness that you can't help but adore their crazy behavior. Ha!

Carson's back to his sporadic sleeping. Wait. That's misleading. That makes it sound like he at one point hasn't been a sporadic sleeper. There was one point when he was sleeping in until 7-8ish and that's stopped. Now he prefers the 6:00 hour. And the day he woke up at 4:00, I called my mom in desperation to entertain us and keep me from strangling my kids in a weak moment of exhaustion. Luckily she and my sister had already made arrangements to go to a park for a picnic and a hike, so we made our way down just in time to tag along.

The following Saturday, it was my third Saturday in a row of bailing on Jeff. I thought it would be good to wear the kids out at a splash pad in the afternoon so they would go down easy for him in the evening.