Join the Mureens

my friend Libby asked me one day. The short answer is, "no," but since we drink at least 5 gallons of milk per week, I often think, "God bless the sweet mama cows that provide us with this milk." Because I know FIRST-HAND how draining milk production is.

my husband. He is so sensitive to my needs as a woman and listens to me talk about my thoughts on life for hours and hours and is incessantly patient with my hormones and treats me as a totally equal person. Some men in the world just think of women differently. Also, he is the most involved and amazing father. He gets his hands dirty by changing diapers and helping me with housework and spends so much time with our kids just investing his time in them and enjoying them. Jon is my greatest blessing in the world and having witnessed first-hand how God has changed him for good makes me know God is real.

is what Anna Kate requests to listen to all the time. You see we love to dance at our house (not that we are good at it AT ALL, some are better than others, but we disagree on who those "some" may be) and our favorite dance songs are...

1. Jean Knight's Mr. Big Stuff (This song is always dedicated to college-Jon)


2. Michael Jackson's Black or White


3. Goldfinger's More Today Than Yesterday


4. Dianna Ross's I'm Comin Out


5. Color Me Badd's All 4 Love


6. Cece Peniston's Keep On Walkin


7. The Turtle's Happy Together

Anna Kate's far and away favorite is The Turtle's Happy Together. She wants it playing non-stop at our house. And she has some great moves that go with it.

is definitely withing the rhealm of possibilities because I'm driving around with my tank on empty (my parents will be very concerned about this). The reason is that we ran out of money about a week ago and Jon thinks it would be prudent for us to stay within a budget and suffer the consequences of running out of money because I've never known/understood "what that feels like." Well, let me tell you...I know what that feels like now and it does not feel good...it feels like never-ending tuna salad and pb&j's and suffering from buyer's remorse for every purchase since May 1. The next time a stray animal comes my way needing vet attention, I will RUN the other direction and the next time my dog gets a wart that grows a milimeter each day and needs to be removed I will tell him, "it's what's on the inside that counts," and the next time our son's circumcision bill comes in the mail 11 months after the procedure I will say, "we only pay bills that arrive in a timely manner." (Since these things, not me, put us over this month) If you see our hip family ride (see the '93 Volvo station wagon below) around town and do not want to pull over to help someone who has run out of gas, then turn around and head the other direction.

Things break on them ALL THE TIME...especially with kids. Another glass bit the dust today thanks to J.R.'s help putting away the dishes. Can you see it in the picture? I don't care about losing the glasses all the time as much as cleaning up broken glass all the time. Maybe we should switch to plastic...or get wood floors :)

If I take a picture of J.R., Anna Kate asks me to take one of her too...she doesn't realize we have pictures of her to him 2 to 1 already :)

since Elise joined our family about a week ago (sorry I couldn't get her eyes not to glow in a pic).

She was so boney when we touched her that we knew she was starving and she's been in our alley for a while and she was bringing her dead birds to us to show us honor instead of eating them, so we did what any feeling human would do and fed her our tuna. Next thing we know she's living with us in our house (the birds are very thankful...Ty our dog thinks we're nuts). The first thing we did was take her to a spay/neuter clinic to to get spayed, but apparently after they cut her open, they realized that she was already spayed...sad...then they clipped her left ear so she wouldn't have to go through this again (the universal signal that a cat's been altered...who knew?) Now I need to take her to the vet to see if she has a micro-chip b/c they didn't check for that last time...just in case she's someone's baby. But even with Anna Kate's help (trying to get her to come out from behind our washer)

we can not get Elise to do something that's not her idea...so she may not be going to the vet any time soon. Meanwhile J.R. is swimming in our indoor pool and playing in our NEW indoor sandbox that we acquired about the same time as Elise.

It's been recently brought to my attention that maybe we should not use our last name on our blog...I'm not exactly sure what the threat is...is it that some creep-ball could see our pics & decide he wants us and look us up and come to our house and kidnap our kids? Do people really do that? Aren't most abducted kids abducted by people that they know already? I don't think we know anyone that would do that sort of thing, but maybe I should start worrying about such possibilities... Anyway, about half my friends that blog use their last names and the others don't. Maybe we shouldn't use ours b/c we'd be really easy to find since there are about 10 Mureen families in the whole U.S. and half of them are in prison ;) Just kidding Jon. I won't use anyone else's last names from now on, but these are dangerous times...blog at your own risk folks. This is a good article on the risks.

Our house!!! We were Yard of the Month for the month of May for our homeowners association area. I really did flip out when I drove by and say the sign out front May 1 because Jon and I have worked so hard (with no idea what we're doing exactly as this is our first yard ever) and in less than a year we reaped this great reward :) You can email me and request a pic ;)

I've wanted to start a blog for a while now, but thought the last thing I needed was another procrastinatory (sp?) diversion from my homemaking duties...my husband agreed. But today I had a brilliant idea that I could not blog until the house was straight, so maybe this will keep me in line! And I explained to my husband, Jon, that this will be a wonderful gift to our children some day, for them to have record of precious memories from this dear time in their lives. And with that intro, I have to make up for lost time that I have not spent blogging.