Sylvia found my bridal jewelry at Amy Kuschel’s salon and wanted a custom necklace made for her wedding, so I whipped something up for her and I CAN’T WAIT to see the pictures. The wedding is next weekend in Puerto Rico and she is stunningly beautiful as well as sweet as can be. I did an inspiration board for her wedding, and added my own touches.

Her wedding will be in a church, then the reception will take place outside on the beach with lit pathways to the water, tropical flowers in pinks and whites with touches of cyan blue. Did I mention she is adorable? Well she is wearing a sexy Watters wedding dress and she will truly be stunning in it. I envision their wedding will be casually elegant with a bit of pomp yet still beachy.

The bridal necklace she liked was the Tattinger, but she wanted it with a longer drop as well as in white topaz and cream freshwater pearls. I whipped it up in the champagne colorway and sent it to her, oooops! We live so close to one another we met up so I could give her the right one and so that she could pick out some earrings. I had the kids with me and Ethan was seriously smitten with Sylvia. I have never seen him like that and it was cracking me right UP! And Scarlett couldn’t quite understand why she didn’t meet us in a white wedding dress as I had told her Sylvia was a bride.;)

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Originally uploaded by cdmader

Happy Mother’s Day! Ethan came home loaded up with these flowers yesterday, and Scarlett brought me a ‘guy’ which is just Mader code for a stuffed animal you sleep with. She was VERY upset this morning when she found my ‘guy’ abandoned on the kitchen counter and rushed into my room to give him to me in bed.

Here was my discussion with Ethan last night about puberty.

E: Mom, what is puberty?
Me: mortified, ‘puberty is when your body goes through changes and you go from being a boy to a man.’
E: What happens to your body?
Me: still mortified, ‘well, you grow hair on your chest and your face and other places and your voice changes’
E: What happens to girls?
Me: is this line of questioning ever going to end!? ‘girls get boobies’
E: interrupting, ‘Oh I get it, boys and girls START with just nibbles, then for girls, the nibbles turn to boobies and for boys the nibbles stay nibbles.’
Me: dumbfounded ‘well, yes.’

Nibbles!

I don’t understand why children spend the first 13 years of their lives fighting sleep, then all of a sudden they won’t get out of bed. I think it is one of life’s great unsolved mysteries. Getting Ethan to go to bed at night is a whole series of plays in the playbook… he’s hot, he’s cold, his head hurts, he is thinking bad thoughts… I was rationalizing with him, but I gave that up, that got me no where. He says ‘I can’t sleep, I am thinking bad thoughts’ to which I reply, ‘well think about good things like pizza or your scooter.’ He says ‘I can’t think good thoughts.’ ‘Of course you can,’ I say, ‘you control your mind’ to which he says ‘I can’t control my thoughts, bad thoughts come into my head and I can’t get rid of them.’ And here I realize I have no rationale for this except that he must be schizophrenic and clearly that is not the case.

His latest theory is that he is nocturnal. He said to me the other day ‘I want to stay up all night, I am nocturnal.’ I shoot back, ‘you can’t do that, you need to go to school during the day.’ Little stinker says ‘well you could home school me.’ He taxes my brain cells, there is no way I can come up with stuff fast enough for him, and he is only going to get better at it. HE WEARS ME OUT!

I have always had a thing for baby bellies, I think they are just about the cutest things in the whole world. ‘Where’s your belly?’ gets the response from my kids of lifting up their shirts and laughing. And that big pink baby belly is just darling, so much stuffed into one small little area, it’s like you can literally see a big breakfast pile up in there. ‘Who’s got the biggest belly?’ and ‘Lookit your big belly!’ is something we say a lot in our household, lots of shirt raising and giggling. The belly is a thing to be praised, loved, admired, no 6 pack abs for this family.;)

So we are on a road trip to go see Grandma and Pop and Ethan is about 2, maybe 2 and a half. His belly is so huge that I am forced to find other pant solutions for him. Anything I buy that will fit around his waist has to be rolled up 18 times so as not to trip over the pant legs. I find the perfect solution in long board shorts sized up… they are supposed to be shorts, they fit my little chubster like pants. Oh well, wardrobe dilemma solved. Oh sorry, back to the road trip… we stop at In N Out burger, not because that is a staple in our diets, but clearly because we are on a road trip and well that is one of the few choices available to us.;)

We are at the counter trying to decide, animal style, protein style… and my left eye that is trained on Ethan sees him start to strike up a conversation with a man who would clearly win the big belly contest in our house. After making sure our order will be correct, no ordinary burgers for us, I take the two steps over to Ethan to hear what he is saying. ‘Lookit your big belly!’ and ‘You’ve got a big belly!’ are what he is telling the big bellied man just like he has won the contest. Eeeek! I mutter apologies to the man and get Ethan mesmerized in some stickers to draw him away from the big bellied man. Never in a million years would I have thought he would go up and tell a complete stranger ‘Lookit your big belly!’ We are now working on not talking to strangers.;)

Luckily Ethan has grown out of the phase where we praise the big belly, he now says things to me like ‘Mom, why is your belly so big, are you going to have another baby?’ Or ‘Mom, your belly has gotten smaller since you had Scarlett, why isn’t your butt getting any smaller?’ Isn’t he just a gem?;)

The kid totally cracks me up.  We spend a day out, we go do something fun like hit the pumpkin patch or have ice cream after school… we have a great time and his way of telling me is to say ‘I don’t want to be adopted today.’  Like every other day in his poor pitiful life he would rather be adopted by another family.  And if he says this in public, the looks I get from other parents, MOTHER OF THE YEAR OVER HERE PEOPLE.;)