Boys just wanna have fun!

We are back, and had a great time on our cruise! I am not even going to try to make a nice, neat and even looking post with all these pictures because there are too many pictures and I have a hard time making a post look nice with just a few pics! As you can see by my hair in one of the pictures, it was sometimes very windy!






I love this picture!! I wish the sunset had come through better in the photo.

These Senor Frog stores were everywhere! It's hard to tell, but the whole outside of the store is covered in water falls. It's neat to be inside the store and just be surrounded by water!




This place new how to serve a DIET COKE! This was a huge goblet. Ben enjoyed his margarita as well!

I went parasailing!!! Nothing like trusting your life to a bunch of people you just met!!!









The entertainment on the ship was AMAZING! Great singers, dancers, and comedians.




Some scenic pictures in Cabo San Lucas!



Our waiter, Rajeev from India!

Once again here we are eating. We did a lot of this on our cruise because the food was SO good and it was everywhere!
There was another cruise ship out there! But as you can see in the picture, it was a LOT smaller than ours :)
We really had fun, and definately want to go on another cruise someday (maybe to Hawaii or the Mediteranean.) Next time I will for sure wear sunscreen, because in my effort to get really tan, I got really burned which made two of the days a little miserable. And the last couple of days Ben's face looked like it had some disease he was peeling so bad! It was seven days, which is a pretty long vacation for us, and turns out it's just the perfect length....we felt like we had enough time to relax and have fun...and ready to come home too. It's such a shift to go from cruising to being a parent again, but man I love being a mommy! And Ben loves being a Dad. Riley keeps us laughing, especially now that we've started attempting to potty train. More to come on that...let's just say for now that Riley is already trying to manipulate the treat-for-going-potty system. More to come!

Last weekend we spent the night at my brother and sister-in-law's house while they went for a weekend getaway. Including Riley, we had six kids! It was definately fun even though near impossible to maintain a clean house with that many kids, but I was actually sad when we had to leave Saturday night. As you can see by the pictures, Riley has a cousin who is as cute as he is, and they had fun feeding a pet lamb (Yes, the picture of the stressed out lamb IS the pet lamb and yes, it hangs out in the house!). Riley also tackled his new hobby....skateboarding. He's much better than me all ready and he's only two! They also had fun in the tub. Riley refused to get out. Even after the water was completely drained he's still slipped around the tub on his belly for five minutes and was upset when I pulled him out. Ben and I will be leaving soon for our cruise, and we are pretty excited! It's hard to believe it's actually happening. We apologize to any friends that we haven't been able to get together with for a long time...things have been BUSY. Even though school is out, I am just as busy because I am taking care of the lawn again here at the townhomes, plus working part time as a cashier again for the summer. The rest of the time I am having fun with Ben and Riley! But we miss some of our friends that we haven't seen for awhile. Bon voyage!!!

This past weekend I was able to drive to Boise and visit with my mom for a few days.

We had so much fun doing what we do best...watching movies, eating, shopping (I performed a wardrobe intervention on my mom!!!) She took me to this amazing nursery that has got to be the best nursery out there....it is unbelievable and the pictures do not do it justice. We had fun just wandering through the endless aisles and rows of gorgeous flowers and trees and plants, and as you can see we also had fun posing for pictures. I love the two pictures of us being attacked by the petunia. Ever went to sniff a petunia and it wrapped itself around your nose??? I could have a blast at this place, although I wouldn't know where to even start. There are so many different types of plants, and they each have different needs to thrive. I'm overwhelmed at the prospect of landscaping our land when we build our house. I am recruiting my mom to come and help me because she really loves this kind of stuff (I do to, but she has loved it longer than me). Anways, I had a really fun time, and the best thing I bought with all my shopping was an Il Divo CD. Boy oh boy.....they are quite the group!!! Notice that they are my new background music :)

I took Riley to see the fire truck today! He was a little scared at first and did not cooperate very well for the photo moments I was hoping for. He was actually in the truck when the fireman sounded the horn, and about had a meltdown because it was SO loud. It was pretty funny! Afterwards some of us went to Hogi Yogi and got a little treat, and let's just say when Riley and the little girl in the picture get together....the silliness and hyperness abounds!

Last night we cut Riley's hair, and it took us forty-five minutes to realize that our clippers were CRAP and to run next door and borrow the neighbors which are not crap! I wasn't intending on buzzing his hair, but I had made so many mistakes with the scissors and our crappy clippers that we had no other option, but I think it actually looks pretty cute. Now that I know how easy it is to buzz his hair with a GOOD buzzer, I will probably keep doing it. At the beginning of this hour of haircutting, Riley was REALLY good and cooperative. But once we hit half and hour, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth (by both Riley and I) and by the time we were done Riley looked like a hairy little monkey with all his fallen hair on his back, and he was begging for Ben to wipe his tongue off with a rag which Ben had been doing during the last half hour.

This picture has a funny story with it. The other day Riley was in time out on his chair, and when time out was over and he was getting off his chair, somehow the chair hurt his leg. So of course, the law demands that the time out chair must now go to time out. I could see the wheels turning in Riley's head as he tried to figure out how to put the time out chair in time out. Well, he picked up the chair and put it in time out in the bathroom. After a minute, the chair had to say sorry to Riley and was then able to be returned to its corner :)

TO SPANK OR NOT TO SPANK?

When I worked at Walmart, I saw a few too many kids being smacked or spanked HARD by their parents (Walmart can be stressful!) that I decided I would never spank my child, no matter what. Wellllllll....there have been a few times lately when Riley has really tested my patience and made me reconsider. The other day I was at an ourdoor shopping place, and Riley took off and was lost to the world for several minutes. I would finally find him, and he'd take off running (and LAUGHING) and literally he was on one side of a building and I was on the other and we ran around in circles. People were staring. Now, if I were a spanker, this would have been an EXCELLENT time to spank. Today Riley locked me out of the downstairs bathroom while he played around in the toilet with marshmallows. By the time I got in, he had his hands immersed in marshmallow soup in the potty. Then as I lifted him up he shook his hands and got nice toilet water all over the place. Before I knew it, my hand landed with a spank on his diaper padded bottom. This did not hurt him at all (in the chaos I don't even think he realized he had been spanked!) but I realized I need to decide...to spank or not to spank? Are there times when spanking is good? But do I really want to deal with the guilt??? Any advice out there, since Riley is testing his limits and seems to be having FUN at it? The time out chair works for most things, but half the time he thinks it's a game to sit in the cute little chair until the buzzer dings.