Mother Nature is quite loud

I always marvel at how windy it is out here, and sometimes, it is amplified whenever a storm is approaching.

The only times I ever heard wind like this in Malaysia was when I was at a beach!

Currently absolutely adoring...

What a lovely, gentle, inspiring, positive show!

Geek Nerdism

A lot of my t-shirts are so worn that they have holes that are too embarrasing to go out in public in.

So, for this past birthday, I decided to get myself a T Shirt -  from where else - Woot.com, my favorite place for Geek Nerd Graphic Tees.

This is what I finally settled on.

Then, I realised the theme was exactly like what I had gotten the last time I got t-shirts there.  A Star Wars -  Doctor Who Crossover.

This t shirt makes me very happy. :)

Goodbye Poor Little WoodPecker

It's called a Malaysian Umbrella.

Oh, Classic Duck Tales. This is so wrong but I still love you.

Glasses for the Little Boy

I had noticed the little boy squinting at the TV quite a few months back, and I had been trying to judge if his eyes were bothering him.  He would say he saw things well, and that the "light was making me squint".

I would ask him to read things which were a little farther away, and he would do okay.

This time, when it was time for the yearly checkup, he didn't do well on the Vision Test with the Eye Chart.

I had all kinds of feelings running through me when we left the doctor's office. I was feeling like I had failed as a mother, that somehow it was my fault.  If only I hadn't let him use his tablet so much, even though I was already setting time limits for devices, if only I had been better with making sure he was spending more time out of doors, and so on and so forth.  AND I wear glasses, and have had a pair since I was 15.  I only found out I needed glasses after a puberty growth spurt and needed to sit at the back of the class because of my height.

And even though I wear glasses, somehow I worried about HIM wearing glasses.

Then I came across a blog post which made me aware that many parents feel this way as well, and somehow I felt a little comforted.

So, we got him an appointment with the optometrist and lo and behold, he needed glasses.  It broke my heart when he started saying all the letters wrong during the testing, and obviously guessing on a bunch of them.  And then, as if by magic, the optometrist repeated the exam with lenses on, and he could see super clearly. I was very relieved that the optometrist looked into the little boy's eyes and declared they were healthy.

We shall see from here on out, how it goes, but when we picked up his glasses a few days later, and he put them on, he kept marveling at how he could see everything in so much more detail, and they weren't blurry any more.

I asked him why he never told me his eyes were blurry, and that I had to guess at it, and take steps to test for it, he replied, "I thought it might get better with time."

*sigh* That almost broke my heart a second time. But never mind all that now.  He is enjoying his new found clarity in visual acuity, and I am thanking the Lord we were able to get it all done quite
painlessly.

I think he looks very handsome, don't you? :)

A CatCentric Post

Just some of The Silkiness' Antics.

Like the time we got him a new scratching thingy that doubled as a kind of wavy chaise lounge, resulting in the cat contorting in some rather interesting ways at times.

And how he likes to look outside, pawing at the window at birds and insects that are buzzing about On The Outside.

And then there's the "What's wrong with me being on the Shower Mat" face,

and last but not least, I have had to put Child Safety Deals on my stove knobs, because one day while I was away for a few minutes, the cat decided to jump onto the stove, and on the way, it somehow managed to turn on the gas.

I had to remove the knobs for a few days while waiting for our order of Knob Covers to arrive in the mail.

I'm sure there'll be LOTS of adventures to come with This One.

Double Birthday and Anniversary

I am sure it has been mentioned before in this blog that the hubs and I have birthdays that are a day apart.

AND, we got married in between those days, somehow.

We DID want to start a tradition whereby we had our Birthdays / Anniversary dinner at Abuelo's but somehow that fell by the wayside a number of years back. The last time was probably when the little boy was a year old.

So this year, the hubs called ahead, and we arrived for dinner.

What would a Birthday/Anniversary dinner be without a WeFie?

The menu was making me dizzy, and I truly did not know what to order.  Finally, on a recommendation from our waitress, I decided to try a chicken dish, which turned out to be absolutely scrumptious.  The portions were huge, and we were all quite stuffed at the end of the night.

And the hubs even got a birthday discount from the manager :)

Hurrah!

Happy Father's Day, Daddy!

The little boy made a special Father's Day card, complete with tags you could pull to move the arm of the Daddy figure :)

I had gotten the materials to make some Shrinky Dinks, and the little boy drew a picture of the hubs while I shrunk the little figure in the oven.


Later that day, the little boy helped me make a Daddy Cookie

A Visit to Breckenridge

We hadn't been there in a while.. but we thought we would stop by Breckenridge after seeing Uncle Carter off.

We revisited the park we had brought the little boy to a couple of times before.. he vaguely remembered it.

Some of the features of the park were as we remembered...

while others were new and exciting. :)

It was lovely to walk through the tall shady trees over to the other part of the park that had the playground equipment..

and "reminisce" about the last time we were there with Grandad..

On the way home, we stopped at the rest stop at the Mile Long Bridge that spans over Hubbard Creek Lake.

We had been there to see it when the lake was so low, there were hardly any boats on it, and all the jetties / docks were on dry land.

This time though, we were very happy to see it quite full.

We also made a little friend there, though he was mostly shy :)

The Day Uncle Carter Visited

We were very fortunate to be able to meet up with Carter when he was in Dallas for a convention.  He was going to drive all the way to Abilene and back the same afternoon, so we decided to meet him semi halfway, in Strawn.

After some Googling, ( Hey, I didn't get the squiggly spellcheck error on Googling! ) we discovered that apparently there's a semi famous restaurant in Strawn, well known for their Chicken Fried Steak.

We thought we'd give it a try, and got there safely without incident.

We ordered some nachos as appetizers, and then the little boy got some chicken drumsticks and smiley fries, the hubs got a grilled chicken burger, Carter got the Famous Chicken Fried Steak and I ordered the livers and gizards.

The portion that came was ENORMOUS!

We managed to get the waitress to get a nice group photo,

as well as a nice shot of the little boy with his Uncle, 

the last time the little boy saw his Uncle was THIS, which has been way too long.



and then when I tried to capture some selfies, The Tan Ham Genes broke loose, and this is what I got on every shot.

I love it that we got to see Carter, and the little boy got to spend some quality time with his uncle, whom I wish we could see way more often.

Let's pray that happens, aye? :)

Humans and how we change our environment.

In social studies with Jaxon, we often come across topics of how humans interact with their environments, and how we change them.  A lot of the time, we try to change it for the good, like for infrastructure, but there are times when we inadvertently harm something in the process.

I was thinking of this as we saw the carving out of Ranger Hill to make a safer route for a highway, in a spot that was notorious for accidents.

What happened to you?

We were driving by the windmills, when we noticed one was blackened.

Was it a lightning strike?  Was it a short circuit? We may never know.

It IS pretty intriguing, though.

A Vege Vandal in Da House

I leave a Spaghetti Squash out for a day and this is what happens....