Every year I take the kids and travel back east to see my parents.  This year we took the dog as well which was an added bonus, big fun!  Visiting my parents is always nice, yet the trip is made even nicer by a quick overnight pilgrimage to the Four Seasons in Baltimore.  We plan this Baltimore jaunt smack dab in the...

IMAG0040 Originally uploaded by cdmader Passed out in the back seat… she was worn out after spending only a couple of hours with Daddy at work while I hoofed it around town to bridal salons.

IMAG0036.jpg 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...

This blogging thing has had me stumped for a while. The main goal of blogging is to have new content to draw people to my site to sell jewelry after all that is what I do. But then it also serves the dual purpose of allowing me an outlet to blab about whatever I have going on and those of you who know me know I like...

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...

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...

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...

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. ...

I would be Frick, hubs is Frack.  I am exhausted and all I can say is that this whole process is a freakin riot.  Every time we put something on the wall we need to take it down again and redo it.  I finally feel like we are starting to make some progress… the ratio of cabinets that need to be redone vs. cabinets...

We hit the pumpkin patch this past weekend for the obligatory pictures of cute kids sitting with pumpkins. I of course tried to have some input on our wardrobe choices, but anything I show the least bit of interest in gets shoved into the very BACK of Ethan’s closet by SirLikesToDressHimselfAlot. I should have expected...