biggest, strongest, fastest

yes, this video is all over the place.  i had to start over after only the first page, i had to take a call in the middle of the video, and i got all confused on whose book i was reading and said the wrong names at the end (tootles, I LOVE YOU!!!), but in all honesty, i was just doing the best i could this week.  i was already on take four so i just left it this last time.  hey, i guess that counts as a "life: as it really is" post, huh?  :-) 

life: as it really is (why makeup should be non-negotiable)

i'll probably regret posting this, but it just makes me laugh so hard that i wanted to share the giggles.  when josh and i celebrated our tenth anniversary last month, we took a few photos to commemorate our special day.  this was one of them...

my precious husband insisted on having a copy of what he graciously refers to as his "smokin' hot wife" so he could put it in his office.  i had the photo printed, and he sweetly put it by his monitor.  now fast forward to this past week when i was in a continual routine of coughing my lungs up, putting them back in place, and then starting the cycle all over again thanks to a nasty bout with bronchitis.  i gathered my wallet and keys and walked downstairs to tell josh goodbye so i could head out to the doctor.  he stared at me with a look of pity, but there was a curious little glimmer in his eye as well.  finally, he placed something in my hand, told me to stand still, and took this:

and that, my friends, is life: as it really is.

life: as it really is

my friend, brook, of too many b's wrote a post a while back about the family "perfection" we often portray on places like facebook and personal blogs.  it's not that any of us actually has it totally together...it's just that we want everybody out there to think that we do.  i've really tried to use our blog as a place to share things that are real -- real happy, real sad, and everything in between -- but as i was reading back through all of the beach posts from the last couple of weeks (sorry for that obnoxious number of photos), i realized that from the outside looking in, it probably appeared as if we spilled out of the car in a heap of giggly goodness onto the white sands of seagrove beach.  it might have seemed as if our children ran on flighty tiptoes toward the gorgeous ocean and played happily there for the remainder of the day while josh and i sipped on lemonade under an umbrella. 

ummm, that's not exactly how it happened.

in fact, on the evening that we joined our friends down there, we walked out to the beach together and i carried my camera eagerly in hand to get jack and isabel's first amazed reactions to the vastness and beauty of the ocean (the last time we were at the beach was when jack was just a few months old).  but what i got was a son who was terrified of the waves and a daughter who bawled her eyes out whenenever we put her feet down in the sand.  she cried like the sand was eating her legs.

and that, my friends, is life: as it really is.