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It is usually the boy that I get to write posts about saying funny things, but I have a few from the girl this week.  Her wit… it’s a comin’ in now and is funnier than ever!

First up was a comment from her on our way to her soccer practice/the parent’s soccer game at the soccer indoor facility about a guy driving next to us down the road:

“Mom… oh my gosh… did you just see that guy? He’s wearing a turtleneck AND has a mullet!!!”

Then there was our conversation last night in the grocery store:

KAIDEN: Mom, you know the guy that does the afternoon bus run and picks me and Ashton up from school every day?

ME: Yes

KAIDEN: Well every day on the bus, he forces us to listen to some radio station called K-Love that only plays religious music.

ME: Okay, not surprising with him.

KAIDEN: Well, the other day, while we were waiting at another elementary school to pick kids up, they announced a contest and needed like 5 callers or something to call in and answer some stuff to win an iPad2.  He asked us all to pray for him that he would win that iPad2 and he called in.  Well he won that stupid iPad.  **Kaiden cannot stop laughing hysterically**

ME: That’s great Kaiden, good for him.  Why is that so damn funny?

KAIDEN: No… Mom… listen… he won it because he was the only person that called in.  They waited FOREVER… and NO ONE ELSE CALLED, so they just had to say he was the winner and award it to him!!!  Isn’t that hilarious?  Not one other person was listening to K-Love to even call in, so he just won it.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!  Seriously… who listens to K-Love by choice?  JUST HIM.

That one had me ROLLING.  That she seriously FOUND the humor in that situation JUST LIKE I WOULD HAVE!!!!!  PROUD MOMMY MOMENT PEOPLE!!!!  PROUD MOMMY MOMENT!

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Many, many months ago, my sister, my brother and I registered to run in a race/obstacle course called the Warrior Dash together.  Shelly and her husband also signed up to do it.  So, last Thursday, my sister flew up from Florida so that we could do it and on Saturday morning, we left my mom’s house at 6am, with mom driving us and drove the almost two hours to Berkeley Plantation in Charles City, VA, where the race was being held.  We were excited to all be doing this… although slightly less excited when we first found out that Charles City was not allowing beer at the event (one of the main things we WANTED) and then when we pulled up to pouring rain and very chilly temps.  Plunging into water obstacles and running soaking wet doesn’t sound so much fun when it is freezing outside.  Thank goodness the rain did not last long and it was warm enough that with running, the water was not so bad.

Here we are before the race… looking all clean and happy.  We have our warrior eye black on, our numbers pinned to our shirts and our OLD running shoes laced up and ready to go.

This is one of the obstacles from the race - The Cargo Climb… and that is my brother coming down on it.  There were 12 total obstacles, as follows and in this order:

Barricade Breakdown - Hurdle over waist-high barricades then crawl under barbed wire about 6 times.
Rubber Ricochet - Ram your way through the rubber jungle of swinging tires.
Road Rage - Stampede through tires, then over a scrap yard of rusted cars, then through tires again.
Chaotic Crossover - Combat crawl across tangled nets.
Deadweight Drifter - Trudge through chest to overhead deep water and over multiple spinning logs.
Teetering Traverse - Level your nerves as you teeter through a soaring track of planks.
Deadman’s Drop - Climb to the top and over the tall unhandy hurdle.
Great Warrior Wall - Conquer the wooden barricade climbing up one side with a rope.
Rio Run - Dash down the river at multiple depths.
Warrior Roast - Leap over the Warrior fire pits.
Cargo Climb - Maneuver over the cargo nets.
Muddy Mayhem - Scramble beneath barbed wire in a pit of mud as you near the finish.

The Great Warrior Wall was the hardest for me to do - as I have ZERO upper body strength and had to pull myself up a 2-story wall with a rope.  FUN FUN.

The entire course was a complete mud-bath.  In normal conditions, it would have been an awesome trail run, but after two and a half weeks of NOTHING BUT RAIN, it was a pit of mud from start to finish.  Not to mention that the trail we were running on, I can only assume, is normally used as a trail for horses, since the god-awful smell of manure that we inhaled the entire time was prominent.  The mud was not a huge deal, since parts of the course were SUPPOSED to be mud… but having to run the entire thing with your shoes sticking in the mud constantly, and if they were not sticking, you were sliding around every single curve and almost completely eating shit.  The above photo is me coming out of the “Muddy Mayhem” and crossing the finish line… with a mouthful of mud.  My sister got to this point and ran to throw up because of the smell/mud in her mouth.

Here are the three of us after the race - not so clean looking anymore… but damn proud for finishing it!  My damn brother finished the thing in like 36 minutes - which is AMAZING.  The boy smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and NEVER exercises… yet ran through this race like a damn gazelle under attack!  The minute the flames went off at the start line signaling us to go, my brother said “see ya bitches” and TOOK OFF!  It was so damn funny.  After this photo, we all trekked down to the James river and jumped in to clean off, then we donated our shoes to the large pile they were collecting to be cleaned/donated to people who need them.

Then we headed to the truck to take turns holding up towels and covering each other so that we could strip down naked in the parking lot, wipe ourselves down and change into some dry, less stinky clothes.  We also cracked open some beers from the cooler we packed… PSSSHHHH… NO BEER… OKAY…SURE!!!  We also made sure to put on our Viking Helmets and pose for photos!

It was an AWESOME experience… and I am SO SO glad that I did it.  I can barely move from my stomach up, but still TOTALLY worth it!  Special thanks to my mom for driving us so we could drink after the race, for braving the chilly rain/muddy race site and for taking photos of us.  She was a trooper!!!  Below is a slideshow of all the photos from the day.

A couple weekends ago, we traveled to Clarksville, VA (about 3.5 hours away from Virginia Beach) to attend the wedding of Dena’s son Stephen and his now wife, Ashley.  They were engaged on 08/09/10, so the wedding was held on Saturday morning, 09/10/11.  Very neat that they worked it all out that way… but I would expect nothing less from Stephen.  We got into town early enough on Friday, that we were able to attend the Rehearsal Dinner party the night before the wedding at the house Dena had rented.  We enjoyed delicious BBQ, coolers filled with beer, kamikaze bats, cornhole and some awesome rounds of flip cup!  It was lots of fun.

The wedding was absolutely adorable, the location, the music they chose, the decorations - all of it was just awesome.  I am very happy that I was able to attend and be a part of it.  A cute idea they had was to include in their RSVP cards for the wedding, an area for you to write a joke or some “wedding advice” for them.  They have a site where they shared all of the jokes/advice that they received back with the RSVP’s.  You can see all of those here.  They are an adorable couple and I wish them all the happiness in the world!

Of course I cannot talk about the wedding without mentioning how absolutely handsome a one Mr. Ethan Clavier looked in his little tuxedo… very dapper… very dapper indeed!

I was talking to Nadine about the wedding one evening and telling her how it was at 10am and 3.5 hours away and I was trying to decide whether to go up the night before, or try to swing driving in the morning of, etc.  She mentioned that her parent’s lake cabin was about 30 minutes away from the wedding location and suggested that we just stay there.  That turned into, well why don’t you and Kev see if you can get rid of your kids for the weekend and come to the cabin too and we will make a weekend out of it… which is exactly what we ended up doing.

I think it took Todd approximately 2.2 seconds after getting back to the cabin after the wedding, to get out of his fancy clothes and change into his fishing clothes.  The man LOVES his fishing time and along with Kev, spent the entire rest of his day in this little boat with a cooler full of beer, a bubbling bucket full of minnows and about 5 fishing rods trolling around this lake.  It was the funniest thing to watch them.  Two big ass men in this little boat, with a battery powered engine, going about 1.2 miles per hour and every time they looped around and passed us on the dock you could tell they were a little bit drunker.  You could really tell when you had to keep listening to Todd yelling across the lake about some coon dog he had (huh?) and how he fed it dry dog food and had we seen that damn dog.  It became more and more incoherent as the day turned to night, which to us was funnier and funnier.  With his mouth that NEVER shut, it was amazing that they caught any fish at all.  Nadine gave him the Indian name “A River Runs Through It.”

The dock is where Nadine and I spent our day, drinking our own beer and laughing.  Nadine was a trooper with her fishing… especially with the dead ass bait she had to work with.  We would ask the guys for another minnow and they would circle around and without stopping, pick the sickliest, deadest minnows from the bucket and throw them at us and keep on puttering along.  By the time it was dark, we were all a little toasty…

That’s when we busted out the half gallon of Southern Comfort and the deck of cards and started playing some Spades.  Whenever we play spades, it is always Nadine and I against Todd and Kev… and it is always us playing fair and them CHEATING LIKE DOGS… and then talking shit the whole time while they are CHEATING.  Todd was the worst… dropping cards out of nowhere and swapping out cards when nobody was looking… and trying to convince Nadine with a STRAIGHT FACE that she did not throw a 10 of Clubs… and instead threw a Spade, so that she won the round and not him… since he had said he would go nil that round.  That became the joke of the trip… WHERE IS THE 10 OF CLUBS TODD????  Nadine changed Todd’s Indian name from “A River Runs Through It” to “Lies Like a Coon Dog.”

I spent the first part of the evening all up Todd’s ass about slowing down with the drinking, especially when I saw that he was drunk enough to think it would be delicious to mix Southern Comfort with boxed red wine.  But the joke was on me, when we were out on the porch and all of a sudden I was completely covered in sweat (looking like Whitney Houston on crack as Nadine described it) and then puking my guts out in the woods.  Apparently I was the one drinking WAY too much.  I felt like hell on earth Sunday for the drive home… but who cares, it was a great weekend and well worth it!

I made this little collage to send to Nadine as a reminder of the weekend.  It pretty much sums it all up.  Don’t even ask about the grape cigarillos… it was just another thing Todd kept yelling about, just like his lost coon dog that he feeds dry dog food.

UPDATE:
Just saw this super amazing photo of Dena and I from Stephen’s wedding.

That’s us acting very grown-up and classy at her son’s wedding.  We actually ASKED the wedding photographer to take this photo so that it would show up in Stephen’s photos.