My Life According to Chris Ledoux

Rules: Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title. Holler if you're going to do it. I'd love to see what you come up with. It's a lot harder than you think!

My Artist: Chris LeDoux

Am I male or female?
Look At You Girl

Describe Yourself:
Blue Eyes And Freckles

How I feel:
Simple As Dirt

Describe where you currently live:
Western Skies; I Believe In America

If I could go anywhere it would be:
Mountain Wild

My favorite form of transportation:
Running Through The Rain; Gravitational Pull

My best friend is:
Tougher Than The Rest

To me life is:
The Goodnight Loving Trail; Feels Like I'm Getting Into Something Good;
Don't It Make You Want To Dance

My fear:
Hard Times

The best advice I have to give:
Get Back On That Pony

How I would like to die:
Running Through The Rain

My Motto:
Bang A Drum

Tagged

Thanks for the invite Kristine. {It's a simple tag: Go to your sixth folder, post the sixth photo and tag six people.}

I LOVE this picture! This is my amazing older bro, Dave, with his sweet, beautiful bride, Jamie, right after their memorable morning jog last Thanksgiving, when he proposed. (He hid the ring in an ice cube in her water!)

These two are so great together. They truly enhance e.o. and are happier together. I'm so glad to claim Jamie as a sister!

I'm going to tag 6 people that haven't posted in a while that I miss! Cathy, Tracy, Candace, Jessica, Rachel, and Lisa. And I'd love to see what's lurking in everyone elses files! (Did I spell that right?)

Interview With My Kids...

1. What is something I always say to you?
Smarty: Um.. go in your room and pick my toys and cars!

2. What makes me happy?
Smarty: Sweety and me give you loves
Sweety: me, baby (patting chest)

3. What makes me sad?
Smarty: I dunno (guilty look on his face. *giggle*)

4. How do I make you laugh?
Smarty: Make a funny face

5. What was I like as a child?
Smarty: You would sleep in your bed and Grandma would sing to you

6. How old am I?
Smarty: 63 (crap, gotta work on that)

7. How tall am I?
Smarty: One, this many (with a hand on his head) I am taller!

8. What is my favorite thing to do?
Smarty: Clean up the outside

9. What do I do when you're not around?
Smarty: Play with my toys
Sweety: cack, cack, cack (his duck sound)

10. If I become famous, what will it be for?
Smarty: Cause you like to run away

11. What am I really good at?
Smarty: Finding triangles (nice to see my talents are truly appreciated)

12. What am I not very good at?
Smarty: Our home work (pointing around the room. I'm afraid he's got me there!)

13. What is my job?
Smarty: Fixing the couch and my drink in my sippy cup at nighttime

14. What's my favorite food?
Smarty: Broccoli, broccoli, broccoli, broccoli
Sweety: PEAS! (peas are his favorite food)

15. What makes you proud of me?
Smarty: You do puzzles; you tickle me

16. If I were a cartoon character, who would I be?
Smarty: a baby

17. What we do together?
Smarty: toys, ice cream

18. How are we the same?
Smarty: We eat cheerios, you like cats and I like cats
Sweety: yum, yum, yum, yum, MAH! (which is a request for more)

19. How are we different?
Smarty: We're boys and you are pizza! (he thinks he's pretty funny)

20. How do you know I love you?
Smarty: I will ask Daddy, I show you I love you!
Sweety: bee-bee! (baby) Gagh.

22. Where is my favorite place to go?
Smarty: To the store; to the Treehouse (children's museum)

Leave me a comment you are going to do this. I'd love to hear from your kids!

100 Books (34 for me...)

My brilliant friend Rachel tagged me with this on Facebook, and I thought this was an interesting experiment, but I'm too dumb to know how to do it there. Let me know if you're doing it too. I'd love to see your response.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' (plus) to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '-' (minus) to the ones you hated
4) Add a '*' (star) to those you have partially read
5) Tally your total and put it in the title.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x+)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x*)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x+)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x+)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x+)
6 The Bible (x*)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x+-)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (x+)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x-)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( )
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x*)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (x*)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ( )
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (x)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x*)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (x+)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x+)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x+++!!!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x+)
37. Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ( )
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell ( )
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x+)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ( )
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x+)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( )
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (x+)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ( )
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( )
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ( )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ( )
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ( )
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ( )
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ( )
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x+)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath ( )
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ( )
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ( )
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x-)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery ( )
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ( )
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x)

Tags

Picture Tag!

RULES:

1. Go to your documents/pictures folder

2.Go to the 6th file folder

3. Go to the 6th picture

4. Blog about it

Oct '08. I'm always amazed at how flexible these little guys are. Ben sleeps during the day, and we'd just gone in to wake him up. I set Sweety on the bed, and in order to have a face to face chat with his father, he just kind of folded himself in half. It was totally cute!

7 Random Things

RULE:

Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.

1- I hate folding laundry more than just about any other chore in the house. Seriously. Bring on the toilets to scrub, but please, don't make me fold clothes!!!! It drives me crazy that laundry never gets completely done. Even as your putting laundry away, you're dirtying more laundry!!!! Aaaaaggggghhhhhh!

2- I'm totally claustrophobic. I can't even stand having my arms pinned to my side. The mere thought of crawling into a sleeping bag upside-down makes me nauseous and my heart race. It's completely ridiculous!


3- I dig heights. Have you heard about hiking Angel's Landing down in Zion's Park, Utah? That would be the hike were for the last 100 yards of the trail, they've provided a chain for you to hold onto, while you crawl, because the trail is only about 2 feet wide and on either side, the mountain drops away for a couple thousand feet.

At the end, the trail widens out into a platform about 10' by 15'. It's the most amazing feeling in the world to stand there with your arms out, feel the wind blow on your face, and take in the whole park from that great height! It's almost like you're flying! It makes my palms sweat to just think about it, but I can't wait to go back and hike it again some day!!!

Looking up at Angel's Landing

The prize that awaits, if you make it to the end:

4- I am a dedicated tummy sleeper. There are two positions I am able to sleep in: face down leaning slightly to the left or face down leaning slightly to the right. That's it.

5- Like many women, I HATE wearing shoes. The first thing I do when I come in my house or the house of a loved one is take off my shoes. It's not even March yet, there's still snow on the ground, but I've busted out the flip-flops, because my feet were slowly suffocating over the winter.

6- I have a weak sense of smell. My mom only smells once in a while. (and because she isn't able to identify smells, it usually sends her into a panic when she can. *giggle* ) My grandma (mom's mom) couldn't smell anything at all, ever, to my knowledge.

This condition has totally affected my ability to cook and the foods I like and dislike. For example: I never got what the big whoop is about soda! It's just really sugary water that burns your throat all the way down! What on earth is so pleasant about that?! But Ben informed me that carbonation is accompanied by some olfactory experience that's just fantastic. Hmm. Totally lost on me.

7- I don't wear shorts. Ever. Well that's not entirely true, I do wear shorts when swimming. Anyone who's seen my legs in recent history completely understands why. I'll admit, I have some beautiful features, but my legs are nowhere near that list.

Thanks for listening y'all!

I tag....
Tracy, Bonnie, Amy, Cathy, Julia, and anyone else who wants to play. Pick one or both. Whatever you want.

Award

Thanks Tiff, you're a sweetheart. Its nice to be recognized.

The Friends Award is given to blogs that are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and to be friends.The hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated.

I am blessed with lots of great bloggy friends. I don't know how to possibly choose only 8 blogs when I love reading like 30! But for this go-around, check out these 8 dear friends with blogs that I absolutely love:

Jessica- Brunson Family Adventures

Kristine- Our Forever Family

Christina- Kilton Adventures

Susie- Sauntering with Sue

Emily- Sunshine and Lazy Days

Liz- the Adams 5

Sarah- the Happy Hodsons

Amy- Because I Knew You

Tag I'm It

Sorry Jaime. It's taken me a while to get to this, but here it is:

What's your husbands name?
Ben Bardwell

How long have you guys been married?
6 years, and we still like each other!

How long did you date?
6 months before his mission, a year and a half after.

How old is he?
6 uh, woops, I mean 29! Sometimes I get a little confused.

Who eats more sweets?
I'm likely to sneak a little here and there, but he can sit down and pound a half-gallon of ice cream all at once. I'm not sure how that adds up, but we all know who carries more of it around forever!!!!

Who said I Love You first?
I don't remember.

Who is taller?
Ben

Who is the better singer?
Depends on who's listening.

Who is smarter?
Usually Ben, but I made a much smarter choice in my mate then he did!! (don't barf :P)

Who does the laundry?
Probably half and half.

Who pays the bills?
Me at the moment, but we take turns.

Who sleeps on the right side of the bed?
When we actually sleep at the same time, (darn that night shift) I think it's usually him.

Who mows the lawn?
Ben, but I'm willing.

Who cooks dinner?
Me about 85% of the time.

Who drives?

Ben. I never liked it before my Camry, and now it's just habit. He drives, I smack kids. (just kidding Mom, quit freakin out!)

Who is the first to say they are wrong?
Either

Who kissed who first?
Ben kissed me first. On the floor of his family room, during the Princess Bride.

Who asked who out first?
He asked me first.

Who wears the pants?
We prefer kilts. Ha! Analyze that! Seriously though, he wears the pants, but when he needs it, I tell him which ones to wear. ;)

Friday's Feast

I liked this Friday's Feast:

Appetizer

When was the last time you had your hair cut or trimmed?

Mid June-ish, my hubby, in our kitchen, with our scissors. (Sounds like a CLUE hypothesis.)

Soup

Name one thing you miss about being a child.

I miss not worrying about the future. Safety, money, security, that was all a given to me when I was a kid.

Salad

Pick one: butter, margarine, olive-oil

For taste is has to be butter! I'm a farm girl at heart. Olive-oil is irreplaceable too. But, I don't give a dang about margarine. Sorry margarine. :(

Main Course

If you could learn another language, which one would you pick, and why?

I've had some experience with Spanish and some with American Sign Language. And while Spanish is so beautiful to listen to and infinitely practical in this country and the world at large, ASL comes naturally to me. That is, I don't have to struggle as hard to learn it. I've had two official semesters of ASL and lots of practice with Smarty. I would love to get proficient at it.

Dessert

Finish this sentence: In five years I expect to be...

...Acquiring a piece of land on which to plant my future dream house, mothering 3 or 4 children, and crossing a stage with my husband to finally recieve our bachelors diplomas. (Okay so that last one was probably a bit of a stretch, but here's hoping)

I hope to be...

...A little more patient, kind, understanding, brave, clean, thrifty, and pretty much everything else listed in the Boy Scout Motto.

Friday's Feast

For once I don't have much to say off the top of my head, so here's a little 'food for thought.' (Stop groaning and read)

Appetizer

Name 2 blue things.

A perfect sky

My beloved Camry

Soup

What is your favorite color of ink to write with?

Purple. I love all things purple when it comes to office supplies.

Salad

Pretend you are about to get a new pet. Which animal would you pick, and what would you name it?

I love dogs! I adore how loving they generally are. They’re great for kids. They can live happily outdoors. (all my boys have allergies) And they make great body guards/ running partners, so I could run wherever, whenever.

(As for names, you can't pick a name until you've met the dog!)

Main Course

Write a sentence with only 5 words, but all of the words have to start with the first letter of your first name.

Living loose leaves lots less loot! (right; more than 5, but I couldn’t resist)

Dessert

If you could live on another continent for 1 year, which one would you choose?

Europe, Europe, EUROPE! There are so many things I want to see for myself! But I’d love to go almost anywhere else for a year too.

Tag, I'm It

Thanks for tagging me Tiff. I hope you don't mind the additional topic. I wanted to hear other's responces. Here ya go.

4 Things I love to do over and over:
1. run away. Running clears my head and re-sets me for motherhood.
2. family bike rides. We live close to a beautiful river-side trail. It's so fun to watch the river and the trees and animals change with the seasons.
3. take my kids to the park. They love swinging, sliding, hanging out, and running around. They also get a kick out of watching other people, their dogs, and the inevitable bread-stealing seagulls. It's a great way to pass an afternoon.
4. visit Treehouse Children's Museum in Ogden, Utah. It's amazing. I highly recommend it. Yes, as a former employee I may be prejudiced, but check it out anyway; it's worth it.

4 People who call/text/email me regularly:
1. my moms, who are my best girlfriends.
2. my sisters-in-law (including Amy). I have the coolest in the world.
3. my brothers. They have always looked out for me.
4. my college roommates and friends from high school. Thanks for keeping in touch y'all.

4 Favorite Foods:
1. Ben's mashed potatoes served with roast. They're absurdly creamy, buttery, and lump-free. He makes the best in the world; no kidding.
2. Whatever my mom-in-law is serving. She's a genius with food.
3. Pork barbacoa from Cafe Rio. (No explanation necessary)
4. Most importantly, pretty much anything I didn't have to cook!

4 Places I'd Rather Be:
1. the Flake Ranch in Aripine, Arizona. A place that is more "home" to me than the home I grew up in.
2. the mountains. (anytime, anywhere) After a month or so of city life, it's crucial to my happiness to 'get outa Dodge.'
3. the 1000 Acre Lodge in North Slamon, Idaho. A quiet little B&B we discovered on our honeymoon.
4. The dream house Ben and I designed together and hope to build some day.

4 Movies I'd Watch Over and Over:
1. Secondhand Lions. Who knew Michael Cane could play a hillbilly?!!
2. The DaVinci Code. Great book + plus great director & actors = fantastic movie.
3. Hairspray. I giggle just thinking about it. Beautifully done.
4. Anything with a score by my hero, John Williams. He picks movies that are remarkable to start with, and his brilliance makes them epic.

4 Musicians I love to listen to:
1. Chris Ledoux. The biographer of Western America.
2. U2. They're unique and yet the widest varieties of people find validation in their music.
3. Kenneth Cope. The man is a rock, but his sensitivity is prevalent.
4. And good 'ole Michael Buble. King of crooners.

4 Times of the year I look forward to:
1. Halloween. This holiday belongs to children. It's so fun to watch even the shy kids' personalities come out when their all dressed up.
2. Spring. I get the worst cabin fever. I love to watch the world wake up again. The rebirth of nature rejuvenates my spirit.
3. The 4th of July. One of the best, and most important birthday parties of the year.
4. Christmastime. We all do.

4 People I'm tagging:
1. Candace Laughead
2. Sarah Hodson
3. Bryant Reeder
4. Allison Duffy