GOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!

I'm not sure how to spell that phonetically, but Natty scored her first goal of the season today! Usually she plays defender because that's where she likes, but her coach had her play forward today and she got the opportunity to score- Tim took her for ice cream afterwards to celebrate. I wish I had a camera, but she was pretty excited!

The other day at her practice, I realized what an un-cool mom I really am. For those of you who don't know, I hate...no....loathe....grasshoppers, crickets, moths. (basically, anything that jumps or flies really fast. YUCK.) Anyway- Dallin and Madison were playing in the field near Natty's practice field and all of a sudden Dallin charges up to the van with his hands cupped around something yelling, "Mommy!!! Look what I found!!!" Prior experience told me it was either a worm or some form of insect. So before I even knew what it was, I closed all the van doors *very* quickly and yelled, "Dallin!! Go put it back!! It needs to be with it's family!!"
Well, he looked completely dejected and turned around with slumped shoulders to put his pet back. I felt horribly guilty, so I cracked a window and said, "Okay, Dal- come around to my side and show me what you found"....He got a big old grin on his face and came to my side and tried to open my door. "No, no, no. Let's just leave the door and window shut, just hold it up to the window so your chicken mother can see what you found." And this is what I saw *through* the window:
not a great pic because you can't really see the grasshopper's little head poking out of dallin's fist- but if I didn't think they were such vile things, it could have been pretty cute.

And now for something completely different: I went to shopping today for the first step in my freezer-meal-making-marathon. I had a cart loaded to the brim since I'll be cooking for a full month, and I was going slow feeling so sorry for myself because my 8 month preggo body was hurting as I was pushing all of that food around. And all of a sudden I saw a man in the produce section who was obviously down on his luck. He passed me and grabbed a bag of lettuce and then turns to me and asked, "Is this lettuce?" I told him that it was and he just thanked me, nodded, and walked off. I get so self-absorbed sometimes that I forget how blessed I am that our family is able to buy a month worth of groceries, while others are going hungry or wondering how they're going to afford lettuce. So I had a little talk with myself and said, "Ashly, buck-up. Get over yourself. Show a lot more gratitude and complain a lot less." So that's my goal for this week. Shouldn't be hard because I have SO MUCH to be grateful for.