Some more fun PA pics

Dada was a hit reading to Maddie and Nora


we took a nature walk with Grandma Mag and found this turtle





M has a slight obsession with hats at the moment... it is her favorite word

PA and Maddie's FIRST BIRTHDAY!!

For Maddie's 1st Birthday, Jeff parents (Nana and Pap Pap) flew us out to stay with them in beautiful Reedsville, PA for a week. We had a nice party on Memorial Day with my mom, Maddie's great grandma, Uncle Luke and Aunt Kim and cousin Nora. It was practically the only day we had nice weather and it was much appreciated!

The Zoo

We spent last week in PA, but the week before we left we had some lovely, lovely weather. I decided to get out of The Woodlands and drive into Houston to visit the Zoo. Maddie was teething and slightly miserable. Her favorite experience was playing in the mulch. (ugh) I did manage to get her to make some animal noises and I think she enjoyed the experience overall.

yay for meerkats!!


the petting zoo was really quite nice


rrrraaaaaarrrrr


...and I leave you with Maddie's favorite part of the zoo

Landry's Update

It pays to complain! After writing Landry's a nasty note, we received a $50 gift certificate to any Landry's Inc. restaurant! Luckily that encompasses a steak house. I'm just not sure I want to go to their seafood place again. Too greasy. But kudos to them for taking me seriously!

Pictures from the Landry's disaster

Family pictures before we left... clearly we're very excited to be going out to a nice restaurant! I even fit back into a pre-pregnancy dress for the occasion!

doesn't it look like we stole some blonde-haired blue-eyed child for a mother's day prank?



Here we are waiting to be seated... and waiting... and waiting...

..and this is what "the lion says"! RAAAAARRRRR!!!



And we end with a very tired bebe... resting on the table. Note lack of food.

By the way, I don't know how long I can maintain this level of blogging lavishness, so enjoy it while it's here.

UPDATE to Blah blah blah

My mom was equally intrigued by what's pooping in my back yard and decided to write a note to the people at the Texas Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. Posing as me, she wrote a note simply stating that something was defecating in my back yard and it's dog sized poo and she (I) was wondering what it could be. The director, Ms Roslyn Even, promptly wrote me back to inform me that it's raccoon poo. Apparently healthy raccoons have some really healthy poo. Good to know! Our suspicions were confirmed when I noticed yesterday morning that a raccoon(s) had drug a 5lb bag of bird seed about 10 feet across my deck, ripped it open, and consumed part of its contents.

Since Ms Even was so helpful in the raccoon debacle, I decided to ask about the things in my trees. I described it as a chirping (although it's not really a chirping, per se, more like a squeaking) and said they're in my trees and it sounds like bats. She responds: "Bats don't live in trees and they don't chirp." I'm quite sure she thinks I'm a complete idiot and I'm partly inclined to write her back and ask her where this 'tude came from. She also suggested that I try to look for the chirpers with binoculars. Maybe she thinks I have night vision goggles? Anyway, in her brief and terse response she also said that tree frogs make a peculiar sound. So maybe it's tree frogs. Anyone have any night vision goggles I can borrow??

I just checked out the site: http://www.twrc-houston.org/staff.html Ms Even looks like Cruella DeVille. She's probably not rehabilitating the animals, she's breeding them to make coats! Mom, next time email the sweet looking woman from the Education department! :)

Blah blah blah

I have a few things on my mind. First, we went to Landry's tonight as an early mother's day dinner thing (plus we had a $25 gift card, thanks ExxonMobil!). We waited for over an hour for our food, finally had to get it to go because Maddie was wiped, and when we got it home it was greasy and disgusting. Good times. I'm hoping we can cure all ills tomorrow with some banana sour cream pancakes for breakfast.

OK, next. We were weeding today and found some very large, strange poop in our back yard. It's the part of the yard we have fenced off from the dogs. Hmmmm... what could possibly be making dog-sized poop in a totally fenced dog-free zone?? Can any Texans offer any light into this?? Whatever it is, it must be able to climb fences.

Lastly, I have more questions for you Texans. What is relentlessly chirping in my trees at all hours of the night? It sounds like bats. It's definitely NOT birds. But I haven't seen anything flitting around the way bats do, gobbling up insects. (And we have plenty to be gobbled!) Help. So. Confused. I've heard that tree frogs chirp, but I'm not sure I'd buy that either...

Ahh, the south.

Mandi!

A few weeks ago Maddie and I took a little trip to see our dear friend Mandi (who is pregnant again!) and her daughter Abby. Abby is 2 weeks older than Maddie. They had a fabulous time playing together, which left Mandi and I time to hang out and relax. And paint. :) Thank You Mandi for taking care of us while Maddie ate you out of house and home!!!

Tara In Training

Please check out my newest blog: http://taraintraining.blogspot.com/
You can also get to it through my profile on this blog. It's going to be all about my running and training so that I can have a separate page for that. The one provided to me from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is nice, but it doesn't allow me to be creative and loquacious. I'm still keeping that one because that's my fundraising page, but the new one will have pictures and ramblings about rashes and blowing snot rockets while running... You know, stuff you really want to hear about!

Team In Training

You'll be hearing more about this from me as time goes on. I'm training for a marathon through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in memory of my aunt Mary (Sig) who passed away last fall. The deal is that the branch of the LLS called Team In Training trains me and sends me to the marathon in return for me raising a set amount of money for them. The Society uses the money for research and a good portion goes to families in need, an aspect that I really like.

I'm going to be running the Dublin marathon in, yes, Dublin. I'm really excited about it, but I have to raise $6700, which kind of makes me want to puke. Could I have picked a worse economic climate to do fundraising in? Oh, well. People don't get to pick when they get sick...

Anyway, the LLS has given me my own fundraising page. So here it is:

http://pages.teamintraining.org/txg/dublin09/troth4sig

Official training begins May 9th, but I've been huffing around Texas for the last few weeks to get a jump start. Ugh.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!

She wouldn't really hold still, stop crumpling the paper, etc. I did my best. :)

Drew

It's been a long, long time since I posted anything on here. In part it's been because I've been busy. In part it's because I've wanted to post about my nephew Drew before anything else. I guess it's hard to write about something so tragic because it makes it palpable again.

Andrew Arden Roth, 3 years old, passed away unexpectedly in his sleep on February 25th, 2009 - Ash Wednesday. He was just the most beautiful boy, so joyful and sweet. He loved everyone, particularly his twin sister Nora. I don't even know how to write about the sadness of losing a child. I don't really think that I can. So I'm going to post these pictures of him so that we can remember him and keep his memory alive.

Rubber Duckie You're The One...

Here are some cute bathtime photos. And one of her pulling up on the fridge. She's so great.

The Puppy That Lost Her Way

Yesterday, on my weekly trek to my Weight Watchers meeting (stupid baby weight!), I got out of the car and was greeted by a beautiful black lab/pit mix who jumped up gave me lots of kisses. She had a bright purple collar on and no tags. This shopping center is on a very busy road next to the main artery into Houston and her owner was nowhere to be found. A landscaper said "sheee followed me all deee way from deee other side of deee highway". Being my mother's daughter, I decided I was going to find this dog's owner. I threw the lab in the back of the 4Runner, grabbed Maddie, weighed in (up 1.6 lbs! ugh! must have been that Blue Bell cookies and cream ice cream), weighed Maddie (she's at 17lbs now, up 3.5 from the last dr. visit! yay!), skipped the meeting, and went off to find this lovely dog's owners.

I drove around deee other side of deee highway to see if anyone was looking for her, but I saw no one. So I drove towards home. I called our vet to see if they could scan her for a microchip and they said they could. My dogs have microchips and many dogs do, but I figured if this gal didn't even have tags, the likelyhood of her having a microchip was slim to none. The vet tech reiterated this to me as well. But lo and behold, she had one!! The vet told me that she had never seen this happen before. I had to take the pup home, so I left her in the garage and she and Kona and Chula "talked" to one another through the door. Ugh.

After nearly an hour on the phone to various agencies trying to find the address and phone number associated with her microchip, I finally got a call from a nice pizza delivery man named Lee who was missing his dog, Chloe. In the end, Lee and Chloe were reunited and I got even more kisses from a very happy dog, but not from the pizza guy. That would have been weird.



The moral of this story is MICROCHIP YOUR PETS!!!!!

Have You Seen Me?

I am about 2' long and thin, with mottled brown and copper skin and small scales. I love hiding in leaves and underneath porches and I love to be near water. My friends and family are abundant in the South and we love living The Woodlands lifestyle!

I was last seen in The Roth's backyard biting a small, tricolor Cattle Dog. Unfortunately, her owners got her to the vet in time to get the necessary shots. All that venom wasted...

new bathroom pictures

The other bathroom picture that we put up was kind of yellowish (although taken with a super cool fisheye lens), so I'm putting up some more that are true to the color.




And here's Chula being adorable.


In other news, Maddie cut her first tooth this weekend! It's about time! Not looking forward to the biting though... nope, not one bit.