After yesterday’s post about our beloved Mario the barber retiring, I figured this would be a good follow up.

The boys have all signed up for St. Baldricks this year (second year for Jack & Patrick, first year for Timmy). For those of you who aren’t familiar with St. Baldrick’s, they are the biggest fundraising organization funding kids cancer research. Once you sign up as a participant, you get your head shaved at an event to show your support for kids with cancer, while raising money to help find a cure. Here are before, during & after shots of the boys from last year’s event. You can find last year’s St. Baldricks full blog post here.

If you’d like to help support Team Beyrer (they’ve set their fundraising goal at $1,000 but I hope that they can exceed it- especially since they are more than half way there) in their shaving of the heads/finding a cure for kids cancer, you can find their page  here: http://www.stbaldricks.org/teams/mypage/76779/2012 . Simply click the make a donation button and donate anything from $1 and up. They’d love your support!!

We were SO sad to learn of Mario’s retirement earlier this month. Mario has been cutting the boys hair since all of their very first haircuts and John’s since he was in high school. He’s off to a whole new life in Florida and we are all so, so sad to see him go. The man has the patience of a saint. He would never flinch or bat an eye when the big boys were babies and would scream bloody murder the entire time they were getting haircuts. That went on for about a year before the stopped crying like someone was cutting off their arms instead of their hair. But Mario never minded- he was always so calm and nice no matter how loud they screamed. He would let Timmy spray him with the water bottle, stand up in the chair with the blowdryer -all to keep him happy while he was cutting his hair. When I told the boys that their beloved Mario was retiring, there were definitely tears shed (from me, too) and Timmy said he never wanted anyone else to cut his hair, ever and cried a river of tears. Break my heart, kid.

A bad scan of the boys first haircut scrapbook page. They were okay the first time, it was every.single.time after that there was hysterics.

How are we ever going to find someone else to cut their hair??? Any local recommendations?

I am somewhat of an avid reader. I love to read but usually don’t have too much time to do so (hence the somewhat part of the avid). I haven’t been reading much lately- just busy with work, life and Disney. However, when 2 friends recommended the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and I read the summary, I was hooked. Bad.

So, for those of you who have read the books you know theres not much to discuss on a ‘family blog’ such as this, but suffice it to say I called it “Twilight with no vampires but with lots of xorn” (just replace the x on xorn with a p.) There were quite a number of times while reading I stopped to say “ohmy”. Out loud. The funny thing is that I later found out after finishing all the books that the 50 shades books actually started out as fan fiction based on Twilight. No wonder I loved them!  Christian=Edward, Ana=Bella, Ana’s mom =Bella’s mom, Ana’s stepdad= Bella’s dad, Mia= Alice (it was really the Mia/Alice thing that got me thinking about twilight). The whole dark vs. white knight (what if I’m the bad guy) thing, the controlling aspects of Christian/Edward’s personalities, Fifty being rich. The characters even “look” like they do in Twilight, just more grown up.

And the jeans from the RRoP. Yeah.

If you are up for a great read (but be forewarned about the xorn), I definitely recommend them. They could definitely have used a much tighter edit but they are like crack. You know it’s rotting your brain, but you just keep on doing it anyway. With a smile.

I was going to do a 13 for Thursday post, but I don’t think I have enough to make it to that many! So I’ll just write what I got at the moment.

1. A big, giant thank you to Beth W (aka Mrs. Ow W) for taking care of the house and Timmy’s fish Moustachio & Sputnik while we were away in Disney this past week.

2. A full Disney post (or probably posts) coming next week. I really didn’t take many pictures at all. (I know, you’re gasping. But it was our zillionth trip to Disney, I only brought the little camera and I just wanted to be on vacation!) I did, however, have quite a lot of fun with the tilt-shift iphone app.

3. Timmy took the day we left for Disney off from school although he was supposed to go in until 2pm. There has been like the 12 plagues in his classroom lately. Between strep, pink eye, lice, stomach viruses and colds (yep, all of those) that have been floating around, with 2 kids at his table of 5 out last week, I figured I’d keep him home to try to avoid the bugs. A stomach virus on the plane or at Disney would not have worked well for us. I’m just hoping they hose down that classroom with Lysol over the break.

4. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the Orlando Airport waiting for our very delayed flight. Huge thunderstorms caused the plane that was supposed to be incoming (the one we’re taking home) to be diverted to Tampa. The plane has to be refueled and then flown from Tampa to Orlando, deplaned, serviced and boarded before we can even leave. So instead of arriving in NY at 9:30pm, we’re looking at landing at 11pm. Going to be a long night. And that’s all before I even get on the plane and start freaking out about crashing.

5. Timmy’s pal Liam from school. Liam was such a great model on that day- my boys have totally gotten the overphotographed syndrome. And do not want to pose anymore. Ever.

6. So with the whole office remodel (almost totally done so pictures are coming soon, I promise!) I brought the big imac (27″) upstairs to the office and bought a new 21″ imac for the kitchen. I figure I can still edit downstairs in the busy season between cooking dinner, helping w homework, etc without being holed up in my new upstairs office. The new screen just seems so tiny!!

Ok, I think that’s pretty much it. Looks like the plane just arrived from Tampa so I’m now commencing my freaking out. If I don’t die in a firey plane crash, see you back here on the blog soon.