What's the matter with Kansas?

Hey folks, I'm Jenny, and I'm new here at Midwest Parents. Well, I'm not new to being a parent in the midwest, of course, I've been doing that for the better part of ten years.
Ten years.
OMG you guys I'm about to have a ten year old. Hold Me.

Ahem, sorry. Anyway, Glad to be on board. A little about me:

• I have two sons - age seven and almost TEN. (breathe.)

• I live in Kansas, in suburban Kansas City. Yes, most people do in fact think that Kansas City is in Missouri, and this is true, however we are one of those weird places where the "Greater Kansas City Area" actually spans two states, like 6 counties and umpteen cities. When I was a little girl growing up here, you could call across the state line, from one area code in Kansas to an area code on the Missouri side, without having to dial the area code first. And we had party lines! Remember party lines? You could call into some random number and get on the line with some random kid from some other random part of town and have a chat, a conversation, a talk. It was kind of like, oh I don't know, Twitter: The Analog Version.

• I drive a minivan. It is full of soccer balls, smelly cleats, and half empty water bottles that probably have bacteria growing under the lid. There may be a stray french fry or two under a seat, along with a missing arm to a Iron Man 2 Happy Meal toy. It does not, however, have one of those 3-D stickers on the back that looks like a small soccer ball broke the glass and got lodged there. Those are so five minutes ago. Now everyone seems to have those white outlined people stickers that used to be reserved for Calvin (as in, Calvin & Hobbes) peeing on Jeff Gordon's Nascar number. But I don't have one of those either.

• I do, however, have a license plate that says MAYHEM. I think that's fairly self-explanatory.

• I have a husband. He is busy. Right now, he's in Australia, for work.
  

• I don't mind him going to Australia for work, because every mile he flies across the ocean gets me closer to a free ticket to Maui. Fly Baby, Fly.

• I have a dog, he's a black standard poodle, named Max. He is younger than both my kids, and much more rotten. I'm not sure how that happened, I used to be good at training dogs. Then I had kids, and three years ago instead of having another baby, I got myself a dog.
  

• I do work outside the home, which you can totally tell if you were to ever actually visit my home, except every other Tuesday when a really nice man comes and cleans it for me. Then its nice for about five minutes, or until the school bus comes around the block. If you'd like to come by on one of these Tuesdays, between 3:30pm when the house cleaner is done and 3:45 when the monsters exit the bus, I'd be glad to show you around. Otherwise, just know that its gross, and that I really don't care much. No, you can't eat off my floors. But I don't really think anyone wants to do that anyway, so why keep them clean?

• Anyway, back to my working? I work at our church, I'm in charge of children's and youth ministries. I spent many years on the corporate track, albeit in a flexible environment, and trust me, this is much better.

So that's me, in a nutshell. My regular blog, which I've had for five and a half years, is called We're Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto. Yes, I know, I am actually in Kansas, but I started the blog because we were moving to San Diego, California, as a way to keep my family and friends up on what we were doing out there. Getting a lot of sand in every orifice of our bodies, turns out, is what we were doing out there. And we loved it. But we came home.

And so here we are.