Hello everyone.

Tim and I have been burning the midnight oil, trying to get a new store up and running. We are frustrated and fed up with our current provider, MyCart.net. This weekend we had quite a few credit card orders started but could not be completed because our stores credit card processor kept giving our customers error after error. We contacted each customer as soon as we realized what happened. We were not sent an email from MyCart about the trouble. I only discovered it when I logged into the system to do something else. We were able to save some orders by completing the process manually, but could not save the others. It happened Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but we couldn’t contact our store about it because they closed at 5:00 on Friday and no type of support is available on the weekend. Tim called them Monday morning and only got voice mail. He sent them an email and still has yet to receive a response.

Saturday we began looking for a new store and discovered it in Volusion. We were chatting with them online late Saturday night and on Sunday. They have a completely different style, look and feel; so many cool features for not only the storefront, but behind the scenes as well! Every minute Dev and B allow, I’ve been sitting here copying over all the product and information from one store to the other. I’d like to get this done and launched before the boys and I leave on Saturday.

Where are we going? It’s Hunter’s Spring Break of course! Our destination is always Michigan. It’s my goal to take over my parent’s house every break Hunter gets! LOL

It’s been a pretty uneventful week. Tim was gone to California, Palm Springs area, for a conference. He stayed in a hotel/resort and was glad he could get all he needed there, where the conference was, because California is expensive! He didn’t need to rent a car and only took a cab from and to the airport. No complaint from him about the temperature, and no snow! LOL He never had the time to go anywhere else besides the resort. He mentioned there was a tennis tournament there, but didn’t recognize any players.

No problems with the boys while he was away, but we did have an issue with Knight. I think he was rebelling about Tim being gone for so long. I was guilty of only letting him out to pee that day. It was cold and I was doing other things when Bryce was napping. Hunter had let Kit out before he had gone to bed. Now that I was heading that way myself, it was 11:30, I let Knight out from inside the garage so I could grab a bag of pellets at the same time. I looked outside by the trees and shed, saw as far as the back light would allow, then released the dog. He ran to his favorite spot by the shed to pee.

When I came back out from filling the hopper of the pellet stove, I assumed Knight wasn’t done because he didn’t come when I first called. If you don’t have dogs, they have to smell everything all over before they finally get down to business.

So I went back inside and got ready for bed. Usually when we go that route, the dogs are waiting for me by the door, sometimes barking their impatience. But Knight wasn’t there. As we still had snow, I put on my boots, coat and grabbed a flashlight. I made a lot of noise breaking thru the icy snow and thought for sure Knight would appear as just two eyes out of the darkness. His coat is so black it’s hard to seem him in the dark. I walked part way out to the pond before accepting that he wasn’t on the property. I also realized that he didn’t have his collar on.

I went back and forth from the windows of the house to the garage door, calling to him. After about an hour of Knight being gone, I sent Tim a text message. He was three hours behind me and replied fairly quickly. Eventually, after 1:00 a.m. for me, he told me to leave the back garage door open and the light on and to check for Knight through out the night. I checked for him each time Bryce woke me up, but he was never there.

I didn’t get much sleep that night. I was worried about the dog and Bryce seemed to have picked up on my emotion because he wanted to nurse constantly that night for comfort. When the alarm went off I dragged myself out of bed and forced my legs to carry me upstairs. Hunter was already awake and was watching TV when I said good morning to him and tripped over something warm and hairy. It was Knight!

I asked Hunter where Knight came from. He said that he heard Knight barking outside the sunroom door and let him in. As simple as that. He didn’t ask what Knight was doing outside so early in the morning when I was still in bed. I looked down at Knight, who hadn’t moved at all to greet me, and told him that he gave me a scare. His eyes looked at me and he wagged his tail twice, but he was obviously exhausted from his night out in the cold. His muscles were twitching and I could only guess if they were tired from a long run or simply cold and trying to warm up. Even though Tim wouldn’t get the text for three hours or so, I told him that Knight was back home and safe, waiting for his return.

This week Hunter decorated his car for the Pinewood Derby. He sanded it and thought about how he was going to decorate it. I’m not sure what he planned on doing, but he chose two shades of blue and a white paint. He started with a stroke of white in the front. When that dried, he put a stroke of blue behind it. I had told him to let the car dry in-between colors, thinking he’d do a lot with one color and then another. I was wrong! LOL He added another stroke before school one morning. I closed up the paint and put that away, but then my Mommy Syndrome kicked in at full force. I was distracted by something, which led to something else, etc., until I returned to the table and saw Devin on his knees on a chair. He had been playing with his Moon Sand the last time he was at the table…but not this time. He was covered in paint, the table and chair had a coat as well (water based, easy clean-up) but Hunter’s car! Ack! I had left the paintbrush still with paint on it on the mat next to the car, and Devin continued the paint job Hunter started!

Oh, no! I couldn’t fix it! Hunter had sanded it but didn’t put on a base coat, just started painting over the wood, so I couldn’t cover it all up and have Hunter start anew.

When Hunter got home he actually noticed his car sitting on the island before I had a chance to mention it. He asked, ‘What happened to my car?’ and I told him what I didn’t do and what Devin did and how sorry I was and asked him if he thought he could still paint it the way he wanted to. He wasn’t upset! He said, ‘I can still work with that.’ Hooray! He ended up going with the different shades of blue and no white (Devin had painted over the white). I said it looked like the ocean and he said it was like a wave and talked about putting a sea animal on there. The only stickers we had were too big. I said we could find something on the Internet, but he had come across a sticker of a metallic ant and it fit on the car.

We do have a little delay because Hunter lost one of the axles (a nail) from his kit and we’re waiting on the scoutmaster to replace it for us. We’ll have that after school today (Tuesday).

Hunter came up to me the other day and said, ‘I have something fantastic to tell you.’ It was that Bryce had stood up on the strength of his legs alone, no using his hands to pull himself up!

The past two weeks, Hunter hasn’t scored lower than an 85% on his tests!

Some of the things Devin said this week;

‘Mama. Will you clean my poopy, please?’ (I think he said that this week…but it could have been last. All these poopy diapers just run together….)

After bath I pinched his bare bottom as he walked by, commenting on such cute butt cheeks. He giggled, came back to me and said, ‘Tickle my butt cheeks!’

He discovered the magic of the garage door opener, so every time we leave, I let him open the door. His response is always, ‘Cool!’. I told him it was a magic button, and he told me no, that it was a remote. Of course, how silly of me!

We’ve been whispering some of our conversations. But he never wants to whisper when Bryce is sleeping!

As Hunter told me the other day, Bryce is indeed standing up on his own. His legs and belly aren’t as chubby as they once were. He’s crawling so fast! He tried to chase Devin around the kitchen island, but right now Devin does laps around him. Bryce sits down and laughs as Devin runs by. He’s enjoying more table foods, but he’s still getting his meals from me. Still six teeth. He’s gotten so long and he’s become a vocal little thing! He sat in one spot for a long time, just ahhing and lahhing at one toy. I can’t believe he’s 10 months old already!

That’s it for this edition. I need to get back to work. I started this when I came upstairs at 7:30. I’ve had to take a lot of breaks to go marching with Devin!

Have a great rest of the week!