Hello out there!

I don’t know why I’m in such a good mood. It can’t be because my husband is gone for a whole week! Well, maybe a little bit! It’s always nice to hang out in one’s PJ’s, eat unhealthy foods on the floor with messy children, and ignore the dishes until they start to stick…wait a minute, we do that when Tim IS home!

The first couple nights will be OK. I can stretch out across the entire bed and just invite Devin to climb in instead of bringing him back upstairs. But come Wednesday, I’ll be missing Tim and be feeling impatient for his return. Especially if I rent a couple of scary movies! Tim doesn’t watch them, so I’ll be doing so alone! Crazy, I know. There are also a couple of movies I’d like to see that Tim has no interest in. Drat! I just remembered that our video store, called Iggle Video, part of the Giant Eagle grocery store chain, took out their video store and will instead use an outdoor video vending type machine. They didn’t set it up before they closed and I didn’t see it outside yet the last time I drove by. Darn. We do have Pay per View, and, honestly, it’s probably cheaper! Iggle charges almost $4.00 a movie!

It’s been a pretty interesting week around here. Last Tuesday we had a dinner for Cub Scouts where the boys rode around on a tricycle with a homemade spear and stabbed at buffalo shapes cut out of plywood. There were balloons stuck to them, but they wouldn’t hold still and the younger kids kept trying to run away with them (Devin included!). They also made tomahawks with blunt edges. When we first arrived we had to wait in the van as the church it’s held at was locked and no one had brought a key. Phone calls were made and soon after we carefully walked across an ice covered parking lot. Two hours later we were walking curled toes back to the van and had to go backwards out of the parking lot because we were parked on an incline and my van couldn’t go forward on the ice. We were home long enough for me to watch American Idol when the power went out. I think hubby was thrilled with the opportunity to use the generator he picked up earlier this year. Until he realized he didn’t have enough gas and had to travel double the distance to find a station that had power.

Devin also loved the fact that we had no power. He got to use his flashlight and soon commandeered his dad’s head lamp. It didn’t much matter to Hunter as he had turned off his light and gone to bed just minutes before the power went out. I brought him a flashlight in case he needed it, but Tim had the generator up in no time and we were able to turn on the lights and one TV. Hunter was worried about his alarm clock, so I told him to just stay in bed and I’d wake him if he had school or not. I watched the 11:00 news and his school was closed.

The next day I think Hunter would have rather been in school because I made him clean his room! There’s a picture on the web site of it before, but I didn’t take one after. It’s already looking cluttered again. Desks are just made to be cluttered I guess; I’m sitting at mine and I had to push things aside to put down my drink! I asked my neighbor to text me when power came back on because we can’t determine that ourselves with being hooked up to a generator. Nothing much changed really at our house. To conserve gas in the generator I didn’t keep the TV in the new toy room on with Blue’s Clue’s like I usually do; the boys go back and forth most of the day between me and that TV. So it wasn’t bad at all! I was feeling bad for the neighbors as I’m sure it was getting cold in their houses by then! The power came on just one hour short of 24 hours.

Hunter hasn’t been responding to us lately. If we ask him a question he won’t respond until we get right up into his face. I don’t know if he thinks he’s going to get into trouble, or maybe doesn’t want Devin to get into trouble, but he is silent until I tell him I’m not going to be mad at him or Devin, maybe a little disappointed, but not mad. He’s also been sneaking food. I hear him trying to open the door to the fridge quietly and then he does that fake laugh when I remind him only one pop a day. When I got a hand towel from under the bathroom sink I found an open box of Girl Scout cookies. He must have taken them in there when he went to take a shower. When confronted he gave me this crooked grin and a shrug. I told him it’s not that big of a deal that he ate the cookies, but that it’s a big deal that he feels he has to hide it and another big deal that if he ate them after he brushed his teeth then he needs to go and brush them again.

I re-scheduled his eye appointment for the 21st.

Devin has been talking non-stop! He’s also been making me follow him all over the house. One morning I went back and forth so many times between Elmo on the computer and Blue’s Clue’s and toys in the toy room I wanted to just holler for him to make up his mind! He’s been asking a lot of what questions and one day he brought me his sippy and a whole bunch of toys one after the other, asking me to “Clean them up, please” because Bryce had put them in his mouth. The other day I broke up some crackers into smaller pieces for Bryce to snack on and Devin brought me his bowl and said, “Crash crackers, please”. It took me a minute before I realized he wanted me to break up the crackers for him like I did for Bryce. Two nights this week he stayed in his bed all night long! Hooray!

Bryce has been on the go for a couple weeks now, and it’s showing when I put him in a diaper I used to snap him in using the second snap around his chubby legs and the same location in the row around his waist, but now I find that setting is no longer snug. He’s now wearing them on the third snap settings! Forget the crawling video I have yet to post, I’ll be recording memories of him walking soon!

With crawling comes bumped noggins, and Bryce is no exception. The poor little guy was watching his hands, bump into the wall, his hands weren’t that close to his destination yet, but his head was and thump, into the toy. While pulling himself up he tumbled over and thud, onto the floor. Devin is helpful in telling me when Bryce crashes…but sometimes he’s the one responsible for the crashes.
Many times I’ve seen a little foot jab out to push Bryce on the chest and back down on to the floor. Devin has had to sit down by himself often these past couple weeks because he’s come up to Bryce and smacked him on top of the head. Sometimes it’s because Bryce wants whatever Devin has, but sometimes for no reason that I can see. Devin has come back to apologize to Bryce, and once he told me he was sorry after telling Bryce because I told him how I was upset and sad that he hit Bryce. It was so very sweet. When he asks me to lay down with him, I just can’t say no!

I think I’ll end here for now. I’ve been in contact with Tim and he arrived safely in Palm Springs earlier this afternoon. There’s nothing on his agenda until tomorrow morning, so he’s taking it easy until then.

There’s still plenty of week left for any of you that wants to stay with us!

Hope everyone is well. Write when you can, I love to get your emails.

Yo