The Return of the Keys

Last Sunday we went to church.  We haven’t been going as often as we’d like lately but we’re working on getting back into it.  N was giving the children’s sermon on Sunday.  We got there early and sat down, at which point I realized I had forgotten the collection envelope in the car.  I didn’t have my purse with me, so no keys.  I borrowed N’s and ran out to get the envelope.  When I got back, N and the boys were gone…to the restroom I figured & sat down to wait.  They came back and sat down & I handed N his keys.  We were sitting on the right side of the church at that point, and then we saw G and L come in so we got up & moved over to the left side and back a few pews to sit with them.

The service started, N did his sermon & walked with the kids down to Sunday school.  R and K decided to be shy (remember we had not gone in a while) so he stayed with them for a bit.  The service ends, we pick up the boys & socialize a bit over refreshments in the Fellowship hall.

Walk out to the car, N asks me for his keys.  I don’t have them, I gave them back to you.

No you didn’t, I don’t have them.

The keys are gone.  Not in his pockets, and I don’t have any.  Not in the car that we can tell.  We go back inside and ask Pastor S if anyone has turned in a found set of keys…nope.  We go in and start searching through the pews for them, N checks the Sunday school room.  Pastor S offers us a ride home, but without my keys, we can’t get into our house.  We realized a couple of weeks ago that mom’s spare key doesn’t work in our lock anymore and haven’t yet replaced it.  Then I remembered that when we were leaving home that morning, I grabbed our spare key and locked the door behind me with it.  I then dropped it in the cupholder of the car since I didn’t have pockets or a purse with me.  So if we can get into our car, we’ll be able to get into the house.

N calls AAA – people are still searching the pews for the keys, lifting the cushions, checking the book-holders.  J and the boys are crawling under the pews, checking the floor.  We determine that the keys are absolutely not in the sanctuary.  We go out to the car to wait for AAA, Pastor S is waiting for us so she can give us a lift home to get our keys, and suddenly the lightbulb goes off.  The back window of our car is broken…one of the boys hit it and knocked it off the track.  It slides up and DOWN at will.  Push the window down, unlock the back door, K crawls in and opens the front door, and VOILA…House Key!  While we are in the car, I start searching under front seats in case I somehow dropped N’s keys while I was getting the envelope out (even though I clearly remember both locking the car with the remote and handing the keys to N).  What’s that?  There, between the front seats?  Is that the emergency wallet key we got with the car?  The one I LOST OVER A YEAR AGO?  Yes, yes it is.

So now, we can get home.  We can get into our house.  N’s keys are still missing but we are fairly confident that they will turn up at some point.

Yesterday we got a phone call from the church.  Another parishioner had picked up the keys from the pew thinking they were his.  When they realized they had an extra set of keys, they retraced their steps and realized they must have picked them up at church.

Someone up there was absolutely looking out for us last Sunday, and yesterday.  I have my faith, and my beliefs, I don’t talk about them much or make a big deal about them, but they are there and are a part of me.  Someone moved that wallet key to where we would find it.  Someone prompted my memory about the broken & hence unused back window of the car.  Someone urged me, when we were leaving that morning, to use the extra house key to lock the door behind me instead of having N do it.  And someone nudged the memory of an elderly parishioner to recall where he could have picked up an extra set of keys in the last few days.
Thank you, Lord.

Tent? Sleeping Bags? S’more making supplies? Check!

Yay — we booked our vacation for this summer!!  We’re going beach camping again on Assateague.  We last went two years ago and I’m REALLY looking forward to going back!  We’re staying an extra night this time and at a different campground than we did last time (Hoping it’s as nice!)  And hoping no ponies come in the night and choke on our food this time!

This is from last time:

I’ve also been fixated on visiting Rhode Island.  I started looking at some stuff on it and it looks so beautiful.  We probably won’t be able to go this summer or next (we’re starting to plan a Disney trip for next year…HUZZAH!!!) But it will definitely happen sometime!

Misc.

Finished “Water for Elephants” yesterday.  Excellent book.

N and I have been watching the first season of Dr. Who (the new series w/Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant playing the Doctor).  When I started watching these with N a couple of years ago, I wasn’t sure I was going to get into them.  And I didn’t pay much attention.  I’m picking up so much more this time through!!

Although I haven’t been especially impressed with the new ones w/Donna the companion.  She annoys me.

I need to be cleaning.  I REALLY need to be cleaning.  I have the laundry going but that’s about it for today so far.  It’s a step.  But I really need to be cleaning.

But we booked our vacation!  Woohoo!  We are going beach camping on Assateague again.  One of these days we will have a vacation that includes room service.  But I’m really looking forward to going back to Assateague.  Especially now that we know better than to leave the marshmallows where a pony might smell them. (and destroy our property in the quest to get to them)  Ocean, sand, ponies…we are going to have a great time!  It’s a different site than we stayed at the last time, I hope it’s as nice.  Time to stock up on sunblock and bug spray!

The Party

Must…resist…urge…to…sing…and…dance!

K’s Backyardigans birthday party was yesterday. We had a great time!

I can let the pictures tell the story.  And check out the nifty photo gallery that I drove N nuts with!

Kieran’s Birthday Pictures

This made me smile :)

I was driving the other day…probably going to pick the boys up from school or something, and was stopped at a red light.  A little way up the road someone had put a cabinet at the curbside w/a sign on it saying “free”.  A couple pulled up in an SUV and got out to look at the cabinet. (For the record, if I had a big enough vehicle I would totally have claimed it…it was a nice cabinet.)

Guy looks at the cabinet, and opens the back of the truck, and the girl starts doing an excited little happy dance.

It was cool to see.   I’m glad the cabinet found a nice home, and I’m glad the girl found something that was obviously exactly what she wanted.

Date Night, Earth Hour, Overheard

Last night, N and I got to have an actual, real, true DATE NIGHT!  Woohoo!!  It was a very nice evening out.  Mom came over and watched the boys for us.  They have been completely whammy all week long, and I was concerned about their behavior for her, but they were great!  Being stuck at home so much has been trying for all of us.  The boys are bored, and have too much pent-up energy, and I’m on a very short fuse.  Soon…soon…soon the weather has to turn and we can start going outside! Even if we just get into the yard to work on the gardens a bit would be a Very Good Thing.  But even on sunny days there has been a bit too much of a bite in the air to do so.  But anyway…despite my fears the boys were great for Mimi and we got to go out on a date!

We went to Hibachi for dinner, and ate way too much food, and I got about half of mine boxed up to take home…only to forget it on the table when we left.   Of course, the flaming volcano we ordered may have had something to do with that, too   (Flaming Volcano = Rum, orange Curacao, & tropical fruit juices in a volcano shaped dish w/a crater in the center where they set fire to some other kind of alcohol & two-foot-long straws to drink it with.  It serves two and is ohhh so yummy!)

After dinner we decided to go wander around the bookstore for a while.  I picked up one of the book-club-books I need to read (Eat, Pray, Love) and the third in the George RR Martin series I’m reading, and we picked up a Backyardigans book for K for his birthday.  Gah.  A week from now my baby will be four.  Gah, I tell you.  GAH!

We closed the bookstore…we were one of the last to check out.  The boys tend to be loudest in the places where you’d most like them to be quiet (bookstores, church, libraries, the living room…) and we generally avoid bringing them in.  Which means we don’t often get to a bookstore together.  As an activity that was formerly a frequent date for us, we’ve both missed it terribly in the last six years or so.  It was great to hang out, chat, check out new books.  I found two books in the humor section that looked like a lot of fun, but not quite enough so to actually pick up.  One was “What Would MacGuyver Do?”, a collection of essays about real-life situations where people found ways to “MacGuyver” their way out of a tough spot, and the other was “Porn for New Moms” which I thought about picking up for C but her sense of humor isn’t quite as twisty as mine.  It’s a collection of pictures of men & babies with captions like “Here, honey, I filled the bath for you and lit candles, and I’m going to read dozens of stories to the baby while you relax in the tub” and “No, no, you carried this baby for nine and a half months and you’ve done enough!  I’m going to cook dinner and do the dishes and feed and bathe the baby…”   Cute, but totally not a necessary book to own!  Especially not when my own baby is about to turn four.  Gah.

We participated in Earth Hour tonight.  I had meant to post about this earlier in the week but it kept slipping my mind.  As Sam from Quantum Leap would say I have a brain like a sieve.   We lit a few candles, read some stories to the boys by candlelight, talked to them about conservation and recycling, and played a game of Cosmic Wimpout by candlelight after putting them to bed.

And last but not least, I’ll leave off with a couple of quick “overheards”, both from K.  Earlier today we were going out for lunch with C & C, and when we asked him what he wanted to eat he requested a “girled cheese sandwich”.

A while back was one I meant to post and don’t think I ever did, when we were at church and the children’s choir got up to sing.  K clapped his hands over his ears and loudly proclaimed, in that pause just before the music starts to play, that “I don’t want them to sing to me!!!”  I wanted to hide under the pew but of course everyone else thought it was hysterical.

Not-So-Wordless Wednesday 3-19-08

Aarrggh.  I haven’t been in the mood to talk in what feels like weeks.  So it figures I get the urge to post on a Wednesday, of all days.

I’ve been feeling tired, blah, annoyed, dull & pretty much useless for a while.  My creative juices have not been flowing.  They haven’t even been dripping.  I have managed to get some of the important things done, like making sure the kids get fed & clothed and all that good stuff, and we got through C’s baby shower and THAT was nice.   I finally got to meet C’s mom, and although she has already left the state again, I am looking forward to meeting her again soon, since she’ll be back once the babies are born.  Pic #1…C and I at the shower:

Doesn’t she look FABULOUS?!  I cannot believe she has two little boys hiding in there!

The boys are on spring break this week, and I was careful to set up a couple of playdates and activities for them.  One thing we got to do was the egg hunt at church.  Naturally, the weather was miserable so it was indoors, but the boys had lots of fun:

Then these are from a while ago, from one of the few nice days we’ve had this year:

The crocuses are proof that spring has to be on its way, right?  I have some daffys about to bloom, too.  And as soon as it is nice enough I am really hoping to get outside and do some real gardening this year.  The boys are getting big enough to help, even just a little, or at the least to play together without running out into the street whilst I work.

I think Easter being so early this year is also throwing me off.  Everything is just knocking me for a loop this year, and it’s coming one thing on top of the next.  The DST change, and early Easter, and crappy weather, and being on edge about N’s job, and being so sick…it’s all just dogpiling right on top of me.

But I’m also super-excited about C’s babies, and looking forward to doing some gardening, and working on my photography.  K’s birthday is coming up too, and he decided on a Backyardigans theme while we were out shopping for supplies.  We got a stick-the-bowtie on Pablo game, and we’re doing a Pablo pinata.  Of course, nothing can ever go completely right and Giant doesn’t have Backyardigans theme cake kits.  So I need to try another store, or, failing that, order a cake kit online.

Oooh, and we registered for the Con in April, and I’m pretty sure the beach camping trip is going to actually happen this year.  So that is exciting too!

Egg Plants Day 6

We have our first sproutling!!!

Egg Plants

This is the craft activity I set up for my MOMS Club today.  Unfortunately, only a couple of people could make it but it was a lot of fun!

The idea is, you take eggs and break the shells a bit before the middle.  Use the eggs for whatever, and rinse the shells with warm water and mild dish soap, and remove the membrane from inside.  Poke a small hole in the bottom of the shell for drainage. (I used a cake tester for some of them and a pushpin for the rest – the pushpin was easier)

When dry, fill the egg with potting soil and plant seeds.  We used assorted flower seeds – I picked marigolds, daisies, forget-me-nots, and a couple of others.  Add a little bit more dirt on top and water (I used a small spray bottle)

Later, when the seedlings are ready to plant, you can just pop the whole egg into the ground outside!

Hair

I had an appointment with J this morning to get the boys’ haircuts, as they are starting to look a bit neglected.  Since K still had a fever last night, I didn’t want to bring him over to J’s house since she has two kids herself.  So I called this morning and changed it from an appointment for them to an appointment for me.  I’ve been bored with my hair and wanting to do something different with it for a while.

Here’s what I ended up going with:

And K has been doing much better today.  The fever is way down, and he’s congested but happy.