Eh.

Is pretty much how I’ve been feeling lately.

I am very excited about the new baby, with occasional bouts of “What were we THINKING?”

But the reality of early pregnancy for me is a lot of nausea, tiredness, and irritability.  (yeah yeah, I know…me and every other knocked-up woman on the planet.  And if that’s not your reality…I don’t want to hear about it!  Not right now, anyway!) Coupled with some of the medical issues K has been having, I haven’t really even been in much of a mood to write about my “one good thing” each day (although I am still looking for a good thing each day, by the time N gets home and we have dinner, & get the boys ready for bed, I’m not usually up for much besides crawling into bed myself.)

If I’m lucky, I have about two more weeks of this before I make it to the second trimester and I start to feel a little better.  Although, going by my first two pregnancies, this usually extends a bit further than that for me.  But, we can always hope!

About K, it’s nothing serious, simply unpleasant, and I’ll spare everyone the TMI details.  You’re welcome!

Anyway I just wanted to give a quick update of things around here.   Happy Wednesday!

If you don’t listen, you suffer the consequences.

This morning, we are getting ready for school & the day.  K was told & told to get his socks and shoes on.  He didn’t.  It was time to leave to get R to the bus stop, and he was still barefoot.

Fine, then.  Get your jacket on and let’s go.

Yeah.  I made him walk to the bus stop in barefeet.  Next time, he’ll put on his socks and shoes when I tell him to.

Amusing story aside, we need prayers and good thoughts for G.  I can’t really go into detail right now, but she needs them badly.

Sunday Catch-Up

We went to Linvilla today and wore the boys out!  They are both asleep, which means I have a little time on my hands…woohoo!  (Of course, what I should be doing is cleaning, but hey, whatever.

I’ll work backwards with the news.

Like I said, today was Linvilla.  I’ve got some great pictures, and can’t wait to share them. (Wednesday!!)  We went apple picking, and got pumpkins, and cider donuts…yum, yum!

Yesterday, we finally got the old entertainment center out of the living room.  It’s currently living on the front lawn with a big “Free” sign stuck to it.  I’m hoping someone comes and takes it, otherwise it’s getting dismantled and tossed into the trash over the next couple of weeks.  We’re getting a “new” hand-me-down couch to go in the living room, and moving the current funeral-parlor-looking couch (thanks so much, J, I have never been able to get that image out of my mind since you told me that our couch looked like it came from a funeral parlor!! ) into the playroom.  That way the boys can do all the couch-jumping they like (just not in a creepy Tom Cruise kind of way).  One of them may eventually move upstairs into the “library” if we ever get that room put together.

Also yesterday, K got stung 3 times in the arm by a yellowjacket.  It got inside his shirt and went to town.  Ugh.  They were pretty light, as stings go, and this morning, there was more of a mark from the band-aids than from the actual stings.

We’ve been so busy with school & life & stuff, but it’s been good.   I volunteer at R’s school library, K’s been doing great in school (but we’re still having some potty issues at home…ugh!), we’re still playing D&D pretty regularly, and really liking 4th Edition and the new Living Forgotten Realms setup.

We haven’t settled on Halloween costumes yet…we need to get on the ball with those!!

We went camping a few weekends ago with T, K & D.  We had a great time…very relaxing.  Well…relaxing besides the hike D & I went on with the boys.  We got a little lost, and needed to get a lift back to the site from one of the rangers!

Other highlights of the weekend were:

~The boys and I found a toad when we first got there, and the boys were fascinated by him for a little while.

~I got the tent almost completely put up by myself! (I just needed help with the rainfly)

~D sang almost the whole soundtrack from “Once More With Feeling” (The musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for us as dinnertime entertainment one night.  R particularly liked the “I touch the fire and it freezes me” bit, and I still catch him trying to sing it occasionally.  N helped sing some of the duets.

~S’MORES!!!!

Pictures from camping:

When the boys and I first got to the site. It was PJ day at R's school.

We found this little toad while we were getting ready to set up.

The boys' little pirate tent. They played in it, but I didn't let them sleep in it.

Our tent. I actually got the whole thing up by myself, with "help" from the boys. I needed help only with getting the rain cover on later

The whole group

Me and R, at the top of a big rock

Me and K, at the top of the same big rock

What time is it? Dinnertime! K cooking his kabob.

T and his kabob!

D singing for us over dinner. Bunnies, bunnies, it must be bunnies!!!

Fire

R and T

Sunday morning, family picture

R back at the big rocks

Look, K's a bridge!

N on the rocks

Me & D playing games

D and K

Me and N at the lake

The boys played frisbee golf, too.

I’ll post a bunch more pictures from the past few weeks on Wednesday (or maybe over a couple of Wednesdays)  I need to go through them and figure out what I’ve got that’s any good.

Little Yay!

The petition that we signed earlier this year was apparently a success!  Looks like our township is finally going to be improving it’s abyssmal recycling program next year!!  Hooray!

I have not forgotten about the blog here…just been busy, and apathetic.  I didn’t do Wordless Wednesday yesterday because I decided that if I can’t write something on a different day of the week then I have no business posting a picture!  I do have lots to say…don’t give up on me!!

Found, then lost, and found again

I am a very disorganized person.  I would sometimes willingly give up my right arm to be one of those super-organized people with their systems and their neatness and their general lack of scatter-braininess.  However, without a right arm I’m not likely to be much good to anyone, least of all myself, so I plod along in my own disorganized, scatterbrained way.

Last week, as I checked the mail, I found an unexpected little delight.  A check, for me!  Apparently, there was a class action lawsuit against a service I used years ago, and this check came to me as a result of the settlement.  Woohoo!

Saturday, I planned to go the bank and deposit the check in the midst of our other errands…food shopping, dropping the car off for inspection, dropping books off at the library.  The garage ended up unable to inspect our car (It’s a ‘91 and the special machine needed to do the emissions check on a car of such venerable age was Out of Order.) N dropped off the library books, we did our other errands, and moved along with our day.

Earlier this week, it dawned on me that we had never gotten to the bank on Saturday.  So, where’s the check?  A quick, increasingly frantic look through my various stacks and piles of paperwork revealed no lovely little slip of paper.  A desperate, and resignedly hopeless call to the library turned up nada.  I sadly informed N that I had Lost the Check.

This of course, prompts one of my occasional forays into getting more organized.  I WILL get the old bills filed, I tell myself.  I WILL make sure the junk mail gets deposited straight into the recycling bag or the shredder, rather than becoming yet another Pile on the counter.  I WILL make a good place for the bills, to keep them all together and ready-to-pay.  I WILL NOT continue to have ominous piles of papers all over the dining room table, living room chair, and kitchen counter.  I WILL NOT continue to pay bills on time by the skin of my teeth, by remembering that such-and-such is usually due around this time, and maybe I should find that and check on it.

WIth these goals in mind, I gathered up all the various piles of stuff and sat down to start the sorting, filing, discarding, and organizing of the paperwork.

And can you believe it, I found the check!  Yay!

Don’t even ask me…

…how I managed to dump the trash can into the dishwasher yesterday.

Because I’m not quite sure myself.

And I wasn’t even drunk.

Goodnight

So I can’t keep my mouth shut on a Wednesday.  This is a very special Wednesday.  Tonight, we said goodnight to a five-year-old.  Tomorrow morning, my firstborn, my eldest child, will wake up and begin life as a six-year-old.

We have a day chock-full-of-fun planned, so I don’t know if I’ll do my usual rambling Happy-Birthday-I-can’t-believe-how-much-you-have-grown post.  But I love that kid, and he gave me and my new friend D a crazy laugh today!

We played at the park with D and N and K’s friend L today for four hours!  The boys were filthy (see the actual Wordless Wednesday post below for the aftermath).  I was sitting and chatting with D, and
R comes running up to me.  Our conversation:

R: Mommy, will you please spank me?

Me: Why would I need to spank you, hon? (especially when the boys were all playing together beautifully!)

R: I have something in my eye and I need to cry so it comes out.

D and I were both doubled over laughing so hard…it was completely priceless!

(for the record, I declined to spank R, preferring his eyes take their natural course of getting rid of intrusions.)

K and I went out tonight to shop for a birthday gift from him to R.  He pondered over sidewalk paints, a Wall*E dancing robot/MP3 speaker (my favorite), a tool bench, a magic 8-ball (High School Musical branded, even!), and a frilly-maned pony doll, he finally found something he knew R really wanted…a video game joystick.  It’s loaded with 8 games (four different versions of pacman and four other old arcade-style games)  R is going to love it.

Cliche

Where do they learn this stuff?

K is now telling R “You’re not the boss of me” whenever R tells him to do something.

I thought that was one of those sitcom lines that no one really said in real life…

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!

Overheard – oh, to be four again

It amazes me how children find delight in the smallest of things.

Today I broke out the shorts for the first time this year.  K was so funny!  With total glee in his voice he says “Mommy, these are LITTLE pants!  And they have BIG pockets!!  Look at this Mommy, isn’t that so funny?”

Me: “K, those are called ’shorts’.

K: “They’re SO cool.  They have big pockets!  These…what are they called again Mommy?”

Me: “Shorts”

K: “These shorts are SO COOL!”
Then he asked me to put his socks on him because his hands were cold.  I asked if he really just wanted to keep them in his pockets, and he said “Yeah, because these shorts have BIG pockets!”