Gingerbread houses

Here are some pics from yesterday when Grandma Jill came by to make gingerbread houses with the boys. (Why do I keep typing "gingerbreak" instead of "gingerbread"? Annoying.) Both boys, but especially Ben, were big fans of the unfettered access to candy and frosting. In fact, as I typed this post, we have put Ben in time-out twice and hid his gingerbread house because he CANNOT leave it alone.
This morning I filled in for the 3-year-old Sunday school class. I had Maiya, McKenna, Mira, Max (because he wanted to stay with his mama), and Ben, my only non-M. Try running down that roster 5 times quickly. Almost every parent dropped off his/her child with a nervous smile, saying "She's in her big girl undies today. She should be fine." Ahhh, outings with newly potty-trained kids, such a leap of faith. And, for the record, everyone did just fine.

On the drive home, Max said, "You know mama?"

"What buddy?"

"You know, you're pretty good at that teaching."

"Gee thanks, little buddy."

Silver City

Here are some pictures from our Thanksgiving trip to Silver City to visit Andrew's parents. We enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving feast that Sue cooked up. Here is Andrew enjoying a new libation, New Mexico style, prickly pear margarita. Sue juices the prickly pear cacti in her yard and then mixes up the margaritas. They were delicious and such a pretty color!

We stopped into their church Saturday to help decorate since we were leaving early Sunday morning and they wanted us to say "hi" to some of their friends. Both dogs made the journey too; they were excellent travelers. Cedar is convinced he is a lap dog. We had a smooth drive down and almost all the way home. We had horribly slick, snowy roads for the last bit of our trip. It took us 3 hours (usually about 1 hour) to get from Colorado Springs to home! But we made it safely, and for that I am thankful.

Here are the dogs all sacked out tonight at home:Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving too!

Stubborn!

Well it only took Benjamin 2 hours to decide to ask for his breakfast with a "please" this morning.

Good times.

Road-trip ready

Brian & Tiff were nice enough to loan us their Thule so we'll have a little more room in the family roadster for our Thanksgiving travels. And by "we," I mean 2 adults, 2 kids and 2 dogs. Yes, we are a little crazy and my mother-in-law is very generous to tell us to just bring both dogs along to her house. Now we'll just load 'er up tomorrow and hit the road early Wednesday morning.

That time of year

Don't you just want to snuggle 'em in those cute footie jammies?

Party On!

This morning the boys had their very first birthday party that they got to invite friends to. Needless to say, they were very excited. We are blessed to have a great group of friends with kids about the same ages, some from church, some from playgroup and some that we even met in Utah who have since moved to Colorado also! We rented out Party On, a giant inflatable bounce place, for their birthday extravaganza and the kids had a blast! I cannot believe my babies are 5 and (almost) 3.

Bouncing: Moving on into the party room: The birthday throne: Ice cream cake (that Max has had his heart set on since we toured DQ with MOMS Club):
Happy Birthday boys! We love you!

Recap

All right, so I know it's already Wednesday, but here's a catch-up starting with last weekend.

I called Mom on Saturday to see if she and Dad wanted to get together for dinner either Saturday or Sunday night, and by the way, they changed the schedule and Max's little choir wasn't singing in church this weekend after all. Mom said, "Well, since Max doesn't have to be at church tomorrow, how about Dad and I come over tonight for dinner, then take the boys home to spend the night at our house and we'll bring them back Sunday after their naps?"

Done.

So Andrew and I had an unexpected kid-free night. We went out to the Celtic Pub here in Parker just because we could and had a beer together. Andrew and I are so fancy that he wore his Wyoming sweatshirt to the pub and on the way in a guy goes "Go Pokes." This stopped us in our tracks since we'd stopped following the Pokes this season after several games posting a big fat doughnut against various teams. Well, the Pokes actually beat Tennessee this weekend! As in the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for their homecoming game! According to ESPN, the Pokes are 3-1 against SEC teams. Weird. Cool but weird.

So after a beer at the pub, we headed home at the late, late hour of 8:15 with Get Smart in hand, which was a pretty funny movie. Sunday morning we slept until the unheard of hour of 9:30 and then just putsed around, reading the paper, driving around looking at houses with land in Parker (one day...after we sell Utah). We tried a new restaurant, Taste of Philly, for lunch and it was delicious!

A lovely weekend (save for Cedar's body not agreeing with the salsa that he slurped on Thursday, but after fasting him for 24 hours and then just feeding him rice, he is corked up again, thank you very much) and nothing much out of the ordinary this week...just getting ready for birthday season at our house.

Random thing that's cracking me up: Max has taken to calling dry skin "chicken skin." In the mornings after I rub Vaseline on his hands at bedtime, he wakes up and goes, "Mom, my chicken skin is all gone!"

Gotta run...Max has choir practice and then we have "night church" tonight.

President (Elect) Obama!

I can finally exhale.

Passed!

Max passed Guppy swim lessons! Now we have a Minnow!

Mama's Boy

One of the treats Max came home from his preschool Halloween party with was a little ghost stamp. This prompted the boys to drag out the bucket of stamps they have in their art supplies and start stamping away. After finding orange ghost stamps on the walls and sink in the bathroom, I reminded the boys that "stamps are for paper and skin only." They took this to heart and kind of went to town stamping themselves. Ben really took it to the next level though by tatting himself up good. Here's his arm: If you look closely, the stamp says "Jessie." Aww, he already has his mama's name tatted all over his arm. Maybe a future Nugget?

Yeah November!

I confess, I am a Halloween grinch. There doesn't seem to be a point to this holiday other than sugaring kids up so they are maniacs bouncing off the wall and driving adults crazy with incessant whining for more candy. Dressing up in costumes doesn't really appeal to me. It seems to be the only holiday that you sort of expect vandalism, whether in the form of smashed pumpkins or, this year, stealing political signs (a lot of Obama yard signs are mysteriously missing this morning in our neighborhood). And it doesn't really honor anything particularly patriotic or religious (all hallow's eve?). It is also the opening of Lawn Trash Season. Apparently 2 weeks ago was the opening of the season, because our neighbor's lawn devolved into this. Next up will be turkeys and then Christmas lawn trash galore.

I have to say though, the weather has been mid- to upper-seventies this week, so some of my grinch-ness was lessened after taking the boys (and Cedar) trick-or-treating because it was an undeniably nice evening and a walk always makes me feel good. And here they are in their familiar but still cute train costumes:

Resourceful

I had a couple of little things around the house bugging me that I solved this week with very little money spent - love it!

The carpet behind the couch always looks kind of trashed so I wanted a rug to help ease the wear and tear on the carpet. I had a runner in the laundry room that matches the big area rug in the family room. The laundry room is a heavily-trafficked area as we traipse through it everytime we go to or from the garage. But I took the runner and spent some time removing spots and scrubbing and vaccuuming to fluff it up a little and put it down behind the couch. Then I found a rug we had in our donation pile. It had a couple of paint spots but I was able to scrub them out with nail polish remover and put it down in the laundry room. Nothing more exciting than area rugs, I know.

Then I dealt with the gigantic wall behind our front steps. I didn't like the display of family pictures I had up there; they were too tiny for that vast wall. I thought I'd move them to the upstairs hallway and eventually get some big pictures for the wall. I was telling Andrew about this and he said that he really likes the family pictures where they are; they make him smile as he goes up and down the steps. Now if he'd told me how much he liked the beer sign in the family room, I'd say too bad, so sad, but I thought this was actually kind of sweet and so I tried to figure out how to improve the family picture display. So I spent some time going through pictures and frames and whatnot to beef up the display and make it bigger for the wall.

I even went step-by-step to arrange the display because stairs are such a pain. (When you move as much as we have lately, you learn from your past mistakes and get a definite method figured out.) I started with measuring up from the floor at the top and bottom of the steps, putting in a small nail and running a string the length of the steps. Then I traced the frames onto newspaper, cut them out and arranged and rearranged them on the wall until I found one I liked. Then I measured the hooks on the backs of the frames, made corresponding dots on the newspapers, hammered in a little nail, pulled down the newspapers and hung the frames. I finished by putting poster tack on the backs of the frames to keep them level (a great tip I got from a friend) even with dogs thundering up and down the steps.Imagine the newspaper is another collage frame. I'm much happier with this display and there's still lots of room to add on in the future.

Working out the kinks

This week Andrew had a business trip to downtown Denver. Yep, Denver. His regional meeting just happened to be in Denver this time, so he still stayed at the hotel with his colleagues just like if the meeting was in Phoenix or Vegas. So it was just me and the boys and the dogs for 2 nights. Days when the hubby is gone are always a little more tiring, but he travels more with this job, so it is becoming almost second nature as I do it more often. However, add a dog that is still adjusting to our family from time spent in a shelter and a rescue organization, and by Wednesday night, I was at my wit's end. Literally, I felt like I could see the end of my wit.

Wednesday morning I woke up to a big steaming pile of dog poop at the bottom of the steps, which as it turns out, was a perfect metaphor for much of the rest of my day. It was a day of just lots of little things, kids screaming, fighting, cranky, dogs not cooperating, etc. I was having thoughts of "why did I want 2 dogs again?" But before I went to bed I read a lot of info online about helping shelter dogs adjust to a new home and was feeling a lot better. I think Cedar will work out long-term, just some kinks to keep working out. Most of the time when we are home, Cedar is just like this and perfectly awesome.

However, we do have to leave the house sometimes, and Cedar hates going in his crate. But until he's reliably housebroken and trustworthy, he definitely does not get the run of the house. So I got the great idea of using the awesome dog run that came with the house. We even picked up this cool dog house from craiglist (love, love, love craigslist!). When I got home though, Cedar was laying right next to the backdoor, gate to the dog run still locked, no holes to be found...my guess is that the punk jumps out. So not only is he running around the yard doing things like digging and eating wood chips and branches (yes, he likes the taste of wood and it's lovely regurgitated), he's locked himself out of the area we're trying to train him to use as his bathroom. So the dog run is out for now and we're back to forcing him in the crate.

I love the info on crate training that says to NEVER, EVER force your dog to go into the crate. If we did that, our dog would NEVER, EVER go into the crate.

We tried the crate in the kitchen, thinking that he could get used to it on his own. We threw treats in the back. The only problem is Aspen, who has no fear of the crate. As soon as Cedar nears the crate, she runs up, boxes him out, marches in and eats the treat. So the crate is back in the garage, which is working beautifully for now, but it took us some trial and error this week.

Thursday night we tried the crate in the kitchen. That night Max woke up at 3AM crying that he couldn't find Anty. Anty is the stuffed anteater (such a cuddly animal, that anteater) that he sleeps with. So I crankily went through all the blankets on his bed until we found Anty.

Cedar of course heard us and thought that IT! IS! TIME! TO! GET! UP! and the crate tail-thumping and yipping began. Andrew got Cedar settled down and I laid in bed for about an hour, still hearing an occasional weird noise. I tried to ignore the weird noises and go back to sleep, but I kept thinking that maybe Andrew forgot to lock the door when he let Cedar out and some weirdo was stealing my children and I would never forgive myself if I woke up in the morning and they were gone because I was too lazy to check on them.

Totally rational line of thinking, I know.

Finally, I went to check on the kids. I let myself peek at the clock, 4AM. Normally I don't let myself look at the clock because then I start calculating the hours of sleep I'm not getting and just get more worked up. Anyways, I went to check on the kids and Max was still wide awake. (Aha, weird noises = 4 year old playing in bedroom.) He was "so excited for Halloween!" he couldn't sleep. That and since we're almost to the end of daylight savings, it's been dark in the morning when we get up, so in his mind, it very well might have been about 7AM instead of 4AM. I convinced him that he needed to go back to bed and finally, finally got a little bit of sleep.

Cute li'l ones

This morning we had a Halloween party/playgroup at our house for MOMS Club. Awhile ago, I asked Max and Ben what they wanted to be for Halloween. They yelled "Trains!" At least it made getting their costumes easy: hmmm, open closet, reach to the back, pull out last year's costume. Done. And you can see that Ben wasn't interested in wearing his costume this morning. Shocker, huh? But at least he had his Thomas t-shirt on. The dogs did well too. I put a gate at the bottom of the stairs and closed all the bedroom doors so they could hang out on the steps or in the little hall at the top. I figured they'd be a little calmer if they could see the action instead of being totally closed into a bedroom or running amok through the middle of it. I should've gotten a picture of the kids...they were all smiles just petting the dogs through the stair railings, and Cedar and Aspen were just eating it up too. A little petting zoo attraction at the Halloween party!

But the party went really well. I was initially a little worried at the prospect of being overrun by preschoolers when the evite was up to about 30 guests within about 24 hours of going out. Our final tally today was 27, but it didn't feel crazy at all and I think the kids had a lot of fun, especially since many (like Max) are on fall break and missing that extra time playing with kids at school. Now mine are crashed out...nice!

Cedar!

Well this morning we adopted Cedar.

We think and hope he'll be a good match for our family. He's about 12 months old, and we adopted him from Freedom Service Dogs, an organization that rescues dogs from shelters and then trains them to be service dogs - very cool! About 50% of the dogs that are rescued end up not meeting the requirements to be a service dog and are put up for adoption, whether it's for health reasons (not having perfect hips, eyes, etc) or for temperament. Cedar is a service dog flunkee :) because he just kind of reached a point in the training and stopped progressing. But he seems very sweet and was the calmest of the bunch we met. Plus he has some basics already, like being house-broken (yeah!) and a lot of health and temperament screenings from the agency.

We'll see how Aspen adjusts...he's definitely a younger dog that wants to play with her and she's kind of a dog snob, but at least he's not a totally crazy baby pup.

He was already named Cedar too. We could rename him, but he responds well to Cedar, and since we have an Aspen already, we'll just go with the tree theme :).

Bring on the dog hair!

Here's Max keeping those dogs in line:

Pumpkins for the Punkins!

Priceless! SNL VP Debate

Keeper

I just skipped over to Dooce's post today. I've received this story as an e-mail before and it always makes me cry. In scrolling through some of the comments on Dooce's blog, I had to cut and paste this one here so I don't forget: be the person you want to be in every moment, not just the convenient ones.

Tweens. Teenagers. Shudder.

Allow me to indulge myself with a couple of little stories about why I love the ages my kids are right now and try to savor the moments as much as possible. (Or at least a couple of stories that I soothe myself with when I'm listening to tears and screaming about something as important as, say, whose turn it was to turn the light off.)

Anyways, last Saturday at swim lessons, Max was bouncing and bobbing near the pool wall while the teacher took the other little boy in his class across the pool. I heard Max yelling "Mama, mama!" I looked at him and he blew me a big ol' kiss. A few minutes later, I heard him yelling "Mama, mama!" again over the din of the pool auditorium, and after making eye contact, he yelled "I love you!"

Then Sunday, Andrew took the boys to church. I stayed home, still under the influence of Nyquil Sinus. Andrew said Ben made it about halfway through the service and then Andrew was paged to the nursery to come get him. The nursery attendant reported that Ben looked at her and asked (in his very best manners), "Would you please help me find my mommy?"

Awww...

Sugar

Now granted, I don't buy bags of sugar all that often, certainly not as often as milk or bread, and I'm sure that I don't notice price changes as much on the items I don't buy every week. And grocery prices have certainly gone up across the board ($7 for a gallon of my favorite OJ - seriously?? Hello, frozen OJ concentrate...it'll have to do), but it seems like not all that long ago (definitely w/in the last few years) I could get a bag of sugar for around a buck. You know how much I paid for a Wal-mart brand bag of sugar today? $3.12!!

Call Me a Couch Potato

So this week, Dancing with the Stars, AND Survivor AND The Amazing Race all debut their new seasons. Why oh why don't they stagger these shows so that I have something to watch year-round instead of having virtually nothing followed by couch-potato-status?

Welcome!

Welcome to the world, baby Grace Peters! Our good friends Adam and Karla welcomed their first baby this morning. According to Adam, Grace is healthy & Karla's doing well too after a c-section (after 20 hours of pitocin and labor, Grace just wasn't really engaging, so they went with the c-section). Congrats, Peters family!!

Another week in the books...

This was the first week that all of our "activities" kicked in for the fall. In addition to preschool, playgroup, and the swim lessons that started last week, Max also started in the kids' choir at church. We'll see how he likes it, but he said he had a lot of fun this week. We also squeezed in a trip to the zoo to take advantage of the lovely weather we've been having.

Andrew was in Craig for 3 days and had to go back today. It's a 4-hour trip each way and he's going up and back today!

I also scored an awesome buy on craigslist, knocking out most of the boys' birthday presents. I got them each their own Leapfrog LeapPad, LeapPad organizer, and 12 books/cartridges to share. A woman had twins and so she was selling 2 whole systems...perfect & they're in great shape! I love craisglist!!

On the way to school today, Max informed me, "Mama, when I grow up, I'm deciding between being a train conductor and a zookeeper. I know, I know! I can be a zookeeper and still live with my brother and he can be my train conductor. When I grow up, I want to live with my brother because I'll still love him."

Awwww...

Maybe I'm Just Overthinking This

So while we were watching Jeopardy tonight, there happened to be a black male contestant and a couple of ads featuring black men. Max gleefully identified each by shouting "There's Barack Obama!" (And the ads surprisingly were not politicial, so they were not in fact Barack Obama.)

In my head, I was saying, "You know, not every black man you see is Barack Obama."

And we totally need to get him out of Parker more often.

But I refrained from saying this out loud, thinking about how much of classifying people based on race is a learned behavior and I didn't want to just start inadvertently teaching my kids to do that. So I just smiled and said "No honey, that's not Barack Obama."

Well it's a good thing I didn't mention race because I'm not sure what features Max was using to identify the people. The next ad featured an older, bald black man with a white beard.

Max shouted "And that's John McCain!"

Swimming

Max had his first swim lessons this morning & he had so much fun, I think he had an ear-to-ear grin plastered on his face the entire half-hour! He literally bounced and bounced and bounced around...partly from being a little chilly and partly from pure excitement. Sorry the pics are kind of dark and grainy. He's the one with the Mexico necklace on.

Go and buy some now

OK, I had heard of Bar Keepers Friend and its greatness before. (Try to ignore the fact that there should be an apostrophe in its name. As a friend of a bar keeper, it would be Bar Keeper's Friend, or as the friend of many bar keepers, Bar Keepers' Friend.) I meant to buy some, but for whatever reason, I just hadn't yet. Saturday evening we had our monthly get-together with our Parker crew over at Adam & Karla's. I happened to see a can of it under Karla's sink and asked what she thought of it. Her response: "the best stuff ever." Amber concurred.

So I picked some up today. Oh my Lord! A few examples:

My stainless steel sinks were embarrassingly dull...now they are beautiful and shiny!

My glass cooktop, which I HATE cleaning, had a few cooked-on spots. I have tried Ceramabryte, Cook Top Magic, the little scrubby pad and razor blade made by Ceramabryte (which I went to 4 stores to find), Soft Scrub, pouring a little water on the burners while they're still hot...a lot of work, but I'd usually get the cooktop looking OK. I usually just lived with cooked-on spots. BKF cleaned it right up with very little effort - glorious!

And there was this weird watermark looking stain in our downstairs bathroom sink that we inherited when we moved in. I've tried Magic Eraser, Soft Scrub with bleach, straight bleach soaked on a rag, CLR...nothing. Whaddya know, I just sprinkled a little BKF on my damp rag and it was gone after about two minutes.

So I just had to share a great product!

Good luck!

Becca and Jordan joined us Friday night for dinner as they are headed out Monday morning to Prescott, AZ for Jordan's new job as the voice of the Arizona Sundogs. We are so excited for this new opportunity for them career-wise, plus it just sounds like it'll be a great place to live! Good luck guys & we love you!