Tilting at windmills and other stories

Carrie has decided she wants a windmill. We pass a wooden decorative one every day on the way to and from preschool. And we talk about the wind, if the windmill is moving fast or slow, etc. She claims she wants one, and that she's going to ask Pap to make her one because, "they can't be that hard to make. All you need is a fan and a holding stander and a turning stander." There you go, Pap. There's your blueprint! =)

She also was chattering about birds this morning. There are tons of retarded Canadian geese who don't leave for the winter, so we see them V-ing all over the place. But today she was asking where the watching bird and his wife were. I figured out that she means the resident hawk and his mate that we do see up on the telephone poles, in the tops of trees, or once, swooping into one of the huge ditches to snag a ... something. We didn't see him then, but on my way to get here I spotted him at the top of a telephone pole. Sure enough, he was watching!

Liam is learning more & more words. He was waiting outside the bathroom door calling me, "a-weed to meeee? A-weed to meee?" The boy loves books, play doh, coloring (well, pulverizing the crayons...but MARKERS sure are a big hit), and eating. His most used words are, "hun-rey" for hungry, "leh EAT" for let's eat, and "MINE TURN!" especially if anyone is on the phone. He wants to talk to whoever- doesn't matter if it's only the pizza dude. Such a silly boy.

We'd had Grandma Barb visiting for a few days, which means I've been taking any possible moment to escape. I've finished a library book at Beaner's, washed the car, gotten groceries, gone shopping, had breakfast with Rita, visited w/ Michael & Jeannine, and other things all sans kids! It is AMAZING how much I can accomplish when I'm not repeatedly wrestling two kids in huge coats into and out of car seat belts all the time... heh heh!

Have a great week. It's 46 here now and supposed to be 19 or so tomorrow =( Boooooo!

Happy birthday to meeeee

These flowers are from my wonderful hubby for my birthday. We won't mention how old I am now. Aren't they gorgeous?

From our resident Magna Doodle artist...

And the only things I did on this one are the ears on the giraffe and the tree. Really!

There's Grandma Barb teaching Carrie (disguised as a lion) and Liam how to do icing decorations on my cake. Hehe! Thanks for all the help, Grandma Barb. It was nice to have some time off! =)

Random shots fired... by my camera, that is! =)

This is where we put the tree this year. It's a 6 foot artifical job and it's on top of the front closet. The plant on the left of it, the spider one, is named Aragog as in the huge spider from Harry Potter. Hehe. Shelob is in our bedroom, also a spider plant. Anyway, just wanted y'all to see the tree before I dismantled it. It worked well up there away from Liam and Triskal, and I had actually wrapped presents as I bought them and stuck them under it too. Gonna do it again next year! Those are my birthday presents up there now, hehe!

I'm so not a photographer, but you get the idea. It was pretty all lit up on top of the closet!

This is Carrie in her new jammies. I think she looks just like her Daddy in this picture... the way she's holding her head.

She wanted an extreme closeup, and you should have heard her giggling when I showed her this one.

Quiet weekend, we hope...

We hope this will be a peaceful weekend. Liam's nose started running this morning (he was sneezing a lot yesterday) so I'm anticipating cold #989270982364456 of the fall/winter cycle. Roughly. It doesn't help that it is 20 degrees out, and that is no exaggeration. It IS sunny though. YAY! Other than church, I think we'll be staying in and eating. Hehe!

Carrie's been wanting to sleep in Liam's room all week, so we'll let her do that this weekend. Might as well get them sick at the same time, right? Instead of them taking turns and then ganging up on me! Little germ factories. =D

Not too much going on. Just burned all the photos from my camera chip onto a disk, so now I have free camera space. Amazing. Guess I'll have to start documenting the year!

Gonna bake my own birthday cake again next week. So excited! It'll be a butter recipe yellow cake with triple chocolate chip icing... pardon me, Liam just brought me a toy banana that he's making me talk to Nina on... there, it's his turn. "Ah hel-lo? Yeah...a buh-bye." So my cake... gonna make it Tuesday morning and then take it with me to Bible study on Wed. That way the ladies get spoiled and I don't end up with an entire cake to eat by myself since Dada is trying to be good.... weeeee!

Have a good weekend. Stay toasty!

What's that saying...

...about how rednecks know trouble is coming for certain when someone says, "y'all ain't never gonna believe this!" That's how I feel right now, and I even heard it firsthand.

I just got Care Bear from preschool and her teacher tells me, "we did things a little differently than what it says on her care sheet (being the paper she brings home each day that talks about what they did in preschool). Instead of having honey like it says since we're talking about bears, we made bear feces."

Me:...?!

"So that's what she's talking about if she talks about bear poop." *giggle*

Me: Ohhhhkay!

So I ask our resident Care Bear about it. She's giggling. She tells me they had big marshmallows that you dip into the chocolate and they look like poop. There were also rice krispies and cookies, apparently. Sooooooo if you call and she starts chattering about bear poop, and you know she will, at least now you're in the know!

Here's a recent conversation while playing her version of "Go Fish" with Uno cards, too.
Carrie: Do you have any 3's? 'Cause I have two.
Me: Don't tell me what you have! Go fish.
Carrie draws a card: Ack! That's a 5!
Me: *smacks herself in the forehead*

And THEN, (this kid makes me nuts, I swear) she's playing Go Fish with Dada again before we leave for the Y last night. We are in the car and she tells me, "I need to go potty!" I say, "are you kidding me!?" And she tells me, "no!" So I ask if there is a potty in KidZone and she tells me yes. I tell her to go as soon as she gets in there. I pick her up an hour and a half later and she is DANCING, "I need to go potty!" "Did you go in KidZone?" "No!" "Ack! Why not!? Okay, let's go..." Silly girl didn't go at KidZone, needless to say. Who knew parenting would be so crazy? Even if someone had told me, I don't think I'd have believed them...

That's all for now. Have a great week. Tomorrow is over the hump day already- yay! =D

Brides and Brooms

Carrie told me at breakfast this morning that she wanted a letter "G" in her name. I told her she needed to marry Noah since his last name started with a G. She told me, "no. I am not getting married unless I can be the broom. You know, that stands with the bride. Not in the dress. Unless I'm in the suit. Noah's going to be in the dress."

So now you know. Hope you know what you're getting into, Noah! Good luck! Might need it. Hehe!

Rob & Jana are here to play with us this weekend. They brought Gilmore too, and Liam is delighted to have "a puppy" his own size. He's not as excited as Triskal is, though. She's thrilled to have a playmate. Gilly isn't quite as thrilled. ;) We're glad they could squish us into their busy schedules. Rob's opera will be April 18 and 20, so mark your calendars and watch for more details!

Thanks to PaPa for coming out and watching the kids at New Year's so Dada and I could get a night of fun sans kids. It was great to have his help and company! xoxoxooxoxox

And thanks to Carlos and Tatiana for joining us for dinner on Thursday night. We had a fun time with the Wii and the fellowship. Come play again soon!

Have a good weekend, everyone!

"The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep..."

I love that Robert Frost poem, and I kept thinking about it this morning as I came home from my morning errands. Ohio is indeed very flat, but thankfully we still have pockets of wooded areas. It's not all farms or suburbs yet. I was coming home on Thompson Road and there is a wooded stretch along the last length of it. Every tree was perfectly dusted with fuzzy ice. You know the kind- it wasn't the glazed ice we had a few weeks ago. This is the kind that makes each twig look like it had been dipped carefully in powdered sugar. Every single blade of wild grasses that I could see, every bush, each tree, had all been carefully laced like that. It made me think also of the snow fairy scene in "Fantasia" and I wished that I had my camera. Granted, I was driving, so it wouldn't have been the best move, but I wanted you all to see how still and beautiful everything was this morning. It's melted off now. I hope you got to close your eyes and picture God's beauty for a minute!

I'm so thankful for my laptop so I can share all this stuff now! Hope you all are having a great first week of the new year. Take a minute to enjoy the sun shining on snow! Or for those of you in the soggy Northwest, enjoy how green everything stays because of all your rain. You don't have to shovel rain, you know! Enjoy the beauty of where you are. Have a blessed day! =)

2007 in review

Eep. I had planned on a picture for each month as I reviewed them, but I don't have anything from last Christmas until spring. I DID burn pictures onto disks during that time, but I haven't found them yet in the frantic cleanup and drying out after the infamous sump pump death (which then turned into the frantic get ready it's almost Christmas party time)...

In January of 2007 I had my birthday, my dad's mother passed away, Dada had a few out of town trips, and it was cold.

In February, we had an awesome vacation in Oregon, staying with our Olsons and a calm day at the coast! It was still cold, and we missed Rita and Nina while they were in India. Did I mention it was cold?

"In March, the wind blows down the door, and spills my soup upon the floor. It laps it up and roars for more. Blowing once, blowing twice, blowing chicken soup with rice." Maurice Sendak's Chicken Soup With Rice, as recited constantly by Carrie. Just substitute all the r's for w's and the l's for w's too, now that I think about it...

...and yes, it was still cold!

Enjoy the rest of the wrap-up, pictures included. Let me know what you think!

Happy New Year, everyone!

April Fools! Hehe. This is not an April picture, but I couldn't resist. This is Care Bear in the garage after the sump pump died. The look on her face is priceless and perfectly describes how we all felt about the experience! In April, we had something going on every day of the week with the Y, getting ice cream, moms' Bible study... we were a family on the move!

Carrie turned 4 in May and has pretty much never gone anywhere since without "colored Tino" (the bear on the left) and has not stopped talking either... we also had a ton of ice cream in May thanks to $1/ scoop night at Baskin Robbins every Tuesday!

June came along and all the kids wanted to do was be outside. This shot is of them watching the garbage men first thing in the morning.

July brought hot, sweaty, dirty, busy, hungry-for-ice-cream kids!

In August, our sump pump died but nobody wants to see pictures of that. So here is a much better one of the crew at the zoo! That would be the butterfly exhibit stuff...

September was a "normal" month. We had lots of time at the Y, at church, at my moms' Bible study, and apparently, in the tubby!

October brought Liam's second birthday and a decently warm Halloween for trick or treating. Carrie began preschool, and we got a trip to PA in that month for Dave & Colleen's wedding. Fall weather started this month, too!

In November, we hosted Thanksgiving here at The Best Nest, joined Carrie for her feast at preschool, got our family portraits taken for Christmas, and called multiple family members for their birthdays. This was before church one of those Sundays, I think...

In December, we did the Lights Before Christmas at the Toledo Zoo. Although, we did them after Christmas. ;) We went to Dada's formal work party and had our Christmas Extravaganza here for the second year in a row. We had visitors in and out all month.

We hope to see all y'all again throughout this New Year! Be safe and healthy and blessed in 2008!