Behind, as usual

We are around here somewhere. The next post chronologically is the trip to Indy for Elijah's surgery. You know when you are dreading uploading all those pictures, but that you first have to go through all 200 of them to figure out which ones you want to keep in the first place before you can upload them on the family blog??? That's where I've been lately. It doesn't help that I had the blessing (in disguise) of 2 full weeks of transcripts. It helped out tremendously with school, but with up to 4 hours of typing a day, that left little time for anything else. Really. I tried ignoring the kids for some of those days, but they don't take too kindly to that! Trust me.

Let's see...I have missed a lot. I will probably just bypass the Indy trip as it seriously has about 200 pictures to sift through. I will just say a long overdue thank you to all of you who prayed for Elijah and his doctor through the whole event! He recovered wonderfully; probably typical for a 7 1/2 year old little boy. One minute he was moaning and groaning. The next minute quite literally he stood up and said, "I'm ready to get dressed to go now." Tim and I laughed and then helped Elijah get ready. Little did he know that his body wasn't in the mood to cooperate with a boy fresh out of surgery wanting to move that fast!

We will know better by his 2 month check up whether or not he may need surgery again. Our goals were to straighten his eyes vertically and to get him to hold his head straight. We have a stronger prescription to get his eyes to straighten up horizontally. We pray that is all we will need. I just got the bill in the mail. Before insurance it is $7593.53. Thank you, God, for insurance, but look at that number. Holy smokes. His eye cost more than 2 kids' deliveries.

A few days later we had Halloween. Our church had a Trunk or Treat at the Harvest Celebration, so we geared up and walked our freezing selves up and down the aisles of cars for precious chocolate loot. Every year the Goodwill store has costumes for sale and if you wait until half off day, you can get costumes, still in the packaging, for under $5 a piece. That's what we did. I figured that with as much as Eden loves Princesses and the fact that she has several dresses, I didn't need to buy her a costume because naturally she'd be a princess. No! That was not to be. She saw a pumpkin and wanted to be that for Halloween. I tried to convince her of the Princess, but she is her mother's daughter and she had her mind made up. I decided for $2 she could be a "Punkin" and bought the costume. I am not wise enough to know the "punkin" enthusiasm wouldn't last.

Here is our unhappy pumpkin an hour or so after I told her she'd go as the pumpkin she insisted on getting or she'd go as nothing. $2 or not, she was wearing the bloomin' pumpkin costume. After all, I'm a woman of principles, or something like that. Besides the precious pumpkin we have a motocross dirtbike rider, a carebear, buzz lightyear and a ninja, the ONLY costume at the goodwill that was even close to Levi's size. It was a long night and Titus got overloaded with sugar, but we survived to eat candy another day.

Friday night we went to the apple orchard because all their activities were free. Tim had to work late so my mom and dad went with me and we had a really good time. However, before we left the house, our little Titus must have been feeling a little feisty because he had to go and grab a marker and VanGogh my living room wall. Can you see it??? It's very light marker. I was half tempted to frame it and leave it there, but it wasn't my color.

The following morning he was at it again. This is what came of wondering, "Where's Titus???"This video is terrible for some reason. Unfortunately I stopped the video just short of his finding out that he was not alone anymore. He rolled over and tried to hide everything by laying on it all. What was he thinking? It was rather funny. Well, all but the part where he had an obscene amount of chocolate in a short amount of time, all before 10am. That wasn't so funny. What also wasn't funny was the spanking he got for it all. We're done with sneaking food (especially candy) around here.

While we're on the topic of Titus and food and spankings...can any of you offer some solace or maybe just wise words or something...? The other day Titus took Levi's candy out of his backpack (candy that he "earns" for napping at school...what's up with that?). Nonetheless, Titus has been told time and time again not to do that and yet he persists. This day, he ate the candy, I saw the chocolate teeth as evidence and yet he chose to lie about it. Big no-no.

My strong willed little fiend battled with me for 55 minutes before he finally broke and admitted (in a whisper at that) his wrong doing. Have you all been in that closed bedroom one-on-one with a strong will? I will admit that I won this battle; I was, as some of you may say, a prayerful Larry the Cucumber through it all, but unfortunately we had to stay home from the nursery on Sunday due to evidence of the confrontation. Have you been there? Am I a psycho mom? Share your story to this mother who stuck to her guns and almost gave up thinking that this kid doesn't even know what he did wrong. By the way, God was gracious enough to show me that Titus knew full well what he did was wrong because when he finally broke and told the truth, he followed it up with, "I going to tell Levi I sowry." I asked him why and he said, "for eating his candy." Need I say how long that 55 minutes felt or how much I started to doubt everything I thought I knew about discipline? I pray that I won't have another one of those anytime soon!!!

More old news to come. Hold on to your pumpkins!