He's Baaack!

It's been a week or so, but as all monsters do, he came back. It was all to quiet. Now, I'm serious about the noise thing. Titus makes noise every waking moment between laughing, crying, fighting, wrestling, etc., so when it's quiet, it should be deafening, and sometimes, I forget it shouldn't be quiet. At any rate, this isn't huge or anything, but those of you who know that Titus doesn't mind dressing up in anything, pink or blue, it will come to no surprise that I found him, just a minute ago, putting on some of my lip gloss...on his chin. And those glasses...cute, I know! To know him is to wonder!

Vacation!!!

Ok, so for the past 3 years now, Tim has had to work for "Moody Week" at Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference in Muskegon, Michigan, and Moody pays for our whole family to go with. For 6 days, we have a 2 bedroom apartment with a huge soccer field in the front yard, breakfast and dinner, the beach, the pool, craft room, bike riding, hiking, zip line, climbing tower, a gym and more, and the best part...the kids are in class (and nursery) from 9:30am-noon and 6:30pm-8pm. These are the session times and this year I didn't attend the sessions. I relaxed. I know some of you think that going to camp is no vacation (much less "church" camp), but for our family, it's the only real vacation we get every year, and we love it. The conference slogan is "Vacation with a Purpose" (maranatha.gospelcom.net) and is really time well spent...the kids love it and look forward to going "where we ride our bikes everywhere." Tim basically worked during session times and the rest of the time was spent with us, so what more could we ask for?

Moody week always covers the Fourth of July and there is a parade through the grounds that all the kids and leaders dress up for and walk in for the adults to watch, and at night there are fireworks over the lake, which we have yet to see as they start at dusk, and dusk in Muskegon is between 9:30 and 10pm. Weird, huh?!? We are too young to be out that late and not feel it the next day!

I usually do some scrapbooking with free time like this, but I didn't have time to get all my stuff together from mom's house in time for the trip, so I finished a project that had been sitting in the house for a couple months, I read, and I did some very minor shopping...groceries and whatnot...all without kids.

In the mornings, the kids would get up however early, get dressed and ready to go and then meet the kids in the apartment next to us out in the field to play baseball, or to ride bikes until the rest of us got ready for breakfast. During breakfast they would constantly ask, "Is it time???" and they would not-so-patiently wait for their classes to start. We would have lunch at the apartment, do activities/nap time during the afternoon, dinner and then classes again. The week always goes by too fast, but we have a lot of memories (good and bad...we had a bad pool experience again this year with Eden, this time) and we can't wait until next year.

What was I thinking???

Before I go and catch up on our little vacation post, I will take care of today's event...holy cow!!! You know, we are all so tired from vacation (is that even supposed to happen???) that I must not have been thinking clearly or something because I was full of bad ideas and making bad choices all day today. I sent the kids outside all morning and even though I should have been cleaning up from the trip, getting laundry done and cleaning up from breakfast and all, I was outside with them. The people who had our trampoline while we were building our house gave us a swing set when we picked up the trampoline, so this morning, I got the trampoline and enclosure put together and jumped with the kids for a bit and then looked to see what the swing set was going to need to get put together. I even got the patio set out of the garage, got the umbrella set in it and we enjoyed lunch outside for the first time. On a side note, in putting the umbrella in the table, I broke the plastic circle that protects the hole in the table where the umbrella goes and had to remember to get a new one sometime. For some reason, I thought that after lunch we might go to Menards (already past 1pm...way into nap time) to get the parts for the swing set so I could have the set put together before Tim got home tonight as a surprise for him...one less thing for him to have to do. There was absolutely no good reason to drag all the kids to Menards, but for some reason, I did. I didn't find anything for the swing set, but I did find that piece for the patio table. 2 hours later we get home and no one wants to take a nap (who can blame them) so like a dummy I let them stay up, crying, whining, fighting and complaining. That'll do numbers on a mom's patience, let me tell you. Well, needless to say, I am irritable because of lack of sleep and crazy, tired kids, I am sweaty and sticky from working outside the whole morning and now I want to put the replacement ring on the table. I pick up and remove the umbrella, put on the new ring thingy and put the umbrella back into the table, but I missed the hole under the table to get the pole into the base, and you know what happened??? The top heavy umbrella decided to take a dive.
No more lunches outside, or dinners, for that matter. We love to eat outside in the summer...I just sat down and in my frustration, but more importantly in the knowledge that I can't just go out and buy another table, I cried. Now I have a bazillion tiny pieces of glass all over the ground where the kids are supposed to play. So how do you clean that up???With a shopvac, of course!!! We had to take the filter off first, just in case the glass would tear it all up, so we blew dirt all over the yard as we sucked up the glass, but it's clean now. The topsoil is gone in many spots, as is the grass seed, but as far as I could tell, there is no glass. Holy smokes, what a day. Next time, the kids get naps. For sure! None of this would have happened if I would just have put them all down...argh! What was I thinking?

Forgotten Photo

I TOTALLY forgot to post this picture on the Father's Day blog for "Who's Eye Is It?" Guess who??? I know, it's not too hard. Embarassin', for sure! Heeheehee!

Another day another mess to clean up...

Let's see...today we went to the park for a while, and it was so humid and sticky that I had to take a shower when we got home. I had no sooner gotten into the shower (my hair wasn't even wet yet) and in comes Ty-Ty to say "Levi kick me," followed closely by Levi who says he kicked Titus to get the make-up out of his hands. Titus clearly made a b-line for the mascara as soon as he knew he was in the clear...no mommy around. Thank goodness for the miracle of Spray Power that gets all kinds of make-up out of carpeting!!!

While at the park, I told the kids that since we would be going to see some friends in Michigan the next day, I would take them to the library after nap time to get some videos to take with us, but we also had to go to the grocery store to find something for dinner. We were all getting ready to get out to the van, Titus had his sandals on and was on his way out to the garage. I was holding Micah and turned around in the kitchen for something, and when I turned back around, Titus was dropping something on the floor and running back to the garage. I never saw him come back into the house. I looked to see what he dropped, and wouldn't you know that in the time it took me to turn around and check on Eden, Titus had time to run back into the house about 20 feet, find a RED crayon and bend over to color on the floor right on the unsealed grout!!! It was almost as if he was walking out the door and thought to himself, "wait, I haven't destroyed something in 2 whole hours...it'll only take a sec, " because he literally was coloring as he was starting to run back to the garage. His sole purpose to come back into the house was to color on the floor. This one didn't get a pause to photo, mostly because I had to spray my Spray Power on it to clean it up and then get on to the library. Ugh.

deep breath

The library was fine until the last few minutes where the kids wanted to see the fish tank, so we walked over and looked until Micah decided she couldn't take her stroller anymore and started screaming. I told the older 3 kids to go on to the van and when I started to go myself, Titus started loudly saying "See fish!!! See fish!!!" which coupled with Micah was enough to bring all eyes on the poor mom with "all those kids."

final breath

We still have to go to the store. Can I handle this...all 5 kids and me when they are spent already??? It was overly crowded...there were "customer in training" carts being pushed around that got on my close-to-shot nerves, but we made it to the deli area to get fried chicken per Levi's request. The kids were on each other's nerves, my nerves, they were antagonizing each other and were just plain keeping me from concentrating on telling the lady what I wanted, so she gave each kid a potato wedge to get them to behave for me. I was going out with some girlfriends later that night, so I was already dressed and had some heels on, which were telling me very loudly that they were not the right choice for the grocery store by about aisle 4. I had to get several more things and went to check out, sweating, no doubt, only to find that I had no debit card. I tried to write a check, but we just moved, the address on my checks is mom and dad's address and the address on my driver's license is my address from before mom and dad's, so needless to say, they wouldn't take my check...I went home empty handed, frustrated, close to tears and followed by the cries of 4 children chanting "I'm hungry!!!" Bad mommy. I went home, dropped off the kids, got my card and came back to pick up dinner and we got to eat. Phew.