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!

Just another day...

Ok, so it's been very busy around here. I'm not exactly sure what all we've been doing, but I can tell you that Titus has had his share of fun.

Here he is in his favorite spot in the kitchen doing his favorite thing. Sneaking food; Pringles this time. No, he's not supposed to be there and yes, he will probably find his way back in there in the next hour or so, but for now I will seize the moment and rain on his parade, after I take the picture. Naturally.

Micah has found her favorite spot in the kitchen. She loves to just sit on the dishwasher door. I guess I would find it fun too, if I were her. The funny thing is that she will sit and "talk" to me, rambling on and on. It's very cute. We are running out of nice days to go for walks and bike rides, but there's no better time than fall to go outside for some football!!! Some of my favorite times as a kid was playing football in the fall! Sure enough, Titus made his way back to his little Atlantis of sorts. He opened the pantry door and pulled up the chair with his booster seat in it. Fortunately (for him) the open door hid him and I didn't find him until he was pretty much done. He found the hones, as you can see, and he also managed to down 2 granola bars. It was about then that I realized that I was hearing (but not totally noticing) some package crinkling and almost as if realizing for the first time, I remembered that I hadn't heard Titus for a while and the scene started to unfold in my mind. I wonder just how much honey he drank anyways.
I don't even remember what I was doing during this episode. Really, does it matter anymore? Actually, I think I was enjoying some bathroom time, but the problem was, Tim was too and no one was watching our beloved Titus as he was in our bedroom with a bottle of lotion... He got it everywhere! He must have just been squirting the bottle as he was walking through our room, because not only was it on every surface you could see, but even on some that you couldn't see (it blended nicely into my Maurice's bag). My carpet was "soft."
My dresser was "soft."My glider was "soft."My comforter and bedpost were "soft."
Even Titus' favorite Big Foot truck was "soft." I was so irritated by the end of finding all the "softness" that anything that wasn't on the floor or my bed got left right where it was. I actually ended up using some of it on the kids after their baths that night. It was still good lotion and I wasn't about to waste it! Now, lest you think our creative genius is all crazy and no cute, here is evidence that he does chill out once in a while. Strawberry Shortcake looks good on him, don't you think?
Not to be "out cuted" by her brother, Eden had to have her glasses and wanted a picture taken. I indulged her. After all, she's kids cute too.

There's more excitement to come. I am a bit behind, but don't have time to post everything, so stay tuned. I'm sure we won't disappoint!

Carving Pumpkins...better than smashing them

At about 4:30 or so Sunday afternoon, my friend, Erin, called me up to see if we wanted to go to a new park with her and her family. We decided that this being one of the last few nice evenings we were going to have, we joined them. Elijah was concerned that we weren't going to have time to carve our pumpkins, something he has been looking forward to since he requested it on the way to church. I assured him we would be fine, and then I convinced myself just the same. This park was different from other parks in our area in that it had a lot of interactive things to play on, most of them made of tires. Of all the things to do, however, the first thing Titus managed to play on (or in) was a mud puddle. He wasn't too thrilled to have found it though. He got out of it and was walking exaggerated cowboy style. You know, like a big kid who just peed his pants?!? It was quite funny!

This park had so many interactive stations, I guess you could call them. Here is the zip line which also had 2 stationary ropes next to it to play on. Of course, Levi quickly became Indiana Jones when he saw those.

This beam was hanging by chain on either side, so it was a balancing act to stay on and a great game to knock everyone off. I'll have to say, either I had the best balance of everyone there, or else I just have the most "balancing options" to put it kindly. Catch my drift? Either way, I got quite the workout of my legs getting everyone to fall off.

This is another balancing station. The faster you run around, the harder it is to stay balanced.

Of course Elijah found a better use for it! Can we say belly flop?

This park is in the back of a subdivision and has access to the rails to trails that we occasionally ride. If ever we have the stamina, I'd like to make a day of it. They had a pavilion there, a basketball court, a baseball field and, unfortunately, thousands of mosquitoes. There was a climbing tower of tires, a sand box, a giant race car, a stage, a slide playhouse and I'm sure more. I just don't remember it all. Oh yeah, one more thing. There was this bunch of tires stuck together at the sides making a web of sorts that was hanging in the middle of 3 poles (tires parallel to the ground) so that when you got on, it was another kind of a ride or game to knock people off. Very wiggly it was. I also knocked Tim off of that, though he tried in vain to get me. I kindly suggested that if I were to fall off, I was sure to break something, and that would land me in the hospital because I'm too old to break things and he'd have to be Mr Mom for a while. We didn't play that game too much longer.

We left at dusk to go home to take baths. We all wreaked of OFF. When we were all done, we carved our Apple Orchard pumpkins!!! I purchased a couple of those carving kits at the thrift store for 75% off (they ended up being a whopping$.40) and so the kids chose designs that they wanted to cut out. They found out rather quickly that they didn't so much like this family fun.
Levi put on the plastic skeleton gloves. I have never seen someone use gloves to gut a pumpkin, least of all a little boy, but there's always a first.
Elijah was a bit timid at first but quickly turned to thinking it was cool. As you can see, Eden thought it was stinky and ended up leaving the kitchen on account of the bad smell.
It took 2 or 3 tries with the carving tools to find out that the kids weren't able to use them properly and so they passed them off to mommy and daddy. I did the spider and Tim did the bat. It was fun! We put tea lights in the bottoms and lit them up.
Turn out the lights and we are good to go. We let the boys carry their pumpkins outside to put them on the porch and then it was bedtime. What a fun night. Now, I hope we weren't so anxious to carve these pumpkins that they wilt and rot before Halloween.

All in the matter of 45 minutes...

Ok, well, I was going to wait until I was chronologically caught up, but you've just got to send me your "aw's" and other sympathies. I need them!

In the spirit of Fall, our precious pumpkin(eater) has struck again. Titus and Levi ended up in our bed around 5 this morning. Titus went back to sleep rather fitfully, but did go back to sleep. 7am we have to get up, so I got him up and since he was dry, I decided to catch him and put him on the potty before he went in the pull up. I took him, and he went, but he screamed the entire time. Good morning to you too, Ty-ty.

Ok, well, I have to be out the door by 7:50 to get to school at a time where the boys don't have to rush in, and no later than 8 on the nose to get there on time, but perhaps a bit rushed. 7:15ish we all sit down for breakfast, which is cereal this morning. Everyone started eating rather peacefully and so I went to get Micah up so she could eat before getting out the door. I go to the gym MWF after I take the kids to school, so by the time I get home, there is no eating because it is her am nap time.

While I am upstairs I hear Eden screaming (like someone has bit her or yanked out all her hair or something important like that). Then I hear the kids yelling that Titus has dumped all Eden's cereal onto her.Now, unfortunately, this is the SECOND spill that I took a picture of. The first one, I just mentioned. I sat Titus back down to eat his breakfast but by the time I got that one wiped and cleaned up, Titus had somehow managed to pull down his own cereal onto himself. That is the picture you see. I didn't find the first one very funny, but this one just made me laugh and wonder what else this day had in store for lucky ol' me! It was only 7:30.Well, in order to prevent any other catastrophe before we got out the door, I set Titus up on the counter so I could clean up. There he is, eyeing the bag next to him which contains 5 suckers that I got from the bank drive-through. Not on your life bub! Sit and stay, for pete's sake! 7:40.

Next I went upstairs to make sure that the older kids' clothes matched before they got to school looking like hobos. Eden too, for that matter. She'd go out wearing a shirt that she has long outgrown and a corduroy skirt with flipflops. So, I'm the last one to come downstairs and what I hear on the way down is Elijah yelling at Titus for something.

Titus wanted a drink, so he poured some milk into a straw bowl (makes sense) and spilled some of that as well. Doesn't he know how expensive milk is??? I haven't even had time to get the busy boy dressed yet. It's 7:55 and we should all be in the van, but I'm not even dressed yet, so I clean Titus up, get myself dressed and am now in psycho mom mode...everyone in the van NOW! Well just because he felt like it, Titus grabbed a marker and said, "take that mom!" with his scribbles on the floor. Oh my word!!! I am about to get angry at this little 2 year old...rather than thanking God for his spirit that would otherwise make my days BORING!!! Thankfully I'm smart enough to buy washables!

Just for the record I get the kids into the van (2 in pajamas and one in his pull up) by about 10 after 8 and to school by 8:23. 8 minutes late. Aaarrrgh! Thank goodness for the gym...around an hour by myself to gather my thoughts, read the Word and take a few deep breaths. Dare I ask why I feel so tired???

County Line Apple Orchard

Our Adult Fellowship class met at the apple orchard Saturday morning with the intent to go through the corn maze. Elijah and Levi had spent the night at a friend's house for a Nacho Libre wrestling birthday party. I had the 2 sisters of the "Nacho Libre" boys at our house, so neither my boys nor my girls slept all that well Friday night. That sets the attitudinal stage for the morning.
Well, we started by going to get donuts for breakfast in the cafe area. Home made apple and pumpkin donuts...yum! Also some of their cider to wash it all down was the only way to go. So, now we have under rested children and we just charged them up with sugar. Perfect. Micah was already wanting her morning nap and we hadn't really begun our morning yet.

The other kids were just going to act goofy...the natural un-rested, sugar hyped behavior for these kids...at first. Ok, so breakfast is done and so now it's time to go buy the wristbands for the activities. I hate to say this (same song, different verse),but by the time we did the breakfast and then got to buying the wristbands for the day's activities, we saw that there was no way to pay for everyone to go to the pumpkin patch and the maze, so we were quite contented to go without the maze. It was an 8 acre maze that we would never have had energy or good attitude for!

At the pumpkin patch we had plenty of fun! The rule for the pumpkins was that if you couldn't carry it, we weren't buying it, but we did pretty good here. This was about all Eden could manage.

Elijah attempted to go for broke on his pumpkin!

Levi was the middle-sized man.The kids even picked one for Micah.

We did stop for a photo shoot...what we could muster out of our kiddos.

And then mommy and daddy had a short bit of fun!

Lovin' that man of mine!

Later on that night, we went to a wedding where we met up with John Paul and Sarah.

The happy couple. We had fun at the reception with conversation and food and dare I say a wee bit of dancing?!? If that's what you'd call what I did, then I danced, but if you were raised to believe that dancing is wrong, no matter what, then you are what they call "white, through and through." I find it difficult to dance with Tim sometimes, and that shouldn't be!!! Fortunately my husband is a bit darker on the inside than I.

Miss Sarah, here, has some moves and is getting JP to be the dancing Casanova. In fact, they stole the first dance at the party. Oops! Nikki and Bob were taking a while going around to the tables talking and so JP and Sarah ran off for a dance. I don't know if they realized that Nikki and Bob hadn't danced yet.

This isn't the best shot we took all night, but since it hasn't been emailed to me yet, this is the picture I have. Good enough! We had a good night out and boy did we need that! Our anniversary is coming up soon...November 27th and I can't wait to go out again. We had been visiting local B&B's but I'm not sure if that will be possible this year. No matter what, I can't wait to go out with my hubby and have some much needed and wanted personal time!!! What'll it be this year big daddy?