I don’t know what to blog!

June 26, 2008 at 4:47 pm (family)
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

It has been a busy week. My mom was here for almost 2 weeks for a visit and medical stuff. She went home Monday. We are getting ready to go to the UP for a while. I was busy this week with La Leche League, both meetings and phone calls. I’ve also brought the kids to several fun activities this week. On Tuesday, we went shopping for my husband for his birthday. Wednesday we went to the park and to a friend’s house later, and today we went to “Touch a Truck” at our local library. The city had a fire truck, a garbage truck and several other, smaller vehicles for kids to sit inside and check out. Then after playing outside a while, we went into the library and got both of them signed up for their summer reading challenge. It’s not that challenging, at their ages, because we easily read several books a day to them. Once they meet their goals (reading so many books, in our case) they get to go pick out some prizes. Today I am trying to catch up on laundry, and tomorrow I have another La Leche League meeting.

Sometimes I like these busy weeks. I think the kids just do better when we are out and about. They get nutty when we stay home too long. Heck, *I* get nutty when we stay home too long!

On the knitting front, I finished up a couple of soakers recently. I need to lanolize them but probably will not do that until after our trip, unless I get a little extra time and think of it. I’m washing my last load of diapers today since I am not taking cloth with us and I do not want any stinky cloth sitting around dirty/wet while we’re gone. I am working on a couple of pairs of socks I have not touched in a long time and I started a felted wool bag for another friend of mine (sorry, you gotta be a lifelong friend for me to knit for ya, or my kid, that’s just the way it goes!). I had to order the right sized needles for the bag and they came in this week. I am using Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Worsted, it’s one-ply (which I like for this!) and the colors are really neat – pink and red, but there are slight variations throughout the skeins.

Sophie was REALLY, REALLY crabby last week. And she wasn’t sleeping. And she wasn’t napping. I knew she was working on one lower molar FOREVER and I just couldn’t see anything happening. After many weeks (heck her whole life) of this, you start to think they are doing it TO you, just to make you mad/insane/dead because they want to (irrational, I know, but sleep deprivation does all kinds of lovely things to your brain). So a few days later, I was trying to get a look in her mouth because she never lets me. And there they were, TWO TOP MOLARS, just the edges of them, nice and white and shiny! The poor thing was working on THREE molars at once! Now her lower one is finally breaking through, you can just barely see it. And, last night she slept from 11:30 pm to 6 am (some kind of record). She stirred a few times and woke me up but she didn’t nurse during that time. Granted, she had a late nap and didn’t GO to sleep til 11:30 and that was with a LOT of coaxing… (but hey, I got dinner cooked WITH NOBODY SCREAMING AT ME, but you always have to pay, you either pay for the quiet by a LATE bedtime or you pay for an earlier bedtime by getting screamed at, at least with my kids….) So where was I, oh yeah, the sleeping thing. I am sure it was a fluke. She has never done that, not ever. So I’m sure tonight will be horrid. Just wait!

I have a headache now. I should go do something about it.

2 Comments

Dirt Pile

June 16, 2008 at 10:26 pm (family)
Tags: , , , ,

I learned something new this week.  We got a very large load of black topsoil because we need to do some landscaping around the house and yard.  Not necessarily for anything pretty, but we need to fix the grade (the lawn slopes toward the house instead of away) and there were a few very low spots that needed to be filled in.  We will probably use the last of it in flower beds and if we have enough, I might decide to put in a small garden.  I am not sure what to plant in it, I could probably put in a few things and have food by fall, if I was motivated.

So, my new skill, is that I can drive a John Deere tractor, scoop up dirt with it, drive the dirt to where it needs to go, and dump it!  It’s all great fun.  My first load was what my husband called “girly”.  It was pretty small.  But after about 6-7 loads, I was picking up “manly” loads!  Really big, full ones.  It was pretty funny when the neighbors drove by and saw me driving the tractor and scooping up dirt.  Especially the neighbor who rides a motorcycle.  He is very nice and even plowed out our driveway a few times this winter.  He looked at me kinda funny!  I guess he didn’t expect to see me up there.  You CAN teach this old dog new tricks!  I am having a great time with the tractor, in fact my husband has let me do most of the dirt hauling the past two days.  I can even pick up, haul, and dump dirt with either kid in my lap!  (Don’t worry, I’ve only gotten the tractor up to about 1.5 MPH at the fastest, and my husband is always right there.)

The dirt pile has gone down quite a lot, but it’s weird, because when I look at where we spread it, it looks like we’ve hardly used any of it!  And using the tractor gives us plenty of energy for shoveling/raking it into place.

The kids have had fun with the dirt pile too.  Sophie can climb right up to the very top of it!  And she will sit there and play/eat it until she is ready to come down, then one of us has to go get her.  Right now the pile is pretty uneven because I’ve been digging into it so much, so we are afraid of avalanches.  The top isn’t very stable any more.  And parts of it are pretty gooey from the rain we’ve had recently.

Oh, and they discovered another lovely treat that comes with dirt piles.  Worms.  Sophie had a really huge, really long nightcrawler dangling from her hand!  And she had the most excited look on her face!  Then Will found one and he was swinging it around!  (Poor thing!)  I think Sophie tasted one!  And both of them broke.  Those poor things, they will probably tell all their buddies to stay away from our kids!  RUN (crawl?) as fast as you can, THE OTHER WAY!

2 Comments

Wisconsin Wedding Weekend

June 9, 2008 at 11:21 am (Friends, family)
Tags: , , , ,

This weekend, we took a very quick trip to Oshkosh, Wisconsin for a friend’s wedding.  I have known my friend and his family since I was born, because our dads went to college together.  I am much closer to his sisters, but they were all like cousins growing up, so I wasn’t going to miss the wedding for anything!

We live in lower Michigan, pretty much dead center in the middle of the state, the part that looks like a mitten.  We don’t really have good options for getting to Wisconsin.  We could drive through the UP (which seems to take forever, and although it’s pretty, it can get pretty boring), we could drive through Chicago (more exciting, tall buildings and trains and different things to look at, but hideous traffic) or take a ferry across Lake Michigan (doesn’t save any time, and when we did the math, we found that gas would need to go up to about $6 per gallon to make it cost the same).  Because the ferry would have been so expensive, we decided to drive there through Chicago, and drive home through the UP and through the Straits.

The drive there was very, very long.  Including stops (because of the kids, who held out amazingly well), it took us 11 hours to get there.  It took us 3 hours JUST to drive through Chicago.  There is really no good way around Chicago at all.  When you look at the map, you can see that they tried to make a bypass, but the inner suburbs seem to be just as busy if not worse than downtown so we decided to take the downtown route to get closer to the tall buildings.  Will had never seen a big city and it was fun, he loved seeing all the trains too!  But it just took SO long.  Then, just as you get out of Chicago and feel like you can catch your breath, you are dealing with Milwaukee.  Maybe on a normal day it wouldn’t be so bad, but they had miles of road down to two lanes and traffic was horribly backed up.  We finally got through that and made it to Oshkosh.  Oshkosh seems to be a nice town, lots of young professional people and interesting places to eat, etc.

The wedding was beautiful.  Drew could not have chosen a sweeter girl to marry.  We are all so excited for them and just so happy!  The last time so many of the family was together was at his dad’s funeral a few years back.  So it was wonderful, and a blessing, to have such a happy occasion finally.  The kids held out very well, and of course since they love to be where the action is, they were the last kids standing at the party!  They had a very simple wedding, but a really great celebration afterwards and I swear I have never seen two people so glowingly happy as my friend and his new bride.  I cannot wait until they have children because they will be amazing parents, so loving.  It’s wonderful!

So, we wound up leaving for home a lot later than we planned.  This ALWAYS happens, and it ALWAYS stresses me out… why I ever expect to leave “on time” I have no idea.  But when we finally checked out and got on the road, we found parts of Oshkosh were flooded.  I drove the car through probably 10 inches of water and the wavelets were actually lapping up against people’s garage doors!  It was only street flooding and a line of people were driving through it so I went through it too.  I really, really hated how it felt though!  If we’d stalled, the worst that would have happened was that we would have gotten pretty wet, so we wouldn’t have been swept away or anything, but it had been raining very steadily all night and morning and the drains just couldn’t handle it.

We went north to get home.  As we approached Green Bay, the rain stopped and it was dry all the way home.  It seemed to take forever, it was 7 pm when we got to the Mackinac bridge but we made it home around 10 pm, in one piece.

We are glad we did not try to take the ferry, because it might not have even run on time, or at all.  When we left on Friday, the whole state was hit by such severe thunderstorms, that trees blew down on power lines and over 100,000 people statewide were without power.  It would not have been fun to have been crossing Lake Michigan in that.  And, on the way back, it would have been a wet, soggy trip, complete with more severe storms that went through again and took down more trees and power lines!  It is not likely we will have to travel to Wisconsin again while we are living here, but if we do, we will go north through the UP.  A little boring, lots of trees and stuff, but very little traffic and no huge cities to navigate around.  It is farther to go that way, but it actually took an hour longer to go the “shorter” distance.

Sophie is going to get her first molar!  I can see one of the points of it straining to get through the skin.  No wonder she has been crabby.  Thankfully a little Motrin helps her at night!  And, Will thought he would pee on the potty as much as possible through this whole trip and he stayed dry through almost all of it… we used only a couple of diapers the whole time.  Still won’t poop on the potty though.  But that will come in time.  :)

1 Comment

Purging

June 1, 2008 at 9:27 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: , , , , ,

We just got back from hauling a truck load of stuff to Goodwill. It feels good to purge ourselves of things we do not need, want or use, and get through some of the clutter here. I think we need to make this a yearly, or twice yearly event once we get things under control. I feel like I’ve crawled out of a rock. Since I got pregnant with Will over 4 years ago, it seems like I haven’t felt well or rested enough to make much of a dent in things. He has always been such a poor sleeper, and was sleeping terribly during my first trimester with Sophie. Then after she was born, 3 months later I got mono and it didn’t go away until this past winter. Now, she is finally letting me sleep 3 hours at a time (sometimes even 4!!!) so I feel like it is getting slightly better and I can actually start crawling out from under all the piles.

At one point today everyone was sleeping. I took that time to quickly pull all the bags of fabric and fabric scraps from the closet in the laundry room/sewing room and go through it. I wanted to get all my patterns in one place, and all the fabric in another. I managed to get all my fabric in one of two plastic bins, and the patterns are in a big zippered bag (the kind that comforters come in) waiting for a new home. Do I really need 20 medieval/renaissance style patterns? Because I’m certain I have at least 20 of them. I don’t need to buy another one, ever! I do have some nice quilt fabric though, lots of fat quarters and more of some others. Even if I don’t get to quilting, they would make nice doll clothes or blankets. Once Sophie is a little older, I would really like to do a little more sewing. There are so many neat things I could make for the kids. Knitting and crocheting are currently satisfying that desire of mine right now and that seems to work out best.

We had a good weekend, other than the trip to donate, we got 18 yards of black dirt for our yard.  We need it over the septic field and we also need to fix the grade around the house to see if we can stop the water from coming in the basement.  The flowers could use it too and now is the time to get all the planters I might ever want!  18 yards was a WHOLE dump truck full.  Will really loved that!  We are talking about putting some kind of covered but open patio or porch on the front of the house.  We would need to pull out the shrubs and stuff but it would make the front of the house look a lot nicer.  I think we should consider doing the kitchen too, since we can grill outside easily if we are without an oven.  It seems like we are having trouble finding property we like, so we might as well keep fixing up this house.

1 Comment