Introducing Steve and other adventures from our weekend...

It's weekends like this that trick me into thinking that I like fall. The sun is shining, the air is crisp, and all sorts of fun activities await us. So while I loved every minute of this weekend I know the truth is that I do not actually like fall because I know that soon it will be dark 20 hours a day and rainy 7 days a week. When that time comes I will look back fondly at this weekend and remember the sunshine and smiles and know that fall isn't all bad.



Here's how this weekend went down:



When I got home from work on Friday, it was beautiful outside! The kids and Robbie had spent the afternoon gathering all of the supplies that we needed to build a scarecrow. This all started last week when Robbie found a pole while cleaning out the woods that "will be perfect for a scarecrow." I just let it go because he is known for his hair brained schemes (like the time that he printed out 84 pages of directions on how to carve a canoe out of a tree) and I thought that this, too, would blow over. It didn't. But guess what? It was so fun! I got to spend an hour outside with my fun, funny family and we had a blast!!

We spent most of the time throwing the hay at each other ("HAY FIGHT!!") but somehow we were able to get some of it into the scarecrow. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Steve...

Our fall fun didn't end there. We had a wedding to attend in Seattle and after Ben was so confused and disappointed to find out that his class was going to the pumpkin patch and not on a ferry ride (I seriously have no clue where he got that idea) we decided that it was high time that they went on a ferry ride. So after a morning of flu shots, we hopped a boat to Seattle. They (really just Ben) thought it was "too cold on the bow" so we spent most of the time inside but they were excited nonetheless.

The wedding was beautiful and so much fun (congrats Mel & Derek!!) and the kids did well during the long ceremony. I packed a huge ziplock for each of them full of snacks and they munched away for the entire service. At least they were quiet. Pretty good for two people who only stop talking when they are sleeping! We danced like crazy and then headed for home and our nice cozy beds. Because....

In an attempt to get as much as possible into one weekend and to take advantage of what very well could be the last sunny day this side of July, we headed to the pumpkin patch first thing in the morning. We found this farm by accident a couple of years ago and have been going ever since. It was so fun! We took a hay ride out to the field and searched until we found the perfect pumpkins (pretty much the first 4 we came across).

What a great weekend!! I love my family and friends and am almost forgetting how much I hate fall!

The Ugly Truth

So if you have been paying any attention at all you have noticed that I am a little (okay, a lot) OCD about cleaning and organizing. You know I like things where they go and if they don't have a place we must not need them. You might not know (but I'm sure it won't surprise you) that things left on the counter for more than 15 minutes usually end up in the garbage. Clutter and messes stress me out and the only time I can relax is when it is all put away.

I am about to let you in on a deep dark secret. Yesterday I was finally able to relax. We have lived in this house for ten months now. And before that I lived in my mother-in-law's basement for a year and a half. And before that my house was being packed and there were boxes in the corners. So it is safe to say that April 2008 was the last time that everything was put away in suitable fashion. I know I had all of you fooled. To an outsider, it would appear that everything is where it should be. But few people have had the opportunity to venture into my storage room. It is upstairs, in the corner of the house off the playroom. The door is always closed. When we designed the house, there was no attic or crawl space or basement so I knew I would have to have someplace to store things. You know, Christmas things, tubs of things from our childhoods, the kinds of things you are supposed to put in an attic or crawl space or basement. So we added a storage room to the plans. I thought it was a perfect solution. But then the tubs were stacked on top of each other and in front of each other and all of the things that I wanted to get to were always in the back on the bottom, no matter how arranged it. And so to get to anything I had to move everything. And more stuff just kept ending up that room and before I knew it my storage room looked like Monica's closet. I can't believe I just showed you that. I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem. Well even though it was way upstairs and the door was always shut I always knew it was there. And even though the rest of the house has been neatly organized since 48 hours after we received our occupancy permit, this room has been haunting me. We have looked at shelves and thought about building some of our own but the cost was always so high and we (well Robbie) could always think of something more pressing that the money could be used for. So no shelves for me and my nightmare continued.

Sure I could pretend that it wasn't there but deep in my heart I knew the ugly truth. It was really starting to eat at me. I couldn't find anything that would work for us. Until my stroke of genius...CRAIGSLIST!! The third thing I clicked on Sunday evening looked perfect. I handed the phone to Robbie and he called and arranged to go see it the next morning. By noon on Monday I had received a text that said "got em" and I can't remember the last time I was so giddy. I tried to concentrate at work but all I could think about was the evening of organizing that lay ahead of me. After swimming lessons, with the kids in bed I FINALLY got to begin. In just a few hours the disaster that was my storage room turned into this...

Now, I can relax. I can sleep easily at night and I can find pretty much anything I own in under 5 minutes. That, my friends, is true happiness.

Just one more reason I LOVE my kids

I constantly feel lucky to have the kids I do. There are so many reasons that I love them but tonight's reason is that I can vacuum their rooms while they are sleeping! You may know that cleaning is a pastime of mine and while I enjoy cleaning (most of the time) I L-O-V-E me a clean house. Sooooo since you obviously already know how lame I am (I just spent my Friday night cleaning my house and now I am posting about it on my blog...even I can see how pathetic this is) and love me anyway I know that you won't judge me for what I am about to tell you.

I will say it again. I love a clean house and with relatively little planned for tomorrow, visions of relaxing and playing with the kids jump started my cleaning expedition tonight. As always, I made my list so that I could cross things off as I finished. My original thought was that I would do some tonight and some tomorrow but once I got going, I didn't want to quit until everything was scratched off the list. "Everything" included a lot of vacuuming, even the kids rooms. It was late by the time I was ready to finish up my chores and the kids had been sleeping for hours. Most people would worry about waking them, scaring them with the noise of the vacuum even. Not me. I knew that I would not be able to sleep until all the work was done, so I went for it. When I entered their rooms, this is what I found...

So sweet! Who would want to disturb that, right? A lady with a mission, that's who. With them both sleeping soundly, I picked up their rooms (I even hung some art work on the wall in Abby's room!) and started vacuuming. Just like the kids that I know and love, they slept through the whole thing! When I was done vacuuming I remembered that the one thing still on my To Do List was "change sheets" in the kids' rooms. So I did! How, you may wonder, do you do that with the child sound asleep int the bed? Easy. You just move them to the freshly vacuumed floor, change the sheet and put them back.

Not only do my kids have amazing sleeping abilities (this might quite possibly be a genetic quality that they inherited from both sides) but they are also so supportive of my need to constantly clean! When I was finished with Ben's room I woke him up to use the bathroom and when he walked into the hall (which I had vacuumed minutes earlier) he smiled and said in his groggy little voice, "Oh Mommy, it looks so nice and clean." That's my boy!

90

That's how old my grandpa is. We all had a great time celebrating his birthday this weekend. It was great to all be together. Here is a picture of my grandpa with 4 of his 8 great grandchildren. Abby, my nephew Andrew, my cousins daughter Keira and Ben.

Adam and Ian

That's who the kids learned about in school today. Robbie couldn't figure out what they were talking about so he started digging around in their back packs and found this... "Ummmmm....do you mean Adam and Eve?" Abby decided that yes, that sounded more like it but Ben still swears it's Adam and Ian. The best part is that because of Adam's long hair he thinks they are both girls. Sooooo, I guess it goes without saying that school is going quite well!

It's my lucky day!

If there's one thing I've learned in the past 3 years, it's that shopping early for Halloween costumes is the way to go. Number one, all of the good costumes go quickly and number two, the kids need some time to adjust to wearing the silly things. I would love to be the mom that makes cute costumes for my kids (my mom did). I am sure it would be fun and it would most certainly be less expensive but let's not kid ourselves. I'm lucky to make dinner for my kids on any given night and homemade costumes are just not happening.

Today was our big outing and we have been trying to have the kids think about what they want to be for a couple of weeks now. Last year, Ben was a puppy (a really really cute puppy named Dawson) and Abby was a baby (an odd costume for a 2 year old, I know but it had a lot to do with the fact that if she was a baby she would need a paci and hers had been swept away by the Paci Fairy months earlier). Those costumes were easy and cute so I was hoping for a similar outcome this year. As we were leaving the house, despite my suggestion that they dress as Dora and Diego, they had their minds made up on other things. Ben wanted to be Iron Man (he has no idea who Iron Man is but his new school shoes are Iron Man so obviously he needs a costume to match) and Abby wanted to be B.B. What? you ask. Let me fill you in. This....
is B.B. Abby's most favorite lovey. He (she?) is a bear dressed in a bunny costume (get it B.B. for bunny bear?) that Nana gave her for her first Easter. Over time she has grown to love B.B. so much that she adopted the rest of the family:

They ALL (along with a variety of other pillows, blankets, stuffed animals and baby dolls) sleep in her little toddler bed with her. The mama and the daddy, "Pink the B.B" and "Blue the B.B". (She has two of each because I had an irrational fear when she was younger that we would lose one which would result in me losing sleep, so I rotated them for equal loving, always keeping one hiding in a drawer. Now that she knows there are two and can reach the drawer they are all present at all times.)

So with our ideas in mind, we finished our spaghetti and headed for Target. I was pretty sure that I could find an Iron Man costume (as much as I didn't want to...I have a strong dislike for characters of all kinds) but had no idea what I was going to do about my little girl who had her mind set on being the thing she loves the most. Until.... I walked into Target and saw THIS:

What are the chances, right? She wore it in the store and it is all ready for her to wear as much as she wants tomorrow and for the rest of the month!

In other exciting cute costume news: All of the Iron Man costumes were "too small" (I know, I'm terrible but he is way too cute to be in that ugly thing!) so Ben is all set to save lives and fight fires.

How cute is this?!? It has suspenders and everything! And he just got some new fireman rain boots when he went shopping with Grammy. Perfect, just what he wanted. A costume to match his shoes!

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?

Well, if Robbie and I are any indication....a whole lot!! We have had these huge mountains of wood sitting in our front yard (classy, I know) for a long time. Most of it was wood from our property, a little of it was wood a friend gave us when she cut down some trees (thanks Michelle!) and all of it needed to be chopped and stacked. We had been whittling down the pile slowly but there was no end in sight. Our biggest problem was that there were between 15 and 20 trees that had not been cut up yet and as hard as Robbie worked, he just didn't have the time or equipment to get them all cut. Soooooo we finally hired someone (best decision ever) who was able to accomplish in less than an hour what we had not in 9 months. The problem was that once the logs were sliced, we were left with this..

A LOT of wood (the pallets are what we used to stack it on). So, the wood chucking commenced. We worked our tails off for two weekends and finally...

STACKED!!! It may be hard to tell from the picture but that is a TON of wood. Enough to get us through a couple of winters for sure! We try to heat the house with just the wood stove so we go through it pretty quick. A huge shout out to Robbie who came home from work at least 3 mornings and instead of going to bed after working all night, Rock Starred up and chopped wood for a couple hours. It is nice to have the wood ready to go since it feels like November outside and it is just great to have a small project from the yard out of the way. Oh, and one more thing. Next time you see Robbie be sure to comment on this project. He really wanted me to make sure people saw these pictures!