My Little Soapbox

We’re still recovering a bit from a long weekend made longer by our State Fair trip today. On the plus side my boys are happily tired from a weekend spent with their some of their cousins.

We actually had a more quiet visit with most of the time spent just hanging out with the cousins. It was a lot harder than normal for my 11 year old niece. I think she’s finally crested that age where she can play with the “little kids”. She’s the oldest of all the cousins so I think everyone made an effort to keep her included on the adult level rather than leave her with the rest of the kids (7, 7, 5, 4 years respectively).

The visit wasn’t long enough for the kids and my boys were already missing them before they’d even gotten home. It makes me wonder sometimes how the pioneers handled the long and untravelable distances between relatives. I suppose that’s on of the reasons that the letters from long ago were more frequent and descriptive.

Well that’s the short notes from Friday/Saturday. More notes from the weekend to come shortly..as soon as I catch up on some sleep!!

I am making some random notes for the memory box.

Jr. has an old man tooth. His second front tooth is crooked as all get out but not actually that loose. Thus far he’s not been bothered by it though yesterday when Lil’B smucked him in the mouth we had tears for a bit.
Lil’B is afraid of thunder. This has made for long nights for we parents and the little man himself. He’s fine once he snuggles with us but then he’s snuggling with us. And to be honest he’s not that small anymore. Also he likes to sleep with his arms in strange locations like poking into my back just under my shoulder bone making me quite uncomfortable.

The boys saw the Chipmunk movie - two actually the new one and an classic chipmunk movie. They like the music especially the updated version of witch doctor. This tickles me because we (my siblings and I) used to dance like nuts to the classic witch doctor. And I remember how proud/excited we were to finally get all the words down.

Harley is being a chewy puppy again. Tonight he murdered a poor stuffed parrot. I had parrot fluff guts all over my living room. That I don’t care about. What I do care about is that the rotten mutt some how got a hold of my favorite purple pen and chomped it to bits?! Why he eats things like that when the floor is filled with lots of Harley toys I don’t know! Strange rotten mutt….

Our grass is overgrown and now seeding. On one hand I’m frustrated because its 4ft tall and an end it no where in sight. On the other hand the birds are loving the seeds and we are catching glimpses of several new birds on our place.

See this beauty! She’s a Halictid Bee and graced pool time the other day. Be sure to click through for better photos of this pretty bee!

This is my two cuties waiting in line at the local amusement park. They got to spend the day checking out various rides and generally having a good time.

But the behinds I’m actually talking about belong to we the parents. We are behind in so many small ways this week that we’ve gotten to the weekend only to find everythings jumbled up and needs to be done NOW. So today we took care of some of the lawn, garden, family stuff. We’re working on catching up with the cleaning, sorting and throwing that is all over the house. It is my personal pet peeve to wake up Saturday morning and find your weekend is already booked with crap that could have been done during the week. So you can imagine that I’m grumpy. This always happens when Daddy has multiple nights away from home. It is like the whole week waits until he gets home then dumps all those little must-do-jobs on us all at once. - blowing our entire weekend.

End whine. Cue work.

It occurred to me the other day that some of the people who stop this blog by may be wondering how we are doing. Especially since Iowa is making headlines on all three primetime news channels. For the record we are fine. We’ve got annoying water problems not house threatening ones. Small potatoes truly. We are staying home a bit more because so many of the places we go are blocked off or nearby the rivers.

We are saddened by the Tornado in Little Sioux. It was a bit too close for my sister in western Iowa. But she and the kids are okay too. We are watching the river rise. I am floored by the pictures coming from Eastern Iowa. And I’m concerned about some of my friends in Coraville/Iowa City.

Just a quick note to say we’re okay (in case anyone was wondering :D)

Lil’B chose a train ride as part of his birthday celebrations. So this past Saturday we made that happen. Here are some photo highlights of our day.

My what handsome passengers!

It was a bit darker than I thought but I love the way these are silhouette photos!

Lovely river photo by Jr.

View from outside the window

Tressel (sp?!) shots taken with my camera pointed straight down.

We’ve got a little extra guy for awhile. Friends of our family had a job shift change so we are keeping their small son. This is beneficial in two directions as this is a bilingual family. Though our somewhat poor attempts at speaking spanish can be terribly amusing (as I’m positive the little boy thinks!) but what a benefit in our exposure to other languages!

More updates soon!

The lat part of last week was mostly about catching up:
We caught up on the lawn mowing.
We caught up with some friends.
I caught up on laundry.
We caught up on cleaning the toy infested living room.
We caught up as a family with each other.

And in other ways it was about keeping up:
I kept up with my daily notes, letters goal.
I kept up with the daily gardening “something” and we happily dug in the dirt almost everyday.
Jr. kept up with his daily piano practice and had a much better lesson at the end of the week.
Lil’B kept us updated as to how many days until his birthday. It’s getting closer!!
And Daddy kept working towards his vacation which begin today.

We’re on vacation this next two weeks. But I’m hopeful that I’ll still be updating regularly. We have once again decided to keep this round of vacation time small scale and local. But there is a list of things to do and places to see being made - so I think I’ll still feel pleasantly frazzled by the end.