Happy Mother's Day !!

Today ranked up there as one of my better Mother's Days. ( Much better than the one 4 years ago when I was pregnant with E. The one where I drove myself to the hospital so Howie could stay home with the kids. Where I was subjected to a litany of procedures and ended my stay by puking all over myself, my hospital bed, the floor, etc. That day was probably #1 on my lifetime list of most embarassing moments EVER, but I digress. ) Today we went to breakfast bright and early, came home and did nothing but read the paper, then took off to the in-laws and then my parents.

E made a suncatcher wrapped in a bag that had her hand-prints on it. H made me a card with a poem. M, well, M has had pneumonia of all things for the past 4 days. So he missed school last week when they were making Mother's Day presents. Instead he found a necklace in my room that I had never taken out of the box. He found it, and pawned it off as his own present to me. HE was fully convinced that he got it for me, even though he swiped it off my own dresser. So what is a good mom to do? OOH and AHH like I'd never seen it before and exlaim what a nice present it was, right? This was mine to begin with, so obviously I liked it. This was not like the time H spent 50 cents on me at the Santa Workshop at school and bought a gold plated eagle pendant with teal trim the size of a half dollar. Did I wear the Eagle? You bet. But I took it off as soon as we were out of his sight.

This necklace was cute. So I attempted to put it on. It barely fit around my neck. HMMM... must be a bracelet....HMMM...falling off my wrist..must be an anklet... ( I am so not an anklet person )... falling off my ankle....put back on my neck at the very last link...taken off as soon as M is out of the room. Back into the box until I can re-gift it to someone with really big ankles or a really tiny neck. JK.

I attempted to link video to the blog today. No such luck. I am brain washing E right now with "My First Little House Books" and "The Sound of Music" . (Wendy, if your reading this I know your laughing!) Anyhow, she knows " Do Re Mi " and I got it on disc.

I got H on the guitar, too. H can play realtively well enough to be able to recognize a couple of songs, enough to impress me after about 8 lessons with a not very good instructor. After about two lessons, we showed up on a Saturday morning for a lesson after a snow storm. Nobody home at the Music Store. We chalked that up to the snow, as lots of things were closed that day. A few more lessons, and at the next one the shop is closed again when we show up. No explanation. I had pre-paid for 3 more lessons, so figured I would follow through with those and then find someone else. 2 lessons go by, and then this Saturday, Howie took him once again, only to find out the guy is out of town. Left without a phone call. So needless to say I have found a new guitar instructor at a different shop. If you want the scoop on shady guitar instructor in town, let me know.

In the meantime I'll keep working on trying to post those videos.

Birthday Pictures

M's 7th Birthday Party was today. Here are a few pics...

Super Cool Go Kart that goes 12 miles per hour. I put an elephant Webkinz on the seat, when we did the "unveiling" he was more excited about the Webkinz than the Go Kart....

However he quickly figured it out and we couldn't get him off of the thing until the battery needed charged again. ( My mom bought him the helmet that goes with the Go Kart.. This pic is the only time he will be riding it without. )


Family came a little later... which is when he he opened the helmet.

All 3 "boys" got to go with friends to sit in box seats at the Mud Hens game tonight. A perfect ending to his Birthday Day!
Monday, on his actual birthday, he gets to go on a zoo field trip with his class.
Happy 7th Birthday!!

Play Ball!!!

Tuesday when it was 65 degrees out this is how the boys spent the afternoon. This was SOO cool to me, because we have waited forever for them to have friends to play with in the same neighborhood, as well as space to run. You know in our old house, not only were we cramped inside, but we had no yard to speak of and there was no way they were playing in the street.

The cul-de-sac was home plate, the stop sign first, the streetlight second and the mound in the front of our house third. Also cool was the ages ranged from 4 to 12, and they all helped little Sammy, the 4 year old, make a home run each time he was up for bat. M has the red shirt on, H is in the bright yellow.

A Moldy Revelation

My husband is a wimp. My super strong, sticks-12-inch-long-needles-in-peoples-back, benches-3-times-my-body-weight-husband, is a huge wimp.

Sunday we went to the old house. We have been paying the neighbor there to shovel snow, rake leaves, cut the grass, whatever, until the house is sold. So we went over to pay him and read the gas meter.
I went in to read the meter, but then couldn't get the front door open because the last person who showed the house put the dead bolt on. We hadn't used the deadbolt in 10 years, so it was a little stiff, and I was too weak to budge it. Howie had to come back in the house after I came out to open it. ( Get it? STRONG). He thought he smelled something odd, so took it upon himself to investigate.

His side of the story is that he opened the freezer door and encountered inch thick mold inside. He got a lungful of spores, quickly shut the door, and came out side coughing, hacking and spitting these spores to the ground. I, of course was to blame, as I defrosted the fridge, unplugged it, and forgot to prop the door open.
We left the house with him hocking out the car window and vowing to get a prescription for and antifungal the next day at work. I really thought we were going to have to take him to the ER for a chest x-ray.

I waited until yesterday morning to go back to the house. Howie brought masks home from the hospital so I wouldn't suffer the same affliction as him. I dropped E at a friends house, and stopped at Kroger to load up on bleach, paper towels, a scrub brush, latex gloves, and a new candle so the house wouldn't smell like bleach and mold to the people who were looking at the house at noon.

I thought about putting caution tape across the front door of the house. I garbed up like I was going into an isolation room at the hospital. I opened the freezer door VERRRRRRRY slowly. And laughed. Inside the freezer was an ever so faint dusting of mold. Like powdered sugar on chocolate cake. There was a tiny bit on the ice maker and the basket in the door. That was it. It wiped out easily with a paper towel. I sprayed it with bleach for good measure. It took like 10 minutes.
I'm really glad Howie made it out OK.

Happy Easter!

E being E

The Easter Bunny brought hats from what will be their High School

M in Peep Heaven.
He lives the whole year just for Peeps

Special Days...

E's preschool is a Co-Op. For all of you non-preschooler having people out there, that means that the pre-school she goes to keeps the cost of tuition down by enlisting the help of a parent each day, rather than having the cost of another teacher in the room. The day that the child's parent is designated to be in the room is considered their "Special Day". Theoretically, this is supposed to rank right up there with Christmas and Halloween in the big deal department.

Not with my daughter. On her "Special Day" she wants me to go away.. far far away.

Tuesday was her day for March. When it's your Special Day you get to wear an additional tag on your name tag. It's yellow and says "Special Day" on it. ( go figure ). She has anxiety until someone takes this tag off for her.
Then everyone gets in a circle and sings a song for the special person.
It's super catchy and goes like this:

"Hooray for ( special person name )
Hooray for (special person name )
Someone in the crowd is saying Hooray for( aformentioned person)!
1234 who ya gonna shout for?
(Special person ), That's who!"

I can e-mail you the music, if you want.

While singing, E is supposed to either shake a pom pom, or shake a tambourine.
( By the way, the pom pom is exactly like the ones I used as a cheerleader in 6th grade. It gives me flashbacks to Candies tennis shoes and Legg's pantyhose. )
Anyhow, E wants nothing to do with either the pom pom or tambourine and instead of standing in the middle of the of the circle, climbs on my lap and burys her head in my shoulder. When the song was over she asked me to go away. Several times.

The other big deal is getting to be line leader. Which she doesn't want to do. She holds my hand in the back of the line.

Here's the catch. This is not a shyness issue. She is the center of attention in the classroom when I'm not there. ( She MIGHT get this from her dad, I'm not sure. ) This is a mom's-in-the-room-and-I-am-embarrassed issue. Do you remember the christmas program in which she didn't sing? I heard SANTA was his name-O everyday in the car. She loves to sing. But not in front of a group while I'm there.
So in past Special Day's I have spent part of the day in other classrooms. Tuesday I stuck it out in hers. I need MY Special Day, after all.

Trip to the Zoo

For whatever reason E has been begging to go to the zoo. Lately, with sub zero windchills, that's been a really bad idea, but last Sunday it was nice enough that we went. ( Nice is relative, I guess ). The Zoo has their "Frozentoezen" deal going on in February. So we weren't the only crazy people there.



On a not so lighter note, I volunteered in M's class on Friday, and when I walked into the main office to sign in, found H sitting there all teary eyed. And another kid named Zane also sitting there. With a bloody nose. From my son. Seems that Zane and some other kids were calling H names, and H finally had enough and pushed Zane to the ground, which caused the bloody nose. There is a discrepency as to whether or not perhaps Zane pushed H first, but by most accounts H did the inital pushing. So I , in my naivete', finished up with what I had to do in M's class and went back to the office to talk to the principal and calm H down. Both boys were still in her office, along with a couple of witnesses, so I continued to wait. 45 minutes later, she finally called me back in her office. I really genuinely thought that we would have a nice chat about the incident, H would get a stern warning or maybe a detention. HA HA HA. He got suspended. SUSPENDED!!!! In this day and age of Zero Tolerance, there is no warning system whatsoever. Just suspension. She did let me know that it was supposed to be for three days, and she knocked it down to one. So he is home with me today, very remorseful, very sad, very upset to see the bus come pick up his brother and not him. Those of you that know him know what a great kid he is, this day is killing him. But I think he has learned his lesson.