I'm Too Old For This

There are times and seasons for all things.  

Especially raising children.  

We had some very nice days last week and since I think children should spend more time outside than in, especially when inside involves electronics.  

Barry is one of those kids who gets bored pretty easily inside, 

all the more so when his DS thingy doesn't work.  

So we went out. 

I needed to get back into exercise mode so I thought it would be good for me.  

We walked 5 long blocks to a nice little hill to bike down (the boys were on their bikes), and back again. Then we walked home.  Then we went again, this time I was pulling Christian in the wagon. '

On the way home I had an eye migraine.  

After several weeks of no walking, I was puffed.  

Wednesday, I took the kids to the park right after school with a little picnic, hoping we could forego the walking.  They had a lovely time, but we walked again anyway. 

The boys played on their playset for a good while that afternoon so I could just sit around and take pictures, but I still felt like I had been run over by a truck at the end of that day!

I love it when these boys play well together.  They do, most of the time. 

So, I walked Thursday before the rain, Friday before the biggest snow, and today before the wind.  I put my snow pants on the last two days because even at 32 on Thursday and 20 on Friday the 'feel like' temps, were 8 and 5 respectively.  

We went 'home' last weekend.  I wanted to see for myself how my dad was doing after his surgery, He is doing as well as can be expected after extreme 'surgery shock' that resulted in an extra two week stay in the hospital.  It takes time after surgery to recover.  Anesthesia and pain pills have to be considered as well as the twiddling inside the body.  The older a person is, the longer it takes.  Dad did too much the day after surgery.  Even with my recent ear surgeries (it's been a year now, yay!), that don't seem like a big deal, I would go to bed for three days.

Lynette and Anthony came up for a quick day trip and stayed for lunch.  We took a mini tour of my home town and stopped for a picture of the famous horse swing.  There are pictures of me at 2 or 3 years old on this horse.  So, that makes it ...... how old?   

Little Miss Paislee 6 1/2 months.  

I told Lorene I was tired after looking after those boys.  

She said, "so am I."

Raising children is for the young.  

Photo Overload

Warning!! This post has an over abundance of photos!!

We didn't really do a lot of things this week.  

Mostly we did a lot of things in one or two days of the week and just lived the rest.  

For some reason I was sluggish for most of the time.  It may or may not be because I haven't been walking or it may more certainly be that my dad has been in the hospital for two weeks.  

That is another story for another day. 

Sunday--a road trip kind of day with dinner (lunch to my children) and a visit to our son's new place. 

This is a pretty good photo of Jim and I, not so good of Paislee.  I heard somewhere, when you take family photos, use the ones that are good of the parents.  The kids will change.

Miss Paislee

Monday is always 'get as much done as I can' day since Tuesday and Wednesday are full of grandkids. This week Lorene didn't have class on Tuesday so I started a new knit afghan and binge knitted.  

Wednesday--Back in harness.  Barry got bubbles in his Valentine box so he was practicing his bubble blowing and catching skills. 

Thursday--I had the great honor of babysitting Paislee for a couple hours.  She played nicely for nearly an hour before she began to be uneasy.  Grabbing and chewing seems to be the most important feature of her life these days.  SHE picked the shoes over all the rest of the chew toys. 

She has an extremely unique way of hitching herself around.  With one leg back and one knee up, she gets around by lunging forward and sitting up again.  

She's just plumb cute!

I got out my box of toys and after giving each item the chew test, she enjoyed the box the most. 

Friday the boys didn't have school so we thought we would take them out to The Farm  for a few hours.  They got a bit tired of driving on the way there.

We went down to the creek by way of nearly vertical banks.  The ground was greasy with thawing ground underneath the leaves, and I slipped and sat down in a hurry.  Christian wasn't any too sure about this part and I helped him down, but I couldn't get him quite up the other side so Jim pulled us both up.  After walking in the weeds, Barry and Christian were dismayed to find themselves covered with those little tiny burrs.  So, we got most of them off and Christian was ready to call it a day. He did better while Jim carried him and then I fed him some lunch.  He felt better then and enjoyed playing with Charlie and my camera.  

Zane loves to use the saw.

When B and C get to laughing together I can't help but laugh, too.  This time the gatorade bottles fell off the tool box.  It's obviously a very funny thing for 3 and 5 year olds.  

On the way home those two discovered that Charlie liked graham crackers.  After the graham crackers were eaten by all three of them, they started feeding him goldfish crackers.  They would drop the goldfish in and they would laugh and laugh.  It sure kept them entertained all the long way home. When Jim cleaned out the pickup, there were an awful lot of goldfish on the floor.  

I wonder if their favorite thing was the long pickup ride all over the pasture, up and down the rolling hills, so they had to hang on tight to keep from tumbling around the the pickup box.  

Then a stop to dig a bit on the bank,

chase a few sticks,

get a photo courtesy of Zane, 

and we headed our muddy boots homeward.  

Brand new boots, broken in by a day at The Farm. 

We.Were.Very.Tired.

Then we packed up and went to my folks for the rest of the weekend. 

P.S. Valentine's Day was this week. 

A Square Deal

There's something going on with square photos these days.  

The first ones I remember were square.  That's 50 plus years ago.  

When I had my first camera my photos were square.  

Then 3.5 x 5, then doubles, then 4 x 6, and now the digital size is different all together.  

Now, we are having square photos again.  So much so, that the printing places have to be able to print square ones, or does anyone print photos anymore?  

I guess what goes around comes around.

We had snow last week.  It was the sort of snow that is light and fluffy.  It fell in the night when the temperature was 18 degrees or so.  I know it fell in the night because I when I woke up at 2:30 am, I noticed the snow light in the bedroom.  The snow came softly down all morning, not enough to add to what we had, just to enough to add charm to our black and white world.

After awhile, I couldn't stand to be inside, I had to be out in it.  

So, I shoveled the driveway.  

We had a rather large driveway and I only shovel it under the above conditions, plus no wind. 

A black and white world.

Out of my kitchen window. 

Barry and Zane have started wresting.  

Paislee is 6 months old, crawling and shouting and eating solid food. 

I tried out some new cake decorating tips today.  They aren't hard to use.  They require very stiff frosting and patience.  

You'd Think I'd Learn

A few weeks ago, I posted my photo of my pass/fail chart on the fridge.  The idea was to have a reminder for me to slow down and watch when I do things so I don't make messes.  It involves things like ALWAYS getting the step stool before taking anything out of the top cupboards.  I am better at that, and also at being able to pour a glass of milk without needing a rag.  We had no chart for Jim on the fridge until the other day he knocked his glass of water onto his plate.
Now there is one for him, too. 

Today I had such an enormous fail that I didn't know how to make a mark 

large enough to express the amount of fail.

I knew better. 

I knew when I picked up the bowl of rice and the yogurt container, that I should make two trips, but I didn't.  This is part of the reason for the fails in the first place.  I'm in hurry; it would be faster to take it all in one trip. HA

It was the yogurt that fell.

Right in front of the fridge.  

And, unless you've ever dropped a quart container of yogurt from waist high onto the floor you have no idea what sort of a mess it can make.  

I had yogurt on the fridge, yogurt on the opposite cabinets, yogurt on the clean dishes in the dishwasher, (the door was open), and yogurt on the floor everywhere in between. 

I took what I thought was sufficient time to clean the cabinet doors, the fridge and the floor.

When Jim came home I was telling him about it, and he says, "I wondered what this streak on the fridge was,"  and, "I see it's still on the floor."  Sigh.

Well, the floor needs mopped before the weekend.

Since I spend 1 1/2 days with my grandsons in a week, we always need something to entertain ourselves on those sometimes long days.  This Wednesday, Barry was sick enough to stay home from school, but not quite sick enough to be lying on the couch all day.  He was a little pianissimo, which was nice since we didn't have any running and loud noises going on for a change.  It was also really nice not to have to load Christian up and go after Barry at 11:00.

Tuesday we made an enormous lego tower, taller than me.  

Wednesday we made a taller one, it fell over, we tried again; it fell over, we tried again.   

We compromised then, digging out all the 1x4 legos and made three towers reinforced with some longer pieces.   You can't see that in these pictures.  The green one sticking out on top is the gun.

We're talking about boys here, you know. 

Christian is boning up on his nursery rhymes and songs. He'll sing them for me now, and always calls me out if I say one wrong. 

Barry again,

One of the things we've been doing is playing UNO.  We play a three man game until Christian gets interested in something else, and we play his hand for awhile until he doesn't come back anymore and then Barry and I play.  UNO doesn't work terribly well as a two hand game, reverse cards aren't much use, and skip cards give you two turns in a row.  Barry and I were playing reverse cards worked the same, and I was interested to see Barry start to strategize.  He was watching me, as I would put half a hand down, skips and reverse cards making sure the colors would give me maximum benefit.  It wasn't very long until Barry was up on it, making sure that at the end of his run, he blasted me with a draw two! He wins a lot of the time, partly because I don't play cutthroat UNO at anytime, especially with little boys, and partly because he's just pretty good at it.

Christian was Ella (from Frozen) for part of the day.  He got pretty frustrated because not only was I forgetting to call him "Ella", but because I was calling him Barry!  

Poor kids, I do it all the time.  I still have a hard time with my daughters.

I didn't want to name them with the same first letter.  

When it came time to name Lynette, we had the hardest time thinking of a name that went with Lorene, one that was classic and not too common. However, since Lynette was born early, we went with the last name that we had both been talking about.  When I was in post-cesarean recovery fog, I didn't about first letters of names.  Jim could probably named her most anything and I would have agreed.  But, then, perhaps I would have had trouble anyway.