You Just Never Know

Well this week has certainly started out interesting, that's for sure!! Sunday was my best friend Rhonda's birthday. She turned 29, and swears she's done aging LOL There's been a virus making the rounds here, and I wasn't feeling the greatest, and even after talking to her for over an hour that day, and seeing her briefly to give her some clothes I found for the kids on clearance, I still didn't remember until late afternoon time!! That's proof right there that I wasn't feeling well...I'm usually right on top of the birthday thing!! LOL Sounds like she had a good day though, and that's a great start to the last go-round of the turbublent 20s! LOL

The other werid thing that happened this week was, that same day, AFTER I'd realized it was Rhonda's birthday and called to tell her what an idiot I am for forgetting LOL was that my best friend Kayte called me frantic, telling me that her sister was in the hospital. After listening to the situation, I went up to sit with her for a few hours. When we went in to see her sister, it was really strange for me. Not seeing her in the condition she's in, but not being intimidated or scared of what I saw. Of course my heart ached for her and I immediately wished there was something, anything I could do, but of course I'm helpless, and I hate that feeling. But at least I wasn't scared or intimidated. I was calm and, most importantly to me, able to be a support to Kayte. For those of you who are the praying type, if you feel so inclined to keep their family & friends in your prayers of healing, I know they would all appreciate it.

This weekend is probably Trey's last swim meet. I've looked at the qualifying times for the meet next weekend, the state meet, and he's a good 10 seconds off the mark for any of his individual or relay events. I'm sure next year he'll have a better chance of making it to state, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. He's already expressed a desire to be on the team again next fall, so I'm happy to be able to know that so we can start working towards helping him be on the team again. He's really enjoyed it, and his swimming skills have improved significantly!

Otherwise not a whole lot new. Just trying to hold on tight while this virus makes its way through the house again. I work the rest of this week, all of next week, and then I have an ENTIRE WEEK OFF!! There's only been one other time I've had a paid "vacation," and that was when I was on maternity leave after Derrick was born. That wasn't much of a vacation though, cuz we were going to the hospital every day for the first 19 days, and we got married somewhere in there too LOL I was only off for six weeks before I had to go back to work, and a lot of that was just run, run run!! This time around I'm going to RELAX, even if it's just a little bit!! We were supposed to go visit a friend, that was the original plan, but since she's not talking to us I guess that's not gonna happen. That's okay though...it'll give me a chance to get some spring cleaning done around here, and spend some quality time with my guys...definite bonus!!

I'll post again soon...have a great one!!

The Great, The Good, And The Ugh!!

THE GREAT: Yesterday Trey had his first BIG swim meet. Divisionals was held in Black River Falls, and it is a qualifying meet, meaning he needed to place in the top six in any of his events in order to go on to Conference next weekend in Stevens Point. Individually Trey did extraordinarily well...he took time off from his 50 free, a TON of time...nearly 30 seconds...off his 100 free, and added a fraction of a second onto his 50 back, but he was really tired by then so I can't say I blame him!! He didn't place in the top six individually, but BOTH of his relays...his 200 Medley Relay with him swimming back stroke, and his 200 free relay, both qualified for Conference next week...YAY!! In his 200 free relay, he was second in the relay. When he dove in, his relay was in last place by almost half a pool length. When he got out, they were caught up, neck and neck with the team that was in 5th place. Their relay still came in last, but that's okay....they made it!! On top of that, I'm nearly finished with the baby afaghan I've been crocheting, thanks to having time during that meet to work on it!! LOL

THE GOOD: Today Trey is getting his first Bible presented to him in church. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be there to see it, which is The UGH!!. My parents brought him to church with them today so he could participate in the ceremony with the rest of the third-graders, which is wonderful of them. Bubba has been sick for the last week, and finally went into the doctor yesterday and was told he has a sinus infection and started on antibiotics to treat it. He's on the road to recovery...YAY!!

THE UGH!!: All of us except for Trey have been sick with something!! Bubba and Talin have it the worst...Bub with the aforementioned sinus infection, Talin with something yet to be determined by the doctor later this morning. High fevers, headaches, a sore throat and queasy tummy have plagued him for the last three days. I hope it's something simple like strep or the flu...and not something super-yucky like purtussis (aka whooping cough) or pneumonia. Tylenol Cold & Cough help him stay comfortable, but yesterday the lowest his temp got was 102. Yep...you read that right, 102. This morning he was at 103.3...Yikes!! Derrick has had a cold, and I think Bub shared his sinus infection with me...so I'm going to have that checked today when I take Talin in. I hope it's just a miserable, awful cold and I'll be better in the next couple of days. Gotta love winter in Wisconsin...UGH!!! So today I'll be running to Wal-Mart to pick up juices and liquids for people to consume. I like tea when I'm sick, the kids like Jell-O and freezies. Bub's choices change constantly LOL I just wanna stay in bed :o(

Hope everyone else is WAY healthier than we are!! I'm looking forward to Trey's meet next weekend, and will write again when there's more to tell!! Take care!!

Anniversaries!

Today is the two week anniversary of this blog being used on a regular basis. YAY!! Already I've had 124 hits, which is WAY more than I ever imagined, but in a good way! Thanks to everyone who visits regularly, and for all of the great comments! And welcome to all of the new people who stop by just to see what kind of whirl-wind chaos strikes our house each day LOL

When I started this, I added a little gizmo I thought people would know about, but apparently I'm mistaken here. At the far bottom left of this page there is a picture of a globe. If you click on it, it opens a map where you, the viewer, can pin-point your location. When you have a sec, I'd really love it if you'd do that, and if you have anything like that on your page, please let me know so I can return in kind!

Today is also another very important day for us. It is my husband and my three year wedding anniversary! We had this great plan all figured out, we already had a c-section date set for Derrick to be born, so we figured we'd get married, I'd start maternity leave early to take a week off of work to get things ready for the baby, and then we'd go in to the hospital and meet our baby boy after we were married and everything was all set up! WRONG! LOL I think Derrick wanted in on all of the wedding excitement, because he was born a month early, which earned him a 17 day stint in the hospital since his lungs weren't quite ready to take on the task of processing air. Apparently I failed to explain to him that even if he were born early, he still wouldn't have been able to come to the wedding. I mean, we would have loved to have had him there and meet a lot of our family and friends, but it just seems a bit...irresponsible...to bring a newborn baby to a public event like that and pass him around like a hot potato in the middle of October, commonly known here as flu season. Who wants to spend their honeymoon in a hospital nursing a sick baby?? Well, we did anyway, but that's beside the point LOL Guess I shoulda mentioned that before he wanted to be born, huh? Oops. But he's fine now...nothing to show that he was ever sick...and he yells and screams with the best of 'em!

Last night was a swim team parents meeting at the Y. Being a first time swim team parent, I was really interested in going and seeing what life was like on this side of the coin. I was on the swim team from the 6th grade on through high school, so seeing what I put my parents through is always an interesting perspective for me LOL Trey's coach said he is doing really well though, and I was really happy to hear it! He's so tall and skinny, I know if he sticks with it and does his best, he'll excel at being a competitive swimmer :o) I bought a pair of swimming "jammers," which are the modern-day Speedos for boys. They resemble skin-tight boxers! So, rather than swimming in skin-tight briefs, my guy will be stylin in skin-tight boxers! He loves it so far though, which makes me happy. I would ideally like each of the kids in at least one sport and in one type of musical program, be it piano lessons, guitar lessons, chorus, band, something. My philosophy is that busy kids stay out of trouble, but I don't want them so overwhelmed that they don't have time to see friends and be kids, too. Guess we'll see what the future holds!

Skippin Swimmin

Ever had one of your kids really look forward to doing something, only to blow it first chance they got? That happened with Trey yesterday, his first day of practice for the YMCA swim team.

The morning began the usual way, he got dressed, ate breakfast, got his teeth brushed and shoes on and fed the fish. But, this morning before he went out for the bus, we took some time to put a bag together with his swim trunks, a towel, his goggles, shampoo/body wash, a plastic bag for his wet stuff and a Zip-Loc with some strawberry Mini-Wheats in it for an after swimming snack. We stuffed that bag of swim team gear into his backpack, went over the routine of "Make sure you walk to the Y and don't take the bus home" about a thousand times, and off he went. Swim team practice got done at 4:00, so of course, this was the day I ran late at work. As soon as I finished I raced over to the Y as fast as I could, hoping that no well-meaning child abductor had conned my little guy into leaving with him. I had told him to wait for me on the bench in the entry way so he could see me when I drove up. So, imagine my surprise when I drive up and find NO TREY! Figuring my rather slow-to-move son may very well still be in the locker room, I went into the Y, opened the men's locker room door a crack (in order to avoid seeing any other 'cracks') and yelled into the men's room for him. No answer. Great. Now what? Maybe he was watching the more advanced swimmers practice, so I headed over to the pool observation area. I scanned the area for my scrawny blue-eyed baby, but no dice. Trying to push back thoughts of some scraggly guy with a 7 day beard and a jacket with more cigarette burns than filling dragging my kid out the door, I calmly asked at the front desk if anyone had seen Trey. Have you ever asked a stranger if they've seen your kid? You get that look like "Why don't you know where your own kid is?" and feel like the world's most incompetent parent because you didn't install an ESP GPS system between yourself and your child shortly after birth? Luckily Trey had introduced himself earlier at some point, because both of the girls behind the desk said "Oh, TREY! He's probably in the Teen Room." The what? The Teen Room, I learned, is a young boy's paradise. A room with a dance-pad video game system, exercise bikes and a sofa set up around a TV with kids shows on it, a foosball table, and other fun things for young kids and teens to do while they're waiting for their parents or whomever to come pick them up. This room proved to be Trey's Achille's heel that day, in that he was too weak to resist it's call. He went in there before swim team practice, ate his snack, then promptly forgot the entire reason he had even gone to the YMCA to begin with, and spent the entire 2 hours he was there in the Teen Room.

Rather than defy the laws of physics and hurl the kid into the stratosphere, Trey is grounded from video games at home and everywhere else except school, TV at home and everwhere else except school for the rest of the week. Or until he can remember to swim first, then go play in the Teen Room when he's all ready to get picked up! Apparently this was effective, as today I actually saw him practicing with the team in the pool, and was ready to take him home when he ambled out of the locker room. I think I'm gonna like Trey being on the swim team! Go CFY!

Mini Engineers

What do you get when you take four boys, and then add a chain and a log to a swingset? Here, let me show you:

Yes, that is four boys, two on each end of a log, suspended by a chain from the top of our swing set. Well, no one ever accused any of them of not being creative!! They all love the new "teeter-totter." Hey, who needs to spend money on attachments when you have mini engineers in the house??

Friday night didn't go quite as planned. Derrick wasn't hungry, so he didn't touch his spaghetti. Which meant I had no cute messy pictures to put up here. And he was crabby, so I didn't bother wasting the time to try and make him smile. Hopefully he'll be in a better mood next Saturday when we have his actual party!

Saturday marked cleaning day, which means the kids help maintain the house in which they produce mass destruction during the week. Even Derrick was helpful this weekend, and wiped down the kitchen cupboards...he's on the right path already! My brother came over and watched the boys while Bubba and I went on the closest thing to a date we've been on in months. We went to Menard's to look at new doors, since the need to replace the one in the kitchen is now at a critical point. There is no glass in that door right now where the window is supposed to be, just two pieces of plastic holding out the chill of fall, and things just seem to get colder from the point on. So, we found a door we like, and with any luck it'll be installed sometime next weekend. Then we swung through Wal-Mart, picked up the things we needed there, some we didn't need, and headed home. We had a friend and her kids (one of which is pictured above) over for dinner, and I later, on a whim, went out dancing with another girlfriend. We had a great time, we don't get much of a chance to go out together, so it was really great to hang out again with her. Hopefully more of that to come in the future! It was even an early...uh...morning...since we were home at 12:30 AM!

Today, Sunday, I was in charge of the Sunday School Service Project. This was my first one ever, so I had no idea what to expect. We had a nice turn-out, about a dozen kids or so, and our Service Project was to do fall clean-up outside around the church. I searched the congregation during church for the Sunday School director, but she wasn't there. Gulp! Great...now what?? I'm in charge of getting these kids, most under the age of 10, to be excited about cleaning up outside, when most of these kids probably have nightmares about cleaning up their own rooms. Okay...deep breath...I can do this. And apparently I did alright, becuase we had kids pick up the garbage along the road and along the tree line, we had kids and parents raking leaves in the back of the church, we had kids and parents raking leaves in the front of the church, we had kids cleaning the outsides of the windows all the way around the church, and everyone worked together to bag up 2 1/2 bags of leaves! I gave one of the moms $5 and asked her to please go to the store and grab some hot cocoa, since today was a little chilly and damp, and it started raining as we were finishing up, which she graciously did, and then I had three kids help her make the warm treat for the rest of the troops for when they were finished. On the way home, I was feeling a little unsure of my performance today as leader of the pack, so I asked my harshest critics...the boys. To my surprise, I got a "fine" from Talin, and a "really awesome" from Trey, and Talin said that Derrick thought I was "totally awesome" too (funny thing, I didn't hear Derrick's comment! LOL), which really made all of my anxiety about the day dissolve. I called the director later after I got home and let her know that all survived, and everyone was home in time to see the Packers LOL

Tomorrow is Trey's first swim team practice. I'm REALLY curious to see how this is going to go for him! I know he'll try hard, I know he wants to swim, I know I want to see him succeed, I know he looks better a nice pink flesh color and not blue. He's all packed up and ready to go...I just hope he remembers not to get on the bus home, cuz there's no swim practice here at home for him, unless he wants to practice in the tub!!

Off to bed...will write more tomorrow about Trey's first day of swim practice! Hope you all had a great weekend!!

The Great Marble Slide

Let's start today out with a picture, shall we??

Looks like a marble slide to me, doesn't it to you?? LOL This was my kids' marvelous idea for making a marble roll seamlessly down a flight of stairs, after rebouding it off the wall that hangs over the steps, which would in turn cause it to land in an exact location on one of the books and roll effortlessly down the slope of books. Of course, Trey thought it'd be a grand idea to first try having a human slide down this using a pillow case like a burlap bag, and volunteered himself to be the first to try this.. Visions of broken bodies laying at the bottom of the staircase flashed through my mind, not to mention my husband having a heart attack as soon as he saw this creative innovation, so I had them pick up the books and put them away before anything was able to be hurled down the "slide". They reluctantly complied, but of course this had to be done in the most complicated way possible...they pushed every book down the stairs, sorted them out as to who's book was who's, and then brought them upstaris to be put away, wrapped in blankets in order to get the whole load up in one trip. Whew!!

Last night we had a lot of fun though. I brought the two older boys to the YMCA so that Trey could practice swimming, as he's wanting to be on the swim team, and I'm not wanting him to drown during practice. We arrived a full half hour early, and not wanting to sit in the pool room in a swim suit I decided that maybe shooting some hoops in the gym would make the time pass faster. What a stroke of luck! I found out that Talin is really quite talented for being 6! I was practicing blocking him, gently at first, and then more aggressively, and he always came close to making a basket when he shot! Then I gave him the idea of trying to steal the ball from me, and he tried really hard at that, too! I was thrilled beyond words to see him doing so well at something that he was happy doing! So, I hope that somehow there's a way I can get him into basketball at some point, because I think he'd really do well with that.

Then we hit the pool, and we had a great time splashing around, swimming laps, and the kids had fun having me throw them around. What a couple of little fish we have! Bub stayed home this time since he wasn't feeling 100%, and that way he could get Derrick to bed on time also, since sleeping in until 9:30 like he had the last couple of days wasn't going to be an option for him since his three year old check-up was this morning. I still can't believe that tomorrow my baby will officially be a preschooler...where does the time go?!? I still can't believe that Trey is only one foot shorter than me at 9 years old!! Other than Derrick refusing to do his eye check, or maybe not understanding what he was supposed to do, and flat out refusing his hearing screen, his exam went well. I'm not at all worried about his vision or his hearing...he can see a treat hidden under 3 feet of laundry, and he can hear the word treat spoken in a 10 mile radius! He's 3 feet tall, weighs 30 pounds, and is doing great with his speech therapy. Yay! Only 2 feet and 3 inches left, and he'll have bypassed me in the height category, too! LOL But he's healthy, and he's happy most of the time, and that's what's important. And he's potty trained during the day, which is equally important as this keeps mommy & daddy happy, and keeps mommy's sanity level healthy LOL

Speaking of potty training, I'm told that his current behavior is normal and that he'll grow out of it. This little guy will hold his poop all day until after his bath, right before bed, when a pull up is put on him. Then he will go poop in his pull up, come downstairs from bed needing to be changed. The entire time he's being cleaned up, he'll say "Eww, stinky! Poop in toilet! Eww ucky!" There is no doubt in my mind after hearing that night after night that this child knows where he should be going poop, but refuses to! UGH! The other night Bub was cleaning him up, and when he was finished, Derrick stood up, pinched his nose and said "Eww, stinky poops!" I couldn't help but laugh at the look on Bub's face! LOL Someday....someday...poopy pants will be a thing of the past. Sad thing is, knowing me I'll probably miss 'em!