Wednesday, October 31, 2012

A Mother’s Love (or her warm body)

Olivia woke up at 9:30, moaning and groaning. I laid there, continuing to read, hoping she would go back to sleep. She is prone to crying out at night. After about 10 minutes I decided she was not going to stop so I went into her room. As soon as she heard the click of the door knob she sat up straight and reached her short little arms out for me to pick her up. I rocked her till she fell back asleep, which thankfully wasn’t very long.

11:30 rolls around and she wakes up again moaning and half way crying. This time I was tucked deep into my covers in bed (it’s so stinkin cold in this house right now) trying to drift off to sleep and I laid there for probably 10 minutes before I knew I was indeed going to have to get up again. This time I got the Tylenol and ear drops since she has a little cold and I figure at least one of the two ought to provide us with a decent nights rest (fingers crossed here). Again, as soon as she heard the door knob click, she bolted up and stretched out those short little arms. She didn’t make a sound, just looked at me with confident eyes that I was going to pick her up and comfort her. Make what ever it is that’s bothering her go away. I laid her down on the changing table and gave her medicine and ear drops and the sweet little thing barely made a peep. I grabbed her blanket and we settled into the rocking chair and I rocked her to sleep again.

James and Audrey love to get in the bed with me. I don’t know why in the world they wake up in the middle of the night like they do. But they drift down those stairs one by one as silent as a church mouse and gently and quietly (most of the time) crawl into the bed next to me and get deep beneath the covers cuddled right up next to me. Audrey has to be on the right side, she cannot be on the left for what ever reason. If James beats her down stairs first and is on her side up by my head, she will lay down next to my legs. Beats all I’ve ever seen. Again, I don’t know why they wake up in the middle of the night but they do and they want to be with me. Touching me, I might add. I guess it’s like Olivia needing me to hold her in the middle of the night when something just isn’t right.

I will admit that more often than not I am selfish and wish that Olivia wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and need me. And that James and Audrey would cram their daddy into the sardine can. But, they don’t. It’s me they need and tonight I am especially thankful that I am blessed to be called their mother.



Monday, October 29, 2012

Auntie and Uncle

This past weekend Jon’s brother Will and his wife Angela came to visit us! It was Angela’s first time to visit us at our house and Will’s first time in over 2 years so needless to say we all really enjoyed our weekend together!!

Angela is just a joy to have around and the kids love her so much. Especially Audrey and she will tell you just how much she loveeeees Aunt Angela! After a lazy morning of drinking coffee and spending some time on the front porch we went inside and the kids finally got to have their aunt and uncle all to themselves. Olivia was in desperate need of a morning nap so I put her down and Audrey kidnapped Angela and they went to her room to play. James kidnapped William and they went to his room to play lego’s. A little boys dream!! Will and Angela were so sweet...they stayed up stairs with them for over an hour.



When Olivia woke up we got ready and drove to our favorite little restaurant in Whigham to get the best hamburger you will ever put in your mouth at The Corner Cafe and then we went to the school and played on the playground for a while.




Then we went home where Olivia was ready for another nap and we settled in for a little football watching, lego playing, coloring afternoon. I have to brag on my kids a little and tell how well mannered they were the whole weekend. There were many times that us adults would get into a conversation and the children would sit patiently and listen and wait for their turn to talk and try once again to talk us into letting Will and Angela go back upstairs with them!!

I must say it was the best weekend. It was so relaxed and easy going and so much fun. James and Audrey really got a lot out of their time with Will and Angela. The twins are blessed with two other sets of wonderful aunts and uncles that love them very much but Will and Angela have a little bit of an edge on the others: they don’t have any kids so they can focus all their attention on their nieces and nephews!! My sister in law Emily and I have often joked that if Will and Angela are ever blessed to have children of their own, we are going to spoil them ROTTEN and fight over them. Reason being we have never really been able to do that with each other’s kids because we have always had our own to chase after and tend to. Harrison was really the only one who got extra special attention since he was the first!

Thanks again, Will and Angela, for taking the time to make the time to come see us.




Friday, October 19, 2012

Pumpkin Patch

Tuesday of this week was the kids first field trip and boy were they excited! And boy did they have a good time!! The Pre-K classes from Whigham went to Quincy, FL to Rocky Comfort Farms and got to have their first ride on the big yellow bus. Like I said, they were pumped!!

When we pulled up to the “pumpkin patch” I saw a poor looking corn field off to the left with a large wooden picture of a pumpkin sticking out of it and no real pumpkins to be seen. My initial reaction was that this 1 hour ride was going to be a total bust. How can you go to a pumpkin patch if their are no pumpkins??

It turned out to be a very neat place and it happens that the poor looking corn field I saw was supposed to be the corn maze but something had destroyed it leaving these big empty holes in it during the middle of the night one night. When I heard that I thought about that movie Signs and really thought twice about taking the hay ride.



We made it through the hay ride with out any horror movie encounters (!) unless you consider this cows tongue some kind of creepy. Or just plain gross!!





We learned about cows and how their milk is made and what all you can make out of milk and how one milks a cow. The lady who was teaching them about it was hilarious with a capital H. She made no effort to use different words when speaking about cows um, private areas and of course it went right over the 4 and 5 year olds heads but us moms were having to hold back the snickers. And the lady kept forgetting to use her real name and kept calling her self “memaw” and the kids would just stare at her with blank faces until she said her real name. And watching and listening to her showing the kids how to milk that simulated cow was just too much!!!! Too much.




That’s James milking the “cow” and his best
buddy Welles is watching. Audrey wouldn’t
go near that “cow”



We also learned about pumpkins. How they grow, how many different varieties there are, what family they come from, how many different colors pumpkins can be, what ones you want to eat or not eat, which ones make the best pies and so on and so forth. 30 minutes she talked. 30 minutes. Now, it was all good info and the kids sat there the whole time and listened and answered all her questions right at the end but geez that was a long time. Well, I say they answered them right. She made this big chart with the 6 steps of growing a pumpkin and she quizzed them at the end and mixed up the steps with the numbers to see if they could get them and James shouted out “7” one time. Hilarious! Btw, we also learned that if it rains to much then the pumpkins don’t produce much. We have had a lot of rain around here lately, hence no real pumpkins in the patch. They had to be picked early.





We ate a picnic lunch and then the kids played and played. There was a giant slide that James went down twice with out thinking about it but Audrey had to be coaxed....







There was also a corn bin and the kids got to take home pumpkins and peacock feathers. That farm had something like 40 peacocks on it....


Audrey was not digging the farm, she acted so clingy and depressed and at
 first I thought it was just because I was there but at lunch 
when all the kids got back together I realized it was 
because she had been separated from her best buddy, Katelyn



Mrs. Ponder’s Pre-K class



Audrey and her best buddy, Katelyn!



My son. He is definitely going to be a class clown!


Friday, October 5, 2012

Today is the last day of school before Fall Break!! Jon has Monday and Tuesday off and the twins have the whole week off and my daddy and Nelda are planning on coming in for a few days to spend some time with us while the kids are out of school. We are SO looking forward to that! It’s rare that we get to be together with out having to rush off to a church meeting so we plan on soaking up a lot of quality time doing "granparentie" stuff with them. And maybe, just maybe, taking advantage of having some baby sitters around for a few days!! Maybe.

Jon’s parents and my sister and her kids were here last weekend for the party so we are getting a little spoiled having family around. It’s weird how the more time you spend away from your family and the home where you grew up it gets easier. You don’t feel so “hollow” when you leave there but at the same time it’s sadder because you do feel different. And as the children get older, it gets a lot more emotional. Especially when they can’t fully understand (and who can blame them?) why we don’t live close to ANY body. And when they break down in tears when we have to leave a place. I know we live closer to my family but you still have to pack up and drive a good distance to get there. And you can’t just pop in on any body for any event. Georgia or Louisiana.

We miss a lot of events and our families miss a lot of our things. A lot of things most people take for granted. Birthday get together’s, recitals, Christmas programs, football games, open house’s, shopping together on a whim, lunch dates....the list could go on. Feel sorry for us yet? Good. Just kidding!! I’m not looking for sympathy, honest. Well, maybe a little!

Any way, we do try to look on the bright side of things. Be the Polly Anna of our situation, our life’s calling and hope that because we do miss a lot that means we appreciate being with our families more than most. And we appreciate and are thankful for the relationships and bonds we build when we do get to be with loved ones. That our time together is more special just because we don’t get to be together that often.






Thursday, October 4, 2012

Obsessed

Within the last 2 months my husband has become obsessed (and I mean that in every sense of the word) with Squirrel hunting. Off.of.our.front.porch. Most of you (ok, all of 4 of you who still read this blog!) know we live in the city limits of our little town so he really is living on the edge. Even though he is using a BB gun, the kind you have to pump, I don’t think law enforcement would approve of his new habit....

Our yard and trees are overly populated with the little varmints and always have been. They have always gotten in Jon’s craw, especially when they eat all our pecans from a tree in the back yard. But just recently he had enough and decided to take action. First, he set a trap in the front yard using peanut butter as bait. I suggested extra crunchy and it actually worked! He has caught one squirrel and one opossum. The squirrel died behind bars since he got caught over a weekend we were out of town and you want to talk about STANK in our front yard. I am so sure the neighbors appreciated that.

He has gotten to be a pretty good shot and has killed over a dozen, with a few of them being left in the tree where they were shot. i.e One day Olivia and I were outside in the front yard and I noticed a vulture flying really low over our house. I didn’t really think any thing about it until I spotted 3 more. We walked into the back and I kid you not, I counted 11 vultures on the ground in my back yard with at least 10-15 more circling overhead. I knew it had something to do with those stupid squirrels and when I told Jon about it he sheepishly said “they must of been after that one that got left in the tree the other day.” Nice.

After about 2 weeks of Jon coming home every day after school and staying outside shooting squirrels until supper time and then going back out until it got dark, I really started to worry that something was wrong with him. Seriously, I thought he was using it as an outlet or something for a bigger problem. I texted his sister one afternoon and told her that her brother was obsessed with shooting squirrels and she just laughed and said “He always has been.” That made me feel a whole lot better. Then his mother told me his daddy does the same thing every morning so now it all makes sense. It’s genetic.


Good father/son bonding time!


 “He still has an acorn in his mouth, Amanda! Take a picture of it!”



p.s after reading this blog post I’m sure those of you who saw the post on facebook about Audrey wondering if we were eating Squirrel, well, I’m sure it’s 2x as funny now. Now you can see exactly WHY she would of thought it possible to be eating squirrel at our table :)

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Ernie’s 2nd Visit



Ernie came home with Audrey yesterday. Oh joy. He went straight in the dryer when he entered the door. Still trying not to freak about the car ride home.

Anyhoot, Audrey was beyond thrilled to bring Ernie home. Since his tumble in the dryer took a while she forgot about him till I brought him up at bed time. She remembered to bring him down this morning and he enjoyed watching her eat her birthday breakfast of french toast. She also remembered to bring him to the car so I didn’t have to pull a U-ie on the way to school again!

Olivia and I took cup cakes to James and Audrey’s class this afternoon for their birthday. I grabbed the trusty old “pocket” camera that I haven’t used in months because I knew breaking out the DSLR in that situation (class room full of 4/5 year olds + chasing Olivia trying to make sure she didn’t wreck the room or break her neck) could result in injury. However, since it hasn’t been used in months I didn’t even think to check it and make sure there was a memory card in it. There was not. I realize that life does go on if an event in my children’s lives is not documented by pictures. But I feel like I’ve committed some kind of mortal sin. Kinda like if I paid someone to make my kids birthday cakes!!

Monday, October 1, 2012

Partay

On Saturday we had James and Audrey’s 5th birthday party and it was a huge success!! Every year I claim that this is my last party. Not going to throw another birthday party. They are too much work and cause me too much stress because I am a perfectionist. In all honesty, it’s not the actual party itself that gets me but the making and decorating of “the cakes.” I like to bake and really like to think of myself as cake decorator extrodinare but it’s really just all my imagination. Since I like to bake cakes and I can successfully ice one, I think I can whip out some Cake Boss quality things. Just by looking at what I want to do and saying “I can do that. No problem.”

One would think that since I know what causes me all the stress that I would simply eliminate that part and just pay someone to do it for me. I mean, that’s what any logical, normal person would do. Well I am neither, I suppose, and I am stubborn and hard headed and perhaps a little prideful. But I do sincerely wish to make our children’s cakes myself for the simple fact that I do consider it a labor of love. And I do enjoy creating them. Until the disaster happens that always seems to happen.

This time it was the icing for Audrey’s Barbie cake. I had decided to just use some white icing to pipe with around the edges that was already made and in a tube. Well, dummy me didn’t buy enough and I ran out. My mother in law went to the store for and of course Wal Mart didn’t have any. SO I whipped up some home made but I guess it was too hot in my kitchen and the icing kept getting too warm so it basically was just dripping out of the piping bag. Not to mention that it was not white but cream colored. This was at 9:30 at night. I scrapped everything off, made some more and finally got half of what I wanted on the bottom and top edges of the blasted “dress" and then pulled out the edible pink glitter, sprinkled it all over the cake and finally felt satisfied that it at least looked feminine enough. Even if it was sorta lopsided :)








I kept the cakes a surprise from the kids (which added to the pressure of perfection I think) and James was beyond excited to see his Angry Bird cake!! Audrey, on the other hand, was almost horrified when she saw her Cinderella Barbie stuck in her cake. (Perhaps I should of chosen one that was not so special?!!) She was not impressed and said “Mama but why did you do that? I NEED her.” I couldn’t help but laugh. All that worrying about having the “perfect looking cake” for my daughter and all she cared about was that I had stuck her barbie in some cake! Children really do teach you valuable lessons. She did like it though after I explained that the cake part was Cinderella’s ball gown and that she was gonna get to eat it. She thought that was hilarious :)