We aren’t trick or treating.

We don’t trick or treat at my house. There are several reasons. None of them are very good.
1. I don’t like costumes, I didn’t like them as a kid (though I did like getting all that candy) so I’m not excited about picking out costumes, nor am I thrilled about dressing my children up.
2. I don’t want all that candy in my house. I don’t give my children candy really. (Alex thinks 3 m & m’s in one sitting is a lot) If I took all 3 out, I imagine we’d have candy until next year. No thanks.
3. I personally have religious convictions about the holiday.
4. To me it’s too much like begging. I don’t want to encourage my children to go to strange houses and beg for food, nor do I want strange children coming to my house to beg for food. Does anyone else think it’s just a bizarre concept?
I imagine in a few years when my kids figure out what they’re missing there’ll be some sort of coup and we’ll have to make some sort of arrangement. But for now my children don’t know what they’re missing. So don’t ask them what they are being for trick or treat.
PS. We didn’t carve our pumpkins either – yuck.

More Alex art

Here's a picture that Alex made on the computer today. We were playing in Adobe photoshop. He's learning how to operate a computer mouse.

A little grumpy – a little silly.

So this morning hasn’t been the best morning. Last night Jory was messing with my settings on winamp (where I keep all my songs on the computer) and I can’t get my songs to work. So grumpiness prevails. Heaven forbid I won’t be able to use my playlist until jory comes home to fix it. After a little tinkering I found a solution that works for now. So I sit and reflect. Surprised at myself. Surprised that I was tempted to fly off the handle at my children (who were being rather perturbing during my gotta-fix-my-tunes-or-else state of mind). So I"m really annoyed at myself for getting all worked up over a computer, and even more annoyed at myself for taking it out on my kids.
Anyway.
It’s been a slow week around here again. I’ve been working on Christmas projects (sorry, no details. They’re top secret!). Trying to keep my house a bit cleaner, the kids entertained… that sorta thing. A few highlights from our week: We made apple crisp on Wednesday. Must have been pretty good, because it’s already gone.
Alex has decided he is too good to wear diapers. He’s been wearing them at nights only, but early this week I forgot to put one on him before bed and he woke up relatively clean. Hopefully this means he’s done with diapers.
I told you it was a slow week.

Jammin

So Tenika’s Meme challenge this week is about music. More specifically about the oddities in your music collection. I’ve spent way too much time this week collecting and organizing my music. But now that I’m really organized, I know what I like HA!
So here are some odd balls out of my play list.
Coolio: Gangsta’s paradise. I don’t like rap, so the fact that this one even made it in my play list surprises me, but there it is.
Veggie tales – who doesn’t like to talk to tomatoes?
Disney – Jungle Book sound track
REO speedwagon – I didn’t think it was weird, but my dad thought I was bizarre because I mentioned it in my last post
Kirk Franklin: STOMP – One of my songs from the summer I spent in VA beach
Kenny Logins, Milli Vanilli, and Moby - Who put those in there?
Simon and Garfunkle: those are for you, Dad
The Mask of Zorro – makes me wish I knew how to dance the Brazilian tango
Supertones – another loud obnoxious band that I learned to like when I lived in VA beach

Uncle Junk

I mean Jake.
Jory’s brother Jake was here from Joplin (Missouri) visiting over the weekend. He and Jory had fun riding their motorcycles, playing video games and just being boys together. I think Alex had fun with Jake’s toys also…






As for my weekend, it was relatively uneventful. I was on baby duty most of Saturday while the boys played. Sunday after church I went over to my mom’s house so Jory and Jake could do their guy thing with out feeling guilty that I was stuck with the kids again. Mom and I took the kids shopping for winter coats. I had to go to 4 different stores before I could find winter coats that fit the girls that had NO FUR ON THE HOODS. I’m not crazy about that fashion trend, and am rather annoyed that EVERYTHING I saw had fur on it. Shopping for boys is so much easier.
This morning I spent a good chunk of time creating my own playlist in Winamp. I’ve been using the main playlist that Jory made, but there were like 1500 + songs on that list, and I only liked about ¼ of them. So I decided it was time for me to have my own playlist. Mine only has 378 songs in it so far and THEY ALL ROCK. Right now I’m jamming to REO Speedwagon – and I hope no one is looking cause I probably look like a big geek!

A good day

Yesterday was a fun day. In the morning Alex and I made chocolate chip banana muffins. I was more interested in using the experience as a learning experience than I was having an edible end product, but they turned out pretty well. We ate half of them before lunch – hee hee.
After lunch/nap time I took the kids to my mom’s new school. I met one of her co teachers who delivered triplets the same week I had my twins (turns out we even had the same OB – go figure) 2 girls and a boy, the same that I have – but she has a full time job. I can’t imagine. After that we went to Jory’s office to pick him up and say hello to our friends at the office – he has the nicest co workers.
Then we dropped the kids off at my mom’s, and went to dinner. Jory and I have been trying to have a “date” for about 3 weeks now. Well we finally managed to have one. We went to Red Lobster –mmmmmmmm- and stopped at the scrapbook store to drop off my projects. Not a very exciting date, but it was all done with out children, and that’s what mattered…

My husband, the photographer

Jory took some awesome shots of his motorcycle last night that I wanted to share. I didn’t ask him if I could post these so I hope he’s not mad! But they were too cool not to share.

Happy Birthday Megan!

Everybody sing to my sister today, she’s 29! Happy birthday you ol’ boot! Where are we going for dinner?
We had a fun weekend. Saturday we took the kids out to run a few errands, and made a trip to the park. The girls had a ball playing on the swings, and Alex (my little social butterfly) made friends with another little girl, and chased her all over the park. Sunday we all slept in, so I took Alex to church and Jory kept the girls. After church we went with some friends from church to an apple orchard. We didn’t pick any apples (even though we could have) but Alex had a ball playing in the hay loft, the girls giggled at the goats. Here are a few fun shots of the kids in the hay. I love this one of Louisa, where you can see Alex loaded up with hay and a mischievous look on his face. As you can guess, the hay went all over us, which sadly I didn’t get a shot of. Oh well.

Cooking up trouble and tunes

So I’m not the best cook in the world. In fact I’m rather miserable in the culinary department. I have about 10 things that I cook. But this week I’ve been trying out some new recipes. Trying to work my way out of my cooking rut… So this week we’ve tried the following: for the kids – pizza bread and quesadillas (both a big hit); and for Jory: raspberry cobbler (YUM!) and crock-pot lasagna – also a big hit.
Last week my friend Heather had a list of her favorite songs in her blog, so I thought I’d copy off of her. (ha!) I thought it’d be interesting to have a record of my favorite songs from this stage in my life, so I can look back on it in a few years and remember. Wish I was computer savvy enough to figure out how to put the songs in here, but I’m not. So here are my top 5’s in no particular order:

My favorite Christian/Worship songs:
3rd day: Consuming fire
Nicole Nordeman: Brave
Jennifer Knapp: Trinity
Caedmon’s call: Table for two
LaRue: Someday

General tunes: This one was hard because we don’t have many of these on our computer to pick from and heaven forbid I turn on the radio. I don’t even know if I have the titles right on these:
Rob Thomas: Lonely no more
Phil Collins: Against all odds
Kelly Clarkson: Break away
Billy Joel: Piano Man
Norah Jones: Sunrise

Country: Another hard one, too many good ones to pick from.
Rascal Flatts: Fast Cars and Freedom
Sara Evans: Niagara
Diamond Rio: Beautiful Mess
Josh Gracen: Nothing to Loose
Keith Urban: Better life

What are yours?

Pics and an update

Well here are some of the kid pics I promised yesterday. I meant to post them last night, but time got away from me.







Time for a kid update. My son would now like to be known as Alex the puppy. He crawls around like a dog all day, laps water out of his cup (yuck) and has his own special “puppy voice” that is high and squeaky. He is also learning to tell time. I have him go to the clock on the stove and read me the numbers. He knows that 12:00 is lunch time. We’re working on knowing that 5:30 is when Daddy comes home. It’s rather convenient when I’m in a place with no clock to yell at him to tell me what time it is.
The girls are starting to speak in 2 word sentences. Some of our latest phrases are Daddy go? (as in where’s Daddy), thank you, and excuse me. They are locating new body parts left and right, and following directions like crazy.

new pics!

took the kids out in the yard so they could play (really I just wanted to take some fall pics before the weather got too cold!) Got a handful of decent ones (I only took 60 some pics!) I posted a few new head shots in the side bar. Some day I'll post some of the other ones here...

My weekend and the low-down on Sunday school

Meet Dirty Harry.

He showed up on Friday, and hung out next to Alex’s sand box for at least a day and a half. We were afraid he was going to hang out all winter long, so we named him. He must not have liked the name we picked for him, because he was gone when we came back from church on Sunday. Oh well.
Alex got to spend part of the weekend with Grandma. My mom came and got him on Saturday night, and kept him over night. After church she took him with her to the lake house. It’s amazing how much easier my job is when 1/3 of my children are absent.
Yesterday after church I went to teach my Sunday school class. I haven’t talked much about my Sunday school experiences in this journal yet, but I have so much fun every week. So here’s a little about look at my Sunday mornings. I teach the kindergarten/first grade group. My co-teacher is James. He’s about 18, and excellent with children – especially boys. Some weeks we have as many as 4 adults (like we did yesterday) sometimes it’s just us. He and I taught the kindergarten group last year, so we know the first graders in our class pretty well, and we’ve taught together enough that we have sort of a rhythm – you do this, I’ll do that. No problems. – Now I have to say that our teaching style is rather wacky. Ok I’ll admit it, my teaching style is really wacky, and James sort of just laughs at me. Normally it’s cool, but yesterday we had 2 adult helpers who weren’t used to our teaching style, I’m afraid of what they were thinking.
In our class, we have anywhere from 8-15 kids, who are usually done learning about 20 minutes before the parents arrive to get them. When I say “done learning” I mean they are tired of sitting in a chair doing seat work – can’t say I blame them. Which makes life interesting for the teachers. We try to do some kinesthetic learning activities to fill time (lessons that include movement) but usually we just end up playing duck-duck-goose. (which is why I’m so thankful for having a teenager as my helper - he plays, I clean up)
Not all the kids in the group are the stereotypical church family-well behaved-child. I have some real troublemakers who cause problems on a regular basis. James to the rescue. He’s so good about getting the troublemakers attention focused on whatever little thing he’s doing, and away from causing trouble.

We’re going to the zoo today

(that was for Dad and Megan – I’m sure they’ll understand the reference)
Well yesterday was the last day of nice weather, so my friend Cathy and I decided to take the kids to the zoo. There were hardly any people there, and I’d say about 90% of the people that were there had children in strollers. (including us!) The kids had a ball, Annie would have been happier if we’d let her walk around instead of stuffing her in a stroller. She kept saying “down?” But other than that, everyone was on their best behavior. I didn’t really take any pics, because I was having too much fun enjoying the moment. Oh well.
Other than that, it’s been sort of a slow week. Had some good news on Wednesday, related to Jory’s job – so I bought him dinner – Papa Johns! No funny kid stories are coming to mind. On the whole, sort of an uneventful week. Thanks for asking.

The pumpkin patch

Yesterday after church, Alex and I went to the pumpkin patch with my parents. (Jory stayed home with the girls so they could nap). We picked our own pumpkins, talked to the cutest piglets I’ve ever seen, and Alex got to ride in the wheelbarrow. For the record, Jory says “why on earth would you pay money to harvest other people’s pumpkins. Must be a city kid thing”