Impressed.

As I was sorting through the mundane details of life, trying to decide if any of them were blog worthy, my son came up and informed me that he’d made himself breakfast. Not the cop-out, easy yogurt breakfast, but a bowl of oatmeal. He then proceeded to tell me all the steps you need to take to make a bowl of oatmeal, and by golly, he’d done it the right way. He just hadn’t put it in the microwave because he didn’t know what button to push. His proportions were slightly off, but he realized (on his own) that he’d made too much and decided to share some with his sisters. Impressive for a 3 year old.
So the other random less exciting brain clutter:
I talked to my aunt in North Carolina last night and we decided on a date for our trip down to visit her (May 24-31st). So now I have something to look forward to, and enough time to plan for it so that it’s not a frantic shopping rush at the end!!
Had a nice visit with Sue and Dick yesterday. They were coming in to town to help Cathy get ready to move. They stopped by right after lunch. The girls called Sue “grammie” the whole time. It was cute.
Oh, and while I"m looking at it, the show "the amazing race" on their website, there's a link for Phil's blog. Interesting. Check here:

phil’s blog

Two sleepy heads and a lonely only.

To say that the girls slept in yesterday would be an understatement. More like they slept the entire day away (not that I’m complaining). They slept until 4:15 yesterday afternoon. Yup. It was a little weird only having 1 kid follow me around all day. I was super productive though. Lots of scrapping, lots of cleaning, lots of school stuff. But I started to get a little bored around noon, and I missed my girls. I was so happy when they finally woke up. And yes, they went to bed at a normal time last night.

What’s that sound?

Hear that ladies and gentlemen? That is the sound of a fully functional telephone line. I have not heard that sound in oh……. Maybe 6 weeks. Whenever we talk on the telephone, we’ve had this horrible buzzing noise that makes it really hard for both parties to hear the conversation. Way fun. Additionally, our internet connection has been on the fritz. For weeks it would connect at really really slow speeds, but then on Thursday of last week it decided to stop connecting all together. But yesterday Mr. Sprint repairman fixed my phone for FREE (we were expecting to have to pay A LOT) and I feel like a million bucks. It’s taking forever to catch up on all the web pages / blogs that I haven’t been able to check for days.
Oh, and I received an interesting tid-bit of information recently. There is apparently a rock star in Lebanon named Elissa. How do I know? She (or someone else named Elissa) commented on my blog. Interesting. Weird.

Sweet Sunday.

Yesterday was one of those idyllic days. One of those days where I woke up with a smile and was still smiling when I went to bed. Here’s what it looked like:
Slept in until 7:30, woke up to the sound of the girls jumping around in their beds and giggling at each other, and Jory cooking breakfast for the whole family (bacon, eggs and biscuits – isn’t that impressive?)
We opted to skip the first church service this week – the whole attending three services each Sunday was getting a little old. So we got to take our sweet time getting ready for church instead of rushing around barking orders at each other.
Sunday school/church went smoothly. I had 11 in my Sunday school class – which is just the right amount. Despite the fact that I was short 2 adult helpers, my co-teacher and I managed just fine. Lunch found us at Panera’s with my mom (Grandma Jeep) and brother (Uncle Drew). The kids all happily munched on their bagel bites and apple pieces while I gabbed.
After lunch we came home and threw the kids in bed for a nap. I finished a scrapbook layout and Jory took a nap for most of the afternoon. Suppertime came and went. In the evening I did minimal amounts of cleaning and school with Alex (no, he doesn’t get weekends off) (I’m a pre-k tyrant). Mostly I just played with the kids and avoided responsibility like I do most weekends.
Life is good.

Brain clutter

We’ve implemented a new punishment in our house, it seems to be rather effective. The new rule is, if you don’t finish your dinner you don’t go outside with Daddy. Oh the tears of woe this rule has caused. Last night Annie felt a little rebellious and wouldn’t eat her potatoes. She had a complete melt down as everyone else was getting their shoes on to go out and finally agreed to eat the potatoes. Here’s where the story gets blog worthy. She climbs up to the table, takes a tiny bite of potatoes and gags like she’s eating a worm or something. (She’s the dramatic kid in my family) Then after a series of horrible faces, I caved in and gave her some juice to drink. She gratefully glugs down four big swallows of juice before she can continue. I manage to distract her with the ol’ airplane routine, and she finishes the potatoes with plenty of time to play outside.
Lets see… what other random brain clutter is worth sharing…
Oh yes. I was reading an early childhood ed magazine last night and ran across an article about thinking skills (critical thinking, fluent thinking, and flexible thinking) and how to support creativity with each type of thinking. Look here for the gist of the article:

Early Childhood Today article

My first reaction was “my kid’s so dang creative, he could probably teach me a thing or two” but as I read the article it got the wheels turning and produced a list about half a page long of activities, stuff I wanted to retouch on and the like. Interesting magazine if you care about pre-k development.

More on the mouse.

I sort of expected Jory to get rid of the mouse yesterday morning (like any sane person would have) but clearly I didn’t marry a sane person. He must have been crunched for time before work, because he just set the mouse, trap and all on the railing of the back porch - where the thing could stare at me all day (gee, thanks.) When Jory took the kids outside after supper, I figured he’d do the safe thing, and clean out the trap before the kids found it. But this is Jory we’re talking about. He took the mouse out of the trap, showed it to all the kids (the girls really got a kick out of it, they kept giggling and saying ‘ello mouse!) and gave Alex a mini lesson on mousetraps, and how they work. Thanks babe. I watched the whole lesson from a safe distance, not sure whether to get sick or be thrilled that my children were learning about the facts of life and death, and doing a little close up observation of a critter they normally wouldn’t be close to. He eventually did get rid of it, but not before teasing me with it a little. Double ick.

Easter Sunday, and an unwelcome guest.

Our Easter was relatively quiet. We donned our Easter finery, and went to church, came home and chilled out. I managed to get pics of Alex in his suit, but the girls were ready to get out of their dresses. I’ll probably dress them up at some point this week to get their pictures…
We had an unwelcome guest in our house last night. I was sitting on the couch reading, (a book about Walt Disney ironically) when a little brown and white mouse scampered out from behind the entertainment center and disappeared into the kitchen. Did you hear me? There was a MOUSE IN MY HOUSE!!! Of course I panicked. Funny how a 5 foot person can be terrified of a 3 inch mouse. I ran in and woke Jory to come set some traps (actually I stomped down the hall, whispering “here I come mouse, you’d better hide from me!”) To make a long story short, my little mouse friend found the traps before I finished brushing my teeth. Sorry pal. I hope you make a nice lunch for some deserving bird. Oh, now I’ve done it, I’m going to get nasty letters from the animal rights advocates. Well if it bothers you that I killed a mouse in my kitchen, I’ll just bring all my nasty germy mice to your house and let them loose. Ick.

In case you were interested…

The last two days have been crazy around here. On Thursday, Jory’s office had a cook out, and they invited us to come. I thought it’d be fun to bake a cake for the occasion. So I slaved away all morning long, making a new cake recipe (peanut butter cake with peanut butter-cream cheese frosting). I get the cake out of the oven and run to take a shower. Come back from the shower, and the cake is 1/3 eaten! The cake had JUST come out of the oven, and was still hot, so I figured the kids would leave it alone. Nope. There was a huge hole, and crumbs all over Louisa’s face. Either the other two were much neater in their pilfering, or they didn’t eat any of it.
The picnic itself was relatively uneventful, other than the fact that Annie ate 3 hot dogs.
On the way home, I did something I’ve never done before. I picked up this awesome wire crate out of someone’s trash. (I’d take a picture of it, but I’m too lazy). It was in great shape, I can’t believe someone was throwing it away. What’s worse is I can’t believe I put a wire crate that was IN SOMEONE’S TRASH on display in my house. Still getting used to the idea.
So that was Thursday. Yesterday, Good Friday, was a company holiday at Jory’s office, so he had the day off. We decided to go run errands as a family. Oh my. I can’t say that I’ll be doing that again any time soon. The kids were pretty good, especially after we offered them ice cream. But all the in-and-out got a little old after a while. Silly me forgot to take a goodie bag along for the kids, so they fought over the same 2 matchbox cars the entire time. Oh well.

Early Easter

My parents are going to Finland this week, and won’t be here for Easter on Sunday. So we decided to have Easter dinner and our egg hunt a little early. The kids had a ball searching for Easter eggs in Grandma’s back yard. So much so, that we had to “hide” the eggs all over again, so they could be found again. I didn’t get any really good pictures, cause the kids were just too stinking quick, but here’s one just because. There are a few more on flickr…

Weekend happenings.

I can’t say it was an exciting weekend, but there were a few highlights to share. On Saturday my mom took the kids so Jory and I could run a few errands and have a quiet lunch by ourselves. That was definitely the highlight of my Saturday.
On Sunday we went to church, we added a new service time, and there was some confusion about when I would be teaching Sunday school, so we ended up being there for all 3 services, which sounds like a lot, but it didn’t seem that long at the time. I got to help out in the preschool room during the service that I thought I was supposed to teach. It was nice to get to know some of the kids in Alex’s class, and watch him interact with kids he’s not related to.
After church Grandma took Alex out to visit with Grandpa at the lake for the rest of the day. Our Sunday afternoon was pretty quiet with out him. It’s amazing how quick the group dynamics changes when you take one kid out of the mix. The mess and noise levels go down by about 80%.

early bloomers

Playing with the new lenses I got for christmas...
These are the daffodils in my back yard in various stages of blooming...



You'll notice that everything in the background is all dead and brown... Oh well, they really stand out when you look out my back window...

Surprise

Do your kids ever surprise you? My kids have just been full of sweet surprises this last week. Here are a few that I remember.
Yesterday I asked Alex to give me a weather report (I do this every day), Annie pipes in “it’s cloudy!” I wasn’t aware that she knew her weather vocabulary. Maybe I should start having the girls give me the weather report.
A few days ago, Alex and I were playing with scissors – the kind that cut a decorative edge, and I got out a few extra pairs, so he’d have some patterns to pick from. Well the girls were eyeing them so I passed them out, not expecting the girls to be able to use them. Surprise! They played with them for more than an hour, and made a nice little pile of confetti for me to clean up.
Alex: Ok, so I mentioned early that my son was mentally adding and subtracting earlier this week. I thought it might have just been a fluke, but he did it again yesterday, adding 2’s (which if you aren’t into educational theory, is the next step harder than adding 1’s, which I already knew he could do)
In other news… I went to the scrapbook store last night (the one I teach at) to get supplies for my next class. It always cracks me up when they let me take $30-40 of paper/supplies out of the store without paying for it. I was chatting with my storeowner a little and she just keeps handing me more and more. First it was 3 sheets of letter stickers that “might” work with my color scheme (it was more of her wanting the supplies used up than anything else) then it was another 20 sheets of cardstock to make cards with (for the store of course). Kate (the store owner) then pipes up “yeah next time you’re in, just tell the ladies at the desk that Kate said you could take more paper for cards, you can take as much as you want.” Oh, and Kate said I could take this album, this stack of embellishments, and…. and… and…Too funny.

It’s just not fair…

Last night as I was reading (as I do most nights) and was completely inspired by what I was reading (as I am most nights) only to have to shut my brain down to go to bed. It’s almost cruel. Here are all these great ideas, now stop thinking about them and sleep.
I wish I was a morning person. It makes so much more sense for me. I wish I had the discipline to get myself out of bed 2 hours before the kids were awake (which would be 5 am – bleh) so I could read then.

Weekend antics

Once again, another relatively uneventful weekend has passed in the Peterson household. On Saturday we took the kids to the volunteer fire station up the road for a pancake breakfast. We met some of the firemen, and got to walk around the fire engines, it was pretty cool.
I also took a bike ride this weekend, up through Irwin prairie (which is directly north of my house). While the ride was pretty windy, I enjoyed the peace and quiet – hearing the critters who call the prairie home. I also enjoyed seeing a few more signs of spring, the buds on the trees, the reeds starting to poke up through the murk, bursts of green here and there… They just aren’t things that I notice when I wiz by in the car at about 60 miles an hour with the radio blaring and kids hollering. It was good.