Thankful.

Today there is no pink-eye in my house. . . . .A classmate puked in the lunchroom today though, so, that is something I should probably pencil in for my near future :)

The Boy who cried Wolf!

The 2nd graders had their second assembly of the year today. This week has been insanely busy for the 2nd graders cause they had this, the spelling bee, and the usual spelling tests & memory verse test, and even a science test! Whew! (Kayte and Will both put in a good amount of study time for the spelling bee in the last two weeks and ended up doing really well. Kayte's spelling bee lasted a whole hour and 40 minutes, and she finally got out in 7th place for spelling the word 'thief' by spelling 'their', which signifies sheer exhaustion at that point! That is a smarty-party class and the competition is tough! Will, who experienced a whole lot of life between the spelling bee and when I picked him up at 3, could not remember what place he came in, or any of the words he spelled. But he did say that he made it all the way to the final round of the 1st grade words. . .after that, they start on the 2nd grade list. So that was pretty good!)
Anyway, the final big event of the week was the assembly play on "The Boy Who Cried Wolf!" The costumes were great, the kids remembered their lines and the wolf was appropriately bad. All-around good fun!

With a fellow 'villager', and a half-dressed sheep.

The poor sheep.

The unhappy villagers.

After the play. My camera batteries died in the usual fashion, before I could get a whole shot of the stage. But, I'm happy to say, they are having all the plays professionally videotaped now, for the wicked-good price of $7/DVD! So, we will have that memory for a lifetime :)

Happy Groundhog Day!

Ok, rumor has it that the groundhog did not see his shadow today. And in honor of an early spring, I couldn't resist pulling out some spring sweaters to get me in the mood.

Happy Spring!

The 'shame' approach. . .

At the game the other night (well, we were in kind of a hurry and didn't properly prepare before leaving the house), Ben wet his pants. I happened to have a pair of "spare" pants in the car (not Ben's, and not his size). I think they went nicely with his red plaid and canvas boots.

Will's first ever (!) basketball game!!!

Here we are, at the beginning of a long career of basketball! This was so.much.fun!

The game was much more organized than I was expecting it to be, and my little Will was just awesome. First, he was so super-excited to be there. He kept hugging me all night leading up to the game, and then, right in the middle of the game, he snuck a hug from his dad, who is coaching his team. The game was intense, he was on high-alert, and he sprinted the entire time. It wasn't running, he was in a full-out sprint. So. much. Fun!!!

On our way, I couldn't resist stopping and picking up our little buddy Jack (of course, we had to find his pants first!). Jack is Will's biggest fan. He was thrilled to get to come. When he got in the car, he asked Will, "Will, are you guys the good guys, or the bad guys?"

Will: "Well, we kinda just play against each other. So. . .they think we're the bad guys, and we think they're the bad guys."

Jack: "Ok. . .I'll just cheer for you Will, ok?"

See! Full.out.sprint.

And, oh yeah, that is our "2", with 5:36 left in the 3rd quarter. But we were having way too much fun to really notice. Except Will. He was kinda bummed about that :)

He's not sleeping. . .

. . .he's just resting his poor pink eyes. Upside: cuddle time.

Pink Eye Update. . .

Yep, everybody's getting it. . .Sara and I are the holdouts for this particular round. So basically I have 4 family members doing eye drops, and even after they are completely clear, they are going to be doing them until I run out! My pharmacy actually ran out of drops (yes, you can call it an epidemic) and they called all over town trying to find me some. One pharmacy in all of Moscow still had some, so I jetted over to get my hands on some. We have moved into the lysol/bleach phase of this horrendous disease. The place reeks of lysol, and the washer is taking a beating from all the bedding I've been stuffing in there all day. . .

Still. I'm really glad no one is puking. Yet :)

Oh yes we did!!!

We finally booked our second honeymoon/10th anniversary trip to Maui!!!

This boat leaves April 8th. I can. not. wait.

Woohoo!!!!!

New Year, New Look, New Frontier.

Couple o' things. After much deliberation, and constant harrassment (Ed Driskill), I've decided to go public. Just for a bit. Put my toe in the water. . .see if I like it. My blog is now approaching it's 3rd birthday (isn't that fantastic?) And originally it was public (for a whole 3 months) . . . . but then I got spooked and went into hiding. I just don't really like knowing that who-knows-who from who-knows-where is reading about my daily life and my cute little kids. Plus, I like to brag about my kids and my husband, talk about myself, and air my opinions, and I don't like to be careful what I say on here. Because it is my little diary that I will keep forever and ever and someday show my grandkids and my great grandkids. (And they will wonder how we ever got along without the iPhone 104.9. Speaking of, the lady at the doctor's office today was marveling at how I could fit a whole DVD player in my purse. I'm not cool enough to have all the latest technology packaged into a contraption the size of a 3x5 card. . .I can just hear my grandkids asking me what that might be.) Anyway. If a cyber-stalker hunts me & my family down, you will know who to blame (Ed Driskill). That being said, I will hike up my big girl pants and put on my brave face. . . .

And in honor of my coming out, I've spruced the place up a bit. (Can't let the little sister show me up, you know.) So now that I've got my lipstick & heels on. . .here I come!

Need a pick-me-up?

How 'bout these cuties?
Chillin' out after long hours of studying for the spelling bee. The itouch has some kind of pirate game, and Will is literally unbeatable. (Joe tries! A lot. But not nearly as much as Will. . .) So that is the closest we've gotten to any video games at this house so far. . .baby steps. . .


Whenever I start snapping, Sara has to strike a pose. A lot of thought goes in to each pose. And sometimes, when she is in a creative mood, she has lots of poses and needs a shot of each one. Tonite, there was only one:

And Ben's kisses. Love those. He's started insisting on kissing me right on my dimple, but I try to move just in time so that he smacks me on the lips instead. This of course makes him squeal, and I get many more kisses than I would otherwise :)

My day today didn't go as planned, but gosh, I have a lot of little blessings!

Pink eye.

Yep, I've started saying it with a growl. . . this is our second go-around and it's frankly exhausting. It would be a lot easier if everyone just treated it like a cold instead of a plague. Then you could just go about your daily life without really worrying about it. "This too shall pass" sort of thing. But everyone is afraid of catching it, mostly cause then they too will have the plague, and have to be drugged up for 24 hours before they are allowed back into polite society. So it's inconvenient.
Plus I have to wrangle all the kids to the floor, strapping both arms under my legs so that I can pry their goopy eyes open to administer the evil, but painless, drops. And that just ruins my tidy day.
Ben always pretends he's gonna be so brave. He begs me to get the eye drops out. Lies down on the floor with his hands behind his head. Very very still. But as I approach him with the actual drops in hand, he freaks out and scrambles away, screaming bloody murder. Then we are back to the sitting-on-him approach. . . .as he continues to scream.
But a couple of minutes later, he is as right as rain again. He comes up to me, gives me a thumbs-up and says, "Good job with the eyedrops Mom! Good job!"

If only I could change gears as fast as a two-year-old.

Space Camp in 1st Grade. . .

This little fridge ornament's got me smiling all. day. long.

Big girl ballet!

Kayte is 8 now, with 3 years of ballet experience, so she got to move up to the next class! I really adore their teacher, Miss Katie. She keeps a very disciplined class and works hard on getting the girls to use great form. The class is nice and small too, only 5 girls, so I think she will learn a lot this year. . . can't wait for the recital!

Kayte is starting to look so tall!

Pretty Boy

Ben woke up with pink eye this morning. And he really needs a haircut, so the hair is just dangling in the goo, waiting to spread to the other eye and then all around the house. I don't want to actually risk giving the contaminated hair a cut, because last time Ben got pink eye (a few short weeks ago) I got pink eye. And it is just inconvenient and I had to buy new eye makeup and everything. . .so, to delay things, I put a bobby pin in Ben's hair to keep it out of his eyes. (I was proud of myself for thinking of a bobby pin, instead of just grabbing one of the girly-pink barrettes).

Sara saw him and was staring at him for a little bit and finally pipes up, "Ben has a stick in his hair!"

I should have thought of that. A 'stick' sounds much more manly than a 'bobby pin'.

*and, just a sidenote, since we were speaking of two-year-olds. . . .I love the little things two-year-olds do, like, saying good-bye to inanimate objects. We were at Winco today and Ben introduced himself to the giant american flag there, that was loudly flapping around in the wind. I told him it was a flag and as I was tucking him into the chair and buckling him up, he kept trying to wiggle free and crane his neck over so he could look that flag right in the eye and holler, "good-bye flag!! good-bye!!! . . . .good-bye flag!" over and over as if the thing would finally look down on him and suffer him a farewell.

I'm really really really going to miss 2.

Sara's first ballet class!

We finally got Sara all signed up for ballet. . .She has showed signs of being kind of a natural when it comes to stuff like this, so it will be fun to see how she does in an organized class. First ever!

Kayte started up this week too. . .I will get some photos up soon!

More 'little' stuff. . .

Just sold the rocking chair. Joe bought this for me when Kayte was born. Lots of little ones rocked in here. . .

Big Boy!

Last Saturday, Joe and I rolled up our sleeves and painted Sara's room! Yes, we did it all by ourselves! It was time to move Sara downstairs with all the big kids and time to get Ben out of the crib. And since "Daddy's Little Girl Pink" wasn't a shade that Ben could appreciate, it was time for a new coat of beige. Nice and neutral for resale purposes :)


It was a tad difficult to give up the crib that all four of our kids started out in. But Ben didn't seem too sentimental about it. . .he's made the transition pretty easily!

Little cutie!

1600 on the SAT? Why not?

Conversation with Kayte:

Me: Hey! Are you reading "Beezus and Ramona"?

Kayte: Um, no. Aren't we going to see that movie?

Me: Yeah. . .

Kayte: Then why would I want to read the book?

Me: shrug

Kayte: Well, I'm reading "Mary Todd Lincoln" right now. . . I'd really like to finish that.

Alrighty then. If she'd rather read a history book than the hijinks of the ever-lovable childhood friend, Ramona, who am I to stop her?

Happy Decade, Joe!

Ha! It looks like I forgot to do my anniversary post, which is such a shame cause this was a big one! 10 years!
To celebrate we are going to Hawaii, just for as long as we can, in April. The day of, we went to Spokane for a quick getaway, where they upgraded our room to a suite, ate some fabulous halibut at the Davenport, and snuck into a pub for a beer flight. So fun to be on our own with no schedule! I'm looking forward to a week of that in Hawaii!
The other day I was thinking how much a decade can change things.
When Joe and I got married, we didn't have a cell phone, or internet access, or cable for that matter. I didn't even have an e-mail address, and I never did my shopping online. We lived in a super-romantic 400 sq. ft. apartment, with no laundry facilities, no bathtub, no dishwasher. One and a half square feet of counterspace. There was no such thing as netflix or facebook. And no one we knew blogged. I'm not sure I would've known what that meant. We did have two vehicles, my geo prizm and Joe's jeep. Gas was $1.57/gallon. People were still able to walk their guests straight to their gate at the airport and you could carry a whole 40 oz. bottle of shampoo right onto the plane. I had a good amount of credit card debt, and we both had some student loans. And between the two of us, we made $1800/month. Joe had not yet graduated from college. Our children weren't yet even a twinkle in our eyes. So much has changed. And if the little minute details of our daily lives can change that much, just think how much two people can grow together, and that is where we are. I have so many awesome memories of the last ten years, and so many completely hilarious ones too. Some just too precious to share.
Thanks for picking me Joe! I love you :) Happy 10th Anniversary!

A chai a day. . .

I'm just gonna say it, this may be my very favorite gift of all time! Maybe it is because it lived up to some very high expectations. Or maybe cause it allows me to start out every day with what used to be a semi-weekly treat: a delicious $3 chai.
I tried making chai at home all by myself once. On the stove. It was yucky, and pretty much almost ruined my taste for the stuff entirely (think warm milk with a mix of warm milk). So in desperation I looked for a solution online, and I found this little beauty on amazon. Joe surprised me with it for Christmas and since then I've been getting a lot more calcium in my diet. . .It not only heats, it froths, and the result beats all the coffee stands in Moscow. And, as I just noticed while finding you the link, it is on sale and will certainly pay for itself in under two weeks. Go ahead. Indulge yourself. You will be the envy of the carpool moms :)


I really missed it when I was in Montana this week. Next trip I'm taking it with us!