James and I had been up until 1:00 last night working on incredibly important things. Namely, looking up fun ringtones to put on our cell phones. It sounds silly and trivial until you call and I (and you) will hear the Pink Panther by Henry Mancini. Suddenly it seems worth it all! (I've always been peculiarly drawn to that song--it's one of my all time favorites!) Of course, I have the perfect song set up for when Dad calls, one that has plenty of Texas twang and just sort of suits his "roots." And will make me smile each time I hear it. Twice a year! Ha! (Dad's not a big phone guy!) When James calls I hear "It's Me Again, Margaret" with the sadistic laugher that follows. That's what he chose--just loves it! Ha! Anyway, I was talking about this morning.
Due to our late night we had a hard time waking up this morning. Just after 8:00 Joe showed up at my bedside. "Mom, there's a centipede by my shoes!" I groggily told him to kill it. I dozed back off and a few minutes later we heard Sam saying, "Dad, look--I caught a live centipede!" James opened his eyes to see a fly swatter about 6 inches from his face with a giant centipede resting on it! I must tell you that James didn't actually scream. It was more of a long and exaggerated gasp. I was on the other side of James but--I'm telling you--in correlation with the gasp, his eyes bugged out cartoon style. You know, where they jump way out of the sockets for a few seconds. He responded as most people would've responded (and far better than I--I wouldn't have stopped at a mighty gasp, it would have been a full fledged scream and the centipede and probably Sam would have been slapped at least 6 feet away)... but it was sooooooo funny! I waited to make sure that no children were going to be seriously injured (James was not very happy!) but once I was at ease about that I laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed!!! It was sooooo funny! Oh, I've replayed it in my head 100 times today and I just doesn't get old! HA! It's what you call scarin' the bejeebers out of somebody. Of course, I think it scared Sam just as much as James! He had just come to show Dad his latest accomplishment and never anticipated a reaction like that. :-) Anyway, I think the centipede was already dead, but James took it to the bathroom and flushed it. A few minutes later I was going to brush my hair and James told me to flush the toilet again, just in case. Ha! I reminded him that he bought the super-duper toilet that "can flush 50 golf balls"--the centipede is not coming back! Ha! Anyway, it was a very interesting way to start the day. :-) This picture was taken at Camp--it was the biggest centipede I'd ever seen. That's Keven Lewis' foot next to it. The one Sam shared with James this morning was big and fat like that, just maybe a titch shorter. Bleagh!
But rewinding now... Let's see, we caught Mac on Monday, right? Haven't seen him since then. The kids are sorely disappointed. Me, too! Maybe he'll show up again one of these days.
Tuesday was my big get-everything-caught-up-around-the-house day. At least, I thought it was going to be! I got some things done, but then we decided to go take care of the necessary errands. We went to the library and got a whole slew of new books. We spent quite a while there. It takes longer now that Katie and Joe are learning how to look things up on the computer and I'm teaching them how to find the books on the shelves. It's fun though.
After that we drove to Edgewood to do some serious grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. Came home, unloaded everything and got ready for church. Had a good BTI service that night. James has been going over some of the teachings in our BTI services. That night was on outward adornment and it was really good! Afterwards we went to Denny's for Kids' Eat Free night. James and I split a club sandwich and got chocolate shakes. :-)
Yesterday was an interesting day. In all of my efforts to get things in shape around here, they seemed to have gotten much, much worse. The kids room, in particular. It was just really, really bad and every time we'd gone in there to work on it we'd been interrupted. The day before I had just had the kids clean everything out from under their beds and throw it into the middle of the room. Well, that's when James suggested the library and Wal-Mart outting! So the room was trashed when we woke up yesterday and I had had all I could take. I recited my new favorite scripture: "If any would not work, neither should he eat." I've pulled that one out a few times lately and it usually works wonders. I told them that none of us were eating breakfast until that room was CLEAN. I mean really clean. We cleaned out the dressers, the toy box, the closet, the bookshelf--just about everything. 2 and a half hours and 2 trash bags later, we finally had our breakfast! Crazy. It felt soooooo good to get it done though. After that I finished up on the laundry (don't you hate it when Monday's jobs don't get done until Wednesday?!) and Katie and I watched Three Little Words while I got caught up on all of the ironing. What a great day! (Great movie, too, by the way--an old musical about the song writing team of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. If you like old musicals, it's a goodie! Immediately after watching it Katie sat down at the piano with a sheet of paper and a pencil because now SHE wants to write songs. She wrote a GREAT song! Something about loving you, too, and "I'll bring you flowers, then I'll take some showers... to smell good..." Ha! It was so great!) ANYWAY...
I managed meatloaf, baked potatoes, corn, and buttered carrots for dinner. James made oatmeal raisin cookies and I made chocolate chip for dessert. It's been ages since we've made cookies and I've really been wanting to. After all, it's COOL ENOUGH here to do it! Wa-Hoo!!! I love, love, love, love, love where we live. It's JULY and it's been overcast and cool the last few days. The high today was 72, I think, but throughout most of the day it's much, much cooler than that. ~sigh~ God is sooooooo good to me and--as happy as I was when we lived there--I'm sooooooo glad I'm not in Texas! As much as I loved living in Andrews and being with family and Sam & Tammy, I never did learn to endure the heat very well. I was cut out for mountain living. :-)
James took the kids outside and refereed several different versions of "Tag." He also played Uno with Katie and Joe while I worked on getting some sap out of Sam's hair. Olive oil--works like a charm! Oooooh... can we say that?! It works GREAT! Ha! It does necessitate a shower and good hair washing afterwards, but it pulls the sap out with no problem at all. In any case, it was a great night! And we had a beautiful sunset, as usual.
Today, as I mentioned started off with a bang. I did the last lingering load of laundry and the few items of ironing that accompanied it (oh, I also got the whole house vacuumed yesterday, too, and everything put in order--CLEAN AT LAST! Except the bathrooms...) and actually got my new ringtones up and going. Got a few more things done around the house while the kid-o's were working on school, then James came home with a new swing set/fort thing for the kids!
We found a good spot for it, just down from the trampoline in a clearing beyond some trees. We hauled the boxes out there and spent the next 30 minutes collecting tools and taking inventory of the materials to make sure we had everything. After about an hour, this is what we had accomplished...
That's right--it took us that long to build one stinkin' slide! I knew we were in trouble when the instructions said that the construction would take anywhere from 6-12 hours depending on your expertise. Ha! I happen to know our expertise and was aware immediately that we were in big trouble. But hey, if you've never built one of these dumb things, don't scoff. You have NO IDEA how difficult it is. And the assembly instructions are something that should've been in National Treasure--a complex code that only a Ben Gates type dude could decipher. I'm serious! I may not be a genius, but I'm not a dolt either--these instructions make no sense and none of the parts are marked. There are 76 pieces of wood (not to mention the hundreds of screws, nuts, bolts, washers, and what-have-you) all different widths and legths with holes drilled in different places. And none of them are marked?! You just have to measure them and count holes and hope you've got the right thing. It's ridiculous. I think I should write an assembly instruction book. Any idiot could do better than the jokers that put this thing together. "Stand on your head and lean your elbow in toward your left knee, hop to the left 3/4", then sneeze. While in this position, drill all of the holes that we were too lazy to drill for this 'easy assembly' kit you were dumb enough to purchase--suckers!" I kid you not--some of the boards are labeled in the book as being 5/4x4x30". Can somebody please tell me what that means?! Where I come from there is no such thing as 5/4". Wouldn't that be 1 and 1/4"?! There are three or four boards with that measurement though--5/4". Somebody ought to be shot. But believe it or not, we actually had a good and enjoyable time working on this thing, even though I'm fairly confident that we're going to fall into the 12 Hour Assembly category. After about 3 hours, we had done this...
Plus the slide, of course. :-) Oh well, it was fun and I'm pretty sure we'll be able to get it all finished up tomorrow. Although I wouldn't wager much on it! Ha! It's been a good family day today. There wasn't a whole lot the kids could help with, but as you can see they brought some chairs out so they could watch their new play fort take shape. At least they THOUGHT they were going to see it take shape! Ha! This is what we had to show for all of our hard work at the end of the day...
We've got a ways to go, but at least it's not ALL in little pieces all over the ground, right?! :-)
Sammy is our little worker man. He loves to be a part and he is a very, very diligent little guy if you can get him started on a project.
Katie and Hershey, overseeing the project...
And Joe. I turned around and found him like this. I'm sure you never would have guessed that he checked out some spy books from the library this time! Ha!
We gave the kids their choice of corn dogs or left-overs tonight. Played Tag outside again, read to 'em a bit, had devotions and sent 'em off to bed. Then we crashed for the rest of the night! I'm already a little sore and achy. By tomorrow I'll deserve a nice, long, hot bath. :-) The shower tonight felt good, but tomorrow will be much, much better!
In any case, that's what we've been up to around here lately. Now you know. :-)
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