Egads, has School Started yet?

I see several online friends and my southern network have all started back to school. We still have a couple of weeks to go but I have already purchased the back to school supplies weeks ago. You see I'm one of those moms who can't wait for school to start.

Someone I was chatting with was telling me the other day that when his child started kindergarten last year his wife told him the moms were in two camps. One camp was crying, their baby was starting kindergarten, the other half was saying "bye" and planning a get together at a local bar (the bar does breakfast too) I'm in the latter camp.

While I do wax nostaligic that the boys are growing up, I'll be glad to see the backside of summer vacation. The fighting, the bickering, the constant motion, the constant mess and chaos. Yeah, can't say I'll miss it over much.

Emma the dog is back with us. She's been with us about a week now and will be going home this week. The boys - Hubby included have had a good time with her. She's a good dog in general. The only gripe I have about her is her sloppy drinking habits. She'll fill her mouth up at the water bowl and dribble it all over the kitchen leaving the floor a constant mess. Yuck. Other than sneaking onto our beds occasionally she's really a very good dog. Hubby has had fun teaching her hunting skills and the kids have been throwing balls non stop. I think Emma has run more in the last week than in the last year.

Currently Hubby and I are in the process of painting the garage. The house we had done by contractors but we are cheap and decided to to do the garagw ourselves (not so tall) I've been scraping for a couple of days and have the bulk done. Hubby replaced some rotten siding we are close to throwing the paint on which should go quickly. Hubby and the neighbor tell me I'm over picky with the scraping, but my opinion is I'm only gonna do this once, not again in a year or two.

Well off to tuck the little one into bed, the big one will follow shortly and I'll enjoy a little peace before bed.

Sonny Boy Tackles

Yeah, the coach is in the way, but at least the phone was turned in the right direction!




Sonny Boy is the kid in the reddish T-shirt doubling as a temporary practice jersey.

Random Pictures From the Summer

With Summer coming to a close I thought I might drown you with images of the summer. It's been busy!

Sonny Boy enjoyed his second season of baseball and says he wants to play again next year.

In June we had some wind damage that knocked over our partially rotten fence and made that tree in the background horizontal. We also had a large elm split and that had to be removed as well.

Sonny Boy's legs finally got long enough to reach the foot pegs on the motorcycle so he got his first ride from Dad. Without tags or insurance it doesn't come out of storage much.

A trip to Six Flags in early July netted a long fun day.

Yeah, I know the big Ol' tennis shoes don't look good with capri pants but hey I was going for comfort over fashion here.

Igor rode tons of rides and this was his favorite...

though it doesn't look like it here!

He was game a few more times with his brother later though!

The camping trip with one of the cousins to Flambeau River, Wisconsin

The very recent camping trip to Razorback Lake, WI (you know the Arkie in me loved that!)

A BIG storm moving away from Razorback Lake, if you look REALLY close the speck behind the reads almost against the dark shoreline is Sonny Boy and I in a canoe. Thankfully we were never in this storm, but I believe it did some damage further east.

Eating ice cream on the beach!

Sonny Boy in pursuit of crayfish (or crawdads as southern people say)

Conked out after a hard day of play in the camper

Early mornining fog on Razorback Lake, it got kinda nippy at night.

Summer has been good. Really busy but all good things come to an end. Registered Sonny Boy for 2nd grade today, first football practice is tonight, and the nights have that chill that says summer is drawing to a close. Alas the real craziness starts with a ball practice or Cub scout thing almost every night of the week. I think something has got to give.

Three hours is too Long

I will leave in aproximately three hours to pick up Hubby from the airport. He has been gone to training for work for the last four weeks. In those four weeks I have taken two camping trips, spent countless hours hearing "Mom, Watch this!" as a 4 yo bobs under water at the local pool. Worried over painters ripping me off, - not my stuff, just not doing the work well. I've mowed the lawn a few times, started trying to revive my contractor trampled flower beds, taken the kids to the dentist, had Igor's glasses adjusted and repaired twice, made countless stressful trips to the grocery, baked a birthday cake, paid bills. You get the picture - kept the house running and the kids entertained. Not by a long shot am I claiming to have done even one of these items perfectly. Nor am I claiming that any or all of these things are things I wouldn't normally do if Hubby were coming home on a nightly basis.

But you know what gets my goat? Know what really pisses me off? I'm the bad guy. No matter what I do, no matter what I cook, no matter how many hours I spend sunbaked and chlorine caked at the edge of the pool I'm still the bad guy. I'm the one who asks " Did you wash your hands? Who peed on the toilet seat?" or issues the following edicts " No more TV, video games or DS. No we cannot go to the pool today because I told you ten times to do XYZ before you did it." Today I had a child EXPLODE because I told him to put on a clean shirt so we could leave the house to run ONE errand. The kid didn't even know what the errand was, we could have been going to the toy store for all he knew, but he had to turn off the damn TV. That's when the TV suddenly got turned off for him for a week. Hubby will come home and the kids will all be happy to see him and suddenly find their halos for a few days. Hubby will be loathe to be mean since he's been gone for a month and I'll still be the witch of a mother that hands out the chores and the punishments and makes the kids go to bed on time.

Really, I get that single parents do this crap day in and day out and I give them all the kudos in the world. Don't get me wrong, it's hard. But I tell you this Hubby traveling for weeks on end crap is like being a single parent without any of the perks. If your single at least you might have the luxury of being child free every other weekend to revive, you don't have to compromise on what color to paint the house ( I did ) or scheme and plan the family vacation with anybody else in mind.

Honest to God as I sit here at this computer THE MINUTE Hubby climbs in the van I am no longer on duty. I refuse to do any kid crap for a full 48 hours. If the kids beat the crap out of each other, fine, if they play in street that's good too. I refuse to be the witch, I refuse to tell them to go to bed, I refuse to say " Quit running in the house" Because I'm not mean, I'm not the witch, and Hubby can put on his big boy pants and make sure the little brats behave.

I can't even have a margarita cause I gotta drive to the dang airport - this is torture!

P.S. Just got a text, they are de-boarding his plane so only God knows when he's gonna get home.

The little Swimmer

He's come a long way from the toddler who was so terrified of a bath that the first one I gave him traumatized both of us.




I apologize for the bad quality, I'm just learning how to do this stuff!

Blogging for Books - Plain Wisdom

Previously I have reviewed books for a program called "Blogging for Books". This post is a continuation of that program and my second review. Please go to this LINK and vote for my review. It can win me prizes! On to the Review.

PLAIN WISDOM
Cindy Woodsmall & Miriam Flaud


First I would like to say this isn’t my typical genre of book to read. I don’t normally read anything very spiritual or even that much non-fiction so I am not familiar with the typical format on this kind of book so it’s possible that I am way off on my review of this book. Honestly I read the book a while back and have had a hard time really forming an opinion of the book.

Plain Wisdom is a sweet little book with each chapter having a section written by Mrs. Woodsmall and Mrs. Flaud that details how God worked in their everyday lives guided by certain principals in the Bible. In general I found the book to be well written, but it lacked continuity throughout the chapters and I felt as if I was reading a string of stories that were only slightly related to the previous chapters. I expected a book that would chronicle the differences in Mrs. Woodsmall’s modern Christian life in contrast with Mrs. Flaud’s Amish beliefs. Instead I found a book that showed that no matter how far apart Christian practices are, there are still the same guiding principals underneath all the artifice given in differing denominations.

Overall I found the book only mediocre.


I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review and it in no way colors my opinion of this material.

Pictures

Sonny Boy had a birthday too. His main present was a trip to Six Flags, but of course mom made him a cake. Not top quality but that was my first time trying that technique. Anybody have a guess as to who the figure on the cake is? It says " May the Birthday Force be With You" The kid is REALLY into Star Wars lately.

Of course you can't go camping without roasting marshmallows.

This is my new toy. Not some monster travel rig for around the country but will get us around the state and be drier and more comfortable than a tent. Cooler and warmer if we ever end up at a sight with electric.

pictures in horrible order, but I promise more to come the next time I sit down and get something up on the 'net.

I wanted to post some video, but that will have to wait. I'm too tired to fool with the computer and find my self excited I got these off of the phone.

Nope, havent dropped yet...

...but the days are getting long.

Hubby has hit the middle of his marathon training session on the east coast and I'm at the tail end of single parent for a month status. Yay.

Busy and bored all at once.

The camper finally finished. The kids and I took it for a trial run to a nearby state park last week for a couple of days before the big heat wave hit. Everything went well except for backing it into the spot and a nice guy at the next campsite took pity on me and parked the trailer for me. I did run into a spot of trouble with the tongue jack which broke on me as I was trying to hitch up at home. I did some jerry-rigging and carried some jack stands along, and used the jack out of my mini-van to get the trailer set up and leveled. A little more hassle than it normally would have been but it worked. I tell you having a camper is like sleeping at the Ritz compared to tent camping. I was even able to take something resembling a shower AND scrub the kids before bed and that was without water hookups. It rocks. The only downside I see to the whole thing is that I can almost see the gas gauge on the van drop as we go down the road.

I finally joined the new "smart phone revolution" and got a droid phone. It's cool. My favorite Ap so far is one called "Out of Milk" which keeps a grocery list and a to-do list for you. The best part of the grocery list is that it will automatically enter the item by scanning the barcode. There may be a way to share this list with hubby, we'll figure out our synching techniques with calendars and the like when he gets home.

I have cool pictures and video, but of course got to figure that out. Honestly even this post is alot for me. By the time the kids are in bed I'm wiped and stringing two sentences together is harder than algebra for a third grader.

Kids are doing well. Sonny Boy is a little stressed and believes I'm picking on him and is overly sensitive. Igor is being being defiant and testing boundries and often gets "counted down" into compliance. Makes the days long. The kids aren't really being bad, just kids. I just don't have a break and simple errands like the grocery store turn stressful as I go through as fast as possible, missing half the stuff I planned on buying and therefore requiring two or three trips a week and upping that stress factor again. You see the snowball effect happening here?

Baseball season has officially ended and football will start in a few weeks. The football league called me and moved Sonny Boy up a level as he was on the border for size and they needed space in the smaller group. I hope the kids aren't too much bigger than him, he's a little bruiser though so he probably won't notice. Baseball season didn't go too well. The team did win a few games but I think he needed a more focused coaching crew. Three of the coaches were city cops with rotating schedules so often one or more were not there for games or practices. I also think they didn't practice enough for the boys to really get the hang of the game. Some of the teams we played looked like much more experienced players than they really were. Sonny Boy declares next year he wants to play "minors" which require a try-out. I worry about this as Sonny Boy's batting skills are probably above average, his throwing and fielding skills stink. We'll see, that's in the spring, I hope he changes his mind by then. Baseball is taken WAY too seriously here and they are nursing a little league world series team along making national airtime on ESPN last year and won some big tourney that puts them on the same route again this year. Good for the kids, but I'm not really ready for that much seriousness in kid's sports, especially when my child is not the most athlectically gifted.

The painters are supposed to start on the house on Monday. I'm really stressed about this as my neighbor had a horrible experience with the last painters he hired. Of course I did not hire the same people but I don't want that slap-dash job done on my house. To add to the stress of that I have a camping trip planned with my MIL and nephew (and the kids of course) next week so I won't be here to supervise and pick at what they are doing. I know the check will not be written until I'm satisfied the job is done correctly. We did decide on a color scheme and painted a section on the street side of the house. I've had many good comments on it so I think it will look nice. It be good to leave the blue and yellow french provencial colors behind for something a little more soothing. Basically a couple hues of tan with some reddish brown accents here and there. From all I've read a little more historically accurate than the pastels that now grace the house. I'm not one of those historically accurate crazy people, but do think houses tend to look best in the color scheme that was prevalent at the time they were built. (at least on the exterior, we all agree avocado and orange shag carpet must go far far away)

Well that's about all. I'm going to play with the phone for a minute while I'm still upright and add some pics. Of course they are gonna be in crazy order and in the previous post but hey you get to see them.

Igor JUST has a funny shaped head!! Thank God.

Yeah, I know not the most flattering title to put on a blog post, but it's the best answer and quickest thing to read.

The craniofacial doctor called just about 20 minutes ago and confirmed that Igor's CT scan results were normal, he just has an unusual shaped head "like mine" he said, referring to himself. I didn't notice he had an odd head, but I guess if your a craniofacial doc you know if your head is "normal" or not. The eye doctor also pronounced that Igor does NOT have the eye bulging thing either so we have pretty much ruled out any craniostynosis diagnosis. Woo, I don't have to tell you what a relief it is to get that news.

The ruling out of the craniostynosis also puts the genetic doc's best guess at a syndrome at odds as well since that is a major marker of the his preferred guess. We still haven't done the genetic testing yet. It was not approved by our insurance as they deemed it "experimental" I contacted the genetic counselor lady and she had the doc call the insurance company who then agreed to do some of the test (probably the cheaper part) I just got that news yesterday afternoon. However with the skull issues not being a factor I don't know if the genetic doc will want to run testing in the same strain. We'll see, I have craniofacial and opthamology sending their reports on to genetics. I'm certainly not going to drive up to Milwaukee for a blood draw right away when it appears things may have changed.

Makes my mind SO much lighter. I feel like a HUGE weight has been lifted and the summer no longer has this horrible dangling nightmare hanging over it. I'm prepared for a genetic diagnosis, just not a major skull remodel surgery.

Speaking of remodel.... the camper is making headway. We have now finally sealed the leaks (we think) put the floor down and have installed a bulkhead wall that divides out some pass through storage. We cut the vinyl floor last night but could not put it in due to the fact we had to put some patching compound on a transition area to level it out and that had to dry. We also found some mildew growing under the vinyl in another area (wasn't wet, wasn't soft, old leak we are guessing that had been fixed) so that got scrubbed with some bleach water and needed to dry out. We are down to putting the furniture stuff back in and system checking everything. Just in time for Hubby to leave on his long training trip. Guess I'll take it on it's maiden camping voyage alone - that should be interesting. Here's hoping the van can tow it!

Well I suppose that's it for now. I just wanted to give an update and thank you for the prayers.

Nerves

By this time next week we'll have some sort of idea on Igor's skull issues. The waiting is the hard part, I want action. Why I can't just barge on up to Children's and put him in the machine to be scanned, have the doc look at this eyes and be done. Then I could plan. I'm a big planner. I'm not one to have every minute of the day scheduled but I do like to know roughly what's going to happen. Igor and I are alike in that matter (though he likes things timed to the nano-second) For this weekend I'm trying to not to worry and think about it. This blog post is gonna be my last worry session until we have some real news. I REFUSE TO GOOGLE!!! However my mind keeps drifting back to brain injury and while they may not be technically doing anything to his brain it is too close for comfort. I've delt with brain injuries, my mother had a stroke, and while she survived and is doing well she's not the same person I grew up with. That's my biggest fear is to have my little Igor handed back to me and not be the sweet little kid who's kisses have a daily theme.

A good distraction this week has been Emma. Emma is a friend's dark chocolate lab that has stayed with us this week. She's a good dog and likely the most calm labrador I've ever been around that wasn't 102 years old. Emma has been great with the kids, putting up with all their crazy antics with aplomb. I will say Emma comes from a household with three kids though - two of them roughly Sonny Boy's and Igor's ages so kids are old hat to her. Sonny Boy and her have really bonded and she's been sleeping in his room (and bed) every night. Gonna take me a week and a gallon of Fabreze to remove the dog smell from there - she's not dirty just doggy. Emma goes home this evening.

Work on the camper continues at full bore. We are having a hard time finding the source of the water infiltration. We fix one issue, spray down with the water hose and then find another. Ug, we've used a lot of sealant that doesn't come off your hands with anything short of a sandblaster. We have all the supports for the flooring in, insulation cut and are ready to lay the floor but just keep finding water leaks. My hopes for dragging it around Northern Wisconsin for a few weeks in late summer are slipping away.

We have finally picked out a color scheme for the house. I did paint up one window on the street side and have had compliements on it. I guess I should post a picture, but you know me and putting pictures up. I've taken the heat gun and removed paint from some of the detail work here and there. 120 years of paint build-up can kill a lot of tiny details in woodwork. I still have one section to do. I didn't really expect painters to take the time to get things as cleanly done as I have done them, much less strip to bare wood, they'll just get the loose paint.

Our new neighbors will move in this weekend. They closed on the house last week and spent last weekend pulling up old carpet and cleaning. We went over and met them and they seem like a nice young couple. No children, much to Sonny Boy's disappointment as he wanted some playmates close by. Sounds like they have big plans for the house which is nice to hear as it needs some work and a little love. They got a good deal on it, I like the lot much more than our own and wish the house would have been available when we were house shopping. I hear they are going to paint which makes me happy as there has been an epidemic of vinyl siding lately with even our next door neighbor pondering it (it would RUIN his house) so I've been trying to gently talk him out of it.

Well I suppose I need to get off the computer and do some chores. The kitchen and laundry are my never ending battles around here, but I suppose they are for everyone. Maybe I'll bake some cookies for the new neighbors?