Happy first birthday Baby Jane!
Jane was happier than it appears in the photo, it’s just that she was already taste testing the frosting that she swiped off the cake!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Black and White Snowy Days
The past few days have been a flurry of packing, preparing and digging out from under the first real snowfall of the year.
The blizzard only dropped a foot of snow but it manged to close Ivy’s school for two days and even John had a day and a half at home.
We are all excited to have a white Christmas this year!
Hope your holidays are wonderful with or without snow!
I Can Be Taught!
Let’s Go Out and Play!
Time spent getting ready (almost!) one year old before putting her out to play with oldest sister: 10 min.
Time spent dressing three year old before putting her out to play with other sisters: 3 min.
Time Mom spent dressing self: 1 min.
Time Mom spent outside before one year old started crying from cold hands: .2 seconds
Time spent cleaning up winter clothes and bathing freezing children: 30 min.
Baby wearing in winter: Priceless!
Keeping Us Humble
Kids, they take a perfectly good life and provide all sorts of perspective.
They cure you of selfishness, refute that silly fallacy that you need eight hours of sleep to function and keep you humble.
Ivy: Wow Mom, your butt covers the whole hole on the toilet! (Put that at reason number 634 I need to get a better lock on the bathroom door.)
Clara: “Who that? That not Dad, that boy handsome!”
Kids- keeping us humble since 2007.
The Best of the USA
Back in April I went to the first rodeo I’d been to since I was a little kid and I loved it! I loved it so much that I wrote an entire post about things I loved about the rodeo. Then it got lost in the shuffle before it was posted. I found it tonight and thought I’d share
10 Things I loved about the rodeo.
1) Salute to the Veterans -The night started by recognizing all veterans and active duty military at the rodeo and there were a lot of them!
2) The Star Spangled Banner – I think it’s possible I haven’t been to an event that started with the national anthem since the last swim meet I was at. This was the real deal too, a sing along Star Spangled Banner complete with cowboy hats off and hands on hearts. Hard to do less than the best when you’ve just discovered that your surrounded by men and woman who fought for our country
3)Prayer- A prayer is a fairly unusual way to start out an event but those rodeo boys were about to fall off bulls that wanted to grind them into a bloody pulp. Whatever your religious beliefs I’m thinking that you can’t fault the guys for a bit of a prayer before they start hitting the ground. I say pray away boys, pray away, and may God save your little broken bodies.
4) The Flying Onie – Otherwise known as steer wrestling. Man jumps off running horse onto 600 pound steer and wrestles it to the ground. Now that’s entertainment!
5) Personal Responsibility – Would you like to ride a bull with nothing more than chaps and a cowboy hat on? Go right ahead. Would you like to suit up a bit more? Perhaps wear a helmet? Even better. Either way it’s riders choice.
6)Nachos- I have no idea what the cheese sauce on those things is made of, but I really, really love it.
7) Losing- That would be what it’s called when despite your best efforts all you walk away with is a bunch of applause, bruises, and maybe even a broken hand. When your calf doesn’t play fair, your bronco doesn’t buck hard enough and your horse slides in the dirt and there are no do overs. Don’t get me started on the everyone’s-a-winner way of thinking.
8) Two bison and a one armed man riding a mule on top of a live stock trailer – There’s really not much else to say about that.
9) Bull Fighters – Those guys are amazing, and nuts. Really nuts. They run fast too. It’s possible I’m still in awe.
10) A night out with just one daughter – Thanks to John, Ivy and I were able to have some fun together without any interfering little sisters!
Looking back I think it’s possible that perhaps the reason I loved the Rodeo was that it exemplified many of the best parts of the good ole’ U. S. of A. And when the Rodeo is back in town this spring we’ll be there maybe we’ll see you in the nacho line!
A Proud Moment
We attended Ivy’s first parent teacher conferences recently and were happy to hear that she is behaving and doing well in school. Every day she brings home piles of papers (Really all you tree huggers, piles of papers. You want to save a tree? Talk to a kindergarten class.) and shows us what she’s been working on. She is reading, writing, making friends with everyone and having a great time.
Tonight Ivy found an old notebook and decided to show off some of those writing skills she’s been working on at school, it was a proud moment for us parents:
…a proud moment…
Thank You Honey!
We do a lot of laundry and while I have chronicled many of the reasons for the ridiculous amount (look here) I’ve never really owned up to the fact that I’m terrible at actually doing the laundry (John does most of it) and my plethora of excuses for not getting it done.
Here is one of them…
…how can I fold laundry…
… when this cutie is playing in the middle of it?
It’s way more fun to play peekaboo…
…and where’s Waldo!
Which is why my husband is upstairs finishing folding that pile of laundry -Thank you honey!
Clara Says It All
After an extended weekend away from home Clara, Jane and I drove the hour to my parent’s house in my brother’s truck to pick up both our dogs and my brother’s two dogs.
Why?
Because..
All our dogs were at my parents’ because the deer hunt is the one of the few times where I feel it’s better not to have the dogs along because they can’t run during the day and just find gut piles when you let them out at night so my grandpa was feeding all eight dogs (including my parents’) while we were up north. Tyler’s truck (F350)was at our house because Tyler’s camper needed to come to our house so we could get it ready for the trip to Kansas but the only vehicle that can pull it is his truck and so he switched trucks with my Dad so that my Dad could drop it off here, and when I went to get the dogs I had to be able to bring two kids, four dogs and an igloo dog house back home and I couldn’t fit all that in my Expedition. It was a good plan until I went to go home and the clutch broke on the truck and I ended up switching vehicles again with my Mom and taking her Explorer home and leaving the dog house (which honestly I would have forgotten anyway) and so tomorrow my Mom is driving Tyler’s now fixed truck back to my house with the dog house in the back to get her truck and my trailer and bring them back to her house so that I can put the dog house back in the kennel bring Tyler’s truck back to him this weekend and Mom can use the our trailer for a trip with her ski kids.
(Aren’t you glad you asked?)
Which is why when I found myself in the Explorer driving home with no dog kennel for the four dogs who had been cooped up for days and Trip (my dog) was trying to climb in my lap while I was driving and Turkey (Tyler’s dog) was going over Jane to get to the front seat and Sunday (Tyler’s other dog) was alternately snuggling with Clara and also trying to get in the front seat while Storm (John’s dog) slept in the way back, and Clara was calling out locations of dogs, “Now there is one in the front, two in the back an one in the back. Now there is two in the front, one in the back and one in the back…” and she followed all her commentary up with:
“It’s a commotion!”
I laughed, because she got it right in one, whatever else this crazy plan may be, it is certainly a commotion!
A New Solution
Yesterday my Mom and I had a chance to go pheasant hunting together and the culmination of a morning of mishaps was when I looked down and realized I had lost the transmitter to Trips shock collar.
Not good.
Not good at all.
My much loved, daily used controller that not only “reminds” Trip to pay attention to me but also controls the locating beeps his collar makes was lost in a swamp full of cattails.
This afternoon after dejectedly looking one last time at just how much a new transmitter would be I made one last effort to find it. I headed back to the cattails and dove in.
A quarter of the way in I was certain I was on my trail from yesterday and Trip was hunting just ahead of me.
A third of the way in I was pretty sure things looked familiar and Trip was somewhere… perhaps off to the left…
Half way through I found a very dead, very old, very stinky, six point buck and was abruptly certain I was no longer on my path from yesterday and I thankfully had no idea where my dog was.
Disheartened I quickly pushed through the wall of cattails away from the carcass looking for my old trail, (and the dog) but it was the beginning of the end. I was never able to pick up my path from yesterday or the transmitter. Trip, however, was not as far away as I thought. He found the deer and took matters into his own paws. Yes, my intelligent dog solved our problem with stink.
After that I didn’t need any fancy transmitter to know where Trip was – I could smell him.
Even when I couldn’t see him or hear him – I could smell him.
Not only did I know where Trip was but he solved his own problem at the same time. After Trip applied his “solution” my whistle blowing was over and my cries of “Come!” turned to “GO!” and he was allowed to range out as far as he wanted.
I’m pretty sure he thought he was all that and more after solving our problems…
… until I got him home and it was bath time!
Behind the Willows 