First Phone Number

Yesterday Jake walked in the door with a huge grin on his face and said:

"Mom! I got Shelly's phone number!"

Okay - Shelly isn't really this girl's name, but I'm protecting the innocent. But this is the same girl who had a major crush on him in kindergarten. Her mom told me they find notes all over their house written, "I Love Jacob". In fact - these two have nicknames for each other. I could puke.

Anyway - he was pretty excited about this. Like...VERY excited. So excited that before we did ANYTHING I had to go to our phone list and write it down and he followed it up with, "Isn't that a great phone number!? Isn't that easy to remember!?"

After the ritual of dropping his bag right in the MIDDLE of the walkway we had this conversation:

Jake: Can she come over and play today?
Me: No.
Jake: I don't want to go to watch Maddie in gymnastics tomorrow, so can I just stay home with dad and she can come over and play?
Me: No.
Jake: What about Saturday?
Me: I doubt it.

What I wanted to say was: "Jake - you are going to give me a heart attack. No girls will be allowed in this house to play with you. Especially girls you are this excited about having memorized their phone number. You will be lucky if I let you date in college. You are six years old. Go find your buddies and play tackle football."

And yes, we are definitely busy on Saturday.

Pumpkin Patch

Driving home from my parent's house on Saturday (yep - Saturday was an extremely busy day!) we stopped at a pumpkin patch to get some of those orange balls for carving at a party that night.

I really like this pumpkin patch. It's super close to our house. While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of an apple orchard, it's just a nice local farm that has a fun atmosphere. And who can't resist a pumpkin patch owned by "Peter Pumpkin and Carmen Corn".

So we were able to take a tractor ride out to the field and walked our way back through the patch looking for those two perfect pumpkins that will grace our front step this Halloween.

It is the kids' job to find their pumpkins - Mike really tries to help the process by pointing out several "perfect" pumpkins for them to pick. My job is to take pictures. I'm usually left behind still snapping away. It's a good thing they love me because anyone else would be annoyed enough to leave me behind.

Maddie managed to find her pumpkin halfway across the field. Then realized she had to carry it...half way across the field....

Jake - not surprisingly - had other ideas. I think he intended to inspect ALL the pumpkins before deciding. He wanted a "round one" - and we soon discovered he meant it - no flat sides. Don't even try to offer those. Mike offered up many fine specimens. Even I stopped taking pictures at one point to try and help this search.

Jake did manage to find his perfect pumpkin. And he found it a lot closer to the parking lot than Maddie - hence he didn't have to carry it as far. There may just have been some logic in this thought process!
And I just love taking pictures here - so I'll post a few of my favorites:

Fall Festivities

As mentioned in the previous post we did manage to find a very fun way to break away from packing my parents' house - leaf jumping!

My parents have some gigantic trees in the front yard and I'm pretty sure everything that is needed to take care of these leaves has been packed so there were QUITE a few for us to play in!

So Maddie, Jake and Austin all helped Grandma Smith build quite a pile and right before jumping in the pile, I managed to snap a shot of them before all craziness began:

But, as my sister mentioned in her post - it's hard for this family to stay out of the fun and that includes the grown-ups and soon mom, Tracy and myself were jumping and throwing just as many - if not more - leaves than the kids!

Austin even crowned Tracy: "Princess Mommy" - it's a title she wears proudly.

Ellie joined in the fun a bit later. I think she was still wondering what all of us were yelling and carrying on about, but she did pretty good job of getting into the spirit of things.

I can't say we actually cleared out anything from their yard, but it was a fun way to break up an afternoon of lifting boxes!

Packing Up

Saturday morning at 8am we all met at my parents' house to start packing up the first of two - possibly three PODS for their storage. I think they've done a fairly good job of trying to trim down 30 years worth of "stuff" - for lack of a more appropriate term that I can't use (love you mom and dad!)...but there's still a lot of said "stuff". The boys were trying to come up with a general plan of attack and Dan announces that we'll be done by 11:45am. Frankly, Dan's been known to exaggerate on a lot of things so for him to foresee us being done in less than 4 hours - whatever.

Jake and Austin got right to work playing. They found a cozy home for their shenanigans in the cushions at the base of the stairs:

But eventually we had quite a plan of attack going. Basically Tracy and I attacked this:

We hefted these boxes to the driveway where the boys sorted them and strategically placed everything in their appropriate places. They were able to put boxes and baskets in places I didn't possibly think we could squeeze anything else into!

Mom and Maddie were in charge of any runs to the store when we needed things. Mom tended to be a little nervous about the walls or her furniture when it was being hefted down the stairs so we tried to attack these things when she was running to stores. During one of these runs we got started on the twin beds that used to occupy my room. Dad found an easy solution for getting down the stairs with these:

I know...hard to imagine why my mom was nervous about her belongings! And yes, dad really did ride the mattress down the stairs. This picture was more of a snap-and-jump-out-of-the-way shot.
There were some good things found and Jake couldn't resist trying on the "captain's hat"....

Finally that POD was getting full and at 11:20am Dan called it - nothing else was fitting in there! I have to say we were all impressed with his estimation. The rest of the afternoon we spent hauling stuff to the main floor to get ready for the next POD.

We did find a little "down time" activity and I'll post more about that later. But for now I'll leave you with this shot of my parents standing next to the official sign that says they are moving on to a new chapter:

Question of the Week

I get this magazine and the last page always has a list of things that begin, "I knew I was an adult when...." I love this page - it usually makes me crack up at one or two of the things because I've done or thought the same thing.

So, I started to think back to the first time I realized I was an adult. Here's my memory:

It was my junior year of college. I was living in my own apartment and was making dinner (rice hotdish...super cheap for college kids!) Anyway, it had awhile to cook and I was in a munchy/treat mood. I had also bought some Peppermint Bon Bon ice cream as a special treat for myself to eat for dessert and it was really calling my name.

Then it hit me - I could eat the ice cream BEFORE dinner!!! Why not!?! I wasn't sharing with anyone, I certainly didn't have any parents around to ask if it was okay because I was living in my own apartment and had bought and paid for the ice cream myself!!! I proceeded to eat the biggest bowl of ice cream I may have eaten up to that point in my life and walked around my kitchen giggling because how cool was this! That's when I realized I was an adult. I was - what? - 21.

So, think back - what was that one moment when you realized you were an adult? I'd love to read everyone's stories so post a comment! I have some nieces/nephews under 18 that read this, so if they want, they can post what they are most looking forward to. Hopefully it's a fun little trip down memory lane for you!

World's Worst Babysitter

Yesterday morning Ellie and I got to bond while her siblings were off to the doctor. Tracy tried her best to do the "drop and run" - hoping Ellie wouldn't notice the absence so quickly, but this little girl is too smart for her mom and the second she realized Tracy wasn't actually stepping foot in my house with her - TEARS!

So, I swiped her up and we headed to the family room. Only we really have no toys for kids her age. We've kept around this driving thing simply because Ellie likes it and it's about the only thing not too small for her. But, even that wasn't helping. I tried talking, singing (making anyone cry...) and general goofiness. She was having none of it.

But doesn't she have on the cutest outfit???

So, I did what any self-respecting babysitter would do. I turned on the t.v. We honed in on cartoons and she and I finally bonded over Curious George and Sid the Science Kid (which, if you haven't seen that last one - is SO cute!!).

By the time Tracy arrived to pick her up all the tears were gone and in a whirl they were out the door before Riley started in on the tears from lack of movement!

It's Official

Yesterday, for the first time, Mike spent all day in his office working! Yahoo! It's not even close to being completely set up, but Saturday night we spent putting his desk back together. Without instructions. It's a bit complicated and we had to take a few pieces apart to add something we forgot. But, the kids had a blast helping - they got to use the drill, Jake found a reason to use a flashlight (one of the greatest inventions EVER in his mind!) and they got to lift a few pieces.

Then we started clearing out the guestroom. I wish I'd taken a before/after picture. That room was housing everything we had in our basement. So it was basically trying to fit a basement full of stuff into a closet. Yeah - not working so great. So, Mike's office is littered with boxes until we come up with a better plan, or purge, or both. Halfway through hauling all this we looked at each other and realized we were just moving a mess from one room to another - not really accomplishing anything; kinda frustrating.

Anyway, here's Mike in his new home - he hasn't moved the large work chair from our room, but as I sit in it to type this, I'm expecting him to come up and grab it any second...

Is this the picture of happiness or what? It was taken at midnight last night. He'd been on a conference call since 10pm. The call finally ended about a half-hour later. Needless to say it wasn't an early morning here today!