Baby's First Birthday

May 1, 2009, was a busy day. Superman turned One! We had a blast.

Baby's First Easter

The Cousins

Probably Rosy and III's favorite part of moving to our hometown is that they now live across the road from their 1st cousins. Tonya was baptized Easter Sunday morning by her new pastor, my Hubby, and Sviet sang a beautiful Call to Worship solo that morning. After church, we took pictures of the kids in the prayer garden outside the church.

Egg Hunt

Finally, I have my camera, my camera charger, clean floors (although it's still just concrete subflooring) in my school room, and a few minutes with Superman asleep. I can blog.

We went to his first Easter Egg Hunt today. He didn't really care to hang out with the other kids. He wanted to keep up with the 3 eggs that we had brought and hold on to them. He was sort of okay with other kids touching them, but he clearly wanted them back.

We stayed for about an hour and then noticed that he was getting a little too much sun so we headed home. I can't believe that I forgot to sunscreen him!

High Heel Waders and Mousin' Boots

Living in the country has required me to re-purpose some of my footwear.

I posted a while back that Hubby had seen a mouse in the laundry room. I didn't post the follow-up to that story. So, here we go.

The Monday night after the initial mouse sighting, Hubby was due back in St. Stephens after he finished his class that he teaches for the Baptist College of Florida. Class is over at 10 PM so we expected him around midnight. I had a terrible time getting kids to bed that night, so when I finally got the baby down and Rosy took her shower and got her thick head of hair dried, it was close to 11:30. She bribed me that she would do some of Tuesday's school work if I let her stay up to see her daddy. I gave in and let her. Then I went to clean the kitchen. I walked to the laundry room to toss a hand towel in the dirty clothes and I saw Twinkle in her pouncer crouch in the corner. I knew right away that it was the mouse!!!!! I quickly dragged a big box in front of the door so that the mouse couldn't get into the rest of the house. I hollered for Rosy to run upstairs and grab the boots I'd worn to church the day before - my brown, leather high heeled knee boots! Just as she came racing down the stairs with my "mousin' boots" as they are now called, Hubby came through the front door. He made it down the stairs just as I finished zipping up the boots and was about to head in to rescue Twinkle. He ignored the fact that I was dressed in my night shirt and "mousin' boots" and he went in to battle the mouse. He chased and chased, but the little vermin hid. So, the next morning I called the exterminator. I had tried to be nice, but enough was enough!!!! Forever, Rosy will refer to those boots as my "mousin' boots". (And, in case you didn't get this part, I needed the boots so the mouse couldn't touch my bare feet.)

In other exciting news, our house flooded last night. I came downstairs this morning at 7:30 and stepped in about 1/2 inch of water. Almost the entire bottom floor was covered. It has been a really long day of mopping, swabbing, drying, and trying to make intelligent choices in the face of some real stress. At one point, several men in the church decided to re-route the water flow through our flowerbeds. I looked out my window and I had 3 trucks, 1 front end loader, 1 four wheeler, 1 disc-er, and about 7 guys with shovels in the front yard. Momma and I stayed inside and mopped. Most of the floor is either ceramic tile (which is fine) or wood laminate (which is not fine), but one room is carpeted. We are still soaking water out of the carpet. I refuse to walk on it, so I dug out some of my platform high heels and I now have some high heel waders. As a matter of fact, my computer is in the carpeted room, so I had to put my waders on to get in here to blog.

I can't wait to show y'all pics. As a matter of fact, I dug out the camera today, but I still haven't found the charger, so it was useless. We're working on getting everything up and running.

My husband and I ask for your prayers. We feel that God led us to this new church field, but we feel very much that we are under attack by Satan and his demons. Please pray for our protection in the big and small things.

So Much to Tell...

...so little interest in reading long posts.

An update for those of you who don't know...Hubby and I have moved to our hometown for him to pastor our home church. On Christmas Eve this year after the Candlelight Service, one of the deacons at our home church asked Hubby to submit a resume for pastor of their church. We laughed about it and went on with the evening. Later that night, we discussed it and found that we were both feeling led to begin praying about the situation. We continued to pray about each step of the journey and continued to feel like God wanted us to move farther into the process. Ultimately, the church voted to call Hubby as Pastor.

Unfortunately we had signed a lease on a house in P'cola. We were scheduled to move at the end of February. We ended up losing our deposit and the partial month's rent!!!! (Huge bummer, but at least they didn't sue us for the rent remaining in the lease!)

The kids and I are settling in, but Hubby is still on the road. He finishes up at our old church this week. Wednesday is his last day and we will be taking a U-Haul down on Friday to get the rest of his library and to clean out our storage building.

Right now the digital camera is packed up, but I will soon start posting pics. Little Man is growing, growing, growing. He can take one or two steps and he is finally getting that first tooth! All of the kids are loving living in the country. We are right across the County Road from my parents' house. We see my folks almost every day. We have dinner every Monday night with my brother's family.

I have always asked Hubby how he as a Pastor knows when God is calling him to a new church, and he has always told me that he just always knows. I guess now I understand. We just knew. I'm extremely thankful to God that when he told us to "Go" that he was telling us to "Go Home".

I'll write more about the challenges later...so far we've had mice, sugar ants, centipedes, beetles, brown widow spiders, black widow spiders, wasps, yellowjackets, bees, one frog, and a hoard of ladybugs.

Tiny Mouse and Big Congestion

It's not a very poetic title, but it sums up my last two weeks pretty well. Hubby and I are just getting everything in place. After a week without a compuer or a washing machine, I'm back in business. However, this morning he discovered a mouse in our new laundry room!!!! Yikes!!! No laundry for me until Mickey has moved on. Hubby says, "maybe it went out the dryer vent." I'm not buying it. Until I see it on it's way out the door, it's still here to me. BTW, I'm a catch and release girl, so I had to call around for the right kind of trap.

Superman has been very congested. I ended up taking him to the doctor Friday. He has had diarhea most of the week from teething. It has been a challenge to keep his hiney from getting raw. Then mid-week he developed a chest cold. Tonight, he threw up all over me and himself right after his bath.

Rosy is well, but III is coming down with a chest cold!!!!!

If I remember correctly, the natural order of things is to tend toward chaos...we are really following that law at our house right now!!!!

You've Got the Cutest Little Baby Face!

Superman was fascinated with everything at Rosy's party yesterday! Hubby got a little distracted with the camera and we ended up with more baby pictures than 8 year-old pictures.

Party Hearty last night!

Superman at his Valentine's Banquet last night. One of the other mommies is holding him. They are doing the Hokey-Pokey.

Rosy at her "Baby Shower" Birthday Party. She loved it!

Math Joke

We're packing, and I'm stressing.

In the midst of it all, III has been doing some pretty advanced stuff in math and I have been writing the tests for it. So, my brain is math-fried. I saw this joke online today and I think it is hilarious.

Rosy's b'day is tomorrow and we are having a small, babyshower theme party for her tomorrow after church. I know that III and Hubby will be thrilled, but I do know that she will love it. I'll post pics soon.

Cage Match

Our new playyard, aka "The Cage", is perfect for our family. It has a ton of uses for us. Today, the big kids wanted to go outside to ride bikes, rollerblade, ride scooters, etc. Because our street is kind of busy and I haven't been able to consistantly notice them getting out of the way of traffic, I have to go out when they go out. This has been hard because Superman is only interested in being in his stroller for a little while.

Today we moved the cage outside. We stayed out there for several hours. I could lay on the blanket and read. Superman was in his cage and the big kids were up and down the street. It was one of our better afternoons since Superman has been born.

I'm guessing that it's a sign of the Apocolypse, but we've had two really good school days in a row. We've been completely done around noon both days and have been able to enjoy going out.

And, yes, to Alma and Gram Sam - I did put a hat on that baby right after these pictures. It was very windy outside today and I wanted to take care of his little ears.

School time for Baby Boy

For Christmas my parents gave Superman a set of these differently textured balls. At the time, he had zero interest in them. Now, they fascinate him. He rolls them, chews them, and bangs them. We got 30 minutes of school done this morning while he sat in his walker banging these two balls on each other and everything else he could reach.

Notice his turtle face in the top photo. For some reason he pulls his top lip down to a point and stares at us sometimes. We all think it makes him look like a turtle.

Does that thing come with a lid?

We got all three kids in the new playyard Saturday night, and the first thought I had was, "Does that thing come with a lid?" I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to cage them up in the living room, but there are days when I sure think about it!!!! Either way, I think they are adorable all playing together. Twenty years from now they are going to wonder how big that playyard was if they could all fit in it. They won't believe that they were just that small.

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

Today is my first Blogiversary!!! One year ago, I started my blog. Thanks to Cinda for suggesting it to me, and thanks to everyone who reads it.

I'm not much of a phone talker, so it has been a great way to share Superman's progress without being tied up on the phone for hours. I keep odd hours (stay up late and get up late), and blogging lets me type on my schedule. I'm usually adding to the blog around midnight and it was even later than that during the terrible indigestion of my pregnancy.

Yeah, Papa Deet!

My dad (known as Papa Deet by all the grandkids) and my mom (aka Gram Sam) got us a play-yard! We were at their house a few week-ends ago and little man was all over the place. My mom called this week and told me that she and Daddy had been talking and they had decided that Superman really needed a play-yard. She volunteered to go to Wal-mart and pick one up for him if I wanted her to.

We were up there this week and he really enjoyed it at their house. I set it up first thing this morning, and he is loving it. I've had so much more flexibility now that I can contain him. For the first time in over a month, our couch has cushions. Once he started crawling we had to use the cushions to block the hearth, the television armoire, and the legs of the end tables.

I can't wait until school Monday morning. I think we are going to be able to get a lot more done with him in "Sing-Sing" as my dad calls it.

My Big Boy

Superman had a busy January. He learned to crawl forwards and he learned to pull up. Of course, we immediately tried to baby proof. However, I missed some things. You can't see it in the picture, but I have the outlets covered. It never occured to me that he could pull over the ironing board. I made it just in time to stop him.

He went for a nine month check-up this week. He is 22 1/2 pounds, 30 inches tall, and his head is 47.8cm around. He's about the size of the average 13 month old according to his doctor.

Charley Skedaddle

III's school curriculum is all online. It is a good curriculum for the most part, but sometimes the assignments are extreme. Last week they suggested that he visited the Linneaus' Museum in London to better understand the assignment on animal classification. Obviously, we skipped that one.

He is supposed to read through his work and make a judgement call each day on which parts of the assignment he should complete. He makes a list of things he thinks he should skip because they are too diffiuclt or too involved. (Examples would be trips to London, science experiments that involve live electricity, assignments that involve reading a whole book for one day's work, and things like that.) We are trying to work on his ability to understand what is reasonable and what is extreme.

Earlier this fall, he started "hiding" assignments from us. If he didn't want to do it, he would "forget" to put it on the list. Of course, we check behind him each day, so it NEVER worked. We ALWAYS caught it. Then, if possible, we had to assign him the extra work because it became an integrity issue.

One of his lessons on Nov. 11 assigned him to read a historical fiction book about the Civil War and write tons of stuff about it. It was a HORRIBLE, lenghty, useless assignment and I never would have made him do it, but he chose to "forget" to put it on his list the day after we had sworn that if he ever did that again, he would have to do the assignment "no matter what."

He turned in one messy, misspelled, poorly punctuated version of the book report in December, and got told to do the whole thing over. I am glad to say that after almost 4 months of drudgery, the book report is finished.

Unless you also home school a mule, you can't know how exciting this is to us!!!! What a dark cloud has lifted at our house!

Shouldn't Have Tried It

I was determined to make sure our whole family was at church together this morning. I shouldn't have tried it. Superman is ill and feverish. Any sane mother would have kept him home. Finally, halfway through Sunday School, I gave up and headed home. I've never been so miserable or seen him so miserable. Thankfully, the Tylenol finally kicked in and he is sacked out on the bed now.

What a Day!

My sweet mother came down this week to help me clean the new rental house. She got here on Wednesdaymorning, but we had complications and we didn't make it over there Wednesday. We decided that we would get up early Thursday morning and tackle it.

Thursday morning started very early...too early! Hubby accidentally woke me up at 4:21 AM and I couldn't go back to sleep. I got up and started doing laundry which disturbed my mom. So, by 5:30, she and I were both up but Hubby and the baby were still asleep. We puttered around for a while and then when Hubby got up, I went and laid back down with Superman. I got up and Sam and I were going to head on over to the other house. Then 5 or 10 other things came up (feed us, feed the baby, change the baby, pack baby toys, pack cleaning supplies, etc.)

When we finally got ready to leave around noon, we loaded up the Jeep and backed out of the driveway. CRUNK, CLUNK, CRUNK, CLUNK I looked at my mom and asked her if it sounded right to her. We got out and looked - at a flat rear tire. I called Hubby who canceled a lunch appt. and came home and fixed it.

We loaded up again and as I was shutting the door, the rear passenger window fell down into the door. Now, my Jeep is not brand new, but it is a 2004. It shouldn't be doing all these things.

We decided to go ahead to the house and work anyway, so my poor mom had to ride with her hands bracing the window up. We had to have the baby in the rear facing car seat, so she had to ride back there and keep the wind off him.

We got to the house and it turned out that none of my cleaning products were what we needed. The kitchen has greasy build-up on the cabinets, and we needed a "de-greaser". I was armed with germ killers. I had all the Clorox and such that we could possibly use. We cloroxed all the light switches and the door knobs and decided to wait on the rest. We came home and started packing up china. Fourteen boxes later, we had the china cabinet completed unloaded!

Superman, Rosy, and I are all sick. We feel rotten, but we are going to church in the morning if at all possible. It's been a while since we were all in the same service and could worship together.

Sweet Moments

Most school days we take a small break around 10:30 or 11:00 to put Superman down for a nap. Rosy loves this time because she is usually the one who rocks him to sleep. She gets to go to the nursery and climb up in the big white rocker with him. We wrap them up in his special blanket that Mrs. Jana made for him. We turn our lullaby music on and they rock. She loves when he does "baby doll" things like taking a bottle or nap.

I know these days are fleeting - I wish that we could just double each day!