Friday: family

Today we were with our family.  We got good donuts, played, took naps, and went to a playground because it was rather warm.  In the evening dad and pat showed up and we cut out cookies.

Wednesday: life

Ahh life.  Today was a bit busy.  (Busy enough that I didn't take a nap even!)

We did some errands and got Isaac some ink for some stamps that Cheryl had found.  He loved them!

After the picture we made a dinosaur party.  Isaac drew balloons and a cake with candles.  It's fun seeing that he can actually drawing things now.  He doesn't seem to realize that a drawing should really be a single moment in time and tends to make the pictures do things, like have the candles blown out or bites out of the cake.  But it's fun and who really cares?

Then he found the sheep.  Christmas magic is still at work!  Today there were four sheep and yesterday there were only three.  So it's getting closer to Christmas.

I ended up at Hope to talk with a student and realized that we had about a half hour to kill.  Luckily, Dad saved the day by providing some colored pencils and rings.  Joshua loved throwing the rings in the (empty) trash!  I wasn't going to take a video, but then he kept doing it over and over and over, so I figured I might as well.

Tuesday: found

1. Today I found one of Joshua's lovies.  It had been at daycare.  I've been looking for it since Wednesday, so it must have dropped out of the bag Tuesday night.  (Or, more likely, out of his hands.)  It was then put in the wrong cubby at daycare, and I just happened to notice it as I was putting away his things.  We were about two hours away from buying a new one...we have one and a half other ones that work for him, but having two good ones is nice.  (The half one was a desparate night one night when we realized one had been left at day care and one was missing.  I had the right materials in the closet, and so made one.  It's terribly put together, but it has the right feel.

2. Later today I found out that there had been a change to Moodle, the class site where the students upload most of their work.  Today there was an exam and there was an extra large file to upload. Moodle had worked fine in the past.  Of course, it didn't work fine today.  Students can't email me the file because it is too big.  Blah blah blah.  They ended up putting their work in a public folder and then I transferred the files into a private folder so I could delete the ones in the public folder.  Then I had to put them on flash drives for the graders.  It sounds so simple now, but trying to figure something out and trying to figure out why this was happening was a pain.  But hey, I came up with a solution, even if it wasn't a very good solution...that's half the battle, right?  (Also, I think the problem is fixed.  But it took someone with more background in the class 20 minutes of discussion with IT as to why it should be fixed.)

Monday: favorites

There's no question - our kids have favorite parents.  I'm Isaac's favorite, Ben is Joshua's favorite.

This morning I brought Joshua in bed with us, hoping for just a few more minutes.  He wouldn't settle and wouldn't settle and finally saw Ben.  So he flopped his way over to Ben and promptly fell back asleep.

Isaac loves me a thousand much and loves Ben three much.

The boys were racing between me and a wall yesterday.  Then Ben sat down next to me and Joshua rarely came to me anymore.

Now, this isn't to say that our kids don't like and enjoy the opposite parent.  But they do have favorites.

Sunday: a busy day

Today ended up being a bit busier than expected, partially due to poor planning.  I had nursery this morning and therefore had to wake Joshua up and he was not so excited about that idea.  So then we were running about five minutes late.  Not a huge deal, but I wanted to be on time and felt rushed.

Nursery was going well until one of the kids had a very dirty diaper.  The other helper was changing it and all the other kids decided to cry.  I could only help three at a time, which left one crying.  If I tried shifting them around, they all cried for a bit and the the one left out continued to cry.  Yeah.  I feel like nursery is either really boring or a bit too exciting.  I finally went upstairs to pick up Isaac and his room was completely empty.  I freaked out just a bit.  Not in a "I think my son is in danger" but a "I think my son might be wandering around this big church with tall people in it."  As I was going to get the person in charge I glanced in a different room and found him.  Phew.  They had just changed rooms.  I'm still not sure why, but next time I won't get worked up until I check both.

Bible study was at our house at noon.  The house was mostly clean still from Friday, but there was still some cleaning and prepping to finish up.  Ben was finishing getting ready, Joshua was extra sad, but at least Isaac was cleaning up his train track...we ended up being ready with out any problems (and even got some extra cleaning done) but it wasn't how I imagined that hour going.  The time with our friends was very nice though.

I had a nice nap and then Ben went to get his hair cut.  We had dinner.  We cleaned up the Legos (more pictures to follow).  After the boys' bedtime I happily retreated to my quilting though.  I was ready for some alone-with-my-own-head time.

Saturday: emotions

I've decided that I have my largest range of emotions in the shortest amount of time while playing racquetball.

Ready: about ready to serve and deciding to serve to Ben's forehand.
Dispair: As the ball leaves the front wall, I realize it is a perfect serve to Ben and he will probably do a great return...great for him, terrible for me.
Elation: I managed to return his return!  Go me!
Hope: Perhaps I returned the ball well enough that it will make it to the front wall...come on ball, you can make it...
Resignation: The ball didn't make it to the front wall before bouncing.  I lost control of the serve.

This probably takes about five seconds.

Friday: the day

We are having a lot of guests throughout the weekend, so I decided it was time to at least try and get the house in some sort of order.

It started by sending Isaac off to put some mail in the mailbox and put up the flag.  He did it!  So that is one more thing that he can do by himself and I didn't have to go out in the cold.

Then we did a bit of work - I feel like the boys understood that there was going to be a time where I wasn't going to play and sort of accepted it.  Then they helped with the floors.  Isaac actually helped, Joshua just looked cute.

During this whole week I've been working on laundry.  I really feel like I need a new system, but expect that system would involve me actually putting clothes away.  (This isn't all of it either...there is another load in the dryer and a small load still to be washed.  I'm not really sure how I got so behind, as usually when I'm behind I can at least get it all in the baskets we have.)

This afternoon I was cleaning up in the office and Isaac and Joshua were playing under my desk.  Joshua pushed the CD open button on the computer and jumped back in surprise with a cry when it opened.  I told him it wasn't a big deal and shut it.  Of course. that got Isaac's attention and so he figured out how it worked.  Then he trying to get Joshua to do it.  And when he's talking to Joshua, trying to help him, Isaac has the sweetest little voice.  Isaac finally managed to get Joshua to try it, but of course it back fired on him a bit as Joshua didn't want to stop after that.

We had the first two groups of people over today, one for lunch and one for dinner.  A very pleasant time was had with both, but nothing really of note happened.