The HawksNest

Okay, so I am not doing a very good job of updating and keeping this here space current.  Between schooling Katie, ballet, T-ball and running my eBay business, I’m finding less and less time to blog.  I enjoy doing it, but when so much time passes between posts it looses some of its allure.  I could come in and type to my heart’s content in the evenings after the kids fed, bathed and down for the night but I would be sacrificing time with Ross.  Which isn’t an option for me, our time together is much too important. So I’m going to keep my space up for the time being, but my posts will probably continue to be few and far between.  Hopefully only until ballet and tball are no longer overlapping and Katie is back down to one activity. 

We have had a sick household for a month now.  Will it ever end?  Poor little Jack, was up all night Tuesday sobbing and coughing.  I took him in to see the doctor Wednesday and it turns out he has bronchitis and an ear infection in both ears.  I feel so bad for him.  He’s so miserable, but the antibiotics seem to be working.  His poor nose is raw and he cries every time he sees the bulb syringe, which of course just makes his nose run more.

I dropped Katie off at a friend’s house to play today while I went grocery shopping.  I’m amazed at how much faster and less “arugg” shopping is with only one kid in tow. Unloading the cart at the checkout I see the little toys and games she's always eyeballing and I can’t resist buying one for her.  Usually when we shop Katie can never resist the temptation to ask.  She doesn’t throw a fit or beg, but she always asks and I always say no.  It actually turned out to be a fun little game.  It’s Hangman, where you guess the other persons word, but rather than drawing the hanged man it comes with a little skeleton and mini gallows to build.  Morbid it is but it’s a fun way for her to work on her spelling and even learn the names and places of our bones:)

Katie is dying to start school, so we’ve been doing a little each morning already.  Mostly reading and math b/c those are her favorites, we are also working on time and money. She has so much enthusiasm and excitement about it.  I hope that is something she can hold on to through out the years.

Yes we are all still alive, but just barely.  I fell like I should post a notice on our front door “Beware: All who enter, Plague inside, go away”.  Katie has the worst of it now, poor sweet baby.  At least we remained healthy through Katie’s birthday celebration so we were able to enjoy it.  Katie says the best present she received was the tooth that Jack woke up with on her birthday.  She thinks he grew it just for her special day.  She told him “It’s the best present a big sister could ask for”.  How sweet it that?  Anyways someone is coughing up a lung in the other room so I should go and tend to them.  Hopefully I’ll have time to write more later today and not let so much time pass between posts.

The screen saver on our computer shows random pictures of all the digitals pics we have upload from our camera over the years.  Katie will sit in my lap and we will watch the screensaver for what seems likes hours, talking about and remembering the times from the pictures.  Anyways, today I was sitting eating my breakfast (cold leftover stuffing from last nights dinner) watching the screen saver and a picture popped up of me in the hospital holding a baby right after giving birth.  I could not for the life of me figure out what kid I was holding.  The screensaver changed to a different pic a few seconds later, so I went to the picture folder and looked through them until I found said picture and figured out that the swaddled up little one was Jack.  I figured it by the length of my hair at the time:)  In my defense the baby was co covered up you could barely see him.

Yesterday only a mere four hours after saying I was going to be extra mindful of Jack with all his recent bumps and falls, he, while standing holding on to a kitchen chair fell backwards and pulled the chair on top of himself.  The chair hit him in the face and he hit the back of his head on the floor.  I felt terrible.

I was a little surprised to wake up to snow this morning.  But I guess I can deal with it:)  It’s nothing compared to what the northeastern states are seeing.  The groundhog saw his shadow anyway, didn’t he? 

Yesterday I took the infant car seat and the bassinet to a second hand store that buys and sells kids stuff.  I was hard for me to say goodbye to the bassinet.  Both our babies slept in it.  I debated on keeping it, maybe for Katie to play baby dolls in, but it just took up so much space.  After all we have made the decision not to have any more kids.  I’m a little sad about it, after Ross and I got married I always imagined us with 5 or 6 kids.  But as it turned out God had a different plan for us.  So yesterday I said goodbye.    I did get a pretty penny for both items and bought some new (used) clothes for Jack.  I got him the cutest pair of swim trunks for this summer with little fishys on them.  I think I actually enjoy shopping for a little boy more than a little girl.  It just seems easier.  I did buy Katie a new sunhat  (well new to her).  Which she insisted putting on Jack every time I had my back turned.  Poor little guy, puts up with so much.  (See pictures)  Well I should probably get off this computer and feed this little one, he looks like he’s trying to eat the buckle off his overalls.

We have had some awesome weather!  Saturday was gorgeous.  We went on a bike ride, played some ball, cleaned out the garage, opened all the windows and aired out the house.  

Took the kids to get their pictures taken yesterday, and I’m so happy with the way they turned out.  Katie needed her five years taken, only 6 more days till Bday!  And of course I had to get Jack’s taken, even though we will be returning in a few months for his one years, and then I got a few shots of the two of them together.  If time allows today I’ll scan them in (ignoring all copyright laws) and post them for all to see. 

Katie is getting a swing set for her birthday.  I ordered it yesterday and it should be here in about a week.  She knows it won’t be put together by her birthday, but I showed her pictures of it online and she squealed, which is her way of showing she is most excited.  I ordered a baby seat for little Jack of course, who I have a feeling will love to swing and will probably go straight for the ladder:)  Poor little guy has had a rough few days.  He crawled off the bed, yes we were all sitting right there, but the boy is fast!  Ross managed to catch him before his head hit the floor.  A millimeter more and there would have been quite the bump.  I’ve never seen Ross move so fast, he was like a cat.  The next day Jack hit his cheek on the corner of a table and gave himself a nice bruise.  Later that day he accidentally got tripped over.  Oh the drama!  Yesterday morning, picture day, he woke up, the bruise almost gone but with a big ol’ scratch on his nose, from what I don’t know, I’m thinking his fingernails.  So my goal for this week is not to drop, step or sit on the baby:)

Has anyone else had problems viewing or updating their msn space?  It seems every time I go to add an entry I can’t access my space.  It’s driving me crazy!!!

Hmm… we are half way through February and it’s been on the warmer side around here except for today.  There are already buds on our backyard trees.  Katie’s birthday is just weeks away.  I’m having a hard time believing she’s turning 5.  I know she is because I was there that wonderful spectacular day, but it just doesn’t seem like 5 whole years have passed since we first stared into that beautiful little face.  I can only imagine how fast the next five will go.  Katie will be ten and Jack will be almost six.   My sweet little babies, my little bundles of love, my heart living outside my body.

So I’m lying in bed in the wee hours of the morning listening to Jack crack himself up through the monitor.  I’m talking to Ross, assuming he’s awake now too, about how many new things Jack has been doing lately how fast he’s growing up.  I’m laughing at Jack laughing.  It took me a few minutes before I realize that Ross isn’t talking back, he wasn’t even there!  I had totally forgotten that his flight had been cancelled and his daytrip became an overnight trip.  Poor guy, he didn’t even have a change of clothes.  I was sad not having him to cozy up to. I debated whether or not to have a 2 am shredding party, but decided against it.

I was led to read Romans 8 today by an email I received with this quote……

“With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, "Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?" 

Romans 8:35  Who will separate us from the love of Christ?  Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? 

But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Oh how I’ve neglected you all.  Sheesh I haven’t written in over 2 weeks, or have I visited any of my blogging friends. It looks like I’m going to have a lot of catching up to do.  Shortly after my last entry Jack started pulling up on anything and everything to stand, and can now walk back and forth between things if they are close together.  He had his 9 month check up on the 25th and now weighs in at 19 lbs, and I am pretty sure we are going to have to invest in some baby dentures, the little guy still has no teeth!:)  Katie has been progressing leaps and bounds too.  Her reading skills have absolutely exploded these past few weeks.  I think the joy of being able to read things on your own is finally hitting her.  Our curriculum for next year finally arrived…..I am so disappointed!  I packed it all up and sent it back.  I’m going to lose 10% due to a restocking fee but oh well.  So these past few weeks I have been working on putting together our own curriculum using the first grade course of study.  I was thinking we would do kindergarten, but it would be an entire year of just reviewing things for her.  So we are going to start first grade next year and go from there.

We signed Katie up for t-ball last Saturday.  The season will start right around the time ballet is ending, so it will work out great.    Ross is on a day trip today and will hopefully be home tonight.  I’m going to continue to work on my shredding project.  I cleaned out our filing cabinet right after the New Year and have a huge box of stuff to shred.  Some of it is a decade old!  Our pathetic little shredder shreds about 3 sheets at a time, so it is taking me forever.  It's times like this I wish we had a fireplace or burn barrel.  I think I’m going to have another shredding party after the kids go to bed tonight.  With each garbage bag I fill with the shred, I toss in a smelly poopy diaper for good measure before taking it out to the trash.  I figure someone trying to steal identities will take one whiff and forget it.  (Yes, I’m a little paranoid:))

Hmm…..We had a pretty good weekend.   I finished two books and I’m planning on updating our book list with the finds from Saturdays trip to the library.  I do though feel like I’m coming down with something.  I have an awful itchy achy feeling either in my ears or my throat, I can’t tell which, but our air quality has been poor around here so I’m hoping when that clears up I’ll be feeling better.  I did decide in my attempt to make dinnertime less nerve wracking with Katie’s eating habits to let her pick what we have 2 nights a week.  So one night it was hot dogs and the other night was home made pizza.  Two choices obviously picked out by a soon to be 5 year old.  Last night we had ravioli, caeser salad and garlic bread and there was no complaining and more importantly a lot of eating.  So things seem to be improving so far.  This Friday the curriculum I orderd is supposed to be here.  I can’t wait to go through it!  The more we talk about homeschooling the more excited Katie gets.  I even heard her talking (and kind of bragging) about it with the other kids at ballet class. 

BTW ~ I added some pics of one of the bird cages we made last week complete with a paper bird.  They turned out good!

One of the resolutions I made this year was to make one dinner for everybody.  We would all eat the same thing, no more of this making separate meals for Katie thing just because she’s so finicky.  This I think is completely reasonable, I mean she’s almost 5 for goodness sake.  And it’s not like I’m making her eat liver and onions.  And I don’t make her clean her plate but she is expected to at least try a little bit of everything.  Well last night you would have thought we asked her to eat her own eyeballs by the way she was behaving.  It was chicken. I even breaded it thinking she might enjoy it more since it more closely resembled something you would get at McDonalds.  We told her she had to eat at least one bite, it was about the size of a quarter.  But no, her refusal to eat and her very very poor attitude and her very very loud screaming fit got her sent to bed at 6:30.  Thankfully she’s didn’t wake up at 4 this morning like I feared.  But the second she did get up she was asking for breakfast, starving I’m sure for going to bed without much of a dinner.  I told her that she had to wait until normal breakfast time to eat and that eating a good dinner would keep her from being so hungry for breakfast.  She looked at me like she didn’t know what I was talking about.  I was soooo tempted to make a plate of leftovers for her, but I was having visions of wire hanger beatings and late night rosebush trimmings. 

Well let’s see….What’s been going on around here lately?  The first half of this week Katie had a fever and the chills so we’ve been dealing with that.  I kept her home from school on Wednesday, even though she had already started feeling quite better.  Jack, my little fearless one, has been crawling over, around, in and through anything and everything.  And the night before last he was kicking the side of his crib so hard and it was so loud I thought it was going to collapse.  I’ve been putting him in his exersaucer a lot during the day, just so I can get a few things done.  I have to figure out a way to barricade rooms off but still have a way for Katie to get through unassisted.  

Katie started ballet for the first time last week, after months or even years of her talking about it and me promising to sign her up.  The class actually started last September but they let her join because they still had an opening.  The class learns a total of 4 dances over the year, Sept-June, that they perform at a recital at the end of the year.  They’ve already learned 2 of them, so if Katie doesn’t catch up by then she’ll have to sit those two out at the recital.  But I have a feeling she’ll be able to pick them up pretty quick as the class periodically practices them.  

Katie and I have started a unit study on birds and made papier-mache birdcages.  I think they are going to turn out really neat.  I’ll post pictures here as soon as they’re done.  I finished reading “Alone” and “Edith’s Diary” which were both good and now I’m reading “what was she thinking; Notes on a Scandal”.  I actually broke down and bought the book b/c all the copies at the library were out or on hold.  Made popular I’m sure by the recent movie.  I talked to Ross before I bought it hoping he would agree with me that I could wait for it to become available at the library and not spend the money on something I could get for free with a little patience.  But he said I should get it…..it’s only twelve dollars.

After months of crawling backwards and rolling from place to place Jack is on the move, crawling forward!  We were able to catch his first official crawls on video this weekend.  Such a big boy!  All I can say now is baby gates!,  but with the way our house is, there really isn’t anyway to block rooms off, except the bedrooms and bathrooms.  The second you set Jack on the floor he makes a b-line for Katie’s room.  So we are trying to get her in the habit of keeping her door closed when she’s not in there. 

I finished reading The Bonfire of the Vanities on Friday and finished A Winter Haunting on Sunday so we made another trip to the library.  I added the new books I got over at the left.  I went in search of a specific one that was recommended to me by a fellow blogger  ....And The Little Minion  but all the copies were checked out.  So now I’m reading “Alone” which seems good so far, but I’m only a few chapters in.  ( In case you are wondering, some of the books listed at the left are ones that Ross is reading.)

Katie’s class is having a pajama party today at school.  All the kids were told to wear their jammys and bring their favorite book and stuffed animal.  Katie was so excited to see what the other kids jammies looked like.  She chose to wear her long pink velour nightgown, to bring “Mow Mow” her favorite stuffed cat and her “PJ Funny Bunny” book.

So today is Katie’s first day back to school after the break.  It’s been so nice not having to drive her all the way to school these past few weeks.  Her school is actually in another town, about 20 minutes one-way.  It’s better now since our town got its first official stop light.  It makes pulling out onto the highway much easier and there aren’t as many people making suicidal turns and maneuvers.  I mean what could be so important that you are willing to put peoples lives at risk because you want to pull out into heavy traffic and just hope somebody lets you in rather than waiting 15 seconds for an opening?  Since we’ve lived here there have probably been at least 30 accidents on that corner, some of them fatal, but since they put in the light I don’t think there has been a single one.  Anyways on my drive back from dropping Katie off at school a man driving a UPS truck stopped so I could pull out into traffic.   He smiled and waved and I smiled and waved back.  Well as I drove down the road I noticed that the same UPS truck was still behind me, and behind me and behind me and soon I’m pulling into our subdivision and sure enough so did that UPS truck.  So I’m a little freaked, I dig out my cell phone, I think I’ll just pull into the garage and shut the garage door before I get out of the car and go straight inside.  So I shut the door, get out, unbuckle Jack go inside and I hear the doorbell ringing.  Well I don’t answer it, instead I go into Jack’s room and peak through the blinds.  Sure enough it’s the UPS man standing on my porch.   Turns out he was just delivering me a package.  Heh heh.  Now I FEEL bad for being so paranoid and not answering my door.  I guess it was just coincidence that I was the next delivery on his route. 

Wow, my first entry of the New Year.  Should I be profound?  Should I start the year off will a witty little quip, perhaps a diatribe of kept and unkept resolutions of yore?…..NAW!  Though I might mention a few resolutions that I’m making, or renewing this year.  Once again I want to suppress my deep desire to buy a label maker.  I think possibly, maybe at first I could be reasonable with my labeling, but I know as time went on that would not last. 

Our weekend was great, another three dayer that we enjoyed as a family just hanging out.  I spent most of Sunday and Monday reading.  I got a new book for Christmas from Ross, “Little Children”.  I really enjoyed it (it’s actually a movie that’s playing now, but I think books are usually always better than the movie, so I’d recommend the book between the two, even though I haven’t seen the movie).  Anyways, I liked the book but finished it before I went to bed on Christmas night.  So on Sunday Ross took Katie to the library to get more books for everyone.  Our library is open on Sundays in the winter, cool huh?  Ross pick out some books for me, he brought home three, I picked Bonfire of the Vanities to read first and am about half way through it.  It’s pretty good.  Now I know they made a movie of this years back too, which I haven’t seen either, but I heard that it was one of the worst movies ever made, which is quite surprising since the book is so good.  A little thing about me is that I can’t read a book that I’ve already seen the movie of, and would actually rather read then watch anyway.  I also don’t read the dust jackets or back cover of books if I can help it.  I like going into a book completely blind so to speak, so I have no idea what it’s about.  This is why I like to have Ross pick out my books.  I have read so many books that have been predictable; I think there is nothing worse than reading a predictable book, especially if it is supposed to be a drama.

I hope everyone out there had a very merry Christmas!  Our day was nice and relaxing.  It was just the four of us so we were on our own agenda, which I like.  It would be nice to see family and friends on the holidays, but there is something to be said about having and starting your own traditions.

Along with his “ma ma mas and his “ba ba bas” Jack has added “da da da” to his vocabulary.  Santa didn’t bring him his two front teeth so he still is flashing his gummy grin.  Katie spent the day playing with all her new goodies.  She was so filled with anticipation the night before, like I’m sure every kid in America was, that she was pretty wiped out by the afternoon and a little cranky.  We put her to bed at a reasonable time Christmas Eve but she woke up at 3 am and asked me if it was time yet.  I told her no and put her back to bed, but she was up for a while after that. 

I cooked the largest prime rib I have ever seen for dinner.  We have enough leftovers to feed a small village, but it was sooo good I wouldn’t mind eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

So if there are any parents out there whose daughter got an Amazing Allison for Christmas, are you as freaked out by it as I am?  I swear she’s a distant cousin of Chucky, but Katie absolutely loves her.  I keep expecting to wake up in the middle of the night with Allison standing over me.  Ross is waiting for her to ask for credit card numbers that she probably has the ability to upload somewhere:)  A little freaky but worth the hours Katie spends playing with her.

Only 4 more days until the New Year.  This has been the fastest year for me yet.  I cannot believe how it has flown by.  It seems like just yesterday we were having the ultrasound finding out we were having a boy.  And now our little guy is 8 months old.  Katie will be 5 soon and soon after that we’ll start kindergarten.  When I think about how fast time goes by and how fast the kids grow I find comfort in our decision to homeschool.  I’ll have so much more time with them.  Why should some random teacher, who has to spend most of her day just managing bodies get to spend so many precious hours with my kids.  I know them better than anyone and have taught them everything thus far and am so looking forward to teaching (or learning) with them over the years to come.

Last night we attended Katie’s Christmas program.  The kids sang absolutely wonderfully.  Looking through pictures from last year’s program she looked so small, her face still round and baby like.  She has grown so much and I can’t believe another year has passed.  Time moves so fast.  Jack will be 8 months on Christmas.  I must remember everyday to savor every moment, to just sit and take in my beautiful children.  To remember that they will be small for such a short time and who cares if the laundry piles up when there are so many forts to be made, stories to be read and cuddling to be done. 

I did it, I did it, with a week to spare.  Everything that needs to be bought is bought.  Everything that needs to be mailed is mailed.  All that is left is a little bit of wrapping!  Now I can relax and take in the wonderful sights and sounds of the season. 

Katie is about to burst with anticipation looking at the presents that are already under our tree.  She has been wrapping her “presents” to Jack using notebook paper and electrical tape.  I’m not quite sure what’s in them, but she’s assured me it’s nothing he can choke on.  She also informed me that after he’s done opening them, she’s gonna want them back.