CKZCJ

Seriously. It smells bad in here. No, it’s not stinky little boy feet or even gas exiting the male bottom parts in my house. I think, no wait I’m sure it’s a skunk. Also I’m sure it’s taken up residence under the house directly beneath my bedroom. We can’t exactly trap the skunk in our animal friendly trap because well, if you think about it you’ll get the picture. I thought maybe we could just lure it away with food or something. Apparently we must just sort of wait to see what he decides to do. With my luck it’ll be a she and she will have little stinkers under the house.

On another subject of stink – I stink at posting at any regular interval. Why? Because work sucks all of my creative juices and any patience with my computer right out of me by 5pm.  We’ve done tons of fun things since it snowed back in what February? I’m gonna play catch up in the late warm, ack, hot summer nights here in Texas with photos and stories. Mostly it’s for my most loyal reader (hi dad! we’re going to come catch some fish this weekend!) but the rest of you can enjoy too. Hang around for the ride (mostly like an 8yr old in a bumper car bent on giving his mom a massive headache).

I read a lot, not having cable only increases the reading done in our house. While we visit Half Priced Books and Hastings with regularity I often find a lot of my reading is also done online. I wanted to share a few of my favorite reads lately. Most of these are short stories.

• A Parent’s Prayer – Garrison Keillor
• Fresh Out of Cough Drops
• Naps, for me, are a dream in themselves

I also recently picked up a couple of books (yes, good old fashion books with lots of pages of paper bound together) – a few by Steve Martin (yep, that Steve Martin who also has a really great Bluegrass album), Betty White’s memoirs, another Michael Critchon and “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card. Books that run the genre gamut for sure, hopefully the boys will follow. More soon….

The other day I was talking to the boys in Z Man’s room and he had a little bowl of jelly beans on his desk. As we were talking I reached over and picked out a  red jelly bean and started to eat it. Out of nowhere CaseyJ blurted “Mom! Mom! Spit it out, it’s not good!” In a mild panic (thinking oh my word what did they do to the jelly beans?) I picked up the little bowl and spit the half masticated jelly bean in it. Thereby making all the jelly beans now bad. After a moment to recover I asked why on earth the jelly bean was bad (at this point seriously concerned about what they had put on them). I had forgotten that CaseyJ had seen the movie HOP the day before and he told me “Mom, those jelly beans came from the Easter Bunny’s butt”. Oh, duh. I didn’t need the calories anyway.

You know what’s a lot of fun, driving to town in the rain only to have it turn to ice on the wind shield. What’s even more fun is not being tall enough to see over all the ice that’s accumulating, being a chicken and pulling over so you husband can drive. I left my big girl underwear at home today. It barely got above freezing today and last week was full of fun too.

The cold began Wednesday morning when at 6am we lost power. We got the boys up, dressed and fed by candle light and little LED head lamps before we lost too much heat. Thursday the boys had a non uniform day so they could dress warm and as we pulled up to drop them off the teachers were going car to car saying the water froze at the main and school was canceled. Yeah! A fun day at the office with the boys. They were pretty good about it though and due to the repairs needed to the water lines school was also canceled for Friday. Good thing because when it got light enough to see Friday morning we had a nice blanket of white everywhere. That’s right folks, it snowed, right here in central Texas. I woke the boys up and helped them with jackets and out they went to play.

Big C decided he was still going to work and headed out in his Jeep for the 25 mile trip to town. The boys and I took pictures and came inside to warm up and eat breakfast, got clothes on and went back out to play. We found our green saucers from White Sands in New Mexico and did some fun sliding around. The boys played until their fingers froze and then we played games inside and I made some yummy broccoli cheese soup for lunch, we stayed warm by keeping the fire place stoked all day long.  By lunch any snow in the path of the sun was quickly melting away. It was all gone by the next day. We’ve had quite a long few days of cold and wind, the wind making it that much colder. I think most of my family likes the cold weather except when it forces us to spend many days stuck inside together! See all my photos here.

My boys and their crazy little body clocks are driving my crazy. I am sure other parents have similar issues but the only way I can feel better is to lament about it a bit. During the week (days they need to get up by 6:15am) they are slow to get up, cranky and whiny. They always ask to go back to sleep or sleep later. On the weekend however the little monsters are springing out of bed at the butt crack of dawn. We don’t have a super big house and the living room where they congregate first thing in the morning on a Saturday to wrestle and growl at each other in weird boy tones is right next to my room, where I am still trying to sleep in my cozy bed. Then there was today, a glorious day off which happened to be a weekday. Right on cue those funky little body clocks hit the snooze and they slept until after 9am! Absolutely amazing. We were fortunately able to take a much needed day off, have a late breakfast, hit the grocery store, work on some projects (school and pinewood derby). I actually feel rested, I’m sure 6am will still come about an hour too early for me tomorrow though!

There is a pox upon our house and it’s in the form of little square pieces that hurt something awful if you step on them. Just what the boys have gotten for Christmas is more than around 3,000 pieces of Lego bricks, the majority of them Star Wars sets. The boys are old enough now to build about 80% of the sets themselves with help along the way every now and then. We still have one big set courtesy of Grandmaclaus to build but I thought I’d share this one time lapse with you (first one so it’s a bit of an experiment made using *gasp* Windows Movie Maker).