Party!!

(This was while everyone was singing to him!)




Unfortunately it rained, but otherwise it was a very fun time with our family and friends. Shea had a great day and is very lucky!

Two today, but Three tomorrow

What in the world??

Yes, the "baby" turns three tomorrow. This is all going a little too fast. I must say it is weird when it is the "BABY". There is no more of the "2's" after this!! I'm not as much in a hurry for him to be the big boy that he so wants to be. There are things, I admit, that he can do now which I am so thankful I don't have to do for him, but just as many that I wish I could still do for him. We have our daily challenges of him wanting "to do it". Or him wanting to decide when he will go or come. Frustrating, when it seems like we are always in a rush!
The house is blasted with a pile of black, white and red as we are having a Lightening McQueen party. I finished the cake and made the curry dish I'll be serving for supper tomorrow. There will be 18 of us, and I have this sad feeling that it'll rain (for the first time ever on his birthday).
Anyway, more pictures of party, cake and presents tomorrow. The older boys are each attending a party in the afternoon, so it'll just be a big party day all around.

done like dinner

BEFORE:



AFTER:

I love spring

Even if it means I have a layer of sand on my floors.

DIY disaster??

(This is not our patio...this picture was taken from here.)
Have you ever seen that show Disaster DIY?? The next show airing is Backyard Blues. How fitting, hey Greg??
We worked like dogs today on our back patio. In fact we've been working on it slowly all week. We don't really know what we're doing. We go off a few key clues given to us by our handyman expert "Luke". Then we totally screw everything up 10 times and then finally get it sorta ok and go again.
We're really trying our hardest not to be the people that build the brick patio that looks like it has been through an earthquake. We are surrounded by family that is far more skilled in this sort of thing, and we could potentially be the laughing stock of all.
The hardest part was that we started the project thinking we were doing one thing, and later realizing that in fact it should be done another way. So, we had to shovel dirt out of the hole, more than half of what we had just put into it. LONG story short...I won't bore you. We managed to level it as best we could (keeping in mind that our remaining sidewalk is not level, so we can't match it to that). We removed a million boulders and called them bad names. And we tampered it down and spread a good inch of sand on top. Hopefully tomorrow we will be set to start laying down the bricks. We are reusing the bricks from our yard that are now in a pathway. We have no idea if we have enough bricks to cover this area! I guess it'll be a wait-see thing...it could end up being a much smaller patio!
Please wish us luck that we don't screw this up, as this has been a major project and has taken hours out of our lives while our children are wreaking havoc inside our house in the meantime. Tomorrow I intend to use child-labor to bring the bricks over one at a time! And then I will post pictures and jump up and down and do a happy dance all over our very level and BEAUTIFUL new brick patio. Cuz Greg and I rock at this kind of thing.

A D O R A B L E

Misty mornings.

The weather has been misty and rainy since Sunday. It is that wet damp air that reminds me of Vancouver. It smells so beautiful, and you can almost watch the green grass grow right in front of you. The timing was great as I spent most of Saturday and Sunday doing yardwork. Weeding, sweeping, putting toys away, adding dirt to the patchy grass areas. And now it feels good to just get caught up again on my filthy bathrooms, my baking, vacuuming etc. while the rain pours on outside.
On Sunday, between the rain bursts...we went out to Margaret Falls for a short little hike to the falls.

Kindergarten!

I had fun taking these today...how cute are they??

Our endless yard makeover!

Here is where we left off last fall...
Greg was chipping out the old pavement slab at the back of the house.

Fast forward to this week...Luke framed in the area where we are laying our new brick patio. It is pretty much as big as our new deck!

After a full truck load of dirt to fill up the frame more.

We still need to bring in a load of sand and then lay the bricks...hopefully by next weekend??
I did a huge trim job and weed out of the lilac in the far corner...it looks SO good, I wish I had a better "before" picture.
So that's where I've been. Up to my eyeballs in dirt.

Too Much TV!

I just read this book to Riley tonight. Look at their zombie faces, hey? And how the Mama Bear is waving her hand in front of the TV and no one is flinching. I can't exactly relate, as my boys are usually doing backflips off the chair while watching a show. I DO know the type of zombie TV watchers though. My friends girl can sit in front of the TV with her mouth wide open and her eyes will tear because she won't even stop to blink. You could strip down naked to the right of the TV and she wouldn't even look. It is kind of ironic that I read this book tonight, as we just decided at the end of April to shut off our cable again. Without cable, we don't even get the local channels. We got nothin'.
And it's ok!! My kids haven't moaned about it at all. The TV is not their big draw anymore. They much prefer the Wii and computer. The Berenstain Bears need to upgrade their books and write a new book entitled "Too much Wii".
The only show we regularly watch is LOST, which we download and watch later. I loved my HGTV, W Network and TLC shows...mainly the home reno stuff. I guess I'm on my computer a bit more, but the goal is that I'll get exercising more!! I allow myself the 2 hours in the evening to NOT do housework, as I try to keep at it all day long instead while the boys are running around.
In the book, it mentions all the wonderful things you could be doing instead of watching shows. You know, like chasing butterflies and watching tadpoles (WTH?) We can't do that perhaps, but we have all kinds of "wonderful" activities that go on around here! Today was a beautiful Spring day, and though I still had a sweater on during the morning and evening, the afternoon was warm enough that the boys filled up the pool. Shea and Liam stripped down and dipped their white bodies into the frigid water! Might as well get a head start at summer I guess?! Riley was asking for the slip and slide. I had to draw the line. I think we still might get frost at night! Shea enjoys our "construction zone" backyard and has his diggers working away out there. We filled up our squirt guns and shot the squirrels, picked a few dandelions and planted some sunflowers.
Ya, the TV won't really be missed. Ask me in November though, I may be begging to get the thing turned back on.

So blessed to be... surrounded by these 3

(maybe you can't quite notice, but I'm sporting purple (grape flavored) lip balm that Riley made me for Mother's Day!)

Tractor tippin'

Blood bath

You've all seen my subtitle..."The stories of my crazy life in a house full of boys". Maybe I haven't quite taken you far into that whole realm of craziness for fear that you would shutter and move on. It is CRAZY. It is loud. It is competitive. It is a whole lot of fighting and not a lot else. It is hard to take most of the time, for me, so I can't imagine what other people think of our nutty selves. I find I spend a lot of my day trying to keep them far enough from eachother so as they don't have an all-out brawl. In fact I've been pretty nervous to even hire a poor little teenaged babysitter for fear of what they would do to her.
Tonight was pretty usual. Both Shea and Liam had been up since 5:30am, so I figured we needed an early bedtime. Riley and Greg were out, so I thought it would be a nice calm night to get them asleep before they got home. Didn't happen.
I built the kids a classic blanket fort in the living room, and after a few scraps of whose space was whose, I decided maybe a warm bath would bring them down a few notches. Didn't really happen either. It was as calm as it could be with two naked boys in a tub, but then the ship went down. Liam hit Shea across the back, kind of a fun little slap but it hurt as he was wet. So BOP went Shea with the shampoo bottle, back into Liam's nose. Well of course the blood starts flowing everywhere! (just a bleeding nose, but my word!) So Shea starts screaming because he doesn't want the blood to touch him in the water. Liam is fine but is spitting out blood as it's just pouring down. So I'm trying to rinse off Shea and get him out of the tub while he's screaming (and it's all nice and echoey in the bathroom). Liam is wet, so the kleenex I'm giving him is useless, and he's spitting blood all over me, the toilet, the tub. Stop SPITTING!! just let me get this blood off you and then we can get you out of the tub!! Akk...it took forever to get him to stop spitting so I could move him out of the safety of the tub and dry him off so he could lie down and tilt his head back. Anyway, so then we get all cleaned up, dressed and Riley showed up with Greg to show us his tooth he just lost, and the rocket he just blew up. It was a miracle that they were in bed before 8pm. I need my 2-3 hours of CALM before my day starts again.
Hey, anyone want to babysit?

Going on three...

Shea is getting so much more "big boy" lately, and much less "baby".
He has been potty trained for almost 4 months now!!! We recently lost his soother, so that was the end of that habit (always a goal for me by the time they are 3 to ditch it). He used to nap in a playpen, but now is much happier in his own toddler bed. He's been sick lately, so he's happy to nap but had been fighting it last week. His shoes are all getting too small. He is starting to ride with training wheels. He scoots around the skatepark on his plasma car. He wants under-ducks.


Oh man!! THREE?? He's having his Lighting McQueen party at the end of the month (he tells everyone, including the dentist!).

Am I ready?? I don't know. It makes me sad and happy all at the same time!

Cheers!