Haircuts

I finally won the battle with Eric and got the boys little boy haircuts. They don't even look like the same kids. And their hair looks so blonde now. Handsome fellows if I do say so myself!

A boy and his dog

We rescued 2 dogs last week. They, and their mother, had been dumped at a park. The mother, sadly, had to go to the pound - we could not take all 3. We were going to keep both puppies, but were advised it's not wise to raise dogs from the same litter together. And, over the few days we had them both, we watched them already struggling for dominance and having little dog fights, which only would have gotten worse as they got bigger.

And so we found a home for one, and have kept one. Guthrie named him Edward, after one of our favorite trains from Thomas and Friends. Since the girls of the family all seem to love Twilight (myself included), it works that way too, although the dog does not sparkle in the daylight.

It wasn't deliberate, but we have black pets. Ursula, the black stray we started taking care of last fall, is not sure what to think of the dog, especially since he stole her bed. She is trying to let him know who is boss, and Edward is learning to be careful around the cat. So far, this is her preferred position to keep an eye on things.

Christmas pictures, finally

I know I'm way behind. I'm way behind on everything, I think, except enjoying life, which I've been doing pretty well lately. Spending Bush's last night in office on the beach at South Padre, then watching the inauguration on the beach with a big glass of wine, and the parrots we've been seeing in our beautiful flowering tree - they have all contributed to the "enjoying life."

Here are a few pictures, since I don't have anything great to say right now. If you've not done so already, you should find me over at Facebook, where I seem to be spending all my time lately.

With my "baby" girl at Christmas.

All 3 of my babies.

Being all girly with my daughter.

Parrots. Green Parakeets to be exact. They love to eat the beautiful pink flowers in this tree (and I still have no idea what kind of tree this is, but it's beautiful, and full of butterflies and hummingbirds too).

Happy Halloween!

Hope everyone had a great holiday and is full of treats and not too many tricks.

Turner the UPS man:

Guthrie the scary skeleton (who wiped off all his face paint before we left and wore the mask instead):

The scary sight that greeted the few trick-or-treaters we had:

Even basement cat says Happy Halloween!

Gas under $2.00

I didn't believe it would happen. Here's the proof, from 4 different stations. Sorry for the picture quality - I took some of them stopped at red lights. And the first one is hard to see - it's $1.95!

W Magazine cover - I LOVE it!

Yes, yes, I've been a very bad blogger lately. I just haven't had anything interesting to say, and/or the time or energy to say it. I'm still here, still reading everyone else's blogs.

If you haven't seen it yet, you must click here: http://http://perezhilton.com/2008-10-09-the-photo-everyone-will-be-talking-about to check out the new cover of W Magazine with Angelina Jolie on the cover, breastfeeding.

The picture is beautiful. (Have you ever seen a picture of her that is NOT beautiful? Yes, I have a girl crush on Angelina, and have for years.) But even more than that, if anyone can normalize breastfeeding, normalize breastfeeding in public (on a cover of a magazine for the whole world to see counts as public for me), then it must be her. As a long-term breastfeeder - I've been nursing without a break since March 2004, and both of my sons have nursed for 2 1/2 years, at least - and someone who hopes to help normalize breastfeeding, and make breastfeeding in public more normal and acceptable, seeing someone so public putting it right there for the whole world to see - I'm thrilled. Thank you, Angelina Jolie, thank you Brad Pitt, thank you W Magazine.

His name was Guthrie, he was a Jedi

Guthrie totally looks like





a Jedi.

(Because I can never get it to work when I try to embed video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNiOMQZyMT8)

"Not cars, not trucks, not other things with wheels"

(Don't panic. This is a wonderful train museum in Temple, Texas. The tracks are part of the museum, as is the train. It doesn't run. It's not nearly as scary as it looks.)

Guthrie likes trains. The above quote is how he described his love to his Grandma Mac (Eric's mom) before her visit last fall. "I like trains. Not cars, not trucks, not other things with wheels - trains."

He has had this love of trains all of his short life, since he was first able to communicate his interests to us. His first real Halloween costume was a train.

During our brief trip to the Chicago area for a friend's wedding when he was 18 months, we ended up at a hotel in Aurora with a train theme, right next to Walter Payton's Roundhouse, and the train station. We rode a train to Chicago, and this was the highlight of the trip for him.

For Christmas that year we got him a train set. Eric, of course, couldn't wait until Christmas for him to have it, so he ended up with it early. It started out pretty small, and on a table.

When we moved into our new house, Guthrie was 2. We still had boxes everywhere, the beds weren't set up yet, but we unpacked the trains.

Slowly the train table got less and less use, and every time we found ourselves in a toy store a few trains and a few more tracks, or track sets, found their way into our cart. The trains started to take over the house.

He got himself a costume so he could pretend to be a train conductor any time he wanted.

For his third birthday, we rode on a train from Warrensburg to Kansas City and back, and he got to meet a REAL condcutor.

Then when we were back in Missouri last summer, we happened to be in the same town that was celebrating its annual "Railroad Days" and got to ride a miniature train, before going to ride on the real Thomas the Tank Engine and meeting Sir Topham Hatt. Poor thing was getting sick, but we didn't know it until he started to develop a fever while we were on the train ride.

We went back to see Thomas in Austin in October, and followed that up with a night in Corpus Christi, where we stayed in another train-themed hotel, and rode on the Great Ocean Drive Scenic (GODS) Railway.

A few months ago, Eric got the idea to spray paint some of Guthrie's tracks. Guthrie then insisted they do them all, and carefully they worked on this together, taping off places that should not be painted, unscrewing roundhouses to pain inside them, using brushes on pieces that wouldn't come apart. Now Guthrie has beautiful, colorful tracks, and we spend many of our days (like today) building elaborate layouts that do take over much of the house.

We've read books on trains. Fiction - the entire collected original Thomas the Tank Engine stories cover to cover (all 405 pages) at least 4 times. We've read many other Thomas books, those we own and many from the library. We've read "The Subway Mouse," "A Cricket in Times Square" (because they live in a subway station), "Pano the Train," "The Little Engine that Could" with 2 different sets of illustrations, "Choo Choo" by Virginia Lee Burton, and so many other fiction books I've lost count. For non-fiction, we've read children's books that tell how train works, and we've also read much of an encyclopedia of trains in which the second half of the book describes hundreds of the great rail lines of the world. I learned many places I want to visit and ride the trains.

I do wonder just how long this love will last. It is fun, and he learns so much, but oh, I've looked at the hobby stores. I've seen the electric model trains. I know how much they cost and how much room they require. And we have a friend who works with the railroad, and we know there is a term for people like Guthrie. Yes, that's right, he's a Foamer.

Crash! Bang! Boom!

That's what the back of Guthrie's head looks like right now. He has 4 staples in his scalp. Yes, they were put there intentionally. Oh, yes, we paid good money to have a doctor put staples in our son's head.

Yesterday started off normally enough. The house is total chaos, and really has been for weeks, with the girls visits and then the hurricane, so we decided our mission was to get things under control. And to start with the kitchen. And so, we spent hours cleaning the kitchen, and if you looked at it right now, you couldn't tell.

Okay, back up: Late Saturday night I got a call from my almost 17-year-old niece asking me if she should go to the Emergency Room for her injured wrist. Not quite sure how she injured it, but something about a ledge and her cat. She didn't have her insurance card, couldn't get ahold of her grandparents, and so she called me, thousand miles away that I am. And I didn't know what to tell her, so I spent the night worried sick about my poor injured niece.

Ah, yes, the kitchen. And the boys acting insane because we were ignoring them so we could give them a clean house, a hot meal, a nice home. Fighting, tantrums, the normal for 2- and 4-yo boys.

I napped with Turner. Things felt hectic but okay. I was scrubbing fingerprints off wallpaper when I realized it was about 5 o'clock, time to call Samantha.

She answers, says she's home alone, and that it's stormy. I was at the computer anyway, so I pulled up the weather channel for where she is, and - TORNADO WARNING!!! Anyone who knows me knows I HATE tornadoes, and Samantha freaked out (just a little bit) too. Home alone, going to the basement, sirens going off.

While I'm on the phone, Eric's making dinner, and I hear Turner cry. Eric says Turner broke his piggy bank. (This bank - it's a bear holding a honey pot, and I think actually belongs to Rosalind - has become Turner's "lovey" lately. He calls it "Puppy." It's hard and not cuddly, big and unweildy, but Turner insists on sleeping with him.) Fortunately, it was a pretty clean break and fixable, but Turner was pretty upset. He kept kissing it, holding both pieces, and saying, "I sorry," over and over again.

I'm still talking Samantha through the tornado warning. Asking her when her dad will get home, trying to find local (for her) news stations to see what they are saying. And then -

BANG!

Guthrie was playing on the exercise tower I got for my birthday. He was hanging by his legs off the bottom bar, swung backwards, and BOOM! cracked his head on ... something. I'm not sure if it was the bottom bar of the tower or a wooden block on the floor. He screamed and cried, but, you know, little boys bang their heads all the time, so I was still on the phone with Samantha, Eric was still trying to make dinner and comfort Turner with the broken "Puppy." Guthrie climbed into my lap, and then we found the blood.

Oh, the blood.

I've never before seen that much blood come from one of my children, and I hope to never see it again.

I told Samantha I had to go, slipped on my shoes, and we took off for the ER. Eric was in a panic. There was SO. MUCH. BLOOD. We had a wet towel on Guthrie's head, but by the time we got to the ER I had blood all over me (and my purse and my cell phone), and Guthrie's hair was pink. He was crying, more in fear than pain. Eric's crazy driving there and his sense of panic probably didn't help much.

And then, 5 hours later, we left the ER, Guthrie with 4 staples in his head. Yes, staples. The doctor (she was really, really awesome, and really helped keep Guthrie calm through it all) said staples are better than stitches because they are much faster. Guthrie thought it was all awful, and I'm not sure how much the topical painkiller did to ease the pain of his head BEING STAPLED. And the thought of taking those staples out of my son's head? Not looking forward to Friday when he gets them removed.

Today, things are more normal. We didn't get much sleep. Eric fixed "Puppy," and Turner was distraught he couldn't sleep with him, but Puppy sat right next to Turner on the bed, and that's how he fell asleep. Samantha survived the tornado warning without any problems. Stacia, my niece, has some kind of fracture in her wrist and can't work for a week.

It was after 10 p.m. when we got home from the hospital last night, so too late for any treat. But today, to make up for the horrible owies Guthrie had to endure, the decapitated piggy-bear-puppy bank, and the general chaos of the day, I did what needed to be done: We went to Cold Stone. YUM!

And how was your Sunday?

The Mystery Melon

Still never figured out exactly what it was. I swear the seeds I bought and planted were for a plain old cantaloupe.

This is what it looked like on the inside. It tasted, mostly, like cantaloupe. The kids really liked it. I, on the other hand, absolutely cannot stand cantaloupe (I adore watermelon, love honeydew, but can't stomach even a few bites of cantaloupe), and we waited until Samantha got here to try it, only to discover that she is apparently still allergic to melons (and bananas, for that matter, becuase she had a reaction to the bananas we cut off our tree too).

We have a few other melons growing - the watermelons just don't seem to want to do anything at all though. We caught another mouse (the livetrap rocks!) who was eating our tomatoes. We've gotten a TON of okra (more than we've been able to eat), blackeye peas, and we have a bunch of sunflowers, including one that is about 12 feet tall. Now I'm looking at what we can plant in the fall and thinking about getting ready for that.

With all the rain that we (finally) got, our front lawn looks like a jungle, and we have weeds in our backyard as tall as the boys. We're not the only ones, though, as until today there wasn't enough of a break in the rain to get out and cut it, so everyone's lawns look pretty bad. We needed the rain desperately, but I was starting to get worried that we weren't going to go to the beach or do any of the fun stuff we had planned with Samantha here. No worries - it's sunny right now, and the weekend should be nice and warm and sunny - we're off to the beach this weekend! Yeah!

Name That Melon!

Our game show for today is Name That Melon!

What I thought I had planted in the spot where this grew was cantaloupes. We do have cantaloupes growing - ate 2 of them yesterday, as a matter of fact, and you can see one in the picture behind this melon. This, however, does NOT seem to be a cantaloupe. It was dark green until a couple days ago, then turned yellow. It smells kind of like a cantaloupe, and we're going to cut it (and another one just like it) open later. It's about 4-5 pounds, 20 inches around. Anyone? Any clue? I'm calling it the mystery melon.

(Birthday pictures later.)

Bad Mommy! Bad!

We'd bought a bunch of limes since they were cheap, planned on making limeade and some other things. We finally realized they needed to be used, so Eric and Guthrie started squeezing. I asked him to keep some back so we would have lime juice to use in cooking, but the only bottle we had handy was an empty water bottle. Eric filled that up with lime juice, used the rest for yummy limeade.



Well, Turner's gotten creative and independent lately, and opened the fridge to get himself a drink. He saw the bottle, and I guess he thought it was water. I couldn't resist the opportunity and grabbed the camera, just as he took a big swig of straight lime juice.



I know, I know, it's cruel. Don't worry, I rewarded him with a little piece of dark chocolate after, and he seems to have forgiven me.

Homemade Yum!

Along with the gardening, we're trying to do other things as we can to cut down on our environmental impact, along with saving money and in many cases being healthier. The kids are picking up on this message of "let's do it ourselves." So when Guthrie asked us at Lowe's the other day if we could get the ice cream maker "and then we will never have to go to the ice cream shop to get ice cream again," well, we couldn't say no.

Today he told us he wanted ice cream sandwiches. Okay, easy enough - we'd made ice cream already and had some in the deep freeze, and then made chocolate peanut butter chip cookies. Slap some vanilla ice cream between two cookies, and there you go - ice cream sandwiches.

And then there's Turner, who wouldn't eat it like a sandwich. He had to have a spoon, and once he was done with the ice cream, he ate his cookies with the spoon too.

Okay, so not exactly a "green" food choice, and not really healthy, but we did it ourselves, and was it YUM!!!

Our lazy Sunday afternoon

We walked out this afternoon and looked at the outside of the bedroom window to see this:


As I have two young sons, they were of course fascinated by the lizard on the window. Which proceeded to be terribly frightened by the two tow-headed two-legged creatures which so desperately wanted to touch it that it jumped right onto Guthrie's head and now his back, only to hide under a table, where it was much easier to get to.

We spent the next 45 minutes or so watching it,

squealing with joy at it,

curious as to what exactly it was

whether it was going to get us,

and why it didn't understand our repeated explanations that we were, in fact, people, and not a predator going to get it, and why wouldn't it just let us give it a kiss or hold it for a minute,

before it finally got away.


And such is life with Guthrie, Turner, and our various and sundry lizards and other wildlife here in the Rio Grande Valley.