Our Week Without Nathan

We pick up Nathan tomorrow at WSS. We've missed having him around--the family dynamic is different when he's not here. I will say that we've gotten a lot accomplished without him here, although that is mainly because we didn't do school this week.

Monday I worked in our playroom (also known as our formal living room, LOL, but since we have no furniture in there, only toys, it is truly just a playroom). I was able to weed out a lot of junky old stuff. Then I moved a bunch of Little People and one town thing into the family room, switching that stuff for the baby toys that were in a basket in there. Anna never plays with them anymore, but she doesn't like to play in the playroom unless someone is in there with her. So she has been enjoying the Little People in the family room, and it's fun to watch her discover how to push the little cars through the garage door and down the ramp of the car wash.

Tuesday I spent a great deal of time backing up a year's worth of digital pictures on the computer onto a CD. Now I can rest assured that all my precious pictures, including ones of the births of 2 children, won't be lost forever should something happen to our computer! Then Wednesday I made a CD with pictures I wanted to have printed off, and we took that to Sams.

While we waited for those to be ready, we ran over to Walmart and had pictures taken of Caleb and Jonathan. The last time we have individual pictures taken of the boys, Jonathan was 16 months, the same age Anna is now! I thought it was time, at least for Caleb and Jonathan, since they have changed a lot in 3 years. The photographer had a heavy accent, and he really just wasn't all that into getting big smiles from the boys. You know how the good kiddie photographers have a big bag of tricks involving trills, feathers, stuffed animals, etc.? Well, this guy had no tricks. He just stood by the camera and said "Say 'stinky feet'", which since he had an accent, was pretty undecipherable, especially to Caleb and Jonathan. They just looked blankly at him while I hopped around behind him trying to get them to smile. Finally he miraculously hit upon "Say 'Chuck E. Cheese'", which made Caleb's face light up with a huge smile and Jonathan look pleasant because, unbeknowst to him, Bob actually was taking the boys to Chuck E. Cheese that night, as a special treat while Nathan was gone, and Caleb and Jonathan had been EAGERLY anticipating the outing. Caleb did great for his individual pictures too, while Jonathan put back on the solemn formal face he usually has for pictures. You could tell he was trying really hard to smile in a serious way, but he has such a beautiful spontaneous smile, and that just wasn't there on Wednesday. Oh well.

After all that, we went back to Sams to pick up our 147 pictures. After lunch I got busy sorting them into piles for the boys' scrapbooks. I keep an individual scrapbook for each boy, and I add 4 pages each year after their birthday for the previous year. This year I never did Luke's, Jonathan's, or Nathan's, and I need to start one for Anna. Since I am totally behind on our family scrapbooks, this is the one thing I feel like I need to keep up on, so I am a little anal about it, LOL. The thing about digital pictures is that I never get around to having them printed off, so I don't have the pictures I need to do the scrapbooks. Well, not anymore. I sorted everything out and then cropped all of Jonathan's pictures. I was able to finish his pages last night after the kids went to bed, so I really felt satisfactorily accomplished. Now on to Luke's.

Today the big project was starting on the storage room in the basement. For the past 2 years or so, I've just sort of thrown boxes in there, and if I've needed anything out of a box already int here, I would just take it into the middle of the floor, root around in it, and then leave it. How nice! So the room was pretty much a dump of clutter with Lincoln Logs and plastic army men scattered strategically all around the boxes. After lunch the boys went down and cleaned up the army men and Lincoln logs, and then we got started sorting shoes into different boxes by size (we now have 3 large boxes filled with boys' shoes. I should start a store, LOL), and going through boxes. Unfortunately because of time constraints, I couldn't really go through all the boxes very thoroughly, but I was able to combine some boxes. We also turned around our old entertainment center, which was facing the wall, I think to protect the glass doors on it. I decided we might as well put all our old video tapes, including old home videos, on the shelves of this entertainment center. Luke and Caleb were very helpful in putting 3 boxes of old tapes onto the shelves, which cleared out a lot of room. Someday I will really go through these and donate or toss lots of them (NOT the home ones, obviously, LOL), but for right now, it was good to get them out of the middle of the floor. We also threw away several empty boxes for things we no longer own, like the light Anna broke, and an old DVD player. It feels so great to get rid of junk! Grace cooperated very nicely by taking a 3 hour nap, but eventually she did have to be fed, so the rest will have to be left for another day.

We were supposed to go swimming with friends this morning, and so probably none of the storage room cleaning would have been accomplished. Unfortunately, Anna had a fever last night, and she woke up several times in the middle of the night burning up. I had to call our friends this morning and cancel. Today her fever has stayed down so far, but she has been a major El Crabbo all day long, so she is definitely not feeling well. Hopefully she will feel better tomorrow, since that is when we have to drive up to WSS. Please be praying!