Friday, December 28, 2007

After Christmas

We've had a wonderful week of vacation, with no school at all. The boys have mainly been downstairs, playing with their new Bionicles and Transformers. Anna has been playing daily with an adorable tea set from Aunt Melinda and Uncle Dan. The boys got several new books, including a different Star Wars cookbook ("Darth Malt") and a visual dictionary of all 6 episodes. That last one has been pored over by all the boys at one time or another! A while ago I found a $1.00 Star Wars coloring book at Books-A-million, in their bargain stack, which I gave to Caleb. It's turn came yesterday, although the boys didn't color much in it. Instead, they traced the pictures onto paper, presumably to color those. How thrifty! All I know is that this activity has also kept them all very quiet, LOL.

Nathan starts Upward basketball next Thursday, so I have been making him (and everyone else) go outside and practice basketball, as well as run laps for awhile each afternoon. Conditioning, you know.

We had our house appraised yesterday, and I'm glad that's over! We got it as clean as possible, and the man was supposed to come between 10:30 and 11:00. He finally got here right around 11:00, and I was so worried that I wasn't going to be able to keep the house clean any longer! The boys were watching Jonathan's new Lone Ranger video (from the $1 bins at Target, woohoo!), but I knew that was going to soon be over. And I was sort of following around after Anna, picking up whatever she got out. This appraisal is for us to refinance to a 30 year loan, and we're going to need it, since I don't see how we could ever put the house on the market and try to show it with all these kids, LOL.

Last night we ate dinner at Chick-Fil-A and headed over to Walmart for a few things. While there, Bob spotted at $19 mini-trampoline, so we bought that. I guess it's a late Christmas gift, but we figured they could bounce around in the basement and work off excess energy on rainy days. As a funny aside, my parents have a mini-trampoline as well, and this is how the boys refer to them, as in: "Which Grandma and Grandpa are you talking about?" "The ones with the trampoline in the basement." On some visits, the trampoline isn't even out, so you'd think that wouldn't be the thing they remember most, but who knows how their little minds work. Anyhow, now we have one of our own.

As for me, I am spending my post-Christmas vacation up to my ears in reptiles (well, now that I can let the house go again, LOL). I would just like to say that before I started this research, I thought I didn't care much for reptiles. Now I know that I thoroughly despise them, and that they are totally and completely nasty, with the possible exception of geckoes, which are small and fairly cute, as far as reptiles go (not far, LOL). Yuck. Every single book I got out of the library has tons of pictures of these horrible creatures killing their victims in all sorts of gruesome ways, I guess because the experts tell us that in order to keep kids' attention nowdays, things have to be gross or something. And now I am seeing them when I close my eyes, and dreaming of them at night. Ewwwww! I will be so very glad when my 2 teaching weeks are over!!

2 comments:

Michele said...

That's so funny about the kids telling the grandparents apart. Our kids do the same -- Tim's parents are the pillow fight ones -- as this has become the thing they must do with our kids. It started because they bring a whole suitcase of pillows whenever they visit. My mom is the "pinch-to-grow-an-inch" grandma. In fact, when she left today, Thomas had to make sure that grandma would give him one more pinch-to-grow-in-inch. They remember my dad as he was the one that called them -- Buster, Queeny and Little Buster. It's so nice they even remember that.

Jenna said...

Our kids do the same thing with the grandparent thing... Ethan (4) says are we going to the "white mamaw" or the "black mamaw"?... Brian's mom has black hair and my mom has white. Its hilarious!