The Evil Test

If this doesn't make you smile, then you are evil. No two ways about it.

shows how much he thinks of my cooking abilities!

I was in the mood for something warm for lunch, so I popped 2 freezer pizzas in the oven.

Ryan: Mom, what do I smell?
Me: Pizza, I'm making some for lunch.
Ryan: You know how?
Me: Uh, yeah, they're just freezer pizzas. And I know how to make real pizza, too.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Ryan!

Good Try, Honey

Tonight while my friend Gayelinn & I were carving pumpkins with our kids, Katy went outside, found this (I still have nasty looking tomato plants in my garden! Too much to do!), and brought it inside & put it on the table. She thought she had found a nice little Katy sized pumpkin to carve! And really, it IS quite orange, and roughly the same shape, with a green thing at the top just like a pumpkin. I totally understand why she thought it was one! Sweet little Goo just wanted to get in on the action!

She's a Workin' Dog!

Usually I am a wimp and drive the mile & a half (round trip - the school is around 3/4 of a mile from our house) to take David to & from school. But yesterday morning we ran errands for hours, and hadn't found time to walk the pup yet. So we walked to get David from school. And I had this brilliant idea on the way home!
Molly actually did really good! It took just a little while for everyone involved to figure things out (she wanted to walk on my right side, and if she ended up on my left side we'd get tangled up in her attempt to get back to my right.). And she did a really good job of not running too far ahead, until near the end when I guess she was anxious to get home. David only had to jump off to keep from falling 2 or 3 times! And boy, did he think it was fun!

more bragging about my smart boys

David's kindergarten class has a calendar with various homework projects/activities (like the jumping jacks...look down a few posts if you don't know what I'm talking about!), and we're supposed to pick 3 a week, and turn it in at the end of the month. I'm a little bad at remembering to do them each day, so we frequently end up doing 2 or 3 at a time. Today we picked one from last week - "Draw a picture with a pumpkin, a bat, and the moon in it." I sent him to the table, and this was what he did:

He started telling me about the phases of the moon, and that the blank part was a new moon. I told him that he should write it so other people would know that, and he only needed a little help (he wanted to spell new "noo," which makes perfect sense to me!). What 5 year old knows about the phases of the moon? I was really impressed!

Then I told him that I thought Miss Lindberg probably wanted a picture that just had those things in it rather than a picture of those things. So here was his second go at it:

So those are three clouds, two are raining and one has lightening. Down at the bottom is a scary metal spikey fence. The gray triangle is a haunted house, which he clearly forgot to put details on. Then he drew a circle (kinda) for the moon. I told him he should color it so we would know it was a moon. I expected yellow. Nope, he colored it gray, with white holes that I can only assume are craters! Smart boy!

On to boy #2! Ryan, who just turned 4 in July, is fast becoming an excellent reader! He doesn't really get the "sounding out" concept, and I am much, much quicker at supplying the word for him than I am for David. I figure I'd rather have him enjoy reading than stress him out about it. So he's taking a turn every night, and really loving it! And he's getting a large vocabulary of sight words, some of which surprise me. Tonight, for example, he read "black" and "blue" with no hesitation! And somewhere he learned the rule of an "e" at the end of a word making the vowel say its name (I've taught David, so maybe he was listening?), and kept having a really hard time not saying "some" with the "o" saying its name! Silly English language has so many exceptions! Anyhow, I have been having him read a different book every night, and not ones that we've read recently, and he is doing great! I'm so proud of him!

Showing our House Tonight!

We have people coming to see the house tonight between 5 & 7! That means I have 3.5 hours to prepare. And naughty little Katy hasn't taken a nap today (She seems to think that napping is optional once you get to 16.5 months! Not so!), so I'm going to now go put her down and work hard! Please, please, please pray for us, cross your fingers, or whatever else you think might help!

And he's off!

The big adventure of our relocation has started! This afternoon Dan left for Portland! He prefers to do long drives in two days, and I prefer to just get them over with in one. So since I'm not going with him, we didn't have to fight about it this time! We looked for cheap hotels in Boise (5.5 of 12 hours away, so pretty close to half), and couldn't find anything less than $70 or so. So we decided to spend a little more and get him something nice. We found one for $99 that had great reviews, so we splurged on it for him. It looks well worth it! He sent me these pictures a few minutes ago. I sure wish I was there with him!



So here, I pretty much took the rest of the day "off." I was still a mommy, I just wasn't much of a maid. I figure I deserve a little down time before returning to the business of cleaning & packing! There sure is plenty to do around here! If only these kids would stop creating laundry & dishes & various other messes, I'd have more time to get to the big stuff. Well, I'm headed to bed now, a little earlier than usual (there's no Danny Love here to spend time with!), so hopefully I wake up tomorrow totally energized and motivated to work hard! I can do it!

What's better than having a rocket?

Having TWO rockets!

This morning Ryan showed me that he was building a piano - he really meant a keyboard - basically by making lots of stacks of blocks and putting them next to each other. Then this afternoon he came upstairs and told me he wasn't building a piano anymore. I asked what he was building now, and he said I had to guess. Knowing Ryan, and having heard the sound effects he made while coming up the stairs, I guessed a rocket. He said "Nope!" I thought for sure I was right, so that threw me for a sec. Then I asked what he was building, and he showed me and announced "TWO rockets!" Silly Ryan.

Jumping Jacks?

One of David's homework assignments included doing 10 jumping jacks. Apparently we have the general idea down, but not the specifics. You can hear Ryan in the background ask if those are jumping jacks, so I say "kind of." It's really funny to watch!

Oh, and please excuse the mess. Packing has been taking a lot of my time & all of my energy lately!

She just wanted a story!

Bedtime is always an exciting adventure in our house, thanks to the three kids in one bedroom (for only 3 more weeks!). Sometimes it goes off without a hitch, but usually there is some sort of drama. Tonight Katy went to bed around 7:45, and the boys almost an hour later. She didn't wake up when I tucked them in and sang to them, but she did wake up about 5 minutes later. I didn't hear the boys making noise, so it may or may not be their fault. So I figured it'd be better to let the boys get to sleep before having her rejoin the party, so she cuddled with me while I watched TV. I finally put her back in bed around 9:30 I would guess (it was so nice to cuddle!), and she cried a bit, then was quiet.

About 15 minutes later she started crying again! I was in the office packing up books, and went upstairs planning on giving her some tylenol - her molars are bulging in all 4 spots, so any time she's overly difficult I assume teething pain. But when I went into the bedroom I found her standing in her crib, holding the 2 books that I'd left in her bed. I took them and put them on the ground, then reached for her. She started saying something that I assume was Katyish for "book," and reaching for where I had put them! I said "You want me to read you those books?" And she said "yes!"

So I brought her out to the living room, and she nestled into my lap and listened very nicely to the stories. Then I told her it was time to go back to her bed, and she took the books and walked down the hall to her room! She got back in her bed very nicely, instructing me to cover her with her blanky, hand her her lovies, and turn on her music. That was 10 minutes ago, and she hasn't cried at all! She just wanted me to read those books to her! And once I had, she was ready to go to sleep! How cute is that?

P-TOWN

OK, so, this is the official announcement I guess. We have made the decision that we will be going to Portland.

I have officially accepted a position there as a Relationship Manager at the branch that will be opening. It a good job, somewhat similar to what I do now, but less involved on the trading front. It is my job to make sure that my clients are happy with ETFC, and getting everything they can out of the company. I am really exited to go, since there are alot more things to do there. Especially along the front of bagpipes...which I have missed alot in the 10 years I have been in Utah. I will actually be emailing the Pipe Major of the Portland Metro Pipe band right after this actually....

Sweet, sweet boys

David and Ryan are 20 months apart. That means that for 4 months every year (between July 16th & November 17th), their ages are only 1 year apart - like right now, when they're 4 & 5. For anyone who has the stamina for 2 that close together, most of the time I highly recommend it! They are interested in the same things most of the time, and really like playing together! They do fight quite often, though, and intentionally bother each other way more often than I would like. But just when I start thinking that maybe they don't like each other after all, they show me how much they really, really love each other.

I just dropped David off at Kindergarten half an hour ago, then came home & put Katy down for a nap. I had heated the oven to make my lunch (frozen chicken fingers - yum!), and thought it would be fun to make some cookies while the oven was hot. We still have some cookie dough from last time it was a coupon deal at Costco, so I pulled that out to show Ryan. I thought it'd be a nice, fun thing for just the two of us. I told him that I wanted 3, and would he like 1, 2, or 3? He, of course, said 3. Then he asked if we were going to make some for David. I hadn't planned on it, but Ryan said that he wanted to, and that David would like 3 as well! Sweet little Ryan!

This was only the most recent of many similar experiences. A week or so ago I was going through David's backpack after school, and found half of a brownie wrapped in a napkin. I said "Oh, you had a brownie today?" assuming he just hadn't finished in time, and would eat it at home. Nope! He broke his brownie in half to bring half of it home to Ryan! One of them frequently comes upstairs to get snacks for both of them while they're playing or something, and last spring when David played baseball he always asked for another treat for his brother. But this time his brother wasn't even around! And he didn't just get a second one - he denied himself half of his own brownie for a brother that wasn't even there to know he was missing out! So sweet!

Oh, and a totally different show of sweetness from David occurred a few days ago. First of all, last week sometime I decided we should go to the park, then went to go get my shoes. Katy was all ready to go, so she went, all by herself! Then a couple days later I was downstairs organizing the playroom. The kids kept trying to play with the toys I was trying to go through, so I sent them all outside to the backyard. A little while later Dan called from upstairs to find out if Katy had come back down to me (she had). I kept on cleaning, he kept on doing whatever he was doing. Then about 10-15 minutes later we found out that David was out looking for Katy! He knew she left the backyard & was worried about her, and started searching. He even walked down to the playground to see if she was there! I just about cried when I found out! My sweet little 5 year old loves his baby sister so much that he stopped playing to find her, all on his own!

My kids drive me crazy on a regular basis, and I'm certainly not trying to say my kids are always sweet little angels. They most definitely are NOT! But every now and then they show a little glimpse of how caring & loving they can be, and it just melts my heart. I sure love them!

This just keeps dragging on!

Okay, so I forget who I've told what to in regards to this whole Portland thing, so I'm just going to lay it all out here.

Last Wednesday Dan was offered the job. He asked about relocation costs, and the manager said he'd get back to him. Dan was told a short while later that they don't do that for his position. So we agonized over the decision for a couple days, and told Parker (his manager if he takes the job) that he really wants to take the job, but that we just can't spend the money to move ourselves out there. Parker said he really wanted Dan, so he'd try and work it out. At first he said he'd get back to him by the end of the day (that was LAST Friday), then as it came to the end of the day he said to sit tight, that he was still working on it.

So over last weekend we became very comfortable with the idea that it was out of our hands. If they decided they want Dan badly enough to pay a little bit towards relocation expenses (we were hoping at least $2000), then we would make the move. If they really wouldn't do it, we would stay here and be fine with that. I really felt okay with whatever happened.

The exact days of the past week have blurred together, but at some point in the last couple days Parker told Dan that he received "preliminary approval" for a $2500 "signing bonus." Sounds awesome! Only problem is, bonuses are taxed at 45%, so we wouldn't see much more than half of that until tax time. But still, I would've gladly taken it. Dan told him that we were hoping for $2000 net, and Parker said he'd see what he can do. Later that day (I'm wanting to say Wednesday, but I'm not sure...) he told Dan he was "hashing out the details." That sounds promising!

So all this time we thought Dan would need to be in Seattle on Monday for training. Then yesterday Parker said that he would give Dan at least 1 week (possibly 2, but I'm not holding my breath for that) of paid time off before either going to Georgia next Monday for training, or just starting in Portland the next Monday. So it was looking like not only were they going to pay some relocation expenses, they were going to throw in a free week off so Dan could help get the house ready for moving!

But now, here it is Friday night, and we still know NOTHING! Apparently today Parker's manager and who knows who else were in some kind of "closed door meeting" (whatever that means...) about it! And still no decision! Hello, you're spending way more company resources on this than you would have if you'd just said "Yes, we'll pay for your U-Haul & gas." I've been saying that this is ridiculous for a week plus, but I have no better word for the situation!

So right now, I don't know what the hold up is. I'm getting everything from Dan, who is getting it from Parker, who has said that he is getting the run around, and he's the Branch Manager for crying out loud! So, I don't know if they are debating whether to do it at all, or if they're pretty sure they're going to but just can't decide on an amount. I know they're worried about setting a precedence of paying relocation costs, but I don't see what the big deal is. If somebody is worth more to you, you pay more. You are under no obligation to do it again. So I think that's a silly argument. If they're just worried about the amount, at least tell us that it's a for sure that we'll get something!

So, at this point, Dan is still on the Platinum (the team he's on now) payroll. So he still has to go to work on Monday, unless something happens over the weekend I suppose (I don't see what will make the decision happen over the weekend if they couldn't even do it in a meeting today!). So instead of getting a week or two off to help pack & spiff up the house, and knowing he's getting X amount of a signing bonus, we're still in this awful limbo! We don't know where we will be living in a couple weeks! Part of me wants to say that it isn't worth all this hassle & stress, but I want to move to Portland so badly!