Trying

I've been trying to write a new post. Trying very, very hard but it's been tough. I just have run out of things to say. Oh my gosh! I have nothing to say!

Hmph.

Actually I did start a new piece earlier this week, but it's still stuck in draft form since I haven't had the chance to finish it. I've been trying to get pictures together of the kids to post but I still need to get a picture of Bryce before I can do that. I've been meaning to take pictures of the puppies to show how big they've gotten. Haven't gotten to that either. There are a few things I have finished though. I have:

☺Picked up school supplies for all three kids except their backpacks (they will pick those out tomorrow.)

☺Taken the kids to their back-to-school night to meet their teachers, find their classrooms, and discover who is in their classes for this year.

☺Cleaned the house so that we could have a home visit from Brady's teacher(s) today. We had the opportunity to have visits from Belle and Bryce's teachers as well but it didn't work out.

☺Given the puppies a much needed bath.

☺Got to spend time with Hubby today (on his birthday!) when he got to stop in town for a couple of hours! It's very seldom that he gets to come by the house in the middle of the work week.

☺Went back tonight and picked up the living room, washed dishes and straightened bathrooms so that those rooms stay clean. For now.

☺Changed to my new purse that Hubby bought me on my birthday, over a week after he bought it.

☺I sewed an ear back on a stuffed dog and stitched a seam on a pillow for Bryce, things he's been impatiently waiting for me to do for months.

☺Enjoyed the trailer for the new Harry Potter movie that debuted yesterday and got the boys hyped up for the movie.

☺Picked out a new door knob for my bedroom door when mine broke and I feared I was going to eventually end up trapped in my own bedroom. Every time I shut my door, it got increasingly harder to open. I let Hubby install it this time.

I need to get a couple of pictures of my african violet now that the blooms have really opened up and practically exploded. I need to shoot my crepe myrtle, too, now that it has bloomed. Frost nipped it last year so late in the spring that it actually came back up from the roots and only produced two blooms the entire year. Two lousy, little blooms. I was excited to see that it's really produced well this year.

I also told Hubby that I want to get two more cats (female, please) and name them Bert and Ernie. Yes I know that it's bad to give male names to female pets but you know, it gets very old trying to keep an eye on Zeus to make sure that he's not sneaking around trying to mark something in the house. Two females are so much easier.

Hopefully in the next day or so I will have finished my picture-taking and will have another post. I promise not to find two new cats. I have enough on my plate. I think.

Thirty-One

There are days that seem like no matter how much you want there to be there are never enough hours in a day. I have too many of those days.

I did take the kids to the library as I had planned on Wednesday and signed each of them up for their very own library card. They were excited to know that they were each getting their own card but very disappointed to learn that they were staying in my purse until they get older. The boys each have their own wallets and Belle a purse but if you knew how many times that each of them had come up to me and ask "Mom have you seen my _____?" (insert appropriate piece here), then you know why they are staying in my purse until they get older. I don't want to have to search bedrooms over or pay $2 for every time they loose their card because they don't want to put them away as they are often told to do. Their disappointment gave way when they finally got to use their cards and get two books apiece. Now I'm trying to get them to actually read the books they checked out.

About six weeks ago I made the discovery that July 4th fell on a Friday. That meant my birthday also fell on a Friday. So I called Mom and told her of my discovery.

"Is that a hint?"

"That is a big, jumping up and down, waving my arms and screaming at the top of my lungs HINT." She found that very funny. Hubby and I manage to get very few date nights and didn't get the chance to have when I anniversary fell on Friday last year so what better day to have a date night? Mom more than babysat for Hubby and I to have a date night for my birthday. She stopped by on Thursday, waited while the kids packed and took them to her house so that I could have a night to myself Thursday night and date night on Friday night!

That's right. Yesterday I turned thirty-one. And I got to celebrate it by not having any responsibilites and having a date night.

I called Hubby the same day I had called Mom and let him know that I made arrangements to have the kids stay with her for my birthday. Two weeks ago, he informed his dispatcher that he wanted to be home by my birthday. Early on my birthday so that we could attempt to have a date night. And his dispatcher came through. Hubby called me yesterday morning at 5am to come and pick him up since he was almost to his terminal. I think 5am is early. Isn't it?

After coming in and getting a little bit of sleep, he and I got up and started our day. We stopped by, saw the kids so they could wish me a happy birthday and so I could cut the cake that Belle helped make for me. We left, went to a mall in the next town and did some shopping. We found a great sale at Children's Place and managed to pick up seven pieces of clothing for under $25! We picked up a few more pieces at JC Penney's and ended up with a couple of outfits for each kid to start school with. We stopped by Petsmart and petted some kitties, bought DVD+R's at Office Depot and found me a new purse at TJ Maxx. We came back to our hometown, had dinner and intended to catch The Dark Knight at the local theatre. Unfortunately our movie plans at the local theatre didn't work out the way we wanted so we drove back to the other town to see the movie. While it was a true Batman movie (and they are not really my favorites) it turned out to be an ok movie. It had some pretty good humor in it as well as suspense, but it isn't one that I'm going to let the kids watch anytime soon due to some of the graphics in it. (They'll get over it). I will admit that Heath Ledger is one of the reasons I chose to see this movie but I would like to think that I would've gone to see it regardless of his fate because I just loved to see his movies. Guess this is something I will never know for sure.

All in all, I had a pretty good birthday. I certainly don't feel older but I am much more sleepy than I was before it got here. Maybe it had something with getting up at 5am, staying up until after 2am and then getting up again only a few hours later. Maybe. At least that's what I'm blaming it on. Yeah. That's what I'm blaming it on.

Boring

I wish I could say that I've been busy and that it's been keeping me from blogging but that's not really the case. I really haven't had any good blogging material! I met up with Hubby at my parents house after the baby shower on Saturday. I adjusted a few things on Mom's computer while I was there, instructed her to run a couple of programs and we headed off to the house to keep up with the busy weekend. That included a trip to the grocery store because I had completely exhausted all of the groceries in my house. By the time I finished, the new Aerosmith Guitar Hero was in my cart. Hubby had been drooling over the idea of it ever since he heard that it was coming out. I spent most of Saturday evening and Sunday watching the back of his head and various colors roll across the tv screen. Sunday also seemed to be a blah day. All I really felt like doing was crying and reading. I had no real desire to do much of anything. Hubby was wonderful enough to put the kids to bed so that all I had to do was relax. I also mentioned here that I fell in love with Greg Iles while on vacation. I took the kids to the library one day last week and borrowed the book that I started while in Natchez and didn't get to finish. It was in my hands most of the weekend if I was sitting down.

I could not put it down. I finished it Sunday night.

Yesterday and today have had my neighbors nieces running in and out of our houses playing with Belle. It also brought me a visit both days from a good friend of mine who happened to be in town visiting her family. Kids have been running through this house like wildfire over the last two days. I finished mowing my yard yesterday (Hubby mowed my front yard Sunday afternoon) and also mowed a neighbors yard. Today I spent some time checking in on my neighbor after she had some tests ran yesterday and spent some time with her son and nephew. And got spit up on. Again. I swear that her son knows when I hold him because in all the times that I have held him he has spit up on me at least once except for one time. One. I'll gladly deal with a little bit of spit up if I can see him give that big grin and giggle. He is such a cutie.

Tomorrow I have been seriously considering taking the kids back to the library and getting them their own library cards. I have never gotten them one for no particular reason but now that they are older they are wanting to borrow more than one book at a time. So I have almost decided it would be in my best interest (and theirs) to sign them up for their own cards. Maybe tomorrow will bring a more interesting blog topic as well.

A Baby Shower

Today I attended a baby shower for Ladybird. It's been so long since I've gotten to see her that I jumped at the chance to go! I had a blast seeing her and her baby bump (wish I was that small when I was pregnant). She got so much cute stuff that the baby yearns returned just so that I could have some of the cool baby stuff that they have now! Where was all this stuff when I had little ones? They didn't have Boppy's when mine were little. And the little clothes were just darling! Oh the joys of babyhood. It was great to see you Ladybird! Don't stay away too long!

Recovering

We have finally returned from our vacation and are trying to settle back into our daily lives. I washed my last load of clothes that we brought back with us just a little bit ago. My next task is to go through and pick up everything that we dropped along the way when we came in. I have also been trying to go through and arrange my pictures so that when I got the opportunity I could post them.

Our trip down was fairly uneventful. We started out running 45 minutes later than we wanted to. Our first snag was stopping for coffee after 45 minutes just past the Tennessee line. Hubby and I both managed to land about 3 hours of sleep before getting up to start getting ready. We moved pretty swiftly through the rest of that area, Missouri bootheel, Northeast Arkansas. When we made it to West Memphis, Hubby just had to drive by Graceland and let the kids see the house of Elvis and the Lisa Marie, so that added a bit to our drive time. Not far into the state of Mississippi, we got hung up in a traffic accident. All lanes of traffic were closed so that a life flight could land to pick up a patient and leave again. We managed to come up at the very end on only sat about 20 minutes before our lanes got to move again. Unfortunately for the other side, we measured a three mile line of traffic from our stopping point to the end of traffic. We made the trip through Jackson without any problems, enjoying the sights (I love St. Dominic's Hospital) and laughing about street names (such as Fortification St.) We finally stopped at Hubby's step-dad's house for the day on Saturday about two. We left interstates to drive down two-lane country roads to find his home. The kids had a blast going for rides on his four-wheeler and fishing in his pond before finally crashing for the night.

Saturday morning we got up and prepared to make the drive to Biloxi. Hubby had brought his GPS to make sure we didn't have any problems getting to where we had to be. What he didn't expect was for that little computer to take us on a country drive. We were already in what felt like the middle of nowhere when it took us farther. We left two-lane country roads for chat rock roads that eventually gave way to gravel. Small gravel. Wide enough for one vehicle gravel. The kids were stumped that there were such a thing as gravel roads. I hadn't realized that they had never seen one before since Kentucky made a decision when the kids were little that all gravel roads were at the very least covered with chat rock. I couldn't believe it when we came across a sign that simple stated "Cattle Crossing." I have never in my life seen a cattle crossing sign and hated that my camera was in the trunk, having not anticipated the need to take a photo while taking the drive down. We finally made it to Biloxi about 2pm, just as a thunderstorm was about to start. We wasted a bit of time driving around while waiting for check in time for our hotel and waiting the rest of it out after we checked in. Again, I was mad at myself that my camera was still in the trunk as we made the drive through Gulfport, Biloxi and Ocean Springs. Finally we got to walk across the street to the beach.Some of those pictures are from Sunday afternoon and night and others from Monday morning. By the time we got to the beach on Sunday afternoon, the tide had already gone out for the night so the kids got to walk a good ways out before coming up to any really considerable amount of water. They spent a good bit of time looking for sand crabs, jelly fish, sting rays and fish. We did find three different baby sting rays that got left behind by the tide and died and then found a baby jelly fish that washed up the next morning with the tide. They were really excited by the whole thing.

I was really stunned by the amount of damage that we found from Katrina when we got to Biloxi. I think it was more of the amount of time since Katrina has passed and how much damage that they are still trying to recover from. The street our hotel was on was actually called Beach Street and is normally a four lane highway. It is currently a two lane highway as most of it is undergoing repaving. We also saw a lot of damage that I didn't get pictures of (camera was still in the darned trunk!). When we finally left Biloxi, our intentions were to visit a friend in Baton Rouge (who unfortunately had to go to work before we arrived so we missed him) so Hubby decided he would swing by New Orleans on our way up to Baton Rouge to see the damage left behind as well as how much had been cleaned up compared to Biloxi. In order to get to New Orleans from Biloxi we had to cross Lake Pontchartrain, a bridge that I had already mentioned I wasn't interested in crossing. When we changed our route through New Orleans, I had forgotten you had to cross that lake. We did not take the Causeway bridge across (thank goodness!) but took one of the smaller bridges across that had received damage from Katrina. We were about halfway across the bridge when Hubby mentioned to me where we were. So I took pictures of course. The first picture is of the bridge where the railing is still intact but workers have put up concrete barriers to be safe. The second picture is of the bridge where the railing was destroyed and had the barriers up. The third picture is of what I called a bridge band-aid, where it seems they rebuilt a section of the bridge that had been pretty damaged. I fussed at Hubby more than once about taking me across a bridge that had a band-aid on it. He's not going to live this one down.

We had barely gotten into N.O. when a pretty nice little storm hit. I did get a few pictures of some damage left, but from what we saw, they still had their fair share but not as much left as Biloxi.This was my first time in N.O. and I had to take pictures. I love the old buildings that are down there. And Hubby couldn't take me down there and not take me down Burbon street.
We chose not to go see the French Quarter (though I would've loved to). It was just a wet, icky day, was lightening, and we knew we had places to be so we just kind of ran through quickly. I would love the opportunity to go back to see the sites and take pictures while I'm there.

We finally made it to Hubby's grandmothers house in Natchez Mississippi around four on Monday. Hubby spent a good part of the week doing odd things for them like putting a seal around a door and replacing a water heater that went out while we were there. He also made a few trips to the store for various odds and ends, one of which was for sandwich stuffs for the kids to eat lunch. Belle made this particular trip with him and found packages of ribs in the coolers at the local Piggly Wiggly. After finding out from Hubby that she was actually looking at ribs, she kept peering at the package while he walked on down the aisle. She came running up to him and informed him, "Daddy, those ribs are pigs ribs!" I thought I had shared that with her at some point. Oops. On Friday, Hubby's aunt watched the kids so that Hubby and I could go out and take some pictures. Hubby and I lived here for the first year after we were married and I loved that it is a historical community. I say community because it is really too big to be a town but not big enough to be a city. They have a lot of antebellum homes (I really, really want one) as well as beautiful old buildings and churches. I love that some of the older homes still have old brick retaining walls as well as brick sidewalks. Natchez is located on the Mississippi River. In at least one of the pictures, while looking at the bridge over the river you will see Mississippi on the left side of the picture and Louisiana on the right side. The river photos without the bridge is the opposite of that. We took the kids to see fireworks on the 4th of July and sat up against the fence overlooking the bluff of the Mississippi. By the time we left on Saturday morning I was ready to be home to sleep in my own bed. We had to make three different stops on our way out of town before we could get going good. Along the way we stopped by old military Jefferson College and got a couple of photos. I love the old big oak trees that you have no trouble finding in the area. I couldn't find one I liked in Natchez that had swamp moss on it but found this one just as we entered the grounds to the college. The trip home usually takes us around 8-8 1/2 hours. Because we had to make our stops and we kept hearing "I need a bathroom" it actually took us twelve. Hearing "Are we in Kentucky yet?" is almost as bad as "Are we there yet?" The kids were excited as I pointed out the sign as we rolled back into Kentucky. That sign is located forty minutes from our driveway. It was a sight for sore eyes especially since it was already 11pm. We also knew that we had three little surprises waiting for us when we got there.We were afraid Sophie was going to have puppies before we returned (but I was hoping they'd hold out for when we got back). Unfortunately they had other plans. My neighbor called me Sunday morning to let me know that she found these three and that everyone was doing fine. The top one is a little boy (and already claimed by my neighbors mom) and the bottom two are girls. We will not be keeping either of the girls and I'm hoping finding a home for them will not be hard since they should only weigh around ten pounds based on mom and dad.

The only other happening that has gone on is that my flower was ready to burst open today.I have had this violet for three years now and this is the first bloom I've had since I bought it. I noticed the week before we left that it had buds on it (and if you look you can see at least one more in the picture) and I think there is actually about 6 on it now. I'm excited that I finally got it to bloom and haven't killed it. Yet.

I also returned home with around ten new books to read and found an author that I've become hooked on. I picked up Mortal Fear by Greg Iles while at Hubby's grandmothers house and could not put it down. I didn't get to finish it but it is on my list to get soon. Those are just something else to keep me busy over the next few weeks. I'll have to get them added to my book list soon.

Hopefully over the next couple of days things will settle down. The kids are still trying to adjust to being home, mostly by asking for things they got while at Memaws but don't normally get on a routine basis here. Like Cokes. And lots and lots of candy. And watching tv with no end in sight. I'm ready for this adjustment period to be over but I'm glad to be home.