I'll catch up next year!!

By the way, just in case you've been thinking to yourself, "gee, is Cristyn dead?" the answer is Yes, I was. There's a really nasty two-week flu going around, and of course I caught it a few days after Halloween (note to self, while you're at the clinic getting flu shots for the kids, maybe you should get one yourself, too?) And then, just when I was finally feeling better, my kids brought home a gift from their school: strep throat. Which we all caught one at a time and one after another just to stretch out mom's misery for as long as was humanly possible!!! But we are all well again at long last (although the top two octaves of my singing voice are still gone...but if you've ever heard me sing you know this is no great loss.) Christmas cards are finally on their way out; this was supposed to happen before Thanksgiving since we moved and no one has our new address, but oh well. Perhaps you will receive a New Year's greeting from us instead! Merry Christmas!! We love you!

To the North Pole and back

Uncle G's Christmas present to our family this year was tickets on the Polar Express (known locally as the Lebanon-Mason Railroad during the other eleven months of the year!) The kids were very excited to go visit Santa's workshop at the North Pole, relieved to learn that they did not have to walk on top of the train in the snow, and just a little disappointed to discover that the hot chocolate servers didn't dance on the ceiling. But the juggling elves, a picture with Santa, and more than a few cookies made the trip worthwhile. We love Uncle G!!!!

And just in case you're ever in our corner of the universe, Lebanon Ohio is a really cute little town if you're into antiques and historical markers! There's a hotel where Henry Clay stayed and all kinds of cool stuff. Who knew? Just goes to show, you don't need to travel across the country or across the world to find new stuff to see and learn. (Of course, the chocolate factory across the street from the train station was our favorite attraction, but hey, we did look at the historical stuff...)

Fall Fling

A few pics of the kids in the yard. Once again, they were supposedly helping me rake leaves, but spent more time playing in the leaf piles than bagging them. So, of course, I spent more time taking pictures than making my yard presentable! Oh, well! It'll snow soon, and then no one will be able to see all the leaves in my yard!

And yes, Jackson DOES look like he's smacking his lips in anticipation of a tasty mouthful of pumpkin in the group picture...but after one big bite he decided he didn't like raw pumpkin so much after all.

Crazy Cooperness

Grant and Breanne have been singing a version of "who let the dogs out" in their music class at school...it's almost unrecognizable as a rock/rap song when sung by sweet little voices and punctuated with animal sound effects (who let the sheep out? baa, baa baa baa!!!). I have to laugh every time I hear them because it reminds me of the Sesame Street version of "Rebel Yell" which involved a foam letter L sporting a mohawk and singing, "I'm a Rebel L, I go La La La..." Billy Idol would be rolling in his grave if he had one.

Anyway, the next step was inevitable, since Lauryn cheerfully repeats everything her idols bring home from school...

Breanne's homework

Breanne was assigned to cut out labels around the house that she could "read." (Her kindergarten class is working on sight words.) So I gave her a pair of safety scissors and set her loose on our junk mail and pantry. It was very interesting to see what logos were familiar to her! Especially the one in the bottom left hand corner...Do I really talk about stamping that much?

Kidpile

This is how the kids "helped" me clean up the windstorm debris in the front yard: I raked the leaves into piles, and the minis jumped in them. (Although I do have to admit that Grant and Breanne did a great job of picking up the leaf piles and bagging them after they were done playing!)
Transcript for those of you who don't speak "mini-ese":
Lauryn: "Hop in, Gant! Hop in, Gant!"
Grant: "ha ha ha! That was fun!"
Breanne: "Hello! Hello!"
Lauryn: "Gant! Here you go here you go here you go! I'm in the pile, Mommy, I'm in the pile!!"
Breanne: "Bury me! Bury me!"
Jackson sat on a blanket and quietly munched a luncheon of leaves while I videoed the big kids. He's also pretty good at catching spiders, but I almost always catch him before he eats too many of the legs. That boy is going to have a stomach of steel!! Guess he's practicing for eating unique ethnic foods on his mission!

Afflicting the Comfortable

So, I was talking to my mom last Saturday, and she asked if we were happy to be out of Texas with Hurricane Ike wreaking havoc on our old stomping grounds. Moving is usually an exciting adventure for me, but leaving our beloved College Station was my hardest relocation to date!! However, I DID admit to not being terribly sad about being safe and snug here in Ohio while chaos reigns in Texas. ...Famous Last Words... On Sunday central Ohio was slammed with a crazy windstorm (not a tornado, I'm told, since there was no rotation involved) strong enough to tear a 68-foot tall and 6-foot diameter walnut tree out by its roots in our neighbor's yard and hurl the giant wooden javelin through their brick house. Which would seem like a bizarre fluke of nature, if only the exact same thing hadn't happened this May to another neighbor! (Except that in the May storm, it was an 85-foot tall tree, and it wasn't thrown through the house, it fell down and crashed through the roof.)
We were at church when the storm hit; and I do remember noting that the lights seemed to be flickering, but I was too busy managing the nursery monsters to give the situation much thought. It wasn't until one of the windows in the nursery suddenly blasted out of its frame and shot across the room that I paid any attention to the weather. And then I was too busy returning all 19 of my little ankle biters to their parents and wrangling my own four kids out to the car to think too much about what was going on. But as I drove home and finally started to look around at the destruction in my neighbors' yards, my heart rate increased with every passing block...WHAT was I going to find at our house??!!
Blessedly, our house did not sustain any damage this time around. (Although Grant would disagree with that assessment; his pop-up nylon soccer goals blew across the yard, snagged on a tree, and were ripped to shreds by the wind-frenzied branches.) PHEW!! We're still completing repairs from the three trees that fell on and damaged our house in the May storm, and Aaron just left for SOS, so I'd be handling this round on my own! But as it turns out, all I have to do this time is wipe my neighbors' tears and clean up the mess in our yard. Grant and Breanne are counting their riches with glee--they earn 25 cents for filling a yard bag with leaves or sticks, so this storm was a windfall for them (literally!) We did have 52 hours without power, which was a bit of an adventure, but the kids enjoyed "camping" in the house (apparently their definition of camping includes taking cold sponge baths, eating ravioli out of the can, and playing outside all day.) It was frustrating not being able to do laundry, shower, cook (or even open the refrigerator), check email, watch the news, etc...but it was also very liberating to be totally "unplugged" for a few days!
Some random thoughts for future emergencies... I knew where the Coleman camp stove was stored, but not the propane tanks, so that was not super useful. Luckily my kids like cold ravioli. We had enough water storage for drinking, but not nearly enough for washing, so thank goodness for paper plates. My cell phone was a life saver since all the landlines were down, but only until the battery ran out. Only way to charge it with the power out was to plug it into the car and drive around, but I only had a quarter tank of gas and the gas stations were closed for 48 hours after the storm, so I decided to take my chances with no phone rather than waste the gas. And we were very lucky it didn't rain...the sump pump in our basement runs on electricity, so had the power failure been accompanied by heavy rain we'd have been sunk. Better get an emergency generator for that.
Okay, so much for my whining. Time to go comfort the truly afflicted. About a third of our ward families are still without power and water, so I count myself among the fortunate. And I guess I'm still grateful to be in Ohio, freak storms and all, although my friends in Texas are frequently in my prayers.
PS, If you've been thinking this week that I dropped into a black hole or something because you haven't heard from me, you were almost right. I'll be in touch again as soon as life gets back to normal around here!

Grant the newscaster

We taped the kids in the backyard enjoying the new hammock (while Mom enjoys the new camera!) My favorite part of this clip is Grant's little wink at the end. What a cheeseball!