Magic Moments

This summer my brother got married in California. A California wedding was an awesome idea because they had a beautiful wedding and we got to see a beautiful state. Erik and his bride, drove out but the rest of us all flew out together. The plane ride was thankfully uneventful but maybe one of my favorite parts because seeing what everyone chose to watch on the place was so very tell tale of their typical personality. My mom tracked the flight the whole time. My dad went back and forth between jamming out to music and watching Fox News. Tom chose to watch Tommy Boy, my sister watched a movie and I watched a documentary on King Tut and a couple episodes of a property make-over show. It's not funny to anyone outside the family and maybe it's only funny to me because I love watching people's behavior. :) Anyway, the hotel was so lovely. The boys loved the pools and Cade and I loved getting up earlier than everyone else, stopping at the coffee shop for tea and donuts and e...

While we were at the cabin Tom called to say he heard an animal in our wall. This is common upstairs as we get squirrels in the wall and crawl spaces in our attic. It's really ridiculous and we've tried everything under the sun to get rid of them....owl statues on the roof, motion lights, repellent, poison, speakers with high frequencies...it's an old house problem and it's annoying. Tom caught a squirrel in a trap he set before we left for the summer, even though squirrels are really hard to trap. The problem was Tom set the trap and then FORGOT about it. So when our house started smelling and I was going insane cleaning to try to find the source, it was only then that Tom remembered he set the trap. I'll spare you the details. It was a horrific event. Tom wanted help cleaning it up but I handed him a bottle of bleach and told him I wasn't the one who forgot about the trap. Anyway, back to the noise in our wall. Tom said it sounded much bigger than a squirrel...

Right before we left for the summer we got two kittens. The boys (including Tom) had been talking about it for awhile and I kept saying, "NO!" However, I did tell Tom that in the event he decided to get a cat I wanted an orange tabby and it had to be a girl. He totally played a trick on me and I thought he had bought one for Mother's Day so I felt like it was inevitable and I needed to at least tell him what I wanted. Anyway, one Saturday Aiden told me Tom said we could just go look at cats. So we started looking. We went to several places and couldn't find one we wanted.  By this time the boys had their hearts set on bringing home a kitten THAT DAY. We decided to drive to Charleston because their shelter sounded more promising. They probably had a kitty we would like but we wouldn't be able to bring it home for several days. Anyway, we were 30 miles out of town and stopped for gas. Tom went in to pay and ran into the fiancée of someone who worked for him. In tr...

It's so hard to say that summer is over, but since school starts on Monday that really is the case. My blog has, once again, sat empty since May because of strep throat and because we were gone all summer long. The boys had strep throat 5 times each last spring. We'd never had strep throat before and then it just kept coming back. It was most unwelcome but it didn't seem to care that it was unwanted. I took the boys home to Iowa at the end of May for treatments with our Chiropractor and muscle tester. After 6 treatments we thought we had things under control and went back to West Virginia only to come down with strep throat AGAIN. It kills me to put my kids on antibiotics. Up until strep throat I could count the times they'd taken antibiotics collectively on one hand. After 5 rounds each of strep with no end in sight we unfortunately had to make the decision to take out their tonsils. I'm still anti-tonsillectomy but we live in an imperfect world and I had tried e...