Halloween Round Up

This was our first Halloween without Chey around, pretty creepy.  Our family loves holidays because it gives us a chance to throw another party (we'll celebrate practically anything!).  Mark loves coming up with strange costume ideas, but he is not too fond of carving pumpkins, he groans about it every year, we think it's because he hates the slime inside of them.

This year we tried to do a little pumpkin Skype-carving with Chey so we felt like she was hanging around with us while we carved pumpkins.  Not really the same as having her here, but it was fun to give it a try.

We missed her so much that we got out the photo albums and took a stroll down Halloween past.  Some years we get into costumes and it was fun to look back on all the weird and silly costumes we've painted and hot glued in the past.  So this one's for Chey, a fun look down memory lane!

Cheyenne...

Mitchell...

Connor...

and Chloe!

Ever since Mark went crazy putting together the legendary shower costume, folks have started to expect crazy original costumes from us each year, this is a lot of pressure!  You know things get out of hand when at the end of August your thinking about Halloween Costumes.  One day I'm gonna throw the whole town off by turning back to the dark side like we used to do and scaring people by going store bought!

Until then, kids and parents alike are having fun with a little costume madness.  This year Chloe went as the Travelosity Knome (she even trick-or-treated doors by telling all the candy-givers, "Thank you, and remember, never roam alone."   Connor's been begging to take scuba classes so he wanted to be a scuba diver this year.  Our cousin's Madi and Janelle came over and got into the fun too.  We painted a box up for Madi so she could be WALL-E, complete with a working fan that Mitchell had wired up inside her box so it would really work when you pushed a cardboard button (go figure), and Janelle found an old costume of Chloe's and wanted to be a pretty pirate.

Mitch, who may never outgrown Halloween, got out the duct tape and made his own costume...


It had working parts and somehow he got it to ooze smoke.

Halloween was fun but not the same without Chey home!  One of our favorites is a vintage picture of she and Mitch dressed as a Cowboy and an Indian.  Mitch looks totally cross-eyed in this photo!

Happy Halloween Chey!

Devious Drizzle Dodgers

A fall mystery presented itself.  The kids were coming home from school, fresh off the bus, with little or no signs of being wet from the rain...and not just any rain, Oregon rain.  It took me a few days of consecutive afternoon showers to notice they were arriving home bone dry.  I was originally trying to gauge how sorry to feel for my poor helpless kids, whom I was forcing to fend for themselves under the harsh aquatic assaults of mother nature each afternoon as they dashed the length of our driveway to the warm shelter of home.

They were so dry in fact, that I wondered if they'd smuggled umbrellas with them.  Umbrellas are the sort of sissy contraptions true Oregonians shun.  We leave them to the folks in California or back on the East Coast...and other places around the globe where apparently it's not fashionable to look like a drowned dog. (though I've seen a rash of these contraptions infecting southern Oregon as more people move here from the aforementioned fashion-conscious areas.)  The thought of my children using an umbrella, well, this was an alarming activity that would have to be purged as a bad habit, should it be true.

Fearing the worst, I asked them one day, just how they were threading the gauntlet of droplets and getting home so unscathed...turned out, it was not umbrellas after all.  Whew!  Though the truth may actually be worse.  No surprise, it's that my kids are major scheme-ers.

They explained to me that they are the last kids to be dropped off in the afternoon, and after they get dropped off, the bus driver waves them across the road and continues on down the highway until he reaches an old weigh station for trucks where he can turn the bus around and head back into town.  Seeing opportunity, Connor and Chloe convinced the driver to save himself some time and just head up our driveway and see if the giant bus could turn around on our circle.  He fell for it!!  And now, they get dropped off right at the front walkway every stinkin' day.

I waited to confirm their story and sat out on the porch the following day and waited.  Sure enough, these dang lazy kids are getting dropped off right in front of the house!  Bunch of country kids livin' it up like they're city folk!  Devious Devils.  Mystery solved.

Cooler Coasting??

My kids kill me.  They've got all kinds of outside toys: bikes, skateboards, scooters, and even gas powered go-karts.  So today, when I look outside to see what they're up to, this is what I see:

They're coasting around the driveway on our coolers!  And apparently there's more than one way to coast a cooler; lid up and lid down:

all depending upon the amount of danger you are seeking.  This goes to show; you give a kid a gift, they play with the box.  I think I'll be shopping in cardboard dumpsters for their Christmas gifts this year.  We'll both be thrilled!

All Pumped Up!

No more shots!

Chole got hooked up to her brand-new PINK insulin pump yesterday. The pink pumps are a brand-new color, hot off the presses. Chloe says the blue ones and the teal ones, and even the clear ones just wouldn't do. Whatever the color, we're all pretty excited.

Insulin pumps are simply AMAZING. I call them "A Mom in a Box" 'cause these little pager-looking things practically do everything I'm used to doing, including all the math and calculations on how much insulin to give. Ahhhhhhhh!

In the meantime, while we're getting doses dialed in, we're checking her bloodsugars every couple of hours throughout the day and night...which makes me thankful the days of having a newborn baby around the house are LONG GONE.  Ahhhhhhhhh...times two!

What Mothers Shouldn't Know

Mitchell’s scout troop just got back from climbing Mt. Thielsen and all the leaders seemed pretty impressed that Mitchell scaled to the top of it bare handed. They even showed me photos to prove it. I wasn’t really sure what all the hubbub was about really.  Admittedly, I thought he was a little too close to the edge in the photos and the rocky top of the mountain seemed a tad steep.  But Mitchell likes to hike and climb, no story there.

It wasn’t until last weekend, while driving to Sun River, that I looked out of the car window into the distance and saw a familiar shape on top of a large mountain.  I realized it was from the photos of Mitchell.  To my horror, the tip of the mountain top in the zoomed-in photo wasn't just a rocky craig jutting up from a gentle sloping mountain.  The entire mountain was one big ‘trip and you’re dead’ steep.

“Oh my gosh! He climbed to the top of that?!”

Everyone in the car looked at me with that, ‘well, duh!  Why’d you think everyone was making a big deal about it’  sort of look.

So, I guess that would also explain why everyone was so amused by the photo of Mitchell's cousin Bryce who is afraid of heights:

 

Isn’t there an official Scout Leaders Handbook??

And if there is, this sort of tale with its accompanying photographs should be the sort of subject found under the heading: “What Mothers Shouldn’t Know”.