Halloween 2009

Happy Halloween!
This year, our Halloween Package Deal included one stinky, kneiving, exuberant skunk, a puffy, zealous, nerd-eating marshmallow, and a patient, industrious, SUPER grandma. We sure had a fun time.

Friday night, we went to "Malloween." Yup...the mall shops put on a trick-or-treating event for the kids in town. I had NO IDEA how popular it was. Mike was working, so Mom and I piled the kiddos in the van and took off. As we were driving away, my neighbor, who has twins, laughed and told us we were nuts to go to the mall. Why? I thought. It's warm in there, and we can practice trick-or-treating.

WHOA. It was UBER-CROWDED. Like cheese curd line, state-fair crowded! There were literally thousands of people there, ushering little goblins, witches, faries, and mysteriously-clad kiddos from one store to another to get free dum dums. (I noticed a blatant absence of chocolate. It was one of those deals where "trick or treat" gets you either a tiny tootsie roll, a piece of gum, or if you're lucky, a sucker...)

The kids were great. Mary stayed in the stroller after her first piece of candy...a dum dum...her favorite...and Julia walked because, frankly, she didn't fit in the stroller in her marshmallow suit.

My skunk and marshmallow, ready for action!

Little miss skunk waits in line for her first piece of glory. The big white blob next door is Miss Marshmallow.

The girls lasted about 30 minutes of Mall O Ween. Then, miss Marshmallow was overheating and we moved on to supper at a mall restaurant.

An evil grin: I stole mommy's wallet!!!! Ha!

ANOTHER evil grin: I am the comander of this ship! Ha!

Julia is in heaven....Grandma Beth actually put money into the ride. Mommy NEVER does that. The girls didn't even know that the mall spaceship moved. Now they do. Crap. I will never carry quarters again.

Home, after a bath, reading stories with g-ma. mary is evilly grinning again. This time, I don't know what she's up to.

Halloween! Papa was master-carver. I harvested pumpkin seeds. Julia helped. Mary "helped."

Julia was grumpy because the pumpkin was making her itchy. She started chucking pumpkin guts around the kitchen and got a stern look from mommy. That's when grandma took the picture. This is the stern look that I got in return for the one I gave.

Evil vampire teeth!

Thar she blows! Julia in her SMarshmallow suit. This year, we asked her what she wanted to be for halloween. We offered typical things: a princess, tinkerbell, a fairy, a witch, etc. Nope. Without question, she wanted to be a "smarshmallow." All righty, then. Papa went to the fabric store and bought out their white fleece and six bags of polyester fiber fill. Let's just say she didn't get cold that night.

A picture with grandma!

My skunk. Notice the dum dum in her hand. She spent the entire evening eating suckers. Mary was actually able to carry her candy bag AND eat a sucker at the same time! What skill!

Family picture. That's the rest of us there behind that marshmallow-child.

Ready for action!

Aidan and Sawyer, our neighbor's twin boys. They were our first trick-or-treaters.

Trick or treat!!!

Hacking

I was a neurotic mother this fall season. I was on a mission: the kids will NOT get this H1N1 flu. I made everyone wash their hands. A LOT. I pulled J out of daycare. We avoided the playplace at McDonald's. I used the anti-bacterial cart wipes at the grocery store. We ate vegetables. I bought five bottles of hand sanitizer and put them all over the house, in the cars, and even at church.

Well, so far, my mission has been successful....sort of. Right now, the kids are perfectly healthy, probably eating candy, and waiting to take their prophylactic doses of Tamiflu. Why the tamiflu? Because their MOTHER is at home, sick with the flu. And pneumonia. I even have an x-ray to prove it. Drat.

It started last week with a little wheezing for three days. I have asthma, so I blamed that. Except that I was puffing on my inhalers like a drug addict. One night, I had a fever and a few chillls. That was it. The next day, though, my lungs grew angry. Breathing is not something to be taken for granted. I started taking steroids for the wheezing, and soon it turned to hacking. When I called Mom yesterday (in the middle of her clinic) asking for antibiotics (I had a sinking feeling that something was growing down in my chest because I could hear it rattling in there), she ordered me to go to the ER. I called her from the ER and said I had pneunomia. Little did I know that she had already dropped EVERYTHING at work and drove up here with Dad, picked up the kids, and told me to go to bed.

My mother loves me.

Thanks, Mom. And thanks, Dad. I hope the kids aren't driving you too crazy and you are getting something done today. Don't forget: television is a wonderful invention....

PS: YES, I have halloween pics of our brood...and they will get uploaded eventually. Now, it is naptime. See ya.

Happy Reformation Day

To all my lutheran friends out there: Happy Reformation Day. Yes, today is the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther took a hammer and nails down to the cathedral in Nuremberg and pounded his opinion right into the church door. What a guy. He didn't bother to take the 95 Theses to a committee for revision so that they could get watered down and lost in a sea of meetings, he didn't force his ideas down folks' thorats either...nope. We need more people like that in this day and age.

In church today, Mike was running around like a chicken with his head cut off. Our organist/music director is leaving, so he was in charge of the music that included handbells, a choir, and some brass instruments. Things were going so well....everybody showed up, the music sounded great, and our kids were being QUIET. It was the middle of the sermon before Mike and I simultaneously realized that the kids were being quiet. They are NEVER quiet by the middle of the sermon. Uh oh.

We shot each other a Look. A quick scan of the church: Julia was digging through the pockets of my coat, eating some ancient trail mix. check. Mary: wait. where was Mary? We reached a very disturbing conclusion at the same time....

Two milliseconds later, (still in the middle of the sermon) we had solved the mystery of Mary's whereabouts. Someone was playing an impromptu solo on the piano. Mike and I shot up out of the pew...it was like a scene from a movie where they play the characters out in slow motion: both of us leaping across the choir toward the piano with arms outstretched and our mouthes in a silent "nooooooooooooooo."

But it was too late. pound Pound POUND...of course Mary was on the left end of the keyboard where the low notes reside. As Mike tried to whisk away the Sermon Interrupter, a gleeful laugh erupted from my daughter. She LOVES attention, and by now, most of the congregation had turned around in their seats. Poor pastor Franck was preaching on, but nobody was listening. Everyone wanted to know who decided to share their musical talents at such an opportune time.

Mike set Mary down and tried to help me close up the piano before she could come running back for more. Unfortunately, that's when I chose to slip (WHY do I wear heels?) and landed my right forearm on the extreme right end of the keyboard. A shrill sound from the piano provided overdue entertainment for our audience, who was now watching as I stood up, crashed into the piano bench, and scooped up my toddler who was now completely hysterical.

I pretended that I had to go to the bathroom and left the sanctuary. I snuck back in during communion, secretly hoping that the kid next to us would climb on the organ pedals and interrupt the petitions. No such luck. After church, instead of getting "thank you's" for all of Mike's hard work, we heard plenty of compliments on Mary's solo.
"Thanks for waking me up in the middle of the sermon."
"What a nice change from the regular music."
"She's not afraid to be heard, is she?" they all said.

I think Luther would have agreed.

THANK YOU!!!

A big thank you goes out from us to Jimmy and Joy, who drove up from the cities to visit and spent their entire Saturday cleaning and painting our kitchen. Yes...I know. We have nice friends. And they are talented, too! Joy makes great bars, and Jimmy can paint without using masking tape! We are blessed....

PS: Also a big thank you to gramma Ruth, who took the kidlets for the weekend so we could get some work done. Now I remember how people without kids manage to put make up on in the morning and do things like dust furniture and clean behind the fridge.

Here is a picture of what it looked like under the oven. I made a rabbit with all of the dust bunnies. Notice the baby chew toys and rawhides. That about sums it up.

Random photo of the day

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Coolest thing EVER

Sarah and I are faithful JCPenney shoppers. There's almost nothing about the store that we don't like. Whenever we need to get something that's not a) groceries or b) tupperware, it's off to Penney's we go. And we almost always find what we need. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just thinking about a trip to Penney's.
The two of us have taken this love to an extreme level. Whenever we travel, we make it a point to visit the local JCPenney to check it out. We're kind of JCPenney connoisseurs. It's actually starting to verge on the nerdy. For example, during our recent trip to the Mankato Penney's we had a conversation that went something like this.

Sarah: There are too many walls in here. They need to do something to open up this space.
Me: It looks like this store is pretty low on the remodel list. Look at that tile. I think that's pre-1990s remodel tile.
Sarah: Yeah - it's the same stuff they had in Southdale. That lavender color.
Me: Holy cow - is that the home department?
Sarah: This is a tiny store. They don't even have any dishes. It's all sheets and pillows.
Me: I think this place is smaller than the Sun-Ray store was before it closed. And that was a small store.
Sarah: You know what? Penney's would do well to move out of the mall to a free-standing building in this town. Like Maple Grove. (Etc...etc...)

So imagine my delight when we happened upon this small-town treasure in Ashland, Wisconsin on our recent trip to Marquette, Michigan. A real-life Main Street JCPenney store. This thing is a relic!

Front of the store - I made Sarah pull over so that I could get out and take pictures. Check out that lettering!

Alas, they were closed for the day. Otherwise we would have had to go in and buy something just to say that we did. The signage in the windows was current, though, so I know the store hasn't been closed like so many other similar JCPenney stores.

On the rear of the store. Check out that vintage sign! I can't even guess how old that thing is - anyone have any ideas?

This place seriously has to be the last downtown Penneys in existence. And who knew it was only an hour away from my home?

I know where we're going this Saturday.

Fall has come to Duluth

Sorry about the quality - I think one of the kids slimed my camera lens.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone