(More than) one of these things just doesn't belong here!

Ever play Travel Bingo? This is what I checked off today during my run.

a recliner
3 dog food bags
a deer skin
empty beer cans
fast food wrappers
a change of clothes--medium wash, high-waisted, tapered-leg jeans included
carpet remnants
a toilet
a zippered gun case*
empty cigarette boxes
Solo cups
4 four-wheelers (5 adolescents included)
a possum with tire tracks across its nasty dead back (I almost stepped on this one!!!!)

Thank you, Ewing Drive for your endless entertainment!
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*Actually discovered later to be a heated/vibrating?! seat cover, a small disappointment for my opportunistic husband. ( :

Party II: Owen Turns Five

It is still hard to believe I have a five year old! Owen hit this big birthday on October 19th. Somehow, it just seems pretty old! With our firstborn turning five this fall, I know that this is the end of an era. Next fall, for the next howevermany years, we'll be enrolling kids in school and embracing the whirlwind of activity that comes with our involvement there. As hectic as our lives can be now, and as irritated I get with food and toy messes, sometimes I want to hit the pause button and hold the kids, remembering every detail about how they looked, what they said and what our relationship is like. I treasure this time in their lives! Our kids love us and they want to please us. What a humbling thought to realize the responsibility we have to them.

Owen and I finally decided on a 5 cake for him.
What can I say, but that I got in a hurry decorating and messed up a few details?

Owen was still delighted with his cake, and that is what mattered.
He opted not to blow out his own candles this year. Too many people staring at him, I guess! We had a great little party with immediate family. And then I had about two weeks to rest until it was time to bake the next cake!

Party I: Choctoberfest

Looking through my pictures, it would seem all we have done lately is eat cake. In order to avoid sweet tooth overload and a bad case of gut rot, I'll post the parties in installments.

The MOPS Choctoberfest was a chocolate party I hosted in October (if the title of the event wasn't self-explanatory enough.) MOPS=Mothers of Preschoolers. Hurrah for MOPS of Atmore, but that is an aside.

Choctoberfest was a blast, and we quickly decided it will have to be an annual event. That much fun oughtta be illegal. We loved being together, able to talk without being interrupted. It was a wonderful girls' night out on a Friday evening. And did I mention no kids were there?!

I gave prizes for the most chocolatey dressed, and let me tell ya, we had some people in all the brown they could find in their closets! I myself appeared as a cup of hot chocolate with a marshmallow on top, my creative description of brown pants and a white top. We even had some women wearing chocolate accessories, I kid you not! Tootsie roll necklace and earrings, Hershey's Kisses dangling from a bracelet and a Reese's cup foil-wrapped medallion necklace and hoop earrings! Their creativity amazed me. Quite a bit of effort for a nice-smelling candle, some chocolate-flavored lip balm or chocolate-named fingernail polish, mmm-hmm.

We also had some games, like NUM3ERS, where we guessed the number of Hershey's Kisses in a jar. We played Are You Smarter Than a Candy Bar? and guessed at unwrapped, non-cut candy bars. And of course, we had to vote for the new Iron Chef Atmore! We voted on the best chocolate desserts and gave out candy bars as prizes.

The chocolate itself was extremely delicious, but there was so much there that after we had served ourselves, we had made barely a dent! As we munched, the conversation slowly was overtaken by groans of too much chocolate, so one sweet and thoughtful friend popped a bag of popcorn she had brought for that very purpose. My sister in law really wished she had brought some chocolate-flavored Tums to pass around!

We filled plates to present to our families, those of us who could stomach the sight of another full plate of chocolate, and one by one, my friends left, all smiling, glad to have had a night away from responsibility at home.

____
I got my idea here and here.

Sigh

What to do when my child believes humor to be the most highly prized quality in a person?

Our little Helen is our resident humorist, and she knows it. I have even heard her nearly deadpanning into Owen's Leapfrog recorder. "Helen is a funny girl," she said with a only a very small hint of hilarity. She regularly cracks us up with her actions, faces and words, and we mostly love her sense of humor, because we love to laugh.

But there's the really annoying side of her that cannot be serious. We look into her deep brown eyes and try to impart some wisdom to that sweet little face without busting a gut. She leads the game by a split second, and plays it well, a twitch in the corner of her mouth, as soon as she senses it might be forgiveable to laugh. She has learned very early in life that quick smiles and jests might possibly get her off the hook, should she ever find as much as her pinky toe in trouble.

Tonight before supper, Jack who has just learned to walk, had a tremendous splat of a fall, and nearly bit through his lip. In fact, Jason fished a chunk of his cheek wall out of his mouth, so we knew it was a bad bite. We got the bleeding stopped, made some phone calls to nurses in the family, and figured out he was going to be all right. And yes, yours truly had to sit down in the recliner and close my eyes while I waited for my nausea to subside, my tunnel vision to go away and my hearing to return. As I was sending Helen to bed later, I told her give Jack a kiss on the head, not the mouth, not thinking that she might leverage herself against him to lean in for the kiss. Sure enough, his lip got another sharp bump on an end table, which set his mouth to bleeding again and his pitiful soul to ear-numbing wailing. Helen's response was to sing the alphabet song at a louder decibel level to comfort and/or tease him out of his sadness. I sent her to bed, and while we were discussing Jack's ouchy, her effect on it, and praying for him, a half smirk settled onto her face.

*Sigh*

Jack in Motion

A few months ago, the Flintstones car got parked helter-skelter off the back porch, and several gully-washers later, it toyed with a meterological career change. Its stint as a rain gauge gave Jack an idea.


Hmmm...that was great. Now what else?
...and CUT before you fall out backward and crack your skull open! Bathtime!

*Sigh*

Truly, there is a hum of pregnant silence, randomly punctuated with the occasional tink and crackle of an object hitting the floor and soft baby grunts of concentrated effort. I now know the sound of a new bottle of canola oil thudding onto hardwood and the whisper-soft flutter of toilet paper being unfettered into the toilet.
This dude is a climber, too. Scary thought, that. Besides joining his toys in the drawer, he climbs onto the back of the couch and crawls back and forth. He climbs into the window seat. He even climbs in and out of his walker. He tried out a trip down the stairs while in his walker. Yes, really scary!
And he recharges soundly.

Some of the words he is saying:

STUCK!!!! I'm stuck!! I'm still stuck!!!!!
Dishstuck!! (This is stuck.)
bath
Dada
Mama
Bompaw (Grandpa)
WHOA!!! Yook DIS!!
tractor (can't remember the pronunciation)
Mawball (Meatball, the cat)
Ah, ah, ah, ah, chaw (fake sneeze)
eat
I did it!

Hat Day

Yesterday morning when I woke up and looked in the mirror, I knew it was going to be a hat day. And unfortunately, for me, though a baseball cap could disguise my bad hair, there was nothing in my closet that could compensate for the crazy day I was about to experience.

In the morning, in celebration of the beautiful weather, we picked up pecans. However, the kids were not enthused, especially Owen, who used his new toy skid steer to pick up ONE AT A TIME. We continued until our buckets were full, which happened to be right when Mrs. Stafford pulled in for Owen’s speech therapy. Walking toward the house was slow going. Helen spilled her pecans and wailed about her load being “too heaby!!” Owen was unhappy about giving up play time for working on his sounds, to say the least, and so I had to have a little talk with him elsewhere, out of Mrs. Stafford’s hearing distance. Awkward moment, I know. Meanwhile, Jack screamed so loudly about me leaving the room that Mrs. Stafford picked him up to settle him, which he didn’t buy.

During speech therapy, Mrs. Stafford called my attention to my beans that were boiling over, streaming down the cupboards and onto my just-mopped floor. Fortunately I got it cleaned up quickly and it didn’t stain this time. I switched the beans to a bigger pot and a different burner.

After lunch and rest time, I discovered that my beans had been burning on the stove. I salvaged what I could, but the bottom of the pot was covered with at least a centimeter of black crud, pock-marked with little bean imprints. I poured some water into it and let it soak, the only sane thing to do at that point in time. I put the beans back in the original pot, on the original burner.

I needed a break, so I called Jason to see what he was doing. He was digging peanuts, and bored out of his mind at his 2-1/2-acre-per-hour speed on auto steer, so he was willing to accept an Owen drop-off. Excellent!

Except that I misunderstood his directions out to the field, and I thought I could get there without driving on a road. I threw the kids in my Expedition, not bothering to strap them in or get my purse, and then I remembered that my gas tank had just hit empty. Since “freshly empty” and “appallingly empty” are two different things, I proceeded with my plans, driving very slowly over the bumpy field lane so I wouldn’t spill the coffee I had just brewed, trying to ignore the big “0 miles to empty” flashing at me. And then I approached a foreboding ditch and thought better of it, so I turned around and got stuck in some deep mud while backing into a field. And while I was waiting for my rescuer driving a big green tractor, Jack pooped, and of course, the diaper bag was hanging on its hook at home. So we sat in the smelly truck and laughed.

The on-and-off sprinkling rain that started after lunch allowed no field work other than digging peanuts. It picked up a bit, so Jason decided to quit for the day. That wasn’t so bad, for me.

After a supper of city-roasted red beans and rice, which Jason ate good naturedly, I kicked everyone out of the kitchen so I could work out my frustrations on the dishes and that nasty stockpot. And then Jack grabbed the empty juice bottle that was waiting to go out to the recyclables, because I am a good little girl and recycle plastic and cardboard, and, of course, juice dribbled all over my floor.

The tide turned while I was cleaning; Jason played hide and seek with the older kids; I made some fruit smoothies that turned out really awesome; and suddenly it was 8:00 pm, a very sacred time at our house! The kids went to bed and I got to work undisturbed on my backed-up typing.

At our house, some days are great, most are so-so, and a few are really bad. For those so-so-ish to bad days, thank goodness for hats!

The Forgettable Corn Harvest

Corn harvest came in the latter part of our extremely dry summer. Fortunately, Jason and his dad hadn't planted a huge percentage of their acreage in corn, although I did hear Jason say that one acre would have been too many.

The kids were disappointed that there weren't more combine rides, but we took advantage of the few times the stars aligned, when the combine was close by, the kids weren't napping, Jason was in the field and not hauling a load to the elevator, and mama was feeling agreeable about lugging three children to a hot, sticky and dirty cornfield.

Helen was overall delighted about getting a combine ride with grandpa, although at this moment, her two-year-old female self was obviously upset about some not-so-trivial matter such as having to wear the wrong shoes or an equally horrible offense.


Owen insisted on climbing up by himself, coating his hands and clothes with a dusty black film that can only be known as combine dirt.

While the older two were getting their combine fix, little Mr. Jack had his first official tractor ride.

He was silent, for once.

Jason's guidance system frees him from the trouble of having to actually drive the tractor. To compensate for this loss, he reads magazines and watches movies while on auto-steer. After his first day of this strenuous activity, he came home to his frazzled wife, who had had a really bad day with the kids. She wasn't too excited to hear about the fascinatingly neat article he had browsed. On this day, he wasn't using the auto-steer function, because he didn't have it set up properly and was otherwise occupied with our little bundle of joy.

But the grass, or in this case, the tractor, is always greener on the other side. Here's John Deere's latest cab innovation. I had to wipe his farmer drool off the page before I took the picture.

Jack is sippin' the farming Kool-Aid.

We were pulling the grain cart, and Jim unloaded the grain from the combine while continuing to combine. Quite an impressive feat, especially with two inquisitive grandchildren in the cab!

Jack is still mesmerized.

We headed back to the semi to unload. I'm always amazed by the wide view from a tractor cab.

I think we might have another generation of farming!