It's Ladybug Infestation Time Again!

I'm a little over-due from my usual weekly blogging. I had such a busy weekend that I didn't even check my e-mail, which these days is unheard of for me. With the impending move on the way I'm trying to do what I can so that when it gets here we're not killing ourselves to get out in a short time. The good thing is that we're not selling the house right away, so we don't have to have everything out in one day. We can move sort of gradually. However, I hate moving, so I'd like to keep it from dragging out as much as possible. This weekend I got the laundry room cleaned out. It's one of those rooms that has become a catch-all for the things we know we don't want to throw away yet but don't know what to do with. Well, most of it got thrown away this weekend. One thing I won't miss is the ladybug infestation we get every year around this time. It usually hits at the end of October, but this year it's hit a little late. Yesterday I swept hundreds of them out of the floor in front of the door and windows. I don't know if any of you know that ladybugs have a distinct smell, but in swarms they do. When I walk in the door every afternoon the smell hits me. One year I made the mistake of vaccuming them up, and I had to get rid of the bag because the vaccum cleaner smelled like ladybugs. Maybe soon it'll get cold enough to kill them all. It's just funny because if people were all crowded together and this huge creature came up and started killing them, most of the people would scatter and never come back. Not ladybugs. They don't seem to care if I smoosh all their little friends, or thump them across the room. They just carry on with their invasion fearlessly. Ugh! Since I haven't taken any pictures since Halloween I'm including some pictures of the kids from when we went to the park a couple of weeks ago.

Halloween '07

Halloween has come and gone again, and for some reason I follow the exact same picture format every year with my pictures. Same place in the yard, same poses...at least the costumes are different. This first picture is of the 5, yes, 5 pumpkins that I carved all by myself. Drew helped me dig the guts out of the huge one (for reference it weighed about 50 pounds). Then she drew a face on another pumpkin and lost interest. Evan wrote "boo" about 50 times on his pumpkin, and then drew a face the size of a half-dollar, so he was a little upset when I carved a big face in it and not the tiny one he drew. I couldn't get him to understand that I just didn't have the precision I needed with my kitchen knife. Alli drew the face with the tiny eyebrows and the huge round mouth, and then wrote her name across the top. She also did pretty well digging guts out. So, after I worked with Drew to clean out the big one, and then finished off cleaning Alli's, that was it for me and guts. In the last ones we just set the candles on top of the seeds and everything. It worked just as well, so I may just skip that step in the future. As far as costumes, Drew wanted to be Sacagawea, probably because Andy goes around saying her name all the time because it sounds funny. This was as close as we could get. I was just excited they had an Indian outfit at the costume store, seeing as I waited until the 27th to buy costumes. Alli is a spider princess (the name that came on the costume bag), and Evan is Optimus Prime from Transformers, which Andy was especially pumped about. The mask made it through one house before he didn't want to wear it anymore. Of course they had a great night and got tons of candy, which we all ate and felt like puking before the night was over, and still have tons left. What's sad is within the next couple of weeks we'll eat all the good stuff out, and then the cheap-o yucky stuff like Mary-Janes and Bit-O-Honeys (sorry Dad) will be left over, only to get thrown away while we're cleaning out to move. Oh yeah, we're moving! Our date is January 1, and it's only about 10 minutes north of here. The good news is that it's one mile from Wal-Mart and the bank and several eating places, and there are even places that will deliver. Nothing delivers here. We're moving mainly because this house is just too small. The kids' rooms are tiny and so is our bedroom, and the living room is so not conducive to entertaining (because we're such party animals). The new house is so nice and has lots more room. The kids will all have their own bedroom, plus a playroom. We should be able to live there with plenty of room for at least 10 years (we've been here 7!). Plus, it comes with one of those underground invisible fenses, so it's all ready for Daisy, and it also comes with a golf cart! That was the deciding factor. I'm kidding, but, seriously, we've already decided that next year we'll be trick-or-treating on the golf cart. So, that was the first of many holidays to come and our big news. I can already smell the Thanksgiving turkey, and, yes, that overwhelmed feeling of not having a clue where to start with packing has set in as well.

A Day in the City

Yesterday we decided to take the kids on a trip to Atlanta. Even though we live so close, we just don't go down there much. We drive through it to go on other trips, but we rarely actually stop and experience Atlanta, outside of horrible traffic. Honestly, the traffic is what completely ruins Atlanta. It's enough to make me not want to visit...ever. Not to mention once you get into the actual city, it's full of one-way streets and if you don't know it really well, you end up driving in circles trying to find your way to the right direction to get to the place you need to be. I remember back in the day visiting Atlanta before I lived in Georgia and driving around seeing the building I wanted to go to, but not being able to get there because it was surrounded with one-way streets and we were going the wrong way. Anyways, today, we drove to Doraville, right at Spaghetti Junction (which is on the perimeter of Atlanta), and rode the Marta into Atlanta. We then walked over to the new Coke museum. The kids had never been on the Marta or to the Coke museum, so it was lots of fun. I told the kids that the Marta was a train that's mostly above ground but sometimes goes underground and goes fast and all that stuff. Drew had herself so excited about it that she was shaking when we got there. We also had to make a train switch to get off the north/south train and head to the east/west train. That was a tiny adventure in itself. Once we got there, we walked through Olympic Centennial Park where they were having some huge thing for diabetes, and it was filled with people and balloons and loud music, so that was neat for the kids, too. They've recently built a new Coke museum, so, even though I'd been to the old one a bunch of times, I was pretty excited myself to see the new one. The first thing you do when you get there is watch this really cute movie about what supposedly happens when you put your quarter in a coke machine. Inside the machine is this imaginary world with all these strange creatures. It was one of those movies that's so cute and that the kids were so into that I almost cried watching them watch the movie. They really enjoyed it for the most part. The "milestones" section, which is a lot of the history of Coke was pretty boring for them, plus for some reason it was more crowded than the rest of the museum, so I could've lived without that myself. Crowded areas plus whiney kids makes me have anxiety attacks. But we left there and saw how Coke is bottled and then got to see another movie in 4D (the 4th dimension is feeling I guess - they squirted water and cold air and the seats moved), and that was really neat. Then, of course, there were the decades of old commercials we got to watch. And then at the end there was all the Coke products from all over the world that we got to drink until we were sick. The kids are still talking about Beverly, the horrible drink from Italy. And, I was alive when Tab was around, but never actually drank it until yesterday -- Ugh!!! Who in their right mind drank that more than once? It was a lot of fun, and we got to take home a free bottle of Coke as a souvenier, which was nice because they force you to walk through the gift shop at the end, so the kids weren't as tempted to ask for things when we were leaving. We then ate lunch at the food court in the CNN center, and then headed back to the Marta. At the Marta station, like all subways, once you pay and go through the gate, you can't leave unless you're done for the day or are willing to pay to get back in. Well, even though the kids went to the bathroom twice at lunch, their little bodies just couldn't handle all that carbonation and liquid. We got into the Marta station and Drew was about to explode...again. There was no bathroom anywhere. Then when we got to the station to make our switch, we couldn't find a bathroom there either. She was miserable, and I felt so bad for her. She couldn't even bear (or bare?) to sit down on the train. We had about a 15 minute trip from there, and thank goodness she made it. Back in Doraville we found a bathroom. Surprisingly, the kids fell asleep on the way home, even with all that caffiene and sugar in their systems.

Field Trip

This is a picture of me with my class, plus a few extras. We have four 4th grade classes, and there were only 3 guides at the place we went to, so we had to split a class. I was supposed to have 5 extra, but I ended up with 8 extra for various reasons. One just decided she didn't want to go with the other class, and the other 2 live in outerspace the majority of the time, so they just went the wrong way. By the time I caught them, the other teacher was gone. Anyways, I haven't talked much about school because, while everyone asks, "How's school going?" I am aware that it's like asking "How are you?" You're generally just looking for a "Fine." But, since we went on a field trip today, I thought some highlights wouldn't hurt. We went to this place called Tallulah Gorge, which was pretty neat. It's this huge gorge (obviously) with a few waterfalls and lakes. It's so pretty because it's up in the mountains with these overlooks that make your knees weak because they're so high. This crazy guy (too tired to remember his name - starts with a W) walked a tight rope across it back in the 70's. So anyways, when we first arrived, one of the busses broke down. Every bit of oil in the bus leaked out all over the parking lot and it wouldn't restart. So, the whole time we were in the museum and hiking and petting snakes they were working on the bus. When it was finally time to go to lunch, the bus still wasn't fixed, so the other bus had to take one group and drop them off, and then come get the rest of us. They finally got the bus fixed, but at that point we were running late. When we were about 5 minutes from school, the principal called me (no clue why I was the chose one - I'm the new one!) on my cell phone to tell me that one of the other busses was being split and as soon as we got to the room we had to figure out what kids were being sent on different busses for the day. Also, fundraiser items had been delivered, so we had to pass those out. So, we ran back to the room 5 minutes before busses had to be loaded to go home. I'm trying to figure out who has to ride a different bus while passing out fundraiser junk and parents from the field trip are in my ear asking if they can go ahead and take their kids. It was all crazy, although it doesn't sound so crazy without me there in person to add in the hand motions and the excitement. I was telling Andy about it and he kinda mentioned that it sounded like a mess, and the sad truth is, it was really just another day. It seems like the end of every day is crazy. Parents call and decide at the last minute they're gonna pick up their kids instead of sending them on the bus, or they decide at the last minute to send their kids home with someone else. I've even gotten a note 2 minutes before it's time to leave from a kid who forgot to give it to me in the morning stating that he needed to ride the bus to a certain address, but the parent has no idea which bus that is. Oh, I could go on and on, but most of you are probably starting to skim at this point and are over the picture of all those kids you know nothing about, so I'll close for now. I have to say, though, as stressful and crazy as it gets, I just love it. And I'm not just saying that the way some people act like their life is perfect when we all know they're full of it. The truth is my house is a disaster, the laundry is piled way too high, and there's nothing I loathe more than house work. But, I really love my job.

Mmmmmm...

This weekend we went up to Helen, mainly just for some caramel apples. For those of you not from here, Helen is this little tiny German-themed tourist trap of a town with souvenir shops filled with all the junk and Harley-Davidson memorabilia you could ever want. They also have several little camp grounds and a river that you can go tubing in. We went up there for the homemade candy. We got stuck in traffic before we really even got there, because, being that it's German-themed, they had started Oktoberfest, so it was packed. We decided to stop at the little candy shop just before the town instead of actually getting into town. So, once we got in there, Andy told the kids they could get one thing and could pick anything they wanted. In a store that's wall to wall candy, that was a bit overwhelming for them. Their brains went into overload and nobody could make a decision. They ended up migrating over to the tiny little section of name brand candy that you can get in any gas station, so we had to convince them that everything else in the store was so much better. Eventually Drew settled on a caramel apple with nuts and Evan and Alli chose a rice crispy treat on a stick dipped in chocolate with sprinkles. We went to this little picnic area by the river and ate our candy while we laughed at the people trying to tube through a river that was way too shallow due to the horrible drought this year. They kept getting caught on rocks and having to get up and drag their tubes through the river. After that we went to the Corn Maze -- the same one we went to last fall for those of you loyal to my blog. We got there before dark and sort of followed the same pattern as last year letting the kids run us around wherever they wanted. The only problem was I couldn't figure out the map and Andy was thoroughly enjoying wandering aimlessly. By the time we decided to get serious and figure out the way out it was dark and we couldn't even see the map. Normally I would've freaked out in the dark in the middle of a corn field, but, fortunately, we weren't the only people lost. We finally made it to the edge after a couple of hours of wandering and just cut through the corn to get out. I don't have any pictures of it this time because I left my camera in the car, and once we were in there, there was no getting out. We topped the evening off with a viewing of The Apple Dumpling Gang, which 2 of the 3 kids fell asleep in the middle of.

Build-A-Bear

Last weekend the kids went to a birthday party at the Build-A-Bear workshop. It was a great deal, considering our kids have never been there, but have passed by it a million times in the mall. They all got their own bear and outfit as a party favor, so that was super exciting for them. In the first picture, Drew is holding her bear's heart and making a wish. Then Alli is helping the girl stuff the bear. And then Evan is washing his bear after getting it stuffed. They were all pretty proud of the final product. They've slept with them every night and Evan and Alli have even been taking them to school to sleep with at rest time.

Stephanie's Wedding

Well, Stephanie finally got married this past Thursday. It was such a pretty day and such a nice wedding. Everything was beautiful and went smoothly, and I know we were all relieved to finally get the show on the road. The pictures are of both the rehearsal and the wedding. I'll let them speak for themselves.

A Day on the Lake

Wow! Look at me posting 2 days in a row. That's what a long weekend will do -- laundry is caught up, the house is semi-straight, dishes are in the dishwasher, and the kids are in bed. We had a pretty great day today. A couple of months ago Andy bought a boat for an extremely reasonable price, with no guarantee that it would run. But, guess what -- it does!!! It's a little quirky, but once you learn the quirks, it's perfect. We got us an innertube (intertube?) and headed to Lake Lanier with Andy's dad and had a blast. The kids were a bit skiddish about the tube, but we coaxed them into getting on for a few minutes. I loved it. I haven't been tubing since I was about 12 years old, and I'll admit I was a bit nervous at first, but it was so much fun. We took lunch and ate on the boat, and Andy and his dad attempted skiing. After several hours on the lake we went down to my parents for dinner with our family and Steph's fiance, Jose's, parents and grandmother. The rest of the week will be filled with wedding preparations and festivities, so that'll be the next post to look forward to! And, by the way, I had a video to post as well, but for some reason my computer isn't uploading videos. I don't know if it's my problem or Blogger's problem with their new link. Anyone reading this who has experience or tips in this area, please feel free to share!

I'm a Blog Slacker

I have this friend, who may or may not be reading this, and he and his wife post on their blog, like, every other day. I also have a sister who posts even as much as twice a day on hers. Then there's me, who does good to post once a month. I don't know why, because I feel like I spend half my life on the internet. I have these visions of doing better and keeping people more updated. Then I start thinking, if only I didn't have to get all that sleep every night, and waste time with showering every day, and deal with school (only in a different form these days), and lessons and grading, and kids and wifery (is that a word?)...then maybe I'd find time for blogging. But, that's not it. I just get lazy. I mean, lazy only in the sense that something has to give, and unfortunately, it's the blog that goes first. After that it's laundry and cooking, and then sleep. So, all that said, I accept that I'm not as diligent as some of those bloggers out there, even though I periodically worry that people might give up on me. As long as Granny & Papa keep thanking me for blogging (which ultimately is my main motivation), I'll keep on blogging. Onto the pictures, Andy's mom brought his little nephew, Max, over the other day to see the kids. They're in love with him. They get so excited when their Nana comes over, but Max is even better. They smother him and get in his face and squeal and mess with him, so much that he appears to be in shock, not to mention the fact that Andy sings his own gibberish versions of hymns and 80's rock (yes, an odd combination, but Andy is odd) so loud that Max could barely eat for being so distracted. But, it's fun to have him around. He's so sweet. Andy and I have decided that if we can, we'll just keep him ourselves. In fact, Andy told his mom to just leave him with us, but she wouldn't. Then the other pictures are of me and Alli, and then a couple of the kids early in the morning watching their Saturday-morning cartoons.