rachel's continued ramblings

about shane's room. if you notice over there on my BIG FAT TO DO LIST, for ages now, i've had "do something about shane's room" on the list. and it has sat there on the list, doing nothing.  well yesterday, we "did something". i couldn't put "clean shane's room".  that wouldn't really cover it.  i wasn't sure exactly how to phrase what is was that needed to be done in there, mainly because i don't really know the proper grammatical term for "set off 4 sticks of dynamite followed by much jackhammering and industrial vacuuming".  needless to say, it was a pit! every saturday, one of his chores is to clean his room.  but at this point, that was just putting clothes in the basket, books on the shelf, toys in bins, etc.  anything else was WAY too big of an undertaking for a 9 year old boy on his way out the door. sadly, i didn't think to take a 'before' picture, so i didn't bother with an '...

this is something i tell shane to do all the time and i really needed to tell it to myself this morning.  although i go through phases where i'm diligent and consistent about getting up early and taking care of pertinent chores, getting dressed, etc. i've been REALLY bad lately.  and it's not just the christmas break thing because i've been throwing myself and the little kids into the car in our jammies to take shane to school for a while now.  it's something that's really been bugging me, but it's just so easy to sleep as long as possible and then turn on the tv for the kids while i drink coffee and surf the internet wake up for 3 hours a little while.  i am aware that i really need to have some sort of a schedule and i need to adhere to it. so after staying up past midnight reading a book about scheduling getting motivated, i vowed to get up early - before the kids - this morning and be all dressed and have some time to myself to take care of mornin...

christmas was more than a bit odd this year. we've had an insane amount of snow in the last week and a half, which caused everything to be unusual. church was cancelled both christmas eve and day, and our lovely white christmas knocked out our power half an hour after we got up. it was kind of a bummer, since santa brought a wii and the kids got to play it for all of about 5 minutes before the power went out. my parents were supposed to come for dinner, but didn't so we had a festive dinner of mac and cheese that dave cooked on the campstove. there were utility trucks down the street all day working to get stuff fixed and it finally came back on around 6:30. we'll celebrate for real on sunday when my parents and my aunt come over. here are like a million pictures of how we spent our day. Make a Smilebox slideshow merry christmas everyone!

i learned something about myself today.  well, i realized something about myself.  i hate it when things get all wet.  hard surfaces mostly. i realized this just now, when i went into the bathroom where layla had spent about 5 minutes 'washing her hands' earlier.  the counter was completely covered with water, and to wipe it up, i had to pick up all the things that were on the counter and dry them off too.  grrr. i remember as a kid, sharing a bathroom with my mom, that i despised having to use the sink after she'd been in washing her face.  i don't know what it is she does while washing her face, but she splashes water EVERYWHERE!  all over the sink, faucet, counter, mirror... i hated having to turn on the faucet when the knobs were already all wet.  i'm not crazy about getting into a shower that someone has recently gotten out of.  it would be my preference to always have the first shower (and not just so i won't run out of hot wate...

if you're anything like me, you have one of these: yeah, that WAS my junk drawer.  it's ridiculous.  it was getting to the point where you couldn't even close it.  instead of the "junk drawer" i think it should really be called the "don't know what to do with it or too lazy to put it where it really goes drawer".  so i decided to document exactly how ridiculous it really was. this is all the stuff laid out on the kitchen counter: so what is all this stuff?     here we have a dozen or so rubber bands and used twisty ties, a stamp pad from a hand/foot print kit we got when micah was born, 4 used birthday candles, and a pack of spare buttons from some pants.   a bunch of batteries and a bunch of cord-type things. instruction booklets and a bunch of writing utensils... although upon closer examination, the red one in the middle is actually a tinker toy! a bunch of the little packages of 'hardware' that comes with stuff -...

well, we got dumped on again, but the wind thing was a little bit 'overblown', at least for our area.  it was a little bit windy when i went to bed last night (just before 1), but nothing major. we did wake up with our power out, but there was also a utility truck parked RIGHT in front of our house, with a dude in a cherry picker fixing the lines. i guess a branch fell out of the neighbor's tree and knocked out the power to 17 houses.  but we survived and were up and running and able to turn on the heat (and the coffee pot) by 7:45am. it's hard to see, but this is the utility truck out front of our house. and here are all 3 kids watching the utility truck out the window. and the results of our most recent dump.  the climber on the left has snow filling it about half-way up. that bump is the sandbox. and the front. oh, and looking outside now, i've just noticed that it's snowing again.  holy cow!  are you sure this is washington?

...and i was one of them. today had so many thing working against it. it's saturday. it's the last weekend before christmas. we've been buried under snow since wednesday and the roads have been awful. a very large snow/wind storm is predicted for tonight. did i mention it's almost christmas? every lunatic in king county was at the redmond fred meyer today, including us.  i had that panic bug going on, remembering 2 years ago when we were without power for 4 days (that time without snow and below freezing temperatures), and felt a strong need to stock up on things like batteries, candles, soup...  i also had this fear that we wouldn't be able to get out much or that stores would be without power, and so i wanted to have all of the remaining christmas presents taken care of as well.  this was not an original idea. dave and i decided to divide and conquer... i took micah and did the christmas shopping, he took shane and layla and did the grocery shopping (yeah, i reali...

it's my charlie brown christmas tree.  really! i found this at fred meyer and fell in love when i saw it.

i didn't have an actual roll w/ the green plaid on it, but i found a refill and an empty roll in my junk drawer (yeah, i know, that should tell me something).  but even the empty one says 'scotch' on it.  there you go!  SCOTCH TAPE!

  the snow finally showed up!!! and it's still snowing!  the first pictures were taken this morning at around 7:15 and there's been more since.  dave is at work, i hope he'll be able to get home tonight!  shane's been out playing all morning.  layla said she wanted to go out, but hasn't gotten around to it yet.  she doesn't understand the urgent nature of playing in the snow in seattle.  you never know how long it will stick around!  i'm sure she'll get out there eventually.

just kidding.  but i just have to take a minute to RAVE about this.  we get our milk delivered every week from smith brothers.  we love it.  it's great tasting, hormone-free milk that is delivered to your door.  tomorrow is milk day, and our milk man, kasey has been coming earlier and earlier lately, often before i get up in the morning, and since our bill was due this week, we needed a little less milk than usual, AND i wanted to leave some christmas cookies for him, i wanted to make sure i put all that out before i went to bed.  so when i got home from stitch & bitch at around 12, i wrote a note and a check, and packaged up some of the cookies i made this afternoon.  as i opened the door to put the stuff out in the milk box, i hear a car pulling up in front of my house.  i look and it's the milk truck!  talk about timing!  and out jumps the milk man with our crate of milk and runs it up to my door.  i eloquently say, ...

i had to take a bunch more pictures since i had run out of my original set.  so here's a new sign for today (just ignore the baby gate, it's an ugly necessity): this picture actually covers like 3 different signs - which should make up for my lack of posts in recent days.  we have the nativity set - love the willow tree stuff, the garland wrapped in lights (something from dave's cache of christmas traditions) and the stockings.  some people have all matching stockings, and that's great too, but we like ours all different.  from left to right, we have layla's, dave's, mine, micah's, and shane's.  we were in ohio for layla's first christmas, and a member of our church here, made that and sent it to us.  it's beautifully done cross-stitch.  dave's was made by a next-door neighbor when he was a kid after his original stocking was chewed up by mice in the attic.  it's like a boot or a tennis shoe or something.  my mom made mine when i was 9 o...

we got about an inch of snow on saturday night... amazingly enough it's still around.  and probably will be until january.  we're frozen and there's no thaw in sight.  what state do we live in again?  but the kids have been having fun in the snow.   no, she doesn't have any eyes... and that's her rubbing snow on an inflatable fish - yeah, we still have a few random pool toys out.  classy!  she was trying desperately to make snow balls, but didn't have too much luck. yeah, that's the trampoline.  super fun! there's more coming tonight, so i made a successful dash to target for boots and snow pants.  i'm sure i'll have new pictures tomorrow!

i have this theory that christmas lights are one of those things that have the potential to land you in one of two places: the looney bin, or jail. let me tell you how much i LOVE christmas lights.  don't get me wrong, i really do love christmas lights. they're festive, it's fun to drive around and look at people's displays... it's not like any other time of the year.  but whoever designed the way they function needs to be tied up with all of the stupid, half-lit strands i have and dropped in a snow drift. when we put up our tree, i pulled out the 4 strings of lights i used last year, all neatly bundled together.  of the 4, one worked completely, one not at all, and two, half.  when i started to put the one that worked on the tree, it kept flickering every time i moved it, so i just called the whole thing a wash and went and bought 4 new strings of lights.  they still work, thank goodness! we bought some of those nifty new LED lights for the house.  C7s wit...

i've been neglecting this.  what's up with that?  well, layla's been sick for a week now.  low fever last friday night, and then nothing until sunday afternoon when she starts showing cold symptoms. nothing much until tuesday night when around midnight, there's the classic "my ear hurts" followed by 3.5 hours of whining and crying until i discovered that she can take the jr. strength motrin i give to shane (but only one tablet) and she FINALLY passes out on the couch. a trip to dr. in the morning, followed by a trip to the pharmacy and 2 days of sporadically napping, up and down fevers,and occasionally snapping out of it long enough to shove some nourishment into her takes us to today.  we'll see where we are now.  but dave's office christmas party is tonight and so she'll have to skip that, and we'll see what else comes of it.  hopefully the antibiotics will kick in soon and she'll start to take that other foot out of the grave and act lik...