January – silly, sad, scary, fun, and freezing!

Let’s start with the silly:

Chris let Rachel and Caroline “fix" his hair and I’m sure you’ll agree they did a fantastic job! They each brushed and brushed, then clipped and pinned. Outstanding…

 

 

 

Next, a quiz I call:

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

(If you’re my friend on facebook, you’ve seen this.)

 

I, uh, really don’t think you’ll need to enlarge this one to guess the answer correctly.

 

 

 

OK, the birthday party: Elizabeth wanted a big party so her friends could play Red Rover and have a 3-legged race. Anybody know where she got that idea? Maybe because Maddie Campbell had a party that sounds suspiciously like that a few months ago! And it was so much fun Elizabeth wanted to re-create that for her party. (Yes, it’s Caroline’s party too, but she had no opinions, other than the party needs to hurry up and happen!) So, I was pretty leery about planning an outdoor party in January, but early January sometimes is warm enough… I thought we could give it a try. The Campbells would be back in town around the 7th, so by the time Caroline’s birthday came around on the 5th I thought I ought to get on this and make a move. I checked the weather – and it looked pretty grim – but 5 days out, the 10th, the weather was forecasted to be 65 degrees and sunny. Not bad. We could do that. So I hurried that evening and sent out emails and invitations, apologizing for the late notice, as always :-). The next morning I re-checked the weather, but now the forecast for the 10th was for a temp of 44 degrees and rainy. Seriously!!! OK, we could NOT do that! So I waited a day or two, not trusting that the forecasters knew any more about it being cold than they knew about it being warm (cynicism is such an ugly thing!), then as they started talking about a major freeze and schools closing I realized we would have to postpone. Poor Elizabeth! Her birthday last year was put off for weeks because the main water pipes broke in Jackson and Chuck E Cheese closed. So it appears we are on this road again….

The weekend of January 15th was a really fun one.

Katherine got to stay with her cousin Grace and Uncle Ryan in Baton Rouge, and we had a slumber party here at home for Elizabeth, her friend Kate, and my sixth child – Emily Smith, who was in town for the night.

 

 

Now for the sad (at least for SOME people):

The summer of 2007 we gave Daniel and Katherine two female gerbils on their birthday. After about a year, Chris brought home a male to liven things up. The fact that his name quickly became “Daddy Rat” tells you all you need to know. Very quickly, we had 10 gerbils in 2 cages, and it was VERY sweet watching the baby gerbils grow, but then they grew up. The male cage was a complete disaster, as the little buggers are remarkably aggressive and, well, mean. I really hated reading in the living room in the evening being distracted by squeaks of pain as toes were chewed off by bullies and gangs. Without spelling it out completely, the entire male cage met with a sad end, after the kids were in bed, one night about a year ago. Since then we’ve had 2 gerbils left. I can hardly wait for them to die off. The things are only supposed to live 3 years, tops, and lucky us! Our oldest is at least 3 1/2 now. Well, we realized that Goldie was acting strangely one day (maybe she had been squeezed or dropped) and a few days later we looked in the cage and only had one live gerbil. I offered they could throw it in the trash (yes, parenting at its finest!), so they decided to stage a funeral themselves. They created a nest in an empty Kleenex box and dug a hole in the backyard. Admittedly, my only contribution was to tell them they did a great job and take pictures! None of them were too broken up about it, but Daniel still felt he ought to say something along the lines of “You were a good rat.” Now just one rat to go, and I get to get rid of that cage in my living room!

Now the scary:

The next weekend, January 22nd, Chris took all 5 five kids to visit his dad in Rambin (about 5 hours from us). Uncle Terry would also be visiting that weekend, so they were looking forward to that, and I was looking forward to my weekend ALONE!!! Yay! I slept in Saturday morning (of course I did – you already knew that!), but planned to head out and shop, eat out, and anything else I wanted to for the rest of the day. I was still hanging around by 11am (Oh, let’s just admit it – I was still reading in bed!) when the phone rang. I had called Chris about 5 minutes before and couldn’t reach him (heh, I’d learn later why!), so I thought this was Chris calling me back. Instead, a voice I didn’t recognize identified himself as Steve Martinez and said he was out in the middle of the woods, working on an oil rig, and he had a couple of lost little girls with him. Huh? It took longer than it probably should’ve for the light bulb to click on and for me to go, “Umm, girls?” Yeah, turns out their names were Katherine and Elizabeth and they must’ve been a couple miles from wherever they were supposed to be. Got it. Figured it out (I’m nothing if not swift, huh?). He had MY Katherine and Elizabeth with him out in the middle of nowhere – the lost girls! The only phone number they knew was my house number – so if I’d already left the house they wouldn’t have been able to reach Chris or me, since they don’t know our cell numbers! Something to fix. I gave him Chris’ cell, the house phone for Aubrey (Chris’ dad), and thanked him profusely for helping my daughters. I could only wait for a few minutes, not wanting to tie up the phone lines, before calling Chris but he still didn’t answer. Turns out, he’d figured out they were missing – that’s why he didn’t take my call. He wanted to find them before he had to admit to me he’d lost them! (“Hey, funny story…”) Then, when Steve called, he rushed out and drove off without bringing his cell phone. But I didn’t know whether Steve had gotten through to him, so I texted “YOU NEED TO CALL ME NOW!!!!” to his lonely, forgotten cell phone. Chris got them back none the worse for wear once the tear tracks were wiped off Elizabeth’s face. Katherine even admits to crying “a little.” I was a little twitchy ‘til I heard Chris had them back, but never panicked. Elizabeth didn’t go into the woods again that weekend without Chris! We figured out they were about 2 miles away from Aubrey’s house – they’d walked along the creek and missed the road back to the house, then took a dirt road instead. However, I rather wish they’d seen crossing the bayou as a clue they were headed in the wrong direction…

And once more for the silly:

Daniel had been asking for bagels for breakfast, but I kept forgetting, so Daniel wrote a reminder on the white board for me… A family of ogres, that’s us!