Josh helped the kids carve pumpkins this year. And Monday night we went to a Halloween/Chili dinner party in costume. Here are some pictures. I tried getting some pictures last night from trick-or-treating, but they didn’t turn out.
Archive for October, 2007
Carter Craig Thrap was born on Thursday October 25 afternoon/evening. Charley stayed at our house and we went to visit Mommy and Daddy in the hospital. Jason was scared that his nose would be disfigured for along time, but it was bouncing back by the time we got to see him. COngratulations to Jason, Elise and Charley.
Josh and I registered for and received a crock pot when we got married. During our first year in Ames Josh decided to pull it out and try a pot roast. This was during the heighth of his I-don’t-need-no-stinking-recipe phase and his everything-is-better-when-you-add-loads-of-garlic phase. It was inedible. Seriously disgusting. Since then he’s found other uses for the crock pot but has never again attempted pot roast–until this past Sunday. And it was fabulous. Even the kids ate it. Yay to Josh! There is nothing he can’t cook! Luckily there were some leftovers. Unluckily our microwave fritzed out so I can’t easily reheat them.
Saturday was Jacob’s last soccer game for the season. They got worked around more than in previous games, and the boys didn’t seem to be trying as hard, they seriously lacked follow-through, but they still managed to pull off another win leaving them undefeated for the season! They all seemed to have plenty of energy however at the pizza party after the game! One of the other parents takes LOTS of pictures at the games witrh his heavy duty lens and then emails them all to the rest of us. Of course I take some of my own pictures too, but mine aren’t downloaded yet, so I’ll show you some of his.
Thursday and Friday were parent/teacher conferences. My first conference for Cameron was Thursday evening. At parent night at the beginning of the year I had expressed a concern to Cameron’s teacher that he would be young for the class and small. I didn’t doubt his abilities, but he’d had the least preschool and I hadn’t worked with him nearly the way I had with Jacob and Elise to learn things like the alphabet etc. So, although he seems to be enjoying school and making friends just fine, I was a little nervous to get his teacher’s evaluation. I needn’t have been. She said that she had also worried about him because of his late birthday, but that he was learning quickly and getting along fine. She said he is an absolute delight to have in class and she just loves him. He’s very animated but not disobedient. She said he’s just the kind of student every teacher hopes for! Awww
I had Jacob and Elise’s conferences first thing Friday morning. Jacob’s teacher says he is just a sweetie and that he’s doing fine in everything but she’d like to see his reading words per minute increase faster than it has and that all the kids are now working with 3-digit subtraction and having some difficulty so we should practice that at home until he’s comfortable with it. Elise’s teacher and I talked mostly about Elise’s bathroom needs and her glasses, and she said she can tell that Elise is a worrier and that she gets upset when she doesn’t know something. But she also said that Elise is excelling at reading and writing–so much so that she is part of a small group that the teacher works with separately which will probably cover everything they’re supposed to for the whole year by Christmas break and then they can work ahead. She wanted to show me some of Elise’s free writing samples, but she had a dilemma. She has folders that she keeps for each student with examples of their work to compare at the end of the year to show their progress. For most children she just picked one story writing example and let the parents take the rest that they’d worked on that month. Elise, however, had spent the entire month of free writing continuing and elaborately illustrating one story–which she said is just very advanced thinking for this age. She let me bring the story home to show Josh and let Elise tell us about, but we have to send it back for her folder.
The kids didn’t have school Friday so Josh took the day off work so he could stay with them while I went to conferences and then as soon as I was done we left for Muscatine to attend Josh’s brother Brian’s farewell party. He leaves on his church mission to Brazil next Tuesday.
So yesterday I realized it had been a long time since I’d written anything so I wrote a nice long post about all kinds of things starting with birthday congratulations to my Father-in-Law, and this morning when I still hadn’t heard any comments from anybody I came back to the blog and I see that my post isn’t here! I guess we had internet trouble or something and it never loaded so I have to start all over! So I’m going to write several smaller posts and we’ll see how much I get to. You know it’s a pain when you have to do something all over that you spent time on already.
So this last weekend just before Jacob’s soccer game the girl’s dresser busted–big time. It was the fourth to fall apart on us in the last year or so and it was the last straw for Josh. he wanted to replace it right away, and NO more hand-me-down, garage sale, or Goodwill dressers! So after Jacob’s game we ran to Homemakers in Des Moines with about an hour and a half before we had to get back to take Cameron to his first birthday party of a school friend. Any of you that may have shopped with us before will know that and hour and a half is not a lot of time for us to make a decision on how to spend our money best. But, just when we were about to give up (again, because we’ve been going there and other places for months looking at furniture but not finding–I’ll be honest, a good enough deal–it’s emotionally difficult to go from resale to retail prices) we stumbled across a bed that had been there all along and we had seen several times and just never realized it’s potential to meet our needs. You may be thinking…a bed? Wasn’t it was a dresser you needed? And right you would be, however, we have been needing to solve two bedroom problems, one, where to put all the clothes, and two where to put the sleeping girls, because one dresser was not fitting all of the clothes for both girls (which irritated Josh) and more than one dresser…and in some cases even one dresser wouldn’t fit in the tiny room with both the girls’ beds. Not to mention the fact that Elena is about to outgrow the crib anyway and there is NO way we could fit two twin beds in their room and Elise refused to sleep on the bed she had and kept ending up in a pile on the floor–which is unacceptable because then there is NO room to walk and the room is always a mess and her bed takes up the most space but it wasn’t even being used! So. We stumbled across a bed that could accommodate both girls and allow us to get rid of Elise’s bulky bed and Elena’s crib, leaving room for TWO dressers WHICH we had just seen on sale! Now, the dressers are NOT our taste at all, but they are good sized and solid wood construction with sturdy drawer-bottoms and dove-tailing etc. and they were cheaper than anything else we’d seen for that kind of quality. Plus, they fit in the room and match the bed. So while Josh rushed back to the van to start buckling in kids I placed and paid for our order and we made it back for Cameron’s party with two minutes to spare! (And on another subject, Homemaker’s has free cookies and lemonade for their customers and Josh made it out without eating any and I only had one! The snickerdoodles are just so tasty!) Well, it has felt like forever (since I started this post?) that we’ve been waiting for the delivery of our new furniture, but today was the day! Of course today was also the day it had to start pouring rain. But now the girl’s have a completely new set-up and their room is clean and ALL of their clean clothes are put away and the bedding is all on the bed and there is even room for Elise’s Barbie castle (which all four kids have been playing with since they came home from school today)!
These aren’t awesome pictures, but the room is too small for me to really get good shots. BY the way, I’ve heard that sometimes the pictures that I post here are really big and can’t be seen all at once on the screen. My computer always seems to show them to me as being about 4×6 size, so how many of you are experiencing a problem with my pictures being too large? If it’s many of you, I’ll try a different system to resize my photos. Please respond if this applies to you.
Jacob started out the game all bundled up.
The team he played against had a boy that was on his soccer team last year and his friend from Preschool and Kindergarten, Jalen.
Although officially they don’t keep score, Jacob’s team scored far more goals.
The boy in the “prune” socks scored over half the goals this game. Jacob mostly played defense.
I don’t really have anything interesting or important to say, I just felt like it had been a while since I posted anything so I should get on it. Nothing is really going on with us though. It’s been one of those weeks, you know, the kind that you pass day by day without really living them. I’ve done laundry this week, and thought about scrapbooking, but can’t get myself started. The kids have had their usual appointments, dance, cub scouts, soccer tonight. Everything is normal and everyone is fine. Elise has a field trip tomorrow to the Living History Farms. She seems pretty excited about it. Her teacher has asked her to start wearing her glasses to school again. Jacob has another soccer game Saturday and Cameron has been invited to his first birthday party for a school friend–which happens to be for the boy he talks about most, so I think he’s probably pretty excited for that. Josh ’s classes have started up again, he is not excited about that. This class especially seems to be causing him a lot of grief. Of course I’m no help to him, except to keep him in clean clothes. At least they’re clean when he puts them on. After that there’s nothing I can do. We were going to take the kids to see the Transformer movie up at the cheap theatre in Ames, but apparently it’s coming out on dvd in like a week, so we’re not going to go, we’ll just save the money and buy it. Wow this is dull. Ok, I won’t write more until I have something to say.
Well today has been a day! I got the boys off to school as usual and then readied the girls to go into Des Moines for Elise’s doctor appointments. She wasn’t able to eat any breakfast, they wanted only clear fluids in her so she had a Capri Sun water. In the parking garage at the hospital a man in a little cart–kinda like you might ride on at a zoo or something picked us up at our van and drove us to the elevator, which was nice, but distracted me from getting out the stroller so I had to carry Elena all morning. !!! As soon as we got checked in for the ultrasound Elise said she needed to go to the bathroom but we couldn’t let her because they needed her to have a full bladder for all of her procedures so she sat very patiently waiting for her turn. Then she breezed through the ultrasound and we went across to the other wing of the hospital for her VCUG. They got her in right away but wouldn’t let her pee until they’d finished, I was amazed at how long she was able to wait and she didn’t have an accident at all. That alone is huge, so I am very proud of her. I was really nervous about the VCUG because I remember having that done and NOT liking it. I remember that my mom had to DRAG me to the hospital and even once I was inside I refused to let them do it and I have no idea how long it really took or if I even delayed them at all, maybe we were waiting on them the whole time, who knows, but I remember arguing and crying and laying with my head on my mom’s lap refusing to get up for a very long time until finally she bribed me with the promise of a large Shamrock shake from McDonald’s. To avoid that kind of scene I promised Elise up front that if she was brave and well-behaved I would take her to a Chinese buffet for lunch. She seemed to do just fine. In fact, although I was nervous for her, I was partly afraid for myself, having to go through that again for my own daughter. The whole thing seemed to be much quicker and less traumatic than I remembered, so I don’t know if so much has changed in 20 years or if I’ve just dramatized it in my memory, but either way, both mother and daughter made it out taday unscathed. She was uncomfortable, but she never complained and even she said it was quick. So proud of her. Then we had to walk back across to the first part of the hospital to meet with her doctor who kept us waiting a good long time. Long enough for Elena to FULLY explore all elements of the Urology lobby. So, two hours after arriving we were finally ready to depart from the hospital into the pouring rain. As per our agreement, we went straight to the Shangri-la Buffet where Josh met us for lunch. Elise is our “I’ll try anything once” kind of girl. She very carefully chose an even mix of things that she knows she likes and things she’s never tried. She tried a shrimp and onion dumpling, a sesame ball, and some kind of weird meatball on a stick. She immediately gagged and almost threw up when she tried the kelp wrapped sushi which went straight into her napkin. But by far she was most excited to try the baby octopus dish. Excited, but I think a little nervous too, because she wanted it from the beginning but said she’d get it on her second trip. Then once she had it on her plate she spent a lot of time eating around it and just kind of playing with it, feeling the suckers etc. Sure enough though, after removing the head which she wanted nothing of, she nibbled a few of the tiny tentacles and reported that “it tastes like nothin’, it’s just chewy.” Of course I stuck with chicken, broccoli, and mushrooms–I am not a very adventurous eater. I am really proud of her for being so brave all day and meeting new experiences head-on with eager anticipation. I wish I had some pictures from our adventures today, but I don’t.