Update
I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed today. Just got soooooo much going on all the time it seems. With the business and Jack working tons of overtime, school projects, and household stuff.
Cody has been going through an intellectual growth spurt. He talks in complete sentences and will hold conversations with us. Some of the stuff he says is hilarious. He’s also working on potty training himself. Without a single word from us or anyone, he’s started taking his diaper off to go. It shocked me the first time I saw him do it. He never said a word to any of us and none of us have even started asking him about going… he is just experimenting and learning on his own. Sometimes when he gets out of the bath, he’ll let us know he has to go. It’s cute. We’ll continue to let him work this out on his own.
Yesterday we had a guy come out and give us an estimate on replacing all of our windows with vinyl windows. And the phone guy came out to figure out why there was a phone line just draped over the entire length of our fence. (He says they must’ve been busy when they ran the line to the house behind and diagnal from us and “forgot” to bury the line… um, ok). Now they will be calling me to bury the line. I guess the phone box for the six houses around us is in our backyard. Neato.
Casey and I worked on two of his homework projects this morning. Let me tell ya, his kindergarten teacher is big on these “projects”. From fancy “about me pages” to cutting out leaves to decorate. It’s supposed to be fun for us to work on together and while I always enjoy doing fun stuff with my kids, I find these projects more of a chore. We don’t exactly have all the “suggested materials” just lying around (like glitter and sequins, lol) and Casey’s very particular about how he wants things done. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if this teacher didn’t make it sound like everything has to be very fancy and detailed. The examples she gives are very elaborate. Like the “about me page” example is basically a very fancy (but much larger) scrapbook type page we’re supposed to do. We’re still working on that one. I think it’s a bit much for a kindergartener.
Jack has been working an insane amount of overtime lately. There’s been a big project at work and the people who were supposed to iron out the kinks before the project went live didn’t do their homework, so Jack and his co-workers were left to deal with it all weekend long. And he got a bit of what could be scary news yesterday as well. The new president of the hospital is going to phase out the IS department of the hospital and out-source it. Supposedly the company they hire to become their IS team will be hiring the current hospital IS employees…. The president claims the company would have better benefits and a bunch of stuff that would be better for the current employees, but it’s still kinda scary to me. There’s a lot of unanswered questions (like can this company just lay off hospital employees down the road after they take over???) It supposedly won’t happen for another 6 months to a year but Jack is going to be working on his resume just in case. Not that it matters TOO much. He has a job with another company anytime he says the word. (They have been trying to steal him from the hospital for a while now…)
My own space…
We’ve officially owned our home for three months today. And our garage has been a mess the entire three months. It started out a mess because we unpacked what we needed during the heatwave we had the week we moved and left the rest in the garage. Whenever something we needed has come up missing, one of us would venture out into the garage, find the box and either take what we needed out and leave the still unpacked box there. We’ve been so busy just doing yard work and kid stuff that we kept putting off the garage, till today.
Another reason it was a mess is because Jack has hundreds of “things”. From tools big and small, (like 39 different screwdrivers, I swear there was one or more in EVERY box!) to cd’s, music equipment, computer paraphernalia, game cd’s, books…. well I could go on but that would probably max out the limit of space I have here at my domain… lol :love: Keep in mind that he also has his own room (huge room) upstairs for all of his music and computer equipment.
Lets put this into perspective: at our old house (the one in Orchards) he had all his stuff in the nice-sized garage. And it was packed in there. Barely room to move around in. No way you’d get a car in there either. When we moved to the apartment, we never managed to clean up the garage to where we could use it for any kind of function other than a catch-all. Because it was half the size of our garage at our last house, there was just no way for Jack to set up or unpack all his things (he tried more than once).
So now we have a nice spacious house where Jack can spread his stuff out over both the garage and “his” room. Today it dawned on me that I have lived with most of my own personal stuff in boxes for YEARS. Beside regular household stuff and what’s crammed on my desk, my personal belongings have been in boxes and stored in closets or crawl spaces for years and years.
Today as we were cleaning out the garage, I told Jack, “it must be nice to have your own room and garage to work out of now” and then I thought to myself, wait a minute, why don’t I have a chunk of this huge house for myself? The kids have their room and Jack has his room(s), and we have our bedroom, but I don’t have any space for ME except for my desk, which is always overflowing… I went into the den and looked at my pathetic desk, then I looked in the laundry room and at the pathetic shelves ready to buckle under the weight of my old photo albums and now all my Watkins business stuff. I looked in the bedroom in the closet where my stuff was still in the same boxes they’ve been in for so long…
So I went to Jack and told him I wanted my own space. His face lit up as it dawned on him as well that I’ve never really had my own space and he immediately went to work clearing out a huge space in the garage for me. He anchored some shelves next to a counter for me. Then he found some extra flooring material that was used in our bathroom and covered the counter with that for me. He hung two more shelves above that and cleared out the space under the counter. As a final touch he gave me one of his bookshelves to put on the other side of the counter for my books. I was so excited! I unpacked many of my old boxes and decorated the area with pictures of my kids (there’s never a shortage of those) and family. I have a nice-sized stack of shelves to store all my Watkins inventory and business stuff, and a place to work and make phone calls if needed, a place to see all my books and a place under the counter to store all my pictures and the scrapbooking materials I’ve been meaning to actually work on. Now I’ll have a place to do it besides the dining room table!
He said if I wanted, he could enclose the space and it could even be private. And he offered to set up one of his laptops out there. I said no at first, but the idea is starting to appeal to me. The space is big enough that if he DID close it off, I could set up a small couch and maybe a throw rug for the kids to play on while I worked. And it also might work out better for when I’m doing my other job for a quieter place to take calls. The best part is it doesn’t cut into his space at all and we still have room for the car.
It might sound silly that I’m so excited but I think this is really neat and it’s kinda fun having my own “room” to do whatever I want with. And I absolutely adore my husband. It’s so cool to me that he saw that I wanted something and dropped what he was doing to give me exactly what I wished for at the blink of an eye. :loveu:
Productive weekend!
We had all the kids this weekend (Minus Kayla) and got a LOT of yard work done and even built our new wood box for storing our winter wood!
There were 3 small trees that had to be cleared from behind the tool shed so the older kids got to work on that with a small limb saw. (The trees themselves were only about 3 inches in diameter.)
I dug a small 3′ wide x 10″ deep fire pit and surrounded it with rocks and started a fire. We had fun clearing old debris and branches from around the shed. The fire burned for about 12 hours that day, but we got everything cleared!
Ralph came over about Noon and helped with the cutting and clearing, then we went to work putting the wood box together.
All in all everyone had a pretty fun time, and we made S’Moores that night around our little “Camp fire”
We painted it the next day, and Casey got more paint on himself than he did the wood shed. (I wish I’d taken pictures!) Oh, and Randy also managed to rub up on the side and give himself a nice white streak.
We’ll be warming ourselves by the fire of our wood stove insert this winter!
Now to get some wood before winter sets in…
Sad Squirrel Story
Yesterday I heard Randy playing in the back yard with his squeaky toy. After a while though, I realized the squeaking wasn’t quite right. Then I saw Randy jump back… and to my surpise I discovered he was playing with a very sick and injured squirrel. It was a fiesty little thing at first, actually chasing after Randy! But clearly quite injured. I hope it wasn’t Randy who injured it. I don’t think it was though from the way the squirrel was acting.
I called Animal Control to have them come remove it but they said they didn’t have anyone to send out (and mentioned something about budget cuts… ???) They referred me to the Fish & Wildlife department. The guy there said they didn’t have anyone to send out either because the squirrel was a “common animal” and he too mentioned something about budget cuts. This man was comical as he told me that if he DID send someone out, they’d have to put the squirrel down and that would be sad. While I agreed it would be sad, this squirrel was beyond saving. 
He appeared to be paralyzed from the waist down. I’m guessing he either fell out of a tree or was possibly poisoned. He referred me to a private service.
I called the private service and he explained that it would be $100.00 for him to come out and get the squirrel. He also said it was not normal for a squirrel to go chasing after a dog or anyone. Well, yeah but this thing was injured and very confused. I told him not to come out but asked what I should do? He said to get on a pair of heavy jeans and some boots and go whack the squirrel with a broom. !!! Um, ok… a broom. As I’m talking to this man, I see the squirrel trying to run around on its front legs (and succeeding) but looking quite miserable. I couldn’t imagine trying to put it out of its misery with a broom… So I hung up with this guy and decided to catch it, which I did successfully and pretty easily. By this point the poor thing was clearly dying.
Ralph called about 30 seconds after I caught it and he came over… Jack got home a few minutes later and they took care of it. Ralph said he really thinks it might’ve gotten into poison somewhere… perhaps rat poison at someone’s house.
Intact Cats…
Our neighbor next door has an intact male cat. My two cats are both fixed. My cats stay close to home and are almost always found in our front yard or on the front porch. The neighbor’s cat is very friendly to people and often comes and visits us. Unfortunately, when we aren’t around he will attack our neutered male cat. Often we are woken up in the middle of the night to listen to them fighting. Having gone through this before, I don’t have much patience for this.
Yesterday was the clincher when I found poor Kiki to have an abscess the side of golf ball on the back of his neck. I rushed him to the vet and they said it had to be lanced and drained. They also found numerous bite marks and scratches on him. The abscess was the result of a bite from another cat that got infected. $130.00 later he is home and resting in our bathroom with a 3 inch drain tube that goes in one side of his neck and out the other. Poor baby…
Jack and I talked about how to approach the neighbor. We don’t want bad feelings towards them or to have it blow up into something nasty. But something should be done in my opinion. Why don’t people just fix their damn cats??? Anyway, we decided that taking Kiki over to her house while we very politely explain the situation and allow her to see what he had to go through might be enough for her to do something. Personally I think she owes us $130 bucks but I won’t persue that. It just sucks because it’s not like Kiki is going into that cat’s territory. He’s attacked on his own front lawn. The fur from the other cat is proof and I might have to resort to taking pictures and catching the neighbor’s cat in the act if this continues.
For now, I’ll keep him in the house till he’s healed and let him go out as he pleases once again… I just hate having to worry about him getting attacked yet again by another non-neutered male cat. It’s not fair.
If you’re a cat owner who allows your cat to freely roam the neighborhood, do yourself and your neighbors a favor: NEUTER OR SPAY YOUR CATS!
Added: New button on the left titled “Free Watkins e-Newsletter”. Click it to join my free Watkins Newsletter. Also added a button titled “Free Monthly Contest”. Click it to enter to win a FREE Watkins full size Product. I’m hoping to do these once every other month or more!
