November 13, 2011

Theme of the week: chain saws.

The sound of chain saws has been near constant all week. It's really surreal to drive around - there is barely a piece of sidewalk not covered with branches and trees. Josh took the chainsaw out for 3or 4 hours today and managed to clear just over half of our backyard. Jesse helped, of course. Timothy was called upon to help, but mostly just stood there. We have a pretty good pile of wood started under the deck for future burning in the fireplace.

I thought about helping Josh with the chainsaw activity, but decided to stay inside and sew holiday gift bags out of fabric all weekend. They actually look really cute! It's not exactly the same as the satisfaction of ripping through paper, but it creates far less trash! I already wrapped most of the kids' presents in paper already, so it will be a mixed medium holiday. And I also got Reese's name cross-stitched and sewed to his stocking - woo hoo! That's the last one - we're out of stockings. Actually, we were out one kid ago and with Reese, Grandma and Grandpa gave up their (joint) stocking. But we stopped doing adult stockings years ago, so it all works.

Jocelyn went to her first sleepover party last night. A friend of hers had a sleepover at a hotel where they got to go swimming and have buffet breakfast and painted their nails and watched movies and everything. She had a super good time, and that was after she had already gone to a daytime birthday party at Nomad's (essentially a giant Chuck E. Cheese type place).

We rescheduled Jesse's birthday party for this next Friday and so far most people can still make it. A bit belated, but BounceTown is always fun no matter the timing!

Timothy leaves on Tuesday morning for the 8th grade trip to Washington DC. Josh had the pleasure of taking him to the mandatory informational meeting this week and came home adamant that he would never do that again. I'm not really sure why we are forced to have read to us things we have to read and sign anyway, and apparently the principal went on a long rant about things that weren't allowed, like drugs, which means that kids who had never even thought of getting to do drugs this week are now reaching out to their DC connections.

Seriously, though, when you have the opportunity to speak to your child right before they go on stage to make a big speech, you have 2 choices. You can either say "knock 'em dead, you can do it," or you can say "don't blow it." The principal was clearly of the "don't blow it" camp,

All the kids went back to school (finally) on Wednesday this week, in case any of you were like me and worried they would never go back.

Well I guess that's the news from here. Hope everyone has a great week!

Rhonda