OK, so I was reading through my feeds this evening – after pumpkin carving – and read not one, not two, but THREE different blogs who all said that in their town/city, Trick or Treating was taking place tonight! The 30th!

I’ve tried to wrap my mind around the reasoning for this, because Halloween falls on a Friday this year, Friday : the perfect day for Halloween, you don;t have to worry about bedtimes, you don’t have to worry about saying NO! NO candy! you have school tomorrow.

So what could the reasoning behind the early Trick or Treating be?

Maybe the mayor of the town has bookings at las vegas hotels and could not cancel without losing his deposit.

maybe all of the adults got together and decided that having it one day early left Friday night open for them all to go on dates, leaving kids suffering from sugar overload to convenient teenage babysitters.

Or maybe, there was a printing mishap at the calender store and those towns all got calendars with the wrong dates on them! maybe they really think that tonight is the night!

Do you have any theory??

Oh man. I am SO ill. And the worst part? I thought the worst of this was OVER, but at about, oh, three PM, I got sicker. And Sicker AND SICKER!

And? The littlest one is ill as well. He has no fever, but his nose is raw and bloody from his snot, his lips are dry and cracked from breathing through the mouth and he has a pencil eraser sized blister on the side of his toungue! Poor little guy.

After going into his room for the fourth time to lay with him and calm him down, I told hubs that if he is still up when we go to bed, he will be coming with us to bed. I gave the boy some Tylenol, it didn’t seem to be working, he cried twice more after I gave it to him, but now, I think he is asleep, so maybe it DID work!

Now I am struggling with whether to leave him in bed for the night or carry him to mine for the night. I’m a very heavy sleeper, and I worry that he will cry in the night and I won’t here him.

Nights are the worst part, for me, when it comes to being a mother. I worry about them becuase I am not there to keep and eye on them.

Last October, Smokey was a 12 week old puppy. We thought she was impossiblyu tiny, and oh so cute. How wrong we were. last October, Smokey was ablet o fit a Pet Halloween Costume, She was a witch. She hated her little hat, but at least she fit it!

This year, Smokey is too big to fit a costume – or a tleast any reasonably priced costume and sammi is too tiny to fit one. Both of the pups will be costumeless this year :O(

When I went to the City on Monday, I picked up a few hair clips for Sammi. I don’t know if it is becuase her hair is a bit too short or if I got the wrong kind, but they fall out really easy, and when they don;t fall out, Sammi scratches them out with her back paw.

How do other people get the hair do doads to stay in?

**regarding my earlier post, I have decided that there is no way I can make an infant and a toddler spend that many hours in a vehicle and be able to sleep at night, So I will be watching the Girls for as long as it take their mom and dad to get their stuff all moved. it might inconvenience me, and it might make me bitchy by the end of the day, but I simply am not mean enough to force those babies to suffer like that!**

We had our shopping day on Saturday and while we were in Costco we picked up a gift for my Grandma. Grandma likes decorations and the like so we got a set of three snowmen. The largest is 18 inches high and they are quite cute. The only problem I have with giving Christmas decorations as a Christmas gift is that she has to wait a full year to be able to display them. I wonder if It would be OK to give it to her two weeks before Christmas so that she could at least enjoy it!

We also finalized out list for each other and the boys. I told Hubs that I wanted new slippers – I wear leather ones, the kind with fur round them, and I wear them till they fall apart. I had dug my slippers out last week and was very sad to see that the sole of the slipper was completely detached!

I think it is So funny that for Christmas this year the boys will be giving me slippers! As a child, every year the three of us, my brother, my sister and I, would hunt for the perfect pair of slippers for our mom, and now here my kids are giving me slippers!

We used to get my dad ties – the el cheapo ones, not nice silk ties, and socks! One year, The first year mom gave us each money and set us free in the mall to shop, I was so excited, so proud that I had found the perfect gift for my dad. I bought him a great big package of socks! He needed socks, he had told me so. I could hardly wait until Christmas Morning for him to open his socks, I must have been all of eight years old. Well sure enough, Christmas Morning came, and my dad opened his socks.

Honestly, and my father still doesn’t believe me, I had NO IDEA that socks came in different sizes! I had bought my dad a package of socks that fit MY feet, not his! I really had no idea! I can still remember the big pile of socks on the shelves, packages upon packages of them, I remember looking at the price excited that it was within my ten dollars a person limit, and i remember not thinking to check the size of the socks!

When you were a kid, did you do anything like this??

First – if you read my other blogs you know why I have been gone for so long and I won’t be rehashing it. I am sorry for the long absence, but it could not be helped.

today my brothers girlfriend -the mother of my two adorable nieces – called me. They are moving (finally) out of my fathers home – I will get back to why this is good news in a bit – anyway they are moving on the eighth of November to Alberta. Its a four hour trip there and back. My Brother’s GF asked me to baby sit their daughters while they move as they will have to make two trips, and asking a two year old and a two month old to sit in a vehicle for 16 hours is absolutely impossible.

but….

as horrible as it sounds, I do NOT want to babysit. even knowing that I will not see the girls for months or more, I do not want to watch them. I have kids now, NOT babies, and babies are damn hard work. Then there is the fact that EVERY SINGLE TIME Bro and his girl have asked me to watch the girls, they have NOT returned to get them at the time they told me. NOT ONCE. and they don’t call – they go so far as to turn off their cell  – and then tell me it has died. I know the dead battery thing is a lie as they once told me oh, the battery died, only to make a call five minutes later on it.

They say I will only be watching the girls for the morning and “part” of the afternoon. If I take their previous actions into consideration, this translates to me watching the girls for the morning, the afternoon and the evening too.

I don’t want this!

And yet, what choice do I have? I can’t make two babies sit in a car that long, its cruel.

I spent the day in my sons pre kindergarten class yesterday. it was interesting. These kids have not been in class a full week yet and already know ” 1 2 3, eyes on me” means stop whatever you are doing and look at teacher. they Know that “criss cross apple sauce, apples in a basket” mean sit on the rug, legs crossed hands in your lap”

But the most amusing was the “class” right after Book Look time. (Book look is when the kids sit on the rug and look at books) After book look is what the kids think is the best class. It’s called “Center Play”. to the kids, Center Play is when they play with the cars (sharing, playing quietly) or go to a table to play with cubes (geometry, fine motor skills, imagination) or head to the discovery table where the leaves, pine cones, sticks, rocks and magnifying glasses lay ( science) the kids can also use the glue, scissors and crayons to draw pictures and glue leaves to the picture (art, fine motor skills). Then there is the “work shop center” where the kids have wooden tools and blocks to play with (imagination, more fine motor skills, balancing, sharing).

I think it is so amusing that the Center Play, which to many might just look like a free time activity, is what will teach these kids the most. Sure they like to be read stories, and dress weather bear appropriately, they like going on nature walks and having recess time, but center time? That’s where the real education is at!

Today is my Mother in laws 65th birthday. She does not look or act 65. Not at all. She still has the energy of an..well, she has more energy than I do, that’s for sure. She still takes my boys for weekends, and instead of plopping them in front of the TV, the play with play doh, or take apart electronics together. She takes them on hour long bike rides and she is more than willing to play on the play ground equipment with the boys instead of sitting  on the benches and watching.

The best part of us moving here, was the fact that my boys get to see her, and their Papa as often as they like.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Five more days people!

Today we  did our regular shopping, we do this every two weeks. it’s not horribly fun, as we shop for essentials, you know, like food.

Here are five things I coveted while shopping:

1. The high def TV Wal*Mart had on sale for just under 700$

2. The winning lotto ticket the man in front of us in the line had. I could do a lot with 1200$

3. Purple nail polish. kit was shiny and shimmery and I wanted it!

4. The pretty silver Nikon camera in the locked down display case. Did you know Nikon makes binoculars too? They do : Nikon binoculars

5. The latest edition of Rock Band – I am actually buying that for hubs for Christmas, so it is just a matter of waiting a few more months. Sigh.

What do you covet?

Our town is more like a suburb. We are 15 minutes on a twinned highway from the largest city in our province. We are often referred to as “A Bedroom Community” becuase a HUGE majority, including my husband, commute from here to the city for work. As such, our town has made many improvements in terms of roads, infrastructure, and beautifying the town to attract more and more people to come to live here.

One very short block from our house is one of the more impressive features the town added to help beautify the town. its a HUGE football sized pond with a fountain in the center. At night, the fountain is lit up. its gorgeous! The houses surrounding the pond sell for more than a million bucks, which is a LOT when compared to the prices a short block away!

(I took this – Pretty sweet, eh?)

Because it is so close to our house, and has a nice walking path around it (that we hardly ever use), it is often where we go when we want to walk the kids or the dog. The pond is deep in the center, but quite shallow at the banks with a nice gravel shore that makes for a pleasant walk around. There are also approximately sixty eight bazzillion fish in the pond. (the boys love watching them).

Smokey LOVES the pond. She loves trying to catch the fish, she’s never been successful, her leash is only four feet long, but she loves to try! She also stops every two and a half steps to drink the pond water, and until tonight I thought nothing of it. What changed tonight was the algae coating the Outer Banks of the pond. It’s the thick green kind and it stinks!

When we saw the algae, despite Smokey’s rather vocal protests, we left the edge of the pond and went up to the paved walkway for our walk.

I know algae is gross, but would it have been dangerous for Smokey to walk in and drink? She pouted the entire walk and Hubs said we should find a new place to walk becuase she cried and whined for the pond the whole time.