Is It Naptime Yet

For the first time all the dirty dishes in my house fit in my dishwasher and are being cleaned as we speak, er, as I write, I mean type, as of this very moment.

I know you’re so proud.

I did dishes last night, and then just now, and now my sink is empty, void, of dirty dishes.

OK, so I don’t have much to blog about right now, but having a clean sink does make me happy.

Maybe the Flylady does have something on having a clean sink, I’m just not willing to stash dirty dishes under my sink to keep the illusion of clean.

If it’s clean I want it to be clean for reals.

And mine is clean for reals and I am so happy.

Granted I do have times where my sink is clean and there are no dishes in the sink, but then there are dirty dishes in the dishwasher waiting for more dishes so I can start the load, but instead of being on top of it I let my sink get filled with dishes and then I’m back at square one; a full dishwasher with some left over dishes in the sink waiting to be cleaned but, hypothetically, if I empty my dishwasher before I make lunch I can have nearly all the dishes in my house clean and put away. I say nearly all because there are always the current water cups lying around.

I probably won’t be emptying my dishwasher before lunch, so it’s just a nice dream.

Hopefully I empty it before dinner.

Due to the record snow fall in Las Vegas yesterday, Jon was sent home early that evening. He wanted to make a snowman and play in the snow, so I got layers on the girls, found their hats and gloves and got them ready to have some snow evening fun.

First we built a double sided snowman/ snow teddy bear.

Having fun.

Acting like a kid. ( Isn’t he so cute though?)

Getting the head ready.

Patting the snow down.

Cute smile.

Getting more snow on the head.

Putting on the face.

Putting on buttons.

Lilah working on her side.

Final product on one side.

Eden showing me snow…

…and then starting a snow ball fight.

Lilah’s final snowman. (Mommy helped with the face since Jon’s hands were so frozen and he and Eden were busy having a snowball fight.)

The aftermath.

wet shoes

And wet clothes in both bathrooms.

The family warming up.

Jon didn’t have gloves thus he hands got a little too cold and were still not the same this morning. We think he may have suffered some nerve damage all for the sake of having a snowball fight with Eden and us. Eden was having lots of fun ‘throwing’ the snow. Since she can’t throw far and she knows it, she would gather it in her hands walk up to you and then hit you with the snow point blank by hitting you with her hand and a handful of snow.  Eden’s thumb also was hurting when she got inside, but there have been no complaints today so I imagine she’s fine.

In Henderson my sister still had about 4 inches on the ground and Clark County called off school for the day due to the snow. Oh how unprepared we are for snow in Las Vegas.

Our snow started melting in the night, we got rain after 8 pm or so, and we had a nice wet driveway this morning and afternoon.

We were thinking of visiting Mount Charleston over the break sometime, but honestly I think I’ve had enough snow for the winter.

We don’t have the proper clothing and it gets everything so wet and that’s just not that fun to clean up afterwords or be in.

I’ve been a little preoccupied. I made truffles this week and have been mostly ignoring my children all morning. We’re down to 6 pieces of bread. Luckily we only need 5 for our lunch.

I need to go grocery shopping, as told by our bread situation.

I’ll post pictures of my worst truffle making experience later.

As of right now I’m gonna shower and have lunch with Anna and then bake cookies at my mom’s house for Anna. She’s unprepared for her kids class tonight and I’m exploiting her for food and a reason to leave my house. Never mind I need to do dishes. I’m breaking out of this place!

Well even though the semester is not technically over till the end of this week, Jon received his grade for his independent studies class he took this semester.

He got an A on his paper which means he received an A for the course!

Really I’m just so happy to have the semester over. It was hard to give him study time when I wanted to have my own time  at times. ( How many times can I say time or times in a sentence?)

We’re going to have a lunch date next week and Eden’s old nursery leader is going to watch the girls. I ran into her at the bank last week and she made the comment that she hadn’t watched the girls all year and would love to. (She watched them last year when we went for a celebratory lunch date after the end of the semester.) Since we’re no longer in the same ward I felt like I would have just been using her if I asked her to babysit, but apparently she wants me to use her and her daughter and watch my kids. Who am I to say no?

So next week we celebrate the conclusion of a good semester.

We have a pretty nice mail lady, and mailman for that matter, but this post is mostly about our mail lady.

I’m not sure how long she’s been our mail lady, but I only really remember her from sometime last year. I think before that we hadn’t had much interaction with her because most of our packages were delivered through UPS, and we just never saw her. Last year we began getting a lot of packages from Amazon through the USPS, and we saw her, even if it was just waving thank you as she pulled away in her truck or seeing her as we came or left our house. She also delivered the doll house we got from Conrad, and mentioned to Lilah that she could not open it till Christmas, since it was addressed to Lilah and it said not to open till Christmas.

Ever since last year we wave to her each time we see her and if she happens to be at the mailbox the girls go over to get our mail from her. They were wary of her the first few times, but now they seem to be a little more comfortable with her, though still wary if I just watch from the driveway.

(The mailbox is in our connecting duplex’s yard, so if it were just one house, it would be in our yard.)

She’s a very nice woman but she has an always busy or needs to be moving type personality. We see her dancing and singing to her i-tunes and when we’ve spoken it’s always been very quick.

Today we got another package and instead of just leaving it on the door and waving goodbye as I got it and she pulled away, she waited at the doorstep and also gave us our mail.

I had been taking a nap so she had rang the doorbell and knocked by the time I got there. She said, “Why so slow, slowpoke?” I replied I was taking a nap and she apologized for waking me and asked if the girls were sleeping too. I replied it was just me and the younger one as Lilah emerged and she commented on her being so quiet for me and then she was gone as quickly as she had appeared.

I really like our mail lady and her little quirkiness. With living in an apartment you got minimum interaction with the mailman and now with living right by the mailbox and receiving packages we see them on average once a week and they know who we are.  Our mailman also directly gave me a package and our mail the other day when I was out doing lights on Monday.

I wonder what it’s like to remember people and their addresses.  I wonder if they first know me by my address or by the name on the package. I wonder if seeing my girls ever brightens their day. In fact I know it brightened the mailman’s day on Monday. He handed me a package and Lilah asked what it was as I handed it to her. I told her it was a Christmas present for Daddy and she immediately replied, “Lets go wrap it right now.” Our mailman chuckled and replied how cute it was that she knew exactly what to do with it.

I wonder if I’m allowed to give gifts to our mail people, and I plan on trying to give them some of the truffles I make to show thanks for being such nice mail people.  I think interacting with them as given me teaching experiences with the girls on friendliness and being polite to those who serve us.

Yesterday Lilah and Eden’s dance classes were cancelled for the week. With it being Thanksgiving this Thursday and past experiences, dance class is pretty small, so she had us take the week off and we’ll go one extra week past the schedule.

So with no class we decided to do a Costco run for my MIL. Lilah wanted to eat lunch at Costco, but I said no, so she asked if we could eat pizza at grandma’s house. (I was buying mini pizza’s for them.) So we had a lazy afternoon at the Blake’s house. The girls sat on the couch eating lunch and watching Bambi with Grandpa.

Jon had taken Eden over on Sunday night to help move the computer, and Grandma let Eden choose a VHS to take home, Bambi, but our VCR is broken, so we couldn’t watch it. When I told my in-laws why we had to return the video so soon and that some day we plan on buying a DVD VCR combo due to too many plugs,  my mother-in-law later emerged with a DVD VCR combo. She had bought it for Dara or Jason when they were moving into their group homes, and they ended up not needing it, and my in-laws don’t need it, so she gave it to us and we’re calling it an early Christmas present.

After enjoying a nice afternoon we headed home. I went to go use our bathroom only to have the light burned out and a funny smell in the room. I instant messaged Jon and since we use compact florescent he said I should turn on the bathroom fan and open the back door in our room to air it out.

Later that night when Jon came home and got around to changing the bulb he noticed the bulb had a burn mark and our breaker had been tripped.

We’re not sure what happened. I think I left the light on when I left that morning, but I’m not sure since I try to turn off all lights when I leave. I didn’t see any sparks when I tried to turn the light on so I imagine it happened while we were gone.

Either way I’m glad no real damaged happened and that we had no real fire, though we’re not positive it could have caused a fire, it’s still scary to have a burnt light bulb, a tripped breaker, and a stinky house.

A few weeks ago I was coming home from somewhere and I had the radio on. Strangely enough Lilah was asleep in the back seat and Eden was awake. A song come on the radio and I sang along and then I noticed Eden singing along. Since it was the last song on in the car before we went inside Eden was still singing it and I thought it was too cute.

Later that night I couldn’t remember the lyrics, or song since it was fairly new to me since I don’t listen to the radio a lot. I tried googling  “just say yes”, but those were definitely not the lyrics to the song.

Finally the song came on while traveling to Costco this week and once again Eden was singing the lyrics to the chorus. I remembered the words and was able to find a music video of the song on youtube.

It was Jon Mayer’s ‘Say’.

I’ve decided this song has one of the easiest choruses to learn, especially since Eden had the chorus down pat before her first listening of the song was complete.

I’ve tried to capture video of her singing it, but the mic on our camera was acting up, and then I was testing the mic on the camera by going a little crazy with the camera, so I’ve pieced together what I could of her singing, and I have the original youtube video of it too.

For Halloween some people decorate their front yard as a graveyard.

Me….I like to make my laundry area a mini graveyard of ants.

Can you tell I’m avoiding sewing?

I’m gonna go vacuum up the mass graveyard.

I guess the ant bait is working.

My friend Anna is giving away a $10 gift card to JoAnn’s.

All you have to do is hop over there and tell her: If you could be anything you wanted for Halloween, cost and costume being no object, what would it be?

She’ll close the giveaway once she gets 25 answers.

Go do it so I can win the gift card and buy a pie plate. Or if you’re Carolyn you can win the gift card and buy me a pie plate and I’ll share a pie with you, or you might even win the gift card, but I admit I really want to just win the gift card for myself. 😉

We had ants this morning. Not a lot of ants, but enough that were persistent that we needed to call the bug guy before we got a lot. So we’ve had the bug guy out twice in two months and since we’re not on the monthly plan we pay the call out amount, and we could get three monthly visits for two call out visits.

It sucks to waste money, but we usually only have them out twice a year when we get ants, because we don’t get that many other bugs. Last month the ants were outside by our front door, this month they were in the girl’s bathroom and my laundry area/ kitchen area.

Ants bite.

I really hate them and he sprayed a lot so I hope they all die.

I was also hoping to go to Utah for my friends wedding. We were discussing it and I was going to go, but we have Lilah’s ER bills, Jon has cavities that need to be filled, and we have this mornings bug man’s bill to pay.

Life bites.

I think I’m going to eat some Cherry Chocolate Bread, really cake, after lunch.

I need to sew, those were my original plans today. I have the hem and the skirt to attach to the dress and then I’m at a standstill till they get me buttons, lace, and the fabric for the apron and such. I’ve done so much work already this morning I don’t want to sew.  (I mopped floors, cleaned bathrooms and did dishes, things I planned on doing tomorrow after I finished the skirt. )

This week is going down hill. Fast.