Halloween

I was going for the homemade look this year - not the find a pattern and sew something elaborate homemade, but the throw-together homemade.  Well, these were anything but thrown together.  It took so much work, and I think I was a big grump the whole week leading up to Halloween (why not be honest?). So many trips to the thrift store, the consignment shop, the fabric store.    My mom made Dana's skirt, and I did all the easy stuff like hot gluing foam circles on Levi's pants.  But I LOVED how they turned out.  Looks simple, right? 

We passed out Oriental Trading Co. toys instead of candy.  But my kids still got plenty of junk.  Dana's pretty strong-willed and I usually let her do whatever she wants.  While trick or treating at Jason's work she ate a full-sized Twix, and that was probably half of what she ate that hour.  She'd scream if I told her no (I know, I'm creating a monster).  So I just let her stuff her face.  I figured the candy she ate there was probably, weight-wise, the same as me eating 10 full-sized candy bars.  On the way home in the car she crashed (and she NEVER takes a second nap anymore).  We were a little afraid she was in a sugar coma.  But she woke up.  Since Halloween is over, I pooled the kids' candy, put the chocolatey stuff in some cookie-dough that I froze for future FHE treats, took all the colorful stuff and am saving it for gingerbread houses, and now there is a manageable amount of candy left.  Phew.  Why do we do this to ourselves/our kids anyway?  I don't know any mom that's excited about the amount of candy at Halloween, and somehow we all feel obligated to buy it.  Weird.  I do love Halloween, though. 

Update

I've been feeling especially busy lately, so I'm going to do a lame post with no pictures.  But since it's been 2 1/2 months since I've posted at all, I thought I should.

Baby:
We had our ultrasound, and did something unusual - Jason found out the gender, and I didn't.  Weird, I know, but it made both of us happy.  I just told him he has to act equally interested when we discuss both sets of names, so he doesn't spoil the surprise for me.  I found out the gender on both of my other kids, but this time I thought would be fun to have a surprise, since there's nothing much more I really need, since I have one of each.  It would never have worked to have me find out and not him.  I'm a terrible secret keeper (really, don't tell me secrets), and he's a great one.

Marriage:
Until 2 months ago, we'd never even been a night w/o kids since being parents.  Then my MIL took the kids for a grandma's night out.  On our anniversary, we got another night alone with kids at my parent's house, and then we took a trip to San Francisco for our anniversary (the big 5 years), which was 2 nights.  The kids did great.  I really missed them.  I'd see parents with small children and wish I had mine.  It was really fun, though, and good for us.  I'm weird, though.  I like small breaks - grocery shopping alone, getting something done, and date nights with Jason - but on the whole, I really don't feel like I NEED vacations w/o my kids.  But it was fun and nice.  The highlight was seeing Wicked.  And in case you didn't know, vacationing is expensive.  Those of you who have parents with condo-shares and second houses for you to vacation to, I hope you appreciate it!  :) (seems like I have a lot of friends with those privileges, so I'm just a little jealous). 

Kids:
Probably the best thing we ever did was put the kids in the same room to sleep.  Danes had been in the laundry room until about 4 months ago.  They are both sleeping so much better.  Sometimes the simplest option is the best, though I'm pretty sure my sleep book assured me kids needed their own sleeping space...I'm really questioning advice from books like that.  

House:
Nothing new.  Well, maybe, but we won't know for a little while.  It's hard to get excited at this point, because our house-hunt has been going on for so long I keep thinking it'll never work out.  And in case you are wondering, yes, we qualify for a loan :)  We are just being a little picky for our price range, I think.  

Pictures

I know I shouldn't cover up my announcement from the last post so soon, but that ugly clothes boxes picture was bugging me.

Speaking of pictures, ugly or not, I read a great idea a while back on a blog. The idea is to take a picture of your whole family once a month and write a little bit about that month. I haven't done that exactly. I don't write about each month, and I don't necessarily take one each month. But it did get me thinking about pictures of my whole family. Most of my pictures are of the kids - alone, together, with one parent. But we hardly ever got around to taking one of the whole family (besides "family picture time"). So we ordered this tiny tripod that fits in our camera case, and voila, we can take family pictures wherever.

Easter Morning (actually the day before Easter).  This one is a little bit sad because no kidding we should take a family picture on Easter morning.  But I don't think we ever had before.  If you don't have Easter morning pictures of your family, either, maybe this is a good goal for you, too. ;)

In front of our house.  I love these kind of pictures.  Everyone needs a picture in front of their house.  We've lived in so many places, and I hardly remember what any of them looked like - not that you can really tell from this picture what it looks like.  Maybe we'll try again later.

Camping.  Most of our family pictures are while camping or hiking.  

This is my all-time favorite family picture.  It was taken last year, before I had this picture goal, by my friend Courtney, who sat behind us as we watched fireworks (on the beach - will never beat that 4th of July).  I didn't even know she took the picture, but I was so happy when she gave it to me.  

At the pool.  

So I was thinking about the family pictures as we were swimming tonight, and I wished I could do something more creative/artistic with them.  Someday, I will learn to use my camera.  But in the meantime, (since I have a hard time even getting dinner made on time), I'll just try something new every now and then.  I watched our reflection in Jason's glasses, and decided that was a fun way to capture my whole family. 

I love this picture goal.  It's fun and worthwhile.  My only complaint is that our camera only has a tripod hole on the bottom, so I can only take tripod pictures landscape.  Do they make tripod holes on the sides of cameras?

Our collection of boy clothes and girl clothes

I'm so glad there are only two genders in the world so I don't have to worry about collecting any more boxes.

Yes this is an announcement
Yes I am excited
Yes I am tired
Yes I hope we have a house by then
Yes I'm back to eating ramen noodles and corn dogs (being haunted by my ghost of junk-food past)

So there you have it.  I seriously can't believe I'm about to be a mom to 3 kids.  I think this means I will officially be a mom.  Not that a mom of one or two isn't a mom, but now I will be a mom to the world.  You know, a mom you can spot from anywhere, even if she doesn't have her kids with her; when you see her the first word that pops into your head is "mom."  As weird as it seems, though, to be a mom to 3, I hope to have many more children.  I'm praying that the angel shows up sometime, the one Jason says he needs to see in order to have more than 4. 

And for those of you blog-skimmers who don't like to read details:
We are having a baby this winter!

Almost a CPA

 Louis: Who are you guys?

Ray: We're the Ghostbusters

Louis: Who does your taxes?

(BTW Jason is in audit, not tax.  But we watched this movie on Halloween, and it was so much funnier to me now actually being married to an accountant).

Life has a funny way of teaching us what we need to learn.  I think one of my biggest problems (besides that I'm scatterbrained all the time) is that I'm opinionated and bossy.  I didn't even realize I was like this (very much) until after we were married.  I actually tried to talk Jason out of being an accountant several times.  I told him to be a dentist, like my dad, and only work 4 days a week.  Accountants work too much, don-cha-know?  Well, I am so grateful to be married to Jason.  He puts up with me, but doesn't listen to me (he he).  He became an accountant anyway, and now I am so very grateful.  He has a JOB, a stable job in this wacky economy.  And he comes home from work every day HAPPY.  And busy season, at least this year, actually wasn't too bad for him (except that he was also studying for 3 of the CPA exams after work - that was crazy).

We just found out that he has officially passed all the CPA exams, and is now almost a CPA.  All he needs to do now is wait, I mean work.  He needs a year's work experience, so he should be an official CPA this fall. 

He took his 3rd (of 4) tests on April 1.  I thought I would take advantage of the opportunity to play a prank on him.  I made this "cake" out of (vegetarian) meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  I told him it was his congratulations for taking his test (kind of mean, now that I think of it).  It was such a funny prank, because he was falling for it forever.  I even had the video camera out and was singing "for he's a jolly good fellow," and he was just smiling and thanking me for making cake for dinner.  He even cut it up, and started scooping it out. I was laughing my guts out and he was still clueless as to why.  It wasn't until the meatloaf plopped down, at 3x the weight cake should be, onto the table, that he realized it was a fraud.  (The OJ was jello). 

Saving time on blogging

The moose we saw while camping.  Has nothing to do with the post, but I wanted to add a picture.  

After I wrote that last post, I did something my friend recommended that I've been wanting to do for a long time.  I deleted my blog roll.  I added everyone into my bookmarks, but I don't have a clue when anyone updates.  So it's only been a few weeks since I did this, but I love it.  I think the computer is pretty creepy, actually.  I'm not an addictive personality.  I don't text very much, watch any TV, play any video games.  But that darn computer is really really weird.  I felt like I had to check it every day.  And I knew I didn't, but I did it anyway, out of habit.  I'd get on in the morning, if there was a new post, I checked it.  I tried to not do this, to time myself, but something about knowing there's a new post, for some reason I just had to click on it...

Does this sound like anyone besides me?  It creeps me out that I can be like that.  So now, when I'm thinking about a friend, I'll hop on their blog.  That's how it should be, anyway.  I don't call friends every day for an update.  I guess I'm just trying to make my internet connections mimic real life, to make them more natural and less addicting.  

So there you have it, a way to save time, if you're looking for one.  Another thing I've loved is turning off comments.  Not that I didn't like comments.  I really did.  But I hated the fact that I wanted comments.  That's all. HTH someone.

My blog has become a whole lot of nothing

 Enjoying real life with my family at the mall.

I get pretty disillusioned with blogging sometimes.  When I first started I was super gung-ho.  I mean REALLY gung-ho.  I started under pressure from friends, and quickly found it was an easy way to document my family's happenings that I could even print off.

Then last summer I felt weird about blogging and the computer in general.  I cut my time to an hour a day on the computer, for anything at all on the computer.  That still sounds like a lot, but it was pretty hard to fit the things in that I needed to.  I kept a running list of things to look up on a piece of paper, so when my hour was on, I could go to town (mostly reading about nutrition, I'm a little obsessed).  But it freed me up so much.  Immediately I saw a difference in my self, my happiness, and my parenting.  That lasted a few months.  Then it wore off (you know, I need to just hop on for this or that).  And I'm back to being discontent.

So I tried to simplify my blog.  But I think it's become boring.  I don't say anything important. Now I'm trying to figure out what I am doing blogging anyway.  It's not my record-keeper anymore.  What should I blog about?  I always blogged about my kids in the past.  That's great for grandmas and occasionally for the crowd.  Why do I have a blog?  Sure seems like blogging in one way or another (reading others' blogs or posting on my own) takes up a lot of time.  Is it worth it?

I know some of you have these feelings.  I'm just trying to sort them out.  Because in some ways, I think my life was better, I was happier, my kids were happier, before I started blogging.

Amish buggy driver in Lancaster County.  I think about the Amish a lot, ever since seeing them in '08.  I think they have a lot of things right.  Sometimes I wish I could live that life.  They don't blog.

But then, I've learned a ton.  Like a TON TON from blogs.  Even if I stopped blogging, I don't think I could break my sneak peak addiction at DesignSponge. 

Look, I just totally wasted YOUR time by posting this.  Sorry. ;)