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I promise I read your blog, and have not been ignoring you - you know who you are.

4 Things I Love about my Husband:
- He's a great dad.
- He likes to travel.
- He says he's sorry.
- He loves me.

4 Movies I could watch more than once:
- Pride & Prejudice (A&E)
- Love Actually
- Lord of the Rings
- National Treasure

4 T.V. Shows I watch:
Since I refuse to pay for cable (no, we don't have TIVO either) we don't have a lot of channels, so we mostly watch TV shows on DVD. The series we are up to date on include:
- Bones
- John Adams HBO Miniseries (FANTASTIC!)
- 30 Rock
- 24

4 Places I've been:
- China
- Mexico
- Guatemala
- Bermuda

4 Places I'd like to go:
- Africa (I know this covers a large area, but this way I don't have to exclude anything)
- Japan
- Italy
- France

4 Things I look forward to in the next year:
- Planting grass and cleaning up our yard.
- My parents getting home from their mission.
- Traveling - just not sure where yet.
- The unknown - at this stage in life it is much more exciting than most of the things I know about.

Prodigious

I think I used to have much more interesting posts, particularly when I first started out. Maybe it's just burnout, but now I rarely make time to write anything interesting and tend to only post things about the LG or that I feel obligated to write for the sake of my progeny in hopes that someday I get it together enough to somehow publish my blog in lieu of scrapbooking. Anyway, I guess I am just lucky that for now the LG seems to be at an amusing age - at least according to his mother. This clip is just a taste of his musical repertoire, which includes singing about anything from hippop0tami to strange phrases from books we read like, "shut the door and bolt it" (courtesy of the Grasshopper and the Ants).

Mayhem

Last Friday a bulldozer arrived, along with 4 strong Tongan men, 2 scrawny but very hardworking missionaries, and the rain. The missionaries took one look at the rv parking pad that was partially broken up and tossed into a "mound" (that we initially overlooked as a bush due the ivy growing all over it) and decided to take on our backyard as their service project for the week. Bless their hearts... forever, and ever and ever. I can't tell you how giddy I was that day. It was quite something to watch the bulldozer make small work of what would have taken the BK and me months to do (not to mention the state of our backs afterward). Giddy I tell you. You may think it still looks like a trailer park, but I think it looks like a beautiful blank canvas that will remain muddy and wet for the next 6 months or so until I figure out what to do with it all in the spring.

I dug up this picture which is a pretty good overview of the mess we were originally dealing with. The BK deserves a lot of credit for ridding much of the overgrowth which prevented the sky from being seen.

Here I am sweeping off the "driveway". The " " are to designate that it isn't really a driveway since it leads directly to a fence now and has no access to the road. We figured it might be a good idea before the bulldozer arrived to figure out exactly where the cement was. Notice the beautiful landscaping job behind me where someone so artfully built a beautiful cement retaining wall with parts of the driveway. Nice.
And after the bulldozer did its thing........ Ahhh, so clean. They even cleared out all the stumps of the trees the BK chopped down. Do I mind that the bulldozer also dug up the few flowers I had planted and the only salvagable rose bush in the yard? Not one bit! Seriously, not one bit. If I could just get Mary Poppins to snap her fingers and remove the lingering junk pile.

So below we are looking at the infamous "bush" against the far fence. You can see more cement handiwork peeking out beneath the ivy if you look close enough. There is also a lovely landscaped walkway - also made out of parts of the previous RV parking pad- that leads to the garage door.

And after..... Sorry that this doesn't give you a better idea, but consider that the BK is standing next to the fence, where the "bush" used to reside. Ahhh, so clean.

As I am typing this, it occurs to me that many of you may think we were insane to buy this house, and all the baggage that came with it. All I can say is you may be right.

Late Night Memos

The LG is back to thinking that he is supposed to report for duty between 6:00 and 6:30am. This morning when I finally succumbed to his pleas at 6:40 I asked him if he had received the memo I sent out last night indicating that I didn't want to see or hear from him until at least 7am. After a bit of further pressing it was clear that he in fact had not received the memo and he became very adamant that we find said memo. "A mama, a find memo is. A mama, a find memo is." Usually he is eager to locate food and is asking, "A mama, a have cereal. A mama, a have blueberries. A mama, a have milk." I was impressed that I spent the first 15 minutes of the morning being dragged from room to room looking for the lost memo. After 15 minutes, however, it wasn't hard to divert him with breakfast. I'll send another memo tonight.

Speaking of memos, I finally responded to the ones I received from more than one grandmother that the LG's hair was in need of a bit of a trim. I was inspired last week as he was contentedly sucking on a popsicle that it was now or never. I have such mixed feelings about cutting it because I find his curls adorable, but it started to get in his eyes, and it was getting a little beyond shaggy. He was so good, and his eyes would get very wide every time a chunk of his locks would fall onto the tray of his high chair.

We also went to OMSI last week - one of the refuges in Portland for people with children when it is raining. The LG had a great time painting with his friend ClaireBear. I also found it wildly appropriate that he was wearing his new T-Shirt from Grandma (inspired by the toilet episode) that reads, "If I'm quiet you'd better find me." As we were leaving, the LG took off at a sprint toward the playground area - which I thought was fairly safe since there is only one exit and entrance at the end of a dead end hallway. As I chase after him with umbrella stroller veering every which way and bags swinging from both arms, I apparently miss him running into the open elevator. After frantically searching the indoor playground I come out terrified only to see my friend that we were there with opening the elevator in response to hearing his terrified cries from within the closed doors. Hallelujah no one downstairs needed to come up so it never really moved, but it was enough to scare us both to death. Say what you may, but this child needs a leash.