Catching Up

Here's my painting that I blogged about. It is of the lake that my uncle's house overlooks. I LOVE it to pieces. It reminds me of the Finger Lakes SO much.

Speaking of the lake my uncle's house overlooks, here it is on the puzzle the kids and I just finished.

How do I love this puzzle? Let me count the ways. It is 1000 pieces, but it's not hard, and we did it in two evenings. TJ helped me until the bitter end. It's huge. Too big for my white board almost, so the puzzle surface is not totally flush, but that is not really a problem since it won't be there forever - I think I have friends who want to borrow it. BUT, before I got the chance to take this picture, our crazy kitty knocked it over and I spent the first part of my morning reassembling about 100 pieces. I could have KILLED the cat. My husband is letting me loan the puzzle out under duress, and once it gets back to us, I think we'll assemble it again and then put some of that puzzle preserver on it and frame it.

My kids are doing music camp this week at the church where we do Precept. Scott is a helper- today he had nursery duty, LOL. Mimi and TJ are loving it, as always, and they both got nominate for "Champion of the Day" yesterday. There are 5-6 groups, and each leader nominates one boy and one girl. The names are put into a basket and drawn out. Mimi won! It was a bag full of little trinkets, but she was thrilled.

We have a trial for Netflix right now. The Hubs has taken to watching 24, which we never have watched before. It's good, but really, the amount of things they cram into one 24 hour day is just mind blowing. The show is really good at cliff hanger endings, so we've had more than a few later nights than I would like.

I, on the other hand, have taken to playing the games I have downloaded onto my iPhone. I have a knockoff of Boggle that makes me INSANE. I don't know what dictionary it uses, but not a common one. It says it's the 2006 tournament dictionary. Let me just say, I learn a new word each time I play. And I'm also learning that maybe my daughter isn't as bad a speller as I thought. It' s just that I don't have her meaning correct. She's talking about a little bit of something (haet), and not the fact that she doesn't like something (hate). And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It does NOT however recognize the word cria, which is the name for a baby alpaca. The best I've done is 66 points and 78% of the possible words. I will never get them all. I just will never even begin to recognize some of their words as words.

I'm in the middle of my yearly clothing project. It involves packing up what the older two kids have outgrown in boxes labelled for their younger siblings to grow into. Then I purge what the younger two have grown out of, and either throw it away (ripped, stained, etc.), give it to Goodwill, or give it to a friend in need. That sounds easy enough, but in the process, I have to go through everything in their drawers and have them try on things so that I can have a plumb line to compare things too. Pants are the hardest part- the kids grow wider and taller so fast that I going through the pants and figuring out what fits and what will fit when it is cool again is a TON of work. My table is covered in clothes, the dining room is ringed in boxes, and the mess goes on and on. That is one thing I will NOT be showing you pictures of. Calgon take me away!

I had a ton of things to blog about before I sat down to do this...and now I've forgotten most of it. Why does that happen?