Three Pizza Parties Down

Saturday was a good day. I think. The only thing I remember about it was that we started making turkeys out of paper plates. We spent a great deal of time painting, letting paint dry, then painting again. After all of that, we never did put them together--all of the pieces are still sitting in a pile. They weren't exactly a hit. Ha!

Sunday was good, as always. Brother Chris preached a great message, as always. Several things really blessed me and I felt thankful for so many things that I have been taking for granted--and my faith was encouraged as well. I just love serving God. He is so good and knows just what we need, when we need it. :-)

After service we stopped by Petsmart because... well, because our dog has severe separation anxiety and I'm getting desperate for a solution! Ha! When we leave the house, we lock him in the bathroom with his bed and lots of toys and everything that he'll need. When we come home, he is screaming and crying and panicking. Has he been doing it the entire time we've been away??? It's terrible, but everything I've read (and I KEEP looking things up because it's killing me! Ha!) is to LET HIM CRY IT OUT--whatever you do, DON'T RESCUE HIM until he quits or you'll teach him to scream and cry for the rest of his life to get what he wants, and he'll learn that if he does it long enough it will eventually work. ~sigh~ So we get home and I sit in the bedroom (instead of the other end of the house where I can't hear him) and read or dink around on the computer until he finally wears himself out. Truth be known, he's never actually worn himself completely out yet. I keep thinking he'll finally just collapse and fall asleep. But it's usually about an hour and a half after we get home when he finally wears out enough to quit pitching a fit and winds down to just a low, pitiful whimper. If he can hold out for a full 30 seconds without going back into "fit" mode I hurry up and "reward" him by going to rescue him. Then he starts throwing fits all over again, but these are fits of joy and relief and "I love you so much--don't ever leave me again--you have no idea how horrible it was--thank you so much for coming back..." Stuff like that. The other day he whimpered for 30 minutes after being rescued! And don't even think about putting him down--he needs some serious lap time. Ha!

ANYWAY... I kept reading about how to help your puppy adjust to being alone and a ton of people say to get him a Kong. It's a little rubber toy that you can put treats inside. The dog has to play and wrestle with it to finally get the treat out. Sounds cruel to me (ha!), but they say most dogs LOVE the challenge of it and it will keep them occupied and make "alone" time a happy, rewarding time. So I went to PetsMart to buy a Kong. How crazy! Ha!

We got home and I let Charlie cry it out (an hour and a half again), then got into my PetsMart bag and realized that in all of the different things I'd picked up and looked at I somehow managed to buy two bag of Kong treats and no toy Kong! Ha! Things like this make James so proud of me. :-) We left a few minutes early for church that night and I took the 5 minutes to run into PetsMart and exchange one bag of treats for the toy, so now we're all set. Riiiiiiiight.

It was Sister Yolanda's first VLB service and she did a good job. It was short, of course, but very good for her first time. :-) It is such a blessing to have "the Juans" here. :-) I hung around and visited with the Clarksons for a while after service, then came home and let the dog cry it out again for a while (a little less than an hour, maybe?) before rescuing him. This part of having a puppy is no fun at all! Ha!

I had stopped and picked up Toy Story 3 on the way home, so the kids and I had a pizza party and watched it that night. I liked it a lot. :-)

Yesterday was a big house cleaning day. I got the sheets stripped and washed, the bathrooms scrubbed down, and the laundry done. Katie and Joe did some dusting while Sam "babysat" Charlie. (A puppy being house trained has to have someone watching like a hawk every moment, you know.) In the afternoon we loaded up and went to Edgewood to do some grocery shopping. I got everything I needed--and was thrilled to even find canned cherries! I greatly prefer frozen cherries, but they're next to impossible to find. The canned ones are hard to find too (sweet cherries are easy, but not tart), so I quickly grabbed up three cans so I can make a cherry pie for Thanksgiving. Got home and realized that I had two cans of tart cherries and one sweet. Ggggrrrrrrrr. James stands astonished and amazed when I tell him things like that. "Bec, you've been to two stores since I've been gone and both times you bought the wrong thing. Next time, read the labels carefully and..." I keep telling him to RELAX. It's not a big deal--I can remedy the situation! And besides, I haven't done any shopping in YEARS (he does it all) and it's been sooooooo long since I've had to pay attention to anything (why bother--he's on top of it all)... I told him that this is GOOD for me. Nagging me about it isn't going to be what helps me do better next time; no, EXPERIENCE will do the trick. If I have to take enough things back to the store I'll eventually start paying better attention! But then, who can skip a wide open opportunity to nag? Not James. HA! ;-)

Before I forget about it, here's a picture of Katie with The Charles. He loves a great many things, one of which is chewing on Katie's hair. There are so many other things in the house that he's not allowed to chew on I figured I'd just let that one go. Ha! He laid on her like this for the longest time the other day, just chewing away. Crazy dog. Crazy girl.

We had just a dusting of snow yesterday, so the kids insisted on donning their snow gear and going out to play. After a while there was a knock at the front door. This is what I found when I opened it...
I think they've been reading too much Calvin & Hobbes. Ha! There was barely any snow at all--they probably had to scrape the whole front yard to make this one little head!

I had been planning on buying Sorry! (the board game) for the kids so we'd have a new game to have fun with while James was away. I found it at Wal-Mart in Edgewood, so we were all set last night! I built a nice, cozy fire while the kids went to put on their footed pajamas and we sat on the rug and I taught them how to play. I used to love that game when I was a kid. My kids seem pretty fond of it, too. I love that. :-)

I told them they could get their sleeping bags and camp out in the living room last night, so that's what they did. It was great fun for us all. :-) Here's Sam with Charlie--who keeps getting bigger and bigger by the day!

And here are all of the kids in their camped out positions, pretending to be asleep.
This is Katie after she really and truly fell asleep. With her sleeping buddy. :-)
And Joe. HA! He would be mortified if he knew I posted this. Not because of his insane sleeping predicament, but because of his jammies. ;-) He thinks blanket sleepers are for babies (probably a sentiment shared by most boys his age) though I assure him they are not--I wish I had some! I had to MAKE him wear these. James' mother bought each kid a two-pack of blanket sleepers for Christmas last year but they were HUGE at the time. It was so cold here last night (and I knew they'd be camping out on the tile floor), so I dug the sleepers out and made them wear them. And I'm so glad. Just for the sake of this picture. :-)
Today we got up and cleaned the house up, locked Charlie up with his treat stuffed Kong, and headed into town to have the kids' picture taken. The photo place was sooooo busy (we waited too long to get down there this year), so it wasn't nearly as speedy an endeavor as it was last year. But in the end, we got some decent pictures. And cheap and fast. Though not as fast as they were supposed to be. They said to pick the pictures up in one hour. So I went and filled the tank up with gas, then went to get one more can of TART cherries (got it under control, James! ;-) Ha!), stopped by the Christian bookstore to look for Christmas cards (nah-da), then grabbed lunch for the crowd at Taco Bell. Got back in exactly one hour... and they told me that the computer crashed while printed our order. Ha! They had our $9 picture package, but not the Christmas cards. I had to wait until they had an open computer, then tell them again what I wanted and which pictures to use, then wait another 30 minutes for them to print them. We were supposed to get 9 free Christmas cards with our package deal, and I had ordered 15 more. Because of the trouble, the lady said she'd throw in 15 on top of that. That made me very happy. Until I got home and discovered that they had printed the 15 I ordered and 15 extra ones, but failed to give me the 9 free ones! Ha! Oh well, it still ends up being 6 free cards.

Came home and listened to Charlie cry it out for another hour or so (so much for the Kong being the cure-all. Wasted $6 on that thing... Ha!), then sort of crashed the rest of the day. Joe did some school just because he wanted to (whoa!), but mostly we all just vegged. Toy Story 3 is due back tomorrow, so we had another pizza party tonight and watched it again. That means we've had a pizza party every other night (three parties total) since James has been gone. That's crazy! It's about to change though because two days from now it will be Thanksgiving. And as much as I love Totino's, it's just wrong to eat them on Thanksgiving. ;-) Besides, I'm actually getting tired of them. (WHOA!!!) We'd better take a break from them or I'll end up not liking them anymore. That would be truly tragic. ;-)

So that's about it from here. Tomorrow begins the cooking for Thanksgiving. I'm excited about it. :-) I love Thanksgiving. And then I'll LOVE being in Christmas gear--so much more than the people who've been indulging in it ahead of time. ;-)