And We're Off!

Well, we will be in the morning. We're heading up to Colorado again. James will be attending Men's Retreat this weekend, so the kids and I are going up for the annual Girl Party. :-) The past few years Haley and I have spent the weekend with Emilee at her house while some of the other girls crash at Michele's house in Pueblo. This year we're moving our half of the party down to Jamey's house. :-) Then some of the Pueblo crowd will come join us for a few hours on Saturday. FUN!!! It's always a great time. The kids have a blast with each other and it's sooooo nice to have some girl time. We eat and play games and laugh and eat some more. :-) Then we usually watch a girl movie after we put the kids to bed, then eat and play more games and, of course, laugh a LOT more. It's a grand time--almost like a mini Ladies' Retreat... but with no singing or preaching or classes or... Hhmmm. Okay, well, it's like Ladies' Retreat at night after the service is over! :-)

We've had a pretty good couple of days around here. Joe's been putting more effort and a better attitude into school, so it's been much more pleasant and gone much more quickly. That's NICE.

We just switched our weeknight church service from Thursdays to Wednesdays, so this was our first week of that. It's WEIRD!!! I know it's the normal night for church, but it's been YEARS since we've had church on Wednesdays. It's been Tuesdays or Thursdays for us for so long now. I had to remind myself over and over again on Wednesday that TONIGHT we have church.

Each day seems to get progressively easier in our Hershey Dog grief. I'm thankful that, as terrible as it is, it can't compare to losing a human family member. :-) Still, it's hard. I really thought that everybody was doing better, but this afternoon Sam (of all people!) broke down and just sobbed. He had set his backpack in the "hole" by Hershey's dog door (there's a countertop over that space) and crawled in to get it. Moments after he emerged he just burst into tears and couldn't stop. Then he went and laid on the couch for a while, crying and holding Hershey's old blue collar that I'd let him have a few months ago. (Made me think of Sister Janis' account of me doing the same thing with Dusty's collar.) ~sigh~ Even with the occasional breakdowns, it's still a little easier each day. And certainly better than the first few days when all we did was cry! We're still crying, but we're smiling more at the thoughts of Hershey than we were able to do a few days ago. So that's good.

Hhmmm. Not much else to say. OH!!! Okay, fess up. I wanna know who did it. SOMEBODY out there BID on Katie's little... thing on eBay!!! I figure it was some kindly Church person who read about it on the blog and thought they'd humor the kid. My first thought was that it must be my Dad (!), but he doesn't know about it, to my knowledge, and it wasn't his username. So, come clean, whoever you are. I wanna know! ;-) Actually, there are two of you. The first bid was for $25 cents, but the new bid (yeah, a SECOND bid!) is for $1.25, plus $1 shipping. Ha! Cracks me up! When we got home from church Wednesday night James checked the auction and said, "What?! Hey, Katie, get in here!" Her excitement over receiving a bid was quite amusing, but not half as entertaining as Joe's expression! HA! He has very little GOOD to say about Katie right now (he's big into the not liking girls thing--and Katie doesn't make it espcially easy on her brothers!) and he's just disgusted beyond belief that she made the crazy little thing, that Dad put it on eBay for her, and now that somebody out there is going to PAY her for it! Ha! It's been quite entertaining to watch it all unfold.

Well, I'd best get some sleep. I must be well rested if I intend to not rest at all for the purpose of partying this weekend. ;-) Pray for the Men's Retreat, please. And have a great weekend!