OUCH

My nose hurts soooooo bad from blowing, rubbing, and wiping it ALL DAY LONG. ~sigh~ I'm allergic to something. Isn't that dumb?! I don't even believe in allergies!!! Okay, well, that might be expressing it a little strongly, but I hate it when people gripe and whine all the time about being "allergic" to every tiny little thing. Most of the people who do that are the kind who like to be allergic to things, you know? Quite annoying. Ha! Anyway, annoying or not (who am I kidding--this is sooooo annoying!) I'm definitely reacting to something in the air. I've sneezed at least 60 or 70 times today (I'll try to remember to keep count tomorrow--it could be interesting if it goes at all like today!), but that's okay. Sneezing's fun. I've always kind of had a thing for it. Once when I was a teenager I sneezed 9 times in a row. It's my all time record. Anyway, if it was just the sneezing I'd be cool with it. It's all the other stuff, particularly that itchy feeling in your nose like you NEED to sneeze all the time, the runny nose, and the itchy, watery eyes. If I were to judge simply by the tears shed and Kleenex's gone through today I would say I must be in a deep, dark depression of some kind. HA!

Other than that, it's been a good couple of days! Yesterday was horse lesson day and Daisy was there--a really terrific horse with lots of pep. She gave the kids a really good ride and they were able to practice trotting a little bit. How fun! After that we ran to the library and picked up the same assortment of books we always do: snakes, lizards, turtles... Katie has been reading through some of the American Girl series and really enjoying it. She's reading about Molly right now, I think.

The kids were telling me yesterday some of their dreams and aspirations. Katie wants to travel all over the world like her Grandma Bunny has. And she's dying to take a trip to New York with me. I'm game! Ha! Maybe some day down the road. :-) She also wants to be a wife, a mom and a secretary when she grows up. Sam wants to be a builder when he grows up. Or a cop. Or... whatever the last person he saw was doing! But usually a builder. Joe said he wants to travel around the world for Missions like Brother Rob does. "And maybe I'll go to Australia. While I'm there I'll look for deadly snakes because after that I'm going to be a reptile keeper." ~sigh~ I keep hoping he'll grow out of that particular dream!

Joe recently acquired a back scratcher and just loves it. He uses it all the time. This morning he was walking around with it in one hand and a tin cup in the other hand, offering to give you a good back scratch for .10 cents. Ha! I never heard any rattling in the can. ;-)

I was going to get some good pictures of the boys shooting the BB gun and bow and arrow last night, but it didn't pan out. About the time I showed up outside with the camera James discovered a little hole near where he was standing. He stepped inside and grabbed this thing that looked like a 6" piece of dynamite, lit it up, shoved it down the hole, then covered the hole up as the smoke began to pour from it. He then explained to the kids, "Even though I covered it up, all of that poisonous smoke is still going down into the hole. And whatever lives down there--a mole or a gopher or whatever--it'll kill it!" There was total silence for a few moments, then the lips started quivering. We lost two children to total and complete devastation. Sam was fine, but the others just couldn't take it. Joe stood there and cried and cried and I finally decided I wasn't going to get any good pictures (ha!) and headed back in the house--only to find Katie sitting on her bed just sobbing. I told James later that just because he is cold and heartless doens't mean his children are! Ha! We take 'em to the zoo and say, "Oh, look at the little prairie dogs peeking up out of the hole--oh, aren't they cute???" Then we come home and shove a stick of dynamite down their hole so we can kill 'em! Ha! I don't want the kids to be sissies either, but there just might be a better way to approach the issue. Like... not taking such pleasure in the way we say we're gonna kill 'em! And it might be good to offer the reason why we can't have them around instead of the kids just thinking Dad takes some sort of sadistic pleasure in smoking small helpless animals to death. Those things would never occur to James because he's just not the kind of person who can relate to feeling bad for animals, you know?! He tried to fix things with Joe later. "Joe, you want to hunt when you grow up, right? Well, when you hunt that means you're going to kill an animal..." "Well, yeah, but that's moose and antelope and big stuff like that. This is different." James said, "So... you have a problem with little things dying?" Joe just nodded and sighed, "... Gophers. I have a problem with gophers." HA! Crazy kid. He did seem to feel better once James explained WHY he was trying to rid the yard of rodents. I told James to start with the reason next time instead of jumping straight to the kill 'em part. ;-)

When I put the kids to bed last night I kept Sam up with me for a little while so we could just hang out. He's been so rotten lately and I'm pretty sure it's because he's just been sort of lost in the shuffle. He's been spending most of his day to himself or away from very much adult interaction. So we sat and talked for quite a while and just had a good time. He's been much, much better today so it apparently helped to just have some Mom/Sam time!

James took this picture of him this morning...

Today I stained a bunch of wood for James. He built the door to the boys' room. I LOVE IT. :-) I'll take a picture soon. It was miserable out there staining, since my nose had a steady drip (when I was lucky it was just a drip--GROSS!) and I had my pockets stuffed with tissues for easy access. It took twice as long as it otherwise would have because of the drippy nose. ~sigh~ What a pain. (Literally!) Same thing with dinner. I had to stop and wipe or blow my nose ever few seconds, then wash my hands again, then start mixing--only to have to catch another drip! Ha! Pitiful. I'm glad I'd gone easy: tuna casserole. :-)

I also told Katie we could make something else from her Pink Princess Cookbook. Cotton Candy Cupcakes tonight, with some sort of punch with a froofy name. Well, the cupcakes turned out GREAT! They looked almost as good as the picture in the book... at first. I put them in the cake server and put the lid on it. I made sure they were totally cool before we frosted them and added the cotton candy, but it didn't matter. This is what they were supposed to look like...

And this is what they looked like after about 10 minutes under the glass lid!



The cotton candy just melted into crunchy little blue globs!!! How sad! And we didn't even have any extra to re-do it. ~sigh~ What a gyp. If you ever try these things, don't put the cotton candy on until moments before you're going to serve them! ;-)

I was more excited about the punch anyway, especially in the "sugar sipper" goblets. (Dipped the lip of the cups in the punch, then in colored sprinkles--how fun is that?!)



Of course, Joe wouldn't drink out of a goblet (he is convinced they are "alcohol glasses" and refuses to use them--even though they're Tupperware. He's sooooo touchy about things like that! Obsessive compulsive, perhaps!)... but that means I got to have one! :-) All I can say is it's a good thing the sugar was on the cup because that punch was SOUR!!! I think I went a little heavy on the lemon juice. The raspberry sorbet was delicious, but not enough to knock out the pucker from the lemon. We actually ended up stirring in a little sugar! I thought it was fantastic that way, but it was still a little too much for the kids. They drank what they could, then I told them to freeze the rest--maybe they will like it better in popsicle form tomorrow. ???

Here they are, ready to dig in!

And last, but not least, here's a clip for you, Mom. :-)