Your not my husband

It has been two and a half weeks since I last talked to Oscar and it is driving me crazy. I have now started answering the phone with "your not my husband" when people call in the evening. Even though I have a ton of stuff going on this week like packing and prepping for the upstairs remodel not to mention that it's the first week of school but I'm going to start a new project tomorrow to keep me from going crazy before we leave for Mississippi Friday. I am not a patient person so it seems like Friday is taking for ever to get here.

Food I Won't Eat

We try to eat a very balanced diet around here and our rule is you have to at least half of everything on your plate even if you don't like it. The rule applies to the grown ups also. I even make foods that they like that I find disgusting and I eat them. Recently someone has told Sarah that she has a choice in the foods she eat. I am pretty sure it was a Mitchell because when they are here they refuse to eat their food. Actually it may have started when Emily and Sarah where having lunch and Sarah announced that she doesn't like cheese but I make her eat it. Emily leaned over and told Sarah next time she shouldn't say anything and just quietly take it off. She tried that once and then realized I was still going to make her eat it and it has less of a taste when it's in a sandwich. She is pretty much refusing to eat anything I put in front of her these days and it is driving me crazy. Three days ago she put a notice on the fridge for me to read over when I start to prepare a meal. It is titled "Foods I don't like" and it is a running list of things that she refuses to eat. Everyday she adds more foods to the list. Here is her list so far.

Macaroni, Spaghetti with carrots, any kind of beans, black eye peas, penut buter and honey sandwitches, veggi - cream cheese, macaroni salad, cheese, frosting, penut - butter, spinage, pasta, apple sauce, cherries, wheat bread (i don't get this one because we very often catch her walking around the house with a loaf of bread eating it straight out of the bag), toast, peaches, plumbs, bananas, ham and cheese sandwitches, apples, oat meal, my schools pizza, nuts, fish sticks, the plus dinners (her way of saying any dinner plus vegetables) hamburgers (not sure if she mean soy or beef but beef makes her puke her gut up so will go with that one), pretzals, unsalted nuts, cereal, pancakes and I am sure there will be more tomorrow.
(her spelling)

I don't negotiate so she's probably going to starve.

Naptime

To get the kids to stop taking naps I tried to bribe them with video games. They only get to play video games on Saturday so I thought it would work. Unfortunately they were too grouchy to play nicely so yesterday I decided TV time would be better. They only get 1 hour of TV a day and they're only aloud to watch like 5 channels so I thought that 3 hours of TV time would be exciting enough to keep them from fighting. It turned out to be too much time. Yesterday when I called the kids down for after nap snack only two came down. I called a few more times and then sent Sarah up to get the boys. Zander and Brendan had fallen asleep. Today when it was time for snack four sleepy eyed kids came down and Brendan grouchily said "What do you want mom your interrupting our nap." I guess we're not actually giving up nap time around here.

My mother has lost 8 ponds since she moved in with me. I am a little jealous because we are eating the exact same foods at exactly the same time and she is loosing weight and I am gaining but that's okay because I am very proud of her. For those of you that don't already know she was diagnosed with end stage Gastro Paresis. When it comes to gastro paresis(sp?) there seems to be to diet plans that are the most popular and easiest to fallow. First is the half diet where you serve up your food as you normally would and then put it half of it away for later which I didn't think would work because she would still be eating all the same junk that got her to this point. The second is you just eat anything you want as long as you eat the recommended portion size on the package, which wouldn't work because seriously who is going to eat only 1/3 of a chicken breast or all 4 cups of salad in one meal or 1/4 of a cup of macaroni. The doctors say she has to eat every two hours during they day and once during the night and she has to eat a little from all the food groups so I took all the diets and advise and combined them into one diet for her. Every two hours I feed her what ever she wants (we don't usually keep junk food in the house so there isn't a lot to choose from) and make sure she has something from all four food groups. I make the food and measure out one serving of everything and then divide it in half. She eats one half and I eat the other. She is choosing better foods more now that she has seen the size difference in a serving of healthy food versus a serving of junk food. She has also noticed a big change in her health if she doesn't fallow the plan. She got off on her eating while she was at my grandparents house yesterday and came home very sick last night. She told me this morning we really have to stay on the diet. I am glad she has finally agreed to come stay with me so I can take care of her and help her get her life back.

The past few weeks

My mother has come to stay with me for a while and having her here has been an amazing help. She's usually to sick to really help out around the house but she is a very big help with the kids. She's always willing to babysit during nap time so I can run errands and when ever the kids are bugging me while I'm busy I tell them to go find Bobo and they do. They are very excited to go hang out with her and go draw pictures for her.

We have started remodeling the kitchen. So far the food storage pantry has been started and within a few weeks I am going to put in some new cabinets where the bakers racks are to keep me from going crazy when the kids go to school.

The chickens have left us :( They have found a new home on a chicken farm. We were all sad to see them go and Zander was completely devastated until we explained that they were going to a place where people don't eat the chickens and they could run around all day and didn't have to be locked up when the neighbor was home.

I dropped some kids and now I'm averaging like 6-9 kids a day so I have started letting my kids take turns making lunch. They have been asking if they could make their own lunches for a while but I never would let them because if one kid makes their own lunch then all fifteen will want to make their own lunch and that's just too much chaos for me. When we got down to 9 or less kids a day I decided each day they could take turns making lunch for all the kids. I told them if they make a huge mess I would freak out and they wouldn't be able to make lunch again so when the are done with their lunch all the kids clean the kitchen and wipe down the table and chairs so when I come in to do the dishes the kitchen is already clean for me. Now I am wondering why I didn't start this sooner.

When I go more than a few days without talking to my husband I go a little nuts. To keep me from going totally insane this past week I decided to build a book shelf for the living room. It went faster than I expected so I was a little disappointed. I still have to put in the last shelf and finish unpacking so I can find the rest of my books but other than that the darn thing is finished.

Next week school starts and then the first weekend of school we are going on a road trip to Mississippi to see Oscar so I've stop letting Zander and Tanner take naps. I am tired of our schedule revolving around naps and I figure at 7 & 9 they are old enough to give them up. They have both been real grouchy lately and finely on Sunday Zander came home from church and went to sleep and didn't wake up until about 9:30 Monday morning. He just couldn't take it anymore, he had to catch up on his sleep. If Tanner doesn't get a nap he can't go to sleep at night. Some nights he is up until midnight or later because he says he is so tired he can't go to sleep. Finally one day when they were both being little crabs I told them they were gonna have to take a nap and Tanner started freaking out. He said that if his friends ever found out that he still takes naps they would make fun of him and everyone would tease him. He is determined to get through this. I guess there will be no more after school naps in our house this year - Yeah!!

Someone has started egging our house. In the past month we have been hit 4 times. At first I thought it was the kids that hang out at the school at night but now I don't think so because my house is the only house in the neighborhood getting hit. Last night I came home and there was fresh egg running down the garage door. I must have just missed the punks by a few minutes which I guess is a good thing because I probably would have rum them over If I had caught them in the act. The first time they got the driveway and the back of the van, then they egged the porch, then the front door, and last night the garage door.

I wasn't taking pictures at first, just cleaning it up but then this morning when I was cleaning up I decided if their gonna keep doing this then I'm gonna file a police report and I'll probably need pictures so I stopped cleaning and took a few pictures real quick.

My internet is back Yeah!!! It has only been working in little ten minute spurts randomly throughout the day. It was very frustrating because as soon as we would get singed in and get to website we wanted to be on it would cut off. We finally figured out our wireless internet was getting too much interference from the new wireless system that was installed in the school behind us so we had to get a stronger router and modem and now we have internet again. It's nice to be connected to the outside world again.

The kids and I have decided we like the skies in West Point way better than White Settlement. We can see the clouds better and the rainbows are prettier. I swear the skies are bluer here too. My husband says it's because West Point is higher than White Settlement. There is a lot more wind here but I'm okay with that. Oh and there are no mosquito's here. In the whole seven months we have lived here we have only seen two mosquito's. In White Settlement Tanner would be living on tons of allergy medicine because he is very allergic to bugs and bug bites. White Settlement has mean mosquito's that will bite through your clothes and you can't get away from them either. If you open the door or a window a whole swarm is just waiting to get in.
Yesterday when we came home from church there was a perfect rainbow over our house.

I tried to get the whole rainbow in the picture but I couldn't.

It's about freakin' time!

I have been trying for four years to get Zander to swim but he just wouldn't do it. All of the our kids started swimming when they were three, by four they could swim, and by five they were diving and swimming in the deep end with the big kids. All of our kids except Zander, he refused to swim. But not anymore :) As of today he is now a swimmer. Not only is he swimming he is jumping from the diving board and swimming in the deep end. He can't dive yet but that will come soon.

Learning to swim

Diving Board

Trying to dive