Our nature walk

Nathan's preschool homework assignment for this weekend was to go on a nature hike and gather "treasures" for school. We headed over to Cy Hewit park after lunch on Sunday. It has some bike trails through the woods which turned out to be a very exciting place for the boys. Where there are bike trails, there are hills.

Big, tempting, begging-pesky-kids-to-slide-down-them, dirty hills. And where there are dirty hills, there are muddy pants. The boys had an absolute blast exploring on our little nature walk. Nathan was able to find all sorts of "treasures" to take to preschool. The one thing that eluded us was the mighty oak tree. We couldn't find one anywhere which meant that we could not find acorns. Finally, on our way home, Mark spotted an oak tree. I quickly got out of the car and grabbed as many as I could from someone's tree lawn. They probably thought I was nuts! (pun intended)

We went on to Dale and Shari's. (They just got home from Florida.) You could say we continued our nature walk there. The boys were hooked and wanted to keep exploring. Look at the dirt on that face! I bet the boys left a dirt ring in the tub after our adventure.

I have to thank Miss Beth for the homework assignment. We really had fun! Makes me wonder why we don't do this more often.

Oh, the torture!

I finally get to the weekend, and what do I get to do? Watch the debates....oh, yay! See, Mark and I come from two different camps of thinking. My thinking is that my decision is made so let's watch good television. Mark, on the other hand, thinks he has to listen to every update all day on the radio, watch every debate on t.v. and WORST OF ALL watch people talk about the debates after the debates are finished. No, actually, that isn't the worst thing. Mark just reminded me of something worse. In addition to listening to people rehashing the debates to death, Mark has to keep making comments...expecting me to respond. I just give him the look that says I am not listening to this...instead I am going to watch youtube videos and check out blogs since my television has been taken hostage. SOMEBODY HELP ME!

Didn't want to leave Ben out.

He loves his sissy too!

Big happenings here in the Riley household!

Nathan got a letter today from his cousin Jesse! He was VERY excited, to say the least. As if a letter wasn't exciting enough, Jesse slipped two dollar bills in there...one for Nathan and one for Ben. Before I read Nathan the letter, I voiced my thoughts out loud, "I wonder why Jesse sent money?" Nathan's immediate response with a small hint of well, duh in the tone was, "For garage sales, of course!" We're going to have to think of something very special to do with the money. Thank you very much, Jesse. Nathan enjoyed the mailbox surprise and will hopefully be sending a response soon!

A week without Grandma & Grandpa Riley

Nathan isn't going to know what to do with a whole week away from Shari! Mark's parents met up with Cori in Florida. They are staying at their cousins' gorgeous house right next to Disney World. We stopped by for a quick visit on Friday before they left. Shari got her baby "fix". Dale kept the boys entertained. I thought I'd throw in a random picture of Nathan and Jordyn. He loves holding his baby sister. Both boys are really good with her. If I could get them to treat each other as nicely as they do Jordyn, life would be very easy! Jordyn is now rolling both ways. I'm not quite sure when she started doing this. I just noticed yesterday that when I left Jordyn on the blanket in the living room that she somehow managed to get off the blanket. It took us awhile to catch her in action, but we finally saw it last night. Go Jordyn!

Ben is slowly starting to speak. He seems to be improving now that he's around other really good talkers his age (at Trinka's). His absolute favorite thing to say is e-i-e-i-o, over and over and over! If he's anything like his brother, he will catch up with his peers pretty quickly. Ben's also becoming very particular lately with his clothing. He loves his Thomas shirts. If he gets in his mind that he wants to wear something, there's just no fighting with him. Yesterday, he tore off his diaper and brought me underwear. In what I thought was a clever moment, I tried to put a diaper on and then the underwear. Ben screamed and tugged at that diaper. After fighting for quite awhile, I finally gave up and put him in underwear only. He then proceeded to pee on the kitchen floor. That's the one and only time he will win that battle!

Since we're on the topic of pee, let's move on to TMI. Our oldest boy has always been the neater of the two boys. That's why I've been quite surprised that recently he has been very messy in the bathroom. I always have to wipe the seat before sitting down. I was getting pretty frustrated, and told Mark that he needed to have a talk with his son. Well, the other day I walked in, and Nathan was peeing against the raised toilet seat...pee splattering everywhere. I ranted and raved about how this was so inappropriate...blah...blah...blah. As soon as Mark came near, I barked at him to take care of the situation!!! Mark immediately pointed out that Nathan probably thought he could got potty just like he does in the urinal at church. This is where the obvious difference between men and women is. It never occurred to me that Nathan has experience with urinals. Now that the puzzle is solved, we haven't had problems since.

So, in my typical, classy fashion, I'll leave you with that heartwarming, not at all about gross bodily functions, story.

What have we here?

Is this a new built-in book shelf for all the books I don't read? In fact, don't even own? (Note that it IS empty.) ...or could it be something more?

Yep, Mark's at it again. We now have a new "secret" room. It's actually more of a crawl place, but it's fun nonetheless! :)

Don't know what you got...

til it's gone! I didn't realize how much I relied on electricity until our big power outage Sunday night. We had 2 days of no electricity. It finally came on around 6 a.m. this morning. The funniest thing was seeing how the kids reacted to it. Mark had the boys over at his parents on Sunday night. When they got home, Ben clicked on the hallway switch like he always does. When that didn't work, he did it again. And again (repeated about 20x). By the time they got home, I had candles scattered throughout the downstairs. As you may know, candles are a fascinating thing for little boys. Ben's sole purpose in life was to blow the candles out. I had to get after him several times. Finally, bossy big brother Nathan got face-to-face with Ben and said, "Ben, stop blowing out our ELECTRICITY!" The boys kept busy for quite awhile playing with trains. When they got tired of that, Nathan wanted to watch T.V. I told him he'd have to figure something else out since the T.V. wouldn't work without electricity. "That's okay," he said. "We'll just watch a movie!" Poor boy....no electricity is just too hard of a concept to fathom! :) Luckily, Nathan and I finished his preschool "homework" before the power outage. (This in contrast to Janine who worked on Craig's project to the light of candles.) The kids were given a paper doll cut-out which they were to decorate to look like themselves. The only picture I got was with my cell phone. It was still a bit dark out, so it's a really bad picture. Here's Nathan's mini-me:

Janine made a football guy for Craig. I didn't get to see Weston's. I'm sure it was awesome with Angie's supervision. She doesn't do anything halfway! :)

Jordyn and I are heading off now to get some groceries. Gotta replace the stuff lost in the power outage.

The g'fair

Last year, Nathan had the habit of adding a 'g' to many of his words. This year, the little linguist let Grandma know that we were going to the "County Fair". This is the first ride the boys (or shall we say "sheriffs"?) rode on. It was run by a very strange lady. I know...How unusual to run into anyone who doesn't quite register as "normal" manning rides at the fair! We had just debated, worked the figures, crunched numbers....(can you picture Mark here?) as to what would be the best way to pay for the rides. We figured if the boys got 7 rides in each, the all day pass would be the cheapest option. We made sure that Ben would be tall enough to ride, and reluctantly handed off $28 to the ticket lady. Our first encounter was with the aforementioned lady. She immediately got out her measuring stick and held it up to Ben. It had a black stripe at about the 36" mark, some green in between and a black stripe at the max. height cut-off. Ben was well into the green section. The lady looked at me very concerned and said, "I'll leave this up to you. He's a little too short for this ride." I looked at her in surprise and asked where they needed to fall on the stick. She responded with, "He has to at least reach the bottom black line." I felt like I was in an alternate universe where up is down and, well, you know. I couldn't figure out how she was figuring Ben wasn't tall enough. Then I thought nuts to it! I just played along and said, "Well, he does pretty okay on rides, so I think I'll let him ride it." Thankfully, Ben was accepted on all the other kiddy rides with no problem.

Let me tell you, Ben LOVES the rides. Nathan was a little hesitant at first. Last year, his hesitation had to do with fear. This year Nathan was in a surly mood after discovering that his favorite ride last year...the train...was nowhere to be found. His attitude at the beginning was no train...no riding at all. We were very panicked since we already had shelled out the money for the rides. We kind of forced him on to the first ride (with some promises of visiting the Outlet Mall train in the future). After that, Nathan didn't need any more convincing. He was hooked! You'll see the roller coaster ride above show up again. It was the boys' new favorite ride! The next picture is one of my favorites. Even though it is a bit blurry, you gotta love Ben's face as he guns for imaginary enemies!

Look at Nathan lovin' on his grandma! Mark, once again, held Jordyn almost the entire time, and took some pictures to boot! What a guy!

I think in my fair blog from last year, I mentioned how Ben had a major conniption fit because he couldn't ride anything other than the Ferris wheel. (He was climbing on my head when Nathan got on the bus, bawling his eyes out!) Well, needless to say, we had a much happier boy this time. Now we'll only have to wait through one more fair before Jordyn will be able to join the boys. By the end of the evening, Ben was one tired, emotional and hungry kid. We were so busy getting our money's worth out of the rides, that we kind of forgot to feed the kids. They also were so enthralled with the rides, that I don't even think they realized they were hungry. They scarfed down some "healthy" fries and fried cheese before collapsing in the van in a comatose state the entire ride home. Ben was so over-tired that he screamed his head off the entire way to Trinka's this morning. Nathan was much more resilient. He went to preschool and only took an hour nap this afternoon. The effects on Nathan seem to be showing up more this evening as he has a very short fuse with his brother.

I'm sure they'll both recover soon! :) (and then we'll have to follow through on our Outlet Mall train promise to Nathan)

Preschool

The one thing I hate about working outside of the home is that I miss out on “firsts”. Yesterday, that first was Nathan going to preschool. Between conversations with Janine and communication with Nathan, I think I now have a general idea as to how Nathan’s day went. First of all, none of the cousins had any difficulty at all leaving their moms. In fact, they were absolute boogers about getting their pictures taken because they wanted to play! When Janine came to pick Nathan and Craig up, they also didn’t want to leave. So here are some things I gleaned from Nathan: M: Did you make any friends? N: Yes. M: Did any of them like trains? (silence) M: (being pushy as moms tend to be) Did you learn any names of the other kids? N: There was a kid whose shirt lighted up! (I bet Miss Beth was thrilled about that! Tomorrow I think I’ll send Nathan with a spinning propeller hat…just to shake things up a bit.) M: Did you like Miss Beth? N: Yes…she’s very nice. She also a little Crrr-AAAAAA-Zee! (I tried to get details here, but Nathan wasn’t going to indulge me with what makes Miss Beth so crazy.) M: So what did Miss Beth talk about? N: She said we should leave each other’s things alone. M: (a little worried now) Did she say that just to you or to everyone? N: She said it to everyone. It’s a rule. Miss Beth has LOTS of rules. M: So what fun things did you do today? N: We played outside…we read a book…the teacher measured us for pounds. M: She did what? (said doubtfully) N: She measured us for pounds. I’m 44 and a half of those. (Good golly! I’m glad he’s young and doesn’t care about weight yet.) N: I had homework today. M: Oh, I think you mean schoolwork. Did you do work at school? N: No, I had homework. (Later, I went home and found that, indeed, Nathan does have homework. Well, actually, the parents have homework which I had “difficulty” with, but I’ll save that for another blog!) So there’s a little taste of Nathan’s day. He’s very excited to go back tomorrow.

Cue the baby...

I figure since I am starting to blog, Jordyn should wake up any second now. I've let 5 days go by without blogging! Yikes! Things have just been so busy. I've been up until midnight most nights working on never-ending school stuff, and I still have much more to do. I had Open House on Thursday. We had about 30 parents show up. What a difference from elementary! Considering that there are over 100 kids on the team, that's not a good ratio. (Not that I'm criticizing or anything....I did miss my son's preschool meeting) The parents follow their student's schedule but only stay in each classroom for 5 minutes. In my very first "class", one of the ladies immediately asked, "Are you Pastor Jerry Roth's daughter?" I'm still not quite sure how she made the connection, but she is the daughter of the Kosas. (They go to Weymouth.) Angie, Janine and I went to the Hinkley garage sales yesterday. It was really up in the air whether I'd be able to go. We had plans to paint Mark's parents' house. When I woke up on Saturday morning and it was raining, I knew it would be a-ok for me to go. I was able to find some baby clothes, a desk for one of my coteaching classes, lots of new videos for the boys and just a few odds-and-ends. It was fun just to get out and go treasure-hunting with my sisters. My baby is starting preschool tomorrow. He seems totally unfazed by it. I'm the one who is fretting. For example, when Nathan gets finished going to the bathroom, he always yells, "I WENT POOPY!" The other day, I got an uh-oh feeling and made Nathan promise that he would never yell that out at preschool. I think I need to work on his independent living skills more. :) I'm sending Janine with my camera tomorrow to hopefully catch "first day of school" pictures. (Which means I should be blogging again soon!)

"Little" baby Jordyn

Jordyn had her 4 month check-up today. She weighed in at 15 lbs. 15 oz. That poor, starving girl only checked in at the 90 to 95th percentile: height, weight and head circumference.

Mamma knows how to grow 'em!

Walking in Memphis...

We didn't have any particular plans today. We were tossing around maybe going to the lake with Angie and Janine. Then Mark came across a kiddie park that a friend had told him about. He had it up on the computer screen and suggested we go to it. Now, what would you think if you saw "Memphis Kiddie Park" up on the screen? I just looked at him and said, "Don't you think that's a little far away?" Turns out it's a small amusement park for little kiddos that is only about 40 minutes away. (and not in Tennessee) Nathan's absolute favorite ride was the roller coaster. He's kind of like me. I can't handle any circular rides, but roller coasters are just fine. The train ride was a hit also, especially with Ben. He kept shouting, "All aboard!" as we got on. Nathan was feeling much better today. He wasn't thrilled with all the rides, but his happy personality was starting to peek through. Plus he was thrilled to be hangin' with Grandma.

Doesn't my man look sexy holding the baby? (which he did voluntarily and without complaint the entire time we were there) Jordyn is happy to be hanging out with daddy. By the end, we were trying to get rid of our tickets as quickly as possible. It was hot, and we were hungry. Nathan was very pumped, knowing that we were headed to his favorite restaurant, Olive Garden. Nathan ate a hearty meal...something he hasn't done since Tuesday night! As soon as we got back to Grandma and Grandpa's, Nathan insisted on planting a peach pit that he got last week at G&G Roth's house. Hope he forgets he planted it, because I doubt we're going to get a peach tree.

Now, this is what Mark thinks is sexy. He was all excited that I drove the new 4-wheeler. (We bought this from a friend, and Mark fixed it up. It's bigger than the toddler one, but smaller than a regular 4-wheeler.)