All My Bags Are Packed

 Bronwyn and Mirren have been playing the most interesting things this week. It has usually involved a bag filled with a cell phone, some books, and any other thing they deem worthy to be in their little purses. Also a hit: babies and bottles. They are still learning to play together well because Bronwyn REALLY wants to boss Mirren around and little Miss Mirren is still struggling to use her words instead of screaming, crying, hitting, kicking, etc to make her point. Miraculously the past 2-3 days have been so much better! Mostly because Bronwyn has been busy doing other things away from Mirren and Mirren is independently playing her own games. She has been coming up to me and telling me what she needs, and she seriously has such nice manners with lots of pleases and thank you's. I keep hugging her and thanking her for being so nice and using her words and telling her how proud I am of her. She seems to like that. :)  Ha ha!! She can be such a sweetheart when she's not having to dig her heels in and do what her big sisters tell her to do.

Shine on, Harvest Moon.

                      We had a harvest moon the other night, so I went outside to see if I could capture a shot of it.
This picture doesn't do any justice for how beautiful the moon was that night, but it's a nice memory and I love the shot of the barn behind our house with it.

Linzy's Wedding

 An unfortunately blurry picture. Laura, Lochlan and Reed were looking so cute all together. Laura and Lochlan have the same shade of red. I should get a picture with Laura, Alyson and Lochlan. They could be hair triplets.

                         Linzy and Tanner. Aw!! Young love. :) It was beautifully decorated!!

                                                       Lochlan making a break for it.

                                             Lochlan's 2nd cousin. It was their first time meeting.
                           It will be fun to see these handsome young men interact as they grow older!

      Mirren in our motel room, where lots and lots of Disney channel was watched (when we were there).

                                                        View of the falls from our balcony.

Proof that Aftyn and Bronwyn did come, were dressed cute, and that they too enjoyed the Disney channel.                                                                    Ha ha!!

                                                                   Cousin Carter.

Torturing Myself By Writing A Post

Today, just because I was feeling lazy, I volunteered for the 4th time in this same house, to have a Kirby vacuum salesman come and shampoo some part of my carpet. Here are my reasons why I will never do this again and why you shouldn't either:
           1.  They're going to try to get their foot in the door. From the opening of your front door to the closing, the person pitching the idea of "just having someone come and do a quick shampoo of your carpets, even that little section from the front door to the kitchen" is going to tell you whatever you want to hear, knowing that you won't be seeing them again and they can promise whatever because they won't have to fulfill them.
            2. It's never as easy as someone showing up to shampoo your carpets. They will torture you by a) putting little paper discs into their vacuum to show you JUST HOW HORRIBLE your current vacuum is, that it's depositing dirt into your carpet, etc etc and b)showing you ALL the attachments and how they work. There are about 9 now. Maybe.
           3. They will brow beat you and guilt you into feeling like OF COURSE you should buy their vacuum,  are you stupid that you can't SEE how great it is?? Lots of leading questions, lots of comparisons to your current useless vacuum. There are usually SEVERAL phone calls made to their "supervisor" who enters them into a "contest" and who has to hear about how much like you the vacuum and what attachment impresses you the most. He will also make at least 2 offers of how to sell the vacuum to you today at a special price. Right. (Why is it the supervisor is always a man? That seems kind of sexist.)
          4. When you finally get through all of this and tell the person who has spent a considerable amount of time vacuuming your carpet to prepare it for shampooing that they are not getting the sale from you, you sort of feel like you somehow lied to them. No matter how much you clearly stated you only wanted your carpet cleaned, you still come off feeling like a complete rake. How dare you allow a salesman in so they can give you their pitch only to turn them down and they so nicely cleaned this section of your floor! For free?!?!  Sheesh!! At this point, you just want to push them out the door and go rent yourself a rug doctor, but it's too late, you're in this for the long haul. The verbal silence is killing you as they silently finish shampooing, cleaning up their equipment, cleaning up the many many paper discs of dirt that they pulled from your dirty carpet, and put all the vacuum pieces back in the box that was supposed to be staying at YOUR house while you hand your financial freedom away to them for upwards of $3500. You feel like you should apologize, but all you can do is thank them for cleaning your floor. And then they are gone.
          5. After 2+ hours (I've had them take up to nearly 4), you've just wasted a whole bunch of your valuable time feeling guilty, feeling cheap, and feeling like a prisoner in your own home, tied to this person who has to show you so many things about this piece of equipment when you were only promised that they would shampoo your carpet. It's at this point I feel betrayed. And stupid. But hey, I have clean carpet. :)

Mirren

Mirren wakes up every morning, for the past few months, undresses and then picks out clothes for the day. 

Sometimes they're not half bad. 

She gets very upset if you make her change, or heaven forbid,

 make her get back in her perfectly clean jammies at least until breakfast is done 

so as to not dirty her clothes for the rest of the day. 

Todays choice was unique, but only in the sense that it was inside out AND backwards.

Back At It

Life, as you might have guessed, has been pretty busy the last few weeks. 

We had a trip to Idaho Falls for eye exams. Aftyn got 2 new sets of glasses just in time for school to start! Woohoo!! Mirren's eyes look great after her surgery, she is looking a little far sighted so she may need glasses, but for now she gets to wear her eye patch 5 days of the week instead of 7 and only 2 hours on those days instead of 3. Woot!!

Bronwyn has been turning into the boss at home now that Aftyn is in first grade and she has school every day, all day. In some ways it's good. In others ..... yeah. She is really coming into her own. She had an awesome summer. She finally learned to swim. She learned to ride a 2 wheeler with absolutely no help at all. And next week, unbeknownst to her yet, she gets to have a dance class. She is going to flip!!!!

Mirren recently gave up the binky. We had some strange repercussions from that, like she started having problems staying dry at night and once I caught her with her thumb in her mouth in the middle of the day.  Perplexing....  But as of now, things are back to fine. She is staying dry again, after putting her back in pull-ups for about a week which she hated, and I'm keeping a really strict eye on the whole fingers in her mouth thing. She is 2 months away from turning 3, but has been in 3t clothes for about 2 months. She is going to catch Bronwyn here in a few years unless Bronwyn surprises us all and starts having some massive growth spurts. Bronwyn JUST went into 5t stuff, but still fits in a lot of 4t clothes.

Lochlan's 1st birthday is this Saturday. :(  :)  How did that go so fast? He is such a fun boy. He's stronger than he knows. I call him a brute. Except he smiles all the while that he's unknowingly hurting you. He does really well with being taught to be gentle, thank goodness, so I just have to keep moving forward with that. He's not walking yet, but he cruises and crawls like nobody's business. He can crawl into the bathroom SO fast, all the while laughing and smiling as you try to catch him. Little stinker. It's hard to not smile while he's being naughty because he's smiling and laughing at you while you try to tell him no. Ha ha!!! He sure is loved.

We got 2 cats about the beginning of July. One was a kitten maybe 10-12 weeks old, an orange tabby. We named her Tilly. Now she's referred to as Tilly the terrible or Atilla the Hun. She is your typical crazy kitten. At the same time, we took an abandoned cat from my sister that needed a home. She showed up one day at my sisters house and just never left so my sister was feeding her for a few months before we decided to give her a home. At my sisters house, she was called Blackjack. We initially called her BJ and that morphed into Betty Jean, and now we just call her Betty. Recently, it became Big Betty. She really is a sweet cat and is so patient with our crazy kitten. Poor Betty recently got re-spayed because unbeknownst to us, her previous owners had had her spayed but we didn't know so in trying to do the right thing, the poor thing had to go back in a 2nd time. Except they couldn't find her uterus. Poor poor Betty. She's recovered well, and totally got spoiled while she's been recovering.

Reed is doing great at work. He continues to support our family so well and I am impressed with his work ethic. I am in the middle/beginning of finally losing this dang baby weight! I have lost about 16 pounds so far and cannot wait to be done. Seriously. There will be a party with lots of yummy food. :) Ha ha ha!!!!

Lochlan's New Hat

For a kid who just got his first baseball cap yesterday, he will wear it a lot more than I would have thought!

He must like it.  :)