Friday Fill-Ins

1. It's cold and rainy.
2. I love the smell of tomatoes.
3. My favorite health and beauty product is a good night's sleep.
4. Today I am taking a nice long ride.
5. Well, first of all I need to pack!
6. Grandma and a bunch of witches; those were the cast of characters in a recent dream of Frances' and it was really funny!
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to seeing my parents and little brother, tomorrow my plans include Pathways training and Sunday, I want to come home!

Thankful Thursday

I have gotten somewhat out of the habit of posting my Thankful Thursday, so I am going to try and get better about that.
Today I am especially thankful for:

• Our newly Confirmed youth at church. This group is just stellar! When they wrote their letters explaining why they wanted to be Confirmed, I just cried. They get it. I was showing off to Ken this morning, telling him that this is the first year where I know each kid well enough to recognize them by name off the street. It seems every year we get a couple of kids that have never participated in anything at church before, but not this year. The newly Confirmed are: Amanda, Caroline, Kathryn, Emily, Zach, Devin, Francisco, Maria, Adrian, Elizabeth, Kory, Greg, Gina, and Tanner.
• My church family. Everyone pulled together last night to make things flow smoothly. I didn't even know where my kids were for half of Mass because they were sitting with other people. The reception went very nicely and everything got cleaned up really quickly. I love the way we work together to get things done!
• Surprises! Let's just say that the homily last night was a big surprise. I was very pleased.

Henry's milestones-EDIT

Some of the new and exciting things Henry has learned how to do this weekend:

• Cross himself in the name of the Father and the Son. He's not quite feeling the Holy Spirit part yet.
• Fold his hands to pray. And wear this really intense, really precious look on his face and babble something along with us as we pray.
• Shampoo his hair with mustard and ketchup.
• Shove pieces of hot dog up his nose!
• Run around the front yard naked and slide down the slide in the buff.
• WWF wrestling moves. Last night as I was trying to read him a bed time story, he kept standing up in front of me and doing this really weird spin jump to land backwards in my lap.
• He can drink out of a regular cup. I can't believe I forgot to add this the first time!

OK, I really just wrote this post to highlight the 4th one. HE SHOVED A PIECE OF HOT DOG UP HIS NOSE AT DINNER!! He kept making this funny sniffing noise and poking himself in the nose while we were eating . I thought he had a runny nose, so I got him a tissue and told him to blow. He did; we expelled some snot; and I went back to my dinner. He kept poking his nose and sniffing, so I tried again, and this time plugged one nostril. Sure enough-out came a piece of hot dog! What was he thinking!?!? I think moms must aged twice as fast with boys. Frances never did anything like that! She also never literally climbed walls, tried to jump over the pews at church to "visit" the people behind us, or splashed an entire tub full of bathwater all over the bathroom. Good thing she's not taking notes.

10 Celebrities You’re Tired Of

10 Celebrities You’re Tired Of:

1. Paris Hilton
2. Brittney Spears
3. Angelina Jolie
4. Brad Pitt
5. Jennifer Aniston
6. Nicole Ritchie
7. Lindsay Lohan
8. Tom Cruise
9. Anyone on American Idol
10. Anyone famous solely for one stupid action

Menu plan Monday

Thought I would try to keep myself accountable...

Monday--Ken works late, but I am off. We will have spaghetti, corn and peaches for dinner.
Tuesday--Ken is off, but I work. We will have meatloaf, rice and green beans.
Wednesday--We have Confirmation and have to be at church by 6. We will have chicken, mushroom and black olive quesadillas with pineapples.
Thursday--Ken works early in the day. We will have ham, pasta, broccoli and applesauce.
Friday--Ken works late and I am headed out of town with the kids, so we will probably grab something from a drive-thru on the way out of town.
Saturday--The kids at I will be at Grandma's, so it will be up to her what we eat. Wouldn't mind some potato salad with NO ONIONS or my first yoogurt soup of the season....

Random Picture Challenge

This Saturday's random picture challenge is from the

16th picture folder,

28th picture.

Click the picture above to join in the fun!

This picture is from last year's Gus Bus birthday Bash. Stacey and I took all five kids out to the JMU Convocation Center Parking lot. I blogged about it then, but this is a picture I didn't choose to use. We had a great time and are saddened to hear that the economy has had a negative effect on the Gus Bus program. They might not be able to continue their mission of reading to children in at-risk populations. If you live locally and hear of one of their fundraisers, please do what you can to help out. This is an AWESOME program that needs to stay on the road!

Mother's Day

Mother's Day weekend was quite a busy weekend for us. Friday and Saturday, the kids and I were in Williamsburg for a meeting. We got home late Saturday night and had a bit of a hard time putting the kids to bed, especially since Henry had slept most of the way back already.

Sunday morning, we woke up and got ready for church. Got the kids buckled in to their car seats, tuned the ignition, waited...nothing! I was out of gas!! Did I mention that I was supposed to be at church early because some of the teenagers were reading??

We ended up packing everyone into Ken's truck. The kids got seats, but I got to sit on Ken's coat on the floor behind his seat. Thank goodness we live so close to church. Any other day and we might have just walked. Anyway, Ken dropped me off and I ran inside to find Randi ready to go with the book. I was a little bit panicked, and she said, "It's okay, Rabia. We checked the book and made sure it was on the right page. Nichole and Trevor are both here. We got it taken care of." You can say whatever you want about "teenagers these days," but they really showed some awesome responsibility that morning. I guess they were paying attention during that training!


Anyway, after church (and getting gas for the car) we drove over to Culpeper to visit with Ken's parents. It was a beautiful day and the kids got to play outside, walk through the woods, play with Grams' toys, and have their first tractor rides! All in all, it was a great day!

Williamsburg

Mother's Day weekend the Diocesan Youth Council adults had a meeting in Williamsburg to scope out the campus and make sure we have all our ducks in a row. I hitched a ride with Cathy and Nadia and dragged the kids along for the fun!

We stayed at Mike's timeshare, which was quite a nice place, unless you wanted to sit in the hot tub! We laughed at John's attempts to heat it up by boiling huge amounts of water on the stove (never worked, by the way). The kids and I shared a King-sized bed which means that even though they both did their regular nightly 360s, I slept fine.

Saturday morning we went out the see Walsingham Academy and the campus of William and Mary. Here is the gym we are going to use for all the large group gatherings:

We had a good time visiting campus-I hadn't been there since I was a senior in high school and considering going there for school. We did a lot of walking, which was problem since some dummy (me...) packed socks but no tennis shoes. I had to walk all over the place in a pair of wedge sandals.

Afterwards we had lunch, did some more talking and packed up to leave.

We never did get our ducks in a row...

...they kinda just milled about; chasing the kids. And one of them got tired of waiting for Frances to tear her piece of bread into bite sized pieces and just helped himself.

Henry acted quite brave throughout the whole thing, but at heart he's a bit of a chicken about ducks!

The Little Things

My house is mostly quiet right now. I had a retreat yesterday and today for church. We got home in the early afternoon and I came home instead of going straight to day care to pick up the kids. I missed them and thought about them while I was gone, but it is so rare for me to be alone that I just want to cherish it for a moment. Speaking of cherishing...I read this great blog post and want you to take a look as well: It is here.

Not Me Mondays are back!!!

Welcome to Not Me! Monday! This blog carnival was created by MckMama. You can head over to her blog to read what she and everyone else have not been doing this week.

Praise the Lord! Stellan is home, and his MckMama is (mostly) back to her normal same ole self!
I have had a hard week because of a fundraising auction that our preschool put together, so I have lots of really good "Bad Mommy" stories. Of course, none of this actually happened:

• My kids did NOT sleep in their clothes at all this week.
• They also did NOT eat dinner past 8:00 ever. Especially not two or three times.
• They did NOT eat chicken nuggets twice in the same day, either, But if that had happened, they would have at least been from two different restaurants.
• I did NOT act like a total &!T@# to my husband and mother because I was tired and cranky.
• I also did NOT make any mental lists about how much (or more appropriately; how little) other people helped with the auction so that I could grumble about it in my head and be mad at them.

This week is looking up and I iwll be going on a much needed retreat the next two days, so I will hopefully come back well rested and full of perspective.

My New Landscaping Crew

I hired a new landscaping crew. I meant to check their references before they started, but I just didn't have time. While they did show up on time, I am not really sure about their dress code...
Also, I am not sure that they actually knew how to use the tools they brought.

The girl seemed to be significantly more useful than the boy, but they still didn't get a whole lot of work done. She did not seem to know how to split logs, but that wasn't really why I hired them in the first place. In the end, they did get the hang of it, and I appreciated all the effort.

Also, not that anyone is keeping track, but our lawn is shorter than the neighbor's!!

My baby is growing up!

I remember when Frances turned 2. We got her a "big girl bed" and I was so excited for her to sleep in it. I haven't given it much thought for Henry because there just isn't room in their bedroom for another twin bed. As many of my facebook friends have seen, my two kiddos have a good time playing in Frances bed in the evenings, and last night was no exception. We got home a bit late because we had gone out for dinner, but no one was "headed over the edge" yet, so we took our time getting pajamas on and reading stories. Then Henry jumped up and crashed himself down on Frances' pillow and grinned at me. Thinking it was temporary, I tucked both of them into her bed and said good night. I swear, I thought he would cry or fuss when I left the room, but he didn't. I stood outside the door for a minute listening, and I heard Frances tell him, "This is your first night in a big boy bed, Henry!" awwwwww!
Well, since I can't sleep, I have been in to check on them a few times and they are both sleeping peacefully. . .together. . .in a big kid bed.