I'm Baaack!

A friend of mine emailed last week to see if he was having techincal problems with the site because the last posting he could read was at the end of April. It's been a tough couple of months. In May, I went to PC to help take care of my mom for two and a half weeks. That was REALLY hard. My MIL (the greatest MIL in the world) came to help R take care of the kids while I was gone. It was hard to see my mom in her condition and it was really tough missing my babies. I haven't ever been away from any of them for even half that long before.

Mom is still hanging in there. Daddy is taking really good care of her with "shifts" of help from one of my aunts, my sister and me. My aunt came when I left and my sister arrived today with her family. She will stay two weeks. Her family will stay one. We are all going up later this week to celebrate Mom's bday on Saturday and be with Daddy on Sunday for Fday.

I do finally have some good news to post....we closed on our house in Atlanta last week! Yaaayyy! There were some last couple of weeks melodrama involved because the LP HOA was insane enough to approve a reality show being filmed in our neighborhood. What idiots! The pictures are unreal of what they've done to one of the streets. ..one that you have to drive down to get to our house. Anyway, we were really afraid that the buyers might back out if they drove in for some inspection and saw the debacle. They didn't though, and everything closed as planned. I think as far as home sales go, it was a really smooth one. There are some real nightmare stories out there right now of buyers asking for totally unreasonable and unheard of things, but they were really nice. Of course we lost money, but that was expected since we bought in 2004. There was a page of things found by the home inspector......most minor. They asked that we fix the 2 major ones, we agreed and that was that. It was nice to cancel that autopayment out of the checking acct..

We took the kids to the beach on Saturday. It was the first time since my last post of their ingratitude. The big thing that day was that we saw a sea turtle swimming about 10 yds out from where we were. I don't think I've ever seen one at the beach before, R neither. F wanted to make sure that I included that in my blog tonight. She is going to write about it in her journal tomorrow. She occasionally makes entries and always says she's blogging like Mommy.

Today's big event was W's first trip to children's chapel. It was sad, but not the melodrama that F's first visit was. He had a great time and wants to go back too.......booo! I guess it's a little easier to let go of the second one, plus, he was walking out hand in hand with F so it wasn't like I was throwing him to the wolves. I knew she would take good care of him. My lap was emtpy since both of "mine" were gone. I tried to get G to sit in my lap, but she wouldn't. Her behavior made me wish she was old enough to go, herself....probably not going to have a hard time with that one when she turns 4:) Occasionally, F lifts her hands during the singing in church (not as often as before) but it's so sweet when she does. G raised one of her hands during song today...the one that was holding her baby. For some reason, instead of the vision of the godly servant praising her Lord that F seems to look like, I got this visual of G at a rock concert holding up that baby yelling "Freebird!" Wow, I am really burdening her with some low expectations for life. I should really raise my standards for her before she live up to the potential that her mother has put upon her......and we end up paying for some REALLY expensive therapy:)

Oh, big news on the swimming front. F swims without her floaties on a regular basis now. She jumps in and swims across the pool on her own. I no longer worry about her falling in and drowning. W and G are coming along pretty well too. They can both swim half way across (lengthwise) on their own. G totally underwater and W a little of both. Of course this is really the dangerous time for them to be unattended or sneak out on us because now they all have some sort of false sense of security thinking they can really swim. At least before, they knew they couldn't swim and were afraid to go near the pool without lifejackets or swimmies on. Thankfully, R and I are both really paranoid/overprotective parents............see, I knew those traits would end up as positives sooner or later.

F and R went to their first father/daughter dance a week ago. He took her to her favorite "straunt" the Red Lobster for dinner beforehand. I will post a picture. They were both precious.

Mom, Dad and Aunt Charlene came the same weekend for a few days. It was super to have them here. I am hoping that Mom and Dad will come back after my sister leaves to stay with us for an extended visit. Mom was reluctant at first, but the visit went so well, I'm hoping she will be open to coming back for a longer time. I will post a picture of them from their visit too.

Oh, the funniest thing! The babies have new nicknames. Last week we were discussing chimpanzees. They wanted to see pictures, I found a website of a chimp sanctuary with several pictures. There were a lot of chimps. I found 2 girls and one boy.....all born in the same years as the kids and showed them the pictures. F's chimp is Charlotte, W's, Nelson and G's, Lily. Now they say that they ARE the chimps and call each other and ask others (us) to call them the names too. G messed up the word chimpanzee, so now they are Charlotte, Nelson and Lily

Ch PON' zee. (rhymes with Fonzie)

Also, I think there has been a couple of zoo visits since the end of April, so you can see a pic of that too.

That should just about bring everyone up to date. Hopefully, I can post again in a more timely manner.