Thursday, June 19, 2008

I am Stripping

.....wallpaper that is. HA!
We "moved" into our house last Friday, if you call having two towels, an air mattress, one knife and a single frying pan- living. (on a side note here, I have managed to travel with, and maintain my entire mani/pedi kit- so hey I could REALLY be roughing it). It has been wonderful. We are slowly learning about our new town and we love our neighborhood.

Speaking of my neighborhood, did you know that in certain places, when you are the new people on the block, your neighbors will actually BAKE things and hand them over the fence to you????? Now you know, it happened to us.

Also there is something different all together when you own the house as opposed to renting. All of the sudden I am a chicken about wall colors and the like. I like knowing that it's ours though.

Evelyn is coming right along. At first she didn't want to leave Grandma's but she got on board pretty quickly and she runs all over the house playing and singing. She even goes down in the basement to play- on her own. Pretty cool.

So yeah, we have some wallpaper to get off of the walls and some paint to put up but we really aren't minding working on our house.

In other news, a third of my stimulus moolah will go to paying off an unexpected Vet bill. Billy Bones was coughing and having trouble breathing and it got a tad bit scary. So we hauled him off to the Vet- twice. Why two trips????? Because the first Vet and I weren't jiving together and she charged me $300 to tell me, essentially nothing/something completely scary and weird. So my bff Jodi came to the rescue and got me an appt where she works and now we have a cat on the mend. We think Billy has allergies for Heaven's Sake! (Jodi, what would I ever do without you?)

No pictures for the blog yet. I am still blogging from Smokewood. (I had to come here for a couple of days to do laundry and have sitters for Ev while I shopped for her birthday). We are expecting our household goods to be delivered late next week so hopefully I will be online in my humble abode before the turn of a new century.

OH YEAH! As mentioned above The Bean will be turning 4 in five days. I can't imagine where the time has gone. She seems so much more grown up to me lately. She is just exploding into a pre-schooler and it's wonderful to see. I can still look at her though and see that tiny little thing under all of the bluster and growth. She is fierce and funny and sweet and stubborn and cute and backtalk-y, I could squeeze her silly sometimes.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

A Tale of Two Cousins

We have been here and co-habitating for awhile now. Enough time has passed for the novelty of having a cousin in the same house to wear off on Brevin and Evelyn, so lets just say that the adults are getting their fair share of refereeing!
They seem to get particularly violent when poor old Grandpa is left in charge and alone, in the back yard with them. One day last week, he came into the house, pale and shaking and all agitado over their behavior. He never really would say what happened that day and the kids really has no consequences, which meant "game on" for them I guess. Because.......
Yesterday. Brevin came in from daycare and went right outside in the back yard with Dad and Evie. I watched for a few minutes and when I saw the three of them playing ball and laughing, I thought "oh good, no trouble. Silly woman. Apparently right after I looked away and started dinner or something, the crapola started flying about. Fast forward about 10 minutes. The back door flies open and the house gets taken over by red faced, sweaty , crying kids followed closely by a red faced, sweaty Grandpa who was, quite frankly giving them hell. (YAY! Grandpa!) So the kids had to go sit down and dad, proceeded to give a snap shot of what happened, well there are some gaps in the story of which we will never figure out, but, ummm.
Apparently, Evelyn started aggravating Brevin right away, doing things like hitting him on the head with a ball paddle and tossing bits of foliage into his bowl of goldfish. So Dad stopped the game of ball and sent them on their way. In two minutes they were in his little garden shed and goofing off. In two minutes and 27 seconds, Evelyn was out of the shed , tattling that Brev was up on the riding lawn mower and she wanted him down so she could get up there. Instructions were handed out and she headed back to the shed, while Grandpa sat on the deck, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Lo and behold in a few seconds he heard yelling and grunting coming from the shed. He decided to let them go at it for a bit, because quite frankly, we are all tired if breaking them up. Okay. Then, I guess the yelling intensified and then it got primal, so Gramps headed over to intervene. He says that by the time he got to them, they were both up, on top of the riding lawn mower, staring at each other and screaming blue murder, while using one hand to pull hair and the other hand to slap the bejeezus outta the opponents face!! At that point the fight was pretty even and they were beating each other up pretty good and we really have no idea who struck the opening blow, so they both got punished and that was it. Except that Brevin doesn't have a mark on him and Evelyn looks like she crossed paths with and angry cat- the right side of her face is covered in scratches and she has a bit of a black eye on that side.
Do you think that they were done? NO. They continued to bicker and sneakily take things away from each other all evening.
KIDS!
Seriously though, it was kind of funny seeing them both all red and mad and sputtering- 'cause they make me feel like that at least once an hour when they are picking at each other.
For the most part though, they are fine together and I love to see them at their little kid sized dinner table chatting away with their own weird dinner conversation. Or I like how Evelyn waits all day for Brevin and runs to hide when she hears Lissa's car pull in the garage so she can jump out and surprise him. Or when they just spontaneously hug each other and run off giggling.
Kids.