Sunday again!! The days just fly by don't they! That means we are busy and blessed! This week we did finally do some Valentines Day stuff though it was cut short pretty early on in the day. I"m pretty sure I did not get to it till Thursday. I left the kids bags of goodies at their seats in the kitchen so they would see them when we came down in the morning. They loved them! Grace had no idea what was going on and I just showed Tyler the calendar that we'd missed "Love" day and so we were doing it that day. He didn't care, he got candy. He'd celebrate Christmas in April if it meant presents and candy. He's 4. What do you expect!? I got them each these really cute Winnie the Pooh science/discovery books at the Dollar Tree. They each got two and I need to get ahold of the other ones so we have the complete set for Easter. I also got Tyler a Mickey Mouse clubhouse puzzle from dollar tree and stickers (Dora for Grace, Thomas for Tyler) and a bag of candy hearts for them to share. I had some valentine pencils packed away still from a couple years ago when my mom gave them to me so I sharpened them and put them in their bags too. They were so excited to get stuff and it was too cute. Not bad for $8!! I was a bit irritated though on Wednesday when I went to the Flower Factory in Canton and saw the SAME stickers for only 85 cents! I overpaid at the DOLLAR TREE!! Don't worry, i got more at Flower Factory. Easter's not too far away. :) SO I made the kids toast and was going to cut it into heart shapes and put jelly on it... well, i can't find my heart shaped cookie cutter anywhere! I really think I used to have 3 and now i can't find any of them. As I write this Gary's at Walmart wandering around looking for one. I hope being after Valentines Day he'll find that they are on sale... if not i'll add that to the FF list for future trips. :) So since i could not make heart-shaped toast, i could also not make heart shaped pancakes, sandwiches, or cookies so we pretty much ended the festivities with post-breakfast heart-shaped candies. (Tyler had insisted on using a cookie cutter on his toast so we had stars. It was stars or Santa's and I put my foot down on the Santa's. It's one thing to be still singing Rudolph but quite another to have Christmas shaped toast in February. Even for me.) I gave Tyler 4 or 5 candies and Grace one to see if she could eat it. I was RIGHT by her and watched her very closely and must have said 40 times, don't swallow! chew it up! They are very hard. She did fine but I did not give her more. They went off to play, I cleaned up and played with them a bit then decided to check my email. I was in the Living Room on the chair with the laptop when Tyler yelled "Mommy, Grace is touching the candies." I said "Push them back on the table where she can't reach them." He said "ok" and i could hear him moving them back. They were in zip locks. I said something to the affect of -did you do as i asked? and got an affirmative answer. So a few seconds later Grace walks by me and i hear this strange sound, like a crunching. So I said "Grace, what are you doing?" She turns around and her cheeks were completely bulging on both sides. I leaped out of the chair and had my finger in her mouth before she barely got turned around and I proceeded to pull out not one, not two or even four, but SIX heart shaped candies from her mouth. Yes, SIX. Take six out sometime and see how much that is and imagine it in a 21 month old girl's mouth. *sigh* of course it registered very quickly what was happening and so she tried to eat them quicker which meant she bit me! Ow!!! I told her NO and that she was not to touch the candies, and not to put things in her mouth without asking mommy. I told her also NO BITE and sent her to time out. She's a pistol that one. So our new thing is when one child is in time out (the bottom step) the other has to be in another room completely otherwise the time-out child will peek around the stairs and they'll play or talk and just get each other in trouble... or one will go visit the other and then before i know it they are wrestling on the time out stair. SO I told Tyler to go in the playroom, i rescued the laptop from where it had been not-so-gently placed when i took my flying leap off the chair. I give her about 2 minute time-out's because she can handle it and she's almost two and since this was a pretty strong double offense i decided to give her about 3. Well, a minute into it isn't Tyler back in the Living room sitting on his little chair in front of the window. I was keeping an eye on him ready to bust him for bothering Grace. He looked over at her and i was JUST about to tell him to go back to the playroom and leave her alone when he looked over at me. "Excuse me mommy, but Grace is taking her clothes off in time-out." Stifling a laugh, and picturing her with her arm out of her sleeper, i said "Grace, come here." She comes around the corner and is holding her entire sleeper in one hand. She'd unzipped it and gotten her arms and legs/feet out completely. I just burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. There she's standing in just her diaper and onesie holding her jammies looking SO proud of herself. I wish I had taken a photo. I told her to put them back on and she tried for a good 5 minutes! She's so stinking cute! Gary would wish me to assure you that we are most definitely going to put a very quick stop to Grace's stripping. :) I think it's great she's so independent about it because Tyler to this day won't take off his clothes on his own without threat of consequence. Grace on the other hand puts on her own "mits" and hat, and helps with every other clothing item. She's been pulling her pants down around her ankles and attempting pulling them back up awhile now so while this didn't surprise me, it certainly took me by surprise! It was a fun 3 minutes that still makes me smile. Wednesday I was blessed to have Connie come up for the day and scrapbook with me! I'd recently been given a most generous gift (thanks Melissa!) of 6 Creative memory storage containers and had re-organized all my stuff. It was a lot of fun to get to use everything and know where everything was like that! It took a bit to get used to but I did get 3 layouts done that day. I think that's pretty good for starting around 10:30 and finishing around 5 with kid interruption and of course visiting with Connie! :) I'm not good at conversing and scrapping at the same time. I've since done another layout and a half and have I think 3 more to finish the event i'm working on. I hope Gary will be able to find and purchase within some budget whatever it is we need to get our computer working! I can't access my photo's right now and the memory card on the camera is full. I deleted a few pictures from January to make room for the kids opening their valentine stuff but now I'm stuck. I hate being without my photos and being unable to even take more! For someone who has taken several thousand in some months, it's very hard for me to be without my camera for weeks on end! Friday I got to go with Steph and take the kids to pap's house where we did some deep cleaning. The kids showed increased signs of getting colds and came down with them for sure overnight into Saturday. Saturday was possibly our last trip to the cabin (and NO CAMERA!!!!!!!AHHHHHHHHH). We helped with some packing and got a van-load of stuff loaded to take to their house. We took a walk all together down to the lake and threw rocks, even Grace. She loves it too but they don't go far. :) We can recycle the rocks she throws b/c most of them don't even make it to the water from her stroller. Most of the lake is ice but there was a few feet of water on the edges. Steph had her camera and got a couple pictures, i really pray they come out well. We went to see Sydney play basketball at 1 but the kids were losing it quickly after the first game (which we only saw half of b/c we were a few minutes late and they started early! What tournament starts early!?!). The bush's stayed but we took the kids back for naps. After naps Grandma and Pops took one last walk with the kids down to the lake. We have a lot of great memories there but the memories truly have nothing to do with the actual cabin- it's just where the memories take place. The treasure is in the time we've spend there and the special things Grandma and Pops have done with the kids there. It's the rides on the boat, the walks and hikes and go-cart rides, the movies and campfires and get-together and throwing rocks in the lake. It's the things we've all done together- time spent- that is the treasure. Not where we did it or how much it cost, it's the time. That won't change. Grandma and Pops will still take time out to spend with the kids, play with them and do things they love- the treasure of Time. By the time we got home the kids were both coughing pretty bad and had runny noses, tired eyes and were just miserable. Our church did a ministry last night showing the movie "Fireproof" and Gary went to be available if anyone needed someone to talk to. He then had a 10:00 soccer game. I fed the kids and they were pretty much ready for bed even though they'd both napped and then sat an hour in the car. I kept Grace up till 8 which was incredibly difficult with the crying and whining. We played and read some books then watched some shows. I let Tyler watch a couple extras. His new favorite is this british Racecar named Roary- it's done by the same people who do Bob the Builder so it's that clay-mation. He's obsessed with that and the Fireman Sam-which takes place in Wales and they drive on the "wrong" side of the road- definitely a british show. Very cute though, and only 8 minutes an episode! These sprout on-demand things where we don't get the regular shows so we can only watch the same 5 on demand episodes over and over and over again. Which we have. :) I like that he still enjoys these slow paced shows, he's very easily overstimulated so we monitor his tv shows pretty close. He gets kind of scared when fires happen on the one but i talk through it all with him. We've done a lot of fire safety this month! :) He went to bed around 8:30 and from about 9:00, slept hard all night only waking a few times. They both coughed quite a bit through the night but seemed to do it in their sleep. Not wanting them to infect the other kids at church I kept them home. I've got a head cold too so I stayed with them, and Gary went to church. I also made a huge pot of Broccoli Cheese soup! yum!! I'll be eating it for a year b/c Gary does not like this kind of soup. I hope the kids do b/c they will be eating it once a week or so till summer! or longer! Gary's home... no cookie cutters. Boo! Oh well, i guess another trip to Flower Factory is in order!! I"m praying hard for just the right person to take with me... can you say FAIRLAWN!!!!