He Arrives On Thursday

I'm not sure how excited he's going to be about it though. Who is it that I am speaking of? Why, this guy right here:

That's right. Peavey Cat Walter is making his way from the garden state (NJ - for those of you uncultured enough to only think of...not...gardening things...when you think...okay, I don't know where I was going with that...my apologies) to the last frontier (AK). While Eric and Elyse are sad to see him go, we are pretty excited to see him come. Thanks again guys for taking such good care of him while we were in Oklahoma!

Now, how excited Peavey will be to get out here is anybody's guess. We think he'll be somewhat relieved to be away from the other dogs and cats that E&E have, so he'll probably be happy to be the lone pet, getting ALL the pet love here. However, his elation may be short lived when he sees the boys again. I guess I should say, when the boys see him again, as Zeke has starting hugging every dog he is allowed to pet, and I'm sure the same is going to go for the cat. While it is incredibly sweet to see Zeke wrap his arms around the neck of a great dane and just hang out making that "mmm" sound you make when you get/give a good hug, I'm not sure Peavey will find it sweet. At all. And Deacon's just a beast, so there's that too.

As if that weren't enough to make Peavey Cat wish he were back in the lower 48 (as they are called out here), we live in dogland. Here is a "dog count" for you (the orange numbers are how many dogs live in that particular house):

this picture requires an update. the 1? is actually 1, and the
2 from crazy lady's house should be 1 now.
one of her dogs died last week.very sad.

In case you can't count past ten without taking your socks and shoes off, and taking your socks and shoes off isn't something you feel like doing at the moment, I'll add that up for you. Twelve. There are 12 dogs living on this street. Yeah, Peavey's going to love that. I tell you who does love it though. Zeke. Every. single. time. dogs anywhere on the street are out, he runs to the window, announces the fact that a dog (or dogs) is (are) out and then proceeds to bark like the yappy ones across the street. So, it goes like this: "Dog! Dog! Woof! Woof! Woof! panting sounds Dog! Woof! Woof! Dog! Dog!" and so forth. He has gotten better about it, but before our stuff came, it was the excitement of the morning, afternoon, evening, etc.

All of this is just a long winded way of saying that Peavey is coming on Thursday! Maybe he'll help out with the squirrels.

This Is Why I Love Joni Starling

Well, this is one of the many reason, anway.

Two days ago I said to Josh, "Babe, did we leave our checking account book on the Starling's bookshelf? I wrote a check for the yard people there for Joni to give to the lady, and I haven't seen the book since." Josh looked for the check book where he thought it was, didn't find it there, pretty much said he had no idea, and the conversation was dropped.

Yesterday I walked down to the mailbox to see if there was anything in there, and what did I find, but a package from Joni! (Or, Jomi, as she is more affectionately called here.) I opened the package on my way back to our house and practically fell down in the middle of the street from laughter. For inside the package was the answer to the question I had posed to Josh the night before:

In case you can't read it from the picture, the letter says:

Dear Josh & Beth,

We found this on our bookshelf after you left and thought you might like it back. If you find that a few checks are unaccounted for and a bit of cash is gone from your checking account, blame Sammie and Reese. They have recently taken up online shopping and they don't have credit cards yet.

Josh got quite a kick out of it too. The best part though, she wrapped our checkbook before sending it back to us:

Honestly, who does that? Joni does that, that's who. And that is why I love Joni Starling.

PS - Joni, when you get all settled in, in Cali, call me!

When Did Mornings Get So Stressful?

Oh, that's right. Mornings started getting stressful when this guy:

aaaaaand this guy:

stopped getting enough sleep at night, causing unnecessary meltdowns and freak outs and crankiness galore. What's that? You want to know why they stopped getting enough sleep at night? Well, I'll tell you.

As I mentioned in my last post, the boys are sharing a room here. Fortunately, my boys LOVE each other and have a blast together. Unfortunately, this means that instead of going to bed at 7:30 and falling asleep (usually) within an hour or so, they now go to bed at 7:30 and play and laugh and screech and sing and have a jolly good time until 10:30 or so. Oh, you read that right, 10:30 or so. That is 3, count them, 3 hours of playing before finally going to sleep. That means they are now getting 2 hours less sleep than they are used to getting and need to get.

I'm at a loss here. I have no idea how to get them to go to sleep at a decent hour. I have no problems with them playing for a little while, but I would really like for them to settle down after an hour, say, and be fast asleep no later than 9:00. When my mom was here she would go in (around 10/10:30) and sit in the room with them, keeping them quiet until they fell asleep (around 11). I don't want to have to do that. Obviously if there's no way around it, I will, but I'd really rather not.

Before it comes to that though, I'm wondering if any of you have any ideas as to what I can try, or what works for your kids (if you have more than one and they're sharing a room, that is). We've tried going in every 15 minutes, every half hour, etc. We've tried just letting them go and wear themselves out. We've tried yelling, spanking, asking nicely, etc. What makes it hard though, is when you walk in and see this:

Because, you know, once you start laughing too, you've lost the night's battle.

I Just Wanted To Share

For those who don't remember or have never seen "The Elephant Show", it usually ended something like this:

I taught this song to my kids and they LOVE it. We sing and do the hand motions and everything quite often. Now, I haven't blogged about this yet, and maybe some day I will, but we put the boys in a bedroom together here while my mom was still out. They thoroughly enjoy themselves in there, and the other night I had the best time listening to them as Zeke would sing the above song, and Deacon would cheer. I did my best to catch this on video.

That being said, this video is not the greatest. I had to film the door, otherwise it would have ruined the moment if I got busted opening the door at all. Also, there's a lot of background noise (dog barking) and he sings softly at first. SO, I would recomment starting it, then stopping it right away so it can complete it's buffering/loading/whatevering process. Then I would click to the 28 second mark and enjoy.

Also, I got April's pictures up on Flickr today. You can click here to go see them, or click on the box of ever moving, ever changing pictures on the left side of the screen. Sorry there are so many pictures of mountains. 1. They're everywhere up here. 2. They're GORGEOUS. Talk about God's amazingly beautiful creation. 3. The pictures come from my mom's camera as well as Josh's camera so there are twice as many to begin with than if it was only my camera. That being said, I will try and get May (so far) up there soon, and I will try to post a little more often now that all of our stuff is here, and most of it is unpacked. So, um, that's all. Toodle-pip!