I found the smell!!

Yes, that's right, for the past week and a half there has been an obnoxious smell coming from our walk in closet. Both Mark and I have been constantly trying to figure out where it was coming from. We were finally getting convinced that some critter had died in the walls and we were going to have to pay someone to knock holes in our walls to find it, until today....when I moved the dresser to find a very large cup of chocolate milk!!! (complete with spoon to stir it with) hidden away behind it.......Yep......chocolate milk.

I thought about taking a picture, but I just had to hold my nose grab the cup barely by the edge and walk verrrrry quickly to the outside garbage can.

Anarosa's comment: "Huh, I could have sworn I took that out...."

Our New Friend

We have officially adopted a caterpillar. The girls found a caterpillar in a bunch of flowers that were in Mark's office at church. They REALLY wanted to keep him for a pet, so we sacrificed on of my canning jars to make him a little home.
I was a little worried since, we've tried to do caterpillars before, but they never survive more than a day or two. This little guy has been here for three days and seems to be doing well. He certainly can eat!!
The kids decided to call him Stripedy (pronounced stripe-ed-eee).

Caught!

We have a little spot bot carpet cleaner (which we use ALL the time!). I set it up to clean two little spots on the carpet (nobody knew how they got there...) Each cycle takes about seven minutes and everytime I walked by I had to re-start the cycle.

I finally found out who was doing it!!

Isn't he helpful, pushing buttons for me!!!!

A Slip of the Elbow

"Mom! Mom! You have to come see this"

mmmm...hmmmm......

"It was a little bit of a natural disaster, it wasn't my fault though!"

Uhhhhh whatever it is just get a towel and clean it up!

"Well.....my elbow slipped"

Okay, I'm coming.....

Monkey Tales

So I'm getting the kids ready for church and notice out of the corner of my eye, Jacob running around with Anarosa's scarf sticking out of the back of his pants........hmm..
"Jacob?"
"Yes, Mom"
"Why do you have a scarf in your pants?"
"I'm a Monkey Boy.......you said if I ate all those bananas I would turn into a monkey boy and I did!"
(I don't remember saying such a thing, but it does sound like something I would say, so we'll roll with it) I let him run around with the scarf for a few minutes thinking he'll get tired of it.
Pretty soon Anarosa comes to get her scarf back because it's time to leave for church. Jacob won't give it back.
"But I'm a monkey boy and I need my tail"
"Yes, I know, but it's really Anarosa's scarf and she wants to wear it to church"
"WHY would she want to wear a GROSS MONKEY TAIL TO CHURCH?, besides, if she pulls my tail off of me I will DIE!!"

Sooo...just how do you convince a monkey boy to give up his tail?

One Appendix Too Many

On Monday evening Anarosa started complaining of a stomach ache. I didn't think much of it because all the kids have been sick with the flu, so I told her to go lay down and I would check on her in a bit. She started throwing up and her stomach wouldn't feel any better. At about 9:00 I got worried and called Kaiser. They told me to get her to the nearest emergency room right away. I called Mark and he had to leave his shift at work to come home and let me run her to the emergency room. Once we got there, it took us 6 hours, (they had forty admissions that shift), but we finally got a diagnosis of appendicitis. Luckily we got her there before it ruptured and they were able to do surgery at about 8 am Tuesday morning.
The surgery went great. She came out of the anesthetic without any problems. I felt bad for her, she was really tired from being up all night in the ER before they did the surgery so when she came out of the anesthetic she kept asking what had happened to her (she didn't really understand that she was going to have surgery) But she was up and walking in a couple of hours! She just came home this morning, and we are all happy to have her back! (especailly me, because I've been sleeping in chairs next to her bed for two nights!! and I am ready for my own bed.)

Some Confusion about Tithing

So Jacob's birthday is coming up and he got a card in the mail with money in it! He was really excited about it. Dad mentioned that he could pay tithing now that he had his own money. He looked a little confused so Mark followed up with a simple explanation that we give 10% of our money to Heavenly Father. Jacob accepted that and without further ado started throwing one of his dollar bills into the air! Finally in exasperation he looked up and said "Heavenly Father, you're gonna have to come down here and get it"

Halloween!!

So we had a great Halloween! Anarosa was a bat, Alana was a bride and Jacob was superman. (I was realy proud of Anarosa's costume, since we made that one ourselves!)

The girls had class parties and a parade at school (I got to go this year Yeah!!)

We carved pumpkins:

We went to the ward "Trunk or Treat" Party, and we loved having the McMullens, Uncle Steve, Auntie Sarah, Cousins Eli and Josh and Grandma Candi and Grandpa Wayne all come too!!!

We went to Sulpher Creek for their unhaunted house (sorry no pictures) Sulfer Creek is a nature park that does a halloween carnival with an "unhaunted house" where characters introduce native animals and let the kids pet them and ask questions ect... It's really cute and the kids get a piece of candy at the end.

And last but not least we went trick or treating!!!

And here is all the loot!

Mean mom that I am, I always make them combine candy at the end of the night, so we can't argue over whose is whose. But I really think we came away with a MASSIVE amount of candy. Especialy considering we only trick or treated one street!
And we only had one kid throw up in the car on the way home, so all in all it was pretty successful!

Happy Halloweeen Everone!

Hold the Pickles Please!

Quotes of the Day:

(while driving home from Hollister)
Jacob: "I really want a massage when we get home"
Dad: "You want what????
Jacob: "A massage, they are reallllly good"
Dad: "Really?"
Jacob: "Yeah, but I don't want the pickles"
Dad: "Umm Okay"
Jacob: "You know the ones they put on your eyes at the end"
Explanation: apparently his little friend in Hollister had been trying to explain the spa to him. It sounded good to him, he just didn't want the pickles!! (um...cucumbers from the facial I'm guessing????)

While Getting Ready for School:
Mom: "Alana go brush your teeth, I can smell your breath from over here!!"
Alana: "What? You're going to take away my only defence from bullies???"
note: she is currently in the process of recruiting a first grade "army" to take on all the third graders at school, so I'm pretty sure she doesn't have much of a problem with bullies.

While watching an ad for disney princess on ice:
Jacob: "Mom can we go see that? Pleeeeeeeeease?"
Mom: "well maybe"
Jacob: "There's going to be a lot of princesses there and I'm thinking maybe not all of them will have a prince yet"

The Plauges of Egypt

Warning: This may be a bit of a whine:

Okay, let me start off by saying, everyone is healthy and relitively happy (barring a few left over sniffles) but if I had known that Mark's new calling would call down the plauges of Egypt I might have thought twice about it.

So last week the sqealing sound the car was making was definately the brakes. (I kept trying to think that it was something else....you know something less expensive than the brakes....but it's not). Then the hard drive on the computer completely crashed.......and we can't get a new one until the end of the month because Windows is upgrading it's operating system and Best Buy won't even sell us one that will be outdated in two weeks. hmph.

This week it rained a little and everytime that happens we get ants. They come in the house and look around for a few days and then leave. I hate ants.
Next we find that yes, we do indeed have ferrel cats living under our house and they have had kittens! I do not like ferrel cats. (I know that makes me a bad person, but cats belong in houses with people who love them, not wild and under my house)
Since we have ferrel cats.....you guessed it, we now have fleas. I REALY hate fleas.
Now, the irony is not lost on me, as soon as we found the cats, I noticed that something had chewed threw our 3-day emergency packs and you guessed it we have mice!!! (Don't tell Mark he's got a phobia of mice......which is not good for me because now I have to deal with mice).
And just because God has a great sense of humor, I woke up at 4 am in the morning the night before last to hear obnoxious noises coming from the ceiling. Now my sisters can testify that I am TOTALLY rational at 4am. So I was convinced that whatever was rooting around and scratching on the roof or thereabouts was going to claw through the ceiling and land on the baby and that would be the end of the baby. So I made Mark get dressed and go up on the roof to scare whatever it was away and that's how we found out that we have Raccoons nesting in our attic!

Seriously??????

So, now we have a "wildlife removal specialist" scheduled to come today at 1:30 to see what he can do about removing our wildlife.
I've decided I'm the mama and I just brought another baby into my nest, and all those other little mamas with all their little babies are just going to have to get OUT and FIND THEIR OWN NESTS!!!!!!!!