Some More Summer Shots

 

 

Jack’s band at Six Flags, looking so tall

 

Grant in talent show with some buddies, playing the SpongeBob theme song

Swimming fun

Grant’s indestructible Lego supertruck

  

Gary in the Route 66 race

   

Haircut time

Last Saturday, Grandma and Grandpa Gill brought Sam and Grant home after the boys’ week long stay at their house. 

Grant, like I mentioned before, was not at all happy with the changes to his and Sam’s room and that kinda set the tone for the rest of the day.  This is him as we celebrated his soon-to-be-11th-birthday while Grandma and Grandpa were here.  Grandma even went to town to get an ice cream cake.   

Well, anyway the rest of us enjoyed it. 

More Summer Stuff

   

This is just one of the two big trees that have fallen lately.  Don’t know why since it was during a time with no wind storm or anything and this one looked healthy.  We noticed another one down yesterday.  Plus, one day last week I was standing at the driveway and heard the sound of cracking wood and saw with my own eyes a huge branch coming down from another tree in the woods.  Lots of firewood for us, but why are these trees breaking?  A little scary considering how much time we are out in the woods here right by the house and that’s where these are coming down.  Hmm….

 

Unfortunately, this picture’s exposure is not too great, but this day I was on the mower and looked up to see Caroline on the driveway which is not unusual at all, but it was funny how she was so color coordinated with the background.  Her shorts were the color of our house and her shirt the same as the impatiens. 

  

What she was working on was the pie throwing game she dreamed up for her birthday party.

 

Here’s the before, the day she created it. 

Here’s the during.

 

Kitties were loving the cream.

Things are still fun.

But soon, they turned. 

  

And here’s the after.

Not so smiley and happy by the end.

Speaking of befores and afters… here’s her room.  Gracious.

Much better!

Sam and Grant’s room got a makeover this week too, but I can’t say Grant was smiley about it at all.  Sam liked it.  Who wouldn’t like a neater and cleaner space?  I don’t have the curtain rod up yet so no pics.  Maybe later after I get done ruining Grant’s life forever. 

Scenes from Caroline's 8th birthday.  Kitti from Hungary was over.

Caroline loved her dress from Grant.  He kinda changed up the typical gift giving approach by wearing both the gift bag and the gift. 

Paints and clay from Sam, and an iTunes gift card from Jack. 

That she immediately lost. 

[But I will say her lost DS showed up recently, 8 months missing, when we got the new fridge and moved out the old one.  Guess I had put it in timeout on top and totally forgot.  Oops.]  

The next day, she had a small party with her girlfriends.

    

Pictures and cards from her aunts and grandparents made the perfect b-day decorations. 

And then the next day was Fathers Day.  Here’s Sam with my dad, looking lots better than six months ago when his heart surgery was going on.

 

OK, we’re almost caught up with the summer happenings but not quite….catch ya again soon!

Summer Stuff So Far

I was thinking I had nothing to blog about lately and then I find I have 90 pictures just sitting in my camera.

That’s a good reminder that there has been stuff going on. 

Ok, maybe then the thing is I haven’t had time to blog.

This girl’s had Girl Scout day camp this week and I have been a helper.  Wow, is that tiring.  I don’t know how Gary and Jack manage seven consecutive days and nights at camp.  Two days of 9-3:30 about did me in.  But she’s loving it.  Except for the bugs and stinky toilets.  I will say I appreciate her behavior in handling those things she doesn’t love when comparing to how I saw some other girls handle it = Not well.

 

So speaking of scouting, we hosted a fire safety course for Boy Scouts at our place one recent Sunday.  One of the troop dads had access to expired fire extinguishers, fully functional, just out of date for his factory, so we all (Sam, Caroline, everybody) practiced how to use one.  I always wanted to do that.  In case of a real and panicked situation, I didn’t want that to be the time I learned I didn’t know how they worked. 

 

It’s actually a powder inside (I think I thought it would be a foam).  You can see the coating the woods got from our practice at our fire spot.  Most of this foliage ended up dying, I guess because of the coverage interfering with photosynthesis?

No pictures, but Debra and I cleaned up our old wood pile, see it in the top pic, one blazing hot day and I found out she has a thing about spiders.  I didn’t know that!  And we were uncovering huge huge ugly big spiders left and right.  But she stuck with it and by the end seemed to embrace using the hoe to slice the spiders.   Conquer your fears, right?

Um, quick question….when all we ever do is make you guys work around here, why do you keep coming over?  I don’t know why, but thank you.

Grant’s a Boy Scout now, too, by the way. 

This is our new fridge.  We won’t rehash the day and a half it took to get it in the house and set up and running.  Painful. 

It’s 36 inches wide and our doorway and this cabinet opening is 36 inches wide.  It might have helped to have an extra 1/8 inch or something.  Dad Gill was the guest worker on this project and again, not fun but it seems our family’s always there to help. 

Another new appliance, this little gadget, but definitely a sophisticated gadget, is Jack’s MiniMed insulin pump he used his trial week.  It looks beat up or something but it’s not; it’s actually a blue camo skin so those markings are intentional.  His actual real one, solid blue, comes today but he won’t get started using it until sometime after his week at Boy Scout camp.   He did unbelievably great with it, having to pass the trial before the doctors would consider him switching to a pump, but after two years of him dealing with diabetes, I shouldn’t be surprised.  He’s done unbelievably well with everything thrown at him.  Love that brave boy! 

 

Grant recently designed a simple but fashionable and definitely functional spring raincoat for Bob/Bruce Cat. Yeah, I don’t know which one is which.  They’ve only been living here a year.

 

Cat got tired of playing Project Runway/Driveway and apparently took off for the fields for awhile and wouldn’t let Grant approach to help remove the garment.  I am not sure how long he wore it or how it actually came off, but I can say he’s not wearing it anymore.  

Here are the rascals in Sam’s car seat (yes, plenty of cat photos by Caroline included in those 90 pictures), the rascals that may or may not have been the source of Sam’s mystery hives he had for, what, four days.  Finally got those cleared up with Zyrtec.  Grandma and Grandpa Gill have had to do some doctoring while Grant and Sam are there this week. 

Ok, there’s definitely more stuff to cover, like a little thing called Caroline’s now 8!, but we’ll call it a day for now and catch ya’ll later. 

Déjà Vu View

I think this is the third post like this.  The ones where there’s something in the house that makes me think it’s something else and I have to do a double take every time I go by until I just undo whatever it is and put an end to the mind games.  I’m sure having peripheral vision is a good thing but sometimes, geesh, it freaks me out.

One was Sam’s muscleman costume hanging half out of the laundry chute and I kept thinking all day those legs hanging down were really one of the kids taking fun ride down, never mind that that Walton house crazy laundry chute opening was three inches wide.  The other thing was some doll we’d washed or something and propped up in the bathtub and for like a day, I momentarily thought there was really a kid in the bathtub each time I walked by. 

This was the latest, Caroline’s pillow with the face of a girl…every time I walked into my own bedroom, my eyes would catch a glimpse and I’d think it was really someone in her bed.  I think the ruffled covers cinched it.  

 

Big smiles here today.  It’s Ms. Girl’s 8th birthday and we are gonna have a good time.  Busy, busy day today and tomorrow!

Bump Begone

I could title this Wart Begone, but I don’t really want my blog associated with warts, you know.  They’re like so grody.  So that’s why I am typing up an entire post devoted to my wart story?

Just know it really is quite a story or I wouldn’t be sharing it.   

It started out about six months ago, way back at Christmas-time.  I noticed a tender spot on my right thumb and it felt like the nail was pushing into my skin but upon examination, the nail was not too long and was not in fact even touching the skin.  Weird sensation, but I ignored it and no biggie. 

Fast forward a couple of months and it was still feeling strange, but now a slight bump was forming.  Not really painful so again, ignore, no biggie. 

By March-April, it was a bigger bump and starting to hurt, but was it worth a special trip to the doctor?  Didn’t seem like it.  It was just a bump.  I put some Neosporin and a band-aid on it.

By May, the thumb was swollen to almost twice the size of my normal thumb and pretty red.  The joint was so tight that it popped a real slow pop if I tried to bend my thumb.  If I accidentally bumped it, I got tears in my eyes and had to hold in some bad words.  It was painful.

At that point, Gary said I could not have a hair appointment until I got a doctor appointment.  I knew he meant business, plus, it’s hard to do much without involving the thumb of your dominant hand, so I went to the doctor.  By this time, it was taking on a different appearance, getting a layered kind of look.  Some brown in it.  Very ugly.  The doctor looked and said it was a wart.  I never suspected that at all.

He said it was so progressed that for him to freeze it in the office would take multiple visits and even then we would probably not have it all completely  removed, so he referred me right to the hand specialist to get it surgically removed. Whatever.  I just wanted it gone.  I asked if I hadn’t let it go so long, would a one-time treatment in his office have worked?  Yes. 

Darn procrastination!

A couple of weeks passed until I could be seen by the hand doctor.  The week of my appointment, in fact it was three days before, I noticed the swelling was going down, like dramatically.  By two days before, it wasn’t hurting even.  The day of the appointment, I woke up and wondered if I should even still go in, it felt so much better and had decreased in size an unbelievable amount just overnight. 

It was like finally getting your car into the mechanic and then it doesn’t make the noise that day.

The hand doctor looked at it and said he could scrape it down if I really wanted him to, but he would advise letting it continue as is since it was improving on its own.  He said to just call him back if it got red or swollen again.  Ok.  Sounded fine with me, but I admit it was a little disappointing to walk out having nothing done after going through all the business of getting this specialist to look at it and paying out the two co-pays and having this thing for six months.

That night I took a shower and when I got out, I happened to notice my thumb, my now smooth thumb;  the entire wart was gone and my skin looked as normal as ever at that spot!  It had simply dropped off and apparently gone down the drain. 

What a coincidence since it was the very day it was originally scheduled to be cut out.  So now I’m confused and not sure just which moral I learned from this story:

Take care of something simple before it turns into a real big deal.

OR 

Put it off so long and the problem will disappear like magic.

I don’t think I should really count on #2, except maybe in the case of a grody wart.

MovieMonday—A Trio of Recos

I have three movies to tell you about and you should watch all three, if you haven’t already. 

True Grit

A Coen Brothers movie, it’s really good!  Jack’s seen it three times and I know he’d like to watch it again. Gary and I would watch it again, too.  Jeff Bridges does an impressive job and the story just gets you.  Makes you want to say You Go, Girl!

The Fighter

Marky Mark is good but Christian Bale’s acting was outstanding.  Definitely more humor in this one than True Grit, but also a really good movie.  And it had a delightful surprise for me on the soundtrack.  I was half-dozing (not a reflection on the quality of the movie, just a usual Diane thing) and bolted right up when I heard the first bars of Strip My Mind.  I had no idea!  It fit well.  Overall, a good soundtrack really. 

And then there’s this movie called Napoleon Dynamite…by a young film maker named Caroline Gill.

Legoland

We have started this summer with lots of go-go.  We, the kids and I, took a long, long drive to Chicago earlier this week.  I have never known the drive to be as long as it was taking Interstate 55 across the state.  Yes, we stopped three times in our first hour, but geesh, the road itself seemed to go on forever.  Finally, we got there.  I messed up taking my exit where we were to meet Debra, but I found out by accident exactly where Ikea is, so watch out, I might just take off now and go there sometime. 

So anywho, we finally connected with Deb at a Wendy’s and then headed on up together for the next leg of the drive to Legoland.  Jack decided he didn’t want to do Legoland which was probably an appropriate choice since it was more kiddie than he is, so he and Deb did their own thing at Woodfield. 

I know we had a really good time!  Tell me how else could you pet Einstein’s tongue?

 

^^This is a replica of where Caroline was yesterday.  She stayed with Aunt Deb and they were going to Navy Pier.  Side note:  It sure is quiet around here.

       

    

We paid a bunch of tolls there and back.  This, unfortunately, is the only pic I snapped of our lovely hostess and beautiful sis, Deb.   Back at her place that night, we had some fabulous Aurelio’s pizza.  Wow, that stuff is good.  Very Dimaggio’s like.  Delish.  We watched True Grit (the new version, a good one!), and then left Caroline and headed on back home late the next morning.  We took I-57 to 70 on the drive home and for some reason, it is so much more enjoyable of a drive.  We stopped in Champaign for a late lunch at Cracker Barrel. Grant enjoyed his first beer in a bottle.  The root kind, that is.  

That’s not his tooth, but a funny thing did happen…a waitress dropped a dish clear across the big room and we heard the crash.  A second later, this shark-tooth-shaped piece of glass sailed right across Grant’s chest.  I never would have thought the glass would have travelled such distance and it seemed like such a delay after hearing the crash.  Weird, and so glad it didn’t hit those blue eyes. 

This is my other mystery son that won’t let me take his picture.  Is there a sad mom face icon?  : ( 

Sam threw a whopper of a fit because we walked into Cracker Barrel instead of the neighboring Steak and Shake, but with a jelly biscuit, he seemed to come around.  

 

This is my list of things I wrote down at lunch that wished I had taken a picture of…

Deb and Caroline—self explanatory

Airplane wing—on 74 headed into Champaign, we passed a truck with one of the longest trailers I’ve ever seen and its load was literally an airplane wing.  It was huge and I’ve never seen anything like that going down the road.  It so deserved a picture, but sometimes I have to just drive.  You know, kids in the van.

Limos—on the drive up, we kept playing the passing game with these two stretch limos.  The funny thing was, they were both so full of luggage that their trunks were overflowing and had to be held shut with a cord, plus, the front seats were filled with luggage with only a little open space for the chauffeur to sit and drive.  It looked like a plenty big enough car.  I told the kids it was the Chilis inside. 

Braidwood Inn—And yes, it is the actual one where Neil Page and Del Griffith hilariously share a room when their flight out of Wichita is delayed in my all time favorite movie, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  It is right by I-55 and its sign says Sunset Inn.  But it’s def the Braidwood Inn.  Man, I wish I had a picture.  I’m gonna snap one when I go on my Ikea getaway.

And are we good or what?  Fourteen seconds to spare.  We hit the Effingham Steak and Shake just in the nick of time to get our half-price drinks and shakes to fuel us the rest of the way home.

 

And speaking of fuel, I saw my all-time highest price gas price ever—Chicago $4.29/gallon.  Whoa.

Well, it was a good, fun trip and thanks for the hospitality, Deb!   Love ya!!