Sunday, October 18, 2015

Half-Birthdays and Other Fun


I've always wanted to celebrate half birthdays and always forget. Until this week! Brennan's was the 13th and Hollyn's is tomorrow so I combined them for the celebration. Brennan and Hollyn each got half a small Lego set (i.e. a single set to share - which they opened and played with just the TWO of them for at least an hour yesterday. I didn't even have to enforce it, Brennan invited Hollyn to play with him all on his own!)
That's a candle that says ".5" if you're wondering. The decor has a "1/2" added as well. And yes, that's half a pie, which you can purchase that way from Safeway. Score!
 Today we sang them half of the birthday song, enjoyed half a pie (I cheated and got another to be enough;-) ), and each got the age number amount of mini candy bars.

 Not bad for a first attempt, and I don't want to make the half birthday experience much bigger than it ended up. I hope to find or think of more ideas related to "half" to make the celebration more funny/silly-fun though. Me and Kieran will always get to celebrate together so I'll have to figure that out so he gets his fair share of special days.

Goodbye old friend. No, not Dad or Kieran the pantsless. My 17-yr-old craiglist-find dryer was getting increasingly noisy. I'd started referring to him as The Shrieking Dryer due to the sound it was making when the drum turned. It was time to say goodbye, and a community appliance "roundup" was a great opportunity to get the screamer out. (Thanks SO much, Dad!) Goodbye pal. You served me well as the only dryer I've ever owned.

Hollyn wanted to play minecraft like the big boys, so Brennan showed her how to do it on the computer with quick instruction like "press w to go forwards and e to get into your inventory and left click to mine, space bar to jump..." as if she knows what "w" is, let alone "inventory" or "space bar". Hahaha. But she gave it her best shot. 

 I got kind of a kick out of watching the boys, in matching shirts, playing together. I watched Brennan creating his "best mansion yet" and was impressed at the creativity Minecraft encourages. In the mean time Asher was creating a store which Brennan said was "actually pretty cool looking". His store was stocked with supplies to sell. I watched them lay down their various blocks, effortlessly plugging away at the idea in their head. They know exactly the grand plan, as well as details, including mazes and multiple levels and whatnot. It's so interesting to witness the creativity.

 Earlier in the week Hollyn used blankets and a pillow to create a little fort under our piano bench. She'd asked to sleep in it, but being a school night I told her that she could on Friday night instead. That idea evolved into a "Family-Sleep-Somewhere-Different-Slumber-Party" which essentially was the three kids making forts and talking me into sleeping on the couch near them. I didn't sleep well of course - not their fault but for various reasons. But I think they enjoyed the night.

Fridays are still Movie Night too




Fixing her fort. It must be perfect after all.




We enjoyed some outside time on Friday. These little squirt bottles from the dollar store have been extremely popular since their purchase. Best $2 I ever spent.

Hollyn making "paint" by squirting the chalk drawings



 Did I mention I took 100 pictures? I just love fall outside shots and these cute faces. Win-Win!













O.k. Moving on...

Work is going well. And by "well" I mean SO SO busy. I had been asked to put the new position I was training for on hold to help in Shipping again as my priority. Meh. Whatever, shipping is fine. But a sale on Ipods with one of our suppliers resulted in me helping in a process of days of continual ordering. We are limited by how many of a certain color we can order in a single transaction. In this case the magic number was usually 2, so we'd order two of all the available colors over and over and over again. For hours. Now, all those orders are coming in and it's crazy-house at Underwater Audio.

On Fridays I'm the only one of us 3 purchasing-dept gals in the office - and don't forget I leave at noon myself. So this last Friday I was there alone when the Fedex guy came and confirmed he had 300 boxes. I rounded up some helpers and with wagons and a pallet w/ pallet jack we headed outside to help. And the UPS guy showed up just then himself. Naturally the water-guy would arrive at that time too. The elevator was kept quite busy. Anyway lots of people making lots of trips and loading and unloading and relocating. I was so proud of myself because I started moving the boxes into a place I'd cleared out and stacked them by sizes and neat rows and columns. Before pride cometh the fall. The Fedex guy told us there'd been a mistake and 6 of the boxes hadn't gotten scanned. He was going to get lots of paperwork and we'd have to eventually figure out the status of those boxes.  My columns/rows were tidy but with lots of helpers stacking we couldn't trust the columns in back to be what we thought they were. Plus all the UPS boxes were mixed in. In the end my coworker Cory and I unstacked, counted, sorted, and restacked these 400 boxes like 4 times! We took our piles apart to sort out the UPS boxes. And restacked for counting. But our counting was off by two in the OTHER direction - 2 additional Fedex. So we unstacked and finally found the two culprits we'd mistakenly added. So we restacked again and the number was right. We called the Fedex man who said "Great!" and that he'd have to come back to RESCAN the boxes on his lunch break or something. He was really nice, didn't blame us at all for anything. But, Cory and I knew it would take forever for him to scan them if they're all stacked together. So we unstacked and relocated the boxes AGAIN so that each and every box was accessible. Yeah, it was a crazy morning. Lol. And although no one expected me to be able to log all the ipods into the system on Fridays by myself, it's unfortunate that we are THIS behind, because there's undoubtedly another 300-400 orders arriving on Monday. As it was the other gals were working late - til about 6:30 - after my leaving just to stay caught up each day. Oh well. It's nice to be caught up, but not essential. We'll just have to plug away and finish when we finish.

I am covering for the shipping gal the week before Thanksgiving and BLACK FRIDAY! Yikes! No pressure or anything. I can do regular orders but I still have to ask lots of questions about things that are outside the regular and have never been taught how to do a lot of things, like the orders we send to Amazon each week. Wish me luck.




The audio on my laptop stopped working. Ben Brewster finally figured out the problem. The tip of a headphone cord had broken off inside the computer so that now the computer thinks it's streaming through headphones all the time. Unfortunately it's going to take major surgery to attempt to fix this, and it might not even be successful. I don't know what happened, but I blame my kids! If it comes down to it, I'm undecided whether to replace the laptop or the children. ;-)

♪♫ One of these plugs is not like the other, one of these plugs just doesn't belong... ♫♪ (They used to match)
Such a small thing to be such an expensive problem.


Last Sunday, with no space to store my Costco-sized bag of potatoes I set up a station for peeling, then chopped and pre-cooked the diced pieces for freezing. After my first batch which took 3 big pots and about an hour to complete, wouldn't you know it but the boys both BEGGED to help peel - when there was a total of 2 potatoes left. Hah! Little turkeys!





A week ago I got Kieran up to go to the YW Pumpkin Patch activity with me. His eyes didn't look right. In fact, they looked like they were coming down from an allergic reaction. He also had weird stools that morning and the night before. I thought about it and remembered that he'd been eating cashew clusters the evening before. Nothing immediate showed up, in fact he'd been up for several hours after eating them without showing any signs or swelling. But it would definitely not be a surprise, considering he shares Asher's asthma issues as well. Me thinks I might need to schedule an appt with the allergist for this one.



Saturday, October 10, 2015

Fall Fun

 Took some pictures of Kieran while trying to keep him occupied during the other kids' swimming lessons. I love his sweet chubby cheeks!
 The audio on my laptop is broken, so I have no idea if the above video plays and/or gives sound.
 "It's Mommy!"
 Hey! It's ME!
 Kieran and Cousin B had fun watering Grandma's plants.




 She was all ready to go to Grandma's. It was 8am.

 Here's how she slept the night before. I love 4 year olds.

 Are you ever curious what you look like laying down. Usually I laugh and/or cry at the attempts to see what I really look like from that angle. But hey, this one isn't so bad. Maybe there's hope for me after all.

 Neighbor Sawyer dressing up with Hollyn.


 And showing a little leg.


 We enjoyed viewing the blood moon eclipse. We couldn't see past the trees in our backyard area, so we hopped in the car and drove up a hill just up the road (ha! Get it?) from us. Turns out some neighbor/ward friends had the same idea, among many others, as well as the ward friends who live on the other side of the road who joined us. It was quite the party. :-)

 Sometimes when life is hard, you end up living on pie. Put the kids to bed, turn on Gilmore Girls, and dig in. And I'm not even ashamed. That pie was gone shortly after this picture and it was worth it.


 Toothless. This was the day, as we discussed how weird it is that no adult teeth are showing up despite it being months since the baby teeth fell out, that I suggested to Asher he should rub dirt on his gums and go stand outside with his mouth open to get some sun. Anything to help those teeth grow, right? Asher was skeptical, saying he doesn't think it works that way. But I told him, "My Dad's a Dentist, I'm an expert in these things."

 Hollyn in the ambulance. So, at the back-to-school "Block Party" at our elementary school, there were firetrucks, police cars, and the ambulance. With no prompting, Hollyn climbed up and totally played the part. Someone give this girl an Oscar!

 Kieran was rather a fan of the big trucks.




Showing off his fangs. Seemed appropriate to leave the red-eye.