Future dentist?

This picture cracked me up!

I can't believe I'm going to say this...

For Christmas, we (I mean Santa) got Alyssa an ant farm. It's a plastic container with this blue gel stuff in it that the ants tunnel through as well as eat, so you don't have to find any special ant food for them. It was Jeff's idea and he agreed to be in charge of the ants because I wasn't exactly thrilled to be inviting creepy-crawlies into my house. In fact, my general position on anything in the bug category is that it's fine outside where it belongs, but if it gets into my house, I'm going to squish it.

So they've been waiting for it to get a little warmer before they ordered the ants so they wouldn't freeze in the mailbox or something. The ants arrived last week. I was not amused at the little test tube filled with ants. Big, black ants. That came compete with a warning not to try to handle them because they sting. And the first aid treatment of said stings. Ick.

The ants were installed in their new blue home and at first didn't seem to be doing much except hollowing out one whole side of the gel (trying to escape??). But the past couple days, they have built some honest-to-goodness tunnels, just as promised.

Here comes the part I don't like to admit: those ants are pretty cool! I find myself going into Alyssa's room several times a day to check on them and see what new tunnels they are building. Brendan and I were particularly excited to see what he called "an upside-down rainbow" yesterday afternoon that wasn't there in the morning. As soon as Alyssa got home from school, she had to run and check it out. Last night they made a spiral slide to connect with the rainbow. Pretty cool.

Some pseudo-birthdays

Today is Alyssa's half-birthday, she's officially eight and a half!

And yesterday was Lucas's 11 month birthday. I can't believe he'll be a year old in less than a month!

So what better occasion to take a picture of my sweeties (had to include the almost 5 year old too!).

What did you get for St. Patrick's Day?

Okay, I know it won't be St. Patrick's Day for a couple days yet, but maybe you have a wishlist? A green beer? Perhaps a bouquet of shamrocks? Your very own leprechaun?

Or maybe you're thinking, "Hey, wait a minute - I didn't even realize St. Patrick's Day was a gift-giving holiday!" Me too! But apparently it is, because my children all received St. Patrick's Day gifts in the mail yesterday from their grandmother, my mother-in-law. Yes, each one of them received a $5 bill in a card.

She does this for every minor holiday - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day. And in every card: five dollars. I know she's just trying to be nice, but I really wish she wouldn't send the children cash.

What exactly could an infant do with a $5 bill except eat it? He can't even open the card. I don't think he's saving up his money to buy a new sippy cup or anything. If he needs anything, we buy it for him. I used to try putting it away and saving it for him, but now the money goes right into my purse.

Brendan is excited to get money because he knows it's something he should want, but he doesn't really "get" the concept. He treats it more like something to play with. And like all his other toys, he leaves it laying around. After looking at it sitting on the coffee table for awhile, it finds its way into my purse too. If he asks for something reasonable - the other day he wanted a notebook - I'll get it for him and we can pretend that's what grandma's money bought.

Alyssa does understand about money, so she hides it away in her room. Where it stays along with the money she gets from the tooth fairy and any other money she aquires. She does occasionally spend it on things like the school store, the book fair or her very own Girl Scout cookies. But she also understands that I will buy her whatever she needs and most reasonable things that she wants.

Grandma also sent stickers in Alyssa and Brendan's cards and I think that kind of a "gift" is much more appropriate! Thanks Grandma!

Every Sunday

It's 10:40 p.m. on Sunday night (no thanks to damn stupid Daylight Savings Time, but I digress). Alyssa is still awake. And freaking out.

"It's so late!" {wringing hands}
"I'll never get to sleep! {jumping around}
"Help me go to sleep!" {crying}
"I'll be tired in the morning!" {shaking hands}
"What can I do?" {more crying}

ARGH!!!!!!!!! Enough already! Just go to bed and lay there until you fall asleep!

I swear this happens every single Sunday night. And every single Sunday night I tell her if she has trouble falling asleep, that she just has to relax and lay there and not get so freaked out. And every time it doesn't matter.

Last Sunday (or was it two Sundays ago?), she was in and out of the bathroom about 4 times in 15 minutes. Did she really have to go that often? No, she was in there looking at herself in the mirror and watching herself cry. Why??? Just to work herself up more, I guess.

She does tend to stay up a little later on Friday and Saturday nights, but not that late. Maybe an extra half hour or so, not enough that it should make it impossible to sleep hours and hours after bedtime on Sunday. She was up until 10 last night and that was Jeff's fault. But she was also up early this morning - 7:30 on the old time. Even without DST, she should have been asleep almost an hour ago.

For some reason, she psyches herself up about Sunday night, convincing herself that since she stayed up a little later than usual the night before, she'll never be able to fall asleep. She could get up at 5 a.m. on Sunday and it would probably be the same story.

Well, I'm going to bed. And she'll probably be begging me to do "something" to help her fall asleep who knows how many times. Even though I've told her over and over there is nothing I can do. Ugh.

Look what Lucas can do!

Lucas likes to sit on one of our big kitchen chairs while I'm cleaning up the colossal mess that he makes at mealtime. The past few days, he's been looking like he might pull himself up on the back of the chair. And yesterday, he did it!



Unfortunately, this is apparently the only place he can pull off this little trick. Being a disaster waiting to happen, I had to remove him from the chair and he was none too happy!

Also, I finally got a picture of those two bottom teeth that he's had for almost two months (the scrunchy face/cheeseball grin was a bonus)!

Strange, tragic story

There has been a local news story going on here for the past three weeks. If you want to read all the articles (and there are a lot), go here. Be warned, it is not a pleasant story and does not have a happy ending.

Basically, it's the story of a missing woman, her husband and all the bizarre occurances of the past three weeks. Some of the highlights - if you can call them that - include:

• an uncooperative husband who reports his wife missing after she's been gone for five days
• a media circus that the husband played to
• a dismembered body, part of which was found in the couple's garage
• a statewide manhunt for the husband
• the capture of the husband after a night of freezing temperatures when he was wearing no coat or shoes
• the confession of the husband to killing his wife (while his children were in the house, asleep) and cutting up her body (at his family's machine shop)

There are many, many more crazy details to this story. It has absolutely dominated the local news here ever since the story broke, on February 16th, I believe. All the big excitement of the discovery of the body and the subsequent manhunt and capture happened this past weekend and we have been glued to the TV.

Jeff and I (like most of the rest of the area) would discuss the recent developments almost every day, disecting the TV and newspaper reports. Jeff even called me several times today as news was breaking to talk about it. He thought the husband was guilty right from the beginning. I was hoping he was not, as his original story was plausible to me - his wife travelled a great deal for business and he said they argued about it and then she left the house and he hadn't seen her since. I thought she was dead, but that she had a car accident (we had some bad weather around the time she disappeared) or that she met up with some third person who did her in.

This all happened only a few miles from where we live. What gives me the creeps is that it's very possible that we could have easily crossed paths (it was mentioned in the paper that he would shop at the same grocery store that I shop at). And I feel so very sorry for their children who have lost their mother at the hands of their father.