Hello, Stranger

Wow, I didn't realize how long it's been since either one of us wrote. Geez, a lot has happened. Matthew is back and he turned 6. We had his birthday party at Aventure Landing which was a lot of fun. The kids played laser tag for the first time and Matthew won't stop talking about it. He absolutely loved it and declared laser tag "The best game in the whole world". It was also hilarious watching them play mini golf. Rules to the game escape 5 and 6 year olds. In fact, it's more fun to hit the ball as many times as you can before it reaches the hole. Matthew got his coveted Batman sword and has been wearing his spiderman costume and chopping Emily's neck off with his sword all week. She just thinks he is the funniest thing. He is pretty much the only one who can get her rolling with laughter. The other day, he was playing with his new hot wheels toy and she was screaming from laughing so hard. I have no idea why she thought that was funny, but I have never seen her laugh so hard.

John left on Sunday to go to New Jersey for training. He just got back last night. I remembered why being a single parent sucked! I pretty much crashed every night. We did have a lot of fun, though. We went swimming, went bowling, saw a free movie at the library, and played at Happy's. It's really nice being able to do things with the kids. Also, the house was cleaner than it usually is. It's not that John doesn't clean, he's really good at it, but he's also very good at procrastinating and likes to draw me away to do other things like watching tv and being lazy. Don't get me wrong, I love being lazy and it's not hard to sway me to the dark side, but it is nice to have a clean house. I've been trying so hard this week to put the dishes in the dishwasher as soon as we are done with them, wash them at night and empty the dishwasher in the morning so there isn't this huge pile of dishes in the sink constantly. I hate that! It's been going pretty well, so we'll see if I can get John on board.

Still no word on where we are moving. John has the patience of a saint. His attitude is, we'll find out when we find out, there's no need to harass anyone. My attitude is to harass until I find out something. Is that because I'm a woman? Hmm. So, I'm trying my darnedest to be patient, even though the last word was that they were going to tell us something by this week. The last group had to wait a month before they found out where they were going apparently, so I guess that's what I'm in for.

Emily started crawling. She is so freaking cute! She still pretty slow and will only do it if she is trying to get something (usually something she shouldn' have, like my cell phone). Tuesday when I went to get her out of her bed in the morning, she was sitting up just talking and waiting for me. That was the first time she had done that. She is also teething like crazy! She gnaws on everything and drools non-stop. She says ma ma when she's hungry or tired, and da da or ba ba when she's excited. She still loves being held, but as long as Matthew's in the room, she can handle me not being there. As soon as she sees me, though, she cries for me to hold her.

Matthew read a 38 page book to me yesterday. It had some pretty big words in it too, like especially and overlapping. He only stumbled on a few words. I'm just so glad that he has taken an interest in reading. Last night, we were reading the Book of Mormon. We are reading about Amalikiah and Moroni and he was asking all kinds of questions. I realize that his interest was mostly in seeing how long he could prevent having to go to bed, but at least he was paying attention. Why is war so interesting to boys?

We are still working on getting this house ready to sell. We pulled up the floor in the living room to install wood laminate. That was two weeks ago and it's only 2/3 of the way done. So, I've been walking on concrete for 2 weeks. It seems impossible to get any project done around here. How were my parents able to do it? Maybe I only remember the times when we were grown and they didn't have little kids running driving them crazy. The part of the floor that is done, looks really good and it was pretty cheap. I really wish we could have done it before so we could actually enjoy not having crappy carpet to walk on. Oh well, I guess that's the way it goes.

Happy Batman Sword!
I'm so proud
Emily's 8 month photo. Nine month photos to come.
Emily at Universal Studios
Emily's first experience driving.
Matthew gets free bowling for being an honor roll student
He was really excited when we told him his party was at Adventure Landing.