this was from our fall festival:

and from a trunk or treat:

and from a costume party:

Little J and his friend Little T

Actual Halloween Trick or Treat pictures tomorrow.

I’d like to officially introduce you to Luna and BoJo:

Bojo and Luna

Remember when we started fostering puppies? Well Tucson finally got cleared health wise and we traded him for Luna (he got a home better suited for his size and energy). She was the runt of the litter and started at about 4lbs at 2 months. She is now 8.5 months old and 27 lbs. She had a couple issues with mites both regular and ear as well as mange. Once we got it cleared up she started growing normally. However, because of the mange she missed her spay appointment and I am now dealing with a dog in heat .

All during the summer it was on my heart that our beloved Sable would have to leave us soon. She has been snapping at kids for over a year and progressed to actual biting over the summer. We could not rehome her due to her erratic behavior and so we made the difficult decision to have a humane euthanasia. She had been with us 10 years and this has been very hard on me.

Saying goodbye 9-5-09

Just before we made the final decision, my school friend who I have reconnected with on facebook began to foster BoJo. I fell in love with his pictures and her stories and it wasn’t long before I committed to adopting him. We had to wait until our school fall break to pick him up since they were in TX. We were already contemplating a trip to TX to visit some family so this sealed it. He is not a replacement but he is a wonderful addition to our family. They both are.

Luna is Little J’s puppy:

And BoJo is mine:

J doesn’t pay much attention to them, but he doesn’t hate them and that is a step in the right direction.

I haven’t been here in a while. Did you notice? No? that’s okay.

Not only have I not written anything but I also stopped looking at my stats. I knew they would dwindle when I stopped writing so it was pointless. I may have mentioned a time or two but I am a “numbers girl.” I like math, I like things to add up  and I like seeing all the stats wordpress has to offer. some of the best stats though have nothing to do with numbers. Like the Search Engine Terms stats. What did people plug into their google/yahoo/ask/msn etc. to land on my page. Sometimes I just like to see if there is a particular subject that people are interested in, maybe I need to write more of it. I know there are others who have done search posts before but honestly there has never been anything funny, weird, or gross for me to make the post interesting…..until I looked last night. Oh and sometimes I google them myself to see what page they had to scroll through to get to me.

Here are some of the popular searches (using the All Time stats):

Pink Pancakes

Tighty Whities

He broke my heart

epic shoes

Amanda Sanders Blog (really Amanda, its been searched and landed on me 9 times since I started blogging)

Master Manipulator

How to wear your clothes

and not so popular but most recent and what sparked this post:

Do Backyardigans cause Autism found on page two of google linking to all of February 08.

I almost didn’t provide links to all those posts, but when I went back to reminisce I realized that they sum up our story quite well. So if you are new here feel free to click away. If you know me but have only recently started reading my stuff, there is some very funny stuff in those posts and some sad stuff too. And just a word of caution to those clicking links, Amanda currently has a pooping zebra art piece on the top blog, just so you know.

4 of the 5 boys from the backyardigans post the day before 2 of them moved away

Its national blog posting month. the time of year when we challenge ourselves to write a post every day for a month. I did it two years ago which is really what jump started me into blogging. Then I skipped last year.

I have been so lax on not only writing my blog but on reading the ones I had in my RSS feeder. I switched from IE to FireFox and have yet to switch all my blogs over. I parred down to about 18 and those were all ones that post less than once a day so that I didn’t get bogged down reading. Maybe if I get back into writing, I can also find time for reading.

So this month, I will post. And it might even be every day. and there will be pictures.

Little J has quite an imagination.  Lately it mostly revolves around his dad.  Hubby was gone all of March and April for training and then left for Korea in June.  Now every time we go someplace that he likes, he makes up a story about “when I was little my daddy took me there.” or “when I was a baby my daddy took me.” or “when daddy gets home he is going to bring me..”  And now, the past 2 times we have seen or heard an airplane he asks if daddy is on that plane.  With all this imagining you would think that he would want to talk to him on video chat when he got a chance, but this morning he flat out refused to talk to him.  I thought we would have a few more months before we reached that anger directed at the deployed parent, but here we are and we are only at the 2 month point.

I guess I need to get out the workbooks and stories for kids that we got at the family readiness center.

Today we did the homework packet that we put off all last week.  Today was a day off from school so we could get away with it.  It was an “All about me” book.

When we got to the page that had boxes for him to draw “people who live in my house,” he drew Little J first, then me.  When we got to the next box and he decided to draw daddy (I wasn’t sure if he would draw him since he hasn’t been here in 2 months) I sniffed my itchy nose.  He looked at me sharply and demanded “Why are you sniffling?!?”  I said, “I had an itch so I sniffed and then scratched it.”  He turned and looked at me with those honest eyes and said matter of factly, “sometimes I sniffle and cry because I miss my daddy when he’s not here.”  And then he finished drawing dad’s face and moved on.

Back in the day before diagnosis, J would have crying jags.  They were always of the angry variety and I often had to bear hug him and sing him out of it.  Although sometimes he was so angry that he would yell at me to stop singing.  Since he has been on medication and in school we rarely have those occur.

Tonight was different.  He had a 20+ minute crying jag but it had nothing to do with anger.  This was all sadness and indecision.  We were sitting together in our big chair and debating dinner.  We couldn’t decide on something we would all want to eat.  It had been a long day and I decided to start offering up comfort foods like chicken nuggets or hotdogs and he was still turning me down.  Then his lip started to quiver and I asked him what was wrong. “I don’t have anything to do.  I don’t want to watch TV” Well this was a shock to me, I am usually pulling him away from a TV or computer.  So I saw the water works were coming.  I went to lay down and let him cuddle me.  He left to go get a blanket.  Once he got settled he just let it all go.  Complete and utter sadness.  He said a couple of times between sobs “I don’t have anything to do and I don’t have anything to eat.”  Several times I went over his choices of activities and dinners.  It was like he couldn’t even hear me.  So I sang to him and tried to hold back my own tears.

I finally asked him if he was sad about something or missed someone.  I fully expected him to say his dad.  He’s been in Korea since June 7th.  Its been 2 weeks since J has gotten to skype video chat with him.  Nope.  He said he missed Aunt Melody who had stayed with us for the past 2 weeks.  She is my husband’s 19 year old sister.  She left on a plane early this morning and he got to video chat with her about a 1/2 hour before the crying.

However, when little J came in 5 minutes later and J was still laying on me sniffling, he asked “Why is he crying?”  I told him that J was a little sad and needed to cry.  J said, “and because I have nothing to do or eat.”  ummm ok

He finally calmed down and decided on chicken nuggets and honey.  As he sat down to the table his lip started quivering again.  Thankfully Little J did something silly and there were no more tears.

I’ve got plenty of excuses for not blogging….many of which I can’t blog about.  If you want to keep up with us, request me as a friend on facebook.  I find status updates to be like mini blogging for me.

July 20, 2009

Last week he came home with a worksheet about colors.  They had to write the colors of the rainbow for step one.

Step 2 asked what their favorite color was.  Step 3 predicting what the class would choose. Step 4 tallying the class favorites. Step 5 the results.

And step 6:

 “MY BRAIN”

I’m lazy so this is in bullet format

• we took on a foster puppy2 Fridays ago after losing out on adopting our dream dog
• foster puppy turned out to be wonderful and we quickly fell in love with plans to adopt
• foster puppy is named Maui
• Maui got the sneezes, which turned into a cough, add in goopy eyes and then intestinal issues
• J went to the dentist and got 2 crowns and a tooth pulled and a spacer put in
• he was miserable all day Thursday so we took a mental health day on Friday and went to the park in beautiful weather
• the rescue org took Maui back last firday because she suspects distemper.  with a 20% chance of living we didn’t want the kids to watch
• same rescue org asks us to take a health pup to try and keep it safe from the virus
• 2nd puppy is named Tucson (we didn’t name him)
• he is kind of whiny but has settled down today
• Little J is the puppy whisperer and gets to sleep on the guestroom pullout with the puppies to keep them from crying all night
• we had friends over Friday night for pizza and a movie
• went to a b-day party on Sat at Pump it Up and had a great time with only a few small incidents
• Went to mom’s game night with kids in tow and yelled approximately 50 times to stop playing pillow fight
• Felt bad for hostess, she has one 8 month old girl.  We brought 4 crazy boys.  Had a good time in spite of it.
• Super busy day today.  house appears clean but that’s because the clutter is hiding on my bed…must move before sleeping
• stopped babysitting (on a regular basis) the 2 year old girl.
• Will start babysitting 2 days a week (3 hours each day) for my neighbor’s 2 boys tomorrow morning
• Hoping that her 6 and 8 year old will get along with my 4 and 6 year old.  Would be great if our neighbors could also be friends.
• Did I mention my wack sleeping schedule do to taking puppies out to potty in the middle of the night.
• And the being awake at like 6am because puppies like to play at that time?  That’s 2 hours earlier than normal.

Thus ends this week’s update.  Geeze even my bullets get wordy!

Oh and the accomplishment of the week/year.  J cleaned his room today with minimal input from me in less than an hour.  And when he said it was clean and I asked if I could check he said yes.  I walked in and there was not a single toy left on the floor.  Nothing like Wii Diego Safari rescue game time as motivation!

Sorry if you read the last blog.  I’m really sorry if you are someone who considers yourself my friend and are not moving away.  I wasn’t trying to discount you at all.

On the way home from bible class tonight we were stopping at the mailbox and J says, “I think a rat got my shirt.” 

“A rat got in your shirt?”

“No a rat got my shirt.  See it bit this hole right here.”

“No dear, you bit your shirt.  Not a rat.”

“But Ms. Susan said a rat must have got my shirt and ate it.”

“J, Ms. Susan was teasing you.  You know you chewed on your shirt.”

“She was telling the truth.  A rat got in my shirt drawer”

Little J pipes in with, “But there aren’t any rats in the car right?”

Me “There are no rats in the car and there are no rats in our house.  J ate his shirt and Ms Susan was only teasing and that is the truth.”

I don’t even remember where it went from there.  In circles we went until we pulled around the block and into the driveway.

Thanks Ms. Susan.  We will be talking about literal thinking when we see you on Sunday.  And then we will laugh about it.