Alright Already

Yesterday, my mom commented on my lack of blogging. Today it was Amanda. Point taken. I'll do a quick update, and then some other random posts.

So my previous post about being without water was much ado about nothing. The kids slept in that morning, and by the time we managed to come downstairs, we had water. Yay! That's not to say that we haven't been without water issues...our water softener keeps acting up. Basically, we wind up with salty water (think ocean water.) It's bad. We bypassed the water softener until we found a fix. When I called the water softener people, they quoted me a rate of $95. And that was just to show up on my doorstep. The warranty covers parts only...not labor, and not the service charge. Knowing we'd wind up paying more than $100 to fix our problem, we got resourceful. The guy on the phone thought it was a programming issue. He was nice enough to walk me through the programming, but to no avail.

Yesterday, Mike and I tag teamed our problematic appliance. We cleaned out the reservoir that holds all of the salt crystals, scrubbed the inside, and refilled it. It was positively NASTY. The mud that was coming out of it taught us that it needs maintenance more than once every four years. Hopefully the beast has been tamed. We'll know for sure in another day or two.

In other news...

The kids are doing well. Andrew went to his first 'drop off' birthday party. One of our neighbors hosted their kid's birthday party, and parents weren't allowed. Is Andrew really getting that old already??? Wow! And don't think for one minute that it was hard for us to drop and run. He loved it, and we had fun playing with just Natalie (Nathan slept). We rarely get a chance to spend time with just her.

Nathan turns 7 weeks on Tuesday. He's somewhere in the 11 pound range already. (This figured by holding him and stepping on the gym's scale, ha ha!). He has an 8 week appointment, so I'll have a better report then.

Natalie is solidly Two. We have the tantrums to prove it, but they don't phase us too much. They're pretty much her problem. We have started sending her to sit on her bed during tantrum time. She can come rejoin the family once the tears subside. It works for us, and it's especially funny to see her send herself to her bed. Almost as if she's putting herself in time out. Her linquistic skills are flourishing. She's saying so many phrases and words that I can't even keep up with it. What sometimes sounds like toddler jabber turns out to be actual sentences once we listen carefully.

Andrew just graduated from his pre-school. He had a ceremony, and he and his classmates did a few songs from stage. Wouldn't you know it was our kid who was singing the loudest, practically shouting? He even had all the hand movements and gesturesIt was so cute, and he ate up every moment of stage time. His teacher later told us that he was really afraid of doing that, and that he barely sung in their rehearsals. She was shocked when she saw him being so charismatic. I, on the other hand, was not.

Mike (not considered a kid at this very moment) is doing well. He's getting back to his running. He took a bit of a break for a few months, but is now training for the Moon Pie run in Bell Buckle. It's sometime this summer...not sure when. It's a 10k run, which is somewhere just shy of 6.5 miles, but it's a hilly run. Everytime he runs out there, he says he either threw up, or came really close to it. Nice...
Mike took a break from school just before the baby came. He hated to take yet another break, but we were also needing to be realistic. Going through school while growing and raising a family is hard! I don't know how people can do it without being discouraged by how long it takes. He can either take his next University of Phoenix class that starts in the near future, or he can take an A+ Certification Course (offered elsewhere). In either case, Verizon flits the bill. He's leaning towards the A+ course because it would automatically give him a 5% raise upon certification. That's pretty much a no-brainer, and then he can be making 5% more while fininshing out his never-ending Univ of Phoenix tour.

As for me, I'm getting back to me as well. I got cleared by my doctor to resume life as normal. So, I've found myself back in the gym a few days a week...with Nathan tucked safely in the childcare area (as opposed to my Snugli). I have a few goals. Mainly I'm working muscles which have gone stale and stiff with misuse. I'm also working towards my first 5k. I got bamboozled into running the Fenton Payne 5k in August with some of my girlfriends. Many of us have never done a 5k (3.12 miles), so it'll be interesting. The thing we look most forward too? The men watching the kids while standing on the sidelines. Woohoo!