It has been a pretty rough week for me. The kids have each demolished thousands of dollars worth of my material possessions. I’m just trying to keep things in perspective. Allen started things out with a blue permanent marker on my favorite piece of furniture – my sofa. Yep. Katy came running into the office yelling, “Allen’s drawing on himself!” and this is what I found, plus more not pictured. I’m working on it tomorrow and hopefully the Sharpie website knows what they’re talking about with their chemical recommendations. I thanked my little tattle-tale profusely.

Later Katy was having a fit and she yanked some cords at the computer desk, pulling my 500 gig external hard drive down to a fatally plunging fall. It was one of the best gifts Peter had ever bought for me. It backed up my years of digital photos. It was also the only storage for my 2+ years of digital scrapbook collection. I am pretty sick over it. Peter took my poor, broken baby to his IT guys and they confirmed that I’ll need to dish out major money to even hope to collect my files from it. Sick!

So, that being said, I am really glad that every place I look I see things reminding me to give thanks. And luckily my nuggets are my MOST valuable possessions, or they might have felt my wrath. Here they are from the Sunday before last. I asked Peter to snap their pics while they were still dressed from church but Katy had already danced out of her shoes.

We also had our first annual family camping trip that weekend. It started out a little rocky with Peter putting up the tent in the dark, while trying to start a fire for his starving family at the same time. And Allen loved the freedom of no boundaries so he hiked all around in the dark, falling every other step. The kids both went to sleep just fine, but Juicy woke up in the middle of the night and stomped all over everyone in the tent. He was wide awake with the full moon shining into the tent. I wrestled him for almost two hours before he finally knocked out again, only to wake up at 6:45am. Other than sleep deprivation, it was a great adventure! The best for me was the early morning “leaf hunt” where Peter chased Allen down a sunlit trail, with Katy and I dragging behind, picking up the perfect leaves for her school art project. We tried to fly a kite since it was 45 degrees and windy, but apparently you need experience to do it successfully. Katy’s favorite part was adding leaves to the fire. She was showing off her plumber’s smile every time she bent over to scoop some up. I don’t know about Peter’s favorite part, but his least favorite was the nail he found in the tire that resulted in two new replacement$. We topped off our stay with a 5 minute ride in the pedal boat, straining with all our muscles against the wind-blown, river-fed lake waters. The staff advised against it but they were willing to let us get in the boat for a bit so Katy and Allen could have their promised boat ride.

One other adventure from last week was driving Mom to the Sam’s Club an hour away to pick up her new recliner. It’s the perfect chair for her and we had fun helping her pick it out. Then we were treated to lunch at Black Eyed Pea – yum!

We also lunched with Ruth and Helen somewhere in there. Their table manners are atrocious, of course! Katy taught them how to properly throw the Sweet ‘n Low packets and Allen showed them how to make the floor look like a plate of food. He’s also terrible about double-dipping his chip into the green sauce…or triple or quadruple dipping. Gross!!

And finally, there are rumors circulating about a certain couple but I can neither confirm nor deny.