Ok, we are alive. We just aren't posting much.

Facebook is going to be the death of this blog! Sorry all, just become my friend on Facebook. Then you can find out practically nothing about my life, but you can see what I had for breakfast. It is really a pathetic exchange for a blog entry.

Facebook is not the only reason our blog has not been updated. We have been really busy and had no time to write up anything! Here is what has been going on:

• My mom came to visit. We had a nice time with her. We took her to the farmers market here in town. We went to Powells’ City of Books, the bookstore that takes up an entire city block, and ate lunch at a cool Greek restaurant in downtown Portland with a giant purple octopus on it for attracting customers. We played at the park. We went too see some Estonian folk Dancers perform. We sewed. It was a nice visit.

• A woman I visit teach had back surgery at the end of April and she needed lots of help with her 6 year old who has down syndrome and her new baby. Can you guess who was there a lot? It was nice to serve. I am glad to have a good reason to be exhausted too.

• Also, we have been working on getting Isaac ready for his first PINEWOOD DERBY! He tied for second place. He was in the lead until he started racing his car backwards instead of frontwards. We are pretty proud of his car. He used the hand saw to cut it himself. He did the sanding. He did the drilling. He did the decorating. This car has googly eyes thanks to his creativity. Bryan helped him, but mainly Isaac did it himself.

• There have been more days without rain lately. That means we head outside. Micah has been working on learning to ride his bike outside on the non-rainy days… And Bryan is posting about this more later.

• We planted our garden last weekend and had to lay around the rest of the weekend to recover. It was a ton of work. We got the ground tilled and the compost added to the soil and then planted the plants and then it hailed in a freak storm that could only happen here. Luckily all the plants lived (until Isaac stepped on one yesterday when he was mowing- he owes me a new cherry tomato plant). It was so windy too that the weed barrier flew away. We will be going without weed barrier this year as a result. Here’s to too much weeding this summer. Also a random thing happened because of the garden. After we were all done with the garden I looked at Reece and his temples (the place on your face between your eyes and ears) swelled up and he looked like he got hit in the head on both sides and had big symmetrical lumps from it. We think it was because Reece got too involved with the steer compost that we added to the soil and he had some kind of allergic reaction that caused him to swell up. I got some pictures after he had taken Benedryl and was done with a bath to wash of any foreign substances off of him that might have made him swell. The swelling went down a bit before I took the picture. It was so weird to look at my little son with matching lumps on his head! I almost freaked out. Luckily he looks normal again.

• On Friday I watched a friends’ sleeping baby at her home while she volunteered at the school and got to admire her lovely organized food storage and camping gear in her garage while my kids played with the scooters and such in the garage. As a result, we tore our garage apart (literally) and reorganized a bit yesterday. I got new Gorilla Shelves for Mother’s Day as a result of my envy for Caryn Dewey’s garage. We are making our garage a super awesome place for our food storage and our other gear. Here is a a site that gave us a good idea for helping us rotate our can storage while utilizing up and down space rather than side to side space. We’ll let you know how it turns out. We hope it looks like this. Unfortunately, we will still not fit Bryan’s car into the garage with all of our organization. Two car garages are not made for two cars anymore…

• Did we ever blog about Bryan getting a car this month? Oh yeah he did in the Son of the Powerwagon entry. I am still not used to having another car in our driveway. We went one year and 2 months without a second car and I got used to parking very freely in our driveway… I hope I don’t hit his car anytime soon because I forget it is there!

• We found out that when you leave a company and have not even contributed your full amount to your Flexible Spending Account for the year (FSA- the account you can set up so you get money taken out of your paychecks pre-taxes to set aside for medical expenses… a use it or lose type of thing) you can still spend the FULL AMOUNT that you set aside without paying the company back. So we had $1700 left in our FSA for this year and I spent it all. Bryan is now sporting some prescription sun-glasses even (so he can drive into the sun on the way to and from work in comfort without having to switch to contacts so he can wear his cheapy sunglasses- and anything is cheapy to me after paying for prescription sunglasses-whoa!). After I bought all the glasses I could, and contacts, and prescriptions, and dental work, and paying for Reece’s tubes being removed I still had some money left to spend so I went and bought $100 worth of band-aids and first aid items. I used it all I am proud to say. Thanks HP for all the free medical stuff.

Let’s see… what else has kept me busy? Laundry maybe. Folk Dancing too. Also Yoga. I got my hair cut for the first time in 6 months. I took a free afternoon to make soft pretzels with the little boys because I found a recipe on Pioneer Woman for them and had to try it. Yum, they were good. I haven’t been busy cleaning so much since I have ignored that and my bathrooms can prove it. And the kids are pretty dirty too. The month passed in a big blur. It was like we living in a tornado. Whew, I am glad we are slowing down finally!

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Posted by Ily on May 10, 2009

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