It has been raining all weekend and this morning the temperature dipped below freezing so things have started icing over. In preparation for the “Arctic Blast” I cleaned out the garage so we could get Jen’s car in. While cleaning up I took the last bit of bird feed and filled up one of the feeders, I figured it would be nice to put something out for the birds in the bad weather.

This morning when Alex and I got up there were a couple of blue jays, a few cardinals, a dove, and an assortment of other smaller birds hanging around all getting something to eat. I opened the blinds on the windows in the kitchen so we could get a better look.

A couple of hours later I was doing something in the kitchen when I turned around and out through the window I saw the biggest bird I’ve ever seen in our backyard huddled on the ground. From where I stood I could see the it’s back and it had it’s wings spread out onto the grass like it was making a tee-pee under it’s head. At this point I realized that this wasn’t any regular bird but the hawk that help himself to dinner in our yard this summer.

I tried to grab my camera to get a picture but when I turned around it took off and in it’s claws was a bloodied mess of a bird carcass.

“Holy cow, did you just see that?” I called to Jen.

“See, see. I told you. Now do you believe me, the bird’s huge.”

So once again I thought I was doing something nice for the birds and I ended up setting up a buffet for the hawk. I guess everyone has to eat.

I’m (possibly) back from website and blogging hiatus. Things were busy over the Christmas break and I just couldn’t find time to make updates to the blog or the website. We’ve been so behind on just about everything this season that we didn’t even manage to get our Christmas cards out on time so we’ve fallen back to our tried and trusted New Years Card. We actually got the cards out a couple of days ago so you can be looking for those in the mail in the next day or say.

In addition to being busy we have all been sick at one point or the other in the two weeks. Andrew started it off with a double ear infection, Alex contracted pneumonia right around the same time, Jen followed up with a sinus infection, and I really thought I was going to escape the whole episode unscathed but yesterday it finally caught up with me as well.

Alright, enough for now, The Saints playoff game is about to start and Alex is decked out in all his Saints gear. Let go Saints!

When Jen picked up Alex as school the other day he said,

“Mom, something really bad happened at school today.”

“What happened?”

“Teagan likes the Tampa Bay Buccaneers!”

I haven’t had much spare time to post an update so I’ll try and make it short.

My glasses came in a couple of days ago so I’ve stopped sporting the ever cool one arm look. I had a couple people suggest that I could have increased my geek cred by taping the arm on but I passed on that opportunity.

As for the squirrel about thirty minutes after my previous post he stopped making noise. I have no idea if he finally figured out how to escape or met some other horrible fate. I like to to think he figured out how to get out.

Last Thursday night Alex and Andrew were horsing around in our room upstairs when Andrew fell off the of the mattress he was jumping on and conked his head on the edge of the bed. He hit our box spring and it ended up giving him a pretty good gash right above his eye. It was deep and bleeding pretty good so we took him to the hospital where he needed three stitches to close him up. I’m not sure if the actual process was more traumatic for him or us since we had help keep him immobilize him in the “papoose” while they were put in. Now that he’s had them for a couple of days it really doesn’t look that bad and in the next day or so he’ll get them removed so we’ll see how it looks then.

I haven’t updated this in a while so I’ll try and just sum up the big stuff that’s gone on in the last week or so.

Last Thursday, Thanksgiving of all days, Andrew got a little rough with me and tried to steal my glasses. He’s done this about a million times before but this time when I picked them up I saw they were missing an arm. Great. It was a clean break right where the arm attaches to the glasses so there is no way that I’m going to be able to repair them. Of course I haven’t been to the eye doctor in just over three years so before I could get a new pair of glasses ordered I needed to go to the eye doctor. On Friday morning while the rest of world was out for post Thanksgiving day shopping Jen and I went to the eye doctor and ordered a new pair of glasses.

The glasses haven’t come in yet so for the past week I’ve been wearing the broken pair which is being held up by only one arm. From the right angle it looks like I’m sporting a Morpheus look.

The other item of note is that we have a squirrel stuck somewhere in our chimney which must have happened this afternoon or early this evening. We have a stainless steel chimney and right now he is frantically trying to escape from wherever he’s stuck which is making a huge racket. I can see all the way from the our fireplace to the top of the chimney and he’s not here so I think he’s stuck somewhere between the chimney casing and the actual stove pipe. All I know is that this racket is going to end up keeping us up tonight since the chimney backs right onto our room.

The other night we were trying to decide what to eat for dinner and I suggested crepes. Alex just looked at me and said “Huh, what’s that?”

“You know, crepes. They’re like thin pancakes. You usually put syrup on them.”

“Grapes?”

“No, crepes, it’s French and anyway you don’t put syrup on grapes.”

“Oh”

To complicate matters Andrew was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl full of grapes which I think lead to the confusion in the first place. Alex was going to help me make them and I started getting out the ingredients and when I discovered we didn’t have an flour which brought the crepe making to a quick end. Alex was really disappointed.

“But I wanted crepes.”, translation “But I really wanted to eat something with syrup.”

“I’m sorry son but we don’t have any flour we can’t make any crepes.”

Alex then walked over to me holding a bowl of grapes and said “Can I have syrup on these?”

“No, you have syrup on crepes not grapes.”

“Why?” Oi. We ended up settling on tomato soup with crackers, not syrup.

I would like to say that things have been really really busy around here the last couple of weeks and that’s why I haven’t been making regular updates but now that I’m sitting here I can’t actually come up wit what I’ve been so busy with. (Well we have been busy with lots of Halloween activities over the last couple of weeks.)

When we were in New Orleans a couple of weeks back I chipped the edge of one of my crowns and when we got back I went to the dentist to get it looked. He said that everything looked in one piece and got out the drill to grind down the chipped edge so it wouldn’t keep grinding my tongue on it and when the drill hit the tooth I thought I was going to die. They took an xray and then referred me to a specialist for a root canal. I had that done on Thursday and to be honest it didn’t hurt quite as bad as I thought it was going to. I think I set myself up that this was going to be one of the worst experiences ever so it turned out not to be quite that bad.

We’ve taken a bunch of pictures lately and I’m working on getting those pulled together but we did get the boys school pictures this week. They both turned out pretty good and Alex has a great smile. I wish I could get him to smile like that for my pictures.