Please Excuse Me While I Get Caught Up

Okay, now I need to remember all those things I wanted to blog about.  We left off with Halloween...

After Halloween we had a Do Nothing Day on Saturday.  With Alyssa in ballet and soccer, and Brian making Elder's Quorum visits on Tuesdays, we had no evenings or Saturdays that weren't completely busy.  So back in the beginning of October I looked ahead on our calendar and booked November 5th to be a Do Nothing Day.  We promised not to schedule anything on this day, and we didn't, but I had to stop myself sometimes from planning things to do at home.  I kept thinking, "Oh, it would be so fun to make this on Do Nothing Day," or "We could starting painting this room on Do Nothing Day," or "The kids would love to do this craft  on Do Nothing Day."  And then I would have to stop and think about what those three sentences had in common: Do Nothing Day.  And that means do nothing.  And we did. It was so great!  The kids watched Netflix all day.  Brian lay in bed and played games on his laptop.  I tried to take a nap with Rebecca, but I couldn't fall asleep, so instead I started to tell myself a story.

See, I'm one of those people who hit the pillow at night and is asleep within seconds, but the times I can't go to sleep I start telling myself a story and by the time I have the setting figured out, I'm snoring.  But on our do nothing Saturday I could just not get to sleep.  So instead I kept going with my story, and then because Rebecca was laying on my chest, I started dictating ideas to Brian so I wouldn't forget them.  I'm saving those papers, by the way, because they are hilarious.

example:  (Brian's notes)
1. Bad Guy -we'll call him "George" - not a monkey
 2. Small Kingdom A. "Special" princess - "great personality"
5. Large Kingdom A. Land dying - needs Captain Planet!

Those are just a couple of little examples.  A lot of it is not politically correct, so I'm leaving it out.  So anyway.  Long story, short - I am now writing a book.  I've thought about it many times through the years, but never got serious about it.  Now that I have an idea, I'm going with it.  And I'm going to be serious about it.  My goal is to have it ready to turn in to publishers by 2013.  I've got the story line all mapped out, and now I'm just ready to start drafting.  Oh, and Alyssa was there when I was telling the story to Brian, and on the next Monday she came home from school with a note card that she had written the "5 Steps to Writing" on to help me out.  I'm keeping that, too.

Next thing to talk about:  Marcus' birthday.  Marcus was excited to have a birthday.  He was excited for his birthday, but he didn't want to be four.  He wanted to stay three.  I don't know why.  Now that he is four, he's fine with it, but he did not want it to happen before it happened.

I just put this picture up and asked Marcus, "Who's that?" With no hesitation he answered, "Batman."

His birthday was on a Sunday, which made it perfect to have all the family over for his party.  We had a Batman party for him, because he loves everything Batman.  He's never seen a movie or an episode, but this boy loves Batman.  We had chocolate waffles with ice cream and chocolate syrup, and we had a coloring contest to keep all the cousins busy.  We had a picture of Regular Batman for them to color, a picture of Lego Batman, and a picture of Simba from the Lion King, because it went by on Google Search and Marcus liked it.  Then we had Marcus judge them and the winners got a piece of Halloween candy from our stash.  We were going to have my brother come in his super cool Batman Halloween costume (pictured below) but he said it's coming apart in a couple of places and needs some work before he wears it again.  Luckily, Marcus forgot that Batman was invited to his party, and he had a great time.

After Marcus' birthday, we took a short vacation to Great Wolf Lodge Waterpark in Grand Mound, Washington.  Brian needed to take some time off, so we used our credit card reward points to get some extra family time together.  We headed over on a Wednesday.  It was a beautiful drive - about 5 hours.  Rebecca slept almost the whole way, Alyssa read and listened to music, the boys also slept, Brian drove, and I worked on my book.  (That's when I finished mapping out the story line.)

As close as I could get to a picture with all the kids together. 

This is what Rebecca did most of the time.  That's Brian's chest hair - not mine.

Sorry it's sideways.  Blogger has a mind of it's own.

The Jacks version of Where's Waldo.  Find Brian and the boys.

Alyssa and her friend Elizabeth.

We had a great time.  Even Rebecca was happy, because at first we put her in a life jacket and she spent a few hours with something constantly by her mouth to chew on.  The boys weren't big enough to go on the big slides, but Brian and I took turns going on them with Alyssa.  Alyssa made friends with a couple of girls, the boys loved the wave pool and the slides for their size, and I enjoyed my favorite thing about family vacations: watching my kids have fun.

Does everyone else take this many pictures of their babies sleeping?  I just think she's so precious!  And look at those eye lashes - one of the many reasons I'm glad I married Brian.  All of our kids have his beautiful long eyelashes.

 Next we headed up Seattle way to visit the Sumsions.  While there we went to Fort Worden to walk through an old (built in the 1800's) battle artillery, watched Dual Survival (we're now hooked), ate aebleskivers (guess what kind of pan we're getting for Christmas) and yummy German food at a Europub, and bought Brian a couple of suits at a Veteran's Day sale.  We love hanging out with the Sumsions, and we're so glad they let us join them for a couple of days.

Marcus and I enjoyed the echoes.

braving the rain

Oh, Marcus scared Nelsa and  I when he climbed up here.  It was wet and slippery, and he ran down the slope when we asked him to get down.  What you don't see in this picture is just at the bottom of the slope, on the left, it drops off completely.  We were sure he'd fall right off.

So far November has been pretty fun.  Right now Ethan is home from school, because Kindergartners don't have school during parent-teacher conference week.   My mom is over playing Monopoly Junior with the boys as I type.  We're going to an Eric Herman concert on Friday with all of the cousins.  Then, of course, we have Thanksgiving vacation.  I'm looking forward to that!