bullet points

It's been crazy round these parts the week or so with the beginning of school and football season. Here's what's rattling around in my head, in my [NERD ALERT} favorite format...the bulleted list.

• First grade seems to be going well. E hasn't been bitching about SAC, either! Yay! And, if you need healthy ideas to pack for your kids' lunches...I highly recommend you hop on over to Sweet Pea Chef, where she has compiled a kick-ass list of things that DON'T include Lunchables!


• Yesterday was John's birthday. We have celebrate 13 of those together. The first one I took him to a really fancy French restaurant. Last night the girls and I took him to a pizza joint. My, how the mighty have fallen. We did, however, bake from scratch buy him a cake with "Happy Birthday, John!" in orange.
  


• On a related note, every member of my immediate family would prefer vanilla cake with vanilla frosting over chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. What kind of freakshows are they?!?!?!?


• We are catsitting my parents' cat, Frank, again. Hopefully, he won't run away this time. Now that the girls are older, he's actually letting them pet him. Either that, or he has early onset Stockholm Syndrome.
  


• The Slackers are California Dreaming. Well, actually, we aren't just dreaming...we are doing! All four of us are headed out to visit Baby AJ and her family before her little sister arrives! We are so excited!

the excitement never ends

So my parents have returned from their month-long jaunt to the West coast, including book-end visits to see Kiki. Yesterday, they came over to pick up Frank the Cat before we could lose him again. My parents (and I, for that matter) are really dog people...so they were expecting Frank to show them how excited he was to see them by barking or jumping up and down. I tried to explain to them that Frank was sitting on the couch in the same room as A and E so that they could pet him was sign enough, because he spent the majority of his time at our house running from the girls. Alas, they weren't buying it.

But, you know who was excited to see Nonna and PopPop? My girls. They showed how excited they were by running around like banshees from the time my parents picked them up from school until bedtime. I got tired just watching them literally run laps around the first floor of my house screaming. Bedtime, thankfully, was a breeze.

The other excitement at the Slacker house is that everyone is gearing up for the big birthday tomorrow. And by everyone, I mean, A. If you ask her how old she is, she says "Toooo!" though, sometimes, she does say "Fooooor!" because she wants to be *exactly* like her sister. And if you ask her what she wants for her birthday she says, "Uh...uh...uh...Dora birthday cake!" What's so funny about this is this is her answer every single time, uh's and dramatic pauses included. If you ask her what else she wants she says, "Uh...uh...uh...ice keem!"

I'm just happy that she'll be happy with Dora cake and ice cream as we still need to buy her presents. Luckily, I still have 24 hours18 hours to get it done!

the cat came back (just not the next day)

So, it was a crazy busy weekend in the Slacker house. John left on Thursday night to go to Knoxville for the Tennessee v. Florida game. E and I had dentist appointments on Friday morning. The cleaning ladies let Frank out of the house on Friday as well, causing him to be lost and me to be nominated as The World's Worst Catsitter. I spent a good portion of the day taking walks around my neighborhood and posting lost cat signs without much success.

On Saturday, our living room furniture was (finally) delivered and I went to a wedding in Richmond which was tons of fun. There's a veritable baby boom among my friends at the wedding...two other ladies are pregnant (one with TWINS!) and due right around the same time as Kiki. (For those of you not in the know, my sis and I both went to UVA and were in the same sorority, so Kiki is friends with this crowd but couldn't make the wedding because my parents are visiting. It sound like we are losers who do everything together, I know...but we really are relatively normal.)

On Sunday, I got back from the wedding and spent the rest of the day hanging out with the girls. E and I spent A's nap time making pizza dough and playing board games. We also went for a walk looking for Frank and playing outside in the gorgeous weather. I got the girls to bed a little later than normal (what can I say? I wasn't feeling 100% on account of the wine wedding). I came downstairs and guess who was peeking in my front window? Frank! He was hungry and tired but no worse for wear. John returned home from Knoxville about 10 and the three of us (me, John and Frank) headed up for a little shut eye.

I'll be spending a good portion of this week recovering from this weekend and gearing up for A's birthday on Thursday! We're not going to party, but there might be an Ice Capades trip if we can get our act together. We also have to figure out the snack we're bringing to class on Thursday and buy her presents.

'Cause that's how we roll in the Slacker house.

a little frank

We are currently cat-sitting my parents' cat, Frank, while they do a little traveling, West Coast-style. My parents got Frank a few years ago when they decided they wanted a pet, but didn't want to be tied down to the care and feeding of a dog...so a cat seemed to fit the bill.

Boy were they ever wrong. Frank's a big boy. He likes him some food. So he wakes my mom up at 5 AM so that he can get some breakfast. And if my parents drop by our house and we invite them to stay for dinner, they always say they have to go feed Frank. (This, of course, is more likely a nice way of saying my cooking sucks...but I'm going to blame the cat.)

My parents were very, very, very nervous for the Slackers to watch Frank, in part because Frank ran away once and was lost for 2 weeks -- having two active children aren't exactly the right circumstances for keeping the doors closed at all times. Also, my mom was nervous that throwing a high-maintenance cat to the mix of working, travelling and raising two kids would be more than I could handle. Apparently, she's not fooled by the SuperMom aura I'm sure I give off to you guys. But, since their catsitting options were limited to us and, well, us...Frank came here on Wedensday.

So far, it's going pretty well. Frank is kind of walking around shell-shocked, but he's starting to warm up to us. Here he is telling me he thinks I work too hard.E and A *love* Frank. Everytime A sees him she shouts "HI FANKS!" This morning, E helped me put down his food and water down. She then told Frank that it was ready and we were going to have a great day!
Oh...notice the slippers? That's prize #2 of the Great Behavior Chart Prize Giveaway. Why so long between prizes? Totally keep forgetting to update her chart. But...it's still works to encourage good behavior. Go figure.

what weekends were made for

So the weekend has come to an end...and it was absolutely fantastic. It was just nice to be home with nothing that we *had* to do and nowhere that we *had* to be. John and I mistakenly thought that not having a true summer vacation would mean a slow-paced kind of summer...but really it has flown by and something always seems to come up.

Our date night on Friday was fantastic. We decided against going out, and instead took a nice walk around our neighborhood, and then drank wine and ate Thai food on our deck until the mosquitoes decided that even the bug spray and citronella wasn't deterrent enough from biting the bejeebus out of us. We then watched Juno, which was really cute. If you are one of the 10 people in the world who hasn't seen it yet...I highly recommend it. I then talked to my sister for about an hour...which is really not romantic or date-nighty at all...but I haven't talked with her in forever so I was happy.

On Saturday, my parents brought the girls back. We were pretty much outside for the entire day...the girls rode their bikes, played on the swing set, drew with chalk, and blew bubbles. We even grilled out and ate outside for dinner. Bedtime on Saturday was a breeze.

Today, we tried to head out to Middleburg for breakfast. It was a beautiful drive out there with a gorgeous landscape of rolling hills...that caused A to get car sick within 5 minutes of the restaurant. The rest of the day, however, was great. We walked to the pool, played outside some more and grilled out again for dinner.

As for this week...it's going to be a busy week in the Slacker house. John's got some work meetings which is always fun for me in terms of dropping off and picking up...and my work week is going to be pretty busy, to boot. And starting mid-week, we are also going to be cat-sitting my parent's cat, Frank, which should provide some good blog fodder. My parents are more nervous about leaving the cat under my care than I am when I leave the girls with them.

Not sure what that means...but it can't be good, can it?