In December Damion and I celebrated nine years of marriage. Yup you read that right, nine years. Now I'm sure you've heard of people finishing other people's sentences, but how about their complete thoughts? Apparently after nine years we can do that.

Tonight we were driving and while staring out the window at nothing in particular I start to ask Damion, “Did you see” and he interrupted and said “Yup”. Silly thing is that I didn't even question him further because I knew he knew what I was talking about. Oh, for those who don't speak our language I was going to ask him if he saw any of the stuff related to the impeachment votes against IL Governor Rod Blagojevich. Needless to say we drove a couple of blocks while I tried to figure out exactly how he knew but gave up and started to talk about a document related to the impeachment.

Also tonight we went to Sam's Club. While there a gentleman had a seizure and we happened to be in the area when management started to respond to him and the situation. As we were leaving the guy checking carts asked us if we knew anything about the guy (as an fyi this guy seems to be working every time we go there and he always talks to us and the kids so we were likely familiar looking). We told him and he thanked us. As we were leaving the emergency vehicles were pulling into the lot. I said to Damion in a funny way, “I wonder if they have to show their Sam's card to get in?” Damion laughed and asked the guy waiting to direct them to the right area. The guy smirked and said, “No, we'll just let them go this time.” Don't know why, but I found this interaction amusing.

It is now December 10.  Since I am posting that means that we have survived festivities related to Thanksgiving, two birthdays and our anniversary.  Now we are getting are getting ready for Christmas and the New Year, which includes Chrismas Eve services, Christmas plans (to be determined),  a visit with Peter and Shawn and more than likely Dawn (I'm willing to bribe you with palm trees and yummy tropical drinks with umbrellas :)). 

Until that time we'll pray that Damion gets better (a diagnosis yesterday of sinus infection and bronchitis), we'll watch the  kids work on their sharing skills (okay maybe better put as Anna's ability to trade toys with Jack to get from him the toy he's playing with), and I'll be working on Christmas cards and figuring out scrapbook layouts to finish this years family book.  And you guys?  Well, click your way to our gallery to catch up on the last year via pictures or if you've kept up to date, click here to see pictures from Anna's birthday.

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish everybody a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend……and share a cute story of course.

Today was a beautiful day.  Some may say cold but when I took some garbage out I thought ‘why aren’t we at a park?’  So after a stop at Starbucks we went to the park.  Not the usual park though.  Anna ran around and climbed and went down the big slides with Damion and alone.  Jack walked around and crawled around and went down the small slides feet first on his belly and down the big slides on my lap.

Damion decided we would take to a walk to the lake to maybe see some geese (one thing that excites Anna when we pass them driving).  As we stopped to throw rocks from the bridge she didn’t see any geese but when we got to the open field area there were approximately a hundred of them for our viewing pleasure.  Anna of course wanted to catch one but they were just a bit faster than her so she decided to herd them instead.  Then she and Damion went running into the little groups causing them to fly away, which peeked Jack’s interest because there was suddenly a bunch of motion and lots of honking.

The geese only flew away to the lake a hundred feet away and ofcourse we followed them.  On the lake with them were almost a hundred mallard ducks.  We started across that bridge and at the center Damion & Anna threw little rocks at all the creatures.  I’ll admit it was cute the first time but then I got a bit annoyed, until Damion through a handful that caused the ducks and a couple of geese to gather together.  Now this was funny to watch because the lake had a thin layer of ice on it and have you ever watched Canadian geese walk and try to stop on ice?  If you get a chance you should.

After that we went back to the Jeep via the swings and went home.  Unfortunately Thanksgiving is at a time of year were the weather is so varied from year to year (well at least in Central IL) because I think it would be fun annual tradition to spend Thanksgiving morning at this park. 

These are two companies that most of America are familiar with.  What I would like to know is why they apparently don’t make products that work with each other.

See, this morning Anna was left in the living room using markers on paper.  I went to do something a returned about a minute later to find this……

….Simple solution?  Take pictures to commemorate my bad parenting and then an bath.  And not one of those fun play play play baths.  One of those scrub rinse scrub rinse baths.  Well that didn’t work because apparently the kid friendly Johnson & Johnson soap does not want to wash off the washable Crayola marker.  So Anna got to participate in a scrub rinse scrub soak play scrub soak play rinse bath instead.  After about 20 minutes of bath time she was mostly flesh colored again.

Okay, and this is where I take a deep breath and admit that I’ve apparently decided to take several parenting vacations (stupid facebook) in November and this incident occurred during one of those vacations.  Realizing that they are all my fault I documented them for some reason and yup, I’m sharing the documentation with you.  Each album does have a brief description of what occurred should it not be too obvious.