Save yourself!!! No where is safe!!!!

So you may remember we have had several coyote sightings over the past couple years. I have mentioned it here.

It's not really that big of a deal. We see them, we shoo them away. End of story.

This summer I have been seeing them more and more as I walk early in the mornings when they like to roam. No big deal. Just a part of suburban sprawl living. They were here first so short of my middle class guilt for moving into their home and setting up a Quiznos, there is not a lot I can do about our coexistence but leave them be.

But lately there have been a lot of cats missing and raccoon corpses across in the field that the boys have discovered. So it sort of just is what it is.

Well apparently Bug and his band of warriors (aka his friends) have been watching the local news and noted that the coyotes have made headlines. The coyotes, due to the urban sprawl and lack of food supply have been venturing into neighborhoods and helping themselves to nice snacks we have so nicely been leaving out like pet food and well....pets.
My boys have decided it was up to them to take their neighborhood back in manner of Braveheart.

One of Bug's friends which for anonymity sake I'll call Mikey, is one of the funniest kids to watch. Every group of kids no matter which gender has one kid in the group that gets picked on just for being plain weird. Poor Mikey has few social skills and just is sort of oblivious of the world around him. Usually weird parents spawn weird kids. But not so much the case here. His parents are totally cool and try desperately to get him around other kids in hopes that social skills may rub off on him. But not so much the case with Mikey. He will wander around the neighborhood dreaming about capturing dragons or werewolves and tries in vain to engage the other boys in his obsession with the mythical. The other boys usually openly mock his love of the make believe and he blows it off none the wiser.They are never cruel as I won't allow that kind of behavior, But he is just sort of "that kid" in the group. All the kids like him for his quirks and he does have lots of friends so it's not like he is an outcast or anything. He is the type of kid that will wander into our house when our kids are not even home and try to hang out with us or just use our bathroom because it was closest to him. Even though he lives on the same block.
Rockstar and I secretly have deemed him as either of these stereotypes.

Ralph Wiggum from the Simpsons

Or Butters from South ParkYeah he's "that kid".

He's a good kid, just a little odd but he cracks me up with his antics.

So enough background.

So Mikey comes blasting into our front door a couple days ago out of breath and in a frenzy.

Bug and his friend Skyler ask him "what seems to be the problem?"

He replies "Guys we have a serious problem on our hands!!!!The coyote's food source has run out and we need to protect ourselves and our families from this threat!!!We need to go right now up to your room and develop a plan!!"

Bug and Skyler look at each other and just sort of chuckle.
"Whatever Mikey." They say and go back into the family room where he follows.

"I'm serious this time!!! I saw one out in the field just now!!! He chased me all the way here!! We need to come up with a plan!!" he says nearly out of breath and hopping up and down.

Now mind you, it was 2 in the afternoon. A little unlikely that there were wandering coyotes in broad daylight in the middle of the day.

Bug- "Are you sure it was not just a dog? I doubt there is one out there now."

Mikey- "well it might have been a dog, but this is serious!!! It's up to us!!! "

Bug- "Ok Mikey, just chill the heck out!!! It's not like there is a T-rex waiting to pounce in the bushes!! It's just a dumb old coyote. He's more scared of us than we are of it. It's not like they eat people or anything!"

This is what I imagine was going through Mikey's mind right now...
They all decided that they would talk about their plans to stop the wild coyote and protect their families and civilization after they got their wits about them.

Another viewing of Jurassic park should do the trick to clear their minds.

Of course Mikey spent the majority of the movie in the other room peeking around the corner just in case the dinosaurs jumped through the screen and got him.

It took everything within me not to sneak up behind him and grab him just to watch him jump, but it turns out I'm not completely dead inside that I seek to destroy a child's nerves. I didn't, I just wanted to.

What like it wouldn't cross your mind?

So yeah as of yet, there have been no coyote hunting plans laid out, but I will keep you posted as it unfolds. The drama and excitement as my boys take their neighborhood back from the grips of the vicious man eating coyote.


To be continued......

The Holidays are over!!

So finally I have had a second to get my act together and put up our holiday pictures. I have been putting them together when I thought I may as well just do it after the New year's eve pictures could go into the mix.

To those of you that were playing the home game, we went to my in-laws for Christmas eve and had a great time as usual. It was just our family pounding down beer dogs and fondue as is our traditional Christmas eve meal in our family.

We then spent Christmas day here at home playing with our new toys. The kids got webkins and spent the day playing online with their new friends as this is a world we have managed to avoid until now. It seems to have quickly turned into an addiction with them.

Then the day after Christmas, we packed it up and went down to the southern Oregon coast to spend Christmas with my mom who is working as a state park camp host down there. So we braved it and went camping in a yurt on the coast in late December. It was something that we could honestly say that we have never done :) It was actually a lot of fun and the yurts were nice and heated. The weather was nice (nice for the coast anyway) and my Mom, Peanut and I were even able to go out for a walk on the beach. It was chilly, but bearable. Rockstar took the older kids over to a skate park in Reedsport which was the closest town. We really did have a great time.

New Year's eve sort of crept up on us. We aren't really big party folk anymore and finding babysitting on a night like New years is near impossible. Luckily most of our friends are in the same boat so we all just got together and let the kids run wild together. We had 3 families and a total of 11 kids running wild. We all had a lot of fun playing video games and just hanging out.

So there you have it. I compiled all of our Holiday adventures into one slide show and threw in my favorite version of my favorite Christmas song of all time and voila, the Holidays are finally over!!

Twilight dvd release party

So last night was the big Twilight dvd release party. The Dvd was going to be released for sale at midnight and we had been following along on the news that people started lining up at 3 in the afternoon to secure their purchase. I mean I know I have a serious problem but there are some super freaky Twilight fans out there. I hate to speak ill of my brethren and all, but wow.

We have been scouting out where we were going to go as there were many options . But we (my friends and I) settled on the Wood Village Walmart. A couple of the actors from the movie were going to be there and signing autographs.

These people here....

The waitress from the Carver cafe.



The little girl that played "young Bella" in the home video in the ballet studio.



And best of all 2 of the guys from the wolf pack/Quillute tribe.

So my friends Molly, Erin and I set out for our hot night on the town.

We got to the Walmart around 9. There was already a line and a lot of buzz in the store. Now nothing was happening until midnight. But already the place was packed. So we went through these giant cattle fence to keep the peace I guess. By the way, it should be noted that all this took place in the garden center which is in fact outside. Once we got in position we had nothing to do but wait in anticipation. My pictures didn't really turn out very well, but this was our view for over 2 hours.



Not all that exciting although it was mostly teenage girls and their mothers. So if one of them got over excited they would just start screaming and because dumb celebrity fever catches like wildfire with this demographic, if one starts screaming, they all start screaming (half the time they didn't even know what they were screaming about) It was a pretty funny sociology study.

We discovered that they were herding everyone in to the signing area in groups of 40. Also that the "celebrities" were leaving at midnight. We found this out 2 hours into waiting in line. We had a good 500 people in front of us and an hour left. There was no way that we would make it in. So we jumped ship and just went into the store to wait until the strike of midnight when we could just buy the dvd and get home.

Once inside we realized that they were set up in the middle of the store and we could see what was going on, we just couldn't get anything signed. We were all fine with that. So I got as close as I could to get a couple pictures. Again, they weren't the best but I was not really allowed to stop to take a picture they made us keep moving at all times. You would think that Elvis was in the building. It was sort of silly. I mean it's not like it was Rob Pattinson or anything it was not even the secondary characters. It was more like the 5th string of actors. But they got an extention of their 15 minutes of fame and felt like total rockstars for the night. Even though it was in a Gresham area Walmart.
Anyhow, these are the pictures that I got inside.




This is the table that they would be sitting at. Exciting no?

This is the nutty fans getting all their crap signed. I could barely get close enough to take a picture so all you really see it the fans.

This is the best I could do. The rest were so blurry that you couldn't even see who it was.


Thats right, if you look closely, it is in fact a Twilight cake. Sure, why not.

Then the clock struck Midnight and the cashiers got flooded with the masses. The poor cashiers looked truly terrified. I guess I would be too if I looked out to a sea of crazed lunatics knowing there may not be enough Dvds for everyone. But it all worked out in the end. I made it through the line and had a big happy ending
.
Yay!!

Weekend marathon volume 1...Cutting down our tree

I know I have been behind on putting up pictures here. But I have been so busy lately, that I have barely had time to even get the pictures off the camera . Let alone write a little something about them.

This past weekend we had a marathon of events, one after the other. On Saturday morning we went out and cut down our Christmas tree. Our friends from church, The Austins, have some property that they have been growing Christmas trees on. They let us come up and pick ourselves out a tree. I have decided that I was going to put the tree in the middle of our living room that has 14 foot vaulted ceilings, so I wanted to do a tall one. The dang thing took 3 men and a boy to take down. (Not really, but it IS big) Rockstar just sort of rolled his eyes but cut it down anyways. He thinks it's a little too "Griswald" and that there may be a family of squirrels living in it.

The kids had a blast running around and weaving in and out of the trees. As you can see, the older kids barely stood still long enough to get a picture that wasn't blurry.

We got it cut down and loaded up in my father in laws truck. My in laws asked if they could take the kids for the afternoon so they got the kids loaded up and off they went.

We then had the afternoon to ourselves and off we went to have lunch all by ourselves.

Or so I though......


to be continued....

We're gonna bow-ow-owl to-ni-ight !!

Ok for the 3 people who got that reference....you get a gold star. For the rest of the planet, it's a song and dance number from the horrible and totally unnecessary movie...Grease 2. It was horrible. Don't even rent. Trust me on this one. Any how it was singing and dancing and bowling. I can't set foot in a bowling alley to this day without humming a couple bars of that song. Thanks for that guys! Not only did I have to sit through your crummy movie, but now your stupid song will forever be ingrained in my brain.

Ok enough ranting for now...


In other news, today was Bug's good friend, Romania's birthday. We've been looking foreword to the party for the past week. They had it at the local bowling alley and the kids had a blast. It was Bug's first time bowling with a real ball. He's champ at Wii bowling, just not the real deal. By his third frame he had a strike!
It's in his blood :)

Safari Sam's is made mostly of awesome!!!

So Safari Sam's is this place in my area that is one of the largest indoor playgrounds on the west coast. It has an enormous jungle gym, an arcade , a room for bouncy inflatable things, and a miniature golf course. It is best known for it's birthday party packages.

Well some very close friends of ours had a birthday party for their daughter there tonight. It was nice to get the kids out and blow off some stink, but it was nice to hang out with grown ups and not worry about our kids peeling the paint off the walls too. Our friends used to be the music Pastor for our church while my husband played on the worship team with him. Our kids were about the same age, so we used to hang out a lot. But they took another job in another town and moved (just part of the job, you move where God tells you to ) so we don't see each other as often as I would like. So it's nice when one of our kids has a birthday or something. It gives us a chance to get together.

All in all it was a great night. Considering all the sugar the kids consumed, there was no meltdown or sass. Once we got in the car, well thats another story. But at least they saved it for behind closed doors :)

Here are some pictures of our fun night. Note...I only got 1 of bug, mostly because he barely stopped moving for me to take one :)