How does a 4 year old putt-putt golf?

If you're my 4 year old, it goes something like this: put the ball down where mommy says, hold the putter so the head is upside down and then take a whack at the ball. The ball will then go about 2 feet down the green. Grab the ball, walk up to the cup and put the ball down next to it. Try to hit the ball into the cup. If it makes it, GREAT! If not, try one more time. If it doesn't make it that time, pick the ball up and drop it in the cup.

Repeat at the next hole.

That's pretty much how she played the whole course last night (except for the hole where I helped her get a hole-in-one, but was unable to get a hole-in-one myself @@). I laughed every time.

In my opinion, when the phone rings before 9:00 in the morning, it's not going to be good news. That definitely proved to be the case when the phone rang at my house at 7:30 this morning. Before I picked up the phone, I thought that maybe it was just my neighbor calling to let me know that she was on her way over to pick up the cookie dough that she'd sold for us at her office, but when I looked at the Caller ID I saw that it was not her number but the number of the grandparents of one of Alison's classmates. Oh joy! There are only two reasons for calling that early on a school day. One is that the school is closed for weather related reasons, and cold and cloudy is not going to close the school. The other is that they need someone to co-op for them.

Now, if they had called yesterday, I could have just pretended that I wasn't home, let the machine pick up, and hope that they found someone else before I "got the message." But that's not something I could really do at 7:30 in the morning. So I answered the phone, and yes, Classmate was sick and they needed someone to co-op. I had just gone on the field trip on Monday and worked my scheduled co-op day on Wednesday, and I really didn't want to work again today, but, since I didn't have anything else planned -- other than finishing up the newsletter -- I felt guilty about saying no. So I went to school again this morning.

The good news is that the kids weren't quite as crazy as the were on Wednesday. But it was still an eventful day. One little girl cried when her mom left and wanted no part of getting her picture taken (it was picture day today). Then in the middle of our "work" period, the fire alarm went off. We had just been told in our class meeting Tuesday night that they were going to have another fire drill soon, but this wasn't it. A couple of ladies from the church office came out to see if we needed any help, since no one knew what was going on and they had to evacuate, too. You know it's not good when even the head maintenance guy doesn't know what's going on. It turns out that everything was fine...there's some construction going on in the church and one of the workers somehow accidentally set the alarm off.

I'm so glad that tomorrow is Saturday. Kevin will be home and I am planning to abdicate my authority to him for the day so I can take care of the things I need to do. I'm not dealing with anything that doesn't involve blood or serious bodily injury.

Thank goodness today is Wednesday. That means it will soon be Saturday. And although Saturday is a day that we tend to catch up on things around the house, at least I don't have to worry about getting my child up and out the door for whatever activity we have for the day. And Saturday is the day that I can sleep in!

Today was a school day. And it was a crazy school day. It was my co-op day, and generally I like being in the classroom. Today started out bad and stayed bad. I got to church and there were no parking spaces available in the church parking lot or on the streets surrounding the church. Fortunately there were a couple of non-permit spaces in the city lot, so I quickly took one of those. The reason for the lack of parking spaces? A rummage sale at church. Also on the agenda today, pictures for our 3 year old class and, to make things nice and confusing, it was fundraiser pick-up day. There were people all over the place. There were fundraising committee members in and out of the classroom, talking to the teacher, talking to me. It was quite chaotic.

And the kids must have been picking up on the chaos, because they were crazy! The teacher said it was like the first week of school all over again. They were having a lot of trouble following directions. They were having a hard time being quiet when it was time to be quiet. They were having a hard time listening. They were having a hard time sitting still. It made for an exhausting morning. Hopefully everything will calm down on Friday otherwise picture day is going to be quite exasperating for the photographer.

Since I brought my cookie dough home after our class meeting last night, I was able to run home, get Alison out of her twisters an into her regular shoes, grab my camera and the books belonging to Alison's friend and get us on our way to Wendy's for lunch with our friends from dance class pretty much on time. From there we headed to Chippewa Nature Center for the afternoon. We had never been there, and it was a lot of fun.
We hiked to the Homstead and visited with (and fed) some pigs, chickens, and cows. We checked out the school house and the sugar house. Alison also got to experience the outhouse. We went back to the visitor center and checked out all the exhibits they had there. There's a lot of hands on stuff for the kids, and ours all had a very good time. Alison's preschool class will be going to the Nature Center for a field trip at the end of November, and I know that Alison will be looking forward to it, now.

It made for a very long day. Alison did take a nap when she got home, even though she said she was just going to rest with her eyes open. But she's still going to bed early tonight. And I think I will probably be going to bed early, too!

As of today, I have officially lost all my baby weight from last year. I've been within 5 pounds of it since April and kept gaining an losing the same 3 pounds all summer, but I finally got myself in gear and got to work and hit my goal. Now that I've done that, it's on to the next, and final goal....only 11 more pounds to go.

And in other news, it's October 12, and it's snowing to beat the band right now.
Seriously. If this keeps up, all the leaves that just started coming down last week will be buried in snow. It's not snow that's going to last past today, but still..... snow on October 12? We could be in for a long winter.

It's a good thing that my mom bought Alison a new winter coat at the end of the season last year or we would have been in trouble this morning when it was 29 degrees when it was time to leave for physical therapy.

Right now, my daughter is out in the middle of the backyard, sitting on a chair that is sitting in a wheelbarrow (daddy is standing right next to her), with a bucket containing a worm at her feet and with a stick in her hand. She's fishing. The wheelbarrow is her boat. She also has a little plastic shovel and a little plastic rake that are her oars.

This morning, we made cookies. Again, they were chocolate chocolate chip....Alison new favorite, I guess. As I was mixing in the chips, Alison was looking in the bowl and she said "that cookie dough looks like poop." Gee, isn't that an appetizing thought? The sad thing is, later on I noticed that she had something on her pant leg and since Kevin was closer to her I asked him to check it out, saying it was either cookie dough......or poop.

I had promised myself that I would try to blog more often, and yet time has gotten away from me again. It's been an adjustment to get used to the new school schedule, but we're getting there. Alison loves school. She get so excited when it's a school day. And she gets excited when it's swimming lesson day. And she gets excited when it's PT and dance class day. I guess you could say she's excited just about every day. :)

I'm getting used to having free time on school days (at least the days that I'm not co-oping). I've been trying to use that free time to exercise...either running, when the weather permits, or doing an exercise video. I was doing really well for the first few weeks and then ended up with a cold, or something, and got out of the habit for a week or so. So now I'm struggling to get back in the groove. But I'm getting there.

We've been pretty busy the last couple of weekends and I'm looking forward to a break. Two weeks ago we had a pot luck at church for our couples group. It was a huge success. It was our first meeting of the year and we doubled the size of our group. Hopefully the new couples will keep coming. We had church and UMYF the next day, and for Alison it seemed like she was at church every day that week.

Last weekend we helped out at a pancake breakfast benefit for our friend Dylan on Saturday. He's three years old and has leukemia. It was a long day, but we raised a good amount of money for him. The best news is that he was healthy enough to be there, running around and playing with the kids of the other volunteers. On Sunday, was the annual CROP Walk. We were the only middle school UMYF counselors that could be there that day, so that meant Alison had to be there, too. We decided to make it worth her while this year. We signed her up as a walker and got to work raising money -- figuring the people we knew would be more willing to donate to a (disabled) 4 year old than to either one of us -- in an effort to get enough to get her a t-shirt. Between people in the neighborhood and online contributions from out-of-town family and friends, she raised $165. That was enough for a t-shirt and a pin.

This weekend, we have nothing specific on our agenda. I am so glad. :) I'm looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning, especially since Alison hasn't been sleeping well for the last couple of nights. Wednesday night we had some really bad thunderstorms, which, of course, woke her up (but not until about half an hour after they woke me up -- I laid there awake, waiting for her to wake up and was just about back to sleep when she did end up waking up). Last night a bad dream woke her up. And when she wakes up, I wake up. She has been taking great naps, but I haven't had that luxury. I've been forcing myself to stay awake so that I won't be wide awake until all hours of the night. So I'm tired. And it doesn't help that I'm sitting here in a recliner, in the very warm sun. I guess I should get up and go do something worthwhile, or I'll be asleep before I know it!