Busy Days

We've been working hard the last 2 days to catch up on some important but neglected tasks. For some reason two cute little reasons I can't seem to spend much time on my computer during the day. :) So Jonathan took some time off work and watched the munchkins yesterday while I tried to corral our finances into some semblance of order. And today we took the kids out for some shopping.

Honestly, I'm a little worried about how productive these days have been. We managed to:

• catch up on the finances
• send off our newsletter order (I hope to get the email version off soon)
• do a bunch of laundry (yes, this is worth mentioning because we finally had a sunny day)
• buy Toby's birthday present
• buy 2 pairs of desperately-needed shoes for Toby

Typically, when we have a wildly successful day (productivity-wise), it is immediately followed by a string of days in which all that can go wrong, does. Maybe it's to keep me humble? So I'm bracing myself. :) At any rate, it feels good to have some of these things crossed off my "To Do" list.

Abbie is all girl as you can see from the bead necklace and the shopping basket. She LOVES to carry around bags and baskets of all sorts.

Toby thinks it's such fun to hold Abbie's hand and walk around with her. Gets a bit tricky, though, when she has her own ideas of where to go. :)

Tidbits

Our house is a sneezy, grumpy place these days. :( Toby came down with a cold on Monday, and Abbie started it on Tuesday. Toby has a cough and runny nose; Abbie has a fever and runny nose. We are specializing in rest times, comfort food, and some movies while we ride this out. :) I think this is the kids' first round of illness since we moved to this island, so I'm not complaining.

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They don't run gas lines to houses here. Instead, we buy our gas in tanks and hook the tanks up to our stoves, water heaters, or whatever. We had a bit of a hassle finding a place that delivered full gas tanks to exchange for our empty ones, but then we learned that the school maintenance guys could do that for us. Yay! :) A week or so ago we hooked up our last remaining full tank and put in a request for new ones to be delivered. I've been kinda nervous about running out of gas for the kitchen stove--not that it would be a disaster, but it would be rather inconvenient. I would just have to move the tank from the water heater to the stove, and we'd have to do with cold showers until we got a new tank. But I really didn't want to do that. So I've been putting off my baking...and getting kinda antsy about it all.

This afternoon--oh, joy!--the guys showed up and traded our empty gas tanks for full ones! So I churned out 2 dozen pumpkin muffins and 3 loaves of bread, then toasted some fresh coconut. Feels good to have fresh bread again. :)

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I discovered 3 new teeth in Abbie's mouth yesterday. Maybe that explains the night waking and runny nose that were plaguing her last week? This little girl doesn't do anything half-heartedly. She got her first 6 teeth in 3 weeks. Wonder how many are going to come in this round? Also, the 2 new teeth on the top are molars, even though she hasn't gotten the upper cuspids in. Is that strange? Seems kinda weird to me.

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Toby is really into singing these days. He especially loves the Veggie Tales theme song and wants to sing it every morning during breakfast, as well as multiple other times during the day. He carries the tunes fairly well, but his pronunciation isn't great. His version of "A-Hunting We Will Go" sounds like "uh-uh da baby go." :) Took me forever to figure out what he was singing. We've been singing "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow" for our supper prayer most days. Yesterday he joined right in as we sang. This is the first he's really wanted to sing with us; usually he wants to go solo or hear us sing. It was pretty special.

Toby and Abbie hiding in their closet during Hide and Seek