Everything boke.

I haven't had time to blog lately and I still don't, but I am getting so irritated about the chaos of life that I am rebelling against bedtime and blogging anyway.

This may be long, and I have no pictures, so if you get bored, feel free to stop reading at any time....

Life has been a bit busy, as usual for all of us, right? It has been filled with lots of moments to remember, though, so let me start with the funny ones.

My kids have been saying the funniest things! Here are the top two:
Bren was walking around with an Xbox controller saying "Butt. Butt. Butt." Kaeleb was appalled and said, "He's saying a bad word!!" I finally realized that he meant to say "Button." and said, "Yes, you are pushing buttons." He smiled and said "Ah puss butt!"

Kaeleb was helping Kwint do the dishes yesterday and Kwint complimented him that he was doing a great job at putting away the pots and pans. Kaeleb said, "Yeah, it's my job. I have two jobs: cleaning up and saving the world."

In other news, this month has been the month of breakage. Our washer broke, the Xbox 360 broke (aka red ring of death for all of you gamers), the vacuum broke, and our camera broke (hence, no pictures this time). But, the Lord has been good to us. The washer was just a simple broken clip, cost 50 dollars to repair. The Xbox was still under warranty, and the vacuum was a 10 dollar switch fix. We will be buying a new camera, but I am glad we are not buying a new washer, Xbox, and vacuum... that could have been a couple thousand bucks altogether.

One of Brennan's favorite words is "boke" (broke). He has been livin' it up all month, talking about all the things that "boke". His all time favorite thing, if you remember back to his birthday, is the vacuum. He wants to vacuum every day. He has a toy vacuum, and his favorite thing is for us to vacuum together. He once threw a fit in Wal-mart when we we passed a row of vacuums and I wouldn't let him out to play.

You can imagine his devastation when we left the beloved Oreck at the vacuum repair shop. As I carried him out to the car he was reaching for the door screaming "Yoom! Yoom boke! Yoom! Yoom boke!"

One more on Kaeleb before we move on to the exciting story of the week...
If you know Kaeleb well, you know that he is a very literal person and although he loves to have fun, he is very serious and inquisitive. If you tell him a joke he will often say, "Are you teasing?" and if you say "yes", then he will laugh.

In preschool they read a story about a rainbow fish who had beautifully colored scales. His friends loved his scales and were sad that they didn't have brightly colored scales. The book is all about how he decides to share and gives a scale to each of his friends so that they all have one. Kaeleb's teacher asked at the end, "How do you think the rainbow fish felt when he shared his scales?" Kaeleb piped up and said, "Well, he did the right thing, but it really isn't possible for a fish to take his scales off and give them to another fish." She thought it was pretty funny.

So, the breaking news of the week is about our cat.

This is Howie. Howie is the best cat ever. He loves to snuggle, loves kids, and always stayed around. He played in the backyard (ie, weeds) or sat in the stroller in the garage all the time. Until... we went up North for Christmas. We were gone for 8 days, longer than we'd ever left. While we were gone he ran away. We think he got lonely and thought we'd abandoned him. We were so sad. We left his food out and the cat door open for so long, waiting, but he never came back.

We discussed the possibilities and although we knew the likeliest thing was that he had been hit by a car or died from some cat disease, we hoped that he was adopted by some nice family who thought he was a stray. (He had a collar but it fell off a few months before and I was too lazy to replace it.) So, we went on with life for two months.

Tuesday I was at the park with some friends and made a random comment about our cat who had run away. One of my friends jokingly asked, "He's not big and gray is he?" I said, "Yes, actually, he is." She said that around Christmas a big gray cat had appeared at her parents house and her mom was too nice to ignore him, so they started feeding him and he has been going back every day. I called her mom when I got home, and I'll be darned, it was Howie! He is skinny but massive because of how mangy his winter coat is, and matted- holy cow- he is a tangled mess of hair clots. But he's alive!

We brought him home and he warmed up to us quickly, purring and rubbing on our legs. We can't keep him inside because Kwint is allergic, so we tried keeping the garage shut so that he couldn't leave, but he escaped on Saturday and went back to his adopted family. We will try again, but I don't know if we can keep him from leaving us every time. We are just glad he is ok and that someone nice has taken care of him. He is living the life of a stray, but he knows he has somewhere to go.

We have been busy little beavers with work and family stuff. We had a great President's day weekend with Kwint's family and have been on a couple good hikes. We are going up on Thursday and hope that we can see all of our friends who are up there on Thursday night. We are scheduled out the other days, but get the word out- If we don't call you, call us or any of the friends and make sure we don't forget anyone!! We haven't had the whole group together for sooo long and we'd love to see you all.