This might give you nightmares.

Noble has a sixth-sense when it comes to finding crazy, sometimes dangerous stuff.

Like this black widow.

Tonight he ran in, head lamp on, to report that he had discovered it while searching for "nocturnal creatures".  (not his first encounter with a black widow, btw)

He found its nest in the rocks next the basketball hoop on the driveway. Spiders give me the willies (especially black widows) - and this one was HUGE. Really huge. Like an inch and half across. It must have been making a pretty good living in these rocks.

It retreated under the rock as we watched it & Noble lured it back out by dropping a cricket into the web. (I know. Don't be mad at us.) We snapped the above picture as it moved in for the kill. It was so scary-fast.

Be warned: this video is disturbing. Poor little cricket. I'm still traumatized.

When Black Widows attack from Angie Melton on Vimeo.

I was a little concerned about this spider living in such close proximity to where little kids (Sully) play. So after I stopped filming, Noble got the wasp spray (Noble's idea. He's more rational than I in tense situations.) - and we dispatched the black widow.

Sorry spider. Sorry cricket.

Teenager in the House & Return to State.

Our baby is officially a teenager.

 Here she is wearing the same happy birthday crown on her 2nd birthday.

Where did the time go?

Finally. A cell phone. (She was completely surprised.)

On her birthday - she drove with my parents south to Salina for the State 4H competition where Mike joined them two days later. By all accounts it was a pretty exciting 3 days. Drama, re-runs, a horse collapsing and dying mid-stride with rider aboard, rain, lots of fun, and more rain.

 Jessie placed in the top 20 for over-all speed events out of 102 in her division.

(Yay Jess!)

She's come a long way.

The Vampire Room gets a face-lift, and other adventures in paint

We're painting. Again.

 The "Vampire Room" is going to need a new name. I know. I know. We're all disappointed about losing the most perfect Halloween party location in history. But it had to be done. Noble's Lego Robotics Team needed a place to meet this year. And you can't ask a bunch of 11-ish year old boys to be creative and scientific in the dark gloom of a black and blood-red room. It's just not healthy. Pretty soon they start wearing all black and listening to Nine Inch Nails and stuff. They don't need that. So...

Noble bringing a little cheer to the vampire room.

 Actually, all we've managed so far is to get up a good coat of primer. (If ever there was a need for primer, it's here.) When I get the final color up, I'll post an "after" shot. But already the room is so much brighter.

Credit: my mom painted quite a bit of this - when I got sick with that kidney infection last week, she stepped up (again)...

...and once she got started she couldn't quit. So she also started in on the girls' closet.

 As soon as I was feeling a little better, I joined them.

Sometimes I wonder if I would ever get a project finished around here without her.

Kidneys, don't fail me now.

I have gone through two of these (plus several gallons of water) in the past few days.

What a week. I haven't slept much this week. Here's why: kids with stomach flu, puking in the night, a toddler who wants lots of attention at 2 'oclock in the morning, a very needy newborn who likes to be held and fed and snuggled all the time and also cries just for the heck of it - 24 hours a day. All this while getting sicker every day with what I thought was just a minor UTI (my first, so what did I know?). I've been running a fever most of the week and finally went to our doctor yesterday when my fever spiked really high (about 103) and my lower back started to ache. She wasted no time in telling me that I had a full-blown kidney infection, & pulled out some weapons-grade antibiotics which was administered immediately via hypodermic needle. They made me stay around for 15 minutes after, to make sure I didn't react badly...that scared me a little. I am supposed to appear today same time, same place for round two of the same, after which I will start an oral antibiotics regimen. I imagine when I'm done there will not be a single living bacterium anywhere in or on my body.
I just need to get better. The laundry is piling high and my kids need their mom. Our parents and neighbors have helped out so much, babysitting, driving kids to and from school, helping Mike with Lego Robotics last night, painting in the basement, cooking - and just making me feel loved and supported. I layed there in bed yesterday and felt so grateful for all the people and things that make being sick less uncomfortable. I am blessed.

Mike says I should explain...

We have had a lot of questions about the Tacoma incident after my brief reference in the last post. I was trying to gloss over it a bit for Mike's sake (he was pretty disgusted for about 24 hours). But now that we're a few days out, and Mike has had a few good laughs, we decided a public retelling was OK.

Actually, no one actually witnessed what happened (except Jupiter, and he's not talking) - so this is our best guess at how events transpired.

Jupiter the Space Donkey - lone attestant to the destruction -

 looking down the rock wall at the aftermath.

He's thinking, "What in the...?"

Mike had helped me off with the kids for the first day of school before pulling out of the garage to go to work. He noticed that pen ink had leaked on his sunglasses case. So he decided to run in and rinse it off, leaving the truck in neutral. (Mike traces the whole ordeal back to leaving the lid of his pen at work the day before. How narrow is the knife's edge upon which the events of our lives sometimes balance. ha ha ha.) He was standing there at the kitchen sink rinsing, when he heard the dog going nuts outside, which began, of course, to irritate him. So he walked out yelling for the dog to be quiet, & noticed that his truck was NOT where he left it.

First reaction, "Someone has stolen my truck!"

Next instinct: look at what the dog is barking at in the back yard -----------truck wedged in the back fence. Now start putting the pieces together: truck in neutral, large rock retaining wall, smashed shrubbery, tire tracks in the grass, demolished fence.

A few moments of stunned immobility.

He said his first thought was a sinking, "I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS! What am I going to do?" He said his next thought was, "I hope none of the neighbors saw that." (I think it's hilarious that he thought that...because I KNOW I would have thought the same thing - even though it's silly. *digression* When I was like 8 I drove my family van in neutral down the hill of the church parking lot and hit another car. And even at that young age, I distinctly remember trying to distance myself from the disaster - and act as if I was totally uninvolved. I kept trying to shush my sister who was yelling for help out the window, because I was embarrassed that she was drawing attention to us. Oh my goodness, that is a funny memory...)

At this point he called me (and freaked me out because it took him FOREVER to spit  out what had happened - I  thought it must be something awful) - and started trying to figure out how to get the truck out of the backyard. In case you've never been to our house, the backyard slopes down & there's basically a boulder retaining wall all the way around it. It's hard even to get the lawn mower back there and out again...much less an automobile. 

When I got home he tried rock-crawling up the most gradual & shallowest spot on the wall. No good. The only other thing to do was to go and ask the neighbor if we could drive through her yard. Mike sheepishly rang the doorbell at 8:30 AM and asked if he could drive over her lawn. She responded, "I would rather you didn't." And then he explained that thing was, his truck was stuck in the back yard unless he did. She started to laugh and said she'd let him drive through their yard if she could come see the carnage.

We were sure we'd have to make a claim on our home owners insurance in addition to a claim on our auto insurance to fix the fence & the dent in the truck.

But it turns out PVC is an incredibly forgiving material. All of the downed fence panels were intact, even the posts were relatively unscathed. It took Mike an hour on Saturday to fix the fence. Then he was able to buff out all of the scuffing on his truck. In disbelief, he kept repeating to me yesterday that he was just as shocked about how easily he was able to fix the damage as he was at discovering the accident in the first place.

We still have a dent to repair...and honestly, it's pretty minor. I also have a bunch of broken limbs on a bush in the back yard.

But I'm not complaining. 

It's another good story for Mike to tuck away for telling at parties.

Like the time he got stuck at the mushroom convention, wearing just his boxer shorts. Only this time he doesn't have a cool t-shirt to show for it.