I have woefully neglected the Ponderosa blog. I haven't made a single post in 2013, so I am going to try to summarize January and do better the rest of the year! Here goes:
We rang in the New Year with a big party at the homes of the Ponderosa Princesses.
Everyone was happy to be together and well since we had been plagued with sickness for a while! We made festive bottles for our New Year's Celebration!
The grown kids made supper/dinner. There was shrimp, craw daddies and ham and cheese sliders with lots of sides.
After dinner there was:
Wrestling
Shopping Cart Racing
Brownie Making
General Rowdiness
And Taste Testing--Is it Coke or store brand cola?
After a few games of Sequence, it was bedtime for babies and we took the party to another location where 6 year olds can stay up until the new year!
The first day of the year began with a New Year's Day lunch with all the foods that are suppose to bring you good luck. There was hog jowl, cabbage and black eyed peas.
P-pa and Nana went back to the Ponderosa and things were great until the end of the week when I got the flu, despite the fact that I got a flu shot and had eaten good luck foods on New Year's Day.
The next couple of weeks were uneventful with Peanut opening Gibson Tax Service for the season and me continuing with my now two year project of de-cluttering the Ponderosa.
Then. . . the squirrels returned! They get in between the stories of the house and into the laundry room which is under the stairway. We tried glue traps with little luck. They began hiding hickory nuts in the dirty laundry, so we tried a live trap.
Nothing happened here and they were quiet for a while so we hoped they had left. One night when we returned home from an outing we saw one had been on a glue trap, dragged it into the hallway but escaped. Later I decided to have a snack of cookies and milk. As I was leaving the kitchen carrying said snack, I stepped into the hallway looked up and sitting on top of the laundry room doors was the squirrel! I took one step back, let out a blood curling scream and somehow went around the kitchen table and jumped into a chair in the small room beside the kitchen! I did not spill one drop of milk in this process! Peanut, who had already gone to bed for the night, rescued me by picking up a BB gun and ridding the Ponderosa of this pest! No one but the squirrel was hurt!
The last week of January I spent some time with the grand kids doing lots of playing and book reading and running around. Parker even got a day off from school while I was there because a tornado the night before had caused power outages. Ponderosa Princess, Stephanie and I took The Babies to the Discovery House children's museum in Murfreesboro. They enjoyed it and wore their little selves right out, playing in the store, climbing, digging, driving the firetruck, riding the rocking toys, and watching the turtles and ducks!
These were just a few of the highlights from January 2013. The Ponderosa also enjoyed a week-end visit from Brooks and Brynn. We joined the smart phone generation by upgrading to iphones. Mom and I got in some good shopping days. I made progress on my quest to remove the clutter from the Ponderosa and Gibson Tax Service is off to a busy start. And tomorrow we get to start a new month full of birthdays and new fun!
