CINDY'S BLOG

We had a great Halloween. There were many more trick-or-treater this year than last. My girls hit every house in the neighborhood along with their friends. (They were out for over 2 hours!) They came back with way to much candy. Luckily, I was able to send about 10 pounds of it to school with Kayli this morning. The girls school collects candy the day after Halloween to donate to a local childrens hospital. I took the boys to a few houses. They had a lot of fun. I think Aidan liked passing out the candy better than trick-or-treating.

Today we carved pumpkins while the twins were taking a nap. The kids really had fun. After being confronted with the opened pumpkin, Aidan decided he would rather paint one. Talia did her pumpkin almost entirely on her own this year. I only had to help her scoop it out a bit, she did all the carving herself. After they finished with the pumpkins, the girls wanted to roast pumpkin seeds. The turned out really good and everyone enjoyed eating them.

We all have them, days where everything seems to go wrong. Days where you just want to crawl back in bed and stay there till the next morning. Days where you find yourself raising your voice at your kids way to often, because you are worn out from all the things that haven't gone your way that day. Today is "One of Those Days".

It all started when I woke up and my back was hurting. It has been hurting all day and having to get 35 pounds toddlers into and out of their cribs and up and down the stairs all day has only made it worse. In the hustle of trying to get the kids all fed breakfast and the girls to school on time, Talia can't find her school library book. It isn't due today, but she really wants it. I'm also getting upset at the girls for the mess their room is in, despite it supposedly being cleaned last night. The cleaner comes today and she doesn't need to be straightening up the girls room! She finally finds the book and we manage to get the girls to school on time. The cleaner arrives and starts working. A bit later she brings me the vacuums cleaner, because the little brush thingies on the bottom are not moving. I start to help her out and find that Jared is spraying the windex in his face. He must have gotten it out of the cleaner's supply bucket, which I pick up off the floor and put on the counter so they can't get into it again. I go back to help out the cleaner with the vacuums and see that the brush rollers are very much stuck and we need to take off the bottom to get at them better. I go to the garage to get the screwdriver and see that the twins had also gotten a bottle of 405 cleaner out of http bucket and had sprayed it all over the coffee table and leather chair in the other room! So, I had to get that all cleaned up, get then get the screw driver and take off the bottom of the vacuums cleaner. We still couldn't get the rollers off to clean them and had to take out 6 more screws to get at them. Finally we get them off and see that one was totally stuck and get it all cleaned up. We put it back together and it worked! (Much to my amazement.)

I then take the boys outside to play so the cleaner can clean downstairs. Everything outside was wet due to all the rain we got earlier in the week. I dried of the slide and swings and other equipment, but they twins kept finding other items with water in it that I had to keep going and dry out. Then it is time for a snack, so I go in to get them graham crackers and find that someone had put the box back in the cabinet empty. I found a plastic bag with a few crackers in it, so I give that to them. Once those are gone, the twins start throwing a fit that we don't have any more. They eventually stopped screaming and by then the cleaner was done and it was time for lunch. I turn on the oven to reheat the left over pizza and then go to check the business email account, since I haven't checked it all morning. I hear the oven beep that it is preheated, go in the kitchen and see the twins dumping sand all over the floor. I just about lost it! There was sand on their high chairs, sand on the floor in the kitchen and sand on the floor in the entry way. I was so angry that they had dumped sand all over the floor I had just paid someone to clean!

I swept up the sand, I vacuumed the sand and then I swept about 5 more times and got most of it cleaned up. I then tried to calm down Then I fed the boys lunch and put the twins in bed. After J&R went to sleep, Aidan and I made chocolate chip cookies. I hoping that the rest of the day will go better. But if it doesn't, at least I have home made cookies to binge on!

I posted this earlier today in response to a thread asking people to post why they are voting one way or another. I wanted to save my reponse so that I can add to it later on. I have been a republican all my life and have never seen any reason to change that. I don't always agree with everything they stand for, but I do agree with all the major platforms. I am very pro-life and against any policy that cause the unnatural death of any individual - unborn, sick, disabled or aged. I see this as a very slippery slope. I was reading an article about how in the Neatherlands it is now okay for a doctor to kill a sick child in the hospital without the parents consent. I hear all the liberals says "that could never happen here" - I'm sure a lot of people that lived in the Neatherlands 50 years okay would have said the same about their country then. I am against same sex marriages. Marriage has been defined for thousands of years as being between a man and a women. I find no compelling reason to change that now. I am for a strong national defense. The best defenses is a good offense. In this current world climate dominated by irrational terrorist, you have to be on the offense all the time. I do not want to see the USA bow down to the influence of other countries. This is our country and only *we* can decide how best to defend her. I believe it is much better to spend tax dollars to help train people so that they can get good paying jobs and support themselves. The latest changes to the welfare program are doing just that. The culture of sustained welfare only served to create entire generations of people that were enslaved by welfare. It is far better to teach these people how to help themselves rather than continue to give them a hand-out for doing nothing. I am for school vouchers. The public schools have lots of problems. Why should it only be the people that can afford private schools that get to send their kids there? What better way to help them than to give them a good education at a private school? If the public schools can't do a good enough job of educating our kids, then I see no reason not to use tax dollars to send them to private schools. I am against socialized medicine. I do not want the government telling me what doctors I can go to and when. When I want medical care, I want to be able to choose when and where I get it. I do not want to get stuck in a wait list and end up dying because I couldn't get seen by a doctor soon enough. I do not want all the good doctors to quit because they can no longer get the salary that they currently enjoy. I do not want good young people to decide not to go into medicine because it is not worth all the effort due to the small governement dictated salaries. I am for less government, not more. It is rare to see the government get involved in anything and actually do a good job of fixing things. Government bureaucracy is such that you can not achieve any sort of efficiency that can rival the private sector. Besides, I would just really prefer that that the government stay out of my life as much as possible. A lot of my positions are based on my morals, which are founded in my religious beliefs. Nothing is going to change that. I believe laws should be based on morals. Long stand morals that have been in common to diverse groups of individuals over many, many generations.