CINDY'S BLOG

This picture was taken from my next door neighbor's front yard. The sad thing is that everytime you see the mommy duck, she will have less ducklings. The neighborhood cats get them. They also fall victim to hawks.

It's been a very busy morning around here. I had to take the twins to speech and while they were there I ran over to the community center to register Talia and Kayli for a hip-hop class this summer. After we got back and I nursed Falyn, I decided to try and put her hair in a ponytail. It looked so cute that I had to take some pictures. They are uploading right now. I have about 1/2 a dozen special requests for items in my store that I need to get to and I want to get out a father's day newsletter too today.

Thirteen years ago today, Dan and I were married. Our love has grown stronger with each passing year. We are best friends and I would never imagine having a better life partner than Dan.

I never would have thought then that thirteen years later we would be the parents of six children. We are truly blessed to have such a wonderful family, with such good kids.

Isn't this an adorable picture? Talia loves to carry Falyn around and Falyn seems to enjoy being carried around by her Talia picked that flower from our front yard and put it in Falyn's hair. We are having a very kick-back type of day today. Dan took the kids (except for Falyn) and about a half-dozen neighbor kids on a walk to 7-11 for slurpees, so it is really quite around here right now. Falyn is sleeping in my lap as I type.

This morning the twins got up and dressed themselves. They picked out their favorite tank-top shirts and "shiny" pants - which don't exactly match. Riley got his shirt on backwards and Jared got his pants on backwards, but I'm not complaining! I'm so glad they are now doing more and more for themselves. It makes life so much easier on me now that they use the potty and are starting to get themselves dressed and put on their own shoes. They still need some help figuring out which way clothes go, but it's a big improvement over me having to do everything for them.

Tonight we are going over to Dan's parents house for a BBQ. I'm sure Samantha will be there, but I'm not sure whether or not Pam and Lawrence will be. I know the kids all want to see their cousin Lawrence, so I hope they are there.

They did manage to get the entire floor finished and the bed put back up last night. We moved the bed so that it is by the window. It think I'm going to like it a lot better there. My next task will be to get my closet cleaned out and donate all the clothes in there I haven't worn in years. Then I can move Dan's clothes to my closet and we can start moving the scrapbooking business stuff to our bedroom. That has to be done before we can start on the bonus room expansion project.

Dan, his dad and sister are working hard today to put in a wooden floor in our bedroom. We've had the wood for it sitting in our room for over a year now! It sure will be nice to have it all done. Then we can start to tackle our next project - the bonus room expansion. That is going to be a huge project and will take months to complete.

Aidan can now ride his bike without the training wheels. It took him about a week after we took off the training wheels to get enough confidence to ride it that way. He is doing great without the training wheels now.

I'm trying out the blog-it feature on Flickr. This is one of my favorite pictures of Falyn. Doesn't she look cute?

Do you have a multiples related site? If so, you might want to looking into Cafepress's new Affiliate program where you get 20% of any sales that come from click-thrus from your site. I have a twins related cafepress store and just put up an affiliate page which has instructions for joining the affiliate program and contains all the html code you need to add a link to your site. If you are interested, you can read more about it here.

Jared and Riley have to tell each other every time they go potty. This is a transcript of an actual conversation between them:

J: Riley, I went poop and pee in the potty!
R: You went poop and pee in the potty! Did you flush?
J: No, do you want to come see?
R: Ya! Don't flush, I'm coming.
(Riley goes in to bathroom with Jared.)
R: Good job Jared, high five!
(They give each other a high five.)
J: Do you want to help me flush?
R: Sure!
(They both flush together.)


This goes on each time on of them goes to the bathroom. It is hilarious! I wonder how long they will continue this behavior.

It's hard to believe that Falyn is three months old already. She has grown so much in the last few weeks. She is already fitting into some of her 6 months sized outfits. She is very alert now and loves to observe what is going on around her. She is starting to figure out how to grasp at objects and get the into her mouth. She sit all by herself for 6 whole seconds yesterday. She loves "talking" to you and will hold long conversations gooing back and forth with you. She is getting better in the car, but will still sometimes scream when I have to stop at redlights. If I hit to many or get stuck for too long at one, she will end up screaming the entire rest of the way home. She sleeps through the night pretty much all the time now. And all in all, she is such a sweet, adorable, cute, cuddly baby!!! We so much love having her.

My friend Lisa gave me instructions on how make this cute "taggie" blanket for Falyn. I used the same material that I used for her no-sew fleece blanket. Falyn loves them both! It was so hard finding time to get it sewed with all the kids around. I finally had to get Dan to hold Falyn last night so I could finish sewing it.

It has come to my attention that someone has been stealing pictures of my kids off of my website and claiming them as their own children. Why in the world would you do this? Do you not have a life of your own? Is your own life so pathetic that you have to pretend to be someone else? I really do feel sorry for you that you have nothing better to do than steal other peoples pictures and pretend they are you own. You really do need to get a life of your own.

As a result, I will no longer make my pictures accessible to anyone. All new pictures will be placed on Flickr and only accessible if I know exactly who you are. I will not add you to my list unless you are a trusted friend. Those of you that are my friends will already know my email address. If you aren't, you won't. If you email me, I'll send you an invite so that you can get access to the pictures.

I regret that this action has become necesary, but I will not tolerate people trying to pass off my kids as their own.

After giving Falyn a bath and combing her hair, it made this cute curl on the top of her head.

Our neighbor across the street took pictures of the cops in our front yard. You can see where the trampled the seedlings in the pics.

Brandy and Tammy came by this morning to pick up clothes for Tammy. Mark had tossed some of her clothes on the front porch, but she left those clothes there. They said Joey (the teenage son) had been with Brandy and wasn't in the house while all the cops were staking out the neighborhood. They think he needs to go to the hospital to go get check out, but he won't go and the cops won't make him go without there having been a crime committed. I told Tammy that I'm praying for them and I hope it will all get worked out soon.

It is a good thing we cleaned up our house this weekend, since the police commandeered it and forced us to evacuate last night. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. It all started when I was packing orders in the bonus room. Aidan and Riley were up there playing when Riley said, "Look mommy, I see a police lady and a police car". That got my immediate attention and I went over to the window to check it out. Sure enough there was a police lady, two policemen and several police cars parked up the street. It is rare to see one, let alone three police cars in our neighborhood, especially two days in a row. Okay, I guess I should go back and start this from the beginning.

I was coming home from shopping on Saturday, turned onto my street and saw two police cars parked up the street from my house. I pulled into my driveway and saw my neighbor Melissa outside with her kids talking to Dan. My kids were also all outside by her house playing. She lives two doors down the street from me, so I got out of my car and headed over to her house and said, "What's up with the cops" as I passed the house between our two houses. In hindsight, that probably wasn't the best place to say that since it turned out the police were at our next door neighbors house.

Melissa and Dan filled me in on the situation. There had been yelling at our neighbors house and someone, probably Tammy - the lady that lives at that house, had called the police. All the kids had seen the police arrive and were all watching to see what was going to happen next. It all ended peacefully, no one was arrested and the cops left. Mark (Tammy's husband) came out and Melissa asked if everything was okay. He said everything was fine, went back in the house and then came out and drove away in his truck. This isn't just any truck, mind you. It's a huge white truck that I refer to as "Big Bertha". This thing is loud! I can always hear it from my house when he arrives or leaves.

So, that was the end of it. Or so we thought. Then last night as we were finishing up with dinner, Dan went out front and Aidan and Riley went out too. That's when we started to hear more screaming. This time, Brandy (who is Tammy and Mark's grown daughter) was over there with her boyfriend. Aidan and Riley were right over there trying to figure out what was happening. Dan made them come in and we went upstairs to look out and see what was going on.

Brandy was crying and her and Landen (the boyfriend) got in her car and drove off. Before leaving, she asked Melissa to give her a call if anything else happened. Everyone went inside and we though the situation was resolved. It wasn't.

That's when I started packing orders and soon after Riley commented on the police activity outside. Tammy must have called the police and I saw her standing in her driveway talking to three police officers. It wasn't long after that that they moved from her driveway to between my house and my other next door neighbors house.

I counted a total of five police officers outside my house. I got a good view from Aidan's room and was able to hear them fairly well from his window. From my eavesdropping, I was able to find out that Mark has recently started taking some sort of antidepressant medication and it had apparently caused him to go off the deep end. That in and of itself wasn't the polices concern. Their concern was that he has a lot of guns and ammunition. And, Tammy said he had been up all night cleaning these guns and she was terrified of what he might do.

During all this, Dan tried to put out the trash cans and was told by the police to get back in the house. The same thing happened to several other curious neighbors. The police didn't want anyone out of their homes. Around this time, Melissa called. She said she saw six more police officers down the other street that she can see from her house and we can't see. One of whom was running down the street with a big shotgun. We told her what we knew and she hung up to call Brandy.

Brandy arrived and little while later and Tammy and several police officers went further up the street to meet her. Unfortunately for me, that meant I could no longer listen in on what Tammy was talking about with the police. Turns out it didn't make a lot of difference, since it was soon after that that we got a call from the police telling us we had to evacuate and to go out the backyard side gate.

Riley and Jared were both asleep and all the other kids were in their pajamas about to be asleep. It must have been around 8 pm by this time. We gathered them up, grabbed some blankets and headed downstairs thinking we were going to go outside and down the street to wait this out for a while. We got downstairs and find a police officer waiting for us and he is telling us this could last an hour or all night so be prepared to be gone till morning. He also asked us if we had the numbers of any of our other neighbors. One of whom called right about that time and we gave the phone to the police officer to tell her about the evacuation.

I happened to have a list of a bunch of our neighbors phone numbers and addresses from my baby shower list. I printed that off and gave it to the officer. Then I ran around the house grabbing blanket, animals, jammies, clothes and shoes for all the kids. Somewhere during all this Dan's parents happened to call and we told them we were being evacuated and were headed over there. Melissa also called and we told her we would be at Dan's parent's house. We were finally ready to leave around 8:30 and the officer told us to leave the house unlocked because they may need it for the operation.

We got all the kids in the car, trough the garage - pre the officers instructions, and backed out of the driveway. We saw four police officers standing in the floor bed at the front of our house. Kayli was very concerned about her seedlings that she had planted there a few weeks ago and been watering daily.

We finally made it over to Dan's parent's house, by which time Falyn was screaming because she was hungry and I hadn't been able to feed her at 8:00 when she normally would have nursed. I feed her while Dan got all the kids out of the car and I filled the in-laws in on the whole store.

About the time we get all the kids settled in the phone rings. It was Melissa telling us it was all over and we could go home. We called the police station to verify it was okay for us to go home and they said it was. I'm not sure of exactly what happened, but apparently they called Mark and he surrender to them. They ended up leaving him at the house and Tammy went with Brandy. Since "no crime was committed", no arrest was made. Pretty anti-climatic ending, huh?

I'm really glad that it turned out that way and no one got hurt. Mark is normally a really nice guy and I'd hate for something to have happened to him. This morning around 6:30, I heard Big Bertha peel out and drive off down the street. Right now no on is home next door and I'm left here feeling like I'm waiting for the next shoe to drop. One thing I am a bit concerned about it where their teenage son is. I hope that he is over at his sister's place.

Before you ask, yes I'll give you an update if anything else happens. I'm hoping that Mark goes to the doctor and gets an adjustment to his medicine and that will put an end to all the police action on our block.

Oh ya, Kayli's seedlings did get trampled. I'm hoping they will spring back up, but only time will tell. The weeds, however, have all sprung back nicely.