My kids still surprise me...

In both good and bad ways. I had a really good surprise last night...

Alec has been bringing home a daily journal-type page. He's supposed to write 3 sentences and draw a picture about the sentences. This is what he brought home yestserday...

From September 2009

(since he doesn't have the best handwriting---and yes, we're working on that---i'll tell you what it says)

My best friend is Kyle. He is my best friend because he is nise. He is my best friend because he makes me my diner (second grade spelling...)

The picture is a pretty decent interpretation of our kitchen layout, with Kyle at the counter making "diner" and Alec sitting at the table. Now, Cole tells me that Kyle makes lunch quite a bit when I'm not home, but hardly ever makes dinner. That's beside the point, though....I read this...and got all teary. Despite all the fighting and arguments, Alec still considers Kyle his best friend. It completely touched my heart (and made me feel like we're probably doing something right!).
I made sure Kyle read it as well, so he would know...hopefully next time he wants to beat on his brother, he'll remember this and think twice!

Now for the not so fun surprises...I've been on a purge and organizing kick. I had spent about 45 minutes in Talia's room, picking up, organizing her bins, pulling all the toys out from under the furniture, and collecting the toys she'd scattered around the house. Not 10 minutes after I left her room, I went back to find she dumped out EVERY SINGLE BIN! She's 2, so I can't say it was a total surprise, but I wasn't very happy...luckily, she didn't scatter the toys too, so it only took me about 5 minutes to put it all back. After I was done, however, I closed her closet so she couldn't get back in there.

During my organizing processes, we've been going through Alec's old toys. It's been a slow process. However, I remembered that he'd had some Dora and Diego toys from when he was about 3-4 years old. The boys found Swiper and Boots, and Talia was having so much fun with them, that I went searching through all the old toys in the toy room.
(a little background on the toy room...we really haven't used it much since we moved the boys downstairs. We used it when they were still upstairs, and I didn't want all their toys upstairs in their room. Since they got their own rooms downstairs, they have been allowed to have their toys in their rooms. The toy room has been relegated to storage of old, unused toys and furniture.)

I was able to find most of the Dora and Diego toys in the old toy bins. Talia has been THRILLED! I think we may have found a new set of toys that travel everywhere with us...

From September 2009

One more thing...our laptop, of course, chooses today, the day I'm going to sit down and pay bills, to have some kind of crazy pop-up that is interferring with every time I try to click on any web site...and we've run our antivirus twice with no luck...