And the award goes to....

So, I deliberately waited until today so I could update you on W receiving his award. Now the day is almost over and I'm finally getting around to blogging.

We managed to keep from telling W that he was going to be awarded his $100 gift card at the district dinner last night. It was hard. I was getting tired of the pout session everyday after finding that he yet again had received no mail. Both boys did fairly well at the dinner, considering it was a dinner with a lot of boring talking and not a lot of running around with other kids like they would have preferred. It was a potluck dinner, so they were able to get up and move around a bit. Of course W had helped put water glasses on the table, so he knew where to refill his glass. I think he was on his 3rd glass of water and had eaten a bunch of watermelon by the time the key note speaker was talking. Even though I knew they were doing awards right after her, I made him wait to use the bathroom rather than have him take off up the stairs in the middle of her speech. So, as soon as people started clapping, he was off. Before we could catch the MC's attention to have him switch W to the second award they were saying they wanted to call a youth forward. So, our district executive jumped up and said the youth would be back in about 3 minutes. So, they just talked about things going on in our district until W got back. Gee, when they called him up, they had the whole family come up, including H (that just fed into his little delusion that he is actually a scout as well). They asked W if he could tell everyone a little about how he sold so much candy. He said "...I went to stores. We made sure that it was okay to sell there. I asked people if they would like to sell candy. Some would say not today, some would buy just candy and some would buy just meat sticks. I would make change. I put out a donation jar....and that's all". I have heard some comments back today about how he seemed so confident and spoke so clearly that he could be easily heard and understood clear in the back of the room. I don't think he saw it coming and he did very well.

H is such a little nut. He had to run up and show everyone his cub scout shirt that I made for him. At one point one of the speakers noted how many cub scouts had come (since it was mainly a function to recognize leaders and eagle scouts). It was like he was looking through the romper room mirror "I see a webelo over there and a couple bears back there, and there's a tiger". Then H piped up and in a fairly loud clear voice said "Here I am!!" Part of the table decorations were these rocks that our district executive had painted with "do my best" and "rock solid scouting". She said she wanted everyone to take some home. So, H found a tan colored one for himself. For some reason he also decided that he needed to help pack stuff to the car, so he grabbed the large plastic serving spoon we had brought for the meatballs (it was clean by then) and packed that out. He went to sleep saying his rock and his spoon were his "best friends". Of course once he was out they were moved to the nightstand. But, the first words out of his mouth this morning..."ahhh, ROCK...SPOON..." Maybe we need to work on socializing him....

Well, you guys should all be here this weekend. The weather is supposed to be nice. That means that since we don't have A/C, if I don't get up at 5am to open windows, only to have to close them as well as the curtains by 10am, our house will be hotter than a popcorn fart by 2 and

won't cool down until next Friday. And to make matters worse, we will have to dodge all of the freaky tourists coming here to avoid the heat in the big city. Hmmm, maybe I should have hit the grocery store yesterday...

In non scout related news...W and the neighbor boy are done with their PMS moody feud or whatever was going on. The neighbor was saying that they weren't friends anymore. Of course W is so sensitive. He didn't realize that opened up more time to find another friend. W tried calling him last weekend and the neighbor just hung up on him. Of course they both have to catch the bus at the end of our driveway. H would see the other boy coming and run to hug him or show him his latest treasure. Then when they got back to the end of our driveway...total silence except for H's chatter. Talk about elephant in the room. Anyway, yesterday after school, the neighbor called to say he decided they could be friends again and wanted to play. W was so happy. I wanted to be mean and spiteful and tell W to say something like "well, I haven't decided if you are worthy of being a friend again yet, so check back in a week or so..." They are already acting like teenage girls, so they probably don't need any more coaxing in that direction.

We are trying the potty training with H again. I finally decided that it was easier with W because D was in Antarctica ferrying the penguin molesting scientists around. Poor H, he has to listen to both of us. Anyway, the other day I just decided that he wasn't going to get diapers anymore. I put him in underpants. He screamed and cried. I set the timer on the TV for 30 minutes. Every time it shut off, he had to sit before it would go back on. OMG, you would think I was cutting off limbs when I somehow made the TV turn black when I wasn't even in the room. Anyway, he did really well, until W came home and he peed all over himself like a happy little puppy. Then Wednesday we tried again, even though I had another mom and two grandma's here for a day camp meeting (hmmm, one was the retired prison warden, maybe she should have talked to him...). He did really well with the 30 minute schedule...until grandpa got here, the women were leaving and my mom called to say the all had the flu. Then he decided to sit at the table talking to grandpa as he made a puddle in the chair (ehh, hard surface, no need to haul the steam cleaner out so it could have been worse). Then he had to come stand by me in the kitchen while I stirred some chicken stock that I had simmering and he peed on the floor there. Good grief. I got that all cleaned up and him changed, then we sat down at the table to eat a little snack while I looked at a new magazine. I must be brain dead or something. He was saying something to me and I was just doing the smile and nod as I continued to read. All of a sudden it dawned on me that he was saying "mama....I'm peeeeeeing!!" sure enough, there was a puddle forming in his chair. I almost put him in a diaper then, but I went ahead and broke out another pair of underpants for him. He did good the rest of the day and even managed to wake up from a nap (on a piddle pad) with dry pants. Maybe there's hope for him. I don't know. He doesn't go back to school until next Wednesday, so we'll see how far we come by then. I'm sure once I have to break out the steam cleaner, we will go back to putting him in diapers until college...

So, follow up to my mom calling with news of them having the flu. She put my dad in the hospital that night. He has pneumonia. Being a quad, he just doesn't have the muscles to do a good job of coughing and then being sick to his stomach on top of that. She said once the put an NG tube in to keep his stomach clear, he started doing better. Mom is hoping they just keep him in the hospital until she feels better since she just doesn't have the energy to take care of him right now. He's on some pretty stout antibiotics, so that should cure just about anything that ails him.

D is now working a 5 day work week. He may end up with a little overtime now. The only draw back is that his two days off are Thursday and Sunday. That just really sucks. But he's working, so we can't complain too much. But you know that really sucks for camping.

Anyway, it's not like I don't have a million and a half things to do. I must now depart blog land. Hope everyone has a good holiday weekend.