Happiness is.......

Catching a mouse in your house within 2 hours of setting the trap:

(can you tell whether it is a boy or girl?)

We don't know how the little guy got into our house, but it decided to make it's home behind the dishwasher! It was very active and came out all the time (for the whole day and a half it lived there). But three mouse traps was it's demise. It couldn't resist the luring smell of cheese and crackers. It first set off the cracker trap, but got away......apparently it didn't learn it's lesson though, 20 minutes later it came back for the cheese and was caught by that trap. The peanut butter trap didn't seem to tempt him at all! Poor guy (or girl)- we were worried it might be a girl because of the noticeable nipples.... hopefully there aren't nursing baby mice dying a slow death of starvation, behind our dishwasher.....ewwwww. (and sad).

A little boy fully potty trained morning and night:

It's official this week. Kaelan is really truly fully potty trained (and not just when he is nakey). He wears clothes ALL day long (YAY) and still goes pee (and the other) in the potty. He also wears underwear at night and nap times!! No accidents and no diapers!! (Waaaaa ...my baby is gone. SNiff Sniff.....Yes! No more diaper changing!!) Too bad I just bought some more for night time wearing. Maybe I can donate the new diapers to Samuel when they are up here the end of September.

Finally getting to pick one of your giant tomatoes from your garden:
(the garden pics don't do it justice, it was raining and I couldn't get them all in for a good pic, but you can kind of see it)
(a bunch of early girl tomatoes on the vine, and a good view of my.. ahem... fancy tie up work)

Heirloom Cherokee tomatoes (they ripen to a purplish red):

Nearly ripe Early girls:

Almost ripe Moonglow tomatoes (they are yellow when ripe):

My ripened Cherokee and Early girl tomatoes from that day:

Kaelan loved to play with the huge Cherokee (although he didn't like the taste, he said "ugh, yucky!")

We have been amazed at our tomato plants this year. They are very prolific. We have around 150 tomatoes growing on them right now and the are all HUGE! Some are the size of soft-balls, while the rest are the size of tennis balls and baseballs. It is really crazy because the plants themselves are around 6 1/2 to 7 feet tall!!!! I have had to tie them up to things to stop the heavy fruit from breaking the limbs! You know it must be impressive if Great Grandpa Severson comes over and says he's never seen such amazing tomato plants in his life. (And he farms) I don't know if it is a combination of good soil and good placement, all I know is that I haven't done much to them (other than the occasional tie up), and yet they produce enormous tomatoes. I have been pining away for the ripening stage so that I could cut them up and eat them fresh, with a little salt! YUM! We got to do that this week with one of the soft-ball sized Cherokee Heirloom tomatoes! It was SO delicious.

Finding an extra $700 a month in your budget (that up until now had been looked over):

EXTRA money that was hiding under the guise of "mortgage Pymt and escrow acct." (doubled up) in our budget, and now has been found.....what could be better. Need I say more??? Other than what kind of idiots are we that we could over look an imbalance (in our favor) of that much a month??!!! It feels like we got an enormous raise.

Learning that you don't need a new/extra heater or A/C for your upstairs because the reason it wasn't working was the fact that the vents to the upstairs were turned OFF!! Four years after moving into our house and our upstairs is finally the right temperature!!

We had a Sears guy come by for an estimate on new heater/AC units (well, okay I did...Joe wanted nothing to do with it! He was paranoid he would be pressured to buy). I just wanted to know what it would cost so that we could plan financially to be a position to replace them when that eventuality came upon us. I also wanted to know what it would cost to put in an upstairs unit to cool the upstairs better, because it has never worked upstairs, nothing comes out of the vents, when on.

This Sears guy was AWESOME!! He came in and looked at our unit and said it was in great condition and we wouldn't need to replace it for many years. Then I asked him about the need of an upstairs unit. He looked perplexed for a moment, and then said," Are their vents upstairs?" I said told him that there were. He said "this unit, you have, could very effectively cool/heat a 5000 sq. ft. house without breathing hard." He looked at the vents going up to the upstairs and said "Had this valve always been set at this setting?" pointing to an obscure lever on the side of the unit going up to the upstairs. I said "Yes, considering I didn't even know that it exsisted". He laughed, "Well this explains your problem. This venting system to the upstairs is shut off!!"

He had me go upstairs and feel what it felt like before he switched it...., I did, then he switched it on. Low and behold, cold air came wooshing out of the vents. HAHAHAHA!! Wow. We had been living in this house for four years and suffering (the boys mainly) from the inadequacy of the airflow all because it was turned off. How sad is that!!! What a great day! It's like we did get a new system, because now the upstairs is delightfully cool. We believe that the people that lived here before us must have shut it off because they never went upstairs.

Joe was much appeased. Not only did the Sears guy tell us that we didn't need to get a new unit for a while, but also fixed our mystifying AC/heat problem upstairs. No regrets here!


Listening to a 7 year old tell why he LOVED the movie he just watched SO MUCH:

They loved this movie so much that they kept pausing it to come down and tell it how awesome it was. It was cracking Joe and I up. Now we have been ordered to watch it too, because they KNOW that we will think that it is SO awesome too.! ;-)


Watching a two year old take pictures of things he loves (or try to anyway!):
Without moms help too. He took pictures of his trains, mom-mom's hair (yes his hair fetish is that bad- that he would ask to take a picture of it. Sometimes I think he wishes I was stuffed animal size to he could play with my hair all night long. He will even play with it dead asleep.) It was very cute. I am sure his pictures would have turned out better if it hadn't taken place in the dark!!

This week was a GOOD week!